Did she mean upset things or upset me?
“Bummer,” I said, trying to show I’d taken the news with no less equanimity than if I’d received a “regrets only” from someone I’d invited reluctantly. “It won’t be fun without you.” I couldn’t have found a dumber comeback.
It hurt. The question was where. I didn’t mind going alone — I had always liked going to the movies alone. I just didn’t like having to cancel what, without totally admitting it to myself, I’d taken for granted. I didn’t like finding, as I always knew I’d eventually find, that she had another life, that I played no part in that life, and that the part I played in her lying-low phase was so small that no one, other than Max and Margo, and the few who’d seen us together at the party, had the slightest inkling I existed. Perhaps what I didn’t like was having to change my life back to what it had been before Clara. Four nights, and I’m hooked. Is that it?
A dead silence had fallen between us.
I was afraid this would happen. But so soon?
“I’ll live. Trust me.”
Silence again. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me why I can’t come? With most people not asking means they’re dying to ask.”
I was trying not to ask so as not to seem curious or cranky. Nor did I want to sound indifferent. I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps I didn’t want to know what she did when I wasn’t with her. I cared only for what we did together — or so I wished to believe. What she did with others didn’t matter, especially if it did not interfere with our being together. In this, it took me a while to realize, I was thinking and behaving like every jealous man.
“You really don’t want to know?”
“Doesn’t matter. Obviously you’re dying to tell me.”
“Otherpeoples ” she said. Her way of remaining vague and all too specific at the same time.
But it hit me hard, as though she’d finally taken a large spade and with it shoved dirt at my face. The streets became gray, and the sky became gray, and the festive people crowding the stores around the crosstown stop on Broadway lost their color and became gray, and life, having lost the dimple in its smile, had turned sullen and gray.
Once again, I decided to have nothing more to do with her. This was the time to put that resolution into effect. This is when it should happen: man may be buckling at the knees, man may have aimed too high, but man splits now. Why bother having lunch under the circumstances?
“Do they serve tea in your house?”
I looked at her in total surprise.
“Yes, all the Twinings in the world. It’s just that the pre-check-in crew arrives tomorrow, so the place is a mess.”
“Is there a clean corner?”
“There should be.”
“And il y a things to eat?”
“Very old ham, green-flecked cheese, and the potatoes in the bottom drawer have grown trees. Always wine, though.”
How could she do this? From ice to scalding hot. Suddenly a party erupted in our lives.
On Broadway we stopped and decided to stock up on food. The store was mobbed, but neither of us minded. Two cheeses, one, no two, baguettes, one ripe avocado, some ham, raw and cooked. Why the avocado? Goes with the ham and mustard. Did I have mustard? Yes, but very old. By God, when were you last in the rose garden? Told you, aeons ago. Some fruit? Winter or summer fruit? Does it matter, they’re all imported from faraway places whose fruit matures nowhere but on board the giant dark containers piled on beaten-down tankers called Prince Oscar that shuttle up and down the Atlantic to bring berries of all colors and no taste to people ready to sit around Yule logs and sing carols over spiked fruit punch. “All right, all right, je get it,” she said. Did we have milk? We did, I said, and made a humbled shame-face, but it might have turned to yogurt. At the last minute we remembered what would have made all the difference in the world: caviar and sour cream. We were, once again, playing house. How about some junk? Junk and candy, she said.
By the time we were done, we had filled two large grocery bags. “Suddenly I’m hungry,” she said. I was starving.
“Before we go any farther, is the kitchen clean?” she asked as we entered my building.
Was she asking if my sheets were clean?
“Señora Venegas comes twice a week. But she is not allowed to touch anything in the refrigerator or in my study.”
I got out of the elevator, forgot to tell her that its doors shut very, very quickly, and suddenly saw Clara with her package violently shoved out of the elevator by the closing door. “The fucking door. The fucking nerve.” She kept cursing at the door all the way down the corridor to my apartment.
She fell in love with my rug. She had an idea, she said. “Let’s picnic in the corner room. I’ll take care of everything, you take care of the wine and the music.” For a second we stood next to each other, looking out at the view of the park. Another overcast white day bursting with inner joy.
She found a tablecloth in the linen closet. “What’s this?”
“From Roussillon. Bought it as a present, never gave it, things fizzled, kept it instead.”
On her way to the kitchen she spotted a photograph of my father and me when I was four. It was taken on our trip to Berlin. We’re in the Tiergarten, he and I. And next to it is a black-and-white picture of him with his father on the same exact spot. “Return of the Jew.”
“Revenge of the Jew.”
“You look like him.”
“I would hope not.”
“Didn’t you like him?”
“I was crazy about him. But I don’t think he knew happiness.”
“With what happened after this picture was taken, difficult to imagine happiness anywhere.”
“He had his chance. I think.”
“You think.”
“I know.”
“And?”
“He let it go.”
“Meaning?” Why the sudden interest in my father?
“Meaning he didn’t think he was worthy enough. Meaning he knew love once and only once, yet never got close enough or risked enough to go after someone who might have asked for nothing more than his love. Meaning he had waited too long but didn’t know that life was willing to wait out the hurdles it had thrown his way.”
“Amphibalence Senior?”
“If you wish.”
“When did he die?”
“Last year.”
She got closer to the picture.
“I was born the summer this was taken,” she said.
“I know.”
Let her know that I too had done the math, that I’d already thought, Did I know, as I was ambling in a small park in the Tiergarten with my father, that somewhere in a hospital in Manhattan someone who’d be named Clara. .?
What I didn’t tell her and would never have dared hint at was that I was also thinking, Did he know, as an anonymous photographer was busy snapping our photo, that the one person I wished he’d meet someday would stand before his picture and ask me about him? Did he know that the Persian rug we bought together at an auction sale one Sunday five years ago would inspire Clara to make a picnic?
“How do you know so much about his private life?”
“Because we had very few secrets. Because he was so unhappy sometimes he couldn’t afford secrets. Because he went over all mistaken turns in his life so I wouldn’t make the same ones myself when the time came.”
“And have you?”
“That’s a Door number three question.”
“Has the time come?”
“That’s another Door number three question.”
“And?”
“And — since we’re into ramming doors open — let’s say the matter is being weighed even as we speak.”
“Deep. Very, very très deep.”