This account also explained, at least partly, the oddness of their relationship. What else but shared history could bond two people who possessed such fundamentally incompatible temperaments, such divergent visions of life? The more I grew to know them both, the more I came to understand how truly different they were. That they had traveled in the same social circles as children, attended virtually interchangeable country day and boarding schools, and been able to navigate the New York subway system, the Paris Métro, and the London tube by the time they were twelve said nothing about who they really were as people. It is possible for the same circumstances that draw two souls together to keep them forever at arm’s length. Herein lies the truth of love, and the essence of all tragedy. I was not yet wise enough to understand this, nor would I be, until many years had passed. Yet I believe that from the start I sensed this, and that it was the source of my affinity, the force that pulled me to her.
The day of the party arrived. The daylight hours were all desultory preamble; I got nothing done. Was I nervous? How does the bull feel when he is marched into the ring and notices the cheering crowds and the man with his cape and sword? Jonas had gone off for the day—I didn’t know where—and as the clock neared eight, the appointed hour, he had yet to show himself. The midwesterner in me was forever disturbed by the regional differences in what was and was not considered late, and by nine-thirty, when I decided to dress (I had entertained the girlish fantasy that Lear and I would do this together), my anxiety was such that it verged on anger. It seemed likely that his promise had been forgotten and I would spend the evening like a jilted groom, watching TV in a tuxedo.
The other difficulty lay in the fact that I did not know how to tie a bow tie. Probably I couldn’t have accomplished this in any event; my hands were actually shaking. Managing the studs and cuff links felt like trying to thread a needle with a hammer. It took me ten full minutes of cursing like a longshoreman to lodge them in their proper holes, and by the time I was done, my face was damp with sweat. I mopped it away with a bad-smelling towel and examined myself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, hoping for some encouragement. I was an unremarkable-looking sort of boy, neither one thing nor the other; although naturally slender, and without significant blemishes, I had always felt my nose was too big for my face, my arms too long for my body, my hair too bulky for the head it sat atop. Yet the face and figure I beheld in the mirror did not look so unpromising to me. The sleek black suit and shiny shoes and starch-hardened shirt—even, against my expectations, the pink cummerbund—did not appear unnatural on me. Instantly I regretted the powder-blue getup I’d worn to prom; who knew that something as simple as a black suit could gentrify one’s appearance so thoroughly? For the first time, I dared to think that I, this plain boy from the provinces, might pass through the doors of the Spee Club without an alarm going off.
The door sailed open; Jonas charged into the outer room. “Fuck, what time is it?” He marched straight past me to the bathroom and turned on the shower. I followed him to the door.
“Where have you been?” I said, realizing too late how peevish this sounded. “No big deal, but it’s almost ten.”
“I had a lab due.” He was peeling off his shirt. “This thing doesn’t really get going until eleven. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, sorry.”
“How do you tie a bow tie?”
He had stripped to his boxers. “Hell if I know. Mine’s a clip-on.”
I retreated to the outer room. Jonas called out over the water, “Has Liz been here?”
“Nobody’s been here.”
“She was supposed to meet us.”
My anxiety had now focused entirely on the matter of my tie. I returned to the mirror and withdrew it from my pocket. The gist, I’d heard, was to tie it like a pair of shoes. How much harder could it be? I’d been tying my own shoes since I was two.
The answer was: a lot harder. Nothing I did made the ends come out even close to the same length. It was as if the silk were possessed.
“Now, don’t you look spiffy.”
Liz had come in through the open door. Or, rather, a woman who resembled Liz; in her place stood a creature of pure understated glamour. She was wearing a slender black cocktail dress scooped low at the neck and high-heeled shoes of shiny red leather; she had added something to her hair, making it full and rich, and exchanged her glasses for contacts. A long string of pearls, no doubt real, dangled deep into her décolletage.
“Wow,” I said.
“And that,” she said tossing her clutch on the sofa, “is the very syllable that every woman longs to hear.” A cloud of complex scent had followed her into the room. “Having some troubles with your neckwear, I see?”
I held out the villainous article. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Let’s have a look.” She stepped toward me and took it from my hand. “Ah,” she said, examining it, “here’s the problem.”
“What?”
“It’s a bow tie!” She laughed. “As it so happens, you’ve come to the right person. I do this for my father all the time. Hold still.”
She draped the tie around my neck and positioned it under the collar. In her heels, she was nearly as tall as I was; our faces were inches apart. With her eyes intently focused on the base of my throat, she engaged in her mysterious business. I had never been so close to a woman I was not about to kiss. My gaze instinctively went to her lips, which looked soft and warm, then downward, following the path of the pearls. The effect was like a low-voltage current passing through each cell of my body.
“Eyes up here, buster.”