Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  Her words sounded almost like a dare. I imagined she was joking and that, after showing such an aversion to Gretchen’s friends and their sing-along yuling, the last thing she’d do now was to start singing. But before I had finally put the right spin to my words and answered her, she had already joined the chorus, but with a voice I would never have matched to her face and couldn’t believe was hers, because it bordered total effusion, as though, in singing at that moment right next to me, she was revealing another, deeper side to remind me that everything I’d thought about her so far—from bustling wind to poisoned dart to quips and derision—might be mistaken, that “caustic” had a meeker side, that “dangerous” could turn apprehensive and tenderhearted, that she was so full of other, more surprising turns that it was pointless to keep up with any or try to second-guess them, or put up a struggle against someone whose curt, offhanded I am Clara reminded me that there were people in the world who, for all their gruff arrogance, can, with scarcely a few notes, easily persuade you they are inherently kind, candid, and vulnerable—with unsettling reminders, though, that their ability to flip from one to the other is what ultimately makes them deadly.

  I was transfixed—transfixed by the voice, by the person, by my total failure to master the situation, by the pleasure I felt in being so easily swept over, helpless, clueless. Her singing didn’t just come out of her body. It seemed to tear things out of mine, like an ancient admission I was still incapable of and which reached back to childhood, like the echo of forgotten tales finally breaking into song. What was this feeling, and where was it coming from? Why did hearing her sing or staring at her unbuttoned crimson shirt with her overexposed, gleaming neckline make me want to live under its spell, close to her heart, below her heart, next to my heart, a peek at your heart; that small pendant, I wanted it in my mouth.

  Like a Ulysses grown wise to the Sirens’ trick, part of me still groped for reasons not to be taken in, not to believe. A voice so perfect could make her too perfect.

  It didn’t take long to realize that what I was feeling was not just admiration; nor was it awe, or envy. The word worship—as in “I could worship people like her”—hadn’t crossed my mind yet, though later that evening, when I stood with her watching a glowing moonlit barge moored across the white Hudson, I did turn to worship. Because placid winterscapes lift up the soul and bring down our guard. Because part of me was already venturing into an amorphous terrain in which a word here, a word there—any word, really—is all we have to hold on to before surrendering to a will far mightier than our own. Because in the busy, crowded room, as I listened to her sing, I found myself toying with a word so overused and hackneyed, so safe, that I was tempted to ignore it, which is also why I chose it: interesting.

  She was interesting. Not for what she knew, or for what she said, or for who she was, even, but for how she saw and twisted things, for the implied, complicit jeer in her voice, for how she seemed to both admire and put you down, so that you didn’t know whether she had the sensibility of gleaming velvet or of sandpaper. She is interesting. I want to know more, hear more, get closer to.

  But interesting was not the word I wanted. One more drink and the word struggling to be heard, when it finally came to me, would have spilled out so naturally, so effortlessly, and in a manner so uninhibited that, staring at her skin as I stood speaking to her by the fireplace, I felt no less bashful or hampered than a dreamer who enters a crowded subway car, greets his fellow passengers, and doesn’t feel the slightest shame on looking down at his feet and realizing he is not wearing shoes, no socks either, no trousers, and that he is totally naked from the waist down.

  I made conversation to avoid saying what I wanted to say, the way only the tongue-tied say too much when they lack the courage to say just what’s enough and not a word more. To stop myself, I shut my mouth. I tried to let her do the talking. Then, not to interrupt or say the word, I bit my tongue and held it in place. I bit, not its tip, but its midsection, a large, domineering bite that might even have hurt had I paid it any mind but which held my tongue without altering the outward shape of my mouth. And yet I so wanted to interrupt her, to interrupt her the way one does when one knows one is about to intrude and shock someone with a word that is at once exquisite, reckless, and obscene.

  The word sprang so many times to my mouth. I loved the room, loved the snow on Riverside Drive, loved the George Washington Bridge speckling the distance like a drooping necklace on a bare neck, loved her necklace too, and the neck that wore it, I would have said.

  I wanted to tell her how much I had loved her voice, perhaps with no reason other than to begin saying other things as well, shy, tentative things that I hoped might grow bold and lead elsewhere once I got started. But no sooner had I mentioned her singing than she cut me short.

  “I was a music major,” she said, clearly snuffing my compliment, yet underscoring it by the very impatience with which she seemed to ignore it. It meant, Don’t feel obligated to say anything. I know. I’ve trained for this.

  “I’m moving into another room. Too noisy, too stuffy here.”

  A pensive okay was all I could offer. Was this it, then?

  “Let’s go into the library. It’s quieter there.”

  She wants me to follow her. I remember being amused by the thought: So she wants me to follow.

  The library, which turned out to be equally crowded, had huge, rare, leatherbound volumes neatly stacked around its walls, interrupted by windows and what looked like a balcony facing the river. During the day this particular French window must have let in the most tranquil sweeps of light. “I could spend the rest of my life in this room.”

  “Many people could. See that desk over there?”

  “Yes.”

  The desk was covered with hors d’oeuvres.

  “I wrote my master’s thesis there.”

  “With all that food around?”

  She threw me a hasty nod, instantly dismissing the attempted joke. “I have good memories of this room. I was in this room for a whole year, from nine to five. They even let me come here on weekends. I can remember summer and fall here. I can remember looking out and seeing snow. Then it was April. It went so fast.”

  For a moment I pictured Clara arriving dutifully every winter morning to sit and write all day. Did she wear glasses? Was she totally focused on her project, or did she look bored when she was alone all day? Did her mind drift, did Clara dream of love in the heart of midwinter afternoons? Was there sorrow in her life?

  “Do you really miss your thesis days? Most people hate even thinking of them.”

  “I don’t miss them. But I don’t hate them.”

  My question didn’t seem to interest her. I had set her up to tell me she wished to go back to those days. Or wished she’d never lived through them at all. Instead, what came was the most levelheaded response. I thought of saying, What a lovely, straightforward outlook you have, but held back in case I seemed condescending or, worse yet, sarcastic. In her place I’d probably have said I hated those days but missed each one. I would have tossed the idea for effect, perhaps to tease something out of her, or out of myself, or to test whether she had a feel for paradox and see how far we could grope about together in the murky terrain of guarded ambiguities uttered in attempted small talk.

  But I felt that this sort of thing wouldn’t pass muster in her world either—saying you missed things you hated, hated those you loved, wanted what you’d turn down in no time—all these were affected torsions and spray-painted screens that would stir a withering nod goodbye from her.

  I am Clara. Tell me another.

  “And what was it on?”

  “The thesis?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the table, of course, what else?”

  So she was returning the favor. Thank you.

  “No, seriously,” I said.

  “You mean was it a dialogical treatment of marginalized women living in a hegemonic, monolingual world colonized by phalocrat
ic institutions?”

  Very funny.

  “Well, it wasn’t,” she added.

  Momentary silence.

  “Am I supposed to keep asking?”

  “No one asked you to ask anything. But, yes, you’re supposed to keep asking.”

  For a moment I thought I’d lost her. I smiled back. “What was the thesis on, then?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “No, I’m only asking because I’m supposed to ask, remember?”

  “On Folías. A musical genre. Totally without interest.”

  “Folías? Would someone like me know this music?”

  “Someone like you—” She repeated my phrase as though it were a strange fruit whose unusual taste she was still mulling before passing judgment, which is why she said, “We’re so sharp, so clever. Why, am I already supposed to guess who someone like you is?”

  Right through me. She’d caught my trick question even before I had—my attempt to bring us closer, get her to say something about me.

  I am Clara. Nice try.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard Folías before, though you may not know it.”

  And suddenly there it was again, her voice rising above the din in the crowded library, singing the somber opening bars of Handel’s famous sarabande. I, who had never understood why men love women to sing for them, saw the cobwebs clear before me.

  “Recognize it?”

  I did, but I didn’t answer. Instead: “I love your voice,” I blurted, hesitating whether to say anything else or, if still possible, to take it back. I was, once again, walking naked from my shirttails down, thrilled by my own daring.

  “It’s a standard melody set to a standard chord progression, very similar to a passacaglia. Want some fruit punch?” she broke in, as though nipping both my compliment and the rising intimacy hesitating in the wings. She had uttered these words so abruptly that, once again, I felt she did indeed want me to notice she was changing topics, but that she wanted me to notice it only if I’d picked up her poorly disguised aversion to compliments.

  I smiled at the maneuver. She caught my smile. And, having caught it, smiled back almost in self-mockery, sensing that if she gave any sign of guessing I had seen through her feigned abruptness she’d be admitting that my reading of her feint was closer to the truth than she might have wished. So she smiled both to own that she’d been caught and to show that our game was really so much fun: We’re so sharp, so clever, the two of us, aren’t we?

  Or perhaps her smile was her way of countering my reading tit for tat, and that, much as she’d been caught, she too had found something to smile about in me—namely, the guilty pleasure I derived from the ebb and flow of what wasn’t being said. There may have been nothing there, and perhaps both of us knew it and were simply going through the motions of making contact by tossing empty signals. But I was—and I didn’t care to hide it—wearing a big smile that bordered on laughter.

  Had she seen through this as well? And could she tell I wanted her to know it?

  Nervous hesitation hovered between us, like the quiver of a jibe she considered for a moment but then immediately suppressed. Was she really going to call me on my smile and make me spell out what could have been my totally twisted reading of hers? Who are you, Clara?

  For a moment, and perhaps to play with worst outcomes as a way to avert them, I began to consider the woman in the wide-open crimson shirt from the distance of the years to come, as though I were waving at her from the wrong end of a spyglass. As someone lost. As someone I’d met at a faraway party once and never saw again and soon forgot. Someone I could have changed my life for. Or who’d have thrown it so thoroughly off course that it would take years and a lifetime, generations, to recover. Just by looking at her from the distance of time, I could already foresee hollow January weekday evenings and all-day Sundays without her. Part of me had run ahead of me and was already coming back with news of what had happened long after I’d lost her: the walk to and from her house, whose whereabouts I knew nothing of, the view from her window, which I’d give everything to see again but that overlooked places I’d probably never seen, the sound of her coffee grinder in the morning, the smell around her cat’s litter box, the squeak of the service door when you put out the garbage late every night and heard the clatter of the neighbor’s triple lock, the smell of her sheets and of her towels, an entire world drifting away before I touched it.

  I suddenly stopped myself, knowing, by an inverse logic familiar to superstitious people, that the very foretaste of sorrows to come presumed a degree of joy beforehand and would no doubt stand in the way of the very joy I was reluctant to consider for fear of forfeiting it. I felt no different than a castaway who, on glimpsing a sailboat from a high perch on his deserted island, omits to light a pyre because he’s spied too many such ships before and doesn’t want his hopes dashed again. But then, on urging himself to light a fire just the same, he begins to have second thoughts about the strangers on board who could prove more dangerous than the pythons and Komodo dragons he’s learned to live among. Weekday evenings alone weren’t so terrible. Hollow Sundays weren’t bad either. Nothing would come of this, I kept saying. Besides, thinking that I’d already lost her might ease the tension between us and allow me to regain my footing and act a bit more confidently.

  What I didn’t want to feel was hope and, behind the hope, a craving so fierce that anyone watching me would instantly guess I was utterly and undeniably smitten.

  I didn’t mind her knowing. I wanted her to know. Women like Clara know you’re smitten, expect you to be, can spot every one of your feckless attempts to disguise it. What I didn’t want to show was my struggle to keep my composure.

  To parry her gaze, I tried to look elsewhere and seem distracted. I wanted her to ask why I’d suddenly drifted from her, wanted her to worry that she could lose me as easily as I knew I could lose her. But I also wanted her to laugh at me for doing precisely what I was doing. I wanted her to see through my pretended indifference and expose every one of my little maneuvers and, by so doing, show she was plenty familiar with this game, because she’d played it herself many times, was playing it right now, maybe. I bit my tongue again as brash thoughts welled up within me and clamored to speak. Here I was, a shy man pretending to be shy.

  “Punch?” she repeated like someone who snaps a finger in front of you and brings you back among the living by saying Boo! “Them who sing fetches,” she added, all set to go and fetch me some punch.

  I told her she didn’t have to bring me anything; I’d get some myself. I knew I was being unnecessarily fussy and that I could easily have accepted her offer. But I was unable to extricate myself once I had started down that slope. I seemed determined to show I was more uncomfortable having someone bring me a drink than flattered that she’d offered to.

  “I just want to,” she replied. “I’ll even throw in some goodies on a plate . . . if you let me go now before these singing yahoos come and gobble everything up,” she added, as though this were her closing inducement.

  “You don’t have to, really.”

  Perhaps what I wanted was not so much to spare her the errand as to prevent her from moving; the faintest step might throw us off—anything could come between us—we might lose our spot in the library and never recover our giddy pace.

  She asked again. I caught myself insisting that I’d get the punch myself. I was beginning to sound coy and fatuous.

  Then it happened, exactly as I feared.

  “Oh well,” she shrugged, meaning, Suit yourself. Or worse: Hang it. Her voice was still buoyed by the mirth that had sprung up between us moments earlier; but there was a metallic chime somewhere, less like the lilt of irony and good cheer than like the downscale click of a file cabinet being slammed shut.

  I instantly regretted her change of heart.

  “And where would these goodies be?” I fumbled by way of resurrecting her original offer, thinking there was food elsewhere in the apartment.
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br />   “Oh, just stay put and I’ll get you some”—feigned exasperation bubbling in her voice. I caught sight of her neckline as she slipped on her levity again like a reversible coat, the flip side of hang it, sandpaper turned to velour. I wondered if rubbing people the wrong way was not her way of sidling up to them, her way of defusing tension by discharging so much of her own that if she got any closer it would be to dismiss you, but that in going through motions of dismissal she was actually sneaking up on you like a feral cat who doesn’t want you to know it doesn’t mind being petted.

  I am Clara. She affected to snap. I affected to obey. In the packed, dark room where everyone’s shadow merged with everyone else’s, we couldn’t have chosen roles that came more naturally.

  With this air of chronic turmoil, she got you to mean exactly what she had in mind for you, not because she liked to have her way, but because everything about her seemed so unusually charged, craggy, and barbed that not to give in to her jostling was like snubbing everything she was. Which is how she cornered you. To question her manner was to slight not just the manner but the person behind the manner. Even her way of arching her eyebrows, which warned you she required instant submission, could, if questioned, be likened to the rough plumage with which tiny birds puff themselves up to three times their size, the better to conceal their fear of not getting things simply by asking for them.

  All this may have been wishful thinking on my part. She might be concealing nothing at all. She held nothing back, puffed up nothing, feared no one. It was just I who needed to think this way.

  Perhaps Clara was exactly who she appeared to be: light and swift, alert, caustic and dangerous. Just Clara—no roles, no catch-me-if-you-can, no waggish sidling up to strangers or stealthy angling for friendship and chitchat. One of the drawbacks that came from being just who she was and saying just what she felt was to let those who were not used to such candor think it was a pose, that she had learned to hide her shyness better than most, but that she was no less tentative or apprehensive underneath, and that all this fretful behavior, starting from the way she let her elbow rest on my shoulder to mean just stop arguing when I quibbled over punch to the hand that came out of nowhere, was a sham, the way certain diamonds sparkle for a moment and are quite conveniently deemed glass, until we take a second look and slap our foreheads and ask whatever made us think they were fakes. The sham was in us, not them.