It is a summer evening, 11:00 O’clock in New York City. I am riding The Broadway bus uptown from the theater district after my show. The bus is jammed. Lots of performers live uptown like me. Most of the shows end at 10:30. Just enough time to get the make-up off and catch a bus. Mobs of audience folks are riding home at this time also. I am fortunate to have a seat at the back of the bus but the standees are so squeezed in that they are pressed against my knees. I am practicing my usual people-watching in New York crowds, guessing inside my head about the personality, age, mood, or employment of individuals I notice. It is pretty entertaining when you are alone in a crowd with no book. I discovered later when I studied acting that it is an acting exercise to deepen a sense of empathy. Scanning the people around me in this manner, I had invented a lifetime and a personality for a couple of people when I noticed a pretty woman standing near the back door of the bus who seemed to be looking at me. Checking this out, it became clear that she was looking at me. When she saw me look back at her she smiled. I would have judged this to be an invitation if it had seemed possible to stand up and get through the crowd of people to be near her. It did not seem possible and I smiled back helplessly. She appeared to recognize my plight and looked sympathetic. In this way, we carried on a wordless and pointless flirtation across the distance and the people in between. The bus only made one or two more stops before her stop and, when it came, she turned and got off the bus without waving. For the rest of the bus ride, the rest of the evening, and the following day, I suffered a sense of loss. Something unspoken had passed between us. She was no sooner out the door when I began to regret my lack of attempt to overcome the difficulty of reaching her. No doubt it would have been difficult – quite. Maybe impossible, but I felt that I should have tried. If I had at least made the effort perhaps she would have recognized my efforts and responded to them – even waiting for me to get off the bus after her. I could have called to the driver to wait for me to get off and when I stepped to the pavement, she would be standing there. Then we would have been together for who knows what sort of discoveries – a life-changing connection perhaps. We would discover shared interests. She was a performer I felt sure – a dancer from her apparent fitness. – perhaps a classical music lover like me.“Do you like Shostakovich?” I would ask. She would exclaim over his Fifth Symphony I imagined
When I got off she would have been there. It was night time and 72nd Street was dark at this part. It would be good for her to have me walk with her. We would have walked together to her apartment building, shared phone numbers, and said goodnight. Or maybe she would invite me in to continue our discovered connection. We would get acquainted and perhaps she would invite me in and we would have sex together that very night – perhaps that was her intention from the beginning when she smiled at me on the bus. I continued torturing myself with these fantasies of what might have been for quite a while. Whether a felt recognition of something in each of us had been part of it or not, my self-punishment harassed me with the possibility that it might have been.
You who read this may very well have experienced a sharing of feelings, a recognition of attraction between yourself and your gender opposite. It feels important at the time but you never know for sure that it is a deep connection – only that it is a connection of some sort that you both feel. I recall the Beetles’ line “Would you believe in a love at first sight? Yes, “ I am certain that it happens all the time.” I agree. I think it does happen all the time. Should the connection be lost, as happened to me, it feels tragic.
Such precious moments do not abound, however. Most of us who are unattached live in a perpetual state of yearning for the miracle moment, hoping for the development of love from lust and living the present moment whatever it may bring. Opportunities need to be recognized when they happen and acted upon. An accumulation of experiences like this creates unhealthy self-regard. It is necessary, besides to confront the possibility that this tragedy that you suppose is not tragic at all but a waste of your energy. the attraction that you imagine on the part of the other person was not there – But you can never know.
The woman’s life touched mine only to leave a permanent regret. I wonder if she feels the same way.