The Moon In Its Flight

SUBWAY

She said that she’d got on an uptown local at Canal Street, gone to sleep, and, waking, just fifteen minutes later, found herself in Brooklyn at the end of the line on Ninety-fifth Street, a weird miracle, she said. This is the same girl who got thrown out of Six Happiness on Mott Street a couple of nights earlier for knocking everything off the table and shouting “fuck the Communist bastards!” From Canal to Ninety-fifth Street in fifteen minutes while going the wrong way, dream on, sweetheart, and in the meantime straight, no chaser?

She’d been drinking all afternoon with some friends in a bar that used to be on Greenwich Avenue near Christopher Street but that’s long gone now. They all went down to Chinatown to eat and she kept drinking, beer, and vodka from a full pint that she had in her bag. She wasn’t really a drunk, but that day she was plastered. The story was that her husband, a really lousy painter who lived off her and spent every day in McSorley’s soaking up ale, had been relentlessly unfaithful to her with anybody who’d stand still, but you hear a lot of stories. After dinner, on Elizabeth Street, she got separated from her friends, although they might have conveniently lost her, seeing that she’d become an impossible embarrassment. She must have got a cab and took it to the Cedar, the new one, new then, anyway, on what? Eleventh Street? and sat at the bar nodding over a whiskey sour and trying not to fall off her stool. At about 2:00 A.M., she left the bar, walked east to Broadway, then down to Eighth Street and into the subway station. The change-booth attendant had to call the police because she was standing on a bench about halfway down the platform, screaming and sobbing about Canal Street disappearing and her friends disappearing and the whole world vanishing. She calmed down right away, and the cops took her to the Sixth Precinct station house and let her sober up there, even bought her coffee, since she was well-dressed and good-looking. She moved about two months later to a loft in Long Island City, then to some suburb outside Chicago. She’d been, incidentally, an editor at Mademoiselle when she married the rotten painter. Not that it matters.

She got on the Fourth Avenue Local at Canal Street for the short trip to Twenty-third Street. It was 2:45 A.M. The doors slid shut, the train lurched and banged, the car’s lights shivering on and off. She was alone in the car, and had a violently painful red-wine headache. As far as she could tell, there was no one in the cars before and behind hers. The train screamed into Prince Street’s deserted station, nobody boarded or got off, and the train barged on through the dark. After a minute or so, it entered Eighth Street, but when she looked out the smudged and greasy windows she saw that the station signs read Canal Street. She got up, frightened; the train had not gone backward. But this was Canal Street. Bewildered, she took a step toward the doors, and just as they were closing, lurched out onto the platform, losing one of her high-heeled pumps. An old Chinese woman, her face half-turned to look down the silent tracks, stood at the end of the platform, two crammed and battered paper shopping bags at her feet. One read: Jade Mountain; the other: Six Happiness. A panic possessed her as the old woman, abandoning her bags, turned and shuffled down the platform toward her, her face taut with a fear that seemed to be just short of terror.