“Do you want to hear my idea?” he asked.
She didn’t, not really, not then. She was tired, having been up in the night. But it wasn’t a question, anyway. His mind was his wealth (and her youth was hers). That’s why she was with him, wasn’t it? She hungered for his fame, however middling it was, his place at the table—and hers as muse. He wasn’t one to fool himself (he told himself that; in fact, he prided himself).
They had hours to kill. They had coffee and some kind of sticky tart. Café La France, the place was called.
“It’s funny,” he said. “I’m setting it here.” His story, he meant, the work he’d been absorbed in, grouchy and distant, snappish to her, but now on a high. A triumph: the reading the night before, his old alma mater, the theater packed. A triumph indeed—that woman had said so, clutching his books, brushing her hair back, at the reception (cheese, wine, and something wasabi), again and again, and feting him, late, at the quaint café that the faculty favored.
“Here? Where?” She—the young and increasingly inappropriate girlfriend—opened a packet of sugar.
“Here in the train station. It’s perfect for this.”
He was ever so slightly hungover, she thought, a check in his pocket, wind in his lungs.
“Obviously, there are nuances and subtexts,” he said. “The point of departure . . . and matters will arise in the course of the composition, but this is the gist . . .”
*
The rain had turned to snow by the time he awoke several hours earlier—wet, sloppy flakes that would soon begin to stick (the forecast was certain) and blanket the city and bring it to a halt. He’d worried aloud—delays, cancellations—he had to get back to New York, he said. This wasn’t, he said, optional (meetings, et cetera), and so they had packed their bags in haste: he, the ironic jacket and tie, thick books unread; she, the tiny cobalt dress, crushed now and dirty, spiked heels—all wrong, she’d understood, arriving on campus (the way the gaze fell, the moneyed tone of voice)—toothpaste, Advil, mints, gum, her birth control not recently opened, soaps she had swiped from hotels over the years. He was in jeans now and she in dark leggings, a shirt that was his and was huge on her. “Swimming,” she’d said, with satisfaction in her voice.
Down to the lobby, past Aspire, the restaurant, the front desk—“We’d better move quickly,” he’d said to her. “Let’s try to get seats on an earlier train. It’s worth a shot, at least.”
Business, pleasure, wool, down: checkout was crowded. A mother and daughter (not much older, in fact, than the girlfriend) who’d crisscrossed states for a visit to RISD were heading home, a quarrel in gestation in the cool air between them. Their tour had been canceled: every campus everywhere, it seemed, was set to close. No school for you!
The airport was dicey.
“Taxi,” he said.
“Amtrak,” he said.
“Crap,” he said. “This is exactly, precisely, just what I didn’t need to have happen.”
*
“So here’s the idea,” he said to her. Their train was running late, of course, coming from Boston, and no, there was not a seat, not one, on the earlier Acela. Sold out. Completely. He’d asked more than once, as the line to buy tickets stretched out behind them, heaving in impatience.
“It’s snowing,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Oh, you mean in the story?”
“Obviously. It’s snowing hard, the light is strange, and this young fellow—college student, goes to Brown, he’s maybe a senior, handsome, lucky, you know the type—he is waiting at the station to pick up this girl.”
“Girl?”
“Okay, woman. This woman, I should call her that. Louise is her name. I am naming her that, Louise, I think. I think I like the sound of that. The liquidy L. She is returning to him on the train from New York. But due to the weather . . .”
“Right,” she said. Café La France was crowded, a thicket of elbows. Girls eating yogurt. A toddler—God save them, the girlfriend thought. At least they had seats.
“I already had the idea,” he said. “Before this trip. That’s what’s strange. The train, the snow. The guy, I haven’t named him yet, but you know, a Chip or what have you, but not quite that, drives a nice sports car.”