The Moviegoer

from which there is revealed both the sorry litter of the past and the future bright and simple as can be, and the going itself, one’s privileged progress through the world. But trains have changed. Gone are the uppers and lowers, partitions and cranks, and the green velour; only the porter remains, the same man, I think, a black man with palms the color of shrimp and a neck swollen with dislike. Our roomettes turn out to be little coffins for a single person. From time to time, I notice, people in roomettes stick their heads out into the corridor for some sight of human kind.
    Kate is affected by the peculiar dispensation of trains. Her gray jacket comes just short of her wide hips and the tight skirt curves under her in a nice play on vulgarity. On the way to the observation car she pulls me into the platform of the vestibule and gives me a kiss, grabbing me under the coat like a waitress. In celebration of Mardi Gras, she has made up her eyes with a sparkle of mascara and now she looks up at me with a black spiky look.
    â€œAre we going to live in Modesto?”
    â€œSure,” I say, uneasy at her playfulness. She is not as well as she makes out. She is not safe on a train after all; it is rather that by a kind of bravado she can skim along in the very face of the danger.
    The observation car is crowded, but we find seats together on a sofa where I am jammed against a fellow reading a newspaper. We glide through the cottages of Carrollton cutting off back yards in odd trapezoids, then through the country clubs and cemeteries of Metaire. In the gathering dusk the cemeteries look at first like cities, with their rows of white vaults, some two- and three-storied and forming flats and tenements, and the tiny streets and corners and curbs and even plots of lawn, all of such a proportion that in the very instant of being mistaken and from the eye’s own necessity, they set themselves off into the distance like a city seen from far away. Now in the suburbs we ride at a witch’s level above the gravelly roofs.
    It gradually forces itself upon me that a man across the aisle is looking at me with a strange insistence. Kate nudges me. It is Sidney Gross and his wife, beyond a doubt bound also for the convention. The son of Sidney Gross of Danziger and Gross, Sidney is a short fresh-faced crinkle-haired boy with the bright beamish look Southern Jews sometimes have. There has always been a special cordiality between us. He married a pretty Mississippi girl; she, unlike Sidney, is wary of such encounters—she would know which of us spoke first at out last encounter—so she casts sleepy looks right past us, pausing, despite herself on Kate’s white face and black spiky eyes. But Sidney hunches over toward us, beaming, a stalwart little pony back with his head well set on his shoulders and his small ears lying flat.
    â€œWell well well. Trader Jack. So you slipped up on your plane reservations too.”
    â€œHello, Sidney, Margot. This is Kate Cutrer.”
    Margot becomes very friendly, in the gossipy style of the Mississippi Delta.
    â€œSo you forgot about it being Mardi Gras and couldn’t get a plane.”
    â€œNo, we like the train.”
    Sidney is excited, not by the trip as I am, but by the convention. Leaning across the aisle with a program rolled up in his hand, he explains that he is scheduled for a panel on tax relief for bond funds. “What about you?”
    â€œI think I am taking part in something called a Cracker Barrel Session.”
    â€œYou’ll like it. Everybody talks right off the top of their head. You can take your coat off, get up and stretch. Anything. Last year we had this comical character from Georgia.” Sidney casts about for some way of conveying just how comical and failing, passes on without minding. “What a character. Extremely comical. What’s the topic?”
    â€œCompeting with the variable endowments.”
    â€œOh yass,” says Sidney with a wry look of our trade. “I don’t worry about it.” He slides the cylinder of paper to and fro. “Do you?”
    â€œNo.”
    Sidney suggests a bridge game, but Kate begs off. The Grosses move to a table in the corner and start playing gin rummy.
    Kate, who has been fumbling in her purse, becomes still. I feel her eyes on my face.
    â€œDo you have my capsules?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMy capsules.”
    â€œWhy yes, I do. I forgot that I had