Free The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing

the banquette. ‘I think most men would think they’d have sex with a Russian woman with their wallet in their hand,’ he said. ‘Russian women are crazy about money.’ She looked at him blankly and he added: ‘Oh come on, you’ve heard that before.’ I began to gather my things, and as I did I heard him say: ‘It was the mostimportant moment of my life. I remember every second of it. And now you’ve ruined it for me.’
    If this was a Tennessee Williams play she’d lose the plot and start screaming, or else she’d crush him like Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth , who can’t be made into a victim by anyone, even though her looks are fading and she is terrified of death. And if, on the other hand, it was a John Cheever story, he’d have sex with her and then go home to his wife and children in Ossining, where no doubt someone would be playing a piano. He’d mix a martini and go out on to the porch and look over the orchard to the lake, where the family skate in the winter months. Gazing dreamily into the blue light of evening, he’d see a dog, a dog named Jupiter, who’d come prancing through the tomato vines, ‘holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.’
    I’d stolen, of course, the closing scene of ‘The Country Husband’, with its swerve up and away, out of the trenches, the animal earth, as if gravity were just a joke and the yaw and pitch of flight was somehow in our repertoire. Recently, I’d begun to become suspicious of this weightless element in Cheever’s work, to see it as another manifestation of the escapist urge that fuelled his drinking. Now, however, the line seemed very lovely, an antidote to the harshness that is all too present in the world. I folded a few dollars on the table and left the King Cole then, spinning through the revolving door and escaping, a little tipsy myself, into the cold, illuminated air.

3
    FISHING IN THE DARK
    WHEN I TOLD AN AMERICAN friend I was travelling by train from New York to New Orleans she looked at me incredulously. ‘It’s not like Some Like It Hot any more,’ she said, but I didn’t listen. I love trains. I love gazing out of the window as the cities slide by, and I couldn’t think of anything more pleasurable than taking a sleeper, crossing in darkness through the Blue Ridge Mountains and waking with the dawn in Atlanta or Tuscaloosa.
    In the interests of thriftiness I’d decided that since the journey only took thirty hours I’d do without a cabin, sleeping instead in what was promisingly described as a ‘wide, comfortable reserved coach seat’. Before I left the Elysée for Penn Station I looked again at the route map. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: twelve states. Still, I guessed it would be less arduous than Tennessee Williams’s first trip to New Orleans. In December 1938 he travelled by bus from Chicago, stopping off to see his family in St. Louis and arriving in the south just in time to ring in the New Year. It was the Depression and he had no job andhardly any money, but all the same he felt at home immediately, writing in his journal three hours after arrival: ‘Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place in this funny old world.’
    At the station there were people charging in every possible direction, and yet as soon as I worked out which check-in desk I needed, it all proceeded with beautiful efficiency. A uniformed porter took my bags down to the train and advised me against the seats above the wheels. It seemed like a return to a more civilised age and I felt for a moment, if not like Sugar Cane, then at least equal to Jack Lemmon’s Daphne, sashaying along the