The fries arrived. She squeezed a dollop of ketchup onto them, and then added more. She was about to say something. Before speaking, though, she picked up a fry with her thumb and forefinger and, while it awaited its baptismal ketchup, she kept staring at it, lost in what looked like stray thoughts and misgivings, as though her fry had become an amulet or a sacred relic or a bone fragment from a patron saint who was being asked to guide her in this difficult pass. “I’ll say this much, and you’re free to believe me or not, to laugh at me or not, but I’m ready to go all the way with you,” she said. “This afternoon I left your home feeling I was making the worst mistake of my life, because I didn’t feel I’d ever be able to repair it. The minute I saw Inky, I had to run away on any pretext, not sure I’d find you, not sure you’d be alone, not sure you’d even be happy to see me again, but I chanced it and I came. I left a million messages, if you care to check.”
I hadn’t checked, precisely because I did not want to find none waiting.
“I kept hoping you’d call, which is why in the end I left the house and went to the gym.”
“Now that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And you turned off your télyfön for the same reason, I suppose.”
There was no point denying it.
“It’s as I said, Printz: I’m ready.”
I didn’t know what she meant exactly, but was afraid to ask. What was clear was that her sentence had the assertive dare of a Your move.
“Could you just kiss me now and not argue so much?”
She leaned over toward me, reached for my neck, lowered my turtle-neck, and kissed me straight on the neck — something unusually long and sensual for a first kiss.
“I’ve been staring at your skin for an hour. I needed to taste it,” she said, palming the skin around my eyes.
“And I’ve been staring at your teeth for days now.”
This was the first of many kisses. Her breath tasted of bread and Viennese butter cookies.
•
Last call was on the house, courtesy of the waitress, who’d been working the late shift every night this week. We were sitting on the banquette, unable to move, fearing that any movement or change might break the spell and pull us back to doubts and heartbreak waiting around the corner. When Clara returned from the bathroom, she put her arms around me and immediately resumed kissing me on the mouth. I could not believe how fast things were moving. “You taste fantastic,” I said.
Then she told me: “Just don’t make me think this is happening in my head. Because I know you,” she said. “And I know myself. I want this, but I also know what you’ll drive me to do, and I pray, pray, you don’t.” I had no idea what she meant. “Don’t you have any trust, any faith?” I asked. “None.” In moments of extreme tenderness she spoke with a serrated tongue.
It occurred to me she must have thought the same of me. Had she asked me if I trusted anyone, I would have said the exact same thing.
As some point I said I had to go to the bathroom. “If you take more than one minute, I’ll go into high pandangst and think you’ve escaped through some back, rat-infested alley, and I’ll just leave — because I know I can’t take it.”
“I’m just going to pee, okay?”
But on the way to the bathroom the thought did occur to me: I’ll sleep with her tonight, then tomorrow we’ll see. I wondered if she could get even more passionate in bed than she’d been already on the banquette, or would she suddenly turn out to be the type who needed this done, and that done, and more of this and less of that, and no biting please, or was it going to be beastly lovemaking where we’d tear each other’s clothes off as soon as we were behind the elevator door and out of her doorman’s sight? Or would there be candlelight, with Straus Park behind us and the Prince Oscar looking after us outside our window as we stood naked together and watched the night like two sleepless starlings listening again and again, and many more times again to Beethoven’s “Song of Thanksgiving”? Or would it be as it always was with her: chill winter gusts in a minefield of scalding geysers? In the bathroom I caught sight of my face in the mirror and smiled at myself. I had drunk three, no four Scotches. “Hi,” I finally said out loud. “Hi,” he responded. Then I looked down at Signor Guido, my patient foster-child of silence. “Who’s the man?” I finally asked. “You’re the man,” I said as I watched him perform his ancillary function. “Who loves you?” “You do,” he said, still wearing a simper on his bald pate. “This is your moment, and tonight is your night, you intrepid scalawag, you.”
While standing in front of the urinal, I rested my forehead against the cool, glistening steel pipe connected to the flusher, where condensation had collected, and simply stood there, enjoying its cooling feel as I pushed my forehead into the large hexagonal steel nut, now smiling at myself each time I heard the words repeated in my mind: Who’s the man? You’re the man. Who’s the man? You’re the man. I was almost on the point of bursting out laughing. The most beautiful moment of my life happened before a urinal. Just please, please don’t make me stop loving her, don’t make me squelch this or wake up sated and indifferent. Don’t.
When I returned to Clara, she looked totally alarmed.
“What did you do to your face? Did you fall?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I was too busy trying not to look unsteady as I sat back down. “You have something that looks like a gash — no, a bruise — on your forehead. She was touching it, lovingly. Could this woman who could cut me with two syllables show such tenderness for my forehead? I touched my forehead. No doubt about it; there was an indentation in my skin. Was I bleeding badly? How could this have happened? Then I remembered. The steel nut — I must have been leaning forever against the large nut on the steel pipe.
“Just looking at it makes me want to touch you. What took you so long? What were you really doing in there, Printz?”
“Clara Brunschvicg, you shock me.”
And we kissed again. In the fog of our caresses and lovemaking, I understood why people bring their mouths together. This is why people kiss, I kept thinking, the way an alien from distant constellations might say to himself, after trying out a human body, So this is why they do it. What had I been doing before? I wanted to ask. Whom had I filled my life with all this time? And what had all these women been doing in it? Why, for which reason, what pleasure, what end, when it was so very clear that small love was taken and less given back? Had everyone been a Sunday filler? What rose gardens had I slumbered through and what could we have been swapping in the din-filled Exchanges of Love? Or did it not matter, so long as we kept the ships coming and commerce going and the piers bustling — people, action, places, cargo, buy, sell, borrow — yet everyone, in the end, always, always alone when night falls on the dale of pandangst.
Why even bother asking why this was different?
In the men’s room I had taken a moment to check if there were messages for me. She had called eight times but never left a message. Why did I assume that she’d lied to me when she claimed she’d called so many times? Because you don’t trust me, because you’re afraid of me. Afraid of what, though? Afraid. Afraid because I could be better than you. Afraid because, unlike love with others, you’ve no clue where this is going. Afraid that, contrary to what you desperately want to believe, you’ll never want this to end. Afraid — and you’re only beginning to get a glimpse of it now — that I’m the real deal, Printz, and that this hindrance and disturbance we thought was a rock between us is what bound us from the get-go. Today you like me more than you know. But what you’re scared to death of is wanting me more tomorrow.