Strangers on a train

If I subtracted from my life all the time spent either thinking about sex, or engaging in behaviour calculated to achieve it (by which I mean most of my social life and career choices); or dealing with the consequences of having achieved it (by which I mean all of my romantic life), well, I don’t know how much of my life I’d actually have left. Childhood. The useful bit.

Fifteen years ago, in August, I boarded a train in New Orleans bound for New York.The journey time was 29 hours. What to do? Write postcards? Read a book? Try to have sex with someone?

It was a sultry afternoon: Spanish moss dangled in a sensuous manner, the edges of things were blurry in the heat. And we passengers would be packed together for a really long time going in and out of tunnels. I didn’t actually set out to do it. It was more of a daydream. It would be a wonderful thing. To meet someone lovely and to pass through every stage of an affair, within the same journey. First meeting, seduction, consummation, farewell. Like station names.

I drifted into the smoking carriage. The place where everyone has at least one vice in common. So a good starting point if you were actually going to try and seduce someone, which I wasn’t, but since we had 29 hours I could at least flirt with the idea. Before I read my book.

The most attractive woman in the carriage was small, dark-haired, bright-eyed and talking animatedly to a big black soldier. But I wasn’t trying so it didn’t matter. And because it didn’t matter, somehow he drifted away, and I found myself talking to her, and we got on, and in a way that I really can’t remember there was a seamlessness with which we made our way, over a few hours, from smoking carriage to bar, and from bar to restaurant car, and over dinner we told each other our life stories, and in the narrow section of corridor on our way back to our seats we were forced close together and I turned and kissed her.