“Punch?” she repeated like someone who snaps a finger in front of you and brings you back among the living by saying Boo! “Them who sing fetches,” she added, all set to go and fetch me some punch.
I told her she didn’t have to bring me anything; I’d get some myself. I knew I was being unnecessarily fussy and that I could easily have accepted her offer. But I was unable to extricate myself once I had started down that slope. I seemed determined to show I was more uncomfortable having someone bring me a drink than flattered that she’d offered to.
“I just want to,” she replied. “I’ll even throw in some goodies on a plate. . if you let me go now before these singing yahoos come and gobble everything up,” she added, as though this were her closing inducement.
“You don’t have to, really.”
Perhaps what I wanted was not so much to spare her the errand as to prevent her from moving; the faintest step might throw us off — anything could come between us — we might lose our spot in the library and never recover our giddy pace.
She asked again. I caught myself insisting that I’d get the punch myself. I was beginning to sound coy and fatuous.
Then it happened, exactly as I feared.
“Oh well,” she shrugged, meaning, Suit yourself. Or worse: Hang it. Her voice was still buoyed by the mirth that had sprung up between us moments earlier; but there was a metallic chime somewhere, less like the lilt of irony and good cheer than like the downscale click of a file cabinet being slammed shut.
I instantly regretted her change of heart.
“And where would these goodies be?” I fumbled by way of resurrecting her original offer, thinking there was food elsewhere in the apartment.
“Oh, just stay put and I’ll get you some”—feigned exasperation bubbling in her voice. I caught sight of her neckline as she slipped on her levity again like a reversible coat, the flip side of hang it, sandpaper turned to velour. I wondered if rubbing people the wrong way was not her way of sidling up to them, her way of defusing tension by discharging so much of her own that if she got any closer it would be to dismiss you, but that in going through motions of dismissal she was actually sneaking up on you like a feral cat who doesn’t want you to know it doesn’t mind being petted.
I am Clara. She affected to snap. I affected to obey. In the packed, dark room where everyone’s shadow merged with everyone else’s, we couldn’t have chosen roles that came more naturally.
With this air of chronic turmoil, she got you to mean exactly what she had in mind for you, not because she liked to have her way, but because everything about her seemed so unusually charged, craggy, and barbed that not to give in to her jostling was like snubbing everything she was. Which is how she cornered you. To question her manner was to slight not just the manner but the person behind the manner. Even her way of arching her eyebrows, which warned you she required instant submission, could, if questioned, be likened to the rough plumage with which tiny birds puff themselves up to three times their size, the better to conceal their fear of not getting things simply by asking for them.
All this may have been wishful thinking on my part. She might be concealing nothing at all. She held nothing back, puffed up nothing, feared no one. It was just I who needed to think this way.
Perhaps Clara was exactly who she appeared to be: light and swift, alert, caustic and dangerous. Just Clara — no roles, no catch-me-if-you-can, no waggish sidling up to strangers or stealthy angling for friendship and chitchat. One of the drawbacks that came from being just who she was and saying just what she felt was to let those who were not used to such candor think it was a pose, that she had learned to hide her shyness better than most, but that she was no less tentative or apprehensive underneath, and that all this fretful behavior, starting from the way she let her elbow rest on my shoulder to mean just stop arguing when I quibbled over punch to the hand that came out of nowhere, was a sham, the way certain diamonds sparkle for a moment and are quite conveniently deemed glass, until we take a second look and slap our foreheads and ask whatever made us think they were fakes. The sham was in us, not them.
There are people who come on to you with friction. Chafing starts intimacy; and strife, like spite, is the shortest distance to the heart.
Before you finish your sentence, they nip it from your mouth and give it an entirely different spin, making it seem you had been secretly hinting at things you never knew you wanted and would easily have lived without but that you now crave, the way I craved that cup of punch — and with goodies thrown in, exactly as she’d promised, as though the whole evening and much, much more hung on that cup of punch.
Would she forgive my wishy-washiness? Or had she read it as a triumph of her will? Or was she thinking in altogether different terms? And what were these terms, and why couldn’t I begin to think in them?
She was gone in a second. I had lost her.
I should have known.
•
“Did you really want punch?” she asked when she returned, carrying a plate on which she’d arrayed a selection of Japanese appetizers in a scatter of tiny squares that only Paul Klee would have imagined. The crowd, she explained, had made ladling the punch too difficult. “Ergo, no punch.” Sounded like Ergo, lump it.
I was tempted to hold this against her, not just because I was suddenly disappointed, or because the word ergo itself seemed a tad chilling despite the lighthearted way she’d said it, but as though the whole exchange about getting, not getting, and then going to get the punch had one purpose: to trifle with me, to bait me, to raise my hopes only to dash them. Now, to absolve herself for not keeping her promise, or for not caring to, she was trying to make it seem I’d never cared for punch — which was the truth.
I noticed that she had sorted the appetizers in pairs and placed them in neat little rows around the plate, as though she’d carefully lined them up for Noah’s ark — her way of making up for neglecting the punch, I thought. The tuna-avocado miniature rolls — male and female — the kiwi-tile fish — male and female — the seared scallop with a sprig of mache on a bed of slithered turnips with tamarind jelly and a dab of lemon rind on top — male and female made He them. No sooner had I told her why the extravagant miscellany had made me smile than I realized there was something daring in my remark about the paired appetizers that were about to propagate and fill the earth — except that before I had time to backpedal, I caught something else neighboring this idea that moved me in my stomach as if I’d been buoyed up and let down on a high wave: not male and female, not male and female shifting on the cold banks of the Black Sea, filing up to book passage on Noah’s Circle Line, but male and female as in you and me, you and me, just you and me, Clara, waiting our turn, which turn, whose turn, say something now, Clara, or I’ll speak out of turn and I haven’t had enough to drink to find the courage to say it. I wanted to touch her shoulder, wanted to rub the length of her neck with my lips, kiss her under her right ear and under the left ear and along her breastbone, and thank her for arranging this plate, for knowing what I’d think, for thinking it with me, even if none of it had crossed her mind.
“On second thought—” I began, uncertain whether to add anything, and yet hesitating, because I knew that hesitating would catch her attention.