Places I Stopped on the Way Home by Meg Fee

Author:Meg Fee [Meg Fee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785783043
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2018-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

THE D TRAIN

What if I never see him again? I ask Mary one evening on the phone.

She says that such a thing, in a long life, is more unlikely than not. The next week, while descending the subway steps, I find myself in just the right sequence of wind tunnels, with a coffee in one hand and my purse in the other, and suddenly my skirt is around my neck. And—of course—there he is, Jack, at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for the train and staring at the exposed flesh of my thighs. I regard this as a very particular blessing because the thing about the man who undoes you seeing your less-than-flattering underwear is that the worst thing has now already happened. So, I am suddenly free not to worry about my personal ineptitude when it comes to flirting.

It happens again three weeks later. Not the skirt-around-the-neck so much as the run-in. And then again a week after that. I begin to lose count. There is the time Jack is at the bottom of the stairs and I am at the top. The time he gets on after work and is reading the Financial Times and his glasses are tilted just so, and I am as breathless and unskilled around him as ever before.

The second time we see each other is on a Monday morning and we are meant to have drinks that Wednesday. I see him coming down the stairs and I look at him, mute and expectant and terrified. He doesn’t meet my eye as he reaches the platform, and then walks in the other direction. Later my girlfriends will tell me that he probably didn’t see me, but I know. I know by the way he lifted his hand to scratch at an invisible itch. I know because I know him. Because I am proficient in the body language of playing-it-cool when you are anything but. I ride the train to work with my back to him so as to out-pretend. The date never happens, something comes up—I know before he even sends the email to say. Anne Carson writes, “To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked.”5

At some point, I lose count of how many dates we have set up before he cancels each one. My girlfriends begin to look at me when I talk about him with that silent and measured look that says, He doesn’t love you, move on, but they are kind enough not to say these words out loud, and I am silently grateful because I am not ready to hear them.

On my last morning taking the train from West 4th Street before moving uptown I run into him just as I am leaving the coffee shop—we walk together to the train. I am struggling with my purse and coffee and the sudden leak of my left eye when he turns to me. Do you need help? he asks. I am angled away from him,

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