How to behave in the stoic reserve

by David Benjamin

“I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Métro.”

— Charles de Gaulle

 

PARIS — Hotlips and I indulged last night in our fifth or sixth viewing of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Charade, during which the two incipient lovers take an evening voyage on a bateau mouche and twice pass the Institute de France in the same direction without the boat turning around. Movie magic!

This time, however, we focused on the Métro station featured in the film’s dénouement. The signs there say, “St. Jacques,” but—as longstanding veterans of the Paris subway—we know that no station by that name exists in the vicinity where Grant and Walter Matthau stage their climactic showdown.

There is, mind you, a St. Jacques Métro stop, but it’s twelve stations away, on the No. 6 line, and to get there, you’d have to switch at place d’Italie. 

Hotlips hit the internet to solve the mystery of St. Jacques station. I thought it might be an obsolete stop on the No. 7 line, situated near the Tour St. Jacques. I was wrong. Hotlips informed me that St. Jacques station in Charade was a non-existent Paris locale built at Stanley Donen’s behest. All the better, I decided, because Cary Grant’s subway etiquette was appalling. In a sequence of barely three minutes, he violated half the rules to which proper straphangers scrupulously adhere lest the underground turn into a hellscape of fistfights and mass tramplings.

One of our quiet amusements on the Métro, or any commuter rail line, is watching tourists from subway-deprived regions—like Maine or Utah—blunder into mass-transit faux pas. They know not where to move, how to stand, nor how to shrink as a matter of accommodation to the throngs around them. The other day, as I was riding a sardine-tight rush-hour car on the No. 4 line from St. Michel to Gare du Nord, it occurred to me that an Emily Post for Subway Riders would include at least four fundamental rubrics, starting with the moment the door slides open.

How to Get On: First, you wait.

The most rigid convention in Métro manners is that the people getting off get to get off before anybody else gets on. You back off, you make room. You wait ’til every departing passenger—the Senegalese au pair pushing a white toddler in an advanced tactical baby stroller, the Japanese tourist couple wrestling with three electric-blue four-wheeled Samsonite suitcases, the Beach Boy manqué who just bought a new surfboard at Decathlon—hits the voie and hotfoots toward the sortie.

Second, you keep moving. 

Among the mortal sins of the subway neophyte is a flash of indecision that seems to strike as soon as his little feet cross the threshold. And so, she stops, in her tracks, puzzled about where to go. Left? Right? Straight? The trouble is, dumbass, there are people behind you and the door alarm is about to sound.

Freeze in the doorway and chances are you’ll be manhandled both by the strangers in front of you and the angry mob behind, who also want to ride the train and are prepared, if necessary, to walk over your prostrate form.

So, move! Anywhere. Find a crack, find it fast and squeeze into it, even if doing so requires that you reduce yourself instantly from a 44-stout to a 38-medium. Sooner or later, to survive on the subway, everybody learns how to wedge, worm, deflate and flatten.

How to Sit: Touch not thy neighbor.

If there’s a seat visible, sit. Fast. It won’t last. 

We call the people who do this well “moles.” Hotlips’ mother was a mole.

One of the puzzles of subway car design, especially in Europe, is that seats are often arranged two-by-two in groups of four, facing each other. My theory is that whoever conceived this arrangement pictured countless short-legged families of four—Mom, Dad, Jeff and Mary—piling in merrily together. They fill the four seats as a unit, talking about their day, kidding Dad about his socks, perhaps breaking out sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and opening bottles of orange pop. 

Trouble is, the subway is an incessant churn of comings and goings. Four seats never clear at the same moment. The tube is not family-friendly. The person you face is always a stranger who never welcomes another stranger wedging in kisser-first, three feet away, rubbing knees, swinging a purse, a bag, a baby, or an apoplectic dachshund in a market basket. The designers of these cars could have arranged all seats facing one way, sparing riders from the unease of doing kneesies with God-knows-who and wondering when he’s taken his latest bath. 

But they didn’t. The solution, for the combat-happy subway joe, is to squeeze your legs tight—even painfully—beneath the seat, or turn sideways.

Or stand up.

How to Stand: Honor the pole.

There are grip-bars above every seat. Many subways, but not the Paris Métro, provide straps, hooks or rings attached to a horizontal bar. Hang on, or expect to fly into fellow riders—who will be annoyed—when the train accelerates and brakes. 

More important, in the middle space adjacent to every doorway, there’s a steel poll, not unlike those used by the nudie cuties in a strip club. The pole is for riders to grip, lest they toss about the car like untethered sailors in a tempest. Properly, one grabs but does not hug the pole. Nor does one, if he possesses any couth at all, lean his back against it. Any action that inhibits other riders’ pole access—forcing them to cast about desperately for purchase or cling like wet leaves to windows—is an offense that stirs silent, seething resentment. 

How to Talk: Don’t.

The subway is a moving funeral parlor. Thronged with citydwellers who’ve never met and will never see one another again, it has no society. It is the last refuge of stoic reserve. The visage of the subway passenger is numb, inexpressive and enigmatic. This zombified pall has been deepened by the infestation of the mobile phone. Where once passengers avoided all human contact by reading,  dozing or simply feigning catatonia, now the Métro is a sea of heads bent over tiny screens, upon which thumbs dance and caper like water drops on a hotplate. No one looks up. No one speaks, except to mutter into the device. Talk to the hand.

There are exceptions, of course. Tourists stumble into cars in fives and sixes, babbling about what they’ve seen, where they’re going, how come the pizza here isn’t like the pizza back home. At night, clusters of drunks and young people (often also drunk) prolong their party, noisily and obliviously, turning the funeral—until they reach their stop—into an Irish wake.

How to get off: Be cool.

Everybody wants you off the train. 

I was pinned recently against a doorway when the train stopped . The opposite door, providing access to the platform, rolled open. Two dozen bodies blocked my way to the exit portal. Slowly, saying, “Pardon … pardon,” I wormed toward my escape. A man beside me, stymied by other people trying to leave and by others just trying to make room for us to leave, lost his cool. He shoved a man, muscled past another and, after blundering into a grandmother and almost falling onto the platform, raised a fist and cursed the impassive masses he had left behind.

I followed him off without incident. I knew that, above all, people getting off are cherished by those staying on, because we leave behind spaces that they can then occupy. It might take a while, but—before anybody new gets on—everybody getting off gets off. Everybody left behind gets to shuffle to a better spot. 

There’s a lesson here, I think, about life, death and well-attended funerals.