Un Incident Dans La Rue, Vite Mais Lent Aussi


Around noon last Wednesday I was heading back to my office from the district court.  Saint George Street was
full of traffic, as usual.  I was wearing suspenders and carrying a leather briefcase.  I had on my unbuttoned
overcoat, also a muffler, though no hat.  I feel it gives me an advantage to show my hair, which is thick and still
mostly black, because so many of my colleagues are going bald.  Still, I could have done with a hat.  A chilly,
powerful wind was blowing through the city; people walking north leaned forward while those going south were
swept down the sidewalk by an invisible hand.  Everybody lowered their chins and fastened their eyes a few feet
ahead, intent on not falling.  At the corner a man in a quilted jacket was selling roasted chestnuts from a cart
with little windows in it.  He danced back and forth in the steam, stamping his feet and rubbing his arms.

Outside the Hochberg Building I caught sight of Dillon, a colleague.  I had heard his wife was ill and wanted to
ask after her; but as I was moving north and Dillon south, he flashed by me and my greeting was blown back in
my face.  At each corner eddies of wind blew bits of refuse and newsprint in whirls.  Particles of grit were driven
into my cheeks.  It was useless to smooth down my hair, though I could barely repress the impulse to do so.  
The saplings planted last year on Callowhill Street were bent halfway over while the flags on the Bellevidere
snapped back and forth. People making their way to lunch swayed like a field of grain in a cyclone.

As I came around the corner of Filbert Street the scene changed.  Half a block ahead traffic was stopped, horns
blared into the wind, and the people on either side had slowed, some  moving tentatively toward the curb.

The sort of vehicle you associate with suburbs, a large station wagon, was pulled up in the middle of the street,
blocking traffic.  I was able to see right into the windshield and, so far as I could tell, only one person was
inside.

It's just those crucial things we aren't sure of believing to which we give our deepest attention.  Do my children
love me?  Does God exist?  Am I a decent human being?  If faith keeps us from asking such questions then
faith is inhuman.  Grammatically speaking, it seems to me, the only correct attitude toward life is interrogatory.

What was there about a traffic jam on a blustery day that should turn me so philosophical?  Was it merely a
traffic jam?  No.  That's what I have faith in, I suppose, because it's just this imperfect, negative faith that
provokes thinking and thinking makes me feel more alert and so more alive.  The routine of daily life is
something we really do believe in.  We take it for granted.  Yet who grants it but ourselves?  Our habits,
mores, expectations, upbringings, our media, even the evolutionary wisdom that prevents us from drawing
attention to ourselves — all are on the side of order, of being able to predict what's going to happen next.  
We relish suspense so long as it is boxed in some play or book.  Suspense, in other words, is a strictly
aesthetic pleasure, not a moral one.  Morally, suspense always resolves itself into the question of how rapidly
predictability can be restored.

Consequently, when a late-model station wagon stops dead in the middle of a busy center-city street at
midday, in midweek, when the engine continues to run so that it's not a mere matter of running out of gas,
when a woman of thirty-five or forty, a matron dressed demurely in a pale blue blouse with brown, shoulder-
length hair, sits behind the wheel of this vehicle with the doors locked and stares straight in front of her,
oblivious of the horns behind her and the faces pressing in on either side, the catcalls and curses, you can't
ignore it.  Something is happening or is about to happen.

Something is happening that doesn't happen every day.  And something must be done about the riddle, the
dissonance resolved into a dominant major or, if needs be, minor.  Summon the police, call an ambulance,
phone the husband, the principal of her children's school.  Action, notification, publicity.  Quick, quick.

I walked up the sidewalk pushing forward against the wind, my hair blown back, grit striking my eyeballs like
grapeshot.  A small taut man in need of a shave leapt out of his taxi, beside himself with rage.  I could see his
mouth moving.  He actually tried to push the station wagon.  I saw his tight leather jacket getting tighter, his
red face more red.

I continued making my way toward the car.  I was now in the middle of the street.  Naturally, I didn't think of
myself as part of the crowd closing in on either side.  The first siren was sounding faintly behind me.  I saw her
plainly now, staring straight ahead, not at me, but at the point in space I occupied, at my x and y coordinates.  
In every dimension but one her gaze and my body intersected.

The turbulent wind went on blowing noise, paper, motes.  The buildings appeared to sway like old elms.  What
fascinated me was the woman's stillness.  Here was the dead center of the city in the midst of a whirlwind of
horns and shouts, deals and transactions, lawsuits and mergers.  In the middle of the week, the middle of the
day, in the middle of a whirlwind, that woman sat utterly still, fists on the wheel, eyes blank as a check on an
exhausted account.

If she has failed, then what caused her failure, this woman somebody else married?  Or is she just mad?  I had
a sudden idea:  maybe this was a performance, not an incident but a happening, a one-woman show of
protest, a commentary.  A woman alone in a locked car, bunging everything up, on a busy, blustery day.  It
made me weigh contrasts:  inside/outside, city/suburb, married/single, loving/indifferent, moving/still.  As soon
as you call something art it ceases to be entirely senseless.  It can, for instance, become an intelligible
declaration about senselessness.  But whose?  My own?  I was thinking of all the things that placed me outside
the station wagon and those that put the woman inside.  Where I stood everything was blowing around; where
she was all was calm, or at least unmoving.  I think it must be the stillness that attracted and repelled me.  
Lack of motion always arrests us, suggesting serenity or death.

I stopped ten feet from the car.  Slowly, the woman removed her hands from the steering wheel.  The crowd
shuddered, surging in.  She pulled her blouse over her head.

I can't help thinking that people who are reduced to stillness or hysteria by their lives, destroyed by living, have
the advantage over me.  Why?  The most apathetic of audiences are not superior to me in detachment.  For
years I've felt as though I were living behind an infinitely long wall.  Such a wall would have to be a round one,
which is to say a prison yard.  A person inside such a wall might be aware that he is baffled yet never suspect
that he is actually trapped.  In this wall somewhere is a door, or just as likely hundreds, thousands of identical
doors, which anybody would take for the same door.  Whenever I stand before this door, or one of the
thousands like it, I'm suffused with hope.  I don't want to be but I am.  Hope invades me.  It doesn't matter
what happened last time, the time before that; hope still hits the beaches undaunted.  So, I run up to the door
filled by this aggressive, alien hope, grab the knob and turn for all I'm worth.  The door's locked.  There is no
lock.  I stare dumbfounded, knowing how useless and painful it is to beat on the door.  I wonder if it might be
opened from the other side.  That is the secret hope, a hope inside hope, that there's someone on the other
side whose case is the same as mine.  Perhaps if we both were miraculously to arrive at the door at the same
instant — but then I shrug, the way one does at romantic dreams.  The door is both a possibility and a
torment; to be tantalized is to be punished.

I drew closer to the station wagon.   The woman was thrashing now, making herself naked in the car, tearing
off her bra, her skirt, everything.  Then the crowd closed in.

Robert Wexelblatt