Without Window

The train moved the way confessions do — slowly, then in long unbroken stretches where nothing outside the window changed. She had given him her name an hour ago and was already regretting how easily it had come out. Lena. Just Lena. He had taken it without comment, the way men sometimes take things, and given her his in return. Daniel. From somewhere east of where they were now, going somewhere west of where they were going.

The compartment held six seats and only the two of them. Outside, the country had begun to flatten into a brown corduroy of fields. There had been a town with a brick chimney an hour back. Before that, a river the colour of wet slate. Lena had watched it the way one watches a thing one will not see again, and Daniel had watched her watch it.

"You haven't asked," he said.

"Asked what."

"Why I'm on this train."

She lifted her eyes from the book she had not been reading for forty minutes. "I assumed you were going somewhere."

"That's not the same as having a reason."

He was older than she was by maybe ten years, maybe more — it was hard to tell with men who took care of themselves and men who hadn't slept properly in a long time, and he seemed to be both. The collar of his shirt was soft from being washed too many times in hotel sinks. His hands were on his knees, palms down, very still. Lena noticed the stillness because her own hands had been moving the whole journey — adjusting her hair, the strap of her bag, the cuff of her sleeve, the page she was not reading.

"Alright," she said. "Why are you on this train."

"I was supposed to meet someone in Vienna two days ago. I didn't."

"And now?"

"Now I'm late."

She smiled before she could stop herself. "That's very romantic."

"It isn't, actually."

The train slowed for no apparent reason, the way trains in that part of the world did, as though pausing to consider something. A church spire stood up out of the middle distance and then sat back down behind a row of poplars. Daniel reached into his jacket and took out a small flat bottle, unscrewed it, drank a measured swallow, and held it out across the aisle. The gesture was not a flirtation. It was the offer one stranger makes to another in a shared difficulty.

She took it. She did not look at the label. The taste was thin and warm and tasted of the inside of his coat.

"What does your husband do," he said, when she handed it back.

She had not mentioned a husband. She looked down at her left hand, which she had stopped wearing the ring on six months ago, and at the faint paler band on her finger which had not yet caught up with the rest of her. "He teaches," she said. "He used to. He's between things now."

"Between things."

"It's a phrase one uses."

"You don't believe in it."

"I think people are usually one thing or another. Between is what we say to make it sound temporary."

He nodded, as though she had answered a different question, and they sat with that for a while. Outside, a single horse stood in a field of stubble, looking at nothing. The train made the small considered sounds of a train on old rails. Lena was aware, with the sudden disagreeable clarity one gets sometimes on long journeys, that she had not been alone in a closed room with a man who was not her husband in over a decade. The compartment door was glass. Anyone could pass. No one had passed in an hour.

"May I ask you something improper," Daniel said.

"You may ask."

"What were you reading."

She laughed, surprised, and showed him the cover. It was a collection of essays by a woman who had died at thirty-six in a city neither of them had ever been to. He looked at the cover for longer than he needed to, and then at her, and the look stayed half a second past politeness.

"I haven't read it," he said.

"You should."

"Tell me a sentence."

She opened the book at random. The sentence she found was about a window in winter and a man the writer had loved badly. Lena read it aloud. Her voice, in the small compartment, sounded lower than she remembered it. When she finished, Daniel did not say anything for a while, and then he said, very simply, "Read another."

She read another. And then a third, this one shorter and about the body. She did not look up after that one. She heard him breathe out — not a sigh, something quieter than a sigh, a kind of acknowledgement — and felt the heat move up the side of her neck under her hair.