Pause.
“And the rest?”
This may not have been her drift, but I thought I’d picked up the suggestion of an undisclosed but rattling at the tail end of her sentence like a warning and a lure.
“The rest gets tossed?” I offered, trying to show that I was sufficiently experienced in the ways of love to have caught her meaning and that I too was guilty of taking what I needed from people and dumping the rest.
“Tossed? Perhaps,” she responded, still unconvinced by what I was offering for her consideration.
Perhaps I was being harsh and unfair, for this may not have been what she’d meant to add. She had absentmindedly gone along with my suggestion when all she’d meant to say, perhaps, was “I take people just as they are.”
Or was this a more pointed warning yet — I take what I need where I find it, so watch yourself — a warning I had momentarily failed to heed because it didn’t agree with her distressed look of a few seconds earlier?
I was on the point of changing tack and suggesting that perhaps we never toss away or let go of anything in life, much less unlove those we never loved at all.
“Perhaps you are right,” she interrupted. “We keep people for when we’ll need them, to tide us over, not because we want them. I don’t think I’m always good for people.”
She reminded me of birds of prey who keep their quarry alive but paralyzed, to feed their young on.
What happened to those who had only the best taken from them and the rest junked?
What happened to a man after Clara was done with him?
I am Clara. Not always good for people.
Was this her way of drawing me out, or was it a warning asking to be disbelieved?
Was her life a flea-ridden trench dressed up as a high-end boutique?
Maybe, she said. Some of us have spent our entire lives in the trenches. Some of us tussle, and hope, and love so near the trenches that we stink of them.
This was her contribution to my image of trenches. Coming as it did from a woman like her, it struck me as too dark, too bleak, not quite believable. Did she, with the unbuttoned shirt, single pendant, and gleaming tanned body just back from the Caribbean really nurse so tragic a view of life? Or was this her spin on the demonic image I’d concocted to keep the conversation going between us?
What did she mean by love in the trenches? Life with someone? Life without love? Life trying to invent someone and finding the wrong one each time? Life with too many? Life with very few, or none that mattered? Or was it the life of single people — its highs and lows, as we bivouac from place to place in large cities in search of something we’re no longer sure we’d call love if it sprang on us from a nearby trench and screamed its name was Clara?
Trenches. With or without people. Trenches just the same. Dating, especially. She hated dating. Torment and torture, the pit of pandangst. De-tested dating. Would rather womit than date.
Trenches on Sunday afternoons. This, we agreed, was truly the pits, the mother of all gutters and foxholes. Les tranchées du dimanche. Which suddenly gave them the luster of a twilit France. Ville d’Avray. Corot. Eric Rohmer.
Saturdays weren’t too great either, I said. Saturday breakfast, in or out, always a sense that others are happier — being others. Then the unavoidable two-hour Laundromat where you feel you could just as easily shed your skin and throw it in with your socks, and, like a crustacean hiding in a rock while a new identity is being spun for you, hope to reinvent yourself from what comes out of the dryer.
She laughed.
Her turn: The trenches, the slough of amphibalence, the quag of awkward, the bog of boredom: hurting, being hurt, the cold, lame handshake of estranged lovers who come out to inspect the damage, smoke a cigarette together, play friends, then head back to life without love.
Mine: Those who hurt us most are sometimes those we’ve loved the least. Come Sundays in the quag, we miss them too.
Hers: The quag when sleep doesn’t come soon enough and you wish you were with someone, anyone. Or with someone else. Or when someone is better than no one, but no one better yet.
Mine: The quag when you walk by someone’s home and remember how miserable you were but how truly miserable you are now that you no longer live there. Days that go down into some high-speed funnel but which you’d trade back to have all over again, this time slower, though you’d probably give anything never to have lived them at all.
“High amphibalence.”
“The days I haven’t spent in the quag recently I can count on one hand,” I said. “The days in the rose garden on one finger.”
“Are you in the quag now?”
She didn’t mince words.
“Not in the quag,” I replied. “Just — on hold. On ice. Maybe in overhaul, possibly recall.”
The phrase amused her. She got my drift well enough, even if our meanings and metaphors were growing ever more tangled.
“So when were you in the rose garden last?”
How I loved the way the question cut to the chase and brought out what we’d been hinting at all along.
Should I tell her? Had I even understood her question? Or should I assume we were speaking the same language? I could say: This right now is the rose garden. Or: I’d never expected to see the rose garden so soon.
“Not since mid-May,” I heard myself say. How easy to let this out in the open. It made my fear of speaking about myself seem so trivial, so cagey, every word I’d speak now seemed charged with thrill and denudedness.
“And you?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Lying low, just lying low these days — like you, I suppose. Call it in hibernation, in quarantine, in time-out — for my sins, for my whatevers. In Rekonvaleszenz,” she said, imitating the fastidiously halting lisp of Viennese analysts determined to use a polysyllabic Teutolatinate for on the rebound. “I’m being reconditioned too. Not a party person, really.”
It took me totally by surprise. In my eyes, she personified party people. What was I getting wrong? Fearing our messages were getting all coiled and twisted, I asked, “We are speaking about the same thing, aren’t we?”
Amused, and without missing a beat: “We know we are.”
This didn’t clarify matters, but I loved the disclosure of conspiracy, by far the most stirring and exhilarating thing between us.
I looked at her as she began to head toward the other end of the library, where two bookcases of visibly untouched Pléiades volumes stood. She didn’t look like someone in torment and torture at all.
“What do you think?”
“Of these books?”
“No, of her.”
I looked at the blond woman she was indicating. Her name was Beryl, she said.
“I don’t know. Nice, I suppose,” I said. I could tell Clara would have preferred a devastating bashing on the spot. But I also wanted her to know that I was merely pretending to be naive and was just holding out before delivering my own demolition job. She didn’t give me time.
“Skin’s as white as aspirin, cankles the size of papayas, and her knees have knocked each other senseless — don’t you notice anything?” she said. “She’s walking on her hindquarters. Look.”
Clara mimicked the woman’s gait, holding both her arms with the plate limply in midair as though they belonged to a dog straining to act human.
I am Clara. I invented the hatchet.
“Everyone says she waddles.”
“I didn’t notice.”