Eight White Nights

SECOND NIGHT

I spotted her right away. She was standing outside the movie theater. A crowd was gathered around the box office, and the line of ticket holders extended halfway down the block. From the island in the middle of Broadway, I dove across even before the light changed. When I looked at the crowd again, she was gone. I was almost certain it was Clara.

I had spent the whole day thinking of her, and already twice — at lunch, and later at Starbucks — could have sworn I’d seen her drift in and out of my field of vision, as though wishful thoughts had raced ahead of me and pasted her features on anyone bearing a resemblance. Now running into her a third time today would ruin the spontaneity and allow me to say things I’d had plenty of time to rehearse hours earlier — anything from the initial shock and bliss of bumping into her to the pretense that I was having a hard time placing her—Oh yes, last night, Hans’s party, of course—to a desperate, overzealous desire to restore that initial shock and resist all camouflage by blurting out something seemingly unstudied: I’ve been thinking of you all day, all day, Clara.

All day I’d been doing just that. Looking for one store that was open on Christmas Day and finding all of them closed, lunching with Olaf, who badmouthed his wife in one unending screed, in the packed greasy spoon because everything else was closed, trying to shop for Christmas presents on Christmas Day, the whole day punctuated by hazy premonitions that last night might happen all over again. I had spent the entire day totally spellbound by our parting in the snow, wearing, but not wearing, my coat, saying goodbye with a handshake after she’d walked me to the bus stop and rushed back to her building, handing the doorman the umbrella she had borrowed, not turning, but then turning back at the last moment, every last part of me clinging to the memory of her elbow resting on my shoulder at the party, her burgundy suede shoes kicking off the snow, the cigarette, the ex-boyfriend, the Bloody Mary she had scarcely touched and later abandoned on the balcony while I’d stared at her open blouse, wondering all night why in someone so tanned was the base of her breasts so fair. I’ve been thinking of you all day, all day.

Would I have the courage to say this?

I caught myself making a wish: I would tell her I’d been thinking of her all day provided she materialized on Broadway and Ninety-fifth tonight. Humbled, hopeful, happy, I’d tell her however it came out.

Or this: I was just thinking of you — with a waggish smile in my voice, almost as though I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. She’d know how to read this.

For good measure, I already assumed a flustered, unfocused air allegedly caused by my bold dash across Broadway — which would also justify my failure to notice her any sooner.

I was hoping it would be you — but then I said it couldn’t be — yet here you are.

While I was trying out these phrases like someone matching neckties to a shirt, I made every effort not to look in the direction of the crowd. I didn’t want her to know that I had already spotted her and was simply pretending. I wanted to think she’d recognize me first and be the first to seek the other out.

But there was another reason for not looking in her direction. I didn’t want to dispel the illusion or undo the thrill of running into her. I wanted to hold on to that illusion and, like a well-behaved Orpheus determined to keep his end of the bargain, I wanted to think that she’d already seen me and was just now making her way toward me, provided I didn’t look back. I wanted to cup my hands around this tiny, furtive, shameful hope as if all I had to do then was look away, keep looking away, and so long as I kept up with the pretense, she’d come behind me, place both palms on my eyes, and say, Guess who? The more I resisted turning in her direction, the more I could feel her breath graze the back of my neck, closer and closer, the way she had let her lips almost touch my ears at the party each time she’d whisper to me. There was something so enthralling about waiting and hoping, without so much as giving a hint I knew I was being watched, that I even caught myself trying not to hope so much — she couldn’t possibly be there tonight, what was I thinking! — realizing all along that this sobering strain of counterhope was not just my way of seeing that life seldom grants us what it knows we want, but also my own twisted way of courting its goodwill by pretending to forget it likes nothing better than to grant us our wish once we’ve all but given up and embraced despair.

Hope and counterhope. First you think you’ve spotted her, then you can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, and in between both options you’re instantly rummaging for things to say, for an attitude to strike — hide the joy — show the joy — show you’re hiding the joy — show you’re showing every last strain of joy. Then you spot someone who simply looks like her. The illusion is shattered. It’s someone else.

But then, because the things you thought you’d say thrilled you and seemed to blanket the cold evening around you, you suddenly catch yourself wanting to undo the thrill yourself rather than have others do it for you. Perhaps, you begin to think, it’s just as well this way; such encounters never happen, it’s pointless to think they might, and besides, the quiet evening at the movies you’d been looking forward to all day was finally being given to you, and just as you’d planned. You and the movies are going to sit and spend hours together, though, because of a face half perceived in the crowd, perhaps something might indeed happen between you and the film, as though the film could in its own strange way bring to life the very things you’ve been asking by granting them onscreen instead.

Later, after seeing the film, I’d probably find the lingering mirage of her presence around the box-office window. The mirage had already begun to cast its radiance around the whole evening, and I knew that if the illusion of having seen her was something I could take with me to the movies and snuggle up with for a few hours, the movie in return would allow me, once I stepped out onto the sidewalk, to take home with me the sense that the thing that happens between men and women in films had indeed happened to me tonight.

Perhaps this last illusion was nothing more than a desperate attempt to buoy my spirits before giving up on the day and locking myself in the theater for five hours. By midnight, I thought, it would be tomorrow already — and this strange Christmas Day that had started in a fairy-tale greenhouse and couldn’t have felt more aimless afterward was finally being let go of, like an unmoored punt starting to drift with the rising tide of the day-to-day.

After the movies, I’d take a bus, or walk home, or take a cab farther downtown, or stop somewhere along the way, if for no other reason than to see faces before calling it a night.

To see faces as opposed to not seeing any at all. Faces. People. Midnight people, otherpeoples who’ll brave a storm to buy cigarettes, walk a dog, grab a bite, get the paper, or, like me, see faces.

I began to think of places I’d wander to after seeing the film. A bar-and-grill. Or Thai Soup.

I had good memories of Thai Soup.

Trench soup she’d have called it, with beef pandangst. How I missed her way of taking something, then turning it upon itself, and then turning it back to how it was before, knowing it would never be the same afterward.

Then I saw her.

I wanted to sound surprised — but not totally thrown off — as if I’d expected something of the sort but had let the matter slip and never given it another thought.

Perhaps I would find a way to tweak the conditions of my initial wish now that it had been granted and no longer feel bound to tell her how I’d been thinking of her all day, all day.

“Clara?” I asked, exaggerating my surprise, as people do when they rush to greet you first, for fear of being caught trying to avoid you.

“There you are. Finally!” she shouted. “I tried calling you a million times, but you’re never ever home”—it almost sounded like a lover’s reproach—“I thought you had changed your mind and weren’t going to come.”

To show she wasn’t exaggerating, she displayed two tickets clasped tightly in between flushed knuckles. “I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting. And. It. Is. Freezing,” she said, as if all this was my fault. “Here, feel.” She brought her palm to my cheek to prove how cold. “I’ve called you so many times I know your number by heart. Here—” She turned her cell phone toward me and began to scroll down row after row after row of countless friends. It took a few moments to recognize the numerals on the colored screen. Under the phone number I saw something else that looked uncannily familiar: my name — last name first, first name last. Was I officially on her A-list? “Why don’t you answer your télyfön?” I didn’t know why I didn’t answer my télyfön.

In her place I would never have entered someone’s name that way. Putting a totally new name on my permanent list would have nipped every hint of uncertainty, chilled the flustered hesitation with which we palpate a stranger’s name before admitting it into the ledger of our lives; I would have placed it in abeyance, in limbo — until it had “proven” itself. The inadvertent misspelling on a paper napkin, the name hastily plunked down in the cold, the intentional absence of a surname to show we’re not so sure we’ll call — all these are not just markers of inner diffidence and hesitation along the twisted path to others, they are also loopholes in every exaltation, the shallow wetlands we leave behind for speedy backtracking. I would never have listed her under Brunschvicg. Nor would I have entered her name or her number in my cell phone’s memory. I’d have made every effort to unremember her number if I caught myself already knowing it by heart.

It hit me that she said exactly what I’d have said under the circumstances. But I would have said it for exactly the opposite reason. I would have been overly demonstrative, as she was, to show how lightly I took these matters. Was hers the voice of diffidence cloaking itself behind hyperbolic complaints about the weather, about my phone, about me — or was she making no secret of something most people are reluctant to reveal too soon? Was it too soon?

Was she thinking like me?

Or was she telling a man what he’d give anything to hear a woman say to him on their first night out?

Was this our first night out?

I wondered if she’d rehearsed saying any of it.

I would have.

Then I thought: Better yet if she’d rehearsed it. It meant she’d cared to rehearse it.

Then I remembered I had never given her my number. Nor was my number listed.

She must have read what was going on in my mind. “You’ll never guess who gave me your télyfön.”

“Who?”

“I told you, you’ll never guess. I brought us this,” she said, and produced a white paper bag containing food and things to drink.

“I’m — overwhelmed.”

Pause.

“He’s overwhelmed.” She puckered her lips and looked away, as though to signal stifled exasperation at some strange mannerism in my speech. I instantly recognized the mock chiding of last night’s banter on the veranda. I missed it, welcomed it back, had been away from it too long. “A million times,” she repeated, seemingly speaking to herself.

There was, in her word, both the open-faced boldness of those who know how to make difficult admissions to people they scarcely know, and the specter of irony, which comes to their rescue when they find the difficult admission not difficult at all.

Anyone else would have read the most reassuring signals in this.

I couldn’t have been more pleased to find her standing there, waiting for me, with two tickets in hand and snacks to boot, in an attitude suggesting that she might have planned this all the way back to the moment in church when I’d brought up the Eric Rohmer festival. I had an image of her waking up in the morning and, instead of thinking of Inky, already making plans to meet me in the evening. First she would have tried to obtain my number. Then, having found it, she would have called. Late morning. Early afternoon. Eventually she would have had to leave a message. But no one had left a message.

“People on ice check their voice mail, I guess,” she said, remembering my words.

“And those lying low?”

“People lying low still make an effort to call. I stopped calling until a few minutes ago.”

“How did you know I was going to be here?”

What I meant to ask was how did she know I was going to come alone tonight. “What if I hadn’t come?”

“I would have gone in. Besides,” she added, as though the thought had never occurred to her before, “we had a date.”

Did she know I knew we didn’t have a date, and that if I suddenly pretended to remember that we had one it was less to let her save face than to put off deciding what sort of attitude to strike myself?

Or was this simply her way of spelling out my unspoken reason for bringing up the Rohmer festival last night? Had we perhaps firmed up something that remained undefined in my mind simply because I couldn’t bring myself to believe it could have been so easily arranged?

“Clara, I’m so glad you’re here.”

“You’re glad! Imagine how stupid I’d feel holding these two tickets in the cold. Do I go in, do I keep waiting, what if he doesn’t show up, do I give away the tickets, keep one, give the other to some man who’s going to think he’s entitled to speak to me through both films if I last that long? I just hope they’re good films,” she added, as if she hadn’t quite believed they might be until she’d seen the line and managed to get two tickets minutes before the show sold out. Or was this her way of paying me a compliment, because, left to her, she would never have stepped out into the cold for a Rohmer film unless she trusted the man who loved these films.

We barely had time to say anything more when she proceeded to whisper curses at the management, launching into a mock tirade against the very notion of a 7:10 show. Seven-ten was too early. Seven-ten was for those who needed to go to bed before midnight. Seven-ten was dolt time. “What did I do on Christmas Day in the year of our Lord such-and-such? I went to the movies at seven-ten.”

“I too ended up going to the movies that day.”

“You don’t say.”

There it was again. Mock-rebuke — like someone suddenly slipping an arm under yours as you’re walking together. It was her way of saying that her hunch had paid off. I would remember this. On Christmas Day in the year of our Lord such-and-such—how I liked that beginning. It went with the snow outside the theater, with the light haze around traffic lights down Broadway, with everyone shivering in line, eagerly awaiting My Night at Maud’s.

“I didn’t have a chance to eat anything. I suppose you haven’t, either,” she continued as we stood in line, muttering muffled curses at the weather with spirited feigned anger. I told her about Thai Soup and their garlique-infested prawn broth. It made her laugh. Perhaps she enjoyed how I’d used her word from last night. Her laugh was high-pitched, which drew the attention of one of the ushers, who scowled at us. “Just look at that face,” she whispered, indicating his sharp crew cut and broad shoulders. “And his teeth. People with faces like his invent times like seven-ten.” I laughed. “Quiet, he’s seen us,” she hissed, as though playing cat and mouse, slipping her white paper bag under her coat. The burly usher with the bouncer’s gait and the clip-on tie walked up to us. “Youse waiting for the seven-ten show?” he asked. “Affirmatov. We is,” she replied, staring at his face and handing him our tickets. He took them in one palm and, rather than tear them in two, dropped into her hand what looked like two crushed spitballs.

“What’s this?” she said, holding the mangled stubs in an open palm. The man did not answer. “He chewed them with his hands,” she added as we took our seats. Once again she revealed the white paper bag. “I got coffee.” “Did you get one for me too?” I asked, pretending I hadn’t heard the first time. “No, I only do things for me,” she snapped as she handed me mine, with a look that said, Needs constant reassurance. I watched her remove the plastic cover, add the sugar, stir it, and, after placing the cover back on the cup, lift the tab. “I like coffee.”

It sounded like a bashful admission.

I liked coffee too, I said. It was good coffee. I liked coffee in movie theaters. I also liked where we were seated. This is just perfect, I caught myself saying.

“Do you think I was mean to him?”

“Who?”

“The bouncer. Gave me the dirtiest look since last he boozed Stolies in Bratislavovich. He mad.”

We waited for the theater to grow dark. Another surprise. She dug deeper in the same paper bag and produced two halves of a large sandwich. “Very très goormay,” she whispered, taking an indirect swipe at Manhattan’s love affair with the finer things of the palate. The sudden smell of garlic cheese and prosciutto was overpowering. Once again she burst out laughing. Someone asked us to be quiet.

Then we sank deeper into our seats. “This isn’t going to be boring, is it?” she said as the credits began to roll.

“Might be deadly.”

“Good. Just wanted to make sure we’re in this together.”

An abrupt “Shush” shot out from behind us again.

“Shush yourself!”

Then suddenly we were in the black-and-white universe I’d been longing for all day. The town of Clermont-Ferrand around Christmas, the man studying Pascal where Pascal was born, the drive down the crowded narrow streets of a provincial French town lightly decorated with Christmas lights. The blond girl. The dark girl. The church. The café. Would Clara really like this?

I didn’t dare look in her direction. Did people go together to the movies to see movies or to be together, or because they liked each other and this is what one did sometimes when one liked someone — one went to the movies with her, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Did one switch from watching the movie to being together, and at what point did one stop switching from one to the other? Why was I even asking all this? Did asking automatically put me in the camp of those who wonder about being natural and who suspect others do not nurse the same doubts about themselves, or did others secretly hope that everyone was as diffident as they were? Was she thinking about being natural? Or was she just watching the movie?

She was staring intently at the screen, as though resolved to ignore me now. Then, without warning, she ribbed me with her elbow, all the while sucking in her cheeks and looking straight before her, chewing words that were sure to be nasty. I had seen her do it with Rollo on the terrace in a moment of suppressed anger. Why had she nudged me that way?

Then I got it. Clara was not upset at all. She was struggling not to burst out laughing, and by ribbing me as she was doing a second time now, she was making sure I was aware of her struggle and, better yet, passing it on to me.

“What possessed me to ask for garly cheese — what was I thinking?”

I was about to throw in a possible guess when she ribbed me yet again, waving me away with her hand, as though anything I might breathe was sure to make her explode. Tears of suppressed laughter were welling up in her eyes — which finally gave me a case of the giggles as well. “Want more garly?” she began. It was my turn to brush her away.

It took me a few seconds to note that she had spun out a new version of a word I thought was intimate kitchenspeak between us. Can’t get too cozy with her.

The film. Blond girl. Dark girl. Blond girl is virtuous, dark girl a temptress. Catholic man refuses to be snared. Snowbound on Christmas Eve, the man is forced to spend the night in dark girl’s apartment, in her bedroom, finally in her bed. Nothing happens, but toward dawn, when the flesh is weak and he is just about to make a move, she jumps out of bed. “I prefer men who know what they want.” That same morning, outside a café, man runs into blond girl.

At intermission, Clara suddenly got up and said she had to make a phone call.

•

Left alone, I looked around in the dimly lit darkness of the movie theater, watching people arrive, mostly in pairs. A group of four men and a woman filed in, each drinking from a huge cup, unable to decide where to sit, until one of them pointed to the back and whispered, “How about there?” A couple stood up to let them squeeze through. One of the five turned to the other and said, “Say thank you.” “Thank you,” played along the other. The atmosphere was charged with subdued excitement. People had come from all around the city for this film and, despite their differences, knew they shared something, though it was impossible to tell exactly what. It might have been their love for Eric Rohmer’s films. Or their love of France, or of the idea of France, or of those confused, intimate, random moments in our lives that Rohmer had borrowed for an hour or so; he’d drawn them out, scaled down their roughness, removed all accidentals, given them a rhythm, a cadence, a wisdom even, and then projected them onto a screen and promised to return them to us after the show, though slightly altered, so that we’d have our lives back, but seen from the other side — not as they were, but as we’d always imagined they should be, the idea of our lives.

I tried to imagine these five friends huddled in a corner at the Starbucks next door as they waited for the first film to end and then rushing to catch the last show. Here they were now. One of them produced a bag of doughnuts, which he had smuggled into the theater under his coat and was now passing around. Within a minute or so, another girl holding a giant container of popcorn wandered into the theater, looked momentarily lost, then spotted her group and walked up the stairs toward them. “I also got these,” she said, producing two large yellow boxes of M&Ms.

I liked being lost in this crowd, liked these people who had escaped the swarming, cold, floodlit city to this quiet oasis on the Upper West Side where each hoped to catch a glimpse of an imaginary, inner France. I liked knowing that Clara was out in the hallway somewhere and would be coming back — liked thinking that the world could be shut out for a few hours and, as soon as she was back from wherever she had gone to make her phone call, sitting close together like passengers in a crowded ferry boat, we would once again drift into this strange, beguiling fantasy world of Rohmer’s invention that might be more in us than in the films themselves. I looked around at the groups and couples in the theater: some were clearly happier than others — happier than I, than people who were not lovers, though it was still good to be among them. I liked the idea that dropping Rohmer’s name in the wee hours of the morning last night had made her want to see this film with me.

This was not how I had imagined my evening. Now I was thrilled that this was the course it had taken, that someone had unexpectedly turned up, and that this someone should be Clara, Clara with whom laughter was easier than with anyone else, Clara who knew how to make things happen long before I was aware of wanting them, and who, with two theater tickets purchased before my arrival, had given me the best Christmas present I’d received since childhood — a present that could turn into air, for Clara could have gone to phone another man at this very moment and, being impulsive, could just as easily come back to pick up her things and leave me stranded in my seat. Sorry, have to run, enjoyed the film — great seeing you.

But as I sat there, worrying about this, I knew that worrying was also my way of paying token tribute to unfounded fears before admitting that tonight I was indeed happy. Waiting for her made me happy. Coddling the thought she’d even spurn my way of waiting for her made me happy. Rehearsing her abrupt goodbye as soon as we’d leave the movie theater in two hours made me happy. And what made me happier yet wasn’t just that we were together again after scarcely spending the day apart, but that her presence made me like the way the day had turned out, made me like my life and the way I lived it. She was the face of my life and how I lived it, my eyes to the world staring back at me. The people in the theater, the people I had known, the books read, lunch with Olaf, who bad-mouths his wife, the places I’d lived in, my life on ice, and all the things I still wanted, all had suddenly turned a dearer and more vulnerable face under her spell — for this was a spell, and struck like a spell, and, like all spells, ushered in new colors, new people, new scents, new habits, unveiling new meanings, new patterns, new laughter, a new cadence to things — even if, all along, a small unseen, untapped part of me was perfectly willing to suspect, as though for good measure, that I could just as easily have preferred the spell more than the person who cast it, the coded sparring between us more than the person I was sparring with, the me-because-of-Clara more than Clara herself.

Clara had left her coat on her seat. I let my hand rest on her coat, stared at its lining, touched the inner lining. Clara. It was also my way of remembering I was not alone, that she would very shortly come back and take up her seat again and tell me — or perhaps not — why she had taken so long. Sometimes just placing my coat next to my seat when I am alone in a movie theater is itself a way of conjuring a presence in the dark, of imagining that someone has stepped out for a second and will any moment come back — which is what happens in the dead of night, when those who have left our lives suddenly lie next to us no sooner than we’ve whispered their name into our pillow. Clara, I thought, and there she’d be, taking the seat next to mine.

And as I listened to the violin sonata by Beethoven, which always appears in this theater as soon as the intermission lights come on, I remembered that no more than three winters ago I had done the very same with someone else’s coat while she had gone to buy sodas at the concession stand. I’d pretended we had broken up or that she had never even existed, only to be surprised when she returned and pushed down the seat next to mine. Afterward, we had left the movie theater and had bought the Sunday paper and ambled home in the snow, speaking of Maud and of Chloé, improvising dinner somewhere after visiting a bookstore. It seemed so long ago. And I thought back to a much younger I who had come to this very theater alone one Saturday night and, while looking for a seat without disturbing too many people, had overheard a man ask a woman, “Do you like Beethoven?” The woman, who had let her coat hang on the backrest of her seat, slouched over it and, turning to him, had replied something like “Yes, very much, but this sonata I hate.” They were, even I could tell, on their first date.

That night I’d hurled a hopeful and mystified glance to the future, asking who would the woman be in my life who’d sit next to me and listen to this piece by Beethoven and say, Yes, but this sonata I hate. They knew so little about each other that the man needed to ask whether she liked Beethoven. It had never occurred to me until now that all he was trying to do was make conversation.

Yes, but this sonata I hate, I had repeated to myself, as though the mildly miffed tone of her words held a key that might unlock a passageway to where I wished my life to go one day — words that seemed fraught with intimations that were as stirring and reckless as a compliment I had never heard before and desperately wished to have repeated. Yes, but this sonata I hate meant, I can say anything to you. It’s good to be together on this cold night. Move closer and we’ll touch elbows. Now, reexamining her unguarded response years later, I realized that I knew no more about the shoals between men and women than I did then; nor did I even know what my mystified wish had been that night when I sat alone thinking ahead of myself, hoping to trace the pattern my life might take, and never for a moment realizing that the questions I had asked of life then would come bobbing back to me years later in the same bottle, unanswered.

All those years, and all I’m still trying to do is make conversation!

All those years, and all I want to show is that I’m not scared of silence, of women.

I thought of the lovers again. I had caught sight of them once more outside the theater as everyone waited for the rain to stop. Then the years went by. Then someone came along, and perhaps on our first date I too had asked what she thought of Beethoven and, by so doing, put a check mark next to the question that signaled entrance to the rose garden. We too had waited for the rain to subside. Then I went alone to the movie theater. Then with others. Then alone. Then with others again.

Had I seen more films alone or with others? And which had I liked more? I wondered.

Would Clara say alone was better, but then, just when I was about to agree with her, turn around and say that, in the dark, she still needed otherpeoples, an elbow to rub against?

The road once traveled seemed filled with potholes now.

Perhaps I would tell her all this.

The pleasure of peeling back the years and laying myself bare before her aroused me. The pleasure of telling her anything about me aroused me.

To tell her: For a moment I made myself fear that I was only imagining you were with me tonight. Want to know why?

I know why.

Would I tell her I’d thought about her the whole day, or would I suggest something a bit tamer, that our meeting outside the theater seemed lifted from every film I’d seen and presaged the course of many a Rohmer tale? I could tell her I’d walked many blocks in search of open stores, and all I could think of was her, looked for her, stopped somewhere for coffee, almost certain I had spotted her, but, knowing better than to hope, had given each place a cursory glance, then walked away, just as she was calling me a million times? Should I tell her that I’d rehearsed telling her all this?

I remembered the failing late-afternoon sun and how gradually it began to spell loneliness and dejection after I’d lunched with Olaf, its waffling light taking me down with it as I watched the day put an end to its misery — and yet, in the background always that unwieldy hope that the clock would turn back twenty-four hours and take me to exactly where I’d been yesterday evening, before boarding the uptown M 5 bus, before buying two bottles of Champagne, before leaving my mother’s home on my way to the liquor store. .

I’d been heading uptown all afternoon. Scoping out her territory, on the fringes of her territory. You always run into the one person you’d give anything to run into, baiting them with desire, your own.

But, then, fearing she might run into me and guess why I’d wandered so far uptown, I decided to head home instead. By the time I left again and arrived at the movie theater, the show was sold out. I should have known. Christmas.

•

When she finally sat down next to me, the lights were already dimming. She wasn’t her jovial self any longer. She seemed agitated. “What’s wrong?” “Inky’s crying,” she said. Did she want to leave? No. He always cried. Why had she called him, then? Because he was leaving too many messages on her voice mail. “I shouldn’t have called.” Someone again shushed us from behind. “Shush yourself!” she snapped.

I thought I liked her irked and groused manner, but this was too much. I began to think of poor Inky, and of his tears over the phone, and of the men who cry for the Claras they love — a man who weeps on the phone must be in the bowels of despair. Had she told him she was with me?

“No, he thinks I’m in Chicago,” she whispered.

I looked at her with baffled eyes, not because she had lied, but at the absurdity of the lie. “I’m just not going to answer my phone,” she said. This seemed to ease her mind, as though she had suddenly stumbled on the one solution capable of dispelling all her worries. She put her glasses back on, took a sip from her coffee, sat back, and was clearly ready to enjoy the second film. “Why would he keep calling if he thinks you’re in Chicago?” I asked.

“Because he knows I’m lying.”

She was staring straight in front of her, making it clear she was intentionally not looking in my direction. Then with a huff—

“Because he likes to hear my voice on the outgoing message, okay? Because he likes to leave long messages on my answering machine that I erase no sooner than I hear them and are sheer torture when I’m there with someone and he knows I am, but goes on yapping and yapping away until I lose my patience and pick up. Because he knows I’m fed up. Okay?”

This was rage speaking.

“Because he lingers on the sidewalk and spies on me, and waits for my lights to go on.”

“How do you know?”

“He tells me.”

“I don’t think I want to touch this,” I said with marked, overstated irony, meaning I didn’t want to risk adding anything that would further upset her, and was now graciously backtracking with a hint of humor to ease our passage into movie mode.

“Don’t.” She cut me short.

Don’t stung me to the quick. She’d spoken this word once last night, and it had had the same chilling effect. It shut me up. It stayed with me for the remainder of the second film, a cold, blunt admonition not to meddle or try to ingratiate myself with the intrusive goodwill of people who pry and wheedle their way into private zones where they aren’t invited. Worse yet, she was mixing me up with him.

“He prowls downstairs, and whenever he sees my lights come on, eventually he calls.”

•

“I feel for him,” I said when we sat after the movie at a bar close to her home. She liked Scotch and french fries. And she liked coming here, occasionally, with friends. They served Scotch in a wineglass here. I liked Scotch and ended up picking at her fries.

“Then you feel for him.” Silence. “Feel for him all you want. You and everyone else.”

Silence again.

“The truth is, I feel for him too,” she added a moment later. She thought awhile longer. “No. I don’t feel a thing.”

We were sitting at a small, old, square wooden table in the back of a bar-restaurant that she said she liked because late on weeknights, especially when the place was empty, they would sometimes let you smoke. She had a wineglass in front of her, both elbows spread on the table, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, and between us, a tiny lighted candle, sitting in a paper bag like a tiny kitten curled in a rolled-down sock. She had pulled the sleeves of her sweater up, and one could make out a shade of down along her bony wrists, which were red from the cold. It was an oversized home-knit sweater made of very thick, brushed wool stitches. I thought of heather, and of large winter shawls, and of flushed naked bodies wrapped in sheepskin. “Let’s talk of something else, can we?” She seemed mildly annoyed, bored, vexed.

“Like what?” I asked.

Did she actually believe in choreographed conversation?

“Why not talk about you.”

I shook my head to mean, You’re joking, right?

She shook her head to mean, Absolutely not joking. “Yes, that’s it,” she said, as she dismissed any possibility of hesitation on my part. “We’ll talk about you.”

I wondered whether she suddenly perked up and was leaning over the table toward me because she was truly curious about me or because she was enjoying this sudden turn from pity-the-woman-with-the-wrong-ex-boyfriend to hard-nosed cross-examiner.

“There’s so little to say.”

“Tell!”

“Tell. .” I repeated her command, trying to make light of it. “Tell what?”

“Well, for one thing, tell why there’s so little to say.”

I didn’t know why there was so little to say. Because there’s so little about me I care to talk about before knowing it’s quite safe to — and even then. .? Because the person I am and the person I wish I were at this very moment in the bar aren’t always on speaking terms? Because I feel like a shadow right now and can’t fathom why you can’t see this? What was she really asking me to say?

“Anything but bland pieties.”

“No bland pieties — promise!”

She seemed thrilled by my reply and was eagerly anticipating what I was about to say, like a child who’s just been promised a story.

“And?”

“And?” I asked.

“And keep going. .”

“Depends what you charge.”

“A lot. Ask around. So, why is there so little to say?”

I wanted to say that I didn’t know where to go with her question and that, because its candor made evasion an unworthy option, I was drawing a complete blank — a complete blank that I didn’t want to talk about so soon, the complete blank sitting between us, Clara, that is crying to be talked about. A Rosetta stone in the rose garden, that’s what I am. Give me a pumice stone, and it’ll be my turn to bash every evasion in my mouth. My pumice stone, your pumice stone, I should have brought mine along tonight and dumped it on the table and said, “Ask the pumice stone.” Did she want to know what I’d done in the past five years, where I’d been, whom I’d loved or couldn’t love, what my dreams were, those at night and those by day, those I wouldn’t dare own up to, a penny for my thoughts? Ask the pumice stone.

“And don’t give me the obituary you. Give me the real you.”

Ask the pumice stone, Clara, ask the pumice stone. It knows me better than I do myself.

I raised my eyes, more flustered than ever. It was then that I felt the words almost slip from my mouth. She was looking at me longer than I expected. I returned her gaze and held her eyes awhile, thinking that perhaps she was lost in thought and had absentmindedly let her glance linger on mine. But her silence had interrupted nothing, and she wasn’t absent at all. She was just staring.

I averted my eyes, pretending to be absorbed in deep, faraway thoughts that I didn’t quite know how to confide. I watched her fingers fold the corners of her square paper napkin around the base of her wineglass. When I looked up, her gaze was still glued on me. I still hadn’t said a thing.

I wondered whether this was how she was with everyone — simply stares, doesn’t stuff silence with words, looks you straight in the face, and then bores through each of your frail little bulwarks, and, without shifting her glance, begins smiling a lukewarm, impish smile that seems almost amused that you’ve finally figured she’s figured you out.

Should I stare back? Or was there no challenge in her gaze, no unspoken message to be intercepted or deciphered? Perhaps it was the stare of a woman whose beauty could easily overwhelm you, but then, rather than withdraw after achieving its effect, simply lingered on your face and never let go till it read every good or bad thought it knew it would find and had probably planted there, straining the conversation, promising intimacy before its time, demanding intimacy as one demands surrender, breaking through the lines of casual conversation long before preliminary acts of friendship had been put in place, daring you to admit what she’d known all along: that you were easily flustered in her presence, that she was right, all men are ultimately more uneasy with desire than the women they desire.

For a moment, I thought I caught a mild, questioning nod. Was I imagining things? Or was she about to say something but then thought better of it and retracted it just in time?

Still, someone had to say something. I’d brace myself before taking the bold plunge.

“Do you always stare at men like this?”

I nipped the words just in time. But a moment more under her gaze and I would have broken down and said something more desperate, anything to ward off the silence and choke the chaos of words welling up inside me, words that were still totally unknown to me and seemed to skulk in the backdrop like tiny unfledged, unsprung, jittery creatures caught in their larval stage and that, given the opportunity, would spill out of me and reveal more about me than I knew myself — how I felt, what I wanted, what I couldn’t even suggest or hint at, opening a door I dreaded but was willing to venture through if only I knew how to shut it afterward. Was I going to say anything simply to say something? Is this what people do? Say something instead of nothing, go with the moment? Or, in an effort to avoid taking chances, was I going to utter something unintended and irrelevant: “Do you always ask people to tell you about themselves?” I nipped this as well.

“What a silly, unrealistic movie,” I found myself saying, not sure why I had said it, or to which of the two films I was referring, especially since I knew I liked both films and didn’t necessarily consider realism a virtue. I had said it with an air of resigned gravity and preoccupation, attributing the vague dismay in my voice to something awkward and disturbing in the films themselves.

I was simply trying to conceal my inability to come out and say something that didn’t bear on the two of us.

She misunderstood me completely. “Unrealistic because no one sleeps together in Rohmer’s films?” she asked.

I shook my head with a hint of troubled irony, meaning she was so off base that I’d rather erase my misguided attempt at casual conversation and start all over with something else. She let a moment pass.

“You mean because we’re not sleeping together tonight?” she said.

It came from nowhere. But there it was. She hadn’t misunderstood a thing. Or, if I thought she had, it was only because she had taken the words from my mind and given them a spin that wouldn’t have occurred to me so soon but was the only one eager to be heard.

“It had occurred to me,” I said, pretending I wasn’t startled by her thunderbolt. I was attempting an amused smile that meant to overstate her reading of the situation and by so doing to suggest how far off the mark it fell — my way of parrying her dart with an equally pointed admission of my own. She right away dismissed it with an arch smile to mean I thought as much—a variation on what the woman on the terrace had asked her companion when he put an arm around her while holding a cigar in his other hand. Are you hitting on me?

The silence that rose between us as quickly as steam from a sprinkled clump of dry ice made it clear that neither had anything to add and that we both wanted the subject swept aside by whatever means. “Nev-er mind,” she intoned, with the self-mocking strain of people who have ventured too far but who, to smooth ruffled waters, are merely pretending to be unhinged by their boldness. Her smile either underscored her outspoken remark or suggested she did not believe I was as unfazed by it as I wished to seem. “That was just in case,” she said, raising her eyes at me once more. And then it came: “In case I hadn’t made it clear last night. I’m just lying low,” she added, something almost helpless and modest in her voice. She had used the exact same tone last night, lacing, as she always seemed to do in difficult moments, straight talk with double-talk, blandspeak with sadspeak. But this time she wasn’t saying it about herself or about her reclusion from those around her; she was saying it to me, staving me off, shooing me away. It occurred to me that if she was with me on this Christmas night, it was precisely because she was lying low. We would never have met, or spoken, or stood on the terrace together, much less been to the movies or sat in a bar as we were doing now, if she wasn’t in Rekonvaleszenz and if I hadn’t taken on the role of night nurse, the visitor who stays long past visiting hours, the last hand that gently turns the lights down after the patient’s finally dozed off.

As she explained when I walked her home later that night and watched her look for ways to underscore the words lying low, she was always this far from crying, she said, indicating, as she’d done last night, the distance between her thumb and her forefinger. But when we finally reached the entrance to her building, the girl who could come this close to crying would suddenly turn on me and remind me, with goading raillery, not to look so glum. I’d been forewarned, hadn’t I? Suddenly the distance between us was wider than the distance between ice poles.

•

I had tried, at the bar, to open up and tell her why I liked Rohmer. How I’d discovered him at an age when I knew next to nothing about women or about myself—

“You’re sitting too far away, I can’t hear you,” she had said. Which is why I brought my face closer to the candle, realizing that I had been sitting almost a whole table width away from her. She didn’t like you to drift. At one point I noticed that while talking to her all you had to do was to sound vaguely tired or let your thoughts seem to stray during a moment of silence and she would immediately look hurt. If I persisted, however, she would punish my distraction first by pretending to be lost in thought herself and then by looking bored or far too interested in what the people next to our table were saying. She played this game better than anyone. “Maybe I should be thinking of going home,” she said, before suggesting we have a second drink. Then: “Finish what you were saying.” This was how she flattered you. The films, I thought, were about men who loved without passion, for no one seemed to suffer in them. “Rohmer’s men talk a good game around love, the better to tame their desires, their fears. They overanalyze things, as though analysis might open up the way to feeling, is a form of feeling, is better than feeling. In the end, they crave the small things, having given up on the big ones—”

“Have you known the big ones?” she interrupted me, honing once again on the unstated subject of our conversation.

I thought awhile. There was a time when I could have sworn I’d known them. Now, in truth, I didn’t think I had. “Sometimes I think I have. Have you?” I asked, still trying to stay vague.

“Sometimes I think I have.” She was mimicking me again. I loved how she did this.

We both laughed — because she had mimicked me quite well, because my answer was indeed hollow, and was meant to sound hollow, because by laughing she herself was hinting she’d have tried to dodge the question, seeing that she too might never have known the big ones and that we had both lied about knowing them to sound a touch less icy than we feared we seemed.

Last call came. We ordered a third round. Not one thing had gone wrong.

“Promise me something, though,” she said after I’d just repeated I was pleased we’d met tonight.

I looked at her and said nothing, not entirely certain I understood, trying to look surprised at whatever she was about to say, even if the use of her “though” was like an uneasy warning of gunfire to come.

She hesitated before speaking. Then she changed her mind.

“I don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.

She knew I knew.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know, it might just ruin things.”

I took my time, sensing that my initial assumption had been totally correct. It had never occurred to me that we had so many things that could be ruined if I failed to promise what she was asking of me. I thought we had a scatter of small disconnected things between us — not Things with a capital T, and certainly not as many as she was implying!

“Things?” I asked, with something like an amused expression on my face, as though I had considered but then hushed an impulse to mimic her word. I knew I was being disingenuous and that I was desperately trying to find something else to say, perhaps to stave off what I was inferring from her and wished might remain ambiguous yet. But I didn’t want to deny it either.

“Things,” I repeated, as though her meaning had finally sunk in and that I was going to comply with her wishes.

“It won’t ruin things,” I replied. I tried to soften the conscious irony I was spreading on her words even before they had left my mouth, as though her concerns about us had never occurred to me before and, come to think of it now, were a touch amusing. Perhaps I was trying to dispel her doubts about me but didn’t want them totally dismissed either. I was taking cover in the truth. “Besides, you might be entirely wrong,” I added.

A short silence.

“I don’t think so.”

There was almost a note of apology in her eyes — apology for the unspoken slight directed at me. “Point taken,” I said. “Admonition forbidding mourning noted,” I conceded.

She squeezed my hand across the table and, before I could return the grasp, withdrew hers. She seemed relieved that she had finally set things straight between us and proceeded to light another cigarette by raising the stump of the candle and bringing it close to her face, determined to enjoy her third glass of Scotch. That face in candlelight, I thought!

I had never seen her face in such light before. Smoking, which she did by turning her face away from yours without ever averting her eyes, gave her silence a willful, omniscient air that I found difficult to hold.

We clinked glasses three times. Then three times again. And a third set of threes, “for good measure,” she said, “three times the Trinity.” “Repeat after me: Ekh raz, yescho raz, yescho mnogo, mnogo raz. .” She repeated the Russian phrase once more, slowly, word for word. Once more, and once again, and many more times again. I remembered her toast with Hans. Who knew in whose arms she’d learned it?

•

This was when I made that passing comment on Rohmer’s movies. I had said it to fill the silence, but it gave our conversation a strange spin. Her impulsive reading, brutally frank, had simply exposed the drift of our conversation. Not sleeping together — this was the missing term. It unsaddled and deflated everything. I tried to rescue appearances.

“What is unrealistic is that in Rohmer love may just be an alibi, a convenient metaphor — but as for love, none of his characters really trusts it, much less believes in it, or feels it, including the film director, and even the spectators, though all of us keep going through the motions of knocking at love’s door, because outside of love we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Outside of love, we’re out in the cold.”

She thought awhile. Was she going to make fun of me again?

“Is everyone out in the cold, then?”

“I suppose some more than others. But everyone knocks.”

“Even if love is an alibi. . a metaphor?”

She was making fun of me.

“I don’t know. Some knock at a door. Others at a wall. And some keep tapping gently at what they hope is a trapdoor, even if you never hear telltale sounds from the other side.”

“Are you tapping now?”

“Am I tapping now? Good question. I don’t know, maybe I am.”

“Any telltale sounds?”

“None so far — all I’m hearing are lying low sounds.”

“That was no gentle tap.” She laughed uneasily.

I ended up laughing as well. For a second I thought she was reproaching me for using lying low against her. I was already trying to come up with some form of apology when I realized she was simply deriding what I thought was a deft and delicate pass.

“Trenches are empty, land scorched, all things lite, I thought I told you.”

Was this reproof in her stare? Or was it apology? And why did she keep staring at me?

It was to stop blushing that I finally found myself saying, “Here I am looking at you, Clara, and I don’t know whether to tell you that I love staring at you as I’m doing now or whether I should just keep quiet, say nothing, and curl up into the most abstinent silence.”

“A woman would be crazy not to let you go on.”

“And a man would be crazier not to ask you to stop him.”

“Is this Rohmer, or you?”

“Who knows. I stare at you and my heart is racing and you’re staring back at me, and all I keep thinking is: Trenches are empty, land scorched, keep it lite, and Mind the road signs.”

She made a motion to interrupt. I immediately stopped.

“No, keep going.”

What an amazing woman.

“And now I’ve been made to feel like a street performer.”

“Oh, stop. We’ve had our intensely spiritual Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment for tonight.” She stood up, took out a dollar bill from her purse, walked over to the jukebox, and right away pressed a series of buttons — obviously “her” song. I had expected her to come back to our table and finish her drink, but she stood by the jukebox as though inspecting the list of songs. I stood up and went to her. The music started, it was a tango.

The raucous words of the song cast a spell as soon as I heard them. They rose out of the late-night stillness in the almost emptied bar like a wool blanket being unfolded from a linen closet on a cold night, when the only sound you hear is hail and rattling windowpanes. Clara knew the words, and before I saw what was happening or had a chance to resist or even make a show of resisting, there I was, being asked to lead in a dance I vaguely remembered from my early college days. We danced by the jukebox not three yards away from the entrance to the bar, and we danced much slower than a tango is meant to be danced, but who cared, for there we were, the jukebox and us and the rare faces of passersby on the sidewalk who happened to look in from behind the frosted windows, dancing, as in a Hopper painting, under a lighted green Heineken sign, while one or two of the remaining waiters went about the business of refilling ketchup bottles — we thought we danced perfectly, we thought this was heaven, we thought tango had brought us closer in three seconds than all the words we’d been sparring with since 7:10. And then it happened. After the song, she stood still for a second and, with her hand still in mine, almost in jest — or was it in jest? — said Perdoname, and right then and there began singing out the words in Spanish, and she sang them for me, a cappella, with that voice that tore everything inside me, staring at me the way singers do when they unhinge you totally as you stand there helpless and bared, and all you have is a shaken self and tears running down your cheeks. And she watched this, and she didn’t stop singing, as if she knew, as she began to wipe my eyes with her palm, that this couldn’t have been more natural and was exactly what should happen when one human being stops dancing, holds your hand, and then sings to you, for you, sings because music, like a machete in the jungle, cuts through everything and goes straight to that place still called the heart.

“Don’t, please, don’t,” she whispered, then, changing her mind, went back to “Perdoname,” her song.

“Perdoname,” she said,

Si el miedo robó mi ilusión

Viniste a mi

No supe amar

Y sólo queda esta canción

I knew I’d never forget this. It’s the story of a man who, fearing love, chose to “protect his heart.” “You came to me but I didn’t know how to love, all I have now is this song,” he says. Was Clara speaking to me — or was this coincidence? Did I have Juan Dola, she asked? Who was Juan Dola? “One dollar! Really!” Feigned exasperation. I took one out and watched her push the same buttons on the jukebox. “One more time,” she said.

Is it me she’s dancing with?

It is me.

Why wasn’t there a thing about her I disliked?

“It’s a good thing I’m not your type and you’re not mine either,” she said, as we took our seat after the second dance.

I laughed at the maneuver.

“So, I’ll live with it. Let it be my hell.” I was trying to echo her words from last night.

I helped her with her coat. As she turned around and wrapped her shawl over her head, there was a fleeting moment when all we’d been saying seemed to come to a point. She hesitated. “So you’re not going to listen to me, are you?”

“Listen to what?” I was going to say, feigning once again not to have followed her drift for fear of admitting we were always, always on the same wavelength. Or I could have said, “You know I can’t, and I won’t.”

Instead, I ended up saying something so totally unlike me that it scared and enthralled me at once, as if I were suddenly wearing not my regular clothes but a soldier’s uniform, with saber, stars, medals, and epaulettes, but no boots and no undies. I liked being unlike me, hoped that this being unlike me was not an ephemeral visit to a costume ball or a day trip into an unknown landscape that would vanish as soon as my return ticket expired, but an indefinite voyage out that I had neglected to undertake all life long, and now its time had come. Being unlike me was being me. Except that I didn’t quite know how to yet. Perhaps this was why I’d been so tongue-tied with her; part of me was still discovering in erratic starts and sallies and in all manner of inadvertent ways, this unknown new character who had been waiting in the wings so long and who, for the first time in his life, was going to risk stepping up. Part of me didn’t know him yet, didn’t know how far to go with him. I was still trying him on for size, as if he were a new pair of shoes that I liked but wasn’t sure went along with the rest of me. Was I learning to walk all over again — learning to become human? What had I been all this time, then — a stilt walker? A reversible human?

It took me a second to realize that I was afraid of something else as well: not just of growing to like this new me, of becoming totally attached to him, of giving him more and more slack and, with him, discovering all manner of new worlds, but of finding that he existed only in her presence, that she, and only she, could bring him out, and that I was like a genie without a master who recoils into his millennial spout, condemned to wait and wait for a chance to come out and see daylight when the next right person comes along from behind a Christmas tree and says her name is Clara. I did not want to grow attached to him and then find that he wouldn’t last longer than Cinderella’s livery. I was like someone who doesn’t speak French but who, in the presence of a Frenchwoman one evening, turns out to be the most loquacious French speaker, only to find that she’d gone back home the next morning and that, without her, he’ll never speak a word of French again.

The way she faced me with her wool shawl covering her ears and part of her face made me answer her warning with something uncharacteristically reckless.

“So, you’re really not going to listen to me, are you?” she asked.

“Don’t want to listen.”

“Doesn’t want to?”

“Doesn’t want to at all.”

This could easily have been our last moment together. “Just don’t fall in love with me, please!”

“Won’t fall in love with you, please.”

She looked at me, drew closer, and kissed me on the neck. “You smell good.”

“Walk home with me,” she said.

Outside the bar, it was snowing. A faint, quiet amber glow had fallen on Broadway, coating the dirty sidewalks of 105th Street with a sense of quiet joy that reminded me of the film we’d just seen and of Pascal’s own words: Joy, joy, joy. Traffic was scarce — buses and cabs, for the most part — while from a distance, as though emanating from neighborhoods far away, came the muffled metallic clang of a snowplow quietly plying its way downtown. She slipped her arm through mine. I had hoped she’d do just that. Was this just fellowship, then?

When we walked past the Korean twenty-four-hour fruit vendor, she said she wanted to buy cigarettes. “Read this,” she added, pointing to a misspelled sign that read TANGELINES and right next to it MERONS. She burst out laughing. “Just fancy how they’d spell blueberries and blood oranges,” she said, laughing louder and louder before the befuddled Mexican helper pruning flowers at this ungodly hour of the night. It scared me to think what she’d find about me the moment my back was turned. No, she’d do it to my face.

We reached her building sooner than I wanted. I decided there was no point in tarrying, and although I buttoned the last button of my winter coat to show that I was indeed heading into the cold after dropping her and was already bracing myself against the weather, she seemed to be trying to linger awhile longer as we stood outside, pointing to a view of the Hudson, finally saying that she would ask me upstairs but she knew herself and thought that perhaps we had better say good night now. We hugged — it was her idea, though the embrace seemed a bit too expansive to suggest anything more passionate or less chaste. I let the hug wane on its own. It was a friend’s or a sibling’s embrace, a feel-better gesture followed by a hasty send-off kiss on both cheeks. She lifted up my coat collar to cover my ears, staring me in the face, almost hesitating again, like a mother saying goodbye to a child who’ll probably have a terrible time on his first day at school. “You don’t mind?” she said, as though alluding to something we had been discussing earlier. I shook my head, wondering to myself how, even in saying as simple a thing as good night, she could still remain cryptic and explicit in one and the same breath.

“Let me walk you to where we said goodbye last night.”

Was she into replaying scenes too? Were we pretending it was last night? Or was she doing it for me? Or to get me away from the lobby of her building? I told her I was taking a cab tonight. “’Cuz, bus, he no show up last night.”

“He no show?”

“No show.”

“Then you should have come back upstairs.”

“I was dying to.”

“Party went on till morning. You should have stayed.”

“Why didn’t you ask me to?”

“After your little performance? Me so pressed, me so busy, misosoupor-salad. Get me my coat, get me my scarf, must rush, must go, flit, flit, flit.”

She walked me to the statue where we’d parted last night. My turn, I said. I walked her back to her building. Her face swaddled in the shawl, her hands in her coat pockets, shivering. Posture: vulnerable and beseeching, could break your heart if you didn’t know better.

“Just don’t do it,” she added, with that same touch of apology and fair warning in her voice, shattering our momentary elegy in the cold with the caustic snub of a love sonnet carved on granite with barbed wire. She placed a palm on my cheek, and without thinking, I kissed it — soft, soft palm of her hand. She removed it — not swiftly, as if I had crossed an imaginary line, but almost reluctantly, so as not to call attention to it, which stung me more, for it made her lingering gesture seem deliberate, as though her way of censuring my kiss was to overlook it, gracing withdrawal with tokens of indecision — not unflattering, but chastening just the same.

Whoever minded having the palm of his hand kissed? Even if last night’s beggar woman kissed the inside of my hand, I’d have let her. I gave her an awkward glance, meaning, I know, I know, lying low.

“You did it all wrong,” she explained.

I was dumbfounded. What now?

“Scarf!”

“What about scarf?”

“I hate this knot.”

She untied my scarf and redid the knot the way she liked.

The knot will stay with me till I get home, I know myself. I’d probably want to keep it awhile longer, even with the heat full throttle at home. Get naked with Clara’s knot, get naked with Clara’s knot. Tied me up in knots, that’s what. Last night I’d intentionally undone my scarf to show I had my own way of doing things, thank you very much. But that was last night.

Ivan-Boris-Feodor opened the door for her. I said I would call. But I wanted her to think I wasn’t sure I would. Perhaps I wanted to think so myself. Then she went inside. I watched her step into the elevator.

I remembered the scent of loud perfumes in the corridor fused to that vague, old-elevator smell that had welcomed me to her building. Last night.

I stood there gathering my thoughts, trying to decide whether to walk up to the 110th Street train station or simply hail a cab, wondering which of the dark windows in her building would light up within minutes of our goodbye. I should stay awhile and see which window it was. But what I really wanted was to see her rush out the door looking for me. Something even told me the same impulse had crossed her mind and that she was debating it right then and there, which could be why she hadn’t turned on her lights yet. I waited a few seconds more. Then I remembered I didn’t know which side of the building her apartment faced.

I walked to the corner of 106th and West End, convinced more than ever now that I must never see her again.

I crossed over to Straus Park, following the flakes of snow that were massing like a frenzy of bees swarming in the halo of a streetlamp, growing ever more dense as I looked beyond them uptown and over toward the river and the distant lights of New Jersey. I pictured her in that oversized sweater. All evening long, even at the movies, it had made me think of a rough wool blanket with room for two in it. I wondered what the world smelled of under that blanket, was it my world with its usual, day-to-day odors or a totally alien, unfamiliar world with scents as new and thrilling as those of equatorial fruit — what did life feel like from Clara’s side, from under her sweater, how different was our city when stared at through the lattice of her stitches — how did one think of things when one was Clara, did one read minds, did one always stare people down when one was Clara? Did one shush people when they complained? Or was one like everyone else? What had I looked like when she stared at me with her shawl covering all but her face, thinking to herself, Ah, he’s dying to kiss me, I know, wants to put his hands under my shirt the way Inky did last night, and he thinks I can’t tell his Guido’s up to no good.

•

It felt good to be alone and think of her and coddle the thrill in my mind without letting go. Here, before crossing the street, she had spoken to me of Leo Czernowicz’s lost pianola roll of Handel’s arias and sarabandes as one speaks of unsolved crimes and missing heirlooms. I wondered if the bootprints before me were hers. No one else had stepped on this side of the park since we’d headed toward her building. She had hummed the first few bars, the same voice I’d heard last night. Just a voice, I thought. And yet.

“I’d love to,” I’d said when she asked if I wanted to hear Czernowicz’s lost pianola roll one day.

When I walked into the park from the same exact spot where I’d entered last night, I knew that I would once again step into a realm of silence and ritual — a soft, quiet, limelit world where time stops and where one thinks of miracles, and of quiet beauty, and of how the things we want most in life are so rarely given that when they are finally granted we seldom believe, don’t dare touch, and, without knowing, turn them down and ask them to reconsider whether it’s really us they’re truly being offered to. Wasn’t this what I had done when I prematurely buttoned up my coat in front of her doorman — to show that I could take my leave and not say anything about meeting again, or coming upstairs, staying upstairs? Why go out of my way to show so much indifference, when it would have been obvious to a two-year-old. . Strange. No, not strange. Typical. The distance of a day had changed nothing between us. I was no closer to her now than I’d been last night. If anything, the distance was greater now and had solidified into something more pointed, craggier.

As I loitered about the park and looked around me, I knew I didn’t mind the sorrow, didn’t mind the loss. I loved lingering in her park, liked the snow, the silence, liked feeling totally rudderless and lost, liked suffering, if only because it brought me back to last night’s vigil and enchantment. Come here as often as you please, come here after every one of your hopes is dashed, and I’ll restore you and make you whole, and give you something to remember and feel good by, just come and be with me, and I’ll be like love to you.

I cleared the snow off the same bench I had used last night and sat down. Let everything be like last night. I crossed my arms and, at the risk of being seen from her window, sat there staring at the bare trees. No one in the park. Just the statue, its lean, sandaled foot hanging from the pedestal, snow resting on her toes. Behind me, I made out the rhythmic rattle of a tire chain, reminding me of old-style patrol cars. A police car did appear from nowhere, turned on 106th, and sidled up to a parked bus. A silent greeting between the two drivers. Then the patrol car swooped around, made a brisk U-turn, and began speeding down West End. Officer Rahoon and two other cops. Good thing he didn’t see me. Officer Rahoon, Muldoon, and Culhoon — three cops in a carriage, three beers and a cabbage. Was that it, then, the magic gone, Cinderella’s back mopping floors?

Total silence descended.

The lamppost nearest me stood upon its gleaming pool of light and, once again, seemed to lean toward me as it had done last night, as eager to help, though still without knowing how.

What had it all meant? I wondered — the staring, the chummy-chummy hug-hug and perfunctory two kisses, French-style, the bit about how she knows herself, and telling me not to look so glum, and so much talk of lying low, and mournful hints of love and admonition laced into the sad tale of lost Czernowhiskeys, all of it capped with a bitter I don’t think I need to spell it out, it might ruin things, like venom at the end of a love bite.

Ruin what things? Do me a favor!

Just don’t fall in love with me. Which is when she planted a kiss under my ear—You smell good, uttered almost like a jeer and an afterthought. Venom, venom, venom. Venom and its antidote, like the warm, puffed taste of newly baked bread on a cold morning when the crust suddenly cuts into your gum and turns the most wholesome taste on earth into rank and fulsome gunk. No things, okay? meaning, No sullen faces, no sulky-pouties, no guilt stuff, okay? Because it could turn into her hell. Get real, Schwester! The mopey heiress from Maine didn’t rattle so many keys before unlocking the fortress. The small-time hussy speaks the lingo of eternity — do me a favor! And all that talk of lying low — what prattle and claptrap!

I heard the bus driver turn on his engine. The lights inside the bus flickered on. How snug the foggy orange glow behind the glass panes, a haven from the cold. Just me and the bus driver, the bus driver and me.

Perhaps it was time for me to leave as well, though I didn’t want to yet. And suddenly it came to me. I should call her, shouldn’t I? Just call her. And say what? I’d figure something out. Time I did something — always waiting for others to do — tell the truth for a change, engage, for crying out loud. I don’t want to be alone tonight. There! She’d know what to say to that. She’d keep the conversation going; and even if she had to say no, it would be a kind no, as in: Can’t, lying low, you see? Ah, but to hear her say it that way, Can’t, lying low, you see? like a reluctant caress that starts but then lingers on your face and shoots straight to your mouth and unbuckles your heart. I reached for my cell. She was the last person to call — hours ago. We’d exchanged numbers while still waiting on line, and she said, Let me call you instead, this way you’ll have my number too. This was before the admonition, before Affirmatov had taken our tickets and crushed them in his fist. There was her number. My heart instantly sank, for the task seemed beyond me. What else were you planning to do with me but call? asked my phone, now that I held it in my hand. I imagined the sharp sound of her ten numerals chiming away like metal spikes hammered into splintering rock, followed by the grumbling, minatory drumroll of the ringing itself. Academy 2—fancy people still using Academy as a prefix, I’d said to her, to tease her or imply there was something willfully dated and archaic, even a touch precious in the way she’d given me her phone number. Now it was her number’s turn to make fun of me, like a tiny reptile that looked totally docile in the pet store when the salesman made you rub its tummy with the tip of your finger but that now bites into your fingernail and then tears it out. She justified giving out her telephone number that way, because, she said, this was how her mother would say it and how, to very few people whom she felt comfortable with, she continued to say it — with the implication that you ranked among those who instantly understood that her Old World and your Old World shared a lineage in common, though not necessarily on the same branch, because what was defunct and obsolete in you was retro-swanky-cutting-edge in her, and, despite great-grandparents in common and a language in common, we might not have belonged on the same tree at all. So there! Academy 2 for the happy few.

I thought of her phone number — generations of phone calls from desperate boyfriends. How did it ring when you called her late at night? Could she tell by its ring whether it came from hopelessness or guilt or anger and blame or from shyness that hangs up after three rings? Did jealousy have a telltale ring that shouted louder truths than are dreamt of in caller ID?

Oh, Inky, Inky, Inky. How many times had he called tonight? He’d be calling right now. As I would myself. I imagined calling her. Ringing once. Ringing twice. Suddenly she picks up. Huffing. I can hear the water running in the background. Party’s over, Cinderella’s mopping floors. Inky? No, it’s me. It’s you. It’s me. Me trying not to pull an Inky. But clearly doing just that. How do you say I don’t want to be alone tonight now that I can’t think what to say next? Just like that: I don’t want to be alone tonight. Maybe with a question mark? Maybe not. A woman would be crazy not to let you say all this.

An M104 bus stopped on the corner of 106th and Broadway. I caught it just in time and, before sitting, watched the triangular park fade into the snowstorm. I may never see this place again in the snow. And just as I was beginning to believe it, I knew I was lying to myself. I’d come back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and after that as well, with or without her, with or without Rohmer, and just sit here and hope to find a way to avoid thinking that I’d lost her twice in two nights, sensing all along that hers was the face I’d put up around this park to screen me from myself, from all the lies I round up by night if only to think I’m not alone at dawn.

•

Later that night, I was awakened by the loud bang of a snowplow scraping my street. Suddenly I was filled with a feeling so exquisite that, once again, I could only call it joy, Pascal’s word spoken in his solitary room one night at Port-Royal.

It reminded me of that moment when we’d walked out of the bar after last call and found the snow blanketing 105th Street. Our arms kept rubbing each other until she slipped hers into mine. I’d wished our walk might never end.

I got out of bed and looked out the window and saw how peacefully the snow had blanketed the rooftops and side streets of Manhattan. It was — perhaps because it reminded me so much of Brassaï—a stunning black-and-white spectacle of the rooftops of Paris or of Clermont-Ferrand, or of any French provincial town at night, and the joy that suddenly burst within me cast so limitless a spell in my bedroom as I tiptoed my way to another window next to my desk to glimpse a different view of the world by night that I caught myself trying to avoid making any sound: not let the wood floor creak under my feet, or the old counterweights on the sash give their telltale thud when I’d raise the window just a crack and let the cold air in, not do anything to disturb the silence that had glided in as on the wingtips of an angel, because, as I stood watching the night, I could so easily make believe that hidden under my comforter lay someone whose sleep was as light and restive as mine. When I’d come back to bed, I’d try not to move much, find a spot on the right side and lie still and wait for sleep, all the while hoping it wouldn’t come until I’d smuggled the image of her naked body into my dreams.

Tomorrow, first thing, I’d rush out, have breakfast, and try to see my friends and tell them about Clara. Then I’d take a stroll through a department store, lunch at the Whitney among throngs of tourists snapping pictures with their jet-set grandparents, shop for Christmas presents on the day after Christmas, all of it punctuated by the diffident premonition that tonight might happen all over again, must happen all over again, may never ever happen again.

Once again, my mind drifted back to that moment when we’d walked out of the bar after last call and found fresh snow on 105th Street. She’d kissed me on the neck and, after telling me never to hope for anything, snuggled her arm into mine, as though to mean Never mind all this but Never forget all this. Now, in the dark, with the memory of her body leaning on mine, all I had to do was say her name and she’d be under the covers, move an inch and I’d encounter a shoulder, a knee, whisper her name again and again till I’d swear she was whispering mine as well, our voices twined in the dark, like those of two lovers in an ancient tale playing courtship games with one and the same body.