Beauty and Mystery in the Year of the Mask

There's this woman I keep seeing around the train station.

She has raven hair, porcelain skin, deep piercing eyes. She's about a foot shorter than me.

I know a very few things about her:

She's kind to her mother. They meet up in the evenings for the ride home.

She wears dresses, always. Black dresses, or a blouse and skirt with fabric of conservative, understated patterns, ending about four inches above the knee. Her legs are usually bare. In the coldest weather she'll put on leggings. Also black.

Whenever she can, whenever it's not too cold, she chooses to walk from the station, rather than ride the subway. She takes the stairs, rather than the escalator. She cares about her health.

She speaks quietly—when she sits and talks with her mother on the train, I can’t make out their whisper over the ambient noise. I think she's speaking Russian or Polish, but what do I know? It sounds Eastern European.

Sometimes she and her mother watch something together on a cellphone and giggle and talk softly about it. I've never seen her look at a phone, otherwise.

I don't have a "type." But if I did, she'd be it.

Days go by that I don't see her.

A week, sometimes. And then I'll turn, and she’s there.

I stand outside the station, waiting for the announcement of my train. I'll close my eyes for five minutes, stealing a moment of meditation. Something will compel me to open them and she’s standing in front of me, pandemic-regulation two meters away. She has her back to me, but I recognize her by the length of her black dress and her legs.

Or she’ll overtake me at an intersection, rushing through the walk signal. (She crosses against it, regardless, if the traffic allows.) Or waiting for the Red Line train. Or on the steps between the Red and the Green. It's odd that she should take the same collection of locomotives that I do.

And yet she never gets off at the same place. What does she do in the city?

I don’t follow her, mind. I just see her without meaning to.

Has she come to recognize me?

I passed her the other day. I was walking to the subway entrance across the street from South Station. I turned to see if she was going to take the same route under the street that I preferred. Of course she was. It gets us out of the cold, with the 30 extra steps down and up again (eschewing the escalator, naturally).

I held the door open for her, but nothing passed between us: no words, no expression in the eyes which, in this time of masking, are our only visible feature.

We are still strangers.

I still worry about making her uncomfortable, although I’m doing nothing to seek her out. I worry about the toxicity of the “male gaze.” Am I doing harm by seeing her? Surely I see many others as well; surely I see a lot of the same people day after day without realizing it, just as I must have seen her several times before realizing, sometime last June, that here was a little moment of joy, a bright colorful ray in an otherwise drab collection of days, a strange mystery that repeats but surprises, the same, but different.

If she were uncomfortable, if she were trying to avoid me, I'd see less of her, wouldn’t I? She wouldn’t stop and stand in front of my closed eyes. She wouldn’t get into the same trolley car I’d just boarded. She wouldn’t walk for half a mile in the summer, just a few steps ahead of me, stooping occasionally (bending at the knees, conscious of her hemline) to pick up some small item from the sidewalk and drop it into her purse--something she’s done on several occasions, leaving me to ponder another mystery.

It’s not like I’m obsessed. I’m not looking to have an affair. Or even a conversation. How would I fit any of that into my schedule, anyway? (The last thing I desire at this stage is more talking.)

My wife knows all about her. She's become another character in my daily rounds, an unexpected one, one who, lacking any concrete detail, has come to provide relief from the all-too-concrete details that wall in the rest of my routine.

But I’m conscious of the fact that women feel vulnerable when they're the subject of unwanted attention. So I’ve taken to moving away from her when I find us close together. That’s why I get on the trolley car first: so she doesn’t feel she’s being followed. That’s why I take different routes to work from South Station, sometimes walking, sometimes riding the T, sometimes a combination of the two.

But she keeps appearing, despite these permutations.

And so the other day, which was rainy and not suited to walking, I was part of a crowd doing that semi-run shuffle down the subway steps to the announcement of an approaching train no one wanted to miss, and yet I held back a bit, because missing it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Sometimes what a morning needs is a ten minute break between one train and the next.

A flutter of black fabric caught in the corner of my eye and I thought it can’t be, and turned, and it was, just inches away, hurrying past.

She must have had an itch on her face. She pulled down her surgical mask (did I mention she always wears the black surgical masks?) to scratch her cheek, and for the first time in the nine months of our strange acquaintance, of pale legs and pale forehead and dark eyes and sometimes, in the summer, pale shoulders beneath spaghetti straps, I had three quarters of a second to take in the pale shape of her face.

And she was ugly.

Not hideous. Not monstrous. There were no flaws in her perfect skin. But she was ugly in that below-average, plain way that makes women invisible, the nose too long and the cheeks kind of puffy and too round and the slopes of the profile a bit primitive and exaggerated. She looked a decade older.

She’d gone from stunning to unremarkable.

The mask was only down for a moment; three steps later and it was back over nose and mouth, in accordance with federal guidelines for trains and train stations.

We caught the train and sat opposite each other, and her eyes lit up the car with youth and vivacity, looking up and around, never down, never at her phone. She was of the world and in it, alive and engaged. Nobody else was looking at her.

And I realized that, thanks to that mask, I had gotten to know someone in a way nobody else ever would.

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