Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I was scared too. Fifty-three years old, a pirate, and I was beginning to panic at the realization that if I wanted something to happen between us I would have to make it happen. I have lost beautiful women to nobodies because of this fear, have sat stupidly by because I was afraid, down deep, that I wasn’t wanted and let some dumb, balding insurance salesman walk off arm in arm with a woman I’d been admiring for an hour. Oh yes. As easy as I may be with actresses and showgirls, I can turn prepubescent and unintelligible in a flash, out in the real world. And damn it, I am a good-looking billionaire and a lamb at lovemaking—a gentle and affectionate lover when not plagued by psychosomatic wilt.

All this whizzed around in me before my coffee came, before the train started moving. A minute at most. I knew I’d better act fast before things got even more complicated. Before that insurance man came in and plopped down beside her.

I got up and walked over, fast enough so I wouldn’t feel my lack of poise. “Hello,” I said, “I’d like to have my coffee with you. It’s coming in a minute.” I tried not to think about my red shirt, my rings, my dyed beard.

She looked at me with no alarm at all and my heart immediately grew lighter. “Okay,” she said.

I sat down with surprising ease and introduced myself as Ben Jonson, using the name of my favorite Benjamin in the arts. She was Sue Kranefeld and a professor of history at Berkeley.

“That’s terrific!” I said. “You can tell me about the Punic Wars and why Alexander the Great didn’t live longer.”

“I’m in American history,” she said, which seemed to end that. Maybe she thought I was being facetious, but I meant it. I learned a lot about Scottish communism from Isabel.

Her pernod and my coffee came at the same time, and just as I was pouring, the train pulled out of Grand Central.

“I really love this,” I said. “I love starting a trip. I think I could spend my life doing it.”

“Do you travel much?” She poured the water on her pernod and we watched it cloud up.

I wanted to say I had just got back from the stars, zooming through light-years of void, but I replied that I traveled whenever I could and that I was in the coal-and-wood business, as a power-plant designer. Normally I don’t like telling lies, but on a train it’s part of the ambience.

She brightened. “That’s interesting to me,” she said. “I’ve been in New York researching the greenhouse panic of the twenties, and that has a lot to do with coal.”

“Yes,” I said, glad we had something in common to talk about for a while. She was wearing a perfume that smelled of camellias. That soft voice was really splendid, as relaxed as an oatmeal cookie. Something a bit of the schoolteacher about her, but how pleasant she was! And how turned on I was. What I of course wanted to say was, “I’d sure like to fuck , right this minute if you don’t mind.” I’d have said it too, if I thought it had a prayer of working. Since it didn’t, I had to say something , and what I chose was, “The coal business would be a lot different if they’d planned it right. There was no need to pump all that black soup into the air.” Talk, talk.

“They were greedy,” she said. “When they started heating with coal and running elevators with it in the twenty-teens it was on a huge scale. People died. Crops died. They tried scrubbers and precipitators and cattle keeled over in fields. Then the greenhouse effect began.”

I was getting nervous with this and was unsure how to stop her. She had adopted the professor mode and was lecturing me. I could see the three-by-five cards in her head flipping over. “Uranium would have been safer,” I said somewhat lamely, hoping she didn’t know anything about uranium. “Even plutonium.”

“Of course ,” she said, as though I were a backward student, “but Denver came at the worst possible time.”

“Just before an election,” I said.

“Do you work for the Mafia?”

“I work for Belson Mines.”

“Oh,” she said. “Have you met him?” Her voice, thank God, left the classroom and came back to our parlor car. Outside, behind her lovely head of brown hair, were more and more trees and fewer crumbling apartment buildings.

“Sure,” I said, “a dozen times.”

“What do you think of him?”

“I think his heart’s in the right place.”

She thought about that a minute and finished her drink.

“Want some of my coffee?” I said. I had a big pot of it between us.

She shook her head “No” and flagged down the waiter for a pernod. I poured myself another cup of coffee. “What do you think of Mr. Belson?” I said, as casually as I could.

She lit a joint and looked out the window. “He’s an attractive man, but he seems… frenetic, from what I’ve read. And foolish.”

“That sounds accurate enough,” I said. “I know him to be warmhearted.”

She turned and looked at me. “I think he looks a bit like you, judging from the pictures. Are you related?”

“Cousins,” I said. “I’d like to take you to lunch at twelve. Okay?”

“Sure.” She smiled pleasantly at me.

Beyond the window it was fields now and trees and a blue sky. The train swayed erotically, as did my loins. What the hell , I thought, and said what I wanted to say. “You sure are a beautiful woman,” I said. Isabel I’m sorry.

“Thank you,” Sue said.

There were light freckles on her upper arms, and not a wrinkle anywhere. I could have kissed every freckle. I vowed then I would, perhaps while crossing Pennsylvania.

I glanced over at the priests; one had his hand on the other’s knee and they were bent toward each other in intimacy. What the hell. What are trains really for anyway?

She had another drink before lunch and I worried that the booze in her might get to be a problem, but she only drank a single glass of wine with her spinach quiche. We had the dining car to ourselves, and over dessert I reached out and took her hand. She leaned toward me and said, “I can’t wait until tonight to go to bed with you.”

“What a darling you are!” I said. But I was suddenly nervous. How horrible it would be not to get it up after all this. The thought of how a shot of morphine might help came to mind. But with it there was a flash of unaccustomed clarity: the only way to save this was to tell her the truth and tell it right now.

There was no one seated anywhere near us. I leaned forward a bit and said, “Sue, I’m embarrassed to say this, but I have a sexual problem.”

She looked at me.

“The last time I went to bed with a woman was over a year ago,” I said, “and I was impotent.”

She had become a shade distant and she lit up a cigarette now. “Ben,” she said, “you’re a very attractive man and I like you. But I don’t like complications, or embarrassments.”

“Sue,” I said, “neither do I. But it won’t be complicated and it won’t be embarrassing.” She must have heard the joyfulness in my voice. Sitting right there in the dining car with a pair of dessert plates between us and watching her light a green marijuana cigarette and click her little lighter shut afterward, watching the freckles on her upper arms and the sweet curve of her neck and smelling her perfume, I felt the unmistakable and joyful response.

I leaned forward and said, “Hallelujah, Sue! I’ve got an erection!”

She smiled distantly. “It’s only a little past noon, Ben. I’ve brought a book with me I need to read…”

“Come on, Sue.” I got up carefully—a bit bent over at first. “I’ll be back for you in about two minutes.”

I found a porter and gave her a fifty-dollar piece and told her to make the bed in my compartment. Then I went back to the diner. Sue was drinking what looked like a double Bourbon. For a moment the memory of my mother standing at the sink with a martini, with her ruined face, almost withered me in my tracks. But I pulled myself together. My member, though chastened by the necessity of my walking up and down train aisles, was still alive and well and ready to rejoin the rest of me. I walked up to Sue and bent down to where she was sitting and kissed her warmly on the cheek. Then on the mouth. She kissed me back, a bit warily. I was right; it was Bourbon. Her mouth was full of the taste and it sent a special electricity into my balls. I was ready for rape, ecstasy, tears. Yes, she got up and walked with me the length of two railroad cars and into my compartment. And yes, the sheet was turned down as white and crisp as you ever saw. There was a little vase with three pink carnations sitting on the washstand; lace curtains softened the light from the windows. We were out of our clothes in no time. I could have shouted with pride for my dear old member; I could have hung our clothes on it.