It’s true that we are each our own island, and that the 1 downtown train at rush hour is ferrying many islands to work, but we can see every single one in the stream and we wonder about them. I say “we” not because I’m assuming other people observe other subway riders as closely as I do, but because I know they do. There is so much that is loud about this city, but the subway commute is filled with many small, silent desires.

Craig’s List (www.craigslist.org) is a strange, all-encompassing online community bulletin board. It’s based out of San Francisco, where Craig Newmark, a bald, bearded man with round black-rimmed glasses, had the idea for online classifieds. It became so popular that there are now versions of Craig’s Lists in cities as far away as Melbourne, Australia.

But the Craig’s List that figures into this story is the New York Craig’s List. Under the link “Missed Connections” is a novel-in-stories. The stories are brief, cryptic mini-narratives of a met glance or unobserved observation. Books often play major roles:

Girl on A Train

You were sitting across from me on the A Train reading a thick hardcover book with so much intensity. That caught my attention (enough to try finding you this way). You got on at 42nd Street and rode the train to Jay Street to wait for the F train. It was an A train to Lefferts Boulevard. You were wearing a red tank top with a black bra along with a Reebok cap with gray shorts. You have nice legs. You have a light complexion with hazel eyes and long brown hair (pulled through the back of the cap). You also have a dark blue Eastpack backpack and a black fabric shoulder bag. Personally I’d like to meet you and find out why the book had your attention and find out a bit about you.

Want to sit?

You beautiful dark skin… reading a red book… brown one piece dress… asked me if I wanted a seat on the 7 train this morning… just wanted to say you are lovely…

Robert Ludlum Fan on the 6 Train

It was last Saturday (morning around 9:30am on the uptown 6 train… you were wearing an orange hat with a V on it and reading a Robert Ludlum book with a green cover-I was staring at your book (trying to see which one it was) at the same time I tried not to stare at you. When you saw me looking at your book, we both smiled and I kind of started laughing. I got off at 33rd street and never turned around… I wish I had… I was kicking myself for not talking to you.

Not every Missed Connection takes place on a subway. There are just as many “You were the beautiful Asian bartender at Cellar Bar, eating cherries” and “Girl in the revolving door at Morgan Stanley” postings. One of my recent favorites was a cartoon of a Missed Connection.

Henry Street Hottie on Blades

I was standing outside the Last Resort when you bladed by, hair flying back. We made eye contact and smiled, which I feel kind of bad about, since you didn’t see the fire hydrant. Ouch. Maybe we can blade together soon? Play some street hockey? You find me, wine sparkler in one hand, kneepads in other next Thursday on Atlantic Avenue. Hope you put some peroxide on that knee.

Every once in a while, someone will post the question: “Has anyone ever actually turned a missed connection into a real connection on Craig’s List?” No one ever replies. I wonder how many people scan the Missed Connections page, hoping to find a description of themselves. I know I do. It’s hard to feel any kind of connection to anyone in this city when we’re flying past each other at the speed of an express subway train or walking briskly down the sidewalk, eyes cast straight ahead. But the secret heart of New York living, I think, is that clandestine observation of everyone else around us. Haven’t we all mastered the art of seeing while affecting immersion in a book or a thought? We can immediately spot those who haven’t quite gained that skill; they’re the weirdoes on the subway who stare.

My missed connection was a curly-haired blonde in Mona Lisa Café on Bleecker, sometime around Christmas. My friend Rachel was visiting and we’d just finished off two martinis a piece at Barrow Street Alehouse, where the televisions were all on ESPN and the college boys gathered around them like old homeless men around a fire blazing from a rusty old trashcan. When we finally stumbled outside, we headed to Mona Lisa. As we walked toward it in the light snowfall, the windows cast a warm glow on the wet cement outside.

Inside, I sank into an old, too-soft armchair, my head swimming. Rachel and I ordered coffee and some obscene dessert, and I noticed my soon-to-be missed connection sitting alone at the table next to us. He’d been listening to our conversation, and when I spied him, he quickly returned to his task, embarrassed. He was writing Christmas cards. For some reason-maybe it was the cocktails, maybe it was the holiday snowfall-I found this a deeply decent thing. It would follow, of course, that I would also find this an incredibly sexy thing, as the most decent people-the ones who would never consider an affair, an illicit kiss behind a closed door, the ones who are mortified by a gaze held too long-are the ones we find the most irresistible.

As a general rule, I’m not into blondes, but this blonde was writing Christmas cards at a table in Mona Lisa Café on a Friday night. Alone. And he was beautiful. Almost like an angel, who happened to enjoy eavesdropping, and whom I believed enjoyed being caught at it.

I wanted to impress. I put my hand on Rachel’s forearm in what I hoped looked like a profound gesture from a very wise twenty-three year old, and said: “Rachel, have I ever recited the last page of ON THE ROAD for you?”

“Yes,” she said, unaware of my intentions. “As a matter of fact you have recited the last page of ON THE ROAD. It’s a thing you do when you’ve had too much to drink. And it still hasn’t convinced me to read the damn book.”

“I think you just need a little more convincing,” I said, widening my eyes in a way that hoped conveyed the importance of her acquiescence to this little display. She sighed and sank deeper into her own soft chair. As I began (“So when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier…”), the boy didn’t look up, but his pen stopped moving. I knew he was listening. At that point, I was too drunk to consider the possibility that he was finding me pretentious-if one can be pretentious in reciting Kerouac-but I did notice he was paying attention. When I finished, Rachel yawned and checked her watch, but the boy was looking at me and smiling.

We paid the check and pulled on our coats. I slipped my arms into my coat sleeves slowly, trying to linger. The alcohol in my bloodstream had dispersed slightly and I felt as if I were seeing the world for the first time. The curly-haired blonde boy had put his hand on top of his stack of finished Christmas cards and was looking at me expectantly. Then I did what so many regretful Missed Connections bums do-I walked away without saying anything. As we exited, I desperately wanted to turn around and look at him again.

“He’s watching you walk away,” Rachel whispered, as if we were in danger of being overheard. But Mona Lisa’s big, clear picture windows looking out on the street weakened my resolve, so I linked my arm in Rachel’s as we walked slowly towards Barrow Street.

Blonde boy at Mona Lisa’s, around Christmas two years ago

You were the blonde sitting alone at a table at Mona Lisa’s with a hot chocolate and a stack of Christmas cards on a Friday night sometime around Christmas. You overheard me talking about Kerouac and smiled. You had a sweet, open face that made me wish one of those Christmas cards was for me. I should have stopped to chat on my way out but was too embarrassed. Have been kicking myself ever since.

Beth is a reedy woman with thick auburn hair and damp hazel eyes, snobbish about alma maters. She will not, for example, consider dating a man who graduated from any SUNY school, and she’ll think twice about accepting an invitation from a graduate of her own alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. Dating, she’s discovered is a popular topic for amateur slam poets and so she’d written a funny poem called “Celibate in the City.” It was this poem that she wanted to read at Tonic, a small club on the Lower East Side.

Tonic is just around the corner from the Delancey Street subway stop and is crumbly and dank. The basement used to be a distillation room for Kedem Kosher Jewish wine. For the slam, huge, hollowed-out wine barrels were used as seating pavilions, with folding chairs arranged carefully inside. Our hostess was Pearl, a stylishly dressed young woman who wore rhinestone cat-eye glasses.

Slams have become more democratic in the last five years. Slam poetry – seen by purists as a bane and by freer spirits as entertainment – began in Chicago in the late ‘70s. Clubs like Get Me High Lounge, Green Mill, O’Banyon’s and La Mer hosted poetry battles almost every night. Poets Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldeman went head-to-head in one of these battles, draped in boxer robes and wearing gloves, jabbing as they delivered their poems. Back then there were rivalries, literary skirmishes and even physical confrontations. Poetry was war. Fast-forward to 2002, and the slam scene is more equal opportunity and politically correct. Poets are still scored, but kindly; the scores are usually padded.

The first reader at Tonic that night was a lumpy, middle-aged woman who took the mic after pushing her eyeglasses up onto her head. She loped around the barrels and did a stand-up act. This apparently irked Pearl since it contained no poem. It irked everyone else because it wasn’t funny. Clement, an affected Oscar Wilde doppelganger in heavy-rimmed glasses, said he couldn’t be a judge because he had “an unnatural affection for the number eight.” He surprised no one by awarding the first poet an eight and the second an eight-point-eight.

When it was Beth’s turn, she read her poem about forced urban celibacy, in which ovaries were left to decay and men were left to make double entendres, in a kind of breathless syncopation. She clutched the paper between her hands and I could see the edges grow transparent with the sweat from her fingertips. It was good, I thought. And she read it with such urgency that people paid attention.

But when she ended up placing third out of seven poets – two of whom had performed stand-up acts instead of reading poems – I was positive it had been a fix. The first and second place winners were two teenage boys who’d read poems about sex and Valentine’s Day and virginity and girls who have eyes like oceans and hair like gold.

In the subway station afterwards, I told Beth that I’d heard professors in my MFA program talk about slam poetry like it was the downfall of civilization. She inferred from my comments that I disagreed with these professors, which wasn’t necessarily true.

“I think it’s fun,” Beth told me as we rode the uptown train away from Tonic and its thumbtack-earring wearing slam winner. I told her I thought poetry had suddenly become too democratic.

“Well, that’s snobby,” she said. When I raised an eyebrow I didn’t even need to mention the educational requirements she has for the men she dates. She shook her head. “There’s a difference between equal opportunity dating and equal opportunity slamming.”

I realized she was right. She’s actively looking for a husband, so she only goes out with men that she considers viable candidates. But when it comes to poetry, Beth likes her slams egalitarian. It may be that all eligible men are not created equal but all amateur slam poets are.

She was in her last year of college at Michigan State University, where she had been named the president of her school’s chapter of American Society of Interior Designers. Amy and I had met in high school back in Minnesota, where I’d grown up, but where she’d moved from northern California in the middle of high school. I was a year older than her and barely noticed her presence on the high school basketball team. I was an inconveniently short varsity point guard who had had two knee surgeries under her belt, and was headed for a third (which would be necessitated two years later during a pick up game with Amy and some sweaty men at a health club). Amy was an awkward, dark-haired small forward whom the coach had assigned to the junior varsity, which Amy resented. She was the only person on the team as obsessed with basketball as I was and, she told me later, she thought I was “cute.” We finally got to know each other on the bus ride back from an embarrassing loss.

We stayed in touch after I left for college, and she was still in college when I moved to New York. I’d often begged her to visit me, but she was always too busy. Now that she was coming to New York for this conference—which, like all conferences, you were supposed to just skip out on—I thought we might have a few days of fun. I was wrong. She was here on business.

I didn’t know that Amy had been looking forward to the NeoCon Interior Design Conference for months. As president of her school’s American Society of Interior Designers chapter, her big perk was a trip to New York to attend this conference, held at the Javits Center. She’d been polishing her resume, hopeful that she’d land a job through an interview at NeoCon.

I also hadn’t known that Amy had become an interior design geek and that she had developed a predilection for hand-drafting tools. She told me that it had advanced to the point to where she kept her favorite drafting tool—a 45-degree plastic triangle—on her bedside table, “for emergencies.”

“It’s like your teddy,” she said. “It’s always there for you and really very snuggly. You feel confident and comfortable with it.” I wasn’t sure I had ever met this person, and told her so.

“Interior design becomes a way of life,” Amy told me. “And if you’re not hip to it, then you’re not hip.” She then told me not to expect to spend any time with her during her visit. But when she arrived in New York, she called me. “I’ll keep you abreast of any developments,” she told me. And it was through Amy’s periodic phone calls that I pieced together what happened while she was attending the New York NeoCon Interior Design Conference.

Amy’s first stop at NeoCon was the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill interior design firm’s booth. “It’s the number one firm in the world,” Amy said. “I had been waiting in line for two hours just to hand the guy my resume, and sit down for a chat. This guy in front of me, though, hands the Skidmore guy his entire portfolio. That was just cocky as hell. At a job fair, you don’t bring your portfolio, you just bring your resume because they don’t have time to look through your portfolio, and they don’t want to.” When the guy finally got up to leave, his entire business card collection fell on the floor. Amy chose not to tell him. “My mouth was opening, but nothing was coming out.”

After swapping resumes for business cards for a few hours that first day, Amy decided to see what kind of talks and forums she might attend. “A Day in the Life of Vinnie Vinyl Man” promised to reveal the facts and the fictions of vinyl. “Ceramic Tile—Demystifying the Specification Process” seemed interesting to Amy, since it would address the problems facing an interior designer attempting to correctly “specify” ceramic tile in its “ever increasing and diverse applications.” In the end, however, she wandered onto the main convention floor where representatives from myriad industries hawked their wares.

Amy saw a number of conventioneers with attractive purple bags slung over their shoulders, the name PATCRAFT appliquéd across the front. Amy wanted one. She approached the Patcraft Commercial Carpeting display and introduced herself to Craig, a stocky man with a receding hairline and a cell phone on his belt.

“So I ask him, what does he sell more of, modular or broad-loom carpet? And what’s the cost per square foot? I just didn’t want to be like ‘Oh hi, saw your stand, now can I have a bag?’” Craig showed Amy samples of commercial carpeting—a hardier grade of carpet than the variety you might find in a suburban home. It must pass abrasion tests and pass fire codes. (“It’s not plush,” Amy said.)

To Amy, Craig seemed different from the other men at the convention. Most men in interior design, Amy said, seem cocky in their flashy ties, expensive leather shoes and black mock turtlenecks. “And, they all seem to wear those Buddy Holly glasses.” These types ran the gamut from Kohler sales reps to guys heavily involved in wallpaper and commercial carpeting. They communicate in terms of space plans, mill work, modular furniture, systems furniture, color theory, direct glue down carpet, ergonomics and anthropometrics. At least Craig had had the presence to mention that he and some friends were headed to bar after that day’s activities ended at the Javits Center. Craig and Amy made a date for the next evening, right after Amy secured a purple Patcraft bag. At nine the next night, Amy met Craig at a bar on the east side.

“You walk in to this bar,” Amy told me over the phone, “and the environment was timeless from an architectural standpoint. Leather upholstered booths lined the corridor. There was low illumination; very few foot candles. It felt like a martini bar.” She couldn’t, however, remember the name of the bar. Craig and Amy were slow to warm to each other. The bar’s owner—a little drunk and very arthritic— came over and introduced himself to Amy. He told Amy that he was Craig’s camp counselor ten years ago.

“Hey, this girl is an interior designer,” Craig said. “She loves your place.” The owner asked Amy if she wanted a tour of the bar. She did, and immediately pointed out the violations of the American with Disabilities Act.

“There was no ADA capability. Steps to get up to the bar and all around. And the restrooms are down a flight of stairs.” After doing a few Vodka shots with the owner, Amy and Craig left for Craig’s apartment. When they arrived, Amy noted the modernist tendencies of Craig’s place, with its circular sofa and black and glass end tables and geometric shaped lamps. She also noticed that a number of picture frames were covered up by postcards that had been placed against them carefully. When Craig had left the room for a moment, Amy pulled the postcards away from the frames and saw the photographs were of Craig and a smiling woman who, judging from her numerous appearances in other photographs about the place, was a girlfriend. This was a blight on the otherwise perfectly balanced design of the apartment. It seemed as if it were time to leave.

Amy steered clear of the Patcraft table during the next days of the convention, instead focusing her attentions on the reps from an ergonomic furniture company. “I don’t get it,” Amy told me. “Interior designers are supposed to sort of be a superior kind of human being.”

“Well, he was a carpet salesman,” I offered. There was a pause on the other end of the phone line.

“You’re right,” she said. “I should have known better.”

This was the last I heard from Amy during her visit to New York. She felt bad about not seeing me during the conference. She offered to send me a gift as an apology.

“A teddy bear?”

“Why do I want a teddy bear,” I asked.

“This is no ordinary teddy bear,” she said. “This is a Benjamin Moore Paints teddy bear. He’s wearing a little t-shirt with their logo. I scored it at NeoCon. Almost as cool as my 45-degree drafting triangle—which I’m not giving you, so don’t even ask.”