Yes, we had.
What had we said?
“You said something about how strange it was to find a building in Manhattan with a thirteenth floor.”
What had she said in reply?
Did so stupid a pickup line merit a reply?
What if I hadn’t asked about the thirteenth floor?
That’s a Door number 3 question. And, I already told you, tonight I’m not doing those.
Had she gone to another party in the same building, then?
She lived in the same building.
•
I live here. At first it sounded like I live here, dummy. But then I immediately realized that it came like an admission of something very private, as though my question had backed her into a corner, and this corner was none other than the four walls within which she lived her life, with Inky, and her clothes, her cigarettes, her pumice stone, her music, her shoes. She lives in this building, I thought. This is where Clara lives. Even her walls, from which she has no secrets and which hear everything when she is alone with all four of them, and speaks to them because they’re not half as deaf as people make them out to be, know who Clara is, and I, and Inky, and all those who’ve caused her torment and torture, haven’t a clue.
I live here. As if she’d finally confided something I would never have known unless she was forced to admit it — whence the slightly peeved and bruised whine with which she’d said it, meaning: But it was never a secret, why didn’t you ask before?
Then I had a sudden change of heart. Could Inky have gone home there now instead of heading out to Darien? Was he pouting for her downstairs? Where were you all this time? Upstairs. I waited, and waited, and waited. You shouldn’t have left the party, then. You knew I’d wait. What happened to Connecticut? Too much snow. So you’re staying tonight? Yep.
“Wait a minute,” said Hans. “You mean you were having drinks together and didn’t know you had already met in the elevator?”
I nodded, a helpless, ineffectual nod.
“I don’t believe it.”
I could feel the blood coursing to the very tips of my ears.
“He’s — blushing,” Clara whispered audibly.
“Blushing doesn’t always mean one’s hiding anything,” I said.
“Blushing doesn’t always mean one’s hiding anything,” Hans repeated in his usual deliberate manner, lacing my words with humor. “If I were Clara, I’d take all this as a compliment.”
“Just look at him, he’s blushing again,” she said.
I knew that denying a blush would right away set off an avalanche of mini-blushes.
“Blushing, flushing, flustered. All you men.”
I was about to counter when it happened again. In the midst of our bantering, I mistook a raised biscuit for a cube of sushi sitting on a bed of rice and ended up dunking it in some sauce and gulping down yet another slice of peppered hell. This time it came without any warning whatsoever from Clara. No sooner had I bit into it than I immediately sensed this was no wafer or raw fish or pickled cabbage but something else, something surly and ill-tempered that had only started a process that could last for a very long time, forever even. And in the midst of it, I hated myself, because after biting into it, I knew I should have spat it out instantly, even if there was nowhere to spit in the greenhouse but into my napkin. Without knowing why, I decided to swallow it instead.
This was worse than fire. It scorched everything in its wake. Suddenly, I saw my life and where it was headed. I felt like a man who wakes up in the middle of the night and, under cover of darkness, finds that most of the defenses normally in place by daylight have deserted him like the poor, underpaid, straggling porters they are. The monsters he tames by day are untethered, belching dragons, and before him, as he sweats under his blanket, he suddenly sees — like someone who opens a hotel window in the middle of the night and looks out at the unfamiliar view overlooking an emptied village — how bleak and mirthless his life has been, how it’s always missed its mark and cut corners at every turn, straying like a ghost ship from harbor to haven without ever stopping at the one port he’s always known was home, because, in the middle of this fateful night, he suddenly realizes something else as welclass="underline" that the very thought of home turns out to be little else than stopgap, everything is stopgap, even thinking is stopgap, as are truth, and joy, and lovemaking, and the words themselves he tries to land on his feet with each time he feels the ground slip from under him — stopgap, each one. What have I done, he asks, how sinister my joys, how shallow my crafty roundabouts, which cheat me of my very own life and make me live quite another, what have I done, singing in the wrong key, saying things in the wrong tense, and in a language that speaks to everyone I know but moves me not a whit?
Who is he when he opens his window and looks out to Bellagio and is all alone at night and no one watches — not his shadow self, not his chorus of lampposts with their heads ablaze, not the person who now sleeps in his bed and has no sense that what he’s staring at with so much gall in his heart is his life on the other bank, the life that’s almost there, the life we spend staring at and grew to think was only meant to be stared at, not lived, the life that never happens, because, unbeknownst to us, it’s being stared at from the bank of the dead to the land of the living? Who is he when the very language he disclaims is the only one he speaks, when the life he cheats is the only one there is?
I wanted to think of Muffy and her two gemelline, trying to coax laughter in my heart. But no laughter sprang. I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks again, but I was in too much agony to think whether they were tears of pain, of sorrow, gratitude, love, shame, panic, revulsion — for I felt all these at once, the fear of crying, and the shame of crying, and the shame of my own shame, and the fear of my body giving out on me each time it blushed, and hesitated, and spoke out of turn, or couldn’t find something to say instead of nothing — always looking for something instead of nothing, something instead of nothing.
So that it all came down to this, didn’t it — this moment, these tears, this dinner in a greenhouse, this party, this woman, this fire in my gut, this roof garden, and this glass dome a world apart with its visionary expanse of the Hudson in midwinter and that tireless celestial beam, which kept resurfacing each time you thought someone had finally pulled the plug on it and which now traveled the sky like a lazy presage of the many wastelands in store for me and of the wasted landfills straight behind — all of it added up to one thing: that if to some, being human comes naturally, to others, it is learned, like an acquired habit or a forgotten tongue that they speak with an accent, the way people live with prosthetic pieces, because between them and life is a trench that no footbridge, no corvus can connect, because love itself is in question, because otherpeoples are in question, because some of us — and I felt myself one in the greenhouse — are green card — bearing humanoids thrust among earth-lings. We know it, they don’t. And part of what we want so desperately is for them finally to know this — but not to know. And what kills us in the end is finding that they’ve always known, because they themselves feel no differently, which is why if knowing all this had passed for a consolation once, now it was a consolation from hell, for then, in my father’s words, there was no hope and things were far worse than we feared.
All I could think of as I sat there with my eyes still closed was fear — fear exposed, fear of daring and being caught daring, fear of wanting and hoping so badly, but never badly enough to dare anything worth getting caught fretting for, fear of letting Clara know everything, fear of never being forgiven — fear of spitting out this piece of Mankiewicz as though it were a lie I’d choked on all evening long but didn’t know what to replace it with, fear that I might mull this lie a while longer, as I’d done all life long, until it lost its pungency and became as ordinary as the water of life itself.