A Plea for Eros: Essays

Living with Strangers

IN RURAL MINNESOTA WHERE I GREW UP, IT WAS THE CUSTOM to greet everyone you met on the road, whether you knew the person or not, with a “hi.” A dull, muttered, uninflected “hi” was entirely acceptable, but the word had to be spoken. Passing someone in silence wasn’t only rude; it could lead to accusations of snobbery — the worst possible sin in my small corner of the egalitarian state.

When I moved to New York City in 1978, I quickly discovered what it meant to live among hordes of strangers and how impractical and unsound it would be to greet all of them. In my two-room apartment on West 109th Street, I heard the ceiling creak as my upstairs neighbor paced his floor. I listened to the howling battles of the couple that lived below me, their raging voices punctuated by thuds, bangs, and the sound of breaking glass. My single view took in the back wall of a building that stood perhaps ten yards away. Lying in my bed at night, I sometimes watched the two young men who lived across the air shaft as they lounged in the light of their window dressed only in their underwear. On the sidewalk, I was jostled, bumped, and elbowed as I negotiated the crowds. On the subway, I found myself in intimate contact with people I didn’t know, my body pressed so tightly against them, I couid smell their hair oils, perfumes, and sweat. In my former life, such closeness belonged exclusively to boyfriends and family. It didn’t take long for me to absorb the unwritten code of survival in this town — a convention communicated silently but forcefully. This simple law, one nearly every New Yorker subscribes to whenever possible, is: PRETEND IT ISN’T HAPPENING.

This widely applied coping technique is what separates New Yorkers from tourists and seasoned citizens from those who have just come here. An Iranian friend told me that about a week after he had arrived in the city he was traveling uptown on the Second Avenue bus. At Twenty-fourth Street, the door opened for a woman who was wearing nothing but a flimsy bathrobe over her naked body. When she reached the top step, she started feeling her pockets for something and then, with a shocked look on her face, exclaimed, “My token! My token! Oh my God, I must have left it in the other bathrobe!” The driver sighed and waved her onto the bus. My friend had been staring at the woman throughout the scene but was a little ashamed when he understood that he was alone. Nobody else had given the woman a first glance, much less a second,

Last October, I was on the F Train when I noticed a wild-eyed man entering the car. He boomed out a few verses from Revelation and then, in an equally loud voice, began his sermon, informing us that September 11 had been God’s just punishment for our sins. I could feel the cold, stiff resistance to his words among the passengers, but not a single one of us turned to look at him.

A couple of weeks ago, after seeing a play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, ray husband and I walked down the stairs at the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn to wait for the 2 train. I was tired and wanted to sit and noticed a single bench with several empty seats. At the end of that bench sat a man with five or six plastic bags, and although he was perhaps twenty yards away, I did sense that he might be someone to avoid because even at that distance he gave off an aura of silent hostility. Nevertheless, fortified by the presence of my husband, I led the way to the bench. We seated ourselves at its far end, leaving four empty seats between the man and us. After about a minute, he gathered up his bags, shuffled past us, and spat in our direction. His aim wasn’t terribly good, but when I looked down I saw a tiny gleaming micro-dot of saliva on my pants knee. We let it go.

These three stories — the bathrobe lady, the fanatical preacher, and the spitter — demonstrate a range of increasingly outrageous behavior that may be dealt with through the pretend-it-isn’t-happening law. And yet, as my husband pointed out, in the case of the spitter, had there been more saliva on me, he would have felt forced to act. And acting, as everyone in the city knows, can be dangerous. It is usually better to treat the unpredictable among us as ghosts, wandering phantoms who play out their lonely narratives for an audience that appears to be deaf, dumb, and blind.

Taking action may be viewed as courageous or merely stupid, depending on the circumstances and your point of view. A number of years ago, my husband witnessed a memorable exchange on a subway car he was riding to Penn Station. A very tall black man entered the car with a woman dressed in short shorts and high vinyl boots. Both appeared to be under the influence of some powerful pharmaceutical substance. The woman found a place to sit and immediately nodded off. The man, who was weaving on his feet, took out a cigarette and lit up. Within seconds of that infraction, a little white guy with blond hair, a person probably in his late twenties, wearing a beige trench coat buttoned all the way to his neck, politely demurred. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, in a voice that was obviously formed somewhere in the Midwest, “for bothering you, but I want to point out that it’s against the law to smoke on the subway.” The tall man looked down at his interlocutor, sized him up, paused, and then in deep mellifluous tones, uttered the sentence: “Do you wanna die?”

Most New York stories would have ended there, but not this one. No, the short fellow admitted, he did not want to die, but neither had he finished what he had to say. He persisted, calmly defending the law and its demonstrable Tightness. The big man continued puffing on his cigarette as he eyed his opponent with growing amusement. The train stopped. It was time for the smoker to leave, but before he made his exit, he turned to the indefatigable little midwesterner, nodded, and said, “Have a good Dale Carnegie.”

That story ended well and with wit, but it carries no moral insight into when to act and when not to act. It is simply one of many ongoing dramas among strangers in the city, who often have little in common except that they all belong to this place. There are moments, however, when a smile or a well-timed comment may change the course of what might otherwise have been a sorry event. For the last year and a half, my fifteen-year-old daughter has been refining the frozen, blank expression that accompanies the Pretend Law, because she spends a couple of hours every day on the subway as she travels from Brooklyn to her school on the Upper West Side in Manhattan and back again. With her Walkman securely over her ears, she feigns deafness when the inevitable stray character comes along and tries a pickup.

One day, she found herself sitting across from “a white guy in his thirties” who stared at her so shamelessly that she felt uncomfortable. She kept her eyes off him and was relieved when the man finally left the car. But, before the train pulled out of the station, the ogler threw himself against the window in front of her and began to pound on the glass. “I love you!” he yelled. “I love you! You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life!” Deeply embarrassed, Sophie didn’t move. Her fellow passengers treated the man as if he were an invisible mute, but as the train began to rumble forward, leaving the histrionic troubadour and his declaration behind, the man sitting next to her looked up from his newspaper and said in a deadpan voice, “It looks like you have an admirer.”

Sophie felt better. By breaking the code, the man acknowledged himself as a witness to what, despite the pretense, had been a very public outburst. His understatement not only defined the comedy inherent in the scene; it lifted my daughter out of the solitary misery that comes from being the object of unwanted attention among strangers who collectively participate in a game of erasure. With those few words, and at no cost to himself, he gave her what she needed — a feeling of ordinary human solidarity.

Whatever we might pretend not to see or hear or sometimes smell on our sojourns through New York City, most of us actually see, hear, and smell a lot. Behind the mask of oblivion lies alertness (or exhaustion from having to be so alert). Daydreaming on a country road is one thing. Daydreaming on Fifth Avenue with hundreds of other people striding down the same sidewalk is quite another. But because we are so crowded here, active recognition of other people has become mostly a matter of choice. Nevertheless, compliments, insults, banter, smiles, and genuine conversations among strangers are part of the city’s noise, its stimulus, its charm. To live in strict accordance to the Pretend Law all the time would be unbearably dull. For us urbanites, both for the born and bred and for converts like me, there is a delight that comes from thinking on our feet, from sizing up situations and making the decision to act or not to act. Most of the time, we insulate ourselves out of necessity, but every once in a while we break through to one another and discover unexpected depths of intelligence or heart or just plain sweetness. And whenever that happens, I am reminded of a truth: Everyone has an inner life that is as large and complex and rich as my own.

Sometimes a brief exchange with an unknown person marks you forever, not because it is profound but because it is uncommonly vivid. Over twenty years ago, I saw a man lying on the sidewalk at Broadway and 105th Street. I guessed that he was in his early sixties, but he may have been younger. Unshaven, filthy, and ragged, he lay on his side in an apparent stupor, clutching a bottle in a torn and wrinkled paper bag. As I walked past him, he suddenly propped himself up on his elbow and called out to me, “Hey, beautiful! Want to have dinner with me?” His question was so loud, so direct, I stopped. Looking down at the man at my feet, I said, “Thank you so much for the invitation, but I’m busy tonight.” Without a moment’s hesitation, he grinned up at me, lifted the bottle in a mock toast, and said, “Lunch?”

2003