Scenes from the Amtrak Metroliner: Wilmington to New York City

I assume everyone has times in their lives that stand alone, crystalline, more in focus than other times. They needn’t have stood for anything; life’s movie isn’t broadcast that simply onto a screen.

In junior high school, we played touch football, and I was the quarterback. Norman Fixel would sprint past everyone and I would put it right into his hands. The late fall mornings in Ft. Lauderdale were chilly, dewy green, and clear. Then we moved onto another sport, and I don’t even know which one. The moments throwing the ball over everyone to Norman were the ones that mattered; a half century later, I can still see Norman’s two out-stretched hands, the ball meeting up with him.

A quarter of a century on, I took the Amtrak Metroliner from Wilmington, Delaware, where I worked for AIG, to Penn Station and then the 2 train downtown to Wall St. and AIG’s headquarters. We diligently took the 7:00 a.m. train in order to be there by 9:00. It was, I’ve always thought, typical of AIG: you put yourself out unnecessarily if only because it looks like you’re being diligent. When we arrived at the offices, nothing much was going on, and not everyone was there. But we were.

The train ride was the real show. It really was too early to be expected to get real work done—if you were me, anyway. Once cell phones were prevalent, my boss Robert would call from the train with questions back to us in Wilmington about an agreement or a memo. I don’t remember what I did on the train except natter with my colleagues. Someone would look desultorily over a proposal, a spreadsheet, an agreement, but we gossiped and argued sports, and argued about how arguing about the sports was meaningless. We tried to sit together in the café car across from each other at a table.

One morning we had a dilemma: A tall, fuzzy red-haired fellow was sitting alone at the only remaining table, but the table behind him had a free side. One of us asked him if he would mind moving so we could sit together.

He blustered and frowned and smirked and said no, then pronounced in a firm and loud voice: “Here’s how this is going to go: You four will sit here,” indicating the exact table we wanted, “And I’m going to sit there.” He gathered his papers and breakfast and moved exactly where we’d asked him. He sat down, suddenly intent on his papers, and started into his breakfast: a big glazed doughnut and a Pepsi, all that sugar at 7:00 a.m. I said, “You have a nice day, sir,” and I thought Robert was going to shove me under the bench. When the man bit into his doughnut, his eyebrows rose as if in annoyed surprise.

A secret: I loved alighting in Penn Station and finding the 2 train and crowding into it for the ride downtown. I felt like a proper New Yorker. Once, oh once: I was seated near the door, and an utterly adorable brown-haired woman in sunglasses stood up and waited for the train to stop. She looked down at me and issued a long, dimpled smile. She looked so much like Gloria (see post of December 6, 2019) that I was prepared to believe that it was she, and the thought that Gloria was once again standing and smiling at me was transporting. As she left the train, Robert elbowed me and said, “There was recognition there.” It was an odd but apt way to describe the moment.

Some days in the spring and summer, when the weather was nice, instead of taking the train into Penn Station, we would alight in Newark and take the New Jersey Path train into the World Trade Center. Then we’d walk a little longer through the city to Wall and Pine Streets, enjoying the air, the noise, the bustle. Once while we were walking, a random pedestrian noticed the former New York Knick Dave Debusschere and called out, “Hey, Dave!” We looked up and there he was, a large handsome man in a suit striding in fine style down the street, turning to grin and wave. New York City!

(Since then, I’ve had the anxious nightmare that somehow Robert and I got dropped by a taxi in Chinatown, and Robert insisted that we walk all the rest of the way downtown, quite a hike. I can’t imagine Robert forcing that on us! I also have nightmares about taking the train: there’s a Rube Goldberg-like station, always a crowd, a mess, confusion, but somehow I always make the train. That’s a positive, I think.)

Of course that old World Trade Center is no more, and it’s difficult to think of it collapsing onto the very steps from which we made our way out into the daytime. It would have been about a half hour after the event had we been there on September 11.

Once at headquarters, generally we split up to meet our separate clients. Mine were not at 70 Pine, the headquarters, but down the street—I’ve forgotten the exact address, and, looking at a map after all of these years, I can’t quite place it. There were meetings, pretty much always contentious. No one wanted to take the lawyer to lunch, so I often sneaked across the street to something I’d never encountered before: a Chinese buffet! (This was 1992 or so, stop that knowing smirk.) Those were lovely lunches away from all of that hostility.

Then the afternoon slog, maybe livened up for me by a visit to the Accident & Health Claims department, for whom I managed litigation: this was real lawyering, not that enervating insurance regulation, for which I never really developed a feel. We had some hilarious cases, too: one line of business afforded high-limit disability insurance to, for instance, wealthy dentists who developed horribly debilitating diseases so that they couldn’t work except that they were completely lying about it. That was fun.

One day, Robert and I had to walk the short distance to the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindell (who knows what it’s named now). I have no idea what we were doing there, but we were on our way out, and a very expensive looking, staid, older woman in a fur coat got on the elevator. Robert looked at her and said, “I’ll give you $10 for that coat. Right now, cash. It’s cash, but you have to give it to me right now.” Being a New Yorker, she didn’t much react.

Then the train back to Wilmington. If one were unfortunate to be in the same area with a colleague, one had to wait for his or her business to be done. There were a couple of people so full of integrity and loyalty to their clients that they’d miss a train and wait another hour. I found that simply insupportable. Many a run to the Wall St. Station was staged, many a resentful look cast if we missed the 5:00 p.m. heading back to Wilmington.

The cherished event was a quiet, solitary ride back alone. Yet that wasn’t assured. Back in those days, when cell phones were rare, people felt comfortable using them on the train. I was a third party to a number of phone calls made by a 40-ish fellow in a tan suit, a big tan hat—not quite a cowboy hat, but close—a large brown moustache, and a smirking smile. He was making what I assume were sales calls. It seems odd to me that he had a southern accent. He placed unfruitful call after call, announcing himself only as William. One I remember in particular: “Hey, could I speak to Mark?” Long pause. “Izzy?” Meaning, “Is he”, but slurred. Which struck me as passive-aggressive; the answer to our salesman had been, No, he’s in a meeting or some such. William wasn’t outright saying, You’re a lying sack of shit; he simply forced his phone partner to confirm his or her lie. Call after call he made, at least as far as Trenton.

I don’t recall arriving in Wilmington, but for the slowing of the train around a wide right-hand turn into the station. Or the ride home. The train ride, the day in New York City, was the thing.

This post obviously was not about how I didn’t understand something, ostensibly the theme of this blog. This is about how I loved something just because of what it was, the sort of life it stood for. Though I never felt as though I belonged at AIG, the train was, somehow or other, more like who I was about. After all, I envied the commuters in John Cheever’s stories. I could have ridden that train my whole life. It’s what happened when I got there that nearly killed me.

As Saul Bellow wrote in "Herzog", "Lead me not into Penn Station."