We were to meet at the same spot on the beach the following evening. I’d be there before her, I said.
“Just don’t tell anyone,” she said.
I motioned that my mouth was zipped shut.
“We almost did it,” I told both my father and Oliver the next morning as we were having breakfast.
“And why didn’t you?” asked my father.
“Dunno.”
“Better to have tried and failed…” Oliver was half mocking and half comforting me with that oft-rehashed saw. “All I had to do was find the courage to reach out and touch, she would have said yes,” I said, partly to parry further criticism from either of them but also to show that when it came to self-mockery, I could administer my own dose, thank you very much. I was showing off.
“Try again later,” said Oliver. This was what people who were okay with themselves did. But I could also sense he was onto something and wasn’t coming out with it, perhaps because there was something mildly disquieting behind his fatuous though well-intentioned try again later. He was criticizing me. Or making fun of me. Or seeing through me.
It stung me when he finally came out with it. Only someone who had completely figured me out would have said it. “If not later, when?”
My father liked it. “If not later, when?” It echoed Rabbi Hillel’s famous injunction, “If not now, when?”
Oliver instantly tried to take back his stinging remark. “I’d definitely try again. And again after that,” came the watered-down version. But try again later was the veil he’d drawn over If not later, when?
I repeated his phrase as if it were a prophetic mantra meant to reflect how he lived his life and how I was attempting to live mine. By repeating this mantra that had come straight from his mouth, I might trip on a secret passageway to some nether truth that had hitherto eluded me, about me, about life, about others, about me with others.
Try again later were the last words I’d spoken to myself every night when I’d sworn to do something to bring Oliver closer to me. Try again later meant, I haven’t the courage now. Things weren’t ready just yet. Where I’d find the will and the courage to try again later I didn’t know. But resolving to do something rather than sit passively made me feel that I was already doing something, like reaping a profit on money I hadn’t invested, much less earned yet.
But I also knew that I was circling wagons around my life with try again laters, and that months, seasons, entire years, a lifetime could go by with nothing but Saint Try-again-later stamped on every day. Try again later worked for people like Oliver. If not later, when? was my shibboleth.
If not later, when? What if he had found me out and uncovered each and every one of my secrets with those four cutting words?
I had to let him know I was totally indifferent to him.
What sent me into a total tailspin was talking to him a few mornings later in the garden and finding, not only that he was turning a deaf ear to all of my blandishments on behalf of Chiara, but that I was on the totally wrong track.
“What do you mean, wrong track?”
“I’m not interested.”
I didn’t know if he meant not interested in discussing it, or not interested in Chiara.
“Everyone is interested.”
“Well, maybe. But not me.”
Still unclear.
There was something at once dry, irked, and fussy in his voice.
“But I saw you two.”
“What you saw was not your business to see. Anyway, I’m not playing this game with either her or you.”
He sucked on his cigarette and looking back at me gave me his usual menacing, chilly gaze that could cut and bore into your guts with arthroscopic accuracy.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Look, I’m sorry”—and went back to my books. I had overstepped my bounds again and there was no getting out of it gracefully except by owning that I’d been terribly indiscreet.
“Maybe you should try,” he threw in.
I’d never heard him speak in that lambent tone before. Usually, it was I who teetered on the fringes of propriety.
“She wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
“Would you want her to?”
Where was this going, and why did I feel that a trap lay a few steps ahead?
“No?” I replied gingerly, not realizing that my diffidence had made my “no” sound almost like a question.
“Are you sure?”
Had I, by any chance, convinced him that I’d wanted her all along?
I looked up at him as though to return challenge for challenge.
“What would you know?”
“I know you like her.”
“You have no idea what I like,” I snapped. “No idea.”
I was trying to sound arch and mysterious, as though referring to a realm of human experience about which someone like him wouldn’t have the slightest clue. But I had only managed to sound peevish and hysterical.
A less canny reader of the human soul would have seen in my persistent denials the terrified signs of a flustered admission about Chiara scrambling for cover.
A more canny observer, however, would have considered it a lead-in to an entirely different truth: push open the door at your own peril—believe me, you don’t want to hear this. Maybe you should go away now, while there’s still time.
But I also knew that if he so much as showed signs of suspecting the truth, I’d make every effort to cast him adrift right away. If, however, he suspected nothing, then my flustered words would have left him marooned just the same. In the end, I was happier if he thought I wanted Chiara than if he pushed the issue further and had me tripping all over myself. Speechless, I would have admitted things I hadn’t mapped out for myself or didn’t know I had it in me to admit. Speechless, I would have gotten to where my body longed to go far sooner than with any bon mot prepared hours ahead of time. I would have blushed, and blushed because I had blushed, fuddled with words and ultimately broken down—and then where would I be? What would he say?
Better break down now, I thought, than live another day juggling all of my implausible resolutions to try again later.
No, better he should never know. I could live with that. I could always, always live with that. It didn’t even surprise me to see how easy it was to accept.
And yet, out of the blue, a tender moment would erupt so suddenly between us that the words I longed to tell him would almost slip out of my mouth. Green bathing suit moments, I called them—even after my color theory was entirely disproved and gave me no confidence to expect kindness on “blue” days or to watch out for “red” days.
Music was an easy subject for us to discuss, especially when I was at the piano. Or when he’d want me to play something in the manner of so-and-so. He liked my combinations of two, three, even four composers chiming in on the same piece, and then transcribed by me. One day Chiara started to hum a hit-parade tune and suddenly, because it was a windy day and no one was heading for the beach or even staying outdoors, our friends gathered around the piano in the living room as I improvised a Brahms variation on a Mozart rendition of that very same song. “How do you do this?” he asked me one morning while he lay in heaven.