Eight White Nights

THIRD NIGHT

I was in the shower the next morning when I heard the buzzer downstairs. I jumped out of the bathtub, raced past the kitchen door, and yelled a loud “Who is it?” into the intercom, water dripping everywhere.

“It’s me” came the garbled voice in the box, not the doorman’s.

“Me who?” I shouted, exasperated at the deliveryman, as I began frisking for loose bills, first on my dresser, then through last night’s trousers hanging on a chair.

“Me” came the same voice, followed by a moment’s pause. “Me,” it repeated. “Moah.” Another pause. “Me, Shukoff. Me, lying-low. Miso-souporsalad. Me, goddamnit! How quickly we forget.”

Silence again.

“I’m driving to Hudson,” she shouted.

I demurred a moment. What about Hudson? Did she want to come up? I asked. The thought of her coming upstairs swept through me like an indecent and almost guilty thrill. Let her see my crumpled world, my socks, my bathrobe, my foul rag-and-bone shop, my life.

“Thanks, but no thanks.” She’d wait in the lobby, she didn’t mind, just don’t take too long — was I sleeping?

“No, shower.”

“What?”

“Sho-wer.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Just hurry,” she cried, as if I had already agreed to come.

“Actually—” I hesitated.

There was a dead silence.

“Actually, what? Are you that busy?” she blurted out.

The static on the intercom couldn’t muffle the irony crackling over each syllable.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll be down in five.”

She must have grabbed the phone from the doorman.

There goes my regular breakfast at the corner Greek diner, I thought. Newspaper waiting by the cash register, crossword puzzle I never care to finish, thimble-sized glass of orange juice as soon as they spot you trundling through the snow, omelet, hash browns, and small tinfoiled packets of very processed jam — they know me there — speak a few words of Helleniki with the waitress, pretend we’re both flirting, which is flirting twice-removed, then stare out and let your mind drift. I could almost hear the sound of the door, with its thumb lock permanently stuck down, followed by the bell and rattle of the glass panel as you shut the door behind you real fast, rubbing your palms from the cold, scanning for an empty table by the window, then sit and wait for that magical moment when you’ll stare out and let your mind drift.

Six hours ago, just six hours ago I was standing outside her building watching her disappear into the elevator.

Now she was standing outside my building, waiting. Suddenly the words I’d spoken to her last night in bed came back to me, word for word. You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended. I wish it had gone on and on, and that we’d kept walking all the way to the river, then headed downtown, and who knows where else by now, past the marina and the boats where she’d once told me Pavel and Pablo lived, to Battery Park City all the way over and across the bridge to Brooklyn, walking and walking right until dawn. Now she was downstairs. You know that walk. . The words coursed through me like a secret wish I’d failed to expiate last night. I wanted to take the elevator downstairs and, tying the knot of my bathrobe, drip into the main lobby and tell her, You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended, never ended. Just the thought of saying these words to her now as I was hastily drying myself made me want to be naked with her.

When I finally saw her downstairs in the lobby, I complained that eight o’clock was an unseemly hour to drag people out of their homes. “You love it,” she interrupted. “Hop in, we’ll have breakfast on the way. Take a look.”

She indicated the passenger seat of a silver BMW. Two grande coffees stood at a precarious angle, not in the cup holders below the dashboard, but right on the passenger seat itself, as if she had plopped both down in what I took to be her typical impatience with small things. There were also what appeared to be neatly wrapped muffins—“Purchased just around your block,” she said. She had bought them with me and no one else in mind, it seemed, which meant she knew she’d find me, knew I’d be happy to come along, knew I liked muffins, especially when they had this vague scent of cloves. I wondered whom else she’d have barged in on if she hadn’t found me. Or was I already the standby? Why think this way?

“Where to?” I asked.

“We’re visiting an old friend. He lives in the country — you’ll like him.”

I said nothing. Another Inky, I figured. Why bring me along?

“He’s been living there ever since leaving Germany before the war.” She must have inherited this from her parents. They called it the war, not World War II. “Knows everything—”

“—about everything.” I knew the type.

“Just about. Knows every piece of recorded music.”

I pictured a fretful old garmento type hobbling on frayed slippers around a large gramophone. Tell me, Liebchen, what watch? Do you know that land where the citrus blooms? I wanted to make fun of him. “Another Knöwitall Jäcke,” I said.

She caught my skepticism and my attempted humor.

“He’s lived more lives here and elsewhere than you and I put together multiplied by eight to the power of three.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do say. He goes back to a time when the world ganged up on every last Jew, and all that was left of Europe was a tiny spot off a magical lakeside town overlooking a canton in Switzerland. There, my father, Hans, and Fred Pasternak met in elementary school, which was why my father insisted I go to school there for a while. There, for your nymphormation, Max turned the pages for the man who’d once turned them for the man who’d turned them for the last of Beethoven’s pupils. Maybe I worship him.”

I hated her blind adulation. No doubt she hated my senseless wish to deride him. “So don’t you be the knöwitall.” She repeated my word to soften her censure. “We’re going to hear some stuff he’s unearthed — pretty amazing too, if you care to know.”

A chill suddenly hovered between us. To fend it off, we kept quiet. Let the fog pass, let it disperse and drift away and spill out of the car like the cigarette smoke being sucked out of the tiny crack in her window. Our silence told me not just that our thoughts were temporarily elsewhere, or that anger was blocking something between us, but that she, like me, and without wishing to call attention to it, was desperately scrambling to make last-minute repairs to save the moment.

A good sign, I thought.

This is when she took out a recording of Handel’s piano suites. I said nothing, fearing that mentioning music might suddenly bring up her aging cyborg with the giant phonograph. She’s putting on the Handel to fill the silence with something. To show she is aware of the tension, to show she isn’t aware of it, to smooth the ruffles the way a beautiful woman in an elevator once rubbed a hand across the front of my sports lapel to undo a fold in my collar. A conversation opener. Not a conversation opener.

She must have realized what I was thinking.

I smiled back.

If she cradled a mirror version of my unspoken You know that walk, last night, what would it be? I know what you’re thinking. It’s nothing like yours. It’s only the tension makes you want to read my thoughts. Or was it harsher yet: You had no right speaking of Herr Jäcke that way — look what you’ve done to us now.

We were on Riverside Drive. Soon we would near the 112th Street statue, where, for a while that seemed to last forever two days earlier, I’d enjoyed feeling stranded in the snowstorm. I tried to remember the evening and the snowed-up hillock and the St. Bernard coming out of nowhere, then the elevator, the party, the tree, the woman. Now I was riding in Clara’s car, eager to put the tension behind us. I watched Tilden’s statue come and go. It had seemed so timeless, so blissfully medieval under the snow two days ago; now it scarcely remembered who I was as I sped by in the sports coupe, neither he nor I able to share a thought in common. Later, I promised, maybe we’ll reconnect on my way back, and I’ll stop and ponder the passage of time. See this statue, it and I. . I would have told her, my way of reminding her how we’d stood on a balcony and watched eternity the other night — the shoe, the glass, the snow, the shirt, Bellagio, almost everything about her aching to turn into poetry. It was poetry, wasn’t it, the walk that night, and the walk last night, You know that walk on 106th Street? I’d been thinking about you all day, all day.

“Ugly day, isn’t it?”

I loved overcast gray days, I said.

Actually, she did too.

Why say ugly, then?

She shrugged my question away.

Probably because it seemed the easiest thing to say? Because we’ll say anything to defuse the tension? For a moment she seemed elsewhere and far away.

Then, within seconds and without warning — as though this was where she’d been headed even before putting on the Handel, before the tension in the car, perhaps even before buzzing me or before buying the two grandes around the corner—“So”—and right away I knew what she was going to say, I just knew—“Did you think of me last night?” she asked, staring straight before her, as if too busy to look in my direction, though it was clear she’d see through anything I said.

There was no point beating around the bush. “I slept with you last night.”

She didn’t say anything, didn’t even cast a sidelong glance.

“I know,” she replied in the end, like a psychiatrist pleased to see that the medication prescribed almost absentmindedly at the end of one session had had its intended effect by the start of the next. “Maybe you should have called.”

That came out of nowhere. Or was this her way of pushing what I presumed was the limit between strangers? She was frank when it came to delicate issues. Like me, perhaps, she found admissions easy and bold questions easier yet, but working up to them was probably torment and torture, the way it’s not passion people hide but progressive arousal. Truth jutted out like shards of glass; but it came from an inner skirmish, perhaps because its origin was closer to fear than violence.

“Would you have wanted me to?” I asked.

Silence. Then, just as abruptly: “There are muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag to your left.”

She knew how to play this.

“Ah, muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag to my left,” I echoed, to reassure her that her intentionally obvious evasion wasn’t lost on me, but that I wouldn’t press any further.

I took forever to examine the contents of the white-gray paper bag. The last thing I had eaten was Clara’s garlic cheese sandwich almost half a day earlier.

“Permission to eat in car?”

“Permission granted.”

I broke off part of the crusty top of the buttery cranberry muffin and held it out to her. She took it and, with her mouth full, bowed twice, to signal thanks.

“Permission to try other muffin for sake of variety?”

With her mouth still full and, on the brink of laughter, she simply nodded I go ahead.

“Must absolutely ferret out the other contents of. . this here white-gray paper bag to my left.”

She seemed to shrug a shoulder in mock-laughter. We were over our moment of tension.

Her cell phone rang.

“Speak,” she said.

It was someone asking her a question. “Can’t, I’m in the car. Tomorrow.” She clicked off. Then turned off her phone.

Silence. “I like this breakfast-on-the-go situation,” I finally said. But she spoke at the same time as I did. “And you didn’t call last night because. .?”

So we’re back to that, I thought. She wasn’t letting it go — was this a good sign, then? And if it was, why did I feel this rush of something terribly awkward and uneasy between us, especially since I had nothing more to be ashamed of after my avowal of moments earlier. Or had I made the avowal to shock her enough that it would freeze the subject on the spot, show I could speak the whole truth if I wanted to, but also on condition we slammed the door on it? The last thing I wanted was to tell her why I hadn’t called, though this and only this was the thing I wished to tell her most now. I wanted to tell her about last night too, how I’d woken up to her when I remembered the light down on her skin at the bar and how the thought of it was still with me when she buzzed me downstairs and I’d wanted to run down in my bathrobe and expose the effect of her voice on my body.

“Because I wasn’t sure you’d want me to,” I ended up saying.

Why hadn’t I called her? Was I simply pretending not to want to tell her? Or did I not even know how to begin telling her? What could I tell you, Clara? That I’d abide by your rules even though I didn’t want to? That I didn’t call because I didn’t know what I’d say after It’s me, I don’t want to be alone tonight?

“Why didn’t I call?” I finally repeated in an effort at candor. The words that unexpectedly came to my rescue were her very own from last night: “Just lying low, Clara. Like you, I suppose. Don’t want to disturb the universe.” I knew it was a cop-out. I was looking straight in front of me, as she was doing, trying to give my admission a tongue-in-cheek air of premeditated but all too visibly suppressed mischief. Had I meant to scorn lying low? Was I using it against her? Or was I taking my fragile cop-out back by suggesting they were copycat words, not mine, just hers? Or was I trying to show we had more in common than she suspected — though I couldn’t begin to know what that was? Or did I have nothing up my sleeve but desperately needed her to think I did, so that I might believe so myself?

It did not occur to me until I’d uttered her lying low that I was far closer to the truth about my condition in the car or last night or at the party or in life even than I wished to convey with my mock-struggle to affect an impish look.

But I also sensed that I hadn’t yet told her why I never called and that perhaps she was waiting for an answer.

“Look, I think I’m going to need to say something,” I finally began, not knowing where I was going with this, except that saying it with protest and gravity in my voice gave me the impression I was obeying an impulse to speak out meaningful and inexorably honest words that were sure to banish all ambiguity between us.

“You’re going to need no such thing,” she snapped, making fun of the verb to need, which I’d forgotten she hated.

“I was just going to say that most of us are in a repair shop of one sort or another.”

She looked at me.

“No, you weren’t.”

Had she, once again, seen through me before I could? Or, as I preferred to think, was she thinking I was making fun of her in a delayed revenge for last night’s cold shower when she cautioned me not to ruin things?

To undo the damage I added, “Everyone lies low these days, including those who live happily ever after — they’re lying low too. To be honest, I no longer even know what the phrase means.” Had she asked, I would have found a way of explaining that I had simply taken cover in her words like a child snuggling under a grown-up’s blanket in the middle of a cold night. Borrowing your words, to burrow in your world, in your blanket, Clara, that’s all. Because they explain everything and they explain nothing, because, much as it hurts me to say it, there’s greater truth when you breathe than when I speak, because you’re straight and I’m all coils, because you’ll dash through minefields, unblinking, while I’m stuck here in the trenches on the wrong bank.

“I think I’m going to need to start asking you for another piece of muffin.”

We laughed.

•

We were not far from the Henry Hudson and would be sidling the river all the way north, she said, especially since she hated the Taconic. And as we drove, eating breakfast on the fly, the way we’d had dinner on the fly last night, I began to think that perhaps what brought us together was none other than a longing to lie low with someone desperate to do the same, someone who asked for very little and might offer a great deal provided you never asked — we were like two convalescents comparing temperature charts, swapping medications, one and the same blanket on both our laps, happy we’d found each other and ready to open up in ways we’d seldom done before, provided each knew convalescence didn’t last forever.

“So, did you think of me last night?” I tossed the question back at her.

“Did I think of you?” she repeated, seemingly puzzled, with the air of an unspoken How totally inappropriate! “Maybe,” she finally replied. “I don’t remember.” Then, after a pause, “Probably not.” But the look of guile that I myself had affected a moment earlier told me she meant the exact opposite as well: “Probably not. I don’t remember.” Then, after a pause, “Maybe.”

In this game, which had once again erupted between us, did one score more points by feigning indifference? Or by feigning to feign indifference? Or by showing she had cleverly spotted but sidestepped what was an obvious trap and, in doing so, had managed to throw it back at me war-in-the-trenches style just before it exploded in midair? Or did she score higher points by showing that she was, yet once more, the bolder and more honest of the two, if only because scoring points was the farthest thing from her mind?

I looked at her again. Was she counterfeiting a repressed grin now? Or was she simply grinning at the scoreboard I was busily checking in my desperate attempt to catch up to her?

I held out a piece of muffin for her, meaning, Peace. She accepted. There was now less to say than when there’d been tension between us. So I stared out at the river till I caught sight of a large, stationary cargo ship anchored right in the middle of the Hudson, with the words Prince Oscar painted in large mock-Gothic red-and-black script.

“Prince Oscar!” I said to break the silence.

“I’ll have another piece of Prince Oscar,” she replied, thinking I had for some reason decided to call the muffin Prince Oscar.

“No, the ship.”

She looked to her left.

“You mean Printz Oskár!”

“Who is he?”

“Never heard of him. An obscure royal cadet in a Balkan country that no longer exists.”

“Except in Tintin books,” I added. Or in old Hitchcock movies, she countered. Or he’s a short, stubby, monocled South American dictatór-emperadór type who tortures prepubescent girls in front of their fathers, then rapes their grandmothers. Neither of us was succeeding in making the joke come alive. We were speeding along the Drive when a car suddenly swerved into our lane from the right.

“Printz Oskár up your mother’s,” she yelled at the car.

Her BMW swooped over to the fast lane and sped up to the car that had cut in front of us. Clara stared at the driver in the adjacent car and mouthed another insult: Preeeeentz-os-kááááááááááár!

The driver turned his face to us, leered, and, exhibiting his left palm, flicked and then waved his middle finger at us.

Without wasting another second, Clara smirked back and, out of the blue, shook her hand and made a totally obscene gesture. “Printz Oskár to you, dickhead!” The man seemed totally trounced by the gesture and raced ahead of us.

“That’ll teach him.”

Her gesture left me more startled than the driver. It seemed to come from an underworld I would never have associated with her or with Henry Vaughan or with the person who’d spent months poring over Folías and then in the wee hours sang Monteverdi’s “Pur ti miro” for us. I was shaken and speechless. Who was she? And did people like this really exist? Or was I the weirdo, so easily shocked by such a gesture?

“Any Printz Oskár left?” she queried, holding out her right hand.

What on earth did she mean?

“Un petit Printz muffín.”

“Coming up.”

“I think there might be another Printz left,” she said.

“Already eaten up.”

She stared at the two cups of coffee.

“Mind putting one more sugar in my Oskár?”

She must have sensed her gesture had upset me. Calling everything Printz Oskár was her way of defusing my remaining shock over her gesture. But it also reminded me how easy it was to create a small world of our own together, with its own lingo, inflections, and humor. Another day together and we’d add five new words to our vocabulary. In ten days we wouldn’t be speaking English any longer. I liked our lingo, liked that we had one.

Just ahead of us another large barge came into view. It reminded me of the giant barge anchored among the floes off 106th Street on the night of the party. I’d been thinking of the word worship back then.

“Another Printz Oskár,” I said, my turn to speak our lingo.

“This is more like King Oskár,” she corrected as we watched what turned out to be a dinosaur barge with a very tiny, cocky head jutting at its very, very back, immense, ugly, brainless. There was no way such a thing could have crossed the Atlantic on its own. Probably came down another river. Clara sipped her coffee. “You stirred it good.”

She removed the Handel.

“Bach?” she said, as if to ask whether I minded Bach.

“Bach is good.”

She slipped the CD in. We listened to the piano. “We’ll be hearing this very piece again when we get there, so get ready.”

“You mean at Herr Knöwitall’s house?”

“Don’t be a Printz, will you. You’ll like him, I promise, and I know he’ll like you too.”

“We’ll see,” I said, seemingly absorbed by the Bach and all the while pretending I was struggling to withhold a dismissive comment about Herr Knöwitall.

“What if he turns out to be a total bore?” I finally said, unable to hold back.

“What if you turn out to like him? I just want you to know him. Not too much to ask. Stop being so difficult.”

I liked being told to stop being difficult. It brought us closer, as though she had thrown five or six sofa cushions at me before laying her head on me. What I liked wasn’t just the air of familiarity and reproof that brought us closer; it wasn’t even the sarcasm with which she finally said “You’re a terrible Printz Oskár!” meaning a terrible snob, terribly childish, obtuse — but because “Stop being so difficult” is precisely what everyone had always said to me. She was speaking my language from way back. It was like finding the sound of one’s childhood in an emptied apartment, or the scent of cloves and grandmother spices in the muffin bag Clara had brought this morning.

“Here, take this piece,” I said, on finding a small, hidden muffin.

“You have it.”

I insisted. She thanked me exactly as she had the first time, by nodding her head in front of her.

Clara liked speeding in her sports car. The Saw Mill Parkway in the light fog suddenly opened up, an endless stretch to places unknown and unseen and that I wished might remain so forever.

“Are you good at math?”

“Not bad.” Why was she asking?

“Finish this sequence then: one, two, three, five, eight. .”

“Easy. It’s the Fibonacci sequence. Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four. .”

A few moments later. “How about this one: one, three, six, ten, fifteen. .”

It took a while.

“Pascal’s triangle: twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-six. .”

Always curt and snappy. “Now try this sequence: fourteen, eighteen, twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-four. .”

I thought hard for a moment. But I couldn’t solve it.

“Can’t.”

“It’s staring you in the face.”

I tried all sorts of hasty calculations. Nothing. Why was she always good at making me feel so clumsy and clueless?

“Can’t,” I repeated.

“Forty-two, fifty, fifty-nine, sixty-six. .” She was giving a few hints.

“How do you figure?”

“The stops on the Broadway local. You don’t see what’s right in front of you, do you?”

“Seldom do.”

“Figures.”

Clara Brunschvicg, I wanted to say, what is the Brunschvicg sequence? “Clara, I didn’t call last night because I chickened out, okay? I’d even taken out my télyfön, but then thought you wouldn’t want me to. So I didn’t.”

“So you made love to me instead.”

“So I made love to you instead.”

•

She had picked the right day. Everything was white. Not a chance that the sun was going to break through today. And yet despite the hoarfrost, which cast a chill layer around us from the sloping hood of her silver-gray car to the silver-white lane, something warm had settled between us in the car — part Clara’s mood, part the breakfast she had brought along, part Christmas, and part the afterglow of last night that seemed to have gathered around Did you think of me last night? like an aura on a saint’s figure, solemn and speechless.

“And I kept hoping you’d call.”

“Instead, you showed up.”

“Instead, I showed up.”

Still, what gumption to drop in on someone with breakfast-on-the-go and never a worry he’d say no. This was how she’d introduced herself. This was how she waited at the movie theater. This is how she lived, did everything. I envied her.

This is how she behaved with everyone. Skipping out on people, then barging back in. Speak, she’d say, and then as suddenly click off. Something told me that as late as it got last night and as often as she’d avoid picking up her phone while with me, she’d still found time to call Inky after I’d dropped her off. Then there was the old man we were visiting. He had no idea she was going to show up that morning, much less with a stranger. You mean you’ll just idle into his driveway, honk a few times to give him time to wash his face, comb his hair, and put in dentures, and shout Yooohooo, guess who’s here!

No, she was going to call him as soon as we left Edy’s.

Who’s Edy? I asked, more baffled than ever. You’ll see. Silence. Did I like not knowing anything? No, I didn’t. Actually, I loved nothing better and was just discovering it. This was like playing blindman’s bluff and never wanting my blindfold removed.

Perhaps I got to love having my hours messed and tousled with, because dicing up my days and my habits into scattered pieces that you couldn’t do anything with until she was there to put them together for you was her way of shaking things up, spinning you around, and then turning you inside out like an old sock — your heart a laundered sock looking for its mate — I didn’t just think of you last night, Clara, ask me, make me tell you and I will, I’m dying to anyway.

I didn’t know where we were headed, or when we’d be coming back. I didn’t want to catch myself thinking about tomorrow either. There might not be a tomorrow. Nor did I want to ask too many questions. Perhaps I was still fighting back, knowing that fighting back is the dead-giveaway gesture of those who’ve long ago already surrendered. I wanted to seem totally nonchalant in the car, but knew that the stiffness in my neck and shoulders had started the moment I’d gotten in. It had probably been there last night at the movies as well. And at the bar. And on our walk. Everything was urging me to say something, not something bold or clever, but something simple and true. A strange narrow door was being left open, and all I had to do was flash my pass and push through. Instead, I felt like a passenger timorously walking up to a metal detector. You deposit your keys, then your watch, your change, your wallet, belt, shoes, télyfön, and suddenly realize that without them you’re as bare and vulnerable as a broken tooth. A stiff neck and a broken tooth. Who was I without my things in their tiny, little places, without my little morning rituals, my little breakfast in my crammed little Greek diner, my cultivated sorrows and my cunning small ways of pretending I hadn’t recognized that the woman downstairs screaming Me, Shukoff. Me, goddamnit! was the very one I’d taken to bed with me last night and, in the dark, thrown every caution when I’d asked her not to take her sweater off so that I might slip into it as well, because, in thinking of our naked bodies shrouded in wool together, part of me knew it was safe to break down the sluices and let my mind run wild with her, now that I’d blown two chances two nights running and had, in all likelihood, lost her for good?

“You’re drifting.”

“I’m not drifting.”

She too hated people who drifted.

“You’re quiet, then.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Tell it to the barges.” She paused. “Tell me something I don’t know.” Still looking straight ahead of her.

“I thought you knew everything there was to know about me.”

I was trying to remind her of last night’s admonition at the bar.

“Then tell me something I want to hear.”

The privilege of drivers: to say the boldest things without ever looking at you.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m sure you can think of something.”

Did I get where she was going with this? Or was I just imagining?

“Like walking you home last night and hoping to think of one more way to avoid saying goodbye because there was still so much to say? Like not knowing why the film seemed tied to us in so many knots? Like wanting everything all over again? Like that?”

She didn’t answer.

“Like do you want me to go on, or should I stop?”

I meant it to sound both as a warning of an avalanche to come as well as to show that I was just playing with her, that however close I got, I would never be the first to remove the specter she had put between us.

“Like you can stop whenever you please,” she said.

That would teach me to ask for help in navigating the shoals between us.

“Where do they make people like you, Clara?”

At first she did not answer. “Where?” she asked, as though she didn’t understand the question. “Why do you ask?”

“Because it’s so hard to figure you out.”

“I have no secrets. I lay my cards out. I have with you.”

“It’s not secrets I’m thinking of. It’s how you get me to say things I’d never tell anyone.”

“Oh, spare me the Printz Oskár!”

I let a few seconds elapse.

“Spared!” as though I was conceding the point to humor her only, though I felt at once snubbed, yet relieved.

She laughed. “I can’t believe it’s me who’s blushing, not you,” she said.

“Permission to change subject?” I said, handing her the last piece of muffin found at the bottom of the paper bag.

“The things you come up with, Printz.”

•

I loved these little towns along the Hudson, especially on such an ashen, white day. Two decades ago, some of them may have been no bigger than industrial hamlets with sunken wharves and skeletal jetties. Now, like everything else around the city, they had blossomed into picturesque weekend villages. Off the road and perched on an incline was a little inn. I envied its occupants, its owners, those sitting in small dining rooms reading the morning paper this Christmas week.

No. I liked being in the car.

Yes, but to be in the dining room with her in one of those bed-and-breakfasts. Or better yet: to be there waiting for her to come downstairs and take her seat right next to mine at our table. And suppose it snowed heavily tonight and we had nowhere to sleep but here. .

“So tell me something else — anything, Printz.”

“Clara B., it’s difficult keeping up with you. You’re constantly changing lanes on me.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re headed to one place and one place only—”

“—and have been warned repeatedly there are major repairs up ahead—”

“—and don’t forget the roadblocks,” she corrected, seemingly jesting as well.

Clara was a fast driver, but not reckless; I caught her several times changing lanes to allow impatient drivers through. But she didn’t let them through out of courtesy. “They make me nervous.” I had a hard time picturing her nervous.

“Do I make you nervous?”

She thought for a moment.

“Do you want me to say yes — or no? I can go both ways.”

I smiled. I couldn’t think of a nerve-racking moment in my life I’d enjoyed more. I nodded.

“Deep, very très deep,” she said. “Way too much Vishnukrishnu Vindalu Paramashanti stuff going on between us.”

I said nothing. I knew what she meant. But I had no idea whether she welcomed the intimacy or wanted it stopped.

“Cemetery town,” I interrupted, pointing out the row of cemeteries in Westchester. “I know,” she said.

I looked outside and realized we were in fact fast approaching the cemetery where my father was buried. I knew I was not going to raise the subject and would let it drop as soon as we’d passed the town. Had I known her better or felt less cramped, perhaps I would have asked her to take the next exit, turn around, find a florist along the way, and join me for a short visit there.

He would have liked her. Pardon me for not standing, frankly this here is really not good for anyone’s back. And turning to me, At least this one, with her spunk and her pseudo-hussy airs, is no ballbuster heiress.

I wondered if the day would come when I’d trust asking Clara to park the car and take a few minutes to stop by his grave. Why didn’t I? She wouldn’t have hesitated to take me to her father’s, or to mine if I’d asked. Why hadn’t I called last night? Why couldn’t I just say, Will you let me tell you about my father someday?

I’d never spoken about him. Would I remember to think of him again on our way back? Or would I choose to hate myself for burying him with a second death, the death of silence and shame, which I already knew was a crime against me, not him, against truth, not love. The wages of grief are paid in large bills and, later, in loose change; those of silence and shame no loanshark will touch.

•

A while later, and without warning, she veered right onto an exit and entered what seemed a tiny old fishing village with an antique masthead signaling the center of town. Then, in front of a secluded 1950s candy store not ten yards from a gas station, she parked the car. “We’ll stop for a short while.” A faded shingle up a brick staircase announced a place called Edy’s.

I liked the nippy air that greeted us as soon as we stepped out of the car.

Edy’s was a totally deserted blue-collar luncheonette. “Norman Rockwell goes Podunk,” I said. “Tea?” Clara asked. “Tea is good,” I said, determined to play along. Clara immediately dropped her coat on a Formica table by a large window facing the Hudson. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

I always envied people who never thought twice about saying they were going to the bathroom.

The fifty-plus waitress, whose name was embroidered in cursive pink on a striped blue apron, brought two empty thick mugs from which dangled two Lipton tea tags. Her left index finger was stuck through the handles of the two mugs, while her other hand held a round glass pitcher of hot water. “Edy?” I asked by way of thanking her. “That’s me,” she replied, depositing the mugs on the Formica table and pouring the boiling water.

I took the seat facing the least appealing of the two outside views: a floating shed, which looked more like an abandoned ice-fishing hut. Then I changed my mind when I realized that Clara’s side featured a tilted, rusted, trellised pier. Then I changed my mind again: perhaps the view of the floating barge at the bottom of the gully wasn’t so ugly after all. I couldn’t make up my mind until I sensed a fireplace with a burning log in the back of the coffee shop. Suddenly the illusion of bay windows. I picked up both mugs and moved them to the sheltered corner booth by the fireplace. Even the view was better from here. Two tiny paintings hung between the relics of a sextant and an oversized meerschaum pipe: an imitation Reynolds portrait and a picture of a lurching bull with a matador’s saber pierced up his spine.

When Clara came over, she sat down and cupped the mug with both palms in a gesture suggesting she loved nothing better than the touch of a warm mug between her hands.

“I would never have discovered this spot in a million years,” I said.

“No one would.”

She sat, as she had last night, with both elbows on the table.

Your eyes, your teeth, Clara. I had never been stirred by her teeth before, but I wanted to touch them with my finger. Never seen her eyes in daylight before. I sought them out and feared them and struggled with them. Tell me you know I’m staring at you, that you just know, that you want me to, that you too are thinking we’ve never been together in daylight before.

Perhaps I was making her uncomfortable, for she resumed the affectation of trying to relieve something like frostbite on her hands by caressing her mug. An arm around her shoulders, an arm around her oversized sweater hanging off her bare, cashmered shoulders. That could be done easily enough, why not with Clara?

She sat up, as though she had read my mind and didn’t want me to stray down this path again.

I said something humorous about the old Jäcke. She didn’t answer, or wasn’t paying attention, or was simply brushing aside my limp attempt at blithe chitchat.

I envy people who ignore all attempts at small talk.

An arm to touch your shoulder. Why weren’t we sitting next to each other instead of face-to-face like strangers? Perhaps I should have waited for her to sit first and then sat next to her. What idiocy my changing seats and the commotion about the view of the floating barge and of the trellised pier, back to the floating barge — what did views have to do with anything?

She leaned her head against the large sealed windowpane, trying to avoid touching the dusty tartan curtains. She looked pensive. I was about to lean my head against the window as well, but then decided against it; she’d think I was trying to mimic her, though I’d thought of it first. It would have seemed too premeditated an attempt to seem lost in the same cloud. Instead, I slouched back, almost touching her feet under the table.

She crossed her arms and stared outside. “I love days like this.”

I looked at her. I love the way you are right now. Your sweater, your neck, your teeth. Even your hands, the meek, untanned, warm, luminous palm of each hand resting cross-armed, as if you too were nervous.

“So talk to me.”

“So talk to you.”

I fiddled with a sugar packet. For a change it seemed it was she who needed to fill the silence, not I. And yet it was I who felt like a crab that had just molted its shell: without pincers, without wit, without darting steps, just a hapless mass with aching phantom limbs.

“I like being here like this too,” I said — being here, with you, having tea in the middle of nowhere, next to an abandoned gas station in the heart of soddy, cabin-town America — does it matter? “And this too, I like,” I added, letting my gaze land on the iced white shore and the bluffs beyond, as though they too had something to do with liking being here like this. “Being here the way we are right now,” I threw in as an afterthought, “though all this might have absolutely nothing to do with you, of course,” I added slyly.

She smiled at my attempted afterthought.

“Nothing to do with me at all.”

“Absolutely not,” I insisted.

“I couldn’t agree more.”

She started laughing — at me, at herself, at the joy that came from being together so early in the day, at both our willfully transparent attempts to play down the joy.

“Time for a third secret agent,” she added, taking a cigarette and proceeding to light it.

Teeth, eyes, smile.

“If it’s any consolation, I like this too,” she said, staring over at the distant woods across the river, as if they had more to do with our enjoyment of the moment than we did ourselves. Was she doing exactly what I had just done, paying us a compliment while undoing it by redirecting her gaze to the spectacle of bluffs beyond, or was she trying to raise the subject in a manner I didn’t dare to yet?

“I’m sure you couldn’t care less, but I used to come here with Inky.”

“What, chez Edy’s?” Why did I keep making fun of the place, why?

“When they were kids, he and his brother would ride their boat here, fish, get drunk, then head back home before dark. Inky and I would drive up here, park the car, loll about awhile, and I’d watch him miss the old days, till we got into the car again and rode back to the city. Such a lost, lost soul.”

“You’re a lost soul too?”

“Nope!” she snapped without letting me finish what I didn’t even know I was attempting to ask. It meant, Don’t even try. Trenches, pits, the dales of pandangst were party talk.

“Are you here now to be with him?”

“No. I told you already. We’re over.”

Dumb, dumb question.

“So why are you bringing him up now?”

“No need to be upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“You’re not upset? You should see yourself.”

I decided to joke about it and picked up the tiny metal milk dispenser and, as though to determine what an upset face looked like, examined my reflection in it, once, twice, three times.

Then I saw it. In the rush to meet her this morning, I had completely forgotten to shave. This, after making a deliberate effort to take my time in coming down, to show I wasn’t racing down the stairs to meet her.

Did she want me to say I was upset? Was this, then, an “opener” of sorts, her way of forcing me to admit what I felt each time she spoke of him, so that she might yet again remind me that I had overstepped the bounds? Was she using her constantly resurrected ex to remind me of the trench between us?

“I don’t look upset at all,” I said, pretending to argue with her remark.

“Just let it go.”

Why did she bring me to the brink each time I thought it was safe to take a step closer?

“Inky would just sit here and simply stare at the bridge over there.”

“Stare at the bridge? Why?”

“Because his brother jumped off it.”

I felt for the three of them.

“And what did you do while he stared?” I asked, not knowing what else to ask.

“Hoped he’d forget. Hoped it would stop haunting him. Hoped I could make a difference. Hoped he’d say something. But he’d just sit there and stare, blank, always blank. Until I realized he was telling me in his own subtle, tormented way that if I wanted to and kept at him, I could make him jump too.”

Yes, I could see how Clara could bring anyone to jump.

“So why do you come here?”

“I like the salty-dog grunginess.” She too could affect being intentionally flippant.

“Be serious. Do you miss him?” I proposed, as if to help her see the answer staring her in the face.

She shook her head — not to mean no, but as though she was shaking me off, meaning, You’ll never catch me, so don’t try. Or: You’re way off, pal.

“So this place has Inky written all over it,” I finally said after waiting for her answer.

“Not Inky.”

“Who, then?” I asked.

“That’s a Door number three question. How much do you charge per hour?”

But she didn’t wait for my answer.

“Me, that’s what’s written all over it. Because this is the spot where it finally hit me that perhaps I didn’t know what love was. Or that I’d practiced the wrong kind. That I’d never know.”

“Did you bring me all the way up here to tell me this?”

This caught her totally by surprise.

“Maybe. Maybe,” she repeated, as if she had never considered the possibility that she’d brought me along to reopen old wounds and help her witness where truth had felled her. Or perhaps she simply wished to see if she’d feel differently with another man. Or was it too soon yet? Lying low and all that.

“I’d sit and watch him drift and drift and drift, as if he were taking me up to that bridge and was going to jump on condition I jumped with him. And I wasn’t going to go up that bridge or jump from it, not with him, not for him, not for anyone, unfortunately; nor was I going to sit around and watch him think of it each time we came here while he stared and said he’d die for me, when the one thing I wanted to tell him the most I couldn’t even say.”

“And that was?”

“So I am paying you by the hour!”

She paused for a moment to catch her breath, or to collect her thoughts — or was she smothering the start of a sob? Or was it a grin?

“That he could go ahead. Mean and nasty. Not that I didn’t care, but that I was never going to love anyone — not him, at any rate. I’d have jumped after him to save him. Maybe. No, not even.” She was playing with her spoon, drawing patterns on the paper napkin. “The rest let’s not talk about.”

“I would have rushed in to save you, wrapped you in all the coats hanging on Edy’s coatrack, screamed for help, breathed into your mouth, saved your life, brought you tea, fed you muffins.” I knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment I’d said it, a lame pass sandwiched in soft-core wit.

“The tea and the coats and muffins I like. The mouth-to-mouth, no, because it’s as I told you last night.”

I stared at her with a startled face. Why say such a thing? I felt I’d been led to the bridge and pushed. Just when she was most vulnerable, most human, at her most candid, out sprang the barbed wire and the serrated fang. Because it’s as I told you last night.

How long would it take me to live this moment down? Months? Years?

We were sitting in what was one of the coziest corners in the world — fireplace, tea, unhindered view of the ancient docks, dead foghorns, quiet coffee shop that probably went back to the days of Coolidge and Hoover and where the distant sounds you heard from deep behind the narrow kitchen window reminded you that there were others on this planet — all the dreamy warmth of a black-and-white romantic film sequence slung along a mean and nasty Hudson. I was tense, awkward, dismayed, trying to seem natural, trying to enjoy her presence, sensing all along that I might have done far better at my local Greek diner, chatted the waitress up, ordered my favorite eggs, read the paper. All of it was wrong now, and I didn’t know how to fix it. It kept breaking.

“Just do me one favor, though, will you?” she said as we were walking along the unpaved icy path toward her car, both of us staring at the ground.

“What?”

“Don’t hate me either.”

The word either, which so clearly subsumed the word we’d been avoiding, struck my pride — just my pride and nothing else — as if pride lined every ridge on my backbone and her word had struck it dead with the quick fell stroke that sends a bull lurching to the dust before it knows what hit it. No weakening of the limbs, no buckling, no teetering in the knees — just dead, pierced, in and out. Not only had I been found out, but what was found out about me was being used against me, as if it were a source of weakness and shame — and it became one precisely because she made me feel she’d used it this way. Does pride bruise more easily than anything else? Why did I hate having everything about me found out, exposed, and put out to dry, like soiled underwear?

I was ashamed both of the hatred I knew myself perfectly capable of, and of the opposite of hatred, which I did not wish to stir up just yet, because I suspected how much of it there was, though placid, like lakes and rivers under ice. Her either had made whatever I felt seem like an indecent breach, a suggestion of slop. Suddenly I wanted to blurt out, “Look, why don’t you go ahead to wherever you’re going, I’ll catch the first train back to the city.” That would have taught her a lesson right there and then. I’d never see her again, never answer the doorbell, never go on drives upstate to rinky-dink luncheonettes where a hungover Captain Haddock is as likely to peep from behind the kitchen curtain as would be an old abortionist come out to dram a shot of rum before whetting his tools on Edy’s broken marble slab by the cash register. Why bother coming this morning, why the ride to God-knows-where, why the simpering Did you think of me last night? when she was telegraphing hands off, now and forever?

“I didn’t upset you, did I?” she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders to mean, You couldn’t if you tried.

Why did I still refuse to acknowledge that she had — why not say something?

“Twice in the same morning — you must think me a real Gorgon.”

“A Gorgon?” I teased, meaning, A Gorgon only?

“You know I’m not,” she said, almost sadly, “you just know I’m not.”

•

“What is your hell, Clara?” I finally asked, trying to speak her language.

She stopped cold, as if I’d thrown her off, or offended her, and had put her in the mood to tell me off. I had asked something no one seemed to have asked before, and it would take a long time before she’d either forgive or forget it.

“My hell?”

“Yes.” Now that I’d asked, there was no turning back. A moment of silence fell between us. The fences, so hastily broken down, had come back up again, only to be pulled down the next minute, and were being raised right back up again.

Was ours a jittery, easy, shallow familiarity, and nothing more? Or did we share the exact same hell, because, like neighbors on the same apartment line, I knew the layout of her home, from the hidden fuse box down to the shelves in her linen closet? “Maybe our hells are not so different after all,” I finally said.

She thought about it.

“If it makes you happy to think so. .”

In the car she took out her cell phone and decided to call her friend to tell him that we would be there in less than twenty minutes. “No,” she said, after a hasty greeting. Then: “You don’t know him. At a party.” I fastened the seat belt and waited, trying to look nonchalant as though drifting to sleep in the comfort of my reclining seat. “Two days ago.” A complicit glance, aimed in my direction, meant to pacify me. Pause. “Maybe.” He must have asked the same question twice. “I don’t know.” She was growing impatient. “I won’t, I promise. I won’t.” Then, clicking shut her cell phone and looking at me: “I wonder what all that was about,” she said, trying to make light of the questions I’d clearly inferred by her answers.

To change the subject: “When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“Last summer.”

“How do you know him?”

“My parents have known him forever. He’s the one who introduced me to Inky.”

“A friend of a friend of a friend?” Why was I trying to be funny when I clearly hated having Inky’s name thrown at me all the time?

“No, not a friend. His grandfather.”

She must have loved scoring this point. She caught the missing question. “We’ve known each other since childhood. If you must know.”

Clara never spoke of Inky in the simple past, as someone permanently locked away in some hardened, inaccessible dungeon of the heart whose key she had tossed in the first moat she crossed no sooner than she left him. She spoke of him in a strange optative mood, the way disenchanted wives speak of husbands who can’t seem to get their act together and should try to pass the bar exam again, or grow up and stop cheating, or make up their minds to have children. She had spoken of him with a grievance that seemed to reach into the present from a past tense that could any moment claim to have a future.

Where did I fit in all this? I should have asked. What on earth was I doing in the car with her? To keep her company so she’d have a warm body to chat with in case she got drowsy? Someone to feed her muffin bits? Was I to devolve into the best-friend sort — the guy you open up to and bare your soul to and walk around naked with because you’ve told him to put away his Guido?

I had never seen it as clearly as I was seeing it now. This was precisely the role I was being cast into, and I was letting it happen, because I didn’t want to upset anything, which was also why I wasn’t going to tell her how much of a Gorgon she’d really been to me. Rollo was right.

“Music?” she asked.

I asked her to play the Handel again.

“Handel it is.”

“Here, this is for you,” she said as soon as she turned on the engine. She handed me a heavy brown paper bag. “What is it?”

“I’m sure it will bring bad memories.”

It was a small snow globe bearing Edy’s name at the bottom. I turned it upside down, then right side up, and watched the snow fall on a tiny log cabin in an anonymous postcard village. It reminded me of us, shielded from everyone and everything that day.

“But they aren’t bad memories for me,” she added. She must have known I’d give everything to kiss the open space between her bare neck and her almost-shoulder when we were sitting in our warm corner at Edy’s. She must have known.

“Romance with snow,” I said, as I stared at the glass globe. “Do you already own one of these?”

It was what I ended up asking instead of Why do you turn on and off like this?

“No, never owned one. I’m not the kind who stows away ticket stubs or old keepsakes; I don’t make memories.”

“You savor and spit, like wine experts,” I said.

She saw where I was headed.

“No, my specialty is heartburn.”

“Remind me never—”

“Don’t be a Printz Oskár!”

•

We arrived at the old man’s house sooner than we figured. The roads were empty, the houses seemed shuttered, as though every family in this part of Hudson County was either hibernating in the city or had flown off to the Bahamas. The house was located at the end of a semicircular driveway. I had imagined a shack, or something unkempt and broken down, held together with the insolent neglect that old age heaps on those who have long given up touching up the world around them. This was a mansion on top of a hill, and right away I guessed that the back overlooked the river. I was right. We stepped out of the car and made our way to the front door. But then Clara had a change of heart and decided to enter by way of a side door, and sure enough, there was the river. We stood outside a large porch with a wrought-iron table and chairs whose cushions had either been removed for the winter season or that disuse and sheer age had totally ruined and which no one bothered to replace. But the wooden path down to the boat dock seemed to have been rebuilt recently — so these people did care for the house, and the cushions on the porch were probably being carefully stowed away during winter. From the porch Clara attempted to open a glass door, but it was locked. So she tapped three times with her knuckles. Once again she put on her little freezing-shoulders performance by rubbing her arms. Why didn’t I believe her? Why not take her at face value? The woman is cold. Why go looking for that something else about her, why the hunt for subtexts? To remember to be cautious? To disbelieve what she’d said to me last night and repeated at least twice this morning?

“Don’t you think it would be wiser to ring the front bell?”

“It just takes them a while. They’re scared of wolves. But I keep telling them all they have here are wild turkeys.”

Sure enough, a Gertrude-type old woman opened the door ever so gingerly. Arthritic hands, bad limp, scoliotic back.

They exchanged hugs and greeted each other in German. I shook the arthritic hand. “And I am Margo,” she said. She led us indoors. She’d been working in the kitchen. A large tabletop displayed scattered hints of a lunch to come. Max would be with us soon, she said. They continued to chatter in German.

I felt totally lost in this house, a stranger.

I wished I had taken the train back to New York. Wished I had never stepped out of the shower, or answered the buzzer, or gone to the movies last night. I could undo all this in a second. Excuse myself, step outside the house, take out my cell phone, call a local car service, dash back into their house, utter a hasty toodle-oo — and then be gone, adiós, Casablanca. You, Margo, Inky, and your whole tribe of limp, pandangst kultur wannabes.

I ducked outside on the pretext of wanting to glimpse the scenery. Then I realized I wasn’t interested in their scenery either, came back in, and shut the kitchen door.

“I just made you coffee,” said the arthritic Margo, handing me a mug with her right hand and, with the other, offering me a packet of sugar held between her thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, her bent and troubled arm almost beseeching me to come closer and take it from her before she dropped it and then fell trying to catch it. I wondered why she was offering me coffee and not Clara; but then I saw that Clara had already helped herself to some and was about to sit at an empty corner of the large kitchen table. The old woman’s pleading, beckoning gesture, at once humble and contrite, had touched me.

“Clara always complains I make very weak coffee,” she said.

“She makes the worst coffee in the world.”

“It’s not bad at all!” I said, as if I’d been asked an opinion and was siding with the host.

“Ach, Clara, he’s so polite,” she said. She was still sizing me up and, so far, approved.

“Who is so polite?” came the voice of an elderly man. Mr. Jäcke Knöwitall himself.

Kisses. Just as I’d expected. Firm handshake, hyperdecorous Old World smile that doesn’t mean a thing, slight bow of the head as he hastened, indeed rushed, to take my hand. I recognized the move instantly. Deference writ all over, except when you turn your back. And yet, unlike his wife, not a trace of a German accent, totally Americanized—A real pleasure to meet you!

“What are these ugly shoes, Max?” asked Clara, pointing at what were obviously orthotic contraptions with rows of Velcro fasteners. It was, I realized, her way of asking about his health.

“See, didn’t I tell you they were ugly!” He turned to his wife.

“They’re ugly because your legs and your knees and every other bone in your wobbly, weather-beaten body is out of whack,” she said. “Last year your hips, this year your knees, next year. .”

“Leave that part of my anatomy alone, you pernicious viper. It served you well enough in its time.” This, it took me a second to realize, was all for Clara’s benefit. “Sir Lochinvar may no longer be among us, may he rest in peace, but in the middle of the night you can hear his headless torso galloping above our bedroom in search of a dark passage, and if you paid attention, you toothless daughter of scorpions, you’d open your window, offer him your sagging pan-fried eggs, and put your mouth to work.”

Everyone laughed.

“Ach, Max, you’ve become downright lurid,” said his wife, looking in my direction as though imploring me to pay no mind to his latest outcry.

“Dear, dear Clara, I am out of whack with myself, that’s what I am.”

“Complain, complain. His new thing now is he wants to die.”

He ignored her.

“Do I really complain all that much?” He was holding Clara’s hand.

“You always complained, Max.”

“But he complains even more now, all the time” came back old arthritic.

“It’s the Jewish way. Clara, if I were younger,” he began, “if I were younger and had better knees and a better charger and steed—”

Margo asked me if I could help. Naturlich! Would I mind going with her outside? “Put your coat on. And you’ll need gloves.”

Soon I discovered why. I had to get some wood for the stove and bring it into the kitchen. “We love cooking with wood. Ask my husband. What am I saying — ask me.”

Together we walked out toward the shed where the gardener stored the firewood. She complained about the deer, sidestepped their droppings, cursed when she stepped on something that wasn’t mud, then scraped the bottom of her shoe against a boulder. I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking to me or just muttering. Finally, out of the blue: “I am happy to see Clara.” Perhaps it was an opener of sorts, making conversation, or she might just have been talking to herself, so I didn’t respond.

I returned with two logs. In the kitchen, Margo opened the stove and displayed several halved golden butternut squashes glistening with oil and herbs.

Max uncorked both a red and a white. “To while away the time,” he said, and proceeded to pour the white wine into four glasses. Then, pinching the base of his glass between his thumb and his index finger, he swirled the liquid a few times and finally brought it to his lips.

“A sonnet, a miracle,” he said. Clara clinked glasses with Margo and Max and then three times with me, and twice three times more, repeating the old Russian formula in a mock-whisper. No one said anything until he spoke: “All it takes is a senseless round fruit no bigger than a baby’s testicle and you have heaven.”

We were all tasting his wine.

“Now try the other,” he said, proceeding to decanter the pinot into my glass once he saw that I had downed the sauvignon.

“Another small miracle.”

We all tasted, swayed approbation on our faces. Inky’s grandfather was staring at me. He suspects they’ve broken up already. He’s trying to feel her out before seeing if he can patch things up between them. I’m now definitely the one-too-many in this crowd. I should have called a cab. I’d be in the station and far away by now.

“I think both wines are wonderful,” I said, “but I’m such a boor when it comes to wines that I very often can’t tell one from the other.”

“Oh, just ignore him, he’s just being his usual Printz Oskár.” She was speaking to them, but seemed to be winking at me, or neither winking at them nor at me. Just winking, or maybe not at all.

She is far too clever for me, I thought. Too, too clever. How she shifts and beckons and rebuffs and then switches, and just when you’re about to give up and head for the first train back to the city, she’ll throw you a Printz Oskár for you to chew on, and dangle it way over your head to see if you’ll try to yap and jump, yap and jump.

“Has she said why she’s here?” he finally asked me.

“No, I didn’t,” she interrupted.

“Well, prepare yourself. You’ve come for Leo Czernowicz, Czernowicz playing the Bach-Siloti. Then we’ll hear him doing the Handel. And then we’ll be in heaven, and we’ll have soup and wine, and, if we’re truly, truly lucky, one of Margo’s salads with these strange mushrooms she’ll use to shut me up for good if one more bawdy comment comes out of my mouth.”

“Sit,” he said. I looked around at the many chairs and armchairs in the living room. “No, not over there — here!”

He opened the pianola and began fiddling with it before inserting the head of what turned out to be a long, unfolded strip of something like perforated yellowed parchment.

“Is he familiar with the Bach?” he asked.

I looked at her and nodded.

She was made to sit right next to me on a narrow love seat. I’d wait for the music, and then I would just let my hand rest on her shoulder, that shoulder which now, more than ever, seemed to know and to second and to want me to know it knew everything I was thinking.

“Well, even if he knows the prelude, this is something you’ve never heard in your life. Never. Nor will you ever hear it played this way. First you’ll hear him play the Bach prelude on the pianola and then Siloti’s transposition of that Bach prelude. Then you’ll hear it as I’ve had two students from one of the colleges nearby remaster it. And if you behave, and you don’t interrupt too many times, and eat your soup, I’ll let you listen to Leo’s Handel. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Leo Czernowicz, just a few years before the Germans found him and took him away and didn’t know what to do with him, so they killed him.

And there it was. At first a very faint drone, then the sound of a gasp, like air sputtering and hissing its way through a congested windpipe, and then it came, the prelude I’d heard who knows how many times before, but never once like this: hasty, tentative, and ever so deliberate. Then we heard the Siloti.

“The prelude is too solemn,” said Clara, “too somber, too slow perhaps.” She had to find something wrong with it. Why wasn’t I surprised?

“Not to worry, we’ve had to speed it up, of course, because those of us who heard Leo play remember he was very fast, too fast. But it doesn’t matter. Art is about one thing: speaking directly to God in God’s language and hoping He listens. The rest is pipi caca.”

He put on the CD, and sure enough, I finally saw why we’d traveled for two hours on this freezing day to get to this house.

“Shall I play it again?”

Clara and I glanced at each other. Sure.

“Then I’ll go and look after the lunch,” said Margo.

Without hesitating or even waiting for our response, he proceeded to play the Bach-Siloti a second time.

Deftness and dexterity, something so easy, lambent, and yet ever so contemplative in the face of what lay in store for the likes of Czernowicz, who was, so many, many decades later, still speaking to God. I kept thinking of his playing this piece as the piano cut holes into the very piece of cardboard in front of us — how could he not have known that in a few years he’d drink of the black milk of dawn? The more I listened, the more it seemed to become more about him than about Siloti, more about Jews like Max who outlived the Holocaust but would never live out its sentence, more about the fugue of death than about Bach’s prelude and fugue. I knew that this would never be undone, that from this too there was no turning back, no coming back, just as I knew that without Max and this old house, without winter on the Hudson, without Clara and our three days together, the prelude would remain the glistening empty shell it had always been for me until now. It needed the Shoah for it to come alive, it needed Clara’s voice in my intercom, Clara’s laughter as she waved obscene gestures in her car, it needed our being here like this in Edy’s warm corner by the lurching bull, and her admonitions forbidding so many things; it even needed my inability to focus on the music, as though not focusing on the music while thinking of reaching out to her would end up being part of how the music needed to be heeded, registered, remembered. If art were nothing more than a way of figuring out the design of random things, then the love of art must come from nothing less random. Art may be nothing more than the invention of cadence, a reasoning with chaos. It will use anything, just anything, to loop itself around us, and around us again, and around us once more till it finds its way in.

Could one ever listen to the Bach after the Siloti?

No one answered.

I asked if I could hear it once more.

He looked pleased. I was hooked, he thought.

Then, when the glorious beginning swept over us again, he excused himself to go help Margo out with lunch.

Left alone with her, I began to feel a sense of total discomfort. All of these empty chairs around us, and yet here we were, Clara and I, squeezed tight together on this narrow love seat. I wanted to find an excuse to move away, perhaps by making a show of wanting to get closer to the music. But I stayed put, did not breathe, did not budge, didn’t even show I had thought of budging. She too must have felt awkward before noticing my own discomfort. But she masked it better than I, for she didn’t even stir. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed anything, and my reading of her discomfort, as my reading of the Siloti prelude, or of what she meant by Printz Oskár each time she used the words, or of our awkward love seat arrangement right now, was nothing more than another misreading, my startled gaze to the world looking back at me. Was there any way for her to know what I was feeling, thinking? Or hadn’t it even crossed her mind? She was so distracted by the music that she hadn’t even noticed that her thigh was touching mine, from hip to knee, hip to knee, which is to say, almost 20 percent of our bodies. What if I told her that while the prelude was streaming over us, my thoughts were focused on the hip-to-knee, joined at the hip, you and I, Clara, for we’re of one kidney too, and all we need is a slight tilt in our seating, and it could just as easily be my hips against your hips, me inside you, as we listen to this music, again and again, the smell of you on my skin, everywhere on my skin, because I want to be bathed in your smell, rub it on my back, your wetness on my neck and everywhere on my body, you and I, Clara.

I knew that the slightest stir in my body, even moving a finger, would suddenly rouse her from her own thoughts and tell her that our bodies were touching, hip to knee. So I didn’t move a thing; even swallowing became difficult, as I grew conscious of my own breathing, whose pace I tried to steady to a monotonous rhythm, and finally, if I could, to a halt.

But then another thought rushed through me: Why not tell her what was happening to me, what I felt, why not move, stir, budge, and show at least that I liked being glued together on this love seat and that all I had to do was touch her knee, part her knees, and just place my hand there, and, as in so many paintings of the Renaissance, let her slip a leg in between mine in a posture that speaks legends, like Lot’s with his daughters’? Was she with me? Or was she elsewhere? Or was she one with the music, her mind in the stars, mine in the gutter?

With all these feelings tussling within me, I knew I would never dare anything, especially now that we were alone together. Gone was my resolve, my wish to put an arm on that shoulder, as we listened to the music, and let a hand land ever so lightly and caress her there, and then bring my mouth where it ached to be, not to kiss, or even lick, but to bite.

I sensed her tense up. She knew.

Any moment now, Clara will stand up to help in the kitchen. Or should I be the first to stand now, to show that I wasn’t committed to this love seat arrangement, that I wasn’t trying to feel her up, that I couldn’t really care?

“Do you want to hear it again?”

I stared at her. Should I tell her now once and for all, just tell her and let the chips fall where they will?

“The music — do you want to hear it, or have you had enough?”

“Let’s hear it one more time,” I finally said.

“One more time it is.”

She stood up and pressed the play button, then after standing by the CD player came back and resumed her seat right next to me.

Do we touch hands, or what?

Just be natural, a voice said.

Which is what?

Be yourself.

Meaning?

Being myself was like asking a mask to mimic a face that’s never been without masks. How do you play the part of someone trying not to play parts?

We were back to hip-to-knee. But it felt mechanical, heartless, cold. I’d take that moment last night anytime, when she stopped before crossing the park and told me about Czernowicz as our arms kept touching, inadvertently.

This was all in my head, wasn’t it?

Suddenly I caught myself thinking of wanting to come back here again — if only to touch this moment again: the cluttered room, the frost, the dead pianist, she and I seated unusually together in this snow-globe cabin of our invention, and all this stuff around us, the soup, Inky’s brother, last night’s Rohmer, the snow on Manhattan and on Clermont-Ferrand, and the fact that if Czernowicz never knew what awaited him after playing the Siloti here, he’d never have guessed that, two nights after staring out to his world in prewar Europe, we’d be sitting in this room like the oldest and closest of friends, listening to a pianist that my grandfather and Clara’s grandfather might easily have heard in their youth, never once suspecting that their grandchildren. .

When the music stopped, I said I wanted to step outside for a few minutes. I didn’t ask her. “I’ll come with you,” she said.

“Where are you two going?” asked Margo, when she saw us leave through the kitchen door.

“To show him the river.”

•

The ground underfoot was hard, with patches of brown earth under the snow. Clara cleared away a tricycle that she said belonged to one of the grandchildren. Miles was his name. “Secret agent?”

“Secret agent,” I said, accepting a cigarette.

“Let me light it for you.”

She lit my cigarette, then took it back before I could even draw my first puff in ages.

“Not on my watch!”

So I wasn’t going to be allowed to smoke.

“What do you think they’re talking about now? Me? You?” I asked.

“Us, most likely.”

I liked our being called us.

In the summer, she said, Hudson County was lush, and people simply sat around here and whiled away entire weekend hours on lounge chairs, while food and drinks kept coming. She loved sunsets in the summer here. She was, I could see, describing Inkytimes in Inkyland.

We ambled through a narrow alley flanked by tall birch trees. White was everywhere. Even the bushes were a pallid, pewter gray, except for the stonework around the house and for the wall lining the length of the wood, verdigris bordering on livid gray. I imagined a carriage stopping here a century ago. As we walked, we began to near what seemed a dirty wooden fence that led to a wooden gangway and farther off to a withered stairway. “The boat basin is down there. Come.”

They had cleaned the Hudson years ago. Now, if you didn’t mind the undertow and the eels, you could swim. Still more trees, bare bushes, more sloping walls lining the property.

Then we spotted the river and, beyond it, the opposite bank, all white and misty, an Impressionist’s winterscape.

It made me think of Beethoven’s late quartets. I asked if she’d ever heard the Busch Quartet play. Maybe as a child at her parents’, she said.

As we approached the river, we began to hear crackling sounds that became louder and louder, clanking away like iron rods being hammered on an anvil. Crick, crack, crack. The ice on the river was breaking, clacking and clattering away, one floe knocking into the other, wrecking that neat white sheet of ice we had been seeing from the distance of the house, block after block of iced Hudson whacking its way downstream, with dark, dirty, glutinous black water underneath. Perhaps the Hudson was giving us its own version of the Siloti — crick, crack, crack, crack.

“I could listen to this for hours,” I said. What I meant was: I could be with you for hours — I could be with you forever, Clara. Everyone else has been make-believe, and maybe you are too, but right now, as I hear our music served on ice, my heart isn’t on ice, as I know yours isn’t either. Why is it that with you, for all your stingers and thistles, I feel so much at home?

“I could listen to this all day,” I repeated.

I had forgotten that in Clara’s world one didn’t rhapsodize about nature, sunsets, rivers, or songs in the shower. One didn’t hold hands either, I supposed.

“You don’t like this?” I asked.

“I like this fine.”

“Oh, just tell me you like it, then.”

She turned toward me, then looked at the ground. “I like it, then,” she said. A mini-concession no sooner made than instantly withdrawn.

How long would lying low last?

And then I don’t know what possessed me, but I asked her: “How long will all this lying low last?”

She must have seen this coming, or had been thinking about it herself, perhaps wondering at that very moment how long before I’d say something like this. Which is perhaps why she didn’t ask why I was asking.

“All winter, for all I know.”

“That long?”

She picked up a stone and hurled it far into the river. I picked one up too and did the same, aiming mine as far as I could. “Bellagio is a stone’s throw away,” I said. “And yet.”

She said she loved the sound of stones striking the ice, especially the heavier ones. She threw another. I lobbed another and another. We stood and watched where they landed.

“Maybe I need time.”

She didn’t quite finish her sentence. But I knew right away.

“You’re an amazing woman, Clara,” I said, “just amazing.”

She didn’t say anything.

“It’s good to hear someone say this.” Then having heard her sentence, she couldn’t help it. “It’s good to hear someone say this.” She parodied her own words.

“Amazing all the same.”

We threw more stones at the ice floes and listened to the ice bark back as though there were penguins who’d hopped up on the floes to forage for their young and thought we had thrown them bread, and what we threw was ice and stones.

On our way back, I held out my hand to her. I hadn’t even thought of it. She gave me hers as we went up the wooden stairs that led to the gangway. Then she let go, or I let go, or we both did.

When we returned, the soup was ready. Margo liked to add cream to the thick golden brew. So did Clara. It was a soup for cold weather, said Margo. A rustic, rectangular table had been set up, Max sitting at the head, Margo to his left, Clara to his immediate right, and I next to her. “I would have wanted Clara at my left,” said Margo, who seemed to be in a happy, chatty mood, “but I didn’t want to separate you.”

What on earth were they thinking? What had they been told?

I tried to give Clara an inquisitive look, but she must have anticipated this and was focusing intently on her soup, trying to show she hadn’t heard the comment I knew she couldn’t have missed. She raved about the soup and, better yet, about the crème fraîche, raved about the curry. “I believe in sixty-minute-not-a-second-more cooking. And that includes dessert,” said Margo. “And I,” interjected Max, “believe that a good wine will rescue anything you dish out with your sixty-minute chow even raccoons won’t touch.”

“Be grateful I’m around to feed your rotting gums.”

“And I to down what we’ll call food in front of our guests.”

Clara was the first to laugh, then Margo and Max, then me.

This was family business as usual, I guessed.

I am sitting where Inky sits, I thought.

The soup and the bread and the cream and the wine, which kept coming, were extraordinary, and soon enough we were being regaled with Max’s latest complaint. His knees. He’d been on archaeological digs in his youth and was now, in his nineties, paying the price for his follies near Ekbatana. “With most people my age, it’s the mind that goes. Mine is intact. But the body’s checking out.”

“How do you know your mind is so intact, old man?” said Clara.

“Do you want me to tell you how?”

“Please.”

“I warn you, it will be obscene, I know him,” cut in Margo.

“Well, about a month ago, because of these damned knees — which incidentally are about to be replaced, so this is the last time they’ll be seeing you — I had to get an MRI. They asked me of course if I wanted to be sedated and if I suffered from claustrophobia. So I laughed in their faces. I survived the Second World War without so much as taking aspirin, now I’m to be sedated simply because they’ll put me in a box with a hole in it? Not me. So in I go. But no sooner am I in there than I realize this is what death must be like. The machine starts such a ghoulish pounding and gonging that I want to ask for sedation. Problem is, I’m not supposed to move; if I do, they cancel the procedure. So I decide to brace myself and go on with it. Except I know my heart is racing like mad, and I can’t think of a single thing but the noise, which, more than ever now, reminds me of the hellish pounding of the dead statue in Don Giovanni: dong, dong, dong! I try to make myself think of the Don, but all I can think of is hell. This is death. I need to think of something quiet and soothing. But quiet and soothing images fail to come. This is when memory rescued me: I decided to count and name every woman I’d slept with, year by year, including those who brought me so little pleasure in bed that I’ve often wondered why they parted the Red Sea if they had no manna to give and certainly wanted none of mine. This, to say nothing of those who wouldn’t take off their clothes, or would do this but certainly not that, or who always had engine trouble, so in the end, though you might have been in bed together, and even fallen asleep, it was never clear whether you had scaled the summit. In any event, I counted them and they added up to—”

“One thousand and three!” exclaimed Clara, referring to the number of Don Giovanni’s mistresses in Spain.

At which we all clapped.

“Or was it ninety-one?” asked Clara, the Don’s mistresses in Turkey.

“Six hundred and forty,” added Margo, referring to those in Italy.

“Two hundred and thirty-one, and not a woman more!” thundered Max, the Don’s mistresses in Germany.

"Madamina. .” I began, deepening my voice till it growled with comic gravity the way Leporello catalogs the number of Don Giovanni’s mistresses around the world.

It was so unlike me to hurl a joke among people I barely knew, much less with song, that I was surprised to hear Clara laugh the loudest, and more surprised yet when she took up what wasn’t even meant as a cue and began humming the opening bars of the aria, and then actually singing the aria, with a voice that, once again, came unannounced and was more lacerating than the one I’d heard at the party or by the jukebox, because this time it seemed to palm my neck with its breath, once, twice, every syllable a caress. “Madamina, il catologo è questo, delle belle che amò il padron mio. .”A few verses more and her voice had so totally shaken and moved me that, in an effort to keep my composure, I found myself putting an arm around her and then, pressing my head against her back, squeezing her toward me. She didn’t seem to mind, because, more surprising yet, she held my hand on her waist and, turning to me, kissed me on the neck, letting her hand linger there, the way she’d done last night, as though the hand was part of the kiss.

Her kiss unsettled me more than the singing. I had to keep quiet, focus on the soup, show that this third wine was far better than the first two. But I was too flustered for words. I had touched her sweater, and its softness belied every cutting inflection in her speech, in her face, her body.

By then we had each already finished two servings of soup and begun eating the marinated greens. More wines.

After the salad, Margo got up and came back with a cake. “It’s a strudel gâteau. I hope you all like it.”

She also brought to the table more crème fraîche. “This is everyone’s favorite.”

She had probably meant to say, This is Inky’s favorite, but had caught herself in time. Or perhaps I was making this up. But Clara’s determined focus on her slice of the turned-over apple pie told me once again that she had intercepted the very same backpedaling and was passing over it in silence.

“Max, want some strudel gâteau?”

“Silly woman. Must you always call it strudel gâteau?”

“Behave,” whispered Clara.

Who knows what existed between Clara and the old couple. I would have to ask her at some point, probably on our way back, during one of those long silences that were bound to crop up between us. But part of me was tired of so many reminders of Clara’s past with Inky. Had they grown up together? Would his shadow linger forever between us? If she was done with him, why go visit his grandparents? To show she was with another man now, hoping they’d tell him? But anyone with half a brain could instantly spot by our behavior together that we were not together. Was her kiss meant to suggest we were? Is this why she’d brought me along? Getting me out of the shower, bringing me breakfast, making me feel special, giving me all this nonsense about lying low, which she knew would stoke anyone’s curiosity, calling herself a Gorgon — all this just to send Inky the message that love was dead?

I wondered what kind of evil monster she turned into when her love died — did she tell you it was finished: Just let it go? Did she drop you back into the fish tank where you sank or swam, or did she release a few bubbles at a time and throw you tiny pellets of food as she did with Inky that night at the party, so you wouldn’t go belly-up, though you know and she knows it’s only a matter of time before they pick you up and flush you down where all fish souls end when they go back to the greater scheme of things? Was I making all this up, or was I myself gradually being put in a straitjacket before being dunked in a pickle jar as I looked up at the hole that was about to close on me?

I could always escape. The train to the city. My beloved Greek diner. Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. I still had Christmas presents to buy, the stores would still be open if I left now. Was there a limit to how late one could give Christmas presents?

“Another slice of strudel gâteau?” asked Margo.

I looked at her and wondered where she stood on the Inky front. Then I remembered that they’d sat us near each other, not once but twice.

Yes, I would take another slice of the strudel gâteau.

“All young men like this cake,” said Margo.

I looked over at Clara. Once again, her face was neutral.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been nice,” said Max. “Come, Margo.”

I looked up at them, totally baffled.

“I need to take a nap. Otherwise I age by five years, and that, dear friends, takes us to unreal numbers. Or I start dozing in public, and frankly, no one enjoys watching old people nod and drool and mutter things that had better be left unsaid.”

“As if he ever watches his speech.”

“Ach, Margo, it’s not like you don’t nod in the afternoon either.”

“—and leave our guests?”

“Come and cuddle and don’t fuss so much, woman.”

“Cuddling, he calls it — phooey.”

“Fie and phooey to you too, besotted harridan; come upstairs, I said, and watch me be daring in love and dauntless in war—”

“—and dangle your bonnet and plume? I’m not sleepy.”

“Don’t bother about us,” interrupted Clara. “I’ll make coffee and put the dishes away.”

“Esmeralda will do it. Otherwise we pay her for what?”

“On second thought,” Clara said, “we might as well say goodbye now. We’re leaving in a short while. It might snow again.”

“Yes, you don’t want to be snowed in.”

Clara suddenly turned to me. “Do you want to be snowed in?”

What an amazing, amazing woman.

“You know damn well I would love nothing better,” I said.

“Margo never asked if I wanted to be snowed in. You’re a lucky man.”

“Upstairs, Lochinvar,” said Margo. “Upstairs, with your old bonnet and plume.”

Clara kissed the two of them more affectionately than when she’d greeted them.

“You’ll see, you’ll be your dashing self in no time,” she added, knowing he was worried about his operation.

“Just don’t forget to listen to the Handel. With all this talk of soup, wine, and bonnets, I forgot.”

“Don’t blame the wine or my soup, you forgot because you’re old.”

“Because you’re old. Those are probably the last words I’ll hear before I head out to the eternal landfill. But don’t forget the Handel. That Handel was worth waiting seven decades for.”

•

“Let’s make coffee first.”

I watched her open one of the kitchen cabinets and take out the espresso maker. She knew exactly where to find it. She tried to twist it open, but it was shut tight. “Here, you open it,” she said, handing it to me. “They don’t drink coffee anymore,” she added, as though registering yet another instance of their decline. The packet of ground coffee was also where she knew it would be, in the freezer. Even the silver spoon with which she spooned out three heaping spoonfuls was in an old wooden drawer that rattled first before suddenly dipping at a precarious angle once you pulled it out — a cemetery of old cutlery that hadn’t seen sunlight in who knows how many years. “Here,” she said, handing me two mugs. “Spoon. Sugar. Milk?”

“Milk,” I said.

I liked how she made everything seem normal, habitual, routine, as if we’d been doing this for ages.

Or should I be on my guard: people who make you feel unusually at home when you know you’re just a guest can, within seconds, show you to the door and remind you you’re no better than a deliveryman who rang a doorbell on a hot day asking for a glass of water.

I wondered if we were going to sit next to each other at the large table, as we’d done during lunch, or across from each other, or at a right angle. At a right angle, I decided, and put down the spoons accordingly. “I am sure she has tiny sweets somewhere,” said Clara, who began rummaging through the fridge and the old kitchen cabinets. “Found ’em,” she said.

“Ach, Liebchen, not sweets after the strudel gâteau,” she said as she helped herself to a box of Leibniz chocolate cookies, tore off the cellophane wrapper, and put four on a dish, which she placed right between what were going to be our seats. She had mimicked the old woman’s accent so well that I couldn’t help laughing, which made her laugh as well. I asked her to repeat what she’d just said.

“No.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m embarrassed, that’s why.”

“Just say shtroodel ga’tow.”

“Shtroodel ga’tow.”

I felt my stomach muscles tighten. I was dying to kiss her. She could say anything and I’d want to kiss her, make any gesture and I’d be pulled toward her, and if she happened to lean toward me as we tried to speak softly so as not to wake the old couple upstairs, then I’d have to struggle not to put my arm around her as I did at the dining table, but this time I’d let my palm rub her face, once, twice, just keep rubbing that face, and touch those lips, that mouth, and let my face rub against hers; what wouldn’t I give to touch her teeth with my hand, with my lips. We were standing in the kitchen rinsing the dishes.

“Are you happy you came?” I asked.

“Yes. I liked seeing them, I always do. They are like two coiled snakes corkscrewed unto their last. You watch: when one goes, so will the other, like a pair of old slippers.”

“Is that what love is like — a pair of slippers?”

“Don’t know about the slippers. But they are identical, Max and Margo. Inky and I, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different. Inky doesn’t have a devious bone in his body. Inky wants you to be happy; Inky misses you when you’re gone, runs errands if you ask, fixes things when they break, will die for you if you so much as hint that you want him to jump from this or that ledge. He is kindness and health personified — which is why he’ll never understand me.”

“Because he is not all twisted?”

“Not like us, he isn’t.”

I liked this.

“So you said no to Inky because he’s a healthy human being?”

“So I said no to Inky.” Pause. “Here, eat this cookie, otherwise I’ll eat it, and when I get fat, trust me, I get even more bitter and depressed.”

“Bitter and depressed, you?”

“As if you hadn’t noticed. You’re like me. We’re chipped all over. Like these dishes. Jewish dishes.” She smiled.

I did as I was asked with the dishes. Then we loaded them into the dishwasher. We were standing almost hip to hip, neither budging, until our hips were touching. Neither of us moved away.

She asked if I’d split another Leibniz cookie with her.

“Promise not to be bitter and depressed.”

“I’m already bitter and depressed.”

“Because of me?” I had said it in complete jest and couldn’t possibly have meant what she heard. But she turned to me with her wet pink hand and, with the back of it, touched me once on the cheek, and then again and again. And then she kissed me so close to my lips that she might as well have kissed me all the way. Which is when I let my lips touch hers, once, twice, rubbing her face with my own wet palm as I’d been craving to do all through lunch.

She let me brush her lips, but there was forbearance in her lips, and I knew not to push.

“So you will split another chocolate Leibniz with me.”

“I have no choice.”

“Inky calls these chocolate lesbians. We used to think it was funny. I wonder if there’s anything we can take for the road.”

She ferreted through the cabinets. Nothing. Just M&Ms, probably bought for the grandchildren or for Halloween. The large yellow bag was sealed with a giant clasp. “Let’s take a few.”

We found a small ziplock bag and transferred M&Ms into it with the pantomimed complicity of amateur safecrackers.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For the M&Ms?”

“No, for coming here with me. For knowing. For everything else. And for understanding.”

“Especially for understanding,” I repeated with emphasis and mock-humor.

Thank you for understanding. What a way with words she had. Saying everything and saying nothing.

“I told him I was the wrong woman for him. But did he listen? Then I told him he was the wrong man for me. And he still wouldn’t listen. And he’ll keep fighting it. I know him; he’ll call them tonight and ask if I came by. And they’ll say yes. And he’ll ask if I came alone. And they’ll say no. And he’ll ask who with, and they won’t know, and he’ll call me, and it’ll never end. Happy you came now?”

“You answer.”

“I think you still are.”

She dried her hands, passed me the towel, and began putting the wine away.

“Clara?”

She turned back. “Yes.”

“I want to tell you something.”

She was putting the corks back into the two bottles. This was going to be it.

“You want to tell me something”—again the same restraint in her voice, in the way she held her body and stared at me now—“don’t you think I know?” She looked me in the face. “Don’t you think I know?”

The way she said it broke my heart. I could almost feel a sob rising in my chest. Don’t you think I know? It’s what one said in lovemaking: Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I know?

I was about to add something, but there was nothing else to say; she had said it all.

“Let’s hear the Handel, then,” she said.

We walked into the living room. She turned on the CD player, then lowered herself to the floor and sat on her knees on the rug. She was already wearing her winter coat. I sat across from her on a chair against the wall. In the same room, saying nothing. And then it started.

I couldn’t understand what it was about this sarabande that had made us come all the way up here to hear it. Perhaps because I had never heard it before. “Isn’t it played a bit too slowly?” I finally ventured to say, trying to suggest that I too could tell it could use some mechanical acceleration.

She shook her head once and said nothing, dismissing my comment for the simple, intrusive thing it was. Then, for no reason, or for a reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, she raised her eyes and began to stare straight at me, but in a vague, lifeless manner, which made me suspect that though she was looking at me and wasn’t looking away, she wasn’t really looking at me either. There was no doubt, though; she was staring. I stared back with the same seemingly unfocused gaze, but she didn’t register my gaze, or didn’t register me, and I thought, This is what happens to people who are entirely rapt by music, whereas I am almost just pretending, the way I almost just pretend to be rapt by food, wine, scenery, art, love. When others listened to music, they became one with music and just stared at you, past you, through you, and expected no reciprocity, no implicit eyebrow signal, because they were already one with things.

Were we just going to stare at each other for however long it took to hear the music?

So it seemed.

So I left my chair and, all the while continuing to stare at her — she was still following me with her gaze — kneeled down right next to her on the rug, my heart racing, neither of us taking our eyes off each other, I not knowing whether I was breaking some tacit understanding I hadn’t altogether agreed to, she not knowing what I was up to — except that suddenly I caught her nether lip give a tremor, her chin seemed to cramp ever so slightly, and, before I knew what was happening, her eyes were filled with tears and she began crying. I envied her even this freedom.

“Clara,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders, as if to mean, Can’t be helped.

“I don’t know what’s come over me. I don’t know.”

I reached out and held both her hands in mine.

“I’m a total mess, aren’t I?”

“It’s the Handel.”

She said nothing, just shook her head. I should have kissed her right there and then.

“Or maybe it’s Inky,” I threw in. “Or seeing Max and Margo,” I added, trying to help her narrow down the cause of her tears, the way a parent might help a child find the exact spot where his arm hurts.

“We’re taking the CD. He made other copies,” she finally said. She was trying to show she was quite able to compose herself. “Poor man, him with his dead music and his rotting body and all that talk of eternal landfills—”

She began to cry again, this time in earnest.

“You left out strudel gâteau” I was trying to distract her and make her laugh, though I wouldn’t have minded if she continued crying. Tears seemed to have removed every barb from her body and, better yet, to have humanized her the way I’d seldom seen someone be so human before. It left me feeling totally rudderless. I attempted another joke, this time at the expense of art and pipi caca art.

She gave a mild laugh, but wasn’t falling for the diversion.

“Does music always make you cry?”

But my question was a weak diversion, and she wasn’t falling for it either.

“I’m not ready,” she finally said.

I knew exactly what she meant. Might as well bring it out into the open.

“Because I am?” I asked, as though to undo any pretense that I might be.

Were we saying yes by saying no?

Or was it the other way around? Saying no to mean yes to say no?

“What messes,” she said.

“Well, at least we know we’re safe messes.”

She took this in. I thought I had finally comforted her.

“I don’t know that I am — safe, that is. Perhaps neither of us is.”

Even in the midst of tears, I could heed the light, windblown cheep of rusted barbed wire dangling on a long country fence.

I took out my handkerchief and gave it to her.

She grabbed it as though it were a jug of ice water in July, wiped her tears several times, then crumpled it tightly in her fist.

I feared she might hold this moment against me.

“You’re the only person I know”—she hesitated a moment, making me think she was about to say something ever so sweet about me—“who still uses handkerchiefs.”

“What do most people use, their fingers?” I asked.

“Some do. Most use tissues. Others gloves.”

I could sense that maybe humor wasn’t going to work.

“I’m just afraid I may never see this house.”

She was on the verge of tears again.

“What if we promise to be back here in a week — together?”

She looked at me point-blank and said nothing, the same vague, absent look on her face, which told me she either didn’t trust my motives or that she simply lacked the will to remind me how quixotic was my plan. For all I knew, she had other things lined up for next week, things I wasn’t part of — for all I knew, this should have been the time to bring up her admonition yet again, but she didn’t have the strength or the heart to do so now.

“Why not, you’ll pick me up, bring me breakfast, and sing for me in the car.”

“You’re such a Printz Oskár.”

When she gave me back my handkerchief, I could feel its dampness. I put it back in my pocket, hoping it might never dry.

“You’re the best person to have Vishnukrishnus with,” she finally said. “Today was my turn; yesterday, yours.”

“Keep talking like this and you’ll make me have one this minute.”

“What wrecks,” she said.

•

On the way back we listened to Handel’s sarabande again and again. I knew that this would be our song, the song of December 26, and that wherever I’d be in the years to come, if, like a traveler in the desert I should lose my bearings one night, all I would have to do was think of this sarabande as played by a man who had disappeared into the hinterland of time, and like an anthropologist piecing bone fragments together one by one, I’d be able to bring back who I was on this day, where I’d been, what I’d wanted most in life, and how I’d fallen for it and almost touched it. As we listened to the music quietly, I thought of how she and I had stepped down the ramp onto the riverbed and heard the ice break, and how that too was forever laced into that moment on the rug when I realized, as I’d never done since meeting her, that the remainder of my life could hang on that tune and that it would take nothing but a misplaced breath to make my life go one way or the other.

“Clara Brunschvicg,” I said.

“Yes, Printz Oskár?”

“Clara Brunschvicg, I’ll never forget you,” I was going to say. But then I thought it sounded too wistful. “Clara Brunschvicg, I could so easily fall in love with you — if I haven’t already.” No, too laden. “Clara Brunschvicg, I could do this for the rest of my life — me and you, alone together, whenever, wherever, forever. Spend every minute the way we’ve done today, winter, car, ice, stones, soup, because one hundred years from now, those minutes are all we’ll have to show for ourselves, all we’re ever going to want to pass on to others, and frankly, in one hundred years they’ll all forget or won’t care or know how to remember, and I don’t want to end up like my father with dreams of love and of a better life he’d been robbed of or is still sailing out to. I don’t want to pass by your building in thirty years and, looking up, say to myself or to the person I’ll be with that day, You see this building? There my life stopped. Or there my life split. Or there life turned on me, so that the person looking at the building right now and talking to you is, ever since that one winter so many years ago, still on hold; the hand holding your hand is a phantom limb, and the rest of me is prosthetic, too, and I’m a shadow and she’s a shadow, and, as in Verlaine’s poem, we’ll still speak shadow words of our shadow love while the decades trawl past us as we stay put and hold our breath. The real me is frozen on this block and chances are will outlive me by many years until he turns into one of those family legends that gets retold on ritual anniversaries and from tragedy become a font of laughter and ridicule. So, tell me the one about the man who was named after a large tanker, they’ll say, the way I’d ask my father about ancestors who’d had their heads lopped off.”

“What were you going to say?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not what you were going to say,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I replied.

At which we laughed. “Aren’t we so very, very clever, Printz.”

“We are, we are.”

•

The same thing happened twice again that day.

We were speeding down the country road on our way back to the city. It was past sunset, and we watched a pale, listless color line the white Hudson we’d been staring at all day. We’d been driving for around half an hour when the tiny town began to come into view. Neither of us said anything, and it seemed we’d both forgotten and were going to pass in silence. Clara, who was driving, looked at me. Then she began to pick up speed, and I could tell she was smiling. She was bluffing.

“Want to pass it up?” she asked.

“No. I was going to ask you to stop.”

“Lipton tea that good?”

I nodded.

“You know we’re not being very good,” she said.

“I know. But a cup of tea never hurt anyone.”

We parked the car exactly where we’d parked that morning. I ordered two teas just as I’d done before. Clara went to the bathroom. I chose the same spot by the wood-paneled wall. The fire was still burning in the fireplace. And she knew exactly where I’d be. Except that this time as soon as she sat down I told her to scoot over, because I wanted to sit next to her. She didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t let much time go by before asking, “So tell me about her.” Did she really want to know? I asked. Yes, she really wanted to know. And as though to entice me, she snuggled into the corner between the end of the seat and the glass panel with the darkling view of the Hudson right behind her. I met her right after college, I said. The love of your life? No, not the love of my life. So why are you telling me about her? You’ll see if you let me finish. She was a dancer, but by day an editor, a good cook, and three times a week a single mother. She was older than I was. By how much? Ten years — and don’t interrupt. She cooked meals for me that I’d never eaten before, with sauces that would seem to require chefs and sous-chefs days to prepare but which she’d whip up in a matter of minutes. Here I was almost a vegetarian eating steak dinners every night. It took me a while to realize why she was feeding me so much protein. She, on the other hand, never ate. She smoked all the time. So we’d have those fabulous dishes on the tea table, and I would eat and eat and eat, while she sat next to me on the floor and watched me chomp away. She was probably bulimic, or anorexic, or both, except that you’d never know it, because she was always bingeing in secret. She was also addicted to sedatives, laxatives, antidepressants.

“What was good about her?”

“For a while everything.”

“Then?”

“I stopped loving her. I tried not to stop, but I couldn’t. From not loving her I started not wanting to listen to her, then to not wanting to touch her, to hating the sound of her laugh or the rattle of her keys when she came home, or the sound of her slippers when she woke up in the middle of the night and went into the living room for a smoke, and sat there in the dark because I said the light bothered me, down to the click of the television when she’d turn it off, which meant she was coming back to bed. It was horrible. I was horrible. So I left her.”

“Are you not good for people, either?”

“I don’t think I am. And she knew it. One day, toward the end, she said, ‘I’m someone you won’t remember having loved. You’ll walk out on me and won’t give it a second thought.’ And she was right.”

I fell silent.

“Well, go on with your story.”

“Late last winter, out of the blue, one evening I got a call from her. We’d not spoken in three or four years. She said she wanted to see me — no, needed to see me. Well, I knew she hadn’t borne me a child in secret, I knew she wasn’t short of money, and I knew she hadn’t uncovered an STD she had to tell all her old lovers about. She just needed to see me, that’s all. The man of my life, she called me. It tickled me somewhat. We made a lunch date, but it fell through, then another, which also fell through. And then she never called again, and I didn’t either. A few months ago, through a series of coincidences, I found out she had died. The news of her death still haunts me, or perhaps I want it to.”

“And?”

“And nothing. She’d found out she was very sick and needed to reach out to someone who’d mattered and say a few things she’d never had the courage to say before. Now that the veil was shed and there was no room for pride or other nonsense, all she wanted was to spend a few hours together.”

There was a moment of silence between us.

“I thought she was lonely and had run down a list of old flames, old friends,” I added.

“I wonder whom I’ll call when my time comes. Not Inky, that’s for sure. Who would you call?”

“That’s a Door number three question. And we don’t do those in diners and grills.”

“I hear pandangst.”

I gave her a look that said, You should know.

She replied, I most certainly do know.

She straightened up and sipped from her tea, holding both palms around her mug.

I wanted to grab both her hands, put them together, and hold them in between my own and then spread them open as one opens the pages of a hymnal and kiss each palm.

I told her I liked watching her drink tea.

“And I love your forehead,” she said.

I looked out the window, feeling that this working-class diner had something unbelievably magical, as if it understood that for us to be together and feel comfortable here it had to be as ordinary and unassuming and as run-down as anything in a Hopper painting, like Lipton tea, like the plaid faux-linen curtains that kept rubbing her hair, and the thick chipped earthenware mugs we drank from. I wondered if she and I were not like Hopper’s perpetual convalescents — Hopper people, vacuous, stunned, frozen Hopper people, resigned to hidden injuries that might never heal but that have long since ceased to stir either sorrow or pain. I wasn’t sure I liked the Hopper analogy. But this, I realized, was exactly what she meant by lying low. Staying put like Hopper’s people, sitting upright at a slight distance from things like jittery lemurs scoping out an all-too-familiar landscape called life with neither interest nor indifference.

“I can see why she called you, though.”

It took a few moments for me to realize she was referring to my old flame.

“Why?”

“No why. I can just see it.”

•

“It’s getting late,” I said.

And suddenly, as soon as I’d said this, I knew she knew why I’d said it.

“At what time does it start?”

“Seven-ten, didn’t you know?”

“Am I invited?”

I looked at her. “Who’s the Printz Oskár now?”

“So we’re going to the movies?”

“Yes,” I said, as if I were finally yielding to a request she’d been struggling to make all day.

“So we’re going to the movies.”

It took me a while to understand what the near-imperceptible lilt in her voice meant when she said “So we’re going to the movies.” She was either enacting or genuinely expressing the excitement of children whose parents on a bleary Sunday afternoon suddenly decide to put on their coats and herd everyone to the movies. We’re going to the movies, I repeated after her, the way a schoolmate who’d been visiting me after school, rather than being sent back to his parents in the evening, was invited to come along to the movies.

We had less than an hour to drive to the city and find a parking space. Or we could park in her garage and hail a cab. “It could be done,” she said. Or I could jump out and buy tickets while she parked nearby. Could we call the theater and have them save two spots under our name? Which name? Your name. My name. “You know what name,” she said.

We were now speeding along the highway, and in no time spotted the lights of the George Washington Bridge glimmering over the vast and tranquil Hudson. “The city,” she said, the way anyone might say on spotting a familiar lighthouse signaling the way home. I remembered the tension in the car earlier that morning, and the muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag, and the Bach version we’d listened to and how it all belonged to another time warp. “Look to your right,” she said, having spotted it before I did. And there it was, exactly where we’d left it earlier this morning, anchored smack in the middle of the Hudson, the Prince Oscar, our beacon, our lodestar, our emblem, our double, our namesake, our spellbound word for the things we had no words for — love of my life, my dear, dear Prince Oscar, dear, troubled ship that you are, lord of all ships in the catalog of ships, give us a sign, tell us, oh, boatswain, what of this night, tell us of this land of dreams you ferry passengers to, tell us what’s to become of us, what’s to become of me — can you hear?

It had seen us come and go and, for a minute now, seemed to light up its deck to hail us from far away across the Hudson, as if to say, You mortals, you lucky, holy pair who remembered me tonight when you could so easily have looked the other way and made light of my years, take a good look at this damp, ferruginous, scrap-metal tub stuck out in the middle of my hoary winters, don’t think I don’t know what it means to be young, to hope, to fear, to crave, as you come and go, and may come and go again on this drive, I who have seen riversides aplenty and gone up and down the world like so many phantom ships before me, oh, never become ghost ships, marking your years with layers of rust till the water seeps through and you’re nothing but a slough and a hollow hull stranded after many wrong turns and shallow bends, till the rudder is no longer quite yours, and the rust is no longer quite yours, and you won’t remember you were a ship once — yours is the real journey, not mine. Oh, don’t take me away and unbolt me as they unbuckle the dead, but think of me as both the light and the way, and remember this day, for the time comes only once in a lifetime and the rest, in thirty years, is good for nothing except to remember that time.

“Printz Oskár,” she finally said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Printz Oskár.”

“Yes!” I repeated.

“Nothing, I like saying it.”

The girl is in love with me, and she doesn’t even know it.

•

I thought of the evening awaiting us. Two films, the walk in the snow to the same bar, where we’d take the same seats, though side by side this time, and order the same drink, talk, laugh, dance to the same song, maybe twice, and then the dreaded walk home past my spot in Straus Park, where I’d want to tell her, or maybe not, about my spot in the park, all of it followed by the perfunctory good-night kiss at her door, which would most likely try to seem perfunctory, though maybe not, and finally, after watching her disappear into her elevator with Boris minding the foyer, my walk back to the park, where I’d stop tonight as well, sit on my bench if it wasn’t wet, and just stare at the fountain, look at the trees in the middle of this nothing park off Broadway, and wonder which part I liked best, spending the entire day with Clara or coming all alone here to think of the Clara I’d just spent the entire day with — hoping not to have an answer, because all answers were right till they turned and proved the question wrong, the way so many things were right and then wrong and then right again, till all we had was our nightly colloquy, with the candles lit around us and our shadow selves rubbing shoulders as we’d done at Edy’s, and in our pub, and during lunch, and when we listened to the music, and washed the dishes, and sat together in the theater, shoulder to shoulder, speaking shadow words each to each.

On my way home that night, I received a text message.

PRINTZ OSKAR ONE DAY I’M GOING TO HAVE TO SEND YOU A TEXT MESSAGE