Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  •

  Earlier that evening I had taken a similar bus and, because of the blizzard, had totally missed my stop and gotten off six blocks past 106th Street. I remembered wondering where I was, and why I had erred, feeling ridiculous as I lugged my boutiquey plastic bag where two bottles of Champagne kept clinking despite the piece of cardboard the man at the liquor store had inserted between them. In the blizzard, off 112th Street, I sighted the statue of Samuel J. Tilden with its impassive, solemn gaze frozen westward, as I clambered up the steps and looked around, trying to avoid a drooling St. Bernard who suddenly appeared on the mound and didn’t seem about to ignore me. Should I run away or just stay calm, pretend I hadn’t seen it? Then I heard the voice of two boys calling it off. They were sledding down the mound. The dog, who had strayed somewhat, began to follow them into the park. And then the quiet, peaceful, blissful walk down those six deserted blocks on the service road off Riverside, by turns convex and concave, the sound of ice crunching underneath the snow. It made me think of Capra’s Bedford Falls and Van Gogh’s Saint-Rémy, and of Leipzig and Bach choirs and how the slightest accidents sometimes open up new worlds, new buildings, new people, unveiling sudden faces we know we’ll never want to lose. Saint-Rémy, the town where Nostradamus and Van Gogh walked the same sidewalk, the seer and the madman crossing paths, centuries apart, just a nod hello.

  From the sidewalk, as I looked at the windows upstairs, I had pictured quiet, contented families where children start homework on time, and where guests, ever reluctant to leave, liven up dinner parties where spouses seldom speak. From the terrace where we stood now, the incident with the scary St. Bernard seemed a lifetime away. I remembered thinking of medieval Weihnachten towns along the Rhine and the Elbe, especially with the cathedral looming down 112th Street and the river so close by. To arrive more than fashionably late, I had walked around the block and reached Straus Park on Broadway, glad to see that I still had time to reconsider going to this party, especially now that I had almost no desire to attend, and caught myself coming up with good excuses to do a double turn and head back home, all the while holding on to the invitation card with the address printed in gold filigree. The script was so thin that I couldn’t read it and was almost tempted to ask directions of one of the lampposts, it too, like me, lost and stranded in the storm, though ever so willing to shed the scant light it had to help me read what began to look like ghost quatrains in the cursive hand of Nostradamus himself. To kill time, I found a small coffee shop and ordered tea.

  Now I was here and I was with Clara.

  After downing one Mankiewicz and almost bawling on a piece of peppercorn, I was standing on a terrace overlooking Manhattan, already thinking of revisiting 106th Street tomorrow night to replay this evening all over again—at my leisure, in my own time, the cathedral, the park, the snow, the golden filigree, and the lampposts with their heads ablaze. I looked down and, if I could, would have signaled to the I approaching the building a few hours earlier and warned him to keep putting off coming here—take a half step first, then half of that half step, and half of the half of that half step, as superstitious people do when they half reach out and push away the very thing they crave but fear they’ll never have unless they’ve pushed it far enough first—to walk and want asymptotically.

  Should I put my arm around her? Asymptotically?

  I tried to look away from her. And perhaps she too was looking away, both of us now staring out at the evening sky, where a faint unsteady bluish search beam, emanating from an unknown corner of the Upper West Side, orbited the sky, picking its way through the blotchy night as if in search of something it couldn’t tell and didn’t really mean to find each time it looped above us like a slim and trellised Roman corvus missing its landing each time it tried to come down on a Carthaginian ghost ship.

  Tonight the Magi are truly lost, I wanted to say.

  But I kept it to myself, wondering how long we were going to stand like this and stare out into the dark, tracing the silent course of the light beam overhead as if it were a riveting spectacle justifying our silence. Perhaps, by dint of scouring the sky, the beam might finally alight on something for us to talk about—except that there was nothing for the beam to land on—in which case, perhaps, we’d turn the beam itself into a subject of conversation. I wonder where it’s being aimed at. Or: Where is it coming from? Or: Why does it dip each time it seems to touch the northernmost spire? Or: looks like we’re suddenly in London and this is the Blitz. Or Montevideo. Or Bellagio. Or there was the other, ineffable question I kept spinning to myself as though it were a mini-beam searching within me as well, a question I couldn’t even ask, much less answer, but needed to ask, of myself, of her, and back to myself—because, if I knew I had stepped into a tiny miracle the moment we’d walked onto the terrace to look over this unreal city, I also needed to know that she thought so too before believing it myself.

  “Bellagio,” I said.

  “What about Bellagio?”

  “Bellagio’s a tiny village at the tip of a land mass in Lake Como.”

  “I know Bellagio. I’ve been to Bellagio.”

  Zapped again.

  “On special evenings, Bellagio is almost a fingertip away, an illuminated paradise, just a couple of oar strokes from the western shore of Lake Como. On other nights it seems not a furlong but leagues and a lifetime away, unattainable. This right now is a Bellagio moment.”

  “What is a Bellagio moment?”

  Are we speaking in code, you and I, Clara? I was treading on eggshells. If part of me didn’t know where I was going with this, another felt that I was intentionally seeking dangerous terrain.

  “Really want to know?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to know.”

  “Then you’ve already guessed. Life on the other bank. Life as it’s meant to be, not as we end up living it. Bellagio, not New Jersey. Byzantium.”

  “You were right the first time.”

  “When?”

  “When you said I’d already guessed. I didn’t need the explanation.”

  Snubbed and zapped again.

  Silence fell upon us.

  “Mean and nasty,” she finally said.

  “Mean and nasty?” I asked, though I knew exactly what she meant. Suddenly, and without knowing it, I didn’t want us to get too close, too personal, didn’t want us to start talking about the tension between us. She reminded me of a man and woman who meet on a train and begin talking of meeting strangers on a train. Was she the type who discusses what she feels in the very company of the stranger who makes her feel it?

  “Mean and nasty, Clara. It’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head. I preferred silence. Until it became intolerable again. Was I by any chance pouting without knowing it? I was pouting.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I am looking for my star.” Change the subject, move on, let it go, put smoke between us, say anything.

  “So we have stars now?”

  “If there’s fate, there’s a star.”

  What kind of talk was this?

  “So this is fate?”

  I did not answer. Was this yet another derisive way of slamming the door on me? Or of ramming it open? Was she challenging me to say something? Or to keep my mouth shut? Was I going to be evasive again?

  All I wanted was to ask, Clara, what is happening to us?

  She’d not answer, of course or, if she did, she’d come back with a snub and a spur, carrot and stick.

  Do I really have to tell you? she’d ask.

  Then tell me what is happening to me. Should be obvious enough by now.

  Maybe I’m not going there either.

  As ever, silence and arousal. Don’t speak if you don’t know, don’t speak if you do know.

  “And by the way,” she said, “I do believe in fate. I think.”

  Was this now the equivalent of a nightclub floozy talking Kabbalah?

  “Maybe fate has an on and an o
ff button,” I said, “except that no one knows when it’s on or off.”

  “Totally wrong. The button is on and off at the same time. That’s why it’s called fate.” She smiled and gave me a got-you-didn’t-I? stare.

  How I wished that the staring between us might rouse my courage to pass a finger on her lips, let it rest on her bottom lip, and then, having left it there, begin to touch her teeth, her front teeth, her bottom teeth, then slip that finger ever so slowly into her mouth and touch her tongue, her moist and restless, feral tongue, which spoke such twisted, barbed-wire things, and feel it quiver, like quicksilver and lava brewing in the underground, thrashing the mean and nasty thoughts it was forever coming up with in that cauldron called Clara. I wanted my thumb in her mouth, let my thumb take the venom when she bites, let my thumb tame the tongue, let the tongue be wildfire, and in our death brawl let that tongue seek my tongue now that I’d stirred its wrath.

  •

  To justify the silence, I tried to seem thoroughly rapt by the beam, as though this blurry shaft of light traveling through the bruise gray night did indeed mirror something bruised and gray in me as well, as if it were half prying through a nightworld all my own, searching not just for something for me to say to her, or for the shadow meaning of what was happening to us, but for some dark, blind, quiet spot within me that the ray, as in all prisoner-of-war films, seemed to probe but to miss each time it circled the sky. I couldn’t speak, because I couldn’t see, because the ray itself, like a cross between a one-handed clock that cannot tell time and a compass magnetized to no poles, reminded me of me: it didn’t really know where it was going, couldn’t grope its way around, and wouldn’t find anything out there to bring back to this terrace for us to talk about. Instead, it kept pointing to the bluffs across the Hudson, as though something far more real lay across the bridge, on the other side, as though life stood out there, and this here was merely lifelike.

  How distant she suddenly seemed, so many locked doors and hatches away, so many life-tales, so many people who had stood between us over the years like the quags and quarries each one was and remained so still, as she and I stood on this terrace. Was I a trench in someone else’s life? Was she in mine?

  To persuade us that my silence was not the result of an inability to come up with anything to say but that I was truly distracted by brooding, somber thoughts that I wasn’t about to share, I let my mind conjure my father’s face, when I’d gone to see him late at night after a party last year, his ordering me to sit at the edge of his bed to tell him everything I’d seen and eaten that night—And start from the very top, not midway as you always do, and then finding a way to say it: I see you so seldom now, or I never see you with anyone, or When I see you with someone she never lasts long enough for me to remember her name, and just when I thought I had deftly dodged the larger question about the weeks and days remaining to him, to hear him add that old bromide about children, I’ve waited so long, but more I cannot. At least tell me there’s someone. Then, with distemper in his voice, There’s no one, is there? There’s no one, I’d say. Their names, again, Alice, Jean, Beatrice, and that ballbuster heiress from Maine with the big feet who helped us stack the wines on the balcony and couldn’t even wrap a napkin around the silverware because she smoked so much?

  Livia, I said.

  Why so disaffected, so disengaged? His words. MTH, he’d say. Marry the heiress, then. And all I could think of saying was: Everything she has I never wanted. Everything I wanted she doesn’t have. Or what was even crueler: Everything she has I already have.

  From the scumble of grays and silvers on the horizon, I forced myself to conjure his face, but he kept wanting to drift back into the night—I need you now, I kept saying, tugging and pulling at an imaginary cord to my father, until, for a split second, the lank, sick face I’d summoned flashed through my mind again and, in its wake, a vision of many tubes hooked to a respirator in a cancer ward at Mount Sinai Hospital. I wanted to be stirred by this image so that something like the shadow of suppressed sorrow might settle on my face and justify my inability to say anything to the one person who had me completely tongue-tied.

  I looked at Clara’s Bloody Mary sitting on the balustrade and thought of the grisly inhabitants of Homer’s underworld when they shuffle and drag their aching bunions toward a trough of fresh blood, meant to draw them out of their grottoes: “There are more of us where I come from, and some you wouldn’t care to see—so let me be, son, let me be. The dead are good to one another, that’s all you need to know.”

  Poor old man, I thought, as I watched him wither away into the pallid silver night, loved by few and hardly thought of since.

  “Look downstairs, don’t they look mammoth-sized?” said Clara.

  From high above, a seemingly endless procession of larger-than-life stretch limousines was stopping at the curb of the building, unloading skittish passengers in high heels, and then inching on along the snow to allow the car directly behind to unload more passengers, only to move on to let the car after do the same. Something in me buoyed at the sight of the extravagant display of black cars glistening in the white night. I felt I’d stepped into a strange, high-tech version of Nevsky Prospekt.

  The cars did not go away but were double-parked the length of 106th Street. By the statue of Franz Sigel, a group of drivers had come out to chat and smoke. In Russian, most likely. Two were wearing long, dark overcoats, wraiths lifted from Gogol’s underworld about to hum Russian songs together.

  Where were all these people going? The sight of the cars lined up ever so regally made me wish I’d gone to their party instead. All these posh jet-set types arriving in twos and threes. What wonderful lives these people must live, what splendor, I kept thinking, almost neglecting Clara, who was leaning on the balustrade next to me, equally mesmerized by the spectacle. I felt something verging on pleasure in seeing how easily I’d been distracted and made to think about other things instead of her. This was Hollywood grandeur, and I wished to see it from up close. Then, realizing I had neglected my father, I felt ashamed of myself, especially after I’d summoned him up, only to be caught thinking of stretch limousines.

  •

  Clara and I did eventually speak about the beam, and about the guests downstairs, and about other things, and I did ask about this or that to keep the conversation afloat, until I mentioned, in passing, that standing on this terrace with her reminded me of my parents’ balcony and how on New Year’s each year my father would stack and chill wine bottles, how we’d blind-test the year’s vintage that very night with friends and partners, as we all waited to see which wine was voted best, the wine tasting always getting out of hand, Mother rushing back and forth, making sure the vote was in before her husband delivered the same annual speech in rhyming couplets minutes before midnight—until Mount Sinai. “Why the balcony?” she interrupted. Obviously what interested her was why I’d confused both balconies and put her in the picture. Perfect place to chill white wine and soda when it’s not quite freezing outside. Someone would always help me set the bottles, cover up the labels, hand out improvised score sheets. “The babe in the rosebush?” she asked. I shrugged complacently to mean yes, maybe, why ask, not always a teasing matter, I didn’t care for the joke. She had lost both parents in a car accident four years earlier. That was her snarky comeback to my miffed response to her irony.

  I am Clara. Don’t tread on me.

  She told me about her last year in college, the icy road in Switzerland, the lawyers, the nights she couldn’t sleep; she needed someone to sleep with, anyone, no one, so many. Mid-guilty-giggle just as I was growing solemn for her.

  It was wan and hapless talk, without brio, certainly without the heady banter that had wrapped us like incense in a moonlit shrine. These were probably the trenches we’d made light of before, and during renewed pauses that thumped like heavy footballs portending the end, I found myself already struggling to take mental notes of the evening, as if a curtain were gradually being
dropped on us and I had to salvage whatever I could and think of ways to live down our moments together without being too hard on myself. I’d have to sort through what to rescue and let go of, and to coddle what promised to keep radiating in the morning, like party glow-sticks beaming with last night’s laughter and premonition.

  I wanted to cull must-remember moments—the shoe, the glass, the terrace, the ice floes plying down the Hudson—all of which I’d want to take along, doggie-bag style, the way, after a dinner party, you remember to ask for a slice of cake for someone who is working on deadline, or for the driver downstairs, or for a sick brother or housebound relative who couldn’t make it tonight, or for that part of us that ultimately enjoys care packages more than dinners and seldom goes anywhere but prefers to send shadow versions of itself out into the world like unmanned drones scoping questionable terrain, keeping the best part of ourselves home, as some do when they wear false jewels in public but leave the genuine article in a vault, or as others do when they start “reliving” moments even as they’re living them in real time, in the real world, as I was doing right now. The body goes out into the world, but the heart’s not always in it.

  And I thought of my father again, asking me to sit at the edge of his bed last year and tell him everything I’d seen, whom had I danced with—Names, names, he’d say, I want names, I want faces, your presence is like a gift to me, better to hear you than watch a thousand shows on television. He didn’t care how late I dropped by. So what if I can’t sleep now, we both know I’ll make up for it soon enough. Had he been alive tonight I’d have started with three words and taken the whole evening from the top. I am Clara. Sounds very real-world, he’d have said.