Eight White Nights

FIRST NIGHT

Halfway through dinner, I knew I’d replay the whole evening in reverse — the bus, the snow, the walk up the tiny incline, the cathedral looming straight before me, the stranger in the elevator, the crowded large living room where candlelit faces beamed with laughter and premonition, the piano music, the singer with the throaty voice, the scent of pinewood everywhere as I wandered from room to room, thinking that perhaps I should have arrived much earlier tonight, or a bit later, or that I shouldn’t have come at all, the classic sepia etchings on the wall by the bathroom where a swinging door opened to a long corridor to private areas not intended for guests but took another turn toward the hallway and then, by miracle, led back into the same living room, where more people had gathered, and where, turning to me by the window where I thought I’d found a quiet spot behind the large Christmas tree, someone suddenly put out a hand and said, “I am Clara.”

I am Clara, delivered in a flash, as the most obvious fact in the world, as though I’d known it all along, or should have known it, and, seeing I hadn’t acknowledged her, or perhaps was trying not to, she’d help me stop the pretense and put a face to a name everyone had surely mentioned many times before.

In someone else, I am Clara would have sprung like a tentative conversation opener — meek, seemingly assertive, overly casual, distant, aired as an afterthought, the verbal equivalent of a handshake that has learned to convey firmness and vigor by overexerting an otherwise limp and lifeless grip. In a shy person, I am Clara would require so much effort that it might leave her drained and almost grateful when you failed to pick up the cue.

Here, I am Clara was neither bold nor intrusive, but spoken with the practiced, wry smile of someone who had said it too many times to care how it broke the silence with strangers. Strained, indifferent, weary, and amused — at herself, at me, at life for making introductions the tense, self-conscious things they are — it slipped between us like a meaningless formality that had to be gotten over with, and now was as good a time as any, seeing that the two of us were standing away from those who had gathered in the middle of the room and who were about to start singing. Her words sprung on me like one of those gusts that clear through obstacles and throw open all doors and windows, trailing April blossom in the heart of a winter month, stirring everything along their path with the hasty familiarity of people who, when it comes to other people, couldn’t care less and haven’t a thing to lose. She wasn’t bustling in nor was she skipping over tedious steps, but there was a touch of crisis and commotion in her three words that wasn’t unwelcome or totally unintended. It suited her figure, the darting arrogance of her chin, of the voile-thin crimson shirt which she wore unbuttoned to her breastbone, the swell of skin as smooth and forbidding as the diamond stud on her thin platinum necklace.

I am Clara. It barged in unannounced, like a spectator squeezing into a packed auditorium seconds before curtain time, disturbing everyone, and yet so clearly amused by the stir she causes that, no sooner she’s found the seat that will be hers for the rest of the season than she’ll remove her coat, slip it around her shoulders, turn to her new neighbor, and, meaning to apologize for the disruption without making too much of it, whisper a conspiring “I am Clara.” It meant, I’m the Clara you’ll be seeing all year long here, so let’s just make the best of it. I am the Clara you never thought would be sitting right next to you, and yet here I am. I’m the Clara you’ll wish to find here every one day of every month for the remainder of this and every other year of your life — and I know it, and let’s face it, much as you’re trying not to show it, you knew it the moment you set eyes on me. I am Clara.

It was a cross between a ribbing “How couldn’t you know?” and “What’s with the face?” “Here,” she seemed to say, like a magician about to teach a child a simple trick, “take this name and hold it tight in your palm, and when you’re home alone, open your hand and think, Today I met Clara.” It was like offering an elderly gentleman a chocolate-hazelnut square just when he was about to lose his temper. “Don’t say anything until you’ve bitten into it.” She jostled you, but instantly made up for it before you’d even felt it, so that it wasn’t clear which had come first, the apology or the little jab, or whether both weren’t braided in the same gesture, spiraling around her three words like frisky death threats masquerading as meaningless pranks. I am Clara.

Life before. Life after.

Everything before Clara seemed so lifeless, hollow, stopgap. The after-Clara thrilled and scared me, a mirage of water beyond a valley of rattlesnakes.

I am Clara. It was the one thing I knew best and could always come back to each time I’d want to think of her — alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous. Everything about her radiated from these three words, as though they were a pressing bulletin mysteriously scribbled on the back of a matchbook that you slip into a wallet because it will always summon an evening when a dream, a would-be life, suddenly blossomed before you. It could be just that, a dream and nothing more, but it stirred so fierce a desire to be happy that I was almost ready to believe I was indeed happy on the evening when someone blustered in, trailing April blossom in the heart of a winter month.

Would I still feel this way on leaving the party tonight? Or would I find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so that they’d start to bother me and allow me to snuff the dream till it tapered off and lost its luster and, with its luster gone, remind me once again, as ever again, that happiness is the one thing in our lives others cannot bring.

I am Clara. It conjured her voice, her smile, her face when she vanished into the crowd that night and made me fear I’d already lost her, imagined her. “I am Clara,” I’d say to myself, and she was Clara all over again, standing near me by the Christmas tree, alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous.

I was — and I knew it within minutes of meeting her — already rehearsing never seeing her again, already wondering how to take I am Clara with me tonight and stow it in a drawer along with my cuff links, collar stays, my watch and money clip.

I was learning to disbelieve that this could last another five minutes, because this had all the makings of an unreal, spellbound interlude, when things open up far too easily and seem willing to let us into the otherwise closed circle that is none other than our very own life, our life as we’ve always craved to live it but cheat it at each turn, our life finally transposed in the right key, retold in the right tense, in a language that speaks to us and is right for us and us alone, our life finally made real and luminous because it’s revealed, not in ours, but in someone else’s voice, grasped from another’s hand, caught on the face of someone who couldn’t possibly be a stranger, but, because she is nothing but a stranger, holds our eyes with a gaze that says, Tonight I’m the face you put on your life and how you live it. Tonight, I am your eyes to the world looking back at you. I am Clara.

It meant: Take my name and whisper it to yourself, and in a week’s time come back to it and see if crystals haven’t sprouted around it.

I am Clara — she had smiled, as though she’d been laughing at something someone had just said to her and, borrowing the mirth started in another context, had turned to me behind the Christmas tree and told me her name, given me her hand, and made me want to laugh at punch lines I hadn’t heard but whose drift corresponded to a sense of humor that was exactly like mine.

This is what I am Clara meant to me. It created the illusion of intimacy, of a friendship briefly interrupted and urgently resumed, as though we’d met before, or had crossed each other’s path but kept missing each other and were being reintroduced at all costs now, so that in extending her hand to me, she was doing something we should have done much sooner, seeing we had grown up together and lost touch, or been through so much, perhaps been lovers a lifetime ago, until something as trivial and shameful as death had come between us and which, this time, she wasn’t about to let happen.

I am Clara meant I already know you — this is no ordinary business — and if you think fate doesn’t have a hand in this, think twice. We could, if you wish, stick to ordinary cocktail pleasantries and pretend this is all in your head, or we can drop everything, pay attention to no one, and, like children building a tiny tent in the middle of a crowded living room on Christmas Eve, enter a world beaming with laughter and premonition, where everything is without peril, where there’s no place for shame, doubt, or fear, and where all is said in jest and in whimsy, because the things that are most solemn often come under the guise of mischief and merrymaking.

•

I held her hand a touch longer than is usual, to say I had gotten the message, but let it go sooner than warranted, fearing I’d invented the message.

That was my contribution, my signature to the evening, my twisted reading of a plain handshake. If she knew how to read me, she’d see through this affectation of nonchalance and catch the other, deeper nonchalance, which I am reluctant to dispel especially in the presence of someone who, with three words and barely a glance, could easily hold the key to all my hideaways.

It did not occur to me that people who bolt into your life could as easily bolt out of it when they’re done, that someone who breaks into a concert hall seconds before the music starts may all of a sudden stand up and disturb everyone all over again on realizing she is sitting in the wrong row and doesn’t care to wait until the intermission.

I looked at her. I looked at her face. I knew that face. “You look familiar,” I was going to say.

“You look lost,” she said.

“Does it show?” I answered. “Don’t most people look lost at parties?”

“Some more than others. Not him.” She pointed at a middle-aged gentleman talking with a woman. He was leaning against what must have been a false, chamfered pillar with a Corinthian-style topstone, holding a clear drink in his hand, almost slouching against the pillar as though he had all the time in the world. “Doesn’t look lost at all. Neither does she.”

I am Clara. I see through people.

Mr. and Mrs. Shukoff, she baptized them; Mr. and Mrs. Shukoff couldn’t wait to rip their clothes off, he said with a wink as he gulped down his drink, give me a second and I’m ready for blastoff.

Shukoff: people you couldn’t shake off but wished you could, she explained. We laughed.

Then, in a manner that couldn’t have been less discreet, Clara indicated a sixty-something woman who was wearing a long red dress with black patent-leather pumps. “Santa Claus’s grandmother. Just look at that,” she said, pointing to a wide, gold-buckled, patent-leather belt strapping Grandma’s tummy. She wore what must have been a sparkling blond wig whose sides, matted and hardened like two baby boar horns, curled around her ears. From her earlobes dangled two sliced large pearls mounted on tiny gold plates — miniature UFOs without the little green men, she said. Clara instantly baptized her Muffy Mitford. Then proceeded to demolish Muffy Mitford, enlisting me in the process, as though she never doubted I would join in the character assassination.

Muffy spoke with a warble in her voice. Muffy wore light blue shaggy froufrou slippers at home, I said. Muffy wore a housedress underneath, always a housedress underneath, she said. Muffy had an unshorn poodle named Suleiman. And a husband nicknamed Chip. And her son — what else — Pip. And her daughter, Mimi. No, Buffy, rhymes with Muffy. Muffy Beaumont. Née Montebello. No, Belmont. Let’s face it, Schoenberg, said Clara. Muffy had an English housemaid. From Shropshire. No, Nottingham. No, East Anglia. East Coker. Little Gidding, I said. Burnt Norton, she corrected, and, on second thought, from the Islands. Majorca, she said. With a name like Monserrat, I said. “No, no. Dolores Luz Berta Fatima Consuelo Jacinta Fabiola Inez Esmeralda”—one of those names that never end, because their magic lies in their lilt and cadence as they soar and surge and finally come cascading on a surname as common as the sand on the beaches of Far Rockaway: Rodriguez — which sent us roaring as we saw Muffy laugh and agitate her hips to the rhythm of the singer with the throaty voice, jiggling the limp end of her belt like a fertility symbol dangling from her midriff, her martini glass all empty — and she said with a wink as she gulped down her drink, pour me another and watch me turn pink.

“You’re a friend of Hans’s, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Why — how can you tell?”

“You’re not singing. I’m not singing.” Then, seeing I hadn’t quite seized her explanation, she added, “Friends of Hans don’t sing. Only Gretchen’s friends sing.” She wiped her lips with a napkin, as though to stifle the last flutters of a private joke she wasn’t about to share but whose ripples you weren’t meant to miss. “Simple,” she said, pointing not so discreetly to those gathered around the piano, where a crowd was singing away exuberantly around the man with the throaty voice.

“Gretchen must be the more musical of the two, then,” I added non-committally, just to say something, anything, even if it limped its way to unavoidable silence. Clara’s reply took the wind out of my words. “Gretchen, musical? Gretchen wouldn’t know music if it farted in her ears. Just look at her, nailed to the back of the door, greeting all her guests because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself.” I suddenly remembered the lame handshake, the perfunctory greeting, the kiss on the cheek that grazes your ear so as not to smear her makeup.

The words startled me, but I let them pass, not knowing how to answer or counter them. “Just look at their faces, though,” she threw in, pointing at the singers. I looked at their faces. “Would you sing simply because it’s a Christmas party and everyone’s yuling about like overgrown goldfish sucking on eggnog?”

I said nothing.

“Seriously,” she added — so this wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Just look at all these Euro Shukoffs. Don’t they all look like people who always sing at Christmas parties?”

I am Clara. I get nasty.

“But I sing — sometimes,” I threw in disingenuously, trying to sound no less bland or naive than those who thought it was the most natural thing in the world to sing at parties. Perhaps I wanted to see how she’d take back her hostility, now that she had inadvertently caught me in its fire. Or perhaps I was just teasing her and didn’t want her to know how much her cynical assessment of sing-along fellowship echoed my own.

“But I sing,” she said, arching an eyebrow as though I’d said something complex and difficult. She nodded somewhat as she pondered the deeper meaning of my words, and still seemed to be weighing them, when it suddenly hit me: she wasn’t talking about herself; she was mimicking what I had just said to her—But I sing—and was throwing it back at me with the taunting lilt of derision, like a crumpled gift being returned in its now dented box.

“So you sing,” she said, still considering the matter. Or was she already backpedaling after her poisoned dart?

“Yes. I sing, sometimes—” I replied, trying not to sound too smug or too earnest. I pretended I hadn’t picked up on the goading irony in her voice and was about to add “in the shower”—but immediately sensed that, in Clara’s universe, singing in the shower was precisely what everyone confessed to when they cagily admitted that they liked to sing sometimes. It would have been such a predictable thing to say. I could already hear her unstitching every cliché in my sentence.

“So you sing,” she started. “Let’s hear you, then.”

I was caught off guard. I shook my head.

“Why? Doesn’t sing well with others?” she asked.

“—something like that.” Could do better was a lame repartee to her report-card banter, which is why I suppressed it. But now I had nothing else to say.

Another moment of hesitation. Then, looking over my shoulder, she broke the silence: “Want to hear me sing?”

Her words sounded almost like a dare. I imagined she was joking and that, after showing such an aversion to Gretchen’s friends and their sing-along yuling, the last thing she’d do now was to start singing. But before I had finally put the right spin to my words and answered her, she had already joined the chorus, but with a voice I would never have matched to her face and couldn’t believe was hers, because it bordered total effusion, as though, in singing at that moment right next to me, she was revealing another, deeper side to remind me that everything I’d thought about her so far — from bustling wind to poisoned dart to quips and derision — might be mistaken, that “caustic” had a meeker side, that “dangerous” could turn apprehensive and tenderhearted, that she was so full of other, more surprising turns that it was pointless to keep up with any or try to second-guess them, or put up a struggle against someone whose curt, offhanded I am Clara reminded me that there were people in the world who, for all their gruff arrogance, can, with scarcely a few notes, easily persuade you they are inherently kind, candid, and vulnerable — with unsettling reminders, though, that their ability to flip from one to the other is what ultimately makes them deadly.

I was transfixed — transfixed by the voice, by the person, by my total failure to master the situation, by the pleasure I felt in being so easily swept over, helpless, clueless. Her singing didn’t just come out of her body. It seemed to tear things out of mine, like an ancient admission I was still incapable of and which reached back to childhood, like the echo of forgotten tales finally breaking into song. What was this feeling, and where was it coming from? Why did hearing her sing or staring at her unbuttoned crimson shirt with her overexposed, gleaming neckline make me want to live under its spell, close to her heart, below her heart, next to my heart, a peek at your heart; that small pendant, I wanted it in my mouth.

Like a Ulysses grown wise to the Sirens’ trick, part of me still groped for reasons not to be taken in, not to believe. A voice so perfect could make her too perfect.

It didn’t take long to realize that what I was feeling was not just admiration; nor was it awe, or envy. The word worship—as in “I could worship people like her”—hadn’t crossed my mind yet, though later that evening, when I stood with her watching a glowing moonlit barge moored across the white Hudson, I did turn to worship. Because placid winterscapes lift up the soul and bring down our guard. Because part of me was already venturing into an amorphous terrain in which a word here, a word there — any word, really — is all we have to hold on to before surrendering to a will far mightier than our own. Because in the busy, crowded room, as I listened to her sing, I found myself toying with a word so overused and hackneyed, so safe, that I was tempted to ignore it, which is also why I chose it: interesting.

She was interesting. Not for what she knew, or for what she said, or for who she was, even, but for how she saw and twisted things, for the implied, complicit jeer in her voice, for how she seemed to both admire and put you down, so that you didn’t know whether she had the sensibility of gleaming velvet or of sandpaper. She is interesting. I want to know more, hear more, get closer to.

But interesting was not the word I wanted. One more drink and the word struggling to be heard, when it finally came to me, would have spilled out so naturally, so effortlessly, and in a manner so uninhibited that, staring at her skin as I stood speaking to her by the fireplace, I felt no less bashful or hampered than a dreamer who enters a crowded subway car, greets his fellow passengers, and doesn’t feel the slightest shame on looking down at his feet and realizing he is not wearing shoes, no socks either, no trousers, and that he is totally naked from the waist down.

I made conversation to avoid saying what I wanted to say, the way only the tongue-tied say too much when they lack the courage to say just what’s enough and not a word more. To stop myself, I shut my mouth. I tried to let her do the talking. Then, not to interrupt or say the word, I bit my tongue and held it in place. I bit, not its tip, but its midsection, a large, domineering bite that might even have hurt had I paid it any mind but which held my tongue without altering the outward shape of my mouth. And yet I so wanted to interrupt her, to interrupt her the way one does when one knows one is about to intrude and shock someone with a word that is at once exquisite, reckless, and obscene.

The word sprang so many times to my mouth. I loved the room, loved the snow on Riverside Drive, loved the George Washington Bridge speckling the distance like a drooping necklace on a bare neck, loved her necklace too, and the neck that wore it, I would have said.

I wanted to tell her how much I had loved her voice, perhaps with no reason other than to begin saying other things as well, shy, tentative things that I hoped might grow bold and lead elsewhere once I got started. But no sooner had I mentioned her singing than she cut me short.

“I was a music major,” she said, clearly snuffing my compliment, yet underscoring it by the very impatience with which she seemed to ignore it. It meant, Don’t feel obligated to say anything. I know. I’ve trained for this.

“I’m moving into another room. Too noisy, too stuffy here.”

A pensive okay was all I could offer. Was this it, then?

“Let’s go into the library. It’s quieter there.”

She wants me to follow her. I remember being amused by the thought: So she wants me to follow.

The library, which turned out to be equally crowded, had huge, rare, leatherbound volumes neatly stacked around its walls, interrupted by windows and what looked like a balcony facing the river. During the day this particular French window must have let in the most tranquil sweeps of light. “I could spend the rest of my life in this room.”

“Many people could. See that desk over there?”

“Yes.”

The desk was covered with hors d’oeuvres.

“I wrote my master’s thesis there.”

“With all that food around?”

She threw me a hasty nod, instantly dismissing the attempted joke. “I have good memories of this room. I was in this room for a whole year, from nine to five. They even let me come here on weekends. I can remember summer and fall here. I can remember looking out and seeing snow. Then it was April. It went so fast.”

For a moment I pictured Clara arriving dutifully every winter morning to sit and write all day. Did she wear glasses? Was she totally focused on her project, or did she look bored when she was alone all day? Did her mind drift, did Clara dream of love in the heart of midwinter afternoons? Was there sorrow in her life?

“Do you really miss your thesis days? Most people hate even thinking of them.”

“I don’t miss them. But I don’t hate them.”

My question didn’t seem to interest her. I had set her up to tell me she wished to go back to those days. Or wished she’d never lived through them at all. Instead, what came was the most levelheaded response. I thought of saying, What a lovely, straightforward outlook you have, but held back in case I seemed condescending or, worse yet, sarcastic. In her place I’d probably have said I hated those days but missed each one. I would have tossed the idea for effect, perhaps to tease something out of her, or out of myself, or to test whether she had a feel for paradox and see how far we could grope about together in the murky terrain of guarded ambiguities uttered in attempted small talk.

But I felt that this sort of thing wouldn’t pass muster in her world either — saying you missed things you hated, hated those you loved, wanted what you’d turn down in no time — all these were affected torsions and spray-painted screens that would stir a withering nod goodbye from her.

I am Clara. Tell me another.

“And what was it on?”

“The thesis?”

“Yes.”

“On the table, of course, what else?”

So she was returning the favor. Thank you.

“No, seriously,” I said.

“You mean was it a dialogical treatment of marginalized women living in a hegemonic, monolingual world colonized by phalocratic institutions?”

Very funny.

“Well, it wasn’t,” she added.

Momentary silence.

“Am I supposed to keep asking?”

“No one asked you to ask anything. But, yes, you’re supposed to keep asking.”

For a moment I thought I’d lost her. I smiled back. “What was the thesis on, then?”

“You really want to know?”

“No, I’m only asking because I’m supposed to ask, remember?”

“On Folías. A musical genre. Totally without interest.”

“Folías? Would someone like me know this music?”

“Someone like you—” She repeated my phrase as though it were a strange fruit whose unusual taste she was still mulling before passing judgment, which is why she said, “We’re so sharp, so clever. Why, am I already supposed to guess who someone like you is?”

Right through me. She’d caught my trick question even before I had — my attempt to bring us closer, get her to say something about me.

I am Clara. Nice try.

“I’m sure you’ve heard Folías before, though you may not know it.”

And suddenly there it was again, her voice rising above the din in the crowded library, singing the somber opening bars of Handel’s famous sarabande. I, who had never understood why men love women to sing for them, saw the cobwebs clear before me.

“Recognize it?”

I did, but I didn’t answer. Instead: “I love your voice,” I blurted, hesitating whether to say anything else or, if still possible, to take it back. I was, once again, walking naked from my shirttails down, thrilled by my own daring.

“It’s a standard melody set to a standard chord progression, very similar to a passacaglia. Want some fruit punch?” she broke in, as though nipping both my compliment and the rising intimacy hesitating in the wings. She had uttered these words so abruptly that, once again, I felt she did indeed want me to notice she was changing topics, but that she wanted me to notice it only if I’d picked up her poorly disguised aversion to compliments.

I smiled at the maneuver. She caught my smile. And, having caught it, smiled back almost in self-mockery, sensing that if she gave any sign of guessing I had seen through her feigned abruptness she’d be admitting that my reading of her feint was closer to the truth than she might have wished. So she smiled both to own that she’d been caught and to show that our game was really so much fun: We’re so sharp, so clever, the two of us, aren’t we?

Or perhaps her smile was her way of countering my reading tit for tat, and that, much as she’d been caught, she too had found something to smile about in me—namely, the guilty pleasure I derived from the ebb and flow of what wasn’t being said. There may have been nothing there, and perhaps both of us knew it and were simply going through the motions of making contact by tossing empty signals. But I was — and I didn’t care to hide it — wearing a big smile that bordered on laughter.

Had she seen through this as well? And could she tell I wanted her to know it?

Nervous hesitation hovered between us, like the quiver of a jibe she considered for a moment but then immediately suppressed. Was she really going to call me on my smile and make me spell out what could have been my totally twisted reading of hers? Who are you, Clara?

For a moment, and perhaps to play with worst outcomes as a way to avert them, I began to consider the woman in the wide-open crimson shirt from the distance of the years to come, as though I were waving at her from the wrong end of a spyglass. As someone lost. As someone I’d met at a faraway party once and never saw again and soon forgot. Someone I could have changed my life for. Or who’d have thrown it so thoroughly off course that it would take years and a lifetime, generations, to recover. Just by looking at her from the distance of time, I could already foresee hollow January weekday evenings and all-day Sundays without her. Part of me had run ahead of me and was already coming back with news of what had happened long after I’d lost her: the walk to and from her house, whose whereabouts I knew nothing of, the view from her window, which I’d give everything to see again but that overlooked places I’d probably never seen, the sound of her coffee grinder in the morning, the smell around her cat’s litter box, the squeak of the service door when you put out the garbage late every night and heard the clatter of the neighbor’s triple lock, the smell of her sheets and of her towels, an entire world drifting away before I touched it.

I suddenly stopped myself, knowing, by an inverse logic familiar to superstitious people, that the very foretaste of sorrows to come presumed a degree of joy beforehand and would no doubt stand in the way of the very joy I was reluctant to consider for fear of forfeiting it. I felt no different than a castaway who, on glimpsing a sailboat from a high perch on his deserted island, omits to light a pyre because he’s spied too many such ships before and doesn’t want his hopes dashed again. But then, on urging himself to light a fire just the same, he begins to have second thoughts about the strangers on board who could prove more dangerous than the pythons and Komodo dragons he’s learned to live among. Weekday evenings alone weren’t so terrible. Hollow Sundays weren’t bad either. Nothing would come of this, I kept saying. Besides, thinking that I’d already lost her might ease the tension between us and allow me to regain my footing and act a bit more confidently.

What I didn’t want to feel was hope and, behind the hope, a craving so fierce that anyone watching me would instantly guess I was utterly and undeniably smitten.

I didn’t mind her knowing. I wanted her to know. Women like Clara know you’re smitten, expect you to be, can spot every one of your feckless attempts to disguise it. What I didn’t want to show was my struggle to keep my composure.

To parry her gaze, I tried to look elsewhere and seem distracted. I wanted her to ask why I’d suddenly drifted from her, wanted her to worry that she could lose me as easily as I knew I could lose her. But I also wanted her to laugh at me for doing precisely what I was doing. I wanted her to see through my pretended indifference and expose every one of my little maneuvers and, by so doing, show she was plenty familiar with this game, because she’d played it herself many times, was playing it right now, maybe. I bit my tongue again as brash thoughts welled up within me and clamored to speak. Here I was, a shy man pretending to be shy.

“Punch?” she repeated like someone who snaps a finger in front of you and brings you back among the living by saying Boo! “Them who sing fetches,” she added, all set to go and fetch me some punch.

I told her she didn’t have to bring me anything; I’d get some myself. I knew I was being unnecessarily fussy and that I could easily have accepted her offer. But I was unable to extricate myself once I had started down that slope. I seemed determined to show I was more uncomfortable having someone bring me a drink than flattered that she’d offered to.

“I just want to,” she replied. “I’ll even throw in some goodies on a plate. . if you let me go now before these singing yahoos come and gobble everything up,” she added, as though this were her closing inducement.

“You don’t have to, really.”

Perhaps what I wanted was not so much to spare her the errand as to prevent her from moving; the faintest step might throw us off — anything could come between us — we might lose our spot in the library and never recover our giddy pace.

She asked again. I caught myself insisting that I’d get the punch myself. I was beginning to sound coy and fatuous.

Then it happened, exactly as I feared.

“Oh well,” she shrugged, meaning, Suit yourself. Or worse: Hang it. Her voice was still buoyed by the mirth that had sprung up between us moments earlier; but there was a metallic chime somewhere, less like the lilt of irony and good cheer than like the downscale click of a file cabinet being slammed shut.

I instantly regretted her change of heart.

“And where would these goodies be?” I fumbled by way of resurrecting her original offer, thinking there was food elsewhere in the apartment.

“Oh, just stay put and I’ll get you some”—feigned exasperation bubbling in her voice. I caught sight of her neckline as she slipped on her levity again like a reversible coat, the flip side of hang it, sandpaper turned to velour. I wondered if rubbing people the wrong way was not her way of sidling up to them, her way of defusing tension by discharging so much of her own that if she got any closer it would be to dismiss you, but that in going through motions of dismissal she was actually sneaking up on you like a feral cat who doesn’t want you to know it doesn’t mind being petted.

I am Clara. She affected to snap. I affected to obey. In the packed, dark room where everyone’s shadow merged with everyone else’s, we couldn’t have chosen roles that came more naturally.

With this air of chronic turmoil, she got you to mean exactly what she had in mind for you, not because she liked to have her way, but because everything about her seemed so unusually charged, craggy, and barbed that not to give in to her jostling was like snubbing everything she was. Which is how she cornered you. To question her manner was to slight not just the manner but the person behind the manner. Even her way of arching her eyebrows, which warned you she required instant submission, could, if questioned, be likened to the rough plumage with which tiny birds puff themselves up to three times their size, the better to conceal their fear of not getting things simply by asking for them.

All this may have been wishful thinking on my part. She might be concealing nothing at all. She held nothing back, puffed up nothing, feared no one. It was just I who needed to think this way.

Perhaps Clara was exactly who she appeared to be: light and swift, alert, caustic and dangerous. Just Clara — no roles, no catch-me-if-you-can, no waggish sidling up to strangers or stealthy angling for friendship and chitchat. One of the drawbacks that came from being just who she was and saying just what she felt was to let those who were not used to such candor think it was a pose, that she had learned to hide her shyness better than most, but that she was no less tentative or apprehensive underneath, and that all this fretful behavior, starting from the way she let her elbow rest on my shoulder to mean just stop arguing when I quibbled over punch to the hand that came out of nowhere, was a sham, the way certain diamonds sparkle for a moment and are quite conveniently deemed glass, until we take a second look and slap our foreheads and ask whatever made us think they were fakes. The sham was in us, not them.

There are people who come on to you with friction. Chafing starts intimacy; and strife, like spite, is the shortest distance to the heart.

Before you finish your sentence, they nip it from your mouth and give it an entirely different spin, making it seem you had been secretly hinting at things you never knew you wanted and would easily have lived without but that you now crave, the way I craved that cup of punch — and with goodies thrown in, exactly as she’d promised, as though the whole evening and much, much more hung on that cup of punch.

Would she forgive my wishy-washiness? Or had she read it as a triumph of her will? Or was she thinking in altogether different terms? And what were these terms, and why couldn’t I begin to think in them?

She was gone in a second. I had lost her.

I should have known.

•

“Did you really want punch?” she asked when she returned, carrying a plate on which she’d arrayed a selection of Japanese appetizers in a scatter of tiny squares that only Paul Klee would have imagined. The crowd, she explained, had made ladling the punch too difficult. “Ergo, no punch.” Sounded like Ergo, lump it.

I was tempted to hold this against her, not just because I was suddenly disappointed, or because the word ergo itself seemed a tad chilling despite the lighthearted way she’d said it, but as though the whole exchange about getting, not getting, and then going to get the punch had one purpose: to trifle with me, to bait me, to raise my hopes only to dash them. Now, to absolve herself for not keeping her promise, or for not caring to, she was trying to make it seem I’d never cared for punch — which was the truth.

I noticed that she had sorted the appetizers in pairs and placed them in neat little rows around the plate, as though she’d carefully lined them up for Noah’s ark — her way of making up for neglecting the punch, I thought. The tuna-avocado miniature rolls — male and female — the kiwi-tile fish — male and female — the seared scallop with a sprig of mache on a bed of slithered turnips with tamarind jelly and a dab of lemon rind on top — male and female made He them. No sooner had I told her why the extravagant miscellany had made me smile than I realized there was something daring in my remark about the paired appetizers that were about to propagate and fill the earth — except that before I had time to backpedal, I caught something else neighboring this idea that moved me in my stomach as if I’d been buoyed up and let down on a high wave: not male and female, not male and female shifting on the cold banks of the Black Sea, filing up to book passage on Noah’s Circle Line, but male and female as in you and me, you and me, just you and me, Clara, waiting our turn, which turn, whose turn, say something now, Clara, or I’ll speak out of turn and I haven’t had enough to drink to find the courage to say it. I wanted to touch her shoulder, wanted to rub the length of her neck with my lips, kiss her under her right ear and under the left ear and along her breastbone, and thank her for arranging this plate, for knowing what I’d think, for thinking it with me, even if none of it had crossed her mind.

“On second thought—” I began, uncertain whether to add anything, and yet hesitating, because I knew that hesitating would catch her attention.

“What?”—mock vexation crackling in her voice.

“Actually, I hate punch,” I said.

It was her turn to laugh.

“In that case,” also spoken haltingly — she too knew how to play the waiting game and make me hold my breath for her next word—“I detest — as in de-test—punch, sangria, ladely-lady drinks, daiquiri, harakiri, vache qui rit. They make me womit.” It was her way of pulling the rug from under your feet just when you thought you had one-upped the last of her comebacks. I am Clara. I can do you one better.

What neither asked — because each already suspected the other’s answer — was why we’d fussed so much over punch if neither cared for it.

Once again, not asking could only betray we’d both thought of asking and decided not to. We smiled at our implied truce, smiled for smiling, smiled because we knew, and wanted the other to know, we’d right away own up to why we’d tussled over punch if the other so much as hinted at the question.

“I’m not even sure I’ve ever liked people who like punch,” I added.

“Oh, if that’s where you’re going,” she said, clearly not about to be outdone, “I might as well come clean: I’ve never been crazy about parties that have a bowl of punch sitting right in the middle of them.”

I liked her like this.

“And the people who attend parties where a bowl of punch sits right in the middle, do you like them?”

“Do I like otherpeoples?” She paused. “Is this what you’re asking?”

I guessed this was what I was asking.

“Seldom,” she said. “Most people are Shukoffs. Except those I like. And before I get to like them, they’re Shukoffs too.”

I craved to know where I ranked on the Scale of Shukoff, but didn’t dare ask.

“What makes you want to know Shukoffs?”

I liked using her lingo.

“You really want to know?”

Couldn’t wait to know.

“Boredom.”

“Boredom behind a Christmas tree?”

With my innocent zap, I wanted nothing more than to show I enjoyed recalling how we’d met and that this moment was very much with me, that I didn’t want to let it go yet.

“Maybe.” She hesitated. Perhaps she did not like to agree with people so easily and preferred putting forth a maybe before a yes. I was already hearing the faint rumblings of a drumroll coming to a rise. “But then just think how boring this party would be without me.”

I loved this.

“I’d probably have already left,” I said.

“I’m not keeping you, am I?”

And there it was again, the message that wasn’t the real message but might just as easily have been the real message all along.

Something comforting, almost heartwarming in this undertow of bristles and snags aroused me and made me feel she was a kindred spirit who’d alighted with me in the same afterlife, taken the words from my mouth, and, by saying them back to me, given them a life and a spin they’d never have had I kept them to myself. Under guise of spitfire mini-tantrums, her words suggested something at once kind and welcoming, like the rough folds of a trusted and forgiving blanket that takes us as we are and knows how we sleep, what we’ve been through, what things we dream of and so desperately crave and are ashamed to own up to when we’re alone and naked with ourselves. Did she know me that well?

“Most people remain Shukoffs,” I said, not knowing whether I meant it. “But I could be wrong.”

“Are you always this amphibalent?” she taunted.

“Aren’t you?”

“I invented the word.”

I am Clara. I invent riddles and their cheats.

I looked away, perhaps to avoid looking at her. I scanned the faces in the library. The large room was filled with just the sort of people who go to parties where a bowl of punch sits in the middle of their shiftless chatter. I remembered her scornful just-look-at-these-faces and tried to cast a withering glance in their direction. The gesture gave me a pretext to keep looking elsewhere.

“Otherpeoples,” I said, to fill the silence, repeating the word we’d tacitly agreed to give them, as though this one word summed up everything we’d felt about everyone else and would nail the coffin on our indictment of mankind whole. We were fellow aliens conspiring to renew our reluctant courtship with Earthlings.

“Otherpeoples,” she echoed, still holding the plate, whose contents neither of us had touched yet. She hadn’t offered it to me, and I didn’t dare.

What threw me off was the way she’d said otherpeoples. It didn’t seem as disenchanted as I had hoped, but had paled into something soulful, verging on sorrow and mercy.

“Are otherpeoples as terrible as all that?” she asked, looking up to me for an answer, as though I was the expert who had led her through a landscape that wasn’t really hers and for which she had little affinity or much patience, but that she’d strayed in simply because our conversation had drifted that way. Was she disagreeing with me politely? Or worse yet: rebuking me?

“Terrible? No,” I replied. “Necessary? I don’t know.”

She gave it some thought. “Some are. Necessary, that is. At least to me they are. Sometimes I wish they weren’t — though we’re always alone in the end.”

Again she spoke these words with such mournful candor and humility that she seemed to own up to a weakness in herself, which she had tried but failed to overcome. Her words stung me to the quick, because they reminded me that we were not two intergalactic wayfarers who had landed in the same afterlife but that I was the alien and she the first native who’d run into me and extended a friendly hand and was about to take me into town and introduce me to her friends and parents. She, I gathered, liked others and knew how to put up with Shukoffs till they stopped being Shukoffs.

“So much for otherpeoples,” she added, with a pensive, faraway gaze, as though still nursing unresolved feelings about them. “Sometimes they’re all that stands between us and the ditch to remind us we’re not always alone, even when there are trenches between us. So, yes, they are important.”

“I know,” I said. Perhaps I had gone too far in my wholesale indictment of mankind and this was the time to backpedal. “I too hate being alone.”

“Oh, I don’t mind being alone at all,” she corrected. “I like being alone.”

Had she snubbed yet another one of my efforts to align my outlook to hers? Or, in my attempt to understand her in terms of myself, had I simply failed to hear what she was saying? Was I desperately trying to think she was like me so that she might be less of a stranger? Or was I trying to be like her to show we were closer than we seemed?

“With or without them, it’s always pandangst.”

“Pandangst?”

“Pandemic anxiety — last seen stalking the Upper West Side on Sunday evening. But there were two unreported sightings this afternoon. I hate afternoons. This is the winter of pandangst.”

Suddenly I saw it, should have seen it all along. She didn’t mind being alone, didn’t mind it the way only those who’re never alone long to be alone. Solitude was totally foreign to her. I envied her. Probably, her friends and, I assumed, her lovers or would-be lovers didn’t make it easy for her to be alone — a condition she didn’t quite mind but enjoyed complaining about, as only those who’ve been everywhere in the world readily admit they’ve never seen Luxor or Cádiz.

“I’ve learned to take the best others have to offer.” This was the person who goes over to perfect strangers and just greets them with a handshake. No arrogance in her words — rather the muted dejection over an implied long list of setbacks and disappointments. “I take what they have to give wherever I find it.”

Pause.

“And the rest?”

This may not have been her drift, but I thought I’d picked up the suggestion of an undisclosed but rattling at the tail end of her sentence like a warning and a lure.

“The rest gets tossed?” I offered, trying to show that I was sufficiently experienced in the ways of love to have caught her meaning and that I too was guilty of taking what I needed from people and dumping the rest.

“Tossed? Perhaps,” she responded, still unconvinced by what I was offering for her consideration.

Perhaps I was being harsh and unfair, for this may not have been what she’d meant to add. She had absentmindedly gone along with my suggestion when all she’d meant to say, perhaps, was “I take people just as they are.”

Or was this a more pointed warning yet — I take what I need where I find it, so watch yourself — a warning I had momentarily failed to heed because it didn’t agree with her distressed look of a few seconds earlier?

I was on the point of changing tack and suggesting that perhaps we never toss away or let go of anything in life, much less unlove those we never loved at all.

“Perhaps you are right,” she interrupted. “We keep people for when we’ll need them, to tide us over, not because we want them. I don’t think I’m always good for people.”

She reminded me of birds of prey who keep their quarry alive but paralyzed, to feed their young on.

What happened to those who had only the best taken from them and the rest junked?

What happened to a man after Clara was done with him?

I am Clara. Not always good for people.

Was this her way of drawing me out, or was it a warning asking to be disbelieved?

Was her life a flea-ridden trench dressed up as a high-end boutique?

Maybe, she said. Some of us have spent our entire lives in the trenches. Some of us tussle, and hope, and love so near the trenches that we stink of them.

This was her contribution to my image of trenches. Coming as it did from a woman like her, it struck me as too dark, too bleak, not quite believable. Did she, with the unbuttoned shirt, single pendant, and gleaming tanned body just back from the Caribbean really nurse so tragic a view of life? Or was this her spin on the demonic image I’d concocted to keep the conversation going between us?

What did she mean by love in the trenches? Life with someone? Life without love? Life trying to invent someone and finding the wrong one each time? Life with too many? Life with very few, or none that mattered? Or was it the life of single people — its highs and lows, as we bivouac from place to place in large cities in search of something we’re no longer sure we’d call love if it sprang on us from a nearby trench and screamed its name was Clara?

Trenches. With or without people. Trenches just the same. Dating, especially. She hated dating. Torment and torture, the pit of pandangst. De-tested dating. Would rather womit than date.

Trenches on Sunday afternoons. This, we agreed, was truly the pits, the mother of all gutters and foxholes. Les tranchées du dimanche. Which suddenly gave them the luster of a twilit France. Ville d’Avray. Corot. Eric Rohmer.

Saturdays weren’t too great either, I said. Saturday breakfast, in or out, always a sense that others are happier — being others. Then the unavoidable two-hour Laundromat where you feel you could just as easily shed your skin and throw it in with your socks, and, like a crustacean hiding in a rock while a new identity is being spun for you, hope to reinvent yourself from what comes out of the dryer.

She laughed.

Her turn: The trenches, the slough of amphibalence, the quag of awkward, the bog of boredom: hurting, being hurt, the cold, lame handshake of estranged lovers who come out to inspect the damage, smoke a cigarette together, play friends, then head back to life without love.

Mine: Those who hurt us most are sometimes those we’ve loved the least. Come Sundays in the quag, we miss them too.

Hers: The quag when sleep doesn’t come soon enough and you wish you were with someone, anyone. Or with someone else. Or when someone is better than no one, but no one better yet.

Mine: The quag when you walk by someone’s home and remember how miserable you were but how truly miserable you are now that you no longer live there. Days that go down into some high-speed funnel but which you’d trade back to have all over again, this time slower, though you’d probably give anything never to have lived them at all.

“High amphibalence.”

“The days I haven’t spent in the quag recently I can count on one hand,” I said. “The days in the rose garden on one finger.”

“Are you in the quag now?”

She didn’t mince words.

“Not in the quag,” I replied. “Just — on hold. On ice. Maybe in overhaul, possibly recall.”

The phrase amused her. She got my drift well enough, even if our meanings and metaphors were growing ever more tangled.

“So when were you in the rose garden last?”

How I loved the way the question cut to the chase and brought out what we’d been hinting at all along.

Should I tell her? Had I even understood her question? Or should I assume we were speaking the same language? I could say: This right now is the rose garden. Or: I’d never expected to see the rose garden so soon.

“Not since mid-May,” I heard myself say. How easy to let this out in the open. It made my fear of speaking about myself seem so trivial, so cagey, every word I’d speak now seemed charged with thrill and denudedness.

“And you?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Lying low, just lying low these days — like you, I suppose. Call it in hibernation, in quarantine, in time-out — for my sins, for my whatevers. In Rekonvaleszenz,” she said, imitating the fastidiously halting lisp of Viennese analysts determined to use a polysyllabic Teutolatinate for on the rebound. “I’m being reconditioned too. Not a party person, really.”

It took me totally by surprise. In my eyes, she personified party people. What was I getting wrong? Fearing our messages were getting all coiled and twisted, I asked, “We are speaking about the same thing, aren’t we?”

Amused, and without missing a beat: “We know we are.”

This didn’t clarify matters, but I loved the disclosure of conspiracy, by far the most stirring and exhilarating thing between us.

I looked at her as she began to head toward the other end of the library, where two bookcases of visibly untouched Pléiades volumes stood. She didn’t look like someone in torment and torture at all.

“What do you think?”

“Of these books?”

“No, of her.”

I looked at the blond woman she was indicating. Her name was Beryl, she said.

“I don’t know. Nice, I suppose,” I said. I could tell Clara would have preferred a devastating bashing on the spot. But I also wanted her to know that I was merely pretending to be naive and was just holding out before delivering my own demolition job. She didn’t give me time.

“Skin’s as white as aspirin, cankles the size of papayas, and her knees have knocked each other senseless — don’t you notice anything?” she said. “She’s walking on her hindquarters. Look.”

Clara mimicked the woman’s gait, holding both her arms with the plate limply in midair as though they belonged to a dog straining to act human.

I am Clara. I invented the hatchet.

“Everyone says she waddles.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Look at her legs the next time.”

“What next time?” I said, trying to show I’d already dismissed and filed her away.

“Oh, knowing her, there’ll be a next time soon enough — she’s been eyeing you for a while.”

“Me?”

“Like you didn’t know.”

Then, without warning: “Let’s go downstairs. It’s quieter,” she said, indicating a spiral staircase I had totally failed to notice but had not stopped staring at all the time I’d been speaking to her in the library. I liked spiral staircases. How couldn’t I have registered its existence? I am Clara. I blind people.

•

This was not an apartment; it was a palace pretending to be an apartment. The stairway was crowded with people. Leaning against the railing was a young man dressed in a tight black suit whom she obviously knew and who, after exclaiming a loud, almost histrionic “Clariushka!” put both arms around her while she struggled to hold the plate away from him with a mock-expression that said, “Don’t even think of it, they’re not for you.”

“Seen Orla anywhere?”

“All you have to do is look for Tito,” she snickered.

“Nasty, nasty, nasty. Rollo was asking about you.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Love to Pavel.”

That was Pablito, she said. Did she know everyone here? Not a party person? Seriously? And did everyone have a nickname?

As we proceeded downstairs, she gave me her hand. I felt our palms caress, sensing all along that there was as much good fellowship as unkindled passion in this tireless rubbing of fingers. Neither really acknowledged it or wanted it stopped. This was no more than a play of hands, which is why neither bothered to stop or hide the tenuous, guilty pleasure of prolonged touching.

Downstairs, she navigated the crowd and led me to a quieter spot by one of the bay windows, where three tiny cushions seemed waiting for us in an alcove. She was about to place the dish between us, but then sat right next to me, holding the plate on her lap. It was meant to be noticed, I thought, and therefore open to interpretation.

“Well?”

I didn’t know what she meant.

All I could think of was her collarbone and its gleaming suntan. The lady with the collarbone. The shirt and the collarbone. To a collarbone. This collarbone in two hundred years would, if it was cold in the icy silence of the tomb, so haunt my days and chill my dreaming nights that I would wish my own heart dry of blood. To touch and run a finger the length of her collarbone. Who was this collarbone, what person, what strange will came out to stop me when I wished my mouth on this collarbone? Collarbone, collarbone, are you not weary, will I be grieving over collarbones unyielding? I stared at her eyes and was suddenly speechless, my mind in disarray. The words weren’t coming. My thoughts were all tousled and scattered. I couldn’t even put two thoughts together and felt like a parent trying to teach an unsteady toddler how to walk by holding both his hands and asking him to put one foot before the other, one word before the other, but the child wasn’t moving. I stumbled from one thing to the other, then stood frozen and speechless, couldn’t think of anything.

Let her know all this. For I also loved this. One more minute and I won’t even want to hide how thoroughly her stare had thrown me off and worn me down and made me want to spill everything. One more minute and I’ll break down and want to kiss her and ask to kiss her, and if she says no, absolutely not, then I don’t know, but knowing me, I’ll ask again. And I know she knows.

“So,” she interrupted, “tell me about the six-and-a-half-month babe in the rosebush.”

She’d taken the trouble to calculate the months. And wanted me to know it. Or was this a red herring purposely thrown in to muddy things further and give her — or me — an easy out of the silence we’d gotten ourselves in?

I didn’t want to talk about the babe in the rosebush.

“Why not? Sulky-pouty?”

I shook my head, as in: You’re way off base. I was trying to come up with something clever.

“Do you find love often?” I blurted out, turning the tables, thrilled by what I’d suddenly dared to ask. There was no turning back now.

“Often enough. Or some version of it. Often enough to keep looking for it,” she replied instantly, as though the question hadn’t surprised her or taken her aback. But then: “Do you?” she asked, suddenly tearing the veil I thought I had deftly placed between us. Her switch from questioned to questioner was too abrupt and, as I scrambled to fashion a good answer, I caught her smiling again, as if my hasty reference to last May’s rose garden had come to haunt me and stood between me and the shroud I was wrestling to put on. The more I groped for an answer, the more I heard her mimic the ticking sounds of a quiz show clock. If she hadn’t before, she made it clear she’d already intuited my answer but wasn’t letting me off so fast. I wanted to explain how I didn’t know whether it was harder to find love in others or in oneself, that love in the dale of pandangst wasn’t exactly love, shouldn’t be confused with, mistaken for, but she snapped—

“Time’s up!”

I watched her hold an imaginary stopwatch in her hand, with her thumb pressing down on the rest button.

“But I thought I had a few seconds left.”

“The sponsors of the show regret to inform their esteemed guest that he has been disqualified on grounds of—”

She was giving me one last chance to bow out with dignity.

Again I fumbled for something sparkling and clever to wriggle out of this corner, realizing all the while that my lack of wit stood as much against me now as did my inability to tell the truth and break the leaden silence between us.

“—on grounds of?” she continued, still holding the imaginary stopwatch in her hand.

“On grounds of amphibalence?”

“On grounds of amphibalence it is, precisely. As a consolation prize the house is pleased to have arranged this medley of appetizers on this here plate, which we urge our honorable guest to try tasting before this here show hostess gobbles everything up.”

I put out two timid fingers to the plate.

“These are the best, they have no garlique. Hate garlique.”

“We do?”

“Very much.”

There was no point in saying that I, like those who liked singing in the shower, liked garlic.

“We hate garlique too, then.”

Then she indicated a tiny piece of glazed meat over which a thin serrated leaf stood up like the mane of a groomed seahorse. “Eat it. . elaborately!”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, as if you were eating something that requires stupor and veneration.”

Why did I feel that everything she was saying to me was a veiled, not-so-veiled reference to her, to us?

“What are they?” I asked, pointing at a square fragment of the Paul Klee arrangement.

“We do not ask, we put our hand out, and we reach for.”

Her mouth was full and she was chewing slowly, implying she relished every bite. What a strange person. Was she going to be yet another one of these women who need to remind everyone they are sensual tornadoes held in check by mild civilities at the cocktail hour?

“Mankiewicz,” she whispered a minute later.

“Mankiewicz,” I echoed back, as if the word had a deeper meaning I couldn’t fathom but which I took to be synonymous with exquisite. For a moment I thought she was referring to someone in the room. Or was it the appetizer itself, whose name I hadn’t heard correctly? Or was this a mantra spoken only in moments of delectation? Mankiewicz.

“Qui est Mankiewicz?”

“Mankiewicz made these.”

“Doesn’t sound japonais.”

“Isn’t japonais.”

Then it was the turn of a tiny meatball, which she cautioned was to be dipped ever so delicately in the tiny dab of very spicy Senegalese sauce on the plate. “Just a graze, not more.”

“Love spices.”

“Loves spices.”

I was about to drop the meatball into my mouth when she asked me to wait.

Was she going to impose one of those intricate rituals that people who’ve just come back from the exotic spots adopt and try to foist on their baffled dinner guests?

“I must warn you, it’s very, very spicy.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me.”

I loved the way we echoed each other’s words — and not just our words but the tone of our words, as if in exchanging these curt tit for tats we were being drawn into a magnetic field that required only that we yield to it. Our exchange made me think of a hand rubbing the soft down on someone’s velvet sleeve, back and forth, with the nap, against the nap, with the nap, against the nap, as though the meaningless words we volleyed between us were nothing more than stray objects picked up without notice and swapped from one hand to the other, from one person to the next, and all that mattered was the traffic and the gesture, the give and take, not the words, not the things, just the back and forth.

“Mankiewicz,” I said, as if toasting his health with his meatball and uttering an obscure spell meant to ward off evil. It reminded me of deep-sea divers who sit on the edge of a rowboat and mutter a one-word mantra before raising both thumbs and jumping head down, fins up.

“Mankiewicz,” she whispered in mock sullenness.

It would take me a while to realize that I should have heeded her warning, because a scalding sensation began to take hold of me, rising all over my scalp, then rippling down my nape. Tears welled in my eyes, and even before I knew what to do with them — hold them back, strike an attitude, spit out the food — they overflowed, streaming down my cheeks, while the fire in my mouth intensified each time I bit the food or tried to send it down. I fumbled for my handkerchief, feeling helpless and mortified, and then terribly frightened, because no matter how long I waited for the fire to subside, none of it was going away — because even after I’d swallowed the whole meatball, it kept getting worse, as though the first burst hadn’t even been a fire, and had nothing to do with the meatball itself, but was a preamble to a conflagration yet to come. Could it get any worse than this? Would I get sick? Would there be permanent damage to my body? I wanted to regain my composure and tell her what was happening to me, but my silence, my tears, my agony must have already told her enough. I threw my head back and found it resting on the window-pane, a chilly sensation which felt so welcome at that moment that, in my befuddled state, I understood why people loved huskies and why huskies thrived in cold weather and why, if I had my wish, I’d want nothing more than to become a husky too, roaming freely on the ice-cold banks of the Hudson immediately outside our window. Ask me again, Clara, whether I’m naked in the trenches now and I’ll tell you how deep and deadly is this dun-colored ditch I’ve fallen into and how desperately I’m struggling to come out; all I want is snow, ice, more ice.

Clara was staring at me uneasily, as if I had fainted and was just coming to. She offered me a piece of bread, which, I realized, she had purposely placed on the plate, to follow the peppered meatball. I suddenly wished her mouth was on fire as well. I wanted her to feel as flustered, shaken, and naked as I felt just now, so that I wouldn’t be alone in this, and with fire in both our mouths and tears streaming on our faces we might find one more thing to draw us closer — no words, no quips, no speeches — just our mouths burning as one mouth together, making love before we even knew we were.

Yet there she sat, leaning toward me, tranquil and collected, smiling probably, like a nurse bending down to wipe the sweat off a wounded soldier’s face with a damp sponge. I thought of how the soldier might reach out to hold her hand and, because he’s lost so much blood, opens up his heart to someone who, in other circumstances, would never have given him the time of day. Was she worried? Or would she wait for me to get better before jeering at me, I warned you, didn’t I, but did he listen — did he listen? Just touch my face with these lips, Clara, touch me with your lips, your jeering, taunting lips, touch me with your thumb, Clara, dig into my mouth and pull out the fire, with your thumb and your tongue.

What made things worse was the shame of it. Was there anything I could do to dispel the indignity of being just a writhing human body? I tried to comfort myself by spinning feel-good platitudes — that our body is who we are, that our body knows us better than we do, that showing all was far better than my smokescreen of words, that this went to the heart of things. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.

Or perhaps things were more complicated than I thought. For part of me liked nothing better than to show her how I was put together and where things easily came apart — the thrill of laying myself as bare and open as an anatomy book where you lift one transparency after the other to show the color of fire in my gullet and of the quiet hysteria coiled around the telltale organs of shame, the pleasure of my shame, of my petty, paltry, startled shame — a shame one puts on and tries hard to believe exists and even struggles to overcome, when, all along, as in nudist colonies, it was left in a locker with our watch and our wallet.

I tried to mumble something to cover up my agitation. But, like the stag in Ovid, had no voice left, or, sensing that something between a husky squawk and a puny squeal would come out and embarrass me further, I feigned having lost all speech. I wanted to moan. I wanted us to moan together, to moan and moan and moan, as if we’d become doe and hart, doe and hart, moaning together in a winter-blown forest where lovers never part.

So here was her piece of bread. And here I was, trying to show it was totally unnecessary, that I’d been through this before and would come out whole, just give me a moment, I’ll be done in a sec, just let me save face, stop staring — the wounded soldier stanching and stitching the wound himself — there!

But she sat like a watchful nurse who is paid by the hour and won’t leave until the patient swallows every last pill the doctor prescribed.

“Here, take this piece of bread,” she said, “and hold it in your mouth, it might help.” I am Clara, the merciful.

And I took it the way one might take a handkerchief, without struggle, without pride, because I knew — and this was the part I concealed behind a forced smile — that I had, against my will, against all odds, and against all explanations, come so close to it that my one concern now was to make sure that the seizure which seemed about to erupt in my throat wouldn’t be a sob.

I finally swallowed the bread. She watched me gulp it in silence.

She turned around and looked out the window. She reminded me of someone taking my pulse while looking away, counting the seconds with a faraway gaze. I didn’t know what to do, so I turned around as well and stared out at the Hudson, our shoulders touching — we knew better than to make too much of this, part of me now eager to show that silence is perfectly acceptable between strangers who meet at a party and need a moment to catch their breath. We didn’t say anything about the view, or about the people she knew or didn’t know in the room, or about the lights speckling the New Jersey shoreline, or about the mournful slabs of ice working their way downstream like a flock of scattered ewes shepherded by a large stationary barge that followed them with its vigilant floodlights.

Outside, on Riverside Drive, solitary lampposts stood out in pools of light, glistening on the snow, like the lost chorus of a Greek play, each a stranded magus with his head ablaze. We’re too far, they seemed to say, and we cannot hear, but we know, we’ve always known about you.

•

She liked fresh air, she said. She opened the French windows a crack, letting a cold draft steal into the room. Then she stepped out onto what turned out to be a very large terrace and proceeded to light a cigarette. I followed. Did I smoke? I made a motion to accept, but then remembered I’d decided to quit smoking just around the time of the six-and-a-half-month babe. I gave a hasty explanation. She apologized, she’d never offer again, she said. I tried not to interpret whether the word again boded well, but decided not to extort hidden meanings in everything she said. “I call them secret agents.”

“Why?”

“Secret agents always smoke in movies.”

“Does this mean you have many secrets?”

“You’re fishing.”

Stupid, stupid me!

She mimicked the motions of a postwar agent lighting up as he scurries through the dark, cobbled lanes of old Vienna.

Outside, a pale silver hue hovered over the city. It hadn’t stopped snowing all evening. She stood by the balustrade, moved her foot, and dreamily brushed aside some of the snow with her maroon suede pump, then gently swept it off the ledge. I watched the snow scatter in the wind.

I liked the gesture: shoe, suede, snow, ledge, the whole thing done distractedly, with a cigarette between her fingers.

I had never realized that there was a kind of beauty in stepping on fresh snow and leaving tracks. I always try to avoid the snow, am good to my shoes.

From our high perch, the silver-purple city looked aerial and distant and superterrestrial, a beguiling kingdom whose beaming spires rose silently through the twilit winter mist to parley with the stars. I watched the fresh furrowed tracks on Riverside Drive, the scattered lampposts with their heads ablaze, and a bus crawling through the snow, tilting its way past the knoll off 112th and Riverside before shuffling off, snow padding its lank shoulders, an empty, Stygian vessel headed toward destinations and sights unseen. I am like Clara, it said, I’ll take you places you never knew.

A waiter opened the sliding door to the terrace and asked if we wanted anything to drink. Spotting a Bloody Mary on his tray, Clara, without hesitating, said she’d take that one. Before he had time to protest, she had already lifted it from his tray. I am Clara. I take things. The drink matched the color of her shirt. Then she stood the wide-rimmed glass on the balustrade, digging its base and part of its slim neck into the snow either to keep it cold or to prevent it from tipping over with the first wind. When she was done smoking, she stubbed out her cigarette with her shoe, and then, just as she’d done with the snow, gently swept it off the ledge. I knew I’d never forget this moment. The shoes, the glass, the terrace, the ice floes plying down the Hudson, the bus shuffling up the Drive. Sweet Hudson, I thought, run softly, till I end my song.

•

Earlier that evening I had taken a similar bus and, because of the blizzard, had totally missed my stop and gotten off six blocks past 106th Street. I remembered wondering where I was, and why I had erred, feeling ridiculous as I lugged my boutiquey plastic bag where two bottles of Champagne kept clinking despite the piece of cardboard the man at the liquor store had inserted between them. In the blizzard, off 112th Street, I sighted the statue of Samuel J. Tilden with its impassive, solemn gaze frozen westward, as I clambered up the steps and looked around, trying to avoid a drooling St. Bernard who suddenly appeared on the mound and didn’t seem about to ignore me. Should I run away or just stay calm, pretend I hadn’t seen it? Then I heard the voice of two boys calling it off. They were sledding down the mound. The dog, who had strayed somewhat, began to follow them into the park. And then the quiet, peaceful, blissful walk down those six deserted blocks on the service road off Riverside, by turns convex and concave, the sound of ice crunching underneath the snow. It made me think of Capra’s Bedford Falls and Van Gogh’s Saint-Rémy, and of Leipzig and Bach choirs and how the slightest accidents sometimes open up new worlds, new buildings, new people, unveiling sudden faces we know we’ll never want to lose. Saint-Rémy, the town where Nostradamus and Van Gogh walked the same sidewalk, the seer and the madman crossing paths, centuries apart, just a nod hello.

From the sidewalk, as I looked at the windows upstairs, I had pictured quiet, contented families where children start homework on time, and where guests, ever reluctant to leave, liven up dinner parties where spouses seldom speak. From the terrace where we stood now, the incident with the scary St. Bernard seemed a lifetime away. I remembered thinking of medieval Weihnachten towns along the Rhine and the Elbe, especially with the cathedral looming down 112th Street and the river so close by. To arrive more than fashionably late, I had walked around the block and reached Straus Park on Broadway, glad to see that I still had time to reconsider going to this party, especially now that I had almost no desire to attend, and caught myself coming up with good excuses to do a double turn and head back home, all the while holding on to the invitation card with the address printed in gold filigree. The script was so thin that I couldn’t read it and was almost tempted to ask directions of one of the lampposts, it too, like me, lost and stranded in the storm, though ever so willing to shed the scant light it had to help me read what began to look like ghost quatrains in the cursive hand of Nostradamus himself. To kill time, I found a small coffee shop and ordered tea.

Now I was here and I was with Clara.

After downing one Mankiewicz and almost bawling on a piece of peppercorn, I was standing on a terrace overlooking Manhattan, already thinking of revisiting 106th Street tomorrow night to replay this evening all over again — at my leisure, in my own time, the cathedral, the park, the snow, the golden filigree, and the lampposts with their heads ablaze. I looked down and, if I could, would have signaled to the I approaching the building a few hours earlier and warned him to keep putting off coming here — take a half step first, then half of that half step, and half of the half of that half step, as superstitious people do when they half reach out and push away the very thing they crave but fear they’ll never have unless they’ve pushed it far enough first — to walk and want asymptotically.

Should I put my arm around her? Asymptotically?

I tried to look away from her. And perhaps she too was looking away, both of us now staring out at the evening sky, where a faint unsteady bluish search beam, emanating from an unknown corner of the Upper West Side, orbited the sky, picking its way through the blotchy night as if in search of something it couldn’t tell and didn’t really mean to find each time it looped above us like a slim and trellised Roman corvus missing its landing each time it tried to come down on a Carthaginian ghost ship.

Tonight the Magi are truly lost, I wanted to say.

But I kept it to myself, wondering how long we were going to stand like this and stare out into the dark, tracing the silent course of the light beam overhead as if it were a riveting spectacle justifying our silence. Perhaps, by dint of scouring the sky, the beam might finally alight on something for us to talk about — except that there was nothing for the beam to land on — in which case, perhaps, we’d turn the beam itself into a subject of conversation. I wonder where it’s being aimed at. Or: Where is it coming from? Or: Why does it dip each time it seems to touch the northernmost spire? Or: looks like we’re suddenly in London and this is the Blitz. Or Montevideo. Or Bellagio. Or there was the other, ineffable question I kept spinning to myself as though it were a mini-beam searching within me as well, a question I couldn’t even ask, much less answer, but needed to ask, of myself, of her, and back to myself — because, if I knew I had stepped into a tiny miracle the moment we’d walked onto the terrace to look over this unreal city, I also needed to know that she thought so too before believing it myself.

“Bellagio,” I said.

“What about Bellagio?”

“Bellagio’s a tiny village at the tip of a land mass in Lake Como.”

“I know Bellagio. I’ve been to Bellagio.”

Zapped again.

“On special evenings, Bellagio is almost a fingertip away, an illuminated paradise, just a couple of oar strokes from the western shore of Lake Como. On other nights it seems not a furlong but leagues and a lifetime away, unattainable. This right now is a Bellagio moment.”

“What is a Bellagio moment?”

Are we speaking in code, you and I, Clara? I was treading on eggshells. If part of me didn’t know where I was going with this, another felt that I was intentionally seeking dangerous terrain.

“Really want to know?”

“Maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Then you’ve already guessed. Life on the other bank. Life as it’s meant to be, not as we end up living it. Bellagio, not New Jersey. Byzantium.”

“You were right the first time.”

“When?”

“When you said I’d already guessed. I didn’t need the explanation.”

Snubbed and zapped again.

Silence fell upon us.

“Mean and nasty,” she finally said.

“Mean and nasty?” I asked, though I knew exactly what she meant. Suddenly, and without knowing it, I didn’t want us to get too close, too personal, didn’t want us to start talking about the tension between us. She reminded me of a man and woman who meet on a train and begin talking of meeting strangers on a train. Was she the type who discusses what she feels in the very company of the stranger who makes her feel it?

“Mean and nasty, Clara. It’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

I shook my head. I preferred silence. Until it became intolerable again. Was I by any chance pouting without knowing it? I was pouting.

“What?” she asked.

“I am looking for my star.” Change the subject, move on, let it go, put smoke between us, say anything.

“So we have stars now?”

“If there’s fate, there’s a star.”

What kind of talk was this?

“So this is fate?”

I did not answer. Was this yet another derisive way of slamming the door on me? Or of ramming it open? Was she challenging me to say something? Or to keep my mouth shut? Was I going to be evasive again?

All I wanted was to ask, Clara, what is happening to us?

She’d not answer, of course or, if she did, she’d come back with a snub and a spur, carrot and stick.

Do I really have to tell you? she’d ask.

Then tell me what is happening to me. Should be obvious enough by now.

Maybe I’m not going there either.

As ever, silence and arousal. Don’t speak if you don’t know, don’t speak if you do know.

“And by the way,” she said, “I do believe in fate. I think.”

Was this now the equivalent of a nightclub floozy talking Kabbalah?

“Maybe fate has an on and an off button,” I said, “except that no one knows when it’s on or off.”

“Totally wrong. The button is on and off at the same time. That’s why it’s called fate.” She smiled and gave me a got-you-didn’t-I? stare.

How I wished that the staring between us might rouse my courage to pass a finger on her lips, let it rest on her bottom lip, and then, having left it there, begin to touch her teeth, her front teeth, her bottom teeth, then slip that finger ever so slowly into her mouth and touch her tongue, her moist and restless, feral tongue, which spoke such twisted, barbed-wire things, and feel it quiver, like quicksilver and lava brewing in the underground, thrashing the mean and nasty thoughts it was forever coming up with in that cauldron called Clara. I wanted my thumb in her mouth, let my thumb take the venom when she bites, let my thumb tame the tongue, let the tongue be wildfire, and in our death brawl let that tongue seek my tongue now that I’d stirred its wrath.

•

To justify the silence, I tried to seem thoroughly rapt by the beam, as though this blurry shaft of light traveling through the bruise gray night did indeed mirror something bruised and gray in me as well, as if it were half prying through a nightworld all my own, searching not just for something for me to say to her, or for the shadow meaning of what was happening to us, but for some dark, blind, quiet spot within me that the ray, as in all prisoner-of-war films, seemed to probe but to miss each time it circled the sky. I couldn’t speak, because I couldn’t see, because the ray itself, like a cross between a one-handed clock that cannot tell time and a compass magnetized to no poles, reminded me of me: it didn’t really know where it was going, couldn’t grope its way around, and wouldn’t find anything out there to bring back to this terrace for us to talk about. Instead, it kept pointing to the bluffs across the Hudson, as though something far more real lay across the bridge, on the other side, as though life stood out there, and this here was merely lifelike.

How distant she suddenly seemed, so many locked doors and hatches away, so many life-tales, so many people who had stood between us over the years like the quags and quarries each one was and remained so still, as she and I stood on this terrace. Was I a trench in someone else’s life? Was she in mine?

To persuade us that my silence was not the result of an inability to come up with anything to say but that I was truly distracted by brooding, somber thoughts that I wasn’t about to share, I let my mind conjure my father’s face, when I’d gone to see him late at night after a party last year, his ordering me to sit at the edge of his bed to tell him everything I’d seen and eaten that night—And start from the very top, not midway as you always do, and then finding a way to say it: I see you so seldom now, or I never see you with anyone, or When I see you with someone she never lasts long enough for me to remember her name, and just when I thought I had deftly dodged the larger question about the weeks and days remaining to him, to hear him add that old bromide about children, I’ve waited so long, but more I cannot. At least tell me there’s someone. Then, with distemper in his voice, There’s no one, is there? There’s no one, I’d say. Their names, again, Alice, Jean, Beatrice, and that ballbuster heiress from Maine with the big feet who helped us stack the wines on the balcony and couldn’t even wrap a napkin around the silverware because she smoked so much?

Livia, I said.

Why so disaffected, so disengaged? His words. MTH, he’d say. Marry the heiress, then. And all I could think of saying was: Everything she has I never wanted. Everything I wanted she doesn’t have. Or what was even crueler: Everything she has I already have.

From the scumble of grays and silvers on the horizon, I forced myself to conjure his face, but he kept wanting to drift back into the night — I need you now, I kept saying, tugging and pulling at an imaginary cord to my father, until, for a split second, the lank, sick face I’d summoned flashed through my mind again and, in its wake, a vision of many tubes hooked to a respirator in a cancer ward at Mount Sinai Hospital. I wanted to be stirred by this image so that something like the shadow of suppressed sorrow might settle on my face and justify my inability to say anything to the one person who had me completely tongue-tied.

I looked at Clara’s Bloody Mary sitting on the balustrade and thought of the grisly inhabitants of Homer’s underworld when they shuffle and drag their aching bunions toward a trough of fresh blood, meant to draw them out of their grottoes: “There are more of us where I come from, and some you wouldn’t care to see — so let me be, son, let me be. The dead are good to one another, that’s all you need to know.”

Poor old man, I thought, as I watched him wither away into the pallid silver night, loved by few and hardly thought of since.

“Look downstairs, don’t they look mammoth-sized?” said Clara.

From high above, a seemingly endless procession of larger-than-life stretch limousines was stopping at the curb of the building, unloading skittish passengers in high heels, and then inching on along the snow to allow the car directly behind to unload more passengers, only to move on to let the car after do the same. Something in me buoyed at the sight of the extravagant display of black cars glistening in the white night. I felt I’d stepped into a strange, high-tech version of Nevsky Prospekt.

The cars did not go away but were double-parked the length of 106th Street. By the statue of Franz Sigel, a group of drivers had come out to chat and smoke. In Russian, most likely. Two were wearing long, dark overcoats, wraiths lifted from Gogol’s underworld about to hum Russian songs together.

Where were all these people going? The sight of the cars lined up ever so regally made me wish I’d gone to their party instead. All these posh jet-set types arriving in twos and threes. What wonderful lives these people must live, what splendor, I kept thinking, almost neglecting Clara, who was leaning on the balustrade next to me, equally mesmerized by the spectacle. I felt something verging on pleasure in seeing how easily I’d been distracted and made to think about other things instead of her. This was Hollywood grandeur, and I wished to see it from up close. Then, realizing I had neglected my father, I felt ashamed of myself, especially after I’d summoned him up, only to be caught thinking of stretch limousines.

•

Clara and I did eventually speak about the beam, and about the guests downstairs, and about other things, and I did ask about this or that to keep the conversation afloat, until I mentioned, in passing, that standing on this terrace with her reminded me of my parents’ balcony and how on New Year’s each year my father would stack and chill wine bottles, how we’d blind-test the year’s vintage that very night with friends and partners, as we all waited to see which wine was voted best, the wine tasting always getting out of hand, Mother rushing back and forth, making sure the vote was in before her husband delivered the same annual speech in rhyming couplets minutes before midnight — until Mount Sinai. “Why the balcony?” she interrupted. Obviously what interested her was why I’d confused both balconies and put her in the picture. Perfect place to chill white wine and soda when it’s not quite freezing outside. Someone would always help me set the bottles, cover up the labels, hand out improvised score sheets. “The babe in the rosebush?” she asked. I shrugged complacently to mean yes, maybe, why ask, not always a teasing matter, I didn’t care for the joke. She had lost both parents in a car accident four years earlier. That was her snarky comeback to my miffed response to her irony.

I am Clara. Don’t tread on me.

She told me about her last year in college, the icy road in Switzerland, the lawyers, the nights she couldn’t sleep; she needed someone to sleep with, anyone, no one, so many. Mid-guilty-giggle just as I was growing solemn for her.

It was wan and hapless talk, without brio, certainly without the heady banter that had wrapped us like incense in a moonlit shrine. These were probably the trenches we’d made light of before, and during renewed pauses that thumped like heavy footballs portending the end, I found myself already struggling to take mental notes of the evening, as if a curtain were gradually being dropped on us and I had to salvage whatever I could and think of ways to live down our moments together without being too hard on myself. I’d have to sort through what to rescue and let go of, and to coddle what promised to keep radiating in the morning, like party glow-sticks beaming with last night’s laughter and premonition.

I wanted to cull must-remember moments — the shoe, the glass, the terrace, the ice floes plying down the Hudson — all of which I’d want to take along, doggie-bag style, the way, after a dinner party, you remember to ask for a slice of cake for someone who is working on deadline, or for the driver downstairs, or for a sick brother or housebound relative who couldn’t make it tonight, or for that part of us that ultimately enjoys care packages more than dinners and seldom goes anywhere but prefers to send shadow versions of itself out into the world like unmanned drones scoping questionable terrain, keeping the best part of ourselves home, as some do when they wear false jewels in public but leave the genuine article in a vault, or as others do when they start “reliving” moments even as they’re living them in real time, in the real world, as I was doing right now. The body goes out into the world, but the heart’s not always in it.

And I thought of my father again, asking me to sit at the edge of his bed last year and tell him everything I’d seen, whom had I danced with—Names, names, he’d say, I want names, I want faces, your presence is like a gift to me, better to hear you than watch a thousand shows on television. He didn’t care how late I dropped by. So what if I can’t sleep now, we both know I’ll make up for it soon enough. Had he been alive tonight I’d have started with three words and taken the whole evening from the top. I am Clara. Sounds very real-world, he’d have said.

Was she real-world?

Was she others?

Did she worry I could be?

Or do Claras never worry about such things?

Because they know. Because they are the world, in the world, of the world. Because they’re here and now. Whereas I’m all over the place, whereas I’m nowhere, whereas I’m lifelike. Whereas I this, whereas I that.

Whereas I wanted to think of this as an encounter that had yet to gel, or hadn’t quite happened yet and was still being fleshed out by some celestial artificer who wasn’t getting his act together and hadn’t thought things through and would let us improvise our lines until a better craftsman took the matter in hand and let us have a second go at things.

I wanted to go back and imagine her as someone who hadn’t told me her name yet, or who’d already appeared to me, but the way people appear in dawn dreams before turning up for real the next day. Who knows, I might be given a second chance at all this. But on two conditions: that I end up at an entirely different party and that I forget I’d ever been to this one. Like someone coming back from a hypnotist or from a previous life, I’d meet new people, people I didn’t know I hadn’t met yet and couldn’t wait to meet, and almost wished I’d met instead, and would promise never ever to forget or live without until someone came out of nowhere and said something awkward by way of an introduction and reminded me of a woman I’d met once before, or crossed paths with but kept missing and was being reintroduced to at all costs now, because we had grown up together and lost touch, or been through so much, perhaps been lovers a lifetime ago, until something as trivial and stupid as death had come between us and which, this time, neither of us was about to let happen. Tell me your name is Clara. Are you Clara? Is your name Clara? Clara, she’d say, no, I’m not Clara.

“I love snow,” she finally said.

I stared at her without saying anything.

I was going to ask her why.

Then I thought of saying I envied people who could say they loved snow without feeling awkward or self-conscious, like writing poetry that rhymes. But that seemed unnecessarily fussy. I decided to look for something else to say.

And while I scrambled yet once more to fill the silence with something — anything — it hit me that if she could say she loved snow, it was probably because she too might have found the silence between us unbearable and decided it was more hackneyed to suppress a simple thought than to come right out with it.

“And I love it too,” I said, glad that she had paved the way for simplicity. “Though I don’t know why.”

“Though I don’t know why.”

Was she telling me, yet once more, that our minds ran along parallel lines? Or was she absentmindedly echoing or deriding a meaningless phrase I had thrown in to complicate what couldn’t have been simpler?

And yet I loved the way she had almost sighed, Though I don’t know why. I would have leaned toward her and put my arm around her waist. Did one lean toward Clara and put an arm around her waist and kiss her?

A few years ago I would have brought my lips to hers without hesitating.

Now, at twenty-eight, I wasn’t sure.

•

Someone pushed open the French window and entered the terrace.

“Found you,” he said. Then, as though having second thoughts: “Interrupting?” he asked, with what I suspected was a flicker of mischief in his eyes. “So this is where you’ve been hiding,” said the heavyset man as he leaned over and kissed Clara. “They said you weren’t here yet.”

“No, Rollo, just having me a smoke,” she said, altering her voice and affecting a swankier mode of speech, which I didn’t recognize. She motioned for him to shut the glass door. “Otherwise she kvetches.”

“Like you care,” he cracked.

“All I need now is to listen to Gretchen kvetching.”

“Why would Gretchen kvetch?” I inquired, less out of curiosity than to wedge into her lingo and keep the intimate halo of a while earlier.

“She hates it when I smoke and her baby is about. Tetchy Gretchy, born to kvetchy. .”

“Where is the wench’s baby?” I asked, trying to sound roguish, especially since I hadn’t seen any children about. Gretchen-bashing was the party line in Clara’s world, and I wanted to show I was perfectly capable of dishing out some of my own, if this is what it took to join.

“Her baby was the asthmatic teenager who probably was kind enough to greet you when you arrived,” said the portly man, putting me squarely in place.

“The little ferret,” Clara added for my benefit.

“The little what?” he asked.

“Nuh-thing.”

The portly man put his arm around her shoulder as a sign he forgave her.

“Are you not freezing, Clariushka?”

“No.”

She turned to me. “Why, you be freezing?”

Was she forcibly inducting me into their world, or was this her way of establishing the pretense of a pre-existing friendship between us?

She wasn’t really waiting for an answer. I didn’t volunteer one. Instead, and as if by common agreement, all three of us rested our hands against the balustrade and looked over the limitless southern expanse of Manhattan’s white-purple skyline. “Just imagine,” Clara finally said, “if all the electric streetlamps on Riverside Drive reverted to their original gaslight jets, we might be able to turn off this century and pick another, any other. The Drive would look so mesmerizing on gaslit nights you’d think we were in another age.”

Spoken by the here-and-now party person who wasn’t a party person but was a party person, but wasn’t here-and-now and longed to be elsewhere in another age.

“Or any other city,” I threw in.

“Any city but this one, Clara, anywhere but. I’m so fed up with New York—” started Rollo.

“At the rate you’re going, you should be. Perhaps you should try slowing down and lying low for a while. Shouldn’t he lie low?” She suddenly turned to me. “It might do wonders for you. Look at us,” she said, as if we were an us, “we’re both lying very très low, and we’re the picture of bliss, aren’t we?”

“Clara lying low? Tell us another. Are you always faking, Clara?”

“Not tonight. This is exactly who I want to be tonight. And maybe, after all, this is exactly where I want to be — on this terrace, on the Upper West Side, on this side of the Atlantic. From up here you can see the entire universe with its infinitely small and petty humanoids striving to mingle body parts. From where I’m standing now, Rollo, you can see everything, including New Jersey.”

The fat man sniggered under his breath.

“That, for your nymphormation,” he said, turning his bulging eyes on me, “was an unwarranted jab at Gretchen — née Teaneck.”

“And right across starboard, letties and gentimen,” Clara went on, holding an imaginary mike in her hand in the manner of tour guides, “stands the pride of Teaneck’s skyline, Temple B’nai B’ris, and next to it Our Mother of Tuballigation.”

“All barbs tonight, aren’t we?”

“Oh, get a grip, Rollo — you’re starting to sound like a Shukoff.”

“Nasty is not lying low.”

“I said lying low, not comatose. Lying low as in rethinking things, and holding back, and dipping your toes in for a change instead of hurtling head-on into every hunk we fancy.”

There was an instant of silence.

“Touché, Clara, touché. I strayed into a valley of scorpions and stepped on the erectile tail of the meanest queen mother of them all.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Rollo. You know exactly what I meant. I’m all bite, no venom — Winter,” she broke in, taking her last puff. “Don’t you just love winter and snow?”

It was not clear whether she was addressing me or him, or both, or neither, because there was something so dreamy and distant in the way she suddenly interrupted, and wanted us to know she was interrupting, that she might as well have been speaking to Manhattan or to winter or to night itself or to the half-emptied glass of Bloody Mary standing on the ledge before her, which my father’s ghost had barely sipped from before withdrawing from the terrace. I wanted to think that she was speaking only to me, or to that part of me that remained as ductile as the snow crested on the balustrade and into which she had let her fingers sink.

Looking out and following the beam again, I couldn’t help myself. “I saw eternity the other night,” I finally said.

“I saw eternity the other night?”

Silence.

“Henry Vaughan,” I said, almost cringing with apology.

She seemed to search her mind awhile.

“Never heard of him.”

“Very few have,” I said.

And then I heard her say words that seemed to come back to me from at least a decade earlier:

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright. .

“Very few have?” She echoed my words with a look of mock-jubilation.

“Apparently more people than I thought,” I replied, trying to show that I took the lesson well, because I couldn’t have been happier.

“Courtesy of a Swiss lycée run by Madame Dalmedigo.” The putdown and the caress. And before I had time to say anything: “Oh, look!” And she pointed at the full moon. “Emfordimoon, stretfordamoon, good night moon, what you be doing there moon, here today, gaunt tomorrow, my moon, my everybody’s moon, good night moon, good night ladies, good night mooney-mooney.”

“El gibberish,” commented Rollo.

“El gibberish, yourselfish. Emfordimoon, misosouporsalad, moogoogaipan, merrichrima, merrichrima, I swoon, I swoon, by delightofda-moon.”

“And Merry Christmas to you too, New York,” I threw in.

“Actually,” she broke in, almost as though wanting to change the subject once again, “if anything, tonight reminds me of St. Petersburg.”

What had happened to the This is exactly where I want to be tonight party girl?

Had our minds been crisscrossing while traveling on parallel lanes all evening long? Or would anyone looking out of our terrace instantly think of St. Petersburg?

“And this is a white night — or almost?” I asked.

We spoke about the longest night of the year, and about the shortest, and how so many things, even when they’re turned inside out and retwined like a Möbius strip, always come out the same. We spoke about the man in Dostoevsky who meets a woman by an embankment and who for four white nights falls madly in love with her.

“A white night overlooking New Jersey? I don’t think so!” said Clara.

“A white night in winter? I don’t think so either!” retorted Rollo.

It made me laugh.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked, obviously annoyed by me.

“Dostoevsky in Fort Lee!” I replied, as though the matter needed no explanation.

“Why, is Dostoevsky on West 106th Street any better?” retorted Rollo.

“Can’t take a joke, can you, Rollo? But here’s the million-dollar question,” Clara continued. “Is it better to step out onto a terrace on Riverside Drive and look out onto New Jersey, or to be in New Jersey and make out the enchanted world of Upper West Side Jews celebrating Christmas?”

“Fungible Jews.”

“Runcible Jews.”

“Decibel Jews,” added Rollo.

“Amphibalent Jews,” she said.

I thought about her question, and all I could think of was a gaping New Jersey staring out at the Manhattan skyline asking the same question in reverse. Then I thought of Dostoevsky’s stranded lovers straining ever so wistfully to catch a glimpse of both Clara and me as we longed to alight on their gaslit Nevsky Prospekt. I didn’t know the answer to her question, would never know. All I said was that if those in Manhattan didn’t get to see Riverside Drive, those across the Hudson who did see the Drive wouldn’t get to be on it. The flip side of the flip side is no longer the flip side. Or is it? Haven’t we been speaking the same tongue, you and I? “It’s the same with love,” I threw in, not sure where exactly the parallel was headed, except that I felt emboldened to draw it. “One could dream of a relationship and one could be in one, but one can’t be the dreamer and the lover at the same time. Or can one, Clara?” She mused a moment as if she had grasped, if not the meaning of the analogy, at least its nudging, crafty drift.

“That’s a Door number three question, and I’m not doing those tonight.”

“Figures,” Rollo jabbed.

“Phooey,” she snapped back.

“You must be Rollo,” I finally interjected, trying to adopt the man-toman camaraderie of a Stanley high-fiving Livingstone.

She remembered she hadn’t introduced us. He produced the beefy palm of a successful financier and, as he added, part-time cellist whose private life is an open closet.

“Phooey.” She sputtered one last whimpered salvo.

“Gorgon!” he shot back.

Not a Gorgon, I thought, but the witch Circe, who turned men into the domesticated pets they unavoidably become.

“Gorg,” he retorted under his breath, making an imitation dog bite, both of them enjoying these cat-and-mouse volleys.

Introductions were clearly not Clara’s forte. Rather, she skirted them by making it seem it was your fault you hadn’t shaken hands earlier. We should at least have had the courtesy to guess who the other was.

“A friend of Hans’s,” she explained. “Which reminds me: have you seen Hans?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Where’s Orla?”

“I’ve hardly seen anyone. I saw Beryl, she was with Inky in the blue room.”

“Inky is here?” interrupted Clara.

“I was just talking with him.”

“Well, I’m not.”

He looked at her as though he hadn’t understood. “What are you saying?”

Clara’s face assumed a look of impish sorrow designed to look purposely forged.

“Inky’s gone.” She turned away, studied the new cigarette she was about to light, and seemed to want to resume speaking of Dostoevsky’s “White Nights,” now that the news about Inky was settled. But Rollo was not to be easily distracted.

“I tell you he’s gone. Gone. As in gone, finito. As in out of the picture.”

The fat man looked totally flummoxed.

“Inky’s left me. Tu get it?”

“Je get it.”

“I’m just surprised he’s even here tonight, that’s all,” she said.

Rollo made an exasperated gesture with his arms.

“You two are just too much — too much,” he added.

“Actually, we were never much of anything. It was limbo and twilight from the get-go. Except that Rollo here, and everyone else we know, didn’t want to see it.” Again, unclear whether she was talking to me, New York, or herself.

“Did he know you were — in limbo and twilight, as you call it?”

There were bristles in his last words. I could also tell she was mulling something sharp.

“I was never — in limbo, Rollo.” It had now become a source of humor to mimic a dramatic pause before saying in limbo. “He was — in limbo. He was the great tundra of my life, if you care to know. It’s finished.”

“Poor, poor Inky. He should never have. First of all—”

“Furstible!”

“First of all you get him to throw everything he’s ever—”

“Furstible!”

“Clara, you’re worse than a Gorgon! First and foremost—”

“Furstible, runcible, fungible!”

Clara lifted both hands in a gesture signifying, I surrender and will say no more.

“It’s the cruelest thing I’ve heard all year.”

“What do you care. It frees him up for you. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”

I didn’t know how long this was going to go on, but it was getting uglier by the second.

“Will someone please tell me who’s Inky?” I finally barged in, like a child trying to break up a fight between his parents.

I didn’t mean to interrupt only. This was also a lame attempt to find out more about this beguiling world of theirs, where you come out on a terrace with a stranger and then, like a magician pulling an endless kerchief from someone’s else’s pocket, turn out to have a garland of numberless friends called Hans and Gretchen and Inky and Tito and Rollo and Beryl and Pablo and Mankiewicz and Orla and, on everyone’s lips, Clariushka, Clariushka, while you stood there and thought of Bellagio and Byzantium, of white nights, and of the cold waterways of St. Petersburg, which made the limitless black-and-white skyline of the Upper West Side look like a child’s fairy-tale book, where all you have to do is say the word and you’re in.

“Inky is from the trenches,” she explained, using our lingo, which flattered me and made me think I suddenly ranked higher than Rollo. Then she turned to him. “He did the right thing, you know. I can’t say I blame him. Though I did warn him.”

“Damn your warnings. The poor kid is in pieces. I know him. This is so hurtful.”

“Oh, sulky-pouty you, and sulky-pouty him — and it’s all so very hurtful.”

She did something that looked like a shrug, to make fun of his clumsy use of the word. “Clara, Clara—” he began, as though uncertain whether to plead and reason with her or curse her out, “you’re going to need to rethink. .”

“Need, as we’re going to need to take our temperature this evening, and maybe need to watch our step or need to watch our diet, amigo? Don’t say anything. Say nothing, Rollo.” There was something suddenly indignant in her voice. What she meant, I could sense, was Say nothing you’ll regret. It was neither a rebuke nor a warning. It came like a slap in his face.

“Clara, if you don’t stop joking this minute, I promise I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Start now.”

I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wished to excuse myself and leave the two to wrangle by themselves. But I didn’t want to disappear from this world, which, only moments ago, had opened its doors to me.

“It’s gorgons like you make men like me queer.”

With that he didn’t wait for her to say another word and yanked open the glass door and let it slam shut behind him.

“I’m sorry, truly sorry.” I didn’t know whether I was apologizing for her or for having witnessed their row.

“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said blandly, as she stubbed the cigarette against the stone balustrade and looked down onto the Drive. “Another day in the trenches. Actually it was good you were here. We would have argued, and I would have said things I’d regret saying. I already regret things as it is.”

Was she sorry for him, for Inky, for herself?

No answer.

“It’s getting cold.”

I opened the French window, softly, so as not to interrupt the caroling in the downstairs living room. I heard her mutter, “Inky shouldn’t have come. He just shouldn’t have come tonight.” I extended a half-doleful, friendly smile meant to suggest something as flat-footed as You watch, things will work themselves out.

She turned abruptly: “Are you with someone tonight?”

“No. I came alone.”

I didn’t ask the same of her. I didn’t want to know. Or perhaps I didn’t want to seem eager to know.

“And you?” I found myself asking.

“No one — someone, but really no one.” She burst out laughing. At herself, at the question, at the double and triple entendres, at all sorts of intended and unintended ambiguities. She pointed to someone chatting with someone who looked like Beryl.

“Yes?” I asked.

“That’s Tito, the Tito we were talking about.”

“And?”

“Where there’s a Tito there’s bound to be an Orla.”

I didn’t see an Orla nearby.

“See the guy next to him?”

I nodded.

“He’s the one I was — in limbo with,” she said.

Another moment of silence. I was going to ask if all the men in her life ended up in limbo. Why do you ask? But she’d ask because she would already know why I was asking.

“Some of us may end up going to the Midnight Mass at St. John’s for a short while. Want to come?” I made a slight face. “We’ll light candles together, it’ll be fun.”

•

She did not wait for an answer and, as abruptly as she’d tossed out the idea — which was how she did everything, it seemed — said she’d be right back and had already stepped inside. “Wait for me, okay?” She never doubted that I wouldn’t.

But this time I was sure I had lost her. She would run into Inky and Tito and Orla and Hans and, in a second, slip right back into their little world, from which she had emerged like an apparition from behind a Christmas tree.

Alone on the terrace, I was revisited by the thoughts that had crossed my mind earlier in the evening, when I’d wandered from room to room upstairs, debating whether to stay, not stay, leave, or stay awhile longer, trying to recapture now what exactly I’d felt and what I’d been doing just seconds before she’d turned to me and told me her name. I’d been thinking of the framed Athanasius Kircher prints lining the long corridor outside one of the studies. These were not imitation prints but must have been removed from priceless bound volumes. It was then, as I was brooding over the crime of framing these pictures and then letting them hang outside the bathroom of a rich man’s home, that out had come the hand.

Through the glass doorway now, I saw a clutter of Christmas presents heaped majestically next to a huge tree. A group of older teenagers, dressed for another party that hadn’t even started and wouldn’t start for many hours yet, had gathered around the tree and were shaking some of the packages close to their ears in a guessing contest of what was inside each. I was seized by panic. I should have handed my Champagne bottles to someone who’d know what to do with them. I remembered finding no one to relieve me of them and was forced to set the bottles down as furtively and as timorously, next to the swinging kitchen doors, as if they were twin orphans being deposited outside a rich man’s doorstep before the guilty mother skulks away into the anonymous night. I had, of course, omitted to include a card. What had become of my bottles purchased on the fly before boarding the M 5 bus? One of the waiters had surely found the bottles by the door and put them in the refrigerator, where they’d make friends with other orphans of their kind.

I felt like one of those awkward guests at my parents’ house during Christmas week, when we had our annual wine fest. MGH was my father’s code word for Make guests happy. My mother’s was ROP, Rave over presents. And MTH was his reminder to me: Marry the heiress, MTFH.

To clear my thoughts, I paced about the terrace, trying to imagine how the place might look in the summer, picturing lightly dressed people flocking about with Champagne glasses, all dying to catch what they already knew would be one of the most spectacular sunsets in the world, watching the skyline change from shimmering light blue to shades of summer pink and tangerine-gray. I wondered what shoes Clara wore in the summer when she came out onto the veranda and stood there with the others, smoking secret agents, arguing with Pablo, Rollo, and Hans, tweaking each to his face or behind his back, it didn’t matter which, so long as she got to spit out something mean and nasty, which she’d take back in no time. Had she said anything kind about anyone tonight? Or was it all venom and abrasion on the outside, and a fierce, serrated, scalding brand of something so hardened and heartless that it could tear its way through every clump of human emotion and skewer the needy, helpless child in every grown-up man because its name, spelled backward and twisted inside out, might still be love — angry, arid, coarse, chafing love that it was.

I tried to think of this very apartment on New Year’s Eve. Only the happy few. At midnight they’d come out on the terrace, watch the fireworks, pop Champagne bottles before retreating inside by the fireplace, and chat about love in the manner of old banquets. My father would have liked Clara. She’d have helped with the bottles on the balcony, helped with the party, added life to his tired couplets, snickered when the old classicist threw in his yearly hint about Xanthippe pussy-whipping her husband, Socrates, into drinking the poisoned brew, which he gladly downed, because one more day, one more year like this without love and none to give. . With Clara, his yearly sermon to me on the balcony as we tended to the wine wouldn’t have been laced with so much distemper. I want children, not projects. Seeing Clara, he would have asked me to hurry. She’d walk in, say, I am Clara, and pronto, ravished. The girl from Bellagio, he’d have called her. Together, one night, he and I had stood before the chilled bottles staring into a neighbor’s crowded windows across the tower. “Theirs is the real party, ours is make-believe,” he said. “They probably think theirs is makeshift and ours real,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “Then it’s worse than I thought,” he said. “We are never in the moment, life is always elsewhere, and there is always something that steals eternity away. Whatever we seal in one chamber seeps into another, like an old heart with leaky valves.”

A waiter opened the glass door and came onto the terrace and made to remove Clara’s half-empty glass. I told him to leave it. Noticing that my glass was empty, he asked if I cared for more wine. I would love a cold beer, I said. “In a glass?” he asked, suddenly reminding me that there were other ways to drink beer than in a glass. “Actually, in a bottle.” I liked the whim of it. I was going to have a beer and I was going to drink it from the bottle and I was going to enjoy it by myself, and if I didn’t think of her image floating before my eyes, well, so be it. He nodded and, taking a moment from what must have been a very busy evening, looked to where I was staring: “What an amazing view, isn’t it?”

“Yes, wonderful.”

“Anything with the beer?”

I shook my head. I remembered the Mankiewiczes and decided to stay clear of anything resembling appetizers. But the thought and his kindness touched me. “Some nuts maybe.”

“I’ll get those and the beer right away.”

Then, when he’d almost reached the French doors again, he turned toward me, holding his salver with other empty glasses on it: “Everything all right?”

I must look positively distressed for a waiter to inquire how I’m doing. Or was he making sure I wasn’t planning to jump — boss’s orders: Keep an eye out and make sure no one gets funny ideas.

A couple at the other end of the terrace facing the southern tip of Manhattan was giggling. The man held his arm on her shoulder and with his other hand had managed to rest his refilled glass on the balustrade. The same hand, I saw, was also holding a cigar.

“Miles, are you hitting on me?” the woman asked.

“To be honest — I don’t know” came the man’s debonair answer.

“If you don’t know, then you are.”

“I suppose I am, then.”

“I never know with you.”

“Honestly, I never know with me either.”

I smiled. The waiter looked around for stray glasses and ashtrays, and then stood there almost as if debating whether to take a cigarette break. I looked at his clothes — the Prussian-blue necktie and loud yellow button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up all the way to his biceps — what a strange outfit.

“Beer!” he exclaimed self-mockingly, as if he’d neglected an important mission, and proceeded to pick up more empty glasses.

But I didn’t really want a beer. This party wasn’t for me. I should just leave.

What else was there to look forward to tonight? Bus, snow, walk all the way back to 112th Street, peer one last time at the cathedral and, through the snow, watch it fill for the Midnight Mass, then close the book on the evening. She had said something about heading out there tonight. I imagined the quick dash to the cathedral, the music, the coats, the huge crowd within, Clara and friends, Clara and Company, all of us huddled together. Let’s go back to the party, she’d say. Even Rollo would agree, Yes, let’s go back.

Better leave now before anyone cornered me for dinner, I thought, leave the terrace, go back upstairs, sneak into the coatroom, hand in my coat stub, and slink away as furtively as I had arrived.

But before I’d taken a step to go, the glass door opened again and out came the waiter with more wine and my bottle of beer. He put the wine on a table, then placed the beer between his thighs and instantly pulled the cap off. He had also brought Miles and girlfriend two martinis.

Then, for the last time, I spotted the beam circling over Manhattan. Half an hour ago I was standing here with Clara thinking of Bellagio, Byzantium, St. Petersburg. The elbow resting on my shoulder, the burgundy suede shoes gently brushing off the snow, the Bloody Mary on the balustrade — it was all still there! What had happened to Clara?

I had forgotten whether I had tacitly agreed to wait for her on the terrace. It was getting colder, and, who knows, perhaps asking me to stay put on the terrace may have been Clara’s cocktail-party way either of drifting away without seeming to or of casting me in the role of the one who’s left behind, who waits, who lingers, who hopes.

Perhaps I finally decided to leave the terrace to spite her. To prove that this wasn’t going anywhere, that I had never staked the flimsiest hope.

When I finally emerged from the congested staircase upstairs, the size of the crowd had more than tripled. All these people, and all that hubbub, the music and glitz, and all these rich-and-famous Euro snobs looking as though they’d just stepped off private helicopters that had landed on an unknown strip on Riverside and 106th Street. Suddenly I realized that these imposing, double-parked limousines lining the curb all the way to Broadway and back and around the block were carrying people who were headed to no other party but ours, and that, therefore, I had all along been at the very party to which I wanted to be invited instead. The tanned women who wore loud jewelry and clicked about the parquet floor on spiked heels, the dashing young men who hurried about the huge room wearing swanky black suits with dark taupe open-collar shirts, the older men who tried to look like them by putting on clothes their bedecked new wives claimed they’d look much younger in. Bankers, bimbos, Barbies — who were these people?

The waiters and waitresses, it finally dawned on me, were all blond model types wearing what was in fact a uniform: bright yellow shirt with sleeves rolled all the way up, wide floating blue neckties, and very tight, very low-cut khakis with a rakish suggestion of a slightly unzipped fly. The cross between deca-and tacky-chic made me want to turn and say something to someone. But I didn’t know a soul here. Meanwhile, the waiters were urging the sea of guests to work their way to either end of the large hall, where caterers had begun serving dinner behind large buffet tables.

In a tiny corner three elderly women sat cooped up around a tea table, like three Graeae sharing one eye and a tooth among them. A waiter had brought three plates filled with food for them and was about to serve them wine. One of the ladies held what looked like a needle to her neighbor. Checking blood-sugar levels before mealtime.

I saw Clara again. She was leaning against one of the bookcases in the same crowded library where she’d pointed out her old desk and where, at the risk of drawing too close to what I thought was the real, private Clara, I’d pictured her writing her thesis and, from time to time, removing her glasses and casting a wistful, faraway glance at the dying autumnal light shimmering over the Hudson. Facing her now, a young man her age had placed both palms to her hips and was pressing her whole body against his, kissing her deep in the mouth, his eyes shut in a stubborn, willful, violent embrace. To interfere if only by staring seemed an infraction. No one was looking, everyone seemed quite oblivious. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, especially once I noticed that his hands were not just holding her but were clasping her hips from under the shirt, touching her skin, as if the two had been slow-dancing and had stopped to kiss, until I spotted something more disturbing and more riveting yet: that it was she who was kissing him, not the other way around. He was merely responding to her tongue, swooning under its fierce, invasive fire, like a baby bird lapping its feed from its mother’s bill. When they finally relaxed their embrace, I saw her stare into his eyes and caress him ever so languorously on the face, a slow, lingering, worshipping palm rubbing his forehead first, then sliding down on his cheek in an expression of tenderness so heartrending, so damp to the touch, that it could draw love from a block of granite. If ever this suggested how she made love when she took off her crimson shirt and removed her suede shoes and was lost to her senses, then, until this very precise moment in my entire life, I had probably never understood what lovemaking was, nor what it was for, nor how to go about it, had never made love to anyone, much less been made love to. I envied them. I loved them. And I hated myself for envying and loving them. Before I had time to wish them to stop doing more of what they were doing, or to go on doing it for a while longer, I watched him press his pelvis against hers, as they began kissing all over again. His hand had now disappeared under her shirt. If only his hand were mine. If only I could be there, be there, be there.

So much for lying low. What a lame excuse. With all her talk of limbo and love in times of twilight and pandangst, the party girl had just caved in. And I thought she harbored a tragic sentiment of life shrouded in cocktail chitchat. All she was was a Euro chick mouthing empty vocables picked up chez Madame Dalmedigo’s finishing school for wayward girls.

“Meet Clara and Inky,” crooned a woman who was standing next to me and who must have watched me stare at them. “They do it all the time. It’s their shtick.” I was about to shrug my shoulders, meaning I’d seen such things before and certainly wasn’t about to be shocked at the sight of lovers making out at parties, when I realized that it was none other than Muffy Mitford. We began speaking.

Maybe because I had drunk a bit too much already, I turned to her and, out of the blue, asked if her name wasn’t Muffy. It was! How did I know? I proceeded to lie and said we’d met at a dinner party last year. The lie came far too easily to me, but with one thing leading to the next, I discovered that in fact we did know people in common and, to my complete surprise, had in fact met at a dinner party. Didn’t she know the Shukoffs? No, she’d never heard of them. I couldn’t wait to tell Clara.

Then, from a distance, I saw her waving at me. She wasn’t just waving, but was actually headed toward me. I knew, as I watched her come closer, that I had, against all resolutions to the contrary, already forgiven her. I couldn’t identify what this feeling was, because it was a mix of panic, anger, and a flush of hope and expectation so extravagant that, once again, without needing a mirror, I knew from the strain on my face that I was smiling way too broadly. I tried to tame the smile by thinking of something else, sad, sobering things, but no sooner had I started to think of Muffy and her jiggling fertility belt than I felt on the verge of laughter.

It didn’t matter that Clara had disappeared or that I had let her down by not waiting on the terrace. We were like two persons who bump into each other two hours after standing each other up and pick up as if nothing remotely wrong had happened. I wanted to believe that I didn’t care about their kissing, because as long as I wasn’t hoping for anything and didn’t have to worry how to draw her into my life, I would be able to enjoy her company, laugh with her, put an arm around her.

I was, and I knew it even then, like a drug addict who is determined to overcome his addiction in order to enjoy an occasional fix without worrying about addiction. I had quit smoking for the same reason: to enjoy an occasional cigarette.

Clara came right behind me first and was about to whisper something in my ear. I could feel her breath hovering on my neck and was almost ready to lean gently toward her lips. She was making fun of Muffy, then squeezed my shoulder in what I sensed was a motion of sneering collusion meant to induce giggling.

“Your twin daughters are the loveliest girls in the world,” said Clara. I could tell Clara was leading her on.

“They are, aren’t they,” agreed Muffy, “they’re great.”

“They’re great,” mimicked Clara, brushing her lips against my ear this time, once, twice, three times, “really fucking great.” I could feel every part of my body react to her breath. People who made love to her had her breath all night long.

“We call them le gemelline,” said Muffy, saying the Italian words with a thick American accent.

“You don’t fucking say?” Clara continued to whisper in my ear.

Meanwhile, guests were starting to push us on their way to the buffet tables. Muffy was about to be swallowed by the crowd.

“I think we should get out of the way, or they’ll run us over. I know a shortcut.”

“A shortcut?” I asked.

“Through the kitchen.”

Meanwhile, Pablo, who had spotted Clara, was signaling from among another cluster of people. She told him we were headed to the kitchen from the opposite direction. They’d done this before, it seemed. We’d all meet up in the greenhouse.

I thought of Inky and imagined that Clara wanted to get back to him. But he was nowhere in sight. She wasn’t even making a show of looking for him.

“Where’s the man from the trenches?” I finally asked Clara, giving every indication by my gestures that I was not going to join her for dinner.

I received a blank stare. Would she fail to get the limp joke, or would she cast an indignant look once she’d remembered our lingo? It was taking her a very long while to respond, and I was already tempted to simper apologetically and spell out the shallow thing I’d hinted at, which would sound shallower yet with an explanation.

“I meant Inky,” I said.

“I know what you meant.” Silence. “Home.”

It was my turn to show I did not know what she meant. “Inky went home.”

Was she putting me on? Or shutting me up? None of your business — lay off — you’ve crossed a line? Or was she still trying to find a shortcut to the food and was focusing all her attention on how to get us from here to there before the others? I could sense, though, that she was not just thinking about the passage to the tables. Should I perhaps ask whether something was wrong? “We’ll have to go upstairs by way of the greenhouse and down through another staircase into the back door to the kitchen.” I watched her as she was saying this. I wanted to hold her hand on the spiral staircase as we’d done before and wrap my hand behind her neck and under her hair and tell her everything bursting in me.

“What?”

I shook my head, to mean nothing, meaning everything.

“Don’t!” she said.

There it was, the word I’d been dreading all evening long. I had picked up wisps of it when hinting about Bellagio. Now it had finally come out, undoing Bellagio, dispelling the beam, trouncing the illusion of rose gardens and of Sunday lovers lost in snowbound lands. Don’t. With or without an exclamation mark? Most likely with. Or without. She’d probably said it too many times in her life for it to need one.

On our way through the narrow stairway, she finally blurted the answer to the question I hadn’t dared ask. “Tonight was our valediction forbidding mourning.” She looked behind me.

A crowd of teenagers burst from behind and dashed past us on the way upstairs.

“So, you were saying about Inky?”

“Gone. Left for good.”

I felt sorry for Inky. Here was a man to whom she’d just given all the proof of love a man needs, and a minute later she couldn’t have spoken more disparagingly of a rat. Wasn’t she trying a bit too hard for someone who was just indifferent? Or are there people who no sooner they’re done with you than their love addles into something so unforgiving that what causes intense suffering is not the loss of love, or the ease with which you’re spurned after being given the keys to their home, but the spectacle of being thrown overboard and asked to drown without fussing and spoiling everyone’s fun. Was this what had happened to him? Spurned, kissed, sent packing? Or was she like a strange wildcat that licks your face to hold you down as she devours your insides?

I’d seen his face, tilted slightly sideways as she prepared to kiss him more savagely the second time, every part of his body transformed into one taut sinew. Minutes later she was walking up to me and asking me to sneak upstairs with her.

“He’s probably on his way to his parents’ on a peak in Darien. I told him not to drive in the snow. He said he didn’t care. And frankly—”

We ascended a few more steps.

“I am so tired of him. He’s the healthiest man in the world, and I’m the worst thing for him. There are days when, I swear, all I want is to seize the pumice stone in my bathroom and bash my face in with it, because it reminds me of the face he looks at each day and has no clue what’s inside it, no clue, no clue. He made me stop being who I am; worse yet, I stopped knowing who I was.”

I must have given her a startled and incredulous stare.

“Mean and nasty?”

I shook my head. “I even blame him for failing to make me love him — as if it’s his fault, not mine. Because I tried so hard to love him. And all this time all I wanted was love, not someone else, not another person, not even another person’s love. Maybe I don’t know what others are for either. Maybe all I want is romance. Served chilled. Maybe that’ll do just fine.”

She caught herself.

“Take that into the pit of pandangst.” The party girl smiled uneasily.

I stood behind her on the staircase. It frightened me how similar we were. Just the illusion of having so much in common was enough both to scare me and to give me hope.

“Tell me more.”

“There’s nothing more to tell. There was a time when the lights had gone out of my life and I thought he was the light. Then I realized he wasn’t the light but the hand that turned the darkness off. Then one day I saw there was no light left — not in him, not in me. Then I blamed him. Then me. Now I just like the dark.”

“Hence the lying low.”

“Hence the lying low.”

She stopped looking at me.

“This is my hell,” she added. “It’s not me Inky wants. He wants someone like me. But not me. I’m totally wrong for him, for me too, if you have to know. It’s never really me men want, just someone like me.” A tiny pause. “And I’m wise to it.” It sounded no different than A word to the wise, my friend.

This is my hell. What words for a party girl. Someone like me but not me—where did one learn to say such things or come up with such insights? Experience? Long, long hours alone? Could experience and solitude go together? Was the party girl a recluse posturing as a party girl who was really a recluse — forever rectus and inversus like a fugue from hell?

I am Clara. Same difference.

She opened the door. The balcony overlooked the same view of the Hudson as the terrace two floors below it, except from much higher up. She indicated a narrow passage past the greenhouse. The view was indeed breathtaking, spectral.

“No one knows this, but he’d die for me, if I asked him to.”

What a thing to say.

“And have you asked him?”

“No, but he offers to every day.”

“Would you die for him?”

“Would I die for him?” She was repeating my question, probably to give herself time to think and come up with a plausible answer.

“I don’t even know what the question means — so I suppose not. I used to love the taste of toothpaste and beer on his breath. It turns my stomach now. I used to love the torn elbows on his cashmere sweater. Now I wouldn’t touch it. I don’t like myself very much either.”

I listened, waited for more, but she had stopped speaking.

“Just look at the Hudson,” I said as we stood on the spot staring silently at the blocks of ice.

She had spoken with unusual gravity. I vowed to remember her like this. The greenhouse was totally unlit, and for a spellbound moment as I stood on what seemed the top of the world I wanted to tell her to stand with me and watch our silver-gray universe inch its way through space. I was even tempted to say, “Just stay with me awhile here.” I wanted her to help me search for the beam and, having found it, tell me whether she thought it was like an arm transcending time, reaching out into the future to fade into the moonlit clouds, or whether it was one of those rare instances when heaven touches earth and comes down to us to assume our image and speak our language and give us this ration of joy that stands between us and the dark. She too must have been struck by the sight of the skyline, for she stopped of her own accord, looked out toward the southern half of Manhattan, and what finally made me want to hold her with both my hands under her shirt and kiss her on the mouth was the haste with which she grabbed my hand to lead me away, uttering an intentionally perfunctory “Yes, we know, we know, ‘I saw Eternity the other night.’ ”

•

In the kitchen a man wearing a dark burgundy velvet jacket was speaking on his cell phone and looking very concerned. When he saw Clara, he grimaced a silent greeting, and seconds later clicked off the phone without saying goodbye, cursing his lawyer for our benefit. He slipped the phone back into the inside pocket of his blazer and turned to the chef. “Georges, trois verres de vin, s’il vous plaît.”

“Some party!” he said, moving to the breakfast table. “No, sit with me, I need to catch my breath. Parties like this are so out of another era!”

He liked parties. But so gaudy, and all these Germans and Frenchmen, he added, you’d think this was the Tower of Babel. “Thank God we have us. And the music.”

I gathered that music was what bound this inner circle of friends.

All three of us sat down, while several cooks and numberless waiters fretted behind us. In the corner, what could only have been two blond, burly, retired policemen types turned personal drivers and/or bodyguards were eating a last-ditch, haute cuisine rendition of baked lasagna.

Hans looked at us, then pointed a discrete forefinger at Clara, then to me, then back to Clara, as if to ask, “Are you two together?”

She smiled the limpid, self-possessed smile of a very young lawyer who is about to enter a boardroom and is suddenly told by her secretary that her mother is on the phone. That smile — it took me a few seconds — was the equivalent of a blush. She bit her lip as if to say, “I’ll get even with you for this, just you give me a chance.” And then I saw her do it. “Are you okay, Hans?”

“I’m okay,” he muttered, then on second thought, “No, I’m really not okay.”

“The Kvetch?”

“No, not the Kvetch. Just business, business. Sometimes I tell myself I should have remained an accountant in the music business, a simple, stupid accountant. There are people out there who want me ruined. And the way things are going, they may just succeed.”

Then, as though to shake off a languorous cloud of self-pity—“I am Hans,” he said, extending his hand to me. He spoke slowly, as if every word was followed by a period.

It suddenly must have hit Clara that I did not know Hans, or Hans me. This time she’d make the official introductions, though not without saying that she felt like a perfect idiot, thinking I was Hans’s friend when all along I’d been Gretchen’s.

“But I don’t know Gretchen,” I said, trying to show that it had never been my intention to deceive anyone, which is why this was as good a time as any to come clean.

“But then who—?” Clara did not know how to phrase the question, so she turned to Hans for help.

I imagined that within seconds the two beefy ex-policemen eating lasagna would pounce on me, twist my arms, pin me to the ground, handcuff me to the kitchen table, and hold me there till their bejowled pals from the Twenty-fourth Precinct came round.

“I’m here because Fred Pasternak had the invitation messengered to me and told me to come. I suspect he’s stood me up. I didn’t even know of this party until late this afternoon.” In my efforts to exonerate myself and leave no doubt about my credentials, I began to spill more details than necessary, precisely the way liars do when a simple lie would have done well enough. I was also going to add that I hadn’t even wanted to go to a party tonight — and besides, I wasn’t even hungry, and as for their gimp-legged, flat-footed, flossy Eurotartsie fly-by-night crowd gathered round two hosts ignominiously named Hansel and Gretel, they did nothing for me either — so there!

“You are a friend of Pooh Pasternak’s?” So they knew his old nickname as well. “Friends of Pooh’s are always welcome here.” Handshake, arm around my shoulder, the whole chummy locker-room routine. “He was a good friend of my father’s,” I corrected. “Sort of looks after things.”

“The Swiss connection,” joked Hans, making it all sound like a pact sworn in gymnasium English by abandoned boys in a postwar spy novel.

A waiter finally came round with a bottle of white wine and proceeded to uncork it. As he was just about to pour Clara her wine, he turned to me and asked softly, “Beer for you?” I recognized the waiter immediately. No, I’d have wine this time.

When he was gone, I told Hans that his waiter was convinced he had saved my life. How so? he asked. Must have thought I was planning to jump from the nth floor.

I’d made the whole thing up. A good story, I thought, though I couldn’t explain why I’d made it up. Everyone laughed. “You’re not serious, are you?” asked Clara.

I sniggered. Obviously more than one man had threatened to die for her.

“To Pooh,” said Hans. “To Pooh and to all the feisty shysters on this planet, may their tribe increase.” We clinked glasses. “Once more, and once again,” he toasted. “And many more times again,” echoed Clara — obviously, a familiar toast in their world.

To Pooh, who, but for a whim, I thought, might never have forwarded this invitation to me and never made possible an evening that had cast such a spell on my life.

I am Clara, I’ll make you new. I am Clara, I’ll show you things. I am Clara, I can take you places.

I watched one of the cooks behind Hans open what looked like large cans of caviar. He seemed impatient, with the cans, with the opener, with caviar, with kitchens as he scooped out dollop after dollop. His attitude made me think of Clara. She’ll scoop you out of yourself, give you a new look, a new heart, new everything. But to do this, she’ll need to cut into you with one of those can openers that date back to before the rotary model was invented — first a sharp incision, after which comes the tricky, patient, and persistent bloodletting work of prying and maneuvering the pointed shark-finned steel blade up, down, up, down, till it’s worked its way around you and taken you out of yourself.

Will this hurt?

Not at all. That part everyone loves. What hurts is when you’re out and have lost the hand that sprung you from yourself. Then the sardine key, with the can lid all curled around it like a molted old skin, sticks to your heart like a dagger in a murder victim.

I knew that it took more than a party to alter the course of a lifetime. Yet, without being too sure, and perhaps without wanting to be too sure for fear of being proven wrong, without even taking meticulous mental notes for later consumption, I knew I’d forget none of it, from the bus ride, the shoes, the rush past the greenhouse into the kitchen, where Hans pointed first at her, then at me, and then at her again, my made-up story of the suicide attempt, the threat of spending an evening in jail, down to Clara’s rushing to the police station to bounce me out on the very night of Christmas, and the walk into the freezing cold outside the precinct station as she’d ask, Did the handcuffs hurt, did they? Here, let me rub your wrists, let me kiss your wrists, your wrists, your poor, sweet, wretched, God-given hurting wrists.

These I would take with me as I would take the moment when Hans, who wished to get away from his own party, asked Georges if he could be bien gentil to put together three platters and bring them upstairs dans la serre. For then I knew we were going to retreat to the greenhouse and I’d be closer yet than I’d ever been to Clara, the beam, the stars.

“And yet,” said Hans, standing up, waiting to let us out of the kitchen first, “I could have sworn you two’ve known each other a long time.”

“Hardly,” said Clara.

It took me a moment to realize that neither she nor I believed we’d just met a few hours earlier.

•

Hans turned on the lights in the greenhouse. Awaiting us in what looked like an enclosed half veranda, half greenhouse was a small round table with three dishes whose food was arranged in intricate arabesques. Nearby was a bucket filled with ice in which someone had deposited a bottle with a white cloth strapped around its neck. It gave me no small thrill to think it must be one of the bottles I had brought and that someone had obviously held off serving it until now. Things happened magically here. Inside the napkin that I unrolled was a silver fork, a silver knife, and a spoon bearing initials carved in an outdated florid style. Whose? I whispered to Clara. His grandparents’. Escaped the Nazis. “Escaped Jews, like mine,” she said. Like mine too, I was going to add, especially after unrolling the napkin and thinking back to my parents’ own parties this time of year when everyone had tasted too much wine and Mother said it was time to have supper. The unremembered souls whose florid initials were inscribed on our silverware had never even crossed the Atlantic, much less heard of 106th Street or Straus Park, or of those generations down who’d inherit their spoons one day.

Around us were three small tables that were already laid out but on which nothing had been served yet. What a wonderful spot to have breakfast in every morning. The herbarium stood to my left: spices, lavender, rosemary, shades of Provence all around.

I stared at the white cloth, which had a starched sheen and which seemed to have been washed, fluffed, pressed, and folded by devoted hands.

“So how did you two meet, again?”

“In the living room.”

“No,” she said, before placing her elbow once again on my shoulder, “in the elevator.”

“In the elevator?”

And then I remembered. Of course. I had indeed noticed someone in the elevator. I remembered the doorman who showed me to the elevator and, sticking his large uniformed arm behind the sliding door, had pressed the button for me, making me feel at once honored and inept before a woman wearing a dark blue raincoat who was busily stamping the snow off her boots. I’d caught myself hoping she’d be one of the guests, but then stopped wishing it when she’d stepped out floors before. I was so thoroughly persuaded I would never see her again that I failed to comprehend how the woman sitting before me now in the greenhouse was the exact same one whose eyes, now that it was all coming back to me, had stared me down in the elevator with a gaze that hissed something between “Don’t even think of it!” and “So, we’re not doing chitchat either, right?” Did Clara introduce herself at the party because she felt we’d already broken the ice in the elevator? Or did good things happen to me precisely because I’d given up on them? Or is there design in our stars provided we’re blind to it, or, as in the case of oracles, provided it speaks with a coiled tongue?

Had we spoken in the elevator? I asked.

Yes, we had.

What had we said?

“You said something about how strange it was to find a building in Manhattan with a thirteenth floor.”

What had she said in reply?

Did so stupid a pickup line merit a reply?

What if I hadn’t asked about the thirteenth floor?

That’s a Door number 3 question. And, I already told you, tonight I’m not doing those.

Had she gone to another party in the same building, then?

She lived in the same building.

•

I live here. At first it sounded like I live here, dummy. But then I immediately realized that it came like an admission of something very private, as though my question had backed her into a corner, and this corner was none other than the four walls within which she lived her life, with Inky, and her clothes, her cigarettes, her pumice stone, her music, her shoes. She lives in this building, I thought. This is where Clara lives. Even her walls, from which she has no secrets and which hear everything when she is alone with all four of them, and speaks to them because they’re not half as deaf as people make them out to be, know who Clara is, and I, and Inky, and all those who’ve caused her torment and torture, haven’t a clue.

I live here. As if she’d finally confided something I would never have known unless she was forced to admit it — whence the slightly peeved and bruised whine with which she’d said it, meaning: But it was never a secret, why didn’t you ask before?

Then I had a sudden change of heart. Could Inky have gone home there now instead of heading out to Darien? Was he pouting for her downstairs? Where were you all this time? Upstairs. I waited, and waited, and waited. You shouldn’t have left the party, then. You knew I’d wait. What happened to Connecticut? Too much snow. So you’re staying tonight? Yep.

“Wait a minute,” said Hans. “You mean you were having drinks together and didn’t know you had already met in the elevator?”

I nodded, a helpless, ineffectual nod.

“I don’t believe it.”

I could feel the blood coursing to the very tips of my ears.

“He’s — blushing,” Clara whispered audibly.

“Blushing doesn’t always mean one’s hiding anything,” I said.

“Blushing doesn’t always mean one’s hiding anything,” Hans repeated in his usual deliberate manner, lacing my words with humor. “If I were Clara, I’d take all this as a compliment.”

“Just look at him, he’s blushing again,” she said.

I knew that denying a blush would right away set off an avalanche of mini-blushes.

“Blushing, flushing, flustered. All you men.”

I was about to counter when it happened again. In the midst of our bantering, I mistook a raised biscuit for a cube of sushi sitting on a bed of rice and ended up dunking it in some sauce and gulping down yet another slice of peppered hell. This time it came without any warning whatsoever from Clara. No sooner had I bit into it than I immediately sensed this was no wafer or raw fish or pickled cabbage but something else, something surly and ill-tempered that had only started a process that could last for a very long time, forever even. And in the midst of it, I hated myself, because after biting into it, I knew I should have spat it out instantly, even if there was nowhere to spit in the greenhouse but into my napkin. Without knowing why, I decided to swallow it instead.

This was worse than fire. It scorched everything in its wake. Suddenly, I saw my life and where it was headed. I felt like a man who wakes up in the middle of the night and, under cover of darkness, finds that most of the defenses normally in place by daylight have deserted him like the poor, underpaid, straggling porters they are. The monsters he tames by day are untethered, belching dragons, and before him, as he sweats under his blanket, he suddenly sees — like someone who opens a hotel window in the middle of the night and looks out at the unfamiliar view overlooking an emptied village — how bleak and mirthless his life has been, how it’s always missed its mark and cut corners at every turn, straying like a ghost ship from harbor to haven without ever stopping at the one port he’s always known was home, because, in the middle of this fateful night, he suddenly realizes something else as well: that the very thought of home turns out to be little else than stopgap, everything is stopgap, even thinking is stopgap, as are truth, and joy, and lovemaking, and the words themselves he tries to land on his feet with each time he feels the ground slip from under him — stopgap, each one. What have I done, he asks, how sinister my joys, how shallow my crafty roundabouts, which cheat me of my very own life and make me live quite another, what have I done, singing in the wrong key, saying things in the wrong tense, and in a language that speaks to everyone I know but moves me not a whit?

Who is he when he opens his window and looks out to Bellagio and is all alone at night and no one watches — not his shadow self, not his chorus of lampposts with their heads ablaze, not the person who now sleeps in his bed and has no sense that what he’s staring at with so much gall in his heart is his life on the other bank, the life that’s almost there, the life we spend staring at and grew to think was only meant to be stared at, not lived, the life that never happens, because, unbeknownst to us, it’s being stared at from the bank of the dead to the land of the living? Who is he when the very language he disclaims is the only one he speaks, when the life he cheats is the only one there is?

I wanted to think of Muffy and her two gemelline, trying to coax laughter in my heart. But no laughter sprang. I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks again, but I was in too much agony to think whether they were tears of pain, of sorrow, gratitude, love, shame, panic, revulsion — for I felt all these at once, the fear of crying, and the shame of crying, and the shame of my own shame, and the fear of my body giving out on me each time it blushed, and hesitated, and spoke out of turn, or couldn’t find something to say instead of nothing — always looking for something instead of nothing, something instead of nothing.

So that it all came down to this, didn’t it — this moment, these tears, this dinner in a greenhouse, this party, this woman, this fire in my gut, this roof garden, and this glass dome a world apart with its visionary expanse of the Hudson in midwinter and that tireless celestial beam, which kept resurfacing each time you thought someone had finally pulled the plug on it and which now traveled the sky like a lazy presage of the many wastelands in store for me and of the wasted landfills straight behind — all of it added up to one thing: that if to some, being human comes naturally, to others, it is learned, like an acquired habit or a forgotten tongue that they speak with an accent, the way people live with prosthetic pieces, because between them and life is a trench that no footbridge, no corvus can connect, because love itself is in question, because otherpeoples are in question, because some of us — and I felt myself one in the greenhouse — are green card — bearing humanoids thrust among earth-lings. We know it, they don’t. And part of what we want so desperately is for them finally to know this — but not to know. And what kills us in the end is finding that they’ve always known, because they themselves feel no differently, which is why if knowing all this had passed for a consolation once, now it was a consolation from hell, for then, in my father’s words, there was no hope and things were far worse than we feared.

All I could think of as I sat there with my eyes still closed was fear — fear exposed, fear of daring and being caught daring, fear of wanting and hoping so badly, but never badly enough to dare anything worth getting caught fretting for, fear of letting Clara know everything, fear of never being forgiven — fear of spitting out this piece of Mankiewicz as though it were a lie I’d choked on all evening long but didn’t know what to replace it with, fear that I might mull this lie a while longer, as I’d done all life long, until it lost its pungency and became as ordinary as the water of life itself.

“This is so awful,” I heard Clara say.

I looked at her imploringly as if to say, Give me a few more minutes, don’t start the sparring yet, wait for me, just let me catch my breath.

I heard the hubbub of voices coming nearby.

Hans rang a bell for water.

It took me a few seconds to realize I must have fainted or done something quite like it, because when I opened my eyes, I saw that others had joined Hans and Clara and were already taking their seats at the adjoining tables.

“You shouldn’t talk,” said Clara, as one might tell someone lying on the sidewalk that he shouldn’t move until an ambulance arrived.

The waiter had already brought a glass brimming with ice cubes and handed it to Clara. On her face sat the mildly impatient, steady gaze of a skilled torturer who is long familiar with the undesirable effects of interrogations and who always finds a vial of smelling salts nearby, to bring back the prisoner to his pain.

I held the glass in my hands. Then took short, gasping, almost sobbing sips.

I watched her face again. Just one more sip, she seemed to say, and then another, and another again — she was talking to a baby, not a drinking buddy. She bore the look of worn-out daughters by the bedside of a very sick parent who for weeks has refused to eat. A second later, and that same mournful, worried look hardened into something cross, as though she’d shrugged me off but was going on with tedious motions of caring until the next shift.

Why the turnabout? The sudden hostility? The feigned indifference, even? Or the quipping with Beryl and Rollo in the background while I lay dying? Stop pretending you do not care.

“Drink more water. Please, just drink.” As I was drinking: “What is it with you?” she said. It was the sweetest thing she might ever have said to me, What’s with your mouth, here, let me rub your lips, let me kiss your lips, your lips, your poor, sweet, wretched, God-given burning lips. I’d take pity in a second.

•

Eventually my eyes began to clear. My mouth was still burning, and I could feel that my lips were quite swollen, but at least I could speak. To every dreamer who’s had a nightmare, this was like dawn. Soon daylight would come, when every chimera withdraws and dissolves into the morning dew like milk in a large cup of warm English Breakfast tea. Perhaps this was not even the end of the ordeal — and part of me, even while I struggled to put it as far behind me as I could, was already hoping that it wasn’t quite over and had begun to miss the confused and silent outpouring of panic and grief that I knew was my way of asking her to take a hard look at what anyone with half a brain would have guessed right away.

It was as though I had finally shown her my body, or done something with it to touch hers. As clumsy as my gesture was, I felt no less relieved than a wounded soldier who is seized by a sudden impulse for his nurse, grabs her warm palm, and holds it to his crotch.

“Better?”

“Better,” I replied.

And as I looked at all of those who had gathered more or less around us, some with their plates and their rolled-up napkins containing silverware dating back to the time Hans’s parents had fled the Old World, I realized that, despite all their banter and their teasing about my reaction to Mankiewicz’s appetizer, this was still one of the most beautiful evenings I’d spent in a very long time. Hans, Pablo, Pavel, Orla, Beryl, Tito, Rollo, unknowns all of them.

Clara reminded everyone it would soon be time to head out to the Midnight Mass. “Just for an hour or so,” she explained.

Next year, someone said.

“We’re also missing Inky,” said Pablo.

“He’s gone.” Rollo was obviously coming to Clara’s rescue.

“Yessssss,” said Clara, to mean, Okay, everyone stop asking.

“I can’t believe it.” This, she later told me, was Pavel.

Someone was shaking his head. Clara and the men in her life!

“Does anyone have any idea how fed up I am with men, each with his little Guido jumping to attention like a water pistol—”

“God spare us,” said Pablo. “We’re back to Clara’s I’m-so-fed-up-with-men routine.”

“Which includes you, Pablo,” she snapped, “you and your puny flibbertigibbet.”

“Leave my dousing rod out of this. It’s been in places where no man’s Guido’s been before. Trust me.”

“How about him?” asked a petulant Beryl, meaning me. “Fed up with him already?”

“I want nothing to do with anyone, not this winter, not this year, I’ll kiss a woman before I kiss another man. I’ll sleep with a woman before I so much as let a man touch me with his stinkhorn.” And to prove her point, she walked up to Beryl’s table, sat next to her, brought her lips very close to hers, gave a few soft pecks, and then began to kiss her deep in the mouth. Neither resisted, both shut their eyes, and the kiss, however whimsically begun, could not have seemed more passionate or more acquiescent.

“There!” said Clara, disengaging without giving Beryl time to recover. “Point taken?” It was not clear which man she was addressing. “And she kisses well too,” said Beryl.

It was a savage kiss. I had assumed lying low meant I am not ready, I want to go home, take me elsewhere, I want to be alone, let me find love without others, let me go back to my walls, my staunch, loyal, steadfast walls. Instead, her kiss had been brutal. We can fuck, but we won’t find love, I won’t find it in me, for you, with anyone. Which is why you’re in my way. She was speaking to me, I was almost certain now. Even your patience wears me out. Everything about you — your silence, your tact, your fucking restraint, and the way you give me slack, hoping I don’t notice, everything rushes me, it’s not love I need, so leave me alone. The two women kissed again.

When they had stopped kissing, Hans spoke first.

“All this is starting to look like a French movie. Everything always makes more sense in French movies.”

Trying not to look too unsettled by the women’s kisses, I said I wasn’t sure. French movies were about not life but the romance of life. Just as they’re not about France but the romance of France. Ultimately French movies are about French movies.

“Your answer is like a French movie too,” Clara said as she made her way back to our table, speaking with impatience in her voice, meaning, Enough with the mind games.

“My life as a French movie — there’s an idea,” said the party girl, who was tired of mind games. “Maybe I should see it tonight.” Then, on second thought: “No, I’ve seen it too many times already. Same plot, same ending.”

“French movies are about urbane Parisians,” said Hans, “not dyspeptic Upper West Side Jews on antidepressants.” There was a stunned moment of silence. “And on that,” he said, standing up and turning to me to shake my hand, “enchanté.” He was leaving the greenhouse. “Come for New Year’s. I mean it. But not a word of it to Monique.”

“Who is Monique?” I asked Clara after he had gone and left us alone at our table.

“His flame-no-longer-his-flame,” explained Clara.

I pondered the information.

“Were you his flame once?”

“I could have been.”

“—but didn’t want to?”

“It’s more complicated.”

“Because of Gretchen?”

“Gretchen would have driven me to it, not stopped me. Because of Gretchen, seriously!”

“I was just curious.”

Then, after a pause: “For your nymphormation, namphibalence strikes women too.”

“And do you feel any now?” I asked, delighting in my own boldness, knowing that she’d know exactly what I was referring to, “because right now I feel absolutely none,” I added.

“I know you don’t.” This was the closest she had ever come to me.

“How do you know?”

“Because I just do.”

“You don’t miss a beat, do you?”

“No. But then that’s why you like me?”

“Remind me never to have anything to do with women who never miss a beat.”

“When do I start reminding you?”

“Start now. No, not now. Now is too lovely and I’m having such a good time.”

And then, before I could add anything more, came the one gesture that could change lives. She brought her hand to my face ever so slowly and, with the back of it, caressed my face on both sides.

“I’m lying so very, very low, you’ve no idea. Not like your typical French movie, I’m afraid. In magazine lingo, I’m this close to being not a well person,” she said, bringing her thumb as close to her forefinger as possible.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t read magazines.”

She let the comment pass.

“Can I say something?”

“By all means,” I said, feeling a knot tightening in my stomach.

“I’d be so wrong for anyone these days,” she added, meaning for you.

I looked at her.

“At least you’re honest. Are you honest?”

“Seldom.”

“That’s honest.”

“Not really.”

After that, people began to interrupt us, and unavoidably Clara’s attention was drawn to the others in the greenhouse, which was when she reminded us of the Midnight Mass.

•

We arrived at the Cathedral of St. John long after Mass had started. None of us minded being late. All we did was join the thick crowd bottlenecking the entrance and then just stood there, watching people file through the nave looking for an empty spot among those who were already seated and taking the chalice. The atmosphere was dense with candlelight, music, banners, and the shuffle of infinite footsteps working their way up and down the central aisle. “We’re staying ten minutes, not more,” said Clara as she and I went as far as the cordoned-off ambulatory, then back the way we’d come, squeezing through the crowd, finally running into those of our group who were headed toward the transept. “Runcible Jews,” she said, meaning all of us. We found a tiny free corner to lean on in one of the vaulted chapels and stared at the tourists, as we listened to a New Agey organ piece struggling to sound inspirational.

Perhaps it was the combination of Clara, church, snow, music, our romance with France, and the votive tapers we each lit in silent wish-making that made me think of Eric Rohmer’s films. I asked Clara if she’d ever seen his films. No, never heard of him. Then she corrected herself. Wasn’t he the one where all that people did was talk? Yes, the very one, I replied. I told her there was a Rohmer retrospective playing on the Upper West Side. She asked where. I told her. “To some of these tourists it must be magical indeed, coming all the way to New York City from who knows where and stepping into this Midnight Mass,” she said. She’d been coming here as far back as she could remember. I pictured her with her parents, then schoolmates, lovers, friends, now me. “One day they’ll open up the transept and finish building this cathedral.” I remembered reading somewhere that the cathedral had run out of funds, fired its stonecutters, its masons, put away their tools. In a hundred years they might — but then might not — start rebuilding. “The man who’ll lay the last stone here isn’t even born yet.” These were the party girl’s last words before rounding everyone up and herding us to the main portal. It put things in perspective, I thought. The gas jets of a century ago and the last stonecutter a century from now. Made me feel very, very small — our quags, our party, our unspoken darts and parries, our night on the terrace watching the beam pick its way through this silver gray night as we spoke of eternity, in one hundred years, who’d know, who’d want to know, who’d care? I would. Yes, I would.

On our way back through the snow, she and someone from the party whom I hadn’t met yet darted ahead, holding hands, then started throwing snowballs at each other. There was no traffic headed uptown, which was why we all walked on Broadway itself, feeling like privileged pedestrians reclaiming their city. Finally, when we were about to cross Straus Park, Clara came back to me, put her arm under mine, and insisted that she and I walk through the park, her favorite spot in the world, she said. Why? I asked. Because it was in the middle of everything but really nowhere, just elsewhere — tucked away, safe, nothing touches it, a private alcove where you come to turn your back on the world. Or to lie low, I said, trying to make fun of her, of us — even the statue of Memory was lying low, she said. Indeed, the statue was lost in thought, drifting elsewhere, wrapped in Hopkins’s wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swiveled snow. I want a strong, ice-burning shot of vodka, she said as we were leaving the park. And then I want something sweet, like dessert. But yes, like Hopkins, she added. Why am I so happy tonight? I wanted to ask. Because you’re falling in love with me and we’re watching it happen, the two of us together. In slow, slow motion. Who’d know? you ask. I know.

•

We all crammed in the elevator, dropped our coats at the coat check, and rushed upstairs, back into the greenhouse. Our tables had been cleaned and were laid out for dessert and more drinks. After vodka was poured for everyone, I resolved to wait awhile and after the second round of desserts began to make signs that it was time for me to go. It was already long past two in the morning. The more I feigned veiled uneasiness to signal my imminent departure, the more I felt compelled to hasten it. Perhaps all I wanted really was for Clara to notice and ask me to stay.

Eventually she did. “Are you really leaving?” as if it was something she couldn’t have imagined unless she’d thought of it first.

“What, leaving already?” exclaimed Pablo. “But you’ve just arrived.”

I smiled benignly.

“I”—and there was a loud emphasis on the I—“will pour him another drink.” This was Pavel. “Don’t want you leaving on an empty stomach.”

“We certainly don’t want that,” added Beryl.

“So are you staying or you’re leaving?” asked Pablo.

“Staying,” I conceded, knowing that I wasn’t conceding, since I was doing exactly what I wanted.

“Finally, a decision,” said Clara.

How I loved these people, this greenhouse, this tiny island away from everyone and everything I knew. This shelter from time itself. It could last forever.

“Here,” said Pavel, offering me a large snifter. Just when I was about to take it from him, he withdrew it ever so slightly, and as I got closer to take it, he applied a kiss to my cheek. “I had to,” he said loud enough for everyone to hear. “Besides, it’ll make him so jealous, and I love Pablito when he gets jealous.”

“I must instantly apply the antidote,” said Beryl. “The question is: will he let me?”

“He might.”

“Oh, he definitely might,” said Clara, with implied indifference that unmoored me totally.

“Well, before I plunge, I had better ask,” tittered Beryl.

“It’s not you he wants. But then that’s why he’ll let you kiss him the way she kissed you, big frontal mit frotting too.” Rollo again.

“Who does he want, then?”

“Her,” said Rollo.

“Then I don’t want him,” she retorted.

“She’s lying low,” said Clara, referring to herself.

“And he’s on ice,” I said.

We looked at each other. Mirth and collusion in our heady, seemingly levelheaded words.

“By the way,” she said, “I never told you my full name. It’s Clara Brunschvicg, spelled the French way. And since you did ask, yes, I am listed.”

“Did I ask?”

“You were going to. Or should’ve. Academy two. .”

She read me so well, whereas I couldn’t begin to scratch her surface.

Brunschweig. Brunschwig, I thought to myself, how does one spell that? Brunswick, Brunchwik, Bushwick.

“Shall I write it down for you?”

“I know how to spell Brunchweig.”

Once again, though reluctantly, I made renewed motions to leave. But it must have been so obvious that I was begging to be asked to stay that one word from Pablo and Beryl and I was seated again with yet another something to drink in my hands.

Beryl dawdled past me, then stopped in front of me.

“Are you angry with me?” I asked.

“No, but we’ve a score to settle. Later, maybe.”

Eventually we came down the spiral stairs together to find the party in full swing, the crowded living room huddled around the pianist with the throaty voice who’d probably taken a long break and was now back to his old spot singing exactly the same song he’d been singing hours earlier. There was the Christmas tree. There the same old bowl of punch. There the spot where Clara said I looked lost. There, Clara and someone whom she introduced as the Mankiewicz asked everyone to be quiet, stood on two stools, and began singing an aria by Monteverdi. It lasted two minutes. But it would change my life, my way of seeing so many, many things, as the snow and the beam and the empty snowed-in park had already changed me as well. Minutes later, the singer with the throaty voice took over again.

•

Past three in the morning, I finally said that I did have to leave. Handshakes, hugs, kissy-kissy. When I went to the coatroom, I could see that the party was giving no signs of letting up. As I passed by the kitchen, I thought I made out the sweet, chocolaty yet vaguely fried scent of what might easily have been yet another squadron in an endless procession of desserts if it didn’t bear a suggestion of early breakfast.

Beryl followed me to the coatroom. I had lost my stub, and the attendant let me inside the large superpacked coatroom with Beryl. Was she leaving too? No, just wanted to say goodbye and tell me how happy she was we’d met. “I like you,” she finally said, “and I thought to myself: I must tell him.”

“Tell him?” I knew I was smiling.

“Tell him that I’d been looking at him and thinking, If he ever gets around to it, I’ll tell him. Tomorrow, when I’m totally sober, I’ll pretend I never said this, but right now it’s the easiest thing in the world, and I just wanted you to know—voilà!” She was, I could tell, already backtracking. I would have spoken the exact same words to Clara.

I did not speak. Instead, I put an arm around her shoulder and pressed her toward me in an affectionate, friendly hug. But she was yielding to an embrace, not a hug, and before I knew it, I was pushing her behind one of the overstuffed wobbly coat stands and then farther into the inner jungle of fur coats that thronged the room like unstripped hanging carcasses in a slaughterhouse, and hidden behind the packed racks, I began to kiss her on the mouth, my hands all over her body.

No one saw or would have paid us any mind. I knew what she wanted, was glad to show I knew. Neither held back. It would have taken no time.

“Thank God there are others to stop us,” she said in the end.

“I suppose,” I repeated.

“Don’t suppose. You don’t really want this any more than I do.”

There had been, neither on her part, nor on mine, the slightest passion between us, just juices.

When I left the coatroom with my coat, I saw Clara talking to someone in the corridor. Something in me hoped she had seen us together.

“You do know she’s head over heels for you,” said Beryl to me.

“No.”

“Everyone noticed.”

I thought back and couldn’t remember Clara giving me the slightest hint of being head over heels. Was Beryl perhaps making it up to mislead me?

“Must you really go? I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” said Clara, holding a glass in her hand.

“Ciao, lover,” said Beryl, leaving me alone with Clara, but not without a wink meant to give away part of our secret in the coatroom.

“What was that all about?” Clara asked.

“Her way of saying goodbye, I suppose.”

“Did you two have a Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment, is that it?”

“A what?”

“Never mind. Are you really leaving in this snowstorm?”

“Yes.”

“Did you come by car? It’ll be impossible to find a cab on a night like this.”

“I came by bus — I’ll go back by bus.”

“The M 5—my favorite bus in the world. Come. I’ll show you to my bus stop.”

“I—”

There, I was about to do it again, trying to dissuade her, when nothing would have pleased me more.

It took another twenty minutes to find Hans and say goodbye to everyone all over again.

Then the elevator came. We entered it in total silence, strangers wondering what to say, yet dismissing each subject as an obvious silence filler. “This, for your nymphormation, is thirteen,” she said, as if she were talking about a friend we’d brought up earlier and whose building we were now passing by car. “You saw me get off at ten.” She smiled. I smiled back. Why did I feel that another minute of this could crush me? I couldn’t wait for our ride downstairs to be over. But I also knew that our remaining minutes were numbered, and never wanted these to end. I would have wanted her to press the stop button as soon as the doors had closed and say she’d forgotten something, and would I mind holding the door for her. Who knows where all this might have led, especially if some of her friends spied me waiting for her by the open elevator door — Just take off your coat and enough with this going-once, going-twice routine. Or the old, jiggly elevator could stop between floors and trap us in the dark and let this hour be a night, a day, a week, as we’d sit on the floor and open up to each other in ways we hadn’t done all evening long, in the dark, for a night, a day, a week — to sit and listen to the sound of the superintendent banging away at cables and pulleys and not care at all, seeing we were back to Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” and Rilke’s Nikolai Kuzmich, who ended up with so much time on his hands that he could afford to squander it as much as he pleased, in big bills or small — spend, spend, spend, and like him I would ask time for a huge loan and allow this elevator to be stuck forever. They’d lower down food, drinks, a radio even. Our bubble, our dimple in time. But our elevator kept going down: seventh, sixth, fifth. Soon it would be over. Soon, definitely.

When we reached the lobby, I saw the same doorman. He was wearing the same large brown overcoat, whose shaggy long sleeves with yellow piping I still remembered from the time he had pressed the elevator button for me, making me feel at once honored and inept. He was now opening the heavy glass door of the lobby to let new arrivals in. Stamping their feet, shaking their umbrellas, giving their names to two young fashion-model types leafing through page after page of the same single-spaced list of guests on which I’d pointed out my name inscribed by hand on the very last page. The afterthought guest. The afterthought party. The stopgap, afterthought, adventitious night.

I’d been one of these guests hours ago. I was leaving, they were coming in. Would Clara return to the party, find a new stranger standing by the Christmas tree, start all over?

I am Clara. I can do this forever, once more, and once again, and many more times again, like the beam over Manhattan, and the singer with the throaty voice, and the corridor leading down paths unseen till, by miracle, it took you right back to where you’d started.

Before heading out, she undid the knot of my scarf, wrapped it around my neck once, then doubled up the scarf and looped it on itself. Her knot. I loved it.

“You’re not going out like this, are you, Miss Clara?” asked the doorman in a gravelly voice.

“Just for a minute. Would you lend me your umbrella, Boris?”

She was wearing nothing over her crimson blouse. “I call him Boris, after Godunov, or Feodor, after Chaliapin, or Ivan, after the Terrible. Faithful as a Doberman.”

He had meant to hold the umbrella for her. “It’s okay, stay inside, Boris.”

I wanted to lend her my coat. But then my gesture might be deemed overbearing. So, in an effort not to fuss or seem intrusive, I had basically resolved to let her freeze in her see-through crimson shirt. Then, on impulse, I took off my coat and put it around her — intrusive-obtrusive, I didn’t care. I liked doing this.

Leaning on my arm as she held Boris’s extra-large umbrella for the two of us, she walked past the Franz Sigel memorial statue, both of us hesitating down the stairway that was entirely buried in snow. I used to go snowboarding here, she said.

The quiet, empty Riverside Drive, piled with heavy snow, had grown so narrow it reminded me of an unpaved country road leading to nearby woods that extended for miles before reaching the next small village with its adjoining manor house. You could even stand in the middle of the Drive and never once have to worry about cars, as though on nights such as these a friendlier, quieter, picture-book Manhattan took on life-size dimensions and cast a spell on its otherwise hardened features.

The bus stop stood just across the road. “You might have to wait awhile, I’m afraid,” she said.

Then she took off my coat, gave it back to me, put out her hand, and shook mine.

I am Clara. The handshake.

That coat would never be the same.

Some of her was on my coat now.

Try again: some of me had stayed with her.

Isn’t this why I’d made her wear it?

Correction: there was more of her in me than there was of me.

Yes, that was it. There was more of her in me than there was of me.

And I didn’t mind. If she owned me, I didn’t mind. If she’d read my thoughts because she’d worn my coat and could spell each thought out, one by one now, I didn’t mind. If she knew everything I knew, together with all I had yet to know and might never know, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind, I wouldn’t mind.

Soon I saw myself crossing the street. She stood still for a moment, as if to make sure I had gotten there safely, her left arm crossing her chest and clutching her right ribcage to suggest she might turn to ice any moment now but was trying to hold out awhile longer. I had an impulse to say, “Let’s go back — it’s too cold, let’s go back to the party.” I know she would have laughed — at me, at the suggestion, at the sheer joy of it. Just ask me to ask you to go back upstairs. Just ask me and see what I’ll say.

Then, her right hand holding the giant umbrella, she managed to wave a brief goodbye with her left and, turning in the other direction, headed home like the owner of a manor who has kindly escorted a guest to a small unassuming gate, a last farewell chimed by a hidden bell once the gate closes behind him.

•

When the bus came, I’d sit in the seat nearest to the front door, opposite the driver, and watch the scene unfold before me, as I had watched it unfold earlier this evening, except in reverse order. I already wanted to return by bus again, and again, for who knows how many months. I’d take this bus on Sunday mornings, on Saturday afternoons, and Friday nights, and Thursday evenings. I’d take it in the snow, on sunny days in spring, and on the way back on late-autumn evenings when the cast of fading light still glistens on the buildings of Riverside Drive, and I’d think of Clara writing her thesis on Folías and of Clara speaking of Tea-neck and “White Nights” to me on the terrace as we watched the beam circle Manhattan. The bus ride would become part of my life. Because it would lead to this very building, or pass by it each time and remind me that any moment now I’d get off two stops up in a fairy-tale blizzard and walk back to a Christmas party where my name was permanently penciled on the guest list. I’d take this bus perhaps long after Clara and Hans and Rollo and Beryl and Pablo and all the rest of them had moved out of New York, because in thinking of this ritual bus ride through time at this very moment, I might finally make myself forget that Clara was still upstairs, that I hadn’t asked how to spell her name, that it was always easier to think of vanished worlds and lost friendships and party leftovers than look forward to Hans’s repeated invitation that I return in seven days.

After waiting five minutes by myself at the bus stop, I began to give up on the bus. I was also afraid I’d look terribly stupid if anyone upstairs saw me waiting like this for a bus that was clearly never going to come.

I looked up at the rooftop. Scarcely four hours ago I’d been sitting in that same greenhouse. Now it stared down at me as if it didn’t even know me. On our way there she’d opened up a bit and told me about Inky and how, for a while at least, he had put out the darkness in her life. What an odd way of saying it, that was. I had looked outside and promised to remember all this. I was remembering it now. Turn your back on things and they become Bellagio.

Seeing no hint of traffic from behind the bend farther up the Drive, I walked past the Franz Sigel memorial statue back to Clara’s sidewalk and dawdled there awhile, as if looking for an excuse to linger in her neighborhood, examining each of the surrounding buildings like a latter-day Joseph scoping out lobbies and their doormen while Mary waited in the car, hoping all along that someone might eventually open a window upstairs, yell out my name on this silent night, and utter a peremptory Just come back upstairs — it must be freezing out there.

I imagined myself immediately heading back into the building, overlooking Ivan’s or Boris’s formalities at the door so as not to appear unenthusiastic to those who’d opened the window and called out my name, all the while trying to retain the hesitant, undecided air of someone who was only acquiescing in the spirit of fellowship with the casual Why not, but just for a short while of a parent about to concede five more minutes of television time.

Just look at you, you could use a warm drink. Here, let me take your coat, they’d say.

And before I knew it, I’d shake the very same hands I’d shaken goodbye, including those of the latecomers I’d seen downstairs, as if I were an old friend who made the party just in time for breakfast.

There, and all this rush to get away from us.

So why did you leave tonight? as she hands me the same glass she’s been drinking from all evening. That glass, that glass, in a moment I’d be holding that glass.

I left — I don’t know why I’d left. There are so many reasons. There are no reasons. To strike an attitude. To leave something for later. Didn’t want to overstay the welcome. Didn’t want to show I enjoyed it so much, or that I never wanted it to end.

Perhaps I had other things to do—

At four in the morning?

I have my secrets.

Even from me?

Especially from you.

Remind me never to have anything to do with men who have secrets at four in the morning.

Remind me never to be tempted to say everything, because I’m dying to.

Start now. Why did you come back?

If you ask, Clara, it’s because you know already.

Tell me just the same.

Because I didn’t want to go home yet. Because I didn’t want to be alone tonight. Because I don’t know. My heart beat faster and faster as I thought of adding, Because of you.

Because of me? Spoken in Hans’s slow, deliberate manner.

How lovely to say Because of you or Because I didn’t want to be alone tonight. Hello, I don’t want to be alone tonight. I want to be with you. And with your friends. In your world. Your house. And stay after everyone’s gone. Be like you, of you, with you — even if you’re lying low, as I’m lying low, as Hans is lying low, as Beryl and Rollo and Inky and everyone else in this city, alive or dead, lies low, low, low, shipwrecked, damaged, and wanting, alone with you till I smell of you, think like you, speak like you, breathe like you.

Breathe like me? Are you serious?

I got carried away.

From the middle of the street I looked up again and made out the partying silhouettes of so many people resting their backs against the frosted windowpanes upstairs, everyone with outstretched elbows, meaning they were holding wineglasses and plates in their hands — would they really be serving breakfast soon, as in some demented intercontinental red-eye?

Why had Clara taken me downstairs? To end up walking in the snow with me? Or had she meant something else and I had upset her plans by pressing the L for lobby button before she’d had a chance to press her floor? Did I do this to show that her apartment hadn’t crossed my mind? Or was I just trying to make it difficult because it would have been so easy to say, Show me your place.

Or did I not want to be with anyone tonight? Want to be alone. Want to go home. Yet want to be loved. For the distance between you and me, and, while we’re at it, between me and me, is leagues and furlongs and light-years away.

I want love, not others. I want romance. I want glitter. I want magic in our lives. Because there is so little of it to go around.

I thought of others in my place, so many young men, eager and selfless in their love, like Inky, traveling all the way to or back from wherever to stand outside her home, throwing clumps of snow at her window at night till their lungs give out and they waste and die, and all that stays is a song and a frozen footprint.

As I stood there, I put my hand in my pocket. It was filled with tiny paper napkins. I must have been nervous throughout the evening and, without thinking, stuffing napkins in my pockets each time I put down my glass or finished eating something. I remembered the handkerchief she’d given me during my bout with pepper. What had I done with it?

In my pocket I also felt the folded oversized invitation card on which the address of the party was printed in spirited filigree. I vaguely recalled, while talking to Clara at the party, that I’d frequently encounter this card in my pocket and would absentmindedly twiddle its corners, experiencing a sudden burst of joy when I put two and two together, and, in the fog of distracted thoughts, remembered that if the card was still damp from the storm, this could only mean I’d just come in from the snow, that the party was still young, that we were hours away from parting, and that there’d be plenty of time for anything to happen. And yet, even if behind these bursts of joy lingered something like light resentment for being dragged to this party, only to be stood up by my father’s friend, still, it may not have been resentment at all but yet another cunning way of allowing my thoughts to stray from where they wished to linger, only to be pulled right back to Clara and to the uncanny suspicion that Pooh might even have orchestrated a bit of what had happened tonight. Father died. I promised to look out for him. Lonely. Doesn’t know what to do with himself. Meet people.

I began to make my way toward Straus Park on the corner of West End and 106th Street. I wanted to think of her, think of her hand, of her shirt in the cold, that look when nasty humor twisted everything you mistook for harmless and straightforward and reminded you that I sing in the shower was drab, ordinary, flat-footed stuff. I wanted to think of Clara, and yet I was afraid to. I wanted to think of her obliquely, darkly, sparingly, as through the slits of a ski mask in a blizzard. I wanted to think of her provided I thought of her last, as someone I couldn’t quite focus on, someone I was beginning to forget.

And as I approached one of the lampposts to examine this feeling better and could almost see the lamppost lean its lighted head over my shoulder, as though, in exchange for helping me see things better, it sought comfort for trying so hard to give comfort, I began to think of the lamppost as a person who’d know what this twined feeling of near-bliss and despair was and explain it to me, seeing it had known me for years and surely would understand who I was or why I’d behaved the way I had tonight. It might tell me, if I asked, why life had thrown a Clara my way and watched me thrash about like someone reaching for a buoy that kept sinking. So you know, I wanted to say, you do understand? Oh, I do know and I do understand. And what do we do now? I asked. Do now? You travel all the way to a party and then can’t wait to leave when you’re dying to stay. What do you want me to say? You want guidance? An answer? An apology? There aren’t any. Distemper lacing its voice. The only other person I would speak with, and he is dead.

On the spot where West End Avenue converges with Broadway, I realized there’d be no way to find a cab here either, and as for the downtown M104, chances were no better than with the M 5 on Riverside. Thick, luminous, untouched snow lay everywhere. Not a car in sight, while the borders between sidewalks and streets, or between the streets and the park, or between the park and this invisible moment where Broadway and the northernmost tip of West End Avenue converge, all had disappeared. The snow mantled the entire area and made the city look like a boundless frozen lake from which protruded trees and strange undulations, the buried hoods of cars parked around Straus Park.

Inside the park, frozen, speckling boughs reached out heavenward, a cluttered show of stripped, gnarled, outstretched, earnest hands beckoning from Van Gogh’s olive groves like the tortured shtetlers of Calais huddling in the cold, while the intense white pool reflected at the base of each lamppost made everything seem unsullied, wholesome, and ceremonial, as though the streetlamps had filed up one by one to clear a landing spot for the lost Magi who alight on Christmas Eve.

How serene and silent the snow—candid snow, I thought, thinking back to Pokorny’s reconstruction of the Indo-European root of the word: *kand—to shine, to kindle, to glow, to flare, from which we get incense and incandescent. There was more candor in snow than in me. Let me light a candle here and think of Clara and of that moment in church, ages ago, when we put in a dollar each and lit candles for God knows whom.

I undid her knot and rewrapped my scarf around my neck, crossing both ends of the scarf snugly under my coat, the way I’d always done it. It wasn’t cold. I began to wonder whether the snow would stick and hold out till tomorrow. It never did these days. Slowly, as I made my way through the park, I found a bench and came up with a crazy notion. I must sit here. With my glove, I brushed off the snow and finally sat down, extending both legs in front of me like someone taking the sun on an early afternoon after a hearty midday meal.

I liked it here, and I loved the way both avenues and their adjoining streets seemed to blend in this one spot and, by disappearing in the snow, suddenly revealed that the Upper West Side had undercover harmonies and undisclosed squares that spring on you like stalls in movable marketplaces, new squares that come out with the snow and vanish no sooner than it melts. I could spend the night here and hope the snow stayed all night and all day tomorrow, so that I could return tomorrow night as well and find it lingering still, sit here on this very bench again, as if I had found a ritual and a hub all my own, and wait for the luster of the moment to wash over me again, even if I knew that the luminous patina I was projecting on Straus Park was weather-induced, and alcohol-induced, and love- and sex-induced, an accident and nothing more perhaps, like sitting on this and not another bench, or finding so much beauty because I couldn’t find a cab, or ending up here instead of on Riverside, or biting into a peppercorn instead of crème fraîche, standing, not in the library, where I might have met Beryl first and lived through an entirely different, perhaps better evening, but behind a Christmas tree — suddenly all these incidentals were filled with clarity, radiance, and harmony, hence joy — joy, like snow, that I knew would never last, joy of small miracles when they touch our lives, joy like light on an altar. I knew I would revisit this spot tomorrow night.

All this in one little word that went far back to a language no one had probably ever spoken: *kand—. The candor of women.

Yet I knew nothing about her. I knew her first name, could not spell her last, and I’d seen her kiss a man and then a woman. Who was she? What did she do? What was she like? What did others think of her? What did she think of herself, of me? What did she do when she was alone and no one was looking?

Perhaps all I wanted was to sit and think, and think of nothing, sink into myself, dream, find all things beautiful, and, as I’d never allowed myself to do during the entire evening, to long for her, the way we long for someone we know we don’t stand a chance of meeting again, or of meeting on the exact same terms, but are all the same determined to long for, because longing makes us who we are, makes us better than who we are, because longing fills the heart.

Fills the heart.

The way absence and sorrow and mourning fill the heart.

I didn’t know what all this meant, nor did I trust myself with this, but as I mused over these stray thoughts, I didn’t move, as though something timeless and solemn was taking place, not only in the park itself as I sat there on a cold bench, but in me as well for having entered this deserted, solitary spot called Straus Park, where people like me come to be one with themselves and with everything around them. With the city, the night, and the park, and the loud neon sign hanging over the pharmacy across the park and over the fried-chicken restaurant to the right. The way she stubbed her cigarette and then gently pushed it off the ledge with her shoe, the haunting image of her crimson shirt with its buttons so visibly undone past the sternum that one could guess, and was meant to guess, the shape of her breasts as she spoke to me and tweaked me gently when I’d spoken of love in quags and trenches, only to lure me back into the selfsame quags and trenches and remind me that, with all her confiding airs, she was, in case I forgot, very much the off-limits party girl who just happened to place her elbow on your shoulder when she spoke to you and let you think you and she were one and the same, but not the same, but yet the same and never the same.

I wanted to feel sorry for myself, wanted to feel sorry for always wanting, wanting, wanting, and never knowing what to do or where to go beyond wanting. I wished to light a candle in Straus Park, as one does in church when one isn’t sure whether one’s praying to ask for something or to give thanks for having gotten it, or just for knowing it exists, for seeing it at such close quarters for the short time it is given us to see that the simple wish to hold on to the memory of its passage in our lives bears all the features, not of longing, or of hope, or even love, but of worship.

Tonight she was the face I put on my life and how I live it. Tonight she was my eyes to the world looking back at me.

Tonight I had come so close — one more glance and I’ll kiss you, Clara, as you kissed Beryl, your tongue in her mouth, which is why I kissed Beryl, my tongue, her tongue, your tongue, everyone’s tongue.

If I had my way, I would plant this imaginary votive taper right here and dig it into the snow as Clara had dug her glass in on the terrace, and I’d let it stand there. And I would light not just one but many such tapers, and stand each one along the rim of the dried flower bed girding the statue of Memory, and I would cover the statue itself, from head to toe, with slim tapers, as they do with Madonnas and saints in tiny street altars in the villages of Spain, Italy, and Greece, till they all glimmered around Straus Park like will-o’-the-wisps on those damp and marshy cemetery grounds where the souls of the dead rise up at night and wander about like glowworms clustering together to stay warm until daybreak, because the dead are good to one another.

I would sit here and never budge. I would freeze for her. Because tonight she was the face that I put on my life and how I hadn’t learned to live it.

•

Perhaps it was the cold that finally brought tears to my eyes; perhaps I’d had too much to drink to know the difference. But as I stared at one of the streetlights nearest me, I began to see double, and the lamppost, from seeming to lean, began to sway, as if it were trying to dislodge itself and would eventually drag itself toward me, shuffling like a beggar on misbegotten limbs, doing what could only seem an imitation moonwalk. He stood there, leaned to and fro, as if to make sure it was indeed me he had spotted, then withdrew and shuffled back and became a streetlamp again. Who was he? And what was he doing on this senseless night? What was I doing out in the cold? Was he another me trundling about here, saying he was taking over, seeing how I’d messed things up for us? Or was he an unfinished me, and how many of these were there who hadn’t seen the light of day yet and might never see it, and how many ached to come back from the past if only to give me garbled solace and distempered advice, not realizing that the crib notes we sneak through time are written in invisible ink, all of these selves thronging around me like a penned-up legion from the underworld thirsting to taste what was so effortlessly and perhaps undeservedly given to me and only me: lifeblood.

Perhaps I’d light candles around Straus Park for them as well, as ritual stand-ins for what I couldn’t see within me and wished to behold as candles outside of me.

Then I saw it and touched the speckling twig hanging just above my head. It was crystallized. I tried to pull at it, but it was impossible to break off. What would happen if I pulled harder? The twig might tear somewhat, and I’d probably cut myself. I pictured the blood welling up on my finger and spilling on the snow. I leaned my head all the way back and thought of what my father would say: This isn’t new. You’ve been like this for years. And there’s no one can help you. Life in my blood, soul of my life.

What would Clara say if she’d seen the state of my bleeding finger? I pictured her coming up to me in her maroon shoes and standing right before me in the snow.

What is it with you? Let me take a look at this.

It’s nothing.

But you’re bleeding.

Yes, I know. Soldier in the trenches, you know.

Feeling sorry for yourself?

I did not answer. But, yes, feeling sorry for myself. Hating myself.

She rips off a swatch of cloth from her red blouse and swaddles it around my finger, then around my wrist. I am thinking of the Princesse de Clèves wrapping a yellow ribbon around a wooden cane that belonged to the man she loves. That swatch around my stick, my flesh, my Guido, my everything on your hem, on your hand, on your wrist, your wrist, your wrist, your sweet, stained, blessed, God-given wrist. Now look what you did — she smiles — I’m trying to concentrate. You could get a serious infection.

And if I did?

Let me focus here — as she tends to my wound.

Then, when she’s done being my nurse: So why did you do it? she asks.

Because of everything I wanted and never had.

Because of everything you wanted and never had. You’ll catch your death of cold sitting here.

So? To sit out this cold night and in the morning be found frozen blue, think I’d mind if it’s for you?

For me or for you?

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know the answer. Both answers were right.

Amphibalence, she says.

Amphibalence, I say.

And it hits me that more was being said in this short conversation between our shadow selves in this lonely park than anything we’d spoken all night. A lovers’ colloquy, as in Verlaine’s poem, where both our shadows touch, the rest just waits, and waits, and waits. This wasn’t new. I’d been doing this for years.

•

“Something wrong?” It was a uniformed policeman who had just shut the door of his car and was crossing the park toward me. He looked like the only other being left on this planet.

I shook my head and pretended to look elsewhere. Had I been speaking to myself all this time?

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, Officer. I was just trying to collect my thoughts.”

Collect my thoughts—people get arrested for speaking like this.

“Not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?”

Again I shook my head, smiling. Second time tonight.

“Been drinking?”

“Too much. Way too much.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“And to you too, Officer—?”

“Rahoon.”

“Rahoon, as in ‘She weeps over Rahoon’?”

“Don’t know that song.”

“Not a song — poem. Irish.”

“You don’t say!”

I was about to say youbetya but figured, better not.

“So what you got, woman trouble?” He crossed his arms. I could see the edges of his bulletproof vest bulge under his tight blue jacket.

“Nope. Not woman trouble. It’s just the old man’s gone. Was just thinking about him tonight, soon it will be exactly a year ago.” And suddenly I remembered his very own words, Soon I won’t even know I ever lived—and if my shadow bumps into yours on a busy sidewalk, my heart won’t jump as it did that night when you peeked into my room. So much love and all of it a waste, so many books and verses stored, and all of it gone. I look at this hand, and I know, soon I’ll no longer see it, for it’s no longer quite mine, the way my eyes are not quite mine, I’m not even here, my feet have already gone before me and found a cozier spot at God knows what time zone beyond Lethe and Phlegethon. I won’t even remember Lethe or Phlegethon, or the mutinous Shannon waves, or Phaedo, or brave Aristides and those long speeches by Thucydides we read together. All these immortal words, gone; Byzantium, gone. Pff! Part of me is no longer mine, the way life was never really mine, the way my clothes and my shoes and the smell on my body were never really mine, the way even “mine” isn’t mine any longer, my thoughts, my hair, my everything have drifted from me, and love too is no longer mine, just borrowed, like an umbrella from a tattered old coatrack — you and me, umbrellas on a coatrack, though you’re closer to me now than the blood in my neck, the breath of my life. I look at myself in the mirror and all I’m doing is saying goodbye to both my face and yours. I’m leaving you piecemeal, my love, and I don’t want you to grieve, I want to take this picture of you now to wherever they’re forcing me to go now and hope that once I’ve shut my eyes this will be the last thing to go, for the last thing you see they say is the one you take forever, if “take” means anything beyond Lethe and Phlegethon.

“Do you know Lethe and Phlegethon, Officer?”

“Who’re they?”

“No matter.” The worst part of dying is knowing you’ll forget you ever lived and ever loved. You live seventy or so years, and you die forever. Why can’t it be the other way? To be dead for seventy years — and throw in another seventy for good measure — but to live forever. What purpose does dying serve, anyway? I don’t care who says no human could endure living more than a lifetime. Ask the dead and see what answer you get — ask the dead what they wouldn’t give to be here and catch tonight’s snow, or have a week of starlit nights like these, or fall for the world’s most beautiful woman. Ask the dead.

“ ‘Just promise me this,’ he would say, ‘that when the time comes, you’ll help me — but only if I ask, not before, and so long as I can hold out, but not sooner.’ ”

“And did he ask?”

Was the lawman being cunning with me?

“He never asked.”

“They never do when the time comes. So what you so broken up for?”

“He went to sleep for a few hours and I walked about the neighborhood like a lover waiting for a girlfriend to clear every last thing she owns from his home, hoping she’ll change her mind, until I passed by a park and I knew, by the hiss of the wind through the trees in the cold, that he’d arrived safely. I was to read Plutarch to him. I let it happen.”

“Intentionally?”

“I’ll never know.”

Tell me I’m not cruel, Officer Rahoon. Tell me that he knew, Officer Rahoon.

“Just look at this moon.”

“Good night, moon,” I said.

“Good night, moon,” he repeated, to humor me, shaking his head, meaning, You people!

A beggar woman had crossed the street and was coming toward us. The park was probably her bedroom. Her bathroom. Her kitchen. Her parlor. “Mister, some bread.”

I put my hand in my pocket.

“Are you out of your mind!?” said the policeman. Then turning to the beggar, “Beat it, mamacita.”

“Don’t be cross with her. It’s Christmas.”

“She puts her grubby fingers on you — and see how Christmasy you feel.”

The beggar woman who had spotted a soft heart kept her gaze on me, begging silently.

Just when I was about to leave Straus Park, I took out a five-dollar bill and snuck it into the hand of the beggar woman. Por mi padre.

“Seriously?”

“Let it rest, Officer,” I said. You never know, I wanted to say. In another age, the old hag would have asked me to sit on one of these benches, brought a bucket to wash my feet, spotted something, and I’d be home. Y por Clara también. I should have added.

Rahoon and his car were gone, everything was quiet again.

As I crossed what must have been the street and not just the sidewalk, I looked back at the park, knowing now that I’d give anything to start the evening all over again exactly as it had turned out — do with time what Romans did when they gorged themselves on food — regurgitate time, wind the clock back to seven o’clock, and start right here in Straus Park again. It is snowing. I am still very early for the party. I’ll stop and have tea in this little coffeehouse. Then I’ll head to the building, pretend I am not sure that this is the correct address, shake my umbrella, watch the burly Russian with the stentorian voice open the door for me, and walk into the elevator, whose Gothic doorway doesn’t give a hint of where things are headed tonight. I wanted to start the evening all over again, and many more times again, because I did not want it to end, because, even if something wistful and unfinished hung over the entire night, I would take it, wistful and unfinished night that it was, and consider myself twice blessed.

Tomorrow night I would come and relight each candle all over again, one by one, and, looking around me, almost feel how every corner of the park still echoed with Clara’s presence, with me, my life, and how I live it, and with my father, who, unbeknownst to me, had been trailing me from the very start this evening and to whom I was holding on as to a shadow that is any moment about to dissolve but then comes back to take a last look, as if he’d forgotten his keys, then back again because he’d forgotten his glasses, and once again because he’d forgotten to check the gas, and would be coming back many more times again like the poor, restless, tormented man who’d known scant love in his life, as I would be coming back to this spot, fearing I’d left something behind, knowing that what we leave behind is a shadow self, but that this shadow self is the truest and most enduring of all our selves.

Looking back one last time, I thought to myself how much I’d always liked this little park, and how easy it would be to come back tomorrow and sit here awhile, and in the whiteness of the hour preceding sunup, contemplate once more, as ever again, the imperishable silence of the stars.