Thief of Words (19 page)
Annie cursed herself for bringing it up. “No, absolutely not,” she said. “Swear to me you won’t say anything to Jack.”
“Right,” Laura said. But neither believed she meant it.
Annie put the latte and muffin down on her desk and began tackling the morning’s voicemail when she was interrupted by the sound of a familiar gruff and cheery voice.
“And what is so rare as a day in May?” said Fred, poking his head into her office.
“I thought it was ‘a day in June,’ ” said Annie.
“It is, but James Lowell never lived in the swamps of Washington, D.C.”
“I’m glad to see you looking so happy this morning. I was a little worried. You know, the anniversary and all. I even called you last night, but no answer. Did you go out?”
“Yes,” Fred said. “In a manner of speaking. Lillian and I went to Café Atlantico. The tuna tartare in tablespoons were her favorite, as I thought they would be. She was so charmed by the presentation, she insisted we go into the kitchen and tell the chef. Over dinner we planned a trip to Sicily. For my benefit, she pretended to be excited about seeing the Roman ruins at Syracuse.
“Annie, it was miraculous. I was up until…I don’t know when. I’m sorry if I ignored your call. I got lost in the writing. It was as if she were there. By the end, the night at Café Atlantico was nearly as real as the night on the roof in Georgetown. I got to tell her I loved her, all over again—”
Fred’s voice caught for a moment. He stopped talking and loudly cleared his throat. Annie didn’t know what to do; she’d never seen Fred other than buoyant. She took a sip of latte to disguise her confusion. But before she put the cup back down on the desktop, Fred was merrily back on course.
“The anniversary is over, but I’m going to continue writing. I’m taking Lillian to the Cy Twombly sculpture exhibit at the National Gallery. I went there yesterday afternoon after I left you. It was extraordinary—a monument to the death of culture. He makes piles of plaster that look like something left behind by an elephant. ‘Classical forms resonate in the transformation of Twombly’s found objects.’ I’ve never heard such twaddle. The triumph of pseudo-intellectual art babble. Lillian and I are going to laugh our way around his so-called sculptures.
“Then I’m going to put her into my first honeymoon. She’d get a kick out of taking Yvonne’s place. We went on a train trip from Paris to Venice to Rome. I imagined Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in
North by Northwest.
The trouble was, Yvonne’s idea of travel involved lying on the beach and swimming up to a bar for piña coladas. Lillian was adventurous and gay. Yvonne was more like… well, no offense, Punkin, she was more like your mother.”
“Oh no, not that bad,” said Annie through her laughter. “Maybe worse. Anyway, please thank your Mr. DePaul for me. He’s really stumbled onto something.”
Fred left Annie with thoughts of trains and regrets and an overwhelming desire to hear Jack’s voice. It was 9:10. He’d probably just gotten into the newsroom and was drinking his first cup of coffee. Would she seem too eager if she called first thing? She considered Saturday night. “Take off my dress.” She decided it was too late to be demure and picked up the phone.
“Features, DePaul,” said the now-familiar voice.
“Books, Hollerman,” she answered.
“Oh, hello,” said Jack, who then added, in a rush, “thanks for your e-mail Sunday. Thanks for Saturday night. Thanks for liking me. Thanks for being you.”
“Wow,” said Annie. “That’s pretty good for a Monday morning. Thank you, too. Your e-mail was better than mine.”
“Well. It’s not a contest, Annie,” said Jack. “Just for the record, though? Yeah, it was better.”
She smiled into the receiver. “Okay, Mr. Show-off. Since you’re so good, I’ve got an assignment for you.”
Annie told Jack about how he’d inspired Fred and about Fred’s rewriting moments with Lillian, including a new first honeymoon.
“You know, Fred isn’t the only one who’s had a bad train ride. I always thought it would be so romantic. For years I pestered Trip to book one. I dreamed of riding through Russia or on the Orient Express. Trip didn’t want to have anything to do with conductors speaking in foreign tongues. He finally relented enough to go on a cross-Canada trip. He’d taken some French in college so I guess he figured he could handle the Montreal part.
“It was horrible. Every minute. The food was bad, the toilet overflowed, it was so overcast we never saw the mountains. Trip was grumpy the whole way. One day he accused a porter of stealing his voice-activated tape recorder. It turned out he’d left it at home.
“Jack, you promised to write me something from the conference. Take me on a train. I need to erase that Canada trip. Take me someplace exotic.”
Subject: Night train
The Singapore railway station is sweltering. It must be 100 degrees on the platforms. The place smells of ripening fruit and over-ripe people.
You’re sitting on a bench under the Track 4 sign reading a paperback by Alice Hoffman when I return with the tickets. You don’t see me, so I stop a moment to study you.
We’ve been traveling for two months. Australia, Bali, and Jakarta are behind us. We’ve ridden ferryboats and buses and hitched a half-dozen times; once we were picked up by a limousine. We’ve gotten caught in thunderstorms and slept in hammocks. At the harvest festival in Denpasar, a toothless old man chased us out of his shop. He thought we were stealing a shirt we’d already bought.
You’ve pulled your hair up; weeks of sun have coppered your shoulders. You’re wearing a thin wraparound skirt you bought in Darwin. It’s patterned with stylized Aboriginal birds. Your legs drape over the backpacks. I look at you and think to myself, how did I get so lucky?
“I got the tickets,” I say when I approach.
You smile and shade your eyes with a hand. “Good. I’m glad to leave. Singapore is too … too. Too modern, too crowded, too expensive. When do we leave?”
“We’ve got a couple of hours,” I say, sitting down beside you.
“What train are we taking?”
“Did you know that a train called the ‘Eastern & Oriental Express’ runs from here to Bangkok? It’s pure luxury. Waiters, air-conditioned compartments, fancy chef, ironed napkins in the dining car, Spiegelau crystal. They told me it has a piano bar and teak furnishings.”
“Wow!”
“Well … we’re not going on that train. It takes three days and costs $1,500 each. Ours is something called the ‘Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad.’ It’s one-tenth the price. But we do have a sleeper and the train’s a ‘Special Express’ so we’ll be in Bangkok by tomorrow night.”
“Does it have air conditioning?”
“Um. I’m not sure.”
The sun’s a dusty red ball on the western horizon when we leave the station around 6:00 that evening. The Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad is jammed and there’s nothing made from teak. Signs in four languages, including English, warn: “Please guard your possessions.” But it seems clean and efficient and there are fans in the sleeping cars, if not air-conditioning units.
We dump the backpacks on the tiny bunk beds in our compartment and, as the train lurches its way along, we walk to the outdoor observation platform at the end of the last car. The white cityscape of Singapore falls behind us as we head north, crossing the causeway to Malaysia. Soon we’re gliding through a green steam bath of fields and jungle. The air hums with flying insects and insect-eating bats.
After about an hour the train approaches a tin-roofed shantytown and slows to a stop. A crowd of hawkers appears, and in a babble of voices they offer to sell fruit, colas, gum, and various gimcracks to passengers at the windows. The merchants who gather around the observation platform are insistent even though we wave them off. When the train begins to crawl forward again, they walk away reluctantly, but a herd of coffee-colored children run alongside laughing and shouting, hands outstretched toward us.
“I think they want us to throw them some coins,” you say. “Do you have any?”
I fish in my pockets. “Only some Singapore subway tokens.”
“Throw them those, we don’t need them.”
I toss the tokens to the kids, causing a wild scramble. But it doesn’t last long and, hooting and hollering, the gang takes up its pursuit again. Soon they’re just a few yards behind us. But this time, instead of begging, they start throwing the tokens back at us, laughing.
We duck inside until the train reaches the edge of town and begins to speed up. When we return to our perch our little assailants, standing far down the track, wave goodbye to us.
We stand by the observation railing until, with tropic suddenness, evening turns to night. As the countryside, outlined by cooking fires and solitary light bulbs, recedes into the darkness, we wrap ourselves in each other, only thin cotton separating our bodies. After a moment you pull back, your mouth just an inch from mine, and say, “Let’s go to the compartment.” This seems like a very sensible plan to me and we start back, my hands on your waist as you lead me along the narrow corridors to our car and sleeper No. 23.
Inside I pull you to me and we trade kisses until we can’t ignore the fact that we’re turning the compartment, which was warm to begin with, into a sauna.
“God, it’s hot,” you say. You pull the little chain on the overhead fan, which begins to turn about the speed of a merry-go-round. “Try the window, Jack.”
It only opens partway, but it’s enough. We kneel on the padded bench that extends below the window and stick our heads out into the breeze. Then I take off my shirt, soaked with sweat, and let the air cool my body. You unbutton your top and let it billow around your small pale breasts.
After a while we feel raindrops, and hear them tap-tapping on the metal roof of the compartment. I turn off the lights and sit down on the padded bench, lean back against the wall, my legs stretched out. You sit between them and lean up against me, your back against my chest.
Your head, moving slightly to the train’s metallic beat, rests against my shoulder; my arms encircle your waist; the breeze cools us; occasional raindrops come through the half-open window spattering our arms and faces; the darkness itself seems palpable.
“Jack, do you think we’ve met before?”
“What do you mean? Like 20 years ago?”
“More like 120 years ago,” you say. “We fit so well, it seems like a memory. Just before on the platform when I was in your arms, everything was so familiar. Like I’d been in the tropics with you before.”
“Like reincarnation?”
You nod and say, “Maybe. It sounds silly though.” “Rossetti didn’t think it was silly, he wrote a poem about it:
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.
“He could paint
and
write?” you say. “Doesn’t seem fair. Know any more poems?”
As the miles click-click along, I repeat for you every sweet and melancholy line I know, from Thomas Wyatt to Robert Frost, from Charles Lamb to W. B. Yeats to our friend Pablo. And you hear them in my voice and feel them through my chest as the train carries us into the night.
When at last I run dry of verse, I bend down and kiss your neck. We lie there a time in silence, my hand moving against your thin cotton skirt to the vibrations of the car. After a while, you take my hand away and move something, then you put my hand back. You’ve unwrapped your skirt and now my fingers rest on bare skin.
“Touch me,” you say.
Later, with the smell of you mixing with the dark green smells outside, we rock along in the rain and the heat. I look out into the darkness and hope the journey never ends.
Jack
“Your mail has been sent,” announced the little black letters on the screen. Jack stood up, stretched, and closed the lid on his laptop. Annie had asked for something exotic on a train. A ride through Malaysia was about as exotic as it gets. It gave him a wicked sense of triumph. Stick that in your voice-activated tape recorder, Thomas Harrington Boxer III.
While some of the details of the train e-mail had come from Jack’s own experience (or from
National Geographic
specials), most had been made up out of thin air. But in a way, all of it was true. Jack believed this is how he and Annie could have been and could still be. It made him restless to think of it, itchy to travel, itchy to change. Worse, it made him play with the fifty-year-old’s most hopeless of fantasies: that he was twenty-five years old again.
He walked to the window. It was nearly midnight, nearly Wednesday morning. Below him, pedestrians still clogged the sidewalks of 59th Street and the southern edge of Central Park. The management conference had never been held at the Plaza before. Jack had ducked into the hotel several times during past trips, just to gawk at the Palm Court’s rococo decorations and use the bathrooms, but this was his first stay.
He wasn’t tired, though he’d been up since 5:45. He’d taken an early Metroliner, to avoid sharing the three-hour ride with the other
Star-News
editors. He wasn’t just avoiding Kathleen; he liked traveling alone and wanted some extra time in the city before the afternoon’s opening session. He’d spent the morning walking around the Garment District. He enjoyed the hurly-burly of the streets and being buffeted by the young and the purposeful.
Looking down from his room, Jack watched a cop on horseback point out something to a couple in fancy clothes, who then walked hurriedly toward Fifth Avenue. He had the sudden urge to join them, and five minutes later he was on the Plaza’s front steps, breathing in the May evening.
As he headed east, beckoned by the bright windows of FAO Schwarz, he passed two Central Park carriages, parked side by side. The drivers were having a tabloid conversation. Jack overheard one say, “I think he did it. Hell, I’d of cut her up, too.”
