•
She liked fresh air, she said. She opened the French windows a crack, letting a cold draft steal into the room. Then she stepped out onto what turned out to be a very large terrace and proceeded to light a cigarette. I followed. Did I smoke? I made a motion to accept, but then remembered I’d decided to quit smoking just around the time of the six-and-a-half-month babe. I gave a hasty explanation. She apologized, she’d never offer again, she said. I tried not to interpret whether the word again boded well, but decided not to extort hidden meanings in everything she said. “I call them secret agents.”
“Why?”
“Secret agents always smoke in movies.”
“Does this mean you have many secrets?”
“You’re fishing.”
Stupid, stupid me!
She mimicked the motions of a postwar agent lighting up as he scurries through the dark, cobbled lanes of old Vienna.
Outside, a pale silver hue hovered over the city. It hadn’t stopped snowing all evening. She stood by the balustrade, moved her foot, and dreamily brushed aside some of the snow with her maroon suede pump, then gently swept it off the ledge. I watched the snow scatter in the wind.
I liked the gesture: shoe, suede, snow, ledge, the whole thing done distractedly, with a cigarette between her fingers.
I had never realized that there was a kind of beauty in stepping on fresh snow and leaving tracks. I always try to avoid the snow, am good to my shoes.
From our high perch, the silver-purple city looked aerial and distant and superterrestrial, a beguiling kingdom whose beaming spires rose silently through the twilit winter mist to parley with the stars. I watched the fresh furrowed tracks on Riverside Drive, the scattered lampposts with their heads ablaze, and a bus crawling through the snow, tilting its way past the knoll off 112th and Riverside before shuffling off, snow padding its lank shoulders, an empty, Stygian vessel headed toward destinations and sights unseen. I am like Clara, it said, I’ll take you places you never knew.
A waiter opened the sliding door to the terrace and asked if we wanted anything to drink. Spotting a Bloody Mary on his tray, Clara, without hesitating, said she’d take that one. Before he had time to protest, she had already lifted it from his tray. I am Clara. I take things. The drink matched the color of her shirt. Then she stood the wide-rimmed glass on the balustrade, digging its base and part of its slim neck into the snow either to keep it cold or to prevent it from tipping over with the first wind. When she was done smoking, she stubbed out her cigarette with her shoe, and then, just as she’d done with the snow, gently swept it off the ledge. I knew I’d never forget this moment. The shoes, the glass, the terrace, the ice floes plying down the Hudson, the bus shuffling up the Drive. Sweet Hudson, I thought, run softly, till I end my song.
•
Earlier that evening I had taken a similar bus and, because of the blizzard, had totally missed my stop and gotten off six blocks past 106th Street. I remembered wondering where I was, and why I had erred, feeling ridiculous as I lugged my boutiquey plastic bag where two bottles of Champagne kept clinking despite the piece of cardboard the man at the liquor store had inserted between them. In the blizzard, off 112th Street, I sighted the statue of Samuel J. Tilden with its impassive, solemn gaze frozen westward, as I clambered up the steps and looked around, trying to avoid a drooling St. Bernard who suddenly appeared on the mound and didn’t seem about to ignore me. Should I run away or just stay calm, pretend I hadn’t seen it? Then I heard the voice of two boys calling it off. They were sledding down the mound. The dog, who had strayed somewhat, began to follow them into the park. And then the quiet, peaceful, blissful walk down those six deserted blocks on the service road off Riverside, by turns convex and concave, the sound of ice crunching underneath the snow. It made me think of Capra’s Bedford Falls and Van Gogh’s Saint-Rémy, and of Leipzig and Bach choirs and how the slightest accidents sometimes open up new worlds, new buildings, new people, unveiling sudden faces we know we’ll never want to lose. Saint-Rémy, the town where Nostradamus and Van Gogh walked the same sidewalk, the seer and the madman crossing paths, centuries apart, just a nod hello.
From the sidewalk, as I looked at the windows upstairs, I had pictured quiet, contented families where children start homework on time, and where guests, ever reluctant to leave, liven up dinner parties where spouses seldom speak. From the terrace where we stood now, the incident with the scary St. Bernard seemed a lifetime away. I remembered thinking of medieval Weihnachten towns along the Rhine and the Elbe, especially with the cathedral looming down 112th Street and the river so close by. To arrive more than fashionably late, I had walked around the block and reached Straus Park on Broadway, glad to see that I still had time to reconsider going to this party, especially now that I had almost no desire to attend, and caught myself coming up with good excuses to do a double turn and head back home, all the while holding on to the invitation card with the address printed in gold filigree. The script was so thin that I couldn’t read it and was almost tempted to ask directions of one of the lampposts, it too, like me, lost and stranded in the storm, though ever so willing to shed the scant light it had to help me read what began to look like ghost quatrains in the cursive hand of Nostradamus himself. To kill time, I found a small coffee shop and ordered tea.
Now I was here and I was with Clara.
After downing one Mankiewicz and almost bawling on a piece of peppercorn, I was standing on a terrace overlooking Manhattan, already thinking of revisiting 106th Street tomorrow night to replay this evening all over again — at my leisure, in my own time, the cathedral, the park, the snow, the golden filigree, and the lampposts with their heads ablaze. I looked down and, if I could, would have signaled to the I approaching the building a few hours earlier and warned him to keep putting off coming here — take a half step first, then half of that half step, and half of the half of that half step, as superstitious people do when they half reach out and push away the very thing they crave but fear they’ll never have unless they’ve pushed it far enough first — to walk and want asymptotically.
Should I put my arm around her? Asymptotically?
I tried to look away from her. And perhaps she too was looking away, both of us now staring out at the evening sky, where a faint unsteady bluish search beam, emanating from an unknown corner of the Upper West Side, orbited the sky, picking its way through the blotchy night as if in search of something it couldn’t tell and didn’t really mean to find each time it looped above us like a slim and trellised Roman corvus missing its landing each time it tried to come down on a Carthaginian ghost ship.
Tonight the Magi are truly lost, I wanted to say.
But I kept it to myself, wondering how long we were going to stand like this and stare out into the dark, tracing the silent course of the light beam overhead as if it were a riveting spectacle justifying our silence. Perhaps, by dint of scouring the sky, the beam might finally alight on something for us to talk about — except that there was nothing for the beam to land on — in which case, perhaps, we’d turn the beam itself into a subject of conversation. I wonder where it’s being aimed at. Or: Where is it coming from? Or: Why does it dip each time it seems to touch the northernmost spire? Or: looks like we’re suddenly in London and this is the Blitz. Or Montevideo. Or Bellagio. Or there was the other, ineffable question I kept spinning to myself as though it were a mini-beam searching within me as well, a question I couldn’t even ask, much less answer, but needed to ask, of myself, of her, and back to myself — because, if I knew I had stepped into a tiny miracle the moment we’d walked onto the terrace to look over this unreal city, I also needed to know that she thought so too before believing it myself.