by Ron Carlson
And now Allison kidded me when we’d have tea somewhere or a plowman’s platter in a pub: “You don’t have to try Porter’s frown when you ask for a pint,” she’d say. “This isn’t the Eden.” And I’d taken certain idiomatic inflections from Porter’s accent, and when they’d slip out, Allison would turn to me, alert to it. I would have stopped it if I could. I started being assertive and making predictions, the way Porter did. We’d gone to Southwark one night, and after a few at a dive called Old Tricks, we’d stood at the curb afterward, arm in arm in the chill, and he’d said, “Calm enough now,” and he’d scanned the low apartment buildings on the square, “but this will all be in flames in two years. Put it in your calendar.” And when I got that way with Allison, even making a categorical statement about being late for the tube or forgetting the umbrella, she’d say, “Put it in your calendar, mate.” I always smiled at these times and tried to shrug them off. She was right, after all. But I also knew she’d fallen too. She didn’t pick up the posture or the walk, but Allison was in love with this character too.
One night in March, he met us at the Eden with a plan. I was a meteorologist, wasn’t I? It was key for a truly global understanding of the weather for me to visit the north Scottish coast and see the effects of the Gulf Stream firsthand. “Think of it, Mark,” he said, his face lit by the glass of beer. “The Gulf Stream. All that water roiling against the coast of Mexico, warming in the equatorial sun, then spooling out around the corner of Florida and up across the Atlantic four thousand miles still warm as it pets the forehead of Scotland. It’s absolutely tropical. Palm trees. We better get up there.”
Well, I didn’t have anything to do. I was on hold, taking a year off we called it sometimes, and I looked at Allison there in the Eden. She raised her eyebrows at me, throwing me the ball, and smiled. Her hair was back in the new brown clip Porter had given her. “Sounds too good to pass up,” she said. “Mark’s ready for an adventure.”
“Capital,” Porter said. “I’ll arrange train tickets. We’ll leave Wednesday.”
Allison and I talked about it in our flat. It was chilly all the time, and we’d get in the bed sometimes in the early afternoon and talk and maybe have a snack, some cheese and bread with some Whitbred from a canister. She came home early from the museum the Tuesday before I was to leave with Porter. There was a troubled look on her face. She undressed and got in beside me. “Well,” she said. “Ready for your adventure?” Her face was strange, serious and fragile, and she put her head into my shoulder and held me.
“Hey, don’t worry,” I said. The part of her sweet hair was against my mouth. “You’ve got the people at the museum if you need anything, and if something came up you could always call Roger Ardreprice.” I patted the naked hollow of her back to let her know that I had been kidding with that last, but she didn’t move. “Hey,” I said, trying to sit up to look her in the eyes, comfort her, but she pushed me back, burrowed in.
PORTER AND I left London in the late afternoon and clacked through the industrial corridor of the city until just before the early dark the fields began to open and hedgerows grow farther apart. Porter had arrived late for the train and kicked his feet up on the opposite seat, saying, “Sorry, mate, but I’ve got the ticket right here.” He withdrew a glass jar from his pack and examined it. “Not a leak. Tight and dry.” He held the jar like a trophy and smiled at me his gorgeous smile. “Dry martinis, and we’re going to get very tight.” Then he unwrapped two white china coffee cups and handed me one. There was a little gold crown on each cup, the blue date in Roman numerals MCMLIII. He saw me examining the beautiful cup and said, “From the coronation. But there are no saucers and—in the finest tradition of the empire—no ice.”
Well, I was thrilled. Here I was rambling north in a foreign country, every mile was farther north in Britain than I’d ever been, etc., and Porter was dropping a fat green olive in my cup and covering it with silver vodka. “This is real,” I said aloud, and I felt satisfied at how it felt.
“To Norris,” I said, making the first toast, “and the Eden, hoping they’re happy tonight.”
“Agreed,” Porter said, drinking. “But happy’s not the word, mate. Norris is pleased, but never happy. He’s been a good friend to me, these English years.”
“We love him,” I said, speaking easily hearing the “we,” Allison entering the sentence as a natural thing. It was true. We’d often remarked as we’d caught the tube back to Hampstead or as we’d headed toward the Eden that Norris was wonderful. In fact he was one of eight people we knew by name in that great world city.
“Allison seems a dear girl.” Porter said. It was a strange thing, like a violation, the two of us talking about her.
“She’s great,” I said, simply holding place.
“Women.” Porter raised his cup. “The great unknowable.”
I thought about Allison, missing her in a different way. We were tender people, that is, kids, and our only separations had been play ones, vacations when she’d go home to her folks and I’d go home to my folks, and then we moved in together after graduating with no fanfare, tenderly, a boy and a girl who were smart and well-meaning. Our big adventure was going off to England together, which everyone we knew and our families thought was a wonderful idea, and who knows what anybody meant by that, and really, who knows what we meant at such a young age, what we were about. We were lovers, but that term would have embarrassed us, and there are no other words which come close to the way we were. We liked each other a lot, that’s it. We both knew it. We were waiting for something to happen, something to do with age and the world that would tell us if we were qualified, if we were in love, the real love. And here I was on a train with a stranger, each mile sending me farther from her into a dark night in a foreign country. I thought about her in the quilts of our small bed in Hampstead. The first martini was working, and it had made me large: I was a man on a train far from home.
We got drunk. Porter grinned a lot and I actually made him giggle a few times with my witty remarks. The vodka evidently made me very clever. About nine o’clock we went up to the club car, a little snack bar, and bought some Scotch eggs. This was real life, I could feel it. I’d had a glimpse of it from time to time with Porter, but now here we were.
One long afternoon after we’d first met him, he took us on a walk through the Isle of Dogs. He’d had us meet him at the Bridge & Beacon near the foot of London Bridge and we’d spent the rest of the day tramping the industrial borough of the Isle. The pubs were hidden among all the fenced construction storage lots and warehouses. We’d walk a quarter mile down a street with steel sheeting on both sides and then down a little alley would be the entry to the Bowsprit or the Sea Lion or the Roman Arch, places that had been selling drinks for three hundred years while the roads outside, while everything outside, changed. They all had a dock and an entry off the Thames. For us it was enchanting, this lost world at once rough, crude, and romantic. Two steps down under a huge varnished beam into a long room of polished walnut and brass lamps, like the captain’s quarters on a ship, we’d follow Porter and sit by the window where the river spread beneath us. He’d call the barman by name and order three pints. I mean, we loved this stuff. We were on the inside.
“Do you know the opening of Heart of Darkness?” he asked. We’d never read it. “Right here,” he said, sweeping his hand at the window. “At anchor here on a sloop in the sea reach of the Thames.” And then he’d pull the paperback from his pocket and read the first two pages. “Geez, that makes a man thirsty, eh, Mark?” He’d bump me and we’d drink up.
It was a long tour. We left the London Bridge sometime after five and didn’t cross under the river in the tunnel at Greenwich until almost eleven. I remember scurrying through the long tiled corridor far beneath the river behind Porter as he dragged us along in a hurry because the pubs were going to close and we’d miss the last train back to Hampstead. We were all full of beer and Allison and I were dislocated, a feeling I got used to an
d came to like, as we came out into the bright cold air and saw the Cutty Sark moored there. This was life, it seemed to me, and I ran into the Red Cloak on Porter’s footsteps. I was bursting and so pleased to be headed for the men’s when he took my arm and pulled me to the bar. “Let’s have a pint first, just to savor the night,” he said. I wasn’t standing upright, having walked with a bladder cramp for half a mile, and now the pain and pressure were blinding. I gripped the glass and met his smile. Allison came out of the ladies’ and came over. “Are we being macho or just self-destructive?” she said.
“We’re playing through the pain,” Porter said. “We’re seeing if the Buddhists are right with their wheel of desire and misery.” I could barely hear him; there was a rushing in my ears, a cataract of steady noise. Disaster was imminent. Porter took a big slug of the bitter, and I mirrored his action. We swallowed and put down the glasses. “Excuse me,” he said. “Think I’ll hit the loo.” And he strolled slowly into the men’s. A blurred moment later I stood beside him at the huge urinals, dizzy and reclaimed. “We made it, mate,” he said. “Now we’ve got to pound down a thousand beers and catch the train.”
It had been a strange season in London for me. It was all new and as they say exciting, but I couldn’t figure out what any of it meant. Now on the train to the north coast with Porter, I actually felt like somebody else who had never had my life, because as I saw it, my life—high school, college, Allison—hadn’t taught me anything. For the first time I didn’t give a shit about what happened next. The little play dance of cause and effect, be a good student, was all gone.
“You’re not married,” I said. It seemed late on a train and you could talk like that.
He looked at me. “It’s not clear,” he said. “In the eyes of men or the eyes of God?” I must have been looking serious, because he added, “No. I’m not married. Nearly happened once, but no, it was the timing, and now I’ve got plenty to do.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It was a girl at Hilman,” he said. “I’d have done it too, but it got away from us. There’s a time for it and you can wait too long.” He pointed at me. “You and Allison talking about it?”
“No, not really. I mean, I don’t know. I guess we are, kind of, being over here together. But we’ve never talked about it really.” Now he was just smiling at me, the kid. That’s what I wanted to say: hey, I’m a kid here; I’m too young. I’m too young for anything.
Porter drank. He was the first person I’d met who drank heavily and didn’t make a mess. When the guys in the dorm drank the way he did every night we saw him, you wouldn’t see them for three days. “Well, just remember there’s a time and if it gets away, it’s gone. Be alert.” It sounded so true what he said. I’d never had a talk like this on a train and it all sounded true. It had weight. I wondered if the time had come and gone. I thought about Allison at thirty or forty, teaching art history at Holyoke or someplace. She’d be married to someone else, a man who appeared to be older than she, some guy with a thin gray beard.
“How do you know if the time is right or if the time is coming up? How do you know about this timing?” I held out my beautiful white coffee cup, and Porter carefully filled it with the silver liquid. My future seemed vast, unchartable. “Whose fault was it when you lost this girl?”
Porter rolled his head to look at me. He looked serious. “Hers. Mine. She could have fixed it.” He gave me a dire, ironic look. “And then it was too late.”
“What was her name?”
“It’s no longer important.”
“Was she a Lake?”
The window with the cabin lights dimmed was a dreamy plate of our faint reflection torn up by all the white and yellow lights of industrial lots and truck parks. “Yeah,” he said. “They all were. She wore her hair like Allison does and she looked that way.” He had grown wistful and turned quickly to me with a grin. “Oh, hell, they all look that way when they’re twenty-two.” After a while, Porter sat up and again topped my cup with vodka.
In Edinburgh, we had to change trains. It was just before dawn, and I felt torn up by all the drinking. Porter walked me across to our connection, the train for Cape Wrath, and he went off—for some reason—to the stationmaster’s office. Checking on something. He was going to make a few calls and then we’d be off again, north to the coast. I’d wanted to call Allison, but what would I say? I missed her? It was true, but it sounded like kid stuff somehow. It bothered me that there was nothing appropriate to say, nothing fitting, and the days themselves felt like they didn’t fit, like I was waiting to grow into them. I sat sulking on the train in Edinburgh station. I was sure—that is, I suspected—that there was something wrong with me. I hadn’t seen a fire or found a body or stopped a fight or been in one, really, nor could I say what was going to happen, because I could not read any of the signs. I wanted with all my teeth for something real to claim me. Anyway, that’s as close as I can say it.
When Porter came back I could see him striding down the platform in the gray light like a man with a purpose. He didn’t seem very drunk. He had a blue package under his arm. “Oh, matey, bad luck,” he said, sitting opposite me in our new compartment. It was an older train, everything carpet and tassels and wood in remarkably good condition. It was like a time warp I was in, sitting there drunk while Porter told me he was going back to London. “Have to.” He tapped the package. “They’ve overnighted all the data and I’ve got to compose the piece by tomorrow.” He shook my hand heartily. “Wish me luck. And good luck to you. You’ll love Cape Wrath. I once saw a submarine there off the coast. Good luck to you and your Gulf Stream.” He smiled oddly with that last, a surreal look, I thought from my depth or height, distance anyway, and he was gone.
Well, I couldn’t think. For a while I worked my face with my hands, carefully hoping that such a reasonable gesture might wake me, help me get a grip. But even after the train moved and then moved again, gaining momentum now, I was blank. Outside now the world was gray and green, the misting precipitation cutting the visibility to five hundred feet. This was part of a typical spring low pressure that would engulf all of Great Britain for a week. I didn’t really know if I wanted to go on alone, but then I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I wanted to get off the train, because I didn’t really know why I was on the train in the first place. I felt a little sick, a kind of shocky jangling that would resolve itself into nausea but not for about an hour, and so I put my feet on the opposite seat, closed my eyes, and waited.
Porter had been to our flat once. It was the day I had gone to the Royal Weather Offices in London, and when I came back, he and Allison were drinking our Whitbred at the tiny table. The place was a bed-sitter, too small for three people. I sat on the bed, but even so every time one of us moved the other two had to shift. Evidently Porter had come to invite us to some funky bar, the last mod pub off Piccadilly, he said. Allison’s face was rosy in the close room. I told them about my day, the tour I’d taken, and Porter got me talking about El Nio, and I got a little carried away, I guess. I mean, I knew this stuff. But I remember them exchanging glances and smiling. I was smiling too, and I remember being happy waving my arms around as the great cycles of the English climate.
Now I felt every ripple of every steel track as it connected to the one before it, and I knew with increasing certainty that I was going to be sick. But there was something more than all the drink rising in me. Something was wrong. I was used to that feeling, that is, that things were not exactly as I expected, but this was something else. That blue package that Porter had carried back. I’d seen it all night, the corner of it, sticking out of the blown zipper of his leather valise. He’d had it all along. What was he talking about?
It was like that for forty minutes, my stomach roiling steadily, until we stopped at Pitlochry. When I stood up, I felt the whole chemistry seize, and I limped to the loo and after a band of sweat burst onto my forehead, I was sick, voluminously sick, and then I was better, that is, just
stricken not poisoned. My head felt empty. I hurried to the platform and wrangled with the telephone until I was able to reach Roger Ardreprice. I had tried Allison at home and at the museum, and then I called Roger at work and a woman answered the phone: “Keats’s House.”
“Listen,” I started after he’d come to the phone. Then I didn’t know what to say. Why was I calling? “Listen,” I said again. “I’m uneasy about something.…”
“Where are you calling from?” he asked.
“I’m in Scotland. I’m in someplace, Pitlochry. Porter and I were going north to the coast.”
“Porter, oh, for god’s sakes, you didn’t get tangled up with Porter, did you? What’s he got you doing? I should have said something.”
The phone box was close, airless, and I pressed the red-paned door open with my foot. “He’s been great, but…”
“Oh my, this is bad news. Porter, for your information, probably started the Lake fire. He was tried for it, you know. He is bloody bad news. You keep yourself and that young woman away from him. Especially the girl. What’s her name?”
I set my forehead against one of the glass panes of the phone booth and breathed through my mouth deeply two or three times. “Allison,” I said.
“Right,” Roger Ardreprice said from London. “Don’t let him at her.”
I couldn’t hear very well now, a kind of static had set up in my head, and I set the phone back on the cradle.
The return train was a lesson in sanity. I felt the whole time that I would go crazy the next minute, and this powerful about-to-explode feeling finally became a granite rock which I held on my lap with my traveling case. I thought if I could sit still, everything would be all right. As the afternoon failed, I sat perfectly still through the maddening countryside, across the bridges and rivers of Great Britain with my body feeling distant and infirm in the waxy shadow of my hangover. Big decisions, I learned that day, are made in the body, and my body recoiled at the thought of Porter.
