Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  “Start now.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wished to excuse myself and leave the two to wrangle by themselves. But I didn’t want to disappear from this world, which, only moments ago, had opened its doors to me.

  “It’s gorgons like you make men like me queer.”

  With that he didn’t wait for her to say another word and yanked open the glass door and let it slam shut behind him.

  “I’m sorry, truly sorry.” I didn’t know whether I was apologizing for her or for having witnessed their row.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” she said blandly, as she stubbed the cigarette against the stone balustrade and looked down onto the Drive. “Another day in the trenches. Actually it was good you were here. We would have argued, and I would have said things I’d regret saying. I already regret things as it is.”

  Was she sorry for him, for Inky, for herself?

  No answer.

  “It’s getting cold.”

  I opened the French window, softly, so as not to interrupt the caroling in the downstairs living room. I heard her mutter, “Inky shouldn’t have come. He just shouldn’t have come tonight.” I extended a half-doleful, friendly smile meant to suggest something as flat-footed as You watch, things will work themselves out.

  She turned abruptly: “Are you with someone tonight?”

  “No. I came alone.”

  I didn’t ask the same of her. I didn’t want to know. Or perhaps I didn’t want to seem eager to know.

  “And you?” I found myself asking.

  “No one—someone, but really no one.” She burst out laughing. At herself, at the question, at the double and triple entendres, at all sorts of intended and unintended ambiguities. She pointed to someone chatting with someone who looked like Beryl.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “That’s Tito, the Tito we were talking about.”

  “And?”

  “Where there’s a Tito there’s bound to be an Orla.”

  I didn’t see an Orla nearby.

  “See the guy next to him?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s the one I was—in limbo with,” she said.

  Another moment of silence. I was going to ask if all the men in her life ended up in limbo. Why do you ask? But she’d ask because she would already know why I was asking.

  “Some of us may end up going to the Midnight Mass at St. John’s for a short while. Want to come?” I made a slight face. “We’ll light candles together, it’ll be fun.”

  •

  She did not wait for an answer and, as abruptly as she’d tossed out the idea—which was how she did everything, it seemed—said she’d be right back and had already stepped inside. “Wait for me, okay?” She never doubted that I wouldn’t.

  But this time I was sure I had lost her. She would run into Inky and Tito and Orla and Hans and, in a second, slip right back into their little world, from which she had emerged like an apparition from behind a Christmas tree.

  Alone on the terrace, I was revisited by the thoughts that had crossed my mind earlier in the evening, when I’d wandered from room to room upstairs, debating whether to stay, not stay, leave, or stay awhile longer, trying to recapture now what exactly I’d felt and what I’d been doing just seconds before she’d turned to me and told me her name. I’d been thinking of the framed Athanasius Kircher prints lining the long corridor outside one of the studies. These were not imitation prints but must have been removed from priceless bound volumes. It was then, as I was brooding over the crime of framing these pictures and then letting them hang outside the bathroom of a rich man’s home, that out had come the hand.

  Through the glass doorway now, I saw a clutter of Christmas presents heaped majestically next to a huge tree. A group of older teenagers, dressed for another party that hadn’t even started and wouldn’t start for many hours yet, had gathered around the tree and were shaking some of the packages close to their ears in a guessing contest of what was inside each. I was seized by panic. I should have handed my Champagne bottles to someone who’d know what to do with them. I remembered finding no one to relieve me of them and was forced to set the bottles down as furtively and as timorously, next to the swinging kitchen doors, as if they were twin orphans being deposited outside a rich man’s doorstep before the guilty mother skulks away into the anonymous night. I had, of course, omitted to include a card. What had become of my bottles purchased on the fly before boarding the M5 bus? One of the waiters had surely found the bottles by the door and put them in the refrigerator, where they’d make friends with other orphans of their kind.

  I felt like one of those awkward guests at my parents’ house during Christmas week, when we had our annual wine fest. MGH was my father’s code word for Make guests happy. My mother’s was ROP, Rave over presents. And MTH was his reminder to me: Marry the heiress, MTFH.

  To clear my thoughts, I paced about the terrace, trying to imagine how the place might look in the summer, picturing lightly dressed people flocking about with Champagne glasses, all dying to catch what they already knew would be one of the most spectacular sunsets in the world, watching the skyline change from shimmering light blue to shades of summer pink and tangerine-gray. I wondered what shoes Clara wore in the summer when she came out onto the veranda and stood there with the others, smoking secret agents, arguing with Pablo, Rollo, and Hans, tweaking each to his face or behind his back, it didn’t matter which, so long as she got to spit out something mean and nasty, which she’d take back in no time. Had she said anything kind about anyone tonight? Or was it all venom and abrasion on the outside, and a fierce, serrated, scalding brand of something so hardened and heartless that it could tear its way through every clump of human emotion and skewer the needy, helpless child in every grown-up man because its name, spelled backward and twisted inside out, might still be love—angry, arid, coarse, chafing love that it was.

  I tried to think of this very apartment on New Year’s Eve. Only the happy few. At midnight they’d come out on the terrace, watch the fireworks, pop Champagne bottles before retreating inside by the fireplace, and chat about love in the manner of old banquets. My father would have liked Clara. She’d have helped with the bottles on the balcony, helped with the party, added life to his tired couplets, snickered when the old classicist threw in his yearly hint about Xanthippe pussy-whipping her husband, Socrates, into drinking the poisoned brew, which he gladly downed, because one more day, one more year like this without love and none to give . . . With Clara, his yearly sermon to me on the balcony as we tended to the wine wouldn’t have been laced with so much distemper. I want children, not projects. Seeing Clara, he would have asked me to hurry. She’d walk in, say, I am Clara, and pronto, ravished. The girl from Bellagio, he’d have called her. Together, one night, he and I had stood before the chilled bottles staring into a neighbor’s crowded windows across the tower. “Theirs is the real party, ours is make-believe,” he said. “They probably think theirs is makeshift and ours real,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “Then it’s worse than I thought,” he said. “We are never in the moment, life is always elsewhere, and there is always something that steals eternity away. Whatever we seal in one chamber seeps into another, like an old heart with leaky valves.”

  A waiter opened the glass door and came onto the terrace and made to remove Clara’s half-empty glass. I told him to leave it. Noticing that my glass was empty, he asked if I cared for more wine. I would love a cold beer, I said. “In a glass?” he asked, suddenly reminding me that there were other ways to drink beer than in a glass. “Actually, in a bottle.” I liked the whim of it. I was going to have a beer and I was going to drink it from the bottle and I was going to enjoy it by myself, and if I didn’t think of her image floating before my eyes, well, so be it. He nodded and, taking a moment from what must have been a very busy evening, looked to where I was staring: “What an amazing view, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, wonderful.”

  “Anything with the bee
r?”

  I shook my head. I remembered the Mankiewiczes and decided to stay clear of anything resembling appetizers. But the thought and his kindness touched me. “Some nuts maybe.”

  “I’ll get those and the beer right away.”

  Then, when he’d almost reached the French doors again, he turned toward me, holding his salver with other empty glasses on it: “Everything all right?”

  I must look positively distressed for a waiter to inquire how I’m doing. Or was he making sure I wasn’t planning to jump—boss’s orders: Keep an eye out and make sure no one gets funny ideas.

  A couple at the other end of the terrace facing the southern tip of Manhattan was giggling. The man held his arm on her shoulder and with his other hand had managed to rest his refilled glass on the balustrade. The same hand, I saw, was also holding a cigar.

  “Miles, are you hitting on me?” the woman asked.

  “To be honest—I don’t know” came the man’s debonair answer.

  “If you don’t know, then you are.”

  “I suppose I am, then.”

  “I never know with you.”

  “Honestly, I never know with me either.”

  I smiled. The waiter looked around for stray glasses and ashtrays, and then stood there almost as if debating whether to take a cigarette break. I looked at his clothes—the Prussian-blue necktie and loud yellow button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up all the way to his biceps—what a strange outfit.

  “Beer!” he exclaimed self-mockingly, as if he’d neglected an important mission, and proceeded to pick up more empty glasses.

  But I didn’t really want a beer. This party wasn’t for me. I should just leave.

  What else was there to look forward to tonight? Bus, snow, walk all the way back to 112th Street, peer one last time at the cathedral and, through the snow, watch it fill for the Midnight Mass, then close the book on the evening. She had said something about heading out there tonight. I imagined the quick dash to the cathedral, the music, the coats, the huge crowd within, Clara and friends, Clara and Company, all of us huddled together. Let’s go back to the party, she’d say. Even Rollo would agree, Yes, let’s go back.

  Better leave now before anyone cornered me for dinner, I thought, leave the terrace, go back upstairs, sneak into the coatroom, hand in my coat stub, and slink away as furtively as I had arrived.

  But before I’d taken a step to go, the glass door opened again and out came the waiter with more wine and my bottle of beer. He put the wine on a table, then placed the beer between his thighs and instantly pulled the cap off. He had also brought Miles and girlfriend two martinis.

  Then, for the last time, I spotted the beam circling over Manhattan. Half an hour ago I was standing here with Clara thinking of Bellagio, Byzantium, St. Petersburg. The elbow resting on my shoulder, the burgundy suede shoes gently brushing off the snow, the Bloody Mary on the balustrade—it was all still there! What had happened to Clara?

  I had forgotten whether I had tacitly agreed to wait for her on the terrace. It was getting colder, and, who knows, perhaps asking me to stay put on the terrace may have been Clara’s cocktail-party way either of drifting away without seeming to or of casting me in the role of the one who’s left behind, who waits, who lingers, who hopes.

  Perhaps I finally decided to leave the terrace to spite her. To prove that this wasn’t going anywhere, that I had never staked the flimsiest hope.

  When I finally emerged from the congested staircase upstairs, the size of the crowd had more than tripled. All these people, and all that hubbub, the music and glitz, and all these rich-and-famous Euro snobs looking as though they’d just stepped off private helicopters that had landed on an unknown strip on Riverside and 106th Street. Suddenly I realized that these imposing, double-parked limousines lining the curb all the way to Broadway and back and around the block were carrying people who were headed to no other party but ours, and that, therefore, I had all along been at the very party to which I wanted to be invited instead. The tanned women who wore loud jewelry and clicked about the parquet floor on spiked heels, the dashing young men who hurried about the huge room wearing swanky black suits with dark taupe open-collar shirts, the older men who tried to look like them by putting on clothes their bedecked new wives claimed they’d look much younger in. Bankers, bimbos, Barbies—who were these people?

  The waiters and waitresses, it finally dawned on me, were all blond model types wearing what was in fact a uniform: bright yellow shirt with sleeves rolled all the way up, wide floating blue neckties, and very tight, very low-cut khakis with a rakish suggestion of a slightly unzipped fly. The cross between deca-and tacky-chic made me want to turn and say something to someone. But I didn’t know a soul here. Meanwhile, the waiters were urging the sea of guests to work their way to either end of the large hall, where caterers had begun serving dinner behind large buffet tables.

  In a tiny corner three elderly women sat cooped up around a tea table, like three Graeae sharing one eye and a tooth among them. A waiter had brought three plates filled with food for them and was about to serve them wine. One of the ladies held what looked like a needle to her neighbor. Checking blood-sugar levels before mealtime.

  I saw Clara again. She was leaning against one of the bookcases in the same crowded library where she’d pointed out her old desk and where, at the risk of drawing too close to what I thought was the real, private Clara, I’d pictured her writing her thesis and, from time to time, removing her glasses and casting a wistful, faraway glance at the dying autumnal light shimmering over the Hudson. Facing her now, a young man her age had placed both palms to her hips and was pressing her whole body against his, kissing her deep in the mouth, his eyes shut in a stubborn, willful, violent embrace. To interfere if only by staring seemed an infraction. No one was looking, everyone seemed quite oblivious. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, especially once I noticed that his hands were not just holding her but were clasping her hips from under the shirt, touching her skin, as if the two had been slow-dancing and had stopped to kiss, until I spotted something more disturbing and more riveting yet: that it was she who was kissing him, not the other way around. He was merely responding to her tongue, swooning under its fierce, invasive fire, like a baby bird lapping its feed from its mother’s bill. When they finally relaxed their embrace, I saw her stare into his eyes and caress him ever so languorously on the face, a slow, lingering, worshipping palm rubbing his forehead first, then sliding down on his cheek in an expression of tenderness so heartrending, so damp to the touch, that it could draw love from a block of granite. If ever this suggested how she made love when she took off her crimson shirt and removed her suede shoes and was lost to her senses, then, until this very precise moment in my entire life, I had probably never understood what lovemaking was, nor what it was for, nor how to go about it, had never made love to anyone, much less been made love to. I envied them. I loved them. And I hated myself for envying and loving them. Before I had time to wish them to stop doing more of what they were doing, or to go on doing it for a while longer, I watched him press his pelvis against hers, as they began kissing all over again. His hand had now disappeared under her shirt. If only his hand were mine. If only I could be there, be there, be there.

  So much for lying low. What a lame excuse. With all her talk of limbo and love in times of twilight and pandangst, the party girl had just caved in. And I thought she harbored a tragic sentiment of life shrouded in cocktail chitchat. All she was was a Euro chick mouthing empty vocables picked up chez Madame Dalmedigo’s finishing school for wayward girls.

  “Meet Clara and Inky,” crooned a woman who was standing next to me and who must have watched me stare at them. “They do it all the time. It’s their shtick.” I was about to shrug my shoulders, meaning I’d seen such things before and certainly wasn’t about to be shocked at the sight of lovers making out at parties, when I realized that it was none other than Muffy Mitford. We began speaking.

  Maybe bec
ause I had drunk a bit too much already, I turned to her and, out of the blue, asked if her name wasn’t Muffy. It was! How did I know? I proceeded to lie and said we’d met at a dinner party last year. The lie came far too easily to me, but with one thing leading to the next, I discovered that in fact we did know people in common and, to my complete surprise, had in fact met at a dinner party. Didn’t she know the Shukoffs? No, she’d never heard of them. I couldn’t wait to tell Clara.

  Then, from a distance, I saw her waving at me. She wasn’t just waving, but was actually headed toward me. I knew, as I watched her come closer, that I had, against all resolutions to the contrary, already forgiven her. I couldn’t identify what this feeling was, because it was a mix of panic, anger, and a flush of hope and expectation so extravagant that, once again, without needing a mirror, I knew from the strain on my face that I was smiling way too broadly. I tried to tame the smile by thinking of something else, sad, sobering things, but no sooner had I started to think of Muffy and her jiggling fertility belt than I felt on the verge of laughter.

  It didn’t matter that Clara had disappeared or that I had let her down by not waiting on the terrace. We were like two persons who bump into each other two hours after standing each other up and pick up as if nothing remotely wrong had happened. I wanted to believe that I didn’t care about their kissing, because as long as I wasn’t hoping for anything and didn’t have to worry how to draw her into my life, I would be able to enjoy her company, laugh with her, put an arm around her.

  I was, and I knew it even then, like a drug addict who is determined to overcome his addiction in order to enjoy an occasional fix without worrying about addiction. I had quit smoking for the same reason: to enjoy an occasional cigarette.

  Clara came right behind me first and was about to whisper something in my ear. I could feel her breath hovering on my neck and was almost ready to lean gently toward her lips. She was making fun of Muffy, then squeezed my shoulder in what I sensed was a motion of sneering collusion meant to induce giggling.