On the New York subway, a fellow passenger’s leather bracelet caught my eye. The bracelet, two inches wide, advertised not a specific sexual predilection but a general advocacy of extreme taste. He wore several bracelets; the others, more slender than the leather one, grouped themselves on either side of the primary band. Over his shoulder hung a canvas bag bearing the word Alpha, in a spacious font—an aerated font, susceptible to unsolicited infusions. I was wearing a blue coat; I call it my Picasso jacket, not because Picasso ever wore such a jacket, or because the jacket resembles one of his paintings, but because I need to discover a name for every desirable object that surrounds me. When I first owned the blue jacket, I didn’t necessarily find it desirable, but I enshrouded it with desirability by granting it a name—the Picasso jacket—it didn’t deserve. Picasso was a portly man; we’ve all seen pictures of him topless. Imagine his chest—its width, its arrogance, its suggestion of primacy and sway. Perhaps you find chests like Picasso’s desirable. My chest doesn’t resemble Picasso’s, though perhaps mine is a finer specimen; mine is less weather-beaten, less flabby, less hairy. I will never be able to achieve, in art or letters, what Picasso achieved. (Who among us can?) But my chest is not to be held accountable for the paucity of my gifts. My chest, like a rook in a chess game, has a valuable neutrality of demeanor, a lack of psychological attributes. The rook is not an individual; the rook is a reminder of larger issues—or perhaps a remainder from battles and tempests that occurred long ago.
On the subway, I engaged in a staring contest with the man wearing a leather bracelet and holding an “Alpha” bag. I won. At a certain point, as our train neared 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue, he broke off eye contact with me.
An hour later, in a design showroom where I was offering prizes to winners of a contest, a competition rewarding supplicants who could meld the practicalities of industrial design with the floridities and nebulosities of landscape painting, I saw again the man with the leather bracelet. Our eyes met; he looked away. I took the plunge, walked up to him, and asked him the significance of the word Alpha on his bag. He told me its meaning, but I’m not at liberty to reveal it to you; if I gave you more information about the company he represents, a firm whose name contains the word Alpha, you could google it, and find his name—he is the operation’s leader—and doubtless find his picture, as well. Seeing his picture, you would understand why he arrested my sight on the subway; you would know more about the nature of my desire than I wish to betray. You would understand that the leather bracelet was not the main reason I was staring at him. You would understand that my allusion to the leather bracelet was a displacement.
The stranger with the “Alpha” bag was a visitor from South America; he spoke Portuguese and Spanish, but no English, so I spoke Italian to him. In error, I said prossimo, which means, in Italian, “next,” but I’d meant to say “earlier,” or whatever Italian word means “earlier.” At the moment I don’t know what Italian word means “earlier,” and I don’t want to interrupt the process of composition by consulting an English–Italian dictionary. My devotion to the writing trance’s inviolability is a throwback to an earlier moment in the history of taste; trying to narrate this simple episode to you, I find myself in the grip of an aesthetic style that, if I were a mature writer, I would have outgrown. Obscenity resides in using methods that history has declared obsolete. A full century after Cubism made fracture possible, why am I trying to reproduce this afternoon’s reality in sequential sentences, rather than presenting to you an asyntactic, askew distillation of the events, filtered through a presiding consciousness? Why is the consciousness overseeing the narration of this fable so lacking in discernment?
After the awards ceremony for the supplicants who’d attempted to weld together the arts of industrial design and landscape painting had ended, and long after my enigmatic acquaintance from the subway had left the showroom and I had said goodbye to the supplicants, both those who had received awards and those who had not (I gave especial praise, in my formal remarks to the assembled audience, to those supplicants who had not won a prize, because I always prefer the losers to the winners), I saw, on the elevator ride down to the lobby, a young man with a dense beard. We were the only passengers. I don’t usually speak to strangers in an elevator, but an impulse of transparency and boldness overtook me, and I turned to the stranger and said, “Your beard is sensational.” He said, “Thank you.” I decided to express my admiration for his beard in a more detailed and effusive fashion. I praised his beard’s density. I used the word thorough. I might have said, “Your beard is very thorough.” The beard left nothing out; it lacked ellipses. He said, “Do you want to touch it?” I reached out and felt his beard: rough, dimensional, forthright, it was mostly brown in color, though an underlying redness struggled to break free and achieve dominance. The moment of palpation lasted only five or ten seconds. As we exited the elevator, I asked his name. “Ezra,” he said, shaking my hand. I told him my name. I didn’t tell him that I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Ezra Pound. I wondered, afterward, whether Ezra is usually a Jewish name. I wondered whether the Ezra in the elevator was Jewish. I wondered if my galvanized reaction to his beard stemmed from my intuitive sense of his Jewishness. I wonder now, as I write this allegory, why I considered Jewishness to be a bedrock matter, lending coherence to all attributes of the person, including the thickness and thoroughness of the beard.
I considered the day a festival of rich encounters. Neither encounter—with the man on the subway or the man on the elevator—would likely bear fruit in further conversation or friendship. Ezra and the man from Alpha, I will probably never see you again. And yet you are firmly lodged in my system of magical references. If I said that you symbolize for me the suggestiveness of accidental encounters, I would be saying nothing precise, for the word suggestive has no meaning without an indication of what is being suggested. Perhaps, however, my subject here is simply suggestibility—the capacity to receive suggestions. No hypnotist has stronger sway over me than a stranger; even the notion “stranger,” however, is a mesmerizing fiction, thick with ideology, dense with assumptions about lands, borderlands, and the firm divisibility of the known from the unknown. The German word for stranger, Fremde, reminds me of Frieda Kahlo, of a ghostly Frieda generations ago in my family tree, of Sylvia Plath’s daughter (Frieda Hughes), and of unfriendedness, as if the English word friend had been mingled with alien consonants, in a game involving rope, a game in which the hands of the competitors inevitably suffered rope burn; “friend,” within a consonantal rope-game, becomes Fremde. I suppose that this essay, this fiction, is an allegory about different countries coexisting. It isn’t traditionally a writer’s business to decode her own parable. But I like to clean up after myself. If I make a mess, I take out a whisk broom, a sponge, or a mop. The mop I’m dragging across my prose’s floor, at the moment, is the allegory mop. I need to mop up the messy particles I’ve spilled on the floor, and be sure that I leave the surface as shiny and blank as I found it.
(2017)