Fear Of Flying

19 A 19^th-Century Ending

The hotel was a creaky old Victorian building near St. James’s. It had an ancient cage of an elevator which whirred like a cricket gone mad, desolate hallways, and huge pier glasses on every landing.

I inquired at the desk for Doctor Wing.

“No one here by that name, Madam,” said a long, thin concierge who looked like Bob Cratchit.

My heart sank.

“Are you sure?”

“Here, you can have a look at the register-if you like…” And he passed the book over to me. There were only about ten guests in that haunted house. You could see why. Swinging London had swung right by without stopping.

I looked down the register. Strawbridge, Henkel, Harbellow, Bottom. Cohen, Kinney, Watts, Wong… That was it. It had to be Wong. Of course they’d misspell it that way. All Chinese look alike and all Chinese names are Wong. I felt a great closeness to Bennett, having to put up with that kind of crap his whole life and not become bitter.

“How about this one in Room 60?” I asked, pointing to the dumb misspelling.

“Oh, the Japanese gentleman?”

Shit, I thought. They never can tell the difference.

“Yes, could you ring his room please?”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“His wife.”

The term “wife” apparently had clout back here in the nineteenth century. My friend Bob Cratchit literally sprang for the phone.

Maybe it really was a Japanese gentleman. Toshiro Mifune perhaps? Complete with Samurai sword and topknot of hair? One of the rapists of Rashomon? The ghost of Yukio Mishima with his wounds still oozing?

“I’m sorry, Madam, there’s no answer,” the deskman said.

“May I wait in the room?”

“Suit yourself, Madam.”

And with that he banged a bell on his desk and called for the porter. Another Dickensian type. This one was shorter than me and had glossily Vaselined hair.

I followed him into the elevator cage. Many whirring minutes later, we arrived on the sixth floor.

It was Bennett’s room all right; his jackets and ties hanging neatly in the closet. A stack of playbills on the dresser top, his toothbrush and shampoo on the rim of the old-fashioned sink. His slippers on the floor. His underwear and socks drying on the radiator. It scarcely felt as if I had been away at all. Had I? Was Bennett that able to adjust to my absence, calmly going to plays and coming home to wash his socks? The bed was a single. It was unmade but hardly looked tossed at all.

I flipped through the stack of playbills. He’d seen every play in London. He had not cracked up or done anything crazy. He was the same predictable Bennett.

I sighed with relief, or was it disappointment?

I ran a bath for myself and stripped off my dirty clothes, letting them drop in a trail on the floor.

The bathtub was one of those long, deep, claw-footed ones. A regular sarcophagus. I sank in up to my chin.

“Hello feet,” I said, as my toes surfaced at the other end of the tub. My arms were bruised and aching from dragging that suitcase, and my feet were blistered. The water was so hot that for a moment I thought I’d pass out. “DROWNED IN ESTRANGED HUSBAND’S BATHTUB,” I wrote in my head for the National Enquirer. I hadn’t the remotest idea of what was going to happen next and for the moment I didn’t care.

I floated lightly in the deep tub, feeling that something was different, something was strange, but I couldn’t figure out just what it was.

I looked down at my body. The same. The pink V of my thighs, the triangle of curly hair, the Tampax string fishing the water like a Hemingway hero, the white belly, the breasts half floating, the nipples flushed and rosy from the steamy water. A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it.

I hugged myself. It was my fear that was missing. The cold stone I had worn inside my chest for twenty-nine years was gone. Not suddenly. And maybe not for good. But it was gone.

Perhaps I had only come to take a bath. Perhaps I would leave before Bennett returned. Or perhaps we’d go home together and work things out. Or perhaps we’d go home together and separate. It was not clear how it would end. In nineteenth- century novels, they get married. In twentieth-century novels, they get divorced. Can you have an ending in which they do neither? I laughed at myself for being so literary. “Life has no plot” is one of my favorite lines. At least it has no plot while you’re still living. And after you die, the plot is not your concern.

But whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I’d go on working. Surviving meant being born over and over. It wasn’t easy, and it was always painful. But there wasn’t any other choice except death.

What would I say if Bennett walked in. “I’ve only come to take a bath?” Naked as I was, could I be noncommittal? How noncommittal can you be in the nude?

“If you grovel, you’ll be back at square one,” Adrian had said. I knew for sure I wasn’t going to grovel. But that was all I knew. It was enough.

I ran more hot water and soaped my hair. I thought of Adrian and blew him bubble kisses. I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

I hummed and rinsed my hair. As I was soaping it again, Bennett walked in.