by André Aciman
“The Greeks never had a god for regret,” came the husband’s peremptory remark, either to show off or to sidetrack a conversation that was clearly not just about Ole Brit.
“The Greeks were brilliant. They used one word both for regret and remorse. As did Machiavelli.”
“My point exactly.”
I didn’t know what was his point exactly, but he seemed fond of having the last word.
When we left the restaurant, she and I walked ahead together, while Manfred and her husband followed. “But are you happy?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulders—either to mean that the question was moot or that she didn’t even know what the word meant, didn’t care, didn’t want to go there. Happiness, qu’est-ce que c’est? How about you, though? she asked. Her spontaneous “though” told me she was expecting a completely different report. But I shrugged my shoulders as well, perhaps to echo her own gesture and leave it at that. “Happiness is a foreign country.” I was making fun of hubby, which I could tell didn’t displease her. “With Manfred there’s lots of goodwill, and never a word out of turn, but as for the thing itself—” I shook my head, meaning Don’t get me started. “Can I call you?” she said. I looked at her. “Yes.” But even I could hear the tired, humbled, vanquished inflection in our voices, both when she asked and when I answered. I regretted it as soon as I heard it and once again tried to whip up the buoyancy of dinner talk. Perhaps I was trying to affect the tenor of those who have apathy in their hearts but feign not wanting to show it. Or perhaps I was trying to show how much I wished she’d call. I felt the cold, and I could feel myself shivering. But it wasn’t from cold.
I just wished the two of us could stay together this way and weren’t about to say goodbye, that saying goodbye was still twenty, thirty blocks, thirty minutes, thirty years away. When it came time to part at the street corner, I caught myself saying, “This is unusual.” “What’s unusual?” asked the husband. “Yes, very unusual,” she echoed. We didn’t bother to explain, because neither of us was entirely sure the other had caught the drift. Then we all shook hands. His handshake was firm. We promised to have dinner again soon. “Yes,” he said, “real soon.” We walked away. Manfred put his arm around me, saying, “Courage.”
She called me not the following week, not even the next day, but later that same night. Could I talk? Yes, I could talk. My voice was once again bruised and beaten, as if I’d uttered a listless It’s your quarter.
“I wish it were you.”
What on earth did she mean?
“You know exactly.”
What?
“I told you already! I wish it were you instead.” She sounded angry at me—for not getting it right away, for making her say it.
Like someone roused from a very deep sleep by a sudden demolition blast, I needed to make sure I’d heard right, needed a few moments to pull my thoughts together.
“What—have I upset you that much?” she finally asked, angry again.
“Yes.”
It was her turn to be taken aback.
“Why should you be upset?”
I didn’t know why I was upset. “Because my heart is racing right now and it’s been so long. All those years, and it won’t go away,” I said. Her words about loving someone without being in love with him were coming back to me. I felt their lure in my body. I just loved her, I loved her with heartbreak and resentment, because we’d wasted so many years, because there is no love without desire, diffidence, defeat. And the more I thought about it, the more it tore me up. We’ve misspent years of our lives, I wanted to say. And then I said it. “We’ve misspent our lives—we’re both living the wrong life, you and I. Everything about us is wrong.”
“Not fair. We were never wrong. You and I are the only thing right in our lives—it’s everything else that’s wrong.”
I didn’t know what had come over me or what all this was leading up to, but I was floored by a tsunami of sorrow I hadn’t felt since childhood, when sorrow seemed so immediate, so overwhelming, that without even the merest warning from my body, I caught myself sobbing, or at least trying not to sob so Manfred wouldn’t hear. “It’s been such a long time and—” I was fumbling for words, struggling with the tightness in my throat, not knowing whether I was speaking to her or to myself.
“Say it—go ahead, whatever it is, say it.” What she really meant was, Cry if it helps—it might help us both.
But I took her at her word. “No, you say it for me,” which also meant You cry first, which was another way of saying I’ll take sympathy, compassion, even friendship, just don’t go away again, don’t go away.
I had never been this honest with anyone before, which is why I felt I might be dissembling even as I was sobbing, because thinking I was dissembling was the only way left to dodge the overpowering wave of sorrow that had just hit me. Perhaps in this, finally, lay the leanest proof of love: the hope, the belief, the conviction that she knew more about me than I did myself, that she, not I, held the key to everything I felt. I didn’t need to know anything; she’d be the one to know. “You say it for me,” I said. I had nothing else to add.
She thought awhile.
“I can’t do this,” she broke in.
“And I can? What’s wrong with us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are we going to hide for another four years now until the next party—is that it?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you call me, then?”
“Because I couldn’t stand the way we said goodbye. We keep meeting at these parties but are less together when we meet than when we’ve forgotten who the other is. One day I’ll die and you won’t even know it—and then what?”
That choked me, and it took me a moment to recover.
“I can’t live with who I become each time we split,” I said. “Right now I dread the thought of who I’ll be when this phone call ends. And,” I added with a forced giggle in my voice, “I can’t believe I’m crying now. I need to see you.”
“This is why I called.”
We arranged to meet sometime the following week.
A few hours later, “Sorry, can’t do it,” she texted when I sent her an e-mail suggesting a time and place.
“Can’t do it next week,” I texted back, “or can’t do it ever?”
“Ever!”
Perhaps I had given her an excuse she didn’t even know she was looking for.
I didn’t reply. By now she’d know. Part of me wished she’d follow up with a text asking if I’d received her text. But we both knew the other knew this game.
I was right about one thing. After receiving her text I felt rotten all day Saturday. This was the only word that made sense. Rotten. I had gone to bed thrilled, had tried to seek ways to dampen my excitement with all manner of mental tricks, if only to think I wasn’t being carried away and wouldn’t get hurt in the event she canceled. I’d even thought of Manfred. In his arms, I might put off thinking of her, or even shut the door on her, or leave it marginally ajar, because I’d always left my doors ajar in life, which is what she and I had always feared from each other: that one was no sooner in the room than the other was already headed out. In midsleep I began to think of margins and sidelines, wondering whether she’d always be moored to the margins of my life without being part of it, that my life was filled with marginal beings who sit and wait like vacant ships on abandoned wharves. Then I realized that that the metaphor was all wrong, and that I myself was nothing more than a collection of marginal selves who sit out their time like unpaid stevedores on an unfinished pier where no boats ever dock. I was unfinished. I wasn’t even born yet but had already misspent my time. I was no better than a collection of incipient beings lined up like nine milk bottles in a carnival booth.
That night, feeling Manfred’s body against mine, I dreamt I was holding her and pressed myself against him. “Don’t stop,” he said, which is when I awoke but continued what I’d started so he wouldn’t know. A
nd he found joy with me in midsleep and spoke his love when he turned around and held my face and kissed me.
Her text buzzed me awake the next morning.
I spent that whole Saturday in a sort of stupor. I was grateful to Manfred for not saying anything about last night’s dinner. At lunchtime, in my study, he brought me a plate with a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a handful of potato chips. Did I want iced tea or a Diet Coke? A Diet Coke, I replied. A Diet Coke it is, he said as he stepped out of the room, shutting the door behind him ever so quietly. He knew.
When he returned, he asked if I wanted a back rub. No, I was fine. “Then let’s go to the movies tonight, it’ll change you.” So we went to the movies that night. It was another Danish film. Afterward, we took a walk around the area in front of Lincoln Center. I had always liked the place at night, especially when it is filled with people doing exactly what we were doing, mostly nothing, looking for a place to have a late bite, a drink perhaps, hope to bump into people we knew, no matter who. I didn’t want to go home, but I knew that if we walked around the neighborhood, we’d end up running into the two of them. I just knew. Life works that way. I said I was tired and we hopped on a bus.
A few years before I had desperately longed to go to the movies with him on a Saturday night. If we cannot sleep together, I used to think, then I’ll settle for a movie on a Saturday night. Dinner, drinks, movies. I wanted to hold his hand in the movie theater. Better yet, I wanted to be seen with him. I couldn’t explain why wanting to be seen with him meant so much to me, but I knew it made me want him all the more. Now, outside the theater, I dreaded running into the two of them.
As I looked around the square before boarding the bus, I remembered planning in my own mind a late lunch with her. Then, since neither of us knew of a place to go, we were probably going to do the obvious, tacky thing, which I’d never done in my life: rent a hotel room. I had already thought of a hotel, which happened to be close to tonight’s theater. Yes, a late lunch, hotel, and sex. Champagne? Champagne, before or after? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, I thought, injecting a dose of sobering realism to our fantasy date. I saw the two of us, the jack of hearts and the queen of spades, sitting on the edge of our bed, putting our shoes back on, talking once again of our defunctive love.
But now, facing that very hotel with Manfred, I felt rotten for another reason. Worse than being disappointed by how the day had turned out, and worse yet than hurting Manfred, I was disappointed in myself, in the person I’d always been and might never change. It shamed me, because despite aching for her and thinking back on her thighs when years ago she’d sat naked on my lap at her parents’ table and asked me to look straight in her eyes and not let go of her, I saw something bleak and ugly in myself that I’d been begging for all night but then was sorry to see granted and clumsily gift wrapped. Relief. And with relief, its terrible partner, indifference, which is the impulse to let go before we’ve even begun reaching for what we crave.
Her surly Ever! had relieved me. I wouldn’t have to plan anything, or test the passion, wouldn’t even need to hide our meeting or where I’d been that afternoon. The hotel, the champagne, the clothes we were putting back on, the lies on being asked and forced to explain—thank God! Perhaps I didn’t even want to sleep with her. Any more than she did with me.
This was all in the head. And that’s where it stays.
* * *
MONTHS LATER I went to see a doctor after experiencing a persistent pain in my shoulder. I was sure it was acute bursitis brought on by a bad move I’d made playing tennis. But after two visits I was told that perhaps a CAT scan was in order—just to make sure, added the doctor in that typically hurried, offhand manner with which doctors brush off the merest inflection of alarm. “How much time?” I asked after a short pause, to show I was cutting to the chase. “We’re not there,” he said. But I could tell, even before he’d asked me to take a seat, that he was once again trying to skirt the subject.
My mind was spinning out of control. If I had a tumor, then I’d be dead before the year was out, and if I were dead, then there’d be nothing left, no second chances, no leap-year parties, and all this waiting for the right time would have been for nothing. I will die having lived the wrong life. No, not lived: waited. Two weeks later the diagnosis dispelled my fears. Bursitis.
Part of me was convinced that my brush with death had taught me a lesson. Time to act.
So, scarcely an hour after discovering that I wasn’t dying, I did something I’d never done before. I called her. I had rehearsed everything I was going to say: lunch, just a quiet, ordinary, unencumbered lunch somewhere—I knew of a good place—no, nothing like that!—she’d be back at the office for all the afternoon meetings she complained so much about. And if she asked why now, I’d simply say because something almost happened, but then didn’t, and I wanted to tell her about it. Instead, when she grabbed her phone at the office after the first ring, I felt I had caught her at the worst possible moment and found myself asking if she could spare a sec. “Of course,” she said, “but I’m really out the door to a meeting.” When I said I’d call her another time, she said, “No, tell me right away.”
I liked that she wanted it now and didn’t want to wait. In her place, I’d have done the same. But the haste in her voice threw me off and made me forget the tepid little speech I’d been rehearsing about our lunch in some snug little corner bistro somewhere. Instead, I heard myself saying something totally different: “I need to see you now.”
And suddenly, I knew that if I met any resistance or hostility, I’d lie and say that I had just come from the doctor’s office with terrible news and that she needed to hear me now.
She must have picked up the remnants of urgency in my voice.
“Where are you?”
“I’m walking.”
“Yes, but where?”
“I’m on Madison.”
“Madison and what?”
“Sixty-third.”
I named a store I had just passed.
I heard her holler at one of her assistants to get her a car as in now!
“Stay where you are. Don’t move,” she cried.
Without meaning to, I had spoken on two registers, as if the thought of dying, which two hours earlier had made me look back on my life and find desiccated craters everywhere, hadn’t been dispelled yet and spurred the urgency in my call.
Less than ten minutes later she was getting out of a black SUV.
“Let’s eat, I’m famished. But so we’re clear … what’s all this about?”
We entered Renzo & Lucia’s. They sat us at one of the tables on the sidewalk that was bathed in glorious early midafternoon sun. The two tables next to ours were empty, and the sun-basked sidewalk was unusually quiet.
“Why?” she asked.
I knew exactly what she meant.
“Because until a few hours ago I thought I had two months to live.”
“And?”
“And nothing. False alarm. But it made me think.”
“I’m sure it did,” she said, trying to throw in her usual dose of sarcasm.
“What I meant was, it made me think of you.”
“Why me?”
“Not to sound presumptuous, but I kept wondering what would happen to you when I was gone.”
She hadn’t expected this at all. Her chin began to quiver. Her eyes glistened.
“If you die before me?”
I nodded.
“If you die, there’ll be nothing left, nothing at all. But you know this.”
She was silent.
“If you’re not there, it would be as if a huge zero suddenly fell on top of me.”
“But we’re never even there for each other.”
“Means nothing. You’re always there.”
A moment later: “And what if I should die?” she asked.
“If you die there’ll be nothing too, just nothing.”
“Even if we almost never see each other?”
“Now we know.” Looking down to avoid her eyes, I began fondling the hexagonal salt and pepper shakers and bringing them close together so that the two were touching head to toe. This is me and this is you, I wanted to say. Look how we fit together, I kept thinking, watching how the bevels of the two glass shakers seemed perfectly aligned. “You’re the closest I’ve ever been to anyone,” I said.
She looked at the shakers with something verging on sorrow and compassion for their sad, ill-fated love. At the end of each day, they either fall and shatter or are taken away and paired with another, and then another, and another, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a salt or a pepper shaker, because all they are in the end are fungible little vials with holes in their heads.
Once again, she cast a silent gaze at me.
“So what now?”
She seemed as helpless as I was. We had said everything and yet we had said nothing. I wanted to reach out and touch her face, but this felt out of place. I had stopped trusting my impulses. How would we ever bring ourselves to make love again, I thought, if we can speak of our love only by oblique reference to death? We can’t even look each other in the eye, much less get naked. What had happened to us? Years ago we sat naked having breakfast, and in the middle of it all, I was hard and she lowered herself on me and Englishmuffined me till we both came. Nothing felt natural now. If I showed any passion, or tenderness, or let myself go, she’d laugh in my face. “I want to tell you something, but promise not to laugh.”
“I promise.” But she was already laughing.
“I want to spend time with you away from everything and everyone. Let’s go away somewhere for a couple of days.”