“Rudi will understand,” I said.
The street was blindingly bright. A reddish sun angled just above the rims of the tallest buildings. I took my suit coat off and flipped it over my shoulder. We stopped in the doorway of a shoe store to kiss.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she said.
My roommate would already be home at my place, which was closer. Kate lived up north, in Evanston. It seemed a long way away.
We cut down a side street, past a fire station, to a small park, but its gate was locked. I pressed close to her against the tall iron fence. We could smell the lilacs from a bush just inside the fence, and when I jumped for an overhanging branch my shirt sleeve hooked on a fence spike and tore, and petals rained down on us as the sprig sprang from my hand.
We walked to the subway. The evening rush was winding down; we must have caught the last express heading toward Evanston. Once the train climbed from the tunnel to the elevated tracks, it wouldn’t stop until the end of the line, on Howard. There weren’t any seats together, so we stood swaying at the front of the car, beside the empty conductor’s compartment. We wedged inside, and I clicked the door shut.
The train rocked and jounced, clattering north. We were kissing, trying to catch the rhythm of the ride with our bodies. The sun bronzed the windows on our side of the train. I lifted her skirt over her knees, hiked it higher so the sun shone off her thighs, and bunched it around her waist. She wouldn’t stop kissing. She was moving her hips to pin us to each jolt of the train.
We were speeding past scorched brick walls, gray windows, back porches outlined in sun, roofs, and treetops — the landscape of the El I’d memorized from subway windows over a lifetime of rides: the podiatrist’s foot sign past Fullerton; the bright pennants of Wrigley Field, at Addison; ancient hotels with TRANSIENTS WELCOME signs on their flaking back walls; peeling and graffiti-smudged billboards; the old cemetery just before Wilson Avenue. Even without looking, I knew almost exactly where we were. Within the compartment, the sound of our quick breathing was louder than the clatter of tracks. I was trying to slow down, to make it all last, and when she covered my mouth with her hand I turned my face to the window and looked out.
The train was braking a little from express speed, as it did each time it passed a local station. I could see blurred faces on the long wooden platform watching us pass — businessmen glancing up from folded newspapers, women clutching purses and shopping bags. I could see the expression on each face, momentarily arrested, as we flashed by. A high school kid in shirt sleeves, maybe sixteen, with books tucked under one arm and a cigarette in his mouth, caught sight of us, and in the instant before he disappeared he grinned and started to wave. Then he was gone, and I turned from the window, back to Kate, forgetting everything — the passing stations, the glowing late sky, even the sense of missing her — but that arrested wave stayed with me. It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.
About the Author
Stuart Dybek was born and raised in Chicago. His stories and poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Harpers, Tin House, Triquarterly, Doubletake, Antaeus, and Ploughshares. Mr. Dybek was awarded the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize, and the Lannan Literary Prize. Three of the stories in The Coast of Chicago appeared in the O. Henry prize story collections: “Hot Ice” (which won first prize) in 1985, “Pet Milk” in 1986, and “Blight” in 1987. He is the author of the story collections I Sailed with Magellan (2003) and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980), and a book of poems, Brass Knuckles (1979). Mr. Dybek lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his wife and two children and teaches English at Western Michigan University.
Acknowledgments
Some of these stories first appeared in somewhat different form in The New Yorker, Antaeus, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Chicago Magazine, The North American Review, The Paris Review, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project, The Critic, Witness, and The Alaska Quarterly Review. I wish to thank the editors of these magazines, and also the editors of the following anthologies, in which some of these stories have also appeared: Prize Stories O. Henry Awards, New American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, X, The Ploughshares Reader: New Fiction for the Eighties, The Substance of Things Hoped For, Four Minute Fictions, The Graywolf Annual Four, and Sudden Fiction International.
I also wish to express my gratitude to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts, and Western Michigan University for grants that provided the time during which these stories were written. And I’d like personally to thank the Ponson Estate for permission to use the painting reproduced on the book jacket.
My thanks to Daniel Bourne for his translation of the lines quoted in the dedication from Testament mój by Juliusz Slowacki, and to Philip Levine for his translation of the epigraph by Antonio Machado.