Miss Subways: A Novel Read online

  “It’s funny you say that about writing, though,” he said. “’Cause that’s what I would’ve said I wanted to be when I was a kid. That’s what I wanted to do as a man. It’s actually how I got into acting—to see writing from a different angle, I guess. But then…” He seemed to almost say something else, or he seemed to be exhaling a very articulate and telling silence, like he was looking deep down into himself and wasn’t sure he liked what he saw.

  “What is it?” Emer asked. Even though she hadn’t been in lover’s company in a while, she was surprised to still find herself so immediately in tune with a man’s easy slide into self-loathing, and the coincident feminine impulse to pull him away from that navel-gazing, self-abnegating male darkness.

  He took his time, as men do, used to having the floor. He began speaking at the tail end of a long exhale. “Anyway. I guess I got lazy.”

  The “anyway” was the lie, Emer knew. The “anyway” covered all the things he didn’t feel he could tell her yet but would have to if they somehow continued to get to know each other. The “anyway” was the drawing of a curtain.

  “I got lazy or I was born lazy and just didn’t have the balls to sit alone in a room typing. I guess I wanted to have more fun, and now here I am, kind of a nonwriting nonactor, nonentity.”

  “You have really got to stop bragging. It’s unseemly,” Emer said.

  He smiled, but remained blue. “I’m in my forties and just getting started. I also do a lot of voiceover work.”

  “You have a nice voice.”

  “You think?”

  Emer got up to run her mouth under the bathroom faucet. This man seemed too smart to be an actor. What a waste. It was hard to be a man, with all those demands for worldly success and the vanquishing of dragons. She didn’t care. And yet she did. She didn’t have a ton of experience with men, but she knew well enough that a man of a certain age who had not slain a dragon was a dangerous, sad thing. It seemed Emer couldn’t slake her thirst, taking huge gulps of the cold water, like trying to swallow something back, drown something, or water a deep-seated, neglected, arid need.

  She felt as if she had split in two, and that Con was part of herself, call it the male half of her brain, call it the male imago—the part that felt it could play fast and loose with power and appropriation, the part that felt capable of anything, potent enough to go out into the world and remake, play with its forms like a child with Play-Doh. She remembered some old Emerson quote about not writing, not respecting your “genius” or something, and then reading someone else who has written your story, and feeling the prickly shame and despair of that recognition. Someone else had done what you were supposed to do. She wanted him to leave. Because she, too, had wanted to be a writer as a child. His not writing made her want to write. She wanted him to leave so she could begin.

  But she wanted him to stay. She wanted to tell him she knew exactly what he was talking about and that she was living it, too. But then she checked herself; she really knew nothing about this man.

  She stopped drinking the cool water and came back to the bed.

  “Sex makes you thirsty, huh?” he said.

  “Yes,” she lied, and then thought, My first lie to this man. And she recalled an article in the paper about how little lies make bigger lies possible, that a type of acclimation, or a wearing of a groove is how she envisioned it, happens in the amygdala, the infamous, so-called reptile brain—when a little lie is told, literally paving the way for more, and bigger lies, from dirt paths to asphalt roads to superhighways, just a slippery slope of mendacity.

  “I’ve got to head to work soon,” she said, which was not technically a lie, but might as well have been. She kinda wanted to be alone. Con stood up and put his left leg in his underwear. She glanced at his flaccid prick in the near dark, illuminated only by the slanting bathroom light, hanging somewhat forlornly to the left, not proudly pointing at the sky like the night before; she quickly looked away, as if staring at a limp cock was somehow rude, like lingering too long looking at a car accident, too much softness and vulnerability. It had been so long since she’d seen one up close and personal, it was like looking at an exotic animal in the zoo. She thought she’d like to make it hard again.

  Con looked up and said, “There’s something. Something you’re not saying.”

  He zipped up his jeans—zipper, no buttons. She knew that probably meant something, it meant something about style and whether he was hip or not hip, whether he was trying to appear younger than his years or not, but she couldn’t remember, just as she could never remember which pocket with the bandanna meant you were a top or a bottom in the gay community, or what color the Bloods and the Crips were. All these signs and signifiers she knew and forgot and mixed up put her in ignorance and sometimes even danger. And every few years the signals changed, like those gods, like these gods, she thought, but no, the gods remain.

  “There’s a lot I’m not saying. I’m sure there’s a lot you’re not saying too.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I really do have to get ready. I never do this.” She sounded so prosaic to herself. She already missed the poetry of the night before.

  “I don’t care if you do or don’t.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is that your way of asking if I do this all the time?”

  Emer had to take a moment with that. Was it? Maybe, but she didn’t think so. Con continued, “I don’t care. Even if you’re doing stuff like this all the time, doesn’t matter to me, I don’t judge.”

  “So you wouldn’t judge me if I was a big, fat subway slut?”

  He smiled and went into the bathroom and finished dressing. She heard him raise the creaking toilet seat and urinate forcefully, and she thought, How strange, I doubt that toilet seat has been raised in years. Over the sound of his urine hitting the water, he called out. “You’re not fat,” he said.

  A MOSQUITO, MY LIBIDO

  AFTER CON LEFT, THE SUN ROSE. Emer tidied up. She took the sheets off the bed and cleaned the bathroom, and felt for a moment like she was cleaning up a crime scene. There was a solitary cracked sunflower seed by the window in the living room. Emer kept finding signs that Corvus occasionally visited. Never when she was home, however. She tended to leave the windows open and some seeds and grapes out, and often there was food missing. So either Emer was sleep-eating or fostering a nasty rat population in her building. Or, better, Corvus was making furtive visits to his home nest.

  She ended up taking out some of the old notebooks she had recovered after her mother’s death. She began jotting down notes in the “Godsforsaken” file again. All this writer talk, and all these strange experiences, these dreams and visions, had her wanting to make sense of things. Clearly this was a through line in her life, a notion of divinity or the supernatural, and she wanted at the very least to document it for herself, if not come up with a coherent view of God and gods. Sounds like a minor project, yes, but wasn’t that every adult’s almost responsibility—to square oneself with the divine? She doodled around in the “Godsforsaken” file until it was time to go to work.

  In the subway on the way to school, she wandered through a few cars till she found a Train of Thought that made her self manifest to herself this beautiful blue morn. She found this:

  What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and as you have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  The night before had been just such a “tremendous moment.” Would she run into a god or demon today with whom she might make this deal to relive yesterday forever? And though she looked around for Con, she wondered if she really wanted to see him again already.
Her life was not making out with strangers on trains. It felt unreal. She needed to talk to Izzy about it. That would make it real. To tell another soul, to put it out there in the world, that would shade it, give it weight. And once it felt real, Emer would know better how she truly felt about it.

  For the moment, though, she chose to close her eyes and forget about it. But, even in that enforced act of forgetting, of sweeping it aside, she felt a surge of excitement; the notion that her life, so predictable, could also embrace something so out of the ordinary. She realized she was wet. But it wasn’t sexual, or not merely sexual. It was her primordial soul oozing to life, and this was the only way her body knew how to chime in.

  Saying good morning to her students felt oddly fraught. She felt raw, like an actor who couldn’t remember her lines. It was as if Emer thought the kids, with their pure receptors, could smell it on her, a change, an excursion, something naughty. She imagined they were looking at her askance, imagined their heads tilted slightly to the side in skepticism. But no, that couldn’t be. I’m projecting that, she thought.

  Her favorite child, Alice Freundlich, though she never played favorites, appeared beside her at her desk during a reading exercise and asked, “Are you okay, Ms. Emer?” Emer entertained a moment of imagining giving young Alice Freundlich a blow-by-blow account of the previous night’s events, but, because she wanted to keep her job, did not.

  “Thank you, Alice,” she said. “I guess I didn’t sleep so well.”

  “My mommy never sleeps unless it’s in the valley.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She always says, ‘I need the valley-yum.’”

  Emer nodded at the child. “Go back to your desk, honey, I’m fine.”

  “Okay. Here.”

  As she left, Alice handed Emer a shiny red apple. That clichéd symbol to curry favor with a teacher. Emer laughed at the innocence of it.

  But wait, was the child being symbolically cagey? Was this a descendant apple of Adam and Eve? From the tree of knowledge? Was the child implying that Emer had lost her innocence, been charmed by the snake? This child, who didn’t know what Valium was—or did she? Had that little back-and-forth been a test? How should a child handle the overwrought symbolism of this apple?

  Emer took a big bite. It was one of those awful, mealy Red Delicious that looked like a jewel and tasted like waterlogged cardboard injected with stale fruit essence. Not much more of an apple than just a red, semi-edible thing. Forget about being a symbol for good and evil, it was barely a symbol for what an apple used to be. It was as hard as a stone, and she felt her teeth shift as she bit into it. She realized she hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. She soldiered through to the core, symbolism and taste be damned.

  When the lunch bell rang, Emer excused herself and went running to Izzy’s office. Emer said as she was opening the door, “I ran into that guy again.”

  “Ran into him?”

  “Bullet points?”

  “Fuck bullet points.”

  “I ran into him on the subway last night and we talked and then we made out. A little bit.”

  “Talk about burying the lede.”

  “I made out with an almost total stranger on the F.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It’s a huge deal.”

  “For you, yes. But it’s also not. It’s what people do. I’m giving you what the pros call ‘perspective.’”

  “I don’t think people do this.”

  “No, just animals. Really? Was it strange? Kinky?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Emer opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Finally she said, “I don’t know how to talk about it.”

  “Here: show me on Raggedy Ann and Andy.”

  Izzy handed Emer two stuffed dolls that she kept in her office in case a child was having difficulty talking and needed a proxy. They were especially effective when asking about any physical confrontation of where a child was touched by another child or an adult.

  “You’re such an asshole.”

  “Yes, but I’m your asshole.”

  “Ew.”

  “Use the dolls. And your words.”

  Emer touched the lips of the dolls together.

  “Very good.”

  Izzy took the dolls and turned them into a 69 position.

  “Did this also happen?”

  “We were on the train!”

  “So?”

  “People do that?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “Well, we took the train to the end of the line. We stood between the cars so we wouldn’t be seen.”

  She didn’t know why she was lying to Izzy, as there was no reason—Izzy truly would not judge her. Maybe that little lie road had been cleared earlier in the morning with Con, and now she was making it a bigger, two-lane lie. Regardless, the gist of what she was telling Izzy was true, but for some reason, she didn’t want to tell her that she had taken Con to her bed in her apartment. Like this was somehow worse or sluttier? Worse and sluttier than fucking a guy standing up on a train? Emer marveled at herself, her shifting standards bubbling up from the unconscious.

  “Like this?” Izzy stood the dolls to face each other. Emer took the Raggedy Ann, Izzy played the male. Raggedy Andy said, “You … are a doll. And that was amazing. You tore my stitching out. You put the ‘raggedy’ back in Andy.”

  “He doesn’t talk like that.”

  “How does he talk, then?”

  “I can’t. This is stupid.”

  “You be him and I’ll be you.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Okay, okay, back to bullet points—did he put his man-thing in your lady-thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, not what I’m into, but”—Izzy sang the chorus of Handel’s Messiah—“Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Halay-uh-loo-yahhhh…”

  “I think so.”

  “You think? Oh dear, that’s not good.”

  “I mean I think we did. No, we did, we did. Jesus, Izzy, I did.”

  “How was it?”

  “Great?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “For standing up on a train it was amazing, and it’s been so long.”

  “Well, with stuff like this, I think it’s like figure skating, or diving. You have to factor in the degree of difficulty before you can multiply and get a true score.”

  There was a knock on the door. Izzy looked to the window and saw no one and assumed it was a child she could send away for now until she got the rest of Emer’s download. “Yes?” she called out in an adult-to-child voice.

  “It’s Sidney,” came the annoyed reply. “Is Emer in there?”

  Izzy opened the door for Sidney. His face was cloudy. He clocked that the two grown women were holding dolls. “Izzy, my dear, can we have this room of yours for some privacy? I need to have a word with Emer.” Izzy looked to Emer. Had he been eavesdropping at the door?

  “Sure. I’ll just need the room back in half an hour.”

  “It won’t take that long.”

  Izzy left. Sidney shut the door behind her, and locked it.

  “Bit of a kerfuffle,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Sid, don’t do that, please.”

  “Right. Did you force three girls to eat something a few weeks ago?” Emer’s prophetic heart was right. Her act of righteous anger had been a pebble tossed in a pond, the waves moving out from the center, landing now.

  “Force? I don’t know that I’d use that word.”

  “Recommend?”

  “Well, maybe more than ‘recommend.’”

  “Fucking hell, Emer, I’d be okay if you shoved their bloody little brat faces in it, but I’m in damage control, as per usual.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “They want me to fire you.”

  “Who does?”

  “The parents.�
��

  “And?”

  “And I told them that that was out of the question. That you were a beloved teacher, a master teacher, and that this incident, when I would have the chance to delve deeper, could be chalked up to a bad day and a bad decision, but was in no way indicative of your character or of your pedagogic modus operandi.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, Sidney.”

  “But they want their pound of flesh, and I have to give it to them, or more precisely, you have to give it to them.”

  “From what body part will this pound of flesh come?”

  “Your pride, I reckon. I’m going to set up three separate meetings with the three sets of parents, and at those meetings you will apologize and seem to grovel, you will say ‘mea culpa’ thrice times, and you will sing the praises of their brilliant kids and you will be your absolute best, most smiling self.”

  “Or?”

  Sidney had the oddest look on his face, at once ancient and youthful, scolding and playful, like a man beholding Hell for the first time and thinking—at least it’s not cold. “Come on, Emer, I’m your ally here. You know damn well, or. Or you’ll be fired. It’s a brushfire right now, but if it catches, you will be tossed on the conflagration like a witch, and believe me, I’ve seen cities aflame with less of a spark than this, so please, tread carefully.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Will you allow me to set these meetings for you?”

  “Yes, Sidney.”

  “All right, then. They will happen within the next week. These parents have the patience of honey badgers.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Is there?”

  “What?”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not from my end.”

  “Excellent. Well, I’m sure we’ll have a new crisis soon enough, won’t we, Emer?”

  That strange look came over his face again. Emer mustered a weak laugh and agreed, though she wasn’t quite sure what she was agreeing with or what she was laughing at.

  EMILY D