Free Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda

to be made up. It will take a while.
    I was in no mood for delays. I had power now. I had stopped the
Orient Express
with a paper bag. I didn’t know the official title of the person in charge, but I said, “
Je veux voir le directeur du train!
” instinctively certain that this was the way to say it.
    They looked puzzled. “The
director
of the train? Who is that?”
    “The chief. The master. The captain.”
    “He’s asleep.”
    And here, I rose to my full height. “
Pourquoi doit-il dormir,
” I said, “
pendant que moi, je marche dans la rue?
” (Why should he sleep, while I walk in the street?) My fifteen months in France had been a painstaking preparation for this one grand turn of phrase, which they tried to dismiss as sounding idiotic.
    “Please get on board. We can’t stay all night in Dijon.”
    They could pretend I hadn’t scored on them, but I ushered Elizabeth onto the train with the clear knowledge I had beaten them in their own language.
    Once on the train, the trip didn’t improve. The train must have been built a hundred years earlier, and the bed was designed for people who were a foot shorter than me. I slept with my knees up near my chin.
    All the while, Elizabeth was enjoying this with a delighted, mischievous smile. Her playfulness didn’t seem to have a bottom to it. There was one place she had to visit in Vienna: the Prater. This, she said, was an amusement park with spectacular rides. There was nothing like it in the world. I was there to do anything she wanted, and we went. It turned out that she wanted us to go on a ride that barreled through space at about ninety miles an hour, doing loops and finally plummeting dizzyingly toward the earth. I didn’t think I was interested.
    “Oh, come on. Don’t be a fogy.”
    Reluctantly, I got behind her on the ride, and the gondola started its slow climb to the top.
Well, it’s not so bad,
I thought as we leveled off at the summit. Then the front end of the gondola tipped down, and I realized we were going to die. We plummeted—and then, with no warning, we suddenly rose up toward the sky again. My face smashed into the back of Elizabeth’s head, and my nose went numb. “Isn’t this great?” she said.
    We twisted to the right, then the left, then we dove, climbed again, then headed straight for the earth. We were both screaming like chimpanzees. Finally the ride came to a halt. Every muscle in my body was trembling.
    Elizabeth turned and looked at me with a grin. “Let’s go again.”
    When we got home from our trip, Elizabeth began working on a career as an actress. She studied, she went to auditions, and she got an occasional acting job. Little by little, though, she began to realize that she didn’t enjoy acting as much as she thought she would. One night she worked on a movie, playing a cop with just a line or two. She had to run to a corpse and say something procedural. But after several takes, her thighs ached. She was hungry and cold. And there wasn’t much acting involved. She began to realize that even when she worked she didn’t enjoy it that much. She’d been wonderful in
The Four Seasons
—spontaneous and lighthearted and tearful when that was needed. She had been in the film and the short-lived television series based on the film. But now she began to think about her life in a different way.
    As a sophomore at Kenyon, she had spent a semester at the National Theatre Institute school and became friends with deaf actors from the National Theatre of the Deaf. She was fascinated with sign language and the deaf community and when she decided to leave acting, she went to graduate school in special education, and became a teacher of the deaf.
    Her first student was a girl she followed throughout her day, in a school for hearing children, translating for her in sign language. Her joy in her student’s progress made her glow. She had gone from performing for thousands to teaching one single person, and it couldn’t have made