to let you pay for her. She is very smart. But you? Coming back and paying me when you were already out of the car? Not so very smart.”
Like, thanks. Did I mention that you smell? But anyway, what I want to know is: Who was that woman?
ANA KAGANOVA, safe in the Berkshires and inspired with a fraudulent scheme, decides how to conscript her husband into her plot (September 12, 2001):
Like every American, I sat yesterday on the sofa and watched CNN. Yeah, eventually people called my cell phone, but my instinct was not to answer. Perhaps I liked the idea that they did not know whether I was alive. I left Monday for the country without saying goodbye, which is what I do when I stay at my husband’s grandmother’s cabin.
All day yesterday I thought, Nobody knows that I was not on the ninety-fi rst floor. But, weiß’ du, at the same time I thought, Nobody knows that I had any reason to be on the ninety-first floor. This is the lay of the land.
In the end I turned off the television, because it is always the same thing that they are playing, and I turned on AM radio. The callers all wanted to know, “Where can I send money?” These rednecks in Massachusetts call AM radio to ask other people what to do with their money.
This is when I realized that these people who were in the towers would be rich. There will be millions of dollars of charity, and there will be millions of dollars of lawsuits, and there will be millions of dollars of reparations, and anyone who was in the towers when they fell will be now rich.
You see who I thought I should in such a circumstance perhaps contact? In order that someone should report me missing? After all, Gogi is my husband. He should report that I am missing, and this is all there is to it.
I went outside, and I had a cigarette, and I threw my cell phone into his grandmother’s pond. Because if I was going to pretend that I was on the ninety-first floor, I would need to destroy my cell phone, without a clue. And yeah, have you ever thrown a cell phone into a pond? In September, the pond is nothing but lilies. The cell phone landed on a lily, and it floated. And I thought, This is my shit luck, the floating cell phone from Finland. Why are the Finns making cell phones that float? I thought, Perhaps there is a kayak? And I can drown this cell phone by hand? But then it sank finally into the pond.
And then I drove half an hour to a pay phone and bought one of these calling cards. I spoke with myself for a minute, in order to get the accent correct, and then I called my husband to tell him that his wife is dead.
And this is
It is longer, and consists nearly exclusively of statements made during the summer of 2000. However, the dead and the inanimate also have their say in this part, and there are press clippings. Please note that despite interruptions and digressions, eventually everybody comes to their point. A list of the speakers in this comedy, should you like one, appears at the back of the book, after the Fifth Part, on page 293.
MAYNARD GOGARTY tells us what happened on the subway and dissects a dilemma (early August 2000):
There was a woman with beauty spots, and a misunderstanding with the authorities—all on a Lexington Avenue local, uptown. She was one of these women who strike your heart and leave it resounding, like a bell. It’s a simple story. But may I give a preface, a brief preface, and then we can discuss what I did wrong?
A preface:
You step onto the subway, the subways constituting a borough unto themselves, with different hostilities and different hopes, a whole mobile county of curiosities, and—there she is! This creature with angelic blood, and a cup of iced coffee, and the scent of some recherché shampoo, and her smile just so. Her halo quivering every time the subway rattles. And you must decide what to do. Do you say something, or do you say nothing?
Dignity would seem—dilemmatically, to require both and yet to permit neither.
The subway is, after all, one of the most dignified places to open an affair. Love should contain a constituent element of irreducible destiny, and destiny is exactly what is lacking when—. When Battery Park businessmen ransom dates with chesty socialites from commercial matchmakers in midtown. Or, or when idle and gelatinous West Side freelancers, suctioned to coffee-shop tables like sea anemones, filter through the classifieds in the Village Voice for ads reading “Woman seeks Manly Polyp.” And destiny is what is lacking when, after months of inhaling one another’s dander, the mustard-breathed attorney commences his case, his lascivious case, against his homely, hot-doggy paralegal. Or, or when the bag boy at Gristedes propositions the Gristedes cashier. Love should not be the spoils of a deliberate campaign or the convenient alliance of a war of attrition. Love should be an instant and supernatural uproar in the soul. It should be the resounding of a bell.
So on the subway, with a beautiful girl, dignity demands action and condemns silence. Because—when the girl with the halo sits down across the aisle from you, it is your one chance for truest love!
However, and contrariwise, subways or no, dignity demands that we, as rational apes, reject delusions, including comforting delusions, in favor of the truth. And it is a comforting delusion to think that every time a beautiful woman sits down across from you on the subway, destiny is trying to bring you happiness. Destiny does not manifest itself in the form of chance encounters with beautiful women. Destiny manifests itself, always, in the form of hobbyhorses, pet phrases, pet cats, nose-picking, and credit card debt. And Sunday crosswords, and the pursuit of “fun.” In other words, your destiny has been riding across from you on the subway for much, much longer than you can ever imagine. Beautiful strangers do not each represent a new form of happiness. Beautiful strangers are like everybody else—dull, demanding, violent, and malodorous.
So when a beautiful woman sits across the aisle, dignity condemns action and demands silence. Because—when you fail to say hello to a beautiful stranger on the subway, you have triumphantly avoided yet another form of—human misery.
To say something, or to say nothing? This is the anatomy of the dilemma presented by love and dignity on the subway, and this concludes the preface.
I was on an uptown local on the Lexington Avenue line, a subway that was doomed to stall at 33rd Street.
I had boarded at the City Hall stop, still woozy from a breakfast meeting with the woman who wants to buy the rights to my movie, and I was taking the contract uptown, to my attorney. It was my quadrennial half-pint of success. I was in media res in the worst way, running an errand for my meager movie on a wet furnace of a morning. My armpits were—have you ever used a droplet of water to test the heat of a wok? While I was waiting on the platform for the train at City Hall, my armpits were informing me that the wok was ready. The woman next to me on the platform at City Hall was wearing a yellow muumuu and carrying a Bible and a blue-ice freezer pack. Bible shut, freezer pack against her chest. Fundamentalist heat, this.
The subway was empty, naturally, when it finally rolled in, since City Hall is the first stop on the line. But I didn’t take a seat. I took off my jacket, draped it over my—moist shirtsleeve, and stood like a jack under the air conditioner, to expose myself to as much as possible of that good dry air. Though I did leave my boater on my head, to protect my scalp.
So! The subway leaves City Hall. And as it makes each stop, the doors open, the beastly day seethes into the train, the doors close, and cool order returns. By Spring Street the woman in the muumuu has cooled off enough to start reading her Bible, and I extract my handkerchief and begin to mop myself up, when I notice—a crucial detail. At the far end of the subway car, the alarm for the emergency brake is sounding.
But I do nothing