Now I was just walking. Walking to bid farewell. Walking to spy on her. Walking to be one with all the stonework that had watched her grow and knew all about her comings and goings as a child, as a student, as Clara. Walking to drag out my presence in Clara’s world and not to go back home and be alone with my thoughts that aren’t even thoughts any longer but leering gargoyles sprung from a monstrous netherworld I never knew existed in me until I’d seen them milling about me dressed as sandwich men. Walking, let’s face it, in the hope I’d find a portal back into her life. Walking as prayer, pleading, and penance. Walking to refuse the end of love, to refuse the obvious by picking at it, step by step, shard after shard, taking in the truth of it in tiny doses, as one takes poison so as not to die from it.
In years to come, when I’ll pass by her building again, I’ll stop and look upstairs. I don’t know why I’ll look upstairs or what I’ll be looking for each time. But I know I’ll look upstairs, because this purposeless looking upstairs in this kind of dazed and balmy mood I’m in right now is itself remembrance and soul gathering, an instance of grace. I’ll stand there awhile and remember so many things: the night of the party, the night I thought I’d done the right thing by saying goodbye without lingering too long outside her lobby, the night I first felt my nights were numbered here. The night I knew, just knew, she’d change her mind the moment I said, Yes, I’ll come upstairs with you, the evening I looked out her window and wished my life might start all over again, in her living room, because everything about my life seemed to converge on this one room, with Clara, the barge, our strange lingo, and Earl Grey tea, as we sat and spoke of why this piece by Beethoven was really me, while part of me began to think I’d made the whole thing up to make conversation, to stir things up a bit, because I really had no idea why the quartet by Beethoven was me, any more than I knew why Rohmer’s stories were me, or why I wanted to be here on so many winter afternoons with Clara, trying to understand why the best in life sometimes takes two steps forward and three steps back.
I looked up and knew. It was all there: fear, wanting, sorrow, shame, bitterness, ache, and exhaustion.
Now, as I spied the very end of her block from Broadway with its one lit window that must have been the maid’s room overlooking Straus Park, it struck me that though we’d never really had anything here, still maybe we’d also lost everything here, as though something from being so piously wished for had managed to become the memory of something lost without having existed at all, a wish with a past that never had a present. We’d been lovers here. Once. When? Couldn’t tell. Perhaps always and never.
•
I walked down 105th Street once again — placid, serene, white-pillared lane. The town houses stared at me with frowning suspicion.
Why are you here again?
I am here because I don’t know why I’m here.
Her lights were still on. But too bright. What on earth could she have been doing? Should I look for a human, two human shadows flitting behind the drapes? Would she come near the window when her cell phone rings? Just tell me I’m not spying at the wrong window.
Could she be the type who sleeps with all the lights on? What if she left the lights on because she likes to come back home and find the whole place lit up, the way I do sometimes, to forget I live alone? Or was she moving from room to room, which was why the place was all aglow? Or were the lights on everywhere because she hated the dark when she was alone and this was her way of showing she was alone and hated it?
Suddenly someone turned off the lights in her apartment. She’s gone to bed. A frightful thought raced through my mind: They’ve gone to bed.
But on 106th Street, I noticed that her kitchen light was still on. Who goes to bed with a lover and leaves the kitchen light on?
No one.
Unless it’s in the heat of passion.
What was she up to?
Cognac? Hot toddy? A little snack? How easy can human contact be, how easy had it always been? Why was it so unusually difficult with Clara?
The kitchen light still puzzled me.
What can a kitchen light possibly mean? How many times do I turn mine on and off before going to bed?
And then it hit me: I’ll never ever know why that light was on so late, nor ever see that kitchen from the inside again. Suddenly the kitchen light stood like a distant beacon that was far crueler than the storm itself.
Boris!
He stepped out into the cold to finish his cigarette, stood there awhile gazing at nothing, then flicked the butt halfway across the street. I made certain he didn’t see me.
The moment he stepped back into the lobby, I crossed the street and found myself headed toward 107th Street.
I could not stay on the sidewalk too long. She might look out of her kitchen and catch my eyes glued to her windows. For all I knew, she might have been looking out of her window and staring straight at me. Or perhaps the two of them were. So I walked by in a rush. But having reached the end of her block too soon, I realized that there was nowhere to go, and rather than go the long way around to Broadway and back, I started walking back on Riverside, slowly, then once back to 105th, went up again to 107th, back and forth, again and again, always affecting a busy air, not realizing that there wasn’t a reason in the world why anyone should walk by eight times on Riverside Drive and look so busy at such an ungodly hour of the night.
My passacaglia, I’d tell her one day, not Leo’s prelude, not your sarabande or your Folías, not Beethoven’s Adagio. Just my passacaglia, my passing along here, and losing my mind.
Perhaps I should call, I thought. Not to talk. But to remind her I wasn’t out of her life quite yet. I’d let it ring once, then hang up. But I knew myself: having called her and found it wasn’t so difficult, I’d be tempted to repeat the call. It was the sort of thing Inky might do. Take forever to call the first time, call a second time twenty minutes later, then every five minutes, then all the time. If she wanted to speak to me, if she was alone, she’d call back. If she didn’t call back, well, either she’d turned off the phone or she wasn’t going to play this game. In the end, she’d ask him to pick up the phone and tell whoever had called that she was in Chicago. Say I’m in Chicago.
Had I encouraged them to sleep together?
Suddenly the lights in the living room are on again.
She is unable to sleep. She is fuming. She is upset.