Total silence descended.
The lamppost nearest me stood upon its gleaming pool of light and, once again, seemed to lean toward me as it had done last night, as eager to help, though still without knowing how.
What had it all meant? I wondered — the staring, the chummy-chummy hug-hug and perfunctory two kisses, French-style, the bit about how she knows herself, and telling me not to look so glum, and so much talk of lying low, and mournful hints of love and admonition laced into the sad tale of lost Czernowhiskeys, all of it capped with a bitter I don’t think I need to spell it out, it might ruin things, like venom at the end of a love bite.
Ruin what things? Do me a favor!
Just don’t fall in love with me. Which is when she planted a kiss under my ear—You smell good, uttered almost like a jeer and an afterthought. Venom, venom, venom. Venom and its antidote, like the warm, puffed taste of newly baked bread on a cold morning when the crust suddenly cuts into your gum and turns the most wholesome taste on earth into rank and fulsome gunk. No things, okay? meaning, No sullen faces, no sulky-pouties, no guilt stuff, okay? Because it could turn into her hell. Get real, Schwester! The mopey heiress from Maine didn’t rattle so many keys before unlocking the fortress. The small-time hussy speaks the lingo of eternity — do me a favor! And all that talk of lying low — what prattle and claptrap!
I heard the bus driver turn on his engine. The lights inside the bus flickered on. How snug the foggy orange glow behind the glass panes, a haven from the cold. Just me and the bus driver, the bus driver and me.
Perhaps it was time for me to leave as well, though I didn’t want to yet. And suddenly it came to me. I should call her, shouldn’t I? Just call her. And say what? I’d figure something out. Time I did something — always waiting for others to do — tell the truth for a change, engage, for crying out loud. I don’t want to be alone tonight. There! She’d know what to say to that. She’d keep the conversation going; and even if she had to say no, it would be a kind no, as in: Can’t, lying low, you see? Ah, but to hear her say it that way, Can’t, lying low, you see? like a reluctant caress that starts but then lingers on your face and shoots straight to your mouth and unbuckles your heart. I reached for my cell. She was the last person to call — hours ago. We’d exchanged numbers while still waiting on line, and she said, Let me call you instead, this way you’ll have my number too. This was before the admonition, before Affirmatov had taken our tickets and crushed them in his fist. There was her number. My heart instantly sank, for the task seemed beyond me. What else were you planning to do with me but call? asked my phone, now that I held it in my hand. I imagined the sharp sound of her ten numerals chiming away like metal spikes hammered into splintering rock, followed by the grumbling, minatory drumroll of the ringing itself. Academy 2—fancy people still using Academy as a prefix, I’d said to her, to tease her or imply there was something willfully dated and archaic, even a touch precious in the way she’d given me her phone number. Now it was her number’s turn to make fun of me, like a tiny reptile that looked totally docile in the pet store when the salesman made you rub its tummy with the tip of your finger but that now bites into your fingernail and then tears it out. She justified giving out her telephone number that way, because, she said, this was how her mother would say it and how, to very few people whom she felt comfortable with, she continued to say it — with the implication that you ranked among those who instantly understood that her Old World and your Old World shared a lineage in common, though not necessarily on the same branch, because what was defunct and obsolete in you was retro-swanky-cutting-edge in her, and, despite great-grandparents in common and a language in common, we might not have belonged on the same tree at all. So there! Academy 2 for the happy few.
I thought of her phone number — generations of phone calls from desperate boyfriends. How did it ring when you called her late at night? Could she tell by its ring whether it came from hopelessness or guilt or anger and blame or from shyness that hangs up after three rings? Did jealousy have a telltale ring that shouted louder truths than are dreamt of in caller ID?
Oh, Inky, Inky, Inky. How many times had he called tonight? He’d be calling right now. As I would myself. I imagined calling her. Ringing once. Ringing twice. Suddenly she picks up. Huffing. I can hear the water running in the background. Party’s over, Cinderella’s mopping floors. Inky? No, it’s me. It’s you. It’s me. Me trying not to pull an Inky. But clearly doing just that. How do you say I don’t want to be alone tonight now that I can’t think what to say next? Just like that: I don’t want to be alone tonight. Maybe with a question mark? Maybe not. A woman would be crazy not to let you say all this.
An M104 bus stopped on the corner of 106th and Broadway. I caught it just in time and, before sitting, watched the triangular park fade into the snowstorm. I may never see this place again in the snow. And just as I was beginning to believe it, I knew I was lying to myself. I’d come back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and after that as well, with or without her, with or without Rohmer, and just sit here and hope to find a way to avoid thinking that I’d lost her twice in two nights, sensing all along that hers was the face I’d put up around this park to screen me from myself, from all the lies I round up by night if only to think I’m not alone at dawn.
•
Later that night, I was awakened by the loud bang of a snowplow scraping my street. Suddenly I was filled with a feeling so exquisite that, once again, I could only call it joy, Pascal’s word spoken in his solitary room one night at Port-Royal.
It reminded me of that moment when we’d walked out of the bar after last call and found the snow blanketing 105th Street. Our arms kept rubbing each other until she slipped hers into mine. I’d wished our walk might never end.
I got out of bed and looked out the window and saw how peacefully the snow had blanketed the rooftops and side streets of Manhattan. It was — perhaps because it reminded me so much of Brassaï—a stunning black-and-white spectacle of the rooftops of Paris or of Clermont-Ferrand, or of any French provincial town at night, and the joy that suddenly burst within me cast so limitless a spell in my bedroom as I tiptoed my way to another window next to my desk to glimpse a different view of the world by night that I caught myself trying to avoid making any sound: not let the wood floor creak under my feet, or the old counterweights on the sash give their telltale thud when I’d raise the window just a crack and let the cold air in, not do anything to disturb the silence that had glided in as on the wingtips of an angel, because, as I stood watching the night, I could so easily make believe that hidden under my comforter lay someone whose sleep was as light and restive as mine. When I’d come back to bed, I’d try not to move much, find a spot on the right side and lie still and wait for sleep, all the while hoping it wouldn’t come until I’d smuggled the image of her naked body into my dreams.
Tomorrow, first thing, I’d rush out, have breakfast, and try to see my friends and tell them about Clara. Then I’d take a stroll through a department store, lunch at the Whitney among throngs of tourists snapping pictures with their jet-set grandparents, shop for Christmas presents on the day after Christmas, all of it punctuated by the diffident premonition that tonight might happen all over again, must happen all over again, may never ever happen again.