What I Imagine with the Unknown Woman at the Stop
There is a bus stop on the corner of Carranza Avenue and Almendro Street where time stands still at exactly ten-thirty in the morning. It’s not magic. It’s her. She always arrives at that hour, with just enough haste for her bangs to fall away from her forehead, and leans against the shelter as if the whole day belonged to her.
I arrive early. I always arrive early. I sit on the bench on the right, the one with a shorter leg that rocks, and open a newspaper I don’t read. The words fall apart between my fingers because my eyes are elsewhere. They’re on the curve of her neck when she tilts her head to check the time. They’re on the way the morning sun shines through her skirt and sketches the silhouette of her thighs.
She doesn’t look at me. She never looks at me. And I’m grateful for that, because if she did, she would discover everything that goes through my head every time she crosses her legs.
I don’t know her name. I’ve given her one: I call her Adriana, though she could be called anything else. Adriana sounds like the way she bites her lower lip when the bus is late. It sounds like the fabric of her shirt, opened one button more than decorum would require, that strip of shadow between her breasts that peeks out with a naughtiness she pretends not to know.
Because she knows. Oh, she knows. A woman doesn’t dress like that to go to just any office. The short skirt, the stockings that end exactly where imagination begins, the first button surrendered. She doesn’t dress for me, that much is clear. She dresses to please herself. And in pleasing herself, without meaning to, she destroys me.
***
The first time I noticed her was on a Tuesday in October. It was raining, and we were sharing the few dry inches under the shelter. We were so close I could smell her perfume, something warm with a woody base, and the cold rain made her breath condense into little clouds that vanished between us.
“Do you know if the forty-seven goes through the center?” she asked me.
And I, who know that route by heart, who could recite every stop to her with my eyes closed, was left speechless. I stammered a “I think so” that sounded like a lie. She smiled, a brief, almost compassionate smile, and got on the bus without looking back.
Since then I haven’t spoken to her again. Not for lack of desire. For too much of it. Because I know that if I speak to her, if I break the spell of this distance, I’ll lose the only place where she is entirely mine: my head.
***
In my head, Adriana arrives late on purpose. She lets the forty-seven pass her by, watches it disappear down the street and makes no move to run after it. Then she turns to me, slowly, and for the first time her eyes meet mine.
“I know you watch me,” she says. There’s no reproach in her voice. There’s something else.
I don’t answer. In my imagination I don’t find the words either, but I don’t need them anymore. She comes over to the bench, sits down beside me, and the newspaper I was pretending to read falls to the ground without either of us picking it up.
“And what do you see when you look at me?” she asks.
I’d tell her I see the way the fabric of her skirt tightens over her thigh when she crosses her legs. That I’ve memorized the exact point where her stockings stop being stockings and bare skin begins. That I know the gesture with which she pushes her bangs aside and the little line that appears between her brows when the bus is delayed. That every morning, on this wobbly-legged bench, I undress her button by button while pretending to be interested in the news.
Instead, I put a hand on her knee. She doesn’t move it away. The shelter hides us from the avenue, the traffic noise turns into a distant murmur, and my fingers travel up her thigh with a slowness that is almost torture for both of us.
“Not here,” she whispers, but she opens her legs a little wider.
The hem of her skirt gives. The skin over the stocking is warm and smooth, and when my fingers reach the elastic, she lets the air out through her nose, a contained sigh that makes her chest swell and finishes opening that stubborn button on her shirt.
***
A car brakes with a screech on the avenue and jerks me back to reality. I’m still on the bench. The newspaper is still in my hands. And Adriana is still three meters away, oblivious, checking her watch with that impatience that tightens her neck.
My mouth is dry. My palms are sweating despite the morning chill, and I couldn’t say whether I’m trembling from the cold or from what I’ve just imagined in such detail that I can almost still feel the warmth of her skin on my fingertips.
She shifts her stance. She puts her weight on the other hip, and the gesture, so banal, so involuntary, seems to me the most obscene thing I have ever seen in my life. Not because there’s anything obscene about it. But because my desire turns it into something it isn’t.
That’s the problem with desire when it has nowhere to go. It covers everything. It turns a bus stop wait into a scene of intimacy. It turns a stranger who asks about a transit line into the heroine of every night I spend awake staring at the ceiling. I invent her whole: her laughter, the way she would say my name, the exact way she would yield if I ever dared to touch her. And the more I invent her, the less I care that the real woman looks nothing like the one living behind my eyelids.
***
There are days when I invent variations. In one of them, it rains again like that Tuesday, and the two of us share the shelter once more. But this time, when she asks me about the forty-seven, I don’t stammer.
“I’ll give you a ride,” I tell her. “My car’s around the corner.”
And she, against all logic, against everything a sensible woman would do, agrees. In the car, with the windows fogged up by rain and our breathing, there’s no need to pretend anymore. Her hand finds mine on the gear shift. Her skirt rides up on its own when she turns toward me. And in the empty parking lot of a shopping center that hasn’t opened yet, I kiss her for the first time with a hunger built up over months of stolen glances.
In the fantasy, her mouth tastes like coffee and something sweeter. She unbuttons my shirt with an urgency that belies all her morning elegance, and I pull her bra strap down with my teeth while she throws her head back against the fogged-up glass. The seat reclines. Her thighs clamp around my hips. And at last, after so many mornings of silent desire, I stop imagining what it would be like to have her and have her for real.
***
The bus arrives on time and undoes the scene before I can finish it. The doors open with that hydraulic sigh I hate because it means she’s leaving. Adriana gets on, pays, looks for a seat. For an instant, just an instant, she turns her head toward the stop.
And she looks at me.
This time it isn’t my imagination. Her eyes settle on me, on the man on the wobbly bench, on the newspaper I haven’t turned a page of in twenty minutes. It’s a half-second glance. But in that half-second there’s room for everything: the question of whether I’ve been caught watching her, the suspicion that I’ve been doing it for months, and something else, something I don’t dare name because naming it would mean having hope.
The bus pulls away. Her face slides behind the dirty glass and disappears up the avenue, toward a day I know nothing about and a life to which she will never belong.
I stay on the bench longer than necessary. The next bus, mine, passes me by because I don’t raise my hand. I’m in no hurry. My hurry has gone off on the forty-seven.
***
Tomorrow I’ll come back. I’ll arrive early, as always, and sit on the rocking bench. I’ll open a newspaper I have no intention of reading. And at ten-thirty, when she appears with her bangs lifted off her forehead and her skirt a finger’s width shorter than decency allows, I’ll undress her again with my eyes while pretending to care about the world.
Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough. Maybe on a rainy Tuesday I’ll offer her a ride and find out whether her mouth really tastes like coffee. Or maybe not, and I’ll settle for this version of her that lives in my head and has never given me a no, because I’ve never given her the chance to.
What I know is this: there is a desire that feeds on impossibility. It grows the less it’s touched. And as long as Adriana is nothing more than the unknown woman at ten-thirty, she will remain perfect, untouched, infinitely mine in the only place where no one can take her from me.
The bench rocks under my weight. I close the newspaper. See you tomorrow, I think, even though she will never hear it.
