by Jenny Diski
Incredibly, in spite of what everyone knows about US trains, in spite of my own experience of being hours late on the previous two trips I had taken, in spite of the Empire Builder having travelled 2256 miles since I boarded in Chicago, we pulled into Portland’s Union station at 9.55 a.m., fifteen minutes ahead of time.
Just Like Misery
If it was Sunday lunchtime, it had to be Portland, Oregon. By Monday breakfast I would be in Sacramento, California; by Tuesday suppertime in Denver, Colorado. Then I had to spend the night in a hotel I had booked near the station and catch the bus at 6.15 the following morning – Wednesday – to Raton in New Mexico, to arrive twenty minutes before it was time to pick up the 10.56 a.m. Southwest Chief that would deliver me to Albuquerque by Wednesday at 4 p.m. – half a week away from Portland.
This was my social visit to Bet and her hero. Five days in real America with real Americans. Instead of just heading round the States in a moving corridor, I had a destination, people to meet me at the station, a house to stay in for five days that didn’t move, didn’t shake or rock or go any place at all. In England nothing would induce me to go and stay with perfect strangers for five days, but this was a journey, a contrivance, and it seemed like a good idea to renew a previous accidental meeting that offered a new insight into an America I didn’t know. What made me think it would be all right was that I liked Bet, and had enjoyed her company on the train. You meet someone you like, you arrange to see them again. What could be more reasonable than that? More normal? Perhaps it was an attempt to give up being a stranger. At any rate, to see if I could give it up.
When I called Bet from London and proposed the visit, she sounded delighted. What was more, she and the hero had just bought a trailer, and I could stay in it, a place of my own, while I was there. So I wasn’t going to be on exactly rock-solid foundations during my time off the train, but I was delighted at the idea of living in a trailer in suburban New Mexico for a few days, and, of course, of having a bolt hole, as well as not having to feel too bad about being in my hosts’ hair day in and day out. For all the apparent normality of the visit, the trailer made the five days I planned to spend with these very generous perfect strangers seem less insane.
‘Stay a couple of weeks,’ Bet urged. ‘More. A month.’
‘No, really, I have to get back on the train and finish the journey, and I have to be back in New York by the end of the month.’
‘Just the five days, then. Well, you can always come back.’
* * *
Meantime, the glancing acquaintances of train travel continued. In the waiting room at Portland, before the train arrived, a well but quietly dressed, unshowily good-looking man in his mid-fifties smiled at me and asked the regulation question. He was delighted to hear that I was English. I was intrigued by him because he was the only executive type I had come across so far on these travels. He was an estate lawyer, he told me in a quiet, slightly anglicised, cultured voice. Eugene was taking the train to Sacramento from his home in Rochester, NY, because he had a meeting there first thing in the morning and it was cheaper and simpler to take the overnight train than to fly out the previous day and book into a hotel for the night. He didn’t strike me as someone who chose very many cheaper options, so I took him to mean that he preferred to travel this way. By the time the train arrived, he had quoted Pliny at me on the subject of serving bad wine to one’s guests, told me that there had been a great cultural falling away since the eighteenth century and that we had passed from the Golden Age, through the Silver Age, beyond the Bronze Age to something a good deal more leaden. He was, he said, a Yale man, and an active but old-fashioned Christian (there was nothing happy-clappy about Eugene), working in his spare time at trying to save the Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer had done for prose what Shakespeare did for poetry. Eugene was a different kind of American from my other train acquaintances, alarmingly wrapped up in lost worlds and boastfully ill-at-ease in the present one. He had been married for thirty-six years, he said, and then his patrician manner softened.
‘We dated every week for every one of those thirty-six years, as if we were lovers. We were always lovers…’ They had five children who were now grown up. In fact, he was well into his sixties, a decade older than I had taken him for. ‘I missed the Sixties,’ he said. ‘But I am having a good time in my sixties.’
He wasn’t speaking salaciously. He meant that he had started to find life enjoyable again. One evening five years before, he was waiting for his wife to appear for a drink in a bar on their weekly date. She always did her hair and make-up and wore an elegant dress, as she had when they were courting. ‘We were always courting.’ She never arrived that night. She collapsed and died of an aneurysm on her way to meet him. For a moment Eugene’s eyes looked blank. Then he lifted his chin slightly. He was getting over it. It was time, his children told him, to think about remarrying. I had the strangest feeling as he said this that he was looking very closely at me. The train came, and we agreed that we might have a drink that evening before dinner in the observation car. As it turned out, I had other concerns that made me forget our vague arrangement.
The journey from Portland to Sacramento passed in a blur of discontent. The Coast Starlight was intended to bring back the American traveller and overseas tourist to the trains, with a pastiche of rail travel of days gone by. It was clearly designed to be the New World equivalent of the Orient Express, with all the printed matter, logos and furnishings echoing art deco. It was a luxury superliner of a train, much more glossy and well appointed than either the Sunset Limited or the Empire Builder. In keeping with the class values of days gone by, first-class passengers – or rather guests – defined as those with sleeping accommodation, had exclusive use of the Pacific Parlour Car, an observation coach with upholstered rotating armchairs by the panoramic windows and a bar of its own. There was no mixing of the classes on this train. First-and coach-class passengers met only in the dining car. Flowers, embossed stationery and branded soap in the sleeping compartments completed the trying-too-hard-in-the-wrong-areas feel of the train. And as for the usual other place of miscegenation, the smoking compartment – my first investigation after I stashed my bag in my room – well, there wasn’t one. The Coast Starlight was, it turned out once I found myself trapped in its swaying comfort, a no-smoking train. There was no place for the bad guys to congregate; for the young, the poor, the phobic, the wealthy, the old to discover that they had at least addiction to nicotine in common. More to the point, there was nowhere for me to smoke. Although the specially produced brochure (‘the Coast Starlight with a tradition of excellence harkening [sic] back to the glory days of the “Streamliner Era” of the late 1940s’) assured me that I was on ‘Amtrak’s hottest train with the coolest scenery … offering some of the most spectacular scenery in the west’ with a ‘Crew that makes the magic happen’ and unequalled views of the Cascade Mountains, Crater Lake, the Klamath Falls, Mount Shasta in all its 14,380-foot glory and the Sacramento Valley, I concluded that the only way to survive the 650-mile, 16-hour, cigaretteless journey, was to sulk. I couldn’t just sleep through the agony because there would be brief puffing opportunities at the nine stops between Portland and Sacramento, but that wasn’t smoking, that was damage control. A cigarette is a ritual of pleasure that takes its own time, involves the entire body (posture, arm and hand movements, facial expression, tilt of head, cross of legs) and is at its most gratifying when smoked either in meditative solitude or as a buffer against social nakedness. It is not a thing to be snatched at in a moment of someone else’s devising. The whole idea, once you are an adult smoker, is that whatever you happen to be doing, you can pull a cigarette out of a pack, light it and enhance the moment. Everything is made better, the good as well as the not so good, with the addition of a cigarette in the hand, the inhalation, the exhalation, the tapping of ash, the grinding out of the stub. The point of the body is made clear by smoking. Smoking is an art form that combines the separate capacities of the pa
rts of the body and fulfils the meaning of the whole. The chastely limited satisfaction of gratifying the physical requirement for nicotine is quite far down on the list of the desirable effects of smoking. However, it is true that once the virtuous outside world outlaws smoking, the nicotine craving surges to a critical level and every minute of every hour is spent thinking about cigarettes and longing to scratch the itch in the blood and muscles with a fix. The entire Cascade mountain range could have erupted into a synchronised ballet of exploding fire and smoke, and it would only have put me in mind of the lack of ashtrays on the train. Crater Lake could have opened up and swallowed us whole, and my first thought would have been to wonder if under such special circumstances it would be permitted to smoke in the Parlour Car. When I was young and the world was in the grip of the Cold War, the question of what one would do if the four-minute warning sounded was on every pubescent’s lips. The answer was almost invariably that we would grab the nearest member of the opposite gender and have the sex we were unwilling to die without experiencing before we were blown to smithereens. In those days, four minutes seemed like plenty of time for the short, sharp, explosive and by all accounts pleasurable experience we had only heard tell of. But for a long time now, though the question is no longer asked (the warning likely to be much longer, or much shorter than four minutes), my answer would be to have a final smoke. Even the harshest of authorities appeared to agree with me. No one is expected to face a firing squad without the lingering taste of tar and tobacco flavouring their last breath. What if the choice was to be between never having a cigarette again or having that last firing-squad fag, and of course the firing-squad? Well, I would have to think very carefully about that.
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.’
I
n 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.’
