“What do most people use, their fingers?” I asked.
“Some do. Most use tissues. Others gloves.”
I could sense that maybe humor wasn’t going to work.
“I’m just afraid I may never see this house.”
She was on the verge of tears again.
“What if we promise to be back here in a week — together?”
She looked at me point-blank and said nothing, the same vague, absent look on her face, which told me she either didn’t trust my motives or that she simply lacked the will to remind me how quixotic was my plan. For all I knew, she had other things lined up for next week, things I wasn’t part of — for all I knew, this should have been the time to bring up her admonition yet again, but she didn’t have the strength or the heart to do so now.
“Why not, you’ll pick me up, bring me breakfast, and sing for me in the car.”
“You’re such a Printz Oskár.”
When she gave me back my handkerchief, I could feel its dampness. I put it back in my pocket, hoping it might never dry.
“You’re the best person to have Vishnukrishnus with,” she finally said. “Today was my turn; yesterday, yours.”
“Keep talking like this and you’ll make me have one this minute.”
“What wrecks,” she said.
•
On the way back we listened to Handel’s sarabande again and again. I knew that this would be our song, the song of December 26, and that wherever I’d be in the years to come, if, like a traveler in the desert I should lose my bearings one night, all I would have to do was think of this sarabande as played by a man who had disappeared into the hinterland of time, and like an anthropologist piecing bone fragments together one by one, I’d be able to bring back who I was on this day, where I’d been, what I’d wanted most in life, and how I’d fallen for it and almost touched it. As we listened to the music quietly, I thought of how she and I had stepped down the ramp onto the riverbed and heard the ice break, and how that too was forever laced into that moment on the rug when I realized, as I’d never done since meeting her, that the remainder of my life could hang on that tune and that it would take nothing but a misplaced breath to make my life go one way or the other.
“Clara Brunschvicg,” I said.
“Yes, Printz Oskár?”
“Clara Brunschvicg, I’ll never forget you,” I was going to say. But then I thought it sounded too wistful. “Clara Brunschvicg, I could so easily fall in love with you — if I haven’t already.” No, too laden. “Clara Brunschvicg, I could do this for the rest of my life — me and you, alone together, whenever, wherever, forever. Spend every minute the way we’ve done today, winter, car, ice, stones, soup, because one hundred years from now, those minutes are all we’ll have to show for ourselves, all we’re ever going to want to pass on to others, and frankly, in one hundred years they’ll all forget or won’t care or know how to remember, and I don’t want to end up like my father with dreams of love and of a better life he’d been robbed of or is still sailing out to. I don’t want to pass by your building in thirty years and, looking up, say to myself or to the person I’ll be with that day, You see this building? There my life stopped. Or there my life split. Or there life turned on me, so that the person looking at the building right now and talking to you is, ever since that one winter so many years ago, still on hold; the hand holding your hand is a phantom limb, and the rest of me is prosthetic, too, and I’m a shadow and she’s a shadow, and, as in Verlaine’s poem, we’ll still speak shadow words of our shadow love while the decades trawl past us as we stay put and hold our breath. The real me is frozen on this block and chances are will outlive me by many years until he turns into one of those family legends that gets retold on ritual anniversaries and from tragedy become a font of laughter and ridicule. So, tell me the one about the man who was named after a large tanker, they’ll say, the way I’d ask my father about ancestors who’d had their heads lopped off.”
“What were you going to say?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not what you were going to say,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” I replied.
At which we laughed. “Aren’t we so very, very clever, Printz.”
“We are, we are.”
•
The same thing happened twice again that day.
We were speeding down the country road on our way back to the city. It was past sunset, and we watched a pale, listless color line the white Hudson we’d been staring at all day. We’d been driving for around half an hour when the tiny town began to come into view. Neither of us said anything, and it seemed we’d both forgotten and were going to pass in silence. Clara, who was driving, looked at me. Then she began to pick up speed, and I could tell she was smiling. She was bluffing.
“Want to pass it up?” she asked.
“No. I was going to ask you to stop.”
“Lipton tea that good?”
I nodded.
“You know we’re not being very good,” she said.
“I know. But a cup of tea never hurt anyone.”
We parked the car exactly where we’d parked that morning. I ordered two teas just as I’d done before. Clara went to the bathroom. I chose the same spot by the wood-paneled wall. The fire was still burning in the fireplace. And she knew exactly where I’d be. Except that this time as soon as she sat down I told her to scoot over, because I wanted to sit next to her. She didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t let much time go by before asking, “So tell me about her.” Did she really want to know? I asked. Yes, she really wanted to know. And as though to entice me, she snuggled into the corner between the end of the seat and the glass panel with the darkling view of the Hudson right behind her. I met her right after college, I said. The love of your life? No, not the love of my life. So why are you telling me about her? You’ll see if you let me finish. She was a dancer, but by day an editor, a good cook, and three times a week a single mother. She was older than I was. By how much? Ten years — and don’t interrupt. She cooked meals for me that I’d never eaten before, with sauces that would seem to require chefs and sous-chefs days to prepare but which she’d whip up in a matter of minutes. Here I was almost a vegetarian eating steak dinners every night. It took me a while to realize why she was feeding me so much protein. She, on the other hand, never ate. She smoked all the time. So we’d have those fabulous dishes on the tea table, and I would eat and eat and eat, while she sat next to me on the floor and watched me chomp away. She was probably bulimic, or anorexic, or both, except that you’d never know it, because she was always bingeing in secret. She was also addicted to sedatives, laxatives, antidepressants.
“What was good about her?”
“For a while everything.”
“Then?”
“I stopped loving her. I tried not to stop, but I couldn’t. From not loving her I started not wanting to listen to her, then to not wanting to touch her, to hating the sound of her laugh or the rattle of her keys when she came home, or the sound of her slippers when she woke up in the middle of the night and went into the living room for a smoke, and sat there in the dark because I said the light bothered me, down to the click of the television when she’d turn it off, which meant she was coming back to bed. It was horrible. I was horrible. So I left her.”
“Are you not good for people, either?”
“I don’t think I am. And she knew it. One day, toward the end, she said, ‘I’m someone you won’t remember having loved. You’ll walk out on me and won’t give it a second thought.’ And she was right.”
I fell silent.
“Well, go on with your story.”
“Late last winter, out of the blue, one evening I got a call from her. We’d not spoken in three or four years. She said she wanted to see me — no, needed to see me. Well, I knew she hadn’t borne me a child in secret, I knew she wasn’t short of money, and I knew she hadn’t uncovered an STD she had to tell all her old lovers about. She just needed to see me, that’s all. The man of my life, she called me. It tickled me somewhat. We made a lunch date, but it fell through, then another, which also fell through. And then she never called again, and I didn’t either. A few months ago, through a series of coincidences, I found out she had died. The news of her death still haunts me, or perhaps I want it to.”