From:
http://anneboyer.tumblr.com/nyc (1) He said I needed to listen to him. He said, “Listen.” He said because he was not very fluent in English, he would have to be straightforward, and so I said “Okay,” though I knew what was coming and that this was the man with the body / the man with the hand,
that is, the body which was sitting too close on the subway, which was palpably too close, a body which radiated so much wrong closeness I would not look at it for fear of igniting more closeness, and that is the hand which put itself over mine when on my way out of the subway car, I rested my hand on a metal rail (that is,the hand I had to emphatically pull my hand out from under).
He had followed me from the subway car saying, “Listen, listen,” and so I stopped and turned around and listened.
He said “I like you,” and so I said “Yeah, I am not interested in that,” and he said, “Listen, I like you, you are beautiful” and I said, “I am not interested. I am tired and want to go home.” I began to walk away. He said, “Listen.” I said “What now? I want to go home.”
He said “Listen, I want to fuck you,” and I said “I am not interested,” and he said “But listen, I got off my train to come after you,” and I said “That isn’t my fault. Go back and get on your train.”
He said, “Do you have a boyfriend?” and I have learned to say “Yes” no matter what the facts are, but in response to the fact of the boyfriend, he said “Listen,” he said “You are beautiful. I love you.” I said, “It is very late, and I am very tired. Leave me alone.”
I tried to walk out, was walking out, and he grabbed me by the arms and tried to hold me in place, and I pulled trying to get away from him and said “Let go of me!” and he said “Sorry, oh sorry,” as if he hadn’t even realized or meant to start grabbing me to hold me in place and had in his forceful pursuit exceeded even his own expectations of forcefulness. He removed his hands from me and said, “But listen, I like you”
and I said “You go back to your train and leave me alone,”
and he followed me out and said “But listen, listen, my English is not good ,and I want to fuck you.” I said, “Your English is good enough to understand that I said ‘no.’” He said “What’s the problem?”
I said “I am not interested. I am tired and want to go home,” and he said “But listen, you are beautiful and I love you,” and I said “Leave me alone and go back to your train,” and he said “but what is the problem?” and he said “but why aren’t you interested?” and I said “I want to go home and just stop this,” and he said “Listen, how will we see each other again?” and I said “I have been listening! I don’t want to listen anymore.”
Other men who had come out of the train, men of several types, then gathered around us. They told him how they admired his persistence and how beautiful they thought I was, how they agreed with him on that. They all nodded their heads in agreement and were saying, “She is a fine woman. You are right about that,” but not one of the men said “Don’t do this!” to him, and not one of them asked me “Are you alright?” and so I said to one of them who looked must larger than the man and a bit like a nice person “You need to stand between him and me.”
I couldn’t think of “You need to help me make the man stop doing this,” only could think of “You need to put your body between my body and his body because your body is much bigger than either of the other bodies,” but the man laughed when I said that and didn’t help and instead talked to the man who wanted me to listen to him about me and about how it was an admirable pursuit, with noble persistence, “Good job man,” and no one said a word to me
but the man who followed me off the train into the dark kept saying “Listen, listen, listen, I love you, I want to fuck you, etc.”
And he said “Do I ever have a chance?” and I told him I said, “You go back on your train. This is over.“
And I wanted him to leave me alone, who was following me in the dark and saying “Listen, Listen,” so I said “Listen to me. Leave me alone, I am tired.”
“What about some other time?” he said.
I said, “Listen, if you promise to leave me alone and do not follow me then the next time I see you I might listen to you.” He wanted my phone number, and I said he couldn’t have it, that I would only listen to him if fate brought us together again, that fate would have to determine everything.
He said “But fate?” now thrown off his pattern, having had to listen to me for a change, maybe thinking that fate was an unreliable thing to rely on to get what he wanted, but also maybe finding whatever is the clear relief of possibility, thinking maybe he could ride the Q again and again until he saw me again, and so I said “The only way I will listen to you is if it is fate, and only if you do not follow me and get back on your train”
And he said, “Then I will see you again and you will listen to me!”
And I said, “I am going home now.”
And I walked away and he did not grab me again or try to hold me in place or touch me anymore
but he stood there outside the subway stop calling out into the street behind me “I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!”
I didn’t look back at him and could only tell by the way his I LOVE YOU’s faded that he wasn’t following as I walked into the darkish Ditmas night.
nyc (2)He looked at me in the rear view mirror and said I was beautiful. He wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. I know to always say “yes” no matter the facts, and he said “Your boyfriend is very lucky,” but also he began to say, “Boyfriend and girlfriend mean nothing,” he said.
He began to give me an argument for cheating, involving such claims as 1) everyone does it 2) if you do not cheat you will be cheated on 3) the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is elastic and durable and by its nature survives cheating 4) if the boyfriend does not marry you he will leave you in the end so you might as well cheat.
He had honey colored eyes and was vital and good looking. The last time I had been in NYC the driver Humberto fell in love with me and gave me my ride from La Guardia for free and a hug at the end of it and a promise of as many free rides as I want and dancing and ceviche and trips to Quito, and I began to think maybe I shouldn’t have said to Naseem I had a boyfriend.
I began to imagine I had an army of NYC drivers all willing to make and keep grand promises to me, how practical it would be to amass an entire fleet of cab driver lovers to be mobilized at any minute by my charm. The problem is that I knew with Naseem already that though he was good looking and intelligent I would have to listen to very long philosophical monologues which was not the case with Humberto who while good looking and intelligent, too, loved poetry and dancing and wanted to know what I thought about things — Humberto who said “What is money?” and I said “Money is why we have to do what we do, why we work, Humberto,” and Humberto said “No, it is all for this, what I do is for this” gesturing at me and meaning “Love.”
Naseem told me everything, about his family farm in Pakistan, about his father and mother and family and his grandfather who is old and whose diapers he must change. I asked Naseem if he had a wife or girlfriend, and he said “No,” and I asked him how old he was, and he said “25,” and he said “How old are you?” and I said “39” and he acted shocked by this. He said “But you look young!” and exclaimed and said “Your boyfriend is very lucky!” After it came out that I was old the tone of the discourse shifted, the questions under consideration less the question of seduction and more the question of the world.
The man who had just minutes earlier been trying to convince me to cheat on my imaginary boyfriend now, having learned I had been alive a long time, began to speak of the insanity of the world, the insanity of men (who look this way, who look that way, who are crazy and look past their wives, and he should know, he is a man, he is a crazy, he is always looking this way and that way), the insanity of the world in which everyone is grasping for temporary pleasures: money, sex. He said that these people, who want only sex and money, will become forty and look in their hands which were always grabbing and find that these hands once filled with all the glittering pleasures of the world would be totally empty. They would stare at their empty hands and moan and say “What have I done? I now have nothing!”
He said in this country, things are crazy, that people who are mostly using each other as instruments, that children neglect their parents and parents neglect their children, that lovers do not love each other. He said that as the parents are the servants of the child, so the child when grown becomes the servant of the parents, and that the measure of a person is how they treat not individuals but the whole family and community in each part. He said he had a soft religion, a very soft religion, which had everything in it, like a set of soft laws which accounted for everything, but had in it mostly the soft laws of these interrelationships of people at different points on their lifespans, the sick and the strong, the male and the female, the parent and the child.
He said that in jihad, there is no killing of children, women, sick people, and old people, but that in the United States, there is mostly killing of children, women, sick people, and old people, that these are the people we are always killing. He said that in the United States, there is mostly in our war the killing of children, women, sick people, and old people. He said that in Pakistan, everything is always exploding, that there is no place to be in and near cities that might not explode, but he said this is not Islam, but something else. I said “It is also us, what we do to Pakistan.” He said yes, he did not understand how his soft religion was blamed for all of this.
He said that in his soft religion, if you have saved one life, you have saved the entire world, and if you have killed one person, you have murdered an entire community,
and when he spoke to me about his soft religion which sounded very soft I was tired after a long weekend at a conference in which I kept wanting to use my friends as pillows and all I wanted, then, was a soft pillow. I wanted a pillow that contained a soft philosophy which like his soft philosophy was a thing which was soft and easy to rest my head on and accounted for weakness, infirmity, youth, and age, men and women, the real reality of all of stakes of interrelation and space of care, a soft way of being in the world in which the weak were not the first to die, in which no one would never use humans instrumentally, in which we would never grab after glittering and impermanant objects, a soft philosophy of the world in which it could be guarenteed that we never look at our hands and find, with horror, that those hands which had always been grabbing were now empty, or worse, they were covered in blood.
nyc (3)when I told my daughter about the man who followed me off the subway she said, “Anne, you are writing this down?” and I said “well yes, I wrote about it,” and she said “this is the sort of thing that must be written about” and I said “well yes, it seems to be an event for the world’s consideration and not just my own” and she said “good.”
and she also theorized that what happens to me has something to do with my face, with my cheeks in particular, the way I beam and smile and have round cheeks. she said “you are like a doll with round cheeks, like a cabbage patch doll!” and I said I felt a little betrayed by my face then, and my softness, and thought faces cause a lot of problems for what they let on without any intention of letting on a easy and relatable manner or vulnerability.
and I tried to write about it as cooly and without artifice or opinion as possible, I thought, and just sort of lay out the events and meditation or polemic could naturally follow later, though I served myself with my account of my own cleverness at the end, my introduction of fate (which made my daughter very amused, that I had been that clever and surprising under threat) because I felt very clever at my Odysseus-like talking myself out of a bad scene, and later on Twitter someone actually said “it is like the Odyssey” and I thought how good it is that people can understand this or me, because that is what it feels like to be alive as a woman.
but also it feels like everything. there is a lot of feeling that surrounds events and accounts of these things, even when one tries very hard not to have any feeling at all. among these feelings the one of intense betrayal by the world, also the feeling of the never-endingness of these events (always one after another),
most keenly though of all the feelings one might feel is that feeling of intense alienation, that one hour one could be with friends, and some are male and some are female, and one could be abstracted into thought or semi-intellectual discussion or thinking about politics or literature and feeling a little equal, feeling there is no special designation of inferiority or potential-victimhood upon any of you, and no one anywhere in these clusters of friends (and you yourself also) talks about or thinks about how some of you will leave the place you are all gathered together and be reduced to being a woman as being-a-woman-is in this world and others who are men will leave the place you are all gathered together and never know this feeling, never be menaced for this reason of having been a born a woman or born a woman with a semi-welcoming face.
and it leads one to think that no matter how much thinking you do, no matter how serious you are, no matter how articulate or erudite or generally equal in intellect or commitment, one is always in fact embodied as a potential reduction, as a site to be diminished, as a thing to be exerted against or menaced.
a person will be reduced even while a man is shouting words of love, or a person will be reduced precisely at those times when a man is shouting words of love, how there is never a time that is not about love or desire, or about a man shouting about love.
and what is love then, when there are these times men shout about it? and what is love that one needs it to recover from these violences of love? where do I get the love that isn’t shouting? and what is a face for, other than to be your own trap? and I do not even know what accounts are for, that they bring no relief in particular,
because what relief is there to state what is obvious which is that one is always walking around as a potential reduction? and there is never a system in place for after-the-fact, there is no ritual or center of support, no one you are with thinks of you or seems to care after it happens, no one is outraged that you know or in arms against all the men who menace, and after-the-fact all the thinking you will be cool and feel nothing as revenge falls through, the accumulated reductions insistently reduce despite all the steely intentions to remain whole and substantial.
and among all the feelings, also, that terrible one that you cannot or do not want to survive the world.
by American Dream » Wed May 01, 2013 2:54 pm 
