“Let me walk you to where we said goodbye last night.”
Was she into replaying scenes too? Were we pretending it was last night? Or was she doing it for me? Or to get me away from the lobby of her building? I told her I was taking a cab tonight. “’Cuz, bus, he no show up last night.”
“He no show?”
“No show.”
“Then you should have come back upstairs.”
“I was dying to.”
“Party went on till morning. You should have stayed.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to?”
“After your little performance? Me so pressed, me so busy, misosoupor-salad. Get me my coat, get me my scarf, must rush, must go, flit, flit, flit.”
She walked me to the statue where we’d parted last night. My turn, I said. I walked her back to her building. Her face swaddled in the shawl, her hands in her coat pockets, shivering. Posture: vulnerable and beseeching, could break your heart if you didn’t know better.
“Just don’t do it,” she added, with that same touch of apology and fair warning in her voice, shattering our momentary elegy in the cold with the caustic snub of a love sonnet carved on granite with barbed wire. She placed a palm on my cheek, and without thinking, I kissed it — soft, soft palm of her hand. She removed it — not swiftly, as if I had crossed an imaginary line, but almost reluctantly, so as not to call attention to it, which stung me more, for it made her lingering gesture seem deliberate, as though her way of censuring my kiss was to overlook it, gracing withdrawal with tokens of indecision — not unflattering, but chastening just the same.
Whoever minded having the palm of his hand kissed? Even if last night’s beggar woman kissed the inside of my hand, I’d have let her. I gave her an awkward glance, meaning, I know, I know, lying low.
“You did it all wrong,” she explained.
I was dumbfounded. What now?
“Scarf!”
“What about scarf?”
“I hate this knot.”
She untied my scarf and redid the knot the way she liked.
The knot will stay with me till I get home, I know myself. I’d probably want to keep it awhile longer, even with the heat full throttle at home. Get naked with Clara’s knot, get naked with Clara’s knot. Tied me up in knots, that’s what. Last night I’d intentionally undone my scarf to show I had my own way of doing things, thank you very much. But that was last night.
Ivan-Boris-Feodor opened the door for her. I said I would call. But I wanted her to think I wasn’t sure I would. Perhaps I wanted to think so myself. Then she went inside. I watched her step into the elevator.
I remembered the scent of loud perfumes in the corridor fused to that vague, old-elevator smell that had welcomed me to her building. Last night.
I stood there gathering my thoughts, trying to decide whether to walk up to the 110th Street train station or simply hail a cab, wondering which of the dark windows in her building would light up within minutes of our goodbye. I should stay awhile and see which window it was. But what I really wanted was to see her rush out the door looking for me. Something even told me the same impulse had crossed her mind and that she was debating it right then and there, which could be why she hadn’t turned on her lights yet. I waited a few seconds more. Then I remembered I didn’t know which side of the building her apartment faced.
I walked to the corner of 106th and West End, convinced more than ever now that I must never see her again.
I crossed over to Straus Park, following the flakes of snow that were massing like a frenzy of bees swarming in the halo of a streetlamp, growing ever more dense as I looked beyond them uptown and over toward the river and the distant lights of New Jersey. I pictured her in that oversized sweater. All evening long, even at the movies, it had made me think of a rough wool blanket with room for two in it. I wondered what the world smelled of under that blanket, was it my world with its usual, day-to-day odors or a totally alien, unfamiliar world with scents as new and thrilling as those of equatorial fruit — what did life feel like from Clara’s side, from under her sweater, how different was our city when stared at through the lattice of her stitches — how did one think of things when one was Clara, did one read minds, did one always stare people down when one was Clara? Did one shush people when they complained? Or was one like everyone else? What had I looked like when she stared at me with her shawl covering all but her face, thinking to herself, Ah, he’s dying to kiss me, I know, wants to put his hands under my shirt the way Inky did last night, and he thinks I can’t tell his Guido’s up to no good.
•
It felt good to be alone and think of her and coddle the thrill in my mind without letting go. Here, before crossing the street, she had spoken to me of Leo Czernowicz’s lost pianola roll of Handel’s arias and sarabandes as one speaks of unsolved crimes and missing heirlooms. I wondered if the bootprints before me were hers. No one else had stepped on this side of the park since we’d headed toward her building. She had hummed the first few bars, the same voice I’d heard last night. Just a voice, I thought. And yet.
“I’d love to,” I’d said when she asked if I wanted to hear Czernowicz’s lost pianola roll one day.
When I walked into the park from the same exact spot where I’d entered last night, I knew that I would once again step into a realm of silence and ritual — a soft, quiet, limelit world where time stops and where one thinks of miracles, and of quiet beauty, and of how the things we want most in life are so rarely given that when they are finally granted we seldom believe, don’t dare touch, and, without knowing, turn them down and ask them to reconsider whether it’s really us they’re truly being offered to. Wasn’t this what I had done when I prematurely buttoned up my coat in front of her doorman — to show that I could take my leave and not say anything about meeting again, or coming upstairs, staying upstairs? Why go out of my way to show so much indifference, when it would have been obvious to a two-year-old. . Strange. No, not strange. Typical. The distance of a day had changed nothing between us. I was no closer to her now than I’d been last night. If anything, the distance was greater now and had solidified into something more pointed, craggier.
As I loitered about the park and looked around me, I knew I didn’t mind the sorrow, didn’t mind the loss. I loved lingering in her park, liked the snow, the silence, liked feeling totally rudderless and lost, liked suffering, if only because it brought me back to last night’s vigil and enchantment. Come here as often as you please, come here after every one of your hopes is dashed, and I’ll restore you and make you whole, and give you something to remember and feel good by, just come and be with me, and I’ll be like love to you.
I cleared the snow off the same bench I had used last night and sat down. Let everything be like last night. I crossed my arms and, at the risk of being seen from her window, sat there staring at the bare trees. No one in the park. Just the statue, its lean, sandaled foot hanging from the pedestal, snow resting on her toes. Behind me, I made out the rhythmic rattle of a tire chain, reminding me of old-style patrol cars. A police car did appear from nowhere, turned on 106th, and sidled up to a parked bus. A silent greeting between the two drivers. Then the patrol car swooped around, made a brisk U-turn, and began speeding down West End. Officer Rahoon and two other cops. Good thing he didn’t see me. Officer Rahoon, Muldoon, and Culhoon — three cops in a carriage, three beers and a cabbage. Was that it, then, the magic gone, Cinderella’s back mopping floors?