Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 Read Online Free PDF

anything—including
not only beverages but also sauces, condiments, garnishes and flavorings—that
contained ethyl alcohol. She even warned him that Preston might feign cardiac arrest in a desperate
attempt to con a beaker of brandy from a naive flight attendant. Preston saw the supervisor sneak glances at him
over Dolores Stark's shoulder. He hated being noticed, cherished privacy and
anonymity and the freedom they gave him to keep his little secrets. Now he had
been publicly branded as a loon.
                   For two thousand miles he sat in his seat and
felt the stewardesses eyeball him as if he were a Palestinian terrorist. When
he went to the John, two of them hustled the liquor cart out of his way and
guarded it like wrens protecting their eggs.
                   As the plane touched down in Santa Fe , Preston had
to admit that he felt virtuous: This was the first time in his adult life he
had flown sober. He had always believed that flying in an airplane was
unnatural if not downright impossible, a patent violation of reality. The
unanesthetized mind analyzes the experience and must conclude that it cannot be
happening. The only way a rational man can endure flying, therefore, is to
distance himself from the fact that it is happening. To Preston , there were but two groups of people who
could fly sober, those whose critical faculties had been permanently damaged,
and pilots, who had been conditioned to worship machines beyond all reason. So
virtuous did he feel that he decided to reward himself with a drink or two. He
deserved them, of course-—after a day like this, he deserved a Jeroboam— but he
also needed them, if he was to suffer through an afternoon and evening of Mickey
Mouse bullshit, slogans (“Welcome to the rest of your life," she had said
to him. Jesus!) and facile and phony protestations of love and hope. He had
edited enough self-help books to know that in the universe of therapies,
everybody always loves everybody. He did not love everybody. And as for hope,
he had found it to be a one-way ticket to disappointment.
                   He had had four hours to think, and he had
decided a few things. His wife, daughter and employer believed that he had a
drinking problem. So, ipso facto, a problem existed. But to Preston , the problem was largely one of
perspective. None of them drank at all—oh, a glass of wine now and then, but
that wasn't drinking. If he had married the girl he squired around the watering
holes of New
Haven back in the sixties, a giddy tippler who could bend an elbow with the best of
them, the perceptions of him would have been entirely different. He wondered
where she was. She had been brought up, as he had (and as Margaret and Warren
definitely had not), to recognize booze as a fine tool to be used judiciously
for the relief of anxiety and stress. She would have understood that the only
way Preston could shuffle along from day to day was to
take periodic chemical holidays from himself. She wouldn't have called that a
problem, not when he had never missed a day's work, never had a drunk-driving
conviction, never brawled or made a public display of himself. She would have
known that the memory lapses Warren trotted out as ammunition were just . . .
memory lapses. Everybody has them.
                   Warren and Margaret didn't understand, because
they couldn't.
                   If in the land of the blind the one-eyed man
is king, then in the land of the teetotaler the social drinker is a rummy.
                   Dolores Stark was convinced he was an
alcoholic.
                   But on what did she base her conviction? On
what she had heard from Margaret and Warren (and from Kimberly, though she
wasn't a reliable witness, having been primed by Margaret). Dolores Stark
didn't know him, couldn't appreciate what it was like to live inside his head.
                   Exactly what was an alcoholic,