Once again, my mind drifted back to that moment when we’d walked out of the bar after last call and found fresh snow on 105th Street. She’d kissed me on the neck and, after telling me never to hope for anything, snuggled her arm into mine, as though to mean Never mind all this but Never forget all this. Now, in the dark, with the memory of her body leaning on mine, all I had to do was say her name and she’d be under the covers, move an inch and I’d encounter a shoulder, a knee, whisper her name again and again till I’d swear she was whispering mine as well, our voices twined in the dark, like those of two lovers in an ancient tale playing courtship games with one and the same body.
THIRD NIGHT
I was in the shower the next morning when I heard the buzzer downstairs. I jumped out of the bathtub, raced past the kitchen door, and yelled a loud “Who is it?” into the intercom, water dripping everywhere.
“It’s me” came the garbled voice in the box, not the doorman’s.
“Me who?” I shouted, exasperated at the deliveryman, as I began frisking for loose bills, first on my dresser, then through last night’s trousers hanging on a chair.
“Me” came the same voice, followed by a moment’s pause. “Me,” it repeated. “Moah.” Another pause. “Me, Shukoff. Me, lying-low. Miso-souporsalad. Me, goddamnit! How quickly we forget.”
Silence again.
“I’m driving to Hudson,” she shouted.
I demurred a moment. What about Hudson? Did she want to come up? I asked. The thought of her coming upstairs swept through me like an indecent and almost guilty thrill. Let her see my crumpled world, my socks, my bathrobe, my foul rag-and-bone shop, my life.
“Thanks, but no thanks.” She’d wait in the lobby, she didn’t mind, just don’t take too long — was I sleeping?
“No, shower.”
“What?”
“Sho-wer.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Just hurry,” she cried, as if I had already agreed to come.
“Actually—” I hesitated.
There was a dead silence.
“Actually, what? Are you that busy?” she blurted out.
The static on the intercom couldn’t muffle the irony crackling over each syllable.
“Okay. Okay. I’ll be down in five.”
She must have grabbed the phone from the doorman.
There goes my regular breakfast at the corner Greek diner, I thought. Newspaper waiting by the cash register, crossword puzzle I never care to finish, thimble-sized glass of orange juice as soon as they spot you trundling through the snow, omelet, hash browns, and small tinfoiled packets of very processed jam — they know me there — speak a few words of Helleniki with the waitress, pretend we’re both flirting, which is flirting twice-removed, then stare out and let your mind drift. I could almost hear the sound of the door, with its thumb lock permanently stuck down, followed by the bell and rattle of the glass panel as you shut the door behind you real fast, rubbing your palms from the cold, scanning for an empty table by the window, then sit and wait for that magical moment when you’ll stare out and let your mind drift.
Six hours ago, just six hours ago I was standing outside her building watching her disappear into the elevator.
Now she was standing outside my building, waiting. Suddenly the words I’d spoken to her last night in bed came back to me, word for word. You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended. I wish it had gone on and on, and that we’d kept walking all the way to the river, then headed downtown, and who knows where else by now, past the marina and the boats where she’d once told me Pavel and Pablo lived, to Battery Park City all the way over and across the bridge to Brooklyn, walking and walking right until dawn. Now she was downstairs. You know that walk. . The words coursed through me like a secret wish I’d failed to expiate last night. I wanted to take the elevator downstairs and, tying the knot of my bathrobe, drip into the main lobby and tell her, You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended, never ended. Just the thought of saying these words to her now as I was hastily drying myself made me want to be naked with her.
When I finally saw her downstairs in the lobby, I complained that eight o’clock was an unseemly hour to drag people out of their homes. “You love it,” she interrupted. “Hop in, we’ll have breakfast on the way. Take a look.”
She indicated the passenger seat of a silver BMW. Two grande coffees stood at a precarious angle, not in the cup holders below the dashboard, but right on the passenger seat itself, as if she had plopped both down in what I took to be her typical impatience with small things. There were also what appeared to be neatly wrapped muffins—“Purchased just around your block,” she said. She had bought them with me and no one else in mind, it seemed, which meant she knew she’d find me, knew I’d be happy to come along, knew I liked muffins, especially when they had this vague scent of cloves. I wondered whom else she’d have barged in on if she hadn’t found me. Or was I already the standby? Why think this way?
“Where to?” I asked.
“We’re visiting an old friend. He lives in the country — you’ll like him.”
I said nothing. Another Inky, I figured. Why bring me along?
“He’s been living there ever since leaving Germany before the war.” She must have inherited this from her parents. They called it the war, not World War II. “Knows everything—”
“—about everything.” I knew the type.
“Just about. Knows every piece of recorded music.”
I pictured a fretful old garmento type hobbling on frayed slippers around a large gramophone. Tell me, Liebchen, what watch? Do you know that land where the citrus blooms? I wanted to make fun of him. “Another Knöwitall Jäcke,” I said.
She caught my skepticism and my attempted humor.
“He’s lived more lives here and elsewhere than you and I put together multiplied by eight to the power of three.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say. He goes back to a time when the world ganged up on every last Jew, and all that was left of Europe was a tiny spot off a magical lakeside town overlooking a canton in Switzerland. There, my father, Hans, and Fred Pasternak met in elementary school, which was why my father insisted I go to school there for a while. There, for your nymphormation, Max turned the pages for the man who’d once turned them for the man who’d turned them for the last of Beethoven’s pupils. Maybe I worship him.”
I hated her blind adulation. No doubt she hated my senseless wish to deride him. “So don’t you be the knöwitall.” She repeated my word to soften her censure. “We’re going to hear some stuff he’s unearthed — pretty amazing too, if you care to know.”
A chill suddenly hovered between us. To fend it off, we kept quiet. Let the fog pass, let it disperse and drift away and spill out of the car like the cigarette smoke being sucked out of the tiny crack in her window. Our silence told me not just that our thoughts were temporarily elsewhere, or that anger was blocking something between us, but that she, like me, and without wishing to call attention to it, was desperately scrambling to make last-minute repairs to save the moment.