Why didn’t I trust the drawn-out, doleful all the way downtown that wished to suggest that going downtown was an unwelcome and painful task that was surely going to ruin her entire morning?
Why had she called, then? To make contact, to keep last night alive, to reassure the two of us that nothing had changed? Or was it because I had taken too long to call and she’d gone into high pandangst? Or was hers a preemptive admission, truth as cover-up, which explained the peremptory haste and the diversionary blandspeak of her all the way downtown?
What made me furious was how I always let events and others dictate how my day was going to turn out. Passivity? Timidity? Or was it every man’s diffidence, which invents honorable obstacles to avoid asking for fear of being turned down? I could have offered to go with her, but I didn’t. And I could have told her I’d meet her immediately afterward, but I didn’t. Clara, sensing I wasn’t about to do either, may have suspected I wasn’t so eager to see her. But that didn’t make sense: Why would I offer to bring her breakfast if I wasn’t eager to see her? But then, why was I making it so easy for her not to change her plans downtown? To hide my disappointment?
I knew I was letting the whole day — and Clara along with it — slide like sand between my fingers. Her uncompromising tone had snuffed out my desire to put up a fight or even attempt to.
“Where will you be around lunchtime?” I asked.
I was expecting something like At a place where people eat.
“Well, I’m having lunch with a friend.”
I didn’t like this at all. She had used the word friend to avoid using a name. I knew she knew I’d see through this. Was this, yet again, an instance of tit for tat? What made it worse — and what drew me like a moth to a flame — was that, even if she was trying to avoid being more specific about her friend, she knew I’d think she was doing it on purpose.
“What if I call as soon as we’re done? How’s that?”
But How’s that? was not so neutral either. It could mean Happy now? Or it could mean: See, I can be nice. Now, be a good boy and take this offer before I take it back. She was, it seemed to me, willing to meet me halfway, but not more, even though both of us knew this wasn’t halfway at all. It sounded like a final concession made to a temperamental child before one lost patience and resorted to warnings. How’s that? could easily mean Take that!
I wanted to see her now, before ten in the morning. But she was saying she’d call me around three.
I already sensed that, at the earliest, we’d meet at the movie theater — if then.
What was I to do with myself all this time? Hope? Worry? Fight her? Sit staring blankly at my walls, at my carpet, at my windows, like one of those hollowed-out Hopper characters? Trundle up and down Broadway? Start calling friends I’d been too happy to neglect? Swim in my bathtub? Live with myself?
Wasn’t this what I had been doing — living with myself — and hating every minute of it?
“Bummer!”
She heard it too. Not just the catch in my voice, but the extent of my distress and my hapless attempt to put a lilt on it.
“Bümer?” she said, making light of the word, which was always her way of deflecting tension.
Meanwhile, the two cases of wine arrived. I signed for them and tried to put more authority in my voice. But there was no hiding the whimper, even in front of the deliveryman.
“I was just about to come over. .” I let the thought trail. There was no point. She had already conceded with the promise of a call. No need to push.
“Where will you be?” she asked.
“Sitting in the dark by my télyfön.”
We laughed. But I already knew that at no time today would I enter a building where I’d risk losing the phone signal.
•
It was 9:30. At 9:30 on our third day together we were already past Hastings. Now it felt so very far away. Even the scones, the coffee, the obscene gesture that had totally disarmed me felt far away. I wanted Clara today. Clara so as not to be without Clara. Clara to screen me from things that may have nothing to do with Clara but that found in her a stand-in for life’s inflections. Her image would be before my eyes all day now. To walk about the city and project her image on every store, every building, everything. Run into people and wish you were with her instead. Meet a friend and want to talk of nothing else. Share the elevator with neighbors and wish to unburden every sorrow if only they asked, How are you today?
We’d agreed to call each other by mid-afternoon. I couldn’t prevent myself from saying it: Don’t make me wait forever.
I won’t.
Firmly, but summarily spoken, and with attitude — meaning, Let it go, hon. By the very tone in her promise, I inferred not only that she probably wasn’t going to call me but that she’d made up her mind precisely because of my way of asking. Whiny and mopey. I might as well have said: If you don’t call me, I’ll kill myself.
“That’ll be good,” I said, trying to muster a decisive, chummy-business air myself.
“That’ll be very güd,” she echoed back, instantly poking holes in my bogus firmness.
We hung up.
I immediately wanted to call her back. What would be so terrible about calling someone right back and speaking frankly about the things eating you — the dashed hopes, the worries stoked, wishes left hanging and then nipped before you’d even had time to nurse them and coddle them and get to know them better? Crush and rip, how easily it came to her. Nip and rip. This would have been my morning with her, our morning. Had we spent the night together, she’d never have pulled that friend all the way downtown. Had I spent the night, we might be sleeping still, sleeping after strudel gâteau, sleeping then strudel gâteau again. Eventually, I’d sneak out to buy muffins and scones and go back to lovemaking on our bed of crumbs, our bed of cum, breath of my bread on her bed in her mouth, languid, tender, and raucous her voice, as it was last night after so many cigarettes, the Clara who’d say I was the best thing that happened this year, the Clara who seemed about to break terrible news to me but ended up telling me she spoke my name in the dark — and I believed her, and still did — the Clara who called me idiot in French and meant it, in German, in Russian, in English.
This was definitely going to be the ugliest day of the year. I had hated this year — now I had every reason to want to put it behind me, put her behind me, forget her, forget the party, Straus Park, Leo and strudel and the ice cackling away on the frozen Hudson to the rhythm of the Bach-Siloti prelude. Forget. And if I couldn’t forget, then learn to hate. Suddenly I wanted to find a way not just to hate but to hurt her. Or rather, not so much to hurt her as to watch her suffer. She wants to play rough? I’ll show her rough. I’ll not answer my phone. I’ll go to the movies with someone else. And then head out to the same bar afterward. That’s what I’ll do. But I thought we had a date. Fat chance! Just you barging in on people when you want to and spilling your venom all over their lives, trashing and sweeping everything they hold for dear life, and in your wake, when you’re over and done with them, nothing but stains and salt on a rug, a glass trinket from a factory workers’ den called Edy’s, and the taste of your mouth on their breath, taste of your mouth in my mouth, the bread of your mouth, the food of your mouth, the crumbs from your mouth that I’d pick up one by one, just leave them at my door, bloodstained and wine-stained and heaped with salt and dollops of bile, and I’ll watch over them and bury my seed in them. I wanted you to call me, to want me, to be patient and kind to me. Not this friend downtown malarkey.