“What?”—mock vexation crackling in her voice.
“Actually, I hate punch,” I said.
It was her turn to laugh.
“In that case,” also spoken haltingly — she too knew how to play the waiting game and make me hold my breath for her next word—“I detest — as in de-test—punch, sangria, ladely-lady drinks, daiquiri, harakiri, vache qui rit. They make me womit.” It was her way of pulling the rug from under your feet just when you thought you had one-upped the last of her comebacks. I am Clara. I can do you one better.
What neither asked — because each already suspected the other’s answer — was why we’d fussed so much over punch if neither cared for it.
Once again, not asking could only betray we’d both thought of asking and decided not to. We smiled at our implied truce, smiled for smiling, smiled because we knew, and wanted the other to know, we’d right away own up to why we’d tussled over punch if the other so much as hinted at the question.
“I’m not even sure I’ve ever liked people who like punch,” I added.
“Oh, if that’s where you’re going,” she said, clearly not about to be outdone, “I might as well come clean: I’ve never been crazy about parties that have a bowl of punch sitting right in the middle of them.”
I liked her like this.
“And the people who attend parties where a bowl of punch sits right in the middle, do you like them?”
“Do I like otherpeoples?” She paused. “Is this what you’re asking?”
I guessed this was what I was asking.
“Seldom,” she said. “Most people are Shukoffs. Except those I like. And before I get to like them, they’re Shukoffs too.”
I craved to know where I ranked on the Scale of Shukoff, but didn’t dare ask.
“What makes you want to know Shukoffs?”
I liked using her lingo.
“You really want to know?”
Couldn’t wait to know.
“Boredom.”
“Boredom behind a Christmas tree?”
With my innocent zap, I wanted nothing more than to show I enjoyed recalling how we’d met and that this moment was very much with me, that I didn’t want to let it go yet.
“Maybe.” She hesitated. Perhaps she did not like to agree with people so easily and preferred putting forth a maybe before a yes. I was already hearing the faint rumblings of a drumroll coming to a rise. “But then just think how boring this party would be without me.”
I loved this.
“I’d probably have already left,” I said.
“I’m not keeping you, am I?”
And there it was again, the message that wasn’t the real message but might just as easily have been the real message all along.
Something comforting, almost heartwarming in this undertow of bristles and snags aroused me and made me feel she was a kindred spirit who’d alighted with me in the same afterlife, taken the words from my mouth, and, by saying them back to me, given them a life and a spin they’d never have had I kept them to myself. Under guise of spitfire mini-tantrums, her words suggested something at once kind and welcoming, like the rough folds of a trusted and forgiving blanket that takes us as we are and knows how we sleep, what we’ve been through, what things we dream of and so desperately crave and are ashamed to own up to when we’re alone and naked with ourselves. Did she know me that well?
“Most people remain Shukoffs,” I said, not knowing whether I meant it. “But I could be wrong.”
“Are you always this amphibalent?” she taunted.
“Aren’t you?”
“I invented the word.”
I am Clara. I invent riddles and their cheats.
I looked away, perhaps to avoid looking at her. I scanned the faces in the library. The large room was filled with just the sort of people who go to parties where a bowl of punch sits in the middle of their shiftless chatter. I remembered her scornful just-look-at-these-faces and tried to cast a withering glance in their direction. The gesture gave me a pretext to keep looking elsewhere.
“Otherpeoples,” I said, to fill the silence, repeating the word we’d tacitly agreed to give them, as though this one word summed up everything we’d felt about everyone else and would nail the coffin on our indictment of mankind whole. We were fellow aliens conspiring to renew our reluctant courtship with Earthlings.
“Otherpeoples,” she echoed, still holding the plate, whose contents neither of us had touched yet. She hadn’t offered it to me, and I didn’t dare.
What threw me off was the way she’d said otherpeoples. It didn’t seem as disenchanted as I had hoped, but had paled into something soulful, verging on sorrow and mercy.
“Are otherpeoples as terrible as all that?” she asked, looking up to me for an answer, as though I was the expert who had led her through a landscape that wasn’t really hers and for which she had little affinity or much patience, but that she’d strayed in simply because our conversation had drifted that way. Was she disagreeing with me politely? Or worse yet: rebuking me?
“Terrible? No,” I replied. “Necessary? I don’t know.”
She gave it some thought. “Some are. Necessary, that is. At least to me they are. Sometimes I wish they weren’t — though we’re always alone in the end.”
Again she spoke these words with such mournful candor and humility that she seemed to own up to a weakness in herself, which she had tried but failed to overcome. Her words stung me to the quick, because they reminded me that we were not two intergalactic wayfarers who had landed in the same afterlife but that I was the alien and she the first native who’d run into me and extended a friendly hand and was about to take me into town and introduce me to her friends and parents. She, I gathered, liked others and knew how to put up with Shukoffs till they stopped being Shukoffs.
“So much for otherpeoples,” she added, with a pensive, faraway gaze, as though still nursing unresolved feelings about them. “Sometimes they’re all that stands between us and the ditch to remind us we’re not always alone, even when there are trenches between us. So, yes, they are important.”
“I know,” I said. Perhaps I had gone too far in my wholesale indictment of mankind and this was the time to backpedal. “I too hate being alone.”
“Oh, I don’t mind being alone at all,” she corrected. “I like being alone.”
Had she snubbed yet another one of my efforts to align my outlook to hers? Or, in my attempt to understand her in terms of myself, had I simply failed to hear what she was saying? Was I desperately trying to think she was like me so that she might be less of a stranger? Or was I trying to be like her to show we were closer than we seemed?
“With or without them, it’s always pandangst.”
“Pandangst?”
“Pandemic anxiety — last seen stalking the Upper West Side on Sunday evening. But there were two unreported sightings this afternoon. I hate afternoons. This is the winter of pandangst.”
Suddenly I saw it, should have seen it all along. She didn’t mind being alone, didn’t mind it the way only those who’re never alone long to be alone. Solitude was totally foreign to her. I envied her. Probably, her friends and, I assumed, her lovers or would-be lovers didn’t make it easy for her to be alone — a condition she didn’t quite mind but enjoyed complaining about, as only those who’ve been everywhere in the world readily admit they’ve never seen Luxor or Cádiz.
“I’ve learned to take the best others have to offer.” This was the person who goes over to perfect strangers and just greets them with a handshake. No arrogance in her words — rather the muted dejection over an implied long list of setbacks and disappointments. “I take what they have to give wherever I find it.”