“Not a clue. But I will drop an Earl Grey tea bag into each mug.”
The scent filled the kitchen.
Let’s go into the living room, she said, carrying her mug and the CD. She opened a cabinet, turned on the CD player, and before long there it was, the hymn from the Adagio in all of its piercing, heartrending beauty. I love Earl Grey tea, I said. So did she. “Time for a secret agent.”
The sofa, which was new, was placed directly in front of the bay of windows, so that one could see the Hudson while drinking. What a view, I said. I loved the tea, I loved the Hudson, loved the Beethoven, and I loved the Rohmer tea-in-the-afternoon thing. Outside, where the snow was still untouched by tires or footmarks, was where Clara used to sled with her friends after school.
“Now tell me why the Beethoven is you again.”
“Again with the Beethoven!” I was enjoying this.
“Just try, Printz. It’s you because. .?” she asked, imitating bated breath.
“Because the Heiliger Dankgesang was written while Beethoven was convalescing and, like me, like you, like everyone really, was lying very low. He had come close to dying and was grateful to be alive.”
“And. .?”
“And it’s about a simple handful of notes, plus a sustained, overextended hymn in the Lydian mode, which it loves and doesn’t wish to see end, because it likes repeating questions and deferring answers, because all answers are easy, because it’s not answers and clarity, or even ambiguity, that Beethoven wants. What he’s after is deferral and distended time, a grace period that never expires and that comes like memory, but isn’t memory, all cadence and no chaos. And he’ll keep repeating and extending the process until he’s left with five notes, three notes, one note, no note, no breath. Maybe art is just that, life without death. Life in the Lydian mode.”
The silence between us told me that, in her mind, Clara had right away substituted the word life with another word. Hence her silence.
“Tea in the Lydian mode. Sunset in the Lydian mode. .” I added to stir some humor between us, at which she almost snickered, meaning: I know what you’re doing, Printz. “Yes, that too,” she said.
I looked over the room. There must have been twenty pillows on the sofas and armchairs, and, in one of the corners by the window, two large plants. The armchairs looked old, but not dowdy, as if the rest of the room were trying to adjust to the new sofa without straining itself. Every electrical outlet seemed packed with what looked like a grape bunch of plugs sticking out of it.
“Is this where you did your homework as a little girl?”
“Homework I did in the dining room, right over there. But I liked this spot for reading. Even when we had guests, I’d sit on an ottoman in the corner and slink away to St. Petersburg. This is also where I played the piano.”
“Perfect childhood?”
“Uneventful. I don’t have bad memories, or great ones either. I just wished my parents had lived longer. I don’t miss them, though.”
I tried to imagine her bedroom. I wondered why she had decided to write her master’s thesis in Hans’s apartment instead of right here.
“Because they made me breakfast and lunch. You’d be surprised how quickly time flies when people cook for you and look after you. I spent six months up there writing away, paying attention to no one.”
I remembered the desk and the room upstairs where I’d waited for her to bring back appetizers, fearing she’d never return, though come back she did, bearing goodies, as she called them, arranged in a Noah’s ark formation — two by two, meaning one for you and one for me, and another for you and me — a room where I kept thinking, Let’s just sit here in this tiny alcove all our own and reinvent the world in our image, with our own firmament extending no farther than the table where all these strangers stood confabulating around the singer with the throaty voice, like aliens who had dematerialized around us and whose shadow was all that remained of them. I had promised to wait another fifteen minutes and not a minute more before leaving the party, but on seeing Clara return with the large dish in her hand, I’d begun to think that this was better than a dream and who was I to meddle with dreams, as I watched those fifteen minutes extend past three in the morning, which was, as everyone led me to believe even on my first night here, yet too early for anyone to leave. That little room seemed the closest I’d ever get to Clara. Now I had come back to the same spot, down by a few flights, a few sunken city layers deeper, and we were still on the surface, still above sea level. I wondered how much farther underground Inky’s soul roamed in this building’s netherworld.
“Above that little room, however, was the balcony.”
The poet was Vaughan and the spot Bellagio and, in between, a lady’s suede shoe stubbing a cigarette that tailspun its way down onto the snow-banked driveway where Igors and Ivans stood smoking like displaced double agents recalling the Cold War.
Remember? Could I ever forget?
The rooms and balconies stacked one on top of the other seemed like versions of a vague and mysterious design presaging something about me or about her or about our time together that I wasn’t quite grasping yet. Was I closer to that something on her floor or was I farther from it than I’d been there three days earlier? Did each floor point to a weaker or to a louder echo of itself? Or was it the echoing effect that was beckoning me right now, rising and falling from floor to floor, like snakes and ladders, like Beethoven’s overextended hymn, which comes on and then withers and then comes back again, timeless, spellbound, and imperishable?
So this is awkward, she had said at the restaurant. I wouldn’t touch that, but I knew she was pleading with me to speak, to go beyond, just say something.
The arrangement of rooms and windows on the same corner line made me think of the elements of the periodic table, all of them lined up in neat rows and columns according to a logic that is totally cryptic and yet, once arranged numerically, no less predictable than fate itself to those who know the cypher. Sodium (atomic number 11) is the uppermost floor with the greenhouse, and right under it is potassium (19), where I nearly passed out, and right under it rubidium (37), the floor with the balcony and the Bloody Mary, and under that cesium (55), Clara’s world. Couldn’t one organize one’s life along a periodic table under the assumption that if one calculated the rule behind the 11, 19, 37, 55 sequence, one could easily predict that the next element would be number 87—francium? Weren’t we going to Rohmer’s France in less than two hours?
She liked things improvised; I liked design.
“And what does this room correspond to on the ground floor?” I asked. “The lobby.” “And below that?” “Storage room, superintendent’s digs.” “And below that?” I asked, as if trying to determine where fate might take me if I were to roam from floor to floor like a flying Dutchman trapped for eternity in the freight elevator. “Bicycle room. Laundry room. China,” she replied.
Here I am trying to determine that there is no below after rock bottom, no after-omega, that beyond the person I see in Clara there is no other person, and yet how like her to tell me that rock bottom does not exist, that there are as many Claras as there are buried tiers and legends on our planet. And how about me?
“Man thinking about first night, wondering what would have happened had he gotten off on wrong floor and gone to a different party.”
“Man would have met different Dutch lady.”
“Yes, but what does present Dutch lady think of that?”
“Man is fishing, so Dutch lady says Go fish.”
How I loved her mind. To every north, my south, to every secret, its sharer, to every glove the partner.