going to be it, I thought. There was nothing more to say. There were, of course, plenty of silly things to say, but I couldn’t think of one with which to raise her by one tiny chip. Still, I lingered on our stoop.
“Actually, it’s quite spectacular up there at night, have you ever been?” I asked. “Cambridge as you’ve never seen it. There’s always a breeze upstairs. It’s all dark, with tiny lights speckling all around you that remind me of small towns on the Mediterranean.”
Before she could ask which towns, at which point I’d have to come up with the name of one real fast, I don’t know what took hold of me but I told her I’d been planning to grab something to drink and sit up there. “It’s stunning, you’ll see.”
It took me a moment to realize that I myself had never been up there after sundown, let alone at night. You’ll see was the verbal equivalent of touching her elbow, her wrist.
“I don’t feel like dragging a chair up.”
“I’ll bring one up for you too,” I said. “And they’re director’s chairs,” as though that would persuade her, which made us both laugh.
She followed me up the stairs. Ours was the top floor, and it had become a source of good neighborly relations whenever you met someone going up or coming down the stairs to joke about the wide stairwell in a building that could easily have housed an elevator. It explains our low rent, was the thing to say. Yes, the expected reply. We were both slightly uneasy, and neither wished to say anything about the stairs, or about the rent or the heat, perhaps for fear of showing that what was taking our breath away was not the climb. When we reached my apartment, I opened the door trying to look very relaxed and left it wide open, a gesture meant to show I was just going to look for the chairs, mix the drinks, and head upstairs to the terrace with her. This is going to take just a sec, I was signaling, not sure yet whether all this body language suggesting haste was meant to put her or myself at ease. She dawdled in the foyer, crossed her arms, and watched me head to the kitchen, then slowly she followed in, her way of showing she was waiting for the drinks, her arms still crossed, her shoulders as always glistening, her whole posture saying Just don’t take forever. She looked around. Her one-bedroom apartment was exactly like mine, she said, but strangely everything, down to the door handle, was right-side left here. Mine faced west, hers east. As she was talking, I took out a can of frozen lime juice, ran some hot water on it, and emptied an ice tray into a large bowl.
“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a rubber mallet I had taken out and placed on the kitchen counter.
“You’ll see.” I took out a roll of paper towels, tore out two sheets, and placed a few ice cubes between them. Then, with the rubber mallet, I pounded the cubes on the kitchen counter and emptied the cracked ice into a glass jar.
“Is this how it’s done?” she asked.
Breathless, I could do no more than repeat her words, “That’s how it’s done.” Did she want to try? I handed her the mallet. To steady her hand, I held the hammer with her and then let her pound it once. She liked cracking the ice. She pounded again, then one more time after that. We emptied the cracked pieces into the bowl. Then, just as I was opening the bottle of gin which I’d removed from the freezer, something suddenly seized me and, before I could think twice, I turned toward her and kissed her on the shoulder and then on her neck. It must have startled her but she did not seem to mind, perhaps wasn’t even surprised, and let me kiss her again on the very spot on which for days now I’d been yearning to bring my lips. Then, facing me, she met my lips and kissed me on the mouth, as though I’d been taking forever to make up my mind to kiss her there. We never made it to the terrace that evening.
Around four in the morning, though, when the heat in my apartment had become unbearable, we did go upstairs for a short spell and, standing naked on the dark terrace within sight of the