“Do you really miss your thesis days? Most people hate even thinking of them.”
“I don’t miss them. But I don’t hate them.”
My question didn’t seem to interest her. I had set her up to tell me she wished to go back to those days. Or wished she’d never lived through them at all. Instead, what came was the most levelheaded response. I thought of saying, What a lovely, straightforward outlook you have, but held back in case I seemed condescending or, worse yet, sarcastic. In her place I’d probably have said I hated those days but missed each one. I would have tossed the idea for effect, perhaps to tease something out of her, or out of myself, or to test whether she had a feel for paradox and see how far we could grope about together in the murky terrain of guarded ambiguities uttered in attempted small talk.
But I felt that this sort of thing wouldn’t pass muster in her world either — saying you missed things you hated, hated those you loved, wanted what you’d turn down in no time — all these were affected torsions and spray-painted screens that would stir a withering nod goodbye from her.
I am Clara. Tell me another.
“And what was it on?”
“The thesis?”
“Yes.”
“On the table, of course, what else?”
So she was returning the favor. Thank you.
“No, seriously,” I said.
“You mean was it a dialogical treatment of marginalized women living in a hegemonic, monolingual world colonized by phalocratic institutions?”
Very funny.
“Well, it wasn’t,” she added.
Momentary silence.
“Am I supposed to keep asking?”
“No one asked you to ask anything. But, yes, you’re supposed to keep asking.”
For a moment I thought I’d lost her. I smiled back. “What was the thesis on, then?”
“You really want to know?”
“No, I’m only asking because I’m supposed to ask, remember?”
“On Folías. A musical genre. Totally without interest.”
“Folías? Would someone like me know this music?”
“Someone like you—” She repeated my phrase as though it were a strange fruit whose unusual taste she was still mulling before passing judgment, which is why she said, “We’re so sharp, so clever. Why, am I already supposed to guess who someone like you is?”
Right through me. She’d caught my trick question even before I had — my attempt to bring us closer, get her to say something about me.
I am Clara. Nice try.
“I’m sure you’ve heard Folías before, though you may not know it.”
And suddenly there it was again, her voice rising above the din in the crowded library, singing the somber opening bars of Handel’s famous sarabande. I, who had never understood why men love women to sing for them, saw the cobwebs clear before me.
“Recognize it?”
I did, but I didn’t answer. Instead: “I love your voice,” I blurted, hesitating whether to say anything else or, if still possible, to take it back. I was, once again, walking naked from my shirttails down, thrilled by my own daring.
“It’s a standard melody set to a standard chord progression, very similar to a passacaglia. Want some fruit punch?” she broke in, as though nipping both my compliment and the rising intimacy hesitating in the wings. She had uttered these words so abruptly that, once again, I felt she did indeed want me to notice she was changing topics, but that she wanted me to notice it only if I’d picked up her poorly disguised aversion to compliments.
I smiled at the maneuver. She caught my smile. And, having caught it, smiled back almost in self-mockery, sensing that if she gave any sign of guessing I had seen through her feigned abruptness she’d be admitting that my reading of her feint was closer to the truth than she might have wished. So she smiled both to own that she’d been caught and to show that our game was really so much fun: We’re so sharp, so clever, the two of us, aren’t we?
Or perhaps her smile was her way of countering my reading tit for tat, and that, much as she’d been caught, she too had found something to smile about in me—namely, the guilty pleasure I derived from the ebb and flow of what wasn’t being said. There may have been nothing there, and perhaps both of us knew it and were simply going through the motions of making contact by tossing empty signals. But I was — and I didn’t care to hide it — wearing a big smile that bordered on laughter.
Had she seen through this as well? And could she tell I wanted her to know it?
Nervous hesitation hovered between us, like the quiver of a jibe she considered for a moment but then immediately suppressed. Was she really going to call me on my smile and make me spell out what could have been my totally twisted reading of hers? Who are you, Clara?
For a moment, and perhaps to play with worst outcomes as a way to avert them, I began to consider the woman in the wide-open crimson shirt from the distance of the years to come, as though I were waving at her from the wrong end of a spyglass. As someone lost. As someone I’d met at a faraway party once and never saw again and soon forgot. Someone I could have changed my life for. Or who’d have thrown it so thoroughly off course that it would take years and a lifetime, generations, to recover. Just by looking at her from the distance of time, I could already foresee hollow January weekday evenings and all-day Sundays without her. Part of me had run ahead of me and was already coming back with news of what had happened long after I’d lost her: the walk to and from her house, whose whereabouts I knew nothing of, the view from her window, which I’d give everything to see again but that overlooked places I’d probably never seen, the sound of her coffee grinder in the morning, the smell around her cat’s litter box, the squeak of the service door when you put out the garbage late every night and heard the clatter of the neighbor’s triple lock, the smell of her sheets and of her towels, an entire world drifting away before I touched it.
I suddenly stopped myself, knowing, by an inverse logic familiar to superstitious people, that the very foretaste of sorrows to come presumed a degree of joy beforehand and would no doubt stand in the way of the very joy I was reluctant to consider for fear of forfeiting it. I felt no different than a castaway who, on glimpsing a sailboat from a high perch on his deserted island, omits to light a pyre because he’s spied too many such ships before and doesn’t want his hopes dashed again. But then, on urging himself to light a fire just the same, he begins to have second thoughts about the strangers on board who could prove more dangerous than the pythons and Komodo dragons he’s learned to live among. Weekday evenings alone weren’t so terrible. Hollow Sundays weren’t bad either. Nothing would come of this, I kept saying. Besides, thinking that I’d already lost her might ease the tension between us and allow me to regain my footing and act a bit more confidently.
What I didn’t want to feel was hope and, behind the hope, a craving so fierce that anyone watching me would instantly guess I was utterly and undeniably smitten.
I didn’t mind her knowing. I wanted her to know. Women like Clara know you’re smitten, expect you to be, can spot every one of your feckless attempts to disguise it. What I didn’t want to show was my struggle to keep my composure.
To parry her gaze, I tried to look elsewhere and seem distracted. I wanted her to ask why I’d suddenly drifted from her, wanted her to worry that she could lose me as easily as I knew I could lose her. But I also wanted her to laugh at me for doing precisely what I was doing. I wanted her to see through my pretended indifference and expose every one of my little maneuvers and, by so doing, show she was plenty familiar with this game, because she’d played it herself many times, was playing it right now, maybe. I bit my tongue again as brash thoughts welled up within me and clamored to speak. Here I was, a shy man pretending to be shy.