“And Merry Christmas to you too, New York,” I threw in.
“Actually,” she broke in, almost as though wanting to change the subject once again, “if anything, tonight reminds me of St. Petersburg.”
What had happened to the This is exactly where I want to be tonight party girl?
Had our minds been crisscrossing while traveling on parallel lanes all evening long? Or would anyone looking out of our terrace instantly think of St. Petersburg?
“And this is a white night — or almost?” I asked.
We spoke about the longest night of the year, and about the shortest, and how so many things, even when they’re turned inside out and retwined like a Möbius strip, always come out the same. We spoke about the man in Dostoevsky who meets a woman by an embankment and who for four white nights falls madly in love with her.
“A white night overlooking New Jersey? I don’t think so!” said Clara.
“A white night in winter? I don’t think so either!” retorted Rollo.
It made me laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” he asked, obviously annoyed by me.
“Dostoevsky in Fort Lee!” I replied, as though the matter needed no explanation.
“Why, is Dostoevsky on West 106th Street any better?” retorted Rollo.
“Can’t take a joke, can you, Rollo? But here’s the million-dollar question,” Clara continued. “Is it better to step out onto a terrace on Riverside Drive and look out onto New Jersey, or to be in New Jersey and make out the enchanted world of Upper West Side Jews celebrating Christmas?”
“Fungible Jews.”
“Runcible Jews.”
“Decibel Jews,” added Rollo.
“Amphibalent Jews,” she said.
I thought about her question, and all I could think of was a gaping New Jersey staring out at the Manhattan skyline asking the same question in reverse. Then I thought of Dostoevsky’s stranded lovers straining ever so wistfully to catch a glimpse of both Clara and me as we longed to alight on their gaslit Nevsky Prospekt. I didn’t know the answer to her question, would never know. All I said was that if those in Manhattan didn’t get to see Riverside Drive, those across the Hudson who did see the Drive wouldn’t get to be on it. The flip side of the flip side is no longer the flip side. Or is it? Haven’t we been speaking the same tongue, you and I? “It’s the same with love,” I threw in, not sure where exactly the parallel was headed, except that I felt emboldened to draw it. “One could dream of a relationship and one could be in one, but one can’t be the dreamer and the lover at the same time. Or can one, Clara?” She mused a moment as if she had grasped, if not the meaning of the analogy, at least its nudging, crafty drift.
“That’s a Door number three question, and I’m not doing those tonight.”
“Figures,” Rollo jabbed.
“Phooey,” she snapped back.
“You must be Rollo,” I finally interjected, trying to adopt the man-toman camaraderie of a Stanley high-fiving Livingstone.
She remembered she hadn’t introduced us. He produced the beefy palm of a successful financier and, as he added, part-time cellist whose private life is an open closet.
“Phooey.” She sputtered one last whimpered salvo.
“Gorgon!” he shot back.
Not a Gorgon, I thought, but the witch Circe, who turned men into the domesticated pets they unavoidably become.
“Gorg,” he retorted under his breath, making an imitation dog bite, both of them enjoying these cat-and-mouse volleys.
Introductions were clearly not Clara’s forte. Rather, she skirted them by making it seem it was your fault you hadn’t shaken hands earlier. We should at least have had the courtesy to guess who the other was.
“A friend of Hans’s,” she explained. “Which reminds me: have you seen Hans?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Where’s Orla?”
“I’ve hardly seen anyone. I saw Beryl, she was with Inky in the blue room.”
“Inky is here?” interrupted Clara.
“I was just talking with him.”
“Well, I’m not.”
He looked at her as though he hadn’t understood. “What are you saying?”
Clara’s face assumed a look of impish sorrow designed to look purposely forged.
“Inky’s gone.” She turned away, studied the new cigarette she was about to light, and seemed to want to resume speaking of Dostoevsky’s “White Nights,” now that the news about Inky was settled. But Rollo was not to be easily distracted.
“I tell you he’s gone. Gone. As in gone, finito. As in out of the picture.”
The fat man looked totally flummoxed.
“Inky’s left me. Tu get it?”
“Je get it.”
“I’m just surprised he’s even here tonight, that’s all,” she said.
Rollo made an exasperated gesture with his arms.
“You two are just too much — too much,” he added.
“Actually, we were never much of anything. It was limbo and twilight from the get-go. Except that Rollo here, and everyone else we know, didn’t want to see it.” Again, unclear whether she was talking to me, New York, or herself.
“Did he know you were — in limbo and twilight, as you call it?”
There were bristles in his last words. I could also tell she was mulling something sharp.
“I was never — in limbo, Rollo.” It had now become a source of humor to mimic a dramatic pause before saying in limbo. “He was — in limbo. He was the great tundra of my life, if you care to know. It’s finished.”
“Poor, poor Inky. He should never have. First of all—”
“Furstible!”
“First of all you get him to throw everything he’s ever—”
“Furstible!”
“Clara, you’re worse than a Gorgon! First and foremost—”
“Furstible, runcible, fungible!”
Clara lifted both hands in a gesture signifying, I surrender and will say no more.
“It’s the cruelest thing I’ve heard all year.”
“What do you care. It frees him up for you. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”
I didn’t know how long this was going to go on, but it was getting uglier by the second.
“Will someone please tell me who’s Inky?” I finally barged in, like a child trying to break up a fight between his parents.
I didn’t mean to interrupt only. This was also a lame attempt to find out more about this beguiling world of theirs, where you come out on a terrace with a stranger and then, like a magician pulling an endless kerchief from someone’s else’s pocket, turn out to have a garland of numberless friends called Hans and Gretchen and Inky and Tito and Rollo and Beryl and Pablo and Mankiewicz and Orla and, on everyone’s lips, Clariushka, Clariushka, while you stood there and thought of Bellagio and Byzantium, of white nights, and of the cold waterways of St. Petersburg, which made the limitless black-and-white skyline of the Upper West Side look like a child’s fairy-tale book, where all you have to do is say the word and you’re in.
“Inky is from the trenches,” she explained, using our lingo, which flattered me and made me think I suddenly ranked higher than Rollo. Then she turned to him. “He did the right thing, you know. I can’t say I blame him. Though I did warn him.”
“Damn your warnings. The poor kid is in pieces. I know him. This is so hurtful.”
“Oh, sulky-pouty you, and sulky-pouty him — and it’s all so very hurtful.”
She did something that looked like a shrug, to make fun of his clumsy use of the word. “Clara, Clara—” he began, as though uncertain whether to plead and reason with her or curse her out, “you’re going to need to rethink. .”