Eight White Nights

FOURTH NIGHT

What is your hell?” I had planned to ask her. It would have been my way of drawing her out and helping her lower her defenses. I liked it when she spoke about herself. I liked when she cried, liked when we sat inside the booth at Edy’s in the dark and I had almost held her hand and kissed both palms at the same time, liked her when, past midnight after the movies, she said they made good fries at our usual place, because she knew I wanted to be back there and, better yet, be at the same table, side by side, and pick up where we’d left off our talk of Rohmer and the men and women who were all about the obvious but had lost their way around it. I liked the way she skipped out of the movie theater in between films and found an open newspaper vendor who sold M&Ms, because we’d forgotten those we had poured out into a small ziplock bag in Margo’s kitchen. Meanwhile, she had also found the time to buy two grandes. Morning and evening, she said. I assumed she’d also taken the time to check her messages. How many times had he called? I asked. Just eight — and that’s not counting the messages he left on her home phone. Wasn’t she curious to know what he’d said in them? She knew what he’d said in each. I would much rather have seen her pity and kiss him than prove she could churn kindness into venom.

After we’d said goodbye at night, I’d made myself promise not to expect her to call me the next day, not to expect to see or hear from her in who knows how long, and certainly never to think of calling her. Unless I had good reason to. The best reason sprung on me hours later, but I didn’t heed it.

At first I wanted to call her and tell her that. . that I was happy to have spent the day with her and, in the process, make a few references to the day’s markers — Bach, strudel gâteau, Rohmer again, and the sudden appearance of the Prince Oscar along the Henry Hudson lying in wait for us, or the goodbye kiss it was no less awkward to seek than to avoid.

But call and say what? That I took back every joke made at Herr Jäcke’s expense? That I’d spent an amazing day precisely as she foretold? That there’s so much to say? So, say it. I don’t know where to start. Is this going to take forever? I just wish you’d come home with me now, tonight, this moment. Why didn’t you ask me then, Oskár? Because I just couldn’t, because you’re so fucking forbidding with your hot-cold, fire-ice, speak-don’t-speak airs. Because I can’t make out where you are, who you are. Printz Oskár! Clara Brunschvicg! Good night. Good night. There’d be a moment of silence. Clara Brunschvicg. . What? Clara Brunschvicg — Don’t say it, she’d interrupt. Don’t want me to say it? No. Then you say it. Printz Oskár, let’s not do this now. Tell me why you don’t want us to say it, tell me, tell me, tell me.

I could have called on my way back home.

I could have called in the cab.

I could have called once I got home.

I could have called you while you were in the elevator, called your name while you were speaking to Boris, shouted “Clara!”

I could have answered her message as soon as I got it. One day I’m going to have to send you a text message. Written in typical Claraspeak, in stone, like a glyph that no one can decipher, not even its author. What could One day I’m going to have to send you a text message possibly mean? That this is not the text message she means to write, that the message she will write one day will say much, much more, and that this was just a teaser, a stay-tuned signal, with or without sequel? Or did it mean: I wish I had more to say, I wish I had the courage to say more, I wish I could tell you what I know you want to hear — why don’t you ask me, why don’t you just ask me, goddamnit? I wish you would read in between the lines, as I know you will and love to do, because you’ll take nothing I say at face value, which is why I must speak in double-speak, though I do not want to speak in cipher, especially to you, but am reduced to speak in the bleakest of codes.

I kept reading the text message for at least an hour, as if it had come with a crib note I had accidentally lost. I should have answered something right away. But by three I had not answered, and I didn’t want her to think that I was the sort who checks messages in the wee hours of the morning. By four, when I awoke from a dream I couldn’t even remember, I thought I should answer with something witty: “Ceci n’est pas un message non plus. Go to bed.” But then I thought: Let her stew awhile.

It did not occur to me that of the two of us I was and would always be the one stewing, not Clara. She didn’t do stewing. She’d written her SMS off the cuff and then gone to bed. Or did she just want me to think she’d written it off the cuff, then gone to bed?

And why would she want such a thing? To hide what? To suggest what? To have me suspect or second-guess what exactly?

No, this was me, just me.

Then I was seized by a terrible anxiety. What if she had stayed up waiting to hear from me? What if, left by herself, she finally did pick up the phone when it rang for the nth time that night and had one marathon tug-of-war session with Inky that always led to a listless Okay, come over if you really want? I wonder if she would have picked up the phone on seeing it was I calling?

At eight in the morning, when, contrary to every absurd expectation, it finally became apparent that she was not going to buzz me downstairs, I decided it was time to give up hope and head out to the beloved-no-longer-so-beloved Greek diner. Now yesterday’s missed opportunity to be alone with eggs and the paper came back like a reminder of failure and despair. Before stepping into the shower, I eyed the telephone. No, you do not call the Claras of this world just to say hi. You call them with a purpose, with a plan — even if it is a makeshift purpose. Do you have a plan? I do not have a plan. But you want to call? I want to call.

Lunch, I thought. No, a late lunch. Not too loud, not too many people. A late lunch in a nice place.

CB HOW ABOUT LUNCH PO

Let her think this is my natural texting “voice.” Breezy, untrammeled, happening.

By the time I came out of the shower, she had already answered. Here was someone not reluctant to show she was eager to respond.

WHERE WHEN WHAT HOW WHY

She had seen and raised me.

It meant: So you want to play curt and lapidary, here’s curt and lapidary. See who’ll fold first.

The why she’d thrown in as an afterthought was the thorniest part of the equation.

PIRANESI 2 PM ITALIAN 67 & MADISON CUZ

TERRIBLE REASON

YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE REASON

NAME ONE

HANDEL ROHMER LAST NIGHT

THAT WAS YESTERDAY

I WANT TODAY TO BE LIKE YESTERDAY DO I NEED TO GO ON

I was on the verge of acknowledging something, though I had no idea what.

SMS is at once more intimate and more distancing. More so sometimes than the spoken word. The accent is there, but louder, sharper, clearer, a reef of curt intentions, easily mistaken but seldom misinterpreted. One more round and we’d be quarreling, not kissing.

I KNOW OF A BETTER PLACE PICK ME UP AT 2

I was going to utter a determined “Great,” but then decided to soften the tone to the more upbeat but formulaic “Done,” which I altered to the more compliant “I’ll be there,” to the mock-imperative “Be there,” but which, at the very last second, I wanted to mollify to the more gentle and evasive “Until then,” opting in the end for my original “Done.”

All so very guarded and shifty. Posturing. On both our parts? Or just on mine?

Afterward, I went to my Greek diner and did exactly what I’d longed to do yesterday. Sat by the large frosted window. Managed to exchange the exact same words with the Greek kukla who is no longer a kukla. Had my bottomless insipid coffee, ate all my hash browns, read the paper and yesterday’s as well.

Then I went to a music store and bought CDs of all of Handel’s piano suites and of the Bach-Siloti. I would put on the music as soon as I got home and try to remember how the ice had cracked to the beat of a prelude that cast a haunting spell all day.

I walked into a Starbucks, ordered the same coffee infused with mocha she had brought along yesterday, and opened one CD box after the other. I liked the post-Christmas crowd, tourists milling around Lincoln Center and so many New Yorkers off for the day. I still had two presents to buy. Then I realized that what I truly wanted to do was to buy Clara a present. Why buy me a present? Because. Because is a terrible reason. Because you changed everything, because as soon as you touch a day in my life, it changes color, like one of those mood rings, because if you so much as graze my skin that part of me is burned forever. Here, see this elbow? You tapped it once when we walked back from the bar. It hasn’t forgotten. See this hand? It held the tips of all your fingers when you cried. And as for my forehead, you once said you liked it, and ever since my thoughts are no longer the same. Because you make me like my life, who I am, and if everything stops here, not to have met you would be like having lived in a north country and never tasted a single tropical fruit. Cherimoya, mango, guava, papaya, I’ll name them all like the Stations of the Cross, or the towns to Campostella, or the stations on the Broadway local line, including the ghost station under Ninety-first Street, which is where you and I, Clara, drink of the same blood like two shades from the underworld who need to time-out together before heading back to what are called the living.

And then it hit me: I’m someone you’ll forget having known, aren’t I?

I’m someone you’ll never remember meeting.

I could die and you wouldn’t know.

I bought her a copy of the Busch Quartet playing Beethoven’s A minor. With an indelible marker, I scribbled my dedication: The Heiliger Dankgesang is for you. It’s me.

Dramatic.

Subtle.

Sweet.

Fatuous.

Happening.

I liked it.

Something told me she’d laugh and still forget.

At two in the afternoon, when I came by, Clara was already waiting for me downstairs.

“Last night’s film does not make sense at all,” she said as soon as the other Boris opened the door for her. “He didn’t desire her knee, he wanted her, but knew he’d never get her, so the insidious little perv went for the knee. A cheap diversion. Actually, he desired her but didn’t want to own up to it. Or — and it gets worse — he never did want her but thought he should, which put him in the double-bind position of wanting her and not wanting to want her, without perhaps ever having wanted her—”

“How are you?” I interrupted.

She started laughing.

“I’m very well. But do you think I’m wrong?”

“I think all of Rohmer’s men — oh fuck it!”

She wrapped her huge multicolored wool shawl around her head and tucked it under her chin.

“Scarf!” She wasn’t budging.

“Scarf,” I repeated, undoing my scarf and fumbling with the knot she liked.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

Then she put her arm in mine and suddenly began walking north. We could take a cab, or we could take the bus — very scenic route, she said. Let’s walk, she wasn’t cold, she said. I immediately felt dismayed and began wondering whether this was going to be another outing that would require work or turn out to be one of those restaurants where she and Inky were regulars, where she and Inky did this, ate that, met So-and-so. “I know exactly what you’re thinking, it has nothing to do with it.” “That’s a relief,” I said. “I have to think of everything, don’t I. We don’t want no pouting.” “Who pouts?” “Someone I know gets easily worked up.” “I wouldn’t talk,” I replied.

On our way up the totally deserted sidewalks of Riverside Drive, we finally remembered the barges and the giant tankers. “I see something up higher,” she said. “Do you think it’s what I think it is?” “Might be. Just might be.” But we both knew it couldn’t be. It was just our way of resurrecting yesterday.

As we walked, I kept looking at all the buildings along Riverside Drive. I hadn’t walked on this sidewalk for years, and it hadn’t changed a bit. Now they had Clara written all over them.

At some point along the way her phone began to ring. She looked for it in every pocket of her thick coat and finally found it. “I don’t have my glasses, who is it?” she said, handing over her phone. “It says Ricardo.” She grabbed the phone from me, turned it off, and put it away. “Who is Ricardo?” I asked. I’d always felt that she was surrounded by men, but why had she never mentioned Ricardo before?

“It’s Inky.” Spoken abruptly.

“Named after a ship, perhaps?”

“No.” She didn’t think I was funny.

The restaurant was empty. At one of the large tables closest to the kitchen, the help was already busy having lunch. One of the waiters was sitting at a small table all by himself reading the Corriere dello Sport-As soon as Clara walked in, she greeted him by his first name. He was the co-owner. Was there pasta? Plenty. He didn’t look up. She snuck behind the bar, opened what must have been an old fridge, produced a bottle of chilled wine and two glasses, asked me to uncork it, and headed into the kitchen, all the while removing her coat and undoing the complicated shawl wrapped around her head.

Timidly, I uncorked the bottle, poured wine for the two of us, and joined her in the kitchen. The water, apparently, was still hot, so she asked Svetonio to “throw” in the pasta and begin heating the sauce. There were also some slices of chicken waiting to be sautéed if she wanted. “Grazie, Svetonio.” She turned to me and, without making introductions, explained that their friendship went back a long way. Should I read anything into it? Svetonio lets me come here and do my thing. I get him the best opera tickets all year. Believe me, I get the raw end of the bargain, non è vero, Svetonio? “Who’s to argue with Clara?” he said.

She found the dry frying pan she was looking for, took out the sliced chicken wrapped in cellophane from the large refrigerator, then poured some olive oil into the pan. Svetonio produced some sliced vegetables. “Are you going to just stand there?” “No, I’m observing,” I replied.

“Observe away. Lunch in no more than nine minutes. Better than anything you’d planned, right?. . I need lemon and some herbs.” But she was talking to herself, not me.

I watched as one of the waiters set a table that was far away from everyone else, but right by one of the French windows. I took out the CD and placed it on her side of the table.

“What’s this?” she said when she came out to see if everything was ready. “Ein Geschenk.” “Für mich?” “Für dich.” “Warum?” I looked at her and couldn’t help saying: “Cuz.”

She took the wrapped CD with her into the kitchen. I joined her again and stood by as she watched Svetonio remove the pasta and ladle it into two deep dishes. Sauce, cheese, and what she called some-pepper-please in imitation of waiters in restaurants. He then placed the sautéed chicken in a dish, covered it with another, produced the vegetables, and within seconds we were seated across from each other. Someone had even found time to bring a large bowl of salad for the two of us.

“So what’s this?”

“It’s my favorite piece of music.”

“Yes, but what do you mean by It’s me?”

“My moods, my thoughts, my hopes, everything I was before hearing this music and everything I became after hearing it — it’s all in there. Just better. Maybe it’s how I want you to see me.”

We drank the wine.

“And you want me to have this why?”

“I can’t explain.”

“You can’t or you won’t?”

“I can’t explain that either.”

“We’re doing real good, Printz. Let me ask you different, then.”

Suddenly I felt at risk, exposed, about to be caught off guard.

“Why give me this?”

“Because I’ve bought almost everyone I know a Christmas present except you.”

“And that’s the real reason?”

“No, it is not.”

“Printz Oskár!” There was mock-reproof in her voice.

“Clara Brunschvicg, you make it very difficult for me both to lie and to tell you the truth. Everything seems twisted in an elaborate cat’s cradle.”

“How?”

“We say the things that matter as though they didn’t matter. And we let tangents take us off course to save us from lingering on the stuff that really matters. But then what matters comes back again, and we’re off on tangents and detours again.”

She was staring at me. She was silent.

“What stuff that matters?”

I should have known.

“Do I really have to tell you?”

“Someone walking on eggshells?”

I shook my head to suggest that I wasn’t. But I was walking on eggshells, and there was no point denying it. “Me feet is bleeding and me tongue is tied.”

“Will you please just tell me and let’s move on to the pasta.”

“Well, how shall I say this? Suddenly it feels so difficult—”

“Why?” There was tenderness and no impatience in her voice.

“Partly because I’ve never known anyone like you. I’ve never wanted to be known by anyone the way I want you to know me. I want to fake nothing with you and, yet, without meaning to, when I’m with you, I always feel I’m ducking and dodging. And yet you’re like the twin I never had. Hence this piece of music. The rest is all Vishnukrishnu Vindalu stuff, which I’ll spare you.”

“No, I want to hear the chicken vindaloo stuff too.”

“Not over spaghetti.”

“We can have Indian food for dinner if you like.”

“So you’re free tonight?”

“Aren’t you?”

I saw her lean her right side against the French window. I leaned against it with my left. This was just like yesterday, except better. I did not mind the silence. It brought to mind that time when we’d listened to the Handel together and had stared at each other for so long. She rested her chin on a fist and, looking at me, asked, “So go on with the vindaloo stuff.”

I could feel my shoulders bunch up again. This was beginning to make me feel very uncomfortable, as if I were hiding something but didn’t have a clue what it was. I couldn’t even look her in the eye. The disconnect between our sentences, between her candor and my diffidence, was being rubbed in my face. Why did I feel I was being shifty with her when I was dying not to hide anything from her?

“About the Beethoven-Vindalu,” I said, as if this was really what I’d been trying to say ever since watching her unwrap my gift, “maybe all I wanted was someone to speak for me—”

“And say what?”

“Clara, every subject we touch on, from boats to Bach to Rohmer, to tangelines and strudel gâteau, takes us to the same exact place each time, as though everything between us seems fated to keep prowling and scouring and knocking at one door — and that door we’ve decided—you’ve decided — stays shut. Right?”

“I’ll answer when it’s my turn.”

“Maybe Beethoven is my way around this door. Or maybe I should learn from Rohmer’s people, who get an indecent thrill from talking intimately about things that most people who’ve just met find awkward and prefer to pass over in silence.”

I was running for cover, not realizing that I had just given away my hiding place.

She interrupted me. “So this is awkward for you?”

The this was us, I presumed. There was something savage and cruel in her question, as though she was striking back at something I’d said that had offended her. But it also seemed that all she wanted was to expose me, to expose me for the sheer, perverse pleasure of doing so. Two nights ago she’d warned me not to hint at any of this — why was she raising the subject when I was clearly trying to avoid it? Her six clipped words So this is awkward for you? were a straight indictment of everything I was; they made me feel like a slithery trickster who should be punished for beating around the bush when he’d already been warned to stay off the grass.

And yet I knew she was right. She’d seen through me and zeroed in on the one thing I feared most: the awkwardness that sprang up between us each time she looked me in the eye and made it so difficult to speak to her or find the courage not to deny that awkwardness did indeed exist between us. I didn’t even want her to see how easily I blushed the instant I felt I’d strayed from indirect speech. Was I hiding desire? Or that I didn’t feel I deserved to desire?

Why had she ever asked me this? To unsaddle me even more, in case I presumed too much? To egg me on, if I presumed too little? To rob the moment of its luster? To bring out the truth? To make me doubt everything about us? Or, as I was perfectly willing to accept, was all this taking place in my head only?

I looked at her. I knew I could risk everything by saying something marginally wanton or clever. The Claras of this world seldom give men second chances. Say the wrong thing and they’re gone. Say nothing and they’re equally gone. She’ll put on a dark skirt, a crimson blouse, and, with her daunting good looks and many shirt buttons undone, find any man at the first party she’ll care to get herself invited to. I was staring at her unbuttoned light green shirt now. No wonder she was wearing such a heavy shawl. There was nothing underneath. Why the unbuttoned shirt? Do I look or do I look away? I’ll look.

“Now this is getting really awkward, Printz. Is this another Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment?”

Keep a lid on and out fly the barbs, I thought.

“You mean my silence?” I asked.

“I meant your staring. But the silence too.”

“Let’s change the subject, then,” I said.

“And run away? No, talk to me about awkwardness. I want to learn.”

I cleared my throat.

She removed the cover dish from the chicken plate and served me two slices of chicken and herself two. “Three tiny potatoes for you, three for me, one more for you, because every man about to make a speech deserves a potato, five sprigs of asparagus for you, three for me, because I need to make room for what I’m about to receive from him, and finally, a bit of gravy for you and some for me to wash things down with. Okay, I’m listening.” Then, realizing she’d omitted something, she added, “And don’t ruin the moment.”

“I was thinking of how lucky I was to have gone to Hans’s party.”

“Ye-es.” Cautious encouragement to keep going.

“Lucky for me, I mean, not for you.”

“Of course.”

We laugh. We know why we laugh. We pretend not to know. Realize we’re both pretending. Standard fare. I love it. Aren’t we so very, very clever.

“Maybe I don’t feel awkward at all with you, but feel that I should. Maybe the twinge of awkwardness sitting between us right now is nothing more than intimacy deferred. Or waiting to happen. Or failing to happen.”

“And?”

“And something tells me we both feel that this could easily be the best part, which is why we’re both reluctant to fight it. This may just be the rose garden. What comes after could be trenches.”

“And?”

Was I even speaking the truth? Was I lying? Why couldn’t I believe a word I was saying?

“And?” she insisted.

“And this is where I wish Beethoven might step in and make this moment last forever, this lunch, this conversation, even these twinges of awkwardness. I want nothing to change and everything to last.”

“And?” At this point she was teasing, and I was loving it.

“And here’s a thought: In a year from now, when we go to Hans’s party, will we go there as strangers?”

“Well, I am no stranger to Hans.”

“I didn’t mean Hans and you.”

She elbowed me.

“I know what you meant. Chances are we will have had a few arguments, maybe strong disagreements, ratted on each other — I’m almost certain — and probably hung up and sworn never to speak again — but I harbor no grudges and make up way too easily, so the asshole who’ll ruin things will be you, not me.”

“Ruin? Ruin what?”

I had finally managed to corner her.

“See — you’re doing it now — ruining things, this time by pretending.”

So there was no boxing her in anywhere.

“Well, what if I am an asshole? What then?”

“You mean will I make allowances, and try to understand, and get under your skin and feel your pain, and see the world with your eyes and not through my own blinkered, selfish point of view?”

Why was she sidetracking?

“Put it this way: What if things suddenly die, or are about to, and with their death the desire to keep them alive dies as well — what will you do then?”

Without meaning to, I felt that I had cornered her once again.

“I will let you know they’re about to die, but I won’t do a thing more.”

“So, it is conceivable that we will meet at Hans’s party next year — what am I saying? — next week, and though we’ll stand this far apart, we could be total strangers.”

I was sounding peevish.

“Why are you doing this?”

Suddenly she wasn’t being flippant at all. “We’re having this most wonderful lunch, probably one of the best I’ve had all year, and look at us: we’re playing chess — worse than chess, because chess pieces move, but you’re freezing us on the spot, like two blocks of ice stuck under a bridge. The idiots get past all our roadblocks and find all manner of shortcuts. The one or two lifemates end up ruining things, and I’m the one who’s blamed. Shall I keep going, or shall I flip channels?”

“Please, please, keep going and don’t change channels.”

“Unlike you, you mean.” A little dart — light and swift. Light and swift, just as I liked her. I let it slide. “See, I know what you want, and the funny thing is, I can bring it to you, but I also know you: you want promises more than what I have to bring, and promises I can’t make. Nor, for that matter, can you — not these days. Let’s not fool ourselves; this ain’t the rose garden.”

I was stunned by her candor.

“Have I spoken out of turn?” she asked.

“Nope. As always, you’ve nailed it on the head. Sometimes I wonder why I can’t speak like you.”

“Want to know why?”

“Dying to know why.”

“It’s very simple, Printz. You don’t trust me.”

“Why don’t I trust you? Tell me.”

“Really, really want me to tell you, Mr. Vindalu?”

“Yes.”

“Because you know I can hurt you.”

“And you know this for a fact?” I was trying to recover my dignity.

She nodded.

Why couldn’t I be like her?

I reached out and held her hand in mine, then lowered my head, opened her palm, and kissed it. How I loved that hand, exactly as it was, as I felt it, as it smelled. It belonged to that shirt which belonged to that face, to this woman who had always been me but might never want me. I felt her hand go limp in mine; she was suffering me to touch it and would do no more.

“Why?” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders to mean, God knows.

“I don’t always think I’m a good person. But telling people this only makes them want to prove me wrong, and the more they try to prove me wrong, the more I want to push them away, but the more I push them away, the guiltier I get, the nicer I become, the more they think I’ve changed. It never lasts. In the end I learn to hate both myself and them for things that should have lasted no longer than a few hours.” She reflected on this. “Maybe a few nights. Inky and I could have stayed friends.”

“This is the most twisted thing you’ve said so far.”

“What, that being kind to people makes me want to hurt them? Or that hurting them makes me want to be kind?”

“Both. I won’t ask you why you’re telling me all this—”

She didn’t let me finish. “Perhaps my hell is having to say all and not knowing if I should be quiet instead, and yours, unless I’m all wrong, is to listen and not know whether I mean it.”

“Amphibalence?”

She looked at me with something like gratitude in her gaze.

“Amphibalence indeed. But let me put this on the table, but you can’t raise me, okay?”

So typical. I nodded.

“I said you don’t trust me. And I’m sure you have your reasons, and I won’t ask what they are. But I also know you: you’ll never ask me what we’re doing here together. And one day you’re going to have to.”

“And when that day comes?”

She pursed her lips, gave another wistful shrug of her shoulders, said nothing.

She wasn’t answering. “Door number three?” I asked.

She nodded.

“That’s my hell,” I said.

“Unfair. It’s mine too.”

I thought I understood. But she was right. One day I’d have to ask her what she meant. And that day, it suddenly hit me, was today, was now. And I didn’t have the courage to ask.

•

“On the house,” said one of the Mexican waiters who, along with the other waiters and cooks, had long finished lunch and cleared the staff’s table. He had placed two squares of what looked like tiramisu and two cups of coffee on the table.

“Do you know what time it is?”

We were both dumbfounded. It was 4:30.

She said she needed to walk. I did too. After coffee we put on our coats, she did her complicated shawl knot, said goodbye to Svetonio, who was back to the sports pages, and we walked out to find a cold setting sun. Everything about her, about today even, was totally unusual. Not paying for lunch, helping the cook in his own restaurant, walking into places and taking over — a home, a kitchen, a restaurant, a life — all these gusted through otherwise ordinary days. This was not just Clara’s style, it was Clara’s world, a life that seemed boundless, extravagant, and every inch festive and unlike mine. And yet here we were, two beings who, for all our differences, seemed to speak the exact same language, liked the exact same things, and led almost identical lives. How could we be in two different rooms, let alone live streets and blocks apart, when we were made to share the same chair? Then I thought of Inky and caught a glimpse of his hell. He too must have thought they were identical beings, and yet there he was, living with the awful proof that being similar, and thinking the same thoughts, and feeling inseparable from someone was nothing more than one of the many screens that loneliness projects on the four walls of our lives.

I told her it was doubtful we would have time for Indian food tonight.

“Why?” she asked.

We laughed. She knew exactly why.

We had slightly more than two hours before 7:10. On the way down Broadway, she stopped by a botanica and asked, in Spanish, if the owner was there. The girl, who was hardly older than fourteen, went in, called her mother, who soon after appeared. “Together or separate?” she asked. “You decide,” said Clara to the fortune-teller. The woman asked me to produce my palm, which I did, reluctantly, never in my life having done anything like this before. It felt no different than entering a slovenly tattoo parlor or opium den, something slightly disturbing, because I might never be the same person on coming out. Worth a shot, I thought. The beefy woman took hold of my left palm with one hand and with the pinky of her other seemed to point at things I wasn’t seeing. Someone very dear to me had bad leg troubles, no, just the right leg. A sibling — and moments later — no, a parent, she said. Very serious leg trouble, she said, raising her head and staring at me. It’s over, she corrected. I withdrew my hand before she had time to say anything more. But you have a good line, she said, by way of compensating for the bad news. She asked for Clara’s hand. The bucket is full, but I see nothing anywhere. Was this a metaphor? Then she whispered something in Clara’s ear. Clara raised her shoulders, to suggest either indifference or that she didn’t know. We walked out humbled and crestfallen creatures.

“What did Madame Sosostris whisper to you?” I asked once we’d left the palm reader’s parlor.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Unfair.”

“Actually, you do, but you really don’t.”

“Inky?” I asked, knowing that, after our lunch, my cards were all on the table.

“Not telling.”

Clara wanted to buy a candy bar, she said. It was five o’clock.

We had two hours, yet strangely enough neither of us felt they were hours we had to kill. We could have walked, stopped in stores, bought presents, kept going, kept going — till when, Clara, till tomorrow, next year, forever?

“I can make tea,” she said.

I couldn’t resist. “You mean walk into a coffee shop, dash into the kitchen, and produce two mugs with Lipton tea bags?”

“No, at my place.”

I had to control a sudden surge of instant panic and bliss. Part of me didn’t wish to go upstairs for fear of what I’d be tempted to do. The other for fear that I’d never even dare.

Boris — if he remembered me — must have suspected that something like this was bound to happen. She stamped her feet as he was holding the door; I did the same, and thanked him with a semiflustered greeting. I was, without realizing it, uneasy and trying not to show it.

We stepped into the elevator. This was where I’d met the woman in the blue overcoat.

The elevator felt and smelled different. I didn’t know this smell. A mid-afternoon-in-a-strange-new-place smell. I had wanted to pretend I was coming here for the first time, that the party had already started, and that I was about to meet Clara any moment now. But before I knew it, we had already reached her floor.

She unlocked the door. Then she removed her coat, unwrapped her complicated shawl, and showed me into the living room, which overlooked the Hudson. I felt that I was back at the party, except that everything had been cleaned up and put back together to look totally different. Partitions had come up where none existed upstairs, furniture had been moved, the artwork looked different, older, the Hudson felt closer, and when I neared the bank of large windows, it seemed to me that even Riverside Drive felt different, more accessible than the far-flung vista that had made me think of Gogol, Byzantium, and Montevideo.

“Give me your coat.”

She took my coat, and what almost moved me — because it seemed so unexpected — was her manner of handling it, as if it were going to break or crease if she didn’t take deferential care of my stupid old coat. Was this a sign? There are no signs, I kept telling myself.

“Come, let’s go to the kitchen. Then I’ll show you around.”

Was she going to show me her bedroom?

The kitchen, like the entire apartment, hadn’t been touched up in decades. Her parents, she explained, had lived there until the day of the accident, and ever since, she’d never had the heart or the time to fix much. There were walls to be broken through, others to put up, wiring to pull out, so many things to be given away. To prove her point, she showed me the gas range and asked me to light it. “Don’t you just turn a knob or press something?” I asked. “No, you use this,” she said, taking out a match from a large matchbox. “Does this thing whistle when the water boils?” “No, it chimes.” She pointed at a very contempo-designed teakettle. A gift. But major renovations would take so much time. “Plus I don’t think I want it changed.” Her whole apartment, it occurred to me, was lying low too.

We stood in the unlit kitchen waiting for the water to boil.

“I have no cookies. I have nothing to offer.”

Girl on perpetual diet, I thought.

She was standing with her arms crossed, leaning back against the kitchen counter, looking, as I began to notice during similar moments of silence between us, mildly uneasy. I wondered why. Was she always curt and abrupt and agitated to cover up her uneasiness — was this her way? Or was she really curt and abrupt, which sometimes coincided with her uneasiness? I felt for her, which was why, as I watched the westering light fall on her figure, I said, “All you need is a dead pheasant and a bruised pomegranate sitting in a blue-rimmed bowl near a clear jar of aquavit and you get a Dutch master’s Girl Leaning against Kitchen Counter.”

“No, Girl Making Tea with Man in Kitchen.”

“Maybe girl suspicious of man in kitchen.”

“Girl doesn’t know what to think.”

“Girl very beautiful in kitchen. Man very, very happy.”

“Girl happy man in kitchen.”

“Man and girl talking real stupid.”

“Maybe man and girl seen too many Rohmer films.”

We laughed. “I haven’t spoken to anyone the way I speak with you. You’re the only one I laugh with nowadays.” There was nothing to add to this except to look her straight in the face.

She opened one of the cabinets to get the sugar. I saw an assortment of about two dozen different steel butcher knives. Her father, she explained, loved to cook on weekends. Now they were all bundled up and heaped on the top shelf. One teaspoon for me and two for her. I could tell she was uneasy.

“Girl will put on CD man gave her,” she said, “then the two will go to France.” This was how she referred to Rohmer’s films.

The chime of the teakettle, I said, sounded like a World War II airraid siren. She said she hadn’t noticed, but, yes, it did sound like an airraid siren.

I asked if she had a teapot available, because I was going to make tea as in My Night at Maud’s. She had tea bags only, she said, though surely there must be a teapot around — probably very old and very dirty.

Tea bags would do, I said, and proceeded to pour hot water into two mugs, one bearing the name of a city in Umbria, the other of a store in SoHo. “Let it sit a moment, then we’ll pour the water out.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Not a clue. But I will drop an Earl Grey tea bag into each mug.”

The scent filled the kitchen.

Let’s go into the living room, she said, carrying her mug and the CD. She opened a cabinet, turned on the CD player, and before long there it was, the hymn from the Adagio in all of its piercing, heartrending beauty. I love Earl Grey tea, I said. So did she. “Time for a secret agent.”

The sofa, which was new, was placed directly in front of the bay of windows, so that one could see the Hudson while drinking. What a view, I said. I loved the tea, I loved the Hudson, loved the Beethoven, and I loved the Rohmer tea-in-the-afternoon thing. Outside, where the snow was still untouched by tires or footmarks, was where Clara used to sled with her friends after school.

“Now tell me why the Beethoven is you again.”

“Again with the Beethoven!” I was enjoying this.

“Just try, Printz. It’s you because. .?” she asked, imitating bated breath.

“Because the Heiliger Dankgesang was written while Beethoven was convalescing and, like me, like you, like everyone really, was lying very low. He had come close to dying and was grateful to be alive.”

“And. .?”

“And it’s about a simple handful of notes, plus a sustained, overextended hymn in the Lydian mode, which it loves and doesn’t wish to see end, because it likes repeating questions and deferring answers, because all answers are easy, because it’s not answers and clarity, or even ambiguity, that Beethoven wants. What he’s after is deferral and distended time, a grace period that never expires and that comes like memory, but isn’t memory, all cadence and no chaos. And he’ll keep repeating and extending the process until he’s left with five notes, three notes, one note, no note, no breath. Maybe art is just that, life without death. Life in the Lydian mode.”

The silence between us told me that, in her mind, Clara had right away substituted the word life with another word. Hence her silence.

“Tea in the Lydian mode. Sunset in the Lydian mode. .” I added to stir some humor between us, at which she almost snickered, meaning: I know what you’re doing, Printz. “Yes, that too,” she said.

I looked over the room. There must have been twenty pillows on the sofas and armchairs, and, in one of the corners by the window, two large plants. The armchairs looked old, but not dowdy, as if the rest of the room were trying to adjust to the new sofa without straining itself. Every electrical outlet seemed packed with what looked like a grape bunch of plugs sticking out of it.

“Is this where you did your homework as a little girl?”

“Homework I did in the dining room, right over there. But I liked this spot for reading. Even when we had guests, I’d sit on an ottoman in the corner and slink away to St. Petersburg. This is also where I played the piano.”

“Perfect childhood?”

“Uneventful. I don’t have bad memories, or great ones either. I just wished my parents had lived longer. I don’t miss them, though.”

I tried to imagine her bedroom. I wondered why she had decided to write her master’s thesis in Hans’s apartment instead of right here.

“Because they made me breakfast and lunch. You’d be surprised how quickly time flies when people cook for you and look after you. I spent six months up there writing away, paying attention to no one.”

I remembered the desk and the room upstairs where I’d waited for her to bring back appetizers, fearing she’d never return, though come back she did, bearing goodies, as she called them, arranged in a Noah’s ark formation — two by two, meaning one for you and one for me, and another for you and me — a room where I kept thinking, Let’s just sit here in this tiny alcove all our own and reinvent the world in our image, with our own firmament extending no farther than the table where all these strangers stood confabulating around the singer with the throaty voice, like aliens who had dematerialized around us and whose shadow was all that remained of them. I had promised to wait another fifteen minutes and not a minute more before leaving the party, but on seeing Clara return with the large dish in her hand, I’d begun to think that this was better than a dream and who was I to meddle with dreams, as I watched those fifteen minutes extend past three in the morning, which was, as everyone led me to believe even on my first night here, yet too early for anyone to leave. That little room seemed the closest I’d ever get to Clara. Now I had come back to the same spot, down by a few flights, a few sunken city layers deeper, and we were still on the surface, still above sea level. I wondered how much farther underground Inky’s soul roamed in this building’s netherworld.

“Above that little room, however, was the balcony.”

The poet was Vaughan and the spot Bellagio and, in between, a lady’s suede shoe stubbing a cigarette that tailspun its way down onto the snow-banked driveway where Igors and Ivans stood smoking like displaced double agents recalling the Cold War.

Remember? Could I ever forget?

The rooms and balconies stacked one on top of the other seemed like versions of a vague and mysterious design presaging something about me or about her or about our time together that I wasn’t quite grasping yet. Was I closer to that something on her floor or was I farther from it than I’d been there three days earlier? Did each floor point to a weaker or to a louder echo of itself? Or was it the echoing effect that was beckoning me right now, rising and falling from floor to floor, like snakes and ladders, like Beethoven’s overextended hymn, which comes on and then withers and then comes back again, timeless, spellbound, and imperishable?

So this is awkward, she had said at the restaurant. I wouldn’t touch that, but I knew she was pleading with me to speak, to go beyond, just say something.

The arrangement of rooms and windows on the same corner line made me think of the elements of the periodic table, all of them lined up in neat rows and columns according to a logic that is totally cryptic and yet, once arranged numerically, no less predictable than fate itself to those who know the cypher. Sodium (atomic number 11) is the uppermost floor with the greenhouse, and right under it is potassium (19), where I nearly passed out, and right under it rubidium (37), the floor with the balcony and the Bloody Mary, and under that cesium (55), Clara’s world. Couldn’t one organize one’s life along a periodic table under the assumption that if one calculated the rule behind the 11, 19, 37, 55 sequence, one could easily predict that the next element would be number 87—francium? Weren’t we going to Rohmer’s France in less than two hours?

She liked things improvised; I liked design.

“And what does this room correspond to on the ground floor?” I asked. “The lobby.” “And below that?” “Storage room, superintendent’s digs.” “And below that?” I asked, as if trying to determine where fate might take me if I were to roam from floor to floor like a flying Dutchman trapped for eternity in the freight elevator. “Bicycle room. Laundry room. China,” she replied.

Here I am trying to determine that there is no below after rock bottom, no after-omega, that beyond the person I see in Clara there is no other person, and yet how like her to tell me that rock bottom does not exist, that there are as many Claras as there are buried tiers and legends on our planet. And how about me?

“Man thinking about first night, wondering what would have happened had he gotten off on wrong floor and gone to a different party.”

“Man would have met different Dutch lady.”

“Yes, but what does present Dutch lady think of that?”

“Man is fishing, so Dutch lady says Go fish.”

How I loved her mind. To every north, my south, to every secret, its sharer, to every glove the partner.

“Printz,” she said. She had stood up to put away our two cups in the kitchen and had momentarily looked out to the darkling view of the Hudson from one of the other large windows in the living room.

“What?” I asked.

“I think you should come and have a look. Here,” she said, producing to my complete surprise a pair of what looked like World War II binoculars. “Look over there.” She pointed toward the George Washington Bridge.

“Is it what I think it is?” I asked.

“I think it might be.”

“Let’s give it five minutes. Maybe it will pass by.”

We waited in suspense, listening to the closing segment of the Beethoven.

But the ship was not drawing any closer, and for all we knew, it might have been stationary; it was already too dark to make out its name. It was also late, and unless we hurried, we’d miss the movies. So she tied her shawl, told me where to find my coat. From the bathroom, I heard her strum a few bars of the Handel on her piano. It meant — or so I wished to think — we could stay indoors, we could order in, we could sit still till it got dark, yet never budge to turn on the lights, because just moving a muscle would break the spell. We should take a cab, I suggested. Absolutely not, we’re walking, she replied.

“So this was you,” she said in the elevator. It took me a moment to realize she was still harping on the Beethoven.

“This was me,” I said almost shyly, without conviction, as though held to an admission I’d made without thinking earlier in the day and now wished I could take back.

“Next time I’ll play you a few sarabandes on the piano. They too have me written all over them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sarabandes are fast and slow. Someone once said sarabandes are danced two steps forward and three steps back — story of my life, if you ask me.”

•

We took a shortcut down West End Avenue, which, unlike Riverside, had already been plowed, with the snow gathered in high banks along the curbs. The walk was all downhill, and when we got there, the ticket holders’ line was longer than we’d anticipated. Someone said they weren’t sold out. When we got our tickets, all I hoped was that we wouldn’t be separated. And if we were? We walk out, she said. We recognized some faces from the previous evenings. Clara, as became her habit, said she’d try to get something from a nearby Starbucks. We liked the slice of lemon cake she had bought last night. In line, I started talking with a couple standing in front of us. She had seen many Rohmer films; he had seen only a few. They had come the night before as well, but he wasn’t convinced. She thought that tonight’s films might actually persuade him of the director’s genius. Did I think he was a genius? He could be, I said. But real people never behaved, much less talked, that way in the real world, he said. “Well,” interrupted Clara, who had gathered the gist of the man’s objections as soon as she joined me on line, “Monet’s paintings look nothing like the real world, nor would we want them to. What’s the real world got to do with art, anyway?”

That seemed to shut him up.

Perhaps the poor man was trying to make conversation. They were so clearly on their second date.

“I wonder where seven-ten with the sloping crew cut is tonight. Oh, there he is.”

I gave him our tickets, and she smiled at him. “Danko, filo donka,” she said in mock-German, a clownish simper on her face. He growled in silence as he had done two nights before. He could sense she was making fun of him.

“I don’t like your attitude,” he finally said. “I love yours,” she retorted. She didn’t know whether to call him Fildanko or Fildenko. So she decided to call him Phildonka, with a ph. She was laughing all to herself, until we saw Phildonka’s face peer at the audience through the slit in the thick, dark curtain and, with the beam of his flashlight, point to an empty seat behind us. “Madam, the seat,” he said, which Clara instantly parodied into madamdasit. “Can you see?” I asked when the credits came on. “Not a bit.” Then she repeated Phildonka madamdasit, and neither of us could stop laughing.

Midway through the Le rayon vert the situation became totally untenable. She opened her purse and produced a nip, which she twisted open and pressed on me to drink from. “What is it?” “Oban,” she whispered. My neighbor turned his head to me, then looked at the screen, as though determined never to look our way again. “I think we got caught,” she whispered. “He tell Phildonka, you watch, Phildonka get furious.” Suppressed laughter.

Later, the film stopped rolling. At first people sat quietly in their spots, then they began to grow impatient, finally erupting in hisses and taunts that grew louder and louder, as in a high school auditorium. I told her that Phildonka was all at once ticket collector, usher, popcorn maker, and projectionist, which sent her roaring out loud, shouting, “Phildonka, fixitdamovie!” Everyone was now staring at us, and the more they stared, the more she laughed. “Fixitdamovie,” she hollered, everyone joining in the laughter. This the woman who leaned against her kitchen counter a few hours ago and looked so uneasy during an awkward silence between us that all she could do was speak in pidgin English. Same Clara, new Clara, old Clara, the Clara who shut people up and put them in their place, the Clara who stares and weeps, the Clara who, on weekday afternoons after school, would dash out of her building on 106th Street and scamper down the stairway by the Franz Sigel memorial statue to join the other children and sled down the hill or head toward Straus Park, where they all sat on one bench, ratting on their parents — Clara who mourned her parents in silence when she heard the news, but then changed clothes and went to a party — Clara never outgrew the comfort of those hours when her parents drank tea with friends by the large bay of windows facing the Hudson and all she had to do was sneak in among them with a book, and all, all was well and safe in this medieval town along the Rhine which her parents and grandparents had resurrected this side of the Atlantic. Was there a periodic table for her, as she floated her way up, down, and across her various little squares, her Folía and her solemn sarabande wrapped in one and put under a panino press like a sandwich cubano sold on the corner of her block? Or was she like me — but so much better than me?

“What do we do now?” I asked. “I dunno. What do you want to do?” “I think we should have a real drink.” In our rush to leave the theater before something might make us change our minds, she barely had time to throw her scarf over her head or tie her knot. “What happened to the complicated knot?” I asked. Leave the complicated knot alone, she said as she snuggled under my arm, then under my armpit, before I could even put my arm around her. “Let’s catch a cab,” I said. “Usual place?” “Absolutely.”

But the cabs were not coming on the uptown side, so we walked across to catch those headed downtown. This was exactly the corner where I’d spotted her two nights ago. The light was red, so we had to wait, and in the island in the middle of Broadway she began chanting with teeth clattering in the cold, “Phildonka, Phildonka, thy ’larum afar / Gives brings hope to the valiant, and promise of war.” “Who?” I asked. “Byron.” She couldn’t let go of the word until she saw a cabbie drive by wearing a turban the size of a pumpkin, so that instead of shouting “Hey, cab,” she yelled out, “Da cab, da cab, madamdacab,” into the night, watching the bearded cabbie speed by us with a fare in the backseat no less turbaned than the driver himself. This brought us to such a paroxysm of laughter in the freezing cold that I caught myself thinking, This is all nonsense, but this nonsense is the closest I ever got to happiness or to another human being, and without thinking turned to her and kissed her on the mouth.

She pulled back immediately. Even a hand accidentally put over fire could not have recoiled this fast. She uttered the word no almost before my lips had touched hers, as if she’d been expecting something of the sort and had an answer already prepared. She reminded me of someone who has her thumb already poised on the head of the mace spray can in her coat pocket, determined to spray and ask questions later, only to realize that the man who walked over to her one night was none other than a lost tourist who’d meant to ask for street directions.

For the first time in my life I felt as though I had tried to assault a woman, or was judged to have attempted it. Had she accompanied the gesture with a slap, I would have been less stunned.

This was not only the first time that I had ever met with resistance while trying to kiss a woman, but the first time where the kiss had come so spontaneously and in so involuntary and unrehearsed a manner that to have it thrown back at me so brusquely felt like an affront to every moment we’d shared for the past four days, an affront to candor, to friendship, to our humanity itself, to everything I was, to the me I was only too happy to let her see. Could my kiss have come so unexpectedly as to have shocked her? Could it have been such an offense? Could it — or could I — have been so repellent?

I did not know how she was taking all this and wanted to make sure it wouldn’t spoil things between us. So I apologized. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

“No need to apologize. I should have seen this coming. It’s my fault.”

It seemed I was less guilty than I feared. But my innocence was more galling yet. I had misread our giddiness for something it was not.

“Clara, I really hope you’re not offended.”

“I am not offended, I said. You behaved like a fourteen-year-old. No need to apologize like one too.”

That was it. I was apologizing from my heart. This was a gratuitous snub.

“I think I’m going to get you a cab,” I said, “then I’m going to head home as well.”

She was more flummoxed by this than by my kiss.

“Don’t go home like this.”

“You didn’t have to put me down.”

“You didn’t have to kiss me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Just don’t go home, don’t do it.” She looked at me. “It’s so fucking cold. Let’s have a drink. I don’t want this to happen.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because we were having a good time together. Because if you think it’s a marvelous thing we both ended up at Hans’s party, don’t you think that I think so too? Don’t you think that if you’ve never wanted to be known by anyone the way I know you it’s because I may want the same from you?”

“So why not let me kiss you?”

“I don’t have to explain. I don’t even want to try. I’m cold. Let’s grab a cab.”

“Why not tell me you’d rather not kiss me instead of pushing me away as if I’d tried to rape you or had the plague.”

“You scared me, okay? You wouldn’t understand. Could we not talk about it now?”

“We never talk about anything.”

“That’s not fair.”

She listened for me to say something. But I didn’t know what to think, except that I was happy to be heading back home.

“This is my hell. This is my hell,” she kept repeating, “and you’re making it worse.”

“Your hell? Think of mine!”

I shook my head, at myself, at her. “Well, it’s too cold. And we both need a drink.”

I couldn’t understand, but she snuck right back under my armpit and put one arm around my waist, as if nothing at all had happened. “There’s a taxi coming.”

We hailed a cab, got in, watched the cab suddenly skid in the snow as it made a totally unflappable U-turn and was soon speeding uptown. “It got terribly cold, horrible weather,” uttered Clara through the glass partition. The man was quietly and serenely putting out his cigarette, listening to soft jazz. “Amerikon wezer,” he replied. “You don’t say,” she commented, trying to sound earnestly intrigued by the cabbie’s view of American weather. “Did you hear that,” she turned to me, “Amerikon wezer.”

When we got out on 105th Street, we were in stitches.

We rushed indoors, found our usual shoulder-to-shoulder spot on the bench which she called our banquette, where I ordered two single malts and french fries, while she hastened to the bathroom.

Minutes later, she was back. “You won’t believe what someone left in there,” she said, this time truly bursting with laughter. “It’s too disgusting, as if the entire Third World had come to take a dump in this bathroom.”

Did she need to go elsewhere?

No, she had used the men’s room.

Were there any men in the men’s room?

“Yes,” she said. “This guy.”

And she pointed to a lanky-looking young man at the bar who probably needed a drink to recover from the shock. “And don’t look at me like that,” she said out loud to him. “You didn’t see nothing, and if you did, consider yourself lucky.”

Cheers, we said when our drinks came, once more, and once again, and many more times again.

I looked at her and couldn’t help asking, “Are we just laughing or are we really very happy?”

“Did you by any chance see a Rohmer film tonight? Just give us Juan Dola, mista. And let’s dance.”

•

As had become our habit every night, we left the bar well after two in the morning. The walk home never lasted long enough, and the cold didn’t help. What was not unpleasant was watching how the two of us, while very conscious of the windchill, tried not to pick up our pace. We had drunk more than usual, and as we walked, my arm was around her shoulders. Was anything ever going to be unconscious between us?

The problem was how to say goodbye. Kissing was out of the question. Not kissing, too staged. A normal peck, totally perfunctory. “I know this is awkward,” she said, “but I think we’d better not say good night.” As always, on the same wavelength.

So we shouldn’t kiss at all and forgo all motions of saying good night — that’s an idea, I thought, almost admiring her ability to avoid a yet more awkward moment at her door. Meanwhile, not a word about my aborted kiss, not a word about the song, nothing about the tango we’d danced four times tonight. Why wasn’t I surprised? “Maybe you’re right,” I said. And maybe she was. With her hands deep in her coat pockets, she darted forward to where Boris stood, while I, after waiting a few seconds to see that she got in, spun around and headed toward Broadway. “Well, it’s been nice,” she had said, clearly aware she was using formal Hollywood dating lingo. But without a trace of irony.

Later, when I reached the park, I began to think that perhaps it was time not to see Clara any longer, that this had gone far enough and should go no further. Too much chaos, too many doubts, and far too, too many jabs and darts, everything bathed in a caustic brew that could peel off the outer layers of your body and leave you no less denuded than a newborn mollusk. End it, I thought, just end it. She’ll mind, probably, but of all people, she’ll recover faster than you ever will. Within hours, she’ll forget to remember, then forget she’s forgotten. As for me, it would take a while. Perhaps it was time to reconsider my own lying-low practice.

For the first time in weeks, I found myself itching to buy a pack of cigarettes. Was I going to call them secret agents? Yes, why not, at least for the time being. But my name would never again be Oskár.

The park by night, as always, felt as welcoming as a church on a rainy day when you have an extra ten minutes to yourself during lunch and, because you don’t belong to the faith and have no ritual to perform there, simply step in as you please, asking for nothing, expecting nothing, giving out nothing — just an empty pew, where you sit and think, just sit and think and hope you can intone something like a silent hymn.

I had passed by here just before one o’clock today, thinking to myself that tonight, after walking her home, I would indeed stop by here. If things went better than that, then I’d send the park good-night thoughts. The park would understand. As Tilden understood. As my father understood when I failed to send parting thoughts on rushing back to the city last night. But things had not gone well. Now I was back, no closer to her than I’d been on our first night. Two floors up, and three floors down. Just treading water, as always treading water. How I hated this feeling. I sat in the freezing cold for a few moments, knowing I’d have to leave soon, trying all the same to summon up the splendor of the party and how everything seemed touched by luster and legend that night. No more magic, none left, none here. My Magi with their heads ablaze — gone home. Go home, Oskár, go home.

I stood up and watched the city at three in the morning, the city I loved at three more than at any other time perhaps. It knew nothing about any of this, did it? Nor could it do anything to help, except watch and go about its business and from time to time look up again, the way zebras continue to graze and watch as their predators quietly scour the plain for their young. Go home, Oskár.

I decided to get another drink at our pub and sat at the bar. Perhaps all I wanted was to stay in her neighborhood. There was almost no one left inside, just the waitress and two men sitting at the bar, and a couple farther down. Would I ever in my life be able to come back here and not think of her? Or come back here and not hate my life, myself?

I was, I recalled, sitting exactly where the lanky young man had been standing after inadvertently sharing the bathroom with Clara. I had enjoyed her cutting words to him. Even he was far better off than I was right now. I looked over to what had been our table. They had already snuffed out the candles in that corner. The whole place reminded me of an emptied theater when management allows you to go back to retrieve the small umbrella left under your seat — but all the actors, from King Lear to Lady Windermere to the cleanup crew, have gone home already, including the underpaid mopping crew who’s already taken the subway and is on its way to the outer reaches of town, counting the minutes before each man can sit to eat the food his good wife has kept warm for him.

Traces of our presence were everywhere. This is where she and I had talked of Rohmer’s films, ordering more drinks than either of us was in the habit of drinking, her head on my shoulder, my arm sometimes around her shoulders, neither daring to go beyond that. Just looking at the bench with the cushion that might still be bearing the imprint of our bodies brought everything back.

I ordered a drink. “Fucking winter,” the barman said. The old toothless man sitting at the far end of the bar liked that. “Fucking winter,” he repeated, “you bet!” I immediately thought of Amerikon wezer and almost choked on the laughter as it worked its way up my throat. Had I ever laughed so much with anyone lately? And what was it about laughter that I loved so much — silly, slapstick, childish, fatuous laughter that it was. Amerikon wezer, she had repeated to the cabbie, making a face as if to say, Fancy that, Amerikon wezer! How I’d wanted to kiss her then.

I took out a dollar and put it in the jukebox. It would be just like me to come back and play our song again. I stood there, transfixed by the door of the bar, listening to the song, not caring a bit what the people who’d seen us dance together might think I was doing now, all by myself, en soledad. So she didn’t let him have his way with her, did she, and after all their dancing and boozing—not caring, because nothing mattered to me now but that moment when she put her hand to my face two nights ago with so much kindness — yes, kindness — that thinking of it now could make the tears come again — not tears of self-pity, or of self-hatred, or self-anything, or even love, though it must have been something like love, because two beings, two objects, two cells, two planets cannot come so close and not be altered by a hindrance and a disturbance called love. I could have let myself cry because prolonged confusion could do this each time. And perhaps being all alone here and wanting to remember the doleful tenor of her gesture when she rubbed her palm along my face after singing the words in my ear, only to ask for another dollar seconds later, made me think, almost against my will, that all this must surely be love and had always been love, her love, my love, our love. I played the song once more. Strange how she hadn’t said a word about it on our way home. Not a word about my kiss either. And certainly nothing about the way we’d held each other at the bar. Nothing. The whole thing swept under, forgotten, not talked about — as if they were all just tangents and detours.

We hadn’t taken a step forward since this afternoon, when we stood in the kitchen wrapped in a cloud of awkwardness. Who had put the cloud there, and why, with all our experience in matters of intimacy, were we so frozen and unable to shoo it away? I think we’d better not say good night—who ever says something as cramped and flat-footed as that? I think we’d better not say good night.

•

I sat at the bar and had started drinking my Scotch when it finally hit me.

What a dreadful fool! I kicked the stool next to mine. Then to cover the kick I made it seem that I had accidentally banged it while crossing my legs. I think we’d better not say good night did not mean we shouldn’t kiss goodbye, it meant I don’t want us to say goodbye yet. Why hadn’t she said yet? Is yet such a hard word to say? Why hadn’t she said it clearly? Or had she said it more than just clearly and I had simply failed to hear it because I couldn’t believe I was being offered what I’d always wanted and, because I’d wanted it, felt unworthy of it.

Or had I understood her meaning exactly but pretended to disbelieve it so as to have her repeat it a second time, perhaps with greater emphasis — which Claras don’t do?

Suddenly, and more than anything right now, I wanted to call her and hear her raucous sleepy voice and, in hearing it, say to that raucous sleepy voice what I would with difficulty have said to her sparkling daytime voice, things one only mutters in unfettered half-sleep to those who’ll heed it in half-sleep themselves: I don’t care if I wake you up, I want to be with you now, in your bed, under your blanket, in your sweater, life is so very cold tonight, I’ll sleep in the next room if I have to, but I don’t want to be without you, not tonight.

Should I call her now? Past three in the morning?

After our walk, it might have been easier to call. But at three? Only in emergencies do people call at three. Yes, but wasn’t this an emergency? Only drunks call this an emergency. Well, I am drunk, and if ever there was an emergency, this was it. There! Call her and say, I can’t think of being without you tonight. That sounded more like a suicide note, or a marriage proposal. Aren’t both the same? I asked, thinking of Olaf, already suppressing a chuckle.

What I couldn’t wait to read was the e-mail or text message I knew was bound to come any moment now. Surely it would be cruel and tart in that typically off-putting, cutting, Clara way of hers. But if only not to do what she’d already done last night, she wouldn’t send an e-mail right away. She’d keep me waiting long enough so that I wouldn’t find sleep, and when I did find it, I’d still wake up to check. Then I realized that if my sense of her — or of fate — was in any way accurate, she would not send me a text message at all tonight. Let silence have its full effect, let silence be the poison, let silence be the message.

But she had another torture in store for me, one that allowed me to suspect, without knowing for certain, that all this was happening in my mind, and in my mind only, and that these twisted riddles being spun around me had nothing to do with her and personified my gnarled relationship with myself, with her, with life itself.

But I wasn’t going to fall for this. I wasn’t being paranoid, I thought — she’s the one who’s doing this to me. So I decided to turn off my phone — to show her.

Then, snuffing these thoughts from my mind, sprung the quantum theorem from hell. Two options, but not both at the same time. If I turned my cell phone back on, I would find either no message from her or one that said such cruel things that it would leave me stunned and reeling for days. But if I didn’t check and kept my cell phone off, I would never read the message that started with,

DEAR OSKAR DONT BOTHER CALLING OR WRITING OR TAKING OFF YOUR SHOES JUST BRING YOURSELF OVER AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN I DONT CARE WHAT TIME IT IS I DONT CARE IF YOU WANT TO OR NOT DONT CARE WHAT I SAID TODAY OR YESTERDAY OR THE NIGHT BEFORE I JUST WANT YOU WITH ME TONIGHT AND I PROMISE I WONT SLEEP UNTIL I HEAR THE RING OF MY BUZZER DOWNSTAIRS DONT BOTHER CALLING OR WRITING OR TAKING OFF YOUR SHOES JUST THE BUZZER THE BUZZER THE BUZZER DOWNSTAIRS.

Like Orpheus I could not resist turning on my phone and checking my messages. But, as with Orpheus, no sooner had I checked than the message she would have sent disappeared instantly.