Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  There are people who come on to you with friction. Chafing starts intimacy; and strife, like spite, is the shortest distance to the heart.

  Before you finish your sentence, they nip it from your mouth and give it an entirely different spin, making it seem you had been secretly hinting at things you never knew you wanted and would easily have lived without but that you now crave, the way I craved that cup of punch—and with goodies thrown in, exactly as she’d promised, as though the whole evening and much, much more hung on that cup of punch.

  Would she forgive my wishy-washiness? Or had she read it as a triumph of her will? Or was she thinking in altogether different terms? And what were these terms, and why couldn’t I begin to think in them?

  She was gone in a second. I had lost her.

  I should have known.

  •

  “Did you really want punch?” she asked when she returned, carrying a plate on which she’d arrayed a selection of Japanese appetizers in a scatter of tiny squares that only Paul Klee would have imagined. The crowd, she explained, had made ladling the punch too difficult. “Ergo, no punch.” Sounded like Ergo, lump it.

  I was tempted to hold this against her, not just because I was suddenly disappointed, or because the word ergo itself seemed a tad chilling despite the lighthearted way she’d said it, but as though the whole exchange about getting, not getting, and then going to get the punch had one purpose: to trifle with me, to bait me, to raise my hopes only to dash them. Now, to absolve herself for not keeping her promise, or for not caring to, she was trying to make it seem I’d never cared for punch—which was the truth.

  I noticed that she had sorted the appetizers in pairs and placed them in neat little rows around the plate, as though she’d carefully lined them up for Noah’s ark—her way of making up for neglecting the punch, I thought. The tuna-avocado miniature rolls—male and female—the kiwitile fish—male and female—the seared scallop with a sprig of mache on a bed of slithered turnips with tamarind jelly and a dab of lemon rind on top—male and female made He them. No sooner had I told her why the extravagant miscellany had made me smile than I realized there was something daring in my remark about the paired appetizers that were about to propagate and fill the earth—except that before I had time to backpedal, I caught something else neighboring this idea that moved me in my stomach as if I’d been buoyed up and let down on a high wave: not male and female, not male and female shifting on the cold banks of the Black Sea, filing up to book passage on Noah’s Circle Line, but male and female as in you and me, you and me, just you and me, Clara, waiting our turn, which turn, whose turn, say something now, Clara, or I’ll speak out of turn and I haven’t had enough to drink to find the courage to say it. I wanted to touch her shoulder, wanted to rub the length of her neck with my lips, kiss her under her right ear and under the left ear and along her breastbone, and thank her for arranging this plate, for knowing what I’d think, for thinking it with me, even if none of it had crossed her mind.

  “On second thought—” I began, uncertain whether to add anything, and yet hesitating, because I knew that hesitating would catch her attention.

  “What?”—mock vexation crackling in her voice.

  “Actually, I hate punch,” I said.

  It was her turn to laugh.

  “In that case,” also spoken haltingly—she too knew how to play the waiting game and make me hold my breath for her next word—“I detest—as in de-test—punch, sangria, ladely-lady drinks, daiquiri, hara-kiri, vache qui rit. They make me womit.” It was her way of pulling the rug from under your feet just when you thought you had one-upped the last of her comebacks. I am Clara. I can do you one better.

  What neither asked—because each already suspected the other’s answer—was why we’d fussed so much over punch if neither cared for it.

  Once again, not asking could only betray we’d both thought of asking and decided not to. We smiled at our implied truce, smiled for smiling, smiled because we knew, and wanted the other to know, we’d right away own up to why we’d tussled over punch if the other so much as hinted at the question.

  “I’m not even sure I’ve ever liked people who like punch,” I added.

  “Oh, if that’s where you’re going,” she said, clearly not about to be outdone, “I might as well come clean: I’ve never been crazy about parties that have a bowl of punch sitting right in the middle of them.”

  I liked her like this.

  “And the people who attend parties where a bowl of punch sits right in the middle, do you like them?”

  “Do I like otherpeoples?” She paused. “Is this what you’re asking?”

  I guessed this was what I was asking.

  “Seldom,” she said. “Most people are Shukoffs. Except those I like. And before I get to like them, they’re Shukoffs too.”

  I craved to know where I ranked on the Scale of Shukoff, but didn’t dare ask.

  “What makes you want to know Shukoffs?”

  I liked using her lingo.

  “You really want to know?”

  Couldn’t wait to know.

  “Boredom.”

  “Boredom behind a Christmas tree?”

  With my innocent zap, I wanted nothing more than to show I enjoyed recalling how we’d met and that this moment was very much with me, that I didn’t want to let it go yet.

  “Maybe.” She hesitated. Perhaps she did not like to agree with people so easily and preferred putting forth a maybe before a yes. I was already hearing the faint rumblings of a drumroll coming to a rise. “But then just think how boring this party would be without me.”

  I loved this.

  “I’d probably have already left,” I said.

  “I’m not keeping you, am I?”

  And there it was again, the message that wasn’t the real message but might just as easily have been the real message all along.

  Something comforting, almost heartwarming in this undertow of bristles and snags aroused me and made me feel she was a kindred spirit who’d alighted with me in the same afterlife, taken the words from my mouth, and, by saying them back to me, given them a life and a spin they’d never have had I kept them to myself. Under guise of spitfire mini-tantrums, her words suggested something at once kind and welcoming, like the rough folds of a trusted and forgiving blanket that takes us as we are and knows how we sleep, what we’ve been through, what things we dream of and so desperately crave and are ashamed to own up to when we’re alone and naked with ourselves. Did she know me that well?

  “Most people remain Shukoffs,” I said, not knowing whether I meant it. “But I could be wrong.”

  “Are you always this amphibalent?” she taunted.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I invented the word.”

  I am Clara. I invent riddles and their cheats.

  I looked away, perhaps to avoid looking at her. I scanned the faces in the library. The large room was filled with just the sort of people who go to parties where a bowl of punch sits in the middle of their shiftless chatter. I remembered her scornful just-look-at-these-faces and tried to cast a withering glance in their direction. The gesture gave me a pretext to keep looking elsewhere.

  “Otherpeoples,” I said, to fill the silence, repeating the word we’d tacitly agreed to give them, as though this one word summed up everything we’d felt about everyone else and would nail the coffin on our indictment of mankind whole. We were fellow aliens conspiring to renew our reluctant courtship with Earthlings.

  “Otherpeoples,” she echoed, still holding the plate, whose contents neither of us had touched yet. She hadn’t offered it to me, and I didn’t dare.

  What threw me off was the way she’d said otherpeoples. It didn’t seem as disenchanted as I had hoped, but had paled into something soulful, verging on sorrow and mercy.

  “Are otherpeoples as terrible as all that?” she asked, looking up to me for an answer, as though I was the expert who had led her through a landscape that wasn’t really her
s and for which she had little affinity or much patience, but that she’d strayed in simply because our conversation had drifted that way. Was she disagreeing with me politely? Or worse yet: rebuking me?

  “Terrible? No,” I replied. “Necessary? I don’t know.”

  She gave it some thought. “Some are. Necessary, that is. At least to me they are. Sometimes I wish they weren’t—though we’re always alone in the end.”

  Again she spoke these words with such mournful candor and humility that she seemed to own up to a weakness in herself, which she had tried but failed to overcome. Her words stung me to the quick, because they reminded me that we were not two intergalactic wayfarers who had landed in the same afterlife but that I was the alien and she the first native who’d run into me and extended a friendly hand and was about to take me into town and introduce me to her friends and parents. She, I gathered, liked others and knew how to put up with Shukoffs till they stopped being Shukoffs.

  “So much for otherpeoples,” she added, with a pensive, faraway gaze, as though still nursing unresolved feelings about them. “Sometimes they’re all that stands between us and the ditch to remind us we’re not always alone, even when there are trenches between us. So, yes, they are important.”

  “I know,” I said. Perhaps I had gone too far in my wholesale indictment of mankind and this was the time to backpedal. “I too hate being alone.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind being alone at all,” she corrected. “I like being alone.”

  Had she snubbed yet another one of my efforts to align my outlook to hers? Or, in my attempt to understand her in terms of myself, had I simply failed to hear what she was saying? Was I desperately trying to think she was like me so that she might be less of a stranger? Or was I trying to be like her to show we were closer than we seemed?

  “With or without them, it’s always pandangst.”

  “Pandangst?”

  “Pandemic anxiety—last seen stalking the Upper West Side on Sunday evening. But there were two unreported sightings this afternoon. I hate afternoons. This is the winter of pandangst.”

  Suddenly I saw it, should have seen it all along. She didn’t mind being alone, didn’t mind it the way only those who’re never alone long to be alone. Solitude was totally foreign to her. I envied her. Probably, her friends and, I assumed, her lovers or would-be lovers didn’t make it easy for her to be alone—a condition she didn’t quite mind but enjoyed complaining about, as only those who’ve been everywhere in the world readily admit they’ve never seen Luxor or Cádiz.

  “I’ve learned to take the best others have to offer.” This was the person who goes over to perfect strangers and just greets them with a handshake. No arrogance in her words—rather the muted dejection over an implied long list of setbacks and disappointments. “I take what they have to give wherever I find it.”

  Pause.

  “And the rest?”

  This may not have been her drift, but I thought I’d picked up the suggestion of an undisclosed but rattling at the tail end of her sentence like a warning and a lure.

  “The rest gets tossed?” I offered, trying to show that I was sufficiently experienced in the ways of love to have caught her meaning and that I too was guilty of taking what I needed from people and dumping the rest.

  “Tossed? Perhaps,” she responded, still unconvinced by what I was offering for her consideration.

  Perhaps I was being harsh and unfair, for this may not have been what she’d meant to add. She had absentmindedly gone along with my suggestion when all she’d meant to say, perhaps, was “I take people just as they are.”

  Or was this a more pointed warning yet—I take what I need where I find it, so watch yourself—a warning I had momentarily failed to heed because it didn’t agree with her distressed look of a few seconds earlier?

  I was on the point of changing tack and suggesting that perhaps we never toss away or let go of anything in life, much less unlove those we never loved at all.

  “Perhaps you are right,” she interrupted. “We keep people for when we’ll need them, to tide us over, not because we want them. I don’t think I’m always good for people.”

  She reminded me of birds of prey who keep their quarry alive but paralyzed, to feed their young on.

  What happened to those who had only the best taken from them and the rest junked?

  What happened to a man after Clara was done with him?

  I am Clara. Not always good for people.

  Was this her way of drawing me out, or was it a warning asking to be disbelieved?

  Was her life a flea-ridden trench dressed up as a high-end boutique?

  Maybe, she said. Some of us have spent our entire lives in the trenches. Some of us tussle, and hope, and love so near the trenches that we stink of them.

  This was her contribution to my image of trenches. Coming as it did from a woman like her, it struck me as too dark, too bleak, not quite believable. Did she, with the unbuttoned shirt, single pendant, and gleaming tanned body just back from the Caribbean really nurse so tragic a view of life? Or was this her spin on the demonic image I’d concocted to keep the conversation going between us?

  What did she mean by love in the trenches? Life with someone? Life without love? Life trying to invent someone and finding the wrong one each time? Life with too many? Life with very few, or none that mattered? Or was it the life of single people—its highs and lows, as we bivouac from place to place in large cities in search of something we’re no longer sure we’d call love if it sprang on us from a nearby trench and screamed its name was Clara?

  Trenches. With or without people. Trenches just the same. Dating, especially. She hated dating. Torment and torture, the pit of pandangst. De-tested dating. Would rather womit than date.

  Trenches on Sunday afternoons. This, we agreed, was truly the pits, the mother of all gutters and foxholes. Les tranchées du dimanche. Which suddenly gave them the luster of a twilit France. Ville d’Avray. Corot. Eric Rohmer.

  Saturdays weren’t too great either, I said. Saturday breakfast, in or out, always a sense that others are happier—being others. Then the unavoidable two-hour Laundromat where you feel you could just as easily shed your skin and throw it in with your socks, and, like a crustacean hiding in a rock while a new identity is being spun for you, hope to reinvent yourself from what comes out of the dryer.

  She laughed.

  Her turn: The trenches, the slough of amphibalence, the quag of awkward, the bog of boredom: hurting, being hurt, the cold, lame handshake of estranged lovers who come out to inspect the damage, smoke a cigarette together, play friends, then head back to life without love.

  Mine: Those who hurt us most are sometimes those we’ve loved the least. Come Sundays in the quag, we miss them too.

  Hers: The quag when sleep doesn’t come soon enough and you wish you were with someone, anyone. Or with someone else. Or when someone is better than no one, but no one better yet.

  Mine: The quag when you walk by someone’s home and remember how miserable you were but how truly miserable you are now that you no longer live there. Days that go down into some high-speed funnel but which you’d trade back to have all over again, this time slower, though you’d probably give anything never to have lived them at all.

  “High amphibalence.”

  “The days I haven’t spent in the quag recently I can count on one hand,” I said. “The days in the rose garden on one finger.”

  “Are you in the quag now?”

  She didn’t mince words.

  “Not in the quag,” I replied. “Just—on hold. On ice. Maybe in overhaul, possibly recall.”

  The phrase amused her. She got my drift well enough, even if our meanings and metaphors were growing ever more tangled.

  “So when were you in the rose garden last?”

  How I loved the way the question cut to the chase and brought out what we’d been hinting at all along.

  Should I tell her? Had I even understood her question? O
r should I assume we were speaking the same language? I could say: This right now is the rose garden. Or: I’d never expected to see the rose garden so soon.

  “Not since mid-May,” I heard myself say. How easy to let this out in the open. It made my fear of speaking about myself seem so trivial, so cagey, every word I’d speak now seemed charged with thrill and denudedness.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Lying low, just lying low these days—like you, I suppose. Call it in hibernation, in quarantine, in time-out—for my sins, for my whatevers. In Rekonvaleszenz,” she said, imitating the fastidiously halting lisp of Viennese analysts determined to use a polysyllabic Teuto-latinate for on the rebound. “I’m being reconditioned too. Not a party person, really.”

  It took me totally by surprise. In my eyes, she personified party people. What was I getting wrong? Fearing our messages were getting all coiled and twisted, I asked, “We are speaking about the same thing, aren’t we?”

  Amused, and without missing a beat: “We know we are.”

  This didn’t clarify matters, but I loved the disclosure of conspiracy, by far the most stirring and exhilarating thing between us.

  I looked at her as she began to head toward the other end of the library, where two bookcases of visibly untouched Pléiades volumes stood. She didn’t look like someone in torment and torture at all.

  “What do you think?”

  “Of these books?”

  “No, of her.”

  I looked at the blond woman she was indicating. Her name was Beryl, she said.

  “I don’t know. Nice, I suppose,” I said. I could tell Clara would have preferred a devastating bashing on the spot. But I also wanted her to know that I was merely pretending to be naive and was just holding out before delivering my own demolition job. She didn’t give me time.