Eight White Nights

FIFTH NIGHT

The one question I woke up to and couldn’t shake off and took with me to the shower, to my corner Greek diner, and then on the long way back home without ever being able to answer was: Is she not going to call me at all today or is she just pretending not to call?

After breakfast, to stop myself from hoping — or was it to spite myself for hoping? — I decided to turn off my phone again and found myself dawdling on Broadway under the pretense that I had plenty of time and nothing to do this morning. But my reason for not wanting to get back too soon was too obvious to ignore: I wanted to prove — to myself, to her, to the gods themselves — that I was in no rush to know whether she had written or called or come by, because the last thing I wanted to know this morning was that she had made no effort to call or see me. In the end, what brought me to the brink of shame — because it was the one thing I wanted most — was to hear her admission that she was going through the exact same torment and torture herself. Had she come by car, she would have found my buzzer silent; had she called, she’d have reached voice mail; had she run into me and asked where I’d been, I would have been evasive. Then it hit me that this was exactly what she wanted me to go through — and I found comfort in this. She wanted me to juggle all these doubts because she herself was juggling them at this precise moment.

In my mind — and perhaps in mine only — it all boiled down to one question: Who was going to pick up the phone and call first; who was the author, and who the victim of silence? And was hers just silence or, like mine, was it disguised chatter? Where did tacit end and silent start? Clearly, a Door number 3 question.

There was, however, one last hope, even if it came at the end of what would surely be a long and twisted day: the unspoken 7:10. Not saying anything about 7:10, however, was either a sign or no sign, but no sign was itself a sign as well.

How to break this radio silence?

I could take the Staten Island ferry, and as soon as I stood on the freezing deck before the Statue of Liberty, call and say, Guess where I am — and send her a picture to prove it. But I also imagined her reply: gruff and unresponsive, Your point being? Or I could stand on the Brooklyn Bridge or sit on one of the pews inside the Cathedral of St. John, scarcely ten blocks from her home. And your point being?

Or — and this is what I did — at around 2:00 p.m. I sent her a picture of the statue of Memory in Straus Park. This is where you can find me. I’ll wait awhile, a very long while. But by then bring an ice pick.

I waited for her to call me back. But she did not. So things had degenerated far worse than I feared. She wasn’t talking to me. Perhaps she had turned off her phone. But then that too was a sign, wasn’t it? — especially if she kept hers turned off for the same reason, which would make it the loudest sign of all.

I ran through a series of wished-for scenarios. The best consisted in her sending me a picture of where she was at this very instant. No text. Just her way of explaining why she couldn’t meet me. For some reason I imagined her sending me a photo of the Temple of Dendur. Bergdorf’s. The road to Darien. A bathroom bowl.

Then I began to wish that her reply might come in the form of Leo Czernowicz playing the Bach.

Then that she’d call me back, saying, What?

What do you mean “What?” I’d reply.

You called.

Are you free?

Why?

If you’re busy, I’ll call some other time.

What did you want?

I called to apologize.

For?

You know exactly what for.

You already did. What else?

Nothing else.

•

“It’s freezing cold, and I can’t believe you made me leave my house.”

She knew she’d surprise me. But no sooner did I see her materialize at Straus Park than we burst out laughing hysterically. Partly because she was making fun of our overdrawn radio silence; or because it was obvious that our embattled stillness was nothing more than a clash of wills, a bogus cold war. What a relief to admit it with laughter — and move on.

“Were you working?” I was hoping she’d say no.

“Yes. But it was taking too long, and with all you made me drink last night, I could barely focus.”

“Are you still pissed?”

“Depends what for.”

“Did you eat?” She made it clear she was changing a delicate subject, though I was not quite sure what precisely that subject was. Standard MO.

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“Want to do ethnic?”

Within minutes, I knew, there’d be new people in our lives, new ways of naming things, new foibles to pick up on in a storehouse of characters sprung out from the mind of a girl I couldn’t begin to understand except by thinking she was my spitting image, but my image in reverse, the mirror image of her own replica.

We walked down Broadway, examining several places along the way as possible restaurants for lunch, and yet, for one reason or another, dismissing each. The truth is, neither of us was hungry and would have settled for an intimate café. I missed the sextant and the oversized meerschaum pipe and the picture of a lurching bull. There were, as usual this time of the year, lots of people about, lots of tourists and young residents of the many two-star hotels that had sprouted around the neighborhood. Every place was full, and there was a ferment in the air, which gave our walk its hasty, spirited pace.

Clara decided she needed to buy candy. Did one really buy candy at her age? “I like candy, okay?” At some point, we decided to take the crosstown bus and head to the East Side. But did we want to run into more crowds of people? There’s the Guggenheim, I said. Did we really want to go to the Guggenheim? Actually no. We could go to France, I suggested. But at this time in the afternoon? It would be all wrong.

“Yes — about the movies,” she started, “I know this will upset things, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it tonight,” she said.

Did she mean upset things or upset me?

“Bummer,” I said, trying to show I’d taken the news with no less equanimity than if I’d received a “regrets only” from someone I’d invited reluctantly. “It won’t be fun without you.” I couldn’t have found a dumber comeback.

It hurt. The question was where. I didn’t mind going alone — I had always liked going to the movies alone. I just didn’t like having to cancel what, without totally admitting it to myself, I’d taken for granted. I didn’t like finding, as I always knew I’d eventually find, that she had another life, that I played no part in that life, and that the part I played in her lying-low phase was so small that no one, other than Max and Margo, and the few who’d seen us together at the party, had the slightest inkling I existed. Perhaps what I didn’t like was having to change my life back to what it had been before Clara. Four nights, and I’m hooked. Is that it?

A dead silence had fallen between us.

I was afraid this would happen. But so soon?

“I’ll live. Trust me.”

Silence again. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me why I can’t come? With most people not asking means they’re dying to ask.”

I was trying not to ask so as not to seem curious or cranky. Nor did I want to sound indifferent. I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps I didn’t want to know what she did when I wasn’t with her. I cared only for what we did together — or so I wished to believe. What she did with others didn’t matter, especially if it did not interfere with our being together. In this, it took me a while to realize, I was thinking and behaving like every jealous man.

“You really don’t want to know?”

“Doesn’t matter. Obviously you’re dying to tell me.”

“Otherpeoples ” she said. Her way of remaining vague and all too specific at the same time.

But it hit me hard, as though she’d finally taken a large spade and with it shoved dirt at my face. The streets became gray, and the sky became gray, and the festive people crowding the stores around the crosstown stop on Broadway lost their color and became gray, and life, having lost the dimple in its smile, had turned sullen and gray.

Once again, I decided to have nothing more to do with her. This was the time to put that resolution into effect. This is when it should happen: man may be buckling at the knees, man may have aimed too high, but man splits now. Why bother having lunch under the circumstances?

“Do they serve tea in your house?”

I looked at her in total surprise.

“Yes, all the Twinings in the world. It’s just that the pre-check-in crew arrives tomorrow, so the place is a mess.”

“Is there a clean corner?”

“There should be.”

“And il y a things to eat?”

“Very old ham, green-flecked cheese, and the potatoes in the bottom drawer have grown trees. Always wine, though.”

How could she do this? From ice to scalding hot. Suddenly a party erupted in our lives.

On Broadway we stopped and decided to stock up on food. The store was mobbed, but neither of us minded. Two cheeses, one, no two, baguettes, one ripe avocado, some ham, raw and cooked. Why the avocado? Goes with the ham and mustard. Did I have mustard? Yes, but very old. By God, when were you last in the rose garden? Told you, aeons ago. Some fruit? Winter or summer fruit? Does it matter, they’re all imported from faraway places whose fruit matures nowhere but on board the giant dark containers piled on beaten-down tankers called Prince Oscar that shuttle up and down the Atlantic to bring berries of all colors and no taste to people ready to sit around Yule logs and sing carols over spiked fruit punch. “All right, all right, je get it,” she said. Did we have milk? We did, I said, and made a humbled shame-face, but it might have turned to yogurt. At the last minute we remembered what would have made all the difference in the world: caviar and sour cream. We were, once again, playing house. How about some junk? Junk and candy, she said.

By the time we were done, we had filled two large grocery bags. “Suddenly I’m hungry,” she said. I was starving.

“Before we go any farther, is the kitchen clean?” she asked as we entered my building.

Was she asking if my sheets were clean?

“Señora Venegas comes twice a week. But she is not allowed to touch anything in the refrigerator or in my study.”

I got out of the elevator, forgot to tell her that its doors shut very, very quickly, and suddenly saw Clara with her package violently shoved out of the elevator by the closing door. “The fucking door. The fucking nerve.” She kept cursing at the door all the way down the corridor to my apartment.

She fell in love with my rug. She had an idea, she said. “Let’s picnic in the corner room. I’ll take care of everything, you take care of the wine and the music.” For a second we stood next to each other, looking out at the view of the park. Another overcast white day bursting with inner joy.

She found a tablecloth in the linen closet. “What’s this?”

“From Roussillon. Bought it as a present, never gave it, things fizzled, kept it instead.”

On her way to the kitchen she spotted a photograph of my father and me when I was four. It was taken on our trip to Berlin. We’re in the Tiergarten, he and I. And next to it is a black-and-white picture of him with his father on the same exact spot. “Return of the Jew.”

“Revenge of the Jew.”

“You look like him.”

“I would hope not.”

“Didn’t you like him?”

“I was crazy about him. But I don’t think he knew happiness.”

“With what happened after this picture was taken, difficult to imagine happiness anywhere.”

“He had his chance. I think.”

“You think.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“He let it go.”

“Meaning?” Why the sudden interest in my father?

“Meaning he didn’t think he was worthy enough. Meaning he knew love once and only once, yet never got close enough or risked enough to go after someone who might have asked for nothing more than his love. Meaning he had waited too long but didn’t know that life was willing to wait out the hurdles it had thrown his way.”

“Amphibalence Senior?”

“If you wish.”

“When did he die?”

“Last year.”

She got closer to the picture.

“I was born the summer this was taken,” she said.

“I know.”

Let her know that I too had done the math, that I’d already thought, Did I know, as I was ambling in a small park in the Tiergarten with my father, that somewhere in a hospital in Manhattan someone who’d be named Clara. .?

What I didn’t tell her and would never have dared hint at was that I was also thinking, Did he know, as an anonymous photographer was busy snapping our photo, that the one person I wished he’d meet someday would stand before his picture and ask me about him? Did he know that the Persian rug we bought together at an auction sale one Sunday five years ago would inspire Clara to make a picnic?

“How do you know so much about his private life?”

“Because we had very few secrets. Because he was so unhappy sometimes he couldn’t afford secrets. Because he went over all mistaken turns in his life so I wouldn’t make the same ones myself when the time came.”

“And have you?”

“That’s a Door number three question.”

“Has the time come?”

“That’s another Door number three question.”

“And?”

“And — since we’re into ramming doors open — let’s say the matter is being weighed even as we speak.”

“Deep. Very, very très deep.”

We uttered it at the same time: “Vishnukrishnu!”

She took the tablecloth from Roussillon, threw it briskly on the rug with one determined flap that made the cloth rustle like a pennant on a windy day. I put on my favorite recording of the Goldberg Variations, uncorked a bottle of red, and watched her bring plate after plate from the kitchen. Then came the puzzling moment. There were no napkins, neither cloth nor paper ones. We looked everywhere. That Venegas woman probably uses them to wipe her nose with. Was there a roll of paper towels anywhere? “I looked everywhere,” said Clara, “es gibt kein paper towels.” She’d checked all the cabinets in the kitchen—Nada, she said. There was, I said, only one solution left. I hadn’t even finished saying it when she burst out into hysterical laughter.

“Can you think of a better option?” I asked.

She shook her head, still unable to contain the laughter.

“It’s your house, you get it.”

So I found a full roll and brought it to our picnic, placed it next to her.

“I can’t believe you’re making me eat with a roll of toilet paper staring at me. To your health and a Happy New Year.” I reached over and placed what turned out to be a prolonged kiss below her ear. “And many more times again, many, many.”

I loved the way she had removed her boots and was reclining on the floor facing me, with one bare tanned foot on the other, staring at me with her lingering, sometimes sullen gaze. Once or twice she’d caught me staring at her feet, and I could tell she liked that; she knew what I was thinking, and I knew she knew, and I loved it. A week ago they were on sand, now they’re on my rug. We were no longer just friends, and there was clearly much more between us than ordinary man-woman friendship, but I didn’t know what any of this was or where it was headed or whether it had already crested and this was all we were ever going to be together. For the first time in days I was willing to see that what stood between us was not a gray, barren no-man’s-land littered with craters and mines but something else, though uncharted and as silent and snow-hushed as the Nativity itself, filled with the hopeful, aching mirth that lasts no longer than improvised truces when guns go silent on December 25, and enemy soldiers climb out of their trenches to light a cigarette, but then forget to light another.

At some point I said I’d let her hear all the Silotis I’d been able to buy.

“Which is the best?” she asked.

“Yours.”

“My point exactly.”

•

Our picnic lasted over two hours, especially since she turned on the television and, without either of us meaning to, we watched The Godfather, starting from the murder of Sollozzo and of the crooked policeman till the near-end, when Michael Corleone has everyone eliminated and tells his brother-in-law, whom he’s about to have killed as well, “Ah, that little farce you played with my sister. You think that would fool a Corleone?” “Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?” she repeated. Afterward, we listened to my new versions of the Handel. We discussed Rohmer again, but stayed clear of tonight’s films. I didn’t want to know where she was going after our picnic, did not want to ask, did not want specifics. Knowing might hurt more than aching to know.

“What is it that he says?” I asked.

“Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?”

I loved how she said it. “Say it again.”

“Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?”

But then, just as she was about to pour me more red wine, she tipped over her glass, which had been standing quite steadily on a large dictionary. The little that remained in her glass left a small red pool on the carpet that soon disappeared into the dark-hued lozenges of the Persian rug. Her sudden apologies reminded me of the spontaneous and effusive Clara I’d seen when she had turned around and kissed me in Max’s dining room. I tried to calm her, told her not to worry, and rushed into the kitchen to find a rag.

“Dab, don’t rub. Dab,” she repeated.

I tried to do as told.

“You’re still rubbing, not dabbing.”

“You do it, then.”

“Let me,” she said, first imitating my rubbing motions far from the rug, then showing me how it should be done.

“Now I need salt,” she said.

I gave her the salt shaker.

She laughed at me. Where did I keep the salt?

I brought her a giant box of kosher salt. Clara poured a generous mound on the wine stain.

“Why on earth do you have such a giant box of salt but no food in the house?”

“Rose garden lived here and cooked a lot — which also explains the very large containers of spices. Food’s lying low these days,” I added.

“What did she do?”

“Cooked big dinners.”

“No, I mean what did she do to get booted from the rose garden?”

“Told me I should dab, not rub.”

“And where is she now?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Gone.”

I looked at the neat little mound she’d carefully evened with the flat of her fingers and which bore four finger-length furrows that I knew I’d never have the heart to remove. I shall keep this forever and ask Mrs. Venegas not to even think of touching or of vacuuming the salt. And if she does remove it, I’m sure I’ll have the stain to remember this day by, the way people put plaques at the site where a meteor struck the earth but left no trace of itself save for the crater bearing its name now. She was the meteor, I the gaping hollow. On December 28 Clara and I picnicked on my floor, and here’s the proof. As soon as she’d leave — I knew myself — I’d stare at those tiny creases marking the spaces between her fingers and say to myself, Clara was here.

“Hopefully there won’t be a stain.”

“Hopefully,” I said, “there will.”

“Printz,” she said reproachfully. Both of us understood. After a short pause, she suddenly added, “Dishes!”

We brought the dishes back to the kitchen, and she dropped them in the sink.

“We forgot dessert,” she said.

“No, we didn’t. I bought chocolate lesbians.”

“I didn’t see.”

“Surprise! But on one condition—”

“What condition?” Concern rippling down her face. I knew I’d made her nervous.

“On condition you say, Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?’”

My heart was racing.

“The things you think of!”

She opened the three packs of cookies and laid them out by twos. If you wedged each one in between your toes, I’d bring my mouth there and bite each one—The things I think of, you said?

“Still want tea?” I asked.

“Quick tea,” she said. “I have to get going soon.”

I don’t know what had made me think she’d forget about her date with otherpeoples. How silly of me. But how totally insensitive of her to remember. Part of me went so far as to believe that she enjoyed breaking our little routine, enjoyed throwing me off, enjoyed watching me hope she’d forgotten, only then to yank me back to reality and remind me that she hadn’t.

But I also knew that to ascribe such motives was like attributing an intention to a storm or looking for a meaning behind the sudden death of a friend with whom we’d been playing tennis just two hours earlier.

We boiled water in the microwave oven — two minutes. Then dipped Earl Grey tea bags in the boiling water — one minute. Within seven minutes, we were done with tea. Bad sex tea. Very, very bad sex tea, she repeated, not Lydian at all.

Then she stood up and went to one of the windows to watch yet another white cold gray winter day wear itself out. She didn’t say anything about Rohmer. I didn’t say anything either.

I left the door to my apartment ajar and walked her to the end of the corridor, where we waited in an awkward silence for the elevator to arrive. We never made plans when saying goodbye, and this was no different, except that not saying anything about tomorrow had strained the air between us and given an unnatural, almost hostile cast to our silence, as though what we were hiding was not our reluctance to formalize our friendship or to reinvent it each time it brought us closer; what we were hiding was the guilty diffidence of those who have no intention of meeting again and are desperately avoiding the subject. When the elevator did come, we were back to an abrupt and hasty peck.

“Soon,” I said.

“Soon,” she mimicked.

As the door began to shut between us, I knew I was seeing her for the last time.

“The fucking door,” I heard her yelp once the door had slammed into her. I’d forgotten to remind her about the door again. I could hear her laugh all the way down.

•

Once in my apartment, I was back to that moment earlier this morning when I didn’t know if we’d ever speak today, let alone continue this hybrid friendship for another day. The late-afternoon hour, which I remembered having set as that time of day when I’d finally let myself break down and make the dreaded phone call, had come and gone, and yet I was no better off now, after spending a few hours with her, than I’d been in the morning when my resolution stood out like the last beacon, the best morsel you leave for last, because after that there’s nothing left to look forward to.

I looked out the window. Dreary, dreary, dreary.

Teatime, I thought. But I had just had tea with her. I could feel the air closing in on me, as it does in everyone’s image of London in this unnamed, predusk hour that could last anywhere from fifteen minutes to an entire day. Time to get out. But there was nowhere to go. I should call a friend. Half of them were out of town. The other half might not be free. There were Rachel and her sister, but the first thing they’d do was give me a hard time for lacking courage, gumption, and, above all, honesty. Besides, I didn’t want to see them again without bringing Clara to meet them.

I decide to head out to the gym, take a book, get on the treadmill, maybe swim a few laps, and by 7:10 be where I had always planned to be, except that now it felt as though I’d be doing it failing anything better. Maybe I’d have dinner after the movie — ironically at Thai Soup, of all places. Sometimes it’s not bad to be alone.

She had cut the avocado into thin slices and superimposed a series of green half-moons obliquely on the baguette, then added two layers of ham, then the cheese, then a drop of hot mustard, finally flattening the bread down a bit under the panini grill, licking the excess mustard that had stained her fingers. “This is for you, Printz,” she had said, handing me the sandwich on a plate with something any halfwit wouldn’t have called just friendship.

But there was the caviar too. She insisted on spreading it on the sour cream herself. Why? I’d asked. “Because you don’t know how to do it.” “I can do it just fine.” “Then because I want to.”

•

The words Because I want to simply undid everything protecting me from her and shot straight to my heart.

•

The afternoon went faster than I expected. What surprised me was the sense that things hadn’t turned out as badly as I’d feared. One could always live through this. All I needed was to overcome the haunting regret of having come so close, only to lose her. I’d live. Or was she, like John the Baptist, a sign, a precursor of worse things to come, of sorrows, like photographs, that hadn’t even been developed yet, much less hung out to dry?

When I arrived at the movie theater, I noticed that the line was shorter than usual. These were not Rohmer’s better films, and the thin audience tonight confirmed it. After purchasing a ticket, I decided to get a grande coffee next door and, without bothering to ask myself why, bought a candy bar. Then I bought her brand of cigarettes. Time, I wanted to think, had stopped last night at the movies, and like a sports trainer, I was intentionally holding the stopwatch down to mark the moment when the race ended, to mark the high point of the week, of the year.

Phildonka Madamdasit was there, unchanged and stout, same haircut, same scowl, same shirt. Without her, though, he was not funny, simply smug and thuggish. He took my ticket, stared me down with a Stood you up, didn’t she? then grabbed someone else’s ticket.

I found a spot three seats away from people at either side and sat down. Coffee at the movies was her invention; I’d always had a cold drink, never coffee, and certainly not a nip. I wondered which of her many ex-boyfriends had taught her to bring nips to a movie theater. How many times had she resurrected with me habits picked up with old flames?

In the dark before the film started, I suddenly remembered how I had put my coat on the seat next to mine the first time with Clara when she’d gone to make a phone call, trying to pretend that I had come alone that night the better to enjoy waking up to her presence when she returned. Had I squirreled away the memory for this evening, the way a time traveler on a mission to alter history buries an automatic pistol now, to retrieve it in Ancient Rome tomorrow?

Then came the film credits, and my mind tried to drift and think of someone else with whom I’d been to see this film a few years earlier. This was not bad — not great, but not bad. The opening sequence was exactly as I recalled it, and I was happy to see that for all my ability to recall it in detail, the film still seemed very fresh and would have carried me exactly where I wished to be taken had there not been more noise than usual in the theater, a latecomer unable to decide where to sit, a couple chitchatting about changing seats, Phildonka’s beam traveling over my head, and finally the banging of the door, and behind it the repeated clank of a soda dispenser that seemed to be stuck. There was a rumble of voices. I heard someone try the dispenser again — clank, clank, and clank again — then I heard the thud of several cans crashing into the dispenser’s bottom tray. “You’ve hit the jackpot,” someone shouted. The audience laughed. This should have been Clara’s line, I thought. But just as the film was starting, the door opened once again and another couple walked in, both their heads cowered in typically considerate, Upper West Side self-effacement. The light from outside intruded for a second but disappeared when the door shut. Another intruder was having a hard time finding a seat — that too distracted me. Then I heard the cough. Not a nervous cough, but an intentional cough, as when people cough to remind others of their presence in a room. Again the damned cough interrupted both the credits and the voice-over that had begun as soon as the credits had run their course. Cough, cough. I was convinced I was making it up — but the cough was whispering, “Printz Oskár”—I couldn’t be making it up, but what wouldn’t I give. . Seconds later, without the cough this time, but whispered all the same, almost as an inquiry to mean, Are you there? Can you hear me? “Printz Oskár?” The whole audience turned in the direction of the door. This was unbelievable, but who else would say such a thing in a movie house once the film had started? I raised my arm, hoping she’d spot it. She did, and walked immediately in my direction. “Very sorry, most very, very sorry indeed,” she said in mock-apology to those standing up as she tried to reach my seat. “The fucking Phildonka wouldn’t let me in”—and right there and then she burst out into uncontrollable laughter, arousing universal hisses from everyone in the theater, while I couldn’t let go of her as soon as I embraced her, holding on to her head and kissing her head and pressing her head against my chest as she quietly began to remove her shawl.

“Can I watch the movie now?”

My lips must have been all over her neck. “Do you have any idea how happy I am?”

She took off her coat, disturbed more people, sat down, took her glasses out. “Yes, I do know.”

I knew, however, that I’d have to let go of her. I didn’t want to let go of her. I liked being like this. I knew that, once released, she’d be impossible to touch again, and that soon enough the water that had bubbled between us for a few seconds would freeze and, for miles of cracking ice, would loom the old no-man’s-land between her mainland and my distant shore. So I let my hand rest almost casually on her shoulder, knowing, though, that she’d spot the studied nonchalance of the gesture and in all likelihood make fun of it. So this is awkward for you, isn’t it?

When she spotted my coffee, she immediately reached over and drank from it. Why hadn’t I put sugar in? Because I never do. I can’t believe you didn’t buy me coffee. So this is your revenge — not buying the poor girl coffee? Anything to eat?

I handed her the candy.

“At least that!”

She chuckled.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

The man behind us asked us to lower our voices.

Clara turned to him and threatened to wash his hair with her coffee if he didn’t take his feet off the seat next to hers.

•

Until she appeared in the movie theater, I’d been more or less resigned to an evening by myself. I was even able to stare straight ahead and not be too scared of the bleakness awaiting me as soon as I walked out into the empty street. It was not going to be so terrible, I’d been telling myself, just as it wasn’t so terrible that she had found yet another cutting way to remind me she had a life outside of mine, other friends, otherpeoples—not terrible that a day that started poorly should end no less poorly, not terrible being so thoroughly alone now and watching the hours stretch into tomorrow, and other tomorrows, and more tomorrows pitching their way back-to-back like blocks of ice crick-cracking down the slow Hudson till they’d leave all land behind and head to the Atlantic and out toward the glacier of the Arctic Pole. Not terrible that everyone was wrong, wrong as my life, as this day, as everything can seem so thoroughly muddled and disjointed and yet so easily tolerable.

After the movie I’d already resolved to head uptown, perhaps even walk past her home, especially now that I knew which side her windows faced. Walk uptown to replay and relive the scene uptown. Or was this all an excuse to stalk her building, her street, her world? Was I really the type who stalks buildings, windows, people? Follow her, spy on her, confront her? Aha, see! Or better yet, bump into her. Fancy running into you at this time of the night!

Or was heading uptown to 106th Street simply a pretext to stay busy and give myself something to do at night, the way buying Christmas presents three days after Christmas might give me something to look forward to once I’d run out of things to stuff my hours with?

Sitting next to her now on our usual banquette, I realized that all I’d done since hearing she wouldn’t be going to the movies with me was try to keep a straight face, with her, with me, with everything — try not to enjoy too much our moment together on the rug so as not to feel it was the highlight of the year, keep the moment on ice, keep friendship on ice, and live with each of my tiny, minuscule hopes, like caviar always chilled.

As soon as we walked out of the theater, neither of us said anything about where we were headed. Instead, we started walking in the same direction as always and, in case there were any doubts, crossed over to the right side of Broadway to show we had no other place in mind but that one. I couldn’t wait to get there and go back to our ritual by the banquette and order our first drink. Perhaps she too was eager to bring things back to where we’d left them — though there was no telling where her thoughts were. Once we crossed Broadway, though, all she did was slip her arm into mine and say she couldn’t wait for our Oban.

“You’re becoming an alcoholic under my influence.”

“That, and other things,” she said. I thought she was referring to her growing fondness for Eric Rohmer and didn’t bother asking her to explain. Then it occurred to me she might have meant something else, but for fear of finding it out, I didn’t press her to explain.

But no sooner were we sitting at our spot and had signaled to the waitress, who immediately assumed we were ordering the “usual,” than things began to trickle forth. At first I thought she’d already had something to drink before coming. But that was almost four hours ago, long enough for her to have sobered up. As was her habit, she ordered crispy fries, which she liked to drown in salt and mounds of ketchup. I would have ordered a salad, but decided to go with a side order of fries as well. I liked mine with mayo. Once the matter of ordering was taken care of, she extended her palm.

“Give!” she said.

I gave her a dollar.

“More.”

She walked over to the jukebox, and soon enough we began hearing the few bars of Chopin that prefaced our tango.

I had made myself promise not to ask her anything about where she’d been, what she’d done, whom with. But she almost resented my silence, and after we’d danced, she finally blurted a “Well, aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”

“This time I don’t dare ask.”

“Because you’re too polite to ask, because you don’t care, because you don’t want to know — or other?”

“Other,” I said.

She was in a strangely sparkling mood tonight, and I feared the worst. She was going to tell me something I knew I didn’t want to know. I would gladly have steered her away from it. I could sense it was probably going to be something like “We’ve decided to get back together,” or “I’m having his child,” or — and this was a road I didn’t even want to travel on, though scoping out its signposts before she’d even hinted the matter might blunt the shock — she’d remind me I was doing precisely what she’d warned me not to do, Printz. Knowing Clara, she’d still manage to surprise me. “I think we shouldn’t be together so much.” She would not say “seeing each other,” which might implicate her more than she wanted, but “be together,” which would leave things vague enough and not give a deeper meaning to the whimsical, improvised beauty of our five days. I was already anticipating the flustered stammer in her smile as she let an earnest, longing gaze precede the tenderness of the five words she would most likely say, all the while gauging their effect on me: “You’re not upset, are you?” Damned if I’m upset, I’d say, fuck damn I’m upset! But I knew myself: I’d say nothing.

The drinks arrived. We clinked glasses carefully, because if you miscounted, you’d have to clink another nine times. We uttered the Russian words in unison.

“Do you or don’t you want to know?”

I said I wanted to know, almost listlessly, not just to dampen my curiosity, but to dampen the frisky tone in her voice.

“I was with Inky.”

“So you two are an item again?”

She looked at me in wonder.

How had you guessed? she seemed to ask. It was obvious from the start, I would have said.

“I had promised to have dinner with him. We started with early drinks, which is why I had to leave your place early. Then it fell apart — I knew we were going to quarrel. So I left.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“You wanted to leave?”

Clara gave me a fearless stare.

“I’m not going to lie to you: I was looking for an excuse, and he gave it to me in no time. I knew I’d find you at the movie theater.”

I couldn’t put together the reasoning behind what she’d just said.

“Are you two over, then?”

“So very over.”

I was on the verge of asking if she was sorry things had taken this course, but she seemed so bubbly, there was no point in asking.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, leaning sideways toward me.

I knew what she meant, but pretended not to understand. “My turn for what?”

“What did you do after I left?”

“Went to the gym, swam, went to the movies — that’s all.”

She wanted something from me, and I wasn’t responding. She started doing what she’d done the first night: wrapping her napkin around the base of her wineglass. It was her way of collecting her thoughts before speaking. I knew exactly where she was headed. There should be others in your life, not just me. I don’t want to mislead you. And besides, I am still lying so very low. I didn’t know the exact order, but these were going to be the highlights of her little talk, because, from long experience with my father, I could sense a little talk coming.

No sooner had the waitress passed by than Clara ordered another round. That was fast, I thought.

“So I’m the one who’s going to have to say it, then?” she said.

All I could do was stare her in the eyes till she looked down.

Was this how she had started with Inky? Want me to be the one to say it, then? Twice in one day? I hated conversations that threatened to leave me totally exposed — even when I didn’t know what exactly I’d be exposing, even when I knew that exposure, as an abstract concept, was far better than being so bottled up. What was I hiding that she didn’t already know?

“I was going to say it in an e-mail two days ago.”

What was she being so cagey about?

“Why didn’t you send it, then?”

“Because I know you: you’d read it this way, that way, turn it around 180 degrees, 360 and 540 degrees, and still come out with nothing. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“See, I know you.” She was going to accuse me of not heeding her warnings, of wanting from our friendship things she’d never promised, much less be able to deliver. She’d said it before already, didn’t have to repeat it, it hovered over every minute we’d spent together. Now it was going to come out in the open. I knew the it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech. I’d given it myself many times.

“You asked me the other day if we could end up at Hans’s party and be total strangers. I’ve run into people I no longer speak to. I can live with that. I don’t even mind having to hate them if that’s what it takes to dump leftover baggage. I know how quickly I change. But if we do become strangers, and I do learn to hate you, and watch you turn your back as soon as I walk into a room, just know this: that no part of me will ever forget this week.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason you won’t.”

“This is starting to sound like a lopsided goodbye.”

“Let’s say then that maybe this is our hell. The closer we draw, the farther we drift apart. There’s a rock standing between us. I obey it. Or let’s say: I don’t have it in me to fight it, not these days. Frankly, I don’t think you have it in you either.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why? It’s the truth.”

“You’re the one who put the rock there four nights ago, not me.”

“Maybe. But I had no idea it would turn into such a convenient rock for you as well.”

Was this the truth, or had Clara seen something I’d been avoiding? Did the rock between us really work for me? Was my habit of deferring and doubting and reading into so many things simply my way of keeping my distance by drawing closer? What doubts, what fears was I cloaking? Had I, perhaps, been blaming her flippant mood, or her string of other-peoples, or her caustic tongue, the better to blame the tip of an iceberg that hardly stood between us when it was really my miles and masses of hardened ice underneath that would cause the real damage?

“Look,” I began, as I shifted in my place. Perhaps I was trying to change the drift of our talk, or perhaps I wanted the two of us to think I was finally about to say something momentous that might stem the downhill course of where we seemed to be headed. Perhaps I wanted to throw her off by sounding very solemn and serious — this was going to be a time for calling a spade a spade. In fact, I had no idea what I was about to say.

“The other night I read you loud and clear, and ever since, I have not strayed. I haven’t even raised the subject. I said it already: we’re like two blocks of ice trapped under a bridge — you’re lying low, and I’m too frozen on the spot to risk anything. Let me just say, though, that this is unlike anything I’ve known. You read me better than I read myself, and part of the joy of being together is just that: discovering that you and I are the same person in two bodies, like identical twins.”

This was worse than I sing in the shower. The same person in two bodies — seriously?

“We’re not twins.” Clara overlooked nothing. “I know you’d like to think it, but we’re not. We’re very similar, but we’re also very different. One of us will always lapse into wanting more—”

“And this someone is me, of course, right?”

“It’s me too, if you cared enough to look.”

“I do care enough to look — what did you think?”

“Then you should have seen it coming, Printz.”

Clara made me order another round of fries.

“You’re not going to eat more fries by yourself?”

“You order a pecan pie and we’ll share both. With whipped cream — the kind that comes in a spray can.” The carefree gesture with which she threw her hair back said she was going all out tonight.

The waitress must have grimaced at the suggestion of the spray can. But then something told me that Clara asked for it precisely for its shock value.

Then she did something she’d never done before. She took my hand and placed it on her cheek. “Better,” she said, as if she were just speaking to herself, or to a friend with whom she was trying to make up. I let my hand rest on her cheek, then caressed her neck, right under her ear, the exact spot where I had kissed her so feverishly when she arrived in the theater a few hours before and, in the heat of the moment, must have caught her totally unprepared for my kisses. Even now, she didn’t seem to mind; she leaned into my hand, like a kitten whose cheek you might have rubbed absentmindedly but who then wants more of the same. “But I have to tell you something.” All I could do was stare at her, saying nothing, just keep caressing her face now that I saw I could. Then, without thinking at all, I let my finger touch her lips, and from her lips let it move to her teeth — I loved her teeth, and though I knew that this had crossed the line and gone beyond the harmless hand on a cheek she’d asked from me, still, I was no longer the owner of that hand, she was, for she kissed my finger first, then held it delicately between her teeth, and then touched it with the point of her tongue. I loved her forehead and rubbed it as well, and the skin of her eyelids, I loved it too, everything, everything, and that smile that made silence come and go and made my heart skip the instant it left her face. What were we doing? “I want us to speak,” she began, “because I want you to know something.” I had no idea what she meant, but knew that if she seemed to be yielding with one side of her, she was just about ready to take back everything with the other. “Time for a secret agent,” she said.

“Wait.” I put my hand in my coat pocket and pulled out a sealed packet of her brand.

“You’re joking!” She tapped the pack, then opened it. “I won’t ask what this was doing in your pocket.”

“Don’t bother, you know already.”

I’ve always envied people who put their cards on the table — even when they don’t have a hand — people who are willing to call a conveniently ambiguous situation by its name if only to clear the air. She was right: I didn’t trust her, I feared being set up. Any moment now, she’d tell me the one thing I dreaded most. You do know what I want to say? I think so. What? And I’d fall for the oldest trick in the world. Chastened by her frank gaze and by that hint of reprobation to come, I caught myself tempted to preempt her, if only to say it myself and not hear it from her. That we should cool it, maybe see other people, not misread this for what it’s not, it’s not you, it’s me — I’d been expecting this speech for days already. Then, by way of capping all this, I finally said, “I know you have a whole life outside of Rohmer and me.” It was meant to show I harbored no jealousy or illusions. But I also wanted her to read that the same might be said regarding aspects of my life about which she knew very, very little.

“Can I be blunt?” So she wasn’t going to let me diffuse what she had started to say. “Yesterday afternoon when you came by I could have asked you and I know you would have said yes — but it would have been more by way of consent, just as had you insisted after you tried to rape and bludgeon me last night, I’d have agreed, but that would have been no more than a lukewarm yes. By the time we left the bar last night, you knew I was of two minds anyway — and don’t deny it.”

I was about to affect surprise. But she cut me short. “Don’t bother. You knew.”

This was more frank than anything I’d expected. She was honing in on everything, and I suddenly felt this wave of anxiety wash over me, because I didn’t know yet whether she was about to bring out into the open everything we’d left tactfully unsaid during our evenings together or whether she was simply going to eviscerate me and expose me for the shifty, jittery, wanting man I’d always known I was.

“Why call it consent if we’re both willing?” I threw in.

“Because you and I both know there is something holding us back, and neither of us knows what it is. If I cared less, I’d say I didn’t want to get hurt, but I don’t give a damn about getting hurt, just as I don’t care if you get hurt. If I cared less, I’d also say it would ruin our friendship. But I don’t give a fuck about friendship either.”

“I thought we did have a friendship, or were working up to one.”

“Friendships are for other people, and neither of us wants friendship. We’re too close for friendship.”

Was there no hope for anything, then? Suddenly all I could think of was the word heartbreak. You’re breaking my heart, Clara, and these are cruel and cutting words that cause heartache, and rupture of blood vessels. My heart was indeed racing. This was so sad that, for the first time in my life, I suddenly found myself on the verge of crying because a woman had said no to me before I’d even had a chance to ask anything. Or had I asked her already? Hadn’t I been asking for days now? Did men really cry like this — and if they did, where had I been all my life? I’ll always hate you for this, for bringing me to the abyss and forcing me to stare down, the way they force a detainee to watch the brutal execution of his cellmate, only to be told after, but not before he’s witnessed the atrocity, that they had no plans to execute him at all, in fact he was free to go.

She must have noticed. Maybe she’d already seen it once this very afternoon with Inky. “Please don’t,” she said, as she had the last time, “because if you start, I’ll start, and once this happens, then all signals get crossed, all systems go down, and we’ll be back to even before we started this conversation.”

“Maybe I’d rather be where we were before we started. This talk is going to places I’m not going to like.”

“Why? You’re not surprised. I’m not surprised.”

It swept through me before I knew what was happening. This was going to be totally out of order, and it might bring everything we’d been saying down to a crappy, hackneyed plane, but I had nothing left to lose, no dignity, no ammunition, no water in my gourd, and I felt it was worth throwing this last vestige of pride into the fire the way, on very cold days, a freezing bohemian poet might throw his manuscript into the fire, to stay warm, find love, spite art, and show fate a thing or two.

“Let’s just face it,” I said, “you’re just not attracted. Just say that the physical thing isn’t there. I don’t do it for you. Say it. It won’t tear me up. But it will clear the air.”

“You’re always playing, even when you’re serious. It has nothing to do with physical attraction. If anything, it’s because I am attracted that we’ve come this far.”

This was news! Had I so thoroughly misread her that it had to hit me in the face — or was this her turn to play with me, play any card, so long as she averted the silence she probably hated as much as I did.

“So, according to you, all this should flatter me,” I said. I was being ironic. Or perhaps I wanted her to say it once more in clear and plain language.

“Flattery is irrelevant. I don’t give a fuck about flattery, and neither do you. It’s not what either of us wants.”

“Why, do you know what you want?”

“Do you?”

“I think I do. I’ve wanted it from the very first, and you’ve known it.”

“Not true. You’re knocking at a door, but you’re not even sure you want it opened.”

“How about you?”

“I’m not knocking, I’ve pushed open the door already. But I can’t say I’ve stepped in either.”

“Maybe it’s because you don’t trust me.”

“Maybe.”

And then it hit me. “You’re not afraid of getting hurt, or of being rejected, are you?” I said. “You’re terrified of what you may not find. You’re afraid of being disappointed.”

“Aren’t you?” she asked right away, as though she’d known it all along.

“Petrified,” I replied. I was exaggerating.

“Petrified,” she repeated. “This doesn’t flatter either of us, does it? Or maybe we’re just two grown-up scaredy-cats. Just scaredy-cats.”

I didn’t like where this was going either.

“Petrified or not, let me say this, then,” I said. “I think of you all the time. All the time, all the time, all the time. It’s a fact of life. I’m just happy this is a magical, snow globe, holiday week — but I’ve been with you every minute of every day. I eat with you, I shower with you, I sleep with you. My pillow is tired of hearing your name.”

It didn’t seem to surprise her.

“Do you call it Clara?”

“I call it Clara, I tell it things I’ve told no one in my life, and if I have more to drink tonight, what I have to tell you will make it difficult to face you again tomorrow.”

The heavy silence brooding between us told me I had overplayed my hand and made a dreadful mistake. How to backpedal now?

“If you need to know, it’s hardly any different here,” she said, almost reluctantly, something like halting sorrow straining her voice, the equivalent of a helpless shrug during a moment where words fail. Was she bluffing? Or was she raising the stakes? “I say your name when I’m alone.”

Was this the same girl who didn’t sing in the shower?

“Why didn’t you say anything before?” I asked.

“You never said anything, Mr. Amphibalence, me-Door-number-three man.”

“I was playing by your rules.”

“What rules?”

I looked at her more baffled than ever. The admonitions, the roadblocks, the subtle warnings — were they nothing?

The fries arrived. She squeezed a dollop of ketchup onto them, and then added more. She was about to say something. Before speaking, though, she picked up a fry with her thumb and forefinger and, while it awaited its baptismal ketchup, she kept staring at it, lost in what looked like stray thoughts and misgivings, as though her fry had become an amulet or a sacred relic or a bone fragment from a patron saint who was being asked to guide her in this difficult pass. “I’ll say this much, and you’re free to believe me or not, to laugh at me or not, but I’m ready to go all the way with you,” she said. “This afternoon I left your home feeling I was making the worst mistake of my life, because I didn’t feel I’d ever be able to repair it. The minute I saw Inky, I had to run away on any pretext, not sure I’d find you, not sure you’d be alone, not sure you’d even be happy to see me again, but I chanced it and I came. I left a million messages, if you care to check.”

I hadn’t checked, precisely because I did not want to find none waiting.

“I kept hoping you’d call, which is why in the end I left the house and went to the gym.”

“Now that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And you turned off your télyfön for the same reason, I suppose.”

There was no point denying it.

“It’s as I said, Printz: I’m ready.”

I didn’t know what she meant exactly, but was afraid to ask. What was clear was that her sentence had the assertive dare of a Your move.

“Could you just kiss me now and not argue so much?”

She leaned over toward me, reached for my neck, lowered my turtle-neck, and kissed me straight on the neck — something unusually long and sensual for a first kiss.

“I’ve been staring at your skin for an hour. I needed to taste it,” she said, palming the skin around my eyes.

“And I’ve been staring at your teeth for days now.”

This was the first of many kisses. Her breath tasted of bread and Viennese butter cookies.

•

Last call was on the house, courtesy of the waitress, who’d been working the late shift every night this week. We were sitting on the banquette, unable to move, fearing that any movement or change might break the spell and pull us back to doubts and heartbreak waiting around the corner. When Clara returned from the bathroom, she put her arms around me and immediately resumed kissing me on the mouth. I could not believe how fast things were moving. “You taste fantastic,” I said.

Then she told me: “Just don’t make me think this is happening in my head. Because I know you,” she said. “And I know myself. I want this, but I also know what you’ll drive me to do, and I pray, pray, you don’t.” I had no idea what she meant. “Don’t you have any trust, any faith?” I asked. “None.” In moments of extreme tenderness she spoke with a serrated tongue.

It occurred to me she must have thought the same of me. Had she asked me if I trusted anyone, I would have said the exact same thing.

As some point I said I had to go to the bathroom. “If you take more than one minute, I’ll go into high pandangst and think you’ve escaped through some back, rat-infested alley, and I’ll just leave — because I know I can’t take it.”

“I’m just going to pee, okay?”

But on the way to the bathroom the thought did occur to me: I’ll sleep with her tonight, then tomorrow we’ll see. I wondered if she could get even more passionate in bed than she’d been already on the banquette, or would she suddenly turn out to be the type who needed this done, and that done, and more of this and less of that, and no biting please, or was it going to be beastly lovemaking where we’d tear each other’s clothes off as soon as we were behind the elevator door and out of her doorman’s sight? Or would there be candlelight, with Straus Park behind us and the Prince Oscar looking after us outside our window as we stood naked together and watched the night like two sleepless starlings listening again and again, and many more times again to Beethoven’s “Song of Thanksgiving”? Or would it be as it always was with her: chill winter gusts in a minefield of scalding geysers? In the bathroom I caught sight of my face in the mirror and smiled at myself. I had drunk three, no four Scotches. “Hi,” I finally said out loud. “Hi,” he responded. Then I looked down at Signor Guido, my patient foster-child of silence. “Who’s the man?” I finally asked. “You’re the man,” I said as I watched him perform his ancillary function. “Who loves you?” “You do,” he said, still wearing a simper on his bald pate. “This is your moment, and tonight is your night, you intrepid scalawag, you.”

While standing in front of the urinal, I rested my forehead against the cool, glistening steel pipe connected to the flusher, where condensation had collected, and simply stood there, enjoying its cooling feel as I pushed my forehead into the large hexagonal steel nut, now smiling at myself each time I heard the words repeated in my mind: Who’s the man? You’re the man. Who’s the man? You’re the man. I was almost on the point of bursting out laughing. The most beautiful moment of my life happened before a urinal. Just please, please don’t make me stop loving her, don’t make me squelch this or wake up sated and indifferent. Don’t.

When I returned to Clara, she looked totally alarmed.

“What did you do to your face? Did you fall?”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I was too busy trying not to look unsteady as I sat back down. “You have something that looks like a gash — no, a bruise — on your forehead. She was touching it, lovingly. Could this woman who could cut me with two syllables show such tenderness for my forehead? I touched my forehead. No doubt about it; there was an indentation in my skin. Was I bleeding badly? How could this have happened? Then I remembered. The steel nut — I must have been leaning forever against the large nut on the steel pipe.

“Just looking at it makes me want to touch you. What took you so long? What were you really doing in there, Printz?”

“Clara Brunschvicg, you shock me.”

And we kissed again. In the fog of our caresses and lovemaking, I understood why people bring their mouths together. This is why people kiss, I kept thinking, the way an alien from distant constellations might say to himself, after trying out a human body, So this is why they do it. What had I been doing before? I wanted to ask. Whom had I filled my life with all this time? And what had all these women been doing in it? Why, for which reason, what pleasure, what end, when it was so very clear that small love was taken and less given back? Had everyone been a Sunday filler? What rose gardens had I slumbered through and what could we have been swapping in the din-filled Exchanges of Love? Or did it not matter, so long as we kept the ships coming and commerce going and the piers bustling — people, action, places, cargo, buy, sell, borrow — yet everyone, in the end, always, always alone when night falls on the dale of pandangst.

Why even bother asking why this was different?

In the men’s room I had taken a moment to check if there were messages for me. She had called eight times but never left a message. Why did I assume that she’d lied to me when she claimed she’d called so many times? Because you don’t trust me, because you’re afraid of me. Afraid of what, though? Afraid. Afraid because I could be better than you. Afraid because, unlike love with others, you’ve no clue where this is going. Afraid that, contrary to what you desperately want to believe, you’ll never want this to end. Afraid — and you’re only beginning to get a glimpse of it now — that I’m the real deal, Printz, and that this hindrance and disturbance we thought was a rock between us is what bound us from the get-go. Today you like me more than you know. But what you’re scared to death of is wanting me more tomorrow.

I’d known her for only five days, but I already knew that this was the stuff of planets and of lives moved by fate, gods, and by the nebulae of ghosts who have come and gone, keening over loves that time won’t expiate or pleas bring back. You’ve sprung like a curse on my land, Clara, it will take my blood generations to wash you away.

Clara, I was lying, I am not afraid of being disappointed, I am afraid of what I’ll have and don’t deserve or wouldn’t know what to do with, much less learn to fight for each day. And yes, afraid you are better than I am. Afraid I’ll love you more tomorrow than I do tonight, and then where will I be?

“Tomorrow is Full Moon in Paris,” she said.

I did not reply. She intercepted my silence before I did.

“Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

She knew, she knew.

“You don’t know if there’ll be a tomorrow?”

“Do you know?”

“I make no promises.”

“Neither do I.” I was boasting.

“Printz, sometimes you don’t know what you’re saying.”

Our knives were drawn again.

“For the record, though—”

“Yes. .” There it was, as always, the little threat that pricks your pulse and sends it racing into panic mode.

“Just for the record, so you won’t fault me for not saying it now: I’m more in love with you than you know. More in love than you are.”

We kissed again. Neither of us cared who was watching. No one bothered to watch when it came to couples in this bar. This was the woman who was going to make love to me tonight. And she was going to make love to me, not like this, but more than just like this. All that stood between us was our sweaters. Then we’d be naked together, her thighs against my thighs, face-to-face, very face-to-face, and we’d pick up just where we’d have left off at the bar and go on talking and laughing and talking as we’d make love, and go on and on till morning and exhaustion. This was, and the thought came from so far away that I could easily put it on hold for a while, the first and only woman I’d ever wanted to make love to.

•

It had snowed outside. The snow on the stoop to the bar made me think of our first night together when we’d left the party and she wore my coat for a few minutes and had then given it back to me, after which I slogged my way down the stairs by the monument onto Riverside Drive, thinking to myself that perhaps I’d left the party too soon and should have stayed awhile longer, who cares if they think I’ve enjoyed the party and am eager to stay for breakfast! Later, I had changed my mind and walked to Straus Park, where all I did was sit and think and remember the minutes when we had come back after Mass and she’d pointed out her bench to me. So many years on this planet, and never once felt anything like this. “Wait,” she said, before leaving the bar. “I need to tie my shawl.” Soon her face was almost entirely wrapped in her shawl. All one could see was the top of her eyes and part of her forehead.

At the corner of the street, I put my arm around her and let her mold into me as she always did when we walked together. Then, without caring how long it had taken her to cover her face, I snuck my hand into the shawl and held her face, pushing the shawl all the way back to expose her head and to kiss her again. She leaned her back against the bakery store window and let me kiss her, and all I could feel then was my crotch against hers, pushing ever so mildly, then pushing again, as she yielded first and then pushed back, softly, because this is what we’d been rehearsing all along, and this too was a rehearsal. This was why they’d invented sex, and this was why people made love and went inside each other’s body and then slept together, because of this and not for any of the many reasons I’d imagined or been guided by during my entire life. How many other things would I discover I didn’t know the first thing about tonight? People made love not because they wanted to but because something far older than time itself and yet way smaller than a ladybug ordained it, which was why nothing in the world felt more natural or less awkward between us than for her to feel my hardness rubbing against her or our hips caught in a rhythm all their own. For the first time in my life I wasn’t out to seduce anyone or pretend that I wasn’t; I had arrived there long before.

But perhaps I had arrived too soon, and my mind was lagging behind, like a limping child slowing down those who had gone ahead of him.

“This is my bakery. I buy coffee here,” she said.

Why did it matter? I thought.

“And the muffins?”

“Sometimes muffins too.” We kissed again.

Inside the park, she stood by the statue. “Isn’t this the most beautiful statue in the world?”

“Without you it means nothing,” I said.

“It’s my childhood, my years in school, everything. We met here this morning, and here we are again. It has so much of you.”

Clara’s world.

In the cold night I began to dread our arrival and was hoping to defer it — not, as I had hoped on previous nights, because arrival meant saying goodbye after perfunctory pecks and the perfunctory hug — but because tonight I’d have to say what I lacked the courage to say, what I wasn’t even sure I wanted to say: “I’m dying to come upstairs, Clara, I just need time.”

She looked at me as we approached the door to her building. She’d sensed something. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Not a thing.”

“Then what is it? What’s happened?”

I was the girl, she was the man.

I stopped on the sidewalk with her still in my arms. I couldn’t find the right words, so I blurted the first thing that came to mind.

“It’s too soon, too sudden, too fast,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to rush it. Don’t want to mess this up.”

Perhaps I didn’t want her to think I was like everyone else, and was determined to prove it to her.

Or was it boorish Boris and his so-you’re-finally-gonna-get-some-tonight smirk that I wished to avoid?

Or was it just that I wanted to let the romance last awhile longer and ripen on its vine?

“So you’ll leave me alone and go home in this weather? Sleep on the couch if you must.”

“We’ve seen too many Rohmer movies.”

“You’re making such a terrible mistake—”

“I just need a day.”

“He needs a day.”

She had withdrawn from my arm. “Is there something I should know?”

I shook my head.

“Are you. .” And I could tell she was looking for the right words but couldn’t find them: “Are you damaged? Am I not what you like?”

“For your nymphormation, I am not damaged. And as for that other thing — you’re so off track.”

“Still, such a mistake.”

We were both very cold by then, and it was good that Boris had opened the lobby door a crack.

“Kiss me again.”

Boris’s presence for some reason cramped me, but not her. Still, I kissed her on the mouth, then once again, and as though she remembered the gesture that had brought us closer than we’d ever been before, she lowered my turtleneck, exposed my throat, and placed a long kiss there. “I love your smell.” “And I love everything, just everything about you — that simple.” She looked at me. “Idiot.” She was quoting Maud from the film. “I know.” “Just don’t forget. First thing tomorrow morning — call me,” she added, making a gesture she often parodied by extending her thumb and index finger. “Otherwise, you know me: I go into high pandangst, and there’s no telling what can happen.” I tried to humor her. “Printz, I shouldn’t tell you, because you don’t deserve it, but you’re the best thing that’s happened to me this year.”