The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Read online

  We sat down against all the clashing, to a slow rhythm of our own. He stared at me closely. A nightclub table is built to just such a small radius across which couples may lean stalk to stalk, like negligently stacked flowers, or like two matches fused at the top.

  I turned, as if on the swivel of vanity, so that he might see, even in that dusky jazz-light, all I was. A wig is the more risky the less swirls and curls it has to conceal the hairline; every wig has to have some—unless it would be like those poor nothings, the toupees; this wig had almost none. It was cut almost flat, like a young girl’s or a boy’s, almost gamine. Some wearers, of course, can pull out a little of the real hair beneath, to blend. I turned again, to an inner wish—but he was looking at my eyes.

  “You’re always changing it,” he said; “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you spent half your time at it.” I looked out on the scene before us, where almost everyone else was pretending to be private right out in public.

  “Why,” I said, “I’m in the habit of … wearing wigs.” For how many weeks I had planned that careful phrase, that gay plural! “Didn’t you know?” And when he looked blank—“Years ago, they used to call them … ‘transformations.’”

  He said “Ah, is that it?” and after a moment, “Yes … I know that my mother-in-law—but I thought it was only older women—” He was still doting on my eyes, one of his hands, in nightclub manners, with mine a-playing.

  And I said, to the same swing-a-ding of it, “Oh not any more, everyone’s doing it now.”

  I grind my teeth now, to think of it, how I put my birthright down there with those others.

  Then he said, “Well, I may be sentimental, but I like this one best. And tell me … I’ve an idea … I’ve a suspicion—”

  A skin that can’t tan can blush the deeper; the hot, expectant dye rose from shoulders, to cheek—to scalp. I awaited him, steadily.

  “Now, tell me,” he said, “isn’t this the real one? The original?”

  I lowered my face, until that flush should ebb. “It was, once,” I managed to say hoarsely.

  “And now?” His cheek was almost on mine.

  “And now?” I said. “And now—almost. Not quite.”

  Then the singer, Makeba, came in to sing. “Isn’t her head beautiful?” I said. “I wanted you to see it.” My wig, pat to my head as it was, felt clumsy. She stretched back her ebony head, that long, almost shaven head which needed no goldleaf behind it, on which there was merely the faintest blur, only a hairsbreadth of difference between it and skull, a head drawn all in one swelling line which completed itself again, into which setting the face receded like a jewel. He agreed to all these points, adding only that length of neck also was a point of beauty—that singular head, like a music box with a bird in it, on that neck poised. And once more, he doubted that ever a Western—And I stretched so that he could see that my neck also was long. And then we rose, to a rhythm of our own, and went home.

  “Very good,” he said when we were inside. Travel-case in hand, he scrutinized the room as if it were a collection submitted to him for the museum, but I had pruned as close to the personality I wanted here as the most careful grower of dull plants, even among the prints permitting myself only that commonplace Cranach nude, the high oval of whose forehead flows endlessly from her other nudity, back, back into the dark, “—very good, but where’s the rest of you?”

  I thrilled to the roots of my danger, like a cat in her suit of fur. “What do you mean?”

  He put the case down, teetering on his heels, as if he were here for forever. “Come, come,” he said, “anybody talks to you for ten minutes knows you draw your imagery from some other world than the one you look like—I got it the first ten minutes I saw you. And it’s certainly not this one.”

  Never before had I been wild enough to dream him into those alleyways I had assumed I must give up for him, seeing him there at best like some large balloon in the shape of a philanthropist, which I might perhaps tug after me, on tour. But now, I stretched my neck for him, delirious with his cleverness.

  “Yes, like that,” he said “—and then you’ll say something with a joke at the back of it, or a pun even, that I can’t catch. But there’s no joking to this place.” He surveyed the room again, scanned the books with a nail. “Ah, I begin to see,” he murmured. “For the other ‘workers,’ eh, as you call them. Your fellow workers. That avocation of yours, that I can never quite believe in.”

  Yet he was marrying me. My legs trembled toward our pleasure, like some girl of the trottoir married by a young roué for her purity—which she has. His hand strayed toward the sugar-cheap marble bust of the English jurist, the ripple of his mouth turning down.

  “He looks like you,” I said. My voice tremored. “That’s why I bought it.”

  He shrugged, smiled, and said, “Sculpture with curls? Or beneath them? D’ya suppose they were his own, powdered? Must say he doesn’t look too honest.”

  Oh, he was keen. Somewhere, a little lady, sitting quiet back there in her altogether, had observed this, adding gaily to herself, “all as it should be, invisibles on both sides.” I smiled back at him. “I haven’t been to your place,” I said.

  “Ah, nothing there,” he answered. He was holding the bust to the mirror, its profile parallel with his own. “Guess I carry my crimes with me,” he murmured, mugging at himself like a man sure of only a few hearty blemishes. Then he put the bust down, smoothed his own crown where it was tan-bare, and sighed, in the bluff way men can, when they refer to that—fact. “Uh-oh. Soon.”

  “Soon!” I echoed greedily—what lechers hope makes! I pushed him toward the bathroom, left towels in his hands, turned on lights for him. “In ten minutes.” And I went into the bedroom and closed the door.

  My vanity there was pillows. There must have been dozens piled in rows against the headboard, all of the tenderest fabrics for hot-weather nudity, in all of the softest aurora tints—dozens of small pillows all cut to the same replica oval, so that if a head had a fancy to lie there in its own altogether it would seem in any mirror opposite to be lying half in a camouflage of repetitions, or if it sat up, to be rising in the midst of innumerable crescent convexities of itself. Egotism—or beauty—always tends itself most saddeningly in the boudoir. And that was the way I meant to appear, to rise for him, no rubicund Titian rosy-packed in her own curves to the forehead only, but calm crescent of the earliest hour, a Western Aurora.

  I embowered myself, taking up a mirror. On my lips I left only the faint vermeil one finds on the lips of bisque dolls, for whom, as they sat bare in the shop, I sometimes felt a sororal—ah now, leave that! But I added more eye shadow, knowing from experience that our so perfect orbs, when left unshaded below that other high oval one, tend to occupy more of its beauty than their fair share. Then I stripped.

  He was a gentleman, and gentlemen do not knock. More than that, he was a courtier to the end—or almost. What had he expected of me, other than those innocent capers for which the maribou and the veils might be bought in any bridal salon? We were to marry, and with the respectable zest of the song-of-the-week, he wanted “all of me”—but perhaps not quite so much as he saw. He uttered my name. Again and again he uttered it. Then, in a whisper … “You didn’t … you—” Then he came forward. “But … my darling!” he said then, “… you shouldn’t have done it. Not even for me.”

  Already I knew my mistake, made from the moment I heard him at Knoller’s, from my first wig, from age thirteen and before, flowing endlessly back. Any mystery or hope I had made of him—it had all been in my own head from the beginning. But women are slow to unfreeze from their own legends. So I sat there, the draft cold on me in the hour of my only avowal.

  “Don’t you see how artificial it is?” he said. “Unless it comes from the culture? Otherwise—it’s … depravity.” He forced himself to look at me, even tenderly. “My dear,” he said, “there’s a difference between art and life, you know.” He sighed. “But women never see
it. They always overdo.”

  And though I held myself upright in silhouette, meanwhile repeating inner aves to Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Piero della Francesca, he never said a word about the Western world.

  Then he carefully turned down the light, and came to bed with me. He was a gentleman, even if one interested only in statutory nudity. And I think now that he may have had his own wistful legend of me that I violated: either that I was not all I should be—meadows!—or most romantical of all, to the rich—that I was poor. Perhaps, and this is hardest to say, I was his vagrant.

  For in the end—I’ll come to that. But then and there, hell had its furies, and I my vengeance. Men know earlier and better than we what the razor can do and what it can’t. I waited until we were fully entwined, then I rested the crown of my head—which his hands had avoided—on his lips.

  After a moment, he shuddered, but I held on firmly, moving it only to caress. And after another moment—though strong nostrils indicate what they will to the contrary—we were parted. Willy-nilly, a small sob escaped me.

  “Oh my God,” he said, not in ecstasy, and even through the dark I could see how he was aghast.

  Then I rose, locked myself in the wig closet, and stayed there throughout all his protestations—a weak opinion of which we both shared—until, at dawn, he at last left me. Art and life, was it? I had taught him the difference.

  Three days later, attired in a new Beehive-with-Double-Guiche, and carrying a spare, I left for Bangkok, telling myself that I had good powers of recuperation, perhaps a hairsbreadth too much humor ever to find my solution in ars amoris—and two more weeks of vacation. And who should know better than we of the Agency that when people lack love affairs, or pressing money ones, they turn to a study of the ethical world?

  Just before I was leaving, the switchboard rang to ask me to take delivery on a package. “Keep it for me!” I snapped, but the doorman said “No, we can’t, Miss. It’s come in an armored car.”

  It was the picture that we had both wanted, from Knoller’s. I saw the tremendous justice of this, that I should have what so suited me—and what I hadn’t paid for, so dearly. But there wasn’t time to open it, so I locked it up with the wigs to keep them company, and didn’t read his card until I was well out, on the plane.

  “Forgive me,” he wrote gracefully, “and forget me. I am a dilettante.”

  Ah he was clever, clever enough even to speak the truth about himself—though I should have phrased it differently. The half-bald often are. Later on, in the hotel, I meant to send him a cable of acknowledgment, then thought better of it and settled for a postcard on which I wrote obscurely, and may never have sent at all. “I have seen them,” it said. “The monks of Bangkok.”

  They walked the streets in the early morning in their orange tunics, going from house to house with their begging bowls, young boys to old men; a man could shave his head to be a monk at any time, could leave his marriage, his children, his aged, and people would understand his reasons; indeed it was expected of every man that for at least once in his lifetime he would live hairless. And agreed, they were beautiful as they walked the dawn-hours with their concept. And their heads (though merely shaven), when met at any angle—the high twin-domes of the forehead brooding toward the welkin, or that sweet rear haunch above the neck muscles, nakedly working—when met at any hour, these were golden unaided, of themselves. But monks though they were, they were men also, and though some women can study up ethically to be anything, I am not one of them. Now and then, I glimpsed the lean-headed, black-garbed widows, but after all, as yet I hadn’t had their successes either. And finally, there were the common people, denuded merely to be sanitary, which I already was. There remained—if I were to insist on a group solution to both philosophical problems and practical ones—one simple course I had never considered myself temperamentally suited for, which however, via an awkward incident in the hotel swimming pool, was brought again to my attention.

  At certain hours the pool, a handsome one surprisingly free-form for the East, was deserted, when it was my pleasure to float on my back there in equally free meditation, reviewing the temple-shaped lamps which bordered it, and other more distant pagodas. Actually, the Thai civilization was in many ways also a heavily hatted one—rooftops, headdressed goddesses, dancers—and I found this mentally very supportive. What at home seemed the inexcusable doubleness of the world here seemed merely inexhaustible, and—oh blessings of travel—not my burden.

  At these times, due to my having only a spare wig with me, I wore bathing cap merely, one of those shaggy rubber flowers, silly thing, but with a chin strap that buttoned securely under each ear. It is also germane that on this day, the bathing suit I wore was black. For, as I floated, quite suddenly I was jounced, splashed, dived under, sent upright and grabbed round the waist by a man who said, “Tell by that cap you’re from the U.S.—hi!”

  It was my fleeting impression that he was one of those pink-eyed jockey-types who might be either in the opium trade or a representative of American business; it was my firmer one that he was drunk as blazes on gimlets, not frangipani. I batted him away, but he hung on, saying, “Come on baby, don’ wan’ drown you, jus’ wan’ see more of you,” and binding both my wrists with one of his hands, he tore off my cap with the other. And there we were, treading water vis-a-vis.

  Right then and there in the water, he crossed himself. “Omigod, sorry Sister!” he managed to say before he clutched his own head and turned tail. “Sorry omigod, Sister. It never entered my mind nuns went to bathe.”

  Dressed and downstairs again, I saw no trace of my attacker, but there was now a party of French nuns on the terrace, their enormous, paper-boat-shaped white coifs in full sail. They were several tables away, but in a sense we took tea together. Is it indeed a beautiful arraignment, I asked myself and them, that one in which the skull is first adorned with itself and then forever hidden? I thought of how it must be done, that holy barbering, in community, in gaiety even—a bride. But almost at once I answered myself, hearkening nearer today than I knew. No, even in community, even in communion, I said to myself, it would be an ugly baldness, not a holy one, that tried to hide its birthright under the coif.

  One more incident of my tour might be reported. Under the hotel’s porte-cochere, a wide advance of steps led up to the doorway. To the left of these, against the façade of the building itself, a line of pariah dogs always rested. Thousands of them, it was said, roamed the city, since it was forbidden by Buddhist law to destroy them—though the police reduced their numbers on the sly. These particular dogs were smart or discreet; they had sought the better part of that public safety whose gradations—from park bench to lamppost, from the outer doors of churches to the underside of bridges—are known to strays the world over. And just as I went up those steps for the last time, one of the dogs—not the mangiest but with a few bare patches—keeping his head on his paws, the way dogs do, rolled his eyes up at me, unmistakably me, and slowly thumped his tail. Dozens of other travelers were going up and down, and to my certain knowledge he and I had never met before, yet he lifted his coattails to me, as it were, in signal.

  That day, of course, I ignored it, and continued up the steps of the Hotel Erewan in Bangkok, with exit visa, passport and other credits necessary to the upper parallel, intent only on packing my bags and my conclusions. Half an hour later I had done both, after the fashion of most vacationers. These people here, I told myself, were foreigners, working out their destinies according to foreign reasons; despite our common plight, neither their religion, their bereavements nor their lice as yet were mine.

  So I skipped back home, not unfrolicsomely on the way, unlocked the wigs and recurled them, unpacked a picture and hung it in the wig closet, put away my pillows and one wig forever, gave a brunch for some colleagues, after which I spent the night on the wharves, sharing my Aquascutum with I-don’t-know-who, who was harmless—in short I went back to being myselves. And there I had been ever since—until y
esterday. And to con it all over in memory had taken only as long as it takes to fly from Logan to LaGuardia. Brahma itself comes more slowly.

  When I disembarked, I tried after all to leave the kit behind, stowed in the overhead rack under a blanket, but the second stewardess came from the rear and handed it to me, shaking her head like a coy goddess—“Tchk, tchk!” I agreed with her estimate of me—“Tchk!”—ran down the ramp, passing two women carrying familiar boxes, and caught a cab which deposited me at Rockefeller Center at 2:48.

  Standing in the entry to the Morgan Guaranty, there was a woman not carrying one, but wearing one. It was the best of its kind, every hair human, delicately Aryan and singly sewn, but she had been ill-advised on the streaking, which was contradicted by several small tufts of reality she had coaxed out at the sides. I even knew her procurer, who turns such cases over to an assistant. Under my stare, she reddened, then bridled—there’s never much finesse to these liars-without-cause. I waited coolly, until I was sure her eye had certified my carefree, blown strands as being dumpily my own, then I murmured, “Next time, get Duvoisin himself,” and swept on. Let them cover the earth, these towhead triflers, layercake beauties, fake Marie Antoinettes who will never know the guillotine; they would never catch up with me, who had, as it were, one more head up my sleeve.

  For meditation, there is no place so pure as one of the patrons’ cells in the safe-deposit vaults of a bank like the Guaranty; the silence whines on diatonically, set to a combination whose tumblers never fall. After transacting my upstairs business in a gay welter of powers of attorney to attorneys, and notary seals each as firm in design as one large drop of blood from a cardinal, I went downstairs to the vaults. The men there greeted me profoundly, like butlers trained to be grandfathers, or vice versa, and I them, in the proper responses—over the years we had trained each other well—and then I took my long box, of the usual raggle-taggle of certificates and costumery (which I meant not even to open), went into my cell, and sat down.