by Неизвестный
After saying goodbye to her that evening, I watched her walk downtown and, for a few moments, lingered on the square, thinking to myself that I could easily stop taking the Brooklyn train, move in somewhere not far from here, start a new life right next to the bar, take her to the movies on weekday evenings, find other things to do in life, and, if this worked, watch her become famous, more beautiful, have children, until the day she’d step into my study and say we’d fallen in a rut and had basically outgrown each other – Life. Can’t be helped. You know how it is, she’d say, and, FYI, I’m moving to Paris. Even this didn’t scare me. The vision of this alternate life was outlined on the large glass pane of the bar where she and I could easily spend so many more hours together. When she looked back at me after crossing the street, I liked being caught standing there, watching her go her way. I liked that she had turned around. I liked the sudden arousal that had made me hug her and, for the first time since we’d met, allowed me to think of her naked. It had come unbidden.
That Saturday evening, in a crowded movie theatre, I watched a young couple ask those seated in our row to move one seat over. You could tell they were on their first date by the tentative way they took their seats and then hesitated on how to go about sharing their bag of popcorn. I envied them, envied their awkwardness, envied their back-and-forth questions and answers. I wished she and I were together in this very same movie theatre. With a bag of popcorn. Or waiting in line outside with our coats on, eager for our show to begin. I wanted to see Last Year at Marienbad with her, take her to hear The Art of the Fugue, listen to the Shostakovich Piano with Trumpet Concerto together and wonder who of us two was the piano and who the trumpet, she or I, trumpet and piano as we’d sit and read St John of the Cross on quiet Sundays and I’d hear her say things I’d never known about Maria Malibran, and then, on impulse, throw on a few layers and head out together to see something really stupid, because a stupid movie with super-moronic special effects can work wonders on drab Sunday evenings. The vision grew and began to touch the other corners of my life: dinner with friends, short trips to the Cape, longer trips abroad, Salzburg, Cinque Terre, Corfu, new friends, old friends, her friends would become my friends, as my friends would become hers if they wished to remain my friends. The weekends we’d go away and on Sundays would come back from the country with lots of dirty laundry, but first a bottle of wine, then something on TV.
There had been a moment while I helped her with her coat when I could have said something. I’m falling for you, you know I am. The dinner thing with my give or take friends tonight can go to hell. Just about everything else can go to hell too. All you have to do is make one crack about my life, say one word about the unspoken, and everything I have goes up in smoke. But I knew, as I watched her make her way through the crowd, that she was as grateful for my silence as I was for hers. High-tide avowals are all very good but they mustn’t break the surface. This works. What we have works. We could be doing this for months, years even. One day I asked her which she’d like to be, the piano or the trumpet. The piano is blithe and spirited, she told me; the trumpet wails; which did I think I was?
A mantra from my friend Raùl: What you need is less scepticism and more courage. Courage, he said, comes from what we want, which is why we take; scepticism from the price we’ll pay, which is why we fail. What you need is to spend some time with her, not in a cafe, not in a bar. Take it to the next step. She’s not sixteen. If it doesn’t work, well, you’ll be disappointed, but you’ll move on, and that’ll be the end of that. When I told him that my scepticism was hardly misplaced, considering she already had someone waiting in the wings, his reply couldn’t have been more heartening. That someone is you. And if it’s not, only knowing it might be can move mountains. This woman is all real.
I tried to find a way to pry open the lockage between us. She wanted me as I wanted her, and everything else was just nonsense and speculation. But the more I saw how much I wanted her, the more the idea of her new beau began to muddy my thinking, the more her blandished dearests began to irk me. Everything I liked about her, everything she wrote and said had the ring of hollow appeasements thrown around to prevent me from drawing closer. There was nothing upfront about her. I became more guarded and oblique.
Twenty-four hours after our gins, I wrote saying I wished I’d stayed and had dinner with her in our neighbourhood rather than go to that dumb dinner party.
Dearest, did you have as terrible a time as all that? What about the give or take friends you like so much?
I liked sarcasm. Wish I had brought you along with me – would have livened the company, thawed winter, dusted off their old bookshelves, made me so happy.
I remembered dinner in my friends’ carpeted dining room, all of us talking about someone we knew who had cheated on his wife but had chosen to stay with her because he couldn’t think of life without her, or of that other friend who had left his wife for a man twenty years younger than he, claiming that all he wanted was just another go. One look from her across the table, had she been present that night, and we would have burst out laughing together, repeating just another go on the sidewalk as we were heading back to Abingdon Square.
We were neither friends, nor strangers, nor quite lovers either, simply wavering, as I wavered, as I wished to think she wavered, each grateful for the other’s silence as we watched the evening drift into night on this tiny park that was neither on Hudson, nor on Bleecker, nor on Eighth Avenue, but a tangent to all three, as we ourselves were, perhaps, nothing more than tangents in each other’s lives. In a blizzard, we’d be the first to go; we’d have nowhere to go.
Two days later, past midnight: My dearest, I haven’t been happy once this week. It’s been very rough. And the worst isn’t over. I want you to think of me.
Think of you? I’m always thinking of you, I wrote as soon as I was up at five thirty the next morning.
Later that same day: My dearest, let’s have drinks soon.
Done.
‘I wish I could do something to help. Have you told him where he stands?’ was my tentative foot forward.
‘I’ve already told him everything. I’m not afraid of telling people the truth.’
I wish I knew how to tell people the truth.
I wanted her to say something like: But I thought you did tell the truth. You turned down my article when you didn’t like it, didn’t you? You’ve always told me the truth.
I wasn’t talking about that kind of truth.
Then, what kind? she’d have asked, and I’d have told her. All I needed was an opening.
‘I don’t always like being straightforward,’ she said, ‘but I always tell the truth when it matters,’ she added. I loved when she snuggled in tightly between two opposites.
She had sidestepped my flimsy little trap.
A few days later she wrote saying a family emergency was taking her to DC. Meanwhile she had finished her piece on Malibran.
How many words?
Too many.
I’d love to see it.
But you know I can’t publish it with you.
I know that. I don’t care who runs your story. But I care about everything you do, write, think, say, eat, drink, everything, can’t you tell?
This was as straightforward as I could be. If my meaning wasn’t clear, then obviously she wasn’t eager to know it.
Dearest, your feelings for me touch me deeply. I too listen to everything you say. Surely, you know this. I just hope I’m worthy of you. I’ll email the manuscript as soon as I’ve revised it for the nth time. Your loyal and devoted me.
From Raùl in Germany a word of caution: Stop talking shop with her. This is not about work.
What he didn’t see was that, as she and I continued to write to each other, my emails were becoming ever more cryptic: too many smoke signals and plenty of allusions. I was speaking in irked nudges, she with syrupy shrugs. I didn’t even know what I kept hinting at; what mattered was for her to know I was hinting, that h
inting had become my language, my only language. I wanted her to see, to imagine, to intercept, and ultimately to invent the undisclosed script behind everything I hadn’t said, couldn’t say, was never going to say, because I didn’t need to say it – because she already knew and if she knew and wasn’t saying anything, then she was already saying plenty enough.
Peeved by her inability to respond in a manner less oblique than my own, I didn’t write for three days.
Dearest, is something wrong?
I could almost feel the smooch you give grumpy grandaddies when they want to seem hurt.
Raùl: You’ve been seeing each other far too many times to assume she doesn’t already know. She wouldn’t have met you a second, certainly not a third time if she didn’t already want what you want. No man in my world spends more than a minute with another man without knowing they both want the same thing. She likes you; she doesn’t like the twenty-or thirty-something idiots who surround her. If anything, she’s probably no less puzzled or hampered than you are. Just cut the coffee face-to-face interviews and sleep with her.
The following Friday we decided to have dinner. I’d found a restaurant on West 4th and made reservations for six thirty. That early? she quipped back. I knew exactly why she was smiling and what she was asking. The place gets overcrowded, I explained. Overcrowded, she replied, echoing my own word to mean Understood. Tart and snide. At least this much is clear between us, I thought. Knowing that she saw through everything was an irresistible turn-on. A woman who knows what you’re thinking must be thinking what you’re thinking.
If the weather didn’t change, it might snow again, and the snow would slow things down and put a halo on an ordinary dinner date and give our evening the lustre and magic that snow always casts on otherwise drab evenings in this part of the city.
What bothered me was the strange suspicion that she wasn’t coming to dinner willingly but had consented to it, was playing along – who knows why. This was goodwill, not desire. Perhaps I’d made her uneasy and she had relented. We were face-to-face-coffee people. In-between people. Not strangers, not lovers, not friends. In a blizzard, she’d be the first to go.
And yet, on the walk to the restaurant I already knew I’d never forget the sequence of streets as I took my time on West 4th Street. First Horatio, then Jane, then West 12th, then Bank Street, Perry, Charles and then West 10th. The picturesque buildings with their tiny picturesque high-end stores, the people heading home in the cold, the old lamp posts shedding their scant light on the cobbled streets. I caught myself envying young lovers living in their tiny apartments here, all the while reminding myself: You do know what you’re doing, you know where this is likely to go tonight . . . I loved every minute of the walk. She knows what this is about. She knows and she’s telling you she knows. The worst that could happen at this point was being invited upstairs after dinner and explaining that I could stay but couldn’t spend the night. No, I corrected myself, the worst was walking back along these same streets a few hours from now after making love to her and wondering whether I was any happier than I’d been before dinner, now that I had left her and was crossing Charles, Perry, Bank, West 12th in reverse order, as though nothing had happened between us.
Then it hit me. The very worst would be walking back these selfsame streets without having spoken or come close to speaking. The worst was watching nothing change, that nothing ever changes – which is when I’d feel the stab of delayed irony puncturing my makeshift defences. For somewhere along that walk to the train I’d recall rehearsing my deft little exit line for when I’d have to tell her that I’d sleep with her but couldn’t spend the night. It would have to come out sounding natural, I’d told myself, not the kind of thing one rehearses and still fumbles. Silence is worse than fumbling, said my inner Raùl, but fumble if you must.
She was wearing high heels when she showed up, looking much taller than I remembered. She had dressed up and was wearing jewellery. When she came to my table after negotiating her way through the crowded bar area, I told her how ravishing she looked. We kissed on both cheeks and I on her forehead, as we always did. Everyone was staring. Any doubts about what we meant to each other were instantly banished. This moment of clarity between us thrilled me and dispelled my inhibitions. How silly of me to have even considered taking my time getting here.
I ordered two Hendrick’s gins. Did she like the place? ‘Feels decadent but quite, quite wonderful,’ she said. She removed her shawl and for the first time I saw her arms – same glistening skin, same tone as her hands; slim, but not delicate; the merest sight of her underarms stirred me and reminded me that none of this was a mistake, that I wasn’t making any of it up, that if I couldn’t find it in me to attempt a pass, just the sight of her underarms at the table when she sat and stared at me would prod my courage.
The menu seemed to confuse her. She didn’t feel like ordering.
I didn’t quite believe her. But I loved what she was doing and couldn’t resist: ‘I know exactly what you’ll like. I’ll order for you?’
‘Please!’ She seemed relieved. She shut the menu, put it down and continued staring at me.
She let me order the wine too.
The way she scraped her mussels made me hope she’d take her time and keep eating and finish none of it, ever. You’re staring at me, she said. I’m staring at you, I said. She wasn’t displeased.
Of course, there was no way to avoid Maria Malibran. I asked if she knew that Pauline Viardot, Maria’s sister, was an opera singer as well. Yes, she knew that Maria’s sister was an opera singer. Somehow, it didn’t seem to interest her. Did she know that Ivan Turgenev was madly in love with her sister for years? A lifelong love, she said, yes, she knew that Ivan Turgenev . . . ‘Now tell me about you. You never say anything about you.’
It was true. I seldom spoke about me. ‘Everything there is to say is more or less already out there.’ A moment of silence.
‘Well, then tell me what’s in there,’ she replied, pointing to her chest to mean mine.
For a moment I was about to tell her that the one and only thing going on in there for weeks could easily be summed up by I think of you all the time. I keep seeing you everywhere. I want you everywhere in my life. But perhaps she hadn’t meant the question this way at all. Perhaps she simply wanted to know more about the part of me involved in the arts. A friendship question, an I-listen-to-everything-you-say question.
‘Do you really want me to answer this now?’ I didn’t mean it to sound wistful, cagey or give her request a sinister inflection. What I meant was: I’ll answer this question later, once we leave the restaurant and are on our way to your home. I want you to ask me again what’s going on in there when we’re past the film crew, which I hope will be out there tonight and which I pray will stop us from crossing the street as fake rain pours down. Let the gofers manning their cellphones and eating donuts tell us to be very, very quiet, because I want to walk and talk and walk till we reach your door, where you’ll ask me to come upstairs, and we’ll go upstairs, and you’ll open the door, and say: This is my place. I want to see where you live, how you live, how you look when you take your clothes off. I want to see your cat spring on you and snuggle in your bare arms, I want to smell the cat litter in your stairwell, I want to see where you sit and write. I want to know everything. That’s what’s happening in there.
Instead, I ended up by saying: ‘A restaurant may not be the best place.’
The girl who had written about Maria Malibran and who knew all about crypto-Jews who for centuries had been living with their identities turned in would easily have read what I was saying in my crypto-lover’s speech. If she picks up on it, she’s telling you something. If she lets it slide, she is telling you something too.
Raùl: You’re giving her an out.
Me: Yes, I am.
Raùl: Not fair. Not fair to you. Not fair to her.
I remembered his latest email after I’d told him of our plan for dinner tonight. If she
invites you to her home, don’t hesitate; don’t ever let her think you’re rejecting her.
I know when to put the moves on, thankyouverymuch. I can read signs.
Your problem is not that you misread signs; it’s that you see them everywhere.
And yet, as we lapsed into a moment of silence during dinner, how very, very far from sleeping together all this seemed. Dinner still felt like a concession I’d wrenched from her – and yet such a godsend, such a gift, her arms, her skin, even dearest began to seem real, plausible, thrilling. All she had to do was expose her armpit, tell me something sweet, almost promise she’d repeat the exact same words with a dearest thrown in, and I was ready to believe that things could go anywhere tonight. Just looking at the other women in the restaurant and the way they cast fleeting glimpses in our direction told me I was being watched, was being talked about, envied. So why not just tell her that this was exactly what was going on in there right now? I want nothing to go wrong tonight. Yet, the silence that had crept between us wasn’t relenting.
I knew exactly what was happening: one more second of this and she’d put something on the table, say something that would chase away the illusion of the godsend and the dream. And I knew that what she was about to say was not what I wanted, that her arms, her hand, her fingers, which seemed to beg me to reach out across the table and touch them, would, within seconds of what she’d say, turn into stone and take back the dream. She chose silence instead.