But what was I thinking! What if I had offered what she’d offered me last night and waited for a call that never came this morning? What if she’s doing what I had been doing myself from the very start? What could possibly have made her beg me not to keep her waiting last night at the bar while I went to the bathroom if I hadn’t already signaled that I was Mr. Reluctance Amphifibbing personified?
•
This, I could tell, was not going to be a good day. I’d have to put myself on hold, find a quiet spot somewhere, and, like an animal about to hibernate, stop breathing, hold still, make no plans, just wait for her call.
By eleven, I couldn’t stand it. I tidied up the place a bit, if only to start working. But working at home was not what I wanted, so I put everything aside, decided to pay some bills, tried to answer some e-mails. But I couldn’t focus on anything. I picked up my wallet and keys, put my coat on, and headed out.
Life without Clara had officially started. Going down in the elevator where I’d heard her laugh so loudly, I repeated to myself: Life without Clara has officially started.
I knew that there was no reason to despair, that we might be back to the movies this very evening, but I also suspected that something had cracked and that I had better start rehearsing the loss now.
It occurred to me that rehearsing loss to dull the loss might bring about the very loss I was hoping to avert.
What crazy ideas you have, Printz.
The thought amused me. Just trying to think the worst-case scenario would most likely bring it on; the anger I felt each time I thought of losing her would, if she suspected it in my voice or on my face, turn her against me.
I walked down Central Park West and then decided to cross over to the East Side and head to the Met. I liked walking on the bridle path, liked the chalk white city on winter mornings that could take a miserable day and white out the sun long before sunset. I even liked the frozen, whey-hued ground that made me focus on my steps as I crunched my way across the park, step by step, like an invalid learning to walk again, her image before me all the time, and the sound of my footsteps going crick, crack, crack, crick, crack, crack, how I had loved that day. We’d enjoy this too if we were together, she forever nipping every moment of effusion by adding a livelier form of effusion herself. She and I just crunching along together, step by step, each trying to be the first to break the icicles along the way.
You’ll never forgive me for last night, will you?
I never held last night against you. But maybe you’re right.
Don’t keep saying that.
I could feel it coming — this whitening of the landscape gradually closing in around me and spreading out like stage fog, wrapping the entire city in the oppressive color of eggshell and blanched almond verging on the dirty gray-white of industrial cataracts humming away in the distance. The oppressive whiteness of the day swimming before my eyes.
I was going to be alone all day. Who knows, tomorrow as well. And the worst was, there was no one I wanted to be with to stave off the loneliness. I could have called people. But I didn’t want them. I could go to the movies early today, but movies, especially after the past four nights, would drive the point home even more fiercely now, as though even movies, from being my staunch allies, had gone over to her side now. Why were people so easily available to her? Why did someone forged in the same smithy as I need to gather so many people around her? The answer scared me: because she’s not you, not your twin. Simple. Or is it that she can be of your ilk and everyone else’s as well? The woman she is with them is totally unknown to you, and what she’ll share with them or want from them has names she’s never even told you.
No doubt about it. I’ll be alone all day and learn to look things squarely in the face. It may not have much to do with her. It had to do with wanting, and waiting, and hoping, and never knowing why or what I wanted. And this creature made of flesh and blood and a will so strong it could bend a steel rod simply by staring it down, was she another metaphor, an alibi, a stand-in for the things that never worked out, for what draws close but never yields? I was drowning, not swimming to Bellagio. I was on the outskirts of things, and being on the outskirts of things was how I lived life, while she. . well, while she’d simply flipped on me. Yes, that was the cheap, petty, sordid word for it: she’d flipped on me. From extreme this to extreme that. Tit for tat.
And the worst part of it was that there were no explanations.
When I reached the East Side, I watched the traffic lights turn red, one after the other — pip, pip, pip — their blotchy red halos suddenly reaching all the way down into the Sixties, casting a premature evening spell, which seemed to wipe off this entire big mistake of a day to restore a semblance of peace by sundown.
But when I watched the lights suddenly turn green again and the day prove far younger than I’d hoped, I saw that I was hours away from her promised mid-afternoon call, five long grudging hours, with the weight of five long winter afternoons before I’d leave the Met, watching the tourists wander through corridors abutting each to each, leading to an overwhelming question — Are you losing your mind, Printz?
I looked at the green lights dotting Fifth Avenue. They seemed so cheerful, like office receptionists blinking their false eyelashes while uttering tame, perfunctory, upbeat greetings to clients who’ve lost everything, a poinsettia at one end of their desks and bonsai evergreens at the other, festive and mirthless, like all season’s greetings, like today, like Christmas itself, like Christmas parties, with and without Claras or a bowl of punch sitting right in the middle of them. If you didn’t bring your own warmth, these lights had none to give. They just glittered like party sparklers across the city, bringing neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. All these words, words, words coming to haunt me, not rescuing, just waving — why was I losing my mind?
Could I really be losing my mind if I knew I was losing my mind? Tell me, Clara.
Ask the pumice stone.
Tell me why.
It’s quantum stuff, dear, for the answer is both yes, you could be, and no, you couldn’t, but not the two at the same time.
But if I know that the answer is yes and no, but not the two at the same time, am I still losing my mind?
Hieronimo doesn’t know, Hieronimo won’t tell.
I knew what I was doing. Cobbling fragments together the way my father, once he began losing his memory under the spell of morphine and more morphine yet, would quote long stretches from Goethe and Racine to show he remembered each in the original. I was reaching out to the poets like a cripple lurching for a cane.
The Met, when I arrived, was mobbed with tourists. Everyone was milling about me like flat, two-dimensional cardboard figurines capable of producing stentorian sounds when speaking French, German, Dutch, Japanese, and Italian, their children especially. People fretted their way about the great hall like souls awaiting transmigration in this great Grand Central of God’s kingdom. They’re all craving to be New Yorkers this time around, I thought, suddenly struck by the notion that I would give anything to be a native of their own sunless, pallid cities, Montevideo, St. Petersburg, Bellagio, how distant they all seemed this morning. Wipe this life clean and start all over again, less shipwrecked, less wanting, less damaged.