“I’m here because Fred Pasternak had the invitation messengered to me and told me to come. I suspect he’s stood me up. I didn’t even know of this party until late this afternoon.” In my efforts to exonerate myself and leave no doubt about my credentials, I began to spill more details than necessary, precisely the way liars do when a simple lie would have done well enough. I was also going to add that I hadn’t even wanted to go to a party tonight — and besides, I wasn’t even hungry, and as for their gimp-legged, flat-footed, flossy Eurotartsie fly-by-night crowd gathered round two hosts ignominiously named Hansel and Gretel, they did nothing for me either — so there!
“You are a friend of Pooh Pasternak’s?” So they knew his old nickname as well. “Friends of Pooh’s are always welcome here.” Handshake, arm around my shoulder, the whole chummy locker-room routine. “He was a good friend of my father’s,” I corrected. “Sort of looks after things.”
“The Swiss connection,” joked Hans, making it all sound like a pact sworn in gymnasium English by abandoned boys in a postwar spy novel.
A waiter finally came round with a bottle of white wine and proceeded to uncork it. As he was just about to pour Clara her wine, he turned to me and asked softly, “Beer for you?” I recognized the waiter immediately. No, I’d have wine this time.
When he was gone, I told Hans that his waiter was convinced he had saved my life. How so? he asked. Must have thought I was planning to jump from the nth floor.
I’d made the whole thing up. A good story, I thought, though I couldn’t explain why I’d made it up. Everyone laughed. “You’re not serious, are you?” asked Clara.
I sniggered. Obviously more than one man had threatened to die for her.
“To Pooh,” said Hans. “To Pooh and to all the feisty shysters on this planet, may their tribe increase.” We clinked glasses. “Once more, and once again,” he toasted. “And many more times again,” echoed Clara — obviously, a familiar toast in their world.
To Pooh, who, but for a whim, I thought, might never have forwarded this invitation to me and never made possible an evening that had cast such a spell on my life.
I am Clara, I’ll make you new. I am Clara, I’ll show you things. I am Clara, I can take you places.
I watched one of the cooks behind Hans open what looked like large cans of caviar. He seemed impatient, with the cans, with the opener, with caviar, with kitchens as he scooped out dollop after dollop. His attitude made me think of Clara. She’ll scoop you out of yourself, give you a new look, a new heart, new everything. But to do this, she’ll need to cut into you with one of those can openers that date back to before the rotary model was invented — first a sharp incision, after which comes the tricky, patient, and persistent bloodletting work of prying and maneuvering the pointed shark-finned steel blade up, down, up, down, till it’s worked its way around you and taken you out of yourself.
Will this hurt?
Not at all. That part everyone loves. What hurts is when you’re out and have lost the hand that sprung you from yourself. Then the sardine key, with the can lid all curled around it like a molted old skin, sticks to your heart like a dagger in a murder victim.
I knew that it took more than a party to alter the course of a lifetime. Yet, without being too sure, and perhaps without wanting to be too sure for fear of being proven wrong, without even taking meticulous mental notes for later consumption, I knew I’d forget none of it, from the bus ride, the shoes, the rush past the greenhouse into the kitchen, where Hans pointed first at her, then at me, and then at her again, my made-up story of the suicide attempt, the threat of spending an evening in jail, down to Clara’s rushing to the police station to bounce me out on the very night of Christmas, and the walk into the freezing cold outside the precinct station as she’d ask, Did the handcuffs hurt, did they? Here, let me rub your wrists, let me kiss your wrists, your wrists, your poor, sweet, wretched, God-given hurting wrists.
These I would take with me as I would take the moment when Hans, who wished to get away from his own party, asked Georges if he could be bien gentil to put together three platters and bring them upstairs dans la serre. For then I knew we were going to retreat to the greenhouse and I’d be closer yet than I’d ever been to Clara, the beam, the stars.
“And yet,” said Hans, standing up, waiting to let us out of the kitchen first, “I could have sworn you two’ve known each other a long time.”
“Hardly,” said Clara.
It took me a moment to realize that neither she nor I believed we’d just met a few hours earlier.
•
Hans turned on the lights in the greenhouse. Awaiting us in what looked like an enclosed half veranda, half greenhouse was a small round table with three dishes whose food was arranged in intricate arabesques. Nearby was a bucket filled with ice in which someone had deposited a bottle with a white cloth strapped around its neck. It gave me no small thrill to think it must be one of the bottles I had brought and that someone had obviously held off serving it until now. Things happened magically here. Inside the napkin that I unrolled was a silver fork, a silver knife, and a spoon bearing initials carved in an outdated florid style. Whose? I whispered to Clara. His grandparents’. Escaped the Nazis. “Escaped Jews, like mine,” she said. Like mine too, I was going to add, especially after unrolling the napkin and thinking back to my parents’ own parties this time of year when everyone had tasted too much wine and Mother said it was time to have supper. The unremembered souls whose florid initials were inscribed on our silverware had never even crossed the Atlantic, much less heard of 106th Street or Straus Park, or of those generations down who’d inherit their spoons one day.
Around us were three small tables that were already laid out but on which nothing had been served yet. What a wonderful spot to have breakfast in every morning. The herbarium stood to my left: spices, lavender, rosemary, shades of Provence all around.
I stared at the white cloth, which had a starched sheen and which seemed to have been washed, fluffed, pressed, and folded by devoted hands.
“So how did you two meet, again?”
“In the living room.”
“No,” she said, before placing her elbow once again on my shoulder, “in the elevator.”
“In the elevator?”
And then I remembered. Of course. I had indeed noticed someone in the elevator. I remembered the doorman who showed me to the elevator and, sticking his large uniformed arm behind the sliding door, had pressed the button for me, making me feel at once honored and inept before a woman wearing a dark blue raincoat who was busily stamping the snow off her boots. I’d caught myself hoping she’d be one of the guests, but then stopped wishing it when she’d stepped out floors before. I was so thoroughly persuaded I would never see her again that I failed to comprehend how the woman sitting before me now in the greenhouse was the exact same one whose eyes, now that it was all coming back to me, had stared me down in the elevator with a gaze that hissed something between “Don’t even think of it!” and “So, we’re not doing chitchat either, right?” Did Clara introduce herself at the party because she felt we’d already broken the ice in the elevator? Or did good things happen to me precisely because I’d given up on them? Or is there design in our stars provided we’re blind to it, or, as in the case of oracles, provided it speaks with a coiled tongue?
Had we spoken in the elevator? I asked.