And so when the phone rang late in the afternoon, he had no doubts who was on the line. “Have you been thinking of calling me?” were her first words.
He would never again, he told himself, get involved with a woman with a similar personality profile. “As usual, you’re on to me,” he said.
“And so why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I what?”
“Why didn’t you call when you were thinking about it?”
He assumed it was a rhetorical question since, as the evidence suggested, she knew him better than he knew himself. After worrying the question, he made the only answer their dialogue allowed. “I didn’t call,” he said, “so as not to deny you the opportunity to call first and ask if I’d been thinking of calling you.”
His remark, which he meant to be charming, produced a jagged hole in the conversation. “If you say so,” she said after the silence had extended itself into the anxiety of unknown territory.
He was about to say he was glad that he hadn’t lost her when she said “pigeon shit” and hung up. She was gone before he could register his surprise at what seemed a wholly uncharacteristic response.
A former wife, a former former wife used to hang up on him when he said something she didn’t want to hear (or anticipated not wanting to hear what he hadn’t yet said) and the recollection doubled his anger at Clarissa. If he called back, which was his first impulse (already replaced) he would tell her how much he hated to be hung up on. In the end, he decided against calling her until, if ever, he was in a position to forgive her dismissal of him.
He imagined Clarissa thinking that she never wanted to hear from him again and he was strangely comforted by the realization that on such short acquaintance, they had already achieved a near unbreachable rift in their undefined relationship.
The next day he called MatchesMadeinHeaven.com and told his counselor that he didn’t think it was going to work out with Clarissa. What other matches were there with his name on them? “I’ll reevaluate your profile,” the counselor said, “and get back to you.”
Clarissa called later in the week to tell him of a dream she had concerning him. “In this dream,” she said, “we were leaving a movie together — it was a Japanese horror film in which characters transformed according to certain inner qualities — and I suddenly knew — it couldn’t have been more lucid — I knew without a doubt where your lost car was and I led you to it. The odd thing was that you were displeased at my finding it for you and I was sorry — this was also very clear in the dream — I was sorry that I had gone out of my way to help you.”
“I see,” he said, not seeing at all.
“You don’t see,” she said. “Josh, the dream was extremely vivid and if you’ll take me on as your guide so to speak, I have the feeling that I can find your lost car for you. There’s one provision you’ll have to agree to first.”
“Okay,” he said, “what do I have to agree to?”
“You have to promise in advance that you’ll be pleased to get it back. Can you promise that?”
“Why did you hang up on me last time we talked?” he asked.
There were a few beats of silence before she spoke and he wondered if he had inadvertently invited being cut off again.
“When did I hang up on you?” she asked, her tone aggrieved. “Why would I hang up on you?”
“Well,” he said, “you hung up on me because apparently you were offended at something I said,” he said.
“Offended, huh?” she said. “If you knew why I hung up on you, why did you ask me the reason?”
“I’m willing to let the subject drop,” he said, “whatever the subject.”
When they arrived at the movie theater to begin their search, Clarissa corroborated that his local nine-plex, grandiosely called the Pavilion, was indeed much like the theater in her dream.
They walked slowly, hand in hand, checking out each car they passed, and he felt, and not for the first time, that there was something uncanny between them.. Nevertheless, he found himself hoping that the unlikely, the near impossible, was not going to triumph over what he liked to think of as common sense.
She pulled him to a stop at a nondescript Honda with a Massachusetts plate and he hesitated, not quite looking at the car, before denying that it was his.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
The question outraged him. “Don’t you think I know my own car?”
“You have to admit,” she said, “the coincidence is impressive, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes… no… who knows,” he said. “Despite the impressive coincidence, I’m fairly sure this is not my car. Clarissa, do you ever have the sense, if this is crazy tell me, that the world is haunted?”
Clarissa reluctantly agreed to move on, but after two more blocks in which there had not been another vehicle with a Massachusetts plate, she wondered if they might not revisit the Honda Civic he had rejected.
“That’s not my car,” he said again, which was not exactly denying her request.
They retraced their steps in no particular hurry, their destination unacknowledged, though found themselves alongside the vehicle in question before either was ready to resume their postponed dispute.
She put her hands over his eyes to which he made the smallest of complaints. “What does your lost car look like?” she asked.
It took him awhile to evoke a picture in his mind. When he had conceded the car’s loss he had all but erased it from memory. “It’s a grayish, tannish color,” he said.
“What’s the nameplate?” she asked.
“I don’t pay much attention to those kind of things,” he said. “It’s a Honda something, a Honda Civic, I think, four years old, though it could be a Toyota. No, my previous car was a Toyota.”
“When last seen, what kind of condition was the car in?”
“A few scrapes on the back and on the left side, which were not my fault,” he said. “Other than that, and some winter residue, it looked almost immaculate.”
“Well,” she said, removing her hands from his eyes, “we have here a latish model grayish-tan Honda Civic with a nasty scrape on the left side, and some scratches here and there on the back.”
“All cars look pretty much alike these days,” he said.
“Why don’t you try your key,” she said, “so there will be no residual doubts afterward.”
He was in no rush to retrieve his key from the depths of his left pocket, but he made a point of walking around the car, going through the motions of noting its disfigurations. “This car has more dings than mine,” he said.
She laughed. “I won’t say it,” she said, “because I don’t want to have you angry with me again. If I didn’t like you as much as I do, would I be here with you on this bizarre errand?”
He felt as if he was standing on his toes in quicksand. “What won’t you say,” he said, the words escaping his decision not to ask.
“I won’t say what I won’t say because you already know what it is. Look, I’m sorry, Josh. Really. I am sorry.”
He produced the key from his pocket like a magic trick. With grave reluctance, he made a show of trying to open the passenger door and failing.
She gently took the key from him and opened the door on the driver’s side on first try.
He turned away. “Must be a universal key,” he muttered.
“I didn’t hear that,” she said, “but I get the general point. Shall we see if the key is also compatible with the ignition?”
She was one of those women who acted on the likely response to a question — he had intuited this about her from day one — before the answer was ever spoken… He put his arms around her, held her close to him — people passed in two’s and threes, there were occasional cheers, darkness arrived unannounced — to hold off the inevitable for as long as possible.