Finally, in the subway, coming home one night during rush hour, I do it. It is sweltering in the car, hundreds of us packed against one another; a dull rumble of fear and assault moving through the tunnels and I am jammed against a tall blond girl, around twenty-four or twenty-five with a briefcase under her shoulder, a fine moistness coming from her forehead, a fine heat seeming to come from the damp of her underarms. The car lurches, we press against one another, smile, turn away, slam into one another again at a halt, uncouple, smile, move, smile, jerk, slam, grunt at one another, move away unsmiling, slam to a halt, drive into one another, smile, and I cannot take it anymore, literally cannot take it, her left breast is resting against my forearm, her right less than an inch from my nose and I say, “I could love you, you know, I could really love you, it wouldn’t be difficult at all, you have no idea of what goes on inside me, but if I could only make you see, I know that the two of us could somehow come together; you’re really extraordinarily beautiful, sensual arms, beautiful breasts, but more than beautiful you’re sensitive as well, I can see from your face how sensitive you are and furthermore from the briefcase you are carrying that you are a consequential person, an artist perhaps, or a fashion designer, possibly a model carrying around shots of herself or a writer turning in brilliant crisp samples of her prose style to the top magazines. I am thirty-five years old, a college graduate, industrious, intelligent, I am making approximately fifty thousand dollars a year from my own business, I have lived an interesting life and am really at the verge of my best possiblities. What do you think? Do you think that we could manage somehow with one another? It would be no problem to disentangle myself from my home life and as far as you, a girl so beautiful could have formed no entanglements that she could not break without the others thinking that they were blessed to have known her on whatever terms for however short a time. What do you think? Will you make love to me?” and then, shyly look up at her for the first time as the train pulls into the Fifty-ninth Street station, yawns to a halt, flings open its doors and begins to evacuate passengers.
She adjusts her briefcase, gives me a smile, prepares to join the passengers on the way out. “I think,” she says, looking at her watch, “I think that it’s about five twenty. But I’ve been slow for weeks, maybe you’d better ask someone else.” Her ass waggles a slow, sad good-bye to me as she steps to the platform.
Before I can get really involved, however, in thoughts about modern alienation, the train gets jammed in the tunnel outside Seventy-second Street, and for half an hour I have nothing to contemplate but the smell of smoke and my own terror, both rising like the winking lights of an incoming New Lots Express bearing out of the tubes, and by the time we finally get going again, a good share of the passengers in the train have panicked or fainted or begun to curse about being late for dinner on the fuckin subway, and comforting the wounded, healing the sick, and talking with the afflicted keeps me quite busy almost all the way home.