SIXTH NIGHT
That night, in Straus Park, I almost did light a cigarette. It was too cold to sit and it had started snowing, so I could stand there for only a short while before moving on. One day, I’ll grow tired of this. One day, I’ll pass by and forget to stop.
I called her as soon as I arrived home. No, she wasn’t sleeping. Didn’t want to lose the feeling either. No, same spot, by the window, men’s pajamas. She sounded sleepy and exhausted, but no different than when I’d left her. I can still smell you, she said, and it will be like sleeping with you. I felt she was drifting off, perhaps I was keeping her up. “No, don’t go yet, I like that you called.” Maybe I’d done the right thing, she said. “Calling?” I asked. “Calling too.”
There were long silences on the phone. I told her I’d never felt anything like this for anyone. “I have,” she said, and, after a momentary interruption, added “for you.” I could see her smile rippling on her tired features, the dimples when she smiled, her hand when she rubbed her palm over her forehead. I want to be naked with you. It’s not like you weren’t asked.
We said good night, but neither got off the phone, so we kept urging the other to hang up, and each time we said good night, a long silence would follow. Clara? Yes. You’re not hanging up. I’m hanging up now. Long silence. But she wouldn’t hang up. Did it take you an hour to get home? Almost. What crazy ideas you have, Printz, going home like this, you would have made me happy, and I’d have made you happy too. Good night, I said. Good night, she said. But I didn’t hear a click, and when I asked if she was still on the line, I heard a smothered giggle. “Clara B., you’re crazy.” “I’m crazy? You’re crazy.” “I’m crazy for you.” “Obviously not crazy enough.”
I did not want to miss her by calling too late the next morning. But I didn’t want to call too early either. I waited to take my shower for a while, but then, for good measure, took both my phones into the bathroom in case she called either one. As for breakfast, no way I was going to leave home before speaking to her. This was when I came up with the idea of buying an assortment of muffins and scones nimbly stacked in a white paper bag folded at the top. That’s right. Two coffees and an assortment of muffins, scones, and goodies, nimbly stacked. .
On my way to the shower I spotted the mound of salt on the carpet still bearing the grooved imprints of Clara’s fingers. My God, she had been here less than twenty-four hours ago — here, in this very apartment, sitting on this very carpet, barefoot, with chocolate cookies wedged in between her toes. The idea seemed unreal, impossible to grasp, as if some higher order had suddenly descended to pay a visit to my arid, dull, sublunary landfill. Yesterday we were together, I kept repeating.
I watched the stain and feared that it might lose its luster and meaning, that she too, as a result, might begin to retreat, ebbing like a lakeshore town when just hours earlier it seemed a stroll away.
When I bought this rug, the idea of a Clara couldn’t even have crossed my mind, and yet that Sunday in late May with my father when I bid on the rug at an auction before moving here is now indissolubly fused to this spill, as though she and the rug and my father, who wanted me to learn how to buy things at an auction, because one had to learn these things, had run on three totally seemingly unrelated paths that were destined to converge on this very stain, the way the pictures of the cages in the Tiergarten would lose their meaning now unless joined to that of a baby born that same year one summer thousands of miles away.
I loved reading my life this way — in the key of Clara — as if something out there had arranged its every event according to principles that were more luminous and more radiant than those of life itself, events whose meaning was made obvious retrospectively, always retrospectively. What was blind luck and arbitrary suddenly had an intention. Coincidence and happenstance were not really chaotic but the mainsprings of an intelligence I had better not disturb or intrude upon with too many questions. Even love, perhaps, was nothing more than our way of cobbling random units of life into something approaching meaning and design.
How nimble, how natural, how obvious her suggestion that we have lunch at my place. It would never have occurred to me. How simple her way of coming up to me at the party. Left to my own devices, I’d have spent the whole evening trying to speak to her and finally given up on hearing her tell someone something casual, caustic, and cruel.
I looked at the salt on the rug and renewed my promise never to touch it. This was proof that we’d been happy together, that we could spend entire days and not once grow tired of the other.
Of course, I feared that the joy I felt, like certain trees, had taken root at the edge of a craggy cliff. They may crane their necks and turn their leaves all they want toward the sun, but gravity has the last word. Please don’t let me be the one to pull this tree down. There is so much sarcasm and drought in me, to say nothing of fear, pride, disbelief, and an evil disposition ready to spite myself if only to prove I can do without so many of the things that life puts on the table that I’ll even be the first to push the poor sapling into the water. Don’t do it. If anything, let her.
I thought once again of last night and how our hips had moved together. Too soon, too sudden, too fast. What an idiot!
Compare this to: You’re the best thing that’s happened to me this year. You could take these words to a broker and buy put options in a bullish market and still make a killing — words whose hidden luster I recovered and would let go of so as to recapture them over and over, the way someone finds his fingers returning time and again to a pleasurable round object on a string of tiny hexagonal worry beads. Even when I forgot these words, I knew they were waiting close by, like a cat rubbing its back against your closed door. I’d even delay letting it in, knowing that as soon as I changed my mind, it would immediately rush in and jump on my lap—You’re the best thing that’s happened to me this year.
I had a vision of Clara wearing glasses still, in her men’s pajamas and white socks, but nothing else. “So this is no longer too soon, too sudden, too fast?” she’d ask. “Fuck too soon, too sudden,” I’d say, struggling with the urge to undo the drawstring of her jammies — drop the jammies, keep the socks, off with the glasses, and let me see you naked in the morning light, my north, my south, my strudel gâteau, Oskár and Brunschvicg ready to rollick, coiled up like reptiles flailing and agile. I wonder if the coffee would get cold. Split the muffins and bless the crumbs, the sticky buns, the icing on the cake, and stay in bed, reach out for the coffee until arousal sweeps over us again, and we’ll call it making strudel gâteau.
In the shower this morning, hands off Guido.
“So did you make love to me last night?” she’d ask. “I most certainly did not,” I’d say. Did not.
By nine I was walking out the door when the phone rang. I hoped I’d still answer with last night’s tired, intimate, unguarded voice, perhaps I’d even try to affect it if it wouldn’t come naturally. But it was only a deliveryman. The thrill with which I had rushed to answer told me how much I wanted it to be Clara, today like yesterday, like the day before, like every other day this week. I wondered if she’d sound as languid and hoarse as she did last night, heedless of everything that didn’t bear on us — or would she be back to her blithe and sprightly self again, light and swift, alert and caustic, untamed rebuke all set to sting?
The delivery was taking longer than necessary. “He’s already on his way,” said the doorman when I called downstairs. I waited. By now it was past nine. I waited some more. Then I buzzed downstairs and told the doorman to see why the delivery was taking so long. I hung up. The phone rang again. “Yes!!!” I said. “Didn’t you know I was going to call?” Obviously I must have sounded miffed and was sending the totally wrong signal. Her voice, as I suspected, was entirely sober. “Funny, I was just on my way to bring you muffins and coffee.” But I knew I had picked something up in her voice. I couldn’t quite tell what had tipped me off, but I knew that something didn’t bode well. “That’s so sweet, but I have to be all the way downtown. I was just about to walk out the door.”