The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 12

Isabel was not to be found in New York. I called everyone I dared call and learned nothing but what I had learned from orbit: Isabel had left for London six months before, in Hamlet. Hamlet closed four months later and no one had heard from her since, not her agent and not her friends. The agent was trying to get her to do the mother in Mourning Becomes Elektra—crazy typecasting for childless Isabel, with her teenage figure. She could be in Istanbul or Santa Fe or Aberdeen. I gave up temporarily and concentrated on business.

It’s taken over fifty years of living to get my priorities right and to learn that love is more important than money. What fortune-cookie wisdom to spend a lifetime acquiring! But now that I knew it, circumstances forced me to put money first anyway. It was time to peddle endolin.

First I found my friend Millie Shapiro in a little studio apartment on West Fifty-seventh. Millie is a retired makeup artist, once at the top of her profession. I knew her through Isabel; they were both cat fanatics. Millie was grumpy and shaky, but she expertly washed the cheap hair dye out of my hair and redyed it dark brown, with gray at the temples. Her breath was horrible, but when. I looked in her cracked vanity mirror afterward I had to whistle. She also trimmed my hair and beard for me in a kind of movie-star way that was far different from my usual rough-and-ready. She gave me a pair of black-rimmed glasses to wear and suggested I shift from cigars to a pipe and that I wear rings. I dismissed the pipe idea immediately; I have a hearty distrust of pipe smokers and tweedy people in general.

Myra had managed to put together sixty thousand dollars in cash and had bought me a money belt at an Army-Navy store to keep it in. I paid Millie, asked her one more time if she had any notion of where Isabel might be, enjoined her to silence, and left. Good woman, Millie, and I trusted her.

I did as she suggested and bought a couple of classy-looking rings at a costume-jewelry place. At a men’s store I finished my metamorphosis: tight Western jeans, army boots and a red silk shirt. In the clothing-store mirror I looked as if I’d been sent from central casting to play an aging gigolo—which was something of a laugh considering my recent troubles. Anyway, most people knew me from the covers of Time and Newsweek, and on those I’d been beardless and dressed in one of my famous lumberjack shirts. I was known as a “boyish eccentric”: the beard, red shirt and rings should throw people off as long as I could stand to go on looking that way.

Actually, I figured they weren’t searching very hard for me. Baynes had the Isabel and the uranium and he knew there was no way I was going to get another spaceship. The next move was mine. The move I had in mind was checkmate. I went to Grand Central and bought a Pullman ticket to Columbus, Ohio.

The train had a parlor car, with armchairs and magazines and little tables to set your scotch and soda on. The furnishings were shabby—frayed green curtains on streaked windows, a peeling mural on one wall—and the upholstery was that woeful green that is one of the perversions of U.S. railroading. But I felt at home instantly in that car. I was the first passenger there and I chose a window seat in the chair with the least-worn upholstery. It was ten-thirty in the morning; I ordered a pot of coffee and toast and settled back, clicking the rings together on my left hand, occasionally stroking my freshly trimmed beard and feeling a pleasant anticipation in my stomach.

After a bit, a couple of priests came into the car and seated themselves prissily at the other end from me. And then a small, sexy woman came in and sat down alone. I began changing plans. Ever since that sight of the thighs of my fantasy sweetie who left my life in New Hope, Penn. I travel with the unconscious expectation of sex. It’s an expectation that, up to the point I’m writing about, had never been fulfilled. I’d had opportunities when I was younger and on my way to check out a coal mine or a merger or a commodities possibility—taking a firsthand look at Kansas wheat, say, or North Carolina firewood—but I’d always somehow fumbled or lost out or had gone horribly, maddeningly shy at the sight of a crossed pair of legs under the hem of a skirt. The awful truth is that women turn me on so goddamned much I feel powerless with them. Jesus, do I like asses and breasts and pubic hair and the sweet pungency of vaginal lips! Thighs. The backs of knees.

All this response to a small, pretty woman entering a parlor car! Well. It had been a long time. I’d just got back from outer space and from a stretch as solo gardener on a slippery planet. A stint at impotence before that. It had been three years since I’d genuinely experienced a woman. Seeing her there, about forty, with splendid legs and an intelligent face and light-brown hair and a white blouse draping so nicely over her ample breasts, I immediately lost any notions I’d had of catching up on world news on my trip across country. I no longer cared about what had happened in politics or war or energy or show business or acts of God during my absence; I wanted to share my bed with that woman. She had been in the car about thirty seconds and I was in love with her.

Little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. How nice! Her back straight and her ass neat and firm under her skirt. Splendid! L&M marijuana cigarettes in the gold pack and a gold lighter to match, set with assurance on the little table by her seat. Quel délicatesse! She ordered pernod and water in a soft voice, flitted her eyes quickly around the car, passing over me with just the hint of a pause. Oh my God, how I love all those things women do! How I love a civilized New York woman who dresses right and talks warmly and knows how to order a drink on a train! Monuments should be built to such women. To hell with generals, admirals, presidents, artists, messiahs; a civilized, grown-up woman with an education and a firm ass is worth the whole lot of them.

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.

All I can say is the whole thing was as easy as anything I’ve ever done in my life, as easy as drinking cold water on a hot day. God what a lovely, relaxed woman. A little drunk, but I thought: so what, if that’s what she needed. We did everything in bed we could think of doing. Weight fell from my troubled spirit—some of it was weight I hadn’t even known was there—and it was like zero-gravity on the bed afterward. Free fall. If only we could live our whole lives in moments like those. I pulled the curtains open, finally, after we had both napped, and we copulated in twilight as the hills of Pennsylvania rolled by under an August moon.

The next morning she was hung over and threw up in the little sink. It seems she’d gone to the parlor car while I was sleeping and had drunk for three or four hours before coming to bed.

“What a crazy thing to do!” I said, exasperated at the way she looked and the way she sounded at the washstand. Her hair was sweaty, and in the morning light I could see a roll of fat at her waist. There were blue veins behind her knees.

“I’m an alcoholic, Ben,” she said, washing her face.

“I can’t believe that,” I said. “You’re in too good shape for a boozer.”

“I only started about a year ago. After my divorce.”

“How do you feel?” I said.

“I’ve got a terrible headache.”

“I can fix that,” I said, and got one of the little packets out of my briefcase. “Here. Dissolve this in a glass of water.”

She did as I told her. She dried her face and went on talking. “I never had an orgasm with my husband until I started getting drunk.”

I just looked at her. After a minute she sat on the bed and sighed. We were both silent. Then she said, “Hey! my headache’s gone.” Her voice was brighter, and with her face freshly scrubbed and her hair combed she was beginning to look good again.

I washed myself up, got dressed and had a silent breakfast while she drank a bloody mary. The morning scenery outside the window began to restore my spirits. Sue’s problems were Sue’s problems; she had been no problem to me where it counted. I ordered extra toast and coffee and sent a silent prayer of thanks toward Fomalhaut.

At noon she ordered a couple of drinks—martinis this time—and by one we were back in the sack again. I feared failure for one bad moment, thinking that maybe I needed the force of abstinence to impel me. But the fear was dispelled by the salute of my comfortable member. It is a remarkable and wonderful thing to be a man.

During lunch at two-thirty she talked of how coal could supply the world with all its energy, if only it was mined and distributed right. I nodded agreement with her, not going into what I knew about it—considerably more than what any professor knew. That greenhouse effect was only an inconvenience compared to the fights among Mafia families. This was the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake. But the Mafia was run the way General Motors and the Roman Catholic Church had been run in the twentieth. It was an assemblage of bureaucrats whose only loyalty was to the institution.

Well, people like that ran the world in the Middle Ages. The people who run it now are little different. The laws of the Church meant more to the Church than the happiness of mankind. Ditto the Mafia. Ditto General Motors. Ditto Belson Industries? Yes, sometimes. A corporation is more intelligible than life; one can more easily learn its rules and live by them.

I began talking. “The trouble with coal, Sue, is that it’s heavy and dirty. It’s hard to get it out of the ground and hard to ship it where you want it. You can gasify it or grind it up and mix it with water and send it through pipes, but the pipes are an invitation to sabotage. They chopped pipes like Christmas ribbons during the gang wars thirty years ago.”

I realized I was talking more heatedly about this than I had planned to. What in hell was I angry with?

She had listened attentively, with an opened book primly in her lap. I was leaning against the green back of my chair, making gestures with my cigar. I wasn’t wearing the rings, since I was already heartily sick of them.

When I finished, Sue leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Ben,” she said, “you’re Ben Belson, aren’t you?”

I stared at her. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, your hair’s dyed for one thing. I noticed that last night. And you talk like a tycoon.”

I thought about that for a moment and almost said I was more pirate than tycoon. But what the hell was the use of being defensive about it? “Okay,” I said. “But for Christ’s sake don’t tell anybody. I’m on the lam.”

She laughed. “On the lam? That’s a quaint way to talk. Didn’t the government make you an outlaw or something?”

“A pirate. They took away my citizenship and made me a pirate. Or L’Ouverture Baynes did, the son of a bitch.”

“I voted for Baynes when he ran for President,” she said.

“He’s still a son of a bitch.” I drank some coffee angrily. “I voted for him too. Set a thief to catch a thief.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the drink in front of her. I had been mulling over an idea ever since breakfast. “Look,” I said, “why are you going back to California anyway?”

She closed her book and took a sip from her drink. “To write up my research. I need to publish.”

“Do you have to teach?”

“I’m on leave for six months.”

“Well, look,” I said, “I have two interests in life: spiritual growth and financial resurrection. I’m going to Columbus to make money, so I can take my spaceship away from Baynes. If you’d stay with me I’d be able to continue my spiritual growth.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Let me mull it over, Ben.”

“Sure,” I said.

Well, I needed to mull, myself. One problem was Ruth, my motherly redheaded spaceship pilot. I’d chosen Columbus and Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals partly because Ruth lived there and I had some idea of staying with her awhile. And Ruth’s brother was Howard the biophysicist, whose help I would need before I saw any of those wily Chinese. Ruth was fond of me, and I was fond of her. I was concerned with how things would work out if I showed up in Columbus with a new sweetie.

Why do I complicate things so much—as Anna would say. As Isabel would say. As Sue would be saying soon enough. Orbach didn’t ask that question; he answered it. The reason you complicate things so much, Ben Belson, is that you are trying to get your mother’s love and your father’s attention. Since they are both dead, it’s a complicated thing to do. I had to admit there was truth in that; there are simpler goals in life than jarring the dead loose from their sleep.

Sue suddenly spoke up. “Sure, Ben,” she said. “I’d like to stay in Columbus with you.”

By mutual consent Sue and I split up for a while. I found a Newsweek and read its Energy section. There was another of those pieces about plutonium—that malign transuranite stuff. Newsweek did acknowledge that Buenos Aires had been lost to it but claimed plutonium was now safely under lock and key. They talked about the Chinese breeder reactors and about all the cheap energy available in the stockpiles, but they didn’t mention what a microgram of plutonium could do to a human lung.

There was another Newsweek piece, about coal distribution, full of false hope. I knew far too much about the way coal was moved around to have any faith in it at all. If the United States was going to revive, it was going to be with Juno uranium making steam for the next millennium and beyond. I could feel the straightforward power of it the way I felt my sexual power.

That brought me back to thinking about Sue. I looked at my watch. We were due in Columbus in twenty minutes. I set my magazine down and went back to the parlor car to look for her. I’d been reading in the diner. She wasn’t there. The place was empty except for the two priests still in murmured conversation, still with the hand of one on the knee of the other.

I headed briskly toward the sleeping car, pushing my way past a couple of porters, already beginning to feel angry at what I was sure I’d find. And find it I did.

When I opened the door to our bedroom I could smell her. I felt like picking up her fallen-off shoe and beating her in the face with the heel of it. She was sprawled out in the easy chair in a rumpled, red-faced mess, passed out drunk. I might have been able to wake her, but I didn’t try.