THE WAY PEOPLE TALK about the hell of the subways these days, you would think it is all a matter of municipal decadence, which is never the fault of the people talking. For my part, I often recall the time I did a bad thing on the subway, myself. And I still feel responsible, although it was owing to the difficulty of modern life.
In those days I lived in Brooklyn and worked in Rockefeller Center. I was on my way from the former to the latter on the D train. I had had the foresight to leave tardily enough that morning to get a seat. Still the car was fairly crowded, several unfortunates standing. (Even in those days, before sexism, I gave up my seat only to women who could show definite signs of dizziness and a doctor’s statement that they were at least six months pregnant, or to anyone carrying a razor.)
We pulled into, I believe, the Grand Street station. I was absorbed in the Park Slope News, our weekly neighborhood paper, which reported the seizure of $200,000 worth of heroin in a house near ours (we didn’t know them). Suddenly one end of the subway car was aflutter. It was the first time I had been in an even partially aflutter subway car, and I was bemused. I was accustomed to subway cars having the interior atmosphere of cattle cars, or of quarter-ton trucks carrying enlisted men back at night from long, pointless exercises in the rain.
My end of this car, though, was filled suddenly with people gesturing, pointing to a spot just over my head and saying, “The window.” Two men across from me had even risen from their seats and advanced in the direction the others were pointing.
I looked over my shoulder and saw what seemed to be the window in question—an adjustable horizontal vent over the big stationary pane. The doors had closed, the train was just beginning to move out of the station, and a young couple was running alongside, pointing at the window. It was open.
I can’t explain my reaction very thoroughly. All I know was that I felt I had to react quickly, and I suppose that the only previous situations to which my mind could relate this one immediately were situations in which my automobile door was open and other drivers were shouting at me to close it. I knew, in my mind, that you couldn’t be sucked out of a subway window the way you can an airplane window, but I may have assumed subrationally that there might be something nebulously hazardous about a subway window left open. And I loved New York, even including its subways, and I wanted to be a good citizen.
With one reflex motion of my arm, at any rate, I shut the window. The faces of the running couple outside fell as the train pulled away from them, and a paper bag hit the window and dropped back inside, onto the woman beside me.
“He closed the window,” from another woman across the car, was the only comment on my action that I heard; its tone seemed moderately surprised, but too tired to be censorious. The man who had thrown the bag picked it up off the lady’s lap and went back to his seat.
He and the man next to him opened the bag, revealing the contents to themselves only, and the other people in the car murmured a bit and then lapsed back into their previous attitudes.
I couldn’t put the thing out of my mind so easily. I went over to the two men, losing my seat to a blind woman as I did. “What was that all about?” I asked.
Both men shrugged, but then they showed me what was inside the bag. A blond wig and a sandwich.
It all came clear to me then. The young running couple had left his or her wig and lunch on the seat by mistake and had been calling for someone to throw them out through the window before the train departed.
The two men put the bag back down on the seat. They didn’t want to wear the wig, and they didn’t trust human nature enough to eat the sandwich.
By getting involved, not wisely but too well, I had prevented what might have been the only spontaneous and niftily coordinated friendly effort between strangers going on at that moment throughout the metropolis. I felt bad. I wanted to account for my actions. But nobody would look at me. I glared at the blind woman and stood there impersonally rattling and groaning on underground the rest of the way to work. Urban life is too complex.