Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [33]
A man who was squeezing past me knocked my elbow. He had brown hair and a cashmere coat. Like one out of keeping with the times, he turned to apologize. And for the briefest moment I thought it was Tinker.
But I should have known better.
Tinker Grey was nowhere near the Interborough Rapid Transit. At the end of their first week in Palm Beach, Eve had sent me a postcard from the Breakers Hotel where she and Tinker were holed up. Sis, we miss you somethin’ awful—or so she wrote—and Tinker echoed the sentiment in the margin, wrapping little block letters around my address and up toward the stamp. On the picture, Eve had drawn an arrow pointing to their balcony overlooking the beach. She drew a sign stuck in the sand that read: NO JUMPING. The postscript read: See you in a week. But two weeks later, I got a postcard from the marina at Key West.
In the meantime, I took five thousand pages of dictation. I typed four hundred thousand words in language as gray as the weather. I sutured split infinitives and hoisted dangling modifiers and wore out the seat of my best flannel skirt. At night, alone at my kitchen table I ate peanut butter on toast, mastered the ruff and slough and waded into the novels of E. M. Forster just to see what all the fuss was about. In all, I saved fourteen dollars and fifty-seven cents.
My father would have been proud.
The gracious stranger maneuvered across the platform and took a position beside a mousy young woman who looked up at his approach and briefly met my gaze. It was Charlotte Sykes, the typing prodigy who sat to my left.
Charlotte had thick black eyebrows, but she also had delicate features and beautiful skin. She could have made a favorable impression on someone if she hadn’t acted as though at any moment the city was going to step on her.
Tonight she was sporting a pillbox hat with a funereal chrysanthemum stitched to its crown. She lived somewhere on the Lower East Side and she seemed to be taking her cue from me as to how late one should work, because she often ended up on the platform a few minutes on my heels. Charlotte took a furtive look in my direction, obviously working up the courage to approach. Lest there be any doubt, I took A Room with a View from my purse and opened to Chapter VI. It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance:
George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress
The beating of flowers was drowned out by the brakes of a train. The refugees on the platform gathered their possessions and readied themselves to fight for passage. I let them push their way around me. When the station was this crowded you were generally better off waiting for the next train.
Strategically positioned across the platform, rush hour conductors in little green caps acted like cops at the scene of an accident, broadening their shoulders and preparing to push people forward or back as necessary. The doors opened and the crowd surged. The blue-black chrysanthemum on Charlotte’s hat bobbed ahead like flotsam on the sea.
—Make room in there, shouted the conductors, shoving high and low alike.
A moment later the train was gone, leaving a smattering of wiser folk behind. I turned the page secure in my solitude.
—Katherine!
—Charlotte . . .
At the last minute, she must have doubled back, like a Cherokee scout.
—I didn’t know you took this train, she said disingenuously.
—Every day.
She blushed sensing that she’d been caught in a fib. The blush brought badly needed color to her cheeks. She should have fibbed more often.
—Where do you live? she asked.
—On Eleventh Street.
Her face brightened.
—We’re nearly neighbors! I live on Ludlow. A few blocks east of Bowery.
—I know where Ludlow is.
She smiled apologetically.
—Of course.