“What did I wear?”
“Oh, where to begin? Jeans, of course. T-shirt with place names on them … no, no, I’m getting a tool vibe. John Deere T-shirts, maybe, or like Ace Hardware. Something utilitarian or proletariat. And you wore your hair long, like you do now, only probably you deliberately pulled a front lock down across your forehead because, well, because you were just so darn caught up in your deep poet-y thoughts. Right? So you were the common-man guy, farmer boy, with a deep soul. Did you come in a kit? Or were you already assembled?”
“No assembly required.”
“And grade-wise you rode the B train. Maybe B-. Good work, but not serious, missed a few assignments, could have done better, but you were reading and the teachers were okay with that. Girlfriend? Hmmm. That’s a tough one. Probably a girl who raised sheep. Or goats—goats are better. She smelled of perfume and farm manure, but she, too, miraculously, loved to read and adored poetry. Kind of a Sharon Olds type.”
“You nailed it. You’re scalding my soul with your insight.”
“She was probably named after a plant … or a season. Summer. Or maybe Hazel or Olive. Or maybe June Bug.”
We didn’t talk for a while. I wondered if I had gone too far. Then our eyes met again. The train rocked, and he lifted his cup and drained it to the bottom. It was possible we were heading toward a kiss. A serious kiss. I liked him way too much, I realized. Then a guy came out and lit a cigarette, which was entirely against the law, but he did it, anyway. He said something to us in English, but I couldn’t hear him over the train noises. He looked like a bicyclist, all wire legs and a baseball hat with an abbreviated brim. I couldn’t quite figure him out.
Then two more of his buddies came out wearing about the same thing, so it was some sort of team or tour group, I supposed, and Jack looked at me. Our eyes went down each other’s tunnel a long way. He smiled, and it was a good smile, but also wan. It meant that this moment on the platform had finished, that we had caught it while it existed, then it disappeared. Something like that.
“Ready?” he asked, nodding his chin toward our car.
I nodded. And that was it.
6
Amy came back without Victor when we were a half hour outside of Amsterdam. Jack had gone down to the dining car.
“Where’s Count Chocula?” I asked.
“OMG,” she said and slid in beside me.
“Has Poland been conquered?”
“Let’s just say the nations of Europe have once again given of their bounty.”
“You’re such a tart.”
“Embrace the inner slut, Heather.”
She did a little wiggle dance and sang something ridiculous. Her singing woke Constance. Constance sat up quickly and looked around, evidently unsure of her surroundings. A line from her U-shaped travel pillow ran down her cheek. When she saw she was on a train, and that Amy was wiggling next to her, she groaned and put her head down on her knees.
“Not another,” she said, groggy.
“Count Chocula has some game,” Amy said. “He’s really quite adorable.”
“You’re hooking up with Dracula?” Constance asked, slowly rubbing her face clear of sleep. “Does anyone have any water?”
“Here,” Amy said, reaching into her backpack at her feet and liberating a bottle of water. “Is anyone else starving?”
“Cheese and apples,” I said, because I was more or less the quartermaster on this trip. I always had food. Sometimes, as I told Jack, I was a little too organized, a genetic hand-me-down from the Mom-a-saurus.
“Can you get to them easily?”
I dug around in my backpack. Amy pulled out a pear-shaped cutting board we had bought after a week. It fit in a backpack and made a decent impromptu table. We all took out Swiss Army knives while I laid out apples, a block of French cheddar, two stalks of celery, and peanut butter. I had to dig a little deeper to find a baguette I had broken in half to fit in my backpack. I put it beside the apples.
“How long did I sleep?” Constance asked. She smeared peanut butter on a slice of apple and chomped it down.
“Three, four hours, maybe,” I said.
“What did I miss? Who is Count Chocula exactly?”
“The Polish guy who was sitting behind us,” Amy said. “Victor was his name. His last named sounded like a sneeze. He invited us to a party in Amsterdam, by the way. I took down the address.”
“Where is he, anyway?” I asked, arching up and looking over the back of the seat. “Did you sex him to death?”
“It was a fair fight,” Amy said.
“I have to see this guy,” Constance said. “I didn’t notice him when we sat down.”
I ate a bite or two of bread. Then I sliced cheese and ate that with more bread. Amy divided another apple into three sections. I ate that, too. For a minute or so, we ate without talking, and I felt happy. I looked at Constance, her face serious and concentrated, her blond hair beautiful in the dull light of the train compartment. She was the prettiest of us all and the least interested in guys. She was bookish, but not in the Hemmy sort of way. She liked research, imagined the saints as an extended family she could visit when everyday life became too dull, and she was the one we turned to when we needed the name of a figure in a picture or statue. She ate daintily, cutting things precisely and fitting them together in neat packages, while Amy, dark and slightly more abundant, slathered peanut butter wherever it landed and ate with a gusto that reflected her general approach to life. I had known them since first-year orientation at Amherst, had visited their homes, had seen them cry over boyfriends, get drunk, get As, get carded at bars, watched them dance until their legs dropped off, saw Amy play lacrosse like a demon woman, watched Constance cross campus on her sky-blue Schwinn, her books neatly organized in a front basket, her slightly myopic gaze finding the beauty in the campus oaks and the arches of the buildings. Seeing them in the soft, stuttering train light, watching them eat and smile and keep good company with each other, I felt enormous affection for them.
“I love you guys,” I said because I felt it keenly in that moment. “And I want to thank you for doing this trip together, for everything. I don’t want us to ever lose track of one another. Do you all promise?”
“What brought this on?” Amy asked, her mouth full.
Constance nodded at me and reached over and took my hand. Amy made a little shrug, then put her hand on top of ours. The Musketeers. We had been doing the Musketeer hand stack since a drunken night in our first year outside the Lord Jeffery Inn when we realized we were pals, true pals.
“One for all and all for one,” we said, which was our secret code. “Un pour tous, et tous pour un.” As we finished, the train began slowing for Amsterdam.
7