I did as I was asked with the dishes. Then we loaded them into the dishwasher. We were standing almost hip to hip, neither budging, until our hips were touching. Neither of us moved away.
She asked if I’d split another Leibniz cookie with her.
“Promise not to be bitter and depressed.”
“I’m already bitter and depressed.”
“Because of me?” I had said it in complete jest and couldn’t possibly have meant what she heard. But she turned to me with her wet pink hand and, with the back of it, touched me once on the cheek, and then again and again. And then she kissed me so close to my lips that she might as well have kissed me all the way. Which is when I let my lips touch hers, once, twice, rubbing her face with my own wet palm as I’d been craving to do all through lunch.
She let me brush her lips, but there was forbearance in her lips, and I knew not to push.
“So you will split another chocolate Leibniz with me.”
“I have no choice.”
“Inky calls these chocolate lesbians. We used to think it was funny. I wonder if there’s anything we can take for the road.”
She ferreted through the cabinets. Nothing. Just M&Ms, probably bought for the grandchildren or for Halloween. The large yellow bag was sealed with a giant clasp. “Let’s take a few.”
We found a small ziplock bag and transferred M&Ms into it with the pantomimed complicity of amateur safecrackers.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For the M&Ms?”
“No, for coming here with me. For knowing. For everything else. And for understanding.”
“Especially for understanding,” I repeated with emphasis and mock-humor.
Thank you for understanding. What a way with words she had. Saying everything and saying nothing.
“I told him I was the wrong woman for him. But did he listen? Then I told him he was the wrong man for me. And he still wouldn’t listen. And he’ll keep fighting it. I know him; he’ll call them tonight and ask if I came by. And they’ll say yes. And he’ll ask if I came alone. And they’ll say no. And he’ll ask who with, and they won’t know, and he’ll call me, and it’ll never end. Happy you came now?”
“You answer.”
“I think you still are.”
She dried her hands, passed me the towel, and began putting the wine away.
“Clara?”
She turned back. “Yes.”
“I want to tell you something.”
She was putting the corks back into the two bottles. This was going to be it.
“You want to tell me something”—again the same restraint in her voice, in the way she held her body and stared at me now—“don’t you think I know?” She looked me in the face. “Don’t you think I know?”
The way she said it broke my heart. I could almost feel a sob rising in my chest. Don’t you think I know? It’s what one said in lovemaking: Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I know?
I was about to add something, but there was nothing else to say; she had said it all.
“Let’s hear the Handel, then,” she said.
We walked into the living room. She turned on the CD player, then lowered herself to the floor and sat on her knees on the rug. She was already wearing her winter coat. I sat across from her on a chair against the wall. In the same room, saying nothing. And then it started.
I couldn’t understand what it was about this sarabande that had made us come all the way up here to hear it. Perhaps because I had never heard it before. “Isn’t it played a bit too slowly?” I finally ventured to say, trying to suggest that I too could tell it could use some mechanical acceleration.
She shook her head once and said nothing, dismissing my comment for the simple, intrusive thing it was. Then, for no reason, or for a reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, she raised her eyes and began to stare straight at me, but in a vague, lifeless manner, which made me suspect that though she was looking at me and wasn’t looking away, she wasn’t really looking at me either. There was no doubt, though; she was staring. I stared back with the same seemingly unfocused gaze, but she didn’t register my gaze, or didn’t register me, and I thought, This is what happens to people who are entirely rapt by music, whereas I am almost just pretending, the way I almost just pretend to be rapt by food, wine, scenery, art, love. When others listened to music, they became one with music and just stared at you, past you, through you, and expected no reciprocity, no implicit eyebrow signal, because they were already one with things.
Were we just going to stare at each other for however long it took to hear the music?
So it seemed.
So I left my chair and, all the while continuing to stare at her — she was still following me with her gaze — kneeled down right next to her on the rug, my heart racing, neither of us taking our eyes off each other, I not knowing whether I was breaking some tacit understanding I hadn’t altogether agreed to, she not knowing what I was up to — except that suddenly I caught her nether lip give a tremor, her chin seemed to cramp ever so slightly, and, before I knew what was happening, her eyes were filled with tears and she began crying. I envied her even this freedom.
“Clara,” I said.
She shrugged her shoulders, as if to mean, Can’t be helped.
“I don’t know what’s come over me. I don’t know.”
I reached out and held both her hands in mine.
“I’m a total mess, aren’t I?”
“It’s the Handel.”
She said nothing, just shook her head. I should have kissed her right there and then.
“Or maybe it’s Inky,” I threw in. “Or seeing Max and Margo,” I added, trying to help her narrow down the cause of her tears, the way a parent might help a child find the exact spot where his arm hurts.
“We’re taking the CD. He made other copies,” she finally said. She was trying to show she was quite able to compose herself. “Poor man, him with his dead music and his rotting body and all that talk of eternal landfills—”
She began to cry again, this time in earnest.
“You left out strudel gâteau” I was trying to distract her and make her laugh, though I wouldn’t have minded if she continued crying. Tears seemed to have removed every barb from her body and, better yet, to have humanized her the way I’d seldom seen someone be so human before. It left me feeling totally rudderless. I attempted another joke, this time at the expense of art and pipi caca art.
She gave a mild laugh, but wasn’t falling for the diversion.
“Does music always make you cry?”
But my question was a weak diversion, and she wasn’t falling for it either.
“I’m not ready,” she finally said.
I knew exactly what she meant. Might as well bring it out into the open.
“Because I am?” I asked, as though to undo any pretense that I might be.
Were we saying yes by saying no?
Or was it the other way around? Saying no to mean yes to say no?
“What messes,” she said.
“Well, at least we know we’re safe messes.”
She took this in. I thought I had finally comforted her.
“I don’t know that I am — safe, that is. Perhaps neither of us is.”
Even in the midst of tears, I could heed the light, windblown cheep of rusted barbed wire dangling on a long country fence.
I took out my handkerchief and gave it to her.
She grabbed it as though it were a jug of ice water in July, wiped her tears several times, then crumpled it tightly in her fist.
I feared she might hold this moment against me.
“You’re the only person I know”—she hesitated a moment, making me think she was about to say something ever so sweet about me—“who still uses handkerchiefs.”