Ghost Train to the Eastern Star Read Free

darkness, and hoping for light and a soft landing.
    "I'm going to do a lot of knitting while you're away," my wife said. That was welcome news. I needed Penelope this time.
    Though I had pretended to be jolly in the published narrative, the first trip had not gone as planned.
    "I don't want you to go," my first wife had said in 1973—not in a sentimental way, but as an angry demand.
    Yet I had just finished a book and was out of ideas. I had no income, no idea for a new novel, and—though I didn't know what I was in for—I hoped that this trip might be a way of finding a subject. I had to go. Sailors went to sea, soldiers went to war, fishermen went fishing, I told her. Writers sometimes had to leave home. "I'll be back as soon as I can."
    She resented my leaving. And though I did not write about it, I was miserable when I set off from London, saying goodbye to this demoralized woman and our two small children.
    It was the age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones. I wrote home often. But I succeeded in making only two phone calls, one from New Delhi and another from Tokyo, both of them futile. And why did my endearments sound unwelcome? I was homesick the whole way—four and a half months of it—and wondered if I was being missed. That was my first melancholy experience of the traveler's long lonely evenings. I was at my wits' end on the trip. I felt insane when I got home. I had not been missed. I had been replaced.
    My wife had taken a lover. It was hypocritical of me to object: I had been unfaithful to her. It wasn't her sexual exploit that upset me, but the cozy domesticity. He spent many days and nights in my house, in our bed, romancing her and playing with the children.
    I did not recognize my own voice when I howled, "How could you do this?"
    She said, "I pretended you were dead."
    I wanted to kill this woman, not because I hated her, but (as homicidal spouses often say) because I loved her. I threatened to kill the man who, even after I was home, sent her love letters. I became an angry brute, and by chance I discovered a wickedly helpful thing: threatening to kill someone is an effective way of getting a person's attention.
    Instead of killing anyone, or threatening it anymore, I sat in my room and wrote in a fury, abusing my typewriter, trying to lose myself in the book's humor and strangeness. I had a low opinion of most travel books. I wanted to put in everything that I found lacking in the other books—dialogue, characters, discomfort—and to leave out museums, churches, and sightseeing generally. Though it would have added a dimension, I concealed everything about my domestic turmoil. I made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering, with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most: my children, my wife, my happy household.
    The book succeeded. I was cured of my misery by more work—an idea I had on the trip for a new novel. Yet something had been destroyed: faith, love, trust, and a belief in the future. After my travel, on my return, I became an outsider, a ghostly presence, with my nose pressed against the window. I understood what it was like to be dead: people might miss you, but their lives go on without you. New people take your place. They sit in your favorite chair and dandle your children on their knees, giving them advice, chucking them under the chin; they sleep in your bed, look at your paintings, read your books, flirt with the Danish nanny; and as they belittle you for having been an overindustrious drudge, they spend your money. Most of the time, your death is forgotten. "Maybe it was for the best," people say, trying not to be morbid.
    Some betrayals are forgivable, but others you never quite recover from. Years later, when my children were out of the house, I left that life, that marriage, that country. I began a new life elsewhere.
    Now, thirty-three years older, I had returned to London. To my