“Have you known the big ones?” she interrupted me, honing once again on the unstated subject of our conversation.
I thought awhile. There was a time when I could have sworn I’d known them. Now, in truth, I didn’t think I had. “Sometimes I think I have. Have you?” I asked, still trying to stay vague.
“Sometimes I think I have.” She was mimicking me again. I loved how she did this.
We both laughed — because she had mimicked me quite well, because my answer was indeed hollow, and was meant to sound hollow, because by laughing she herself was hinting she’d have tried to dodge the question, seeing that she too might never have known the big ones and that we had both lied about knowing them to sound a touch less icy than we feared we seemed.
Last call came. We ordered a third round. Not one thing had gone wrong.
“Promise me something, though,” she said after I’d just repeated I was pleased we’d met tonight.
I looked at her and said nothing, not entirely certain I understood, trying to look surprised at whatever she was about to say, even if the use of her “though” was like an uneasy warning of gunfire to come.
She hesitated before speaking. Then she changed her mind.
“I don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.
She knew I knew.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know, it might just ruin things.”
I took my time, sensing that my initial assumption had been totally correct. It had never occurred to me that we had so many things that could be ruined if I failed to promise what she was asking of me. I thought we had a scatter of small disconnected things between us — not Things with a capital T, and certainly not as many as she was implying!
“Things?” I asked, with something like an amused expression on my face, as though I had considered but then hushed an impulse to mimic her word. I knew I was being disingenuous and that I was desperately trying to find something else to say, perhaps to stave off what I was inferring from her and wished might remain ambiguous yet. But I didn’t want to deny it either.
“Things,” I repeated, as though her meaning had finally sunk in and that I was going to comply with her wishes.
“It won’t ruin things,” I replied. I tried to soften the conscious irony I was spreading on her words even before they had left my mouth, as though her concerns about us had never occurred to me before and, come to think of it now, were a touch amusing. Perhaps I was trying to dispel her doubts about me but didn’t want them totally dismissed either. I was taking cover in the truth. “Besides, you might be entirely wrong,” I added.
A short silence.
“I don’t think so.”
There was almost a note of apology in her eyes — apology for the unspoken slight directed at me. “Point taken,” I said. “Admonition forbidding mourning noted,” I conceded.
She squeezed my hand across the table and, before I could return the grasp, withdrew hers. She seemed relieved that she had finally set things straight between us and proceeded to light another cigarette by raising the stump of the candle and bringing it close to her face, determined to enjoy her third glass of Scotch. That face in candlelight, I thought!
I had never seen her face in such light before. Smoking, which she did by turning her face away from yours without ever averting her eyes, gave her silence a willful, omniscient air that I found difficult to hold.
We clinked glasses three times. Then three times again. And a third set of threes, “for good measure,” she said, “three times the Trinity.” “Repeat after me: Ekh raz, yescho raz, yescho mnogo, mnogo raz. .” She repeated the Russian phrase once more, slowly, word for word. Once more, and once again, and many more times again. I remembered her toast with Hans. Who knew in whose arms she’d learned it?
•
This was when I made that passing comment on Rohmer’s movies. I had said it to fill the silence, but it gave our conversation a strange spin. Her impulsive reading, brutally frank, had simply exposed the drift of our conversation. Not sleeping together — this was the missing term. It unsaddled and deflated everything. I tried to rescue appearances.
“What is unrealistic is that in Rohmer love may just be an alibi, a convenient metaphor — but as for love, none of his characters really trusts it, much less believes in it, or feels it, including the film director, and even the spectators, though all of us keep going through the motions of knocking at love’s door, because outside of love we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Outside of love, we’re out in the cold.”
She thought awhile. Was she going to make fun of me again?
“Is everyone out in the cold, then?”
“I suppose some more than others. But everyone knocks.”
“Even if love is an alibi. . a metaphor?”
She was making fun of me.
“I don’t know. Some knock at a door. Others at a wall. And some keep tapping gently at what they hope is a trapdoor, even if you never hear telltale sounds from the other side.”
“Are you tapping now?”
“Am I tapping now? Good question. I don’t know, maybe I am.”
“Any telltale sounds?”
“None so far — all I’m hearing are lying low sounds.”
“That was no gentle tap.” She laughed uneasily.
I ended up laughing as well. For a second I thought she was reproaching me for using lying low against her. I was already trying to come up with some form of apology when I realized she was simply deriding what I thought was a deft and delicate pass.
“Trenches are empty, land scorched, all things lite, I thought I told you.”
Was this reproof in her stare? Or was it apology? And why did she keep staring at me?
It was to stop blushing that I finally found myself saying, “Here I am looking at you, Clara, and I don’t know whether to tell you that I love staring at you as I’m doing now or whether I should just keep quiet, say nothing, and curl up into the most abstinent silence.”
“A woman would be crazy not to let you go on.”
“And a man would be crazier not to ask you to stop him.”
“Is this Rohmer, or you?”
“Who knows. I stare at you and my heart is racing and you’re staring back at me, and all I keep thinking is: Trenches are empty, land scorched, keep it lite, and Mind the road signs.”
She made a motion to interrupt. I immediately stopped.
“No, keep going.”
What an amazing woman.
“And now I’ve been made to feel like a street performer.”
“Oh, stop. We’ve had our intensely spiritual Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment for tonight.” She stood up, took out a dollar bill from her purse, walked over to the jukebox, and right away pressed a series of buttons — obviously “her” song. I had expected her to come back to our table and finish her drink, but she stood by the jukebox as though inspecting the list of songs. I stood up and went to her. The music started, it was a tango.
The raucous words of the song cast a spell as soon as I heard them. They rose out of the late-night stillness in the almost emptied bar like a wool blanket being unfolded from a linen closet on a cold night, when the only sound you hear is hail and rattling windowpanes. Clara knew the words, and before I saw what was happening or had a chance to resist or even make a show of resisting, there I was, being asked to lead in a dance I vaguely remembered from my early college days. We danced by the jukebox not three yards away from the entrance to the bar, and we danced much slower than a tango is meant to be danced, but who cared, for there we were, the jukebox and us and the rare faces of passersby on the sidewalk who happened to look in from behind the frosted windows, dancing, as in a Hopper painting, under a lighted green Heineken sign, while one or two of the remaining waiters went about the business of refilling ketchup bottles — we thought we danced perfectly, we thought this was heaven, we thought tango had brought us closer in three seconds than all the words we’d been sparring with since 7:10. And then it happened. After the song, she stood still for a second and, with her hand still in mine, almost in jest — or was it in jest? — said Perdoname, and right then and there began singing out the words in Spanish, and she sang them for me, a cappella, with that voice that tore everything inside me, staring at me the way singers do when they unhinge you totally as you stand there helpless and bared, and all you have is a shaken self and tears running down your cheeks. And she watched this, and she didn’t stop singing, as if she knew, as she began to wipe my eyes with her palm, that this couldn’t have been more natural and was exactly what should happen when one human being stops dancing, holds your hand, and then sings to you, for you, sings because music, like a machete in the jungle, cuts through everything and goes straight to that place still called the heart.