Maybe I wasn’t going to call Lauren after all.
“Why not?”
Someone else intervened: “Just give me this Lauren’s number, and I’ll call her.”
“And tell her what?”
“Tell her for starters that she’s always welcome to come here. There’s always a plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork here for new friends.”
How I loved the sounds of these words: A plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork. Where would I be without them?
There was a time when I too was a stranger here. Rachel might have told Julia the same exact words about me: Tell him there’ll always be a plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork here for him.
Clara was right: others were important, and sometimes they’re all that stands between us and the ditch. Why wouldn’t such an idea have occurred to me — that others were important — why did I have to fish it out from under a sheet of ice in an ice-fishing hut? A plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork.
Would that they had said this about Clara now.
“You’re not saying anything, and I don’t like it,” said Rachel, breaking the silence around me with another one of her prods.
“I’m eating,” I replied, trying to suggest that if I was quiet it was also my way of avoiding saying anything unkind to the Forshams.
“You’re so weird today. You’re hiding something, I know it,” she said, continuing to speak to me.
“And?”
“I think we should toss him in a blanket.”
“Someone get a blanket.”
Rachel’s four-year-old boy, whose loyalty I thought I’d purchased with a fire truck, was the first to race upstairs. He returned with his five-by-three-foot blanky.
Someone insisted they find a real blanket.
“Okay, I’ll tell everything,” I said.
Which was when I realized that the one thing I wanted most right then was to talk to everyone, the Forshams included, about Clara — tell the world about this woman who with three words six days ago had jiggled my universe and turned it to Jell-O.
Rachel’s ex replenished my wine.
I took a sip and for a moment was quiet, because I didn’t know how to begin. “There is someone,” I said. “Or, at least, there was. I don’t think there is any longer.”
“A phantom woman. I love it. And?”
“We met on Christmas Eve.”
“Yes, and?”
“And nothing. We went out a few times. Nothing happened. Now it’s over.”
Silence.
Rachel’s ex: Did you steal the jewels?
Mrs. Forsham: What a terrible question.
Me: I did not steal her jewels. But she offered to let me see them.
The ex: And?
Me: I took a rain check.
A man named David: He’s lost his mind.
The ex again: Do you even like her?
My answer caught me by complete surprise. “Immensely,” I said.
Julia: So what’s wrong with her?
Me: She’s flighty, arrogant, prickly, caustic, mean, dangerous, maybe perfect.
The ex: I see a very long winter. Go to the cave, open sesame, plunder the jewels, handle the thieves.
A moment of silence.
Racheclass="underline" You’re not going to call Lauren?
Me: I’m not going to call Lauren.
Racheclass="underline" Not nice.
•
Later that afternoon we decided to walk the dogs. I walked next to Rachel on our way to the park and told her about my evenings with Clara after the movies, the hours at the bar, the dancing by the jukebox, the walk back through Straus Park, the nights when I was sure all was lost, the heartthrob when I was proven wrong, the night when life put everything on the table, then took everything back and put the cards away.
We were walking into the park, as we always did when we went out as a group, and were headed to the tennis courts and beyond that toward the tennis house, which, by early twilight that day, seemed already sunk in darkness, its two puny lamps scarcely lighting the way across the bridge leading over to the icy reservoir. All I need is for the ice to start cracking and I’ll want to run away, be elsewhere. But we were already elsewhere, lost in a winterborne forest, away from the tall buildings off Ninety-third and Central Park West, cast in Corot’s winterscapes, where twilight had blurred the colors to pallid earth tones right in the very heart of Manhattan. Another country, another century, our two dogs scampering around on the grounds of a small provincial French town. This part of Manhattan had never seen me with Clara and should not have reminded me of her. But because it reminded me of places she and I had invoked on the terrace that night, my mind was immediately drawn to her. It would be nice to go to France from here. Walk down Ninety-fifth, buy something quick to eat along the way, and be there in plenty of time. I wanted her to be with us now. This wasn’t elsewhere at all. The set was right, but the play and the players all wrong.
“All I did was not sleep with her,” I explained.
“Because?”
“Because for once I didn’t want to rush it. Maybe I wanted this to be different. I didn’t want ordinary. Maybe I wanted the romance to last longer.”
Rachel listened.
“What comes after courtship?” I asked.
“Who ever knows. Besides, you’re asking the wrong person.”
I must have stared with a baffled look.
“We’re back together again,” she said. “We were friends, got married, got divorced, became friends again — now he wants to get married.”
“And you?”
“I’m not against it.”
Dangling the leash of her freed dogs, Rachel then crossed her arms and with her boot gave a gentle kick to a clump of clay. “It might actually be a good idea.” Rachel was not given to enthusiasm. This could have been a clamorous endorsement. Then, looking away, and just as I was about to put my two cents in, “What do you think our phantom woman is doing right now?”
“I don’t know. She could be with friends. Maybe another man. Who knows? One thing she is not doing is sitting waiting for my call.”
“Were you supposed to call?”
“No. We make a point of never calling. We’d just meet on impulse, kept it light and improvised.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know that there’s anything I can do.”
“But you must do something.”
I did not answer. I felt like shrugging my shoulders, but I knew she’d see through this too.
“It’s hard to tell what we had. At first I thought she wanted nothing, then that she wanted friendship of a sort, then that she might have wanted much more but wasn’t really sure, now we’re strangers.”
“And I take it you know exactly what you want.”
There was irony in her voice.
“I think I do.”
“You think you do. Put it this way: she’s probably not sure why you’ve been seeing her either. I think she’s very interested, the way you are. She wants friendship, she wants love, she wants everything, and nothing. No different from you. Nothing either of you does is wrong, even if you do nothing. But you should never have said no to her. Find a way to fix it before it’s too late.”
My smirk meant: And how do you propose I do that?
“Look. Perhaps she may not want to end it yet. Or she may want to end it before it sours. Either way, though, you can’t not call her.”
By then her two dogs had reappeared. The other guests were approaching us, Mr. Forsham had lit a pipe. “The phantom lady,” she repeated. “I like that.”
Then, on second thought: “Do me a favor. Go over to that tree where no one can hear you, take out your cell phone, and make the call.”