violent, and malodorous.
So when a beautiful woman sits across the aisle, dignity condemns action and demands silence. Because—when you fail to say hello to a beautiful stranger on the subway, you have triumphantly avoided yet another form of—human misery.
To say something, or to say nothing? This is the anatomy of the dilemma presented by love and dignity on the subway, and this concludes the preface.
I was on an uptown local on the Lexington Avenue line, a subway that was doomed to stall at 33rd Street.
I had boarded at the City Hall stop, still woozy from a breakfast meeting with the woman who wants to buy the rights to my movie, and I was taking the contract uptown, to my attorney. It was my quadrennial half-pint of success. I was in media res in the worst way, running an errand for my meager movie on a wet furnace of a morning. My armpits were—have you ever used a droplet of water to test the heat of a wok? While I was waiting on the platform for the train at City Hall, my armpits were informing me that the wok was ready. The woman next to me on the platform at City Hall was wearing a yellow muumuu and carrying a Bible and a blue-ice freezer pack. Bible shut, freezer pack against her chest. Fundamentalist heat, this.
The subway was empty, naturally, when it finally rolled in, since City Hall is the first stop on the line. But I didn’t take a seat. I took off my jacket, draped it over my—moist shirtsleeve, and stood like a jack under the air conditioner, to expose myself to as much as possible of that good dry air. Though I did leave my boater on my head, to protect my scalp.
So! The subway leaves City Hall. And as it makes each stop, the doors open, the beastly day seethes into the train, the doors close, and cool order returns. By Spring Street the woman in the muumuu has cooled off enough to start reading her Bible, and I extract my handkerchief and begin to mop myself up, when I notice—a crucial detail. At the far end of the subway car, the alarm for the emergency brake is sounding.
But I do nothing about it—yet.
Spring Street, Bleecker Street, Astor Place. Our train arrives at Union Square simultaneously with an express train. Fatefully, I decide against doing that bounce across the platform to catch the faster train. I am too hot, and am in no hurry. My lawyer can wait. The fundamentalist in the muumuu leaves, however, thumps away to catch the express, and into our car, from the express train, slips—the woman with the beauty spots. A shapely twist of a woman, dressed in black, with two beauty spots on her right cheek. The doors shut. She sits down at the other end of the car, directly underneath the colicky emergency brake.
Twenty-third Street. Twenty-eighth Street. Shadows and stiff air. The beautiful woman’s halo is vibrating in time to the trill of the emergency brake siren. Thirty-third Street. And just note the pointlessness of the place and time. Thirty-third Street? Ten twenty-five A.M.? In the midst of a primordial heat wave? At 10:25 A.M., 33rd Street—is harrowingly bland. It is nowhere.
But—33rd Street. The train pulls up to the platform, but the doors don’t open. And then, as was foreordained, the train stalls. The electricity weakens and dies, the lights dwindle and quit, the air conditioning expires. We, the passengers, are experiencing the subway as it was in the age of reptiles. The only things still functioning are the alarm on the emergency brake and the public address system, the latter of which the conductor is using to scold us. She is accusing someone of having pulled the emergency brake. “This train is going to be held in the station.” Apparently she is planning to go car to car, looking for the culprit.
Now, you can tell a lot from this conductor’s voice. She is black, young, and calm, but not necessarily always calm—you can hear the potential for impressive intemperance. “People, listen up. We have a brake situation, so you are going to have to be patient. Be patient, please.”
So we sit there and, without the air conditioning, commence to sweat, and we listen, in the darkness, to the whine of the emergency brake. Outside, growing restless, are all the damned souls on the platform at 33rd Street, waiting to get into the train, waiting to be pardoned and released into the cool interior of the 6 train, or rather, the ever-less-cool interior of the 6 train.
The woman with the beauty spots is sipping an iced coffee, at peace in her seat. She is wearing leather sandals, but her feet are enchantedly clean for someone who has been walking about Manhattan in weather hot enough to sublimate the concrete. Her hair is thick and wavy and blackish, pulled back under a knotted white handkerchief, a pristine handkerchief. Eyes closed, soft features, and two beauty marks on her right cheek. Maybe she is Spanish, or maybe Jewish. A sleeveless black shirt made out of something elastic-y, stained in the faintest half-moons of perspiration, right along the bottom of the armholes, which is very sexy, and billowy black linen pants. Sipping her iced coffee through a straw. No milk; she’s drinking it black. And the condensation is dripping onto her hands. She’s got a napkin, a bundle of paper napkins, that she’s using to mop the condensation from the side of her plastic iced-coffee cup and that she’s then holding against her forehead, so she can feel the coolness. Freckles on her shoulders.
Her seat is at the other end of the car, directly under the noisy emergency brake. And I—I see my opportunity. All I need is one teaspoon of courage, in order to do her the dignifi ed courtesy of shutting off that alarm.
JAMES CLEVELAND, age twelve, describes what Maynard looked like under the air-conditioning vent on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
He was just some tall white guy dressed like an old man. Except he wasn’t old, as in old-old. But he had on old-man clothes, like one of those brown checkered jackets that looks like a tablecloth, and a white straw hat with a brown stripe around it, and a red tie with one of those silver clips to hold it to the shirt. He looked like the geezer who sits all on his own at church and who thinks he behaves better than everyone else and who stares at you and your sister to let you know it. And that was the thing with this white guy—he had a face like he was surprised at something. And when he raised his eyebrows, he had about five hundred and fifty-five wrinkles on his forehead. You know how they add extra lines in music for the high notes? His forehead was like music that has all kinds of notes that are going way, way, way too high.
Chief was like, “Son, he look like he just step in something nasty, son.”
And I said, “Son, you be saying son far too much, son.”
And Chief said, “Your mother be saying it too much. He got a face like something cold just touch his balls.”
But the point being is, ain’t nobody going to pay attention to you unless you make a problem for them. And Brittany and Juney and Shawna were trying to make a problem for the white guy, to see if Chief and me were scared enough to run away. So they got the guy’s attention, and then they flipped him off. And I think the reason they picked him was because of his face.
MAYNARD GOGARTY continues undeterred with the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
So, now, out on the platform, waiting to get in, are five black kids, two boys and three girls, twelve or thirteen years old, and they are waving at me through the window. Or at least the girls are waving. Only twelve-year-olds could muster such brio in such heat. These three girls are absolutely—conjubilant. And bear in mind, these kids are perfectly the age to do something simultaneously adolescent and childish: go on a double date, yet wave at strangers on the other side of the glass. They have the look of cutting class—some infinitely tedious summer band camp, perhaps, since the boys have trumpet cases with them. They feel daring for skipping class, for being on a date, and so the girls are giving themselves courage and teasing their young escorts by waving at me. Well—! Naturally I wave back.
