A Plea for Eros

stories would have ended there, but not this one. No, the short fellow admitted, he did not want to die, but neither had he finished what he had to say. He persisted, calmly defending the law and its demonstrable Tightness. The big man continued puffing on his cigarette as he eyed his opponent with growing amusement. The train stopped. It was time for the smoker to leave, but before he made his exit, he turned to the indefatigable little midwesterner, nodded, and said, “Have a good Dale Carnegie.”
    That story ended well and with wit, but it carries no moral insight into when to act and when not to act. It is simply one of many ongoing dramas among strangers in the city, who often have little in common except that they all belong to this place. There are moments, however, when a smile or a well-timed comment may change the course of what might otherwise have been a sorry event. For the last year and a half, my fifteen-year-old daughter has been refining the frozen, blank expression that accompanies the Pretend Law, because she spends a couple of hours every day on the subway as she travels from Brooklyn to her school on the Upper West Side in Manhattan and back again. With her Walkman securely over her ears, she feigns deafness when the inevitable stray character comes along and tries a pickup.
    One day, she found herself sitting across from “a white guy in his thirties” who stared at her so shamelessly that she felt uncomfortable. She kept her eyes off him and was relieved when the man finally left the car. But, before the train pulled out of the station, the ogler threw himself against the window in front of her and began to pound on the glass. “I love you!” he yelled. “I love you! You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life!” Deeply embarrassed, Sophie didn’t move. Her fellow passengers treated the man as if he were an invisible mute, but as the train began to rumble forward, leaving the histrionic troubadour and his declaration behind, the man sitting next to her looked up from his newspaper and said in a deadpan voice, “It looks like you have an admirer.”
    Sophie felt better. By breaking the code, the man acknowledged himself as a witness to what, despite the pretense, had been a very public outburst. His understatement not only defined the comedy inherent in the scene; it lifted my daughter out of the solitary misery that comes from being the object of unwanted attention among strangers who collectively participate in a game of erasure. With those few words, and at no cost to himself, he gave her what she needed—a feeling of ordinary human solidarity.
    Whatever we might
pretend
not to see or hear or sometimes smell on our sojourns through New York City, most of us actually see, hear, and smell a lot. Behind the mask of oblivion lies alertness (or exhaustion from having to be so alert). Daydreaming on a country road is one thing. Daydreaming on Fifth Avenue with hundreds of other people striding down the same sidewalk is quite another. But because we are so crowded here, active recognition of other people has become mostly a matter of choice. Nevertheless, compliments, insults, banter, smiles, and genuine conversations among strangers are part of the city’s noise, its stimulus, its charm. To live in strict accordance to the Pretend Law all the time would be unbearably dull. For us urbanites, both for the born and bred and for converts like me, there is a delight that comes from thinking on our feet, from sizing up situations and making the decision to act or not to act. Most of the time, we insulate ourselves out of necessity, but every once in a while we break through to one another and discover unexpected depths of intelligence or heart or just plain sweetness. And whenever that happens, I am reminded of a truth: Everyone has an inner life that is as large and complex and rich as my own.
    Sometimes a brief exchange with an unknown person marks you forever, not because it is profound but because it is uncommonly vivid. Over twenty years ago, I saw a man lying on the sidewalk at Broadway and 105th Street. I guessed that he was in his early sixties, but he may have been younger. Unshaven, filthy, and ragged, he lay on his side in an apparent stupor, clutching a bottle in a torn and wrinkled paper bag. As I walked past him, he suddenly propped himself up on his elbow and called out to me, “Hey, beautiful! Want to have dinner with me?” His question was so loud, so