After the movies, I’d take a bus, or walk home, or take a cab farther downtown, or stop somewhere along the way, if for no other reason than to see faces before calling it a night.
To see faces as opposed to not seeing any at all. Faces. People. Midnight people, otherpeoples who’ll brave a storm to buy cigarettes, walk a dog, grab a bite, get the paper, or, like me, see faces.
I began to think of places I’d wander to after seeing the film. A bar-and-grill. Or Thai Soup.
I had good memories of Thai Soup.
Trench soup she’d have called it, with beef pandangst. How I missed her way of taking something, then turning it upon itself, and then turning it back to how it was before, knowing it would never be the same afterward.
Then I saw her.
I wanted to sound surprised — but not totally thrown off — as if I’d expected something of the sort but had let the matter slip and never given it another thought.
Perhaps I would find a way to tweak the conditions of my initial wish now that it had been granted and no longer feel bound to tell her how I’d been thinking of her all day, all day.
“Clara?” I asked, exaggerating my surprise, as people do when they rush to greet you first, for fear of being caught trying to avoid you.
“There you are. Finally!” she shouted. “I tried calling you a million times, but you’re never ever home”—it almost sounded like a lover’s reproach—“I thought you had changed your mind and weren’t going to come.”
To show she wasn’t exaggerating, she displayed two tickets clasped tightly in between flushed knuckles. “I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting. And. It. Is. Freezing,” she said, as if all this was my fault. “Here, feel.” She brought her palm to my cheek to prove how cold. “I’ve called you so many times I know your number by heart. Here—” She turned her cell phone toward me and began to scroll down row after row after row of countless friends. It took a few moments to recognize the numerals on the colored screen. Under the phone number I saw something else that looked uncannily familiar: my name — last name first, first name last. Was I officially on her A-list? “Why don’t you answer your télyfön?” I didn’t know why I didn’t answer my télyfön.
In her place I would never have entered someone’s name that way. Putting a totally new name on my permanent list would have nipped every hint of uncertainty, chilled the flustered hesitation with which we palpate a stranger’s name before admitting it into the ledger of our lives; I would have placed it in abeyance, in limbo — until it had “proven” itself. The inadvertent misspelling on a paper napkin, the name hastily plunked down in the cold, the intentional absence of a surname to show we’re not so sure we’ll call — all these are not just markers of inner diffidence and hesitation along the twisted path to others, they are also loopholes in every exaltation, the shallow wetlands we leave behind for speedy backtracking. I would never have listed her under Brunschvicg. Nor would I have entered her name or her number in my cell phone’s memory. I’d have made every effort to unremember her number if I caught myself already knowing it by heart.
It hit me that she said exactly what I’d have said under the circumstances. But I would have said it for exactly the opposite reason. I would have been overly demonstrative, as she was, to show how lightly I took these matters. Was hers the voice of diffidence cloaking itself behind hyperbolic complaints about the weather, about my phone, about me — or was she making no secret of something most people are reluctant to reveal too soon? Was it too soon?
Was she thinking like me?
Or was she telling a man what he’d give anything to hear a woman say to him on their first night out?
Was this our first night out?
I wondered if she’d rehearsed saying any of it.
I would have.
Then I thought: Better yet if she’d rehearsed it. It meant she’d cared to rehearse it.
Then I remembered I had never given her my number. Nor was my number listed.
She must have read what was going on in my mind. “You’ll never guess who gave me your télyfön.”
“Who?”
“I told you, you’ll never guess. I brought us this,” she said, and produced a white paper bag containing food and things to drink.
“I’m — overwhelmed.”
Pause.
“He’s overwhelmed.” She puckered her lips and looked away, as though to signal stifled exasperation at some strange mannerism in my speech. I instantly recognized the mock chiding of last night’s banter on the veranda. I missed it, welcomed it back, had been away from it too long. “A million times,” she repeated, seemingly speaking to herself.
There was, in her word, both the open-faced boldness of those who know how to make difficult admissions to people they scarcely know, and the specter of irony, which comes to their rescue when they find the difficult admission not difficult at all.
Anyone else would have read the most reassuring signals in this.
I couldn’t have been more pleased to find her standing there, waiting for me, with two tickets in hand and snacks to boot, in an attitude suggesting that she might have planned this all the way back to the moment in church when I’d brought up the Eric Rohmer festival. I had an image of her waking up in the morning and, instead of thinking of Inky, already making plans to meet me in the evening. First she would have tried to obtain my number. Then, having found it, she would have called. Late morning. Early afternoon. Eventually she would have had to leave a message. But no one had left a message.
“People on ice check their voice mail, I guess,” she said, remembering my words.
“And those lying low?”
“People lying low still make an effort to call. I stopped calling until a few minutes ago.”
“How did you know I was going to be here?”
What I meant to ask was how did she know I was going to come alone tonight. “What if I hadn’t come?”
“I would have gone in. Besides,” she added, as though the thought had never occurred to her before, “we had a date.”
Did she know I knew we didn’t have a date, and that if I suddenly pretended to remember that we had one it was less to let her save face than to put off deciding what sort of attitude to strike myself?
Or was this simply her way of spelling out my unspoken reason for bringing up the Rohmer festival last night? Had we perhaps firmed up something that remained undefined in my mind simply because I couldn’t bring myself to believe it could have been so easily arranged?
“Clara, I’m so glad you’re here.”
“You’re glad! Imagine how stupid I’d feel holding these two tickets in the cold. Do I go in, do I keep waiting, what if he doesn’t show up, do I give away the tickets, keep one, give the other to some man who’s going to think he’s entitled to speak to me through both films if I last that long? I just hope they’re good films,” she added, as if she hadn’t quite believed they might be until she’d seen the line and managed to get two tickets minutes before the show sold out. Or was this her way of paying me a compliment, because, left to her, she would never have stepped out into the cold for a Rohmer film unless she trusted the man who loved these films.
We barely had time to say anything more when she proceeded to whisper curses at the management, launching into a mock tirade against the very notion of a 7:10 show. Seven-ten was too early. Seven-ten was for those who needed to go to bed before midnight. Seven-ten was dolt time. “What did I do on Christmas Day in the year of our Lord such-and-such? I went to the movies at seven-ten.”