Platform

Nights like these, I wonder what happened.

Everything was going great. I had it all. I had the job - stockbroker extraordinaire; the family - a good-looking and attentive wife, twin daughters, and a moody cat; the real estate - 1500 glorious square feet of apartment space with a distant Central Park view; the connections - I've personally met 37 of the top 50 richest men in the country. It's too bad that when it came down to the wire, none of those things could save me.

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If you stood close enough to the end of the platform, you could feel a breeze coming off the trains that went flying by. You could also freak out the few decent people in the vicinity, who seemed to worry that your last step was going to be one that carried you in front of a subway train. It's ridiculous really. There are plenty of less bloody, less public ways of doing it. So no, I never stood on the edge of that platform and debated whether or not I should die that night. I simply watched the faces in the windows.

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My wife asked me once how much she was worth to me. I told her, in a most jovial tone of voice, that I wouldn't trade her for a million dollars, but 1.5 might make me reconsider. Apparently, it was the wrong answer, because she didn't speak to me for several days after that aside from "pass the butter dish" or "go to hell, asshole." This is a good example of how most of our marital stress, which was relatively minimal considering, was mea culpa. I include in this generalization the night I caught her in bed with the busboy from our favorite Chinese place.

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If one train is traveling west at 30 miles per hour, and one train is traveling east at 40 miles per hour, and they're 2 miles apart, which train will be able to stop in time to avoid hitting the person in the middle? An ex boyfriend asked me that once. I told him it was a morbid question and to stop being foolish, but I spent the next two weeks wondering the answer. Sometimes I look at the people bustling around me on the platform and think that perhaps I'm the only one still wondering.

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"We're sorry, but due to several bad investment recommendations and one very unfortunate Page Six reference, we feel the need to...ahem, find a suitable replacement." I chased those words around in my head so many times that I eventually forgot what they originally meant. When my wife called me from her new apartment in Soho to tell me she was dropping our daughters off at boarding school next week, she asked me if I had gotten that promotion at work yet. I forgot that I had been fired and told her yes, and she should tell that to her new boy toy. She promptly hung up.

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One of the faces in the window smiled at me today. I saw her staring out the window when her train was still way down the tracks and I couldn't take my eyes off her. She looked a lot like I did when I was little, except that she had the saddest eyes I've ever seen. We locked eyes as her train passed and she gave me a tiny, sad smile. I waggled my fingers at her, but couldn't manage a smile. The grief in her young eyes made my middle-aged ones threaten to tear up.

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I've never been know for my witty responses. The few I've attempted in the past ten years have all largely failed, which is probably why responding to my landlord's inquiry of what I'd done with the month's rent with "I threw it in the Hudson - go fetch it" was not a good idea. He failed to understand my dry humor and decided that maybe the street would be a better place for me to live than this lovely rent-controlled apartment. At least he thought to mention of the slightly-padded bench in north Central Park.

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A woman approached me today. She said she'd seen me standing there for the past three nights, and was wondering if I need money for a cab. My blank stare must have done a decent job of portraying my confusion, because she explained that she figured I stood there as long as I did because I was afraid to board the train. New Yorkers are crazy.

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In all my years of living in the Big Apple, I've only ever taken the subway once. I only did so to say that I had done it, and until tonight I'd never again visited below the city. As I made my way through the throngs of people, I noticed a woman standing at the far corner of the platform, at the very edge. She was staring straight ahead, watching the trains go by. It struck me as very peculiar, but everyone else seemed oblivious to her. I soon forgot about her as I studied the time schedule. A two-minute window of opportunity seemed like a lot of time.

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The New York Times has a lot of news to cover. I suppose that's why the man's death didn't even make the paper. I was wondering how many people ride the subway on a daily basis when I heard a scream to my right, followed by a big commotion. I didn't have to turn my head to know that somebody had finally done what I'd been too scared to do for years - step to death.