more tales of the subway

There's a man I see at the subway station about once a week. He's beautiful. Whenever I see him there I can't concentrate on what I'm reading, only on what he's reading, what he's wearing, how close he's standing to me. I've recently discovered he's a neighbor, just a few doors down. I passed him shoveling the snow on his front walk two weeks ago. But I can't say hello or introduce myself or look for excuses to talk to him, not just because I'm dumbfounded by his presence, but because he's married, and I have no desire to simply be a friendly neighbor. So I take it for what it is.

I like watching the people on the subway in the mornings, the married people in particular. I like couples who ride the subway together, if only because they make me nervous and uncomfortable. There is a certain couple I see from time to time. The man is a tall, gangly intellectual; the woman a well-coiffed professional. He crosses his long legs and reads a magazine; she stares at her own reflection in the darkened window. They both always look like they've just finished crying, as though they wake up every morning and fight while they dress and then load the subway car with their silent baggage. I'm afraid of them because they make life seem undesirable. They make love seem undesirable.

I prefer the married men riding the subway alone. I like watching them watch the women, peering out from around the top edge of a newspaper or stealing quick glances and averting their eyes quickly. I like catching them when they look at me. It makes me feel like I'm part of a secret, like I know the inside of something someone else doesn't know at all. But if I stop my thoughts on them, these married men looking, they scare me too. Because I don't know the ones who look from the ones who go further, and I don't want to know.

It's so I don't know what love is. I know now, finally, what kind of man it is I want, and what kind of man it is I need. I like the comfort I've known, a man whose mouth is full of sugar and whose belly is full of laughter, but I need someone who's going to inspire me. Make me try harder. Someone by whose side I want to look forward, not someone I'd be afraid to push or leave behind. And this man I need, he looks like the intellectual on the train with his sad, vain wife. He looks like the married men in the pressed pants who glance past their wedding rings at the legs on pretty girls. This is what scares me most of all.

Then I encounter my favorite subway couple, after I get to my stop, walking up from the concourse to street level, there on the landing. Filthy and covered over in blankets. An old black man and a white woman whose face is creased with life despite that she is years younger than he is. Their shoes sit side by side, a neat set of pairs beside the bedspread. Their arms are wrapped around each other somewhere inside the nest of blankets. And always I look at them sleeping and I smile because they are the happiest couple I'll see in the morning. Just holding each other and caring for each other and one will succumb to the elements someday but in the meantime, they won't sleep anywhere they're not welcomed together. It's all love needs, in the end.