There was a man in the corridor of the sleeping car (it was the only sleeping car on the train; it had a name, 'The Silver Orchid'). His face and forearms were against the window and he was staring, I suppose, at Pittsfield or the Berkshires - a paper-white birch grove smothered by night and snow, a row of fence posts visible because of the drifts in which they lay half-buried, and the shadowy lantern shapes of small cedars, and a frosting of flakes mimicking a contour of wind that streaked the pane of glass in front of his nose.
'This is like the Trans-Siberian,' he said.
'No, it's not,' I said.
He winced and went on staring. I walked to the end of the car, but felt bad for having snapped at him. I looked back and saw him still there, studying the darkness. He was elderly and what he had said to me was a friendly gesture. I pretended to look out of the window myself, and when he stretched and came towards me - he was doing a sort of tango to keep his balance, the way people walk on the decks of ships in storms - I said, 'Actually, there isn't this much snow in Siberia.'
'You don't say.' He kept moving. I could tell from his gruffness that I had lost him.
There would be no food until Albany, when the New York section, with its diner, was hooked to this train. So I went into the Lounge Car and had a beer. I packed my pipe and set it on fire and savoured the trance-like state of lazy reflection that pipe smoke induces in me. I blew myself a cocoon of it, and it hung in clouds around me, so comforting and thick that the girl who entered the car and sat down opposite seemed wraithlike, a child lost in fog. She put three bulging bags on her table, then tucked her legs under her. She folded her hands in her lap and stared stonily down the car. Her intensity made me alert. At the next table a man was engrossed in a Matt Helm story, and near him, two linesmen - they wore their tools - were playing poker. There was a boy with a short-wave radio, but his racket was drowned by the greater racket of the train. A man in a uniform was stirring coffee - a train man: there was an old greasy lantern at his feet. At the train man's table, but not speaking, a fat woman sneaked bites at a candy bar. She did it guiltily, as if she feared that at any moment someone would shout, Put that thing away!
'You mind not smoking?'
It was the girl with the bags and the stony gaze.
I looked for a No Smoking sign. There was none. I said, 'Is it bothering you?'
She said, 'It kills my eyes.'
I put my pipe down and took a swig of beer.
She said, 'That stuff is poison.'
Instead of looking at her I looked at her bags. I said, 'They say peanuts cause cancer.'
She grinned vengefully at me and said, 'Pumpkin seeds.'
I turned away.
'And these are almonds.'
I considered relighting my pipe.
'And this is cashews.'
Her name was Wendy. Her face was an oval of innocence, devoid of any expression of inquiry. Her prettiness was as remote from my idea of beauty as homeliness, and consequently was not at all interesting. But I could not blame her for that: it is hard for anyone to be interesting at twenty. She was a student, she said, and on her way to Ohio. She wore an Indian skirt, and lumberjack boots, and the weight of her leather jacket made her appear round-shouldered.
'What do you study, Wendy?'
'Eastern philosophy? I'm into Zen.'
Oh, Christ, I thought. But she was still talking. She had been learning about The Hole, or perhaps The Whole - it still made no sense to me. She hadn't read all that much, she said, and her teachers were lousy. But she thought that once she got to Japan or Burma she would find out a lot more. She would be in Ohio for a few more years. The thing about Buddhism, she said, was that it involved your whole life. Like everything you did - it was Buddhism. And everything that happened in the world - that was Buddhism, too.
'Not politics,' I said. 'That's not Buddhism. It's just crooked.'
'That's what everyone says, but they're wrong. I've been reading Marx, Marx is a kind of Buddhist.'
Was she pulling my leg? I said, 'Marx was about as Buddhist as this beer can. But anyway, I thought we were talking about politics. It's the opposite of thought - it's selfish, it's narrow, it's dishonest. It's all half truths and short-cuts. Maybe a few Buddhist politicians would change things, but in Burma, where - '
'Take this,' she said, and motioned to her bags of nuts. 'I'm a raw-foodist-non-dairy vegetarian. You're probably right about politics being all wrong. I think people are doing things all wrong - I mean, completely. They eat junk. They consume junk. Look at them!' The fat lady was still eating her candy bar, or possibly another candy bar. They're just destroying themselves and they don't even know it. They're smoking themselves to death. Look at the smoke in this car.'
I said, 'Some of that is my smoke.'
'It kills my eyes.'
' "Non-dairy",' I said. 'That means you don't drink milk.'
'Right.'
'What about cheese? Cheese is nice. And you've got to have calcium.'
'I get my calcium in cashews,' she said. Was this true? 'Anyway, milk gives me mucus. Milk is the biggest mucus-producer there is.'
'I didn't know that.'
'I used to go through a box of Kleenex a day.'
'A box. That's quite a lot.'
'It was the milk. It made mucus,' she said. 'My nose used to run like you wouldn't believe.'
'Is that why people's noses run? Because of the milk?'
'Yes!'she cried.
I wondered if she had a point. Milk-drinkers' noses ran. Children were milk-drinkers. Therefore, children's noses ran. And children's noses did run. But it still struck me as arguable. Everyone's nose ran - except hers, apparently.
'Dairy products give you headaches, too.'
'You mean, they give you headaches.'
'Right. Like the other night. My sister knows I'm a vegetarian. So she gives me some eggplant parmyjan. She doesn't know I'm a non-dairy-raw-foodist. I looked at it. As soon as I saw it was cooked and had cheese on it I knew that I was going to feel awful. But she spent all day making it, so what else could I do? The funny thing is that I liked the taste of it. God, was I sick afterwards! And my nose started to run.'
I told her that, in his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi stated that eating meat made people lustful. And yet at thirteen, an age at which most American children were frolicking with the Little League team or concentrating their minds on making spit-balls, Gandhi had got married - and he was a vegetarian.
'But it wasn't a real marriage,' said Wendy. 'It was a kind of Hindu ceremony.'
The betrothal took place when he was seven years old. The marriage sealed the bargain. They were both thirteen, and he started shagging her - though I'm not sure one should use that term for describing the Mahatma's love-making.'
Wendy pondered this. I decided to try again. Had she, I asked, noticed a falling-off of her sexual appetite since her conversion to raw vegetables?
'I used to get insomnia,' she began. 'And sick - I mean, really sick. And I admit I lost my temper. I think meat does cause people to be hostile.'
'But what about sexual desire? Lechery - cravings - I don't know quite how to put it.'
'You mean sex? It's not supposed to be violent. It should be gentle and beautiful. Kind of a quiet thing.'
Maybe if you're a vegetarian, I thought. She was still droning on in her pedantic college student way.
'I understand my body better now . . . I've gotten to know my body a whole lot better . . . Hey, I can tell when there's just a little difference in my blood sugar level. I can sense it going up and down, my blood sugar level. When I eat certain things.'
I asked her whether she ever got violently ill. She said absolutely not. Did she ever feel a little bit sick?
Her reply was extraordinary: 'I don't believe in germs.'
Amazing. I said, 'You mean, you don't believe that germs exist? They're just an optical illusion under the microscope? Dust, little specks - that sort of thing?'