Chapter 2

In her dream she was squeezed into a seat on a crowded train in the dark noisy depths of the New York subway. She was on her way to teach at a new school, but she had forgotten the street address, and her mind blurred when she tried to place its approximate location in the context of subway routes. Shuttled from station to station, she believed herself to be near only to find herself farther away. The fluorescent lights flickered on illegible graffiti scribbled over the walls of the car. People's backs bumped against the seats; their heads jerked and lolled on their necks. The straphangers were drooping with weariness. The train writhed in a spasm and stopped at a grimy, deserted platform, but the doors of her car stuck. She felt the cold fix of her fellow passengers' eyes on her. The car stank with suspicion, and no one looked away from her puzzled, frightened face.

She woke with a jolt from her nightmare and looked around, startled, at the sunny peaceful scene. She climbed on her bike with a residue of fear, and rode into town.

On the island of Manhattan in the middle of August, Jeanne stood on the congested subway platform under Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, clutching her purse. Briefly she checked to make sure her necklace was safe under the blouse buttoned up despite the humidity. Before her, heat sparked on train rails. She craned her neck to see down the empty tunnel where, alone, a green light winked. She stared at her wristwatch; the second hand pulsed round its measured circle once, twice, half a dozen times. She sighed; again she would be made late, and it was out of her hands.

The city was falling to pieces around her. In summer the benches in the parks were threaded through with dusty weeds, and the streets oozed at their broken cracks. And Jeanne, whose work helped to light the city's spangled gleam, took in its indifference in her mid-August exhaustion. She could hardly breathe the air, so close was it with the stench of dirt grimed in crevasses and over the surfaces of the ground and walls. Next to her a tall, fair man lapped up a melting ice cream cone as it ran over his fingers. A train passed in the other direction, and briefly she envied its boarding passengers. "Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream... Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart./O when may it suffice?"

The verse came from her viselike mind like a message. She had been waiting too long for something to happen, for a train to come with its chance meetings and departures, for a new country to visit, a foreign language to learn, preferably with the memory of effort expunged the way an infant acquires its first words: she was waiting for another life to surface into her own.

So intent was she on what was not that she didn't notice the tall man at first who, while wiping his sticky fingers on a diminutive napkin, a leather satchel tucked awkwardly under his arm, was attempting to engage her attention.

"Do you have the time?" he inquired twice before she heard him, for she was involved in her interior recitation and felt the intensity of his concentration on her before she took in his question. There was something so avid in his demeanor that she inadvertently began to step back, but just in time she sensed a person behind her. They were too hemmed in on the crowded platform for her to avoid the tall man, but because the presence of many imposed constraints on the behavior of one, she felt reasonably safe. She might as well answer his question.

It was clear he wanted to talk though she would rather remember verses. He guessed aloud that the train would be air-conditioned; he asked her opinion.

"I wouldn't bet on it," she said.

But he insisted; Jeanne shrugged; and so she found herself slipping into easy familiarity with a stranger as the train pulled into the station, and they discovered they were both in the right. Most of the cars had open windows; a few that were jammed with people hadn't, but it was so hot they had opted for cool though confined air.

"We might get seats at Grand Central," she found herself predicting over the screech of the subway starting its next lap downtown. They were both clutching the center pole, but, while she was limited to a view of nothing but the immediate bodies around her, his head stood over most of the crowd. Still, he watched only her. The subway reached Fifty-first Street; the doors opened. The passengers adjusted their positions; he moved toward her, his largeness around her smallness. She felt a hand heavy and warm on her cotton-clad shoulder though it had recently held an ice cream cone.

Across her back, the muscles contracted. Already small, she tried to grow slighter, but she did not shake her shoulder, nor did his hand attempt to add to its territory. But she resented his easy advances, and at Forty-Second Street, she slipped into the just-vacated, love-seat size bench by the door. People were streaming out before they were streaming in; over a loudspeaker the conductor shouted, "Let them off, let them off," and her self-chosen companion stumbled over another passenger's briefcase in an effort to sit beside her. Under his thin-woven slacks, she saw his thighs flex; how could she help it, at her eye level? She moved for him; he crowded her into a wedge, but he must have felt her earlier cringe, for a narrow division of space kept him from touching but not from talking as the train lurched once more forward.

She instantly guessed his game and refused on principle to participate when he asked her first if she were a secretary and, second, if into fashion. Jeanne, who had chosen to look at his lap instead of his face, was watching the play of his long-fingered hands over his leather satchel when she started as if betrayed and eyed him accusingly.

"You're wearing a watch after all."

"I just wanted to check it," he countered. "It's been giving me trouble."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Look," he said anxiously, "I change trains at Fourteenth Street. Where do you get off?"

"After you," she evaded, and as an afterthought added rudely, "I don't care for your questions."

He squinched his elbows into his chest; his body withdrew as if to say he had meant no harm.

She did not have to trust in him for her fear of his aggression to relent; it let up when his body let hers be. After Grand Central, the car had grown emptier and she breathed easier. If he could catch it, forgiveness was implicit in her subsequent statement that it felt good to be sitting down.

"Because the car is air-conditioned," he insisted.

She found herself smiling at his smooth yet angular face as he watched her, eyes wide and blue, and she felt as if a door had just blown open. In letting him attract her, she had changed one of her cardinal rules of behavior, but it didn't matter because, she figured, he would be getting off in three stops.

Was it merely the dependable brevity of their encounter that suddenly made him more amusing in her eyes? He had obeyed her wish and no longer crowded her. This time she made the small talk; she asked him about his watch, a Swatch that showed its inner workings, and told him about hers: the first in her possession, she'd received it from her parents for her ninth birthday, and it still ran beautifully, unchanged except for its band, now one of inlaid Hopi silver in a native sign signifying a prayer feather attached to a row of thunderclouds for rain. "But you have to wind it," she added.

"How many years have you had it now?" he asked.

She wondered if this were a roundabout way of extracting more personal information. "We've shared a subway ride, but we don't have to share our ages," she reprimanded.

"I won't guess," he promised. "My stop's next," and he rose to his feet so fluidly it seemed to her he must have swung himself up, but he held his satchel in his fist. A moment later, he'd switched it to under his arm. His hand reached to take hers, and she gave it to him.

"Nice meeting you."

"For doubtless we won't meet again," he dared to add, and she agreed with him. The train was approaching Union Square. He bent his lips to the back of her hand. "Farewell." It was a flourish.

The car screeched to a stop. One door of the two slid open; people began to file out. "I'm off," he said.

"I'm right after you." She told him after all.

"Astor Place, aha!" He was half out of the door when he said it. He grinned and waved, and she turned her face in the dirty window to watch him leave. When the train staggered forward, she had the whole seat to herself for a single stop.

* * *

Coming out to the blue sky of an August six o'clock was a momentary shock but also a little boost for the evening ahead toward which she propelled her mind as she walked rapidly west: shopping at the greengrocer's, the deli, and the health food store, picking up clothes at the dry cleaners, and what else? She couldn't remember. While the evenings were still long, she had them free, for in August the repertory company was not in residence. So, after shopping she sat for awhile on a bench in an out-of-the-way square, her feet half out of her low-heeled shoes, both arms cradled around brown paper bags, her pocketbook wedged into her waist.

At home Jeanne put her purchases away. Then she poured herself a glass of white wine, sat down, and flicked on her phone's answering machine. The first call was from her mother who'd come to the city to shop for the day but who hadn't been able to reach Jeanne at her office, the next from a retired director she'd once worked with. Then came on a man's voice she didn't recognize, somewhat high in timbre. The speaker identified himself as Paul, Althea's friend, to whom she'd given this number in case he wanted to leave her a message and couldn't reach her.

Jeanne decided to relay Paul's request in a letter instead of by long-distance phone, being influenced by a tradition of writing to Althea going back to when they attended separate schools. After confirming her day of arrival, she added the following note:

A new man named Paul who presumes himself your friend appeared on my answering machine last Friday the 15th with a desire to let you know he'd called off his dinner party, for his friend Bryce was unexpectedly summoned to his Mississippi hometown.