Stranger

She was who she is and who she’ll always be: the young woman on the concrete stoop of the little clapboard farmhouse by the side of the road, sitting reading in a gloaming.

That’s a book in her hands. Not a tablet. Not a fucking iPhone. Worth noting that this may be years ago, but those things have already pullulated.

A book, though. For sure.

She’s beautiful in a boyish way. The blue jeans. The T-shirt. The haircut—a six-week-neglected U.S. Marine’s or maybe a Buddhist nun’s. Her posture could be either, except it’s really, in its lily-stem straightness and its fineness, a John Singer Sargent figure’s. A James or Cather character’s. A transplant, she is, from a time before the Age of Slouch.

I’m slouching myself, no doubt, when I spot her. Driving with all the windows down on one of those early-summer Delaware evenings so gorgeous it’s a little unsettling, a little scary, making you think how nobody gets but so many of these in a life, and here goes another.

Making you wonder if maybe you’re dead already and missed it.

I’m joyriding, is what I tell myself. Marveling, I tell myself, at hills and beanfields. Massive coral-pink cumulus clouds. Distant swooping sparrow murmurations. A bright crescent moon.

Tell myself because I’m up to my old tricks. Imagining I’m someone who deserves these gifts, or whatever, from the universe. Imagining I’m someone who can use them.

In fact, I’m not a good person.

There are reasons I’m alone on a night like this.

Don’t think I’m exotic. Dangerous. I’m un-good in the same ways you probably are; you like reading shit like this.

Like a bomb blast, she radiates serenity. A clarion. A summons loudspeakered from atop a minaret. Its effect—on me—is complex. I want to put my hand out the car window. Salute her. With a single finger. Because no one so assiduously performing not having it coming doesn’t have it coming. Because I hate all things churchly, and there’s a decidedly numinous glow around her. Because she’s both seamlessly integrated into and the epicenter of an Eden, I move through like an android. A tank.

Because it’s her, obviously, the gift of the perfect evening is for, and the universe put me on this road passing this house just so I know it.

And yet. And still. I’m in love with her. Instantly, hopelessly. Same as every other creature, great or small, beholding her in that unearthly dusk. I mean the ants and garter snakes gazing up at her from the ground under her dirty bare feet. If it lives, she’s its mother. I want to pull over. Leave the car by the breeze-combed field opposite the house. Walk to her, up that gravel drive. Bend, as she closes the book, smiles uncertainly at the stranger, to kiss the top of that feline head. Kneel in front of her. Kiss her between her legs, right through those frayed, threadbare jeans. Odd: Maybe twice in my life, female persons have had this effect on me. I want to tell her I, too, am an anachronism. That I miss human bodies of just the sort she has here. Patchouli-scented. Sweat-tinged. Dirty-footed. Analog. Want to ask her to read to me. Before it’s too late. Too dark. While I kiss her like that. Want her, above all else, to teach me solitude. Instead of loneliness, I mean. Same as she has. Something I knew the instant I glimpsed her. Even if I don’t know her at all. Never did, never will. Not outside those five seconds she’s in my life, in my sight, so absorbed in her book she doesn’t even glance up as I drive by as I’m joyriding, I tell myself on that terrifyingly beautiful summer night a dozen years ago.

I think of an impossibly handsome man in a supermarket aisle in Brooklyn Heights. Winter of 2009, this is. Gurning at the ape-shit-happy toddler in his shopping cart. He’s got Robert Redford-from-the-’70s hair. A Rolex on his arm. Bright blue eyes. They meet mine for a half-second and say thanks, but I’m out of your price range.

I think of a teenaged homeless girl in a dim alley off Hollywood Boulevard on a blazing-hot August afternoon. She’s puffy-faced, choking, trying to stop herself from crying. Her freaked-out friends stand around her, petting her, patting her, doing their pitiful best to soothe her. It must be 2003.

I think of a coltish young grad student settling onto a barstool in a subterranean dive by a Southern university campus. Chuck Taylors. Peacoat. Wire-rim specs. He’s fidgety. Keeps watching the door. It’s late on a crystalline November afternoon in 1996. The pretty bartender brings him his pint, and he leans over and asks her something involved. We can’t know what it is. But I’m watching her face and can tell you he’s just accidentally seduced her.

We’re the same, aren’t we, you and I?

We’re against our times. Prefer the company of strangers.

You and I.