“You look wonderful—wonderful!” was all he could bring out. She turned away, he turned away. How stupid he had been! No blushing schoolboy could have been more tongue-tied. That clumsy scraping caress he had tried to deliver with a book in his hand. His failure to ask any searching questions. His body felt like a struck gong, swollen by its reverberations. To think that she was near, that she had come to find him! As he dizzily plowed through his reading, the questions he should have asked her flocked to his mind. Where did she live, exactly? Was she happy? Would she run away with him now, now that her motherly duties were done? There had been small children, he remembered, whom she had left with her husband’s parents in the Bronx. But she was not from New York City, her journey had begun upstate, and that made her seem even more of a gift from beyond. Beyond all reason. Beyond all expectations. Under the lectern light his hands looked strange and withered, but for all that rather beautiful. Articulated masses, with fine hairs on the backs of his fingers. He had once been beautiful.

She did not sleep with him the first night. She stood up after coffee and firmly said good night. In those days the Pullman sleepers with green-curtained upper and lower berths had become antiques; the sleeper cars on the Twentieth Century Limited were divided into roomettes, each measuring seven feet by three. Bech scarcely slept, knowing that she was but a few steps away, in another roomette. Perhaps like him she was writhing between the too-tight sheets and flipping the pillow over to its cool side in the vain hope that blessed oblivion would rise from it, mixed with the tireless thud of the rail joints. Toward dawn there was a prolonged bright ruckus that must have been Buffalo.

They found each other at breakfast, in the dining car as it swayed and chimed through Ohio. “How did you sleep?” he asked.

“Terribly.”

“Maybe we were lonely.”

“I never sleep well on trains, thanks,” she said. Her sleepless pallor and the unforgiving morning sunlight as it bounced up from the glittering stubble of the cornfields brought out a slight roughness, a constellation of tiny nicks as if from an adolescent storm of acne, below her cheekbones. The harsh slant sunlight betrayed her and then was slapped down by intervening poles, brick gables, rail-side warehouses. Makeup hadn’t quite covered this touching flaw. He had forgotten it, he had forgotten to look for it in the few amazing moments when she had appeared again before him. She had once asked him if he would ever forget her. He had scorned the idea.