Chapter 6: Taylor and Lindsay / The Subway Ride Home

Until recently, he worked with a guy named Taylor.  There’s nothing about Taylor that is especially relevant to the novel he’s not writing or the novel I’m writing about him not writing.  He was just a guy who worked in the same store.  They went to the same grade school, where young Taylor was often tormented by our man and his friends in the name of picking on outsiders " problematic to this narrative because this takes place during a time when our man was happier or more adept at hiding his own outsider status.  But Taylor, with some weird earnest ways about him, was most visibly an otherly type who earned more than a bit of teasing from these kids.

In a more conventional, perhaps even more true-to-life narrative, Taylor would have grown to be bitter at our hero for all the jokes made at his expense.  The two probably wouldn’t have gotten along, re-associating all these years later in the workplace.  The resentment, the feeling that Taylor’s life could’ve been better, more satisfied if it weren’t for the intervention of those types that found targets wherever they could.  They called him names, ignored him, tried to get him to cry.  They were little grade school b******s and he’d be right to hold that against our protagonist if this were a real story.

But in reality, and in this fiction that apes reality, peoples’ lives aren’t defined by one little interaction they have with one person ten years earlier. As hard as it may be to believe, Taylor grew past it and became a well-rounded, if slightly eccentric individual.

During his time at work, Taylor met a girl named Lindsay, who also worked in the mall.  She worked upstairs at the place that sells wraps and salads, but her true ambition was to be an aesthetician.  She would come into the store and flirt and make chitchat with him, and our hero would stand by feeling all dialectical about it.  He was pleased that his friend was getting attention and mad that he wasn’t getting any of the same.  He’s just not mature enough to handle it, but he tries.  Not everything can be about him.

The facts of Taylor and Lindsay’s relationship are these.  After weeks of innocent but meaningful flirting between the two, one day Lindsay comes into the store and things have changed.  She stands a little closer to him than before.  She grabs for his hand, wraps her arms around him tightly, leans in close and kisses him deeply and showily as she parts.  She just seems that much giddier than ever before, and it’s not hard to guess what changed.

After she left, he turned to Taylor and said with all the tact and charm characteristic of a man of words, “So, you banged!”

“Yeah,” Taylor said modestly, “I don’t know, man, I just... it’s starting to go pretty fast, you know?  We were hanging out the other night, and then we did it, and I didn’t expect it to turn out like this.  Like, all of a sudden she’s acting like she’s my girlfriend.  I mean, I like her and everything, but I don’t know if I want this.”

Matt, another co-worker around the same age with girl problems of his own, overhears this and interjects.  “Yeah man, you gotta tell her to back off.  She’s lookin’ pretty clingy there.  Like a little clinger.  You gotta assert yourself, you know?  Slow things down. ”

Our man disagrees, “Taylor, don’t be an idiot.  You wanted this.  You like this girl, right?  She seems cool.  So she moves a bit fast.  That’s kinda to be expected when you just outright hook up with someone.  Don’t act like this is some big shocking thing.”

His words seem genuinely reassuring, but come at least a little from a place of jealousy, that this story happened so easily, and our man just goes home at night and types, writing and rewriting himself into oblivion.  And partly it’s bitterness that Taylor doesn’t seem to appreciate this.  The kid wasn’t going to push Taylor into a relationship with a girl he didn’t really like, but didn’t want to see the guy lose an opportunity when a guy like him seemed completely incapable of scrounging up an opportunity for himself.

A few months later, Taylor no longer works at the store, but the two of them are still together and happy as anything. The little smiles and hand-holding and little fidgets of new love remain, and are even reciprocated.  Maybe they’ve found real love, and maybe our hero played a little part in this.  It still makes him sick, though.

He’s lonely, he has his own hang-ups.  It can’t possibly be as impossible to meet someone as he’s making it out to be, but it’s not like in the movies.  You don’t just happen to meet your soulmate the way all his favourite fictional characters did, even though that’s exactly how it happened to Taylor and Lindsay.

This thought lingers with him months later as he sits in the lecture hall of his British Literature class.  He’s worried that he’s met everyone he’s going to meet in his life, and if he doesn’t already know his soulmate, he never will.  He’s thinking of this because he sees two girls in the row ahead of him he wishes he could introduce himself to.  One of them speaks often in class.  She has a short boblike hairstyle and horn rimmed glasses.  She has a rounded face that makes her look younger than she probably is.  But the main feature he was able to discern from behind was the curve of her breast.  The fact that it’s big enough to see from back and slightly to the side, he likes probably too much.  He fixates.  Later, he notices that she keeps her brastrap visible over the neckline of her top.  On the inner side of her forearm is a tattoo of parentheses, which she uses to write notes to herself.  She speaks often in class.

The girl beside her is more slender, with a petite nose and long femme fatale eyelashes.  Her hair is a long, flowing series of tight red dreadlocks.  She wears Cosby Sweaters of ragged CBGB souvenir tees and vintage jeans.  She has a laptop, which she uses to play Sudoku instead of taking notes.  They seem like an unlikely pair.  Our hero would be glad just to get a nod of attention from either of them, but he knows this is it.  This sick sense of voyeurism, hoping for even the slightest glance of female curvature to keep him occupied while he doesn’t talk to them and they return the silence, is all he has.

A couple weeks later they have a test, an in-class writing assignment on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1.  Our boy rambles his way through a convincing-enough thesis on Prince Hal’s status as an anti-hero, and how he is defined by his relationship to Falstaff and Hotspur.  The weird thing about the test day is that attendance suddenly goes up, and all the empty seats in the lecture hall are suddenly occupied.  In the need for extra space, the girl with the dreads has found herself in our man’s home row, one seat over from where he usually sits and contemplates her the way her dreads wind around each other, and her friend’s side-b**b.  Now he sees the girl with the dreadlocks’ pretty blue eyes.

He drops his pen.  She retrieves it.  The test ends and he looks over and smirks self-deprecatingly.  “Well, I blew that one.”

“I didn’t think it was so hard,” she says, “Which question did you do?”  They compare notes a moment and then the lecture starts back up again.  At the end of class, the girl with the dreads sees what her friend has written in her tattoo.  “It’s lyrics from The National.”  He doesn’t know this band, not having been subjected to them during his work day, but nods along anyway.

He introduces himself and shakes their hands.  The girl with the dreadlocks smiles, “I’m Lindsay, and this is my friend Taylor.”

 

(The Subway Ride Home)

 

He walks out of the lecture hall with Lindsay and Taylor thinking how weirdly unlikely it was to know two combinations of people of the same name.  He wonders if this Taylor and Lindsay are “together” in the same sense as the others.  If that was their predilection, they might make a cute couple.  After meeting a friend of Taylor’s, with whom she’d had plans to go drinking, they begin to walk south toward the transit station.  Lindsay walks with our guy a bit ahead of the other two and explains:

“We’re not really friends.  We knew each other a bit in high school, but she wasn’t someone I hung out with.  Then I got to University and I had class with her, and I figured hey, it’s someone I know.  Other than that, we’re pretty different people.”

“I know the feeling,” he says, thinking about how the world sometimes just pairs you with someone for better or worse, especially the random forces of the University.  More than that, there are times when he feels he’s met the same people over and over again, only in different places and different names.  Lindsay herself reminds him of someone but he can’t put his finger exactly on it.

It’s dark and just freshly rained.  “I picked a hell of a day to wear flats,” she says, “Usually I wear these huge boots and it doesn’t make a difference, but now it would help.”  They hop over a wide puddle in the crosswalk.  They’ve already parted from Taylor and her friend.  The kid has more in common with Lindsay anyway, it seems.  They’ve had some of the same Profs, and compare notes.  Lindsay is currently taking the same Sci-Fi Film course he’d been through years earlier.  She’s a big fan of the show Mad Men, and as always happens when that show comes up in conversation, he notes that he keeps meaning to get into it, and rattles off a brief list of other shows his friends all like: Breaking Bad, Dexter, Battlestar Galactica.

“Battlestar?” she smirked, “You really were in that Sci-Fi class.”  He shrugged self-consciously.  He wears glasses and isn’t great with women, but he doesn’t like being stereotyped.  She asks about his Halloween plans, noting that last year she went out as Link for Legend of Zelda.  He feels comfortable enough to say he’s aiming for a Scott Pilgrim costume; something simple and easy.

They get on the subway " she’d meant to take the streetcar, but in the light rain and without one in sight, she didn’t see much difference between that and the subway.  He wonders to what extent it’s just because she’s enjoying his company.  Maybe a little.

On the train, they talk a little about what “heading home” means for them.  For her it’s a ride out to the edge of the city, and as we’ve already learned, for him it’s considerably further.  “Oakville, huh?” she sighs, “That’s quite a way.”  But she seems to see the logic.

They have to talk over the squealing noise of the train on the tracks.  “Sorry about my voice,” she says, “I just quit smoking, my throat is so raw.”  It has a feminine, husky, Mae West quality that invokes the presence of someone he can’t quite remember.  He doesn’t overtly compliment her on it, though.  He doesn’t want to seem so eager for her presence. 

He gets off the train at Union station to transfer to the commuter line, and she keeps going.  He knows he’ll see her again next week, but until then it’s back to the suburbs, back to the store, back to his other life. 

Only he can say what’s on his mind as he stares out the window of the train on the ride home.  Even I can’t read his face, his blank expression as he just drifts off to the nowhere between stops.