Eight White Nights

SEVENTH NIGHT

I hoped she’d ask one day, when none of this mattered, Why did you leave that night? Because I was angry. Because I grew to hate myself. Because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to sit quietly and go on struggling with him, with you. I was losing you, and sitting in a bar watching the loss unfold before me unleashed more bitterness yet, because you seemed determined to speed up its course. I felt ridiculous, weak, ineffectual. I hated you, and I hated you for making me hate myself. I was pissed. Pissed that you never once let me catch my breath on those nights when all I did, it seemed, was watch the torrent of missed opportunities race past us. I blamed you for inhibiting impulses that had nothing wrong with them, then for holding these very same inhibitions against me. I blamed myself for thinking it was your fault. It was mine, always mine.

All I saw that night was the lightness with which you turned a new leaf and were letting yourself off ever so easily—see, one hand, one hand—while fate in the form of a jack-in-the-box waved a broomstick over my head. Yes, we could have gone somewhere with this, but see, we all change. You made me find solace in self-pity. I could never forgive this.

I’d thought of waiting for you inside the park. I was even tempted to send you a text message and say something either funny or obscene about Monsieur VFC, or so cruel that it would burn all bridges between us if I hadn’t already burned them at the bar. But you’d pick up your phone and, on the pretext of not wearing glasses, hand it to VFC, ask him who the caller was, then grab it from his hand and shove it back into your coat pocket. Printz!

I stood in a pool of white light trying to feel enchanted and cleansed as I’d felt on my first night here. But it didn’t work. I recited more verses by Leopardi to myself, squeezing out some comfort, knowing that if no solace came, then beauty might come in its place, and that beauty on this most sullen noir night in December would be good enough. But nothing came. Then I saw a yellow cab. I hailed it, got in, and was welcomed by the comforting warmth of old upholstery, and the vague acrid smell of curry and cumin. I was in a noir, black-and-white world, and I wasn’t being let out of it.

No sooner in the cab, though, than I asked the driver to take me to Riverside and 112th Street. He’d have to go all the way down to 104th Street, he said, then turn around and head uptown. Did I mind? No, I didn’t mind. All I wanted was to return to the spot where I’d stepped off the bus and gotten lost on the night of the snowstorm. The blizzard had lasted all through the party and hadn’t quite cleared when she walked outside with me hours later. Now I was going back to where things seemed safe no matter how clueless my steps that night. Just me and two silly bottles walking up the stairs by the statue of Samuel J. Tilden.

As the cab passed by her building, I looked up at her window to see if she might be home already. But the car came too close, and it was impossible to look up.

I got off right at the spot where I’d seen the St. Bernard. Or had I imagined the dog while thinking of medieval Weihnachten towns that turn dark and gray and then empty faster than the last grocer can pull down his roller shutters in the winters of pandangst? Who walks alone in the dead of night in Saint-Rémy but madmen and seers and those longing for otherpeoples?

Longing for others. What a concept!

I walked east on 112th Street, aiming for Broadway, but enjoying the suspense, because I knew where I was headed but didn’t quite want to admit it yet. This, by the way, is what I’d do in two days if I decided to go to Hans’s New Year’s party: walk up toward the cathedral, turn right on Broadway, walk down another six blocks, and finally turn right on 106th. Is this what I was planning to do tonight as well? Or was all this a roundabout ploy to pass by her building or, better yet, run into her as she’s heading home on her way back from the bar?

What are you doing?

I was taking a walk in the snow. Or just venting.

Venting?

As in learning to live with myself, now that you’re no longer in my life.

No longer in your life?

From the look of things—

From the look of things you’re the one who walked out, not me.

Yes, but from the look of things. .

From the look of things you should take a hike. If I were to run into her on her way home, I’d more than likely run into the two of them together. Even if he wasn’t going upstairs with her, he’d still have to walk her home. Would she give him her arm when they walked together and burrow under his armpit?

When, as I knew would happen, I approached 106th Street, I began to walk slowly. I didn’t want them to see me. But I didn’t want to see them either. Had they had enough time to order another round before leaving the bar? Then I realized why I was hiding — because I was hiding, wasn’t I? — I was ashamed of skulking like this, of hanging around her house, of spying, on them, on her. Stalker. Stalk-ex!

If I had to bump into her at this late hour, all I’d want is for her to be alone.

What’s wrong?

Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to be alone. That’s what’s wrong.

What do you want from me? Spoken with impatience, pity, and exhaustion.

I don’t know what I want. I want you. I want you to want me as desperately as I want you.

Why had I let her walk away from me this afternoon? What was I thinking? A woman walks into your house, is clearly telling you she cares, grabs you by the gonads, and you just stand there, jittery Finnegan running for cover while panic-stricken Shem and Shaun race fast behind, clamoring up the Pelvic Highway.

But if she wasn’t alone and if I had to bump into the two of them, I’d utter a mirthful “Couldn’t sleep” and shrug my shoulders, adding, “I was on my way to the bar, hoping you hadn’t left.” I could just picture the two of them standing together on the sidewalk in front of me, disbelieving glances thrown back and forth, all three of us looking so uneasy. Good night, Clara. Good night, Manattàn. And I’d scurry home, knowing that the first thing I’d want to do was call her and say, Manattàn noir, c’est moi.

On the corner of 106th Street and Broadway I decided to walk one block south, turn on 105th, and come back to 106th by way of Riverside. I wanted — or so I told myself — to take a last, farewell look at her building, especially if I wasn’t going to the party in two days. Could be years the next time I come around here, years and years.

But I knew this was just a ruse to take another peek.

The road down 105th couldn’t have been quieter along the row of white town houses that seemed to slumber in an otherworldly, snowbound era of fireplaces and gas jets and hidden stables. No one had shoveled the snow, and it looked as pristine and wholesome as Rockwell’s towns on snowbound nights.

By contrast, her large building, when it came into view on the corner of 106th Street, bore a minatory scowl on its forefront, as though its Gothic windows and friezes knew of my whereabouts in the snow and, like two distrustful Dobermans, were lying still, almost feigning sleep, vigilant and set to pounce as soon as I took another step. Then I spotted Boris’s light and his side entrance door. I could never tell where exactly he sat, but no sooner would we near the door every evening than he’d always be there to let her in. If I wasn’t careful, he’d spot me. I looked up and to my complete surprise noticed that the lights in her living room were all on. How shameful, I thought, spying.

So she must have gotten home while I was walking slowly down Broadway. This either meant that they had had a hasty round of drinks or had decided against it and simply left the bar soon after me. Or she may never have turned off her lights before leaving this morning. Was she the type to leave her lights on all day? I didn’t think so. Chances were, she’d just gotten home and had turned on the lights in the living room. Maybe watching TV. Unless, of course, she was not alone.

I crossed the street at 106th and Riverside and headed north, trying to catch a glimpse of the other rooms immediately upstairs. These were lit up as well, though I couldn’t tell if their light was being referred from the living room. I was not even sure that one of the side windows belonged to her apartment. She had forgotten to show me around after offering to. I had probably tried not to sound too curious, or too eager, and had finally come out sounding indifferent, which perhaps was why she didn’t insist. I remembered wanting to see her bed but not wanting to show I did. Did she make her bed every day or did she leave it undone?

On the corner of 107th I had to make a decision: either walk back down Riverside or walk over to Broadway, and then loop around 105th once again. In the snow, it might take me ten minutes.

There was something so peaceful about walking. It would allow me to think about things, speak to her in my mind, find reasons to see how all this might work itself out one day, even if I knew that such walks seldom bring answers, that no one resolves anything, much less sees through the fog we burrow in, that all walking does is keep our legs and eyes busy the better to keep our mind from thinking anything. The most I’d be capable of right now would be to think about thinking, which meant sinking deeper into myself, which meant blunting everything else, including my thoughts, which meant spinning something everyone else would call daydreams. Perhaps all this wasn’t necessarily headed downhill — even thinking in this quiet, aimless manner was itself, like amnesia and aphasia, a form of healing when the body comes to the mind’s rescue and ever so gently numbs it, wiping bad thoughts one by one as I’d seen the nurse do with the child who was bleeding from the leg, blotting his cuts with soft, delicate, occasional light dabs with a folded piece of gauze, while with deft tweezers she picked out shard after tiny shard of shattered glass, dropping each one in a plastic trough, trying not to make a sound so as not to scare the boy. All my mind wanted now was to fantasize, because images were like feathers on a bruise, while thoughts flowed like iodine on open sores. She and I together when we’d make up. She and I together on New Year’s Day with those friends she said she wanted me to meet. On the last evening of the Rohmer festival, she and I together.

Now I was just walking. Walking to bid farewell. Walking to spy on her. Walking to be one with all the stonework that had watched her grow and knew all about her comings and goings as a child, as a student, as Clara. Walking to drag out my presence in Clara’s world and not to go back home and be alone with my thoughts that aren’t even thoughts any longer but leering gargoyles sprung from a monstrous netherworld I never knew existed in me until I’d seen them milling about me dressed as sandwich men. Walking, let’s face it, in the hope I’d find a portal back into her life. Walking as prayer, pleading, and penance. Walking to refuse the end of love, to refuse the obvious by picking at it, step by step, shard after shard, taking in the truth of it in tiny doses, as one takes poison so as not to die from it.

In years to come, when I’ll pass by her building again, I’ll stop and look upstairs. I don’t know why I’ll look upstairs or what I’ll be looking for each time. But I know I’ll look upstairs, because this purposeless looking upstairs in this kind of dazed and balmy mood I’m in right now is itself remembrance and soul gathering, an instance of grace. I’ll stand there awhile and remember so many things: the night of the party, the night I thought I’d done the right thing by saying goodbye without lingering too long outside her lobby, the night I first felt my nights were numbered here. The night I knew, just knew, she’d change her mind the moment I said, Yes, I’ll come upstairs with you, the evening I looked out her window and wished my life might start all over again, in her living room, because everything about my life seemed to converge on this one room, with Clara, the barge, our strange lingo, and Earl Grey tea, as we sat and spoke of why this piece by Beethoven was really me, while part of me began to think I’d made the whole thing up to make conversation, to stir things up a bit, because I really had no idea why the quartet by Beethoven was me, any more than I knew why Rohmer’s stories were me, or why I wanted to be here on so many winter afternoons with Clara, trying to understand why the best in life sometimes takes two steps forward and three steps back.

I looked up and knew. It was all there: fear, wanting, sorrow, shame, bitterness, ache, and exhaustion.

Now, as I spied the very end of her block from Broadway with its one lit window that must have been the maid’s room overlooking Straus Park, it struck me that though we’d never really had anything here, still maybe we’d also lost everything here, as though something from being so piously wished for had managed to become the memory of something lost without having existed at all, a wish with a past that never had a present. We’d been lovers here. Once. When? Couldn’t tell. Perhaps always and never.

•

I walked down 105th Street once again — placid, serene, white-pillared lane. The town houses stared at me with frowning suspicion.

Why are you here again?

I am here because I don’t know why I’m here.

Her lights were still on. But too bright. What on earth could she have been doing? Should I look for a human, two human shadows flitting behind the drapes? Would she come near the window when her cell phone rings? Just tell me I’m not spying at the wrong window.

Could she be the type who sleeps with all the lights on? What if she left the lights on because she likes to come back home and find the whole place lit up, the way I do sometimes, to forget I live alone? Or was she moving from room to room, which was why the place was all aglow? Or were the lights on everywhere because she hated the dark when she was alone and this was her way of showing she was alone and hated it?

Suddenly someone turned off the lights in her apartment. She’s gone to bed. A frightful thought raced through my mind: They’ve gone to bed.

But on 106th Street, I noticed that her kitchen light was still on. Who goes to bed with a lover and leaves the kitchen light on?

No one.

Unless it’s in the heat of passion.

What was she up to?

Cognac? Hot toddy? A little snack? How easy can human contact be, how easy had it always been? Why was it so unusually difficult with Clara?

The kitchen light still puzzled me.

What can a kitchen light possibly mean? How many times do I turn mine on and off before going to bed?

And then it hit me: I’ll never ever know why that light was on so late, nor ever see that kitchen from the inside again. Suddenly the kitchen light stood like a distant beacon that was far crueler than the storm itself.

Boris!

He stepped out into the cold to finish his cigarette, stood there awhile gazing at nothing, then flicked the butt halfway across the street. I made certain he didn’t see me.

The moment he stepped back into the lobby, I crossed the street and found myself headed toward 107th Street.

I could not stay on the sidewalk too long. She might look out of her kitchen and catch my eyes glued to her windows. For all I knew, she might have been looking out of her window and staring straight at me. Or perhaps the two of them were. So I walked by in a rush. But having reached the end of her block too soon, I realized that there was nowhere to go, and rather than go the long way around to Broadway and back, I started walking back on Riverside, slowly, then once back to 105th, went up again to 107th, back and forth, again and again, always affecting a busy air, not realizing that there wasn’t a reason in the world why anyone should walk by eight times on Riverside Drive and look so busy at such an ungodly hour of the night.

My passacaglia, I’d tell her one day, not Leo’s prelude, not your sarabande or your Folías, not Beethoven’s Adagio. Just my passacaglia, my passing along here, and losing my mind.

Perhaps I should call, I thought. Not to talk. But to remind her I wasn’t out of her life quite yet. I’d let it ring once, then hang up. But I knew myself: having called her and found it wasn’t so difficult, I’d be tempted to repeat the call. It was the sort of thing Inky might do. Take forever to call the first time, call a second time twenty minutes later, then every five minutes, then all the time. If she wanted to speak to me, if she was alone, she’d call back. If she didn’t call back, well, either she’d turned off the phone or she wasn’t going to play this game. In the end, she’d ask him to pick up the phone and tell whoever had called that she was in Chicago. Say I’m in Chicago.

Had I encouraged them to sleep together?

Suddenly the lights in the living room are on again.

She is unable to sleep. She is fuming. She is upset.

I should call, shouldn’t I?

What if she knows I am downstairs? She is the sort who would intuit just that. She knows I am downstairs this very moment.

Or worse yet, what if she simply wants me to spin these thoughts in my head, including the worst one of all: that she isn’t even thinking of me?

Then the lights go out.

Only a pale, bluish light near her window. Was it a night-light? Was Clara really the type to use night-lights? Or was it a dusky, weakened incandescent light from another room, or light reflected from a nearby street sign? A candle? God forbid, no, not a candle, not a lava lamp. Clara Brunschvicg would never own a lava lamp!

Ah, to make love to Clara Brunschvicg by the light of a lava lamp.

Noir, noir thoughts.

•

I did not call that night. The next morning I was awakened by a light pattering on my windowpane, the sound of rainfall, timid and tentative, without the hysteria or conviction of a downpour, like rain on an August afternoon that might stop any moment and restore things to how they’d been minutes earlier. It felt like afternoon. I wouldn’t have minded if I’d woken up six months later. Let time, not me, deal with this.

I’d had a fitful night, perhaps with weird dreams flaring through a wasteland called sleep, though I couldn’t remember a single dream, save for their collective pall, which lingered in my sleep like smoking stacks on a parched landscape after a great fire. At some point toward dawn I felt the same rapid throbbing in my chest that had made me go to the hospital the day before. But I must have fallen back to sleep. If I have to die, let it be in my sleep.

By morning, I knew exactly what it was. It didn’t surprise me; what surprised me was its ferocity, its single-minded persistence in every part of my body. No ambiguity, no doubt, no cloud could be summoned to give it a kinder name. This was not a whim. It was a commandment that must have started somewhere in mid-sleep, slogged its way out of one nightmare into the next, and finally worked itself out into this morning’s light. I wanted her and I wanted nothing else in the world. I wanted her without her clothes, with her thighs wrapped around me, her gaze in mine, her smile, my every inch inside her. “Perse me, perse me, Printz, perse me one more time, and another, and another still,” she’d said in my sleep in a language that seemed English but might just as easily have been Farsi or French or Russian. This is all I wanted, and not having it was like watching life drained from my body and, in its place, a false serum injected straight into my neck. It wasn’t going to kill me, and I wasn’t going to die, and things would go on as before, and I’d definitely recover, but not having her was like laughing and drinking while watching every single person I grew up with being taken to the gallows and hanged, until my turn came, and I’d still be laughing.

My own body was pounding at my door, pushing the door open with the dogged truculence of a crime about to be committed in which I was both felon and victim — open up, open up, or I’ll ram the door down—Perse me, perse me, Printz, perse me one more time, she’d said, to which I finally replied, I’ll perse you with everything I have, just make me make trouble, make me do something, make me hurt you, as I want you to hurt me, Clara, and hurt me hard, because this staying put like two boats tied to a dock is like waiting decades on death row, make me yield to you as I know I must and have been craving to ever since I kissed you and you snubbed me with a No that I want you to take back with the very lips I kissed that night, take back the curse and spit it from your mouth and I will take what you cast out because it was mine before it was yours.

Part of me did not want to admit any of this, or yield to the impulse, because yielding now would be like letting the enemy dictate terms I’d regret signing no sooner than the ink had dried. This was not like our second night, when shutting my eyes and thinking she was in bed with me had seemed so easy and so natural that I didn’t even bother hiding it from her the next day. Where had that openness gone, why couldn’t I speak to her like this any longer, why with so much in common did my body feel so gridlocked and bottlenecked? The more I knew her, the more fettered my impulses; the more reclusive my body, the more muddled my speech. Could it be that the older I was, the more callow I got? Now that I knew how little there was to fear from others, I was turning shy; candor was more difficult the more fluent my speech. In the alchemy of desire, the more we know, the less we fear, but the less we fear, the less we dare.

Now, in bed and with the words she’d spoken in my dream still ringing in my ears, I felt as though something had broken the sluices, mocked my inhibitions, and flooded every improvised sandbag I’d put between us. So what if I surrender to her, so what if she knows? I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.

I decided to call her. Better yet: send her a picture of Sir Lochinvar, bonnet and plume. Top of the morning, greetings and salutations, from prow to aft, starboard and portside, all aboard, beware of our corvus, this is the captain speaking. .

Call and pick up where we’d left off two nights ago.

I ache for you.

Do people still ache for people?

Not really.

Then speak differently.

I know you’ll want to hang up on me, and you have every reason to, and I know you’ll think I’m drunk or that I’ve lost my mind, but just speak to me, stay on the phone with me, say you know, say you know exactly, because you’re going through it yourself, for if you know, then I know how you’ll take the raspy, churlish snigger in your soul and unbraid it till it loosens into strands of passion, prayer, and thanksgiving.

I put a pillow between my thighs, said the word Clara, thought of her legs wrapped around my back, and then knew, when there was no turning back, that I was signing over my life to her, that I was handing her all my keys for her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder — after this I would never be able to say it was nothing, or that morning had made me do it.

Later, I went out in the rain, bought three papers, had breakfast at my crowded Greek deli, then headed for a walk to Columbia, maybe farther. I like rainy days, especially light rainy days that are just barely gray but whose overcast sky does not hang oppressively over the city. Such days make me feel cheerful, perhaps because they are darker than I and therefore make me seem happy by contrast. This was a good day for a walk. I knew there was no point in checking my e-mail or even expecting a call from her. She wouldn’t call because she knew I wouldn’t have called either, and I didn’t call because I knew she wouldn’t. But I knew she had thought of calling, because I myself had thought of it. She’d want me to make the gesture first, if only to hold it against me, which is why I wouldn’t call, which is also why she wouldn’t call either. It was this twined and tortured shadow-thinking that both paralyzed us and drew us closer. Aren’t we so very, very clever.

Clara, you are the portrait of my life — we think the same, we laugh the same, we are the same.

No, we’re nothing similar. It’s just love makes you say this.

By the time I approached Straus Park, I knew I had absolutely no interest in going any farther uptown, that this whole expedition to Columbia or past Columbia was a ruse to step back into Clara’s world.

In Straus Park the snow had already started to melt. I stood where I had stood on the day she’d come to meet me. The tenor of our relationship was so different on that day, or on the day before that: the quick dash to the restaurant in the cold, Svetonio, the visit to her home, our Lydian tea, that sacrosanct moment when in the kitchen she put two mugs on the counter and, with a resigned, uneasy air that sprang from the depths of reticence, had said, “I have no cookies. I have nothing to offer.”

I went back to 105th Street to go over last night’s footsteps. I didn’t know why I was doing it, just as I didn’t know why I trundled down the same area so many times last night. But last night everything seemed shrouded in a spectral fog behind which I took cover, the better not to see the void looming before me. Last night I knew I was a shattered being. Today, I didn’t feel shattered at all. Things must be getting better, I thought, I must be healing and already getting over the hardest part. How fickle the human heart. I was almost about to take myself to task for being so frivolous when I suddenly caught sight of her window. I was jolted by an overwhelming sense of panic. It told me that the wound I thought was already healing hadn’t even been thoroughly inflicted yet, which was why it didn’t hurt so much. The knife wasn’t all the way in yet, things hadn’t started getting worse.

Through her window I caught sight of the very large plant I’d seen in her living room a few days before. I hadn’t really noticed it at the time. Now I remembered we’d been discussing Rohmer and Beethoven, and she was sitting right under its leaves and I’d been staring at it all the time.

I decided to walk downtown. I hadn’t crossed the street when an impulse made me pass by the bakery and stop once I noticed that the windows were all fogged up inside. I could use a croissant, I thought. There was a long line, there always was by mid-morning, especially during the holidays.

This was the spot of two nights ago. To stir the memory of our kiss, I came even closer to the glass and, so as not to arouse suspicion inside the bakery, pretended to be straining my eyes to make out whether the line was long inside, almost pressing my nose flat against the glass. Clara was with me again. Our mysterious hip movements were as alive to me now as they were then. Nothing had changed. It amazed me to think that this bakery not only remembered the night better than I could but, in the tradition of all great bakeries on holidays, it remembered it for me and was offering me the choicest slice, the one with the king’s charm. One could keep this charm for life. Clara would become like one of those diseases that can definitely be overcome but that leave their mark on your skin and, sometimes, disfigure you completely, and you’ll call it a blessing all the same because it opened the way to God.

If I should ever wish to see her in the weeks to come, the easiest way would be to come here instead of walking around her building. Or I could do both, the way people go to a cemetery to visit one tombstone and, since they’re there already, might as well put flowers on someone else’s too.

I opened the door and walked into the bakery and, when my turn came, on the spur of the moment decided to buy one of their large fruit tarts. Then, on second thought, added four pastries as well.

“I could have sworn it was you,” said a man’s voice. I turned around. It was a friend I hadn’t seen in months. He was having breakfast with his girlfriend, seated at a tiny round table. “I saw you peeking in from outside, and for a moment I thought you were about to flatten your whole face at me.”

He introduced me to Lauren. We shook hands. What was I up to these days? Nothing, I replied. I was headed for a late lunch with some friends on Ninety-fifth Street — hence the cakes.

The idea of visiting my friends had occurred to me only after I’d purchased the cakes.

We were almost a week past Christmas and I had yet to find toys for their children, I added. How old were my friends’ children? asked the girlfriend, clearly interested in children. Two and four, I answered. “There are children’s shops a few blocks down.” Was she a schoolteacher? She shook her head.

I looked at her. What a lovely person. There are children’s shops a few blocks down. A whole lifetime of kindness, sweetness, and goodwill in these eight words. We joked about buying gifts for children we hardly knew at all. She had no handbag; just a coat, which she was wearing buttoned down, both hands digging deep in her coat pockets — tense and uncomfortable, she’d finished her coffee long ago, it seemed. They had the look of a couple who’d had some words.

“We were headed that way, anyway,” she said. “We’ll walk down with you.” They’d help me pick out toys. Did I mind? Not at all.

How sweet of her simply to volunteer with a complete stranger. Then I realized why this wasn’t what I wanted at all and why I’d floated the plan of visiting friends on Ninety-fifth Street. I had bought the cakes in the hope of finding the courage to call Clara before announcing I was coming up with a tart and four pastries.

If I don’t ditch these two now or tell them I’ve changed my mind, I may never drop in on Clara this morning, may never see Clara again, and — who knows — life may take a completely different turn, just because of a pair of toys and a stupid fib concocted with a fruit tart in my hand! Like those tiny, arbitrary accidents that determine the birth of a great piece of music or the destiny of a character in a film — a small nothing, a meaningless fib, and your life spins out of orbit and takes a totally unexpected turn.

So here I am with a cake and four pastries going to a place I had no intention of visiting and about to buy gifts I couldn’t care less about.

In the toy shop, all three of us seemed to disband for a while. He was interested in bicycles, while she simply ambled about looking at the cribs and baby furniture, her hands still digging into her coat pockets. I found myself right next to her.

“I think you should buy a fire engine,” she said, pointing at one under a glass counter.

How come I hadn’t seen it? It was staring right at me.

“Because you don’t see, maybe?”

“Because I don’t see, maybe. Story of my life, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” she said.

The huge fire engine was made of plastic with rounded corners and no sharp edges, which gave the truck a friendly but unintentionally cartoonish character that was not likely to please a boy of four.

“Does the ladder move?” she asked the owner.

“It also has a rotating functionality, see, madam?” he said, with a thick Indian accent, showing how the entire ladder assembly could be rotated 360 degrees.

“But the same model also comes with a nonrotating functionality. Fewer parts, breaks less easily.” He turned his attention to a woman in her fifties and her pregnant daughter. They were wearing identical wigs. They wanted to buy furniture but did not want it delivered before the birth of the baby. “We’re a bit superstitious,” said the mother, speaking for the daughter. “I understand,” he replied with the deferential empathy of someone who’d lived his entire life with superstitions far creepier than this.

Minutes later he was back. “So, which do you want, with rotating functionality or without rotating functionality?”

By now, Clara would have been tempted to mimic his Indian accent, and together we would have been on the floor and added one or two new words to our clandestine lingo. Want to see a rotating functionality? I’ll show you a rotating functionality if that’s the last thing I do.

With Lauren I wasn’t sure it was good form. I fiddled with the rotating ladder.

“Which functionality do you think they’d like?” I said, turning to her and trying as discreetly as I could to coax laughter out of her.

She smiled.

“You were the four-year-old boy once, not me.”

“I think I never grew beyond four.”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” Obviously this was her way of acknowledging without really responding to another hasty attempt at bridging the distance between us. Then, probably suspecting she might have snubbed me without meaning to, she added, “You’re not in bad company. Most men seldom grow beyond four.”

We stood before the fish tank. I noticed she was staring at a fluttering flat Aleutian fish streaked with very loud blues; it looked like an imitation iris about to blossom. She saw me staring at her, looked away, and gently began tapping her fingernails on the glass pane just in front of the fish. The fish didn’t flinch but kept staring at her. She smiled at it, gazed at it more intensely, and then back at me.

“He’s not taking his eyes off you,” I said.

“Now, there’s something unusual,” she replied almost distractedly, with a roguish melancholy smile that could have said more about the man she was living with than about all the fish in the Pacific.

I looked at her and couldn’t resist. “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

She shrugged her shoulders and, taking my tit for tat like a good sport, continued the flirtation with the fish, which suddenly got flustered.

“Oh no, he’s gone,” she said, feigning a crushed face. Then she looked at me, as if for confirmation that something unusually sad had indeed happened and that she hadn’t just imagined it. Her fingers were still touching the glass pane. She was lost in thought.

If she were Clara, my heart would have gone out to her and I would have kissed her, because there was something incredibly moving in her sorrow. “Can I call you sometime?” I asked.

“Sure,” she replied, her face still glued to the fish tank. I wasn’t sure she understood.

“I mean: can I call you?”

“Sure,” she repeated with the exact same casual air that continued to find fish far more important and that seemed to say, I heard you the first time.

Her number couldn’t have been easier to remember. The whole thing had happened in less than ten seconds.

“Anything else you care to look at?”

I shook my head and decided to buy two of the rotating models. The owner of the store asked his son to gift wrap the boxes. “Wrap them separately, Nikil, not together, not together, I said.” I was ready to burst out laughing and was trying to control the quivering on my lips. She must have thought I was smiling broadly for the joy such gifts would bring the two boys.

“Put yourself in the place of the boys when you walk in with these huge packages,” she said.

I tried to and was only able to think back to my childhood. A stranger walks into my parents’ living room with a wrapped box a few days after Christmas. I’m not sure the box is for me, so I contain my excitement, and to master it rush to my bedroom. Meanwhile, the stranger mistakes my quick exit for indifference or, worse yet, for arrogance. I wanted him to coax me out of my bedroom, while he wanted to see excitement and gratitude. When I am no longer able to contain myself and ask someone if the box is for me, they tell me “Probably,” but that the guest has already left and taken the gift with him.

“Maybe this is why we like Christmas so much. It brings out the child in us,” I finally said.

“Which is a good thing?” she asked.

“Which is a very good thing.”

I liked her very much.

“I can’t wait to call you,” I said.

She gave an absentminded shrug, as if to say, You men, all the same! There wasn’t the least touch of guile in her, unless absentmindedness itself was its most rarefied form. She might have been saying, You mean to call, but you won’t. “Call me this afternoon. I’m not doing anything.”

When my friend joined us, he seemed surprised by the speed with which we’d managed to find and purchase two toys. He put his arm around her shoulders. She simply dug her hands into her coat pockets again and seemed preoccupied by the patterns on the floor. What a complicated woman, I thought. Then I corrected myself: perhaps not complicated at all; perhaps she was the more candid person of the three. Perhaps Clara was too. It was just I who needed them complicated, if only because finding guile in them was my way of making them like me, of assuming they spoke my language and that I could speak theirs.

There’d been a moment at the wrapping desk when we were both resting our hands against the counter. By accident, our hands had touched. She did not remove hers, and I didn’t remove mine. You’d think we were both totally engrossed by the fire trucks.

We separated a block later. I watched her reach for his hand and find it before springing through the slush to make it across the street before the light changed.

Yet she’d cheat on him in a minute, I thought, thinking back to Clara, who, for all her kisses at the party, was busy telling friends and strangers how easily she’d ditched Inky. I was sure she did the same with me: weep with me while listening to the Handel, have me over for tea, want me to spend the night with her, then double-cross me all the way downtown first thing the next morning.

I was hardly better myself.

On Ninety-fifth Street I had a moment of unbearable hesitation. Should I bother going at all? Had I even been invited? I couldn’t remember, but assumed I was always welcome there. I’d have lunch with them, even if they had already started without me. I’d drop the toys with the boys. We’d have cake. Then by four o’clock I’d call Lauren. It had been my intention earlier this week to bring Clara along and introduce her to Rachel and her friends and open up my life to her, bit by bit. Now, I’d call Lauren by three — to put Clara out of my mind.

Before ringing at their brownstone, I could already hear the hubbub of voices chatting loudly within. I even heard my own ring, and the effect it had on the noise in the house. At first silence, then the patter of feet, and the sudden burst of greetings. A stranger bearing gifts. It did remind me of my childhood.

We’ve so much food. And all this booze.

Rachel came out of the kitchen and kissed me. Her sister said she would fill a plate with a bit of everything. An Indian couple had brought a stew that was to die for, and there was still lots left.

I called this house the Hermitage, because there was something good and wholesome about it, though it was never clear who lived there, who didn’t, who was sleeping over and who just passing through. Always plenty of food, always new friends, children, and as always a bevy of pets, laughter, good fellowship, and conversation. What a relief to stop by this sanctuary and see everyone again, as if I were just dropping in on a sick friend, or just needed to pick something up or borrow a book, reconnect, touch base.

Sometimes I pass here by cab without stopping. Just look in through the large dining-room window to make sure everything is all right. Someone is always bringing in something from the kitchen, and around the dining table there are always people, good friends. Once, while passing by, I even caught sight of two bottles of white wine which they’d left outside the window to keep chilled. I’d taught them this trick, which my father had taught me. When the bottles were stolen once, Rachel decided the refrigerator was good enough.

As usual, I made my way straight into the kitchen. It felt safer there, and gave me time to settle in and get used to faces I hadn’t seen in a while. I found a huge uncut French cucumber and right away put it in my trousers. “They put people in jail for sporting such huge ones,” said Rachel. “And this while it’s resting,” I said, which brought a guffaw from all those in the kitchen. Someone suddenly burst in: “They’re fighting again.” “They should get a divorce,” said Rachel, “they’re jerks.” “Who’s the jerk?” asks her sister. “I am,” said the man who was just quarreling with his wife and who thrust his way into the kitchen to get a glass of water, “I’m the jerk, I am. I. Am. The. Jerk. See?” he said, ramming his head against the wall. “The biggest jerk on earth.”

The wife, who couldn’t resist, followed him into the kitchen. “At least no one’s hiding it from you.”

“What?” he asked.

“That you’re a jerk!”

“You people are so boring,” broke in Rachel’s ex-husband, who was already preparing dinner for everyone tonight. “Can we at least pretend we’re all still friends? Tomorrow is New Year’s, for Christ’s sake.”

Rachel in the kitchen was busy cutting the fruit tart I had brought. She turned to me once the kitchen was cleared of people. “And I want you to be nice to the Forshams,” she said. There was reproof in her voice. “But I am nice.” “Yes, but I know you’ll say something nasty, even without meaning to; you’ll imitate them, or make fun of their boy, I know you’ll do something.” Clara would have encouraged me to do nothing short of that. The Forshams always dropped in on Sundays. I called them the Connubials, or the United Front of Wedlock Appeal. She played bad cop, he played supercop. She was never wrong and he was just perfect.

“And what’s with the disappearing act?” Rachel asked as she continued putting things on a large salver. Julia walked in. “Ask him.” “Ask him what?” “Ask him where he’s been all week and why he doesn’t answer his phone.”

I decided to tell Rachel about Lauren so as not to say anything about Clara. Halfway through my story, though, she told me to follow her into the living room, which was when she told me to start the story all over again. “Tell everyone? Including those I don’t know?” “Including, and especially, those you don’t know.” This, I knew, was my punishment for not promising to be nice to the Forshams. It was also the price for my disappearing act, she said. I loved being put in the pillory.

They listened to the story about the toy store, laughed when I imitated rotating functionality.

“Just like that — because of the way she tapped the fish tank?” someone asked.

She tapped with two fingers, the index and the middle finger, in succession. I wanted to kiss her.

Rachel was serving the wedges of tart. She had asked me to bring in two large espresso pots. In the middle of the room stood a very large glass plate on which lay an uncut hollowed circle of wobbly Jell-O for the children. It jiggled each time someone took a step in the room.

“What fish tank?” asked the Forsham wife.

“The girl he met.”

“What girl he met in what fish tank?” asked the husband.

“So when were you planning to call?” someone interrupted.

“Around three.”

“Want us to spot you?”

“No, thank you.”

“Can we listen in, then? We promise, we won’t make a sound.”

I loved the teasing.

Julia brought me a plate with all kinds of leftovers. Gita, the Indian lady, insisted I have a second helping of biryani. She was wearing a sari over blue jeans. Her husband was busy explaining the scales on the piano to their five-year-old son. I took a seat on a low stool, put the square plate on my lap, and, resting my back against the large television set, began eating. Someone brought me a glass of red wine. Here’s a napkin, said Rachel, hurling a folded cloth napkin at me. I loved this.

•

One of the guests began to discuss the Rohmer festival that was playing down the block. Tonight was to be the last night. I made a point of not saying anything, because I knew that once I mentioned Rohmer, I’d have to spill out everything about my evenings with Clara. At first they wouldn’t suspect anything, but before long they’d sniff out a rat and start plying me with questions, and my evasive measure would only give me away. Which is why they kept prodding. And which was exactly what happened once Julia seemed to remember that I loved Rohmer, didn’t I? I did, I said, continuing to stare at my food. Had I been to see any of the movies this week? Yes. Which ones had I seen? Before I could answer with All of them, the Forsham husband said he’d once seen a Rohmer film but still couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He doesn’t appeal to everyone, said Julia, who suddenly recalled seeing a Rohmer film with me a few years earlier. I tried to change the subject. The Forsham woman thought there was something sick and twisted in wanting to touch a minor’s knee. Her husband couldn’t agree more: “He likes the knee more than he likes the woman it belongs to. Fetishistic!” “My point exactly,” echoed his wife, “fetishistic.” Julia brushed the comment aside and told the Forshams’ son to keep his fingers off the Jell-O unless he was going to eat it, in which case he had to ask for it. In the kitchen she had described him to me as the most repellent child in the world. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, turning to me, after giving the boy a second menacing stare. “We could have gone together.” “I went at the last minute,” I said. Was I going tonight? I didn’t think so, I replied, surprised at the total lack of hesitation with which I found myself lying to a woman who was one of my best friends. “Maybe you can bring Lauren along.”

The thought did not displease me. It freed me from thinking I had to go with Clara only. If Clara did happen to go tonight, well, she’d find me with Lauren, and if not with Lauren, then with friends, and frankly, I’d rather be with good friends than with a prickly Clara out to remind me how little she needed me, with all the friends and all the men in her life, and all her comings and goings uptown and downtown that made me feel like a puny, far-flung planet demoted from satellite to testy asteroid. God knows what she’d been telling her friends about me. Or was she like me: not saying a word about us to anyone for fear of seeing the dying wick of friendship snuffed by the merest breath of gossip? Say nothing, smile, and move on. Say nothing because you’re aching to tell the world but fear no one could possibly understand, but if they did understand, then there’d be nothing special to understand in the first place, would there? Say nothing because you don’t want to see where hope trails off and loses luster and, like a lumpy bolide tailspinning to earth, finally thumps down on the desolate, dark folds of the Siberian tundra. Say nothing, because the two of us were perfectly ready to say there was indeed nothing.

And yet Clara would be crushed on seeing me with Lauren in a place where we both knew we’d meet if all other plans failed. This was sacred.

Or would Clara burst out laughing, and so loudly that I’d better think twice before going to the movies with Lauren.

And then it hit me. Clara could easily show up at the movies with someone else. The thought sent me into an instant frenzy, and I could see myself free-falling into a pit of anger and despair. What would I say if I saw her with another man? Leaning on his shoulder once they sat down. Or standing together at the entrance, drinking coffee, trying to decide where to sit, chatting up Phildonka about Amerikon wezer. After the movies, if it’s still raining, they’ll wait outside the main entrance to the theater.

Where would I be, then?

To forestall this new wave of anxiety, I came up with a brilliant compromise: I would be willing to give up Lauren altogether on condition that Clara not show up with another man.

The idea had come to me the moment I imagined Clara putting herself in my place and guessing that I’d probably want to go to the movies with another woman tonight. She must have figured, however, that I’d renounce taking someone if she too agreed not to go with another person. I could just see her sorting this knot out, smiling abstractly at my smile once she saw how, in this as well, our thoughts ran on the same lane. This kind of thinking aroused me. Thinking she was thinking what I was thinking, and enjoying it, as I was enjoying it, reminded me of our hug by the bakery past three in the morning. I wanted to be with her now, both of us partly naked in one of the bedrooms upstairs in Rachel’s house, tripping over the fire trucks as we finally locked one of the bedroom doors, Perse me, perse me hard, harder, harder still.

Maybe I wasn’t going to call Lauren after all.

“Why not?”

Someone else intervened: “Just give me this Lauren’s number, and I’ll call her.”

“And tell her what?”

“Tell her for starters that she’s always welcome to come here. There’s always a plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork here for new friends.”

How I loved the sounds of these words: A plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork. Where would I be without them?

There was a time when I too was a stranger here. Rachel might have told Julia the same exact words about me: Tell him there’ll always be a plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork here for him.

Clara was right: others were important, and sometimes they’re all that stands between us and the ditch. Why wouldn’t such an idea have occurred to me — that others were important — why did I have to fish it out from under a sheet of ice in an ice-fishing hut? A plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork.

Would that they had said this about Clara now.

“You’re not saying anything, and I don’t like it,” said Rachel, breaking the silence around me with another one of her prods.

“I’m eating,” I replied, trying to suggest that if I was quiet it was also my way of avoiding saying anything unkind to the Forshams.

“You’re so weird today. You’re hiding something, I know it,” she said, continuing to speak to me.

“And?”

“I think we should toss him in a blanket.”

“Someone get a blanket.”

Rachel’s four-year-old boy, whose loyalty I thought I’d purchased with a fire truck, was the first to race upstairs. He returned with his five-by-three-foot blanky.

Someone insisted they find a real blanket.

“Okay, I’ll tell everything,” I said.

Which was when I realized that the one thing I wanted most right then was to talk to everyone, the Forshams included, about Clara — tell the world about this woman who with three words six days ago had jiggled my universe and turned it to Jell-O.

Rachel’s ex replenished my wine.

I took a sip and for a moment was quiet, because I didn’t know how to begin. “There is someone,” I said. “Or, at least, there was. I don’t think there is any longer.”

“A phantom woman. I love it. And?”

“We met on Christmas Eve.”

“Yes, and?”

“And nothing. We went out a few times. Nothing happened. Now it’s over.”

Silence.

Rachel’s ex: Did you steal the jewels?

Mrs. Forsham: What a terrible question.

Me: I did not steal her jewels. But she offered to let me see them.

The ex: And?

Me: I took a rain check.

A man named David: He’s lost his mind.

The ex again: Do you even like her?

My answer caught me by complete surprise. “Immensely,” I said.

Julia: So what’s wrong with her?

Me: She’s flighty, arrogant, prickly, caustic, mean, dangerous, maybe perfect.

The ex: I see a very long winter. Go to the cave, open sesame, plunder the jewels, handle the thieves.

A moment of silence.

Rachel: You’re not going to call Lauren?

Me: I’m not going to call Lauren.

Rachel: Not nice.

•

Later that afternoon we decided to walk the dogs. I walked next to Rachel on our way to the park and told her about my evenings with Clara after the movies, the hours at the bar, the dancing by the jukebox, the walk back through Straus Park, the nights when I was sure all was lost, the heartthrob when I was proven wrong, the night when life put everything on the table, then took everything back and put the cards away.

We were walking into the park, as we always did when we went out as a group, and were headed to the tennis courts and beyond that toward the tennis house, which, by early twilight that day, seemed already sunk in darkness, its two puny lamps scarcely lighting the way across the bridge leading over to the icy reservoir. All I need is for the ice to start cracking and I’ll want to run away, be elsewhere. But we were already elsewhere, lost in a winterborne forest, away from the tall buildings off Ninety-third and Central Park West, cast in Corot’s winterscapes, where twilight had blurred the colors to pallid earth tones right in the very heart of Manhattan. Another country, another century, our two dogs scampering around on the grounds of a small provincial French town. This part of Manhattan had never seen me with Clara and should not have reminded me of her. But because it reminded me of places she and I had invoked on the terrace that night, my mind was immediately drawn to her. It would be nice to go to France from here. Walk down Ninety-fifth, buy something quick to eat along the way, and be there in plenty of time. I wanted her to be with us now. This wasn’t elsewhere at all. The set was right, but the play and the players all wrong.

“All I did was not sleep with her,” I explained.

“Because?”

“Because for once I didn’t want to rush it. Maybe I wanted this to be different. I didn’t want ordinary. Maybe I wanted the romance to last longer.”

Rachel listened.

“What comes after courtship?” I asked.

“Who ever knows. Besides, you’re asking the wrong person.”

I must have stared with a baffled look.

“We’re back together again,” she said. “We were friends, got married, got divorced, became friends again — now he wants to get married.”

“And you?”

“I’m not against it.”

Dangling the leash of her freed dogs, Rachel then crossed her arms and with her boot gave a gentle kick to a clump of clay. “It might actually be a good idea.” Rachel was not given to enthusiasm. This could have been a clamorous endorsement. Then, looking away, and just as I was about to put my two cents in, “What do you think our phantom woman is doing right now?”

“I don’t know. She could be with friends. Maybe another man. Who knows? One thing she is not doing is sitting waiting for my call.”

“Were you supposed to call?”

“No. We make a point of never calling. We’d just meet on impulse, kept it light and improvised.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know that there’s anything I can do.”

“But you must do something.”

I did not answer. I felt like shrugging my shoulders, but I knew she’d see through this too.

“It’s hard to tell what we had. At first I thought she wanted nothing, then that she wanted friendship of a sort, then that she might have wanted much more but wasn’t really sure, now we’re strangers.”

“And I take it you know exactly what you want.”

There was irony in her voice.

“I think I do.”

“You think you do. Put it this way: she’s probably not sure why you’ve been seeing her either. I think she’s very interested, the way you are. She wants friendship, she wants love, she wants everything, and nothing. No different from you. Nothing either of you does is wrong, even if you do nothing. But you should never have said no to her. Find a way to fix it before it’s too late.”

My smirk meant: And how do you propose I do that?

“Look. Perhaps she may not want to end it yet. Or she may want to end it before it sours. Either way, though, you can’t not call her.”

By then her two dogs had reappeared. The other guests were approaching us, Mr. Forsham had lit a pipe. “The phantom lady,” she repeated. “I like that.”

Then, on second thought: “Do me a favor. Go over to that tree where no one can hear you, take out your cell phone, and make the call.”

“And say what?”

“Say something!”

“Chances are she won’t pick up.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I’d do if she called.”

“Just call.” Impatience sealed her words.

She was tousling her collies.

Perhaps Clara had said nothing about me to anyone. Or perhaps she’d spent a good portion of the afternoon as I had, speaking to her friends about someone who was opaque, difficult, fractious, and transparent. Perhaps she’d taken a walk along the marina by the boat basin, where I pictured her with Pablo and Pavel today, discussing me with the same dismayed shrug I had shown Rachel after she’d asked me if I liked Clara and I said immensely, hoping Rachel might think I was probably exaggerating, which would allow me to think I was. Perhaps Clara too was being told that this thing between us was most likely leading nowhere, but that we were headed there with such locked steps that there was no telling where any of it was going. I saw myself taking a few steps on the hardened, cold earth and walking away from Rachel toward the very tree she had pointed out. Here, against my better judgment, I’d force myself to make the phone call as soon as I knew I was no longer within earshot of anyone. I just wanted to call, I’d say. A lapse of a few seconds. Agonizing silence. You just wanted to call? she’d repeat. Well, now you’ve called.

There’d be many voices in the background. Probably she’d be at a late lunch on the marina. Did I think she’d stay home knitting?

Where are you? How are you?

How am I? Is that what you’re asking? How do you think I am?

We’d have a hard time hearing each other. Or we’d pretend not to hear each other. Either way, the breakups on the line would help defuse the tension between us and give a flustered sprightliness to our words. She’d be in the boathouse. Where was I? In the park. It’d be just like us, I’d say, one in Riverside Park, the other in Central Park. It might thaw the chill. I’m so bored. Are you bored too, Clara? I’d ask. Terribly. Was either of us honest, or were we simply exaggerating to show we wished to be together instead? Would I want to come? Did she want me to come? Only if I wanted. Give me an address. She did not know the exact address, but it was on the marina off Seventy-ninth Street. I’d have to call her once I got there, and someone would come out and open the gate to the houseboats.

•

“Did you at least leave a message?” Rachel asked when I told her I wasn’t able to reach Clara.

“Yes,” I said.

“So, if she doesn’t call back, we’ll know.”

“I suppose so.” I must have sounded too vague.

“Did you really leave a message?”

I looked at her.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You’re really something. Let’s go home. I’ve found this extra-scented tea from Sri Lanka. And we’ve got so many cakes.”

By then it had grown dark.

When Rachel unlocked the door, we were struck by the smell of beef stewed in wine sauce. Her ex-no-longer-her-ex was sitting in total darkness watching the History Channel, drinking bourbon. He thought we had arrived too soon. Bag the tea, we’ll have drinks instead, someone said. There was a rush to one of the closets by the bookcase, glasses were produced, bottles, mini-snacks, including my favorite, pistachios roasted in hot spices. Someone put on a CD, even the Forshams were pleasant to be with. I began to look forward to this evening. From a limping afternoon-evening that was headed into a deep abyss filled with the darkest scree below, this was turning into a night that could last into the wee hours and remain as pleasant and warm as if Clara had promised to show up and might any moment ring the doorbell. It would have been so good if Clara came. I suddenly thought of 7:10. Seven-ten was less than two hours away now. There was still time to decide. What if I did call?

No, I wasn’t going to call — never ask the question again.

But after downing a glass of Scotch, I couldn’t remember why I’d been putting off calling her or why I’d even hesitated. I went into the empty pantry and took out my cell phone. I had the best intentions, I thought. I was simply going to ask her to join us for dinner. Light and simple.

She picked up exactly as I’d imagined: “Speak!”

I told her I was with friends and that I’d love her to join us for drinks. I didn’t say anything about dinner, figuring it might scare her off.

“I can’t.”

It still caught me by surprise. I threw in my one and only trump card. “I’m so bored. I’m bored out of my mind. I’m dying to see you. Say yes.”

“I’m sorry you’re bored. But I can’t. I’m busy.”

No apologies, no explanation, not even feigned regret in her voice. Hard, glacial, petrous.

“Bummer,” I said — my way of coaxing a smile to her voice. But she didn’t respond. Her voice seemed drained of its warmth and humor. Everything came off deadpan, the silence of a cobra that had just bitten and is watching to make sure its victim has collapsed.

She didn’t bring up 7:10. I didn’t either.

The conversation couldn’t have lasted for more than half a minute. It left me stunned — which was exactly why I’d been avoiding calling her. Stunned was worse than hurt, worse than snubbed, told off, insulted, or just simply ignored. Stunned was like being totally paralyzed, good for nothing else afterward, scrapped, zombified, eviscerated. I turned off the telephone completely. I didn’t want to hope, didn’t want to think there’d be anything good to expect from this phone. There were never going to be other calls. Serves me right, serves me right.

When I returned to the living room by way of the dining room, I saw that the large country table had already been set, with its usual selection of ill-assorted dishes and glasses. And then I remembered. I’d wanted to tell them to add a place setting for an extra guest. Then I’d gone to make my phone call. Is this the guest? Rachel would have asked. Yes, the guest. I had told no one her name. So where shall we seat the guest, across from you perhaps? I loved Rachel’s irony. This table, though, would never see Clara. Clara would never see Rachel.

•

That night after dinner and our second dog walk later in the park, I did walk up Broadway. On 106th I dawdled about awhile, then strolled around her block once and, for good measure, a second time. Her lights were out, both the first and second time. Obviously she wasn’t home, might not come back, or had gone to bed already. Then I walked to Straus Park and stood there, remembering the candles I’d imagined on the statue a week ago, remembering Officer Rahoon and Manattàn noir and Leopardi’s short poem about life being all bitterness and boredom. Busy, she’d said. What an ugly word. Lethal, flat-footed, snooty, dismissive busy.

The rats have all gone under, I thought. There was something good and soothing about standing here and feeling one with the specter of things, something wholesome in watching life from the bank of the dead, siding with the dead against the living, like standing by the river and hearing, not the Bach, but the hard, glacial, petrous cracking underneath the prelude — hard, glacial, petrous, like her, like me. Outside of time we were so good together, as the dead are good together. Outside of time. In the real world, the meter was always running.

For a while I thought of the man who had pledged to sit outside his beloved’s window for one thousand and one nights, but on the one thousand and first deliberately did not show up. It was his way of spiting her, of spiting himself, as if spite, in the end, and love, its bedfellow, were coiled together like two vipers that bite the hand that feeds them, one with venom, the other with its antidote — the order makes no difference, but the biting must happen twice and hurts both times. I thought of how everything I’d done with Clara, from the very first night to the last, was governed by spite and pride, and, in between, lots of fear and admonition, while the one word that should have mattered most was the one condemned to remain silent, till it too became hard, glacial, and petrous. I had never said the word, had I? To the snow, to the night, to the statue in the park, to my pillow, I had. And I’ll say it now, not because I’ve lost you, Clara, but I’ve lost you because I loved you, because I saw eternity with you, because love and loss are surefire partners too.