Big Boy: Strangers on a Train Read online

  Dedication

  To Twitter, without which the Strangers on a Train stories would not exist.

  And to Meg, Serena, Donna and Sam, with thanks for all the laughs.

  Chapter One

  He always meets me at the gate. The chain link swings open, and I pull my car through at a crawl. I don’t look to the left where he’s standing. I don’t want to know who he is yet.

  Until I step onto the train, he’s nobody special.

  “Are my seams straight?” I ask, pausing in my walk so I can tip the arch of my foot toward the floor of the train car and point my toe. I glance over my shoulder, the epitome of coy.

  I’m Marilyn Monroe from Some Like It Hot tonight. I coaxed Lisa into sewing the black satin dress for me, adding fringe from a flapper costume I found at Goodwill. Lisa says that in this dress, my ass looks like two puppies fighting under a blanket.

  The banked fire in his eyes tells me that’s a good thing.

  He wears a leather jacket and a newsboy cap. He carries my luggage. When we get to my berth, I’ll tip him, and he’ll smirk at me the way he does.

  Rocky is his name. I asked when I handed him my hatbox.

  He’s five or six inches taller than me, his body lean and sculpted by hard work. I bet he looks grand with his clothes off.

  I toss him a smile, another form of gratuity. “Well? Are they?”

  He shakes his head as if I’m doing something to him, and it’s painful, and he’d like me to stop. But all he says is “They’re straight, ma’am.”

  I’m ma’am tonight. I like that.

  I think it means I’ll get to be in charge, but I’m wrong.

  As soon as we pass through the narrow doorway of the berth, he’s on me, his hands spanning my waist, sliding over the curve of my hips. His skin catches the slick material of my dress. He puts his lips on the pulse at my throat and lingers there. I hear him draw in a deep breath, reverent.

  I missed you too.

  And then his mouth is moving down, down, until he reaches the tightly cosseted swell of my breasts.

  “Stop me if you’re gonna stop me, lady.”

  I want to lift my leg up and wrap it around his hip, but I can’t lift anything. I’m wearing a garment designed for mincing around. I know, because I designed it.

  “You’re awfully fresh.” I can feel the smile on his lips as they brush my nipple through the satin. The tease.

  “You married, ma’am?” He addresses the question to my cleavage.

  “You care?”

  “I don’t truck with married women.” He lifts his head to tell me this, his hound-dog eyes all soulful and dark. He’s lost the cap. I see it on the floor where our feet have tangled together, Glen-check wool next to beat-up cordovan oxfords and two-tone pumps with bows on the toes.

  I spent days finding the right shoes.

  “A cad with principles.” I furrow my fingers through his hair. He’s slicked it back, but I loosen it. I like it falling in his eyes. “That’s rich.”

  “Who says I’m a cad?”

  He squeezes my ass, his long fingers pressing close to where I want them but not close enough.

  “Jeez, fella,” I say on an exhale, dropping my head to the wall behind me and letting my eyes drift closed. “I sure as hell hope you’re a cad.”

  I imagine the vibration of the train in the wall behind my back as he peels the satin off my shoulders and puts his mouth on me. As he drops to his knees and pushes the dress up my hips. The fringe ought to be an impediment, but he’s the sort of man who can handle a little fringe.

  He’s not a cad, though. Not really.

  The babysitter is sick, and I hate her.

  This makes me a bad person, I know. She sounds so pathetic on the phone, frog-voiced and snotty, and I’m supposed to comfort her. It feels like emotional blackmail. Why do I have to be nice to her when she’s ruining my day?

  “I can still come if you want me to.” She means I want to stay in bed and watch reruns of bad television. “I just don’t want to get Josh sick.” Only a very bad mother would expose her child to this pestilence. A very bad, very selfish mother.

  I’m not a bad mother. Not usually. But there’s no room in my life for sick babysitters. I have to teach in forty minutes, and I haven’t done my class prep yet. I have office hours afterward, meetings with nine separate students to talk about papers they haven’t started thinking about writing. I have a dissertation chapter to finish if I’m going to manage not to get fired when I come up for my contract renewal in the fall.

  Sometimes Josh gets the short end of the stick, but I console myself with the thought that I get it a lot more often.

  I’m not a bad person. On the other hand, I’m not such a good one that I’m going to tell my babysitter to stay home. This will be a life lesson for her: Don’t say yes when you mean no.

  Maybe if I’d learned that lesson sooner, I’d have told my sister no when she asked me if she could put me in her will as her children’s guardian. Then, when Paige and her husband and my three-year-old niece, Ava, got killed by a drunk driver, I wouldn’t have become the mother of a nine-day-old infant.

  But if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have Josh now, and not having Josh has become inconceivable.

  Sweet as pie, I ask the babysitter, “Why don’t you come on over? He has a strong immune system. If you feel really crappy, you can show him cartoons.”

  Of course, Josh gets sick the next day.

  He sleeps badly, waking up every hour and calling for me. I set up a humidifier in his room, rub his back and soothe him to sleep, but by the third time he wakes, I’ve given up on the idea of getting any sleep myself. I rock him in my arms for hours, singing folk songs when he gets fussy.

  He tucks his head against my neck, breathing warm against my skin, and I feel so guilty. So inadequate.

  I should’ve canceled my office hours and stayed home with him. I should put him in daycare, but I can’t afford it. My salary is pitiable, and I have loans to pay off. So I make do with a couple of babysitters, telling myself he’s better off at home, spending as much time as possible with me.

  But when I’m at home with him, I’m a distracted mother, always trying to get away with as much work or as much cleaning as I can. He wants nothing but me—my attention, my love—and I want to give it to him, only I want so many other things too.

  When Paige and I were kids, we both thought we’d have big families one day. I imagined a husband and three children, every little girl’s version of domestic bliss. Then I went to college, and I spent the summer after my sophomore year as a camp counselor in Colorado. The job was relentless. Cabins full of eight-year-olds for three weeks at a stretch. They never stopped needing me for one second. I felt like I was suffocating.

  That’s when I decided I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. I was always the better student, anyway. I focused on school and let Paige focus on motherhood. She found her husband, her scrapbooking group, her happy domesticity. I went to grad school and fooled around in an unserious way with unserious boys.

  I pet Josh’s back, breathing against the solid weight of his sleeping body pressing into my neck, my breasts, my belly. I wouldn’t trade him for the world.

  I want him to have everything, but all he has is me.

  Lisa’s students call her Lisa. Mine call me Professor Sharp. I suspect this is no mere accident. I’m a nice person but a hard grader. I kick them out of my classroom for texting, and I tell them things about Indian nations and white-male privilege that disturb their comfortable worldviews.

  My students walk into my classroom expecting odes to the American frontier and walk out disgusted with their ancestors, incapable of waving a flag or watchin
g a Fourth of July parade without deconstructing it.

  Some of them dislike me for this, but the best ones love having their eyes opened. They sit in my office and wax enthusiastic about prejudice and abuse, nattering on about how the readings I’ve assigned them have recast the way they look at everything.

  I used to be like them. It’s hard to remember now, but that sort of critical idealism is what got me into grad school in the first place. These days, I fill my grocery-store cart up with packaged baby foods and state-government-subsidized milk, and it’s harder to get fired up about any of it. The condition of my bank account and Josh’s diaper seem to be about all the worries I can handle.

  I’m a professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, the most recent hire in an abysmal job market. I got the job three months before I got Josh. I was packing up to move when Paige died and everything changed.

  Now I’m in my second year in Green Bay, and I like it well enough. It’s the sort of place people don’t move away from, which means I’ll be an outsider even if I live here until I die. Which I might. There are pitifully few jobs in my field, and I hadn’t liked being on the market. So many sharks fighting over so little chum.

  I’m Mandy to my friends, Amanda to my mother when she calls, which is not all that often. She lives in Oregon, and she’s mourning Paige’s death with long stretches of silence and solo camping trips that worry me. I’ve tried to talk her into relocating to Wisconsin so we can have each other for company and she can help me with Josh. She says she needs the quiet and the high desert to heal.

  Josh calls me Mama, which is my favorite name. I love him with a ferocity that scares me. I once made myself retch thinking about what would happen if he died in a plane crash or got sick or abused.

  But having a baby is like having a bad boyfriend. Josh will kiss me one minute and smack me in the face with a sharp-edged block the next. If he could talk, he’d say, I need you, Mama. I need you so bad.

  It wears me out, being needed.

  Lisa calls me a martyr and tells me to stop trying to save everybody and take care of myself.

  I do, I tell her. I do.

  But it’s not exactly true. One night a month, I let somebody else take care of me.

  Chapter Two

  After Rocky has me thoroughly sullied, he helps me clamber up on top of the train car, and we look at the stars.

  His idea. He has all the fun ideas.

  Technically, there aren’t any stars, of course. The Pullman car is housed indoors. But the train is real, unyielding beneath my back. He’s real too, holding my hand and breathing beside me in the dark. It’s easy enough to pretend.

  When I’m with him, anything can be true.

  “Do you ever think you were born into the wrong life?” I ask.

  It’s not an idle question. Our role-playing has brought all these other versions of me to the surface. Some of them come so easily and feel so real, I wonder if they’re authentic echoes of the person I ought to be.

  I like the women I am with him.

  “Do I want to be rich, you mean?”

  “Not rich, necessarily. Just somebody else.”

  Maybe it’s an odd question. Maybe porters named Rocky don’t think about such things. But he’s not always Rocky. Last month, he was a vacuum-cleaner salesman from Spokane. The month before that, he was an investment broker.

  Every fourth Tuesday night, we’re both somebody else.

  He rolls to his side and leans close to kiss my temple, which makes my eyelids flutter closed. “Every day.”

  “Who would you be?”

  “A Rockefeller.” I open my eyes to catch a glimpse of his confident smirk. “All the oysters I could eat.”

  “Oysters are vile.”

  “Nah.” His expression turns mischievous, the way it does when he’s about to say something he knows will wind me up. “They taste like a woman.”

  “You’re vile,” I accuse with a smile.

  He tangles his fingers in my hair and kisses me. The hot sweep of his tongue into my mouth erases my disappointment in his answer. He hadn’t said what I wanted him to say. I don’t know what I wanted him to say.

  “A complete cad,” he agrees. “But that’s what a woman like you needs.”

  “What kind of woman am I?”

  “You’re a racehorse. You need a man who will work you up to a good lather and rub you down right.”

  “Maybe you should give that a try.”

  “Up here? We’re liable to fall off and break our necks.”

  I twist sideways so I can pull him closer, sneaking my hands inside his jacket to find the ridged plain of his rib cage with my palms. He smells like leather and thrift stores and the peppermint candy he offered me right before he hoisted me up.

  “Tell me a secret,” I say, reckless. “Tell me something nobody knows.”

  I know all about him. He hates the smell of lilies. His grandmother died in a factory fire. He wants to visit Fenway Park one day.

  The trouble is, I don’t know what’s true, or if any of it is. He’s better than I am at disguising his real self.

  Tonight, I want a sliver of honesty to pierce the illusion. A splinter of reality to carry in my pocket all month, to cherish with my fingertips, thinking of him.

  He presses me onto my back and stares down at my face, his irises seeming to stutter as he considers my lips, my forehead, my chin. One finger traces the shape of my cheekbone, and he says, “Nobody but me knows the way you look up here in the moonlight.”

  Pretty words. There’s a tenderness in his expression that I don’t think he’s faking. I feel cherished and fragile—a rare experience, considering that I spend a lot of my time being smeared with food and climbed all over by a rambunctious toddler.

  But on the other hand, there is no moonlight.

  He kisses me so gently, I think I might break, and then he lies back down, tucking my head into the hollow of his shoulder. He strokes my arm, humming a tune in my ear I don’t recognize. I can imagine it playing on a phonograph, the blanket of white noise overlaying both of us. The static pop of the recording.

  All we ever do is lie to each other. Fool that I am, I’d hoped he would tell me the truth.

  We met online. How else?

  Lisa wants to find a life partner, and she’d talked me into thinking online dating made sense. I blame sleep deprivation. Josh was four months old then, and I hadn’t had an uninterrupted night’s rest since I took custody of him.

  I moved through the days in a fog, mainlining coffee to keep from nodding off during any silence that lasted longer than twenty seconds. In my profile picture, I looked like a zombie, but the algorithm the dating service relied on kept matching me up with brainless men. After three hapless, awkward dates, I tried sifting through the profiles on my own.

  That’s when I found him. Viscount Curzon. In his profile picture, he wore a cravat and a monocle.

  In another one, he was Benjamin Piatt Runkle, a Civil War soldier. Under Accomplishments, he’d typed, Survived the Battle of Shiloh. His picture was tinted sepia, like a daguerreotype.

  The third one, for Frank Sinatra Jr., made me laugh out loud. Dislikes: Living in father’s shadow. Likes: Loose women.

  I found eight of them altogether, each with its own picture. He did a remarkable job of looking like eight different men. I mean, I could tell it was him—he had the same hazel eyes, the same sandy-brown hair in every photo. But he inhabited the disguises.

  I showed Lisa, and she told me he was weird. I’d already figured that out. Still, I was surprised how much stock she put in it. His weirdness was what appealed to me. I felt so unfocused so much of the time in those days—like I wasn’t myself anymore, but I wasn’t a new person either. I was a blob with feet.

  This guy knew something I didn’t. He knew how to change identities nimbly, with a gleam in his eyes that said I’m having more fun than you are.

  I sent him an email. It had to go through the d
ating service, so he only knew me as Mandy, and I only knew him as Chet Baker. Likes: Porkpie hats, West Coast jazz, heroin. Dislikes: Rigamarole.

  He told me he had rules. He didn’t want to know my last name or what I did for a living, and he didn’t want to tell me anything about himself, either. It was the very opposite of what the dating service encouraged us to do.

  I accepted his boundaries and tried to engage him in chitchat about music, movies, books. He asked me out. Sort of.

  He proposed to meet me at the gate of the National Railroad Museum at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night. I had to wear something appropriate to 1957.

  Lisa said he was a crackpot and I should stay away. But I liked the idea of meeting him in costume. If he could pretend to be Chet Baker or whoever, I could pretend to be the version of myself who didn’t have a four-month-old. I could be the superseded me, a competent grad student who never burst into tears at the drop of a hat.

  I suppose I was betraying the new me, but I didn’t like her much.

  Lisa agreed to babysit. She helped me find a boiled-wool travel suit and locate a source for heavy silk stockings. We curled my hair with rags.

  When I got out of my car in the parking lot, I noticed the angle of his hat first. He wore a dark checked jacket with a pocket square, held a cigarette in his mouth that he never lit, and had a louche way of leaning against the brick side of the museum that put me at ease.

  “You can be whoever you want,” he told me before he led me to the Aerotrain. “Just stay in character.”

  The National Railroad Museum—a considerably less grand operation than the name implies—houses a couple dozen trains. Some are scattered around the grassy grounds, but most, including the fin-tastical 1950s Aerotrain designed by General Motors, are lined up in a huge outdoor shed that’s open on both ends to the elements.

  Only the very best trains—the rarest, the well preserved—are indoors, in the Lenfestey Center. The main building also houses a few exhibits, staff offices and a gift shop. Four times a day, they offer a train ride around the tracks that circle the property.