If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black Page B

this. That’s all I meant.”
    “To each her own,” Clara said. “It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. I find it cheers me up.”
    But now, as she enters her home, Clara herself finds all that imposed cheerfulness jarring. She stands still in her doorway for a few moments—as though there’s an obvious next move to make and she just can’t remember what it is. This is a familiar sensation, since George’s death. She waits and nothing comes to mind. Nothing ever comes to mind. It is the sensation of absence, she knows, disguised as an impulse to act. There isn’t a damned thing to do, except see it for the trick it is.
    She hasn’t eaten all day, and decides to make herself a tuna sandwich—the perfect, semiconscious kind of task. The body moving almost on its own. Bread in the toaster. Can opener from the drawer. Simple, simple, simple. Drain the tuna of its water in the sink. Take out a bowl. Find the mayonnaise, and check the expiration date. Unscrew the lid. Look for a lemon, and throw out the decidedly shriveled one in the fridge. Just enough thought required. The brain occupied, but not challenged in any real sense.
    This is the best way to get through these days, she knows. Stay active. But not too active. Stay busy. But not frenetic. She is familiar with the routine. George Cooperman, old friend, lover too, isn’t her first loss. Not by any means. This isn’t even the first time she’s lost George Cooperman, though now, of course, he can’t come back. Still, she well understands that grief must take her as its plaything for a while—like a kitten with a mouse. A hopeless matchup.
    Clara Feinberg doesn’t believe in God; she never has. She believes in time. Omnipotent, surely. Friend and foe both, as deities of all religions seem to be. Determining everything about one’s life, from the sudden absence of a man like George to the expiration date on a jar of mayonnaise. For now, time will be an ally of a kind, she knows. At the very least, it will soon take care of this sense of disbelief, this punch to the gut when she thinks of George and remembers again that he’s died. Given time, she knows, that will fade. A day, a day, another day, another day, and soon, she’ll be used to the idea. She won’t like it, but at least she will know it without having to keep remembering again.
    She slices the sandwich from corner to corner, and corner to corner again, four triangles on the plate; then she brings it into the other room, over to the window, and she stares outside. Snow is falling, the first snowfall of the season, not yet sticking on the ground. It isn’t quite dark, but it will be soon.
    She’s always loved this time of day. George also loved this time of day. Some of their best hours together had been passed sitting in this room, her living room, both of them reading, waiting for the sun to drop from view, the daylight to fade, staying there, in that early darkness together, not switching on a lamp, not yet. Tacitly agreeing to fight the evening off. Fight every ending off. Live within all transitions for every possible second. But then, as true darkness fell, they would be forced to look up from their books, forced into conversation, into each other’s company.
    It had all been a great big tease, she understands now. Fighting off the moment of conversation had been like fighting off an orgasm, the delay designed to increase the pleasure.
    A streetlight comes on. Clara waits to see how long it will take another to join it. A minute passes, two minutes. Nothing. They must have different levels of sensitivity, she thinks. They must believe different things about what darkness is.
    When she leans back against the window glass, she feels the cold there and also the heat of the radiator below, on her thighs, on her rear. At this moment, there is a perfect absence of consensus in the world. The streetlights busily debating among themselves over definitions of night and day, while these