Rain nor Snow
If you want intrigue, it’s there for you. Always has been. Take, for example…well, anything. Take, I don’t know, mailboxes. The lone specimen on a dusty country road might conjure, depending on the traveler, the wholesomeness of an era when folks came to the aid of their neighbors and plinked spare change in a coffee tin to buy something from a department store and sat on swept porches with the weekend newspaper, or, on the other hand, for someone else, that forlorn and battered receptacle, its red metal flag crimped like an injured birdwing, might conjure persistent poverty, provincialism, abuse of drink, dazing boredom. You can imagine lives whole in a single morning, is the point. You just need to stop for a minute and really look. Don’t stop, actually—keep moving, milieu to milieu, making slight shifts of tack, little accelerations that to the outsider seem random and that sometimes are; turn flush into the darkness, like a shark. Don’t be anxious, but don’t be lethargic. Don’t act cool, or you definitely won’t be. Your intuition isn’t the best—that’s been proven—but so what? You’re not a criminal. You’re not an artist…not the real kind, like Mary Cassatt or something.
Imagine a vast bank of mailboxes in the cramped, dim lobby of a big-city apartment building. Both uniformity and a sense of cross-purposes attend. The presence of schemes is felt; not necessarily nefarious schemes, perhaps only those necessary to maintain purchase in a callous metropolis. Alienation within crowds, of course. Put-on jadedness quick-setting into genuine jadedness. But still, connections are possible. Fleeting smiles. Near-winks. Buoyant little revelations as one body smells another in passing. The folks assigned these shadow-filled cubbies carry around all day their tiny penny-colored mail keys, light as forgotten sweet words on their rings of heavier keys, these folks that hail from all over the nation and world, and they must, these living characters, daydream of brushing their lips over each other’s ribs, or of slitting each other’s throats, or of slipping cryptic notes underneath doors. You’re the one who wants all this. You could invent it in your sleep, if you could just be as clever awake as you are unconscious.
Those country bumpkins from earlier—the folks associated with scarcity of gainful employment and with plastic liquor bottles—are resigned to stagnancy, whereas these denizens of the city we’re beginning to envision, they’re given over to standoffishness, because what is a person, after all, except a bundle of infatuations beat down and beat down? Our subjects do not walk over and peel up a shirt and kiss the ribs beneath. Of course they don’t. Because they’ve barely ever spoken to that person or because that person seems harried enough already, without being slightly bodily revealed and momentarily, sweetly attacked.
But what do the people look like? It always matters. I guess, to be honest, I’m thinking these people are underweight. They snack sometimes, instead of sitting down to a meal. They smoke sometimes, instead of grabbing a snack. The visible ribs are pretty relevant, in truth, as they invoke self-neglect or self-denial—they invoke, if we wish them to, a lack of healthful, blood-level satisfaction. So it’s thin people, city people (though likely not originally), people with recently, neatly trimmed hair and elegant eyeglass frames, eyeglass frames that make the wearers seem like precise and careful people, though they’re not careful at all, really, but are only fuddled quiet by the whole frenetic, exhausting theater of urban life, and it’s a very, very big—boundless almost, sweeping—bank of worn brassy boxes, and let’s imagine dusk has begun to fall, dissolving the shadows between the skyscrapers along the streets on which our people have just walked home. They’re in the lobby; it’s the same temperature in here as it was outside, though it’s stuffier in here. Perhaps the highest boxes, just perhaps, need to be reached on tip-toe, especially by a shortish female in a knee-length skirt, while the lowest row is practically on the floor, so that a soft-spoken, patient-handed male with dark eyes and a five-o’clock shadow would need to crouch, as he might to tie a small girl’s shiny leather shoe.
Might as well make it New York—that way the lobby being cramped and some of the boxes inconvenient to reach won’t indicate economic straights. We don’t want to indicate that. Leave the straights for the hayseeds. These people here, if not doing well, have prospects. In New York, it takes longer to show the headway you’re making. At the same time, we’re glad they’re not doing overly well. There’s something stale about the sexiness of the wealthy, especially wealthy Americans. Something flat, I would venture. Without depth. The allure of leisure and preservation, it only carries so much water. It’s heady, sure, but it doesn’t burn a person down like a barn in a prairie fire. These people we’re thinking about, these thin youngish city people who were raised in St. Louis or Maryland or St. Paul, they’re in the struggle. They’re compromised weekly, as a matter of course—blizzards of best practices and policy memos and spreadsheets and quarterly reports and prospectuses and injunctions and waivers, wilted salads bolted with plastic forks, trains and crowds and trains and pressing crowds, briery industry rumors, bosses and the smiling bosses of bosses, rivals who sneer even electronically, rivals reared on the crowded seaboard and so not required to unlearn cumbersome virtues. But here’s the thing: the more compromised they get, also the more striking—the slower the man’s hands (his energy sapped and fingers lean) and the shapelier the woman’s calves and more doleful her eyes behind her retro hornrims.
The woman reaching upward—I’m not going to guess what she’s pulling out of there; let’s not imagine windfall or tragedy when it’s only coupon circulars and modest credit card bills and thank-you notes from Midwestern cousins—you can’t see this woman’s ribs right now because she’s just returned from work and so isn’t wearing clothes that would expose that part of her, but she is reaching up, and her white blouse has, if we’re watching closely, tugged loose of her grey skirt in places, so that a thin line of wheat-colored flesh is visible; not enough to see the tattoo she loves as much as the day she got it, but still, the best skin of a particular woman, visible right now, this very instant in all the centuries. Look—it’ll be gone as soon as she’s got everything the mailman left her, gone for who-knows-how-long because normally there’s a stool waiting against the wall to be used for this express purpose, short persons with lofty boxes, and today, for reasons unknown, the stool is nowhere to be seen. It’ll be restored tomorrow, either the same stool or a new one. You can count on that. Like you can count on this woman being old one day and sitting for a photograph, just as Duras has promised us, sitting for a photograph meant to be a portrait and looking noble and withdrawn. She’s sweeping her fingers around up there blindly now, making sure nothing got pushed to the back, thinking there might be something she deserves that’s just out of her reach.
