Jacob Dreams of Girls

(in the manner of O. Henry) 

   Jacob had one harmless pastime: he liked to look at girls.
   Whether the girls liked being looked at never troubled his conscience. Jacob lived by a simple commercial principle picked up somewhere on the sidewalks of New York: “Window-shopping is free.” Who first issued this valuable piece of street legislation, Jacob never discovered, though he suspected it must have been a philosopher disguised as a shoe salesman.
   In the department store of his imagination, Jacob was a prince. He escorted young ladies to restaurants with soft lamps and expensive menus. He invited them to his humble Brooklyn apartment which, in these reveries, obligingly expanded into something halfway between a Fifth Avenue suite and a fairy-tale parlor.
   In dreams, Jacob grew taller, bolder, more eloquent. The girls - every last one of them - were enchanted.
   Awake, Jacob was neither tall nor bold, but he was no worse than the next fellow on the subway. He held a steady job in Manhattan. The salary was modest, but Manhattan paid him in scenery: no city on earth displayed its female population with such confident extravagance. The trouble was, they were all in a rush - toward careers, gyms, life itself.               
   Still, it was pleasant to watch them from the curb, like admiring the skyline without any obligation to own a penthouse.
   Brooklyn suited Jacob better. Lately it had grown so international you could circle the globe in two blocks without leaving the borough. But its women, in Jacob’s estimation, presented difficulties. Muslim girls were, he felt, a lost cause; Black girls didn’t wander into his particular brand of dreams; the beautiful Chinese girls seemed to hide like rare birds.
   As for Jewish girls -                Jacob never looked at them at all and could not, for the life of him, explain this omission.
   Thus his romantic field narrowed to two territories: schoolgirls and subway girls.
   The first were out during business hours, when Jacob was in Manhattan making exactly enough to pay rent and consider a sandwich. The second grew drearier each year, as though the subway system had entered into a secret partnership with the devil to test the endurance of the city’s eyes.
   Once Jacob stumbled on a poem—anonymous, sentimental, and perfectly suited to him. It began:

 “You’re getting older,
 And new girlish faces
 Appear every day
 On Brooklyn streets…”
               
   Jacob liked those lines. They fitted him as comfortably as his old overcoat.
   Now, Jacob would not admit his age, but he had long passed the charming forties, that dangerous frontier where every morning pain is the only proof a man has not gone to meet his Maker overnight. Jacob’s pains were reassuringly abundant.
   At night, after his bones finally forgave him, Jacob often twitched and groaned in sleep like a man wrestling with angels or indigestion. But sometimes he grew very quiet, and a small, wistful smile softened his face.
   For in those rare, gentle moments Jacob was young again and he dreamed of girls.