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.
I have some very astute things to say but I’ve got to scramble off to *my* work at the moment so they’ll have to wait. Suffice it to say that it’s more insightful than simple man-bashing and it reaches deep into the psyche of gender, modern life and culture.
Might as well just wrap up the prize and send it to me now so as to avoid delay.