No. 9

Summer 2005

Maura Kelly
Hey Ya

It was two or three on a cold, purple-sky winter Friday night and my body, like a shaken Coke can, was ready to pop: I was full of the fizz of unrealized libidinous energy. Unfortunately, I also happened to be alone, underground and in full public view, on a W train, somewhere in between Manhattan’s Prince Street station and 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens.

I had just left a party hosted by a guy I’d been casually dating. He had all sorts of ritzy degrees, a great job, money. Let’s call him MBA, M for short. I met M at a bar shortly after I had put myself on a new dating diet. My mantra: No more starving artists or un-medicated manic-depressives! (I'd even written the phrase out on a post-it note and stuck it on my fridge. Not that I needed help remembering it -- just steeling myself to the task.) M was (and probably still is) a Vice President at his firm; that officially qualified him as a non-struggler in my book. Nor did he appear to need lithium; he didn’t stay up for days at a time without sleeping, nor believe he was in communication with a higher power. But things weren’t happening naturally between us; making conversation was too much work. The only way we were able to connect passionately was by touching tongues (and some other body parts) -- which is valuable in an absolute way, yes, hell knows I agree. But it’s not quite enough to hang a relationship on.

Still, that didn’t stop me from trying to force one into existence -- an endeavor I have been guilty of more than once. I had made up my mind to have M as my boyfriend, and I figured if I could just be clever enough, patient enough, passive-aggressive enough … something enough -- this is America, after all! -- I could trick him and myself into it. We were about four weeks into our thing by the time of his party. And with the exception of an out-of-towner who was spending the night on M's couch, I was the last guest to leave. After I said I should probably get going, M pulled me into his bedroom, pinned me against the wall and started kissing me. Standing, clothed, we ravaged each other wildly for a few minutes before he ripped the A-line button-down skirt I was wearing off my waist with one fell flick of his wrist -- whoever designed that thing had to have been a heterosexual male -- and threw me on his bed. Tempting as a quickie was, though, I couldn’t go through with it. Not while his buddy was in the other room, anyway. That didn’t seem quite like appropriate behavior for someone who wanted to be the very proper girlfriend of perfectly pedigreed M.

So I left, nerves tingling and, after striding a few blocks, descended the subway stairs. I would have taken a cab but I wasn’t ready for the night to end, not yet. I could almost see my breath because it was so frosty on the platform, but the cold was invigorating -- and so were the strangers surrounding me. Thanks to my arousal, I felt like I was on some kind of natural acid trip in an alien city full of Futurama creatures that looked both familiar and wildly exotic. I made eye contact with everyone around me, desperately hoping to find some kind of connection that would slack my unappeased lust. It was late enough on a weekend that no one under forty seemed to be around: just the young, outfitted for fun and intercourse, drunk and giddy.

That Outkast song, "Hey Ya," was pounding in the soundtrack of my mind, urging me on. It had just been released and I was obsessed with it: it was hard to uninstall it from your head once you heard it. Earlier in the night, we’d shaken ourselves like Polaroid pictures, just like the song instructed us to do. The music -- the driving guitar, the insistent bass, the chorus of clapping at the end of every line -- made it almost impossible for me not to move my body when I heard it.

"Don’t have me break this down for nothing," my brain sang in perfect imitation of Andre 3000, while I nodded my head to the invisible music. I wished I had an iPod. "Now I wanna see y’all on your baddest behavior." I thought, Well, buddy, I want to see myself on it too.

Wondering if the young woman sitting next to me on the rectangular wooden slab of seats could hear the song emanating from my mind, I snuck a look at her out of the corner of my eye. Far from noticing anything strange, she didn’t seem aware of me at all; she was looking forward, giggling a little. I turned to examine her. She was wearing tight jeans and a small puffy black jacket; her powder-smooth cocoa-colored skin peeked out from under heavy make-up. Her lashes were weighted down with thick black mascara and she had lined her eyes heavily with a powder blue pencil; heavy pink shadow floated above them, soft and dense like cotton-candy clouds. And her lips: as if she'd been drinking cherry wine all night before shellacking them. Looking at the whole picture, I was surprised that all the paint did not make her look used-up and tainted but rather younger than her twenty or so years. Acutely innocent, in fact.

Coming half-way out of my trance, I realized her eyes were focused on a young man who was standing by the tracks, his gaze trained on the black vacuum stretching out before him. Trying to keep warm, he was shuffling from one foot to the other, like a shadow-boxer. He was dressed in a ghetto uniform: jeans that started half-way down his ass and stayed there in a gravity-defying feat, black nylon stocking cap, a bigger version of the puffy jacket his lady was wearing, an absurdly large plastic diamond earring . . . and tiny baby-girl pink gloves. Spotting them, a laugh popped out of me, sudden as a sneeze. Hearing it, he turned around and seemed to glare at me. He was beautiful: wide eyes, strong cheekbones, cleft chin like a bullet had entered there.

He walked towards me and I wondered what he would do.

He peeled the gloves off, and shaking his head, tossed them in his girlfriend’s lap. She started giggling again.

"Come on," she said as he hoofed back to his watch-post. "Take 'em. I ain’t cold."

"Nah, nah," he said, shaking his head slightly, staring into the distance again. He started rubbing his hands together, blowing on them. She rolled her eyes. I looked away from both of them. Charmed by their youth, their beauty, their toughness, their vulnerability, I started grinning so hard I could feel the wrinkles forming around my eyes. The guy looked over at me again and I wished I could stop smiling. I thought it smart not to meet his glance, worried he might think I was laughing at him.

"Hey, miss," he said, and I looked up, stuck an index finger in my chest: You talking to me? He nodded at me, his chin high.

"This goes to Times Square?"

I was surprised he didn't know, more surprised he would ask me, trust me. I wondered where the two of them were from. I figured they lived in the Bronx or Harlem, didn’t ride the W often and needed to switch trains at 42nd Street.

"Yeah," I said. "It's easy. You can't miss it. Right after Penn Station. But I'll tell you."

He nodded again, not letting go of my eyes as he did.

"Thanks," he said.

I was happy: I had a duty. The train finally came. People crowded to enter and I had to use a different door than the two kids. The car was packed but I found a seat and then located my charges, standing near a set of doors, maybe ten feet away from me. I made eye contact with the guy and we smiled. We checked in with each other every few minutes like that till we neared Times Square, when I called out to him.

"Next stop," I said, jabbing my thumb behind me. He bobbed his head. The train pulled up and before the doors opened, he looked back at me and pointed out.

Here? he was asking; he wanted to double-check.

Yes, yes.

He and the girl walked out. They passed the window behind me and we all waved. I wished for a second I was the archangel Michael and could guide them forever.

The train lurched on and I went back to mentally repeating "Hey Ya." The lyrics, as far as I could tell, were about the difficulty of holding relationships together: "If what they say is ‘Nothing is forever,’ then what makes, what makes, what makes love the exception?" Damn good question, I thought. As the song goes on, Andre 3000 seems to be saying, very jauntily, that he wants to live in the present, rather than think about the long-term: "Don’t want to meet your daddy, just want you in my Caddy . . . Don’t want to meet your mama, just want to make you cum-ah." Who knew Outkast could be so Zen?

At 57th and 5th, three young dudes got on. They weren’t talking much, but exchanged enough glances as they stood, hanging on to poles above us, that I knew they were together. Their familiarity with each other made them seem like brothers, though they looked nothing alike.

The one farthest away from me was the one you would have noticed first. He could have been Brando's son, a leaner, darker young version. His livery was inspired by the working class: a fisherman's heavy navy knit sweater and black hat, old jeans, mustard construction boots, sideburns so thick they could give you splinters. But there was an air of wealth about him; it was clear he wasn’t a blue-collar man.

The second member of the triumvirate was closest to me -- standing just left of my knee. He was handsome too, though less so and more raffishly: squarer, thicker, stronger, with a banged-up face that was nicked like he had never quite gotten the hang of shaving with a blade. He’d be the one who would protect them all in a street fight; any comers might be scared off just looking at him.

The third, who stood across from the other two, holding on to a different straphanger’s anchor, would only be a liability in a brawl. Gangly and tall, his nose was a little too thin, his eyes a little too small, his face a little too long. A single woman sitting in a bar, hoping to meet guys, would have looked right through him. He had a rust-colored sweater on over a white T-shirt; worn Levis; New Balance sneakers; a green North Face parka.

I was about to go back to staring at Brando when I noticed an old-school camera with one of those long protruding lenses slung around the skinny kid’s neck. And then I saw his eyes. If you could have seen them, you would have known too: they were burning, screaming, laughing, crying, ecstatic. A world was in them: everything they had seen. And they loved it all, the ugly as much as the beautiful, simply because it was true. Except they wanted more. Needed it.

All right, fine. So my brain went overboard. But he was what I had been looking for all night, I was sure of it. I loved him in that second. Then he glanced over at me. We smiled, both looked shyly away: I think we recognized too much in each other, felt too naked.

The train stopped again. Departing passengers mixed past the newcomers in a spasm of color: Boccioni’s "States of Mind I: The Farewell." The deck shuffled. The Bruiser was realigned squarely in front of me. And the Photographer came closer, into the position near my leg; I noticed he had a single white wire plugged into his head.

"You gotta hear this," he said to young Brando, handing his friend the other earphone and slipping the iPod it was connected to out of his pocket to play the song. "I can’t stop listening to it."

I sat forward and strained to see what he was cuing up. Noticing, he turned the sleek tablet he held in his hand toward me so I could see its face.

And you know what song he was listening to. It couldn’t have been anything else, but it was shocking to see the gray words -- Hey Ya -- on the glowing screen anyway. A bolt of lightning moved through me. It was like hearing the voice of God. It was proof.

I wanted to burst. I bit my lip and looked down at my hands; I needed to contain my joy for a second. Anything I would say or do might ruin it all. When I finally turned my eyes up, the Photographer was looking at me, smiling a crooked grin just like mine.

And then Andre sang out inside me: "Don’t try to fight the feeling."

"That’s the best song around right now," I blurted out.

He nodded. "I know."

It seemed imperative that I keep talking. "The three of you are like brothers," I said.

"We grew up together," the Boxer jumped in. "Since we were four or five."

"Where?" I said.

"Atlanta," the Boxer said. I couldn’t detect an accent: that seemed a sign of intelligence.

"And now?" I said. "You all live here? In the city?"

"Nah," Brando said. "Just me. These guys are only visiting for the weekend." Wait a second: that meant the Photographer was not a New Yorker. My heart descended into my ribs.

"We’re celebrating his birthday," Brando went on, jerking his head toward the Photographer.

"Happy birthday " I said. "How old?"

"Twenty-five," he said, raising his eyebrows sheepishly. "A few hours from now." Nearly my age, I thought.

"I hope life just keeps getting better for you," I said, maybe too eagerly. "I know it will." He nodded and finally the two of us had the courage to really smile at each other, to let all our teeth show. Then the engine was slowing down and the upcoming stop was mine. Thoughts flashed through my head: I could buy him a celebratory beer, I could get his email address, I could . . .

But then I thought: Anything more destroys it. I don’t want to give him a chance to disappoint me by not calling; by not being as passionate and brilliant as I imagine he is; by telling me all the pictures he takes are of golden retrievers; by shrugging when I read him that Richard Wilbur poem I love and saying "Poetry’s not really my thing"; by saying the timing’s not right, that he’s not up for a relationship right now, that he doesn’t do long distance; that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him but he’s not into me; by flirting with another girl at a party right in front of my face or snorting a line with a Russian in the ladies’ room at an art opening and then screwing her in the bathroom stall; by telling me he dreams about the apartment we’ll have together and then breaking it off with no explanation a few weeks later; by scaring the hell out of me by saying too soon he loves me; by loving me; by killing himself and not leaving a note.

That’s no more an exaggeration than "I saw my life pass before my eyes."

I needed to believe that he would love me forever, given the chance -- that someone out there was capable of that -- and I didn’t dare do anything that might disturb that illusion.

So I said to myself: Here is how I will end this story, with him perfect in my memory, like this.

I stood up. "Good-bye," I said. "I’m glad we met."

"Me too," he said, and as his pals chimed in, I took one last look over my shoulder. Our eyes held. Then I walked out and was swallowed up by the biting cold black shadows as the subway, elevated out there in Queens, huffed off towards the end of the line.

As I write this, I regret it all. I should have risked going too far.
I stopped seeing M almost immediately after that and went back to dating artists.

Copyright 2005, Maura Kelly

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.