My Love Affair

I fell in love on the metro this week.

At least I fell into daydreaming. I had to take a later train after a morning meeting on Wednesday, so the 9:00 a.m. rush was past. There were more empty seats than occupied ones on the yellow line train at King Street. I took a seat by the window and opened Graham Greene. Reading Graham Greene always puts me in the mood for falling in love, though I can't really explain why that's the case. I had five pages left of The End of the Affair, and I dove into them with divided heart--half delighted in reading Greene, the other half sad that there were only five pages left. For the seven and a half minutes (and three metro stops) it took me to get through those five pages, I paid no attention to the world.

Then I reached the end (sorrow!) and closed the book and put it away, and took a long look around me. And there he was. A dark-haired soldier in uniform with his right arm in a sling.

I probably wouldn't have noticed him much at all except that just at the moment I happened to glance in his direction he happened to be glancing in mine. Our eyes met (excuse the cliche), and he smiled a small, amused smile and then looked deliberately away.

I liked him right off. This never happens, especially not on the metro. When I happen to make eye contact with men on the metro, my first reaction is almost always annoyance, if not complete revulsion. The sorts of men who will make eye contact with ladies on the metro tend to look at us as a possiblity, a conquest they could laugh about with their friends later. Then there are my favorites--the obviously Christian guys who read Bibles or books with titles like Finding Christ in the Modern World. I also like the stuffy literary types who grow beards and wear glasses and read scientific journals and Arabic texts. Those guys make it a point never to look at anything that might be remotely female, so they're safe. (Safe from what exactly, I've never been able to figure out. But don't worry--it won't get them.)

But this soldier was different. His expression didn't say, "Hey baby," and it didn't say, "Excuse me, miss, but I have more important things to do, as you can see...." It just said, "Hi."

I liked that he didn't keep staring (though we made eye contact once or twice more). I liked that he was a soldier, and I liked that his arm was broken. Most of all, I liked that he had the sort of face that belongs to a person with a good sense of humor. His whole demeanor said, "I'd tell you a joke if I knew you, and we'd both laugh, because we'd agree that it was funny." And I liked that, though we transferred to the same red line train (and the same car) at Gallery Place, he didn't try to strike up a conversation.

Two stops later, I got off the train, he stayed on it, and it rumbled off as I made my way up the escalator to Massachusetts Avenue.

And that was that.

I think what I like best is that I'll never see him again. But I was in love for twenty minutes, and that was kind of nice.