I’d known her for only five days, but I already knew that this was the stuff of planets and of lives moved by fate, gods, and by the nebulae of ghosts who have come and gone, keening over loves that time won’t expiate or pleas bring back. You’ve sprung like a curse on my land, Clara, it will take my blood generations to wash you away.
Clara, I was lying, I am not afraid of being disappointed, I am afraid of what I’ll have and don’t deserve or wouldn’t know what to do with, much less learn to fight for each day. And yes, afraid you are better than I am. Afraid I’ll love you more tomorrow than I do tonight, and then where will I be?
“Tomorrow is Full Moon in Paris,” she said.
I did not reply. She intercepted my silence before I did.
“Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
She knew, she knew.
“You don’t know if there’ll be a tomorrow?”
“Do you know?”
“I make no promises.”
“Neither do I.” I was boasting.
“Printz, sometimes you don’t know what you’re saying.”
Our knives were drawn again.
“For the record, though—”
“Yes. .” There it was, as always, the little threat that pricks your pulse and sends it racing into panic mode.
“Just for the record, so you won’t fault me for not saying it now: I’m more in love with you than you know. More in love than you are.”
We kissed again. Neither of us cared who was watching. No one bothered to watch when it came to couples in this bar. This was the woman who was going to make love to me tonight. And she was going to make love to me, not like this, but more than just like this. All that stood between us was our sweaters. Then we’d be naked together, her thighs against my thighs, face-to-face, very face-to-face, and we’d pick up just where we’d have left off at the bar and go on talking and laughing and talking as we’d make love, and go on and on till morning and exhaustion. This was, and the thought came from so far away that I could easily put it on hold for a while, the first and only woman I’d ever wanted to make love to.
•
It had snowed outside. The snow on the stoop to the bar made me think of our first night together when we’d left the party and she wore my coat for a few minutes and had then given it back to me, after which I slogged my way down the stairs by the monument onto Riverside Drive, thinking to myself that perhaps I’d left the party too soon and should have stayed awhile longer, who cares if they think I’ve enjoyed the party and am eager to stay for breakfast! Later, I had changed my mind and walked to Straus Park, where all I did was sit and think and remember the minutes when we had come back after Mass and she’d pointed out her bench to me. So many years on this planet, and never once felt anything like this. “Wait,” she said, before leaving the bar. “I need to tie my shawl.” Soon her face was almost entirely wrapped in her shawl. All one could see was the top of her eyes and part of her forehead.
At the corner of the street, I put my arm around her and let her mold into me as she always did when we walked together. Then, without caring how long it had taken her to cover her face, I snuck my hand into the shawl and held her face, pushing the shawl all the way back to expose her head and to kiss her again. She leaned her back against the bakery store window and let me kiss her, and all I could feel then was my crotch against hers, pushing ever so mildly, then pushing again, as she yielded first and then pushed back, softly, because this is what we’d been rehearsing all along, and this too was a rehearsal. This was why they’d invented sex, and this was why people made love and went inside each other’s body and then slept together, because of this and not for any of the many reasons I’d imagined or been guided by during my entire life. How many other things would I discover I didn’t know the first thing about tonight? People made love not because they wanted to but because something far older than time itself and yet way smaller than a ladybug ordained it, which was why nothing in the world felt more natural or less awkward between us than for her to feel my hardness rubbing against her or our hips caught in a rhythm all their own. For the first time in my life I wasn’t out to seduce anyone or pretend that I wasn’t; I had arrived there long before.
But perhaps I had arrived too soon, and my mind was lagging behind, like a limping child slowing down those who had gone ahead of him.
“This is my bakery. I buy coffee here,” she said.
Why did it matter? I thought.
“And the muffins?”
“Sometimes muffins too.” We kissed again.
Inside the park, she stood by the statue. “Isn’t this the most beautiful statue in the world?”
“Without you it means nothing,” I said.
“It’s my childhood, my years in school, everything. We met here this morning, and here we are again. It has so much of you.”
Clara’s world.
In the cold night I began to dread our arrival and was hoping to defer it — not, as I had hoped on previous nights, because arrival meant saying goodbye after perfunctory pecks and the perfunctory hug — but because tonight I’d have to say what I lacked the courage to say, what I wasn’t even sure I wanted to say: “I’m dying to come upstairs, Clara, I just need time.”
She looked at me as we approached the door to her building. She’d sensed something. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Not a thing.”
“Then what is it? What’s happened?”
I was the girl, she was the man.
I stopped on the sidewalk with her still in my arms. I couldn’t find the right words, so I blurted the first thing that came to mind.
“It’s too soon, too sudden, too fast,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to rush it. Don’t want to mess this up.”
Perhaps I didn’t want her to think I was like everyone else, and was determined to prove it to her.
Or was it boorish Boris and his so-you’re-finally-gonna-get-some-tonight smirk that I wished to avoid?
Or was it just that I wanted to let the romance last awhile longer and ripen on its vine?
“So you’ll leave me alone and go home in this weather? Sleep on the couch if you must.”
“We’ve seen too many Rohmer movies.”
“You’re making such a terrible mistake—”
“I just need a day.”
“He needs a day.”
She had withdrawn from my arm. “Is there something I should know?”
I shook my head.
“Are you. .” And I could tell she was looking for the right words but couldn’t find them: “Are you damaged? Am I not what you like?”
“For your nymphormation, I am not damaged. And as for that other thing — you’re so off track.”
“Still, such a mistake.”
We were both very cold by then, and it was good that Boris had opened the lobby door a crack.
“Kiss me again.”
Boris’s presence for some reason cramped me, but not her. Still, I kissed her on the mouth, then once again, and as though she remembered the gesture that had brought us closer than we’d ever been before, she lowered my turtleneck, exposed my throat, and placed a long kiss there. “I love your smell.” “And I love everything, just everything about you — that simple.” She looked at me. “Idiot.” She was quoting Maud from the film. “I know.” “Just don’t forget. First thing tomorrow morning — call me,” she added, making a gesture she often parodied by extending her thumb and index finger. “Otherwise, you know me: I go into high pandangst, and there’s no telling what can happen.” I tried to humor her. “Printz, I shouldn’t tell you, because you don’t deserve it, but you’re the best thing that’s happened to me this year.”