I’d seen his face, tilted slightly sideways as she prepared to kiss him more savagely the second time, every part of his body transformed into one taut sinew. Minutes later she was walking up to me and asking me to sneak upstairs with her.
“He’s probably on his way to his parents’ on a peak in Darien. I told him not to drive in the snow. He said he didn’t care. And frankly—”
We ascended a few more steps.
“I am so tired of him. He’s the healthiest man in the world, and I’m the worst thing for him. There are days when, I swear, all I want is to seize the pumice stone in my bathroom and bash my face in with it, because it reminds me of the face he looks at each day and has no clue what’s inside it, no clue, no clue. He made me stop being who I am; worse yet, I stopped knowing who I was.”
I must have given her a startled and incredulous stare.
“Mean and nasty?”
I shook my head. “I even blame him for failing to make me love him — as if it’s his fault, not mine. Because I tried so hard to love him. And all this time all I wanted was love, not someone else, not another person, not even another person’s love. Maybe I don’t know what others are for either. Maybe all I want is romance. Served chilled. Maybe that’ll do just fine.”
She caught herself.
“Take that into the pit of pandangst.” The party girl smiled uneasily.
I stood behind her on the staircase. It frightened me how similar we were. Just the illusion of having so much in common was enough both to scare me and to give me hope.
“Tell me more.”
“There’s nothing more to tell. There was a time when the lights had gone out of my life and I thought he was the light. Then I realized he wasn’t the light but the hand that turned the darkness off. Then one day I saw there was no light left — not in him, not in me. Then I blamed him. Then me. Now I just like the dark.”
“Hence the lying low.”
“Hence the lying low.”
She stopped looking at me.
“This is my hell,” she added. “It’s not me Inky wants. He wants someone like me. But not me. I’m totally wrong for him, for me too, if you have to know. It’s never really me men want, just someone like me.” A tiny pause. “And I’m wise to it.” It sounded no different than A word to the wise, my friend.
This is my hell. What words for a party girl. Someone like me but not me—where did one learn to say such things or come up with such insights? Experience? Long, long hours alone? Could experience and solitude go together? Was the party girl a recluse posturing as a party girl who was really a recluse — forever rectus and inversus like a fugue from hell?
I am Clara. Same difference.
She opened the door. The balcony overlooked the same view of the Hudson as the terrace two floors below it, except from much higher up. She indicated a narrow passage past the greenhouse. The view was indeed breathtaking, spectral.
“No one knows this, but he’d die for me, if I asked him to.”
What a thing to say.
“And have you asked him?”
“No, but he offers to every day.”
“Would you die for him?”
“Would I die for him?” She was repeating my question, probably to give herself time to think and come up with a plausible answer.
“I don’t even know what the question means — so I suppose not. I used to love the taste of toothpaste and beer on his breath. It turns my stomach now. I used to love the torn elbows on his cashmere sweater. Now I wouldn’t touch it. I don’t like myself very much either.”
I listened, waited for more, but she had stopped speaking.
“Just look at the Hudson,” I said as we stood on the spot staring silently at the blocks of ice.
She had spoken with unusual gravity. I vowed to remember her like this. The greenhouse was totally unlit, and for a spellbound moment as I stood on what seemed the top of the world I wanted to tell her to stand with me and watch our silver-gray universe inch its way through space. I was even tempted to say, “Just stay with me awhile here.” I wanted her to help me search for the beam and, having found it, tell me whether she thought it was like an arm transcending time, reaching out into the future to fade into the moonlit clouds, or whether it was one of those rare instances when heaven touches earth and comes down to us to assume our image and speak our language and give us this ration of joy that stands between us and the dark. She too must have been struck by the sight of the skyline, for she stopped of her own accord, looked out toward the southern half of Manhattan, and what finally made me want to hold her with both my hands under her shirt and kiss her on the mouth was the haste with which she grabbed my hand to lead me away, uttering an intentionally perfunctory “Yes, we know, we know, ‘I saw Eternity the other night.’ ”
•
In the kitchen a man wearing a dark burgundy velvet jacket was speaking on his cell phone and looking very concerned. When he saw Clara, he grimaced a silent greeting, and seconds later clicked off the phone without saying goodbye, cursing his lawyer for our benefit. He slipped the phone back into the inside pocket of his blazer and turned to the chef. “Georges, trois verres de vin, s’il vous plaît.”
“Some party!” he said, moving to the breakfast table. “No, sit with me, I need to catch my breath. Parties like this are so out of another era!”
He liked parties. But so gaudy, and all these Germans and Frenchmen, he added, you’d think this was the Tower of Babel. “Thank God we have us. And the music.”
I gathered that music was what bound this inner circle of friends.
All three of us sat down, while several cooks and numberless waiters fretted behind us. In the corner, what could only have been two blond, burly, retired policemen types turned personal drivers and/or bodyguards were eating a last-ditch, haute cuisine rendition of baked lasagna.
Hans looked at us, then pointed a discrete forefinger at Clara, then to me, then back to Clara, as if to ask, “Are you two together?”
She smiled the limpid, self-possessed smile of a very young lawyer who is about to enter a boardroom and is suddenly told by her secretary that her mother is on the phone. That smile — it took me a few seconds — was the equivalent of a blush. She bit her lip as if to say, “I’ll get even with you for this, just you give me a chance.” And then I saw her do it. “Are you okay, Hans?”
“I’m okay,” he muttered, then on second thought, “No, I’m really not okay.”
“The Kvetch?”
“No, not the Kvetch. Just business, business. Sometimes I tell myself I should have remained an accountant in the music business, a simple, stupid accountant. There are people out there who want me ruined. And the way things are going, they may just succeed.”
Then, as though to shake off a languorous cloud of self-pity—“I am Hans,” he said, extending his hand to me. He spoke slowly, as if every word was followed by a period.
It suddenly must have hit Clara that I did not know Hans, or Hans me. This time she’d make the official introductions, though not without saying that she felt like a perfect idiot, thinking I was Hans’s friend when all along I’d been Gretchen’s.
“But I don’t know Gretchen,” I said, trying to show that it had never been my intention to deceive anyone, which is why this was as good a time as any to come clean.
“But then who—?” Clara did not know how to phrase the question, so she turned to Hans for help.
I imagined that within seconds the two beefy ex-policemen eating lasagna would pounce on me, twist my arms, pin me to the ground, handcuff me to the kitchen table, and hold me there till their bejowled pals from the Twenty-fourth Precinct came round.