NIGHT VISION

The couchette from Paris to Interlaken leaves from the Gare de Lyon just before midnight. The station at that hour is vast and gloomy, and, to Steven, their group seemed noisy and brash, invading the deep spaces with careless noise. Everyone seemed to have come on with them from the restaurant, though only Steven, his wife, Lisa, and Clive were getting on the train.

Walking down the long platform, Steven listened to the steady hollow echo of their footsteps. Clive was in front, like a general leading his troops. He was an old friend of Lisa’s, an English journalist who lived in Paris. He wore blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a camel’s-hair coat thrown over his shoulders like a cape. Lisa walked beside him, her long legs in high purple boots, a fringed shawl thrown over her jacket. They were arguing, as usual.

“You are so arrogant,” Lisa said, “you Brits are all so arrogant.” Steven could not hear Clive’s answer. Lisa took a rapid, skipping step to keep up, and the fringe on her shawl swung angrily.

Next to Steven walked a sulky French girl with short, gleaming hair, and on the other side of her was the Italian who wanted to buy a vineyard in California. They were all Clive’s friends, they, and the English couple who wrote screenplays, and the rich Portuguese Clive played tennis with. Steven and Lisa had met them for the first time at the crowded, smoky restaurant near the Madeleine.

Steven had sat between the English couple, who had ignored him completely, quarreling steadily across him. At least this had relieved him of making an effort at conversation; he was deeply tired. He had spent the last two days at the Paris office of his company’s law firm: an annual task, annually exhausting. The sudden flood of French and the long row of decisions to be made had worn him out. Walking down the platform he felt suspended in exhaustion like a diver in deep water, all sound and connections gone. He longed to be on the train, rolled in a blanket, rocked in darkness.

Steven blinked his eyes. They felt, not exactly painful, but there was an ache, some sense of dull unease he could not quite name. He squinted in the dim light: some trick of the shadows, or the echoing spaces, or perhaps it was the lateness of the hour that made it impossible to see certain things. He could not seem to focus on things at a certain distance, things he was—wasn’t he?—accustomed to seeing clearly.

There was an invasive chill in the damp air, and Steven hunched his shoulders against it. The voices of Clive and Lisa rose and faded, sliding in and out of his consciousness like a radio left on in another room. He heard Clive say politely, “Oh, you have universities in America, do you?” and then he heard him laugh; he wondered what Lisa had done.

The three of them were going skiing in Switzerland, though Steven, rumpled, cold, tired, in the endless gloom of the midnight station, could not now imagine why. The Paris trip usually took place in the summer, but this year it had been changed to March. When Steven had heard this, he had wondered if he should go over alone, and plan another trip with Lisa in the summer.

They had discussed it one night in their kitchen, Steven in his shirtsleeves and his old corduroys, leaning against the white painted table, waiting for dinner. The table was already set; Lisa had given him a white nineteen-twenties plate, with stylized baskets of yellow flowers around the rim. She had given herself an old, crackled blue-and-white rose pattern: her china was all bought singly at junk shops, and none of her plates matched. Lisa stood at the big old-fashioned stove on its high legs. On either side of it the wooden cabinets, glass-fronted, reached up to the ceiling. Lisa’s assortment of china was dimly visible through the panes.

“Paris in March won’t be any fun,” said Steven. “Maybe I should just go over and come back, and you and I can go together later, in the summer.”

Lisa shook her head impatiently, pushing her hair away from her face with her forearm. Steven stepped forward and put his arms around her from behind. He put his face into her hair, the cloudy mass of it, faintly rough, like soft grass. She leaned against him, and he moved his hands across the strong arch of her ribs. Over her shoulder Steven could see the trembling blue circles of flame beneath the pots, he could feel the heat coming up at his face. He felt the small shifts and tensions in Lisa’s thighs, in her shoulders, as she leaned forward to stir something. She was making a risotto, and the smell of the cheese, the stock, rose up at him with the steamy heat. Lisa’s shoulders were against his chest, and he felt the soft rise of her rump against his thighs. He liked holding his wife from behind: it allied him with her, it put them on the same side.

“Oh, no,” said Lisa, “don’t go alone. Let’s not waste the trip.”

“But it will be cold and damp, everywhere, even if we go to the south of France, or Italy.”

“Well, we can go somewhere it’s meant to be cold. We’ll go skiing.”

“Skiing,” said Steven.

“Why not?”

“I haven’t skied in years,” said Steven. “I don’t ski.”

“You do,” said Lisa, “you just don’t.”

It was true that Steven had skied years ago, before his first marriage. He had given it up when he married; his first wife had disliked it, and they had gone south for winter vacations. Now the whole process of skiing seemed cold and cumbersome, part of someone else’s life. He was trying to put his past behind him, he was addressing this new life, Lisa. They had been married for two years, and were still finding things out about each other.

Lisa was a graphic designer, she was from California, and she was ten years younger than Steven. She was smart and energetic and funny. She seemed interested in everything: She took easily things that he thought were serious, seriously things he thought were insignificant. She loved opera, which he found daunting, and she thought duck shooting silly, which he found faintly wounding. She liked baseball, and could recite the history, all the statistics, of each of the players. She had served on the Santa Monica School Board, she had taught art classes in London, she had bred Australian sheep dogs. She had no children, and would not discuss it (something had gone wrong, years ago). She took for granted both the importance of her job and of his happiness: this was the most remarkable thing about Lisa, for Steven. She loved him. He was amazed at this, and grateful. Not only did she love him, she loved him strenuously: she confronted him with herself, she made inescapable the fact that she loved him. At night she slept clambered boldly about his body, each move he made was encumbered, involved, with her soft light limbs. She wrapped herself into his life, his nights, she made him quicken.

Three years earlier Steven had left his first wife and his daughter in their old apartment on East Seventy-second Street. When he took up with Lisa he moved across town, into her apartment on West End Avenue. Steven had never lived on the West Side, and this felt like a bold political move. Lisa’s building had high ceilings and graceful moldings, like Steven’s old apartment, but, instead of a grand piano in the living room, there was Lisa’s drafting table, austere, angular, functional. On the wall, instead of English horticultural prints, she had hung something she had found in a junkyard: the old Pontiac symbol, a huge metal Indian head in silhouette. It was still rusty around the edges, and Steven had suggested that they send it to a restorer, but Lisa said it was the roughness that she liked.

The Indian head, like the neighborhood, seemed to have undergone some mysterious gentrification process. It was not the kind of thing he had grown up with, and Steven was never sure what to make of it. Sometimes it seemed a tawdry relic—junk, really—the symbol of a steamy, seamy decade, one of scarlet lips and adolescent passions. Sometimes it seemed serious, a classical silhouette, an ideal of speed and nobility. But he liked this, its mutability, and the idea of seeing things in a new way excited him. He was grateful to Lisa, for changing his life, for bringing him these new visions. And she, like the Indian, was full of mysterious shifts, unexpected views. Why did she buy used plates from sidewalk sales and junk shops, instead of from a proper china store? And what about the rusty edges on the Indian head? He was used to having things clean, things arranged so that you were in charge of them, so you knew what they were. These shifts that Lisa brought to him were exhilarating but unsettling.

“I’m not from your tribe, that’s all.” Lisa told him. She had majored in anthropology at Berkeley. “These are tribal differences between us, not ethical ones.” Sometimes Steven did feel as though he were with a member of some wild tribe, she seemed so full of conviction, so knowledgeable about such strange things. He felt bewildered and tentative, he had no choice but to trust her.

Standing in the kitchen, Steven felt reluctant at her suggestion. “Skiing,” he said. He had given it up, years ago. He felt too old to start all that up again, the risks of those steep, cold slopes.

“Clive will know somewhere to go,” Lisa said decisively, “I’ll call him tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to call Clive to find a place for us to go skiing,” Steven said, nettled. “I can find a place for us to go.”

Lisa looked at him at once and smiled. “All right,” she said. “I know that.”

And there they left it, Steven thought, but the next day Clive called Steven at his office. Clive had just been talking to Lisa, he said, and she had mentioned their plan to go skiing. He thought he should tell Steven about a little village in the Bernese Oberlands, beneath the famous Eiger, where there were old-fashioned pensions, broad treeless pistes, wonderful food, and no cars.

“It sounds very nice,” said Steven politely.

“It is rather sweet, actually,” Clive said. “You get there on the night train from Paris, and change at Interlaken. And there’s one little inn in particular that I know, I think you’d like it.”

“I wonder if it would be hard to book all that this late in the season.”

“I’ve already called the pension,” said Clive, “and I’ve found out about the train. Everything is still available. I’ll book it for us from here if you like.”

“Ah, you’re coming with us, are you?” Steven asked, irritated.

“If you can bear it. Lisa very kindly suggested that you might be able to. But tell me if you’d rather be alone. I’d love to see you both, and as it happens I’ll be between things then. But do please say if you’d rather be à deux.”

“It’s only that I wasn’t altogether sure that we had decided to go,” said Steven.

“Ah,” said Clive, “I had the impression that you were—rather decided.”

“Not actually, no,” said Steven bluntly, trying to kill some of Clive’s grace. “The thing is, I’m not much of a skier.”

“Nor am I, I assure you,” Clive said instantly. “You and I shall link arms and make cautious snowplow turns down the slope, waving sedately to Lisa as she schusses past us with her dashing Swiss guide, full of schnapps.”

Steven laughed. He liked Clive, it would be churlish to rebuff him. And he knew what would happen with Lisa: she would be incredulous at his irritation. She had tried to reach him, he was in a meeting, then she was in a meeting, Clive was only being friendly, and, in any case, didn’t it sound very nice? Steven had to admit that it did sound nice. But when he hung up he had a moment of real dread—could it be wise, this return to those icy runs, risk-filled descents? He thought of the serious cold of the deep snow, of the dooming overhangs of rocks. He suddenly remembered pictures he had seen of the fearful Eiger, looming like a vast skull over the village below.

The group shifted during its passage down the platform, and Steven found himself again, impossibly, walking between the English husband and wife, who continued their feud.

“I think you might have told me,” the woman said bitterly, before Steven realized she was there. He turned, startled, to her, and met the look she was sending to her husband. Steven took it full in his face, like acid.

He quickened his steps to get away from them, and hunched his shoulders against the cold. Even so, the damp reached in at him, and he shivered. They would never reach the train, it seemed, the night would pass in this interminable march. Steven peered ahead: trying to penetrate the gloomy tunnel, he was again aware that his eyes were working oddly. He squinted, past Clive’s authoritative back, past the camel’s-hair coat, swaying briskly.

“I like New York,” he heard Clive say magnanimously. “I find the people there interesting. Not more intelligent than the people here—they’re not—but interesting.”

“Gosh, how kind,” said Lisa. “They’ll be so pleased to hear that.”

There was some itch between Clive and Lisa. Whatever they discussed, they disagreed on. They carried on like siblings, not angrily, but as though they could not help themselves, a steady undercurrent of heated irritation between them. Steven had once asked Lisa if she had gone out with Clive. She had laughed.

“I was married then,” she said. “I was married to Robert. I wasn’t going out with people.” She had not said no.

Steven did not pursue it. Lisa’s past, like Steven’s, was now too large to own. Their first marriages loomed, dangerous passages, in their adult lives. He had owned his first wife’s past, he knew her early loves, her childhood, and he had offered up his own. But he and Lisa each had a great failure behind them—there were things he could not bear to know about her, and things of his own he would rather not share, there was censure he would rather not endure from her as well as from himself. There was the problem of his daughter, who would barely speak to him: he would not discuss the mistakes he had made.

Second marriages had this lack of transparency: there were things better not brought to light. The brave certainty of the first marriage, the conviction that love would overcome any revelation—Steven still held that notion, but he held it in private. He preferred not to test it. He held Lisa in the center of his life, he did not need to know all the pain in her past. At forty-eight, he hoped those things were over, hoped they were past confrontations, past violent revelations. He wanted now to live peacefully with his wife.

“Here we are,” Clive called out briskly, “a mere four and a half miles from the station. Walk after dinner, good for the digestion.” They were, at last, in front of the train, they were even in front of the right car. Everyone stood about on the platform. Metallic steam drifted up in clouds from the wheels of the train; the pavement gleamed with damp. The light was greenish, deep shadows cut across faces. Color had been sucked from the scene, and everyone was gaunt and hollow-eyed, like vampires. Steven had the sense of nightmare.

Animated by the prospect of an ending, people began to talk in different languages. The Italian began to sing a French song, and the Portuguese joined in, putting his arm across the Italian’s shoulder. Their voices were enormous in the shadowy space. The light came down from directly overhead, and behind was blackness, so they seemed onstage. The song was about “le départ,” but they did not know most of the words, and much of the time they sang “la-la-la,” instead, roaring with laughter. It was endless, Steven thought, he was trapped in this forever. He longed simply to climb onto the train, but Clive stood on the top step of the car, smiling. Lisa stood on the step below. The two of them looked like celebrities, movie stars on tour. Lisa wore a soft felt hat that shadowed her eyes, and the fringed shawl muffled her neck and framed her face. In the shadows her eyes shone, and Steven could see the whiteness of her smile. She raised her hand to throw a kiss to the singers, and lost her balance slightly on the narrow step. Clive put his arm around her, finding the curve of her body so easily that Steven, watching, felt an odd catch in his breathing.

Clive leaned over, laughing, talking to the singers. He was handsome, in an English way: tall, very blond, with a narrow, bony face. Steven was suddenly filled with a dislike for his looks, those weedy, overbred features, the supercilious expression, the overcoat thrown over the shoulders.

“Could we get on, do you think, any time soon?” Steven asked.

Clive turned to him at once, taking his hands off Lisa’s shoulders without haste, clear-eyed, polite.

“This instant,” Clive said, half-bowing. He called goodbye in a last general way, and turned in toward the train. Lisa smiled at Steven, too, putting her hand on his shoulder as he came up the steps to her. Steven mounted without saying good-bye to the others, he had had enough of them, and he was tired. Also, he had not liked the sight of Lisa and Clive waving glamorously.

Inside the train, at once, all was different. The space was intimate, tiny, enclosed. They could hear one another breathing. A conductor appeared in an ornate uniform, buckled, trimmed, buttoned, his mustache a neat line. His face was impeccably composed, he was full of conviction.

“Vos passeports, Madame, Messieurs,” the conductor said crisply. Silently they handed them over. The conductor opened them, nodded, and tucked them inside his jacket. He strode off down the narrow corridor.

“Will we ever see them again, do you think?” Lisa said. “Why won’t he just sell them on the black market in East Berlin?”

“We’re going nowhere near East Berlin, Lisa,” Steven said, irritably, nudging her toward their cabin. He was longing for sleep.

The compartment had four bunks: two up, two down. A Swiss with a fierce mustache lay in a lower one, the blanket pulled neatly to his chest, his eyes-shut. Steven sat down on the other lower bunk and began to unlace his shoes.

“This is wonderful,” Lisa whispered loudly. She pulled off her boots and clambered easily into the bunk above Steven. Clive climbed up more sedately into the bunk across from her. Steven, watching, wondered how old Clive was. Somewhere between himself and Lisa, probably, early forties. Up on his bunk, Clive pulled off his tooled cowboy boots and dropped them on the floor. Steven put his smooth black business shoes side by side beneath his bunk. Cowboy boots, he thought.

Overhead, Lisa ranged about in her bunk, settling herself in like a dog in deep grass.

“Isn’t this great?” she asked, her head appearing suddenly above Steven’s, smiling. The overhead light shone directly above her, he could barely see her face.

“It’s great,” said Steven, smiling. He took off his jacket, and slid his suspenders off his shoulders. He unpacked the couchette kit: a clean, coarse cotton pillowcase, a thick red wool blanket. He took off his trousers and stuffed his clothes at the foot of the bunk. He lay down, still in his shirt, and pulled the blanket up. He could not quite stretch his legs out completely, and felt cramped and restless.

Lisa was whispering to Clive. “It’s like the Orient Express, isn’t it. Here we are at midnight, with no passports, and a spy in the bottom bunk.”

Of course she meant the Swiss. Steven hoped he didn’t speak English.

“Is there a murder every night, do you think? What a nuisance for the gendarmes!”

Steven lay on his back, staring at the bunk-bottom above him. There was a small mirror on it, pointlessly reflecting his blanket. He felt something touch his face: Lisa’s fingers. He looked up to see her face hanging raggedly upside down: she was smiling at him. The light glared through her hair, a dusky red cloud.

Steven smiled back. “There’s a mirror on my ceiling.”

“There’s not!” said Lisa. “What are they thinking of? Aren’t murders enough for them?”

Steven laughed. “I think it’s meant for daytime, when the bunk is up against the wall and the mirror is vertical.”

“Still, it seems a shame to waste it now,” Lisa said. “Shall I come down?”

“Do,” Steven invited.

Her fingertips moved across his face, and he felt her reminding herself of his flesh, the shape of his face, the pleasure she took in it: the rise of his cheeks, the hollow of his temple. She stroked the hair back gently from his temples, touched his lips. Steven kissed her fingers, hard, he held them to his mouth and pressed them, warm, against his cheek.

“I love you,” whispered Lisa.

“I love you,” he whispered back. “Good night.”

“Good night.” She smiled down at him.

Steven raised his voice. “Good night, Clive.” Clive’s face appeared, long and sheepy, over the edge of his bunk.

“Good night, Steven. I imagine we’ll all sleep blissfully until Interlaken, where we will pull up the shades to discover our luggage neatly stacked with the utmost Swiss efficiency onto the wrong platform as we steam irrevocably away from it.”

“Something to look forward to,” Steven said, smiling at him, too.

“Will the light bother you?” Lisa asked them both. “There’s only this big overhead one, and I have to read for a bit or I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Oh, God, you’re one of those,” Clive said easily.

“It won’t bother me,” Steven said. He didn’t like Clive classifying Lisa among women with whom he had spent the night, he didn’t like Clive knowing Lisa’s bedtime habits.

Rolling back up on top of her bunk, Lisa was now invisible to her husband. She said something Steven could not hear, and Clive laughed. Then there was silence, and Steven wondered what they were doing, the two of them, on those high, private, lighted bunks. He wondered if they were smiling at each other, if Clive were looking at Lisa’s face on the pillow, her hair spread out across that white linen.

Steven rolled toward the wall, pulling the blanket up to his chin and closing his eyes, willing himself to sleep. The train had begun to move, silently at first, slipping like water underneath the streets of Paris at night, then picking up a more determined, businesslike rhythm, clicking and swaying. Dozing, waiting for sleep, Steven opened his eyes, stared dimly at the wall, closed them again. The sliding rattle of the train made it difficult to hear anything else, but he found himself listening for conversation overhead. There were times when he was sure he heard laughter. He became convinced that part of the humming rattle around him was the steady undercurrent of conversation. They were talking, he was sure of it: on and on. He opened his eyes. The light was still on. He imagined them laughing, lying on their pillows, watching each other. Why did they not just go to sleep? What were they thinking of? He imagined complaining to them, standing up and speaking sternly to them, like a teacher.

Of course he wouldn’t: he would sound like Lisa’s father. It was possible they were not talking at all. Possibly he was hearing mechanical gibberish, not conversation. He would lie quietly in his bunk, not stand up and see what was going on.

Steven opened his eyes, he was not as sleepy as he had thought. Looking around his cramped space he thought again of the odd sensation he had had on the platform. He would experiment again here. He focused first, firmly, on his hand, holding the blanket. He saw it clearly: the skin was pale, bluish in the dim light, the knuckles taut, blunt, the deep fleshy creases of the curled-up fingers definite. He opened his hand: the fingers seemed thicker, somehow, than he expected. He flexed them, and something—the way they moved, or the set of the bones inside the flesh—reminded him of his father’s hands as he had lain dying in the hospital, those thickened, twisted shapes. At the hospital he had looked at the hands, forgiving his father for the frailty of his flesh, but he could see now that his own hands possessed, in fearful embryo, that same shape, potential for the same thickened worthlessness. Steven flattened his hand out on the blanket, strong and rigid. He made the hand his own, willing the image shift, like the Indian head, to one he wanted: the hands he remembered from his youth, large, supple, strong.

Steven looked farther down the bunk, to the hump of one knee beneath the blanket. He could see distinctly the weave of the wool, the diagonal strokes in it. He felt cheered, as though he could, simply by willpower, clear up this physical problem.

He shifted his gaze confidently to the post at the foot of his bunk, and found confusion. The outline of the post—a simple black shaft—was vague and blurry. Even worse, there seemed to be two outlines, each edge seemed vaguely doubled. Squinting, concentrating, Steven tried to reconcile the lines, to draw them magically into each other with his will: he could not. He tried again, first with one eye, then the other. It was so strange an effort, involving muscles he did not know how to command, energy he did not know how to direct. He found himself holding his breath, straining, frowning. The lines were unresolved.

The discovery was so large, so flat and disturbing that at first Steven simply rejected it. It was like the problem, always with him, of leaving Amanda, his daughter. The knowledge that he could never correct that error, never make up for it, had damaged Steven. He could see now that he could not reconcile these shifting lines, he could not make them take on the appearance of true reality which he knew was there. He was helpless, now, and it frightened him. Amanda would continue, surly, hostile, aligned with his first wife against him. His eyesight would get worse. What was he going toward?

The overhead light went out above him, but the cabin was not black. From his bunk Steven could see the safety light, a small red bulb that sent out a dull, surreal glow, dim but insistent.

Lisa and Clive must be going to sleep. Steven listened, but could tell no change in the undercurrent of mutterings. Perhaps he had been mistaken, after all, perhaps they had not talked at all. He longed for Lisa to reach down again to touch his face, he longed to tell her of the danger he had discovered.

The sense of loss, the unexpected treason of his own body, shook him. There was nothing he could do, his body was aging. All of him was aging, without his consent, all of him was changing, whether he noticed it or not, whether he permitted it or not. Of course, he had always known this, he was not such a fool as to think he would not grow older, but—what? He had not thought it would happen so soon, or with such brutality, that there would be no appeal. And there was Lisa: Steven could see that on some private, illogical level he had believed that by allying himself with Lisa’s freshness, her quicksilver energy, that he had somehow acquired some of it himself—youth by association.

Now the fallacy of this was borne in on him, chilling. He was becoming older; Lisa had no part in it; he was alone.

Steven lay very still in the dim red glare. Above him the subtle current of noise continued: were they talking? He kept himself immobile, separate, as though by forbidding himself motion he could somehow alter the inclination of tissue, of bone and cartilage and blood vessel. He set himself against the thought of aging, as though he had a choice.

He began drifting toward sleep; he turned onto his side. As his mind began shifting in and out of consciousness, Steven found himself reaching out for Lisa. He missed the tanglement of her limbs. His drowsy hand groped for the loose, complicated connection of her body, trying to gather it to himself, trying to press the smooth descent of her spine to his chest. Each time, his hand touched the metal wall of the compartment, and he half-waked himself again. He was on a train, he was being carried through the depths of the night across the continent of Europe, through the countries of strangers, into a dour mountainous place whose language he could not speak.

The train stopped so subtly, gliding to such a gentle, tenuous pause, that Steven, waking, was not sure of anything: how long it had been stopped, how long he had been asleep, whether or not he was still asleep, in fact. The breathing silence of the train was absolute. There was the feeling of the utmost reaches of the night itself, that part of it which cannot be struggled against. But the silence, the cessation of the gliding passage of the train, kept Steven alert, as though he must keep some sort of vigil until the passage was resumed. And, as he lay still, the sullen glow of the red bulb permeating his tiny darkness, he became aware that the silence in his own cabin was alive. He became aware that in the bunk overhead Lisa was crying.

Lisa crying was very difficult to detect: she was silent, her breath slowly leaving her chest in a series of painful exhalations until she seemed empty altogether, only misery left inside her body. When she drew the next breath there was a sound, high, faint, private. It was that sound which Steven thought he heard now; he listened, waiting for it to come again, and it did.

Steven moved gently to the outer edge of his bunk and looked up. The red glow came from the center of the wall between the two bunks. The light changed everything, casting a scarlet dusk over everything it touched. Up above him, between the two bunks, Steven saw a shape, profoundly black, linking the beds. It was a silhouette: an arm. He stayed still. The train around him rocked faintly, faintly, poised in this nighttime stillness. He heard Clive’s voice, so soft, so gentle, that it might be coming from next to Steven’s own pillow, the night around them had become so intimate.

“But you were so brave when it happened,” Clive said, “you didn’t cry then.”

Steven felt Lisa’s descending breath, then heard the faint sad sound as she drew it in again.

“I wasn’t brave,” she said, “I was twenty-two years old. I didn’t believe the doctor. I was sure I’d have children. I was sure I knew better than him.”

Now Steven lay absolutely without moving, almost without drawing breath, as though a sound from him would mean the apocalypse. It was all he could do, really: be quiet.