The car was packed tight yet completely quiet but for the sound of a young man in a nice suit and tie, crying. I looked around and saw alert, concerned faces—people not wanting to intrude but at the same time listening.
An Indian woman seated nearby caught my eye. She mouthed to me: Is he okay? Does he want to sit down? I asked Kenneth, but, no, he wanted to stay put. The Indian woman squeezed through and joined us. There we were, three strangers steadying ourselves on the same subway pole. Pressing up against us from all sides, it seemed, were hundreds and hundreds of subway riders, in this car, and in the next, and in the next, in both directions, like a long retaining wall that keeps a whole mountainside from sliding down.
She asked Kenneth if he had a place to go, people to be with tonight. He was going home, he answered. He had to get off at Grand Central to get the train to Yonkers. She offered to go with him. He refused her help—No, no, he said—but she insisted she would be happy to go.
I thanked her. “I have to get off at the next stop. You’ll make sure he gets home safe?”
“Absolutely.” She introduced herself to him, her voice like a song.
The subway stopped at Fourteenth Street–Union Square. I wished Kenneth well and thanked the woman again and stepped off.
A Touch-Up
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
9-16-12:
In Brooklyn, waiting for the subway back to Manhattan at the Graham Avenue stop, I happened to see a somewhat older man—nice-looking, bald, maybe fifty-eight, fifty-nine—do a double take as a young woman walked by in a short skirt. He looked over and saw that I’d seen him seeing her. He smiled. “Do you think she knows how pretty she is?” he said to me.
She was just far enough away that she couldn’t have heard him.
I watched her, retreating with her friend; she was a knockout, at least from the back, she really was. “I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask her?”
He shook his head. “Nah, too old for her.” Pause. “I’ll tell another one that tonight.”
“A date?” He nodded, and as if in preparation for whatever he had going on later, he began doing a waltz—one-two-three, one-two-three. This was the sweetest thing to see, like that time I saw the actor on the subway practicing his lines, a rolled up script in one hand. The man kept dancing. The subway came. At the far end of the platform, the girl and her friend got into one car. Here, the waltzing man and I got into another.
Do you think she knows how pretty she is?
_____________________
9-30-12:
Why is it hardest to write when there is so much to say?
Let me rephrase: It is hardest to write when there is so much to say.
Wendy Weil, my agent, has died. She was found at her home in Connecticut on Monday; apparently, she’d had a heart attack while in bed—she was surrounded by manuscripts, I was told (“I have so much reading to catch up on,” she’d said when we spoke on Friday afternoon—we had just finalized my new book contract).
I am so sad to lose this friend, not just a friend but also a mentor. I can hear her saying so many things to me, always supportive: how she’d say, “O-kay,” a hard stress on the second syllable, drawn out, say it several times, as you told her what you wanted, maybe what you wanted answered by a publisher or editor. How when she said something like, “This is you at your very best,” lowering her eyes and looking at you dead-on through her bangs, as she did about some of my Times pieces, I knew she really meant it. How, after lunch with that editor from Simon & Schuster, we decided to walk back to her office rather than take a cab. We saw an expensive chocolate shop near Rockefeller Center—“Their chocolates are divine,” she said—so we stopped and bought five, one each for Emily, Emma, and Anne back at her office. Wendy and I ate ours as we continued walking.
_____________________
10-2-12:
This morning on a crowded subway, I spotted a young black woman dressed entirely in shades of pink: pink pants, pink ruffled blouse, pink jacket, pink ballet slippers, and pink clutch handbag. She was wearing giant round sunglasses. I thought about how Wendy enjoyed hearing stories of my subway encounters and sightings. I had my iPod on, as I always do, and was listening to a Neil Young song, his voice plangent and impossibly beautiful. I started to weep. I put on my sunglasses. I took a breath. I didn’t really want to be crying on the subway. I zeroed in again on the young woman in pink. I loved that she had dressed up in what must be her favorite color. Her lucky color. I imagined she was going to an interview for a new job. She was looking in my direction. Although I couldn’t see her eyes, I was sure they were meeting mine, tears falling. “You are going to have an amazing day,” I told her, purely through my thoughts. “You look fabulous.” The subway came to a stop. The woman in pink stood and smiled back at me as she exited.
_____________________