“So you sing,” she said, still considering the matter. Or was she already backpedaling after her poisoned dart?
“Yes. I sing, sometimes—” I replied, trying not to sound too smug or too earnest. I pretended I hadn’t picked up on the goading irony in her voice and was about to add “in the shower”—but immediately sensed that, in Clara’s universe, singing in the shower was precisely what everyone confessed to when they cagily admitted that they liked to sing sometimes. It would have been such a predictable thing to say. I could already hear her unstitching every cliché in my sentence.
“So you sing,” she started. “Let’s hear you, then.”
I was caught off guard. I shook my head.
“Why? Doesn’t sing well with others?” she asked.
“—something like that.” Could do better was a lame repartee to her report-card banter, which is why I suppressed it. But now I had nothing else to say.
Another moment of hesitation. Then, looking over my shoulder, she broke the silence: “Want to hear me sing?”
Her words sounded almost like a dare. I imagined she was joking and that, after showing such an aversion to Gretchen’s friends and their sing-along yuling, the last thing she’d do now was to start singing. But before I had finally put the right spin to my words and answered her, she had already joined the chorus, but with a voice I would never have matched to her face and couldn’t believe was hers, because it bordered total effusion, as though, in singing at that moment right next to me, she was revealing another, deeper side to remind me that everything I’d thought about her so far — from bustling wind to poisoned dart to quips and derision — might be mistaken, that “caustic” had a meeker side, that “dangerous” could turn apprehensive and tenderhearted, that she was so full of other, more surprising turns that it was pointless to keep up with any or try to second-guess them, or put up a struggle against someone whose curt, offhanded I am Clara reminded me that there were people in the world who, for all their gruff arrogance, can, with scarcely a few notes, easily persuade you they are inherently kind, candid, and vulnerable — with unsettling reminders, though, that their ability to flip from one to the other is what ultimately makes them deadly.
I was transfixed — transfixed by the voice, by the person, by my total failure to master the situation, by the pleasure I felt in being so easily swept over, helpless, clueless. Her singing didn’t just come out of her body. It seemed to tear things out of mine, like an ancient admission I was still incapable of and which reached back to childhood, like the echo of forgotten tales finally breaking into song. What was this feeling, and where was it coming from? Why did hearing her sing or staring at her unbuttoned crimson shirt with her overexposed, gleaming neckline make me want to live under its spell, close to her heart, below her heart, next to my heart, a peek at your heart; that small pendant, I wanted it in my mouth.
Like a Ulysses grown wise to the Sirens’ trick, part of me still groped for reasons not to be taken in, not to believe. A voice so perfect could make her too perfect.
It didn’t take long to realize that what I was feeling was not just admiration; nor was it awe, or envy. The word worship—as in “I could worship people like her”—hadn’t crossed my mind yet, though later that evening, when I stood with her watching a glowing moonlit barge moored across the white Hudson, I did turn to worship. Because placid winterscapes lift up the soul and bring down our guard. Because part of me was already venturing into an amorphous terrain in which a word here, a word there — any word, really — is all we have to hold on to before surrendering to a will far mightier than our own. Because in the busy, crowded room, as I listened to her sing, I found myself toying with a word so overused and hackneyed, so safe, that I was tempted to ignore it, which is also why I chose it: interesting.
She was interesting. Not for what she knew, or for what she said, or for who she was, even, but for how she saw and twisted things, for the implied, complicit jeer in her voice, for how she seemed to both admire and put you down, so that you didn’t know whether she had the sensibility of gleaming velvet or of sandpaper. She is interesting. I want to know more, hear more, get closer to.
But interesting was not the word I wanted. One more drink and the word struggling to be heard, when it finally came to me, would have spilled out so naturally, so effortlessly, and in a manner so uninhibited that, staring at her skin as I stood speaking to her by the fireplace, I felt no less bashful or hampered than a dreamer who enters a crowded subway car, greets his fellow passengers, and doesn’t feel the slightest shame on looking down at his feet and realizing he is not wearing shoes, no socks either, no trousers, and that he is totally naked from the waist down.
I made conversation to avoid saying what I wanted to say, the way only the tongue-tied say too much when they lack the courage to say just what’s enough and not a word more. To stop myself, I shut my mouth. I tried to let her do the talking. Then, not to interrupt or say the word, I bit my tongue and held it in place. I bit, not its tip, but its midsection, a large, domineering bite that might even have hurt had I paid it any mind but which held my tongue without altering the outward shape of my mouth. And yet I so wanted to interrupt her, to interrupt her the way one does when one knows one is about to intrude and shock someone with a word that is at once exquisite, reckless, and obscene.
The word sprang so many times to my mouth. I loved the room, loved the snow on Riverside Drive, loved the George Washington Bridge speckling the distance like a drooping necklace on a bare neck, loved her necklace too, and the neck that wore it, I would have said.
I wanted to tell her how much I had loved her voice, perhaps with no reason other than to begin saying other things as well, shy, tentative things that I hoped might grow bold and lead elsewhere once I got started. But no sooner had I mentioned her singing than she cut me short.
“I was a music major,” she said, clearly snuffing my compliment, yet underscoring it by the very impatience with which she seemed to ignore it. It meant, Don’t feel obligated to say anything. I know. I’ve trained for this.
“I’m moving into another room. Too noisy, too stuffy here.”
A pensive okay was all I could offer. Was this it, then?
“Let’s go into the library. It’s quieter there.”
She wants me to follow her. I remember being amused by the thought: So she wants me to follow.
The library, which turned out to be equally crowded, had huge, rare, leatherbound volumes neatly stacked around its walls, interrupted by windows and what looked like a balcony facing the river. During the day this particular French window must have let in the most tranquil sweeps of light. “I could spend the rest of my life in this room.”
“Many people could. See that desk over there?”
“Yes.”
The desk was covered with hors d’oeuvres.
“I wrote my master’s thesis there.”
“With all that food around?”
She threw me a hasty nod, instantly dismissing the attempted joke. “I have good memories of this room. I was in this room for a whole year, from nine to five. They even let me come here on weekends. I can remember summer and fall here. I can remember looking out and seeing snow. Then it was April. It went so fast.”
For a moment I pictured Clara arriving dutifully every winter morning to sit and write all day. Did she wear glasses? Was she totally focused on her project, or did she look bored when she was alone all day? Did her mind drift, did Clara dream of love in the heart of midwinter afternoons? Was there sorrow in her life?