Then I thought of saying I envied people who could say they loved snow without feeling awkward or self-conscious, like writing poetry that rhymes. But that seemed unnecessarily fussy. I decided to look for something else to say.
And while I scrambled yet once more to fill the silence with something — anything — it hit me that if she could say she loved snow, it was probably because she too might have found the silence between us unbearable and decided it was more hackneyed to suppress a simple thought than to come right out with it.
“And I love it too,” I said, glad that she had paved the way for simplicity. “Though I don’t know why.”
“Though I don’t know why.”
Was she telling me, yet once more, that our minds ran along parallel lines? Or was she absentmindedly echoing or deriding a meaningless phrase I had thrown in to complicate what couldn’t have been simpler?
And yet I loved the way she had almost sighed, Though I don’t know why. I would have leaned toward her and put my arm around her waist. Did one lean toward Clara and put an arm around her waist and kiss her?
A few years ago I would have brought my lips to hers without hesitating.
Now, at twenty-eight, I wasn’t sure.
•
Someone pushed open the French window and entered the terrace.
“Found you,” he said. Then, as though having second thoughts: “Interrupting?” he asked, with what I suspected was a flicker of mischief in his eyes. “So this is where you’ve been hiding,” said the heavyset man as he leaned over and kissed Clara. “They said you weren’t here yet.”
“No, Rollo, just having me a smoke,” she said, altering her voice and affecting a swankier mode of speech, which I didn’t recognize. She motioned for him to shut the glass door. “Otherwise she kvetches.”
“Like you care,” he cracked.
“All I need now is to listen to Gretchen kvetching.”
“Why would Gretchen kvetch?” I inquired, less out of curiosity than to wedge into her lingo and keep the intimate halo of a while earlier.
“She hates it when I smoke and her baby is about. Tetchy Gretchy, born to kvetchy. .”
“Where is the wench’s baby?” I asked, trying to sound roguish, especially since I hadn’t seen any children about. Gretchen-bashing was the party line in Clara’s world, and I wanted to show I was perfectly capable of dishing out some of my own, if this is what it took to join.
“Her baby was the asthmatic teenager who probably was kind enough to greet you when you arrived,” said the portly man, putting me squarely in place.
“The little ferret,” Clara added for my benefit.
“The little what?” he asked.
“Nuh-thing.”
The portly man put his arm around her shoulder as a sign he forgave her.
“Are you not freezing, Clariushka?”
“No.”
She turned to me. “Why, you be freezing?”
Was she forcibly inducting me into their world, or was this her way of establishing the pretense of a pre-existing friendship between us?
She wasn’t really waiting for an answer. I didn’t volunteer one. Instead, and as if by common agreement, all three of us rested our hands against the balustrade and looked over the limitless southern expanse of Manhattan’s white-purple skyline. “Just imagine,” Clara finally said, “if all the electric streetlamps on Riverside Drive reverted to their original gaslight jets, we might be able to turn off this century and pick another, any other. The Drive would look so mesmerizing on gaslit nights you’d think we were in another age.”
Spoken by the here-and-now party person who wasn’t a party person but was a party person, but wasn’t here-and-now and longed to be elsewhere in another age.
“Or any other city,” I threw in.
“Any city but this one, Clara, anywhere but. I’m so fed up with New York—” started Rollo.
“At the rate you’re going, you should be. Perhaps you should try slowing down and lying low for a while. Shouldn’t he lie low?” She suddenly turned to me. “It might do wonders for you. Look at us,” she said, as if we were an us, “we’re both lying very très low, and we’re the picture of bliss, aren’t we?”
“Clara lying low? Tell us another. Are you always faking, Clara?”
“Not tonight. This is exactly who I want to be tonight. And maybe, after all, this is exactly where I want to be — on this terrace, on the Upper West Side, on this side of the Atlantic. From up here you can see the entire universe with its infinitely small and petty humanoids striving to mingle body parts. From where I’m standing now, Rollo, you can see everything, including New Jersey.”
The fat man sniggered under his breath.
“That, for your nymphormation,” he said, turning his bulging eyes on me, “was an unwarranted jab at Gretchen — née Teaneck.”
“And right across starboard, letties and gentimen,” Clara went on, holding an imaginary mike in her hand in the manner of tour guides, “stands the pride of Teaneck’s skyline, Temple B’nai B’ris, and next to it Our Mother of Tuballigation.”
“All barbs tonight, aren’t we?”
“Oh, get a grip, Rollo — you’re starting to sound like a Shukoff.”
“Nasty is not lying low.”
“I said lying low, not comatose. Lying low as in rethinking things, and holding back, and dipping your toes in for a change instead of hurtling head-on into every hunk we fancy.”
There was an instant of silence.
“Touché, Clara, touché. I strayed into a valley of scorpions and stepped on the erectile tail of the meanest queen mother of them all.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, Rollo. You know exactly what I meant. I’m all bite, no venom — Winter,” she broke in, taking her last puff. “Don’t you just love winter and snow?”
It was not clear whether she was addressing me or him, or both, or neither, because there was something so dreamy and distant in the way she suddenly interrupted, and wanted us to know she was interrupting, that she might as well have been speaking to Manhattan or to winter or to night itself or to the half-emptied glass of Bloody Mary standing on the ledge before her, which my father’s ghost had barely sipped from before withdrawing from the terrace. I wanted to think that she was speaking only to me, or to that part of me that remained as ductile as the snow crested on the balustrade and into which she had let her fingers sink.
Looking out and following the beam again, I couldn’t help myself. “I saw eternity the other night,” I finally said.
“I saw eternity the other night?”
Silence.
“Henry Vaughan,” I said, almost cringing with apology.
She seemed to search her mind awhile.
“Never heard of him.”
“Very few have,” I said.
And then I heard her say words that seemed to come back to me from at least a decade earlier:
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright. .
“Very few have?” She echoed my words with a look of mock-jubilation.
“Apparently more people than I thought,” I replied, trying to show that I took the lesson well, because I couldn’t have been happier.
“Courtesy of a Swiss lycée run by Madame Dalmedigo.” The putdown and the caress. And before I had time to say anything: “Oh, look!” And she pointed at the full moon. “Emfordimoon, stretfordamoon, good night moon, what you be doing there moon, here today, gaunt tomorrow, my moon, my everybody’s moon, good night moon, good night ladies, good night mooney-mooney.”
“El gibberish,” commented Rollo.
“El gibberish, yourselfish. Emfordimoon, misosouporsalad, moogoogaipan, merrichrima, merrichrima, I swoon, I swoon, by delightofda-moon.”