Going Home

I left my office the way one leaves a museum. It would all be there intact if I chose to return--the rosewood box I had bought in Marblehead, the plaster statue of General Grant bought on Third Avenue, my desk chair made in 1775 that Miriam had found in the attic of a cousin living on Block Island, the photos of Tony, Alex and Sheila that stood in the elegant silver frame Miriam had bought at Tiffany's. I would not miss a single possession. The chair could go back to Block Island. We seem to possess everything but ourselves.

By profession I am an editor. Being an editor isn't a profession. One drifts into becoming an editor. I am convinced the happiest people in America are small shopkeepers and the people who believe they have a profession. The rest of us wander through life looking for the kind of comfort one earthworm can give to another earthworm.

I am the editor and publisher of The Scientific Man, a magazine that I bought in 1967 when I decided to give up one of the most exalted jobs on earth, being a member of the New York Times editorial board. There had been a thrill to working for the Times, a feeling of being part of the awe. The Times was sweet and lofty, but I had arrived at the end of my life too soon. I needed a new job and I chose to buy The Scientific Man.

The magazine is located on the top two floors of a brownstone on East 37th Street. The magazine was broke when I took over. The articles had deteriorated; so had the professors writing for the magazine. They had slipped into a jargon that even they no longer understood. They quotedone another as though thinking had never existed. The scientific age seemed to have passed themby. I started out boldly, having been trained by the best newspaper in the world for making people feel important. I took a full page in the Times announcing a change of publisher for The Scientific Man and a policy of interpreting to the readers of the Times and others the advances in scientific knowledge that the common man discovered by Thoreau, Emerson, William James and Dewey ought to know and understand if he was not to be crushed by the arctic flow of knowledge. It worked. Manuscripts began pouring into the 37th Street brown-stone written by men desperate to share what they had learned before their own knowledge became obsolete. Ifelt it was my job to keep alive the last glimmer in American life of knowledge other than thatof how to make a living or kill an evening.

This morning, when I woke up, Cleo, part retriever, part Newfoundland, looked at me and whimpered. I am always amazed that Cleo lives in our house and shares our life in Redding as though we had given birth to her. She had every right to whimper when she awoke and looked at me. I stood by the window in the bedroom where I sleep alone--Miriam has the larger bedroom to herself--and I stared at the early-morning Connecticut sky as though it were going to fall to the ground like chunks of wet dough. I could understand why people in the Middle Ages believed the earth was flat and that beyond the flatness there was silence. It was a sleep in which I never knew whether I was awake, asleep, lost or dead.

Now it was evening and I entered Grand Central Station, looking for the last time at the taxis roaring down Park Avenue, at the people on the sidewalks, who seemed unreal, and it didn't seem possible to me that everything nearby, including the Empire State Building, was all there was to the world. The bits and pieces of my life were flying apart like the rush-hour commuters who ran for their trains as though they might be left behind to spend the night in the enemy city, New York.

"I'm going to make the five-thirty train," I said to Miriam from a phone booth in Grand Central.

"I tried to reach you at your office, but they said you were gone."

"I left early."

"I'll pick you up."

"All right."

"Is everything all right?" Miriam asked.

"Of course."

"I'll see you at the station."

"The train may be late. It was late coming in this morning."

"All right," Miriam said.

"I'm going now to get a seat."

"Do you want to eat out or at home?"

"At home," I said, leaving no choice.

"Oh, I thought you would like to drive to Westport and eat a Chinese dinner with the children."

"Not tonight."

"All right," Miriam said again, with the dread in her voice I had heard when she was in the hospital recovering from an overdose of Ritalin, when she described the nurses, the attendants, the locked doors; or maybe it was my own voice, which I tried to keep under control but I knew was coming through strained. It must have left Miriam wondering what kind of scene she would face when I got off the train.

The floor of Grand Central was littered with stubs from the off-track betting windows. The lines of people waiting to bet on the horses always looked like a ragged army in retreat. They succeeded in destroying the grandeur of the station, the last great open space in New York, a city that already had more ruins than Rome. It was the height of the rush hour. Time to go home for dinner. Time to see if we remembered the faces of our children. Time to watch television. The worse the program, the greater its success. I would never see Grand Central Station again. Before I entered the track for the Redding train, I turned to look for the last time at the ceiling painted to look like the sky. I never forgot my first thrilling look at this station, when the beams of sunlight filtered through the great windows and bathed the station in light. It seemed so good then to be young and to be in New York. I don't know the precise time New York Citydied, but it must have been during the Sixties, when the iron window gates began to go up on the Madison Avenue shops. I wrote the first of a series of editorials for the Times warning that New York faced extinction because, more than any other city in the world, it survived onmutual trust. Now that trust was gone. New York was a city of enemy camps, ruled by an enemy population. When I came to New York from Nebraska, it was a city where everyone trusted everyone else because no one could live in New York without that trust. Now tenants in a thousand apartment complexes were handed leaflets telling them never to enter an elevator in their own building with a stranger. New York is a city of elevators. I could no longer care about New York. I took my last look at Grand Central and its massive ceiling of stars because it was the first great sight I had seen when I left my real home in Nebraska and came to the city.

I didn't buy a paper. The New York Post had nothing left to tell me. I settled into a seat by the window. The train wasn't air conditioned. I took off my jacket. I stuck my ticket in the slot on top of the seat so that the conductor wouldn't awaken me. I prepared to sleep for the ride to Redding.

I could no more sleep than can a sky diver in a free fall. My legs tingled. My hand brushed against my raincoat and I felt the box of .22 bullets.

The Danbury train began the slow pull out of the station into the tunnel that ran for a mile under Park Avenue. I began to feel New York pull away from me.

I had no desire to see the morning edition of the Times. I would not miss my Lexington Avenue delicatessen with ham, Swiss-cheese and Russian-dressing sandwiches that seemed to have been my main source of food for the past five years. I would not miss the salesmen at Brooks Brothers who never seemed to remember me. The Plaza would not miss me.

The train groaned like a man in pain. We were only minutes into the tunnel. I smelled smoke, but it could have been the diesel fumes. The train stopped with a shudder, as though it didn't want to be alone in the tunnel. The lights on the train flickered, then went out. Even the batteries weren't working. A voice cried, "What the hell is going on?" No one answered the voice. I saw a conductor hurry down the aisle. He knew nothing. Then the entire car went pitch-black. The lights on the side of the tunnel went out, something they seldom did. But it wasn't unusual for the Penn Central trains to break down. The commuters didn't stir. We had learned to sit in our seats and not complain. We had even learned to read our newspapers with the lights out. Somehow the train always got moving again. It was better to sit in your seat and wait than to walk on the tracks or climb out of the train in deserted (continued on page 152)Going Home(continued on the page 130) sections of the Bronx where whole neighborhoods looked as though they had been exposed to shellfire.

We stopped dead. The conductor came down the aisle with a flashlight. "All the trains have stopped ahead of us. No trains are moving in or out of Grand Central. We are tied up here for an indefinite delay. We think there's a fire farther up on the tracks near 96th Street." He moved to the next car to deliver his message.

I tried to doze, but the pitch-blackness kept me awake. Above us on the street level was all of New York, a fact of slight consideration to the passengers on the train who were beginning to look for other ways of getting home. I welcomed the delay.

We now seemed to have been in the tunnel for 30 minutes, longer than most delays on the Penn Central. I settled back in my seat.

All was quiet. No voice was above a whisper. No one stirred. No one paced the aisles. We seemed to welcome the blackout. The sudden end to clamor. The train would lurch and groan its way out of the tunnel. We were not all Pharaohs being buried in the depths of Grand Central Station.

I realized for the first time that a woman was sitting next to me. She may have moved from another seat. She may have been sitting next to me all of the time and I didn't notice. But now the perfume began to be released from her body. I smelled the body of a woman, a smell that beauty firms working day and night try to obliterate. They should have descended into the tunnel to capture the scent from her body. Her leg brushed against mine. It was not a heavy leg. She said, "Sorry." Her accent was Boston or New York. It was Eastern with that assurance Midwesterners think they have in their speech.

I said, "We've been here for an hour and ten minutes now. In another fifteen minutes, I will have broken my own record for a delay on this train."

"Do you ride the train often?"

"Every day from Monday to Friday."

"Do you like it?"

"No."

"Some men do. My husband does. He has a passion for crossword puzzles. He takes his business papers on the train, but he does the crossword puzzles. I could never understand crossword puzzles. At night he asks me for the meaning of words I never knew existed."

"What does your husband do?"

"He's a lawyer. I thought everyone who rode these trains was a lawyer."

"Just about everyone."

"Do you mind this blackout?" she asked. "I don't. I think we need a period every day when we black out like this. I think it's terrible that our minds keep going day and night whether we sleep or not. I used to think it was nature's way of telling us that we had so much to learn. Do you think the cave men appreciated the beauty of the world they lived in?" Her voice was now conversational. She was in her early 40s. I knew that voice and I knew those years. I liked her voice.

"I'm from Nebraska originally," I said. "My father told me that when he was a boy, he used to stare in awe at the plains. He said they were like a great sea of grass. I think Spencer Tracy once played in a movie called The Sea of Grass. Spencer Tracy would have been a good man to cross those plains."

"I remember weeping all through a movie I saw where Spencer Tracy was a man with one arm," she said. "I kept saying to my husband that the earth should be populated with men like Spencer Tracy. He kept telling me to keep still and watch the movie. I don't watch movies. I swim in them. I go inside the screen. The movie becomes a three-dimensional world. I feel like a spy in every scene. I don't like the new movies. They have become cartoon strips. Comic books. The new movies don't give you a chance to believe in a character, to follow a story, to believe in good over evil, the triumph of goodness. The new movies are like those rides in the amusement parks where a giant machine does nothing but toss and turn your body and shake you up to no purpose, yet people love it. I think there is something ominous and obscene in the new movies. There was something grand about Bette Davis in those early movies; she was like a roving goddess, going from part to part, sometimes a Southern belle, sometimes a hostess in a night club, sometimes a woman dying of an incurable disease. Nobody else could touch her intense sense of being right, good, true, of understanding her own feelings, even able to place herself at the mercy of a man without panic. She was just plain extraordinary in Now Voyager. I see it over and over again the way some people go to the Met to see Carmen year after year."

"You talk beautifully about the movies," I said.

"It's nice of you to say that. This stalled train reminded me of the movies, I think. Except that we don't have a flickering light and a no-exit sign in faded red. I am always struck by the way people come together in a movie-house. It seems like such a public way to enjoy a private pleasure. It's extraordinary the way we can blot out everyone in the audience. Which is why I get annoyed in a movie if someone talks or puts his feet up on a seat. I can't stand to sit behind someone who is taller than me. My husband thinks I'm mad for always switching seats. He once got up and walked out of a movie because I said I couldn't see the screen and he wouldn't change his seat. I had the keys to the car, so that wasn't a problem. He came sulking back after eating two boxes of popcorn and he almost had a coronary."

"That would make a good piece for the Reader's Digest," I said, "the pleasure of going to the movies."

"Are you a writer?" she asked.

"No," I said. "I have a feeling that writers don't write for the Reader's Digest."

"They do," she said. "I have a son who reads it with fascination. To him, those articles are all marvelous. They give him so much information. He can't eat cornflakes without the Reader's Digest in front of him."

"Are you a writer?" I asked.

"I write in lined notebooks that no one will ever read."

"A diary?"

"It's more than a diary. I write about the way I feel about things that I can't seem to tell anyone else. I write about things that no one seems to want to talk about anymore. I write about conversations I never have with my husband. I write about everything I think I should tell my son that I somehow find impossible to say to him face to face. I wonder why we are so frightened of confiding in our children. So I write. Every evening, when my husband is watching a basketball game. I have twenty-five notebooks filled already. I think I will leave them in a place that will be easy for my son to find. I think my husband would go mad if he read the notebooks. If he reads the notebooks, he will discover that he never lived with the woman he thought he was living with. I am so absolutely different in the notebooks."

"What do you put into them?" I asked. "I always wanted to keep a notebook."

"Three nights ago, we had dinner in town at a restaurant the Times gave four stars to. My husband thinks he is doing me a great honor every time he takes me to a restaurant that has been given four stars by the Times. They are always a disappointment. And so stupid. I ordered a shrimp dish. The shrimps were tough, they smelled of iodine. I started to send the shrimps back. My husband objected. I left my plate of shrimps untouched. They cost $7.95. He started to eat the shrimps on my plate. He began to gag. He blamed me for the taste of the shrimps. When he takes me to an expensive restaurant, he likes to have sex immediately when we get home. In his mind, I am a date and he is spending money on me for one thing and he can't wait to get out of the restaurant and get me into bed. When we got home, I said I had a headache. He said, 'To hell with your headache.' I didn't have a headache. I was trying to think of what I could do to assert myself. I hit on a brilliant idea. I decided I would screw my husband like a callgirl who gives her customers their money's worth. I pulled out every stop. I moaned. I kissed him where I haven't kissed him in years. I scratched his back. I dug my nails into him. I thrashed my legs, as they used to say in the sexy novels I read at Smith. I wouldn't let him out of bed to fumble for a box of Kleenex. I kept him in bed and forced him to puff like a heart patient taking a treadmill test. I wrote this all up in my notebook. In the notebook, it's witty, perceptive; I achieve a depth that Willa Cather gets at her best. The writing of that scene was exciting to me, though I know it won't hold together on a printed page in a book. It's too personal, too much of me; I can read meaning into the words that I am certain the words can't claim for themselves. I put into my notebook my desire to sleep with my son. It's not an obscene thought. It's not perverse. I think it's a feeling most mothers have. To experience their sons. I can see it being warm and protective, full of wonder, and if I could teach my son to sit on a toilet seat, I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to teach him how to know a woman. I don't think we come to these things instinctively. I think we come to them through a whole series of bad habits, bad information, second-rate initiation rites. You are a writer!" she said to me. "You listen like a writer. You don't interrupt. You listen."

I couldn't see her face in the pitch-black of the train. But I could make out a dim outline. She wore her hair pulled back. She had taken off her jacket. She wore a tailored shirt. She sat facing me, turning her whole body, not the way the passengers usually spoke on the Penn Central, holding their bodies stiff, claiming an entire seat for themselves.

"I'm not a writer the way you mean a writer," I said. "I have worked on newspapers. I even used to work for the newspaper that passes out four stars so New Yorkers will know where to eat."

"The Times," she said. "Why are people always in awe when they meet someone from the Times? It's a newspaper greater than any of its independent parts. The writing in the Times is ordinary. The words are stacked neatly, like crates in a warehouse. You seldom get a line of emotion. Doesn't anybody feel anything on the Times? Doesn't injustice deserve its own language? Who dreams up those stories on the woman's page?. It makes us seem like a nation of children. You say you used to work for the Times. What do you do now?" she asked.

"I sit on trains most of the time. This stalled train is an exception. I feel we're moving faster than any train that ever ran on this line."

"That's a good way of putting it. You are a writer. Writers announce themselves. I don't know how. But they do. I feel this train is moving. I can feel it. We move fast when we feel ourselves thinking. That's why I feel so good when I write in my notebooks." She moved closer to me. I knew she would. Our hands touched, then we grasped each other as though we were falling off the Matter-horn.

"That feels good," she said. "So good." I moved closer to her. We had a seat that usually held three passengers, but no one claimed the middle seat when the train left the station. Her arms went around my neck. Her body was soft, still firm, her breasts were as firm as those of any girl of 20. We kissed like a couple dating in a Nebraska moviehouse on a Saturday night. I was biting her lips. She put her full tongue into my mouth. I had never known that perfume could be so strong. The perfume was under her ears. It came from her breasts. It was on her arms. She rubbed her breasts against my shirt. I slipped one hand into her blouse, fingering her nipple, which was taut, sensitive, and she let her hand go down to my pants. She skillfully took hold of me with her fingers. She stroked me in a way that made me want to be capable of a dozen orgasms. She brought her mouth away from a kiss and whispered in my ear, "I think we can fuck without being seen. I'll turn my back to you and you can get into me sideways. I like it that way, don't you?" She kissed me again on my mouth and then with her tongue, leaving my mouth, turning her back. I held on to her from the side, my hands still on her breasts, and I could hear her slipping off her underpants. I put my raincoat over us. When I put my hand on her, my fingers, she arched her body toward me. I found her on the first try. She pressed herself into me. I could feel the fluttering inside her. It held me in its grasp. I moved into her. She held me in her grasp. Any motion from her would have sent me into an orgasm lasting a month. My arms encircled her. My hands were on her breasts. "Now," I heard her say, "now." She began pushing into me. I plunged into her. I brought my hands down to her hips and pulled her into me. "Now!" she said, "now," suppressing a moan but not suppressing the movement against me. I felt her body shudder so deliciously that I was reminded of a dreamlike feeling I remembered of the wind awakening me when I fell asleep on the bank of a pond near our house in Seward.

"My God," she said, "it will never be the same after this." We both sat back in our seats like swimmers gasping for breath. "I don't want the lights ever to come on again. I don't want this train ride to end."

The train was still pitch-black. I could see now like a leopard in the dark.

"On the train," she said. "My God, it was so delicious. That shows you what you can do when you dare. I don't think we could do it again. This time we'll be listening for the conductor. It won't be the same. That was so good. Not to think about anything else. I always hear the water running somewhere in the house or the refrigerator defrosting itself."

"It was very good," I said.

"I won't put this in my notebook. I don't need to be reminded. Nothing went wrong. I usually write in my notebooks about everything that went wrong during the day."

"You must have a book already."

"But not a book anybody else would read. I'm not a writer. I don't care to be. All I care about now is not being overwhelmed by the vulgarity of my husband. That is a full-time job for me. He doesn't sleep. He started taking sleeping pills. He has three drinks before dinner. He still insists on eating red beef every night. His veins must look like a clogged-up sewer. He will die soon. He is a machine that was wound up by the Harvard Law School and pointed in the direction of tax law. You know," she said, "we could never do this again. What you and I just did. I've been thinking if we could meet at the Drake or the Plaza, but where could we find such a marvelous couch at the Plaza for making love as this Penn Central plastic seat? I will never knock this railroad again. I'll tell you what I am going to do. The car is still pitch-black. I'm going to get up and find another seat, in another car. You shouldn't see my face and I shouldn't see yours. I shouldn't talk anymore about what we did. It was too good to waste on conversation. I don't think you want to know more about me than what you now know, which is probably more than anybody else has known. The train will start soon. I don't think there will ever be another train ride like this for either of us. I can't imagine it ever being repeated. I absolutely won't share this with anyone else, not even my lined notebook. But who are you?" she whispered, as though she had been sent from another planet to ask me that question.

This morning, when I woke up, when Cleo looked at me and whimpered, I heard myself say aloud, "This is the day when you will take the Remington semiautomatic rifle in the closet, load it with 15 bullets and shoot Miriam, Tony, Alex, Sheila and yourself. You will do it about 8:15, after you return from New York on the 5:30, just when Miriam calls you down to dinner. You will shoot Miriam first, then the children, then it will be over; for at least that part of what we think we know of this life and for the rest after that, nobody has told us anything that a schoolboy couldn't imagine." All men think of killing their families. Some men do it. The kitchen would be the scene of the shooting. Miriam would probably be shot at the kitchen sink. The children would be seated around the table, the one true bargain I bought in my life, an original Shaker trestle table I found in a Danbury farmhouse for $18. I made no provision for any of our possessions to be passed on. Neither Miriam nor I had any family left. We were the only people on earth we knew and we didn't know ourselves. The bigger family I had grown up in always relied on relatives to set our heads straight. No one could ever be pompous in our living room, no dream ever got further than the cutting analysis of my Uncle Walter. Life was lived in the family. It was there we drew our courage as though it were a weekly salary. We are not meant to live alone. A stairway led into our kitchen, one of those rear stairways built in the 18th Century houses. Neither Miriam nor the children would see me enter the kitchen until I was already on them, with Miriam in the sights of the Remington. At the range of 15 feet, I couldn't miss. We will be gone from the world and away from whatever harm the world can bring to the children, Miriam or me. For a billion years, none of it will be able to touch us, the feeling that we can't live with one another because we don't dare to, even though that is what we want more than anything else the world has to offer.

"No," the woman on the seat next to me said. "No, I know too much already; don't tell me who you are," and she was gone, up the aisle, before I could speak.

I leaned back in my seat and looked into the pitch-blackness of the train. I waited for the train to lurch. The wheels didn't move. It was past 7:30. We had been in the tunnel for two hours. No one on the train raised his voice. I half-expected the commuters behind me to lean over the seat and whisper congratulations to me, but apparently they had seen nothing.

How could they see what they would never believe? More than the raincoat shielded us. She had been so skillful with me. The actual intercourse may have lasted only a minute or two, but I had stayed in her longer because of the fluttering, which to me was one of the most extraordinary sensations on earth, something like the birth of puppies, something I had experienced from Miriam only once and that was in London, not in our own house.

The train lurched at 7:45. We began a slow, halting ride through the tunnel, stopping every few feet, then moving on with caution. The lights came on again. When we reached 125th Street, the train began to glide with its usual speed toward the Bronx. We roared through the Westchester towns toward Connecticut in the vain hope that the train could make up for lost time. I stared out the window at the houses flashing by as though they would go up in smoke in a series of explosions.

The cause of the holdup had been a fire in the tunnel at 94th Street. One fireman had been killed when he stepped on the live tracks. The conductor passed the news to us. I thought the engineer should have let out three loud blasts for the dead fireman. But death is no longer an affair for mourning. We mourn the living more than the dead.

The white Connecticut houses were beginning to appear alongside the track--the white-clapboard houses built in the innocent clays. A pitcher of lemonade-on a hot July afternoon had saved my father's generation. I was born in a house with white clapboards, a peaked roof, a porch, a swing hanging from two hooks, a musty toolroom where I found old copies of Liberty magazine. On Sunday, my father always sat in a hickory rocker that faced the afternoon sun, which was where he died with a copy of Steinbeck's Red Pony in his hand. The funerals in Nebraska were stately. I disliked the New York funerals I attended, with funeral parlors on the street level and shops on either side where ladies would purchase costume jewelry. We were approaching Wilton, Branchville, Georgetown, then Redding.

I put on my raincoat and went to stand between the cars, so that the rushing wind would wash me clean of New York. The train rattled and roared. The white houses rushed by, the lights were on in the kitchen windows, the red lights flashing when we came to a station. The cars nervously waited at the crossroads. Redding was only a minute or two from Georgetown. The train swept through the wooded fields. In Redding, there was a siding where the cars waited, a post office; the train always glided into the Redding station like a monster running out of breath.

I saw Miriam looking at the train as though it had arrived from outer space. She waved to me from the Volvo. I walked quickly toward her. I was trembling like a prisoner about to be hanged.