Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

and sit with them climbing around me in the daytime; my body felt bruised by their knees and elbows and feet. I did think then that it would be lovely to be a woman traveling alone, able to sit after a meal drinking coffee and looking out the window, able to go to the club car and have a drink. Now one of my daughters is hitchhiking in Europe and the other is a counselor at a camp for handicapped children, and all that time of care and confusion that seemed as if it would never end seems as if it never was.
    Somehow without my noticing it we have got into the mountains. I ask for a gin and tonic. The glass catches the sunlight, reflecting a circle of light on the white mat. This makes the drink seem pure and restorative to me, like mountain water. I drink thirstily.
    From the club car a little staircase goes up to the dome, where people have been sitting no doubt since Calgary, waiting for the mountains. Latecomers hoping for seats climb part way up the stairs, crane their necks, come down disgruntled.
    “Them that’s up there’s going to stay for a week,” says a fat woman in a turban, turning around to address a procession of what may be grandchildren. Her bulk fills the whole stairway. Many of us smile, as if the size and loudness and innocent importance of this old woman were being offered to us, as encouragement.
    A man sitting by himself, further down the car with his back to the window, looks at me, smiling. His face reminds me of the face of some movie star of a past era. Outdated good looks, a willed and conscious, yet easily defeated, charm. Dana Andrews. Somebody like that. I have an unpleasant impression of mustard-colored clothes.
    He does not come and sit beside me, but keeps looking at me from time to time. When I get up and leave the car I feel him watching. I wonder if he will follow me. What if he does? I haven’t time for him, not now, I can’t spare him attention. I used to be ready for almost any man. When I was in my teens, and later too, when I was a young wife. Any man looking at me in a crowd, any teacher letting his eyes pause on me in a classroom, a stranger at a party, might be transformed, some time when I was alone, into the lover I was always searching for—somebody passionate, intelligent, brutal, kind—and made to play opposite me in those simple, satisfactory, explosive scenes everybody knows about. Later on, a few years married, I took steps to solidify fantasies. At parties, with my push-up brassiere, my tousled Italian cut, my black dress with the shoestring straps, I kept on the lookout for some man to fall in love with me, involve me in a volcanic affair. That did happen, more or less. You see it is not so simple, not so plain a case as my grieving now, my sure sense of betrayal, would lead anybody to believe. No. Men have left marks on me which I did not have to worry about hiding from Hugh, since there are parts of my body at which he has never looked. I have lied as well as I have been lied to. Men have expressed ravenous appreciation of my nipples and my appendix scar and the moles on my back and have also said to me, as it is proper for them to do, “Now don’t make too big a thing of this,” and even, “I really do love my wife.” After a while I gave up on this sort of thing and went secretly to see a psychiatrist who led me to understand that I had been trying to get Hugh’s attention. He suggested I get it instead by kindness, artfulness, and sexiness around the house. I was not able to argue with him, nor could I share his optimism. He seemed to me to have a poor grasp on Hugh’s character, assuming that certain refusals were simply the result of not having been properly asked. To me they seemed basic, absolute. I could not imagine what tactics could alter them. But he was shrewd enough. He said he assumed I wanted to stay with my husband. He was right; I could not think, I could not bear to think, of an alternative.
    The train stops at Field, just inside the British Columbia border. I get off and walk beside the tracks, in a hot wind.
    “Nice to get off the train for a bit, isn’t it?”
    I almost fail to recognize him. He is short, as I believe those handsome movie stars often were, too. His clothes really are mustard-colored. That is, the jacket and pants are; his open shirt is red, his shoes burgundy. He has the voice of somebody whose dealings bring him into daily and dependent contact with the public.
    “I hope you don’t mind me asking. Are