How many times and on how many screens has JFK been assassinated? she asks a few minutes into the commute.
Someone has said that to me before, I say.
And I notice, now for the first time, even she is a rerun or a ghost
or an unfortunate reminder of the one who came before her,
from the artfully mismatched polish on her toenails to the way her wrists wrap around each other as she talks her quiet talk, her fingertips balancing her iPhone, which streams Jackie Then Kennedy scrambling toward the back of the Cadillac. Its the Zapruder footage in slow motion and somehow in HD, and she touches the thumbs up icon when the footage comes to a close.
Across from me sits a dead man. I'm sure of it—his death. He lounges in himself, his belly fat imperialistic in its expanse, moving beyond beltline and claiming a space all its own on the torn, blue cushioned seat. The dead man looks a bit like Marlon Brando, post-Tango in Paris, when the depression set in and with it the weight, but like Brando, there's still a cool magic in the deep lines of the dead man's forehead, something forlorn and knowing in the drag of his eyelids.
It's here that I remember I'm a writer. And moments like these, I'm supposed to render in belabored yet fragmented ways.
That's ego, she says, not looking up from her phone.
What's that? I say.
The way you pigeonhole me. Rerun, ghost, et cetera, she says. Maybe I've made love to a sad man like you before. Maybe you're a trigger for me. Maybe I know everyone you're going to be, everything you're going to say. Like I was going to tell you these pants, these pants are lenin pants and I got them from Bali. And I didn't say it because I already knew your response.
Are they ethically made? we say smugly and simultaneously.
And the subway car does that screeching sound you hear in movies and the tunnels outside do that motion blur you see in movies and I try to kiss her but she says that uh-uh cowboy line you know from movies.
Brando had affairs, I say.
Kennedy had affairs, she says.
Have you ever had an affair?
It was exhausting, she says, the performance required. All the effort in your vocal affectations, those terrible 3 p.m. lunches, the pet names, your obligatory passion and one-liners, the secrecy for the sake of secrecy, the purchase and disposal of lingerie. If I could get the time back—
I'd spend it alone with a glass of red wine and a good book, we say.