Layover E-Book

Lisa Zeidner

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 339

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A smart and sexy novel about a woman on the edge, soon to be a major film "Subtle, astute... Zeidner joins the ranks of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon"New York Times Book Review, Notable Book of the Year Claire Newbold is not your typical heroine. Smart and sexy, yes, but she's also been known to sneak into a hotel room or two without paying, seduce a teenager in wet bathing trunks, and just check out of things altogether - like her job. And her marriage. Grieving the loss of her only child, and unsure of what's to become of her relationship, Claire takes a leave of absence from everyday life. She moves from hotel to hotel, basking in the anonymity of travel and forbidden sex, struggling to understand herself. Who has she become? And how will she ever find redemption? "A moving portrait of a woman who reclaims her life... Zeidner skillfully charts the map of Claire's vulnerable heart... a wicked sendup of contemporary life"Publishers Weekly "A sharp and wryly moving portrait of a woman in the midst of a breakdown... A wise and satisfying read"Kirkus Reviews Lisa Zeidner has published five novels, including the critically acclaimed Layover, and two books of poems. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, GQ, Tin House and elsewhere. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.

Leseprobe

Love is giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist.

JACQUES LACAN

Contents

Title PageEpigraph  IIIIIIIV  AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorCopyright

I

I packed for homelessness the way I would pack for a week in Europe—wrinkle-free, in a carry-on. Traveling light is easy in summer. Everything I owned that year seemed to be beige or gray, the palette of Roman tombstones, and airy enough to dry in a breeze, or by fan in a windowless hotel bathroom. The homeless people in cities pushing shopping carts, with their splayfooted, third-trimester walks: I saw no need to be manacled to my past, weighed down by it, when I had so little left. I floated away with no regrets. By then I was a ghost in my own life anyway.

I had no plan. The first time, I simply missed a flight. I’d been traveling for business, and had taken to packing a bathing suit for hotel pools in Scranton, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. On weekdays, midmorning, the dollhouse-sized pools were always empty, like sets from moody foreign films. No flirting, no kids. I tried to do enough laps to lose count.

People kept telling me to take advantage of the gyms. Even the hotel clerks praised the equipment, always confidential and leering, as if sharing the address of the local S and M joint. I knew exactly the kind of men I could find bench-pressing there, but I didn’t want to socialize with them or with anyone else. I just wanted the freedom not to think. The chlorine felt soothingly medicinal. And one day I swam too long, missed a plane.

Only when I was back in my room, in the shower, did I wonder about the time, but I didn’t rush. Even when I saw that it was too late to get to the airport, I didn’t panic. My trajectory was infinitely adjustable.

This is not the attitude I had been encouraged to cultivate in sales. But for some time I had been silently recalibrating my attitude toward my job. My “career” was old enough, rooted enough, to be allowed to grow or not on its own, as my child would have done if my child hadn’t died. I was not less involved with work because my child died, though that’s what everyone thought—I felt their edgy tolerance, their benevolence and the predictable backlash from their benevolence, their confidence that they were cutting me some slack even when I was performing perfectly well.

So now I told no one who didn’t already know. There wasn’t anything to say, unless I wanted to discuss theology with strangers in airport lounges, meditate on whether one could find meaning in the statistics of highway fatalities, and I wanted to do this so little that when forced to discuss family status, I lied: I had a grown son in college, and was suffering from a mild case of empty-nest syndrome.

He was at Brown. He didn’t know his major yet. If pressed, I would add that he played tennis. If I’d had children at the old-fashioned time, right out of college myself, my son would have been college-aged.

Nothing was repressed. My husband, Kenneth, and I had clocked in the requisite hours in therapy, singly and collectively, cupping the coal of grief in burned hands, fanning our grief as it turned to ash. The therapist was a tall man with very bad vision. I could barely see his eyes through his glasses, and their magnified, amniotic softness was oddly comforting. I thought of him, sometimes, while swimming. I could still summon forth his number on my laptop, and had been told I could call him whenever I needed to talk.

But at the time, I felt fine. I called the airline, changed the flight. Still numbly tingling from swim and shower, I lay down, fell asleep.

In retrospect, I understand that my bodily clock must have already been off, the battery low or spring overwound. Since there was no reason to hurry back, to snatch a child from day care, I’d revised how I set up appointments—eliminated some return trips so I could go straight from city to city, make my days less crammed. Avoid airport rushes. Swim in the morning and nap until checkout time, or not even sleep but just drift, waiting to be hungry enough for lunch.

That day, however, I slept past checkout. The maid came in her white uniform, like a nurse. Waking, I took the hotel room for a hospital room, cringed from her tray full of hypodermics and ministrations.

I knew Ignatia from three years of business in that city, that hotel. She knew about my son. We’d actually had a scene—this was earlier, when I would still confess, because I still cried unexpectedly—when I told her about the accident and she held me, smelling of gardenia and ammonia. Then pulled out a snapshot of her grandchildren, identifying each by name and age, which I thought was interesting. Most people will try so hard not to mention their own families, and you can feel their pride to be so restrained in the face of your bad luck, but she seemed to feel it would help me to witness her abundance. “What was boy’s name?” she asked. I told her. She repeated it, smiled, and never mentioned him to me again. But she was always cheerful.

I must have looked stricken. “Oh Miss, is okay,” she assured me. “Sleepy,” I apologized, and she said, “Oh, yes. Work hard,” meaning I did, she did, or both. Then she backed herself and her cart out of the room, nodding.

Her wordless concern felt almost psychic, as if she knew about Ken, forgave him for his perfectly understandable little affair as I did, but realized that I needed some extra solicitude.

She must not have alerted the desk that I was still there. Nor did I. When I reached the lobby early that evening, the clerks were busy. I slipped my electronic key card into my purse and left. There was no thought of avoiding the charge for the extra day. But I knew instantly that I wouldn’t be charged.

I was a hard-core wage earner of the type hotel ads target. My husband was a cardiothoracic surgeon. My wallet was a garden of credit cards budding possibility, the holographic birds’ wings glinting as if poised for flight. No one would ever suspect me of fraud, though I knew enough about the rhythms of that hotel, the staffs’ frenzies and downtimes, the secret pockets, to take advantage.

Over the next week I found myself returning to this idea as I made my appointments and did my rounds, greeting housekeepers and clerks cordially as I had for the years I’d covered this territory selling medical equipment. Across a swath of country, defined as a brewing storm on a weather map, hotel clerks were friendly enough to say, “Ken called to see if you’d gotten in. Said it was urgent.” And I could retort, “No pot roast tonight,” though Ken had always been the cook in our family; he liked dishes where he got to wantonly chop and toss, as antidote to the precision of surgery. I could wave to the plainclothes detective in the lobby who was reading, just to be inconspicuous, the latest issue of SecurityManagement, with revealing articles on methods for controlling “access-related incidents” that result in “guest property loss.”

Dollars and frequent-flier miles accrued. I was on the up-and-up, a true friend to “the lodging industry.” But more and more often, I seemed to be neglecting to return my card to the desk, until I’d developed quite a collection—pathetic, like people who save restaurant matchbooks.

Meanwhile, I’d begun to sleep later and later, until I was doing appointments in the morning and early afternoon, taking a siesta, and swimming in hotel pools at ten, eleven at night. Then midnight. (The posted signs prohibited this, but at that hour there were no pool police.) Calling room service at 2:00 AM, checking my voice mail at dusk.

Ken: “Where are you?” Ken: “I called Pittsburgh, just for fun.” Flirtatious (“I’d send flowers, if you gave me a target state”) and weary (“I am not amused”). In each call, hospital pages as background drone, steady as surf. I could imagine his bloody hands emerging from a rib cage as he rushed to answer my page. I’d interrupted surgery when I went into labor, and it was still seductive, romantic, to picture that pried-apart chest being abandoned, Ken storming into Labor and Delivery still sporting his mask and butcher’s smock. How much time the both of us have spent in hospitals! The smell of it clung to us, not sanitized at all, but tacky, tumescent: the blood, the piss, the smoke in lobbies and bathrooms.

Every day I left a reassuring message. No need to torture him. But no need to discuss it, either. In fact, there didn’t appear to be any need to speak with anyone. Between fax and voice mail, I could go about my rounds invisibly, like the Wizard of Oz. Why board the plane, take the shuttle to the rental car, endure the running totals and ticket lines? Would it be possible to just stay still and concentrate—Tantric sales?

What mainly stopped me was the fact that, after eight days, my husband had thought to trace my itinerary through my credit card use. I’d been leaving my messages on the home answering machine when I knew he’d be on rounds, but he was persistent, and when he dialed at 3:00 AM, hoping I’d just pick up groggily, I did, because I was waiting for a cheeseburger and beer from room service, and it had been a while.

“Hey,” Ken said, aiming for breeziness.

“Ken, what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? You tell me.”

I didn’t answer fast enough. “I should never have said anything, okay?” he went on. “But Christ, I was falling apart. It’s not like—”

“It’s fine, Ken,” I said, sincerely.

“In what sense? In what sense is it ‘fine’? I called Kramer. This is a stage, remember? He warned us. Like quitting smoking—you think it’s done, you think you’re safe. You’re fuguing out. I mean, what do you need, retaliation? Go for it. But it won’t help.”

“Sex?” I said, too surprised to get the words out: “Is that what you—?” So Kenneth winced to envision hotel couplings, soothingly anonymous. Maybe that’s what he’d sought at his convention of cardiologists, though my impression was that he’d known the woman from his undergraduate days, and that their lighthearted reunion seemed like a promising way to suture past and future, chop out the unpleasant present. I understood that he never intended to bypass me. He just hoped to thrust his way past the accident’s impact, the twisted tin. For him it was not a memory. He was not there. Still. The infant in the car seat hardly bloody, but no heartbeat. Never meant to throw baby out with bathwater was what I was thinking, what I couldn’t work into a sentence, an unfortunate phrase under the circumstances, and also, still astonished, sex?

The best way I could summarize was “I love you. I’ll be home soon.”

“When?”

“Get some sleep,” I said, and went to open the door.

A college kid doing a summer job nodded to me with the skepticism due a lone woman who orders room service in the middle of the night. (After aerobic sex, I’d presumably deserve to carbo-load.) Someone’s son, with huge feet in sneakers like futuristic barges. His white uniform jacket was pointedly small, to stress that the hotel was by no means his real life. He wheeled in the cart and used a Chaplinesque flourish to remove the metal lid from the plate, grinning with a mime’s delight at the burger. I smiled back, tipped him.

Fact is, I loved the tin lid with its eye like a porthole, the cloth napkin, the carnation in the bud vase. I loved room service even when the food was tepid, the napkin reeked of ammonia. The failures were almost touching. My encounters with clerks and bellboys made me feel weirdly spiritual, as if we were preparing to rise to the occasion of flood or famine, to transcend the provincial louts we mostly were in daily life.

Especially with the housekeepers. Tips aside, I had a real rapport with them. Like them, I knew how it felt to make other people’s beds. And I knew how to use the little Spanish I had—not to insult them with hello or thank you, as if they couldn’t recognize those words in English, but if I needed something specific: hand cream, thread. Maybe I credited them with too much insight, but I sensed that many of the housekeepers, even the very young ones, recognized me as a fellow exile, someone on the lam from tragedy, grateful to humbly enter and exit my compartment of the honeycomb.

So it felt like fate that the next day saw me back at Ignatia’s hotel.

At the reception desk, I was greeted by an impressive packet of messages. Multiple, out-of-date inquiries from my husband. One from Kramer, licensed therapist, assigned to case and chase along with my brother, who had already left the phone number of his place in Maine on my pager, which I’d been mostly ignoring, because of Ken. Thus I hadn’t gotten word from the day’s main client, canceling due to a family emergency.

“Know what?” I said to the clerk processing my check-in. “I don’t need to be here.”

He laughed. “Stood up?”

“Yup. Footloose and fancy free in Cincinnati.”

“You could check out the Air Force Museum in Dayton.”

“Thanks for the tip. Why don’t I just check out, period.” He laughed as he returned my credit card.

I headed toward the bathroom, and once out of sight of the desk, toward the stairs. Went up one flight, grabbed a couple of towels from a housekeeping cart in the hallway, and took the elevator up. The pool was mine. I draped a towel over my suitcase, briefcase, and laptop case for protection, pulled out my bathing suit (still damp) from its suitcase pocket, and quickly stripped. Once safely in the bathing suit I folded my skirt, rolled my pantyhose into one shoe and tucked my watch in the other, put the shoes under the chair, and hung the suit jacket over the back, where it looked oddly exhilarating.

I swam until I got company. In a spasm, by spontaneous generation, an extended family—sisters, their brood, in town for a wedding. “No splashing!” one mother warned, shooting me the veiled look—part apology, part defiance—that women use to gauge each other’s tolerance for children.

As soon as it was polite, I took off, trying to grab my clothes and computer like a carefree person and not a fugitive.

On the fire stair I paused to slip my pumps on bare feet. With my computer case strapped over my shoulder sari-style and my wet bathing suit, I looked like some genetic experiment gone awry, Miss Universe crosshatched with an insurance salesman.

Ignatia was on the fifth floor, nonsmoking. From the end of the hall, I watched her wheel her cart into a room that was often mine. I followed.

“Good morning!” I said, laying my computer down on the desk as if it belonged there.

“Oh, hi, not finished, so sorry,” she said, handing me a dry towel from the cart. “No problem, take your time.”

I collapsed on one of the chairs, put my feet on the bed. Ignatia checked the list on her cart. “You here, in this room, you are sure?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“I’m nowhere. Not checked in.”

She shrugged to indicate that she didn’t understand.

The night before, after Ken’s call, I’d conducted a database search about hotel security. For all the updated electronic lock systems, it appeared that master keys abounded on the black market and that, furthermore, anyone could walk into any room being cleaned, interrupt and say, “I have to use the bathroom right now.” Officially, staff would demand to see the intruder’s room key or ID, but most housekeepers didn’t feel they were paid enough to be guards. So, technology aside, it was still just like Cary Grant slipping into the imaginary FBI agent’s hotel room in North by Northwest. You could march right up, rifle through another man’s jacket pockets. I wanted no cameras or cash; I just wanted to lie down on Little Bear’s bed, like Goldilocks.

“Just need to dry off,” I told Ignatia. “Take a nap, then I’m catching a plane. I won’t stay.”

She gave me an appraising look. “No work?”

“Not today.”

“Husband good?”

“Oh, he’s fine, Ignatia.”

“How long?”

“Just a couple of hours.”

“No. Poor little boy.”

“Oh, it’s not that. I just—”

“Young,” she said, pointing to my belly. “Don’t worry. Home better. Travel no good—” she made gentle circles in the air, then scattered them, to indicate the pregnancy I was failing to achieve, because frequent travel was throwing off my menstrual cycles.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. She was right, of course. I had the circadian rhythms of a cicada.

“Rest,” she said, “but then go home. Airplane, hotel—air no good.”

“That’s true, Ignatia.”

As she swept by me to change the sheets, I stood up to help her. This time she laughed. “No pay is good you help,” she said, and we stood on opposite sides of the bed to unfold the blank flag of a sheet together.

I stayed in the Cincinnati hotel for two-and-a-half days, one in that room, which had not been booked again after I changed my mind. The next day I watched a man down the hall leave his room—I’d stayed in that room before too, and just happened to have the key in my collection. The articles forewarned that hotel management sometimes neglects to rekey when a key card is not returned to them, especially in smaller, less computerized establishments. So if the room happens not to have been rented in the interim, you’re made in the shade. This man, however, was encumbered by so much luggage that he did not even manage to click the door shut behind him.

I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob, ate a couple of pieces of toast that my predecessor had left from breakfast and drank the last bit of lukewarm coffee from his personal pot, checked his bed for hair.

Ignatia came in the following morning and shook her head at me with a parent’s firm concern. “You clean up and go,” she ordered, and I did as she said.

The timing was perfect, as the client who had stood me up earlier in the week was now back at her desk after her father’s double bypass, delighted with the variety and vigor of her daily life in the way that only visiting hospitals as a healthy person can make you.

As I walked past the reception desk and waved—the clerk only had time to look momentarily mystified—I thought, as I did more and more often, about Hitchcock, about the scene from Psycho where Janet Leigh, moments after stealing from the boss who trusted her, takes a pedestrian crossing and looks up to see the selfsame mystified boss, through the windshield of his car. It occurred to me that I was turning into the kind of woman who could show up dead in a motel or at the bottom of a lake, eyes open, skin translucent as a tadpole’s.

But the thought wasn’t alarming. Before the accident, I’d worried much more about death. In fact, every time a plane lifted off or landed, I’d had to clench eyes and stomach against the vision of a motherless son, my lovely boy feeling cheated forever because I’d left him rather than letting him decide to leave me, as is every child’s right. I could understand the Nazi commanders who shot their wives and children. In the ideal world, all families would die together, in a row, tidy bullet holes in their heads. I understood even then, even without Kramer’s gentle help, that much of the fear was guilt, self-punishment, because it felt so good to peel him off me at day care and board that plane, to sit alone in the seat and be allowed to let my thoughts drift, untethered.

After the accident, I had much less to fear. I could walk on nails, eat fire, explode, or be garotted—nothing would ever hurt as much again.

Still, in the tinny, rattling rental cars I drove for work, to and from airports and hospitals, I felt about as safe as I would curled up in a tin can with the lid cut off, the kind children use to make fake telephones. It was on highways, dodging obnoxious drivers in their sport utility vehicles, their Suburbans—all of their fake signs of strength and bounty—that I most often felt really bad. Airports were easier. I liked the impersonal bustle, the programmed security of gates. Except that air travel, of course, had been getting more difficult. The waits longer, the rows of seats more crammed. More screaming babies.

It had been becoming harder, on planes, to feel serene, buffered. I used to remember to take my vitamins—C against plane flu, E for dry skin—when the flight attendants brought the drink carts, until I had to stop that; it opened up too many conversations with chirpy-bird seatmates, all of whom wanted to sing Prozac’s praises, hold hands with strangers and make a Xanax circle. After almost fifteen years in sales, I could spot, and avoid, the garrulous manic-depressive men with their needy eyes, their onward-and-upward narratives. They were like flat tires, the drugs like those cans of air you’re supposed to keep in your trunk. Not even a patch, just a fart’s-worth of air to get them a couple of yards down the road.

My technique: I told them early on that my husband was a surgeon. If I said the word surgeon first and then quickly, before they could ask, cardiothoracic, they would almost always nod as they visibly deflated, then leave me alone.

This was necessary, I assured myself, but it did make me feel mean. And certainly unfeminine, to be so uncaring about a male ego. But I was no longer, in some sense, even a woman. I’d buried myself in work as a man would—it is a good idea, nothing to sneeze at—and rejected everything frilly, decorative. So I was no longer fragile. In fact, I felt almost armor-plated, and that’s a shame, because grief at least ought to make you empathetic.

“You’re lucky,” my neighbor declared—undeterred by my husband’s status, he’d extracted the empty-nest story. “The boys are much, much better than the girls. Give ’em the car keys and they’re out of your life. You just have to worry about AIDS. The girls wanna hang around and torture you. Teenage girls, man. God’s scourge. What are they sticking you for tuition?”

Invented son, invented sum. Before I could even utter the amount, he’d added, outraged, and that’s after-tax dollars, as I could have predicted. To him I had to be aggressively rude. Extracting the laptop wouldn’t deter him, since all frequent flyers now have computer come-ons and software bonding; for a female traveler, a laptop is as loud as a red bra spotted sideways through an unbuttoned blouse.

“Truth is,” I said, “my son is dead. So I’d rather not discuss him or your kids or your feelings about parenthood, if that’s all right with you,” which did the trick. He reared back, put both hands up palm forward like a traffic cop, and I did feel a little bad, then, to see his watery eyes in the headlights of the speeding big rig he now saw me as.

On a crisp evening in mid-May, after dinner, I had been just about to take a shower—felt I needed one, after having grilled tuna and cleaned up—when Ken stuck his head into the bathroom and commanded, “Put that dress back on. And come outside.”

He had changed into a bathing suit. Did not seem quite warm enough for that. From his urgent tone I assumed there was a problem. Raccoons in the trash. “Not those,” he added, pointing to my underpants. He led me out into our fenced backyard and looked for the place where we would not be exposed in the glare of the neighbor’s harsh garage floodlights. Chose a tree to lean me up against.

I appreciated this. The dark felt good and so did the air, just the right temperature. The dark, and the air, seemed related to the perfect meal we’d just enjoyed, which I could still taste in his kiss—a Beaujolais at the peak of its short life’s curve; the fish precisely pink. His hand went right under the dress with its cheerful floral print to find me wet. This is all a terrible cliché, I am fully aware, but hey, so is spring.

He pushed up the dress so we could get a little chest-onc-hest action. Me on tiptoe to reach the tall man’s mouth. “Turn around,” he instructed. I did, the tree providing a branch at the right height to grasp.

I thought this was all very good of Ken, who had had a particularly arduous day. I tried not to be too alert for the slam of the refrigerator door in the neighbor’s kitchen, the high school kids down the block clattering out for some one-on-one on the asphalt. Or too distracted, when I opened my eyes, by the tulips—headless, already goners—in the elaborately terraced bed that Ken had gotten planted, in the spot that had held our son’s climbing apparatus, which Ken had gotten taken down and put in a remote corner of the basement, packed up tight as a tent, ready for the new child whom we had thus far failed to conceive.

At the time, I was not thinking these things. Was merely aware, as how could I not be, that he was making an effort to do things my way. “Naturally.” As opposed to by the instructions of one of his esteemed colleagues, who had recommended six months of birth-control pills to regulate my irregularities, followed by a six-month “holding pattern” of elaborate record-keeping, then a program of fertility drugs that might, he warned—talking as doctors often do to women, even to doctors’ wives—“make you a little nutsy.”

Just what I needed.

I had hated birth-control pills when I was young, and dating. They gave me headaches; they made me dry. These were, I understood, minor side effects, especially for a woman who had lost what might well turn out to be her last viable reproductive years to a trance of grief. But the irony felt like the bridge too far: I was supposed to take birth-control pills now, in middle age, in order to get pregnant?

So I appreciated what Ken was doing. No calendar. Just trees, stars, and a wife taking it from behind, ass glowing in moonlight. It would befit the occasion for me to come efficiently, exuberantly. But I could tell that was not going to happen. Ken would certainly do what was required. The man always cottoned to a project. Eventually there would be some kind of release. Many of my orgasms, however, had had a distant, thrumming, Novocained quality. Almost not worth the trouble.

I’d basically decided to fake it. Not exactly lie; no prostitutional theatrics. Simply not to have my eyes on that particular prize. Just to enjoy the night, the air, my husband’s unexpected ardor. (“It’s the thought that counts.”)

But Ken surprised me. He stopped, pulled out. Turned me around by my waist and got me draped the way he wanted me on the tree, one hand thoughtfully behind my back to keep the bark from abrading me. Then just began to work on me with his other hand, staring at me almost sternly, the eye contact a challenge: Concentrate! I did, best I could. Then surprised myself by coming in a smooth parabola that put me in mind of how perfectly cooked tuna separates when you hit it with a fork, those striated curves.

I was pretty pleased for us. We could have been any old couple, doing the yeoman’s work of keeping desire alive—bent over to shovel coal into the damn thing. Marriage like an old-fashioned train. Huffing and puffing, little engines that could.

As Ken finished I said, in gratitude, “Very nice.” Then, in the way of the praise any man deserves, especially a middle-aged one, “You been practicing? Bonin’ up?”

And he responded, voice cracking, “Only once.”

This was the special moment that my husband selected to reveal to me that he had been unfaithful.

Unbelievable, really. I mean, he was still inside me.

I thought I had misheard. But no, he pulled his bathing suit up for a halting confession that was going to include the date and place of the regretted betrayal. “I’m—” he said. “God, I’m so—”

I straightened up. As one would expect. Dress falling back into position. Stared at him. Said, “Thanks for sharing.”

At this point he began to yell at me. He was sorry. But. My sarcasm typical, etc.

What he said then, and what he revealed in the series of painful conversations we would subsequently have, in which he’d carom from apology to anger, either thanking me profusely for being reasonable or enumerating the occasions on which I had failed to show proper feeling, I could not say. The only accusation that stuck was fucking zombie.

Back inside, my work phone was ringing. I heard the answering machine pick up in the den, then the tone that indicated an incoming fax. I stopped in the kitchen to get a Kleenex, to wipe the sperm that had dripped out onto my inner thigh. No Kleenex. Box empty. Used a paper towel. Before I could get to the fax machine, another beep, less familiar. I went in to find the document cut off, incomplete, and a message: “Paper roll empty.”

This failure was what made me cry. Or it just hit me then, in a time lag, what Ken had said. Or both.

One of my post-traumatic stress symptoms had to do with fax machines. Ken knew about it. I did not like to load fax paper. I did not like the oily feel of fax paper, the smell. The car accident that took my son’s life had happened on a not-too-busy street less than five miles away, when a housewife—not drunk, not even speeding—turned right on red legally and went into a skid in a light rain. I had just picked up my son from day care and was coming from Staples with a bag full of home office supplies. A box of fine-point felt-tip pens. Post-its. Thermal fax paper—there is a deeply ungratifying purchase.

Ken came in the room and put his arms around me, stroked my hair, murmuring apologies, while the phone fired again, as whoever it was attempted to resend the aborted message. Then tried again.

He led me out of the room and closed the door, so I didn’t have to listen.

The next day he managed to find time to leave the hospital and buy me a plain-paper fax machine, so I would never again have to load thermal paper through that guillotinelike aperture. Over dinner told me all about how he had made his consumer choice, the various available features, how much the plain paper copiers had come down in price. This was not an evasion. In our marital tug-of-war, in fact, it represented a gesture of goodwill, that he was not going to be “pushy” about us confronting the issues, parsing out blame.

Still, it was annoying. Ken tended to spend money at emotional junctions. His purchases were often smoke signals. This is not unusual, I suppose. Women get new haircuts; men buy small electronics. Cars and major appliances spell big trouble.

“Well, I am very touched,” I told the man who, early in our courtship, had showed up at my doorstep with not roses but pans—he’d found my cooking equipment woefully inadequate. “I guess I should have figured out you were having an affair when you bought the espresso machine.”

“If you’d been paying attention,” he noted sourly.

I didn’t want to even set foot there. We had been down that landmined road already. Up a good part of the night, in fact, numbly going over the timetable. His reasons, my reactions.

“Look, I’ve already officially forgiven you,” I said. Had even made a joke of it, best I could—bad things happening in threes. This ought to do us. Satisfy our little family’s quota for taking it up the ass.

“‘Officially,’ yes.”

“But it’s going to take time, Ken.”

“As opposed to everything else.”

“Exactly like everything else.”

“We should go back to Kramer. Help us talk it through.”

“We can talk all you want,” I said. “But it’s still going to take time.”

“More time.”

“More time. Right.”

“How much time do you think we’ve got?”

More than he could spare. Less than I needed. I just let it go. “I’m only saying, upgraded office equipment aside, I don’t think we have much of an immediate future in Outdoor Copulation.”

Which was a shame. I’d eventually taken my shower the night before, fishy and swollen-eyed from crying, to discover, hosing myself down, that despite the fresh trauma there was all sorts of stray sensation left. If Ken had managed to control the need to confess, he could have joined me there. Backyard, bathtub—Ken had the instincts, if not the follow-through. He had managed to make actual desire well up in me. It had not altogether subsided, even yet, in the bland hotel rooms. It was not, however, exactly attached to Ken. More free-floating.

I was sad about the dress. A cheap little flippy dress, machine-washable, but I’d liked it. I wasn’t going to be eating tuna again for a while either. This had all been over two months ago. We were dealing with it now, along with everything else.

In Columbus, I pitched equipment to a dialysis lab, then went straight to my hotel. Took the elevator straight up to the room for which I’d saved a key card. It didn’t work. No housekeepers were visible. One floor down, I stopped in front of the parked cart in the hallway. Poked my head in and waved to a young woman twitching a rag at the furniture.

“Hi,” I said, wheeling my suitcase toward the closet. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going to—”

“Haven’t done in there yet,” she warned.

“That’s fine. I’ll be right out. Just going to throw on my bathing suit.”

She looked mildly puzzled, but not suspicious. I did my half-second pantomime of sisterly fatigue as I hung up my jacket. She smiled, said she’d come back.

A line you cross, a better sanity test, perhaps, than asking someone to recite the year, month, and current president: whether you will use a hotel soap that someone else has unwrapped, dry your face with a towel still damp and balled-up from use by a stranger. I’m not claiming that I was ready to eat the wrinkled tail ends of hot dogs resurrected from public garbage cans. But I felt no disgust toward the damp bathroom. If anything, I felt the smugness of the ecologically sound: why splatter the planet with that much Clorox when some poor fellow had rushed out, as I had so often myself, right after his wake-up call?

The pool actually had a guard posted, checking key cards. I’d forgotten mine, but the woman on duty recognized me, and waved me through. “Is your husband up there?” she asked, to my surprise; turns out she was more concerned with my getting back into the room than with my marital status. Good point. I’d pulled the door shut. It seemed risky to pad around the hotel in a wet bathing suit, looking for a trusting housekeeper; risky as well to try the front desk. What was I doing?

I took the elevator straight to the basement, where I was pretty sure I’d find an airless employee lounge with vending machines and smokers on break. I was right. “Can I talk with you for a second?” I asked, poking my head in, to the woman closest to the door. She met me in the hallway. Not only was I locked out, I told her, locking my legs together beneath the towel, but I’d just gotten my period. Didn’t really want to parade through the lobby dripping blood on the carpet. She grinned, and marched me right to the freight elevator. “Got what you need now?” she asked as she let me in, and I felt like hugging her.

Room service, obviously, was out of the question. And the door, it was clear, would lock automatically behind me. It took a good half hour of surreptitious fiddling with the mechanism to figure out how to jam it. I went to a place nearby with a newspaper. I hadn’t bought it, incidentally. Part and parcel of my homelessness: I got my folded newspapers from the pockets of the airline seats in front of me, from lounges and lobbies. Still not from trash cans, but close. This is a very different feeling from that of home delivery, the illusion that the whole world arrives at your doorstep at dawn. What scraps of news there were felt veiled, coded, as if they were meant for me alone, came to me like messages in bottles.

The article I read over pasta, from the Style section of The Washington Post, a stop on someone else’s route, was about Tiny Tim of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” fame. Now an old man, but still quixotically upbeat, he was staging his comeback from a boardinghouse room in Minneapolis, so poor he ate only beans from cans but still faithfully colored his flowing locks with Clairol. I took this as a cautionary tale that whatever I was doing, I would not be able to do it forever. But then that went without saying from the onset. The only question, really, was when it would end, and how.

Something had begun to happen to me, so subtle that I had not even yet identified it, though I would later carbon-date it to the airport in Pittsburgh. I saw things about people, instantaneously. Especially at airports, where everyone was ripped from context, people’s souls would glow phosphorescent, as if X-rayed by the baggage-check machine. Hot spots molten, clearly defined as keys or loose change.

At a gate, awaiting the boarding call, I would sit with my eyes trained on the crowds and watch people pass in suspended animation, frame by frame. In a flash I could tell who loved their wives, who loved their work. Who had gotten laid and who had just spent huge sums of company money in lieu of getting laid. Who was smart as a fox, who dumb as dirt. Who was lonely, empty, afraid. Almost everyone was afraid. Stunning, how much fear was out there. Not fear of anything tangible—danger or death—so much as a fear of being exposed, seen through.

People lurched or glided past like luggage coming down a conveyor belt. Some were threadbare, some spanking new. Many were hard to tell apart. At heart was a hunger to be claimed. To be met. By the human beings whose pictures you carry in your wallet. To not spin round the claim carousel, forlorn and unwanted. To not turn out to have missed your life as you’d miss a connecting flight.

Most people, if you yanked them from the throngs and sank your hand into their secrets as you’d search their luggage, you’d find—not much. Deodorant and a change of clothes. Pathetic. But there was, in the pathos, a kind of grim and shining truth.