She pulled back immediately. Even a hand accidentally put over fire could not have recoiled this fast. She uttered the word no almost before my lips had touched hers, as if she’d been expecting something of the sort and had an answer already prepared. She reminded me of someone who has her thumb already poised on the head of the mace spray can in her coat pocket, determined to spray and ask questions later, only to realize that the man who walked over to her one night was none other than a lost tourist who’d meant to ask for street directions.
For the first time in my life I felt as though I had tried to assault a woman, or was judged to have attempted it. Had she accompanied the gesture with a slap, I would have been less stunned.
This was not only the first time that I had ever met with resistance while trying to kiss a woman, but the first time where the kiss had come so spontaneously and in so involuntary and unrehearsed a manner that to have it thrown back at me so brusquely felt like an affront to every moment we’d shared for the past four days, an affront to candor, to friendship, to our humanity itself, to everything I was, to the me I was only too happy to let her see. Could my kiss have come so unexpectedly as to have shocked her? Could it have been such an offense? Could it — or could I — have been so repellent?
I did not know how she was taking all this and wanted to make sure it wouldn’t spoil things between us. So I apologized. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”
“No need to apologize. I should have seen this coming. It’s my fault.”
It seemed I was less guilty than I feared. But my innocence was more galling yet. I had misread our giddiness for something it was not.
“Clara, I really hope you’re not offended.”
“I am not offended, I said. You behaved like a fourteen-year-old. No need to apologize like one too.”
That was it. I was apologizing from my heart. This was a gratuitous snub.
“I think I’m going to get you a cab,” I said, “then I’m going to head home as well.”
She was more flummoxed by this than by my kiss.
“Don’t go home like this.”
“You didn’t have to put me down.”
“You didn’t have to kiss me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Just don’t go home, don’t do it.” She looked at me. “It’s so fucking cold. Let’s have a drink. I don’t want this to happen.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because we were having a good time together. Because if you think it’s a marvelous thing we both ended up at Hans’s party, don’t you think that I think so too? Don’t you think that if you’ve never wanted to be known by anyone the way I know you it’s because I may want the same from you?”
“So why not let me kiss you?”
“I don’t have to explain. I don’t even want to try. I’m cold. Let’s grab a cab.”
“Why not tell me you’d rather not kiss me instead of pushing me away as if I’d tried to rape you or had the plague.”
“You scared me, okay? You wouldn’t understand. Could we not talk about it now?”
“We never talk about anything.”
“That’s not fair.”
She listened for me to say something. But I didn’t know what to think, except that I was happy to be heading back home.
“This is my hell. This is my hell,” she kept repeating, “and you’re making it worse.”
“Your hell? Think of mine!”
I shook my head, at myself, at her. “Well, it’s too cold. And we both need a drink.”
I couldn’t understand, but she snuck right back under my armpit and put one arm around my waist, as if nothing at all had happened. “There’s a taxi coming.”
We hailed a cab, got in, watched the cab suddenly skid in the snow as it made a totally unflappable U-turn and was soon speeding uptown. “It got terribly cold, horrible weather,” uttered Clara through the glass partition. The man was quietly and serenely putting out his cigarette, listening to soft jazz. “Amerikon wezer,” he replied. “You don’t say,” she commented, trying to sound earnestly intrigued by the cabbie’s view of American weather. “Did you hear that,” she turned to me, “Amerikon wezer.”
When we got out on 105th Street, we were in stitches.
We rushed indoors, found our usual shoulder-to-shoulder spot on the bench which she called our banquette, where I ordered two single malts and french fries, while she hastened to the bathroom.
Minutes later, she was back. “You won’t believe what someone left in there,” she said, this time truly bursting with laughter. “It’s too disgusting, as if the entire Third World had come to take a dump in this bathroom.”
Did she need to go elsewhere?
No, she had used the men’s room.
Were there any men in the men’s room?
“Yes,” she said. “This guy.”
And she pointed to a lanky-looking young man at the bar who probably needed a drink to recover from the shock. “And don’t look at me like that,” she said out loud to him. “You didn’t see nothing, and if you did, consider yourself lucky.”
Cheers, we said when our drinks came, once more, and once again, and many more times again.
I looked at her and couldn’t help asking, “Are we just laughing or are we really very happy?”
“Did you by any chance see a Rohmer film tonight? Just give us Juan Dola, mista. And let’s dance.”
•
As had become our habit every night, we left the bar well after two in the morning. The walk home never lasted long enough, and the cold didn’t help. What was not unpleasant was watching how the two of us, while very conscious of the windchill, tried not to pick up our pace. We had drunk more than usual, and as we walked, my arm was around her shoulders. Was anything ever going to be unconscious between us?
The problem was how to say goodbye. Kissing was out of the question. Not kissing, too staged. A normal peck, totally perfunctory. “I know this is awkward,” she said, “but I think we’d better not say good night.” As always, on the same wavelength.
So we shouldn’t kiss at all and forgo all motions of saying good night — that’s an idea, I thought, almost admiring her ability to avoid a yet more awkward moment at her door. Meanwhile, not a word about my aborted kiss, not a word about the song, nothing about the tango we’d danced four times tonight. Why wasn’t I surprised? “Maybe you’re right,” I said. And maybe she was. With her hands deep in her coat pockets, she darted forward to where Boris stood, while I, after waiting a few seconds to see that she got in, spun around and headed toward Broadway. “Well, it’s been nice,” she had said, clearly aware she was using formal Hollywood dating lingo. But without a trace of irony.
Later, when I reached the park, I began to think that perhaps it was time not to see Clara any longer, that this had gone far enough and should go no further. Too much chaos, too many doubts, and far too, too many jabs and darts, everything bathed in a caustic brew that could peel off the outer layers of your body and leave you no less denuded than a newborn mollusk. End it, I thought, just end it. She’ll mind, probably, but of all people, she’ll recover faster than you ever will. Within hours, she’ll forget to remember, then forget she’s forgotten. As for me, it would take a while. Perhaps it was time to reconsider my own lying-low practice.
For the first time in weeks, I found myself itching to buy a pack of cigarettes. Was I going to call them secret agents? Yes, why not, at least for the time being. But my name would never again be Oskár.
The park by night, as always, felt as welcoming as a church on a rainy day when you have an extra ten minutes to yourself during lunch and, because you don’t belong to the faith and have no ritual to perform there, simply step in as you please, asking for nothing, expecting nothing, giving out nothing — just an empty pew, where you sit and think, just sit and think and hope you can intone something like a silent hymn.