I will probably be stabbed on the subway because too often I violate the MTA prime directive and I stare at people.  One day I will stare at the wrong person and he will stab me; either he will be one of America's Most Wanted, or he will be an impatient paranoid man with a penchant for privacy and a long blade strapped to the side of his left leg, a gangster, perhaps, antsy from a recent release from a halfway house.  I say "he" because a woman wouldn't stab me.  She would, if obviously beautiful, long ago have learned how to endure a gaze.  And if not, she would walk away, scowl, or stare back in an exaggerated manner to demonstrate what an impolite fool I look.  I can tell you this with the authority of experience.

I'm not staring because of attraction.  Attraction inspires a series of furtive glances.  I'm staring either because I've become lost in a series of image associations or because I've fallen into a narrative inspired by the first quick observation but swiftly detached from the reality of the stared-upon person as I cascade through the story in my head.  (And before you suggest it, yes, I have mentioned this to my therapist, and she confessed that she did the same thing.  She makes up stories about people she sees on the bus.  "He has a mean wife,"  she will silently diagnose.  "She hectors him.")

Recently I was staring at a man who looked like a Russian icon.  "He looks so Russian,"  I thought.  "Like Ivan the Terrible Russian.  No, like a saint, the way they portray their saints.  The long, gaunt faces, the dark, otherworldly, suffering eyes."  He looked like the depiction of Joseph in the paintings of the Holy Family I saw at the Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Prague.

I was watched as I walked through each room by a different short unsmiling nun.  But I couldn't hurry along (I had no idea of what they needed to get back to doing, anyway) because the depiction of the nativity in Eastern Europe art is so different from what I was accustomed to:  more brown, less blue, more earthy, less divine.  No celestial shafts of light, no halo around the Virgin and child, no magi.  Plenty of straw and wood, a large assortment of unimpressed livestock, a slightly more interested cat (the Italians never show a cat) and a weary Joseph.  He has the air of a man who most likely has to muck out the stables to pay for their night's lodging and still has that tax thing to figure out.

Any-way.  I was staring at this medieval-faced but youngish man on the 7 train.  He nodded.  I nodded back.  The train stopped at Bryant Park.  I rose to leave.  He spoke to me.  I pulled my earbuds off in time to hear him ask, "Russki?"

"Sorry?"  I asked.

He shook his head, realizing I was not Russki.  But he was.  I was right!  And I stepped off the subway, still alive.

posted by Elizabeth at 12:17 PM   1 Comments

In the time since I last wrote about the vandalized Astoria piano, much has changed.

I was laid off from my "day job" in legal marketing.

My primary and immediate response to this has been to focus almost all of my energy on revising my novel, Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me.  The novel takes place in Bermuda during the spring of 1941.  During my revision process, I have kept my leisure reading "in period" in order to keep the voice of the novel "yar."

Among the nonfiction:  a collection of essays by George Orwell (always a pleasure), Facing Unpleasant Facts, John Steinbeck's so under-crowed-about dispatches from the European theater, in a collection called Once There Was a War, transcriptions of Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from the London Blitz called (of course) This is London, and a heart-rending accounting of Murrow, Harriman and Gil Wynant by Lynne Olson, entitled Citizens of London.

In addition to the John Lawton "Inspector Troy" series of novels (particularly Second Violin, Blackout and Riptide), I have read and can happily recommend several contemporary novels which are set in the period.  A Fine Radiance by Lauren Belfer, The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and The Information Officer by Mark Mills.  A Fierce Radiance follows the story of Life magazine photographer Claire Shipley and her involvement with a doctor on a medical team racing to perfect the formula for pencillin with the hope of saving the lives of millions of soldiers (since so many of the wounded died from the infection to their wounds when they might have survived the wound itself).  It's a terrific evocation of the New York City of that period, particularly of my old neighborhood on the west side of Greenwich Village.

The Postmistress weaves together the story of three women, two of them residents of a small New England coastal town and the third a radio reporter and Murrow colleague with the wonderfully Dickensian name of Frankie Bard.  Her reports from the London Blitz are both frank and bardic, and they reach into the lives of the two stateside characters with poignant and tragic consequences.

The Information Officer details another blitz -- that of the island of Malta.  With its fast-paced and (almost unbearably) suspenseful plot and its witty, sexy characters, I wish British television would just hurry up and produce it already.  It contains the best exchange of dialogue I have read recently.  I can reproduce it here without spoilers since I'm not saying who, to whom, when or in what context:

"You threw him out of a plane?"
"You make it sound easier than it was.  He fought me like a tiger all the way."

Labels: A Fierce Radiance, Citizens of London, Lauren Belfer, Lynne Olson, Mark Mills, Novels about World War II, Sarah Blake, The Information Office, The Postmistress

posted by Elizabeth at 7:23 PM   11 Comments