IF, WHEN I am drunk or sentimental or prodded by a stupid friend, I think back to the women I have really loved, most of them are covered and hidden by wishes and disappointment. But there is one of whom my memory is clear, and it is strange—she was so unimportant.
She was named Johanna, and I knew her for a summer when I worked in a typewriter-ribbon factory in the Bronx. It was very simple. She sat across from me on the production line all day long, and when either of us lifted our eyes we saw one another. Our job was to put the spools of ribbon in boxes—a very boring job—a job which left our hands automatic, and faces and eyes free so that we spent many days looking and talking. She was not such an attractive girl, and she knew it. These days I don’t like beautiful girls so much, any more. It makes them less able to cry and be sad, and I won’t have a girl who cannot cry and be sad.
Now Johanna had a big wide face, and big heavy limbs, although she was not fat by any means, just big. She was in fact bigger than me but she thought like a very delicate woman, and so she moved as if she were little. Although she was not in the least self-conscious about her body (I often saw her breasts as she leaned over to get more boxes and her open shirt came more open), she thought that perhaps she should be, and I could always tell that she was thinking to herself, I have to be more delicate about myself. But she could not be, and the exposure she suffered made her no less attractive to me.
I confess that at first this was not so. She was big and my image of women had been so ideal; I imagined them as princesses and perfectly clean. I thought that perhaps I might sleep with her, understanding that it would not lead to anything. Then I took pity on her for her clumsiness and the way she was impressed by me. I am externally slick, rather handsome, people say. She thought I was beyond her reach; I did too. I took her to lunch, and she blushed under the fan in the little restaurant. The heat of that summer was so intense that it made us both sweat in the shade. She was taken by me and I was therefore not very interested in her. After all she was not very pretty. And every day we sat for eight hours sweating, our legs sometimes touching, across from one another under the inky breeze of the big fan. She looked down so much not because she needed to see to put the spool into the box, but because she was shy, and think, I had told her everything, wanting to make her a sister. She was very unhappy when I told her of the women I thought about that summer. When I first mentioned Nina she looked so sad that I stopped, but later I went on, and I would speak to her of my girls, and I think she cried in the women’s dressing room. The other women avoided her and thought she was strange.
We had lunch together every day. All she did was keep still, and laugh with me, and smile when I spoke without thinking. She went home to her mother each afternoon; she spoke well, but she was just not pretty.
In the South Bronx one feels as though one is in the hotter part of Naples or the dull part of the Great Plains. Dirt falls from the air, and the heat, the heat, makes everything, even the iron, wet. And the heat changes people. The people I don’t like complain about the heat. Johanna, whom I saw every hour of every day, sitting next to a half-painted column in the skylight light of a hot dirty workroom, did not complain about the heat, but wiped her forehead with her hand now and then and seemed to me very much like myself. She seemed to be me when I was not worried about things, when I was quiet and watching, when I had fallen and could learn and feel, in the heat, the rising heat of that time. Johanna, white-faced and green-eyed, darting-eyed, hands full of ink, wiping her brow with her wrist and getting ink on her wide face anyway. Johanna in the South Bronx in a hot summer when I was stronger and when I thought I would succeed, sat across from me each day. And then I left, and she had to sit there in the same place, and when January came around she was there, accepting whoever sat across from her. I don’t think I would have her now, but if she could know that I loved her then more than anything, that I would have married her, loved her, if only I had not been so young, if only I had known myself. Johanna. When she wiped her brow with her wrist she got ink on her face anyway, and she was always smiling.