Night Train to Boston

The first thing the man in the gray suit noticed when he sat down was that the train-car reeked of bleach. He felt gypped—he had walked the entire length of the train to find the one car that had seats facing forwards, and once he got in, it smelled so strongly of bleach that he almost gagged. Well, he supposed, at least it was clean. Right?

As soon as the man got used to the smell, the train’s power quit, shutting off the lights and the air conditioning. Without the AC noise, all he could hear were fingers clacking away at keyboards. It was peaceful, even if the man wasn’t internally at peace. But not even this atmospheric peacefulness could last. When the power came back on, a minute or so later, the woman sitting catty-corner from him opened a bowl of fish. Wrinkling his nose, the man stood up. He was careful not to hit his head on the luggage racks above him as he did so; he was quite tall. It was time to go to the dining car, it was time to escape the smells.

Pushing the metal door open, the man went into the dining car. No one stood in line at the counter.

“What can I get for you?”

The man paused for a second. He felt, suddenly, too nauseous to eat.

Then: “Small coffee. With cream.”

The attendant nodded, swiping a styrofoam cup with his right hand before swiveling around to the coffee machine. He poured the coffee in, splashing in the cream afterwards. He slid the styrofoam cup across the counter, and rang up the man on an iPad.

“Three-fifty.”

The man in the gray suit nodded, tapped his credit card, grabbed the coffee, and quietly thanked the attendant. He surveyed the dining car. All the tables were empty—it was pitch-black outside, well past dinnertime. The man chose the booth closest to the counter. He looked out the window, tracing figure-eights against his cup. Even though it was pitch-black outside, there was a lucidity to the darkness. Once in a while, orange lights whisked past—the man reckoned they were cruising well upwards of sixty miles an hour. It would be ambitious to say 100—he knew that, due to shoddy management, this line was no longer capable of those speeds.

He clutched his coffee tightly. A thin film of oil rested atop the liquid. He brought the cup to eye-level and squinted into it, but his stomach turned and he placed the coffee back onto the table in front of him. His cup shuddered pitifully with every one of the train’s jolts. A minute later, both the man in the gray suit and the attendant turned their heads—a rush of air and loud rattling filled the dining car.

“Hey, good evening,” the new entrant said forcefully.

“How's it goin,” said the attendant back.

“Excellent, thank you! Could I get one coffee, with cream and sugar please, and one cookie. You guys got chocolate chip?”

“That’s all we got.”

“Excellent. Just don’t tell my wife, she’ll get on my ass,” the new entrant said, turning to the man in the gray suit and winking preposterously.

The man in the gray suit smiled frigidly back.

The new entrant was a short man. He wore jeans, tennis shoes, a striped button-down, and an ugly brown blazer. The shirt and the blazer were beset by wrinkles. He had a slight New York accent. He paid in cash, and loudly flung his change into the tip jar. Then he turned to the man in the gray suit and, like they were back in elementary school, asked:

“You mind if I sit here?”

The man in the gray suit motioned for him to sit down, though he didn’t particularly want this. He would prefer to be left alone, especially since this new entrant, tastelessly dressed as he was, caused him to suffer an uncomfortable superiority that always comes with being overdressed. As if he, in his slim suit and white shirt and steel cufflinks, was both superior to the man opposite him, and yet also committing some grave faux-pas. At least, he would’ve felt superior if he wasn’t traveling for the reason he was.

“Frank Vitale,” the new entrant said, extending a hand. The hand was lightly calloused and its fingers were thick. The man in the gray suit regarded Frank Vitale for a second, and then daintily offered his fingertips for a light shake. Frank Vitale’s handshake was anything but light.

“Jack Whelan,” the man in the gray suit said softly, wincing a little from the vigorous handshake.

“Where’re ya headed? Providence? Boston? That’s about our options left, huh?”

“Boston,” Jack said, adjusting his cufflinks.

“Me too. You get on at New Haven too?”
“No, New York.”

“Ah New York! Grew up there, you know that? Yep. South Brooklyn. But I bet you live in Manhattan.”

“How could you tell?” Jack said wryly.

“Oh you know us Brooklyn boys, we can always tell things about strangers.”

Both smiled at this: Jack gently, Frank with more largesse. Jack noticed Frank’s stubble, which folded around his lips when he smiled. It coated Frank’s face; he needed a shave. Jack thought to himself, the fluorescent lights do this guy no favors.

“It must’ve been quite something to grow up in Brooklyn.”

“Oh yeah. It was silly. We’d do stupid shit. We’d go drag racing down on Flatbush Ave. You know that area?”

“I’ve been once or twice.”

“It was totally different back then. There was nothing there then, it was empty. You’d get these huge crowds on Friday nights. Trick was to make sure you didn’t hit a spectator. You ever been drag racing?”

“No, I’ve never really been into cars.”

“You know, to be honest with you Jack, I’m not either. But when you’re 17 everything’s different.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, fingering his coffee cup.

“You gonna drink that?” Frank asked, pointing at the coffee.

“Oh. Yes.”

Jack raised the cup to his lips and drank. The coffee had cooled somewhat. It tasted so awful that Jack winced, but he steadied his face and gulped down more. Frank broke off a chunk of his cookie and passed it to Jack, looking from Jack to the cookie and back to Jack while raising his eyebrows—the universal sign for “you want some?” Jack set down his coffee and waved Frank away.

“Sorry, I’m a bit nauseous.”

“Hey, whatever you say.”

Jack took another sip of coffee and looked out the window. The train gathered speed. Jack figured they were in Rhode Island now; the line in Rhode Island was newer and much better maintained than the line in Connecticut.

“But you live in New Haven now,” Jack said, question-like.

“Yep. Work, you know. You go where they pay you.”

“Are you affiliated with Yale?”

“No, no, I’m not that fancy, if you couldn’t tell. SCSU for me. Why—you went to Yale?”

“Yes, a while ago now.”

“Good school, terrible people. That’s what I always say. No offense. But weirdos, all of them, such overachievers. It’s like they’re all, fuckin’, academic firefighters hopped up on cocaine, dashing around a burning library.”

“Well, when I was there, it wasn’t like that. It was less cutthroat. You know, things were different.”

“Of course. It was different for you. Mmhmm. I’m sure Jack, I’m sure.”

Jack exhaled quickly; a mini-laugh. He felt awkward for fiddling with the cup so much, so he forced his hands to quit. But he couldn’t keep them still—soon his hands were reaching underneath his gray suit-jacket to fiddle with his cufflinks. Necco, its janky font imprinted upon the cufflinks. He traced the letters unthinkingly. Bob Boyle, Jack’s ex-father-in-law, had given him the cufflinks; he had worked for Necco before they went under. Now all that was left was the cufflinks and a few other knick-knacks that he would never see, especially not after Mary’s death.

Jack had gotten along excellently with Bob, Bob and Jack got along better than Jack had with his ex-wife Mary. In fact, when Mary divorced Jack (two years ago, almost to the day), Jack felt that losing Bob was worse than losing Mary. Bob was so sure, so confident, such a wonderful underlying presence. To lose Bob was like losing a guide in a foreign country.

Jack brushed his hair aside and squinted out of the window. Nothing to be made out. He thought he could see the ocean, blacker than the trees, but he couldn’t be sure—the train was moving too quickly. Jack had always found the light in New England deceptive. It was so poorly saturated. But that was part of the joy; everything was like a watercolor. Inlets, lakes, endless triple-deckers; the only thing that looked like an oil painting was the sea, its wildness, the choppiness of the waves even when they were at their most placid. The sea gave Connecticut and Rhode Island a sense of frontier. In the rest of America, the sense of frontier was given by the land and sky, by their endlessness. But here, facing east, it was the sea, frothing with a subdued yet terrifying intensity.

But all of this was invisible to Jack from inside the searingly bright dining car. The light was playing tricks on him, and Jack felt that he was being cheated. Jack felt like that a lot nowadays, like he was being cheated. Well, not quite cheated per se, but shortchanged. Oftentimes he felt like he was not being shortchanged by someone else, but that he was shortchanging himself. Or that there was shortchanging going on around him, and he was a central player in it. Jack supposed that Mary was the quintessential example: Mary had oh-so-desperately wanted children. Jack oh-so-desperately hadn’t. Then they began reaching the age at which decisions had to be made (or, at least, Mary was reaching this age). They couldn’t come to an agreement. And so they split; Mary divorced Jack. Neither of them had wanted it per se; it wasn’t that they didn’t love each other. It was simply that this problem was intractable.

Jack remembered when he first fell in love with Mary, six years ago now, when he was just out of college. He used to miss her presence so desperately he would cry on his 16-block walk home from her apartment. Back then, when he’d just graduated college, he thought that he would never fuck her over. But years later, childless and partner-less, Mary was dead, lying in a casket awaiting Jack, futilely racing northwards, sitting across from Frank Vitale.

Whether or not Mary was bitter Jack could never tell. She should’ve been bitter towards him; he certainly would’ve been bitter if he were her. Jack would make even the moral judgment: he deserved her bitterness, her derision, her contempt, her hatred even. He had shortchanged Mary of what had become her raison d’être.

“It was a very good school even back then,” Frank said after the long pause, as if Jack’s quietness was in anger.

“Oh yeah, of course.”

“But the drama, I personally can’t do the drama. So much drama at such a small school!”

“I guess, yeah, there was always drama,” Jack said.

“I mean what do you expect, considering, no offense, the type of people who go there?”

Jack shrugged. Frank wasn’t exactly wrong.

A month after Mary divorced him, while Jack was thick in the throes of her absence, his boss told him, offhandedly talking about someone else, that “sometimes the ugliest things are people’s lives.” Did Frank, sitting across from him, have an ugly life? With his general disheveledness Frank seemed to have known either little suffering or gobs of it. On the one hand, Frank was the cheeriest person on the train. On the other hand, his skin was puffy and sallow. Though, Jack supposed, all of this meant nothing. Look at himself.

A clean break. Jack had wanted to make a clean break. He didn’t want any of the artifacts of their past life. He didn’t want to look like Frank across from him, he didn’t want other people to wonder about the ugliness or beauty of his life, he wanted things to be orderly and pretty so that there would be no guessing. Look clean, act clean, ingest clean foods, keep a clean house; all these things after he and Mary had split. All he had kept were the cufflinks, Bob’s rusting Necco cufflinks. And he loved them, cherished them. So much so that Jack realized, just at this moment across from Frank, while he fingered the cufflinks, what the real problem was. It was precisely that the past two years had felt clean. All this cleanliness made him feel odd, sanitized, hospital-like. The past two years were clean but dead and soulless. Jack’s intention was to kill his old life with Mary, to deprive himself of old comforts and find new ones. And it was comforting, in a way, to be obsessed with tidying up his physical life. But at what cost?

“What do you teach?” Jack asked politely.

“Political science.”

Jack nodded—he had no interest in political science. He had no interest in politics, let alone the mathematical calculations behind why people voted the ways they did. Game theory downright disgusted him. Frank started explaining what he did, and Jack looked blankly into his face. What would it look like if he applied game theory to his own life? Zero-sum game: wasn’t that how he and Mary had divorced in the first place? Either yes to kids or no to kids. No in-between. You couldn’t have a half-kid, after all (pets don’t count).

Route 128. The colorless park-and-ride station rushed into view. Jack wondered if the fish smell had cycled out of his original, handpicked, forward-facing train-car by now. Probably, he thought. He entertained going back to his seat, but felt that Frank’s presence, so loathsome to him at first, had become comfortable.

“You want a beer before South Station? On me.”

“You make a very tempting offer my friend,” Frank responded.

“Is that a yes?” Jack asked, a little too quickly.

“Well. My stop is Back Bay. I can’t have a drink unfortunately, I really ought to get back to my seat and prepare to leave. I gotta be responsible, I don’t want to end up in the yard tonight!”

Jack drained the last of his coffee, lukewarm now, and watched Frank gather his trash in one hand and huff to his feet.

“It’s been good talking to you, Jack,” Frank said, offering his hand for the second time that night.

Jack smiled. “You too.”

Frank shook his hand with gusto, and then edged his way out of the booth. He tapped the attendant’s glass countertop in goodbye, threw his trash in the receptacle at the end of the car, and lurched out of the dining car. The train quickened its pace towards the heart of Boston. Jack could hear the attendant readying the galley for the train’s termination two stations later. Jack figured he should get back to his train-car now.

Back Bay, half-underground, and Jack still had yet to rise out of his booth. He was simply incapable of moving. They were off again, Back Bay and Frank were sliding away; he needed to move, the conductor was coming on now:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the next and last stop is Boston South Station. This train will be terminating in Boston South Station, you must exit the train. The train is going directly to the yard after Boston South Station, if you do not want to end up in the yard you must exit this train. Next and last stop is Boston South Station. Thank you.”

Just like Frank had said, don’t end up in the yard; it was almost as if Frank was the conductor. Smiling slightly to himself as he stood up, Jack slipped out of the dining car and back to his own, which no longer smelled like anything. People were starting to gather their bags and queue up at the doors to exit. Jack grabbed his bag from the racks above him and stood, leaning against the wide gray seats, waiting for the train to slow. The people shuffled out silently, half-asleep at this hour of the night. Jack followed them out onto the platform. The lighting was harsh, the air thick and roaring with diesel fumes. It was sweltering outside of the air-conditioning; walking towards the station house Jack felt his skin prickle with sweat. Still fiddling with Bob’s cufflinks, he pulled out his phone and called a car to his hotel.