“Well played. I admit it, well played. I like your passion. It doesn’t take much to get your tongue sharpened, does it?”
“Is that the best you can do? Are you calling me a sharp-tongued shrew, Jack? I’ll know most of the references you throw at me. I’m well educated and wicked smart. Drift away, Jack Vermont. Go back to contemplating the great significance of your life, or maybe plot out the next novel you will never write. Go find a café where you can sit and have pretend conversations of pretend importance with other pretend expats who like to believe they see a little more deeply into the human experience than we poor, benighted businesspeople. That will make you feel terrifically superior. You can look down from your lofty heights and throw your thunderbolts.”
“Pretend expats?” he said, grinning again. He grinned to get me to grin, and I had to fight not to give in to him.
“Should I go on? Or do you get the idea?”
“I do,” he said, and he slowly stood. “I think this went very well. How about you?”
“It was great.”
He made a show out of creeping past me out to the aisle—and he did have a great body—and then he swung up into the sleeping rack again. When he settled back, he waited until I looked at him. He stuck his tongue out. I stuck mine back at him.
4
That’s where it stood for a while. My neck burned red, and I had trouble controlling my breathing. For a ten count, I sat with my face in my hands, trying to get control of myself. I didn’t like thinking I was so easily pegged, because I was from New Jersey, and my dad was a corporate suit, and my mom was a Junior Leaguer. I hated thinking I was a convenient type, a person someone like Jack could identify in the first minutes of meeting me. I also didn’t like the venom that came out when I turned it on him. Then again, he had crossed a line. I watched him while the lights continued to flicker and flash from outside. I had been in the no-man zone for months, ever since I’d broken up with Brian, my major college crush. I still couldn’t bring myself to think about the fact that I had brought Brian home, even decorated the family Christmas tree with him, only to discover he had screwed a girl on a dare the week before. He had been drunk, and the girl had been a local bartender with a wide bra strap and a head full of blond-tinted hair, and he’d been put up to it by his friends. Bar dare, bar dare, bar dare, ha ha ha, funny, funny, funny, another round, they chanted. So he had gone off into her car, or his car, or to an alleyway, for all I knew, to have his rendezvous. And it didn’t mean anything, that was for sure, the world agreed on that, but all I could remember was looking up at Brian’s cordovan corduroys as he stood on the stepladder and took ornaments from my hand, while my dad made drinks in the dry bar off the living room and my mom, the T. rex, lumbered around the house with a wispy sweater over her shoulders like a cape and $300 trousers from Eileen Fisher hiked up to the bottom knobs of her ribs. Bing Fucking Crosby played on Pandora. I confess: I felt the dreamy romance of the entire thing—Christmas in the country, snow falling, Holiday Inn and all that rot—until his friend Ronnie Evers Facebooked a picture of Brian with his hand down the back of Brenda the bartender’s skinny jeans, his tongue stuck out like an acid-band lead guitarist, while she ground her buffalo legs against his thigh and leaned back cowgirl-style.
What followed, when I twigged it all out from Twitter and Facebook and a few tagged photos, was a quiet little scene between Brian and me down in the old rumpus room, our tight, controlled voices hissing like old radiators.
How could you? Her? You did her?
It was a joke. A bet! I was drunk!
Oh, jeez, Brian. For fuck’s sake.
Everything’s okay. Jeez, lighten up, Heather. We’re not engaged, you know?
Fuck you, Brian.
But we had tumbled out of our particular little Eden. We split up the next day, his bag thumping into the trunk of his old Volvo sedan before he pulled out, Christmas lights leading him away. When I turned back to the house, I spotted Mr. Periwinkle, our ancient cat, watching from the upstairs window.
*
So Jack. Constance was still asleep. Amy was still gone. The train car had settled into that kind of restless calm that comes to things in motion when people are trying to sleep, but keep waking up. I smelled coffee from the bar car behind us. Now and then, right out of a noir movie, we got the train sound that comes when you go through a stop or past a siding: duhhhhh-de-de-de-de dealllllllhhhhhhhh. A Doppler effect, I knew from first-year physics.
I decided on coffee. And decided halfway thumbs-up on Jack the Wolverine, so that when I passed him I took a little snapshot of him with my iPhone. He didn’t wake. But then I felt guilty about what I had said to him, how harsh I had been, so when I ordered my own latte, I ordered one for him, too, figuring someone would drink it if he didn’t want it. While the porter made the coffee, I looked at the picture. Jack was drop-dead gorgeous but slept deeply—zombie sleep, really—and I wondered what that was about. Brian had always slept halfheartedly, an insomniac itching for the world to start again. Jack sank way, way down when he slept.
I carried the order back, one in each hand, which proved harder to do than you might think. I stopped next to his head and stared at him for a second, figuring eyes always woke people up. It did. Maybe he detected the presence of someone, I don’t know, but he looked over at me and smiled, and it was a sweet, innocent smile, one he might have given his mom on his tenth birthday.
“I got you a coffee,” I said. “It was the least I could do given your pitiful life.”
“Let me get up.”
I stood and waited. He slowly slid down. It was my first time standing next to him, and I liked the way he seemed to curl around me. Big shoulders, big muscles, a riot shield of a man.
“We could drink these out between the cars,” he said, arranging his bag so he could leave it. “I could use some air, miserable, trust-fund, lame-ass Vermont boy that I am.”
I nodded.
“You are,” I agreed. “Sad but true.”
He finished with his bag and grabbed his coffee. I wondered, as I followed him out to the space between the two cars, if what I had done could be called a pickup.
5
“Sorry if I was being a jerk earlier,” he said. “I sometimes oversell.”
“To women?”
“I guess.”
“Are you a show-off in general?”
“Only around women as beautiful as you.”
“How old is that line?”
“Not so old. Maybe I mean it. Maybe I think you’re beautiful. How tall are you, anyway?”
“Five six.”
“That’s the perfect height, you know? Trapeze artists are all five feet six inches or under. So are human cannonballs. The people who get shot out of cannons … they’re five six.”
“You’re making that up.”
“It’s a known fact. An accepted fact everywhere. It’s the first question if you go for a job at a carnival. Even lion tamers are five six or under.”
“Have you worked in a circus?”
“Of course.”