This is what I am Clara meant to me. It created the illusion of intimacy, of a friendship briefly interrupted and urgently resumed, as though we’d met before, or had crossed each other’s path but kept missing each other and were being reintroduced at all costs now, so that in extending her hand to me, she was doing something we should have done much sooner, seeing we had grown up together and lost touch, or been through so much, perhaps been lovers a lifetime ago, until something as trivial and shameful as death had come between us and which, this time, she wasn’t about to let happen.
I am Clara meant I already know you — this is no ordinary business — and if you think fate doesn’t have a hand in this, think twice. We could, if you wish, stick to ordinary cocktail pleasantries and pretend this is all in your head, or we can drop everything, pay attention to no one, and, like children building a tiny tent in the middle of a crowded living room on Christmas Eve, enter a world beaming with laughter and premonition, where everything is without peril, where there’s no place for shame, doubt, or fear, and where all is said in jest and in whimsy, because the things that are most solemn often come under the guise of mischief and merrymaking.
•
I held her hand a touch longer than is usual, to say I had gotten the message, but let it go sooner than warranted, fearing I’d invented the message.
That was my contribution, my signature to the evening, my twisted reading of a plain handshake. If she knew how to read me, she’d see through this affectation of nonchalance and catch the other, deeper nonchalance, which I am reluctant to dispel especially in the presence of someone who, with three words and barely a glance, could easily hold the key to all my hideaways.
It did not occur to me that people who bolt into your life could as easily bolt out of it when they’re done, that someone who breaks into a concert hall seconds before the music starts may all of a sudden stand up and disturb everyone all over again on realizing she is sitting in the wrong row and doesn’t care to wait until the intermission.
I looked at her. I looked at her face. I knew that face. “You look familiar,” I was going to say.
“You look lost,” she said.
“Does it show?” I answered. “Don’t most people look lost at parties?”
“Some more than others. Not him.” She pointed at a middle-aged gentleman talking with a woman. He was leaning against what must have been a false, chamfered pillar with a Corinthian-style topstone, holding a clear drink in his hand, almost slouching against the pillar as though he had all the time in the world. “Doesn’t look lost at all. Neither does she.”
I am Clara. I see through people.
Mr. and Mrs. Shukoff, she baptized them; Mr. and Mrs. Shukoff couldn’t wait to rip their clothes off, he said with a wink as he gulped down his drink, give me a second and I’m ready for blastoff.
Shukoff: people you couldn’t shake off but wished you could, she explained. We laughed.
Then, in a manner that couldn’t have been less discreet, Clara indicated a sixty-something woman who was wearing a long red dress with black patent-leather pumps. “Santa Claus’s grandmother. Just look at that,” she said, pointing to a wide, gold-buckled, patent-leather belt strapping Grandma’s tummy. She wore what must have been a sparkling blond wig whose sides, matted and hardened like two baby boar horns, curled around her ears. From her earlobes dangled two sliced large pearls mounted on tiny gold plates — miniature UFOs without the little green men, she said. Clara instantly baptized her Muffy Mitford. Then proceeded to demolish Muffy Mitford, enlisting me in the process, as though she never doubted I would join in the character assassination.
Muffy spoke with a warble in her voice. Muffy wore light blue shaggy froufrou slippers at home, I said. Muffy wore a housedress underneath, always a housedress underneath, she said. Muffy had an unshorn poodle named Suleiman. And a husband nicknamed Chip. And her son — what else — Pip. And her daughter, Mimi. No, Buffy, rhymes with Muffy. Muffy Beaumont. Née Montebello. No, Belmont. Let’s face it, Schoenberg, said Clara. Muffy had an English housemaid. From Shropshire. No, Nottingham. No, East Anglia. East Coker. Little Gidding, I said. Burnt Norton, she corrected, and, on second thought, from the Islands. Majorca, she said. With a name like Monserrat, I said. “No, no. Dolores Luz Berta Fatima Consuelo Jacinta Fabiola Inez Esmeralda”—one of those names that never end, because their magic lies in their lilt and cadence as they soar and surge and finally come cascading on a surname as common as the sand on the beaches of Far Rockaway: Rodriguez — which sent us roaring as we saw Muffy laugh and agitate her hips to the rhythm of the singer with the throaty voice, jiggling the limp end of her belt like a fertility symbol dangling from her midriff, her martini glass all empty — and she said with a wink as she gulped down her drink, pour me another and watch me turn pink.
“You’re a friend of Hans’s, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Why — how can you tell?”
“You’re not singing. I’m not singing.” Then, seeing I hadn’t quite seized her explanation, she added, “Friends of Hans don’t sing. Only Gretchen’s friends sing.” She wiped her lips with a napkin, as though to stifle the last flutters of a private joke she wasn’t about to share but whose ripples you weren’t meant to miss. “Simple,” she said, pointing not so discreetly to those gathered around the piano, where a crowd was singing away exuberantly around the man with the throaty voice.
“Gretchen must be the more musical of the two, then,” I added non-committally, just to say something, anything, even if it limped its way to unavoidable silence. Clara’s reply took the wind out of my words. “Gretchen, musical? Gretchen wouldn’t know music if it farted in her ears. Just look at her, nailed to the back of the door, greeting all her guests because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself.” I suddenly remembered the lame handshake, the perfunctory greeting, the kiss on the cheek that grazes your ear so as not to smear her makeup.
The words startled me, but I let them pass, not knowing how to answer or counter them. “Just look at their faces, though,” she threw in, pointing at the singers. I looked at their faces. “Would you sing simply because it’s a Christmas party and everyone’s yuling about like overgrown goldfish sucking on eggnog?”
I said nothing.
“Seriously,” she added — so this wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Just look at all these Euro Shukoffs. Don’t they all look like people who always sing at Christmas parties?”
I am Clara. I get nasty.
“But I sing — sometimes,” I threw in disingenuously, trying to sound no less bland or naive than those who thought it was the most natural thing in the world to sing at parties. Perhaps I wanted to see how she’d take back her hostility, now that she had inadvertently caught me in its fire. Or perhaps I was just teasing her and didn’t want her to know how much her cynical assessment of sing-along fellowship echoed my own.
“But I sing,” she said, arching an eyebrow as though I’d said something complex and difficult. She nodded somewhat as she pondered the deeper meaning of my words, and still seemed to be weighing them, when it suddenly hit me: she wasn’t talking about herself; she was mimicking what I had just said to her—But I sing—and was throwing it back at me with the taunting lilt of derision, like a crumpled gift being returned in its now dented box.