“Maybe I need time.”
She didn’t quite finish her sentence. But I knew right away.
“You’re an amazing woman, Clara,” I said, “just amazing.”
She didn’t say anything.
“It’s good to hear someone say this.” Then having heard her sentence, she couldn’t help it. “It’s good to hear someone say this.” She parodied her own words.
“Amazing all the same.”
We threw more stones at the ice floes and listened to the ice bark back as though there were penguins who’d hopped up on the floes to forage for their young and thought we had thrown them bread, and what we threw was ice and stones.
On our way back, I held out my hand to her. I hadn’t even thought of it. She gave me hers as we went up the wooden stairs that led to the gangway. Then she let go, or I let go, or we both did.
When we returned, the soup was ready. Margo liked to add cream to the thick golden brew. So did Clara. It was a soup for cold weather, said Margo. A rustic, rectangular table had been set up, Max sitting at the head, Margo to his left, Clara to his immediate right, and I next to her. “I would have wanted Clara at my left,” said Margo, who seemed to be in a happy, chatty mood, “but I didn’t want to separate you.”
What on earth were they thinking? What had they been told?
I tried to give Clara an inquisitive look, but she must have anticipated this and was focusing intently on her soup, trying to show she hadn’t heard the comment I knew she couldn’t have missed. She raved about the soup and, better yet, about the crème fraîche, raved about the curry. “I believe in sixty-minute-not-a-second-more cooking. And that includes dessert,” said Margo. “And I,” interjected Max, “believe that a good wine will rescue anything you dish out with your sixty-minute chow even raccoons won’t touch.”
“Be grateful I’m around to feed your rotting gums.”
“And I to down what we’ll call food in front of our guests.”
Clara was the first to laugh, then Margo and Max, then me.
This was family business as usual, I guessed.
I am sitting where Inky sits, I thought.
The soup and the bread and the cream and the wine, which kept coming, were extraordinary, and soon enough we were being regaled with Max’s latest complaint. His knees. He’d been on archaeological digs in his youth and was now, in his nineties, paying the price for his follies near Ekbatana. “With most people my age, it’s the mind that goes. Mine is intact. But the body’s checking out.”
“How do you know your mind is so intact, old man?” said Clara.
“Do you want me to tell you how?”
“Please.”
“I warn you, it will be obscene, I know him,” cut in Margo.
“Well, about a month ago, because of these damned knees — which incidentally are about to be replaced, so this is the last time they’ll be seeing you — I had to get an MRI. They asked me of course if I wanted to be sedated and if I suffered from claustrophobia. So I laughed in their faces. I survived the Second World War without so much as taking aspirin, now I’m to be sedated simply because they’ll put me in a box with a hole in it? Not me. So in I go. But no sooner am I in there than I realize this is what death must be like. The machine starts such a ghoulish pounding and gonging that I want to ask for sedation. Problem is, I’m not supposed to move; if I do, they cancel the procedure. So I decide to brace myself and go on with it. Except I know my heart is racing like mad, and I can’t think of a single thing but the noise, which, more than ever now, reminds me of the hellish pounding of the dead statue in Don Giovanni: dong, dong, dong! I try to make myself think of the Don, but all I can think of is hell. This is death. I need to think of something quiet and soothing. But quiet and soothing images fail to come. This is when memory rescued me: I decided to count and name every woman I’d slept with, year by year, including those who brought me so little pleasure in bed that I’ve often wondered why they parted the Red Sea if they had no manna to give and certainly wanted none of mine. This, to say nothing of those who wouldn’t take off their clothes, or would do this but certainly not that, or who always had engine trouble, so in the end, though you might have been in bed together, and even fallen asleep, it was never clear whether you had scaled the summit. In any event, I counted them and they added up to—”
“One thousand and three!” exclaimed Clara, referring to the number of Don Giovanni’s mistresses in Spain.
At which we all clapped.
“Or was it ninety-one?” asked Clara, the Don’s mistresses in Turkey.
“Six hundred and forty,” added Margo, referring to those in Italy.
“Two hundred and thirty-one, and not a woman more!” thundered Max, the Don’s mistresses in Germany.
"Madamina. .” I began, deepening my voice till it growled with comic gravity the way Leporello catalogs the number of Don Giovanni’s mistresses around the world.
It was so unlike me to hurl a joke among people I barely knew, much less with song, that I was surprised to hear Clara laugh the loudest, and more surprised yet when she took up what wasn’t even meant as a cue and began humming the opening bars of the aria, and then actually singing the aria, with a voice that, once again, came unannounced and was more lacerating than the one I’d heard at the party or by the jukebox, because this time it seemed to palm my neck with its breath, once, twice, every syllable a caress. “Madamina, il catologo è questo, delle belle che amò il padron mio. .”A few verses more and her voice had so totally shaken and moved me that, in an effort to keep my composure, I found myself putting an arm around her and then, pressing my head against her back, squeezing her toward me. She didn’t seem to mind, because, more surprising yet, she held my hand on her waist and, turning to me, kissed me on the neck, letting her hand linger there, the way she’d done last night, as though the hand was part of the kiss.
Her kiss unsettled me more than the singing. I had to keep quiet, focus on the soup, show that this third wine was far better than the first two. But I was too flustered for words. I had touched her sweater, and its softness belied every cutting inflection in her speech, in her face, her body.
By then we had each already finished two servings of soup and begun eating the marinated greens. More wines.
After the salad, Margo got up and came back with a cake. “It’s a strudel gâteau. I hope you all like it.”
She also brought to the table more crème fraîche. “This is everyone’s favorite.”
She had probably meant to say, This is Inky’s favorite, but had caught herself in time. Or perhaps I was making this up. But Clara’s determined focus on her slice of the turned-over apple pie told me once again that she had intercepted the very same backpedaling and was passing over it in silence.
“Max, want some strudel gâteau?”
“Silly woman. Must you always call it strudel gâteau?”
“Behave,” whispered Clara.
Who knows what existed between Clara and the old couple. I would have to ask her at some point, probably on our way back, during one of those long silences that were bound to crop up between us. But part of me was tired of so many reminders of Clara’s past with Inky. Had they grown up together? Would his shadow linger forever between us? If she was done with him, why go visit his grandparents? To show she was with another man now, hoping they’d tell him? But anyone with half a brain could instantly spot by our behavior together that we were not together. Was her kiss meant to suggest we were? Is this why she’d brought me along? Getting me out of the shower, bringing me breakfast, making me feel special, giving me all this nonsense about lying low, which she knew would stoke anyone’s curiosity, calling herself a Gorgon — all this just to send Inky the message that love was dead?