Lust and Process: A Rumination

Lust and Process: A Rumination Michael Seidman Heat . . . and noise: The #1 pushes in from the Bronx on its way to Battery Park, this a stop on the literary upper west side; pushing in, it punches hot winds before it, into the station where you stand and wait in the noise and heat, clothes, even at this early hour, already sticking to backs and legs, beads of sweat rolling like crystal lava tearing bits of mascara away from eyes and rolling them down, ravaging the landscape of a face used to icy calm. (Lava flows downward to the sea, burning brush and homes, adding layers to the layers already there, flows to the sea where it sizzles and steams and cools, extending beaches, building something other than what was . . . creating.) It was decided once on a morning like this or different, there in the humid nastiness ofthe back hallway to which you retire to smoke, that with the right first sentence, the rest ofthe copy simply flows. . . . humidity . . . (It's not the heat but . . . Unless, of course, it is.) . . . the air as still as a dead man's lips. (Lips: Clara-Bowed; thin and tight, pursed to kiss you hello or off. Eyes: Brown-eyed blonde: blue-eyed brunette, redhead with trite emerald saved byflecks ofhoney. Oh, honey.) Faces. Sweat . . . You stand pushed together on the train, the sudden almost-cool of the air conditioner bringing chills, drying sweat, and try not to look each other in the eyes, not to study the curves of breasts and buttocks or feel them brushed against your curves. Covert surveillances, though, eyes sliding along the sheen growing as bodies defeat machinery and the heat builds again; mumbles sorries as personal space becomes only interior space, something surrounding organs. 29 30Fourth Genre The Gen-Xers are here, in suits too dark, with ties too tight; they haven't learned the origami of The NewYork Times; papers unfolded, they try to read the pages as they travel south toward the financial district and the day's classes at Dean,Witter or the morning's bids and torts; laptops and briefcases and looseleafsjuggles, beepers and cell phones flashed, they lick their fingers as they try to turn pages spread across three seats, hands brushing another's hand. The women's skirts are too short, barely covering thighs; jackets are open and you can watch a bead ofmoisture flow inexorably into the shadow demarcating cleavage. At this hour, on this day, there are no ladies in the subway car; everyone sweats; no one dews or glows. (Steel comes from heat; blown glass, a katana, a well-formed pot, our children; all born of heat, all created by and in heat.) Against the clanging, banging slamming of the train, the conductor's voice garbles a message, informing you of where we are, where you're going; in sounds of information not understood is the cool calculation of a plan. (There is the heat of the moment, the fires of emotion. And there are plans laid coldly: creations come ofboth. Some are positive, some negative; some lie flat, buried under ash.) As riders surge out of the car, station heat bores in to replace them, but now there is some space, some room; there are sight fines. What is she thinking, that one over there, skirt hem cutting across her thighs like a tourniquet stopping the upward flow of anything toward her loins? Her stockinged legs shimmer with a mineral light; the eye follows the line that begins at her ankle and traces up until vision is lost in a dark shadow illuminated by imagination. Look at her eyes, the set of her lips, the way her right hand plays with her necklace, the way the thumb ofthe left turns a ring around and around her finger; unconscious movements? What is she thinking now, as her eyes close to avoid yours? Look at him: the one lounging in the corner, tie loosened against his next forced march from train to platform to stairs to street to the unremitting heat and humidity, poised to pounce like a feral animal . . . look at him preparing to move, to run around some tree...