“We’re playing through the pain,” Porter said. “We’re seeing if the Buddhists are right with their wheel of desire and misery.” I could barely hear him; there was a rushing in my ears, a cataract of steady noise. Disaster was imminent. Porter took a big slug of the bitter, and I mirrored his action. We swallowed and put down the glasses. “Excuse me,” he said. “Think I’ll hit the loo.” And he strolled slowly into the men’s. A blurred moment later I stood beside him at the huge urinals, dizzy and reclaimed. “We made it, mate,” he said. “Now we’ve got to pound down a thousand beers and catch the train.”
It had been a strange season in London for me. It was all new and as they say exciting, but I couldn’t figure out what any of it meant. Now on the train to the north coast with Porter, I actually felt like somebody else who had never had my life, because as I saw it, my life—high school, college, Allison—hadn’t taught me anything. For the first time I didn’t give a shit about what happened next. The little play dance of cause and effect, be a good student, was all gone.
“You’re not married,” I said. It seemed late on a train and you could talk like that.
He looked at me. “It’s not clear,” he said. “In the eyes of men or the eyes of God?” I must have been looking serious, because he added, “No. I’m not married. Nearly happened once, but no, it was the timing, and now I’ve got plenty to do.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It was a girl at Hilman,” he said. “I’d have done it too, but it got away from us. There’s a time for it and you can wait too long.” He pointed at me. “You and Allison talking about it?”
“No, not really. I mean, I don’t know. I guess we are, kind of, being over here together. But we’ve never talked about it really.” Now he was just smiling at me, the kid. That’s what I wanted to say: hey, I’m a kid here; I’m too young. I’m too young for anything.
Porter drank. He was the first person I’d met who drank heavily and didn’t make a mess. When the guys in the dorm drank the way he did every night we saw him, you wouldn’t see them for three days. “Well, just remember there’s a time and if it gets away, it’s gone. Be alert.” It sounded so true what he said. I’d never had a talk like this on a train and it all sounded true. It had weight. I wondered if the time had come and gone. I thought about Allison at thirty or forty, teaching art history at Holyoke or someplace. She’d be married to someone else, a man who appeared to be older than she, some guy with a thin gray beard.
“How do you know if the time is right or if the time is coming up? How do you know about this timing?” I held out my beautiful white coffee cup, and Porter carefully filled it with the silver liquid. My future seemed vast, unchartable. “Whose fault was it when you lost this girl?”
Porter rolled his head to look at me. He looked serious. “Hers. Mine. She could have fixed it.” He gave me a dire, ironic look. “And then it was too late.”
“What was her name?”
“It’s no longer important.”
“Was she a Lake?”
The window with the cabin lights dimmed was a dreamy plate of our faint reflection torn up by all the white and yellow lights of industrial lots and truck parks. “Yeah,” he said. “They all were. She wore her hair like Allison does and she looked that way.” He had grown wistful and turned quickly to me with a grin. “Oh, hell, they all look that way when they’re twenty-two.” After a while, Porter sat up and again topped my cup with vodka.
In Edinburgh, we had to change trains. It was just before dawn, and I felt torn up by all the drinking. Porter walked me across to our connection, the train for Cape Wrath, and he went off—for some reason—to the stationmaster’s office. Checking on something. He was going to make a few calls and then we’d be off again, north to the coast. I’d wanted to call Allison, but what would I say? I missed her? It was true, but it sounded like kid stuff somehow. It bothered me that there was nothing appropriate to say, nothing fitting, and the days themselves felt like they didn’t fit, like I was waiting to grow into them. I sat sulking on the train in Edinburgh station. I was sure—that is, I suspected—that there was something wrong with me. I hadn’t seen a fire or found a body or stopped a fight or been in one, really, nor could I say what was going to happen, because I could not read any of the signs. I wanted with all my teeth for something real to claim me. Anyway, that’s as close as I can say it.