The Reader
by Maury F. Gruszko

A guy boarded the train at Delancey Street with hair the color of an old bronze and more of it than I’d ever had and there was even (and of course) one of those Superman locks cresting his forehead just so, insouciantly, and while I’d lay odds he’d never uttered the word “insouciance,” he obviously and enviously knew how to live it, leaning back with shoulder blades and the sole of a Vans pressed against the subway door and his body sheathed in black jeans and an artfully ratty black t-shirt emblazoned with the crazed remnants of the word MEMOREX. Anyway, I’m still not sure what he has to do with this beyond eclipsing the window where a person of interest I dubbed The Reader had existed for me in reflection since the 14th Street station, her image poised like a charcoal portrait as the tunnel shaded her features with cascading, slaty darkness.  

While it was her reflection that was framed in the window glass, in substance and dimension not all that much was confined by her choice of garb, which was one of those diaphanous frocks that many were wearing that summer and which inevitably reminded me, but at that time reminded me too well, of that Irwin Shaw story The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, only she was no longer a girl nor had been one for some time; just like that sultry July, she had fully evolved into her new season and, I admit it may sound dumb, but she looked smart with her features accented by eyeglasses whose frames were roundish and clear and they alone elevated her from the pack of ubiquitous New York City clones who mindlessly perpetuated the played out fashion of ersatz-retro rectangularity. She was by anyone’s estimate the picture of a post-graduate type and thus may well have read that Irwin Shaw story and no doubt she not only knew the term “insouciance” but, like Memorex, practiced it, for she seemed, as perhaps she and her peers might term it, “Chill.” It was none of the above that maintained my captivated attention but  instead something palpable and invisible as magnetism: it was the way she’d been reading while waiting on the platform that portrayed a ferocious intensity, an enviable focus that at times seemed the precursor to rapture.

When the train arrived at the 14th Street station and the doors parted I entered the subway car first and, as The Reader passed close by, I saw that I was, I guess, old enough to be her dad if I’d gotten started at a young age, back at a time when I had, in fact, been married and we had, in principle, planned on kids, one day. I’m married now again, but just between the two of us we’re not sure for how much longer. I’d been listening to the audiobook of “The Remains of the Day” but it became background chatter within my head as The Reader found a seat and I spotted and devoured her reflection as unabashedly as a termite would wood.

It was just a reflection, I kept telling myself, until my self said “It?” Seeing the carriage of her head, how she cradled the tome in upturned palms, the act of reading itself, the reception and translation of symbols into life, if only synaptically, it was that – that was the “it” – that so transfixed me. I’d just spent hours at a place up the block designed to provide a “writerly space” to work in “partitioned workspaces” (remember “reading carrels” in middle school?) and at the end of the day (literally, it was night now), all I had to show for my irretrievable time and unrefundable expense was some backbreaking work done on the crops in FarmVille.

It wasn’t until The Reader dashed off the train at my stop that I saw the book’s title – one I’d often nodded in solemn agreement about its landmark brilliance, yet had never read a word of. She slid it, the book, into her tote bag and pulled from the folds of her dress a lipstick and a phone, angling the screen to apply color while ascending the stairs. Then thumbing out a text message, she disappeared into one of the area bars that were way too hip for me.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my wife and I hadn’t known each other as married people for so long it was no longer something we could really bring up, discuss; our condoms were perilously old, “Vintage,” I once joked, but by then humor had become a casualty of our cold war. Still, my sensitivity to this connubial fact was often commandeered by the most banal mnemonic and on the way home I’d stopped at CVS to buy milk and eggs and walked into a chaos of change, the most blatant being the installation of self-checkout machines and believe me when I say I reviled the suits at headquarters for putting people out of work and, by extension, forcing me into it. The one machine that was up and running sounded self-righteous and I was still hearing its strident voice penetrating the humid night when there, right outside the CVS on the sidewalk, right there alongside the matériel and crap they’d been assembling, I spied with my little eye a top-of-the-line Makita drill, standing all by its lonesome. 

In this part of Brooklyn, only a block from those bars but light years away in all other respects, not a creature was stirring, not even a rat… 

Well I stashed that drill in the coat closet behind the stuff of other seasons, handily camouflaging it beneath the his ‘n’ hers Crocs my wife and I had each worn but once, the things the exact color as the body of the tool. God, to think how we’d laughed together at that footwear and how it’d made each of us look.

All the way home to Brooklyn a quadrant of my mind that never learned to shut the hell up, to enjoy a bite to eat without counting calories or raising a finger at this thing or that, all the way it continually worried the question of what could be taken from an image but memory? (But memory? Great Caesar’s ghost! What remains from the apple but its seed?) There in the subway window she’d been as incorporeal as a ghost, but that, I knew, was my status; I alone knew that I’d watched her reflection and I alone was the phantom. Had The Reader stolen peeks at Memorex over her eyeglasses, pretending to keep abreast of the stops, manufactured a thing or two in the whirling zoetrope of her imagination in the numerous times I’d had to look down to rewind what I’d missed in the audiobook? One never knows, nor will I. 

I sold the drill the next day on Craig’s List. CVS could fork out for another with the money they’d saved by sacrificing human beings. I did not go directly to one of those shops and buy paraphernalia and fresh condoms and come home and say to my spouse, “Listen: we must do this.” I did not go directly to eBay and buy a chunky old laptop for my private delectation and release, one I could risk losing to an inevitable virus. I did not go directly to jail because I didn’t even steal the drill.  

You see the way my mind works? You see the way it is? 

Maury Gruszko’s fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Confrontation (Pushcart Prize nomination), cream city review, Inkwell, and Oxford-based The String magazine; his story “Gershon” (adapted from his novel-in-progress THE PALE DRUG OF SILENCE) was published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn in 2023. Maury lives in Brooklyn with his wife, media maker/artist Chloe Smolarski, and their kitty Willa (Cat-her).

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