I envy people who ignore all attempts at small talk.
An arm to touch your shoulder. Why weren’t we sitting next to each other instead of face-to-face like strangers? Perhaps I should have waited for her to sit first and then sat next to her. What idiocy my changing seats and the commotion about the view of the floating barge and of the trellised pier, back to the floating barge — what did views have to do with anything?
She leaned her head against the large sealed windowpane, trying to avoid touching the dusty tartan curtains. She looked pensive. I was about to lean my head against the window as well, but then decided against it; she’d think I was trying to mimic her, though I’d thought of it first. It would have seemed too premeditated an attempt to seem lost in the same cloud. Instead, I slouched back, almost touching her feet under the table.
She crossed her arms and stared outside. “I love days like this.”
I looked at her. I love the way you are right now. Your sweater, your neck, your teeth. Even your hands, the meek, untanned, warm, luminous palm of each hand resting cross-armed, as if you too were nervous.
“So talk to me.”
“So talk to you.”
I fiddled with a sugar packet. For a change it seemed it was she who needed to fill the silence, not I. And yet it was I who felt like a crab that had just molted its shelclass="underline" without pincers, without wit, without darting steps, just a hapless mass with aching phantom limbs.
“I like being here like this too,” I said — being here, with you, having tea in the middle of nowhere, next to an abandoned gas station in the heart of soddy, cabin-town America — does it matter? “And this too, I like,” I added, letting my gaze land on the iced white shore and the bluffs beyond, as though they too had something to do with liking being here like this. “Being here the way we are right now,” I threw in as an afterthought, “though all this might have absolutely nothing to do with you, of course,” I added slyly.
She smiled at my attempted afterthought.
“Nothing to do with me at all.”
“Absolutely not,” I insisted.
“I couldn’t agree more.”
She started laughing — at me, at herself, at the joy that came from being together so early in the day, at both our willfully transparent attempts to play down the joy.
“Time for a third secret agent,” she added, taking a cigarette and proceeding to light it.
Teeth, eyes, smile.
“If it’s any consolation, I like this too,” she said, staring over at the distant woods across the river, as if they had more to do with our enjoyment of the moment than we did ourselves. Was she doing exactly what I had just done, paying us a compliment while undoing it by redirecting her gaze to the spectacle of bluffs beyond, or was she trying to raise the subject in a manner I didn’t dare to yet?
“I’m sure you couldn’t care less, but I used to come here with Inky.”
“What, chez Edy’s?” Why did I keep making fun of the place, why?
“When they were kids, he and his brother would ride their boat here, fish, get drunk, then head back home before dark. Inky and I would drive up here, park the car, loll about awhile, and I’d watch him miss the old days, till we got into the car again and rode back to the city. Such a lost, lost soul.”
“You’re a lost soul too?”
“Nope!” she snapped without letting me finish what I didn’t even know I was attempting to ask. It meant, Don’t even try. Trenches, pits, the dales of pandangst were party talk.
“Are you here now to be with him?”
“No. I told you already. We’re over.”
Dumb, dumb question.
“So why are you bringing him up now?”
“No need to be upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
“You’re not upset? You should see yourself.”
I decided to joke about it and picked up the tiny metal milk dispenser and, as though to determine what an upset face looked like, examined my reflection in it, once, twice, three times.
Then I saw it. In the rush to meet her this morning, I had completely forgotten to shave. This, after making a deliberate effort to take my time in coming down, to show I wasn’t racing down the stairs to meet her.
Did she want me to say I was upset? Was this, then, an “opener” of sorts, her way of forcing me to admit what I felt each time she spoke of him, so that she might yet again remind me that I had overstepped the bounds? Was she using her constantly resurrected ex to remind me of the trench between us?
“I don’t look upset at all,” I said, pretending to argue with her remark.
“Just let it go.”
Why did she bring me to the brink each time I thought it was safe to take a step closer?
“Inky would just sit here and simply stare at the bridge over there.”
“Stare at the bridge? Why?”
“Because his brother jumped off it.”
I felt for the three of them.
“And what did you do while he stared?” I asked, not knowing what else to ask.
“Hoped he’d forget. Hoped it would stop haunting him. Hoped I could make a difference. Hoped he’d say something. But he’d just sit there and stare, blank, always blank. Until I realized he was telling me in his own subtle, tormented way that if I wanted to and kept at him, I could make him jump too.”
Yes, I could see how Clara could bring anyone to jump.
“So why do you come here?”
“I like the salty-dog grunginess.” She too could affect being intentionally flippant.
“Be serious. Do you miss him?” I proposed, as if to help her see the answer staring her in the face.
She shook her head — not to mean no, but as though she was shaking me off, meaning, You’ll never catch me, so don’t try. Or: You’re way off, pal.
“So this place has Inky written all over it,” I finally said after waiting for her answer.
“Not Inky.”
“Who, then?” I asked.
“That’s a Door number three question. How much do you charge per hour?”
But she didn’t wait for my answer.
“Me, that’s what’s written all over it. Because this is the spot where it finally hit me that perhaps I didn’t know what love was. Or that I’d practiced the wrong kind. That I’d never know.”
“Did you bring me all the way up here to tell me this?”
This caught her totally by surprise.
“Maybe. Maybe,” she repeated, as if she had never considered the possibility that she’d brought me along to reopen old wounds and help her witness where truth had felled her. Or perhaps she simply wished to see if she’d feel differently with another man. Or was it too soon yet? Lying low and all that.
“I’d sit and watch him drift and drift and drift, as if he were taking me up to that bridge and was going to jump on condition I jumped with him. And I wasn’t going to go up that bridge or jump from it, not with him, not for him, not for anyone, unfortunately; nor was I going to sit around and watch him think of it each time we came here while he stared and said he’d die for me, when the one thing I wanted to tell him the most I couldn’t even say.”
“And that was?”
“So I am paying you by the hour!”
She paused for a moment to catch her breath, or to collect her thoughts — or was she smothering the start of a sob? Or was it a grin?
“That he could go ahead. Mean and nasty. Not that I didn’t care, but that I was never going to love anyone — not him, at any rate. I’d have jumped after him to save him. Maybe. No, not even.” She was playing with her spoon, drawing patterns on the paper napkin. “The rest let’s not talk about.”