But she had another torture in store for me, one that allowed me to suspect, without knowing for certain, that all this was happening in my mind, and in my mind only, and that these twisted riddles being spun around me had nothing to do with her and personified my gnarled relationship with myself, with her, with life itself.
But I wasn’t going to fall for this. I wasn’t being paranoid, I thought — she’s the one who’s doing this to me. So I decided to turn off my phone — to show her.
Then, snuffing these thoughts from my mind, sprung the quantum theorem from hell. Two options, but not both at the same time. If I turned my cell phone back on, I would find either no message from her or one that said such cruel things that it would leave me stunned and reeling for days. But if I didn’t check and kept my cell phone off, I would never read the message that started with,
DEAR OSKAR DONT BOTHER CALLING OR WRITING OR TAKING OFF YOUR SHOES JUST BRING YOURSELF OVER AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN I DONT CARE WHAT TIME IT IS I DONT CARE IF YOU WANT TO OR NOT DONT CARE WHAT I SAID TODAY OR YESTERDAY OR THE NIGHT BEFORE I JUST WANT YOU WITH ME TONIGHT AND I PROMISE I WONT SLEEP UNTIL I HEAR THE RING OF MY BUZZER DOWNSTAIRS DONT BOTHER CALLING OR WRITING OR TAKING OFF YOUR SHOES JUST THE BUZZER THE BUZZER THE BUZZER DOWNSTAIRS.
Like Orpheus I could not resist turning on my phone and checking my messages. But, as with Orpheus, no sooner had I checked than the message she would have sent disappeared instantly.
FIFTH NIGHT
The one question I woke up to and couldn’t shake off and took with me to the shower, to my corner Greek diner, and then on the long way back home without ever being able to answer was: Is she not going to call me at all today or is she just pretending not to call?
After breakfast, to stop myself from hoping — or was it to spite myself for hoping? — I decided to turn off my phone again and found myself dawdling on Broadway under the pretense that I had plenty of time and nothing to do this morning. But my reason for not wanting to get back too soon was too obvious to ignore: I wanted to prove — to myself, to her, to the gods themselves — that I was in no rush to know whether she had written or called or come by, because the last thing I wanted to know this morning was that she had made no effort to call or see me. In the end, what brought me to the brink of shame — because it was the one thing I wanted most — was to hear her admission that she was going through the exact same torment and torture herself. Had she come by car, she would have found my buzzer silent; had she called, she’d have reached voice mail; had she run into me and asked where I’d been, I would have been evasive. Then it hit me that this was exactly what she wanted me to go through — and I found comfort in this. She wanted me to juggle all these doubts because she herself was juggling them at this precise moment.
In my mind — and perhaps in mine only — it all boiled down to one question: Who was going to pick up the phone and call first; who was the author, and who the victim of silence? And was hers just silence or, like mine, was it disguised chatter? Where did tacit end and silent start? Clearly, a Door number 3 question.
There was, however, one last hope, even if it came at the end of what would surely be a long and twisted day: the unspoken 7:10. Not saying anything about 7:10, however, was either a sign or no sign, but no sign was itself a sign as well.
How to break this radio silence?
I could take the Staten Island ferry, and as soon as I stood on the freezing deck before the Statue of Liberty, call and say, Guess where I am — and send her a picture to prove it. But I also imagined her reply: gruff and unresponsive, Your point being? Or I could stand on the Brooklyn Bridge or sit on one of the pews inside the Cathedral of St. John, scarcely ten blocks from her home. And your point being?
Or — and this is what I did — at around 2:00 p.m. I sent her a picture of the statue of Memory in Straus Park. This is where you can find me. I’ll wait awhile, a very long while. But by then bring an ice pick.
I waited for her to call me back. But she did not. So things had degenerated far worse than I feared. She wasn’t talking to me. Perhaps she had turned off her phone. But then that too was a sign, wasn’t it? — especially if she kept hers turned off for the same reason, which would make it the loudest sign of all.
I ran through a series of wished-for scenarios. The best consisted in her sending me a picture of where she was at this very instant. No text. Just her way of explaining why she couldn’t meet me. For some reason I imagined her sending me a photo of the Temple of Dendur. Bergdorf’s. The road to Darien. A bathroom bowl.
Then I began to wish that her reply might come in the form of Leo Czernowicz playing the Bach.
Then that she’d call me back, saying, What?
What do you mean “What?” I’d reply.
You called.
Are you free?
Why?
If you’re busy, I’ll call some other time.
What did you want?
I called to apologize.
For?
You know exactly what for.
You already did. What else?
Nothing else.
•
“It’s freezing cold, and I can’t believe you made me leave my house.”
She knew she’d surprise me. But no sooner did I see her materialize at Straus Park than we burst out laughing hysterically. Partly because she was making fun of our overdrawn radio silence; or because it was obvious that our embattled stillness was nothing more than a clash of wills, a bogus cold war. What a relief to admit it with laughter — and move on.
“Were you working?” I was hoping she’d say no.
“Yes. But it was taking too long, and with all you made me drink last night, I could barely focus.”
“Are you still pissed?”
“Depends what for.”
“Did you eat?” She made it clear she was changing a delicate subject, though I was not quite sure what precisely that subject was. Standard MO.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“Want to do ethnic?”
Within minutes, I knew, there’d be new people in our lives, new ways of naming things, new foibles to pick up on in a storehouse of characters sprung out from the mind of a girl I couldn’t begin to understand except by thinking she was my spitting image, but my image in reverse, the mirror image of her own replica.
We walked down Broadway, examining several places along the way as possible restaurants for lunch, and yet, for one reason or another, dismissing each. The truth is, neither of us was hungry and would have settled for an intimate café. I missed the sextant and the oversized meerschaum pipe and the picture of a lurching bull. There were, as usual this time of the year, lots of people about, lots of tourists and young residents of the many two-star hotels that had sprouted around the neighborhood. Every place was full, and there was a ferment in the air, which gave our walk its hasty, spirited pace.
Clara decided she needed to buy candy. Did one really buy candy at her age? “I like candy, okay?” At some point, we decided to take the crosstown bus and head to the East Side. But did we want to run into more crowds of people? There’s the Guggenheim, I said. Did we really want to go to the Guggenheim? Actually no. We could go to France, I suggested. But at this time in the afternoon? It would be all wrong.
“Yes — about the movies,” she started, “I know this will upset things, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it tonight,” she said.