Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

I am alone. From what I understand — and “understand” is a relative word now, and surely not just for me in an era like this, though more so for me, of course — I understand that I am alone in some surpassing way, plucked out of a place in the sea that apparently is notorious for mysteries, a place far from the fatal ice field, and I have outlived by many years everyone I ever knew and I am still just turned thirty. Not that I wasn’t alone even on that night in April in 1912. It was a matter of pride to me, and would have been to any of my friends, all of them women who knew that we have a higher calling than the world had ever allowed for us, and who could travel alone as well as any man. I went to London to attend the convention of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the English edition of our own National American Woman Suffrage Association birthed from the loins of our great Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, all heroines in my time, all women who’d known how to be alone.

I am afraid to bathe. The place is so bright and so hard-surfaced, but the sense of utter strangeness about the design of things is starting to wear off. It’s the water. It flows so quickly, so profusely. I watch it run hard into the tub and it seems out of control and I stop the water and open the drain and I think of a man whose name I do not even know. For there was something more specific, more personal, in the scene before me as I sat in the lifeboat on that night. The lights and the smoke, I truly did feel them directly, as if they were the desperate souls on that ship, but to me they were humanity generalized, they were the masses. I have a mind. That’s something else a woman has in equal measure with a man. And I was inclined, in the use of my mind, to think and speak often of the masses. I was no Marxist, though I had read his books, and though I was occasionally accused of being one by some stupid man or other, and though my father’s newspaper might well have run a headline “All of Human History Redefined” and been close to the truth, I think. We were moving into the century that would carry humanity to a new millennium and everything was being made new. But I have been sitting on this remarkable bed that can be commanded to have a life of its own, quaking gently at the touch of a knob, and I have become conscious of the pattern of my mind, how it has always been easy for me to think of humanity as just that, a monolithic thing, or at best a bipartite thing, men and women. Yes, women too. I strove for the rights of women and how often I thought of them — of myself, too, therefore, in a way — as a large thing made up only incidentally of individuals, important only because of the concerns that were held in common, a corporate entity.

This man seemed stupid at first, in a typical way, when I met him on the promenade deck not long after we struck the iceberg. He was English and he was stiff but he had very nice eyes, which I could see only by moonlight for a long while, but they were soft really, a woman’s eyes. I sat in the lifeboat and watched the Titanic and its bow was gone and the rest was beginning to lift, though slowly, the motion not quite visible, but inexorable, clearly so. The great propellers at the rear were exposed, like a sexual part normally hidden from polite view but naked now in the throes of this powerful feeling. And he was standing up there on the boat deck, invisible to me since our boat had been lowered away, but his eyes were searching the sea for me even then, I knew. He was happy I was safe. Why had I let him persuade me to live?

I was reading in my cabin and I heard the sound and felt the faint hesitation in this great beast of a ship. I put my book down and I was instantly angry. They had appeared in the newspapers in London, an array of mustachioed men with derbies saying that this ship was the technological wonder of the age, a testament to man’s power over the elements, a vast machine, greater than any in history, and indestructible, unsinkable. I’d known even then that it was all an age-old lie. But I booked passage. I was anxious to get back to New York. The convention had led to the streets and we had marched to Trafalgar Square and the crowds had lined up and they had mostly jeered us and the bobbies had ringed us in and prodded us gently with their sticks and isolated us in small groups and then talked to us with unctuous voices as if we were children, and we drifted away. We took it. There were some angry words and there were a few latchings on to gas lamps and iron fence posts and some arrests and a few flashed fingernails drawing a little bobby blood, though not by me.

To be honest, I grew weary of it all suddenly, and I went away. I cashed in my passage back to America and I went off to Italy for a little while, to Venice. I rented a room in a palazzo on the Rio San Luca and I found a small campo nearby with a fountain and a statue of the Virgin Mary without her child in hand, just her, and I sat in the sun, dressed from throat to ankle in a shirtwaist suit and I read and I spoke to no one. At night I would lie on the bed and the window would be open and I would read some more, by candlelight, still in my clothes, and one night there was a full moon and I went out and the tide was high and I think there had been storms at sea and I wandered the dark paths toward the Piazza San Marco and I came through the gallery and suddenly before me was the piazza and it was covered with water from the lagoon. Thinly, but there was not a single stone left uncovered. I drew back. The moon was shimmering out there in the water, and the stars, and I was afraid. And I was suddenly conscious of my solitariness there in that place, in that city, in that country, in the world. I had friends but we only had ideas between us and though the ideas were strong and righteous, I had not yet been naked in Venice except curled tight in a stone room with a tub of water and a sponge, wiping the scent of my body away, and quickly, never looking at myself, and then rushing back into my clothes. For all my ideas I was not comfortable in this woman’s body.

And worse, it had its own intent: I felt a stirring in me at San Marco, a thing more like a need than a desire, a thing that I did not agree with but that would hear no arguments, no matter how clear and reasonable. Still, though I could not persuade it, I could put it aside. And I left the piazza, my mind ascendant, without so much as making my feet naked and wading out into this liquid sky. Instead I went back to my room and then back to London and I hated these men who’d made this ship but I have learned to wait for justice in this life, I have learned that there is always a long and perhaps even endless wait for justice, and so when I bought my ticket I did not expect the arrogance of these men to be so quickly punished. And then the moment came and I knew what it was and I went up onto the promenade deck and he was there looking out at the sea. He was tall and dressed in tweeds and he had a mustache, but he had no hat and he was watching the icebergs out there in the calm and moonlit sea and I wanted to tell him what I knew.

So I came near him and I said, “We’re doomed now.”

Then he turned his face to me and his eyes were soft and I would be patient with him for the sake of his woman’s eyes, I thought.

He said something about the ship being all right, this unsinkable ship. I wondered if he really believed that. I said, “We’ve struck an iceberg. The deed is done.”

Then he looked back out to the ice. I realized he was, in fact, listening to me. He was changing his opinion.

“And suppose we have,” he said, a gravity in his voice now. I felt a rustle of something in me before this man who was listening, a sweet feeling, even a legitimate one, I thought. But it’s then that he played the fool. He asked me if I was traveling alone and he tried to blame my fears on that.