Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

She made no seeming effort to encourage him, but on one occasion she responded in kind to a move that he had made. That was on the afternoon when he set out to have her learn his name. His given name and his surname were both somewhat uncommon, and so he printed both boldly on the cover of a schoolbook that he took home regularly. What he planned had to wait for an evening when the seats in their compartment were all occupied and no one stood in his way to prevent him from standing directly above her corner seat. While she herself was reading, he took out from his bag, which was resting in the luggage-rack at the height of his head, the book with his name on its cover. He looked into the book for a few minutes and then, as if trying to memorise something from its pages, closed his book and tucked it between his chest and his upper arm so that his name would be visible if she looked upwards. He had to repeat these actions twice, and each time a little more emphatically, before he saw from the sides of his eyes that she had read his name.

He had wanted only that she should learn his name. He had thought this would make a little less abrupt and startling his eventually confronting her and introducing himself; he had not expected her to do what she did next.

She carried always an elegant-looking leather case that rested across her knees while she sat in the train. He had sometimes entertained a preposterous daydream: that she would leave the case behind her in the train one afternoon or would drop it in the grass beside the railway line when she fled homewards from the scene of a terrible traffic accident. (He and she left the train at the same station, although they set out in opposite directions thereafter.) He, of course, would find the case, would find her address inside, and would later return the case to her home, which would have given him the opportunity to talk to her at last. Before returning the case, however, he would spend several hours examining every item it contained, stroking and feeling the items that she herself handled so often, and trying to learn from the way she had stacked or arranged the items what were some of her whims and preferences. Above all, he would read whatever was written in her own hand in her school exercise-books. He would read aloud every sentence of every essay that she herself had composed. He would learn from the oddities of her handwriting and from the choice of words and the patterns and stresses in her prose a sort of knowledge that he could never hope to learn from mere conversation.

After she had looked for a few moments in the direction of the book resting under his arm, she unfastened her case and took out an exercise-book. She looked into the book as though wanting to check what was her homework for that evening, and then she closed the book and placed it with its front cover upwards on top of her case, which was now closed again. He had been tense and uneasy while he was displaying his own name for her inspection, and when he had understood that she was showing him her name he became even more so. His eyesight was sound, and the railway compartment was so well lit by afternoon sunlight that he could have read the fine print of a newspaper if she had rested such a thing in front of her, but he struggled to make out her name, even though her handwriting was of average neatness. His first impulse was to look away, as he would certainly have looked away if he had been walking behind her one afternoon down the ramp from the railway platform and if a gust of wind had lifted her skirt from her thighs. He might have looked eagerly at the name on the exercise-book if he had been spying on her, but he was not ready to have her make it so freely available to him. He became somewhat calmer after he had made out her surname, which was not an uncommon name, but he became agitated again when he could not decide what was her given name. The word was of medium length with its letters boldly formed in blue ink, but he could not recognise the word. For all his confusion, he had no wish to cause her the least anxiety, and after what he considered an appropriate interval he looked away as though he had easily interpreted the only written message she would ever send him, whereupon she returned the book to her leather case.

It might have been better for him if her given name had appeared as a blur, but he had read it as D-a-t-h-a-r , which he felt sure was a misreading. He did not need to consult any books of girls’ names to know that no girl-child in the English-speaking parts of the world had ever been named Dathar , although he sometimes thought her mother might have belonged to some or another dark-haired Slavic minority group in whose language dathar meant fair of face or blessed by fortune . Mostly, he felt as though he had failed an elementary test that anyone in his situation should have passed with ease: as though he was henceforth disqualified from thinking of himself as having a girlfriend, given that he could not even read her name after she had exposed it to him.

He had felt, on several occasions during the third decade of his life, that he was about to experience what was mostly called in those years a nervous breakdown. On all but one of these occasions, he had sought no help and had either avoided the breakdown by some or another means or had experienced the breakdown and had survived it, although he could never afterwards have said which of those two was the correct version of events. On one of those occasions, he had consulted a psychiatrist who had advised him, among other things, to meet weekly in his, the psychiatrist’s rooms, with six or seven others of his patients, all males, in the expectation that their discussions would serve as what was called in those years group therapy and would result in each person’s either avoiding the nervous breakdown that he was threatened with or recovering soon from that which he had recently suffered. He, the likely chief character of any further version of these already fictional events, joined the group for five or six weeks but then wrote to the psychiatrist explaining why he would no longer attend, his chief reason being that the men in the group mostly gossiped when they should have been confessing their problems and asking for advice. Of all that was talked about in the group he recalled long afterwards only an account by a certain man who was married and a father of his becoming interested, when he had been a young man and hardly more than a boy, in a female person of about his own age who was one of a small group who waited every morning at the same suburban bus stop. He who was hardly more than a boy had glanced often at her who was hardly more than a girl, and she had glanced almost as often at him. After the two had glanced thus for several months, the young man, hardly more than a boy, resolved to speak to the young woman, hardly more than a girl, although he dreaded doing so. On morning after morning, he walked from his home to the bus stop rehearsing in his mind a certain few words that he intended that morning to say to the young woman, which words were about the weather or the likelihood of the bus’s arriving on time. On morning after morning, he could not bring himself to utter the words in the hearing of the young woman. Then, on a certain morning, he forced himself to stand beside the young woman and to deliver his rehearsed words in her direction. He could never recall afterwards whether or not he had delivered the words; he could recall only his waking on the grass beside the bus stop and being told by the concerned persons around him that he had fainted shortly beforehand.

Several members of the group in the psychiatrist’s rooms had been amused by the man’s account while several others had seemed to suppose that the man had been exaggerating and had not actually fainted at the bus stop, but the likely chief character, as I called him above, not only believed every detail of the man’s account but asked him whether or not the young woman, hardly more than a girl, had been one of the concerned persons surrounding him while he recovered from his fainting fit and whether or not he and she had spoken to one another on subsequent mornings at the bus stop and had become friends. The man replied that he had been too ashamed to look into the faces of any of the concerned persons and that he had returned home at once and had never afterwards taken a bus to work but had walked each morning far out of his way to a railway station. The chief character, as I call him, would have liked to tell the man who had fainted the story of his, the chief character’s, dealing silently for two years with the young woman, hardly more than a girl, whose name he had once misread as Dathar , but he did not trust the other men in the group to comment honestly on what he might have told them.