Free Carrie Pilby by Caren Lissner Page A

as low. When I descend into the subway, there’s only one other person in the station. Still, I have to glance up at him.
    The way he looks strikes me immediately. He’s wearing a gray bowler hat. He appears to be in his early thirties. He’s also got on a long raincoat, and he’s clean shaven and looks unusually neat. But it’s the hat that strikes me. No one wears hats these days, especially a gray bowler hat. He looks like he’s out of an old detective movie.
    He paces before the complement of full-length Broadway ads: You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; Les Mis; Phantom of the Opera. Occasionally, he starts muttering to himself. Just one of the many people in this city who are on the borderline.
    I lean against the wall and stare at the ground, at the oval slabs of gum that have been there so long they’ve turned black, and at the dirt and stones and wrappers. The Hat Guy is still pacing, still muttering, and I don’t want to appear to be staring at him, so I look away. There are so many places where we pick things to stare at in order to avoid looking at strangers. We do it in elevators all the time. But there is hardly anything to stare at on an elevator. I should start a company that manufactures sticky blue dots that read “Stare at this dot to avoid talking to the person next to you.” I could make a fortune.
    I wonder what people are supposed to talk about in elevators. “Wouldn’t it be funny if these Braille ‘numbers’ were really curse words?” “You know, it has been statistically proven that ninety percent of ‘door close’ buttons don’t really work.” “Hey, wanna order pizza from the emergency phone?” “You know, most buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor because the builders were superstitious. But this building actually used to have a thirteenth floor. It collapsed last year during a storm.” Come to think of it, I might use that one.
    The light from the subway train comes out of the tunnel, and then the train itself appears. The Hat Guy hops on, and we immediately head to opposite corners of the car like boxers in a ring.
    The Hat Guy pulls a long, thin book out of a flat paper bag and again starts muttering. On the train, there’s not much to stare at, except ads for community colleges. I think the quality of a college is inverse to how much it has to advertise. You don’t see Yale putting ads in the subway. The other ads are about made-for-TV movies on cable. Years ago, you used to be lucky if you could find one decent program out of three networks. Now, through the wonder of cable, the odds have been reduced to one in twenty.
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    I get to Petrov’s a few minutes early and the door to his office is closed. I crouch next to the door and put my ear to it.
    I hear the guy inside say, “It’s in every one. In every sexual fantasy I have, right as we’re about to…uh, do it, the phone rings.”
    Petrov: The phone rings in your fantasies right as you’re about to have sex.
    Man: Yes.
    P: Do you answer it?
    M: No. But it completely ruins the mood, and the fantasy’s over.
    P: So you’re getting hot and heavy with a woman, you’re about to have sexual intercourse, and the phone rings.
    M: Yes.
    P: I think you have intimacy issues.
    M: What makes you say that?
    What idiots. Petrov shouldn’t even charge me, after having to listen to this dreck all day.
    I hear him approaching the door, and I scramble away from it. The guy who comes out is about four foot ten. I wonder how people like him even have sex. I’m not trying to be funny. How do people who are so different in height have intercourse? I’ve seen four-foot-eleven girls with men who look like they’re six foot three. When they’re in bed, do the girls climb up to kiss them, then lower themselves and have sex, and then, when they’re finished, climb back up and kiss them