A Sudden Boon

I wasn't sure I wanted to sit across from him. I had the dog in my arms plus the other things I carry and he was balancing a plastic plate on his knee, cluttered with broken ends of pizza crust slimy with greasy looking tomato sauce-- gross to me but delectable, I was sure, to Desiree whose nostrils were already twitching, her whole body alert to pounce or at least beg in her ear-piercing whiney way. The man himself I couldn't figure out. Ethnic, perhaps Middleeastern, crumpled, incapacitated in some indiscernible way, the air of a drooling derelict about him and of one who had taken up residence on the bus simply because he had nothing better to do all day than ride up and down the hill. That the only seat available on the bus was the seat I didn't want across from his seemed a kind of rebuke, a kind of dare.

I needed to sit because I was overburdened--with the dog, as I've said, and her cage and my computer heavy on my shoulder in its messenger bag also bursting with books and another tote bag with the thermos of soup I bring so I don't eat pizza the way the man now sitting across from me was still eating his pizza, swirling the crusts around in the ooze of orange grease staining the textured plastic of his plate and his fingertips which he would lick ever-delicately after popping the last bit of crust in his mouth. Desiree watched without whining and the man watched Desiree as though deciding mouthful after mouthful that he would not feed her anything. When there was no more crust to chew, he reached deep into his deep-pocketed parka and produced a liter of beer, Moretti beer, the man in the Fedora on the beer lable winking at me in a way that made me thirsty for beer though I never drink it. I imagined the man would ask me for a bottle-opener since he didn't seem to have one and I started taking inventory--had I brought my Swiss Army Knife? Could it be in my bag? Mind-reading the man waved the bottle at me as though to assure me he didn't need it, then feebly brushed the bottle neck against the arm-rest of the seat as though doing so would open it--pitifully, I thought; tragically, I thought. His face was so deadpan, so inscrutible, I could not even guess what was happening inside of him. Frustration? Disappointment? Helplessness? Determination? Boh! But before a second attempt, he turned his face to consider the window-sill, and then, looking first at me with raised brow, again made his feeble effort to dislodge the cap by brushing it against the windowsill. This time the cap popped, miraculously, the beer foamed triumphantly over the bottle-mouth, down the bottle-neck as the man's eyes seized mine--"Ta Da!"--and we both giggled--the delight was something, the communion, too, as though this moment of industry had been arrived at together, creating for us both fresh standards of the possible.