Subway Love

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “It’s OK. Take another step. If you just act like everything’s OK, it will be. Tell your body to just keep moving. Before you know it, it will feel just fine.”

  It seemed impossible, but Jonas trusted his father, and wouldn’t you know it, like his father promised, the whole of New York City never collapsed into the ground. And now he was here with Laura, and it was safe again.

  “So you live in Woodstock?” Jonas asked, metaphorically putting one foot in front of the other, acting as if everything was normal as Laura told him her story.

  She told him about her mom and dad, about their move, about the changes, finally about Bruce. She had never told anyone about Bruce, she said. No one knew.

  “You’ve got to tell someone,” Jonas said. “That’s against the law. What a sick bastard. You can’t go back there.”

  “I live there,” Laura said.

  “Well, you can’t.” Jonas felt a rise in his heart, a fear, maybe, an urgency, a sense of indignation, and a powerlessness all at once.

  Laura suddenly looked worried. The lovely calm fled her face. “I gotta go actually. I want to be back before my dad gets home. Is this the right stop?”

  Jonas looked up. He hadn’t noticed where they were. There was no electronic map on the wall above the straphangers’ bar. He had no idea where they were along the route, only that they were heading back uptown again.

  “I don’t know. But you can’t go. When can I see you again?”

  “We’ve been managing so far,” she said. She blushed. She actually blushed. Jonas felt his whole body rise with heat, remembering her mouth, her hands cupping his face when she kissed him.

  He wanted more. This wasn’t enough. It was crazy-making. “But what if I want to call you? What if you want to call me?”

  “I guess we can’t do that,” she said. “But I’ll come back. Will you?” She stood up.

  His mind ran through the options: no texts, no phone, no e-mails. It was impossible to imagine. “But what if I can’t wait?”

  She scrunched up her face and shrugged, and there was that smile again, and there was the subway chime. The doors hissed opened. It was no use trying to follow, that much he had already figured out.

  IT wasn’t just their mom. Laura’s dad insisted that Mitchell come into the city. He wanted to talk about something important, and he wanted to do it in person.

  Laura’s dad wanted to take her brother to Europe. It would be a business trip to West Germany that June. Then, after their dad had given the lecture he had been invited to present, they would travel. Once upon a time, perhaps their dad would have traveled Europe on a rail pass and stayed in youth hostels and studied the great artists, but as an art director, he gave talks on promotions and free giveaways. Still, it was a trip to Europe. Mitchell would have to miss the last week of school, but their dad was sure he could get permission; after all, the trip would be educational. How many seventeen-year-olds got to fly to Europe?

  “But you’ll have to cut your hair,” Laura’s father said. He had ordered Chinese food, and they were eating at the table. No TV this time — a discussion was on the agenda.

  Mitchell put down his chopsticks. Laura and her dad ate with good old-fashioned utensils, but Mitchell insisted on chopsticks. He’d asked for brown rice, but the restaurant only had white, so he had made his own and carried it in with him.

  “I’m not cutting my hair,” Mitchell said.

  Their dad put down his fork.

  “What do you mean, you’re not cutting your hair?”

  It was perfectly obvious to Laura, predictable. Mitchell wouldn’t cut his hair. If this conversation had occurred a few months ago, she would have been upset that her father hadn’t even considered taking her, but now she was glad. She had only one thing on her mind, and it took up every space in her waking brain. She was hardly listening to them bicker.

  “I mean, I’m not cutting my hair.”

  “You have to. It’s not a choice. They won’t let you into the country. You can’t get a passport photo looking like a freak.”

  But Mitchell stayed oddly calm.

  “Then I guess I can’t go,” he told their dad.

  Oh, no. Not good. Their dad did not stay calm.

  “I’ve had enough” — he raised his voice — “of this hippie crap. This is an opportunity of a lifetime, and you’re not going to miss it because of some disrespectful teenage rebellion. You’ll cut your hair.”

  “You’re the one being disrespectful. This is my body, my hair. I’ll do with it what I want. You can’t tell me what to do. You can’t turn me into some square, conservative, brainless automaton like you.”

  Laura pushed her chair away from the table. She wanted to hold on to the last particles of memory Jonas had left on her skin, on her lips. When the subway emptied out, on either the last or second-to-last ride from the Bronx to Midtown down toward Brooklyn and back, they had had a few moments alone. This time Jonas had pulled her toward him, reaching his arm around her waist.

  She fit. Perfectly.

  Into the curve of his arms and the space where his shoulder met his chest, like their bodies had once been connected. She remembered learning about the continental drift and looking at it for the first time on a map of the world. Ah, yes, of course anyone could see it, where South America would slip naturally into Africa, North America fit right under Europe, and Greenland nestled into Russia. Something had torn them apart and now they were together again.

  He always acted as if he needed to know when he would see her again and couldn’t bear not knowing when.

  But what if I can’t wait until next time?

  If she brought her hair to her nose, Laura believed, she could smell him still nestled there.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mitchell asked her. Their father had left the table in a huff. Laura ignored her brother.

  Next time seemed so far away, not even on the horizon, but for the time being, next time made all of this so much easier.

  “OK, so look her up,” Nick was saying. “Google her.”

  Not like that hadn’t occurred to Jonas right away.

  Nick sat with his finger poised above the keyboard. “What’s her last name?”

  “Like I’m going to tell you.”

  Jonas was babysitting his sister, a gift to his mother, who had a date Saturday night. An enormous gift, according to Nick, who was keeping him company. She promised to be back early. Most likely before ten, his mother said.

  “Stay out, Mom,” Jonas had told her. “Have a good time.”

  “Ten thirty the latest,” she promised.

  Enough time to hit the subway when she got back.

  “OK, then, let’s go find her. I think it’s about time I met this girl,” Nick suggested. “C’mon. Lily would love it, a little field trip.”

  “Are you kidding?” Jonas was cleaning up from dinner, chicken parmesan, picking off cheese stuck to the plates, while Nick sat at the counter with the laptop.

  “I’m not. Or you can give me her last name and I can Google her. Nineteen seventy-three? Hell, she’s probably over fifty years old now, right? Sounds hot to me.”

  Jonas nearly regretted telling Nick anything — about Laura, about the strange vintage-looking subway car, the wild, colorful graffiti, and about the even stranger shift in time, how what was apparently days or even weeks for Laura could be a matter of minutes for Jonas. He had no idea.

  Oddly, their time together seemed out of time completely, neither night nor day, present nor past. The subway car itself was a constant, but the way minutes passed, or hours, the way they didn’t at all, was hard to figure out and hardly mattered.

  Still, telling Nick might have been a mistake.

  But Nick hadn’t laughed. And he hadn’t doubted what seemed impossible.

  “Sorry,” Nick said quickly. And he was sorry, again. “But we could Google her and maybe we’d find out where she lives, or lived. I mean, lives now. Or then. I mean — you know what I mean.”r />
  “Forget it. The Internet is the source of all evil,” Jonas said. “E-mails can be big trouble.”

  “You don’t know her last name, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think Googling ‘Laura, Woodstock, New York, 1973’ will give us much. Are you certain it’s New York? There’s a Woodstock in Vermont, you know.”

  “I’m sure,” Jonas answered, but of course, he wasn’t. He wasn’t even sure it was still 1973 for Laura.

  Nick let out a sigh. “This is clearly a no-win situation, my friend. How do you know she’s telling the truth? Honestly, I think you might be driving yourself crazy. I think your guilty brain is getting the better of you.”

  “What guilty brain?” Lily walked through the living room and up to the kitchen counter.

  If it was no accident that his father had left his e-mail open on the computer, it was less of an accident that Jonas had printed them out and his mother found them. But in that moment, Jonas regretted having confessed any of that to Nick. Telling on himself hadn’t made him feel better anyway. And now it was going to come back and bite him in the ass.

  She said it louder. “What guilty brain?”

  “Nice work,” Jonas said. Lily was a hard one to dissuade. When she got something into her skull, she rarely let go. Over the years, bribery and promises had only made it worse.

  “What guilty brain?”

  “Nothing, Lily. Go back and watch TV.”

  “There’s nothing on. When’s Mom coming home? Where did she go? What guilty brain?”

  “Nothing on? With five hundred channels? Netflix? You must have something on the DVR.” Jonas knew he sounded like their mother. Or Nick.

  “It’s about Mom and Dad, isn’t it? The divorce, isn’t it?” Lily said.

  Nick looked over at Jonas, and Jonas wished he hadn’t. Lily was fishing. She didn’t know anything. But it was too late.

  “I knew it,” Lily burst out. “You know what I did. You know it’s my fault.” And she started crying.

  “Oh, jeez, what’s happening?” Nick had two older brothers, and this crying stuff made him nervous. Jonas told him to go home.

  “It’s fine. I’m not mad at all. I’ll talk to you later,” Jonas told him. He pushed his friend out the front door.

  “I’m really sorry.” Jonas could hear him on the other side.

  “It’s fine,” Jonas shouted.

  He finally got Lily to stop crying and go to bed, only by assuring her he would never tell their mother about how she broke the hand mirror in the bathroom, though he had been completely unsuccessful in trying to convince her that the broken hand mirror had nothing to do with their parents splitting up. Somehow Lily had come to believe that directly after her mother found the broken mirror — and Lily flatly denied having anything to do with it — her parents had ended up fighting. And then ended up getting divorced, and somehow Lily connected it all to the lie, and the mirror, and to herself.

  It was a story, her story, just like any other story, as plausible as it was implausible. Most people will tell themselves anything in order to feel better about themselves, but some people do the opposite. Lily was truly her brother’s sister. For the briefest moment as her sobs took over her body, Jonas (thinking that surely no one had enough liquid stored inside to remain alive after crying so long) considered telling his sister that it was his fault, not hers. But then, as quickly as she had begun crying, she stopped and she fell asleep, most likely from sheer exhaustion and dehydration. And he never said anything.

  “How was it, Mom?” Jonas asked because he wanted things to be all right — if not better than before, at least right enough.

  “It was awful, Jonas,” his mother told him. She dropped her keys in the bowl by the front door. “People just lie, all the time. Is Lily asleep?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m going to bed. Lock up, will you, sweetie?”

  “Sure, Mom.” When she was in her bedroom, Jonas took his keys, grabbed his camera bag, and closed the door behind him.

  MAYOR Lindsay had declared war, and by early 1973, well over fifteen hundred New York City youths had been arrested for vandalism. He called graffiti “demoralizing and obscene,” and he said the graffiti writers were “insecure cowards” seeking recognition, though nothing could have been further from the truth.

  There was talk of making spray paint illegal for anyone under eighteen, not only to purchase but to be found carrying. Attack dogs were brought into the yards, and coils of razor wire were added to the tops of the fences. Not only did MTA guards, who were usually too lazy or too fat to chase anyone for very long, patrol the yards and layups, but now real New York City police were put on “graffiti duty,” and the cops didn’t like it. It had always been risky sneaking into the yards at night to work, but now it was downright dangerous.

  Max was thinking of changing his tag name again.

  THE city looks purple at night. The streetlights catching the exhaust from the buses and taxis and cars, the headlights from all that traffic, the hot steam escaping from the sidewalk grates all rise up to the moon — when it’s out and not totally blocked by the tall buildings. The light is unnatural and filtered, not quite yellow anymore, not gray, but more purple. Jonas held his camera in his hand as he walked, adjusting the settings. He had never found Laura this late before. Most of their meetings, if you could call them that, had been during the day, at least on her end of things, on her way to or from her father’s apartment as she explained it. She didn’t go out at night, and she wanted to be back before dark. From what he could gather, the city must have been more dangerous back then, or maybe it was the fact that she wasn’t a native. What time it was for Jonas didn’t seem to affect anything.

  Finding Laura was hit or miss. Jonas could ride the subway for hours and not see her all day, or go out Saturday morning first thing and there she was. Or sneak out late at night. There was no telling when she might appear, and it was killing him.

  So when Jonas saw the kid from the museum, the writer, as he called himself, standing at the top of the subway entrance smoking a cigarette, he half expected to see Laura again right behind him, coming up the stairs.

  Jonas was about to say something to him. Spike, right? But the kid spoke first.

  “Hey, you’re that boy,” Spike said. “The boyfriend.”

  “Huh?” Jonas managed. He looked down the stairs. Only a man bumping an oversize suitcase onto each step up into the light appeared from below. No Laura, though he could feel her. It was a longing. It never left him.

  “She’s not up here,” Spike said. He blew smoke circles into the air. “She can’t be. You know that.”

  Jonas didn’t question how or why this kid knew that or why he should believe him, but of course he did.

  “I don’t know what she sees in you,” Spike went on.

  This kid had no right, no reason, to judge. What did he know? Who the hell was he?

  “But if you do me a favor, I’ll help you find her.” He stamped out his cigarette on the sidewalk.

  Jonas looked at Spike. It was Spike, wasn’t it? He felt stupid using that name. That couldn’t be his real name. On the other hand, Jonas was game for anything that could make it easier to find Laura.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I need someone to take photographs for me. I need to record this. I need a record of it. I need witnesses to my greatness.”

  None of this sounded very safe. Why did this Hispanic kid need to ask a stranger to take a picture of his greatest if there wasn’t something criminal involved? Just thinking that made Jonas feel like a racist, but on the other hand, better safe than sorry. He could practically hear his mother’s voice.

  “Why me?”

  “Your camera.” Spike nodded at the bag slung over Jonas’s shoulder. “You’ve got a camera.”

  “I thought you had a camera,” Jonas said. “I saw you with a camera before.”

  “It got stolen.” Spike shook his
head slowly. “So, you in, Romeo?”

  The sidewalk lit by neon pouring from the storefronts, the traffic speeding to make the green light, the street lamps that bent their heads and illuminated everything below — nothing was different, maybe, from when Laura made her way to this subway station. But maybe everything was different — the make of cars, the way people dressed, the tensions, the dreams, the politics — he didn’t really know. In the end it was the same concrete under his feet, and hers. The same black sky cut between the same soaring buildings; the same moon, just a different light.

  “I can’t wait all night,” Spike said. “But, hey, if you’re a chickenshit, I’ll understand.”

  He was. Jonas had been pretty much all his life, but if he was going to see Laura again, he would have to think outside the box. Of course, that was understood. Lately nothing fit inside the box.

  “OK, I’m in,” Jonas said.

  Spike nodded in approval and laid out his plan: the time, the place; it all came out fast.

  “And don’t forget”— Spike was still talking —“plenty of film, fast — four hundred or higher. No flash. You got a light meter? Be there. Don’t forget. And I’ll make sure she’s here.”

  THE truth was, Max had no idea how to find that girl Laura and he certainly couldn’t promise he’d bring her to Jonas tomorrow night or any night. He unlocked his closet. His mom didn’t pry into his stuff, but he kept it locked anyway, and the key hung from a split ring holder that he attached to his belt loop. Max had work to do. This was art. True art is more important than love. It certainly lasts longer. He opened the closet door.

  The shelves were stocked with spray paint, all colors. There was Red Pepper Red and Cherry Red. He had to know which one to choose. There was Golden Pear Yellow and Bright Idea Yellow, very different. Celery. Hosta Leaf. Global Blue or Peekaboo. Rich Plum and Purple. It had taken him months to collect it all. It had to be lifted, not bought. It just did. He didn’t make the rules.