I knew that the slightest stir in my body, even moving a finger, would suddenly rouse her from her own thoughts and tell her that our bodies were touching, hip to knee. So I didn’t move a thing; even swallowing became difficult, as I grew conscious of my own breathing, whose pace I tried to steady to a monotonous rhythm, and finally, if I could, to a halt.
But then another thought rushed through me: Why not tell her what was happening to me, what I felt, why not move, stir, budge, and show at least that I liked being glued together on this love seat and that all I had to do was touch her knee, part her knees, and just place my hand there, and, as in so many paintings of the Renaissance, let her slip a leg in between mine in a posture that speaks legends, like Lot’s with his daughters’? Was she with me? Or was she elsewhere? Or was she one with the music, her mind in the stars, mine in the gutter?
With all these feelings tussling within me, I knew I would never dare anything, especially now that we were alone together. Gone was my resolve, my wish to put an arm on that shoulder, as we listened to the music, and let a hand land ever so lightly and caress her there, and then bring my mouth where it ached to be, not to kiss, or even lick, but to bite.
I sensed her tense up. She knew.
Any moment now, Clara will stand up to help in the kitchen. Or should I be the first to stand now, to show that I wasn’t committed to this love seat arrangement, that I wasn’t trying to feel her up, that I couldn’t really care?
“Do you want to hear it again?”
I stared at her. Should I tell her now once and for all, just tell her and let the chips fall where they will?
“The music — do you want to hear it, or have you had enough?”
“Let’s hear it one more time,” I finally said.
“One more time it is.”
She stood up and pressed the play button, then after standing by the CD player came back and resumed her seat right next to me.
Do we touch hands, or what?
Just be natural, a voice said.
Which is what?
Be yourself.
Meaning?
Being myself was like asking a mask to mimic a face that’s never been without masks. How do you play the part of someone trying not to play parts?
We were back to hip-to-knee. But it felt mechanical, heartless, cold. I’d take that moment last night anytime, when she stopped before crossing the park and told me about Czernowicz as our arms kept touching, inadvertently.
This was all in my head, wasn’t it?
Suddenly I caught myself thinking of wanting to come back here again — if only to touch this moment again: the cluttered room, the frost, the dead pianist, she and I seated unusually together in this snow-globe cabin of our invention, and all this stuff around us, the soup, Inky’s brother, last night’s Rohmer, the snow on Manhattan and on Clermont-Ferrand, and the fact that if Czernowicz never knew what awaited him after playing the Siloti here, he’d never have guessed that, two nights after staring out to his world in prewar Europe, we’d be sitting in this room like the oldest and closest of friends, listening to a pianist that my grandfather and Clara’s grandfather might easily have heard in their youth, never once suspecting that their grandchildren. .
When the music stopped, I said I wanted to step outside for a few minutes. I didn’t ask her. “I’ll come with you,” she said.
“Where are you two going?” asked Margo, when she saw us leave through the kitchen door.
“To show him the river.”
•
The ground underfoot was hard, with patches of brown earth under the snow. Clara cleared away a tricycle that she said belonged to one of the grandchildren. Miles was his name. “Secret agent?”
“Secret agent,” I said, accepting a cigarette.
“Let me light it for you.”
She lit my cigarette, then took it back before I could even draw my first puff in ages.
“Not on my watch!”
So I wasn’t going to be allowed to smoke.
“What do you think they’re talking about now? Me? You?” I asked.
“Us, most likely.”
I liked our being called us.
In the summer, she said, Hudson County was lush, and people simply sat around here and whiled away entire weekend hours on lounge chairs, while food and drinks kept coming. She loved sunsets in the summer here. She was, I could see, describing Inkytimes in Inkyland.
We ambled through a narrow alley flanked by tall birch trees. White was everywhere. Even the bushes were a pallid, pewter gray, except for the stonework around the house and for the wall lining the length of the wood, verdigris bordering on livid gray. I imagined a carriage stopping here a century ago. As we walked, we began to near what seemed a dirty wooden fence that led to a wooden gangway and farther off to a withered stairway. “The boat basin is down there. Come.”
They had cleaned the Hudson years ago. Now, if you didn’t mind the undertow and the eels, you could swim. Still more trees, bare bushes, more sloping walls lining the property.
Then we spotted the river and, beyond it, the opposite bank, all white and misty, an Impressionist’s winterscape.
It made me think of Beethoven’s late quartets. I asked if she’d ever heard the Busch Quartet play. Maybe as a child at her parents’, she said.
As we approached the river, we began to hear crackling sounds that became louder and louder, clanking away like iron rods being hammered on an anvil. Crick, crack, crack. The ice on the river was breaking, clacking and clattering away, one floe knocking into the other, wrecking that neat white sheet of ice we had been seeing from the distance of the house, block after block of iced Hudson whacking its way downstream, with dark, dirty, glutinous black water underneath. Perhaps the Hudson was giving us its own version of the Siloti — crick, crack, crack, crack.
“I could listen to this for hours,” I said. What I meant was: I could be with you for hours — I could be with you forever, Clara. Everyone else has been make-believe, and maybe you are too, but right now, as I hear our music served on ice, my heart isn’t on ice, as I know yours isn’t either. Why is it that with you, for all your stingers and thistles, I feel so much at home?
“I could listen to this all day,” I repeated.
I had forgotten that in Clara’s world one didn’t rhapsodize about nature, sunsets, rivers, or songs in the shower. One didn’t hold hands either, I supposed.
“You don’t like this?” I asked.
“I like this fine.”
“Oh, just tell me you like it, then.”
She turned toward me, then looked at the ground. “I like it, then,” she said. A mini-concession no sooner made than instantly withdrawn.
How long would lying low last?
And then I don’t know what possessed me, but I asked her: “How long will all this lying low last?”
She must have seen this coming, or had been thinking about it herself, perhaps wondering at that very moment how long before I’d say something like this. Which is perhaps why she didn’t ask why I was asking.
“All winter, for all I know.”
“That long?”
She picked up a stone and hurled it far into the river. I picked one up too and did the same, aiming mine as far as I could. “Bellagio is a stone’s throw away,” I said. “And yet.”
She said she loved the sound of stones striking the ice, especially the heavier ones. She threw another. I lobbed another and another. We stood and watched where they landed.