Unlikely Places

Like most male animals I have often peed in unlikely places. On trees, in the bushes, behind houses; once in a decorative vase, when slightly drunk, in a house where I couldn’t find the bathroom. 

But the one time I am thinking about was memorable, not because of where the pee ended up, but for other reasons.

This was in New York, I was going with a friend to an art movie theater, the Angelika, in Greenwich Village. I wanted rather to impress her but it was not going very well. I was just speaking about how lucky we were, so healthy, in life and limb, not even having to wear glasses. 

What are you talking about, she said. I wear glasses, I wear them all the time. She took me by the shoulders and said, Do not turn around. Tell me what color are my eyes. 

They are fascinating eyes, I said, exactly why I never even see your glasses, I cannot take my eyes of your eyes. Fine, she said, but what color are they? Amber with a touch of gold, I said. She let me go, looking sadly at me with her clear blue eyes. 

I was not defensive about this, I was quite used to owning up to all the shortcomings detected in me. I just have to own up, I said, to being an academic, a nerd, quite absentminded and not very observant, almost like an immaterial intellect hovering above the material world. By this time we had taken our seats in the theater but I suddenly realized that I could not just sit there for two hours. I’ll be back in a moment, I said, I have to go to the bathroom. 

On my way down I remembered a passage in a novel by Romain Gary. Two middle-aged men are at the urinal and one says, by a certain age, no matter what you do, the last drip is going to go down your pants. This I just did not want to happen this particular evening. So I determined go immediately into a stall, where there would be toilet paper to use. I rushed in, and I entered the first stall. 

Everything was fine, but I started noticing some movement and noise in the next stall, and became convinced that there were two people in it. Well, this was New York, and if a couple of gay friends needed some privacy ….. But then when they raised their voices I became convinced that they were women, speaking a language I didn’t know. Oh well! Tourists in New York, I thought. Don’t know the language very well, naive small-town people, always getting lost here. And there they are in a men’s bathroom. 

By this time it seemed a lot of people had come in, I suppose a movie had just let out. I left the stall, going at once to the sink to wash my hands, and then noticed something from the corner of my eye. There was a long line of women waiting for the next stall to open. I suppose I could have come up with more auxiliary hypotheses. But I just quietly washed my hands and walked out under the tolerant, slightly speculative eyes of all those women.