We were sitting on a bench, waiting for the subway train, and I could tell you which train for the sake of detailed writing, but I don't remember which one it was. We had to wait a while, though, and it was cold. One day I will go to New York and it will not be December. The platform was gradually filling up. A few yards to our left was a man in his mid-thirties, who was wearing very nice, very rumpled clothes. He looked deep in thought and confused at the same time, as if he were thinking about the meaning of life and the answer was not what he expected. He walked - was he staggering ever so slightly? - over to a woman standing with her arms crossed a few feet to our right. She said something, and she didn't sound happy. With a loud and frustrated sigh, she walked a few yards away, leaving him standing there.
At this point, I lost track of them. And to be fair, I hadn't been paying all that much attention to them. I was talking to Sarah and looking for the train, whichever train it was. But I'd been keeping an eye on them the same way that I'd been keeping an eye on the middle-aged woman next to me and the teenagers a bit of a ways down. Suddenly I heard water running, and started looking around for the source, as I asked Sarah if she knew where it was coming from.
"Is the ceiling leak - oh my." The well-dressed rumpled gentleman was urinating down onto the tracks. I looked away quickly, as Sarah's giggle told me that she'd seen it too.
I'm not an absolute bumpkin, but I'm still pretty naive when it comes to life in the big city. I knew that people peed in the subway. I'd been in enough stations to know that smelling urine, fresh or stale, wasn't exactly rare. But I figured the urinators were bums, not investment bankers who'd had too many at the company Christmas party. I've apparently still got a lot to learn about the kind of people who pee in the subway.
Now all my attention was on this guy, and I watched him walk back to the woman. His face still wore an expression of incredulous bafflement - life was blowing his mind. They were hidden from me by a column, but I could hear an angry female voice. The one phrase we caught was "no self-control." Could we assume that she had seen him take a public leak, or was she angry because he'd done something equally outrageous at wherever they'd just been? Sarah and I furtively whispered thoughts on the couple. I was relieved to be with a friend who shared my affinity for eavesdropping on strangers.
The train, the one whose name I cannot remember, arrived. The couple boarded, as did we. We took seats halfway down the car from them and across the aisle. I was still very focused on these people and the little drama playing out in front of me. This was the kind of scene that reality TV was based on. All we needed were one-on-one personal interviews with each of them.
We wouldn't be able to hear them in the busy subway car, not that they were saying anything. Here was a test to see how well we could read body language. The woman, she was mad. Frustrated. Humiliated, too, I think. She sat bolt upright with her arms crossed, her whole manner screaming don't you even touch me. And he was confused still. He seemed to know that he was drunk and was concentrating on getting through the rest of the night with his angry girlfriend, no, wait, wife. Yes, wife - they had rings. He never said anything, never defended himself or shot back. He was waiting out the storm.
At some point, it occurred to me that this was not the first time this couple had played out this scene.
Perhaps she said nothing because there was nothing to say that she hadn't said before. Perhaps she knew that arguing with a person under the influence is an exercise in futility. And perhaps he knew there was nothing he could say to her anyway, either because he hadn't the wherewithal to come up with something or because he, too, had said everything in some previous showdown. He could only sit and wait until her posture became less rigid and her body stopped telling him where he could go. She didn't want to have to be angry at him, and if he just waited silently, she would give up on it. And that she did. The day caught up with her and she started slouching a little in the hard plastic chair. By the time we arrived at our stop and had to leave the little drama behind, she had her arm in his and her head was on his shoulder, her eyes closed.
She was trapped. Even when her husband is the guy at the party who has a little (or a lot?) too much, even when he makes an absolute fool of himself, even when he attracts the attention of tourists by taking a whiz on the subway, she still has to go back to the same apartment in Brooklyn with him, crawl into the same bed, face him tomorrow over breakfast. Was she at peace with her head on his shoulder, or did she feel defeated?
Maybe I'm reading entirely too much into this. Maybe this guy is ordinarily very responsible about his alcohol intake. Maybe even regular people find themselves peeing in the subway sometimes. Maybe I'm wrong about it all. I really hope so.
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