Finishing Books In Public
Late at night on the train, I finish my book, and there isn’t much else to do except look at the other passengers. I flip back once to check the page number on the story the author indicated was the first one he wrote in his postscript notes. Page 77. I read the first lines again. It wasn’t one of the stories I’d actually liked, but I’d enjoyed some of the others so at least I think he’s improved. Progress is something, right?
To me finishing a book in public is the same thing as kissing open-mouthed on the street, with just licked lips and maybe tongue. I always feel dragged from the words to the world of the park or the classroom or on this occasion, the train, where an Asian girl in a beige sweater rests her head on her blonde boyfriend’s shoulder just for a second. He touches the back of her hand, and I imagine the slivery blue veins protruding and prominent— his fingers travel the force of life. When she picks her head up, she goes back to playing some sort of game on her phone. He watches her play, amused and indulgent.
The couple gets off at 116th Street, Columbia University. Maybe this is how they met: a classroom, senior level advanced chemistry or something of the like. She looks a little older than him, maybe she’s the TA and he’s in her study recitation section. They share sneaking, careful looks; she reads his problem sets with extra care. A chemical equation that means chemistry. Or even, do you like beer, because I like beer, and you.
They are very appropriate. Nothing happens. He dates the blonde who sat next to him relentlessly for weeks and she thinks they make a cute, adorably Aryan couple. She probably fools around with her ex-boyfriend but it’s never really on again even though this ex-boyfriend makes a point to tell her how much he likes it when she eats spicy hummus right out of the container, with her finger. Which she does, frequently, and sometimes in bed.
After the final exam, they run into each other at an American Constitution Society keg party on 109th. They both have mutual friends in the law school, oddly enough, and they drink too much cheap wine and that’s it, they’re together and happy. He applies to Columbia’s med school and gets in; they stay together and happy.
I get off the train at 125th Street, the first stop above ground. The guy with the green tennis shoes and an unfortunate amount of forehead acne who had been standing the whole time gets off, too, and he calls someone the second the doors whoosh open. The artificial lights hurt my eyes for a second, my contacts are dry.
The boy tells the person on the phone that he’s right around the corner and he’ll be home in three minutes, not even. Somehow I’ve gotten in front and he follows me down the escalator, and we walk to the same building. I fit my key in the lock, which is stupid, because the buzzer is broken and just buzzes constantly— anyone can come in, nobody needs a key. He thanks me anyway and I don’t point out the fact that we seem to have a security breach in our building. I’m working on not telling strangers irrelevant or obvious information.
He walks up the stairs behind me and stops on the third floor. 3B. Now I know his apartment number. I continue on and I wonder if he thinks about the sound of my feet on the stairs. Endless, it seems, but only three more flights for me to go. I’m wearing Chucks tonight but when I wear my cold weather boots the click of my heels sounds like heavy rain. He’s not thinking of me, though, a stranger. He has someone who was waiting for him to get home.
I cried a little bit earlier today on the train because I was in the middle of reading that book and there was an essay about a boy who lost his mother to a terrible illness. I thought too much about my grandfather. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I thought too much about my grandmother without my grandfather, her trembling hands unfolding his old silk flight handkerchief to show me a tumble of bronze pins— his pilot wings, the first ones he ever received from the Army Air Force, and a few others. I can’t remember what they were for, now, even though that was only about a month ago. But she pressed the handkerchief into my hand and said I should have them and now I do.
I also have my grandfather’s watch, a rather delicate gold piece that requires daily setting and winding. The face of it is worn, some of the tiny second marks are lost forever. It was the first present my grandmother ever bought my grandfather, and when she gave it to me, she told me the story of being 22 years old and picking it out and then going to the shop with Pap, her father, in tow, in the hopes that Pap would pay for it because what she wanted to give her new husband she couldn’t quite yet afford. The money was a loan; the gift a tentative step into her married life. Would he like it? she worried. He did. And she paid her father back.
I started this essay intending to write a piece of fiction, and of course it is not, except for my made-up backstory for the couple. For all I know, they met at a bar and he just happens to have a thing for Asian girls. But it’s funny, when the blonde boy touched his girlfriend’s hand, and she curled herself into him, I saw my grandmother’s hands again, holding out that handkerchief. I saw her hand disappear into my grandfather’s as they stepped off the elevator together at the Petroleum Club in downtown Fort Worth for Easter brunch a thousand years ago. He wore his powder-blue suit and orange socks; she wore a brown dress and a carefully tied scarf around her neck.
It’s a chemical formula, an equation, a secret. And I wear the watch, all my grandmother’s love, the things she couldn’t afford, that none of us can really afford but give anyway, around my wrist. Before I sleep I take it off and wind it until it won’t go anymore.
The 1 train rattles by outside my window and I think about how tomorrow morning I’ll be on it heading in the opposite direction, to work in Midtown. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get a seat. When the car is crowded and I’m sitting down, I feel like I’m in a forest and all the trees are made of denim and corduroy.
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Rec Writer’s Theme: Tentative First Step / Original Post October 25, 2010
