Jeanne thought, How much longer can this man keep this woman? His eyes darted, and his free hand reached in his jacket's inner pocket and found a silver flask. He drank his whisky neat. Jeanne watched the tips of his ears flush red and fade. Three gulps and the fire was in his face. He passed his flask to his companion, and she drank as deeply as he, but didn't blush. The liquid slid down her throat, and she accepted Jeanne's smile and returned it.
There was warmth in her expression and more—an assent. The face she showed Jeanne was beatific, as if the rise of her own passion had blessed her. She had taken Jeanne in with just a look though she hadn't meant to.
Jeanne found herself wishing for Paul beside her, in the empty seat. Why? she wondered, even as she felt the effect of the woman's smile, as if to look on beauty were beautifying.
That was, in itself, already an answer: Paul had brought her closer to a woman before. Over the years, Althea's beauty had always glimmered at her fitfully. Early in adolescence, Althea had seemed another aspect of Jeanne's changing self. The two girls had separated off into the waiting arms of ardent boys. She remembered that those dates were the only times in her life when she had let herself be driven around without an apparent destination, allowing for any kind of detour. When she was a teenager, she hadn't had too many places to go to. She let herself be tempted, but circumstances at first didn't lead her too far. Her virginity did not burden her until somewhat later. She was not yet ashamed to admit what she was, even to the boy she happened to be with who, whoever he was, wasn't yet the right one.
She didn't understand the distinction they made—why, just because a girl had slept with one, that she was more likely to succumb to another, as if they were all alike!—or what the French boy at the seashore had meant when he claimed that her embrace of him was not “comme une vierge.” What had he expected of her? Jeanne used to wonder what that knowledge was that she appeared to him to possess. She watched other couples kissing and wondered if this or that girl felt the way she had.
And how was that? For the adult Jeanne on a journey to her present home and away from her past one, it was almost impossible to bridge the abyss to her feelings of those far-away years. Such a fact she had to be glad of, because of the shame that had followed those feelings at first. Even now the pleasure could not wholly deny fears of danger and of damage, although it often overruled them; and she was still learning that the secrets of that knowledge bore unpredictable fruits. Then she had not understood how virginity, which seemed emptiness, could be lost.
Thus, in reverie, Jeanne was briefly tangent to her past as she rushed pell-mell into the presence of something new. For one's life changes despite everything and sometimes, as now, on the train, it seemed to her to flash by in a confusion of the close and far, rendering even to the intangible the appearance of the attainable.
Manifest in the woman's fair face was a sense of being beloved. This was at once so vivid to Jeanne that she thought she might comprehend it as a far possibility in herself that she had not yet reached but might someday. Might she, too, with further wear, improve in lustre?
A streak of columns and a flash of aluminum siding in the window appeared in the night like the vestigial frame of a once grander structure. The lights overhead dimmed, and then brightened. The curly hairs on the man's ginger-freckled forearm shone like wires as he took off his jacket, revealing a short sleeved knitted shirt. He shook his flask experimentally but found it empty. When his lady had looked at him with love, he had turned away and taken a drink. Now he tweaked at a tuft of her tucked-back hair until it loosened. He wanted her attention, but what did he make of her ardor? An off-color occasion was contained in his subsequent, impromptu recital of a rhyme. It was a limerick to be exact, and not one intended for a delicate ear either, although it fell on two pairs of them.
A Mamaroneck maiden was laid-on
By a Harrison lad with a hard-on
Mamaroneck mammilla
Was sweet as vanilla
So he stuck in his dick and he stayed on.
He threw back his head and laughed, and lightly slapped the woman's thigh, then caught and clasped her knee.
His amusement was Jeanne's mortification. She hated him for having to hear his low humor. From the first, his forward manner distressed her, while at the same time she had to admit it also aroused her. Disillusion cancelled out the second sensation. She didn't question if the outrage she registered were general; she assumed it. His crude taste degraded the woman with him. But had Jeanne overlooked what that woman felt?
It was as though two tiers of lights, the earthly and the celestial, described her at once. She accommodated his remark, but she was casual. Neither a puritan nor easily shocked, she condescended and dismissed discreetly; and whatever her real opinion of his limerick was, she did not offer it, but her urgency was dissipated.
Even the man soon tired of his tease, and he let go of her to turn the pages of his picture book. Abruptly freed of his handling, she leaned her head back against the seat. Her neck elongated from her stand-up collar, and momentarily, Jeanne glimpsed the lambent gleam of her throat. With weariness in her fingers, the woman twisted her ring round and round; if one of the stones gleamed, she wouldn't notice it.
Suburb after suburb was slipping by. In the dark it was hard to tell where the train was. Jeanne watched the empty aisle; the older couple were still in slumber. In half an hour or forty minutes, she would leave these people behind to go her own way.
"Oh dear."
The woman's gentle exclamation broke into Jeanne's thoughts, but she was not the one being spoken to. To her companion the woman confessed her forgetfulness; she was afraid she had neglected to take along a list made out by a close friend's son. The entries were titles of scientific articles she was to search for at the New York Academy of Medicine. Of what topic they addressed, she didn't seem sure; she didn't remember the list, and now it appeared she'd left it behind.
"In the study, on the desk, lying in the letter tray," she mused aloud. Jeanne watched her turn out her beige leather handbag on her lap—sunglasses in a cloth case, a checkbook and wallet, keys, cosmetics, and various documents, but not, apparently, the one she sought.
"Oh well." If she wasn't asking for an answer, she wanted his commiseration, but he wasn't giving any. He was engrossed in his comic, and her obligations left him unconcerned. One by one, she put the articles back in her bag. As she bent her forehead to her task, Jeanne saw a line that had been faint deepen its crease between her eyes.
The man looked up as he turned a page, recalled to her however briefly. "You can always phone for it," he said.
"I suppose."
He was restless. He patted his shirt pocket and found a cigarette pack. He was going down the aisle to have a smoke, for they weren't in a car that allowed it. His waist twisted slightly as he stepped free of the seat. He took two steps, and Jeanne no longer could see him.
What happened next was purely between the women. Jeanne stood up to straighten her tight skirt. The train lurched, and she lost her balance. She felt herself slipping as the floor moved under her feet and, in a heedless moment that lasted only an instant, she didn't resist, and by then it was too late. She might have banged her head against the window, but she was caught around the waist by the woman's arms that had gone out to her as automatically as a mother's.
Their embrace was brief. Just as Jeanne thrilled at their closeness, she was set on her feet. But before the beautiful woman released her, she cupped Jeanne's chin in her palm for a moment. Their eyes met steadily. She was so close, and yet she seemed to look back at Jeanne from the distance of years. If the knowledge in her face was partly pity, the expression which molded it was tender. Jeanne felt that she was witness to a splendor in this other woman's life, and maybe it didn't matter too much about the kind of man her companion was.
Perhaps Jeanne looked ill, for the woman, still standing, spontaneously laid her hand like a narrow, cool bandage against Jeanne's forehead. Jea
nne felt as if there were an aura around her, as if she were a figure in a dream, but who dreamt it? Reassured, the woman let her go and sat back down. Jeanne kept her balance and sat down, too. Although she was secure in her seat, she felt as if she were still falling and being held. Even the rackety noise of the rails was like a cushion, an insulation against what it was at the same time bringing them into. The wonder was all around her, and she was in it.
Even before the woman rescued her, Jeanne knew that she was the subordinate one. Yet it was a blessing to be what she was, to be aroused but not always overcome, to be able to let go believing that something would always happen in enough time to save her. Her weekend romance, shortened by an early parting, had an unexpected postscript, and the gold of her trip to Connecticut wasn't all to be found in the shapes of a fire and in dying leaves.
They were being hurled through the graying, early autumn night, approaching from the outskirts ring on ring of a city of a light so great it bled a vast pink yellowing cloud all night long into the sky. When they entered the glare, they didn't pause for it. For a quarter of an hour the train made not a single stop, but rushed them headlong from the suburbs towards Harlem.
Across the aisle, the elderly gentleman shifted and sighed, and Jeanne saw how, in his sleep, he patted his wife's ankle propped up by his side. She didn't stir. Sleep dignified her, gave her a natural calm that enhanced her regular breathing.
Then Jeanne watched the woman in front of her shake off her shoes and draw her bare feet up under her. She yawned and gazed outside, her forehead pressed intently as a child's against the glass. The suburban houses she had earlier lamented had given way to six-story tenements and higher buildings. Under the penumbra of the city's nocturnal light, the dark glow had left the window. Now, looking outside, Jeanne could tell how scratched and smudged the glass really was. What she saw through it, she thought, could be pictured at a distance as a single building multiplied a hundred thousand times.
Do all great cities have ugly outskirts? Jeanne wondered. They were riding on elevated track. Strings of lights stretched down parallel streets. On a roof in the distance, she saw a white flag flapping. The train's own rushing so filled her ears that it seemed as if the whole world were going through them, and the rhythm was the measure of time itself.
Jeanne had come to New York to seek her fortune, as the saying goes, and she was returning to New York to pursue it. And yet she knew how often it was that people, in persisting after what they wanted, jettisoned what they needed. While the woman had held her, Jeanne had felt as if something inside herself were quelled and refreshed and she was in a calm like a deceptive calm before a birth, a stillness waiting to be broken by the first momentous quiver.
But nothing had happened, no wrench, no ache. For all the benefits that beauty bestowed, it was better to behold beauty than to be it. Jeanne still had the shining and she was unconsumed. Her lovely vision was a living woman. What would enable her to meet the lights and the crowds and the cold, sharp knives of air that would strike her coming around corners if not sensations like this one, as if she'd slipped through an interstice of existence and then was buoyed up?
After the long acceleration came the braking in preparation for the Harlem station. As the woman pulled her face away from the window and swung down her legs from the seat, Jeanne saw that her eyes were alertly widened. In an instant she was prepared to go.
But this wasn't her place to disembark, or scarcely anyone else's. They stopped, the doors opened, but only a couple of people got up. A draft from the doors blew down the aisle, and, against it, in the opposite direction, came the missing man. He slapped his chest several times as he advanced. Then the doors closed, and the wind stopped.
He reoccupied his seat just as they started again, and it was like a new beginning for all of them. The lady was smiling, and Jeanne didn't squirm because all the man took was her hand this time. It lay steadily across his. Neither cautioning nor suggesting, she held his wrist with a light but constant pressure as quickly darkness surrounded them, and the train's rattle down the rails reverberated back as a roaring echo. They were inside the tunnel.
They weren't going under the whole world, just part of it. Jeanne's strongest sensation was of the train's speed and of her own stillness laid over that motion. In reality, she was moving, too, even when she wasn't her own propellant; and now, with the train rolling down the burrowing tracks that would end with the whole city spread out and about her, she felt safe in the security of having just a few more minutes to go.
She looked at the reunited couple, unperturbed. She sensed a slight disengagement of their shoulders, as if something between them were being unconsciously averted. She thought she'd not see the two of them again. Not together. Not ever.
Feeling weary, she closed her eyes. Their passage through the tunnel seemed endless. She imagined the tons of bedrock that had had to be blasted through to make it. Some of it had been used as facings of buildings. In those you saw the glitter of the mica that was hidden in the depths down here.
Suddenly her thoughts shifted to the idea of marriage. The couple close to her weren't married, she had concluded. The married couple were across the aisle, fast asleep. Throughout her train trip, their rhythmic breathing and physical stillness had seemed to enclose her in the living lattice of dream.
With just over a minute of travel to go, Jeanne finally opened her eyes to find that atmosphere vanished, for the elderly couple were awake and anticipating arrival with their shoes and coats on and their feet on the floor. Jeanne watched as the wife reached into her handbag, withdrew a roll of mints, unpeeled two, handed one to her husband, and popped the other in her mouth.
More than a mint was transferred between them; they had pledged their lives to each other. Jeanne thought, If the horror of marriage is usurped advantage, then the blessing of marriage is the harmony of two wills. She wondered if she would one day sit across from her husband on a train and hand him a piece of candy like a sacrament.
In front of her, the woman put on a beige cashmere jacket while her man held the shoulders open to her arms. He was good for something, after all—Jeanne allowed a pure pettiness to sustain her thought. The return of even so slight a contempt reoriented her to an interior where she noted the grime worn into the floor and the staleness of the air through the ventilation system. Outside, the platform would be even dirtier. Where was the exaltation that she had earlier felt as strongly as if it were an actual glimmer in the air all around her, as well as within her—a splendor without danger, a brilliance that promised comfort, suggested safety?
Even before she got up to go, she was no longer certain quite what it was she had come so close to. It was unreachable now, sealed over.
She groped for her bag beside her, as if she were the one coming out of the dream. The train stopped easily, but a slight delay before the doors opened detained the passengers.
A moment was extended past its expected close, and she felt the result as a palpable tension in the air, as if a fine net were being stretched finer, attenuated. Everyone was roused to go, but no one had gone. She was aware of the restless people standing, but she was apart from them. She thought of how she had come so close to the woman sitting opposite from her and as yet had not exchanged a single word. Jeanne's silence had been part of her entrancement; perhaps she could not have spoken even had she wanted to, but as she waited, with the train stopped and the doors apparently stuck, the stillness became too unbearable for her to keep inside her, and she had to break it with a pleasantry.
"Have a nice time in New York."
"You, too."
It was then that the doors opened at last to free them all. And Jeanne knew, finally, smiling as she advanced to the exit, swifter than the other four, that she did not need to look back, and she did not.
Her momentum carried her up the ramp, through swinging doors, and immediately she was inside Grand Central Terminal, under the vault. It seemed to her that, just as in slow-exposure p
hotography, the passing people became blurs, leaving the drama to the architecture: triple arched windows, three levels visible at once and brought together by two staircases. No one watched Jeanne or cared about her as she checked her watch with the four faced clock on the information booth and the Newsweek clock mounted above the passageway behind it. Within a close range, each face told a different time than the others, all just after seven. Such subtle difference between so many clocks was eerie.
She gazed up to the giant Kodak photo across the eastern wall, which was an extremely wide-angled view of the huge head and outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. The distortion which emphasized the rays emanating from the brow was dazzling. In the photograph, the face seemed abstracted, or self-absorbed, unmindful of all that came and went under it.
The statue was meant to stand as a generalized mother for all mankind. Jeanne thought she looked like an expectant mother as yet undelivered of child, brooding on herself. Once, a girl on an outing with her family, she had climbed up all the winding stairs inside that colossal statue. At the top she had looked out over the concession stand and the litter and the gray, rocking waters. Gulls were circling over a dark streak in the bay. A low ceiling of clouds had blanched the afternoon sky of its sun. She could still recall the somber quality of the light and the strangeness of standing on a little ledge extending halfway round the crown at the top of the Statue of Liberty's head.
Now, musing in the great space of the terminal, Jeanne heard her name clearly spoken by a masculine voice quite close to her, yet, turning, she took in a scene that excluded her. She had mistaken the sound of another's name for her own.
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