“And?”
“And nothing. She’d found out she was very sick and needed to reach out to someone who’d mattered and say a few things she’d never had the courage to say before. Now that the veil was shed and there was no room for pride or other nonsense, all she wanted was to spend a few hours together.”
There was a moment of silence between us.
“I thought she was lonely and had run down a list of old flames, old friends,” I added.
“I wonder whom I’ll call when my time comes. Not Inky, that’s for sure. Who would you call?”
“That’s a Door number three question. And we don’t do those in diners and grills.”
“I hear pandangst.”
I gave her a look that said, You should know.
She replied, I most certainly do know.
She straightened up and sipped from her tea, holding both palms around her mug.
I wanted to grab both her hands, put them together, and hold them in between my own and then spread them open as one opens the pages of a hymnal and kiss each palm.
I told her I liked watching her drink tea.
“And I love your forehead,” she said.
I looked out the window, feeling that this working-class diner had something unbelievably magical, as if it understood that for us to be together and feel comfortable here it had to be as ordinary and unassuming and as run-down as anything in a Hopper painting, like Lipton tea, like the plaid faux-linen curtains that kept rubbing her hair, and the thick chipped earthenware mugs we drank from. I wondered if she and I were not like Hopper’s perpetual convalescents — Hopper people, vacuous, stunned, frozen Hopper people, resigned to hidden injuries that might never heal but that have long since ceased to stir either sorrow or pain. I wasn’t sure I liked the Hopper analogy. But this, I realized, was exactly what she meant by lying low. Staying put like Hopper’s people, sitting upright at a slight distance from things like jittery lemurs scoping out an all-too-familiar landscape called life with neither interest nor indifference.
“I can see why she called you, though.”
It took a few moments for me to realize she was referring to my old flame.
“Why?”
“No why. I can just see it.”
•
“It’s getting late,” I said.
And suddenly, as soon as I’d said this, I knew she knew why I’d said it.
“At what time does it start?”
“Seven-ten, didn’t you know?”
“Am I invited?”
I looked at her. “Who’s the Printz Oskár now?”
“So we’re going to the movies?”
“Yes,” I said, as if I were finally yielding to a request she’d been struggling to make all day.
“So we’re going to the movies.”
It took me a while to understand what the near-imperceptible lilt in her voice meant when she said “So we’re going to the movies.” She was either enacting or genuinely expressing the excitement of children whose parents on a bleary Sunday afternoon suddenly decide to put on their coats and herd everyone to the movies. We’re going to the movies, I repeated after her, the way a schoolmate who’d been visiting me after school, rather than being sent back to his parents in the evening, was invited to come along to the movies.
We had less than an hour to drive to the city and find a parking space. Or we could park in her garage and hail a cab. “It could be done,” she said. Or I could jump out and buy tickets while she parked nearby. Could we call the theater and have them save two spots under our name? Which name? Your name. My name. “You know what name,” she said.
We were now speeding along the highway, and in no time spotted the lights of the George Washington Bridge glimmering over the vast and tranquil Hudson. “The city,” she said, the way anyone might say on spotting a familiar lighthouse signaling the way home. I remembered the tension in the car earlier that morning, and the muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag, and the Bach version we’d listened to and how it all belonged to another time warp. “Look to your right,” she said, having spotted it before I did. And there it was, exactly where we’d left it earlier this morning, anchored smack in the middle of the Hudson, the Prince Oscar, our beacon, our lodestar, our emblem, our double, our namesake, our spellbound word for the things we had no words for — love of my life, my dear, dear Prince Oscar, dear, troubled ship that you are, lord of all ships in the catalog of ships, give us a sign, tell us, oh, boatswain, what of this night, tell us of this land of dreams you ferry passengers to, tell us what’s to become of us, what’s to become of me — can you hear?
It had seen us come and go and, for a minute now, seemed to light up its deck to hail us from far away across the Hudson, as if to say, You mortals, you lucky, holy pair who remembered me tonight when you could so easily have looked the other way and made light of my years, take a good look at this damp, ferruginous, scrap-metal tub stuck out in the middle of my hoary winters, don’t think I don’t know what it means to be young, to hope, to fear, to crave, as you come and go, and may come and go again on this drive, I who have seen riversides aplenty and gone up and down the world like so many phantom ships before me, oh, never become ghost ships, marking your years with layers of rust till the water seeps through and you’re nothing but a slough and a hollow hull stranded after many wrong turns and shallow bends, till the rudder is no longer quite yours, and the rust is no longer quite yours, and you won’t remember you were a ship once — yours is the real journey, not mine. Oh, don’t take me away and unbolt me as they unbuckle the dead, but think of me as both the light and the way, and remember this day, for the time comes only once in a lifetime and the rest, in thirty years, is good for nothing except to remember that time.
“Printz Oskár,” she finally said.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Printz Oskár.”
“Yes!” I repeated.
“Nothing, I like saying it.”
The girl is in love with me, and she doesn’t even know it.
•
I thought of the evening awaiting us. Two films, the walk in the snow to the same bar, where we’d take the same seats, though side by side this time, and order the same drink, talk, laugh, dance to the same song, maybe twice, and then the dreaded walk home past my spot in Straus Park, where I’d want to tell her, or maybe not, about my spot in the park, all of it followed by the perfunctory good-night kiss at her door, which would most likely try to seem perfunctory, though maybe not, and finally, after watching her disappear into her elevator with Boris minding the foyer, my walk back to the park, where I’d stop tonight as well, sit on my bench if it wasn’t wet, and just stare at the fountain, look at the trees in the middle of this nothing park off Broadway, and wonder which part I liked best, spending the entire day with Clara or coming all alone here to think of the Clara I’d just spent the entire day with — hoping not to have an answer, because all answers were right till they turned and proved the question wrong, the way so many things were right and then wrong and then right again, till all we had was our nightly colloquy, with the candles lit around us and our shadow selves rubbing shoulders as we’d done at Edy’s, and in our pub, and during lunch, and when we listened to the music, and washed the dishes, and sat together in the theater, shoulder to shoulder, speaking shadow words each to each.