“Look at her legs the next time.”
“What next time?” I said, trying to show I’d already dismissed and filed her away.
“Oh, knowing her, there’ll be a next time soon enough — she’s been eyeing you for a while.”
“Me?”
“Like you didn’t know.”
Then, without warning: “Let’s go downstairs. It’s quieter,” she said, indicating a spiral staircase I had totally failed to notice but had not stopped staring at all the time I’d been speaking to her in the library. I liked spiral staircases. How couldn’t I have registered its existence? I am Clara. I blind people.
•
This was not an apartment; it was a palace pretending to be an apartment. The stairway was crowded with people. Leaning against the railing was a young man dressed in a tight black suit whom she obviously knew and who, after exclaiming a loud, almost histrionic “Clariushka!” put both arms around her while she struggled to hold the plate away from him with a mock-expression that said, “Don’t even think of it, they’re not for you.”
“Seen Orla anywhere?”
“All you have to do is look for Tito,” she snickered.
“Nasty, nasty, nasty. Rollo was asking about you.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Love to Pavel.”
That was Pablito, she said. Did she know everyone here? Not a party person? Seriously? And did everyone have a nickname?
As we proceeded downstairs, she gave me her hand. I felt our palms caress, sensing all along that there was as much good fellowship as unkindled passion in this tireless rubbing of fingers. Neither really acknowledged it or wanted it stopped. This was no more than a play of hands, which is why neither bothered to stop or hide the tenuous, guilty pleasure of prolonged touching.
Downstairs, she navigated the crowd and led me to a quieter spot by one of the bay windows, where three tiny cushions seemed waiting for us in an alcove. She was about to place the dish between us, but then sat right next to me, holding the plate on her lap. It was meant to be noticed, I thought, and therefore open to interpretation.
“Well?”
I didn’t know what she meant.
All I could think of was her collarbone and its gleaming suntan. The lady with the collarbone. The shirt and the collarbone. To a collarbone. This collarbone in two hundred years would, if it was cold in the icy silence of the tomb, so haunt my days and chill my dreaming nights that I would wish my own heart dry of blood. To touch and run a finger the length of her collarbone. Who was this collarbone, what person, what strange will came out to stop me when I wished my mouth on this collarbone? Collarbone, collarbone, are you not weary, will I be grieving over collarbones unyielding? I stared at her eyes and was suddenly speechless, my mind in disarray. The words weren’t coming. My thoughts were all tousled and scattered. I couldn’t even put two thoughts together and felt like a parent trying to teach an unsteady toddler how to walk by holding both his hands and asking him to put one foot before the other, one word before the other, but the child wasn’t moving. I stumbled from one thing to the other, then stood frozen and speechless, couldn’t think of anything.
Let her know all this. For I also loved this. One more minute and I won’t even want to hide how thoroughly her stare had thrown me off and worn me down and made me want to spill everything. One more minute and I’ll break down and want to kiss her and ask to kiss her, and if she says no, absolutely not, then I don’t know, but knowing me, I’ll ask again. And I know she knows.
“So,” she interrupted, “tell me about the six-and-a-half-month babe in the rosebush.”
She’d taken the trouble to calculate the months. And wanted me to know it. Or was this a red herring purposely thrown in to muddy things further and give her — or me — an easy out of the silence we’d gotten ourselves in?
I didn’t want to talk about the babe in the rosebush.
“Why not? Sulky-pouty?”
I shook my head, as in: You’re way off base. I was trying to come up with something clever.
“Do you find love often?” I blurted out, turning the tables, thrilled by what I’d suddenly dared to ask. There was no turning back now.
“Often enough. Or some version of it. Often enough to keep looking for it,” she replied instantly, as though the question hadn’t surprised her or taken her aback. But then: “Do you?” she asked, suddenly tearing the veil I thought I had deftly placed between us. Her switch from questioned to questioner was too abrupt and, as I scrambled to fashion a good answer, I caught her smiling again, as if my hasty reference to last May’s rose garden had come to haunt me and stood between me and the shroud I was wrestling to put on. The more I groped for an answer, the more I heard her mimic the ticking sounds of a quiz show clock. If she hadn’t before, she made it clear she’d already intuited my answer but wasn’t letting me off so fast. I wanted to explain how I didn’t know whether it was harder to find love in others or in oneself, that love in the dale of pandangst wasn’t exactly love, shouldn’t be confused with, mistaken for, but she snapped—
“Time’s up!”
I watched her hold an imaginary stopwatch in her hand, with her thumb pressing down on the rest button.
“But I thought I had a few seconds left.”
“The sponsors of the show regret to inform their esteemed guest that he has been disqualified on grounds of—”
She was giving me one last chance to bow out with dignity.
Again I fumbled for something sparkling and clever to wriggle out of this corner, realizing all the while that my lack of wit stood as much against me now as did my inability to tell the truth and break the leaden silence between us.
“—on grounds of?” she continued, still holding the imaginary stopwatch in her hand.
“On grounds of amphibalence?”
“On grounds of amphibalence it is, precisely. As a consolation prize the house is pleased to have arranged this medley of appetizers on this here plate, which we urge our honorable guest to try tasting before this here show hostess gobbles everything up.”
I put out two timid fingers to the plate.
“These are the best, they have no garlique. Hate garlique.”
“We do?”
“Very much.”
There was no point in saying that I, like those who liked singing in the shower, liked garlic.
“We hate garlique too, then.”
Then she indicated a tiny piece of glazed meat over which a thin serrated leaf stood up like the mane of a groomed seahorse. “Eat it. . elaborately!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, as if you were eating something that requires stupor and veneration.”
Why did I feel that everything she was saying to me was a veiled, not-so-veiled reference to her, to us?
“What are they?” I asked, pointing at a square fragment of the Paul Klee arrangement.
“We do not ask, we put our hand out, and we reach for.”
Her mouth was full and she was chewing slowly, implying she relished every bite. What a strange person. Was she going to be yet another one of these women who need to remind everyone they are sensual tornadoes held in check by mild civilities at the cocktail hour?
“Mankiewicz,” she whispered a minute later.
“Mankiewicz,” I echoed back, as if the word had a deeper meaning I couldn’t fathom but which I took to be synonymous with exquisite. For a moment I thought she was referring to someone in the room. Or was it the appetizer itself, whose name I hadn’t heard correctly? Or was this a mantra spoken only in moments of delectation? Mankiewicz.
“Qui est Mankiewicz?”
“Mankiewicz made these.”
“Doesn’t sound japonais.”