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Into the Sun
by Matt Ufford
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It was Gabriela’s job to look good. Even when she dressed down, her petite body and dark features twisted necks, caught eyes, dropped jaws. When I saw her on the downtown F platform at West Fourth, she was wearing her usual mix of casual and combustible: denim jacket, gray capri sweats, lime stilettos. She sat, and sleek calves peeked from her pants. At rest, her face was at once girlish and knowing, both innocent and incendiary. But it was the walk, the model’s walk, that set the station on fire when the train arrived. The spiked heels moved with quickness and confidence. Dangerous angles came from nowhere. The divots flanking her spine in the small of her back winked alternately as her hips turned heads like at a tennis match. I followed her into the same car. I could only follow. I sat next to her, in the last open seat in the car. Appropriately, we sat in silence. (New York’s subway system represents an entire subculture of people-watching. Some glance, some stare, some leer, some look away, but few people speak; it violates the barriers we surround ourselves with—headphones, frowns, books, thousand-yard stares.) I read a bad short story by Bukowski and pretended to be interested in it. I saw her in my periphery, and discerned her subtle gaze over my shoulder as she read the same pages I did. I felt embarrassed because the story was so bad but self-conscious about stopping reading and overwhelmed by the desire to look at her. My head was crowded with exploding synapses and the faint smell of her perfume, or her shampoo. It was feminine and insistent. The train screeched out of East Broadway, the last stop in Manhattan. Not even the fluorescent light could brighten the dingy walls of the station, stained with water and grime. Tiles went missing in patches, revealing gray-black concrete. A few new tiles made the jaundiced old ones look worse. I closed the book. I was determined to speak to her. I can do this. I fumbled with the snaps on my bag while putting the book away and thinking of something to say. Sorry that story sucked. What’s your name? Bear my children. Where are you going? “Where are you going?” I was surprised to realize that she was the one speaking. We were somewhere under the East River, and I made note of it in case I needed to someday lay out in detail how I met my first wife. Her dark round eyes looked at me, both expectant and nonchalant. I tried to control my heart rate and collected my thoughts: I was visiting a friend who lived in Kensington. “I’m going to Church,” I said. I looked at her face and saw a door closing. “No, I mean Church Avenue. I wouldn’t be going to church on Saturday. I don’t even go on Sundays. But, I mean, it’s cool if you do. Go on Sundays, that is.” I smiled apologetically and choked out a laugh: “Ha ha. Ha?” She smiled. Salvation! After that, we spoke easily. I pretended to be confident and funny, and she continued to smolder. She had moved out of the Queens apartment she shared with her ex-boyfriend and was looking at a new place in Carroll Gardens. She had run track in high school and college. She was less exotic when she spoke; her speech patterns suggested suburban malls. I asked her what she did. “Freelance, mostly. But I have an agent.” “What kind of freelance?” She feigned modesty. “Modeling.” “Really? You’re a model?” “Yeah.” “That’s surprising, because I don’t find you attractive at all.” I hammered home the sarcasm by slowly shaking my head and mouthing the word NO. At Jay Street, we paused to allow the usual flux of people at the convergence of the A and F lines. On: gentrified Brooklyn coming home from the West side. Off: working-class Brooklyn and Queens headed to Bed-Stuy and Jamaica. The train lurched forward. “So, how am I going to find you again?” I asked. “My e-mail’s on my website,” she said, telling me the address. She paused as I scribbled it down; I was terrified and thrilled by what the content might be. “And I’m going out with some friends tonight. You should come out, too.” “I don’t know. I’m not sure if I can trust someone who talks to strangers on the subway.” She got off the train at Carroll, and again I was treated to her walk of kinetic energy and exclamation points: Hips! Legs! Ass! Back dimples! I watched her leave, then sat back and exhaled, full of expectant hope and wonder. The train pulled away from the station, gathered speed, and exploded out of the tunnel into the bright spring day. As the F climbed to the Smith-9th stop above the Gowanus Canal, everything glinted and gleamed. The skyline of lower Manhattan, all sharp points and right angles, stabbed at scattered cirrus clouds. To the west, the sun shone off the Statue of Liberty’s golden torch. Below, the Gowanus was blue. I had never seen it blue. On the clearest, sunniest days, it’s only a gunmetal mirror, reflecting the images of the graffitied warehouses lining its concrete banks. But something else was at work that day. I saw Gabriela that night (careful inspection of her website revealed a talented lingerie designer—she was stingy with fabric but had all the right assets to model her work), and we began seeing each other. Of course, it didn’t work out. I wanted to like her more than I actually did. She liked me more than she wanted to. Or something like that. It’s the typical New York finding-your-way-in-the-world dating story—everyone has a similar chapter, and nobody’s version is all that interesting. Still, when I think about Gabriela, or when I stumble across a photo of her in a magazine ad or photo series, I don’t think about how or why it ended. I don’t think about the sex or conversations or time we shared, or her lack of interest in books, or her genuine, misguided sweetness. I’m not disappointed, because it may as well have never happened. For me, Gabriela will always be walking away from me for the first time, her intoxicating scent dissipating, turning into the high hopes of possibility, my mind and muscles filling with the electric energy of what might be as the dark world opened up into the shining cityscape of New York.
Matt Ufford is a freelance writer and former Marine living in Brooklyn.
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