I couldn’t put together the reasoning behind what she’d just said.
“Are you two over, then?”
“So very over.”
I was on the verge of asking if she was sorry things had taken this course, but she seemed so bubbly, there was no point in asking.
“Now it’s your turn,” she said, leaning sideways toward me.
I knew what she meant, but pretended not to understand. “My turn for what?”
“What did you do after I left?”
“Went to the gym, swam, went to the movies — that’s all.”
She wanted something from me, and I wasn’t responding. She started doing what she’d done the first night: wrapping her napkin around the base of her wineglass. It was her way of collecting her thoughts before speaking. I knew exactly where she was headed. There should be others in your life, not just me. I don’t want to mislead you. And besides, I am still lying so very low. I didn’t know the exact order, but these were going to be the highlights of her little talk, because, from long experience with my father, I could sense a little talk coming.
No sooner had the waitress passed by than Clara ordered another round. That was fast, I thought.
“So I’m the one who’s going to have to say it, then?” she said.
All I could do was stare her in the eyes till she looked down.
Was this how she had started with Inky? Want me to be the one to say it, then? Twice in one day? I hated conversations that threatened to leave me totally exposed — even when I didn’t know what exactly I’d be exposing, even when I knew that exposure, as an abstract concept, was far better than being so bottled up. What was I hiding that she didn’t already know?
“I was going to say it in an e-mail two days ago.”
What was she being so cagey about?
“Why didn’t you send it, then?”
“Because I know you: you’d read it this way, that way, turn it around 180 degrees, 360 and 540 degrees, and still come out with nothing. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“See, I know you.” She was going to accuse me of not heeding her warnings, of wanting from our friendship things she’d never promised, much less be able to deliver. She’d said it before already, didn’t have to repeat it, it hovered over every minute we’d spent together. Now it was going to come out in the open. I knew the it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech. I’d given it myself many times.
“You asked me the other day if we could end up at Hans’s party and be total strangers. I’ve run into people I no longer speak to. I can live with that. I don’t even mind having to hate them if that’s what it takes to dump leftover baggage. I know how quickly I change. But if we do become strangers, and I do learn to hate you, and watch you turn your back as soon as I walk into a room, just know this: that no part of me will ever forget this week.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason you won’t.”
“This is starting to sound like a lopsided goodbye.”
“Let’s say then that maybe this is our hell. The closer we draw, the farther we drift apart. There’s a rock standing between us. I obey it. Or let’s say: I don’t have it in me to fight it, not these days. Frankly, I don’t think you have it in you either.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why? It’s the truth.”
“You’re the one who put the rock there four nights ago, not me.”
“Maybe. But I had no idea it would turn into such a convenient rock for you as well.”
Was this the truth, or had Clara seen something I’d been avoiding? Did the rock between us really work for me? Was my habit of deferring and doubting and reading into so many things simply my way of keeping my distance by drawing closer? What doubts, what fears was I cloaking? Had I, perhaps, been blaming her flippant mood, or her string of other-peoples, or her caustic tongue, the better to blame the tip of an iceberg that hardly stood between us when it was really my miles and masses of hardened ice underneath that would cause the real damage?
“Look,” I began, as I shifted in my place. Perhaps I was trying to change the drift of our talk, or perhaps I wanted the two of us to think I was finally about to say something momentous that might stem the downhill course of where we seemed to be headed. Perhaps I wanted to throw her off by sounding very solemn and serious — this was going to be a time for calling a spade a spade. In fact, I had no idea what I was about to say.
“The other night I read you loud and clear, and ever since, I have not strayed. I haven’t even raised the subject. I said it already: we’re like two blocks of ice trapped under a bridge — you’re lying low, and I’m too frozen on the spot to risk anything. Let me just say, though, that this is unlike anything I’ve known. You read me better than I read myself, and part of the joy of being together is just that: discovering that you and I are the same person in two bodies, like identical twins.”
This was worse than I sing in the shower. The same person in two bodies — seriously?
“We’re not twins.” Clara overlooked nothing. “I know you’d like to think it, but we’re not. We’re very similar, but we’re also very different. One of us will always lapse into wanting more—”
“And this someone is me, of course, right?”
“It’s me too, if you cared enough to look.”
“I do care enough to look — what did you think?”
“Then you should have seen it coming, Printz.”
Clara made me order another round of fries.
“You’re not going to eat more fries by yourself?”
“You order a pecan pie and we’ll share both. With whipped cream — the kind that comes in a spray can.” The carefree gesture with which she threw her hair back said she was going all out tonight.
The waitress must have grimaced at the suggestion of the spray can. But then something told me that Clara asked for it precisely for its shock value.
Then she did something she’d never done before. She took my hand and placed it on her cheek. “Better,” she said, as if she were just speaking to herself, or to a friend with whom she was trying to make up. I let my hand rest on her cheek, then caressed her neck, right under her ear, the exact spot where I had kissed her so feverishly when she arrived in the theater a few hours before and, in the heat of the moment, must have caught her totally unprepared for my kisses. Even now, she didn’t seem to mind; she leaned into my hand, like a kitten whose cheek you might have rubbed absentmindedly but who then wants more of the same. “But I have to tell you something.” All I could do was stare at her, saying nothing, just keep caressing her face now that I saw I could. Then, without thinking at all, I let my finger touch her lips, and from her lips let it move to her teeth — I loved her teeth, and though I knew that this had crossed the line and gone beyond the harmless hand on a cheek she’d asked from me, still, I was no longer the owner of that hand, she was, for she kissed my finger first, then held it delicately between her teeth, and then touched it with the point of her tongue. I loved her forehead and rubbed it as well, and the skin of her eyelids, I loved it too, everything, everything, and that smile that made silence come and go and made my heart skip the instant it left her face. What were we doing? “I want us to speak,” she began, “because I want you to know something.” I had no idea what she meant, but knew that if she seemed to be yielding with one side of her, she was just about ready to take back everything with the other. “Time for a secret agent,” she said.
“Wait.” I put my hand in my coat pocket and pulled out a sealed packet of her brand.
“You’re joking!” She tapped the pack, then opened it. “I won’t ask what this was doing in your pocket.”