The Arriviste. James Wallenstein
do my best to be there. But I won’t be prepared to discuss anything before then and would like it if you don’t ask me about it.”
“Ask you about it? Please, Neil.” He fingered the crease of his hat. “Do you think I’d come to badger you about that first thing in the morning?”
“Well, now that you put it that way.”
“Damn right I wouldn’t. I thought you might like a lift to the station. I don’t know about your Alfa, but mine doesn’t do too well in this stuff.”
“I’m all set. I’ve had another car for a while now.”
He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said.
There were packs of schoolkids on every block. Listing under the weight of their book bags, lengthening their strides for speed, they were an occupying force whose hold over the territory lasts as long as the snow does. Some kept to the sidewalk, but others, seeing cars creep along, marched down the middle of the street and hardly gave way when I tooted the horn to inch past them. They played keep-away with snatched lunch boxes and pickup football with a rolled-up newspaper; they ganged up on fat boys and made them eat snow. I could see their vehemence in the shapes of their mouths. But as the snow muffled their cries and the rubber seals around the new car were tight, I felt that they were miles away.
They seemed to sense my remoteness and tried to breach it. They threw snowballs at me from the bus stops. From within the pandemonium of the buses themselves, they pressed their sluglike tongues against the misted rear windows. When that didn’t get much of a rise out of me, one boy hiked down his trousers and squashed his buttocks against the window.
Once again, I’d treated Bud badly. What was it about him that provoked me? My animosity was spontaneous, like an older brother’s, without the allegiance that underlies an older brother’s bullying. It wasn’t under my control, I didn’t quite mean it. But it was there. It had even struck Mickey, and a thing had to be truly conspicuous before he’d pick up on it.
Bud had insinuated himself into my affairs and found out more about me than I’d have liked him to know. But it was possible that this knowledge also bound me to him. He had become, if not a friend, a felt presence, an observer of my existence in Dunsinane. His intrusions, or the threat of them, helped keep my feet on the ground. With Joyce gone and Vicky away at school, I was spending time on my own. I didn’t mind the solitude. But there were moments adrift, spells in which I couldn’t be sure whether I was waking or dreaming.
Bud had a knack for taking me out of myself. He’d drop by or call or appear on my visual or mental periphery. His entrances were varied—varied and, the more I thought about them, not the impositions that I’d take them to be. Not always anyway.
I was thinking about them as I sat at a red light on my way to the 7:38. The new station wagon’s violet interior was suddenly oppressive, the seat belt was like a halter, the steering column a trap. My throat was dry; a suffocating heat blew from the defroster. I pressed a button to lower the glass—the whine of the motor was like the mewing of a stray cat—stuck my head out the window and drew in the fresh air. The snow had stopped. It was getting colder.
The light turned green. On the mall beside the boulevard, a French pastry shop and a macramé boutique had opened. A Jack LaLanne health spa was on the way. At the pipefitters’, a man in a mackinaw spread a tarp over a truck bed. A woman in rubber coveralls scattered melting salt around the entrance of the local animal shelter. Snow covered the prow of a boat bobbing on the inlet.
As I pulled into the station parking lot, I saw Irene on her way out. She stopped and rolled down her window. Tiny creases ran from her cheekbones to the corners of her eyes.
“I’m glad to run into you. I’ve been wanting to apologize.”
“Apologize? What for?” I asked. I knew what for.
“You’re right—how clumsy of me! Enough said.”
A car pulled up behind me. She leaned toward me, breaking the plane of the open window with the top of her shoulder and the crook of her arm.
“I’d better move along,” I said.
She stared straight at me, but there was nothing disarming or intimidating about it. “Our house mustn’t seem very warm after a housewarming like that. I hope you’ll give it another chance.”
I’d have liked to turn around and give it another chance right then. Scintillas of covetousness: our neighbors’ wives are the vestals of suburbia. “On the contrary, your house couldn’t be more inviting,” I told her as I pulled away.
The waiting room was jammed. I got a cup of coffee but had left my copy of the paper at home. The kiosk was sold out. The machines on the platform were empty as well. A faint wind rippled the surface of my coffee. The sky was still low and gray, except where it was pierced by a white light. Its reflection off the rails and lampposts and roofs was sharp, a light that affronted the eyes both with its drabness and its glare. We were all squinting under our hats and fishing in our overcoat pockets for sunglasses we’d left in our Windbreakers.
An outbound train hurtled past. I went to the edge and looked through the glare down the tracks for the inbound. There it was in the distance, the light bouncing off its silver siding. My averted gaze landed on Bud at the bottom of the stairs to the overpass. I saw him in profile, his head wagging, shoulders swaying under his coat, feet twitching inside his wingtips. He was talking to a hatless man who was shielding his eyes from the sun. The hatless man laughed, then snorted.
I was walking down the platform when the train pulled in and idled with its doors closed. A crowd gathered before them. The fog on the windows was so thick that the doors might have been metal sheets. When they slid open, the revealed passengers looked like prisoners unaccustomed to daylight.
There was no point in looking for a seat. The aisles were mobbed. I was lucky to find a free hanger and a space for my coat. I hung it up and, retreating to the small space between the rack and the partition and putting my briefcase on the floor between my knees, leaned against the Plexiglas and closed my eyes.
“You made it,” I heard a voice say but didn’t open my eyes till I felt a hand on my shoulder. “You made it,” Bud repeated. He was standing beside me, before the window with the fire extinguisher behind it.
A man on the other side of the partition kept flicking his Zippo. The flint was obviously gone, but he wouldn’t stop. I was about to lean across and give him a light when someone beat me to it.
We were quiet for a while. The car was overheated and stuffy, dampness coming off coats and umbrellas and galoshes, the fluorescent light pooling at our waists. One man breathed down my neck; the brim of another’s hat grazed my ear. Peering through the corner of a window at slate roofs and slate-colored clouds, I wondered how many other passengers I myself was irritating. None showed it, but none would. Among peasants or soldiers there’d have been jokes or songs. We kept to ourselves, more like lobsters in a tank. Where lobsters would have brandished their rubberbanded claws, we raised our elbows and flourished our newspapers.
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