The Making of an Insomniac
if the climber didn't shoulder a tray of prime rib. A very efficient pro named Mae tutored me in the fine art of table hovering and the unobtrusive distribution of lobster bibs. More importantly, she demonstrated how to get through the constantly swinging kitchen door without getting rammed, dropping my tray or bloodying my nose. Expert guidance notwithstanding, I made a wretched waitress-never calm, visibly panicked. The dim lights probably helped to disguise some of the panic, but a total blackout couldn't have concealed alL (In a statistically significant number of diners, server ineptitude must elicit pity. There is simply is no other explanation for my impressive tips.) Past eleven p.m., no new customers were seated, regardless of how creatively they tried to bribe the hostess, which meant the staff knocked off after midnight. Any dating I did began after my shift. Maybe, maybe, I turned in by two-thirty. No matter: the instant I decided to go to sleep, to sleep I went and stayed in that fair land till morning. ON THE EuROPEAN VENTURE, sooner than expected, my tip cache ran short. Booked on a charter flight, I couldn't fly home early without spending more money, so I decided to hole up in a cheap bed and breakfast on the southern coast of England and by other strict economies stretch the funds remaining. For food, I made do with the breakfast provided and a mid-afternoon fruit pie. For entertainment, I walked an overcast beach and read and reread a falling apart copy of Anna Karenina, courtesy of a used bookstall in Switzerland. When a book leaves a lasting impression, where I slept and what I dreamed while reading it figures prominently in the recall. Anna Karenina logs in thus: English seaside, mahogany bed, snow and lots of it. And there, in Camber by the Sea, the sleep idyll ends. OR OOES IT, SINCE AN ENDING PRESUPPOSES a beginning that builds into continuance that settles into a given that an ending rejects? BESIDES BEING A PLAGUE, a scourge and despoiler of equanimity, insomnia turns out to be a naysaying quibbler. It quarrels before it accepts. Right now it's quarreling with the previous descriptions of my sleeping past. Not strictly within the boundaries of accurate is the implication. Quite possibly a whitewash (if not outright hogwash). Very likely delusion dressed up as nostalgia. Sleep nostalgia. That's the charge, the argument, the defamation of character that finally makes me blink. How pathetic. How juvenile. The worship of that which no longer exists, of conditions that no longer apply. The blinder response of a cultist who can't bear to admit that some portion of her paradisiacal drowsing might actually have been sullied by disruption. It's the doubt, the suspicion, that throws me, that reduces me to fretSummer- Fall 2006
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