Sometime during the decade in which Catherine stopped having sex, she got into the habit of imagining herself as an old woman. She had been practicing some variation of this since she was a child—lying in bed each night with her hands at her sides, envisioning herself in the same supine position, the same skeleton underneath sagging skin, with the same internal organs, only decades later. But after she turned thirty she began to envision herself not as an old woman near death, with long gray hair and exaggerated knuckles, but as a woman in menopause instead. There were no invented scenarios, no alternate lives conjured. It was just the idea, the feeling, really, of herself in the present, in bed in her thirties, facing the ceiling—then herself again, in her imagined sixties, facing the ceiling still.
This did not change just because she now found herself in a hotel bed. Just because she was insulated by plush down covers, or just because a switch next to the nightstand sent gentle waves of ice over the top layer of the mattress. The temperature for each square inch of her body could be tailored to her preference, and yet she wondered if it was always true that the nicer a hotel was, the further one felt from home. Even there, in a Tribeca suite that offered her more material comfort than her entire Brooklyn apartment, her mind wanted to go back to what it could know.
