“Need, as we’re going to need to take our temperature this evening, and maybe need to watch our step or need to watch our diet, amigo? Don’t say anything. Say nothing, Rollo.” There was something suddenly indignant in her voice. What she meant, I could sense, was Say nothing you’ll regret. It was neither a rebuke nor a warning. It came like a slap in his face.
“Clara, if you don’t stop joking this minute, I promise I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Start now.”
I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wished to excuse myself and leave the two to wrangle by themselves. But I didn’t want to disappear from this world, which, only moments ago, had opened its doors to me.
“It’s gorgons like you make men like me queer.”
With that he didn’t wait for her to say another word and yanked open the glass door and let it slam shut behind him.
“I’m sorry, truly sorry.” I didn’t know whether I was apologizing for her or for having witnessed their row.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said blandly, as she stubbed the cigarette against the stone balustrade and looked down onto the Drive. “Another day in the trenches. Actually it was good you were here. We would have argued, and I would have said things I’d regret saying. I already regret things as it is.”
Was she sorry for him, for Inky, for herself?
No answer.
“It’s getting cold.”
I opened the French window, softly, so as not to interrupt the caroling in the downstairs living room. I heard her mutter, “Inky shouldn’t have come. He just shouldn’t have come tonight.” I extended a half-doleful, friendly smile meant to suggest something as flat-footed as You watch, things will work themselves out.
She turned abruptly: “Are you with someone tonight?”
“No. I came alone.”
I didn’t ask the same of her. I didn’t want to know. Or perhaps I didn’t want to seem eager to know.
“And you?” I found myself asking.
“No one — someone, but really no one.” She burst out laughing. At herself, at the question, at the double and triple entendres, at all sorts of intended and unintended ambiguities. She pointed to someone chatting with someone who looked like Beryl.
“Yes?” I asked.
“That’s Tito, the Tito we were talking about.”
“And?”
“Where there’s a Tito there’s bound to be an Orla.”
I didn’t see an Orla nearby.
“See the guy next to him?”
I nodded.
“He’s the one I was — in limbo with,” she said.
Another moment of silence. I was going to ask if all the men in her life ended up in limbo. Why do you ask? But she’d ask because she would already know why I was asking.
“Some of us may end up going to the Midnight Mass at St. John’s for a short while. Want to come?” I made a slight face. “We’ll light candles together, it’ll be fun.”
•
She did not wait for an answer and, as abruptly as she’d tossed out the idea — which was how she did everything, it seemed — said she’d be right back and had already stepped inside. “Wait for me, okay?” She never doubted that I wouldn’t.
But this time I was sure I had lost her. She would run into Inky and Tito and Orla and Hans and, in a second, slip right back into their little world, from which she had emerged like an apparition from behind a Christmas tree.
Alone on the terrace, I was revisited by the thoughts that had crossed my mind earlier in the evening, when I’d wandered from room to room upstairs, debating whether to stay, not stay, leave, or stay awhile longer, trying to recapture now what exactly I’d felt and what I’d been doing just seconds before she’d turned to me and told me her name. I’d been thinking of the framed Athanasius Kircher prints lining the long corridor outside one of the studies. These were not imitation prints but must have been removed from priceless bound volumes. It was then, as I was brooding over the crime of framing these pictures and then letting them hang outside the bathroom of a rich man’s home, that out had come the hand.
Through the glass doorway now, I saw a clutter of Christmas presents heaped majestically next to a huge tree. A group of older teenagers, dressed for another party that hadn’t even started and wouldn’t start for many hours yet, had gathered around the tree and were shaking some of the packages close to their ears in a guessing contest of what was inside each. I was seized by panic. I should have handed my Champagne bottles to someone who’d know what to do with them. I remembered finding no one to relieve me of them and was forced to set the bottles down as furtively and as timorously, next to the swinging kitchen doors, as if they were twin orphans being deposited outside a rich man’s doorstep before the guilty mother skulks away into the anonymous night. I had, of course, omitted to include a card. What had become of my bottles purchased on the fly before boarding the M 5 bus? One of the waiters had surely found the bottles by the door and put them in the refrigerator, where they’d make friends with other orphans of their kind.
I felt like one of those awkward guests at my parents’ house during Christmas week, when we had our annual wine fest. MGH was my father’s code word for Make guests happy. My mother’s was ROP, Rave over presents. And MTH was his reminder to me: Marry the heiress, MTFH.
To clear my thoughts, I paced about the terrace, trying to imagine how the place might look in the summer, picturing lightly dressed people flocking about with Champagne glasses, all dying to catch what they already knew would be one of the most spectacular sunsets in the world, watching the skyline change from shimmering light blue to shades of summer pink and tangerine-gray. I wondered what shoes Clara wore in the summer when she came out onto the veranda and stood there with the others, smoking secret agents, arguing with Pablo, Rollo, and Hans, tweaking each to his face or behind his back, it didn’t matter which, so long as she got to spit out something mean and nasty, which she’d take back in no time. Had she said anything kind about anyone tonight? Or was it all venom and abrasion on the outside, and a fierce, serrated, scalding brand of something so hardened and heartless that it could tear its way through every clump of human emotion and skewer the needy, helpless child in every grown-up man because its name, spelled backward and twisted inside out, might still be love — angry, arid, coarse, chafing love that it was.
I tried to think of this very apartment on New Year’s Eve. Only the happy few. At midnight they’d come out on the terrace, watch the fireworks, pop Champagne bottles before retreating inside by the fireplace, and chat about love in the manner of old banquets. My father would have liked Clara. She’d have helped with the bottles on the balcony, helped with the party, added life to his tired couplets, snickered when the old classicist threw in his yearly hint about Xanthippe pussy-whipping her husband, Socrates, into drinking the poisoned brew, which he gladly downed, because one more day, one more year like this without love and none to give. . With Clara, his yearly sermon to me on the balcony as we tended to the wine wouldn’t have been laced with so much distemper. I want children, not projects. Seeing Clara, he would have asked me to hurry. She’d walk in, say, I am Clara, and pronto, ravished. The girl from Bellagio, he’d have called her. Together, one night, he and I had stood before the chilled bottles staring into a neighbor’s crowded windows across the tower. “Theirs is the real party, ours is make-believe,” he said. “They probably think theirs is makeshift and ours real,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “Then it’s worse than I thought,” he said. “We are never in the moment, life is always elsewhere, and there is always something that steals eternity away. Whatever we seal in one chamber seeps into another, like an old heart with leaky valves.”