The wife, who couldn’t resist, followed him into the kitchen. “At least no one’s hiding it from you.”
“What?” he asked.
“That you’re a jerk!”
“You people are so boring,” broke in Rachel’s ex-husband, who was already preparing dinner for everyone tonight. “Can we at least pretend we’re all still friends? Tomorrow is New Year’s, for Christ’s sake.”
Rachel in the kitchen was busy cutting the fruit tart I had brought. She turned to me once the kitchen was cleared of people. “And I want you to be nice to the Forshams,” she said. There was reproof in her voice. “But I am nice.” “Yes, but I know you’ll say something nasty, even without meaning to; you’ll imitate them, or make fun of their boy, I know you’ll do something.” Clara would have encouraged me to do nothing short of that. The Forshams always dropped in on Sundays. I called them the Connubials, or the United Front of Wedlock Appeal. She played bad cop, he played supercop. She was never wrong and he was just perfect.
“And what’s with the disappearing act?” Rachel asked as she continued putting things on a large salver. Julia walked in. “Ask him.” “Ask him what?” “Ask him where he’s been all week and why he doesn’t answer his phone.”
I decided to tell Rachel about Lauren so as not to say anything about Clara. Halfway through my story, though, she told me to follow her into the living room, which was when she told me to start the story all over again. “Tell everyone? Including those I don’t know?” “Including, and especially, those you don’t know.” This, I knew, was my punishment for not promising to be nice to the Forshams. It was also the price for my disappearing act, she said. I loved being put in the pillory.
They listened to the story about the toy store, laughed when I imitated rotating functionality.
“Just like that — because of the way she tapped the fish tank?” someone asked.
She tapped with two fingers, the index and the middle finger, in succession. I wanted to kiss her.
Rachel was serving the wedges of tart. She had asked me to bring in two large espresso pots. In the middle of the room stood a very large glass plate on which lay an uncut hollowed circle of wobbly Jell-O for the children. It jiggled each time someone took a step in the room.
“What fish tank?” asked the Forsham wife.
“The girl he met.”
“What girl he met in what fish tank?” asked the husband.
“So when were you planning to call?” someone interrupted.
“Around three.”
“Want us to spot you?”
“No, thank you.”
“Can we listen in, then? We promise, we won’t make a sound.”
I loved the teasing.
Julia brought me a plate with all kinds of leftovers. Gita, the Indian lady, insisted I have a second helping of biryani. She was wearing a sari over blue jeans. Her husband was busy explaining the scales on the piano to their five-year-old son. I took a seat on a low stool, put the square plate on my lap, and, resting my back against the large television set, began eating. Someone brought me a glass of red wine. Here’s a napkin, said Rachel, hurling a folded cloth napkin at me. I loved this.
•
One of the guests began to discuss the Rohmer festival that was playing down the block. Tonight was to be the last night. I made a point of not saying anything, because I knew that once I mentioned Rohmer, I’d have to spill out everything about my evenings with Clara. At first they wouldn’t suspect anything, but before long they’d sniff out a rat and start plying me with questions, and my evasive measure would only give me away. Which is why they kept prodding. And which was exactly what happened once Julia seemed to remember that I loved Rohmer, didn’t I? I did, I said, continuing to stare at my food. Had I been to see any of the movies this week? Yes. Which ones had I seen? Before I could answer with All of them, the Forsham husband said he’d once seen a Rohmer film but still couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He doesn’t appeal to everyone, said Julia, who suddenly recalled seeing a Rohmer film with me a few years earlier. I tried to change the subject. The Forsham woman thought there was something sick and twisted in wanting to touch a minor’s knee. Her husband couldn’t agree more: “He likes the knee more than he likes the woman it belongs to. Fetishistic!” “My point exactly,” echoed his wife, “fetishistic.” Julia brushed the comment aside and told the Forshams’ son to keep his fingers off the Jell-O unless he was going to eat it, in which case he had to ask for it. In the kitchen she had described him to me as the most repellent child in the world. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, turning to me, after giving the boy a second menacing stare. “We could have gone together.” “I went at the last minute,” I said. Was I going tonight? I didn’t think so, I replied, surprised at the total lack of hesitation with which I found myself lying to a woman who was one of my best friends. “Maybe you can bring Lauren along.”
The thought did not displease me. It freed me from thinking I had to go with Clara only. If Clara did happen to go tonight, well, she’d find me with Lauren, and if not with Lauren, then with friends, and frankly, I’d rather be with good friends than with a prickly Clara out to remind me how little she needed me, with all the friends and all the men in her life, and all her comings and goings uptown and downtown that made me feel like a puny, far-flung planet demoted from satellite to testy asteroid. God knows what she’d been telling her friends about me. Or was she like me: not saying a word about us to anyone for fear of seeing the dying wick of friendship snuffed by the merest breath of gossip? Say nothing, smile, and move on. Say nothing because you’re aching to tell the world but fear no one could possibly understand, but if they did understand, then there’d be nothing special to understand in the first place, would there? Say nothing because you don’t want to see where hope trails off and loses luster and, like a lumpy bolide tailspinning to earth, finally thumps down on the desolate, dark folds of the Siberian tundra. Say nothing, because the two of us were perfectly ready to say there was indeed nothing.
And yet Clara would be crushed on seeing me with Lauren in a place where we both knew we’d meet if all other plans failed. This was sacred.
Or would Clara burst out laughing, and so loudly that I’d better think twice before going to the movies with Lauren.
And then it hit me. Clara could easily show up at the movies with someone else. The thought sent me into an instant frenzy, and I could see myself free-falling into a pit of anger and despair. What would I say if I saw her with another man? Leaning on his shoulder once they sat down. Or standing together at the entrance, drinking coffee, trying to decide where to sit, chatting up Phildonka about Amerikon wezer. After the movies, if it’s still raining, they’ll wait outside the main entrance to the theater.
Where would I be, then?
To forestall this new wave of anxiety, I came up with a brilliant compromise: I would be willing to give up Lauren altogether on condition that Clara not show up with another man.
The idea had come to me the moment I imagined Clara putting herself in my place and guessing that I’d probably want to go to the movies with another woman tonight. She must have figured, however, that I’d renounce taking someone if she too agreed not to go with another person. I could just see her sorting this knot out, smiling abstractly at my smile once she saw how, in this as well, our thoughts ran on the same lane. This kind of thinking aroused me. Thinking she was thinking what I was thinking, and enjoying it, as I was enjoying it, reminded me of our hug by the bakery past three in the morning. I wanted to be with her now, both of us partly naked in one of the bedrooms upstairs in Rachel’s house, tripping over the fire trucks as we finally locked one of the bedroom doors, Perse me, perse me hard, harder, harder still.