Big Boy: Strangers on a Train

by Ruthie Knox

  It’s true. I’d only ever been able to handle babies in small doses. I have an innate distaste for bodily fluids. I never even got a cat, so grossed out was I by how they’re always horking things up or licking parts of themselves I don’t even want to think about.

  “I say stuff like that now,” I tell her.

  “Exactly. So why isn’t he allowed to?”

  “He is.”

  Lisa frowns. She doesn’t understand why I’m agreeing with her. “Exactly. So why have you decided you have no future with the guy?”

  “He’s seven years younger than me. He only works part-time. He lives with his dad—hell, he probably sleeps in his childhood bedroom. He doesn’t like kids—”

  “So far as you know.”

  “—so far as I know, right. And when I met him in a public setting, he pretended not to recognize me. All of this suggests he doesn’t have the emotional maturity I might reasonably be seeking in a mate.”

  “He’s good in bed, though, right?”

  I turn away and make a point of checking my email.

  “Oh, come on. He’s got to be hung like a horse, or you wouldn’t get so excited about these dates.”

  “That’s crude.”

  “Tell me he has a cocktail weenie, then.”

  I’m outraged on Tyler’s behalf. “He doesn’t have a cocktail weenie. He’s…built to scale.”

  Lisa fans herself. She saw him at that faculty party, so she knows he’s tall. She knows an awful lot about Tyler, having been my companion on this bizarre journey from the beginning. “If he’s that good, he’s worth going after.”

  “Except for all the reasons I just told you, which add up to him not being worth going after.”

  “God, you’re such a coward.”

  She says it like she means it, not teasing at all, and it makes the hair on my arms stand up.

  “What do you mean? I’m not a coward.”

  “You are. You know how many dates I’ve been on since we signed up? Twenty-three. I counted them up the other day. I’ve lowered the bar so many times, it’s rolling around in the dirt, and I still haven’t found one guy, not one guy, who made me feel even a tenth as happy as you look every single morning after a date with your weirdo.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. It seems like Also, I’m in love with him would be the wrong direction to take the conversation.

  “You’re making up excuses not to go for it because you’re scared,” she says. “It’s cowardly. Flat-out.”

  “Don’t hold back. Say what you mean, please.”

  “Oh, screw you.” She smiles when she says it. “Screw you and your built-to-scale, weirdo boyfriend. Even if he lives in his parents’ basement and spends his days playing retro Atari games, you should tell him about Josh, and you should ask him out on a date somewhere other than the train museum. Even if he’s an underwear sniffer, you should do it.”

  “An underwear sniffer?”

  “Or some other obscure brand of pervert. You’re not going to find out unless you try. And I’m sick of helping you find costumes.”

  I twirl back and forth in my office chair, looking at the books on my shelves and thinking about Tyler and me and Josh and this whole crazy mess I’ve gotten myself into.

  “It’s so complicated.”

  “It’s really not. Girl meets boy. Girl likes boy. Girl asks boy out to dinner.”

  “What if he says no?”

  “Then you keep pretending you don’t know him when you see him in public, and meanwhile you carry on screwing him on trains until you get arrested for it. The real question is, What if he says yes?”

  She has a point. If he said yes, it might mean I could have Tyler in my life. Every day. Or even every week. I could learn him. I could love him, maybe.

  I have to try.

  A few days later, I leave Josh with Lisa, promising to be back within an hour because she has to teach a class at three o’clock.

  There are photographs all along the wall of the hallway leading to Tyler’s office. I’ve never looked at them before, but now I know he might have picked them out. They might be an example of his curatorial genius. So I look.

  They’re train wrecks. Literally.

  Giant engines beached on their sides like whales, or crumpled up in the snow. Wreckage and steaming metal, vivid pictures that conjure up burning creosote smells and sobbing and disaster.

  I am not encouraged.

  I pause outside his door, staring at his nameplate. His no-nameplate, actually. It just says PHOTO ARCHIVIST.

  I wonder what he does when he’s not here. If he smokes weed in a basement or helps old ladies across the street or bags groceries at some store I don’t shop at.

  I want to know. That’s why I knock. Because I want to know.

  “Come on in,” he says.

  His eyes widen when I open the door.

  I took care to dress like my normal self, as a sort of ambassadorial gesture. Here I am, my outfit says. The sort of woman who wears jeans and very dirty old running shoes and a dark blue lambswool sweater that’s unraveling a little at the cuff. The sort of woman who hasn’t showered today and probably won’t, and who has to instruct the hair stylist not to cut her hair in a way that requires any particular attention, because she uses her blow dryer so rarely, it smells like burning dust whenever she turns it on.

  Here I am.

  “Hey, Mandy.”

  I’m grateful—so grateful—that he doesn’t act as though we’ve never met. Which, it occurs to me, is setting the bar a little low.

  “Hi.” I look at my hand on the doorknob. “Do you have a minute?”

  He stands up. “Sure. Come on in.” He moves a stack of manila folders off the chair by his desk and waves me into it. “Sorry, it’s kind of a mess.”

  Tyler at work is Tyler in an untucked dress shirt and a V-neck knit vest with a gray-on-black herringbone pattern that ought to make him look like he’s trying too hard but doesn’t. He’s got on jeans and Vans. Casual Friday at the train museum, I guess.

  The fluorescent lights pick up the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and the shadows beneath them. He looks tired, older than twenty-seven. He’s got photos spread out over the top of his desk, and the sort of magnifying thing jewelers use. A loupe, I think it’s called.

  “Train spotting?” I ask.

  It’s a terrible joke. Not even a joke, actually, just an inanity. He half-smiles, but not in a way that puts me at ease.

  “Sort of,” he says. “I’m trying to identify which of these pictures are our Big Boy and which are the other ones.”

  “I didn’t know there were other ones.”

  “Sure, there’s a bunch. Couple dozen.”

  His shoulders are tight. I think I’m making him uncomfortable, and he’d like me to leave, but he won’t ask. My heart does this really pathetic squeezing thing, and my throat gets thick and tight.

  “Is it a problem, me being here?”

  “No. I guess not.” He shrugs. “Want to tell me what’s up?”

  I’m suddenly fascinated by my knees. I’ve never been good at this part of being human. The part where you have to tell other people embarrassing things. I let Paige’s hamster out of its cage once, and it got away and disappeared. I didn’t tell her it was my fault, not even when we found it dead in the back of her closet. Especially not then. God.

  But I’m pretty sure this is what life requires of us. That we learn how to tell the truth if we’re going to call ourselves adults. So I open my mouth, and when nothing else comes out, I swallow, give my knee a fierce squeeze, and try again.

  “I have a kid.”

  Tyler doesn’t say anything, and I don’t look at him, so I can’t possibly know what he’s thinking.

  “His name is Josh. He’s a year old, and he was my sister’s baby, but she got killed, and he’s been mine since he was tiny.”

  Still nothing from Tyler. I glance up as far as his desktop, but that only tells me he hasn’t fal
len down dead. I can’t see his hands. His torso isn’t saying much.

  “I was hoping I could…see you. Outside the train museum, as myself, and you as yourself. But I thought I’d better tell you first about my kid, because…”

  Uh-oh. This is a conversational pit. Because I know you hate children is one possible way of finishing the sentence, but not a good one. I decide to go with “…because it seemed like something you should know. About me.”

  When I do look at his face, finally, after seventeen stupid heartbeats of cowardice, it’s not so bad. It’s not so good, either. It’s disturbingly neutral.

  “Do you want to see me?”

  I don’t know why I ask him. It feels like committing hari-kari right in front of him. Sword, meet soft underbelly.

  He presses his lips together. His eyebrows draw in, his forehead wrinkles. It’s a face of sad perplexity. A denial face. He holds it for a few beats as he shakes his head from side to side.

  Oh, Christ.

  In that moment, I revise the story of everything that’s ever happened between us. I become his pursuer, the crazy woman who emailed him because she liked his joke profile. The woman who flung herself at him and screwed him on the floor of a train like a succubus. The woman who dressed like a hooker and had sex in public with a strange man who doesn’t want to know her name, who doesn’t like her, who didn’t ever expect to have to talk to her in the real world.

  It’s ridiculous. I know this even in the moment. There’s only so much revisionism the tale will bear, and I’m taking it way too far. But the denial on his face…the embarrassment. It’s for me. He’s ashamed for me. His expression is all sadness and empathy, which makes me feel like a victim, and that’s the very worst thing. The thing I can stand the least from him.

  I get a lot of pity. A lot of Oh, you brave woman, how good of you to take on your sister’s son. How ever are you managing?

  I pity myself too, though I try to keep it to a minimum.

  He’s never pitied me before. I thought he saw something in me, felt something.

  I’m just a dope, I guess.

  I go ahead and act dopier. My tongue is functioning on autopilot at this point, impelled by the inertia of my humiliation.

  “Why not?”

  He plows his fingers through his hair and blows a puff of air out on an exhale. “It was just for fun. It was only ever supposed to be, you know, kind of a lark.”

  “But it’s more than that now, don’t you think?” A lot more.

  I’m not a big enough idiot to think he’s going to agree, that he’ll leap out of his chair and kiss me and this nightmare will turn into a great big scoop of Wonderful. I guess I just feel the need to crash the train more thoroughly.

  “I don’t…want it to be more.”

  “Because I’ve got a son.”

  His fingers drum against the arms of his desk chair. “Because I can’t handle the responsibility.”

  This time when I look at his face, I revise everything I’ve ever thought about him. Again.

  He’s seven years younger than you, only marginally employed, and he lives in a fantasy world of his own making. He can’t “handle” the “responsibility” of a real-life relationship. That’s not your problem, and it’s not your fault.

  I’m not sure it’s me who thinks this. It might actually be Lisa. She’s fond of air quotes. But whoever it is, I’m grateful for her, because she gets me out of the office before I start to cry.

  Chapter Six

  Even so, I go on one more date with him.

  I know.

  But in my defense, I went into it with my eyes open. In the office, I hadn’t really said goodbye to Tyler. I just ran.

  Tonight, I want to take leave of him—to bid farewell to all the different men he’s been for me, and to the warm, happy glow he lights in my body. I couldn’t have done that in his office. I can only do it here, on the train.

  I’m not playing along this time. His text said it would be 1911, and I should meet him on the snowplow train, but I came in jeans and a plaid flannel jacket, and I only peeked my head into the snowplow to look at him. He’s all bundled up in a peacoat and watchman’s cap, with a hand-knit striped scarf. Very working-class, though not dirty like he was that night on the Big Boy.

  That night. It doesn’t fit my new sense of him. Something was wrong with him then, he wasn’t playing, but whatever opening it might have given us to follow our relationship somewhere deeper, somewhere new, he didn’t take it.

  I look at him like he’s one more exhibit, and then I wander off. I run my hands along the giant wheels of the Big Boy, clicking my fingernails on the sign that labels all the dials and knobs and levers in the engine compartment. I climb up a ramp to let my peripheral vision skate over the blank windows of the Eisenhower. I walk through the indoor displays, the movie theater, the gift shop. I go outdoors, certain the entrance will lock behind me. I’m not sure I care whether he’s following me until I hear his footsteps and I know he has, and that’s what I wanted.

  I walk all the way to the back end of the lot and climb the observation tower. Dozens of steps leading up into the night. At the top, a view of this small, ugly city I’ve adopted. The wide cut of the river. A man beside me who I don’t know, not really. A man who doesn’t want to know me.

  We’ve been doing this for a year. I thought at the beginning he knew a secret, and he’d teach it to me—that he could show me how to put on a new role and inhabit it. I needed that twelve months ago. I was lost, adrift somewhere between my old life and my new one. The clothes, the makeup, the courtship, the sex—they all helped me. The newness of him, every time, and the comfort of attraction, flirtation, banter.

  It’s funny that he doesn’t want to be involved with me in part because I’m a mother. At least, that’s how I interpret what he told me. I can’t be sure it’s what he meant. He wasn’t exactly effusive. But it’s funny because he was the one who showed me a path through the maze of new motherhood. He was the one who helped me see I was still in there, tangled up and turned around. He was the one who led me back out.

  He’s standing at the railing next to me. “Take off your coat,” I tell him.

  I take it off for him. He stands still, watching me, as I unbutton it and push it over his shoulders and down his arms. I unwind his scarf. Unbutton the shirt he has on underneath, too, and keep going until he’s standing in front of me bare to the waist in the brisk October air, covered in goose bumps. Quizzical but patient.

  I’m not sure what I’m up to. I guess I just want to see him one more time without the costume.

  My hands slide over his shoulders, my thumbs balancing on the ridge of his collarbones. His biceps, the inside of his elbows, his golden forearms, his hands. I still don’t know why he has a rough man’s hands, or so much lean muscle. Maybe he’s a gardener. A runner. Maybe he teaches Pilates.

  I’m not ever going to know, and the thought is a sort of final punctuation mark on our relationship.

  I measure his waist with my hands, smooth my fingers over his stomach and chest. I’m not trying to turn him on. I guess I’m trying to memorize him.

  He stands there and lets me. When I’m finished, I kiss him, and I think at first he won’t kiss me back, but he does, hard. He holds my head with his fingertips, as if I’m delicate, but he kisses me with a hunger I’d forgotten somehow.

  Something in there. Something between us. But it’s not enough.

  I draw back, descend the steps and drive away.

  I don’t need him anymore.

  I see him on the highway. He drives a Smart Car, a hybrid SUV, a semi with a load of logs. His name is Johnny, Ray, Clint. He’s the Man with No Name. He’s nobody.

  He’s every single man I walk past, every corner I walk around, every thought in my head.

  It’s disgusting, the way I mourn. Bottomless. Completely out of proportion.

  My contract gets renewed, Josh starts talking in sentences, and still I’m preoccupied. Obsessed
.

  But it’s all quiet, private, because Josh is with me a lot of the time, and he needs me to play with his blocks and change his diapers and feed him applesauce. I can’t be Misery Barbie with Josh; he knows the difference between having my attention and not having it, and he wants it every moment he’s awake.

  Look, Mama! he says, pointing to a bird overhead.

  Read it! he says, plopping into my lap with a board book.

  Pick you up! he says, demanding that I lift him and carry him around the apartment.

  I am his mother, and I don’t resent it. But Marilyn-me, Rhoda-me, Hepburn-me keeps making sneaky escapes. She keeps running off to the train museum in my memories to look for Tyler. She plays maudlin records on her Victrola, drinks too much sherry, cries until her mascara streaks.

  I don’t know what to do with her. I leave her alone. She got her heart broken, I guess. She needs time to heal.

  The fourth Tuesday of November comes and goes. She’s not better yet.

  We’re not even close to better.

  Chapter Seven

  I’m feeding Josh a waffle for breakfast when the phone rings and I think, Fuck.

  At seven fifty-five, the only person likely to call is the babysitter, and the only reason she’d call is to say she’s not coming.

  Briefly, I consider not answering, but then I remember that magical thinking is useless when it comes to babysitters.

  It’s not her, though.

  “Hi, Mandy. It’s Tyler.” He clears his throat. “Is this a bad time?”

  The sound of his voice is a spike of wobbly anxiety in my stomach.

  I’m getting syrup on the phone. I’m wearing flannel pajama pants with skunks on them, and I have to figure out how to warp time so I can turn Josh over to the sitter, shower, dress, eat, and get to campus for my class at nine.