Only in America. Matt Frei
the mood in my section of the plane as if the Grim Reaper himself had arrived with the drinks trolley. As it happened some wanted to order more drinks. Others regretted the ones they had already consumed. I seem to remember straddling both camps. The static resumed: it was the captain again. ‘I understand that some of you may be alarmed. But I jus’ wanna reassure you. This is a very, very big bird but she can fly on two engines real good.’ I remember reading something along those lines. But was the breakdown in grammar from the cockpit an indication of engine issues the captain wasn’t letting us in on? Or was it just vernacular? Turning the 747 into a ‘bird’ was both reassuringly colloquial, betraying the confidence of a veteran pilot, but also, perhaps, alarmingly flippant. It certainly struck me as very American. All around me guttural Cantonese and high-pitched Mandarin tones were flying around like swallows before a storm. My fellow passengers were desperate for a translation that I could not nor would have wanted to give and that took five minutes to come from a Chinese-speaking stewardess. After that a few more people started muttering silent prayers. I ditched the film and went to the sky map, a handy device in moments of impending emergency; handy, that is, for working out the geography of disaster. Where would we crash-land? Who lived nearby to save us? To recover our bodies? Would there be South Sea garlands for the survivors? It was the white wine that was thinking. The little dot that represented our plane had done an outrageous U-turn over a large area of blue that displayed not a single speck of land. I zoomed out. Why not land in Hawaii? I couldn’t think of any other islands in this part of the world. Hawaii, though, was a few thousand miles to the south. We were flying over the middle of the Pacific and now we were indeed heading back to the place I had come from. What a waste of flying hours. After all this time in Asia I had become mildly superstitious. Was this a signal? Should we be going to America after all? We had been so happy in Singapore. Washington, DC, had been attacked by terrorists. My brother Chris had had a narrowish escape in New York. His apartment was next to Ground Zero but he had been on business in Paris at the time. In Singapore the only danger came in the form of stray branches from tree pruning on the airport motorway, the occasional snake in our house or being struck by lightning on the golf course (if you were stupid enough to carry one of those large umbrellas). Had I made a terrible mistake?
In the end we were spared the emergency landing, although it was alarming to see scores of fire engines and ambulances racing down the runway next to our plane. Apparently we made the evening news in Tokyo and the morning news in San Francisco. A new plane was rustled up and after a five-hour delay we recommenced our crossing of the Pacific Ocean. I arrived in Washington thirty-five hours after I had left home. I should have missed two days of my life, but because of the thirteen-hour time difference I was only a day behind. The mental maths was doing my head in. My body clock had been fast-forwarded, then rewound and then binned. Even as a seasoned traveller I had never, ever experienced jet lag like this. I should have been asleep when everyone else was awake. My brain felt like a poached egg encased in pastry. My senses were numbed, my limbs ached and I was not in the least prepared to deal with three Washington estate agents from three rival agencies. All called Kathy.
In a moment of fitful enterprise before leaving Singapore I had contacted these agencies, hoping to see as many houses as possible in the short time I had available. Little did I realize that I had broken an unwritten but widely respected etiquette in the world of Washington property. You choose an agent and then you stick with him or her to the bitter end. It is easier to get a divorce in the United States than to change agents. So to start your hunt for the dream home as a polygamist was hardly a good idea. There was also a matter of verbal misunderstanding. I was happily using the term ‘estate agent’ until the concierge in my hotel informed me that this conjured up images of managing the properties of the dead more than the accommodation of the living. I should try ‘realtor’. But that was difficult to pronounce and, in any case, sounded like something out of Viking lore. We were indeed divided by the same language, I thought, and in my mental state such subtle points of translation actually caused physical pain.
I spent much of the first day of my new life in America wondering if, when and how I should tell one Kathy about the other two. Acute jet lag makes the mind obsess acutely about little things. Eventually the Kathies would find out, wouldn’t they? And how many other BBC correspondents could there be in Washington at that time looking for a place to live? At least two as it turned out. I rang the Kathy I designated as Kathy 1, cross-referencing her name with her phone number. She had seemed to be the most forthcoming when I had called her up earlier from Singapore. ‘I’m dying to meet you in the flesh!’ I now lied, perhaps crossing a red line of familiarity.
Kathy 1 shot back: ‘Well, Matt, there’s a lot of it!’
‘Properties?’
‘No, flesh.’
I liked Kathy 1. After Singapore I was taken aback by humour that didn’t come from friends, books, TV or films. We arranged to meet later that afternoon.
I put the phone down and rang Kathy 2.
‘I am so, so glad that you called, Matt. I have just been chatting to the most delightful gentleman, who happens to be a friend of mine, who has the most gorgeous house in Georgetown. It is superb for entertaining. You and your family will adore it. Meet me in one hour, if you can.’
I was sitting on the side of the hotel bed, looking like a forlorn character in an Edward Hopper painting. My shoulders were rounder than the dome of the Capitol. My eyes had gone AWOL. My skin felt like old cornflakes and looked so pale it was translucent. I was meeting a woman who had got it into her head that I was going to entertain like an ambassador and resemble a well-scrubbed anchorman.
I turned up at the allotted location. I was early. The house was wonderful, huge and looked at least four times my budget. I was clearly wasting my time. Then I noticed an elegant woman sitting in a Jaguar on the other side of the road. She was waiting and fiddling with her phone. She had clearly seen me, but made no attempt to communicate. So she can’t have been my date. I looked at her. She looked away. It was summer. The air was ablaze and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, what everyone in Singapore would have worn. But not, it turns out, in ‘the Nation’s Capital’. Then my phone rang. It was Kathy 2.
‘Where are you, Matt?’
‘Oh. I’m outside the house. Where are you?’
‘I’m outside the house, too …’ and with that the elegant woman in the car looked out of the window of her Jaguar and caught my eye. Despite numerous nips and tucks, her upwardly mobile cheeks fell like wet cement. She got out, straightening a pink Chanel suit. Her trussed-up hair seemed to obey a higher master. In her fifties, Kathy 2 was what I imagined the quintessential Georgetown hostess would look like: elegant, urbane, and horribly disappointed by her new client. One reluctant handshake later she was ringing the doorbell of the house, probably mentally preparing her excuses for the dear friend who would find a man resembling a bedraggled mature student darkening his illustrious doorstep.
‘Hello, Jim,’ she said. ‘This is …’
But before she could end her sentence and uncurl her disapproving upper lip, Jim blurted out: ‘Matt Frei. But of course. I recognize you from the news. I lurved your stuff from Asia. Come in. Please come in.’
First a non-crash and now this. I might have jet lag but there was a God.
Kathy 2 changed her tone as if day had banished night. After this she offered to drive me round town and show me Washington. Having almost never been recognized by anyone, I was immensely grateful for this windfall of minor celebrity and wondered whether it could translate into a 350 per cent discount on the exorbitant rent charged by Jim for his glorious mansion. Alas, it was not to be. I politely declined Kathy 2’s offer of a tour of her city. She promised to get back to me with other properties ‘better tailored for the needs of your family’. In other words, cheap. I went back to the hotel to ring Kathy 3.
‘You’re already talking to two other agents. It’s a small world, you know, and there really isn’t that much around to show you at your budget. Anyway, I am already dealing with a guy called Justin Webb. He also says he’s from the BBC. How many of you are there?’ I had been busted and the in-house