PASSAGES

Miami Herald, The (FL)
June 9, 1985
Author: JEFF LEEN Herald Staff Writer

You amble down the aisle of the bus and there she is: high cheekbones and raven hair, the kind of woman who looks good in bad weather. She is reading War and Peace. The seat next to her is empty.

"This seat taken?" you ask, motioning with your bag.

She looks up and smiles and the whole picture improves, yes. You smile back, tightening the skin around your eyes, believing for whatever reason that this facial flinch of yours communicates something, something like vulnerability. There has been a lot of bad weather in your life lately.

You settle in, stretch, smile back and forth, acutely conscious of the proximity of one blue-jeaned thigh to another. The bus gets underway.

"That's a great book," you say, and think what dumb a line.

But she says, "Yes," and turns full face toward you. She has big wet-looking eyes and big white teeth, a toothpaste billboard of a face, but sensitive, serious, a bit intellectual. Beam me up into that face, Scotty.

"Are you from here?" you ask.

"Yeah, I've lived here for three years," she says.

"Really, I've lived here for two years and I've never seen you around," you say.

This goes back and forth, the reason for this unfortunate and totally logical circumstance, the two of you never having met before. Then, quiet.

She passes the time reading. You try to sleep. After a while, the conversation starts up again.

It isn't long before you're talking relationships. She just broke up for the final time with the guy she has been breaking up with for two years.

"It's okay, now," she says, smiling. "But it was so bad for so long. It was unbelievably bad."

"I just broke up with someone I'd been going out with for two years," you say. "I never knew it would hit me like it did. It was like withdrawal from a drug. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. Every time the phone rang, my heart would pound."

"I know, I know," she says. "You've got to go through that. I used to feel sick every time I saw a Chevelle. That was his car."

"I felt like every decision I had ever made in my life was the wrong one," you say.

"You've got to realize it's not your fault," she says. "That you're a good person. You change the things you can and you don't worry about the things you can't change."

She's looking at you and smiling and you're looking at her and smiling and you know that something's being communicated and you only wish that you were smart enough to decipher it.

There's a silence that becomes hard to break.

"You know, I was an English major, but I never read War and Peace," you say, finally. "It's one of those books everyone says they've read, but very few really have."

"I've read it twice," she says.

"Twice?" you say.

"This is my third time," she says.

"Really," you say.

"Actually, I like Anna Karenina better," she says. "I've read that four times."

"You must," you say, "spend a lot of time reading."

"Oh, I love to read," she says. "When I'm feeling bad, I'll just read a book."

Your heart quickens.

"What else have you read lately?"

"The Red and The Black, all of Dickens and Thackeray and Conrad, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Emma, The Sound and the Fury, Ulysses, Moby Dick, The Rise of Silas Lapham," she says, smiling. "Have you read The Rise of Silas Lapham? It's a really good book and nobody's ever read it."

The bus is coming to a stop. It's her stop. She's getting out.

"Is, there, ah, a number or something you have," you say as she rises. "Maybe I could call you."

"Well, actually, I've met somebody else," she says.

"Well, that's great," you say. "Really good, great. Good luck."

"Yeah, well," she says.

The bus starts up again, and the seat next to you is empty. You're beginning to think it always will be. You open up your bag for the book you have brought with you, Across the River and Into the Trees, not the best Hemingway, but it will do.

You try not to force it. You know it will come: That moment, glorious and sublime, when the world around you vanishes and you enter the page. After that it will be all right.

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 6
Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald