“I wish I could say it was for a scandalous reason, that I fell in love with a local Indian boy, brown and smooth and poor, but that wasn’t it at all. Although the skin color was different, it was the same situation really, because I fell in love with the youngest son of a duke. Three older brothers meant Nigel had nothing of his own, as poor as any poor Indian boy in Udaipur, and Nigel would be left penniless, having to figure out how to make a living when he was educated to do nothing except to be literary and fun at parties. Nigel had no future, unless all three brothers died in some disaster that would eliminate them all in one go. And that wasn’t going to happen. Nor was Nigel going to make a living, so his family had to find him a young woman with a serious inheritance, and I was not that young woman. I was not titled, and although my father had grown quite rich during our years there, my parents did not adhere to the tradition of bestowing an annuity on the groom or the deliverance of a dowry. Falling in love with Nigel let my parents know that my judgment was not to be trusted. If I were so pedestrian to choose a boy with a title but no future, then it was time they sent me abroad. So abroad I went. Finishing school in New York. Cotillions and debutante balls, where I met a nice young man from Boston, and married him, and to Boston I moved, where we had a very fine life together. Now that I am the age that I am, and have lived a life, I can tell you that I am not convinced the life I led with my husband was that much better than the life I would have led with Nigel. Inherited wealth is just that, and working for a living is just that, but that’s neither here nor there, at least not anymore.
“In any case, Whitson and I had a beautiful boy who grew up for a while and then died when he was still quite young. Then Whitson died. And now I have been alone for more years than I was married, and we had a long marriage, longer than I was a mother. I stayed on in our house for all these years, alone most of the time. Sometimes I brought in young artists to stay in the empty rooms, and they were a delight, and taught me much, and I used to put out a cream tea on Sundays, and I popped bottles of bubbly on Tuesdays, and I liberally poured sherry on Thursdays, but now I have sold the house. The hardest thing I have had to do, other than giving up Nigel and burying my son. But I am lucky. Always lucky. Nigel never did make a living and he shot himself in the mouth with a hunting rifle, though I am certain it must have been an accident and not at all what was reported. And I have the years with my husband to remind me of what love might be. He was very smart when it came to investments and life insurance policies, insured himself to a high degree, but he also insured our son’s life. Though, of course, we never expected to benefit. It is decades now since our son died, my husband ten years later. Back then a five-million-dollar life-insurance policy meant whatever it meant, and now it means so much more than that, so I am set. I gave up being Mrs. Whitson Tagamore, and returned to being Vita Brodkey, the name by which I was known in Udaipur. I expect to buy myself a beautiful place overlooking Lake Pichola, which is the lake I could see from my bedroom window as a child. I hear that Udaipur has changed much since I have been gone, but so have I, and perhaps we’ll be perfect for one another.
“Darling,” Vita Brodkey says, interrupting herself, “I hear the rattle of the cart. Another for you? I might have one myself.”
Joan buys a third and fourth vodka for herself and insists on buying Vita’s bottle of wine. Vita points out the wine she would like from the card in the seat pocket. On a trip from DC to Delhi, it is a Chardonnay from Long Island.
“You know, darling, since you’re being so kind. Maybe two bottles?”
In Vita’s hands, the undersized bottles look as large as magnums, and when Joan looks at Vita’s face, her eyes are dancing. She is delighted.
Joan pours the vodkas into her cup and wonders how Vita’s son died, hopes that her dead husband’s financial acumen is real. She feels concern for Vita Brodkey, who is now engaged in some kind of ritual, the slow severing of the filaments of the bottle top, the slow pouring of the wine, the slow wafting of her speckled hand over the glass, trying to bring the wine’s perfume up to her nose in this refrigerated plane. An ornate demonstration for a six-dollar bottle.
“Oh, absolutely lovely, darling,” Vita Brodkey says, when she touches her glass to Joan’s, then takes a delicate sip.
Beyond the small oval of Vita’s face, Joan finds herself pinned by the eyes of the big man, who is watching them pour and taste. His stony face does not reveal what he thinks of their new companionship, and Joan lifts her glass in a toast, embarrassed when he turns away. Should she say something, offer to buy him bottles of whatever he might want from the cart if it returns? But then Vita is describing her plans when she is back in Udaipur. “I will begin to paint watercolors. Just little things. A way to paint the end of my days,” and Joan swallows down the rest of her drink.
When lunch is served, Joan buys a fifth vodka, telling herself that the bottles are, indeed, small. Artists might have been trooping in and out of Vita’s house since the death of her husband, but Joan thinks she has spent most of her time alone because Vita talks as if presented with the best gift in the world—the ear of someone interested. Her words are flowing freely, perhaps after being bottled up for a very long time. And everything Vita talks about entrances Joan, lifts her heart, serves as a stringent reminder that people love and lose, hopes are decimated, lives finished in an instant, and yet so much remains to be done, that life can go on. Vita regales Joan with more memories from her Udaipur childhood, her life as a young bride in the States, her early days of motherhood, the funerals she attended for son and husband.
The lunch trays are long gone when Vita finishes off her second bottle of wine. “I think, darling, that it’s time for my nap. I hate to impose, but I have one of those special pillows just beneath my seat. Could you fetch it for me?”
Joan feels a sharp pang that Vita’s wonderful stories are about to end, and she will be left alone for the hours remaining on this flight, with only her own story to consider.
“Do you want to stretch your legs first?” Joan asks. “Use the restroom? I need to do both.”
Vita rubs Joan’s arm. “I have the bladder of a blue whale, which has the biggest bladder of all the mammals. So I can stay right here,” she says, which makes Joan smile.
It is a complex operation by which Joan is freed from her seat at the window. The big man rises unhappily, Vita Brodkey slowly sidesteps herself into the aisle, and then Joan is out, stiff from sitting so long.
At the back of the plane, the attendants on their jump seats are reading magazines, feeding themselves lunch from trays balanced on knees. She leans up against the porthole and stares out. Where in the world is the plane right now, and what lives are unfolding down on the ground too far away to see? Everything Joan once knew feels immensely distant. What if she could travel across the sky for the rest of her days, never landing, too far up to be touched by what has transpired in her life, set up perfectly in her little corner of space, with her face against the window? As she watches, the portholed sky gains an underwater density, a deep-diving blue. She should return to her seat because Vita is waiting for her. She has waited so long to not be needed at all, she never thought that being needed in the smallest of ways by a little old lady would make her feel there might be some point to it all. In and out of the bathroom, a request for bottles of water from an attendant unhappy to leave aside his magazine and his lunch and satisfy Joan’s polite request. So nothing is perfect, Joan thinks. Even seven and a half miles above the earth, she is forced to deal with grumbling others.