Insomnia
(Odysseus and the sea nymph Calypso)
The Ogygia was one of those new tower buildings on West 57th Street with every possible amenity for the already indulged. Its floors were radiant heated, its spire pierced the sky and cast the longest shadow. It had marble expanses, a screening room, private dining room and wine cellars, a spa and gym and hair salon open at all hours. It had Mauro, the powerful concierge who knew how to steer his Malaysians and Macaoans, his Russians and Chinese past fawning servitors into any place they wished to be at any hour.
True, the upper floors shook in the winds that roared through the canyons of the city, and one could hear a whistling sound of protest from clouds that had been invaded; however, adjustments were being made to the sound-proofing.
On the 34th floor, Phil Stein lived with his wife Anne and a son who was away at school. He was delighted that he had earned enough money to be able to live out his days in the Ogygia, that he could walk to his glass walls and look down at the park with its black lakes and out to the cloaked eyes of the distant shimmering buildings. The glass was thick and cold and he might press his forehead to it and close his eyes and dream of the luxury that he did not possess—the gift of a full night of sleep.
His mother had fallen to her death in an Ambien stupor clutching a lemon tart, and he vowed never to take a sleeping drug of any sort. All the techniques of meditation and behavioral therapy had failed him, and now he wandered room to room at all hours of the night and called the very countries where his neighbors lived to trade their markets. He prowled around in his boxer shorts, barefoot on his ever-warm floors. He may not have known the difference between bianco dolomite or nero voda marble or even which surface was onyx—he just like the feeling of being encased in the permanence of rich stone.
One morning at around four, Phil Stein pulled on his jeans and a polo shirt, slipped into his braided leather flip-flops and left his apartment. He took the elevator to the 24th floor where there was a pool that never closed.
It was deserted when he arrived. He looked up three stories to the ceiling hung with square dangling lights, dimmed at that hour, leaned back on the white leather chaise and, in the steam infused with eucalyptus, promptly fell asleep.
“Are you all right, Mr. Stein?” it was one of the building minions bending over him. “Here with Mr. Stein,” he announced into the microphone on his sleeve.
“Fuck, I was sleeping.”
Phil Stein pulled himself up from the chair, threw off the towel he had wrapped round his legs, and, without another word, headed for the elevator, annoyed at himself for saying fuck and being impolite. He got into his bed and, cradling Anne, fell back asleep until seven.
The next morning Anne was surprised to find him in the bed. He did not tell her where he had been in the night because hiding things was just another way that married couples have of getting the best of each other. Anne, a psychiatrist, left for her office hoping somehow things had improved with Phil.
After work, Anne stopped at the Ogygia’s yoga studio and then came up to find Phil sprawled prone on the bed like a sailor on a raft long abandoned at sea. She would not think to disturb this man who never slept. She dimmed the lights and went off to her kitchen equipped with its comforting Dornbracht fixtures that never ceased to give her a pleasure almost sexual.
This was one of her days with night patients to see and, after a light supper, she returned to her office to hear Linda Roundtree tell her dreams, Dr. Bergman’s murderous fantasies, and Shay Wemra describing crises in his business onto each of which he projected his parents’ defects. When she got home, Phil was still asleep and she went into the bedroom where she usually slept.
At three, Phil woke up and pried himself from the bed. He was still adrift and had lost all sense of time. He was in a day-for-night movie. He decided to go to the pool or maybe to stare at the fish weaving through fronds in the aquarium down there, anything to mesmerize him back to sleep.
A woman was swimming laps in the pool. Without a cap, her long hair streamed behind her in the pale blue rocking water. While he watched, she swam the length of the sixty-foot pool five times and back.
Phil Stein had never learned to swim, but he had watched his son’s lessons and he could see this young woman had very good form. She was doing a long and slow crawl, almost in time to the music they piped into the pool. When she climbed the steps out, she swiped her hair to one side and wrung it out, and he could see it was of a red so dark it was almost purple. Her black tank suit glistened.
Phil Stein sat deep in the shadows watching as she robed her shoulders with a towel and walked off barefoot. She seemed to be humming. He saw her wet trail and the troubled waters where she swam as they calmed themselves and the steam continued to hover, rising to the white marble walls surrounding them like a giant tomb.
He walked through the atrium—called the “aerie”—to the aquarium while thinking of her face in profile, wondering why she was swimming in the middle of the night, how a woman so young had the money to live at the Ogygia. He was pleased she had defied the rules—swimming without a cap, swimming at her own risk, not wearing the slippers the Ogygia required to walk to and from the pool. He thought of the Ogygia and all the glass tower buildings as aquariums full of prized captives of all sorts.
He had brought his headset down and, as he watched the varied fish circling, he called Hangzhou and Shenzhen talking business in his quiet urgent voice. A lone fish was floating belly up on the surface. He did not sleep the rest of the night.
He was waiting by the pool the next night when the girl passed by at her strange swimming hour.
He nodded to her and she came to stand straight in front of his chair.
“You were here last night. You don’t sleep either, I can see. You should try swimming and exhausting yourself, highly recommended…” She might be Scottish or Irish.
Phil Stein introduced himself and told her he was from the 34th floor. She said she was Callie from the 23rd and then swished her arms back, bent forward, and did a flat forbidden dive that skimmed her way out over the water.
After her laps, during which he pretended to be reading, she walked off without another word, leaving wet footprints and a trail of water dots from her hair. Phil Stein put his large foot over one of her footprints. He did not go to see the fish tanks that night, he looked back at her water trail and the bouncing wavelets and went upstairs.
It took Phil an entire day to find the occupant of the 23rd floor. Her apartment had been bought by a holding company that he traced through many pathways to Jordan Liu from Shanghai. It had been a leasehold, to revert after 99 years or her death to the corporation.
“You swim every night?” Phil said to her when she surfaced from the bothered waters the next night.
After she got out of the pool, she came to sit on the edge of his chair, dripping, shaking herself a bit, refusing a towel, both of them talking on into the dawn in their low voices. When she left him, her swimsuit was dry.
Phil Stein was 48-years-old, a fit attractive businessman with dark pouches under his eyes that made him look sadder and older than he was. Like all the sleepless, he was restless and ever yearning, and when Callie took his hand after her swim one night and led him to the elevators, he put the towel round her shoulders and pressed the down button.
After a month of meetings, he asked Anne for a divorce.
“I’m not leaving here,” she said. By then she knew everything and perhaps had from the beginning.
“I am moving down to the 23rd floor. I’ll live with Callie.”
This is what he did, all with the arrangement of lawyers, some tears and a bit of violence coming from Anne. For months in the beginning, the staff, especially Mauro, knew and enjoyed the drama underlying the Steins weather chitchat. This was followed by three years of elevator encounters during which Anne, riding down and encountering the doors opening on 23, would shift her shoulders away from him to stare at the walls or floor.
Callie gave birth to twins and stopped her swimming. She graduated from the Culinary Institute and became a cook who deserved her kitchen. Every night, dinner was an adventure to another very far off country until Phil Stein began to yearn for the kind of non-cooking that his ex-wife and their housekeeper both practiced, relieved by bland and safe Friday and Sunday dinners from the Ogygia catering staff.
His insomnia reemerged, but he did not go to the pool. Instead, he went to his windows and looked up to where he knew Anne would be, still alone, still in one of her soft cotton pajamas with the top that buttoned down the front and the drawstring loose bottoms, glasses on a chain, her Ipad resting on her stomach. He knew it all—the son resenting him from Yale, and the twin baby girls loving him from their little painted beds down the hall.
He still did not understand Callie although he thought that he loved her; he often suspected she might actually be a witch. She sat combing that long hair, such a dark red it still looked purple in the light coming in from the sun and then, the stars.
He thought of that poem from Yeats that Callie, who was Irish after all, liked to say. He went to look it up
‘Go and love, go and love young man,
If the lady be young and fair’
Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
Yes, indeed he was and how hard it would be to go home through the tangles.
One afternoon when his son was back from New Haven, he asked Callie if, instead of meeting at a restaurant as they usually did, and as was agreed in the divorce papers, he might just go up in the elevator to the 34th floor.
Callie, who was making mayonnaise, threw a raw egg at him, much to the delight of his daughters.
Mauro, who tracked the elevators on a console, saw him heading up and, for once in his long stewardship, was truly surprised.
Up, up Phil Stein went to the 34th floor, where his son Todd scowled at him and his ex-wife asked, in the nicest possible way, if he wanted to join them for hamburgers. After dinner and a long talk, he fell asleep in one of the uncomfortable chairs with a mid-century designer name. Anne removed his cell, took the house phone off the hook, and left him to sleep on and on.
Calypso kept Odysseus on her island Ogygia seven years though he still yearned for home. Eventually, with the interference of the gods, he was released.