Last night I dreamed about the woman of, well, my dreams. We met on a bus. The bus (a Manhattan m31) passed 9 West 57th Street, which is where I used to work. I pass this building every day now on the way to my current job, but in the dream I turned toward the window to look at the building again and see if anyone I knew happened to be leaving or entering the building.
I turned around in my seat and saw her sitting behind me. We didn't make eye contact, but she was also looking at the 9 West building, and she asked "How long has it been since you were last in there?"
"5 or 6 months. I worked there for three years." I somehow sensed that she would be receptive to my continued talking, and I knew how unusual this was, so I told her the whole boring tale of how I'd started in that building as a temporary word processor and worked my way up.
She indicated that she already knew this, and that she already knew quite a number of things about me. I asked her how she knew so much about my life, and she responded but I can't remember what she said.
She was thin and pretty, but her looks did not assault me or threaten me the way some women's beauty does. As our first conversation continued, I remembered something I heard on the radio once, about a guy who had dated a lot of extremely attractive women, but who ultimately settled down with someone who he felt was just average looking. He said in his experience, relationships with very attractive people were extremely vulnerable to intrusion and unfaithfulness.
As the dream continued I learned that she worked at the same company I work at now, and by the end of the dream we were living together, maybe married, but I still found her to be something of a mystery. She lived a very complicated and busy life but seldom talked about it at all to me. Despite that fact, I knew pretty much everything about her that a husband or lover could be expected to know, and she also knew everything she could reasonably know about me; we both found each other very interesting, and watched each other's lives with detachment and respect. That's when I realized that she was the one, and I woke up feeling like I was in love, but that feeling disappeared as reality overtook me.
There's this woman I know at work, and when I met her during my first couple of weeks at the job I found myself telling her about all the women I've met and failed to meet on the bus coming to work in the morning. There was one in particular, whose name was Stephanie, with whom I had a marvelous conversation about Tiffany's and Oscar Wilde. She was so beautiful I could barely speal straight, I mean speak straight, but the chatter lasted several minutes. She got off the bus at Lexington Avenue, and I never saw her again, although I suspect she takes the same bus every day.
I'm not hung up on this particular person, although cracking that brittle threshold of indifference with her was greatly exhilarating, and while talking to my friend at work I must have sounded like a 16-year-old going off about his first crush. She thought it was funny, though, and though we don't see each other too often any more, she always asks me if I ever got anywhere with Stephanie, "the gorgeous woman on the bus." And of course I never did.
