The plane landed in Cleveland, and took off again. The stewardess brought more drinks. Though he’d managed to stop arguing, he felt rotten. Balked. Resentful. His anger turned everything good that had happened into something equally bad. He felt cheated, corrupted, betrayed. All the glamor of the past nine weeks evaporated. All his posturings before his friends were wormwood now — for he knew they’d be making the same calculations and seeing his marriage in this new, less rosy light.
And yet, wasn’t it possible that Boa was right in a way? If her father hadn’t dealt with him in a manner wholly truthful, he may at least have limited himself to half-truths. Then too, whatever motives Grandison Whiting may have concealed, the result was still this happy ending here and now. He should, as Boa suggested, put the rest out of mind, relax, lie back and enjoy the beginning of what looked to be the endless banquet ahead.
Besides, it wouldn’t do to arrive at First National Flightpaths feeling any otherwise than mellow.
So, by way of thinking of something else, he read, in the airline’s own magazine, an article about trout fishing written by one of the country’s top novelists. When he’d finished it, he was convinced that trout fishing would be a delightful pastime to take up. Would there be trout, he wondered, in the Seychelles? Probably not.
The nicest thing about New York, Daniel decided, after being there five minutes, was that you were invisible. Nobody noticed anyone else. In fact, it was Daniel who wasn’t noticing, as he found out when someone almost got away with his carryon suitcase, which Boa rescued by a last-minute grab. So much for patriotic feelings about his old home town (For he was, as he’d many times pointed out to Boa, a New Yorker by birth).
The taxi ride from the airport to First National Flightpaths took a maddening forty minutes (The brochure had promised: “Just ten, minutes from Kennedy”). It took another fifteen minutes to register as Ben and Beverley Bosola (The brochure had also pointed out that New York law did not hold it criminal to adopt or use an alias, so long as fraud was not involved). And to be shown to their suite on the twenty-fourth floor. There were three rooms: a regular hotel room (with double-bed, kitchenette, and a sound system to equal the best at Worry) and two small studios adjoining. When the attendant asked Daniel if he knew how to work the apparatus, he took a deep breath and admitted that he didn’t. The explanation, together with a demonstration, took another five minutes. You smeared a little stickum on your forehead and over that snugged on a headband to which the wires connected. Then you had to lay back in what Daniel would have sworn was a dentist’s chair. And sing. Daniel tipped the attendant ten dollars, and finally they were alone.
“We’ve got eleven hours,” he said. “Ten, really, if we don’t want to miss the plane. Though it’s silly, isn’t it, talking about planes when here we are, ready to take off ourselves. Jesus, I’m so nervous.”
Boa threw back her head and whirled one small whirl on the mustard yellow carpet, making the pumpkin-orange of her wedding dress billow out about her. “So am I,” she said quietly. “But in the nicest way.”
“Do you want to make love first? They say that helps sometimes. To put you in the right frame of mind.”
“I’d rather do that afterwards, I think. It may seem terribly presumptuous to say so, but I feel the most complete confidence. I don’t know why.”
“I do too. But, you know, for all that, it might not work. You can never tell in advance. They say only about thirty percent make it the first time.”
“Well, if not tonight, another time.”
“But if tonight, oh boy!” He grinned.
“Oh boy,” she agreed.
They kissed and then each of them went into a separate sound studio. Daniel, following the attendant’s advice, sang through his song once before wiring himself in. He had chosen Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” From the first moment he’d heard the song on a recording, a year ago, he’d known that that was the song for his first flight. It’s three short stanzas read like an instruction manual for takeoff, and the music… Nothing could be said about such music: it was perfection.
He sang, wired in, to his own accompaniment, recorded on a cassette, and at the end of the second stanza — “For really, I am dead to the world” — he thought he had lifted off. But he hadn’t. A second time, as the song went on — “Lost in death to the world’s riot, I rest in a realm of perfect quiet” — he felt the music propelling his mind right out of his flesh.
But at the end of the song he was still there, in that pink padded chair, in his starched shirt and black tux, in his own obdurate flesh.
He sang the song again, but without the same conviction, and without results.
Not to panic. The brochure said that very often the most effective song, in terms of reaching escape velocity, isn’t one for which we have the highest regard or greatest love. Probably his problem with the Mahler song was technical, despite the trouble he’d taken to transpose it down to his own range. All the authorities agreed that it was useless to tackle music beyond your capabilities.
His next offering was “I Am the Captain of the Pinafore,” to which he gave all the extra faith and oomph he could muster. That was the way he still remembered it, almost like a hymn, from the dream he’d dreamt the night before he got out of Spirit Lake. But he couldn’t stop feeling silly about it and worrying what someone listening would have thought. Never mind that the studio was sound-proof. Naturally, with that kind of self-consciousness, his score was another big zero.
He sang his two favorite songs from Die Winterreise, to which he could usually bring a sincere, droopy Weltschmerz. But in the middle of the second song he broke off. There was no use even trying, feeling the way he felt.
It was less an emotion than a physical sensation. As though some huge black hand had gripped his chest and squeezed. A steady pressure on his heart and lungs, and a taste of metal on his tongue.
He got down on the mustard carpet and did pushups rapidly, till he was out of breath. That helped some. Then he went out into the bedroom to pour himself a drink.
At red light glowed above the door to Boa’s studio: she was flying.
His instant reaction was to be happy for her. Then came the envy. He was glad, thinking about it, that it hadn’t happened the other way round. He wanted to go in and look at her, but that seemed somehow like admitting defeat: you look at people do the things you’d like to do yourself — and can’t.
The only booze in the icebox was three bottles of champagne. He’d been drinking it all day long and was sick of it, but he didn’t want to phone room service for beer, so he guzzled a bottle of it as quickly as he could.