A Plea for Eros

watched the two young men who lived across the air shaft as they lounged in the light of their window dressed only in their underwear. On the sidewalk, I was jostled, bumped, and elbowed as I negotiated the crowds. On the subway, I found myself in intimate contact with people I didn’t know, my body pressed so tightly against them, I couid smell their hair oils, perfumes, and sweat. In my former life, such closeness belonged exclusively to boyfriends and family. It didn’t take long for me to absorb the unwritten code of survival in this town—a convention communicated silently but forcefully. This simple law, one nearly every New Yorker subscribes to whenever possible, is: PRETEND IT ISN’T HAPPENING.
    This widely applied coping technique is what separates New Yorkers from tourists and seasoned citizens from those who have just come here. An Iranian friend told me that about a week after he had arrived in the city he was traveling uptown on the Second Avenue bus. At Twenty-fourth Street, the door opened for a woman who was wearing nothing but a flimsy bathrobe over her naked body. When she reached the top step, she started feeling her pockets for something and then, with a shocked look on her face, exclaimed, “My token! My token! Oh my God, I must have left it in the other bathrobe!” The driver sighed and waved her onto the bus. My friend had been staring at the woman throughout the scene but was a little ashamed when he understood that he was alone. Nobody else had given the woman a first glance, much less a second,
    Last October, I was on the F Train when I noticed a wild-eyed man entering the car. He boomed out a few verses from Revelation and then, in an equally loud voice, began his sermon, informing us that September 11 had been God’s just punishment for our sins. I could feel the cold, stiff resistance to his words among the passengers, but not a single one of us turned to look at him.
    A couple of weeks ago, after seeing a play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, ray husband and I walked down the stairs at the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn to wait for the 2 train. I was tired and wanted to sit and noticed a single bench with several empty seats. At the end of that bench sat a man with five or six plastic bags, and although he was perhaps twenty yards away, I did sense that he might be someone to avoid because even at that distance he gave off an aura of silent hostility. Nevertheless, fortified by the presence of my husband, I led the way to the bench. We seated ourselves at its far end, leaving four empty seats between the man and us. After about a minute, he gathered up his bags, shuffled past us, and spat in our direction. His aim wasn’t terribly good, but when I looked down I saw a tiny gleaming micro-dot of saliva on my pants knee. We let it go.
    These three stories—the bathrobe lady, the fanatical preacher, and the spitter—demonstrate a range of increasingly outrageous behavior that may be dealt with through the
pretend-it-isn’t-happening
law. And yet, as my husband pointed out, in the case of the spitter, had there been more saliva on me, he would have felt forced to act. And acting, as everyone in the city knows, can be dangerous. It is usually better to treat the unpredictable among us as ghosts, wandering phantoms who play out their lonely narratives for an audience that appears to be deaf, dumb, and blind.
    Taking action may be viewed as courageous or merely stupid, depending on the circumstances and your point of view. A number of years ago, my husband witnessed a memorable exchange on a subway car he was riding to Penn Station. A very tall black man entered the car with a woman dressed in short shorts and high vinyl boots. Both appeared to be under the influence of some powerful pharmaceutical substance. The woman found a place to sit and immediately nodded off. The man, who was weaving on his feet, took out a cigarette and lit up. Within seconds of that infraction, a little white guy with blond hair, a person probably in his late twenties, wearing a beige trench coat buttoned all the way to his neck, politely demurred. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, in a voice that was obviously formed somewhere in the Midwest, “for bothering you, but I want to point out that it’s against the law to smoke on the subway.” The tall man looked down at his interlocutor, sized him up, paused, and then in deep mellifluous tones, uttered the sentence: “Do you wanna die?”
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