Stranger on a Train (26 page)

Have I conveyed the shock and dismay I felt at learning I was on a no-smoking train? Barely, I think. If there had been an international airport in Salem, the first stop after Portland, I would have been off the train and booking a flight back to the UK. The hell with meeting people, sod being an anonymous traveller, a stranger to myself and everyone I met, I wanted a cigarette, and more to the point, I wanted a cigarette whenever I wanted it.

I managed a few puffs at Salem, and then slept my way through the afternoon. I woke when my alarm went off to alert me to a stop at Eugene–Springfield just before I was due to be called for dinner over the loudspeaker. I managed a few inhalations before the conductor hustled me back on the train. I asked him when we were due to arrive at Chelmut.

‘Eight-o-seven, ma'am.'

‘Good, that'll be just about when I finish eating. Then I can light up, inhale a little nicotine and sleep until six thirty tomorrow morning, when, thank god, we'll arrive in Sacramento. I've got a six-hour wait for the Denver train, so I can smoke up a storm.'

‘Well, ma'am,' the conductor told me with an inscrutable expression, ‘unfortunately, they've got a law against smoking in Sacramento.'

‘That's OK, I'll stand on the street and smoke. The weather's fine in Sacramento.'

‘No, I mean there's a law against smoking on the sidewalk in Sacramento. They're very advanced in their thinking in that part of California.'

I was not feeling very companionable when I arrived at my table. Neither, it seemed, was the small, round, elderly man who sat opposite me. We nodded a brisk greeting to each other and then proceeded through our dismal salad and halfway through the steaks we had both ordered without a word being said. This was a first and I was grateful. A silent fellow-traveller. Although we were at a two-person table, he showed no sign of wanting to begin a conversation, and was concentrating hard on his dinner. I was in no mood for learning about anyone's life, no matter how fascinating. I'd had it with interesting strangers. I would have been quite happy to eat and stare at the scenery passing by. But it was dark. Looking out of the window simply reflected my own face back at me.

It's very hard to sit through a complete meal with others in silence, though I'd had a certain amount of practice at it when I was fourteen. Although I spent my days riding the Circle Line, during my sullen silence while living with my father and stepmother, Pam, I nonetheless had to eat. It helped that the evening meal (‘tea') was arranged to be at the same time as the immortal rural family radio saga,
The Archers.
There wasn't much conversation to be had, apart from comments on the doings of Phil and Jill and their brood on Home Farm. I, of course, despised
The Archers,
and sat with
Lolita
on my lap, trying to read it until it was snatched away by Pam or my father, either because reading at table was rude or because it was deemed a dirty book, and in any case having your head in a book was an unhealthy habit. Then I had nothing to do but stare icily ahead, eat as fast as possible and ask to be excused from the table, when permission was given with relief. I was dying to talk, but I had been locked into a silence by the secret deal Pam had made with my mother, the ineffectualness of my father, and by my own rage and sense of strangeness and dependency. Awful meals. I remember them as cold damp food (lettuce, tomato and cucumber and a slice of wet ham laid on a plate with salad cream available for those with exotic tastes) and icy atmosphere.

I have always liked best to eat alone with a book in front of me. When I was little I would take a plate of something to my hiding place in a corner behind two armchairs and sit cross-legged, reading and eating. The next best thing is the convivial conversational meal. Table talk. Easy suppers with people laughing and arguing. Silent tables chill me. The last silent table I sat at was in a monastery I stayed at a few years ago. The monks were silent, and the rest of the company was on retreat. You nodded to your fellow diners as you arrived at the table and then kept quiet for fear of disrupting their meditations. Getting the salt or the water jug from the other end of the refectory table was a matter of eyebrow raising, pointing and mime – and not complaining when you got the mustard instead. I like silence, but silence and food in company is a very bad combination in my view. And as for meditation, the only thing I managed to think at these monkish meals was how no one was talking and how everyone had their own special, and increasingly disgusting, way of shovelling food into their faces. A little talk helps you forget the purely physical aspect of eating. Perhaps that's what the silence requirement in the monastery is for, to remind us of it.

‘Going all the way?'

I was quite relieved when he spoke. ‘No, just to Sacramento,' I replied.

‘My name is Joseph.'

Joseph was spherical and shy, an inoffensive, reticent man, mostly bald, not at all at ease, I thought, with strangers. I was, of course, quite wrong. Joseph was naturally timid, but he had learned to take himself in hand. He lived on Paulet Island, off the coast of Seattle, and had kids in San Diego and San Francisco. He was on his way to visit them and his three grandchildren, the youngest, just one month old, he had never seen. Between bits of information, Joseph chewed his steak conscientiously. I was pleased that there was nothing especially interesting about Joseph. Just a nice old widowed grandfather on his way to visit the family. No story, no insight into the secret heart of humanity. I could cope with that. My enthusiasm for the remarkable story that everyone had to tell was already seriously on the wane. Joseph required nothing more of me than to take a brief polite interest in the eventless routine of a quiet life. I felt perfectly safe in asking him if he was retired.

‘Yup. Retired and living in suburbia. I was born in the Bronx. In Hell's Kitchen. Where I live now is very quiet, very quiet. Just front lawns and empty streets apart from the cars going to and fro. People keeping themselves to themselves. Suburban life is much too unfriendly for my taste. You don't meet people. I don't have a car. I have a bicycle with a basket on for my shopping. I was an engineer.'

‘Ah,' I nodded, relieved that my assessment of him as narratologically safe and bland was confirmed.

‘Uh huh, weapons and space. I worked on the Apollo engines. I guess the stuff I made is still up there, going round and round. But I'm a professional dancer now, since I retired.'

In spite of Joseph's clue that he was the only cycling shopper on Paulet Island, I had been lulled into relaxing. I was only half listening. I did a double take.

‘Pardon?'

‘On cruises. I'm a dance host.'

I looked at him harder, but nothing I could do in the way of squinting and refocusing could turn podgy Joseph into Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire or Shirley MacLaine. But I did see the eyes take on a confident gleam and bald round reticent Joseph begin to warm up as he explained what he had done with his life these past ten years or so. In return for being available as a nightly dance partner to a great surfeit of older single women on board pleasure ships, Joseph got free cruises all over the world. He'd never been out of the US before he began his new career, but in just the past couple of seasons he had been to Egypt and Australia, ‘dancing,' he said with a delighted smile, ‘all the way.' But it wasn't easy. It wasn't the sinecure it might seem to the uninitiated. This was by no means a cushy number. There were no days off in the dance-host business. Seven nights a week he was on duty. And he had to look smart to a very high standard, wear a uniform of white patent shoes and a blue blazer (the cost of which came out of his own pocket) to show he was a member of staff. It was necessary because single men who went on cruises could be weird.

‘You know, looking for moneyed women. You get a lot of wealthy single women on these cruises. Mostly they're on their own, spending their husband's life insurance. They want fun. They don't want to stand around and watch other people dancing. They paid good money for a good time. But they're a prey to fortune-hunters. So the cruise companies employ respectable retired single men like me – you don't get any wages, but the trip and the food is for free – to keep the single women company without them having to worry about what we're after. Of course, there are strict rules and we're carefully vetted. No drinkers or gamblers. And you have to have diplomatic as well as dance skills. Some of the girls can get very possessive, you know. You've got to be careful about that. You have to treat them all equally, and be seen to do that. The other ladies notice and complain to the purser if a host dances too much with one particular woman. It's completely against the rules to get emotionally involved with the passengers. You get into any kind of relationship, or get caught slipping out of anyone's cabin, and they put you off at the next port. Doesn't matter where it is. It happened on my last cruise. They put one of the dance hosts off the ship, because he'd been fooling around with a passenger and someone told the captain about it. Right in the middle of nowhere. A million miles from America. God knows if he ever got home. You've got to be very, very careful.'

And did he know how to do all the dances?

‘Oh sure, it's part of the qualifications, along with being presentable and being able to talk pleasantly.' Joseph was beaming with pride now at what he had achieved with his life in retirement. ‘My late wife and I used to go ballroom dancing. We got medals. I took a refresher course when I decided to sign on as a dance host. I can do them all. I myself am not too crazy about the cha cha or salsa. But you got to do them, and do them well. Me, I like to tango. Tango is my favourite. But you've got to be able to handle everything, and some of the ladies aren't the best dancers. You help them round the floor. You make conversation, and make them feel that you are enjoying their company. I get to travel and see the whole world, but I think I'm being useful, you know, as well. I help people enjoy themselves without worrying that they are being taken advantage of. That's not a bad thing, is it? It's a good life.'

Dinner was over and that was Joseph, who had spent his working life with weapons and space ships, and now twirled lonely women around a peripatetic ballroom in white patent shoes. There was not the slightest possibility, I realised as I stubbed out my last cigarette of the evening on the platform of Chelmut station, of coming across anyone who led the kind of uneventful and routine life that the vast majority of humanity were supposed to lead. Wherever these hoards of the normal were, they didn't travel by train. Or not on my trains.

In bed I watched the moon swinging erratically in the dense black night as the train curved and snaked down the West Coast. The stars were within reach, bright circles, so close that they appeared to hover like torchlights just above the level of the treetops. The bed swayed gently from side to side as our caravan moved through the night. And aside from the scratchy nicotine need in my belly I felt right then so content that I didn't want the trip to end. I was entirely detached from everything. From life back in England. From family, friends and lover. I felt I was nobody's, and nobody was mine. Like the stars: suspended, just passing through landscape and nightscape and by people, or those things passing by me, and there was little distinction. It was delicious, but I also badly wanted a cigarette.

We arrived at Sacramento at 6 a.m., half an hour before schedule. Amtrak trains are only late, apparently, when you are in a hurry. Six in the morning is too early to arrive anywhere. But the conductor had knocked on my door and warned me to get myself together, and there I stood with my bags on the grandly spacious concourse of Sacramento train station. The no-smoking signs were everywhere, and I had been warned that even the air was protected against my vice. Eugene turned up beside me. Apparently, six in the morning is too early to arrive even if you have got somewhere to go.

‘My appointment is not until nine thirty. Would you like to have breakfast?'

We put our bags in Left Luggage and found an open diner a block or two away from the station. It was just far enough for me to light up and smoke a cigarette. Eugene didn't smoke, but he didn't mind me smoking. It did no violence to his libertarian views.

‘Let me know if you see a policeman,' I said, feeling cagey. ‘It's against the law to smoke even in the open air in this land of health and never-say-die, I'm told.'

Eugene laughed. Apparently, the conductor had been having me on, but I was prepared to believe any no-smoking rumour going.

The diner was a bright Formica and chrome canteen, already busy with workmen who brought in their own mugs for coffee at a discount and had piled their plates with hash browns, sausage and egg. I piled mine up with the same at the counter, being famished and particularly partial to American breakfast, stopping to ponder between over easy and sunny-side up. I decided on over easy because I liked the idea of saying it. I once wrote a short story called ‘Over Easy' because the phrase appeals to me so much. Eugene had waffles and maple syrup. At six in the morning in a strange city, in the pearly Californian light, we were comfortable with each other, like old acquaintances. We talked more of books. He asked me who I wrote for and was pleased when he heard the name of a respectable literary journal he had seen. Although our styles were quite different, I could speak his language, as it were. And I was not married. I was possible. I suspected that Eugene took his children's wishes very seriously.

‘Are you sorting out someone's estate down here?' I asked.

‘No, I've got a doctor's appointment.'

‘Oh.'

‘I'm going blind.'

Dear god, more story. Eugene had a hole in his macula, at the centre of his retina. He was already blind in one eye and now the other was deteriorating. He would be completely blind within a couple of years. He was doing everything he could to prevent this happening, but all the doctors he had seen had told him that nothing could be done, and that he should begin to prepare for living without his sight. Finally, he had come across a specialist in Sacramento who performed an operation that was said to work. He was having his initial examination today and if he was suitable they would operate. It was an extreme measure because the post-operative procedure was arduous. It involved the patient being tipped forward so that his head was facing the ground and remaining in that position with as little movement as possible for three weeks. Gravity and immobility aided recovery. Eugene acknowledged that this was an awful prospect, as much as anything because he wouldn't be able to read, but it was his duty, he said, to save his sight if he possibly could. This procedure might not work and if that was the case then there was nothing left to do. Then it would be his task to accept the situation and learn how to be an effective blind man. Eugene presented his situation starkly and without drama or emotion. Somewhere in all this was a kind of muscular Christianity, but behind that, I suspect, a Stoicism of the ancient sort that I imagined he would admire. Marcus Aurelius was surely on his list of good guys.