The Long Highway Pt. 28B

Yesterday Mitchell told me about once meeting a woman in the train. She'd just gotten on. Two people were getting off, leaving the seat open beside him, which she took, which pleased him.

They hit it off. She was an artist, like me, he said, and they had "a meeting of the minds," as he called it, talked on and on, easily, "in rhythm." She even looked a little like me, he said, had black hair but long, different from mine.

She was American, I guess, anyway not Japanese (he would have said).

He said she wasn't exceptionally beautifully but soulful in his eyes. Something in him connected to her, he felt. She felt a rapport too. He only carried a slight concern in the back of his mind, based on his past experiences with women, that the fact she wasn't highly sexually attractive might be a problem later if they got involved. He'd eventually "stray," look for someone else who did give that erotic thrill he liked. She wore black pants, he said, had a nice statuesque body but it was soft, didn't have the sharp curves that turn him on. He said he saw that softness in her hips.

For the time being, though, there was nothing but excitement between them at their finding so much in common, feeling to share.

Beneath her dark straight hair she had a pale, long, slightly horselike face, plain but he didn't see it that way. He saw kindness and feelings he responded to, as she made them plain to him.

It was as if they knew each other from before- have you ever met someone and felt that?- almost like they shared memories spanning their lives till then, could talk about a garden from their childhood and see the same colors, bright flowers and deep greens, leaves providing shade amid the sun that undulated on the flowers, made their colors look all the more alive, in motion.

It sounds silly, Mitchell admitted, but he said they seemed to be walking a path they both knew from past to the present moment. At such times, he said, love feels just like recognition of the obvious. If you've been with someone for years, you can finish each other's sentences, and there are people able to do that together at first sight. Is it love at first sight? Mitchell didn't use those words for what he'd experienced, said only that their meeting and talking so well was a great surprise that had them both smiling.

But will the soul connection without the great sexual one carry you forward, he asked himself.

Maybe he was trying to make me feel better by saying that, giving an assurance she was never a real rival for his affection. By the way, it wasn't clear exactly when that meeting of the souls had taken place, but I think it wasn't recent, otherwise he would have told me at the time; it might even have been before he and I met.

Big-boned, she had a clumsy, "clunky" body, he said. He sensed she was the type not attuned to the physical, but that didn't matter then. They were getting acquainted "beautifully."

And they did end up getting physical, he said, snuggling, caressing some. She actually touched his penis. He couldn't remember if she put her hand on his pants front on her own of if he'd guided it there. "Why not?" he said, since there were no other passengers with a view to them.

And when she took her hand away, he moved to replace it so he'd again feel its weight. But then he stopped and scolded himself, said to her, "Men" (meaning himself) "are annoying. They'll always say, 'Please touch it'" (meaning penis) "and spoil everything." Here she and he were talking well, in a really unique way, discovering things, he explained to me, and he had to distract with his petty physical need.

She didn't mind, though, he said. She liked him that much and he liked her too. And as an artist, a person who created art works, she had the long view, the ability to see beyond Mitchell's foibles, wait for his good points she knew were there to emerge.

Mitchell said he looked good that day, just happened to be dressed in a way that became him, had on a dark flannel jersey with a white teeshirt over it. You could see the scratchy flannel sleeves on his arms past the short sleeves of the teeshirt. And he wore jeans. The whole outfit showed off his body, made him look fit, which he was.

Mitchell's not above criticizing himself, reflecting on his character as a man. He did it yesterday, said he'd been on his commute to work when he and she met and the very same morning at the college he encountered a new student he found really attractive, became enamored of, such that the woman on the train slipped completely out of his mind. He thought: if they saw each other later (they'd exchanged numbers) what would he say, that he'd already found someone else and was no longer interested in her?

I don't know why Mitchell told me this. Maybe he wanted to show that men could be as inconstant as women. As you know, I've told you, he gets very jealous, not angrily but often.

He talked about that while we were driving and he went through a red light. It was under an elevated train track and you couldn't see the traffic signals well, not because they were less visible than others but because they were sequenced differently from usual. Suddenly there one would be, where you hadn't expected it. Mitchell crossed through the red just after it was changed. At the last moment he saw but it was already too late to stop. He thought suddenly pressing the brakes hard would be more disruptive. Anyway, his speed was low.

After the light, he sort of glided. A man appeared in front of him and deliberately stayed there, to make Mitchell come to a complete halt, wanted to chide him for his lawbreaking he'd witnessed. Mitchell was driving legally then and saw no reason to stop and kept going, at such a slow speed the man would not be hurt, had plenty of time to get out of the way of the car, move from in front, and he did but clung to the side of the car, finally just the side mirror, angrily refusing to let Mitchell off the hook for what he saw as his unconscionable behavior before. He was a light-skinned black man, middle-aged, a little past middle age, very light-complexioned, with a scraggly white beard. He looked a little like an Australian aborigine or like a wild-eyed saint in a biblical painting. I don't know why he was so outraged by Mitchell.

In bed last night Mitchell playfully thumped my side up by my shoulder and joked, "Sounds hollow." He then added, "If there's nothing inside, that's okay. There's plenty of good stuff outside." His hand then went to the curve of my breast, as if to illustrate.

He played around, teased me that the waist of my pajama bottoms was twisted. He wanted them off.