“I don’t know if I’m happy. What’s happy, anyway? I just think I need a change, that’s all.”

“Look,” he said. “We’ve been planning this thing for years. If I can pull it off, this round the world flight, then we can sit down and decide what’s next. If you want to quit flying and start a family, why, we can do that. Just tell me what you want and I’ll make it happen.”

What Irene wanted to tell him was this. She wanted to tell him that she hated going on lecture tours and posing for magazines and manufacturing these so-called landmark flights, in which she was some kind of circus performer doing feats, and each feat had to be more daring and dangerous and record-breaking than the last or nobody cared.

She wanted to tell him that she had no idea what lay beyond this solo circumnavigation that had consumed them both since the very beginning of their professional association. She wanted to do it; there was no question about that. She longed to fly around the world by herself; it was the culmination of everything she’d worked for. But she also felt terrified of it. Because once she had accomplished this last, this greatest goal, what did she have left? What was the point of flying anymore?

She wanted to tell him that this business of being the Aviatrix had become so thorough, the moments of just being Irene so seldom, that she was beginning to feel that the Aviatrix had taken over the rest of her, like she had been painted over and could no longer find the original soul inside, and that even to her own husband—the person whom she should turn to in relief, the person who above all others should see her as a woman, as a person, as her true self—she was the Aviatrix and not Irene.

But George would just say that this was all nonsense, that she wasn’t being logical, that she was doing exactly what she had dreamed of doing, that she was doing what other women could only dream of. That this endeavor was too important and too historic to give up now, when it was finally within sight.

So Irene reached for the lamp and turned off the light, and George, probably thinking about what she’d said, thinking maybe his wife just needed some reassurance after a harrowing few days, some tenderness, sat back down on her bed and asked her if she wanted him to make love to her.

Irene stared at the paleness of his pajamas in the darkness. George had always been a good, considerate lover, and he was certainly attractive. But she did not want to make love to her husband tonight. She wanted something else. She wanted to feel close to another human being, but not like this, and she couldn’t explain how.