A good sign, I thought.
This is when she took out a recording of Handel’s piano suites. I said nothing, fearing that mentioning music might suddenly bring up her aging cyborg with the giant phonograph. She’s putting on the Handel to fill the silence with something. To show she is aware of the tension, to show she isn’t aware of it, to smooth the ruffles the way a beautiful woman in an elevator once rubbed a hand across the front of my sports lapel to undo a fold in my collar. A conversation opener. Not a conversation opener.
She must have realized what I was thinking.
I smiled back.
If she cradled a mirror version of my unspoken You know that walk, last night, what would it be? I know what you’re thinking. It’s nothing like yours. It’s only the tension makes you want to read my thoughts. Or was it harsher yet: You had no right speaking of Herr Jäcke that way — look what you’ve done to us now.
We were on Riverside Drive. Soon we would near the 112th Street statue, where, for a while that seemed to last forever two days earlier, I’d enjoyed feeling stranded in the snowstorm. I tried to remember the evening and the snowed-up hillock and the St. Bernard coming out of nowhere, then the elevator, the party, the tree, the woman. Now I was riding in Clara’s car, eager to put the tension behind us. I watched Tilden’s statue come and go. It had seemed so timeless, so blissfully medieval under the snow two days ago; now it scarcely remembered who I was as I sped by in the sports coupe, neither he nor I able to share a thought in common. Later, I promised, maybe we’ll reconnect on my way back, and I’ll stop and ponder the passage of time. See this statue, it and I. . I would have told her, my way of reminding her how we’d stood on a balcony and watched eternity the other night — the shoe, the glass, the snow, the shirt, Bellagio, almost everything about her aching to turn into poetry. It was poetry, wasn’t it, the walk that night, and the walk last night, You know that walk on 106th Street? I’d been thinking about you all day, all day.
“Ugly day, isn’t it?”
I loved overcast gray days, I said.
Actually, she did too.
Why say ugly, then?
She shrugged my question away.
Probably because it seemed the easiest thing to say? Because we’ll say anything to defuse the tension? For a moment she seemed elsewhere and far away.
Then, within seconds and without warning — as though this was where she’d been headed even before putting on the Handel, before the tension in the car, perhaps even before buzzing me or before buying the two grandes around the corner—“So”—and right away I knew what she was going to say, I just knew—“Did you think of me last night?” she asked, staring straight before her, as if too busy to look in my direction, though it was clear she’d see through anything I said.
There was no point beating around the bush. “I slept with you last night.”
She didn’t say anything, didn’t even cast a sidelong glance.
“I know,” she replied in the end, like a psychiatrist pleased to see that the medication prescribed almost absentmindedly at the end of one session had had its intended effect by the start of the next. “Maybe you should have called.”
That came out of nowhere. Or was this her way of pushing what I presumed was the limit between strangers? She was frank when it came to delicate issues. Like me, perhaps, she found admissions easy and bold questions easier yet, but working up to them was probably torment and torture, the way it’s not passion people hide but progressive arousal. Truth jutted out like shards of glass; but it came from an inner skirmish, perhaps because its origin was closer to fear than violence.
“Would you have wanted me to?” I asked.
Silence. Then, just as abruptly: “There are muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag to your left.”
She knew how to play this.
“Ah, muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag to my left,” I echoed, to reassure her that her intentionally obvious evasion wasn’t lost on me, but that I wouldn’t press any further.
I took forever to examine the contents of the white-gray paper bag. The last thing I had eaten was Clara’s garlic cheese sandwich almost half a day earlier.
“Permission to eat in car?”
“Permission granted.”
I broke off part of the crusty top of the buttery cranberry muffin and held it out to her. She took it and, with her mouth full, bowed twice, to signal thanks.
“Permission to try other muffin for sake of variety?”
With her mouth still full and, on the brink of laughter, she simply nodded I go ahead.
“Must absolutely ferret out the other contents of. . this here white-gray paper bag to my left.”
She seemed to shrug a shoulder in mock-laughter. We were over our moment of tension.
Her cell phone rang.
“Speak,” she said.
It was someone asking her a question. “Can’t, I’m in the car. Tomorrow.” She clicked off. Then turned off her phone.
Silence. “I like this breakfast-on-the-go situation,” I finally said. But she spoke at the same time as I did. “And you didn’t call last night because. .?”
So we’re back to that, I thought. She wasn’t letting it go — was this a good sign, then? And if it was, why did I feel this rush of something terribly awkward and uneasy between us, especially since I had nothing more to be ashamed of after my avowal of moments earlier. Or had I made the avowal to shock her enough that it would freeze the subject on the spot, show I could speak the whole truth if I wanted to, but also on condition we slammed the door on it? The last thing I wanted was to tell her why I hadn’t called, though this and only this was the thing I wished to tell her most now. I wanted to tell her about last night too, how I’d woken up to her when I remembered the light down on her skin at the bar and how the thought of it was still with me when she buzzed me downstairs and I’d wanted to run down in my bathrobe and expose the effect of her voice on my body.
“Because I wasn’t sure you’d want me to,” I ended up saying.
Why hadn’t I called her? Was I simply pretending not to want to tell her? Or did I not even know how to begin telling her? What could I tell you, Clara? That I’d abide by your rules even though I didn’t want to? That I didn’t call because I didn’t know what I’d say after It’s me, I don’t want to be alone tonight?
“Why didn’t I call?” I finally repeated in an effort at candor. The words that unexpectedly came to my rescue were her very own from last night: “Just lying low, Clara. Like you, I suppose. Don’t want to disturb the universe.” I knew it was a cop-out. I was looking straight in front of me, as she was doing, trying to give my admission a tongue-in-cheek air of premeditated but all too visibly suppressed mischief. Had I meant to scorn lying low? Was I using it against her? Or was I taking my fragile cop-out back by suggesting they were copycat words, not mine, just hers? Or was I trying to show we had more in common than she suspected — though I couldn’t begin to know what that was? Or did I have nothing up my sleeve but desperately needed her to think I did, so that I might believe so myself?
It did not occur to me until I’d uttered her lying low that I was far closer to the truth about my condition in the car or last night or at the party or in life even than I wished to convey with my mock-struggle to affect an impish look.
But I also sensed that I hadn’t yet told her why I never called and that perhaps she was waiting for an answer.