Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  It hit me that she said exactly what I’d have said under the circumstances. But I would have said it for exactly the opposite reason. I would have been overly demonstrative, as she was, to show how lightly I took these matters. Was hers the voice of diffidence cloaking itself behind hyperbolic complaints about the weather, about my phone, about me—or was she making no secret of something most people are reluctant to reveal too soon? Was it too soon?

  Was she thinking like me?

  Or was she telling a man what he’d give anything to hear a woman say to him on their first night out?

  Was this our first night out?

  I wondered if she’d rehearsed saying any of it.

  I would have.

  Then I thought: Better yet if she’d rehearsed it. It meant she’d cared to rehearse it.

  Then I remembered I had never given her my number. Nor was my number listed.

  She must have read what was going on in my mind. “You’ll never guess who gave me your télyfön.”

  “Who?”

  “I told you, you’ll never guess. I brought us this,” she said, and produced a white paper bag containing food and things to drink.

  “I’m—overwhelmed.”

  Pause.

  “He’s overwhelmed.” She puckered her lips and looked away, as though to signal stifled exasperation at some strange mannerism in my speech. I instantly recognized the mock chiding of last night’s banter on the veranda. I missed it, welcomed it back, had been away from it too long. “A million times,” she repeated, seemingly speaking to herself.

  There was, in her word, both the open-faced boldness of those who know how to make difficult admissions to people they scarcely know, and the specter of irony, which comes to their rescue when they find the difficult admission not difficult at all.

  Anyone else would have read the most reassuring signals in this.

  I couldn’t have been more pleased to find her standing there, waiting for me, with two tickets in hand and snacks to boot, in an attitude suggesting that she might have planned this all the way back to the moment in church when I’d brought up the Eric Rohmer festival. I had an image of her waking up in the morning and, instead of thinking of Inky, already making plans to meet me in the evening. First she would have tried to obtain my number. Then, having found it, she would have called. Late morning. Early afternoon. Eventually she would have had to leave a message. But no one had left a message.

  “People on ice check their voice mail, I guess,” she said, remembering my words.

  “And those lying low?”

  “People lying low still make an effort to call. I stopped calling until a few minutes ago.”

  “How did you know I was going to be here?”

  What I meant to ask was how did she know I was going to come alone tonight. “What if I hadn’t come?”

  “I would have gone in. Besides,” she added, as though the thought had never occurred to her before, “we had a date.”

  Did she know I knew we didn’t have a date, and that if I suddenly pretended to remember that we had one it was less to let her save face than to put off deciding what sort of attitude to strike myself?

  Or was this simply her way of spelling out my unspoken reason for bringing up the Rohmer festival last night? Had we perhaps firmed up something that remained undefined in my mind simply because I couldn’t bring myself to believe it could have been so easily arranged?

  “Clara, I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “You’re glad! Imagine how stupid I’d feel holding these two tickets in the cold. Do I go in, do I keep waiting, what if he doesn’t show up, do I give away the tickets, keep one, give the other to some man who’s going to think he’s entitled to speak to me through both films if I last that long? I just hope they’re good films,” she added, as if she hadn’t quite believed they might be until she’d seen the line and managed to get two tickets minutes before the show sold out. Or was this her way of paying me a compliment, because, left to her, she would never have stepped out into the cold for a Rohmer film unless she trusted the man who loved these films.

  We barely had time to say anything more when she proceeded to whisper curses at the management, launching into a mock tirade against the very notion of a 7:10 show. Seven-ten was too early. Seven-ten was for those who needed to go to bed before midnight. Seven-ten was dolt time. “What did I do on Christmas Day in the year of our Lord such-and-such? I went to the movies at seven-ten.”

  “I too ended up going to the movies that day.”

  “You don’t say.”

  There it was again. Mock-rebuke—like someone suddenly slipping an arm under yours as you’re walking together. It was her way of saying that her hunch had paid off. I would remember this. On Christmas Day in the year of our Lord such-and-such—how I liked that beginning. It went with the snow outside the theater, with the light haze around traffic lights down Broadway, with everyone shivering in line, eagerly awaiting My Night at Maud’s.

  “I didn’t have a chance to eat anything. I suppose you haven’t, either,” she continued as we stood in line, muttering muffled curses at the weather with spirited feigned anger. I told her about Thai Soup and their garlique-infested prawn broth. It made her laugh. Perhaps she enjoyed how I’d used her word from last night. Her laugh was high-pitched, which drew the attention of one of the ushers, who scowled at us. “Just look at that face,” she whispered, indicating his sharp crew cut and broad shoulders. “And his teeth. People with faces like his invent times like seven-ten.” I laughed. “Quiet, he’s seen us,” she hissed, as though playing cat and mouse, slipping her white paper bag under her coat. The burly usher with the bouncer’s gait and the clip-on tie walked up to us. “Youse waiting for the seven-ten show?” he asked. “Affirmatov. We is,” she replied, staring at his face and handing him our tickets. He took them in one palm and, rather than tear them in two, dropped into her hand what looked like two crushed spitballs.

  “What’s this?” she said, holding the mangled stubs in an open palm. The man did not answer. “He chewed them with his hands,” she added as we took our seats. Once again she revealed the white paper bag. “I got coffee.” “Did you get one for me too?” I asked, pretending I hadn’t heard the first time. “No, I only do things for me,” she snapped as she handed me mine, with a look that said, Needs constant reassurance. I watched her remove the plastic cover, add the sugar, stir it, and, after placing the cover back on the cup, lift the tab. “I like coffee.”

  It sounded like a bashful admission.

  I liked coffee too, I said. It was good coffee. I liked coffee in movie theaters. I also liked where we were seated. This is just perfect, I caught myself saying.

  “Do you think I was mean to him?”

  “Who?”

  “The bouncer. Gave me the dirtiest look since last he boozed Stolies in Bratislavovich. He mad.”

  We waited for the theater to grow dark. Another surprise. She dug deeper in the same paper bag and produced two halves of a large sandwich. “Very très goormay,” she whispered, taking an indirect swipe at Manhattan’s love affair with the finer things of the palate. The sudden smell of garlic cheese and prosciutto was overpowering. Once again she burst out laughing. Someone asked us to be quiet.

  Then we sank deeper into our seats. “This isn’t going to be boring, is it?” she said as the credits began to roll.

  “Might be deadly.”

  “Good. Just wanted to make sure we’re in this together.”

  An abrupt “Shush” shot out from behind us again.

  “Shush yourself!”

  Then suddenly we were in the black-and-white universe I’d been longing for all day. The town of Clermont-Ferrand around Christmas, the man studying Pascal where Pascal was born, the drive down the crowded narrow streets of a provincial French town lightly decorated with Christmas lights. The blond girl. The dark girl. The church. The café. Would Clara really like this?

  I didn’t dare look in her direction. Did p
eople go together to the movies to see movies or to be together, or because they liked each other and this is what one did sometimes when one liked someone—one went to the movies with her, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Did one switch from watching the movie to being together, and at what point did one stop switching from one to the other? Why was I even asking all this? Did asking automatically put me in the camp of those who wonder about being natural and who suspect others do not nurse the same doubts about themselves, or did others secretly hope that everyone was as diffident as they were? Was she thinking about being natural? Or was she just watching the movie?

  She was staring intently at the screen, as though resolved to ignore me now. Then, without warning, she ribbed me with her elbow, all the while sucking in her cheeks and looking straight before her, chewing words that were sure to be nasty. I had seen her do it with Rollo on the terrace in a moment of suppressed anger. Why had she nudged me that way?

  Then I got it. Clara was not upset at all. She was struggling not to burst out laughing, and by ribbing me as she was doing a second time now, she was making sure I was aware of her struggle and, better yet, passing it on to me.

  “What possessed me to ask for garly cheese—what was I thinking?”

  I was about to throw in a possible guess when she ribbed me yet again, waving me away with her hand, as though anything I might breathe was sure to make her explode. Tears of suppressed laughter were welling up in her eyes—which finally gave me a case of the giggles as well. “Want more garly?” she began. It was my turn to brush her away.

  It took me a few seconds to note that she had spun out a new version of a word I thought was intimate kitchenspeak between us. Can’t get too cozy with her.

  The film. Blond girl. Dark girl. Blond girl is virtuous, dark girl a temptress. Catholic man refuses to be snared. Snowbound on Christmas Eve, the man is forced to spend the night in dark girl’s apartment, in her bedroom, finally in her bed. Nothing happens, but toward dawn, when the flesh is weak and he is just about to make a move, she jumps out of bed. “I prefer men who know what they want.” That same morning, outside a café, man runs into blond girl.

  At intermission, Clara suddenly got up and said she had to make a phone call.

  •

  Left alone, I looked around in the dimly lit darkness of the movie theater, watching people arrive, mostly in pairs. A group of four men and a woman filed in, each drinking from a huge cup, unable to decide where to sit, until one of them pointed to the back and whispered, “How about there?” A couple stood up to let them squeeze through. One of the five turned to the other and said, “Say thank you.” “Thank you,” played along the other. The atmosphere was charged with subdued excitement. People had come from all around the city for this film and, despite their differences, knew they shared something, though it was impossible to tell exactly what. It might have been their love for Eric Rohmer’s films. Or their love of France, or of the idea of France, or of those confused, intimate, random moments in our lives that Rohmer had borrowed for an hour or so; he’d drawn them out, scaled down their roughness, removed all accidentals, given them a rhythm, a cadence, a wisdom even, and then projected them onto a screen and promised to return them to us after the show, though slightly altered, so that we’d have our lives back, but seen from the other side—not as they were, but as we’d always imagined they should be, the idea of our lives.

  I tried to imagine these five friends huddled in a corner at the Starbucks next door as they waited for the first film to end and then rushing to catch the last show. Here they were now. One of them produced a bag of doughnuts, which he had smuggled into the theater under his coat and was now passing around. Within a minute or so, another girl holding a giant container of popcorn wandered into the theater, looked momentarily lost, then spotted her group and walked up the stairs toward them. “I also got these,” she said, producing two large yellow boxes of M&Ms.

  I liked being lost in this crowd, liked these people who had escaped the swarming, cold, floodlit city to this quiet oasis on the Upper West Side where each hoped to catch a glimpse of an imaginary, inner France. I liked knowing that Clara was out in the hallway somewhere and would be coming back—liked thinking that the world could be shut out for a few hours and, as soon as she was back from wherever she had gone to make her phone call, sitting close together like passengers in a crowded ferry boat, we would once again drift into this strange, beguiling fantasy world of Rohmer’s invention that might be more in us than in the films themselves. I looked around at the groups and couples in the theater: some were clearly happier than others—happier than I, than people who were not lovers, though it was still good to be among them. I liked the idea that dropping Rohmer’s name in the wee hours of the morning last night had made her want to see this film with me.

  This was not how I had imagined my evening. Now I was thrilled that this was the course it had taken, that someone had unexpectedly turned up, and that this someone should be Clara, Clara with whom laughter was easier than with anyone else, Clara who knew how to make things happen long before I was aware of wanting them, and who, with two theater tickets purchased before my arrival, had given me the best Christmas present I’d received since childhood—a present that could turn into air, for Clara could have gone to phone another man at this very moment and, being impulsive, could just as easily come back to pick up her things and leave me stranded in my seat. Sorry, have to run, enjoyed the film—great seeing you.

  But as I sat there, worrying about this, I knew that worrying was also my way of paying token tribute to unfounded fears before admitting that tonight I was indeed happy. Waiting for her made me happy. Coddling the thought she’d even spurn my way of waiting for her made me happy. Rehearsing her abrupt goodbye as soon as we’d leave the movie theater in two hours made me happy. And what made me happier yet wasn’t just that we were together again after scarcely spending the day apart, but that her presence made me like the way the day had turned out, made me like my life and the way I lived it. She was the face of my life and how I lived it, my eyes to the world staring back at me. The people in the theater, the people I had known, the books read, lunch with Olaf, who bad-mouths his wife, the places I’d lived in, my life on ice, and all the things I still wanted, all had suddenly turned a dearer and more vulnerable face under her spell—for this was a spell, and struck like a spell, and, like all spells, ushered in new colors, new people, new scents, new habits, unveiling new meanings, new patterns, new laughter, a new cadence to things—even if, all along, a small unseen, untapped part of me was perfectly willing to suspect, as though for good measure, that I could just as easily have preferred the spell more than the person who cast it, the coded sparring between us more than the person I was sparring with, the me-because-of-Clara more than Clara herself.

  Clara had left her coat on her seat. I let my hand rest on her coat, stared at its lining, touched the inner lining. Clara. It was also my way of remembering I was not alone, that she would very shortly come back and take up her seat again and tell me—or perhaps not—why she had taken so long. Sometimes just placing my coat next to my seat when I am alone in a movie theater is itself a way of conjuring a presence in the dark, of imagining that someone has stepped out for a second and will any moment come back—which is what happens in the dead of night, when those who have left our lives suddenly lie next to us no sooner than we’ve whispered their name into our pillow. Clara, I thought, and there she’d be, taking the seat next to mine.

  And as I listened to the violin sonata by Beethoven, which always appears in this theater as soon as the intermission lights come on, I remembered that no more than three winters ago I had done the very same with someone else’s coat while she had gone to buy sodas at the concession stand. I’d pretended we had broken up or that she had never even existed, only to be surprised when she returned and pushed down the seat next to mine. Afterward, we had left the movie theater and had bought the Sunday paper and ambled
home in the snow, speaking of Maud and of Chloé, improvising dinner somewhere after visiting a bookstore. It seemed so long ago. And I thought back to a much younger I who had come to this very theater alone one Saturday night and, while looking for a seat without disturbing too many people, had overheard a man ask a woman, “Do you like Beethoven?” The woman, who had let her coat hang on the backrest of her seat, slouched over it and, turning to him, had replied something like “Yes, very much, but this sonata I hate.” They were, even I could tell, on their first date.

  That night I’d hurled a hopeful and mystified glance to the future, asking who would the woman be in my life who’d sit next to me and listen to this piece by Beethoven and say, Yes, but this sonata I hate. They knew so little about each other that the man needed to ask whether she liked Beethoven. It had never occurred to me until now that all he was trying to do was make conversation.

  Yes, but this sonata I hate, I had repeated to myself, as though the mildly miffed tone of her words held a key that might unlock a passageway to where I wished my life to go one day—words that seemed fraught with intimations that were as stirring and reckless as a compliment I had never heard before and desperately wished to have repeated. Yes, but this sonata I hate meant, I can say anything to you. It’s good to be together on this cold night. Move closer and we’ll touch elbows. Now, reexamining her unguarded response years later, I realized that I knew no more about the shoals between men and women than I did then; nor did I even know what my mystified wish had been that night when I sat alone thinking ahead of myself, hoping to trace the pattern my life might take, and never for a moment realizing that the questions I had asked of life then would come bobbing back to me years later in the same bottle, unanswered.