“Why didn’t you help me save the evening, then?”
“Because there was so much double-talk, and I knew you were punishing me.”
“What double-talk?”
“This double-talk, Printz. The kind that stands in the way of so many things.”
“What things?”
“You know exactly what things.”
“Why not give me a sign?”
“A sign? Meeting you on a freezing cold night, going upstate the next day, spending every minute with you — you needed a sign?”
“Do you have any idea what hearing you say all this does to me?”
There’d been a silence between us. And I knew what it was. Not lack of words, but lack of ways to avoid saying the words both of us knew needed to be said.
“What you want I want,” she’d finally said.
“Do you know me so well?”
“I know what you think, how you think, I even know what you’re thinking this very instant.”
I could have said any number of things to throw her off course. But I didn’t.
“You’re not saying anything, and you’re not denying anything, which tells me I’m right in exactly the way you want. Admit it.”
“I admit it,” I said. I felt as naked as a newborn, thrilled with life, thrilled with my living body, thrilled by my nakedness, which I’d have given over to her in a second.
“If I wasn’t so zombified right now, I’d ask you to come with your coat and your bathrobe and your snowshoes, and not a thing more. Because I want you all the way — and you, Misteramphibalenceman, can take this any way you want — from my mouth to your mouth.”
Nothing she had said to me before had stirred me as much. It was as if she had spoken directly to my heart and through the airwaves reached for my cock.
The silence settling between us said everything.
I didn’t want to say good night yet.
“Are you thinking of me?” she’d asked.
“I am.”
And then the words that pierced me to the quick: “You can if you want to.”
•
While waiting for my third cup of coffee, I did what I’d been watching so many people with pocket calendars do. It was my way of hoping, without admitting it, now that the Rohmer festival was over, that there’d be the Alain Resnais festival, followed by the Fellini, and the Beethoven Quartet series — weeks on weeks of evening rituals till we tired of them and decided, Tonight, let’s hang out.
She called me while I was having breakfast. “Change of heart?” she asked, which told me she was in a good mood. None whatsoever, I replied. Someone was giving her a ride to pick up some stuff for Hans’s tonight. Did I mind if we postponed meeting?
“Had we arranged to meet?” I asked. Why did I say something so stupid?
“Yes, we had. You forgot already?” she said almost reproachfully, as if unaware that I was only pretending, which was why she laughed. They really needed her help this morning, she said, we’d meet at the party. Pause. I wasn’t going to end up in the ER, was I? No, I wasn’t, Clara.
Around eleven in the morning I decided to call my friend Olaf. I found him in his office. He had just returned from the Islands. Horrible vacation. Why? Why? Because she’s a cunt. He wasn’t planning on staying at the office much longer, but didn’t feel like heading home. I could come over and we’d walk back uptown together, like the two pricks we are, he added. “What was so wrong?” I asked when we finally met. “We just don’t get along,” he said, using the knuckles of both fists to mimic the cogs of two gears that fail to mesh. Let’s face it, she’s a cunt and I’m a dick.
But I wasn’t paying attention. I knew exactly what I was trying to do. Leave his neighborhood, go elsewhere in the city, run into Clara.
Has it been a good year? I asked. Too soon to tell, he replied with his usual sarcasm.
Did he want to have lunch? Just had something — not hungry. We decided to have coffee instead. I was surprised to find him at work, I said. Only Jews celebrate Christmas. Jews and Dominicans. He was in one of his moods again.
On our way uptown we decided to stop at MoMA, where we’d hoped to sit down for coffee and exchange the latest in our lives, but the lobby was mobbed with tourists, and everywhere you looked teemed with human bodies. The fucking human race, he began. They don’t go to a single museum in Europe, but they come here and all they do is drag themselves through art they can’t begin to fathom, then rush to buy fake watches in Chinatown. Olaf and his rants. There was a time when you could sidestep life in the city and take time out with a friend here. Now look at this — the Mongolian horde. We threaded our way through the lobby and decided to head out to the closest Starbucks. But even the nearest one was mobbed. We ended upstairs at a place on Sixtieth Street — still too loud, too crowded, rich teenagers on Christmas break. We got up and tried a row of places around the low Sixties, till we gave up and ended up taking the Sixty-seventh Street crosstown bus. I knew why I was finding something wrong with each place. She was giving me the slip each time, or I kept missing her by a few seconds at every turn. What was his reason for wanting to go elsewhere every time we stopped somewhere? There was only one explanation: he was looking for someone too, wasn’t he? “You’ve met someone?” I finally asked him. He didn’t stop, but kept walking, looking straight ahead of him. “How did you know?” “I can just tell. Who is she?” Without meaning to, Olaf managed to remind me that he was perhaps my best friend because of the way he answered my question: “You can tell because you too have met someone and are simply projecting. But you happen to be right. We’re both love-starved.”
Eventually, we found a Starbucks in the low Seventies and located a small table in a corner by the window. I borrowed an extra chair from a table nearby while he stood in line and ordered two coffees. I could hear him arguing with the barista. “Medium, I said, not tall, not grande, medium — and it’s not next guest but next customer. I’m a customer, not a guest, get it?” I was tempted to ask him to pick up a couple of muffins or scones, but then thought I was setting things up too much, and besides, if indeed we were to run into her, I didn’t want her to suspect that I was trying to replay our breakfast in the car. Then a counterinstinct told me that being caught replaying our breakfast might indeed propitiate running into her. The stars sometimes worked that way. Wasn’t this how I’d arranged to run into Clara at the movie theater the first time? Since we were close enough to some of the stores where she’d most likely have gone with someone to buy food for the party, chances were we’d run into each other in this very place. Stuff of dreams and Rohmer films. But then I realized that thinking such double thoughts was a way of snooping into the affairs of fate and was precisely what might backfire and prevent us from meeting. I was just about to negotiate a way out of this double bind when there she was, walking past Starbucks with her friend Orla.
I dashed out of the coffee shop with just my shirt on and, from across the street, called out the name of one and then the other. What was I doing here? What were they doing here? Hugs, kisses, laughter. They were each carrying bags of food. I didn’t have to persuade them to come in and join us for coffee. I am so happy, so happy to see you, I said to Clara once I’d introduced Orla to Olaf. That palm on my face, as it lingered on my face, and kept touching parts of my face, spoke all the tenderness I’d lived so many, many days and nights without. They still had tons of things to buy, she said. She ran down some of their unfinished errands. They couldn’t stay too long. Are you happy? I couldn’t help myself from asking when Olaf and Orla were busy talking. Are you happy? she echoed, her way of saying that, yes, she was — or was she parodying what I’d just said, which, in the end, might just have been her way of saying, Yes, I am happy. But we scarcely have ten minutes. Just sit down, take your coats off, I’ll get coffee. I had the strange feeling that I was fighting to keep her with me, struggling against strange odds that were determined to draw her into my life, only to pull her away, and I didn’t know whether these odds were in her will, or in the universe of unfinished grocery errands, or just simply in my head. Part of me couldn’t believe in the sheer luck of running into someone simply because I’d wished it. This could be taken away in a second. Play it light, keep it simple, lie low, you already told her you were happy.