LORI LEWIN
FIFTH AVENUE AND 58TH STREET
The express bus was a miracle. People thought there was romance to the ferry because they’d heard that Carly Simon song. That movie, that song, the boat, were for those who believed in office life—obsolete fax machines, cups of Lipton, perfumed bodies in airless rooms. She didn’t need romance, just an almost hour of quiet.
She always took a window seat. Passengers filed on, and she willed no one to sit beside her. Seven dollars was so little to pay for silence; she’d get off downtown, and that would be lost. The tangle of tunnels at Fulton Street always made her think of ants hurrying off on their ant business.
She’s lived in this city her whole life (people forgot Staten Island was part of the city) and knew how to plan accordingly. Her gig was seasonal—helping a designer she loved sell scarves and hats at a pop-up market—and it was early enough in the season that she didn’t have to think about what would come next. Something always would. She’d worked as a shopgirl, sales associate, customer service, whatever. She’s learned that dealing with people made work feel not like something you did for money but like life itself. She knew all the specialists (vintage clothes; rare coins, manuscripts, and documents; jewelry; magazines and printed ephemera), and their clients remembered her, loved her, asked for her. They talked, and she listened.
A man paused in the aisle, eyebrows asking, Is this seat taken? She smiled enough to be polite. Oh, well. She turned toward the window. Anyway, she liked the view: the harbor hugging the Atlantic.
He kept his silence until the bridge. “Beautiful day.” He said it like he was somehow responsible for it.
“It is.” She looked at the blur where the sea touched the sky, catching—some trick of light—her own reflection. People took the rhinestones, the turban, the veil, as an invitation. Young girls asked if she was bound for a costume party. She reminded old women of their mothers. Strangers sometimes stroked her arm as if she were something for sale. Was it better than the taunts from when she’d been a teen and had whitened her face with powder and worn only black? Was it better than the time an old man on the train asked if she did internet porn? When she looked at her reflection, she saw only herself.
“Headed to work?”
She offered a vague “Yes.”
“Me too. I work downtown. Brookfield Place. You’ve got to be an actress, am I right?”
She thought of something she’d read in Balzac: But, boy as I was, could I have acquired the magnanimity which leads us to scorn the scorn of others? “I’m just going to rest my eyes.” She leaned against the window and, after a while, stopped hearing his steady breathing. She made him disappear.