“Got me. I’m just stopping here. Seemed a good place to come in out of the rain.”
“It’s stopped,” I say.
“Has? Well it had to one day, but I’ll just sit a while more. For now I’ve no real place to go.”
“When does the train reach Trenton?” she asks me.
“I’m not sure.”
“Because you said you rode it so much, I thought—”
“This is The Montrealer. It’s a slower train than I usually take.”
“Which one’s that?”
“The 5:l5—I don’t know the name. Excuse me. I just remembered something.”
I go downstairs to the platform. There are two benches there. A man’s sitting on the one nearest the stairs, so I go to the other. It’s empty and I sit. I close my eyes.
“Mind if I sit here?” a man says.
“No no, of course.” I look at my watch. I was asleep for two minutes.
“Your bags. I don’t mean to, but if it’s no problem?”
“Oh sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” I put the overnight bag on the ground and the briefcase on top of it.
“How far you going?”
“New York.”
“Same here. I always wanted to catch the evening Montrealer. I like the club car idea. I don’t like buying a split of wine and then sitting with it in my seat. I like the tables and chairs and, you know, to spread out a bag of peanuts or cards, even.”
“It’s much better,” I say, “though there’s usually too much smoke in there for me.”
“Sure, I can see it if you don’t smoke. You go up often?”
“Every now and then.”
“I go twice a week. That’s back and forth, back and forth two times. It gets boring but it’s my work, and I wouldn’t live there. Only way to liven the trip up is by taking the plane occasionally or getting different kinds of trains. The evening Montrealer is one I never got. The one in the morning from New York I’ve done a couple-dozen times, but it rarely carries the club car, don’t ask me why, but if it does it’s usually locked and they’re only hauling it to Washington for this or some overnight Southern run. Besides, who wants wine at nine or ten in the morning—even eleven.”
“You could have coffee. Or English muffins.”
“You ever eat their English muffins, though the coffee’s not bad.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It’s not freeze-dried or instant at least. They make it in the pot.”
Yes, I’ve seen.”
“You work here but also have business in New York?” Tve a friend there, so occasionally I go for a long weekend.”
“I’m out in Towson.”
“That so?”
“Work there but live in Lutherville. Electronics. An Engineer, but now mostly supervision of sales. The Murke-Mirablia Company.”
“I don’t know of it.”
“One of Baltimore’s largest employers. You’ll see one of our warehouses on the way out.”
The stationmaster announces our train. That means it’ll be here in seven or eight minutes. “Excuse me,” I say, and I get up, stretch, walk around the platform keeping my eyes on my briefcase and bag. People are coming downstairs, fanning out along the platform, a few heading with heavier luggage to the front where the sleeping cars will stop.
My feet hurt and I almost feel too tired to stand. So much preparing for classes this week, papers to read and grade, talking, talking in class and an inordinate amount of photocopying to do and departmental paperwork. And student readings. Two this week, and one visiting poet I had to meet at the airport, take to dinner, give the introduction for at her reading, go out for beers with after with some of the students, see her back to her hotel. And the old woman in my building. Three days in a row attending to this for her, that. Her lights blew because she overloaded one outlet. Next day she walked into my apartment two flights above hers. “Where am I?” she said. “I think I’m lost.” That night she screamed up the stairs for help. I went down to her with the second-floor tenant, saw she was sick and called an ambulance and she said “One of you come with me to the hospital. They’ll kill me if you don’t,” and I went with her, filled out her forms and helped take her to her room. Then called the landlord and said “Don’t you know if she has somebody?” and he said “You don’t think I want her out also, but so long as she doesn’t want to she doesn’t have to go to a home,” and next day calling the twenty people with her last name in the phonebook.
I go back to the bench. “Almost here,” the man says. “You can see the locomotive’s light on the rails. Another reason I prefer The Montrealer is it’s much roomier inside. And window curtains. You laugh, but if you want to sleep all you have to do is draw the curtain, put your legs up on the leg rest and conk out. In the morning the curtains are only useful against the sun if you sit on the left side of the train going south. Which side would that be? I should know. I’m the engineer. The left side would be, well—heading south—let’s see. My left hand. I’m going south.” He holds out his left hand, faces the direction the train’s coming from. “South,” he says. “I’m going south. It would have to be east, of course, the left side, wouldn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t know why it’s suddenly so confusing. But we’ll say east. I must have a block about it. It has to be east, that’s right. All that water from the Susquehanna and Chesapeake we pass pouring into the inlet. The tankers docked in Wilmington. And God help me, the sun rises there also. So the curtains are only useful on the east side in the morning, but I usually sit—”
“There’s the train.”
“Great,” and he picks up his valise. I hold my bag and briefcase. The train stops. Lots of people are around us now. We stand to the side of the door as the conductor and passengers come out.
“Which one’s the nonsmoking?” I ask the conductor.
“Rear car and one to your left.”
I go to the door on my left. The man’s right behind me. I go in and he says “I smoke, but don’t have to—I’ve in fact been warned not to, so if you want to continue our conversation?”
“I have to go much farther—something about the backs of trains.”
“You can’t go too much farther and you’re not that far back. Next one’s probably a smoking car and then the club car and after that the dining car they won’t let you into till about eight.”
“I’ll try. Nice talking to you.” I walk through the car, turn around at the end of it and see him putting his valise on the luggage rack. He sees me and points to the seats under the rack. I shake my head, point to the next car and tap the door-opening device.
I don’t want to sit in the smoking car so I go into the club car. There don’t seem to be too many smokers at the tables. I get a beer from the service bar, sit at an empty table, give the trainman my ticket and get back a seat check.
“Mr. Taub,” a young man says. I look up. I don’t recognize him. Dark sunglasses, bangs almost over his eyes.
“Ed Shekian. I was in Ida’s class last term.”
“Ida?” I’m sitting and he’s standing.
“Ida Rulowitz. She invited you to speak to us because you’re the expert in I don’t know what. Robert Frost, I think.”
“Wallace Stevens?”
“That’s right, Stevens, Pound and Eliot. You said you knew more about Stevens’ work than Pound or Eliot, but that you maybe knew enough of their work for our class. It was an introduction to contemporary lit. Well, I saw you running up the aisle past me before and I thought ‘Whew, Mr. Taub, there he goes, I got to get him,’ so I just dumped my stuff on a seat and ran after you. You remember Ida. How is she, you know?”
“Oh sure, Ida. She had an awful accident.”
“A woman on a motorcycle with about ten hours experience on it and on a major highway and without a crash helmet no less. That is just stupid, as smart a teacher and nice a person as she is.”
“Yeah, god, awful. Someone told me about her o
nly last week. I didn’t know. The school’s so big. She was supposed to be getting out of intensive care this week, this person said.”
“I knew that. I thought you might’ve known more. I wanted to visit her but they said not yet. Her boyfriend did. Look, excuse me for presenting this to you like this, but remember you said you’d do a radio interview for us?”
“For you? Did I? In what way?”
“For the campus radio station. You see, this year I’ve even a bigger position than I had last year. Not only chief engineer but the program coordinator too, and I’m trying to boost the programs on literary content a notch. You said, when a few of us talked to you after class, that you’d let yourself be interviewedin a Q and A session and maybe then would read some contemporary poems you like. Would you still be interested?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like to be on programs or even panels. I’m not asked that much, granted, but the microphone and I aren’t great friends.”
“Oh, I’ve seen you introduce poets here. You do a terrific job. And we loved you in Ida’s class. Most of us thought that could’ve been the best one all semester.”
“I still don’t know. Listen, why don’t you sit? You want a beer? I’m having one.”
“Sure, why not, this is great. I love meeting teachers like you who are famous on their own and also are great teachers and just talking with them casually like this. I’ll be right back.”
“You have enough money?”
“Why wouldn’t I? You mean for the beer?”
“Since I invited you, and I make more than enough, which partly comes from your tuition. And you must be paying—are you an out-of-town student?”
“From Staten Island. It costs a fortune, but I help out with three thousand of it. My father said—well it wasn’t even that. I just think it’s what I should do, contribute to my education monetarily.”
“Three thousand’s a lot though.”
“I work as a mason in the summer. Not a full mason but a step above apprentice. The mason I work under—”
“Why don’t you get your beer?”
“Right. Your neck must be hurting, looking at me turned around.”
He gets a beer, comes back, sits opposite me. He tells me why he chose our university, what he thinks of sharing an apartment with three men, the premed courses he’s not doing very well in, his mother who was terminally ill for three years and which made him choose medicine as a career. His father and younger brothers: “They’re going to be so surprised when I walk in the door.”
“Maybe you should call them from the station. People today get alarmed when the door opens and you don’t expect anyone.”
“No, they like surprises from me. Just like my girl will too.”
“Now she you definitely should have told you were coming. You know, I’m not saying anything, but you don’t want to set yourself up for being embarrassed or hurt.”
“She’s okay. I’ll show up tomorrow early. She lives with her folks.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” I yawn. “Sorry—just a little sleepy. It’s been a hectic week. But go on.”
We’re pulling into Aberdeen. We must have been speaking half an hour. He’s talking about the fifty hours a week he works at the campus radio station. “I do it because I love it. I’d have to—I don’t get paid.” About the difference of being a freshman and sophomore. Ida and her accident. Some of the interesting people he’s met here: teachers, students. The time he barged into the university president’s office to get more money for the station. I’m yawning again. “Did you really?” I say. The train pulls out of Wilmington. My glass is empty. I don’t know whether to excuse myself and go back to the nonsmoking car or stay here. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I do want to get some rest. Oh, put up with it a little more. Best way is with another beer.
“I’m going to have another,” I say, standing up. “Can I get you one?”
“Sure, why not? No, I probably shouldn’t. Two with no food in me makes me high.”
“Then you better not. I forgot how old you are you speak so well. That’s not a put-down either. You’re very articulate and mature and have done a lot of things with your life. Then I’m going to go in back now, if you don’t mind, and find a seat.”
“Me too, though I already have one, or my bags do. Say, maybe there’s a seat available next to mine. There was when I followed you in here. Whoops, I shouldn’t have said that again, right? Sounds like hero worship, which it’s not. I just think you’re an incredibly nice smart guy.”
“Thank you.”
We start back, I first. Coming toward me in the smoking car is the man I spoke to on the platform. I move to the side so he can pass. “How you doing?” I say.
“Hey there,” he says. “I’m about to check out the dining car if they let me see it. They’re not all the same on The Montrealer. Where’d you finally find a seat?”
“Haven’t got one yet.”
“My car’s filled. They should lose some seats in Philadelphia but maybe take as many on. If I see you later in the club car, let’s continue our chat.”
“This is a student at my school. Ed—and I don’t know your name.”
“What, you teach? I did too. U of P. Five years. Engineering.”
“That’s what I thought of taking once,” Ed says.
“Tickets, please,” the trainman says.
We each show him our checks.
“So I’ll see you,” I say to the man. I go through the smoking car. A few vacant seats. Maybe there’ll be a couple of vacant ones in the nonsmoking car, no matter what the man said.
“I guess you’re in the next one too,” I say to Ed.
“Second aisle by the door.”
We enter the nonsmoking car. Seat next to Ed’s is taken.
“Maybe I can get her to move,” he says.
“No, it wouldn’t be fair. Speak to you later perhaps.”
I go further up the aisle. There’s a vacant seat before and after the one that man had put his valise above. I don’t want him to see me when he gets back, nor do I want to speak to Ed anymore, so I go through the next smoking car into the rear nonsmoking car and look for a seat. They’re all occupied or have seat checks above the seat or something on the seat if nobody’s sitting on it. I return to Ed’s car, choose the aisle seat in the third to last row and put my overnight bag on the luggage rack. The man next to me smiles at me when I sit, then continues looking out the window. He has no newspaper or book around him, so I’m afraid he’s going to be another one who will ultimately want to talk to pass the time. I turn on my reading light, take out a book from my briefcase. My check, I think, and I take the check out of my shirt pocket and stick it in the holder above the seat. It comes loose and drops on the floor by the man’s foot. “Excuse me,” I say, bending down to get the check.
“Yoach a pono,” he says. “Yoach a pono—no.”
“Uh…what?”
“Anglish. No English. No speak. No American.” He puts his fingers over his closed lips, hunches his shoulders as if to say he’s sorry.
“Really, it’s okay,” I say. “Really. No problem.”
He smiles and turns back to the window. I put the check into the holder and my book back into the briefcase and turn off the light. I look behind me, am about to tell the woman in that seat that I’m about to move my seat all the way back so I can sleep, so if she has a drink on the seat tray, hold on to it, then think Don’t say anything, don’t start. I press the seat button and very slowly let the seat all the way back. I rest my head on the seat’s side rest and close my eyes.
“Hey, how are you?” the man from the platform says. I keep my eyes closed, pretend not to hear. “Oh, sorry. Must be asleep.”
“Mr. Taub,” Ed says about twenty minutes later. “There’s a seat next to mine now.”
“Shh,” the man I’m sitting beside says. “Shh shh shh.”
Finished
I can’t finish anything anymore. I try but can’t. I s
pend most of my night working. Then I take a short nap and go to my paying job and work all day there and come home and have a quick bite and sleep for a few hours and wash up and go to my desk, but much as I work there, nothing gets finished. I try to finish. I try extra hard. I’ve been working harder at my work and at trying to finish something these last few months than I have in twenty years. Sometimes I work eight hours straight, time off to walk around the room, do some exercises, have a snack, go to the bathroom, time off for all that. Then back to my desk and I work eight hours, ten hours, but never straight. Three hours of actual straight work at the most, perhaps. Maybe four. Of just sitting down and doing it without getting up, I mean. Then time off for a snack, to relax with a brief walk around the room, to get the kinks out with some hard physical exercise in the room, maybe even to sit on the couch and drink coffee and read a newspaper for about fifteen minutes, newspaper which I bought when I went to my paying job earlier that day. And a couple of times in the last few weeks, time off to go outside and around the corner to the all-night grocery for a quart of milk, pound of coffee, bread. Just a few items as I don’t want to waste much time buying or preparing or cooking foods, time I could be spending on my work. Maybe also some sandwich meat and sliced cheese and ajar of mustard or mayonnaise if I’m out of it so I’ll have something easy to snack on when I work at home and something to smear on the snack so it won’t be so dry. Then back to my desk where I’ll continue my work but never finish any of it. I’ve boxes filled with things I can’t finish. Ream boxes, not big carton boxes, and the city dump must have buried or burned another twenty pounds or so of my work that I haven’t finished these last few months.
When I first started doing this work at home I used to finish all of it. Ninety-five percent, ninety-eight, so just about all. Then I’d finish a little less—after doing this kind of work for about ten years—but not much less. I wouldn’t be able to finish about ten to fifteen percent after about ten years of this work at my desk. Five years after that, and still putting in five to six hours a day every weekday at it and maybe eight to ten hours a day on free weekends and vacations, I couldn’t finish at the most twenty-five to thirty percent of what I started. But never any more than that, and those last figures might even be too high by about five to ten percent. But now, after twenty years at it—twenty-five, counting what I called then my self-apprenticeship, when it didn’t matter if I finished what I started or not; I was just teaching myself to start then, teaching myself to continue and finish—well, after twenty years at it I can’t finish anything. This has been going on—but I already said for how long. Months. If I said a few, I was either intentionally misleading myself or just wrong. It’s been eight months, nine. Before that I wasn’t able to finish about eighty percent, but still, I finished twenty percent and thought, with all the work I did, that that was enough. That twenty percent was almost a distillate, if that’s the right word—a refinement—but distillate’s close enough. I don’t want to get bogged down now over this word or that and end up where I can’t finish this piece too. I want to finish it because maybe with a finished piece I’ll have started something and I’ll be able to finish a piece right after this one and maybe all the pieces or just about all of them right after this one I’ll be able to finish if I finish this one, till I’m finishing as much work as I used to finish when I first started this kind of work after I felt I’d served enough time at my self-apprenticeship. Maybe this piece will start something like that. It feels like it. Feels as if I’m going to finish this piece. That’s what it certainly feels like.
Friends Page 6
