“That’s your advice.”

“Yes,” I said.

He was sitting on the edge of the tub then. The ice in his glass, if there had ever been any, had melted. I had no idea what he might do. Kiss me. Put a hand in the water. His eyebrows had peaks. Up close his mustache was even more impressive. I had never kissed a man with a mustache. I still haven’t. It’s not that I’m not attracted to men with mustaches but that men with mustaches aren’t attracted to me.

“Can I have your maraschino cherry?” I asked.

“No maraschino cherry.”

“I love maraschino cherries. All kinds. Sundae kinds, drink kinds, fruit cocktail. Tell me to change my life,” I said to him, and put a damp hand on his knee.

“I won’t tell you that.”

“But I need someone to tell me.”

He put his glass down where the little bottle of shampoo was. Such a big hotel. So many minuscule bottles. “You must change your life,” he said.

“Good but I’m going to need some details.”

“I keep sitting here I’m going to fall into the water.” He stood up. “You know where to find me.”

There isn’t a moral to the story. Neither of us is in the right. Nothing was resolved. Decades later it still bothers me.

No way to tell how much later I awoke, facedown in the bath, and came up gasping. I had fallen asleep or I’d blacked out. It was as though the water itself had woken me up, not the water on the surface of me, which wasn’t enough, not even the water over my face like a hotel pillow, up my nose, in my lungs, but the water that soaked through my bodily tissues, running along fissures and ruining the texture of things, till it finally reached my heart and all my autonomic systems said, Enough, you’re awake now, you’re alive, get out.

That was one of the few times in my life I might have died and knew it. I fell asleep in a bathtub at twenty-seven. I was dragged out to sea as a small child; I spun on an icy road into a break in oncoming traffic on Route 1 north of Rockland, Maine, and miraculously stayed out of the ditch; I did not have breast cancer at twenty-nine, when it was explained to me that it was highly unlikely I would, but if I did, it was unlikely, it would be fatal, almost never at your age, but when at your age, rapid and deadly.

Those are the fake times I almost died. The real ones, neither you nor I ever know about.