So, I had gone to bed. I had to be up early next morning for my Employment Authorisation interview at the INS. Carol would be home soon, I reasoned: a few moments in this club would be enough to remind her that the incorporeal world of private erotic fantasy was something quite separate from the lumpish, flesh-and-blood solidity of real human beings, however they conducted themselves. Her old, stabilising scorn for the more extravagant manifestations of human folly would reassert itself, and she would be out of there.
But by two in the morning she still hadn’t come home.
I was wide awake. Ancient doubts; insecurities which had seemed miraculously vanquished by the act of marriage, were creeping out of their graves. I wondered if I had once again made a catastrophic misreading of a situation, got myself entangled with another Emily Lloyd. Was I wrong about our happiness? Had I misconstrued Carol’s habitual quietness as contentment when all along it was the quietness of a steadily burgeoning antagonism? The rational part of me dismissed this (after all, she had married me of her own volition!), but anxiety, like arousal, has a mind of its own, and by two-thirty this mind was racing.
I felt suddenly that I didn’t know my own wife: didn’t know who she was, or what she was capable of doing. It occurred to me that for her to have behaved as she had, on this particular night – the eve of my big day at the Immigration and Naturalisation Services, where the fundamental questions of where and how I would be able to live were to be all but settled – was perhaps not an accident. Was she deliberately trying to sabotage my life in the States; use the great impersonal levers and wheels of the INS regulations to do what she perhaps lacked the courage to do herself: separate us? Was there perhaps even an element of pure, gratuitous spite? I felt as if the ground were dissolving under me. The entire basis of my existence seemed to be suddenly in question. Some-where in its whirling fog, my imagination conjured a scene where an immigration officer came to our apartment to check on the authenticity of our marriage, only to find no sign of an American wife at all. Would she engineer such a scene? I wondered; could she all this time have been nurturing a hatred, conscious or unconscious, extreme enough to do such a thing?
As I’d lain there examining this conjecture, an incident from the real past had come back to me; one that I had dismissed as unimportant at the time, even if trivially disturbing, but which now seemed to contain some possibly larger significance than I had allowed myself to think.
This concerned a visit she had recently made to her parents in Palo Alto. Her fear of flying was such that she would always ask me to go with her on these rare trips. If I couldn’t, she would make the journey by train. On this occasion, however, when it turned out I was unable to go, she had decided to fly alone. It was time she got over this ridiculous, irrational phobia, she had said, or at least learned to ignore it. I didn’t try to dissuade her, though I felt a certain anguish: I was worried for her, but I was also a little saddened on my own account. In a strange way, her phobia had become one of the things I most cherished about our relationship. Not only did it turn our journeys together into interludes of extreme intimacy where her guard was down so completely I felt as though I had been entrusted with the care of some infinitely vulnerable child, but I had also – having made quite a study of it – come to see the phobia as a peculiar distinction.
To describe it a moment: it was chronic, extravagant in its effects, but self-contained. Carol herself seldom gave it any thought when she wasn’t about to fly, and before meeting me she had considered it merely an aberration in an otherwise well-balanced disposition; inconvenient but without wider significance.
For me though, the serial terrors she began feeling as soon as she woke up on the day of a journey by air represented a kind of spiritual badge of honor, setting her apart from the great mass of people, who dwelt – as one philosopher put it – in ‘the cellar of their existence’. There was something otherworldly about her feelings, religious almost, like the seizures of ancient sibyls. I always encouraged her to indulge them to the full, so much so that she once playfully accused me of making a private cult out of her fear, and it was true that I was as fascinated in observing every detail of her trauma as I was intent on supporting her.
The whole journey would take on a ritualistic quality, like a sacred procession, with its own stations and advances, its own precise gradations of solemnity as we passed through the airport’s successively more confined and concentrated spaces. At the check-in hall, the day’s formless anxieties would converge into their first distinct manifestation: a bright, uncharacteristic chattiness, where Carol would attempt to engage every passing flight attendant in seemingly casual conversation on subjects such as the incidence of freak storms, or the safety policy of their respective airlines. After that came the passage through the X-ray security checks into the more purposeful atmosphere of the departure lounge. Here, Carol’s fear would begin to acquire force and discipline. Excuses to go home would invent themselves, each more flimsy than the last: she had left the stove on, the door unlocked; there was a TV program she had to watch… And when I had patiently talked her out of these, she would fasten her attention on the flight information monitors, checking which flights were delayed, which canceled, divining from these dim flickerings of intelligence whole inauspicious skies. ‘Oh Lawrence, let’s fly another day,’ she would implore me, and it would seem to her that nothing could be simpler or more obviously correct than to go home and try again another day. If our own flight happened to be delayed, she would gather her things and stand triumphantly, certain that with this incontrovertible portent of disaster she had won the right to abandon the journey; tearfully amazed when I insisted we carry on. So, with a gathering feeling of impending catastrophe, she would follow me down the muffled corridors to the confined, glassed-off room reserved specifically for our flight – the boarding gate – where a trance-like stupor of apprehension would settle on her. Warm, melting undulations of fear would travel through her belly; her muscles would go limp, her insides loosen. She would go five or six times to the bathroom, feeling – she told me – as if she were wading through a medium denser than air, hearing her heart beat with a crunch-like thump. And then, delaying it until the last possible moment, she would let me lead her to the low-vaulted, thick-doored opening of the plane, pausing before it, as one might before the charged darkness of a sacrificial chapel, glimpsing through the divide of the curtain, the immense, green-lit zodiac of the pilot’s console; the whole vehicle humming as if possessed by diabolic forces. And as we taxied out, and the hum grew to a roar, and the lumbering momentum that seemed to her at once too much to bear and yet at the same time nowhere near enough to keep us airborne heaved us up into the clouds, the wheels knocking and whining as they were retracted, other noises more mysterious traveling through the fuselage – thumps and rumbles, sudden alarming cut-offs of certain pitches – she became wholly consumed by the terror of death. She lay back in her seat feeling by turns a vertiginous faintness as if the life were already evaporating from her, and a sudden, intense, unbearably vivid alertness, as if everything death was about to take from her had packed itself into the present moment, and was bursting in her like too much air in a balloon.
All the while I would sit gravely by her, holding her sweaty hands; sympathetic, curious, adoring. When we flew shudderingly into a patch of turbulence, or climbed abruptly to avoid thunderclouds, and she felt herself thrust into a still more poignant realm of dread, I would interrogate her on the precise nature of her suffering, and if she was too over-whelmed to speak, I would tell her my own theories – ‘what you’re experiencing is a revelation of the full reality of death… This is what it’s like to be alive at every level of your existence. You’re a house with every light blazing… You’re in naked contact with the actual substance of your life. You’re seeing it in its full, terrifying splendor. Most of us never even glimpse it. It’s a gift, like healing or clairvoyance…’