Trains and Lovers: A Novel (18 page)

THEY DID SEE ONE ANOTHER IN PRINCETON IN
spite of Bruce’s predictions. David made a point of going to college early, several weeks before the academic year began. Bruce had not yet set off for Oberlin and David called him at home shortly after he had arrived. They met in a coffee bar near the university bookstore; David was laden with books from his advance reading list.

“Philosophy,” said Bruce, picking one of the books out of the bookstore bag. “Is that going to be your major?”

“Yes. I thought of English, but I decided this was more interesting.”

Bruce read the title of the book he had picked out. “
The Examined Life
. What’s this about?”

“It’s about how we should live our lives, I think. I haven’t read it yet. I flicked through it in the bookstore. I think it’s really interesting.”

Bruce opened a page at random and read a few sentences. “Yes. Maybe.”

“Somebody said that
the unexamined life was not worth leading. I forget who. But I heard that once.”

“So you should know what you’re doing? Is that it?”

David considered this. “I think it’s more than that. Sure, you have to know what you’re doing, but I think it’s more about looking at the things you do and asking yourself
why
you do them.”

“That’s what psychology is all about, isn’t it? Is philosophy the same thing as psychology?”

“No. Psychology comes into it, but I think it’s more about making sense of your life. The bit that I read was going on about how many people lead their lives without ever having any real plan—any pattern. They just do stuff without thinking how it fits with the things they did before or the things they want to do in the future.”

“So that’s what life should be like? Knowing what you want? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

Bruce flicked a few pages. “He says here that people should look at their friendships and ask themselves what the friendships mean to them.” He looked up from the book. “But our friends are just … just the people we get on with. That’s all.”

David reached for the book. “Let me see.”

He looked at the page.
Our friendships reveal the contours of the self, what we really are; or at least the examined friendship is capable of doing that
. He read a few more sentences and then closed the book.

He looked at Bruce, who was smiling back at him. He wanted to lean forward and embrace him. He wanted to weep. He wanted to say:
Can’t you see what I’m feeling? Can’t you?
But of course he could not do that. He could never do that. It was not permitted. It was not possible. But most of all, he sensed that what he felt simply was not reciprocated. Bruce did not love him as he loved Bruce. That was the way of it. Oil and water. Salt water and fresh. Different.

Bruce came back home on a few occasions that first year, and always called David when he did so. They met up, and Bruce took him to parties; he knew a lot of people in Princeton and David acquired some of these friends too. They went to New York together, more than once, and stayed with David’s parents. In the summer of their second year at college, they travelled to Ireland and Scotland together. Bruce’s father was of Scottish extraction—three generations back—and his mother was Boston Irish. He wanted company on the trip that his grandparents were funding, and he invited David.

They spent three days in Dublin and a couple of days
in Kerry. In Kerry they stayed in Dingle, a fishing town, and drank too much Guinness one night in a pub in which they had been listening to some folk singers and a traditional fiddler. They made their way back to the hostel they were staying in, full of music and dark ale.

“I love this country, you know,” said Bruce. “I don’t want to go back home. Ever.”

“Me too,” said David. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay. We could both stay. We could buy … buy a farm and live there and raise pigs or whatever. Brew Guinness maybe.”

“And each marry one of those Irish girls with clear skin and dark hair,” said Bruce.

David said nothing.

Bruce stopped. “If that’s what you wanted to do,” he muttered. “You don’t have to, you know.”

David looked away. “Marry an Irish girl? I don’t know.”

“It’s not for everybody,” said Bruce. And then he said, affecting an Irish accent. “Look at the moon up there, would you? What’s that line in the play you were telling me about—
Juno and …
”

“
Juno and the Paycock
. Sean O’Casey. It’s:
What is the moon, Captain? That’s the question. What is the moon?
It’s said by a character called Joxer Daly.”

Bruce burst out laughing. “What is the moon, David? That’s the question. What is the moon?”

David looked up at the sky. Above the outline of roofs with chimneys, a church spire, the moon hung over Ireland, an almost full moon, benign, it seemed to him, tolerant of so much …

“The moon is all about love,” he said. “The moon is about how we love others. About how we just want the best for those we love. We want them to be happy. We want everything to work out for them. The moon wants that for us, you know. That’s what the moon is.”

“The moon!” exclaimed Bruce. “That’s lovely, David. That’s lovely poetry. And you made it up right here, just because I asked some stupid question about what the moon was. You knew all along! You knew what the moon was about!”

“I made it up for you,” muttered David. He spoke quietly, half hoping that his friend would not hear.

But he did. “That’s what I said. You made it up for me.”

WHEN THEY REACHED SCOTLAND, THEY MADE FOR
Skye and the islands of the Outer Hebrides. They hitched a lift to South Uist and stayed in a farmhouse that offered
accommodation. They stayed six days, taking up most of the time they had allocated for their Scottish journey. But neither wanted to move, just as they had felt that they wanted to stay in Ireland forever. The island was part of a small archipelago that was the last bastion of Scotland against the cold green waves of the Atlantic. They walked its length and breadth. Their host showed them the
machair
, the strip of land that separated the beach from the pasture behind: a delicate ribbon of grass and flowers, resistant to the salt that sprayed across it, its soil whitened by tiny fragments of shells.

“Machair,” said Bruce, savouring the word. “Machair. You know, if I ever have a daughter, I’ll call her Machair. How about that?”

“A good name,” agreed David.

It was midsummer, and the nights of the north of Scotland did not get dark until just before midnight, and then, a few hours later, lightened again. They went fishing on a loch with rods borrowed from their host.

“You boys have fitted in pretty well,” said the farmer.

“Scottish blood,” said Bruce. “It tells, doesn’t it?”

“You must come back some day. You’re always welcome.”

AT THE END OF THEIR TRIP, WHEN THEY LANDED
at JFK, they went their separate ways. They stood for a few moments outside the terminal, their backpacks at their feet. They were tired from the journey.

“Well, I guess it’s goodbye,” said Bruce.

David looked down at his hands. They had caught the sun, and the wind, in the Hebrides. They were like the hands of one of those fishermen, he suddenly thought. “Yes. Thanks for everything.”

Bruce stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Yes. Thank you, too, for coming with me. And …”

David looked up, and met his friend’s gaze.
You don’t have to say it
, he thought.

“And I want you to know that it meant a lot to me—that trip, having you there as a friend. That night in Dingle …”

“
What is the moon, Captain?
” said David, smiling. I can smile through this, he thought. I can still smile through it.

“Yes, what is the moon, Captain? You gave the answer, didn’t you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t really remember.”

“Well you did. And I remember it.”

“Well then, I did.”

THAT WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. DURING THAT
time, they saw one another occasionally, but not very often. Sometimes a year or two would pass between meetings, which were usually in New York, when Bruce was passing through the city for some reason. He lived in Washington, where he worked for an organisation that promoted conservation. He had specialised in environmental science and was full of worrying statistics on the consequences of pollution and deforestation. He had married a biologist who worked for the federal government. They had two children. Both were boys, and so there was no opportunity to use the name Machair, which he had never forgotten.

David eventually left New York and took a job at a college in Buffalo. He kept the family apartment in New York, though, and was often down in the city. His father had left him a surprisingly large inheritance that he could have lived on if he had wished. But he enjoyed teaching philosophy
and ran a popular course entitled “The Examined Life.”

“Don’t expect me to teach you how to live your lives,” he said to his students at the beginning of each year. “I can’t provide you with the answers to that. But I can teach you how to ask questions, even if these questions may strike you as unanswerable.” Such as:
What is the moon?
he thought.

David married too. She taught English at the same college. He was a kind and considerate husband, and he loved his wife, and she loved him. There was nothing wrong with the marriage; nothing. They had a daughter whom he could not call Machair. That was Bruce’s name for the daughter he had never had, and it would have been an act of expropriation.

“Your friend, Bruce,” she said. “We should get them up here some time.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Nobody knew about what he felt; and why should they be told? There is no reason why we should not have our secrets, as long as those secrets do not harm anybody else. His harmed nobody, although sometimes he thought that it would help him if he were able to tell somebody about it. Perhaps it would bring him some sort of catharsis;
perhaps it would not. It was safer, he thought, to keep it to himself; because there are many ways of loving, and anyway, nothing had ever happened between the two of them; it had been innocent, unsullied. Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are.

“BY THE TIME WE LEFT PARIS,” SAID HUGH
, “I had more or less forgotten about Johnny Bates. I knew that there were some people who couldn’t let go when a relationship came to an end, and I assumed that he was just one of those. I knew that some of these people could grow into full-blown stalkers, but it seemed to me that he was confining himself to spreading ridiculous rumours about Jenny. That was bad enough, but at least he wasn’t actively pursuing her, which would have been much more worrying for her.”

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THAT INCIDENT WITH
Johnny, the Paris trip had gone well. I know that the romantic Parisian get-away can be a bit of a cliché, but it worked for both of us. I got to know Jenny much better, and appreciated her qualities. She was fun to be with. She was amusing. She took pleasure in small, ridiculous things, just as I did. For example, when we saw a fussily
clipped white poodle being taken for a walk along a boulevard by its owner, a woman dressed up to the nines, neither of us could keep a straight face. Then we witnessed a wonderful, sparky Gallic row involving a taxi driver and a pedestrian, which drew an appreciative and demonstrative crowd. We saw a vain policeman admiring and adjusting his uniform in the reflective window of a glove shop. We saw children carrying baguettes back home. All of these were small things, but somehow it seemed wonderful to be experiencing them in Paris and to be able to share them with somebody who looked on the world in the same way. I had the occasional doubt—yes—but they were just passing thoughts, really, and I made an effort to dismiss them. It is not always easy to put things out of your mind, but I succeeded—for the most part. It just seemed so implausible; possible—just—but pretty unlikely.