We stood before the fish tank. I noticed she was staring at a fluttering flat Aleutian fish streaked with very loud blues; it looked like an imitation iris about to blossom. She saw me staring at her, looked away, and gently began tapping her fingernails on the glass pane just in front of the fish. The fish didn’t flinch but kept staring at her. She smiled at it, gazed at it more intensely, and then back at me.
“He’s not taking his eyes off you,” I said.
“Now, there’s something unusual,” she replied almost distractedly, with a roguish melancholy smile that could have said more about the man she was living with than about all the fish in the Pacific.
I looked at her and couldn’t resist. “I wouldn’t know, would I?”
She shrugged her shoulders and, taking my tit for tat like a good sport, continued the flirtation with the fish, which suddenly got flustered.
“Oh no, he’s gone,” she said, feigning a crushed face. Then she looked at me, as if for confirmation that something unusually sad had indeed happened and that she hadn’t just imagined it. Her fingers were still touching the glass pane. She was lost in thought.
If she were Clara, my heart would have gone out to her and I would have kissed her, because there was something incredibly moving in her sorrow. “Can I call you sometime?” I asked.
“Sure,” she replied, her face still glued to the fish tank. I wasn’t sure she understood.
“I mean: can I call you?”
“Sure,” she repeated with the exact same casual air that continued to find fish far more important and that seemed to say, I heard you the first time.
Her number couldn’t have been easier to remember. The whole thing had happened in less than ten seconds.
“Anything else you care to look at?”
I shook my head and decided to buy two of the rotating models. The owner of the store asked his son to gift wrap the boxes. “Wrap them separately, Nikil, not together, not together, I said.” I was ready to burst out laughing and was trying to control the quivering on my lips. She must have thought I was smiling broadly for the joy such gifts would bring the two boys.
“Put yourself in the place of the boys when you walk in with these huge packages,” she said.
I tried to and was only able to think back to my childhood. A stranger walks into my parents’ living room with a wrapped box a few days after Christmas. I’m not sure the box is for me, so I contain my excitement, and to master it rush to my bedroom. Meanwhile, the stranger mistakes my quick exit for indifference or, worse yet, for arrogance. I wanted him to coax me out of my bedroom, while he wanted to see excitement and gratitude. When I am no longer able to contain myself and ask someone if the box is for me, they tell me “Probably,” but that the guest has already left and taken the gift with him.
“Maybe this is why we like Christmas so much. It brings out the child in us,” I finally said.
“Which is a good thing?” she asked.
“Which is a very good thing.”
I liked her very much.
“I can’t wait to call you,” I said.
She gave an absentminded shrug, as if to say, You men, all the same! There wasn’t the least touch of guile in her, unless absentmindedness itself was its most rarefied form. She might have been saying, You mean to call, but you won’t. “Call me this afternoon. I’m not doing anything.”
When my friend joined us, he seemed surprised by the speed with which we’d managed to find and purchase two toys. He put his arm around her shoulders. She simply dug her hands into her coat pockets again and seemed preoccupied by the patterns on the floor. What a complicated woman, I thought. Then I corrected myself: perhaps not complicated at all; perhaps she was the more candid person of the three. Perhaps Clara was too. It was just I who needed them complicated, if only because finding guile in them was my way of making them like me, of assuming they spoke my language and that I could speak theirs.
There’d been a moment at the wrapping desk when we were both resting our hands against the counter. By accident, our hands had touched. She did not remove hers, and I didn’t remove mine. You’d think we were both totally engrossed by the fire trucks.
We separated a block later. I watched her reach for his hand and find it before springing through the slush to make it across the street before the light changed.
Yet she’d cheat on him in a minute, I thought, thinking back to Clara, who, for all her kisses at the party, was busy telling friends and strangers how easily she’d ditched Inky. I was sure she did the same with me: weep with me while listening to the Handel, have me over for tea, want me to spend the night with her, then double-cross me all the way downtown first thing the next morning.
I was hardly better myself.
On Ninety-fifth Street I had a moment of unbearable hesitation. Should I bother going at all? Had I even been invited? I couldn’t remember, but assumed I was always welcome there. I’d have lunch with them, even if they had already started without me. I’d drop the toys with the boys. We’d have cake. Then by four o’clock I’d call Lauren. It had been my intention earlier this week to bring Clara along and introduce her to Rachel and her friends and open up my life to her, bit by bit. Now, I’d call Lauren by three — to put Clara out of my mind.
Before ringing at their brownstone, I could already hear the hubbub of voices chatting loudly within. I even heard my own ring, and the effect it had on the noise in the house. At first silence, then the patter of feet, and the sudden burst of greetings. A stranger bearing gifts. It did remind me of my childhood.
We’ve so much food. And all this booze.
Rachel came out of the kitchen and kissed me. Her sister said she would fill a plate with a bit of everything. An Indian couple had brought a stew that was to die for, and there was still lots left.
I called this house the Hermitage, because there was something good and wholesome about it, though it was never clear who lived there, who didn’t, who was sleeping over and who just passing through. Always plenty of food, always new friends, children, and as always a bevy of pets, laughter, good fellowship, and conversation. What a relief to stop by this sanctuary and see everyone again, as if I were just dropping in on a sick friend, or just needed to pick something up or borrow a book, reconnect, touch base.
Sometimes I pass here by cab without stopping. Just look in through the large dining-room window to make sure everything is all right. Someone is always bringing in something from the kitchen, and around the dining table there are always people, good friends. Once, while passing by, I even caught sight of two bottles of white wine which they’d left outside the window to keep chilled. I’d taught them this trick, which my father had taught me. When the bottles were stolen once, Rachel decided the refrigerator was good enough.
As usual, I made my way straight into the kitchen. It felt safer there, and gave me time to settle in and get used to faces I hadn’t seen in a while. I found a huge uncut French cucumber and right away put it in my trousers. “They put people in jail for sporting such huge ones,” said Rachel. “And this while it’s resting,” I said, which brought a guffaw from all those in the kitchen. Someone suddenly burst in: “They’re fighting again.” “They should get a divorce,” said Rachel, “they’re jerks.” “Who’s the jerk?” asks her sister. “I am,” said the man who was just quarreling with his wife and who thrust his way into the kitchen to get a glass of water, “I’m the jerk, I am. I. Am. The. Jerk. See?” he said, ramming his head against the wall. “The biggest jerk on earth.”