Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“Sure. Do you know anything about her? I need clues. I can’t find her.”

“No, Dad, I’m sorry. I haven’t any idea at all. You could call her agent.”

“I tried that last night on your phone. Called her director too, and her hairdresser. No luck at all. They’d like to know where she is too.”

Myra nodded politely while I told her this. When I’d finished she tried to be casual, but I could tell she was picking her words with care. “Dad. Why don’t you give Mom a call? She’s in New York.”

Something went tight in my stomach at that. I tried to sound casual too. It was beginning to feel like acting school. “Oh?” I said. “Where’s she staying?”

“At your old place, Dad. The Pierre.”

Jesus! I thought, Anna at the Pierre? It didn’t sound like her at all. “What in hell is your mother doing in New York?” I said. “She always claimed to hate it here.”

“She was over for dinner a few nights ago, Dad. She said she was getting bored upstate and came down to do some shopping.” She looked at me. “Why don’t you ask her for lunch or something?”

For a moment it was a seductive idea. Whatever Anna might possess of a longshoreman’s spirit, she was a hell of a person to talk with. I’ve never really enjoyed talking with a woman as much as I did with her. And I’d never had any trouble getting it up with her—maybe because her sexuality was no threat. I thought, standing there with Myra, of how nice sex with Anna would be—a spell of rain after a three-year drought. But then I thought of that damnable popping girdle and that righteous anger and I said, “Myra, it just wouldn’t be smart. Not now. I know what you have in mind, bless your heart, and I admit there might be something to it. But I don’t need the trauma right now. There’s something fragile in my spirit, and seeing Anna might shatter it.”

Myra pursed her lips. “Okay, Dad. It’s your life.”

“Oh yes, honey,” I said. “It sure is.”

Isabel was not to be found in New York. I called everyone I dared call and learned nothing but what I had learned from orbit: Isabel had left for London six months before, in Hamlet. Hamlet closed four months later and no one had heard from her since, not her agent and not her friends. The agent was trying to get her to do the mother in Mourning Becomes Elektra —crazy typecasting for childless Isabel, with her teenage figure. She could be in Istanbul or Santa Fe or Aberdeen. I gave up temporarily and concentrated on business.

It’s taken over fifty years of living to get my priorities right and to learn that love is more important than money. What fortune-cookie wisdom to spend a lifetime acquiring! But now that I knew it, circumstances forced me to put money first anyway. It was time to peddle endolin.

First I found my friend Millie Shapiro in a little studio apartment on West Fifty-seventh. Millie is a retired makeup artist, once at the top of her profession. I knew her through Isabel; they were both cat fanatics. Millie was grumpy and shaky, but she expertly washed the cheap hair dye out of my hair and redyed it dark brown, with gray at the temples. Her breath was horrible, but when. I looked in her cracked vanity mirror afterward I had to whistle. She also trimmed my hair and beard for me in a kind of movie-star way that was far different from my usual rough-and-ready. She gave me a pair of black-rimmed glasses to wear and suggested I shift from cigars to a pipe and that I wear rings. I dismissed the pipe idea immediately; I have a hearty distrust of pipe smokers and tweedy people in general.

Myra had managed to put together sixty thousand dollars in cash and had bought me a money belt at an Army-Navy store to keep it in. I paid Millie, asked her one more time if she had any notion of where Isabel might be, enjoined her to silence, and left. Good woman, Millie, and I trusted her.

I did as she suggested and bought a couple of classy-looking rings at a costume-jewelry place. At a men’s store I finished my metamorphosis: tight Western jeans, army boots and a red silk shirt. In the clothing-store mirror I looked as if I’d been sent from central casting to play an aging gigolo—which was something of a laugh considering my recent troubles. Anyway, most people knew me from the covers of Time and Newsweek , and on those I’d been beardless and dressed in one of my famous lumberjack shirts. I was known as a “boyish eccentric”: the beard, red shirt and rings should throw people off as long as I could stand to go on looking that way.

Actually, I figured they weren’t searching very hard for me. Baynes had the Isabel and the uranium and he knew there was no way I was going to get another spaceship. The next move was mine. The move I had in mind was checkmate. I went to Grand Central and bought a Pullman ticket to Columbus, Ohio.

The train had a parlor car, with armchairs and magazines and little tables to set your scotch and soda on. The furnishings were shabby—frayed green curtains on streaked windows, a peeling mural on one wall—and the upholstery was that woeful green that is one of the perversions of U.S. railroading. But I felt at home instantly in that car. I was the first passenger there and I chose a window seat in the chair with the least-worn upholstery. It was ten-thirty in the morning; I ordered a pot of coffee and toast and settled back, clicking the rings together on my left hand, occasionally stroking my freshly trimmed beard and feeling a pleasant anticipation in my stomach.

After a bit, a couple of priests came into the car and seated themselves prissily at the other end from me. And then a small, sexy woman came in and sat down alone. I began changing plans. Ever since that sight of the thighs of my fantasy sweetie who left my life in New Hope, Penn. I travel with the unconscious expectation of sex. It’s an expectation that, up to the point I’m writing about, had never been fulfilled. I’d had opportunities when I was younger and on my way to check out a coal mine or a merger or a commodities possibility—taking a firsthand look at Kansas wheat, say, or North Carolina firewood—but I’d always somehow fumbled or lost out or had gone horribly, maddeningly shy at the sight of a crossed pair of legs under the hem of a skirt. The awful truth is that women turn me on so goddamned much I feel powerless with them. Jesus, do I like asses and breasts and pubic hair and the sweet pungency of vaginal lips! Thighs. The backs of knees.

All this response to a small, pretty woman entering a parlor car! Well. It had been a long time. I’d just got back from outer space and from a stretch as solo gardener on a slippery planet. A stint at impotence before that. It had been three years since I’d genuinely experienced a woman. Seeing her there, about forty, with splendid legs and an intelligent face and light-brown hair and a white blouse draping so nicely over her ample breasts, I immediately lost any notions I’d had of catching up on world news on my trip across country. I no longer cared about what had happened in politics or war or energy or show business or acts of God during my absence; I wanted to share my bed with that woman. She had been in the car about thirty seconds and I was in love with her.

Little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. How nice! Her back straight and her ass neat and firm under her skirt. Splendid! L&M marijuana cigarettes in the gold pack and a gold lighter to match, set with assurance on the little table by her seat. Quel délicatesse! She ordered pernod and water in a soft voice, flitted her eyes quickly around the car, passing over me with just the hint of a pause. Oh my God, how I love all those things women do! How I love a civilized New York woman who dresses right and talks warmly and knows how to order a drink on a train! Monuments should be built to such women. To hell with generals, admirals, presidents, artists, messiahs; a civilized, grown-up woman with an education and a firm ass is worth the whole lot of them.