I should call, shouldn’t I?
What if she knows I am downstairs? She is the sort who would intuit just that. She knows I am downstairs this very moment.
Or worse yet, what if she simply wants me to spin these thoughts in my head, including the worst one of alclass="underline" that she isn’t even thinking of me?
Then the lights go out.
Only a pale, bluish light near her window. Was it a night-light? Was Clara really the type to use night-lights? Or was it a dusky, weakened incandescent light from another room, or light reflected from a nearby street sign? A candle? God forbid, no, not a candle, not a lava lamp. Clara Brunschvicg would never own a lava lamp!
Ah, to make love to Clara Brunschvicg by the light of a lava lamp.
Noir, noir thoughts.
•
I did not call that night. The next morning I was awakened by a light pattering on my windowpane, the sound of rainfall, timid and tentative, without the hysteria or conviction of a downpour, like rain on an August afternoon that might stop any moment and restore things to how they’d been minutes earlier. It felt like afternoon. I wouldn’t have minded if I’d woken up six months later. Let time, not me, deal with this.
I’d had a fitful night, perhaps with weird dreams flaring through a wasteland called sleep, though I couldn’t remember a single dream, save for their collective pall, which lingered in my sleep like smoking stacks on a parched landscape after a great fire. At some point toward dawn I felt the same rapid throbbing in my chest that had made me go to the hospital the day before. But I must have fallen back to sleep. If I have to die, let it be in my sleep.
By morning, I knew exactly what it was. It didn’t surprise me; what surprised me was its ferocity, its single-minded persistence in every part of my body. No ambiguity, no doubt, no cloud could be summoned to give it a kinder name. This was not a whim. It was a commandment that must have started somewhere in mid-sleep, slogged its way out of one nightmare into the next, and finally worked itself out into this morning’s light. I wanted her and I wanted nothing else in the world. I wanted her without her clothes, with her thighs wrapped around me, her gaze in mine, her smile, my every inch inside her. “Perse me, perse me, Printz, perse me one more time, and another, and another still,” she’d said in my sleep in a language that seemed English but might just as easily have been Farsi or French or Russian. This is all I wanted, and not having it was like watching life drained from my body and, in its place, a false serum injected straight into my neck. It wasn’t going to kill me, and I wasn’t going to die, and things would go on as before, and I’d definitely recover, but not having her was like laughing and drinking while watching every single person I grew up with being taken to the gallows and hanged, until my turn came, and I’d still be laughing.
My own body was pounding at my door, pushing the door open with the dogged truculence of a crime about to be committed in which I was both felon and victim — open up, open up, or I’ll ram the door down—Perse me, perse me, Printz, perse me one more time, she’d said, to which I finally replied, I’ll perse you with everything I have, just make me make trouble, make me do something, make me hurt you, as I want you to hurt me, Clara, and hurt me hard, because this staying put like two boats tied to a dock is like waiting decades on death row, make me yield to you as I know I must and have been craving to ever since I kissed you and you snubbed me with a No that I want you to take back with the very lips I kissed that night, take back the curse and spit it from your mouth and I will take what you cast out because it was mine before it was yours.
Part of me did not want to admit any of this, or yield to the impulse, because yielding now would be like letting the enemy dictate terms I’d regret signing no sooner than the ink had dried. This was not like our second night, when shutting my eyes and thinking she was in bed with me had seemed so easy and so natural that I didn’t even bother hiding it from her the next day. Where had that openness gone, why couldn’t I speak to her like this any longer, why with so much in common did my body feel so gridlocked and bottlenecked? The more I knew her, the more fettered my impulses; the more reclusive my body, the more muddled my speech. Could it be that the older I was, the more callow I got? Now that I knew how little there was to fear from others, I was turning shy; candor was more difficult the more fluent my speech. In the alchemy of desire, the more we know, the less we fear, but the less we fear, the less we dare.
Now, in bed and with the words she’d spoken in my dream still ringing in my ears, I felt as though something had broken the sluices, mocked my inhibitions, and flooded every improvised sandbag I’d put between us. So what if I surrender to her, so what if she knows? I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.
I decided to call her. Better yet: send her a picture of Sir Lochinvar, bonnet and plume. Top of the morning, greetings and salutations, from prow to aft, starboard and portside, all aboard, beware of our corvus, this is the captain speaking. .
Call and pick up where we’d left off two nights ago.
I ache for you.
Do people still ache for people?
Not really.
Then speak differently.
I know you’ll want to hang up on me, and you have every reason to, and I know you’ll think I’m drunk or that I’ve lost my mind, but just speak to me, stay on the phone with me, say you know, say you know exactly, because you’re going through it yourself, for if you know, then I know how you’ll take the raspy, churlish snigger in your soul and unbraid it till it loosens into strands of passion, prayer, and thanksgiving.
I put a pillow between my thighs, said the word Clara, thought of her legs wrapped around my back, and then knew, when there was no turning back, that I was signing over my life to her, that I was handing her all my keys for her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder — after this I would never be able to say it was nothing, or that morning had made me do it.
Later, I went out in the rain, bought three papers, had breakfast at my crowded Greek deli, then headed for a walk to Columbia, maybe farther. I like rainy days, especially light rainy days that are just barely gray but whose overcast sky does not hang oppressively over the city. Such days make me feel cheerful, perhaps because they are darker than I and therefore make me seem happy by contrast. This was a good day for a walk. I knew there was no point in checking my e-mail or even expecting a call from her. She wouldn’t call because she knew I wouldn’t have called either, and I didn’t call because I knew she wouldn’t. But I knew she had thought of calling, because I myself had thought of it. She’d want me to make the gesture first, if only to hold it against me, which is why I wouldn’t call, which is also why she wouldn’t call either. It was this twined and tortured shadow-thinking that both paralyzed us and drew us closer. Aren’t we so very, very clever.
Clara, you are the portrait of my life — we think the same, we laugh the same, we are the same.
No, we’re nothing similar. It’s just love makes you say this.
By the time I approached Straus Park, I knew I had absolutely no interest in going any farther uptown, that this whole expedition to Columbia or past Columbia was a ruse to step back into Clara’s world.
In Straus Park the snow had already started to melt. I stood where I had stood on the day she’d come to meet me. The tenor of our relationship was so different on that day, or on the day before that: the quick dash to the restaurant in the cold, Svetonio, the visit to her home, our Lydian tea, that sacrosanct moment when in the kitchen she put two mugs on the counter and, with a resigned, uneasy air that sprang from the depths of reticence, had said, “I have no cookies. I have nothing to offer.”