I said, 'What does a family make you think of?'
'A station wagon, a mother, a father. Four or five kids eating hamburgers. They're really awful, and they're everywhere — they're all over the place, driving around.'
'So you think families are a blot on the landscape?'
She said, 'Well, yes.'
She had been at this college in Ohio for three years. She had never in that time taken a literature course. Even more interesting, this was the first time in her life that she had ever been on a train. She liked the train, she said, but didn't elaborate.
I wondered what her ambitions were.
'I think I'd like to get involved in food. Teach people about food. What they should eat. Tell them why they get sick.' It was the voice of a commissar, and yet a moment later she said dreamily, 'Sometimes I look at a piece of cheese. I know it tastes good, I know I'll like it. But I also know that I'm going to feel awful the next day if I eat it.'
I said, 'That's what I think when I see a magnum of champagne, a rabbit pie and a bowl of cream puffs with hot chocolate sauce.'
At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterwards, when I remembered our conversation, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. I had described Leopold Bloom's love of 'the faint tang of urine' in the kidneys he had for breakfast. I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism and the eating habits of Bushmen in the Kalahari and Gandhi's early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question. She never asked what I did, where I had come from, or where I was going. When it was not interrogation on my part, it was monologue on hers. Uttering rosy generalities in her sweetly tremulous voice, and tugging her legs back into the lotus position when they slipped free, she was an example of total self-absorption and desperate self-advertisement. She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism. I still have a great affection for the candour of American college students, but she reminded me of how many I have known who were unteachable.
The talk of food must have been inspired by the late hour and my hunger. But now we were at Albany. I excused myself and hurried to the dining car which had just been attached to the train. The miles ahead were historic: trains have been running between Albany and Schenectady for 150 years, starting with the Mohawk and Hudson Railway, the oldest in America. Farther on, the route followed is that of the Erie Canal. It was the railway that put the canals and waterways out of business, although the railway's efficiency was bitterly disputed by the rival companies. But the facts were indisputable: in the 1850s it took 14 | days to reach Chicago from New York by water; by rail it was 67 days.
The Amtrak meal was promptly served by a towel-snapping waiter. The steak sandwich, on which I had poured Tabasco sauce, was my revenge on Wendy and her preference for raw alfalfa. While I ate, a sales manager named Horace Chick (he sold equipment for making photographic driving licenses) sat down and had a hamburger. He was a monologuist, too, but a harmless one. Each time he wished to emphasize a point he whistled through the gap in his front teeth. He munched and yapped.
'All the planes were full. Pfweet. So I took the train. Never took this train before. Simple. Pfweet. Three am and we're in Rochester. I'll take a cab home. My wife would go ape-shit if I phoned her from the station at three am. Next time I'm going to take the kids. Just plop them down. Pfweet. Let them run. It's hot in here. I like it cold. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight. My wife hates the cold. I can't sleep. I go over to the window and, pfweet, open it up. She screams at me. Just wakes up and, pfweet, screams. Most women are like that. They like it four degrees warmer than men. Pfweet. I don't know why. Bodies. Different bodies, different thermostat. Is this better than driving? You bet it is! Driving! Eight hours, fourteen cups of coffee. Pfweet. This hamburger, though. I taste filler. Hey, waiter!'
There was snow and ice outside. Each street-light illuminated its own post and, just in front, a round patch of snow — nothing more. At midnight, watching from my compartment, I saw a white house on a hill. In every window of this house there was a lighted lamp, and these bright windows seemed to enlarge the house and at the same time betray its emptiness.
At two the next morning we passed Syracuse. I was asleep or I would have been assailed by memories. But the city's name on the Amtrak timetable at breakfast brought forth Syracuse's relentless rain, a chance meeting at the Orange Bar with the by then derelict poet Del-more Schwartz, the classroom (it was Peace Corps training, I was learning Chinyanja) in which I heard the news of Kennedy's assassination, and the troubling recollection of a lady anthropologist who, unpersuaded by my ardour, had later — though not as a consequence of this — met a violent death when a tree toppled onto her car in a western state and killed her and her lover, a lady gym teacher with whom she had formed a Sapphic attachment.
Buffalo and Erie were behind us, too, which was not a bad thing. I had no idea where we were. I had woken in my compartment, and it had been so hot my lips were cracked and my fingertips felt flayed. But there were curtains of heavy vapour between the cars, where it was very cold, and frost on the windows of the diner. I rubbed the frost away but could see very little except a blue-grey fog that blurred the landscape with a cloudy fluorescence.
The train stopped in this haze. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then, in the fog, a dim tree stump became apparent. It bled a streak of orange and this widened, a splash, increasing and staining the decayed bark like a wound leaking into a grey bandage. And then the whole stump was alight, and the bunches of grass behind it flaming, and sudden trees. Soon the rubious fire of dawn glittered in the fields, and when the landscape was lit — the stump and the trees and the snow — the train moved on.
'Ohio,' said a lady at the next table.
Her husband, looking uncomfortable in a baggy yellow shirt, said, 'It doesn't look like Ohio.'
I knew what he meant.
The waiter said, 'Yep. That's Ohio all right. Be in Cleveland soon. Cleveland, Ohio.'
Just beyond the tracks there was a forest of frozen branches, poplars made out of frost, like ghostly sails and masts in a sea of snow. The elms and beeches had swelled cleanly into icy manifestations of exploded lace. And flat windswept snow, with hair-strands of brown broken grass buried to their tips. So even Ohio, covered in snow, could be dreamland.
The train was sunlit and emptier. I did not see Mr Chick or hear his pfweet; and Wendy, the raw foodist, was gone. It seemed to me here — and I was not very far from home-as if more of the familiar was slipping away. I had not really liked either one of them, but now I missed them. The rest of the people on the train were strangers.
I picked up my book. I had gone to sleep reading it the previous night; it was still The Wild Palms and still opaque. What had put me to sleep? Perhaps this sentence, or rather the tail end of a long straggling sentence: '. . it was the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the olfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal unsentient demanding ancient meat.'
I was not sure what Faulkner was driving at, and yet it seemed a fair description of the sausage I was eating that early morning in Ohio. The remainder of the breakfast was delicious — scrambled eggs, a slab of ham, grapefruit, coffee. Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country: the seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains, the proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey-wagons some Indians drive. Dining cars, I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration). The noodle stall in the Malaysian train, the borscht and bad manners in the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman. And here on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited I scrutinized the breakfast menu and discovered that it was possible for me to order a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: 'a morning pick-me-up,' as that injection of vodka into my system was described. There is not another train in the world where one can order a stiff drink at that hour of the morning. Amtrak was trying hard. Near my toast there was an Amtrak brochure which said that for the next 133 miles the track was perfectly straight — not a curve in it anywhere. So I copied down that shin-barking Faulkner sentence without any swerve of the train to jog my pen.