The Art of Living in Advance — Dawn Raffel    

1. The mouth is saturated with the taste of something new

Wind is what wakes her, wind and rain, against the hotel window: he, in a slant across the king-sized bed, as if to fill the whole of it; she curled tightly, knees to chest. Nausea rolls up in her. Feet to the floor.  Nose to the glass. The rain, she sees, in the light from the street, falls thickly, as if not entirely liquid. Across the street a flag is flapping madly.

She enters the bathroom and splashes her face. Reflected back: pale, slim, her face slightly bloated—younger, she thinks, than hours before, dressed up, made up: the luminous muse. Young as the daughter her lover doesn’t have. The light has a flicker. The hotel he’d researched, meticulously. He likes to live in advance.

She tosses a washcloth. Walks back out and watches him breathe.

In the glow from the street, the spit of light from the bathroom, she tries out a password. Second pass. As it is in every fairytale, the third time’s the charm.  

2. “Travelers in Providence”

“Do you want to hear my idea?” he said. 

She didn’t, not really, not then. She was tired, having been up in the night. But it wasn’t a question, anyway. His mind was his wealth (and her youth was hers). That’s why she was with him, wasn’t it? She craved his fame, however middling it was, his place at the table—and hers, someday. He wasn’t one to fool himself (he told himself that; he took pride in being difficult to trick). 

They had hours to kill. They had coffee and some kind of sticky tart. Café La France, the place was called, the concession in the station.

“You see,” he said. “I am setting it here.” His story, he meant, the work he’d been absorbed in. On the way up, he'd been snappish and distant, but was now on a high as a result of the gala the previous evening. His old alma mater, the theater packed. A triumph indeed—that woman had said so, clutching the volume he’d written, sweeping her hair back at the reception, feting him further, late at night, at the establishment the faculty favored.  

“Here? Where?” She—the young and increasingly inappropriate lover—opened a sugar.

“Here in the station. Providence station. It’s perfect for this story.” 

He was ever so slightly hung-over, she thought, with a check in his pocket, wind in his chest. 

“Obviously, there are nuances. Subtexts. And matters will arise in the course of composition, but this is the gist….” 

***

The rain had turned to snow by the time he had awakened a few hours earlier—wet, sloppy flakes that would soon begin to stick (the forecast was certain) and blanket the city and bring it to a halt. He’d worried aloud—delays, cancellations—he had to get back to The City (as if there was only one City) he said. This, he said, in his particular, sentence-splitting diction, was of utmost importance (meetings, etcetera, and while he was at it, his doddering mutt), and so they’d packed in haste: he, the ironic jacket and tie, thick books unread; she, the tiny hot pink dress, crushed now and dirty; her shoes spiked and strappy—utterly wrong, she had seen upon arriving (the way the gaze fell, the moneyed tone of the voice), toothpaste, pills for a headache, gum, her birth control not recently opened, soaps she had swiped. He was in jeans now and she in dark leggings, a shirt that was his and was huge on her. “Swimming,” she said, with satisfaction in her voice. 

Down in the lobby, past “Aspire,” the restaurant which featured a fish tank—“We’d better move quickly,” he’d said to her. “Let’s try to get out on an earlier train.”

Business, pleasure: Checkout was crowded. A mother and daughter (not much younger, it seemed, than the lover). “Mom!” the daughter said. “Must you always repeat?”

“Taxi,” he said.

“Train,” he said. 

“Crap,” he said. “This is exactly, precisely, just what I didn’t need to have happen.”

***

“So here’s the idea,” he said to her. Their train was late, and no, there was not a single seat, not one (although there were two of them traveling together), on the earlier train. Sold out. Completely. He’d asked more than once. 

“It’s snowing,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “Oh, you mean in the story?”

“Obviously. The story is what I am talking about. It’s snowing hard, the light is strange, and this young fellow—college man, he’s maybe a senior, handsome, lucky, you know the type—he is waiting at the station to pick up this girl.”

“Girl?”

“Okay, woman. This woman. Louise is her name. I am naming her that, Louise, I think. I like the liquidy “l”. She, Louise, is returning to him on the train from The City. But due to the weather. …”

“Right,” she said. Café la France was crowded. Latte quaffers.  Girls eating yogurt. A toddler—God spare them, she thought. At least they had seats.

“I already had the idea,” he said. “Before this trip. That’s what’s strange. The train, the snow. The man, I haven’t named him yet, but you know, someone-the-third. Drives a nice car.”

“Benz?” she said.

“Maybe,” he said. “He’d driven Louise here a few days before, to the station—outbound, her train to The City, for a short trip. But this is the thing: She didn’t tell him, precisely, where she was going or why she was going, details and reasons, this girl, this woman of his. He hadn’t really asked. She did this sometimes, flitted off, the years they’d been together—three, I think. Yes, three it is. But this last time she’d looked so sad, so slumped, he thought, so thin yet somehow puffy, her long curls spilling—her face, sad and desolate, her eyes…She’d worn a pink coat. She was going away, for just a few days…and of course he had a car; he had driven her here, to the station. He knew he hadn’t wanted to look at her sadness. It angered him slightly. And he, too, was sad—yes, he was, because he knew he had to end it.”

He waited for the question, begging for it.

“End it,” he said.

“Why,” she said, to move it along.  

“Why?” he said, as if surprised she had asked. “Because for all that he loved her, for all that she knew him—you know, knew that he wanted, for instance, to…act, to perform, and not be the…let’s see, lawyer his father expected, for all they had dreamed, their romance could not last. His parents would insist, of course, subtly, but still….His father, his mother, the family name…Louise was inappropriate…smart and ambitious, but still, there was a matter of—let’s say religion, and, well, ilk.”

“Ilk?” she said.  

“Don’t sulk,” he said. “You know what I mean. And this is in the past, I said. Didn’t I say? Late 70s. I had to have mentioned that, no?”

“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

“It wasn’t so easy for him,” he said. 

“Really?” she said.

“Little you know. Free love and such, the way the world was changing, all of it changing—sure, of course. But not for him. Louise had to go. Louise could not last. He knows that, accepts that, the way it has to be, and he knows that it ought to end sooner than later—as soon as she returns!—and also he knows that she knows that too. Of course she does. She’s smart, Louise. And now at the station, he is waiting for her, and he is filled with trepidation, drowning in anxiety, waiting and waiting, and so upset—the train is delayed, the station looks strange, looks wrong, transformed, not the way he recalls it, not how he thought of the place at all. Nothing’s as it used to be.  He’s shaking. And also, despite that it’s crowded—the station is not that big to begin with, round, domed, and now it is packed full of families and youth, the art kids with sketchpads, women in pairs, the men in suits, you know—everyone gives him a sort of berth, as if maybe they don’t want to brush up against him. As if he stinks. As if, he thinks, it’s the sadness he feels, the strangeness he feels. He is tired, too. He goes to get coffee but doesn’t remember the coffee being expensive like this, fancy like this, and he doesn’t have cash, or not enough, not on him. The girl—the woman—at the register is looking at him, as if he doesn’t understand, as if he doesn’t belong there. He doesn’t much like that. And so he walks away again. He sits on the floor, against a wall, that wall, that one over there—the seats, every one of them, taken, you see. The board keeps rolling, more delays. Coming in increments. Later, later. Snow keeps falling, feathery at first and thicker now, according to the chatter of the people around him, muffled as it is. He—from where he is, can’t see. He starts to sleep. He sleeps. He starts to dream in his sleep. He is possibly even snoring a little, there on the floor. And this is the dream: The dream is the future. His future self. And he is entering a house like the house he grew up in, similar in stateliness, silver and oak, the foreseeable children—a girl and a boy. He has a briefcase in hand. There is a weight in his heart, and from another room he can hear a woman speaking, maybe on the telephone—yes, on the telephone, and then he sees the woman, the one who is his wife. And she is not, of course, Louise, of course she’s not, and he is suddenly flooded, there in the dream, with a bone-chilling sadness, a wave of emotion that makes him ache. He wakes up on the floor.” 

“Are you sure you don’t want a bite of this pastry?”

“No,” he said, peevish. “Listen. As I was saying….Well, maybe. A taste.”

“What then?” she said. 

“Not bad,” he said, brushing a crumb off. “A little too sweet. So there he is sitting, waiting, filled with this sadness, and that’s when it hits him: She might have been pregnant! That must have been it…she went to The City, Louise—why else, what for? And of course it was his, his child, his flesh and blood, and how could he not have known it before? He vows on the spot to propose to Louise, to marry Louise, throw it all to the wind, take heed of the dream, the message, if only it’s not too late…you know…” 

“I get it,” she said. “But why did she need to travel to The City? It wasn’t illegal, was it then?”

He made a motion with his hand as if to swat away the question. Logistics, for all of his forethought, annoyed him; she knew that well. “I’ll figure it out,” he said to her. “That isn’t the point. So anyway, the train at last is coming, it’s coming at last; and filled with resolve, he waits by the tracks. He goes down to the tracks. Track Two. A clot of people. Confusing. The looks he gets, as if he is dirty—why, he can’t fathom. The train comes in, the one heading north, and people pile off. Rush off. Parents and children, their coats and their bundles, their baggage, their breath… it’s cold down there and snow falls hard, he can see it from the platform. And then…there at the end of the platform, the girl at the edge of his vision is her, Louise, a little bit ghostly in a pink coat, but only for a moment. And then: She is gone. He simply can’t find her. He looks and he looks. The train is pulling out again…”

She swallowed her latte. Looked at her watch, which was always fast, which she always forgot for a minute or two.

“And then he reconsiders. He must have been mistaken. He must have been confused. She must be on the next train. She must have told him something. She must have missed her train—they didn’t have cell phones, not back then.”

“I know that,” she said.

“He simply has to wait, he thinks. He sits on the bench now, a seat newly vacant. He’s tired, so tired. The room seems strange. And then he falls asleep again. I think he falls asleep again, waiting, and feels her, Louise, her arm around his shoulder, her presence, there as if to comfort him, as if to forgive him, and then…

“Then?”

“The trains come and go, come and go. The light dies. At last it is the last scheduled train of the day that’s arriving. Announced on the speaker. Track two.”

Crowded around them were people holding their coffees, their yogurts, their muffins, waiting to sit. She did not interrupt him.

“He gets off the bench now and goes down the stairs, descends, so cold, so tired, track two, and snow is still falling, falling….There she is! Yes, there she is! But dressed wrong, somehow, there amid the passengers coming off the train, and the shape of her body, and then her face, her eyes….Not her. He heaves an awful sigh and his breath fills the air. And he looks in the windows, looks in a door but the train is on the move again, onward. Onward.”

She heard how his voice was filled with emotion, despite his cultivation of dispassion. 

“Back in the station, he looks and he looks, by the newsstand, distraught, and out by the taxis….and then…”

“Then?”

“The ladies’! She must have gone in there. He ought to have known. Of course! That’s it! He goes and he opens the ladies’ room door, and a woman yells, ‘Hey! Hey, Mister! What do you think you’re doing here?’ And here come the cops.”   

“Police?” she said. “There in the station?”

“Well, station personnel,” he said. “Really. Whatever. The point is, they take him by the arm, they’ve come to take him away, but just for a moment he catches a glimpse of a ravaged old man in the ladies’ room mirror.  ‘Come, you have to leave now,’ the cop or the guard or whoever he is, says, shooing him out. ‘You know you can’t be here.’

“‘Louise!’ he cries. ‘Louise! Louise!’ And he is out on the street.”

People were listening in on them.

His voice was raised: “‘The poor old soul,’ the second guard—he’s worked there longer—says to the first. ‘Whenever it snows like this, he’s here.’ He shakes his head, the guard does. ‘Somebody told me he once was a lawyer. Lost his mind. That girl died 30 years ago,” the guard says. “Before the new station—back when the train stopped south of here. They say the girl jumped—to the tracks. Track two.’”

“She jumped?”  

He looked at her, expectant.  

“That’s it?” she said.             

“That’s it,” he said. “The point is he’s guilty. He killed her. Okay, he didn’t push her, at least, I don’t think so; it’s still his fault. He is crazy from guilt, regret that was dormant for much of his life.”

“You killed her,” she said.  

“Oh, please,” he said.  

“You wrote it,” she said. “You got rid of the girl. The woman.”

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t be like that. You really don’t get it.”

“What should I get? Do you want me to like him? Is that it? Forgive him? Feel sorry for him? And anyway, this story,” she said (she simply couldn’t help herself—she knew she shouldn’t say it, she ought to let it go, she always did, but the woman last night at the reading, the way she was carrying on and on… ),“it doesn’t make sense. I mean, the timing is wrong.”

“I know the timing is wrong. He…”

“No,” she said. “The story. If this, this tale of Louise, was in the 70s, he’s….your age. Not so old. Not yet. Not old enough yet to have dementia like that, to be ravaged like that.”

“But he’s crazy,” he said. He crumpled his napkin. “I guess you have a point, maybe literally speaking. But listen. Maybe the framing is different. The fifties or something. The time doesn’t matter. Or, I know. Maybe—he might have had a stroke.”

“Now, why would he have a stroke?” she said.

“An addiction,” he said.

“We ought to give up our table,” she said. “All of these people are waiting to sit.”

***

“So who was she, really? Louise,” she said. “You based her on someone.”

“No one,” he said. 

She turned away.

“Don’t do this,” he said.  

“She had to be someone. Everyone you write about is someone you know. And why would you tell me a story like that?” The snow was a cliché, she thought. He ought to know better and probably did. So what was his point?

They stood by the time board—every seat taken under the dome— as new delays clicked into view. “For God’s sake, let it go,” he said. 

The air froze between them, an interstice in consciousness. 

She could see the future; she didn’t need to dream it. Sooner or later the train would come. The laws of things. The two of them grasping their bags, boarding the train, claiming their places. Each would read, or fake it. Back in The City, they’d stop for a drink. They would laugh over nothing. Make it up, brush it off. Neither of them would speak of the story ever again, though later he would publish it. Nevertheless, for the rest of the time they were lovers (which wouldn’t be very much longer—she’d ceased to adore him—plus, the other woman was planning to call) Louise would disturb them. Whoever she’d been, whatever she’d done, whatever her significance, for them, she was real and could not be uninvented. 

He knew what he was doing.

“People you’ve known for a very short while will stay with you always,” he’d said to her once. “Regret. Impossibility. That’s something you don’t understand yet...” 

3. The Art of Living in Advance

She turns off his laptop, there in the dark. His name is his password. First. Last. Crackable. Practical precautions—he isn’t very good at them (she tells herself that), for all of his planning, for all of his critically acclaimed self-awareness.  She’d read the thing twice. “Travelers in Providence,” modified the day before, on the train up here. (And in parens: or maybe “Gestation”).

The action she’s taken cannot be reversed.

He murmurs in sleep as she lies down beside him, nose to nape.

Soon he’ll awaken. Soon he will worry (delays, cancellations). Soon they will go to the station and quibble. This, that. (Although it isn’t Providence. It’s somewhere much colder, and windier too.) He will state his idea at breakfast, the plot.

The future he can’t correctly imagine, for all that he tries. 

“Listen,” he’ll say. 

“It’s snowing…” he’ll say.

They will enter the train. He will answer a text. She will swallow a pill, which will cause her to bleed. He will type in his name: first, last. She will plead an excuse. He will click on a file. She will change her seat, before he apprehends that it is she, Louise, who has deleted the body.

***

*first published under a different title, in slightly different form, in Providence Noir, edited by Ann Hood, Akashic Books, 2015.

Dawn Raffel is the author of five books, most recently Boundless as the Sky, in which this story appears. Her work has been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, New Philosopher, The San Francisco Chronicle, Conjunctions, Black Book, Open City, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies.