•
A short while later, Rachel started putting mittens on her son and insisted on wrapping a scarf around the child’s neck. The boy struggled; eventually she relented.
“Will we see you tonight, Oskár?”
“Probably,” I said, ignoring the lambent rise in her voice as she spoke my nickname.
She knew she’d irritated me. She also knew I wasn’t speaking the truth.
“Well, try. Bring her along too.”
As she put her gloves on, she couldn’t help herself: “She is stunning.”
My shrug-in-silence was meant to pass for unassuming agreement.
“Don’t do that!”
“Do what?” I asked.
“This.” She mimicked the postured indifference on my face. “She didn’t take her eyes off you.”
“Her eyes off me?”
“You’re the most exasperating person I know. Olaf, you explain it to him. Sometimes I think you purposely avoid seeing things. As if you’re scared you’d have to get undressed with the people you really care for and God forbid they should see your pipi.”
As soon as Rachel left, Olaf couldn’t contain himself.
“Cunts, all of them.”
“She may have a point.”
Olaf shrugged his shoulders as though to mean, Yes, she may, still a cunt.
His wife had asked him to order a case of Champagne for tonight, but he had completely forgotten, and now he worried they wouldn’t deliver it on time. Then, with his typical expansive bear hug, he embraced me, uttering his usual salutation, which was “Strength and honor” followed by “Stay hard.”
“She’s the one you were going to tell me about?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Figures.”
“And yours?” I asked.
“Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.”
•
If I called Clara now, I could offer to join them while they were shopping. I could just see all three of us inside a packed Fairway. Laughter. Laughter. Eggs—I saw her saying—We’ll need eggs for tomorrow morning.
I was soaring.
Just hope you don’t pay dearly for this.
When I got home early that afternoon, I decided to take a nap. Was it my way of restarting a day that had gone well so far and having it all over again? Or was it the lure of clean pressed sheets that beckoned — crisp, taut, and lightly starched, as I like them? Or was it the rapture of the afternoon sun slumbering like a cat on my bed, where I knew I’d doze off listening to music?
I had promised to call her in a few hours and wanted nothing more now than to coddle the vaguest thoughts of her and take these thoughts to bed with me, the way we take a wish we suspect may never be granted but whose contour, once we’ve shut our eyes, we begin to unpeel, layer after layer, leaf after leaf, as though hope were an artichoke whose heart lies so deeply buried that we could afford to take our time, mince our steps, step back, sidestep, take forever.
If we weren’t fated to be lovers, or friends, or casual whatevers, well, I’d sleep that off too. In the mood I was in, I too didn’t give a damn about getting hurt, just as I didn’t care if she got hurt. Just get in bed, curl up, think of her with me, our bodies cuddling and canoodling like the two spooning halves of Venice, the space between us we’ll call the Grand Canal and the footbridge my Rialto. My corvus. My Guido. My Lochinvar. My Finnegan. My Fortinbras.
Why didn’t you come for dinner?
Because I picked up resentment in your voice.
Why didn’t you say something, then?
Because I knew you were angry and there’d be more double-talk.
What double-talk?
This double-talk.
Can I tell you something, then?
Don’t you think I know already, don’t you think I know?
Oh, Clara, Clara, Clara.
•
It was already past five when I woke up. There were three missed calls on my answering machine, two hang-ups and one from Clara. Had I slept so soundly that I hadn’t heard the phone ring and missed her voice once my machine picked up? When I listened to her message, she seemed inexplicably irked and fatigued: “You could at least pick up!” I checked my cell. But no one had called. “I’ve been calling everywhere. I can’t believe I spent all this time tracking such a pitiful, pitiful man.” I could feel the numbness and rising nausea in my chest. Was I as vulnerable as all that? All this well-being suddenly zapped because of a phone message?
I thought we’d made up last night, and at Starbucks today she couldn’t have looked happier to see me, her palm not leaving my face as soon as I rushed out to greet her in the cold. Now this? As the five o’clock darkness kept closing in on the day, it finally struck me that this was the worst possible way to welcome New Year’s. Was it a preview of the coming year, or a finish to a terrible one? Or, in Olaf’s words, was it still too soon to tell?
Then I realized. These were last night’s phone messages, not today’s. Could anyone have sounded so enraged? No wonder she sounded so curt when I called her from Rachel’s!
I shaved, took a long shower, and, for good luck, decided to do exactly what I’d done last week: drop in on my mother again, wear the same black shoes, same dark clothes, same belt even; then dashed off, caught the first cab on the side street, and straight off to Mother’s building, thinking to myself what I’d caught myself thinking of last week as welclass="underline" Hope she’s well, or well enough, hope I don’t have to stay long, hope she won’t bring him up again, remember to buy two bottles afterward exactly as I’d done last week, then hop on the M5, it’ll give me time to look out the windows and stare at the snow and the ice floes and at the scant traffic on Riverside Drive and think of nothing, perhaps think of my father, or simply forget to think of him, which is what happened last week on the bus when I promised to think of him and had simply allowed my thoughts to drift.
Mother was all the way at the back of the apartment, in her bedroom, so that, after opening the front door, I had to walk down the long, dark corridor, turning on the lights along the way as I walked past closed doors — she kept the old bedrooms and bathrooms closed, she said, because it gets cold by nightfall. Perhaps she had stopped enjoying the illusion there were others in the house and had shut the door on them. Her old mother-in-law, her husband, my brother, my sister, me.
I found her next to the old Singer, hemming a skirt. “Hardly anyone comes anymore,” she said, meaning You don’t come often enough. She didn’t know whether to give away the skirt or mend it. Mending it made more sense. If it didn’t work, she’d simply throw it away. In any event, it kept her busy, she said. I’ve grown smaller.
I promised to think of her too on the bus. But, with one thing and another, I knew I might totally forget. I’d be thinking of Clara. The last time I was here I hadn’t met Clara yet, didn’t even know, couldn’t possibly guess what lay in store for me that night. Fancy that! I had come, dawdled awhile making small talk, then left, bought Champagne, gotten on the M5 bus, done so many meaningless small things, and all of them belonged to a life where Clara didn’t even exist yet. What was life like before Clara? Now I wondered about the old days, which weren’t so very old, when we’d celebrate New Year’s with a wine tasting by covering the labels on the bottles and managing to fool even the connoisseurs among his guests. I remembered the crowd of friends back then as people milled about the living room, the food and desserts heaped in pyramids upon the tables, and Mother’s baked prunes wrapped in bacon, as we all waited to see which wine was voted best, and the laughter, and the noise, and Mother rushing back and forth, making sure the vote was in before the chimes of midnight, followed by my father’s usual apology for using last year’s little speech in rhyming couplets. I know he would have liked Clara.