Bonnie Nadzam

This is a Painting of a Man and a Train

But let me just say that if it were a story, and I were the train, you would be the man. 

And if you were the man, you’d have large eyes—so large that if I were a woman looking into them they’d reflect back a whole room—with a woodstove and two chairs and two tea cups and stacks of old books and outside the window, yellow leaves hanging in the sun like ripe pears and a small dark bird turning its wings against the sky, which would be a perfect heartache blue. 

But this isn’t a story. It’s a canvas—a nearly empty one—and you start out alone. So there aren’t any small birds or golden leaves or tea cups. 

In fact, you’re hardly here yourself. I have to sketch you in on the page. Arms at your sides, hands open. Face lifted up toward what must be the light of the sun, and toward the wind, as if you were listening very attentively for something. The sound of a train, say. 

Let’s make the canvas a field. With tracks pressed flat against and nailed into the ground, stretching only forward, perhaps a little swoop to the West, where the rail disappears altogether and forever, at the corner of the page. This field is on the prairie. Insect wings catch the light here and there, just as if—there—I’ve tossed a handful of glitter over the whole mess, which is growing more and more green with curling weeds and nodding flower heads. And these silver flecks of insect wings are falling all around you, around your head and shoulders. And you look so good. 

Or you would. If this were a story, and if you were a man in it. 

And then here I am, a train, and I’m coming into the field, but I’m fairly quiet. There’s no whistle, no lurch, no screech of steel. This is mostly because we’re talking about a painting, here, and paintings make no sound. This is not at all how I want to be, quiet, and still. Not at all my kind of train. 

I’d rather be a passenger train. Have you ever seen one of those? This one—this passenger train that I don’t get to be—is all lit up like joy with glass windows and full meals and real silver and steam and crystal inside—crystal that catches the light just as those insect wings do outside, as cheerful travelers lift up their long stemmed glasses of sparkling Champagne in celebration of what—of being pleasantly warmed by the feeling of going on a journey somewhere together. 

They’d sit side by side, these people on this passenger train, and sometimes as the train moved, their bodies would sway, and sometimes as their bodies swayed, they would knock together at the shoulder or the hip or the knee, and sometimes as their bodies swayed, they would sway together, too, like tall grass.

Look, there’s a woman with her head on a man’s shoulder. And there’s a man with his hand opened on top of the woman’s head, and they look nice together, don’t they? And there on the other side of the aisle is another woman looking up at a man and asking him a question, and his face is completely open.

And look, maybe all these men and women—maybe they are all the same man and woman. Maybe I can’t help it. Maybe I see this man and woman together every direction I look. Even though I’m just a train, with no eyes. 

This is just sometimes how these stories go. Everywhere in this warm and well-lit passenger train, which I am not, there they are together, this same man and woman, repeated infinitely in the window glass, as with mirrors. And they look better in every position. Breaking bread over here. Over there, the one pointing to a line in a book and the other reading along. And then back there, in that seat half in shadow, as if in firelight, he’s lifting her chin with the tips of his fingers. 

But we all know that I am not that passenger train. If I’m any train, I’m the train moving alone and off to the side, along even rails like black sentences pushing out slowly, painstakingly across an empty page.  A train with no such warmth, no such Champagne, no such tips of no such fingers. 

No. If I were a train, I’d be like a camera. I’d be witnessing everything from alongside the edge of that beautiful field and never allowed in that field. 

I would even take being a boxcar. Really, that would make me happy enough. An empty one. In such a boxcar, the doors would be open, so you’d be in clear view of the policemen and signalmen with their lanterns and flashlights. I’m imagining, see, that I am this boxcar and you are this man, and you’d be fairly comfortable. Maybe your nose and cheeks a little red, because there’s a little bite on the wind. But that’s okay because even though you’re alone at the moment, you won’t always be. You’re thinking of someone and you might see her at camp, shabby little camp that it is, just the smallest fire sawing quietly in the smallest ring of the smallest stone. And the waiting and hoping to see her would be okay. Because this boxcar would be huge. If this boxcar were time, it would be a thousand years of it. If this boxcar were space, it would be the entire world. All the forests. All the rivers. All the cities and all the city nights and every warm pub and every impossibly tiny table for two in the half-light beneath the stairs where he’s lifting her chin with his fingers. 

But I’m not a woman. As we’ve said. Even if we were in a story in which we could appear together, I would not be able to touch you. I would have no hands. I would be the train. 

But am I not the one who is painting, as it were, you might say? Just make yourself a woman, you might say. No need to be a train. 

But just because I’m the one painting, crossing the page quietly as I am, that doesn’t mean I get to say how this goes. It comes out the way it comes out, a lot like life itself, and if the train turned into a woman, we would all know that was wrong. We wouldn’t trust it for a minute. We would feel no ache. 

After all, the longing is what this is a painting of. Every landscape with a train in it is a portrait of longing. The train never comes into full view. And the man never gets to stop listening for it. Worse still, it’s getting late. All this time I’ve been painting, the light has been draining from the sky and darkness spreading, like a cloth soaking up a stain. 

Somehow, even though I’m a train, even though I am trapped, as it were, in this unfortunate form, as if we were in a story together but I couldn’t touch you or even talk to you directly, I can still see you standing over there next to a house, which I’ve just painted in, and which is beside a stone wall and a line of larch trees. They’re lovely, aren’t they? Like trees aflame. You’re welcome. And it’s a wonderful house, I’m making sure of it. You’ll be able to build a fire in it, then go into the root cellar and get an apple and polish it on your sleeve as you come up the steps and open your book. An apple on Christmas day. Imagine. Look at that. Look at your beautiful wool shirt. Look at the firelight leaping like small copper hands against the wall and all around you. Trying to touch you. Unable to touch you. And that book in your hands. Your fingertips on the pages. Each fingertip turning each page. 

The truth is, reader, art appreciator, I want to get very very close to you. Stupid train that I am. Here we are in this pretty field and here I come around the bend, stuck to the tracks pressed flat against the heavy ground, and I send you a message somehow—can we allow at least for that? Say I send you the message through the way the light is changing all around us. And I see your face turn in my direction. You’ve heard the message. You step a little closer to the tracks. We’re going to have a moment, you and me. You book holder, you bread-breaker, you man in a museum examining the model train in the glass box and the velvet ropes and all the signs saying do not touch and step back.

Still. Step a little closer. Just for a moment. 

If I were a train and you were a man and I pulled up very close to you, you would be just far enough away that when I opened my doors, automatically, silently, there’d be that little stripe of darkness and space that you’d have to step over to come aboard. And it would give you pause. 

The truth is you don’t want to be on this train that wishes she were a different kind of train. You don’t want to leave behind the larch trees, you don’t want to leave behind the soft grass. 

If I were a train and you were a man, and this were a story, and not a portrait of longing, you would step back now, and I would close the doors. I don’t know where I would be going, but I would leave you there to finish the painting yourself. I would leave that whole valley, or field, or woods, or city, or pub, or table for two, or whatever you’d most prefer it to be—I would leave it all just as I found it. That’s what I’m supposed to do. Watch. Observe. Take notes. Move on.

Bonnie Nadzam is an American writer. Her fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in Harper's, Orion Magazine, Granta, Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and many other journals and magazines. Her first novel, Lamb, was recipient of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK, and was translated into several languages. Bonnie is also co-author of Love in the Anthropocene with environmental ethicist Dale Jamieson. Her second novel, Lions, was released in 2016 and was a Finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Fiction. She lives in Northfield, Minnesota and works at Carleton College.