Words in the Eyes
I was standing near the doors when I watched her get on further down the carriage. She managed to squeeze through and sat down at the opposite end to where she got on, nearer to me. It was a window seat, one opposite a youngish looking man of around twenty-eight to thirty. I guessed she was of a similar age. When she sat down he sat up straighter, adjusting himself so that his knees wouldn’t touch hers. Once she was comfortable he slumped down a little again and his knees extended forward, until they were barely a centimetre from hers. She noticed. But she didn’t look at him. Instead she pointedly looked down past her knees to the right and inhaled sharply yet silently and pushed her own tail bone further into the cold, hard plastic of the orange U-Bahn seat and in doing so retracted her knees a good five centimetres. It gave her long body more height and she looked elegant with her correct, upright posture; it almost gave her an air of haughtiness. As she raised her head she naturally glanced in the direction of the traveller sat opposite and on seeing he was looking at her with a strange sort of smirk on his face, she looked away, as naturally as she could. She didn’t glance back, but glanced at the others around her and towards the window, as if to show she hadn’t even noticed him looking at her.
He was smiling. His smile started when she had glanced at him and it continued to grow on his big round face when she looked away. His lazy grin gave him a dopey look and light reflected off his dough-ball cheeks. He was a big man in general; big eyes, big face, wide legs, solid body, like all he ate was meat. The tops of his arms were like legs of lamb. His right elbow was resting against the window and the short sleeve of his tee shirt pulled tightly, gathered around the large circumference of his upper arm. He noticed his arm at the same time I did and as he tried, unsuccessfully, to push the sleeve up it restricted even more as his bicep bulged. He looked at her and started to roll his sleeve up over his muscle. Then he looked back down at it again, then back at her expectantly. All the time he was smiling, evidently impressed with the girth of his arm, flexing it as gradually as he could. He looked at her with purpose, willing her eyes to meet his and follow his gaze down to his flexed arm. But she wasn’t looking at him. She knew what he was doing as she had seen in the reflection. She seemed to breathe in deeper and there was the slight, perceptible beginning of an eye roll which started at the left of her field of vision and stopped dead when her eyes reached mine in my position near the door. She looked me full in the eyes for what seemed like a long time, but it could only have been for three seconds, maximum, if that. She held her breath while she looked at me and I found I was doing the same. It was three intense seconds of eye contact, eye contact that she had so skilfully managed to avoid with the swelling idiot opposite her. In that short time I could read in her eyes exactly what she was thinking; her bored disbelief at the meat head and the ridiculous things people have to put up with on the U-Bahn. For those three, glorious seconds we were co-conspirators, on the same team, but then suddenly, the look in her eyes changed. It became a look of indecision, like she was uncertain of what I wanted and then as quickly as that look had come, it had gone, changed again. I’m sure I saw a flash of anger, although her face never altered, nor did the shape of her eyes. The change came in the colour of her irises and the light that sped across her pupils. But as soon as the anger ignited it died, and her eyes dulled to stone. She had stopped looking at me and was looking through me. So struck had I been that I didn’t alter my face at all during our exchange. I didn’t smile when I could have done. I didn’t nod my head conspiratorially in the direction of the flexing biceps to let her know I had seen the spectacle too. Instead, I looked like I’d been caught spying, like I was guilty. When faced with a second predatory onslaught of eye contact in such a short journey I had made her angry and then, worse, made her withdraw from the real world into a place she could simply be. I fought the temptation to look behind me to check I hadn’t become transparent, that there actually wasn’t some interesting scene which she could see, through me. I tried for a hopeful second to rouse her conscious gaze again so I could smile in a non-threatening way, but it was futile. Her eyes remained as matte glass and I decided I was probably making it worse. I looked sheepishly away, into the eyes of an old woman who seemed to be laughing at me. I turned and faced the doors.
Sam Porter has just moved to Vienna and is interested in the thousands of communications that occur between people every day, whether or not they speak the same language. Her daily travels on the U-Bahn provided the inspiration for this piece. She also writes poetry as well as short stories, and for her day job she teaches English.
