I went back to 105th Street to go over last night’s footsteps. I didn’t know why I was doing it, just as I didn’t know why I trundled down the same area so many times last night. But last night everything seemed shrouded in a spectral fog behind which I took cover, the better not to see the void looming before me. Last night I knew I was a shattered being. Today, I didn’t feel shattered at all. Things must be getting better, I thought, I must be healing and already getting over the hardest part. How fickle the human heart. I was almost about to take myself to task for being so frivolous when I suddenly caught sight of her window. I was jolted by an overwhelming sense of panic. It told me that the wound I thought was already healing hadn’t even been thoroughly inflicted yet, which was why it didn’t hurt so much. The knife wasn’t all the way in yet, things hadn’t started getting worse.
Through her window I caught sight of the very large plant I’d seen in her living room a few days before. I hadn’t really noticed it at the time. Now I remembered we’d been discussing Rohmer and Beethoven, and she was sitting right under its leaves and I’d been staring at it all the time.
I decided to walk downtown. I hadn’t crossed the street when an impulse made me pass by the bakery and stop once I noticed that the windows were all fogged up inside. I could use a croissant, I thought. There was a long line, there always was by mid-morning, especially during the holidays.
This was the spot of two nights ago. To stir the memory of our kiss, I came even closer to the glass and, so as not to arouse suspicion inside the bakery, pretended to be straining my eyes to make out whether the line was long inside, almost pressing my nose flat against the glass. Clara was with me again. Our mysterious hip movements were as alive to me now as they were then. Nothing had changed. It amazed me to think that this bakery not only remembered the night better than I could but, in the tradition of all great bakeries on holidays, it remembered it for me and was offering me the choicest slice, the one with the king’s charm. One could keep this charm for life. Clara would become like one of those diseases that can definitely be overcome but that leave their mark on your skin and, sometimes, disfigure you completely, and you’ll call it a blessing all the same because it opened the way to God.
If I should ever wish to see her in the weeks to come, the easiest way would be to come here instead of walking around her building. Or I could do both, the way people go to a cemetery to visit one tombstone and, since they’re there already, might as well put flowers on someone else’s too.
I opened the door and walked into the bakery and, when my turn came, on the spur of the moment decided to buy one of their large fruit tarts. Then, on second thought, added four pastries as well.
“I could have sworn it was you,” said a man’s voice. I turned around. It was a friend I hadn’t seen in months. He was having breakfast with his girlfriend, seated at a tiny round table. “I saw you peeking in from outside, and for a moment I thought you were about to flatten your whole face at me.”
He introduced me to Lauren. We shook hands. What was I up to these days? Nothing, I replied. I was headed for a late lunch with some friends on Ninety-fifth Street — hence the cakes.
The idea of visiting my friends had occurred to me only after I’d purchased the cakes.
We were almost a week past Christmas and I had yet to find toys for their children, I added. How old were my friends’ children? asked the girlfriend, clearly interested in children. Two and four, I answered. “There are children’s shops a few blocks down.” Was she a schoolteacher? She shook her head.
I looked at her. What a lovely person. There are children’s shops a few blocks down. A whole lifetime of kindness, sweetness, and goodwill in these eight words. We joked about buying gifts for children we hardly knew at all. She had no handbag; just a coat, which she was wearing buttoned down, both hands digging deep in her coat pockets — tense and uncomfortable, she’d finished her coffee long ago, it seemed. They had the look of a couple who’d had some words.
“We were headed that way, anyway,” she said. “We’ll walk down with you.” They’d help me pick out toys. Did I mind? Not at all.
How sweet of her simply to volunteer with a complete stranger. Then I realized why this wasn’t what I wanted at all and why I’d floated the plan of visiting friends on Ninety-fifth Street. I had bought the cakes in the hope of finding the courage to call Clara before announcing I was coming up with a tart and four pastries.
If I don’t ditch these two now or tell them I’ve changed my mind, I may never drop in on Clara this morning, may never see Clara again, and — who knows — life may take a completely different turn, just because of a pair of toys and a stupid fib concocted with a fruit tart in my hand! Like those tiny, arbitrary accidents that determine the birth of a great piece of music or the destiny of a character in a film — a small nothing, a meaningless fib, and your life spins out of orbit and takes a totally unexpected turn.
So here I am with a cake and four pastries going to a place I had no intention of visiting and about to buy gifts I couldn’t care less about.
In the toy shop, all three of us seemed to disband for a while. He was interested in bicycles, while she simply ambled about looking at the cribs and baby furniture, her hands still digging into her coat pockets. I found myself right next to her.
“I think you should buy a fire engine,” she said, pointing at one under a glass counter.
How come I hadn’t seen it? It was staring right at me.
“Because you don’t see, maybe?”
“Because I don’t see, maybe. Story of my life, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I?” she said.
The huge fire engine was made of plastic with rounded corners and no sharp edges, which gave the truck a friendly but unintentionally cartoonish character that was not likely to please a boy of four.
“Does the ladder move?” she asked the owner.
“It also has a rotating functionality, see, madam?” he said, with a thick Indian accent, showing how the entire ladder assembly could be rotated 360 degrees.
“But the same model also comes with a nonrotating functionality. Fewer parts, breaks less easily.” He turned his attention to a woman in her fifties and her pregnant daughter. They were wearing identical wigs. They wanted to buy furniture but did not want it delivered before the birth of the baby. “We’re a bit superstitious,” said the mother, speaking for the daughter. “I understand,” he replied with the deferential empathy of someone who’d lived his entire life with superstitions far creepier than this.
Minutes later he was back. “So, which do you want, with rotating functionality or without rotating functionality?”
By now, Clara would have been tempted to mimic his Indian accent, and together we would have been on the floor and added one or two new words to our clandestine lingo. Want to see a rotating functionality? I’ll show you a rotating functionality if that’s the last thing I do.
With Lauren I wasn’t sure it was good form. I fiddled with the rotating ladder.
“Which functionality do you think they’d like?” I said, turning to her and trying as discreetly as I could to coax laughter out of her.
She smiled.
“You were the four-year-old boy once, not me.”
“I think I never grew beyond four.”
“I wouldn’t know, would I?” Obviously this was her way of acknowledging without really responding to another hasty attempt at bridging the distance between us. Then, probably suspecting she might have snubbed me without meaning to, she added, “You’re not in bad company. Most men seldom grow beyond four.”