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09/19/2006: "When Faced With a Stranger"
The 24 is a bus that goes along Sherbrooke Street in Montreal. I board one westbound at St. Denis, and take a seat in an otherwise empty quad, next to an open window for the afternoon breeze. I slide my shopping bag between my legs and consider the empty seat across from me.
A man my age takes the seat to my right. He too has a shopping bag, which he carries on his lap. Soon a woman takes the seat across from him, and then across from me sits some other woman. As this one settles into her seat, I feel as she kicks my bag, in a soft and gentle sort of way, trying to create what room she needs.
She is young and attractive in a plain sort of way, wearing a simple white sweater with buttons fastened almost to the collar. She opens a book with its cover to her lap, though across the top of the pages I can read a stamp marked ‘McGill’. She is the picture of eager academia, so it’s not surprising that when I look to her face, I find her head down towards the page.
The outside provides relief from having to consider this woman further, except that I notice as she keeps looking up from her page to look out the window, to glance in what I take to be my direction. Eventually she starts rubbing the sides of her nose and then chews on her fingers.
As she shifts in her awkwardness, I see that she is reading Raymond Carver’s collection of short stories, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please”. This happens to be one of my favourite writer’s these days, and so I think to tell her so, and say something remarkably ordinary, something like “I really liked that book”. Except that I either don’t say it loud enough or it’s just too far out of context to say something to someone you don’t know, so that my comment fails to register. Nevertheless, I’m determined to make the connection, and I reach my left arm out towards her and say it again.
This time she looks up, and meets my comment with a smile. “What story are you on?” I continue, and she says “60 Acres.”
“Is that the one about the Indians?” I ask, and she tells me that she’s only gotten to the part with the trespassing boys, so she can’t be sure. Then she wants to know which story was my favourite. I say it’s the one where the woman orders a birthday cake and then doesn’t pick it up from the baker for a few days because her kid gets sick, but that I think it’s a story from another collection. Then she says that she’s reading this one because it’s a collection that was published after Carver’s editor made significant changes without the writer’s consent. I say that I didn’t know that, and then she says yeah, it’s true, and with a sense of certain seriousness, gives me a list of reasons why this is interesting to her.
We are two strangers curious enough to check each other out, left to discover that we have little in the way of easy conversation, though we continue along with our polite-at-a-distance talk. Till she leaves, at a stop somewhere west of Atwater, and I'm left to consider how much more satisfying the real is than the fantasy.
