Warning: The following is a whiny, ranty little interstitial. If you came here looking for a funny story or a nice recipe for dinner, one or both will be back in this space tomorrow, I promise. Feel free to come back then, if whiny rants are not your cup of tea.
5:30 p.m. I am walking down Park Avenue, headed for Grand Central and the 7 train. Several hundred of my fellow desk monkeys are making the same trek. Because I have lost just enough weight for my clothes to be too big, but not enough weight to take the next smaller size, I cut something of a shapeless figure. I am also peaky and drawn, the result of a bad day at the box factory, and of a job interview that I thought would get me out of the box factory but turned out to be for a temp gig. I am ready to be home.
Just ahead of me are two guys, another pair of midtown investment-banking hotshots, alpha dogs from the gym, target markets for luxury consumer goods, dressed expensively. About 20 feet in front of them is a woman who, even without seeing her face, I can tell is a knockout: dressed in a crisp lilac blouse and form-fitting tweed skirt, curvy with muscles, like a dancer, high heels, ankle bracelet, shiny hair the color of toffee pouring down her back. If I were a straight man or a gay woman, I would probably be in paroxysms of lust, but as I am not, I can only appreciate her in a detached way: my, how pretty.
The woman is walking briskly, with purpose, the commuters’ walk. The guys are ambling, deep into the stories they are telling each other, the walk-to-the-pub walk. Since I have a train to catch, I pick up my pace and thus find myself positioned between the guys and the woman. I am not aware that I have blocked their view of her, as I am still deep in thought over the various stray nonsenses of the day.
“Now *that* is a crying shame,” I hear one of the guys say. I think that he’s describing part of the story that I missed, until I hear the other guy snort, “Dude, that’s not cool.” Naahh, it couldn’t be. “What?,” the first guy says? “It’s not like she can hear us.” I should keep walking, but instead I look over my shoulder at them. They look surprised and, fleetingly, guilty for having been caught out. I know that the proper response is either a Myrna-Loy-worthy witty riposte or a withering assessment of their alleged genitalia. The proper response is not to hunch my shoulders and hurry off guiltily even though I haven’t done anything wrong, but that’s what I do.
I know that appearances and surfaces are misleading, that other people have problems about which I have no idea. I shouldn’t make snap judgments about these guys, any more than they should make assumptions about me. Nevertheless, I do. I wonder what it feels like to be a guy like that: a guy who moves effortlessly through life, assuming that obstacles will fall away at his whim and desire, a guy who has no problem commenting loudly and publicly about the bodies of women he doesn’t know, a guy who has never found it necessary to scurry through a crowd, slouched and apologetic, angry at himself for the apology.
Edit: Snowball and I were just discussing the following puzzle: Why is it that when the people we love (this is the universal “we”, not just me and Snow) , be they spouses, lovers, friends or family, tell us that we’re beautiful, we practically make them sign affidavits before we’ll believe them, but when a complete stranger tells us we’re ugly, we believe them without question? Feel free to add your insights to the comments. Best answer wins a prize, something homemade and lovely and full of stuff from the farmers’ market.