I liked calling while still wet. It gave a totally impulsive and informal air to the call, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world; I could focus on my toes, my ears, or her voice, the whole thing relaxed and candid.
“I can’t sleep,” I said as soon as she picked up.
“Who’s sleeping?” she retorted, clearing her throat, as if to mean Who ever goes to sleep these days? It seemed to clear the slightest inflection of hostility from her voice. But there was sleep in her voice. Hoarse, raw, listless, like the smell of a woman’s breath when you wake up at night and her head is on your pillow. Was she embarrassed to be caught sleeping past two in the morning?
“Besides, I knew it was going to be you.”
Why not Inky? I was on the verge of asking, when I realized that her answer might be Because he is right here with me.
So I didn’t ask.
I could have asked why she knew I’d be calling so late. Instead, I told her I had just come out of the shower and was about to go to bed. “I wanted to call because I didn’t want to leave things where we’d left them last night.”
She made an amused semi-grunt. She was agreeing things couldn’t be worse. So there was no chance I’d imagined it.
“Can you talk?” I asked.
There was silence at the other end of the line. Had she, perhaps, fallen back to sleep?
“You mean am I alone?”
Such razor-sharp clarity, even in mid-sleep.
“Yes.”
All I had meant to ask her was whether she was up to talking. As always, she’d read the real meaning behind my question.
“What did you want to talk about?” Her equivalent of This is your quarter; speak. She was giving me an exceptional but necessarily brief audience. So many seconds, but not an instant more. Always with the meter running.
“I was going to say—” But I didn’t know what I was going to say and couldn’t think that fast. “I just wish we were a week ago. I wish we were still at the party and had never left and were trapped there forever.”
“The things you come up with, Printz.” This was sleep talking. “You mean, as in that Buñuel movie—”
Was sleep making her unusually conciliatory?
“Trapped forever, snowbound forever, as in Maud’s house.” And then I said it. “I wish this was two nights ago.”
“And last night.”
My heart started thumping as soon as she corrected me. In the dark living room I stood facing the night and the dark sea of Central Park. “I’m staring out the window. I’m staring at the salt on the carpet. And I wish you were with me now.”
“You want me to be with you now?”
Why did she sound so surprised?
“I want you to be with me now. . and always. There,” I added, as if, using a pair of pliers on my gums, I had managed to pull out an impacted tooth.
“And you want me because?”
I should have known that the triumph in my avowal wouldn’t last. Something sharp and unkind in the rise of her question came like two fingertips snuffing the candlelit amity I’d just found in her voice. Irony, which I loved and found comfort in and which had drawn us together from the very start and made us think we were two lost souls adrift in a shallow, flat-footed world, was not a friend. It cut the incipient warmth between us like a pointed spur wounding the belly of a loyal and beloved pony.
“I don’t know why. There are so many answers. Because I’ve never known anyone like you or been this way with anyone, never this close, or this exposed. Never like this, because every time I turn over my cards and show you my hand — I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because chances are you’ll never forgive me — but just telling you who I am and how I feel as I’m doing right now makes me hard.” I knew I’d been deferring the word, as though trying to test my sentence before finally deciding to speak it.
“Hard?”
I sensed I had caught her totally off guard. Was she really going to ask me not to be obscene?
“Printz.” She sounded heartbroken. Or profoundly disappointed. Or was this still her sleep speaking, or had she read right through me and seen the cost, the yearning, and ache behind this word — taken sex, which was the easy admission, to the heartbreak of sex, which was the impossible and far more difficult one? Or was this just her way of mulling over a tamer version of You’re more pitiful than ever now, her preamble to a long reprimand meant to cut off my balls and slice them into julienne strips.
“Why, Printz?” I said, imitating the strain in her voice, not sure yet whether this was my way of taking back and playing down my admission or of making her feel silly for taking it at face value. Or was I trying to get her to say something she wasn’t saying, hadn’t quite said, might never say, or that she’d just vaguely glossed over a second ago and needed to clarify so that the two of us might seize its full meaning?
“Why? Partly because this is hurting you, and I don’t want you being hurt like this.”
“And partly?” Come what may, by now I was ready for anything.
“And partly”—she was obviously hesitating, as though she was about to raise the ante and break new, dangerous, painful terrain between us, taking those julienne strips we’d been exchanging and mincing them down into sheer slithers—“because I don’t want you calling me tomorrow morning and saying, Clara, I made love to you last night.”
I was devastated. I felt hurt, exposed, embittered, embarrassed, like a crawfish whose shell has been slit with a lancet and removed but whose bared, gnarled body is being held out for everyone to see before being thrown back naked into the water to be laughed at and shamed by its peers.
“You didn’t have to make fun of me, nor did you have to hurt me that way.” This was the first time I told her I was hurt. “As you said, I may be pitiful indeed, and this is clearly my big, over-the-top, mushy-gushy, sulky-pouty thing limping on its last leg—”
There was a moment of silence, not because she was dutifully hearing me out or humoring my little tantrum, but as though she couldn’t wait to break in.
“Did I make it go away?”
In a second she had won me all over again.
“Most certainly did.”
I could hear her smile.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Why are you?” Then after a moment, out of the blue, as if she’d seen a connection that I hadn’t: “What are you wearing now?” she asked.
“Was wearing bathrobe, now in bed.”
My heart, which was already pounding, was going like mad. I hated this, but I also loved it, as though part of me were staring at a river from a very tall bridge, knowing that I was securely fastened to a bungee cord and that fear, more than jumping, was the thriller. Still, the silence was unbearable, and I found myself saying the first thing that came to mind so as not to say what I wished to say.
“You remember, the striped blue-and-white bathrobe hanging on the back of the bathroom door?”
It took me forever to utter this one bland, halting, breathless, complicated sentence.
“Yes, I remember. Old, thick terry cloth — it smelled good.”
Same one, I was going to add.
It smelled good, she had said.
What made her smell it?
“No reason. Curious.”
“Do you do this often?”
“I grew up with dogs.”
An intentionally makeshift excuse. She must have sensed I was groping for a quick comeback.
“If I knew you better, I’d go down forbidden grounds.”
“You know me more than anyone I’ve known in my life,” I said. “There’s nothing you’re thinking that I haven’t already thought of.”