Trains and Martinis
I am asked:
What is your favorite bar for a Martini? This bar is in motion and
keeps eluding me: the club car of the Orient Express or some other luxury
train or one of those privately owned railroad cars about which one can
enviously read in Private Varnish, the magazine published for their
owners.
It is late in the afternoon. Beautiful scenery is rushing past. One's destination and proximate future are secure. The day and one's immediate past recede of their own accord. "I was leaving the day behind me," as Charles Ryder says on the train to Brideshead in the novel by Evelyn Waugh.* Julia is at my side, even lovelier than in the novel. A waiter in a starched white jacket sets the Martinis on the table. As on Charles' trip, so on mine: "The little circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses lengthened to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip, lapped back again, never spilt." I look like Cary Grant on the 20th-Century Limited in North by Northwest.**
What inspired this fantasy? It was an article by Adam Clymer in the Travel section of The New York Times (9-23-01), which began with a self-portrait of the writer "sipping a cold, dry martini and staring at the unfolding Canadian Rockies." He traveled through the Canadian Rockies in a car built for the director of the Canadian Pacific Railway. His three-day trip cost $4,995, which should have been a fantasy-killing figure.
But it is hard to kill. Once I even called a number that I found in Private Varnish. Someone answered! It was a woman. Civil and intelligent. She spoke with a certain East Coast accent now seldom heard, an accent like a Rolex watch. I stated my business: rental of a car, to be attached to an Amtrak train, to convey friends from New York to Washington for a professional meeting. Some details were gone into. She said that she would call back. She never did. Her ilk can tell instantly how much money you have and whether you are one of them.
Do you own one
of those luxury cars, for example, one paneled in walnut that belonged
to Cornelius Vanderbilt? Invite me, and I'll make the Martinis.
They'll be the best we'll ever drink.
*Bridehead Revisited : The Sacred
and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston, 1945), p. 274.
**Alfred Hitchcock, 1959.