Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  His second concession was to permit himself a visit to the art museum once a month. And because most of the exhibits lasted that long anyway, he was able to see a variety of work. He loved paintings. The good ones he could live in. A single picture could easily take up ten or fifteen minutes of his interest, and he only let go of it because there were so many others, like the trees and the forest. He tried to come when no one else would be there and he could roam undisturbed, letting his imagination run wild, usually on Tuesday night. Often his taste would not concur with that of the museum, and there were even some paintings in the permanent collection he didn’t care for. But those were usually easy to overlook. Each visit he would choose several to memorize in the greatest detail and many times during the following month—especially while at work—he would think about them; and the more he did it, the easier it got. They were better than daydreams because they had no motion, and better than sleep because he could control which picture he chose. They were a little like death in the way that he would use them.

  With working Wednesday afternoon, Thursday and Friday at a dress shop, the occasional visits from her parents on weekends and classes at the Philadelphia School of Art on Monday and Wednesday mornings, Mal Rourke’s only real chance to get to the museum was Tuesday night. She usually went after dinner, leaving her roommate, Carol, to fall asleep on the apartment sofa watching television.

  The first time she saw him she thought he must be the janitor, with his hair and eyes as fierce and dark as chimney soot. His face was whiskered and bristling like an old broom. The pocket of his gray shirt (a match for the pants, which together made a kind of uniform) was ripped away and hung down in a triangle with a ragged edge. He was looking at a painting of two ladies snapping beans in an orange field, and as soon as he noticed her he went into another room, looking for a mop, perhaps, she thought.

  It was a month before she saw him again, and except for the absence of any other people, the palatial stillness of the highceilinged rooms and the same torn shirt, she would not’ve remembered him. And like the first time, as soon as he noticed he wasn’t alone he dropped his gaze to the floor and disappeared around a partition, into a small alcove. He walked without making a sound, on rubber-soled shoes. This time she knew he wasn’t a janitor because as she was leaving she heard the whispered voice of the old night watchman who came to close up telling someone that it was only five minutes until closing time; and when she looked over to see whom he was speaking to, she saw the gray uniform from the back, the shoulders wide and shaggy black hair curling over the collar. Waiting for the bus outside, she watched him come down the white steps and cross the street, never once looking up from the pavement.

  July had no thoughts of her at all. He’d noticed her, but thought of her as no more than a brightly colored obstacle that he’d had to walk around twice. There were some things a person couldn’t dismiss: food, shelter, work, routine patterns for getting through the next day; but other people could be overlooked and viewed as dangerous and troublesome. He had plenty of things to occupy himself with. His life was running smoothly, and if it never changed an iota, that would be all right.

  This attitude worked very well for him, and he had no reason to be dissatisfied with it until that girl came up to him one Tuesday night, stood so close he could smell her clothes and her hair and said in an unbelievably soft voice, as though she lived in a song, “Hello, I see you like this painting too. It’s always been one of my favorites. He has such an eye for detail and stress. Those trees are really well done. Every time I look at them I feel like I’m dreaming.”

  After that, July felt an emptiness come into his life. There was something missing from everything. He turned to look at her in bewilderment, his eyes blazing. She looked back and smiled a quick smile. Immediately he dropped his gaze, blushed and said quite abruptly, “Well, I guess if you like it, that’s fine.” Then he walked quickly away like a child underfoot.

  That night his room was a chamber of horrors. He knew his voice had sounded abrupt: it would have been just as well to slap her across the face. At least, it would be the same degree of insult.

  All week these thoughts tormented him without respite. What could she think of him but that he was crass, rude and ugly?

  “There!” he exclaimed to himself. “See there what trouble comes from. The slightest engagement!” He redoubled his vow to have no other people in his life.

  Perhaps if she just understood that it wasn’t in him to be nice.

  Ridiculous! What would a girl like that ever want with a stupid mail boy? A mail boy who insulted her?

  But if she knew it wasn’t meant to be an insult.

  She wouldn’t care. The fantasy itself made him a little sick . . . and what he decided to do was forget about her completely and the very next Tuesday night just explain to her how what he’d said wasn’t meant as an insult—just as a way of saying he thought he was worthless. This, he thought, would clear him of any loose ends, and he could get back to his old way of life. It was the lingering sense of guilt he wanted to get rid of, and this would do it.

  The first Tuesday he didn’t see her. Though he came early and stayed until closing.

  The next week, after making one careful sweep of the building, he stood hour after hour just behind the glass door, waiting to see her coming. Closing time came and the night watchman turned off all the inside lights and stood silently beside him for several minutes looking out with him before opening the door and telling him it was time to go, letting him out into the still, wet night.

  The next week he returned to the museum, but this time he sat on a bench in one of the little rooms in which the china was kept in glass cases. He was looking at the designs in a cup when the front door gave a little metallic snap as it closed, announcing her presence.

  That sound went through July like a red bullet, and despite all his plans and intentions of having no involvement, his heart began to throb with almost audible ferocity. The design in front of him dissolved into a blue blur and his face was hot. His hands were cold. This is terrible, he thought. I should never have come here. I’ll go home and everything will be all right then. He pictured his room, and Butch, and sitting on the bed and looking out the window and turning on the radio and reading the book for that week and felt his heart subside.

  She stepped inside and took off her gloves and rubbed the bottoms of her shoes on the mat, threw her long brown hair back with a quick, shaking toss of her head and opened her coat, revealing a swath of yellow and white. She stepped off the mat and stopped, as though adjusting to the inside, put her gloves in her pockets and went into the first partitioned area where the current exhibits began. He watched her disappear, stood up and walked quickly to the front doors. But when he reached them he didn’t go out. The touch of the door bar seemed to keep him in. He went silently up to the partition behind which she had disappeared. By the time he reached it he was trembling, and he put out his hand to support himself against the wall. He looked in and saw her standing on the far side, her back to him, looking at a huge painting of a herd of cattle and a group of picnickers lying sprawled in the grass talking and eating. She had taken off her coat and draped it over a bench. Her brightly colored dress seemed to fit her well, and when she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, it seemed that the whole room crackled with adjustment and everything echoed for several moments afterward. July felt as if he were dying of thirst.

  Without knowing what he was going to do, he left the protection of his wall and moved imperceptibly, slowly and silently into the room. Then as soon as he was in he thought he’d better leave; then became afraid she would see him running out like a slinking rabbit, thought he’d better go forward, took another step and wondered if he was too far already and if she would turn around and be startled by having obviously been snuck up on, and he thought if he were to introduce himself from there it would frighten her. He took a step backward. He didn’t know what to say. She turned around and saw him, an
d it did startle her a little; he’d been right about that. But what he hadn’t expected was what happened in the next millionth of a second. The expression of her face changed from being startled to recognizing him. This in itself gave him an unmistakable thrill and his voice started shaking though he wasn’t talking. But what followed was almost enough to knock him over and he took a step back toward the wall. Her expression went—immediately—from recognition to a smile. “Oh, hello,” she said. “You gave me a start.”

  “I’m sorry,” said July. “I didn’t mean to . . . I just thought that . . . I thought that I didn’t want you to think I was insulting you.” He smiled self-consciously.

  “For sneaking up on me?”

  “Oh no,” he laughed. “No. I didn’t mean that. I meant, you know, the other day. . . . Maybe you don’t remember, I mean that’s OK, but it doesn’t matter, I mean nothing really does. I have no feelings.” But as though she weren’t hearing what he was saying at all, she was being attracted by the openness of his face, which betrayed everything he might have wished to hide, and she took several steps closer to him and her size seemed to triple.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I mean the other day when I said ‘I guess if you like it that’s all right.’ Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m sorry.” He turned a quarter of the way around as though he might leave, then he turned back, blushed and said, “I love paintings.”

  “So do I,” sang out Mal. July judged her to be about nineteen or twenty. “I’m a painter,” she added proudly.

  “I know. I mean I thought you might be . . . or a model. I thought you probably were. You seemed to know so much about it. But, see, you probably thought I was too, or maybe a scientist or something, but I’m just nobody. Really, I only come here once a month. See, all I really meant was that if you like something then I think that’s a good thing. I didn’t mean anything else.”

  “What,” she said, “did you mean about not having feelings?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, stammering and looking at the floor. “That’s right.”

  “What’s right?”

  “I don’t have any feelings.”

  Mal’s initial forwardness was gone, and now she spoke more softly. “That’s preposterous.”

  “I mean that’s the way I think about myself. Most of my life’s like that. I really should be getting back home.”

  “Say, you’re really nervous, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you relax?”

  “I am.” Pause. “I have to be going now . . . but thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, nothing, I guess . . . Goodbye. I have to be going now. Do you think maybe you’ll be here next week?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well . . . good, maybe I’ll see you then.” And he left.

  Mal Rourke returned to her apartment that night just as her roommate, Carol, was waking up from watching television, her face heavy with sleep. “Hi, Mal,” she said and went into the bathroom. Mal took off her coat and hung it up. She went into the little kitchen and took a Coke from the refrigerator. Carol came back into the living room and changed the channel of the television, looking for movies.

  “Gladys called tonight,” Carol said.

  Mal walked into the living room. “What did she want?”

  “To tell you her brother Earl was coming home next week, on leave from the Army.”

  “Hurray,” said Mal sarcastically.

  “Do you want me to tell her to buzz off next time she calls?”

  “No. I’ll call her back tomorrow.”

  “I don’t like her,” said Carol.

  “Oh, she’s all right.”

  “A little intense, I’d say.”

  Mal wandered across the living room to the open doorway of their bedroom and looked at one of her paintings hanging on the wall—some bright red crabs fighting with their pincers on a sand beach among broken sticks. It didn’t look very good to her, and she turned back to the living room.

  “You know,” she said. “I met a guy tonight—”

  Immediately Carol’s interest quickened. “Where?” she asked.

  “At the museum. At first I thought he was the janitor,” and she gave a little laugh.

  “Is he black?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you think he was a janitor?”

  “Sort of his clothes, I guess. But I talked to him tonight and he’s nice.” She laughed again. “He said that he didn’t have any feelings.”

  “He what? Why did he say that?”

  “Well, I don’t really know.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “He said he loved paintings.”

  “Well, he’s not very consistent. Doesn’t sound like someone I’d care for too much.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Why don’t you go to the museum some other time? There’s no telling what kind of weirdos are liable to turn up down there on Tuesday night. . . . Or take somebody with you.”

  “He scared me at first. He walks so quietly, he was nearly up to me when I first saw him today.”

  “He was probably going to jump on you from behind. I’m not kidding, you better stay away from there if you keep running into guys like that.”

  “Oh, you,” said Mal, and went into the bedroom and took out her drawing pad.

  Despite what July thought was his better judgment—because all the facts, so to say, added up against it—he decided for the last time during lunch hour at the post office that he would go back to the museum—if for no other reason than to confirm his suspicion that she would never come. His dark imagination had few good things to say for her: perhaps she was a whore, or a belly dancer from an incense-smelling bar, or had rich friends—a person to whom enchanting some poor fool was no more than tossing a candy wrapper into a garbage can rather than let it fall on the street. Perhaps she really was a painter, and lived in a world of art, shut up as tight as a princess in a castle tower. What does she expect of me? he wondered. What right has she to make demands on me? If she wants somebody to talk to, let her keep to her own kind, whatever that might be. If she thinks she’s so beautiful, why doesn’t she stay at home and look at herself in the mirror? With little effort he could begin to feel hatred.

  Yet despite these brooding thoughts, he found he could not toss her out of his mind and hardly an hour would pass when he wasn’t trapped between evoking her actual physical presence, her face and smile, the sound of her voice and every word that had passed between them, and berating himself simultaneously for doing it. No, he thought, I’ll go back this one last time and when she hasn’t come I’ll accept that and will just peacefully go to my old ways, no hard feelings or anything like that. I’ll just go in, look around once and leave. It will hardly take a half-hour to go over there and return. There’s no real point in not doing it. Naturally, it’s of little consequence one way or another, but I might as well be done with this once and for all.

  In this frame of mind he returned to the museum, calm and unruffled. It was nearly eight o’clock when he arrived. Only an hour remained before closing, and if she were coming at all, she would be there now. He opened the front door with a wide, nearly arrogant swing and stepped inside. The automatic closing mechanism swung the glass door back and fastened it securely with a snap, sealing him in the palatial silence. Immediately he knew she was there, hidden from his view behind one of the many walls. The very air hung with her—a feeling altogether unlike an empty building. His confidence drained from him like water through a dry, cracked rain barrel; he began an infinitely slow and cautious search for her around the labyrinth of partitions.

  They met facing each other as he walked into the large, carpeted room where the permanent collection (mostly out of the nineteenth century) was displayed on the walls. He crossed over to her hesitantly.

  “Hello,” he said, and immediately lapsed into silence
, then smiled. He wondered if he might just run away—if that would be something he could finally live down in his memory.

  “Hello,” she returned. “I thought for a while that you weren’t going to come tonight.” Then she laughed and it seemed to July like clear-ringing bells. The statement jolted him: it seemed to be so undeniably pregnant with affection; it implied—obviously—that she had been waiting, and thinking about him—it seemed almost obscene in its frankness, and he wondered, in horror, if something of the kind were expected of him in return.

  She smiled, her teeth gleaming white and straight.

  “No . . . here I am.” Pause. “I see you’re looking at these paintings in this room.”

  “Yes. What do you think of them?”

  “Well, they’re . . .” July made a gesture of inevitability. “I don’t know. I’m not a painter.”

  “You have a mind, though, don’t you? You have opinions.”

  “Not really. I mean, sure I do, but they aren’t worth much. See, there’s very little . . .” His voice trailed away unexpectedly.

  “What’s your name?”

  “What?” he responded, stepping back half a foot.

  “What’s your name? Mine is Mal Rourke.”

  “My name is July Montgomery,” he said a little too loudly, then added, “I’m twenty-one,” as though he were offering an innermost secret, and blushed.

  “This one,” she said, calling his attention to a painting of a harbor at night with the long brown masts of boats, with lines of light over the water and a solitary figure on the dock, his back facing outward, holding a large pail, foggy and still. (It was one of July’s favorites.) “This one is just fantastic. Each time I look at it I notice something else. Did you ever see this cat over here in the corner?” And she pointed to a gray cat no bigger than the tip of a pen.