“Don’t bother, you know already.”
I’ve always envied people who put their cards on the table — even when they don’t have a hand — people who are willing to call a conveniently ambiguous situation by its name if only to clear the air. She was right: I didn’t trust her, I feared being set up. Any moment now, she’d tell me the one thing I dreaded most. You do know what I want to say? I think so. What? And I’d fall for the oldest trick in the world. Chastened by her frank gaze and by that hint of reprobation to come, I caught myself tempted to preempt her, if only to say it myself and not hear it from her. That we should cool it, maybe see other people, not misread this for what it’s not, it’s not you, it’s me — I’d been expecting this speech for days already. Then, by way of capping all this, I finally said, “I know you have a whole life outside of Rohmer and me.” It was meant to show I harbored no jealousy or illusions. But I also wanted her to read that the same might be said regarding aspects of my life about which she knew very, very little.
“Can I be blunt?” So she wasn’t going to let me diffuse what she had started to say. “Yesterday afternoon when you came by I could have asked you and I know you would have said yes — but it would have been more by way of consent, just as had you insisted after you tried to rape and bludgeon me last night, I’d have agreed, but that would have been no more than a lukewarm yes. By the time we left the bar last night, you knew I was of two minds anyway — and don’t deny it.”
I was about to affect surprise. But she cut me short. “Don’t bother. You knew.”
This was more frank than anything I’d expected. She was honing in on everything, and I suddenly felt this wave of anxiety wash over me, because I didn’t know yet whether she was about to bring out into the open everything we’d left tactfully unsaid during our evenings together or whether she was simply going to eviscerate me and expose me for the shifty, jittery, wanting man I’d always known I was.
“Why call it consent if we’re both willing?” I threw in.
“Because you and I both know there is something holding us back, and neither of us knows what it is. If I cared less, I’d say I didn’t want to get hurt, but I don’t give a damn about getting hurt, just as I don’t care if you get hurt. If I cared less, I’d also say it would ruin our friendship. But I don’t give a fuck about friendship either.”
“I thought we did have a friendship, or were working up to one.”
“Friendships are for other people, and neither of us wants friendship. We’re too close for friendship.”
Was there no hope for anything, then? Suddenly all I could think of was the word heartbreak. You’re breaking my heart, Clara, and these are cruel and cutting words that cause heartache, and rupture of blood vessels. My heart was indeed racing. This was so sad that, for the first time in my life, I suddenly found myself on the verge of crying because a woman had said no to me before I’d even had a chance to ask anything. Or had I asked her already? Hadn’t I been asking for days now? Did men really cry like this — and if they did, where had I been all my life? I’ll always hate you for this, for bringing me to the abyss and forcing me to stare down, the way they force a detainee to watch the brutal execution of his cellmate, only to be told after, but not before he’s witnessed the atrocity, that they had no plans to execute him at all, in fact he was free to go.
She must have noticed. Maybe she’d already seen it once this very afternoon with Inky. “Please don’t,” she said, as she had the last time, “because if you start, I’ll start, and once this happens, then all signals get crossed, all systems go down, and we’ll be back to even before we started this conversation.”
“Maybe I’d rather be where we were before we started. This talk is going to places I’m not going to like.”
“Why? You’re not surprised. I’m not surprised.”
It swept through me before I knew what was happening. This was going to be totally out of order, and it might bring everything we’d been saying down to a crappy, hackneyed plane, but I had nothing left to lose, no dignity, no ammunition, no water in my gourd, and I felt it was worth throwing this last vestige of pride into the fire the way, on very cold days, a freezing bohemian poet might throw his manuscript into the fire, to stay warm, find love, spite art, and show fate a thing or two.
“Let’s just face it,” I said, “you’re just not attracted. Just say that the physical thing isn’t there. I don’t do it for you. Say it. It won’t tear me up. But it will clear the air.”
“You’re always playing, even when you’re serious. It has nothing to do with physical attraction. If anything, it’s because I am attracted that we’ve come this far.”
This was news! Had I so thoroughly misread her that it had to hit me in the face — or was this her turn to play with me, play any card, so long as she averted the silence she probably hated as much as I did.
“So, according to you, all this should flatter me,” I said. I was being ironic. Or perhaps I wanted her to say it once more in clear and plain language.
“Flattery is irrelevant. I don’t give a fuck about flattery, and neither do you. It’s not what either of us wants.”
“Why, do you know what you want?”
“Do you?”
“I think I do. I’ve wanted it from the very first, and you’ve known it.”
“Not true. You’re knocking at a door, but you’re not even sure you want it opened.”
“How about you?”
“I’m not knocking, I’ve pushed open the door already. But I can’t say I’ve stepped in either.”
“Maybe it’s because you don’t trust me.”
“Maybe.”
And then it hit me. “You’re not afraid of getting hurt, or of being rejected, are you?” I said. “You’re terrified of what you may not find. You’re afraid of being disappointed.”
“Aren’t you?” she asked right away, as though she’d known it all along.
“Petrified,” I replied. I was exaggerating.
“Petrified,” she repeated. “This doesn’t flatter either of us, does it? Or maybe we’re just two grown-up scaredy-cats. Just scaredy-cats.”
I didn’t like where this was going either.
“Petrified or not, let me say this, then,” I said. “I think of you all the time. All the time, all the time, all the time. It’s a fact of life. I’m just happy this is a magical, snow globe, holiday week — but I’ve been with you every minute of every day. I eat with you, I shower with you, I sleep with you. My pillow is tired of hearing your name.”
It didn’t seem to surprise her.
“Do you call it Clara?”
“I call it Clara, I tell it things I’ve told no one in my life, and if I have more to drink tonight, what I have to tell you will make it difficult to face you again tomorrow.”
The heavy silence brooding between us told me I had overplayed my hand and made a dreadful mistake. How to backpedal now?
“If you need to know, it’s hardly any different here,” she said, almost reluctantly, something like halting sorrow straining her voice, the equivalent of a helpless shrug during a moment where words fail. Was she bluffing? Or was she raising the stakes? “I say your name when I’m alone.”
Was this the same girl who didn’t sing in the shower?
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” I asked.
“You never said anything, Mr. Amphibalence, me-Door-number-three man.”
“I was playing by your rules.”
“What rules?”
I looked at her more baffled than ever. The admonitions, the roadblocks, the subtle warnings — were they nothing?