Larissa MacFarquhar on John Ashbery / Nonstop service to Atlanta

"It's late already, five or five-thirty. John Ashbery is sitting at his typewriter but not typing. He picks up his cup of tea and takes two small sips because it's still quite hot. He puts it down. He's supposed to write some poetry today."

The young couple occupying 13E and 13F barely sit down before they whip out identical manila folders. Each contains the other's resume. I think they're resumes, rather than CVs, because I imagine CVs are less bullet-pointed, more narrative. I'm not sure though, since the only job I've ever applied for, namely bussing dishes at a crap country-club in the Allentown suburbs, required neither.

"He woke up pretty late this morning and has been futzing around ever since. He had some coffee. He read the newspaper. He dipped into a couple of books: a Proust biography that he bought five years ago but just started reading because it suddenly occurred to him to do so, a novel by Jean Rhys that he recently came across in a secondhand bookstore--he's not a systematic reader."

Her name is Christin, which bothers me. She wears a ring that supports a monstrous diamond. I'm not sure what his name is, but he wears a longsleeve green shirt and has no earlobes.

"He flipped on the television and watched half of something dumb. He didn't feel up to leaving the apartment--it was muggy and putrid out, even for New York in the summer. He was aware of a low-level but continuous feeling of anxiety connected with the fact that he hadn't started writing yet and didn't have an idea."

During the twenty minutes before we start taxiing from the gate, the five minutes when we taxi back up to the gate after the captain notices we've left some luggage behind on the tarmac, and the first forty-seven minutes of the flight, Christin and her husband intensely edit their resumes. They both work for Ford, she as a Marketing and Communications Specialist, he as a Product Marketing and Cross-Vehicle Planning/Strategy Manager. I suspect that he has fabricated his job title.

"His mind flitted about. He thought about a Jean Helion painting that he'd seen recently at a show. He considered whether he should order in dinner again from a newish Indian restaurant on Ninth Avenue that he likes. (He won't go out. He's seventy-eight. He doesn't often go out these days.)"

Christin edits with a ferocity that startles the men on both sides of her. "I don't think you need to butcher that section like you're trying to," her husband complains. I read the New Yorker. "Do you happen to know what the American sales volume was?" she asks (her husband, not me). "It's in dealer profits, right?" Then, sulkier: "Your first bullet point was a run-on sentence."

"On a trip to the bathroom he noticed that he needed a haircut. He talked on the phone to a poet friend who was sick."

"That's a key accomplishment!" Mr. No-Earlobes protests. He has a B.A. from M.S.U.. He flips Christin's resume face-down on his tray-table angrily, hissing, "I think we should take a break from this and try again later." She disagrees. "You can write down whatever you want," he says, turning to stare fixedly out the window. She does, finally ceasing her crossing-out and re-bulleting to turn her attention to a paperback copy of "Diary of a Mad Bride." One of the diary entries read, "Antonio the architect. I forgot how good he looks wet." Her husband reads the SkyMall catalog. Forwards, then backwards, then forwards again.

"By five o'clock, though, there was no avoiding the fact that he had only an hour or so left before the working day would be over, so he put a CD in the stereo and sat down at his desk. He sees that there's a tiny spot on the wall that he's never noticed before. It's only going to take him half an hour or forty minutes to whip out something short once he gets going, but getting going, that's the hard part."