by Jenny Diski
And did he know how to do all the dances?
‘Oh sure, it’s part of the qualifications, along with being presentable and being able to talk pleasantly.’ Joseph was beaming with pride now at what he had achieved with his life in retirement. ‘My late wife and I used to go ballroom dancing. We got medals. I took a refresher course when I decided to sign on as a dance host. I can do them all. I myself am not too crazy about the cha cha or salsa. But you got to do them, and do them well. Me, I like to tango. Tango is my favourite. But you’ve got to be able to handle everything, and some of the ladies aren’t the best dancers. You help them round the floor. You make conversation, and make them feel that you are enjoying their company. I get to travel and see the whole world, but I think I’m being useful, you know, as well. I help people enjoy themselves without worrying that they are being taken advantage of. That’s not a bad thing, is it? It’s a good life.’
Dinner was over and that was Joseph, who had spent his working life with weapons and space ships, and now twirled lonely women around a peripatetic ballroom in white patent shoes. There was not the slightest possibility, I realised as I stubbed out my last cigarette of the evening on the platform of Chelmut station, of coming across anyone who led the kind of uneventful and routine life that the vast majority of humanity were supposed to lead. Wherever these hoards of the normal were, they didn’t travel by train. Or not on my trains.
In bed I watched the moon swinging erratically in the dense black night as the train curved and snaked down the West Coast. The stars were within reach, bright circles, so close that they appeared to hover like torchlights just above the level of the treetops. The bed swayed gently from side to side as our caravan moved through the night. And aside from the scratchy nicotine need in my belly I felt right then so content that I didn’t want the trip to end. I was entirely detached from everything. From life back in England. From family, friends and lover. I felt I was nobody’s, and nobody was mine. Like the stars: suspended, just passing through landscape and nightscape and by people, or those things passing by me, and there was little distinction. It was delicious, but I also badly wanted a cigarette.
We arrived at Sacramento at 6 a.m., half an hour before schedule. Amtrak trains are only late, apparently, when you are in a hurry. Six in the morning is too early to arrive anywhere. But the conductor had knocked on my door and warned me to get myself together, and there I stood with my bags on the grandly spacious concourse of Sacramento train station. The no-smoking signs were everywhere, and I had been warned that even the air was protected against my vice. Eugene turned up beside me. Apparently, six in the morning is too early to arrive even if you have got somewhere to go.
‘My appointment is not until nine thirty. Would you like to have breakfast?’
We put our bags in Left Luggage and found an open diner a block or two away from the station. It was just far enough for me to light up and smoke a cigarette. Eugene didn’t smoke, but he didn’t mind me smoking. It did no violence to his libertarian views.
‘Let me know if you see a policeman,’ I said, feeling cagey. ‘It’s against the law to smoke even in the open air in this land of health and never-say-die, I’m told.’
Eugene laughed. Apparently, the conductor had been having me on, but I was prepared to believe any no-smoking rumour going.
The diner was a bright Formica and chrome canteen, already busy with workmen who brought in their own mugs for coffee at a discount and had piled their plates with hash browns, sausage and egg. I piled mine up with the same at the counter, being famished and particularly partial to American breakfast, stopping to ponder between over easy and sunny-side up. I decided on over easy because I liked the idea of saying it. I once wrote a short story called ‘Over Easy’ because the phrase appeals to me so much. Eugene had waffles and maple syrup. At six in the morning in a strange city, in the pearly Californian light, we were comfortable with each other, like old acquaintances. We talked more of books. He asked me who I wrote for and was pleased when he heard the name of a respectable literary journal he had seen. Although our styles were quite different, I could speak his language, as it were. And I was not married. I was possible. I suspected that Eugene took his children’s wishes very seriously.
‘Are you sorting out someone’s estate down here?’ I asked.
‘No, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m going blind.’
Dear god, more story. Eugene had a hole in his macula, at the centre of his retina. He was already blind in one eye and now the other was deteriorating. He would be completely blind within a couple of years. He was doing everything he could to prevent this happening, but all the doctors he had seen had told him that nothing could be done, and that he should begin to prepare for living without his sight. Finally, he had come across a specialist in Sacramento who performed an operation that was said to work. He was having his initial examination today and if he was suitable they would operate. It was an extreme measure because the post-operative procedure was arduous. It involved the patient being tipped forward so that his head was facing the ground and remaining in that position with as little movement as possible for three weeks. Gravity and immobility aided recovery. Eugene acknowledged that this was an awful prospect, as much as anything because he wouldn’t be able to read, but it was his duty, he said, to save his sight if he possibly could. This procedure might not work and if that was the case then there was nothing left to do. Then it would be his task to accept the situation and learn how to be an effective blind man. Eugene presented his situation starkly and without drama or emotion. Somewhere in all this was a kind of muscular Christianity, but behind that, I suspect, a Stoicism of the ancient sort that I imagined he would admire. Marcus Aurelius was surely on his list of good guys.
What was more, in his careful account of his diagnosis and prognosis, I caught the note of someone laying his cards on the table. Of making his situation quite clear before going any further. He had a very pleasant house, he told me, and he was semi-retired. Once again an unlooked-for change of direction in my life beckoned; sort of picked me up and played with me the game of unconsidered possibilities. Mrs Ivy League Eugene in my late middle age, five stepchildren, a well-appointed house in Rochester, NY, regular concerts, visits to European cultural centres, time and room to work in a civilised and mature relationship. Of course, in my current real life I had time and room to work, as well as something rather more than a civilised and mature relationship. I lived in a European cultural centre. My home in England was fine and I prefer CDs to going to concerts. Still, I slipped into the possibility of a new existence as, in the changing room of a frock shop, I would try on a dress of the kind I would never wear, just to see who I would be if I wore such a thing. We got on to politics. Eugene praised the eighties as the dying hope of a lost civilisation. Thatcher and Reagan were last-stand heroes of fiscal sanity. Thatcher, in particular, he admired, for her single-minded belief in free-market economy. I itemised the damage her single-minded belief had done to the British health service, affordable housing and state education. Eugene shook his head against my soft, wrong-headed and unthinking leftist attitudes and explained that the poor could only benefit from a strong independent economy and became feckless if supported by the state. This was a civilised disagreement, not like the occasion at dinner with Glenys and the awful man who was so upset by her. Eugene and I argued politely, even enjoyably from our mutually irreconcilable positions, but it became clear that the wedding was off. I took off the life in Rochester, NY, and let it drop to my feet, and Eugene gave up his dinner parties with his acerbic English novelist wife. We veered into talk about London and the theatre, and other harmless topics, but the edge was gone. I hadn’t seriously considered myself as Eugene’s consort, but now that our unsuitability was so clear, I had just a momentary twinge of disappointment, as if I really had lost something that had come into existence and died all in a fleeting moment. With a degree of regret on
both sides, we finished our breakfast and, when the time came for him to go to his appointment, wished each other good luck. I hoped the eye operation was successful and he trusted my book would turn out well. I also wished very much, though I did not say so aloud, that he would soon find the sort of person he was looking for. I didn’t think it would take very long.
* * *
I had three hours before the train to Denver was due, so I followed the signs that pointed to ‘Old Sacramento’, forgetting, for a moment, that I was in America. That’s how much train travel insulates you. ‘Old Sacramento’ meant, of course, ‘New but Distressed Sacramento’. It was the old part of town that had been suffering from inner-city blight for decades. In frontier days, the handful of streets had indeed been the original site of the town, but for a long time since, the area had been derelict and a hangout for junkies, the homeless, the criminal. But all that had been swept away by a city council who knew the value of investment in history. Old Sacramento had been pulled down and rebuilt as a replica of a chocolate-box American West. You’ve seen it in the movies – though they were more likely to be Audie Murphy oaters than Sam Peckinpah meditations on the passing of the old. Of course, it was only the frontages that were rendered out of date. By-laws and health directives required that the interior of the buildings provided late-twentieth-century safety and comfort, however much timber clad the modern building materials, and shopkeepers were not going to risk tourists missing items for sale with out-of-date lighting or old-fashioned displays. You clattered along the boarded, porched sidewalks complete with horse-retaining rails, but entered bright air-conditioned emporia selling cheap, tatty replicas of items that were once desirable mainly for their practicality: durable hats, boots, leather bags for cowboys to improve their peripatetic existence, now remodelled in shoddy materials and badly but equally suitably made for the life they would lead in the backs of wardrobes. Subsistence supplies had changed, too. Barrels of flour were replaced by Perspex containers keeping popcorn warm. A slug of whisky was more likely to be a Tequila Sunrise. A lunch of just-off-the-hoof steak with beans became toasted goat’s cheese and oakleaf salad. Old Sacramento turned out to be theme streets of tourist shops. Heritage with fries. But signs (done as old ‘Wanted’ posters) boasted proudly of the restoration of the deteriorated and decayed ‘historical district’, at the sweeping away of inner-city blight and the reclaiming of the past for the edification of visitors. Of course, the past was not so much reclaimed as sanitised and sold, and it is startling how quickly these bright new versions of history become tawdry, as the gilding wears off and reveals the paper-thin profit motive. Apparently, if you tidy things up in order to sell crap, the crap wins out. Glum-looking men and women wearing western outfits greeted me with weary bonhomie, welcoming me into their empty, pointless shops. I slouched around, killing time before I could return to the interior of a train that was in every way more of a destination than any of this, staring at stuff made of plastic that lit up, or made a sound, or turned out to be something it didn’t look like, and came away, eventually, with a small rubber replica of a brain, the size of a walnut, which was guaranteed to swell to twenty times its size when placed in water.
* * *
‘Why do you make sexist assumptions?’
I had just asked the woman sitting next to me at dinner if she was a nurse. She was travelling with two other women and I was sharing their table for lunch. The three of them were on their way to a convention of franchised sales representatives who bought and sold to their friends and acquaintances a large sea-green capsule that was filled with dehydrated extract of vegetables. It was, apparently, the latest way for West Coast would-be entrepreneurs to supplement their income. The three were a group of gay women in their late twenties who all had other jobs. The woman sitting next to me worked, I was told by her friend opposite, in a medical facility.
‘Are you a nurse?’ I asked.
Which brought down the accusation of sexism by her friend who seemed to be in charge of testing the world for wrong thinking.
‘Why don’t you ask if she’s a doctor?’ she snapped.
‘Because why would she be selling vegetable capsules in her spare time if she had a doctor’s salary? Are you a doctor?’
‘No,’ the woman next to me said. ‘I’m a nursing assistant.’
There was a short silence.
‘We believe in what we sell,’ the one in charge berated. ‘It’s a complete supplement. One capsule gives you all the nutrition that you would get from the recommended daily intake of fresh fruit and vegetables.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hate vegetables. So if I have one of these a day, does that mean I won’t ever have to eat vegetables again? I’ll take a lifetime’s supply.’
‘You don’t seem to be a very serious person,’ I was told. And it was true; except for in the area of eating vegetables, which I seriously do not like to do.
I was aware that I should have taken more interest in the veggie-for-life-selling lesbians on the way to their feel-good convention, but I had suddenly come over profoundly uninterested in all things vegetable, lesbian and feel-good. The smoking coach beckoned and then my new sleeping accommodation. The California Zephyr was a satisfyingly dog-eared change from the Coast Starlight, with ageing rolling stock and worn upholstery. And it had a smoking coach as shabby as any I had seen. I smoked a couple of cigarettes in it, keeping my eyes on the increasingly empty landscape to avoid being drawn into any conversation. Then I padded off to my bed and slept until 5.15 p.m., when the train drew into Reno, Nevada.
Back in the smoking car the sun was setting, but it felt more as if the light was dying. Outside the desert passed by, grey-green, sparse, bleak and getting bleaker every moment. The sunset should have been beautiful, slipping through pastel shades from pink to blue to beige, but it only increased the sadness of the landscape and brought out that dying-of-the-light desolation that lurks in some corner of me waiting for the physical environment to match it. The coach was empty apart from a man with a face as long as my gloom, who sat opposite me, saying nothing. I was halfway through my cigarette before he spoke.
‘I hope it’s not cold in Winnemucca.’
His voice was as doom-laden as his face. He wore a suit and tie and lace-up shoes. A regular guy. A salesman, perhaps. We were due to arrive in the improbably named Winnemucca at seven forty-five that evening. I had no option but to ask why he was worrying about the temperature. He nodded his approval at my question.
‘I left my coat on the door knob at home. Clean forgot it.’
‘That’s a nuisance. You’ll have to get a new one when you arrive.’
He sniffed. ‘Stores will be closed by then. That’s not all. I left the car in the three-hour car park. The wife was going to pick it up after work, but when I got on the train I found the spare keys in my pocket, so she won’t be able to. I’m away for three days. It’s better not to imagine what the parking fine’s going to be.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘Yes. And I left my travel bag in the car,’ he shook his head and then looked at me with real distress as it all came together in a single dreadful fact. ‘You know, I can put up with only having white socks to wear, I don’t like it, but I can tolerate that if I have to, but what I can’t even bear to think, what is really too awful to face, is having to spend three whole days using a hand-operated toothbrush.’
I began to feel much better. He was a gold-mining consultant, he told me when he could get his mind off his many tribulations.
‘There’s still gold in the Sierra Nevada, but it’s all dust. The nuggets they mined for in the Gold Rush days are long gone. There’s still plenty of money in the dust, but only if you can afford to collect it. It’s not a game for individuals any more. Just recently they moved an entire mountain – I mean a real mountain-sized mountain – and sifted it, every last ounce of earth, to get out the gold dust. Then, because of the environmental lobby, they remodelled it. They rebuilt the whole dam
n mountain back where it had been. This is the landscape of gold and gambling. That’s all that happens here. Sifting through the dust and playing on the tables. I don’t remember the last time I brushed my teeth by hand.’
It was dark by the time we arrived at Winnemucca and it looked decidedly cold, I was sorry to note. That night we were passing through Salt Lake City, invisible in the dark. By the early morning we would have passed through the towns of Provo and Helper in Utah. Before reaching Denver we had to cross the Colorado Rockies in the daylight, and it was the most stunning part of the whole trip. Visually, it was extraordinary, chugging at a slow, careful speed around the mountains, carpeted at that height with snow, along a twisting track only just wide enough for the train, so that through one window was sheer rockface while through the other, if you dared look out, you stared straight down at an apparently diminutive ribbon of the Colorado River winding through the canyon two thousand feet below. And then there was the thought of those who made, and often died making, those tracks, blasting away the mountain to make a ledge for the rails or a tunnel through the solid rock. Human life was no impediment to humanity’s will to press on. It was one of the most precarious and moving journeys I have ever made. Absurd really, to look at implacable mountains and decide to go straight through them. But perhaps not so absurd when you consider that the men who blasted and sweated and died were for the most part Chinese or Irish labourers working for a pittance, desperate for whatever work they could get, while the entrepreneurs followed on in moving staterooms making corrupt deals with the politicians. The usual background to humankind’s most monumental achievements.