I turned on the lights. The day had aged so fast.
She dropped her coat on one of the chairs, yet another sign that she wasn’t staying long. “I’ll make tea.”
Had they given me something?
Yes, they’d given me something.
“I disappear a few hours and you end up in the ER. Nice.”
I looked at her. I didn’t have to say anything.
“You’re blaming me, aren’t you?”
“No, not blaming. But the tone this morning was so different from last night’s, it sent me into a tailspin.”
“So you are blaming me.”
“It’s not a question of blaming. It’s more like I don’t recognize me, and I don’t recognize you.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s right what?”
“We change. We change our minds.”
“That fast?”
“Maybe.”
“What happened to yesterday?”
“You’re one to ask.” She paused for a second. “Besides, I can’t be tied to yesterday.”
She walked over to where she must have stowed away the chocolate cookies, found the box exactly where she’d left it yesterday, and freely took two out. It thrilled me that she was behaving as if she were at home. At other times, though, I’d seen her take out a dish and stack four to six of these cookies, arranged, as I suddenly remembered from our very first night, in a Noah’s ark formation.
Neither of us had made a gesture to boil water. She’d obviously given up on tea and had headed directly for the cookies. Bad sex tea. Very, very bad sex tea, I remembered.
“Look, I don’t want us to fight.”
Obviously I must have raised my voice when asking about yesterday.
“What makes you think I want to?”
“Well, you’re obviously upset.”
“Any idea why I might be?”
“Why don’t you tell me, since you’re about to anyway.”
From the tone of her voice I could tell she’d been through this exact conversation endless times before. She dreaded its coming and could probably spot all of its signposts, its shortcuts, cross streets, tangents, and escape routes long before I could.
“I’m sure you already know what I have to say.”
“I think I do. But go ahead,” she added, with an implied If it makes you feel any better.
“Maybe there’s no point.”
“Maybe not”—meaning, Suit yourself.
“Let’s just say I’m sorry you changed so fast.”
She stared at her cookie like a child being chastised, or like someone trying to gain time, collect her thoughts, and come up with the right answer. Or just sitting out a cloud. How I wished that she’d tell me I was completely off the mark, that she hadn’t changed at all since last night, that I should stop putting words in her mouth and making her say things she hadn’t meant to say at all.
“Maybe that’s my hell.”
“What’s your hell?”
“Always letting people down.”
“Do you blame them?”
“No. I can’t say I do. I set them up for it, then I let them down.”
She made it sound that setting people up for disappointment was far worse than the disappointment that rushed them to the hospital.
I stared at her. “Just tell me one thing.”
“What?”
Her What had come too quickly, as if it were concealing a timorous What now behind a seemingly confident, open-faced Ask-anything-you-don’t-scare-me-of-course-I’ll-answer.
“Was it because we didn’t make love last night?”
“That would make me cruel and spiteful. It had nothing to do with last night.”
“Then it’s worse than I thought.”
“Maybe we just got carried away. Or maybe we ended up wanting the same thing — but for entirely different reasons.”
“Your reason was not my reason?”
“I don’t think it was.” Then, to soften her words but to show that softening them was not going to change her mind: “Maybe it wasn’t.”
“And you’d warned me against that.”
“I did.”
“And I listened.”
“You did.”
“Until you told me that I shouldn’t have.”
“Until I told you that you shouldn’t have.”
“We’re a mess, aren’t we?”
“A big mess.”
I was standing in front of her, and suddenly put both hands on her face, rubbing this face with its lips and hazel eyes that meant more to me than sunlight, speech, and anything inside or outside this room. I kissed her, knowing, with a certainty I had never encountered before, that she would kiss me as passionately and as desperately as I longed to kiss her, and that she would do this because the escape hatches between us were wide open and tomorrow was no longer in our vocabulary. It would be aimless, desultory lovemaking, safe and shiftless — with, once again, my usual blend of goodwill and tact, not the stuff of last night.
She kissed my neck as she had last night. I loved the way her hips moved with mine, the way we held each other tight, not letting the air creep between us. We were, it took a second to notice, almost dancing. Or was it lovemaking and I didn’t know it?
I unbuttoned her shirt and let my hand travel under it. For the first time ever, my hand touched the breast I’d been dreaming of for days. She didn’t resist at all, but she wasn’t participating. I let her be. Moments, just moments later, she was already buttoning her shirt.
“Please don’t,” I asked. I want to see you naked, want to think of you when you’re gone, want never, ever to forget that you stood naked in this room by the failing light of the day rubbing yourself against me, with your breath that smells of bread and of old Vienna and of the bakery by your house where last night you and I, just you and I—
“I really have to go.”
I’d known this from the very start. She had looked dressed up downstairs. Not just dressed up for the long lunch she seemed happy to have cut short when she called me at the hospital, but dressed for something that was due to occur yet and about which she hadn’t said a word.
And then I saw it. She had kissed me no less savagely than she’d kissed Inky or Beryl at the party. She probably didn’t know how to kiss otherwise — which was why so many got hooked and tangled. They took for large bills what for her was loose change. She probably made love no differently. What was a mere gesture — consent, as she called it — for others was the full monty, the once-in-a-lifetime you get to tell your grandchildren about when they’re old enough to ask about the woman who called you by the name of a ship.
I wondered if there was or might soon be a third party who was going to be given minute-by-minute dispatches of this fellow called Printz, who came after another called Inky was spurned, kissed, sent packing. Pretty soon I’d be leaving messages on her answering machine, or calling her at the movies, while she’d ask whomever it was she was with to look at the caller ID and mutter a muffled curse on being told my full name. It’s Printz, she’d say.
I wanted to be cruel to her. Say something that would scar her for years, or at the very least stick on her like a stain or a bruise that was sure to ruin her whole evening.
Clara, I feel this is the last time I’m going to see you.
Clara, the moment you walk out my door it will be as though we’d never met.
Clara, I don’t want this to tailspin — I want to save it — help me save it before my ego or yours gets the better of it.
Clara, do you read me?