by André Aciman
All those years, and all I’m still trying to do is make conversation!
All those years, and all I want to show is that I’m not scared of silence, of women.
I thought of the lovers again. I had caught sight of them once more outside the theater as everyone waited for the rain to stop. Then the years went by. Then someone came along, and perhaps on our first date I too had asked what she thought of Beethoven and, by so doing, put a check mark next to the question that signaled entrance to the rose garden. We too had waited for the rain to subside. Then I went alone to the movie theater. Then with others. Then alone. Then with others again.
Had I seen more films alone or with others? And which had I liked more? I wondered.
Would Clara say alone was better, but then, just when I was about to agree with her, turn around and say that, in the dark, she still needed otherpeoples, an elbow to rub against?
The road once traveled seemed filled with potholes now.
Perhaps I would tell her all this.
The pleasure of peeling back the years and laying myself bare before her aroused me. The pleasure of telling her anything about me aroused me.
To tell her: For a moment I made myself fear that I was only imagining you were with me tonight. Want to know why?
I know why.
Would I tell her I’d thought about her the whole day, or would I suggest something a bit tamer, that our meeting outside the theater seemed lifted from every film I’d seen and presaged the course of many a Rohmer tale? I could tell her I’d walked many blocks in search of open stores, and all I could think of was her, looked for her, stopped somewhere for coffee, almost certain I had spotted her, but, knowing better than to hope, had given each place a cursory glance, then walked away, just as she was calling me a million times? Should I tell her that I’d rehearsed telling her all this?
I remembered the failing late-afternoon sun and how gradually it began to spell loneliness and dejection after I’d lunched with Olaf, its waffling light taking me down with it as I watched the day put an end to its misery—and yet, in the background always that unwieldy hope that the clock would turn back twenty-four hours and take me to exactly where I’d been yesterday evening, before boarding the uptown M 5 bus, before buying two bottles of Champagne, before leaving my mother’s home on my way to the liquor store . . .
I’d been heading uptown all afternoon. Scoping out her territory, on the fringes of her territory. You always run into the one person you’d give anything to run into, baiting them with desire, your own.
But, then, fearing she might run into me and guess why I’d wandered so far uptown, I decided to head home instead. By the time I left again and arrived at the movie theater, the show was sold out. I should have known. Christmas.
•
When she finally sat down next to me, the lights were already dimming. She wasn’t her jovial self any longer. She seemed agitated. “What’s wrong?” “Inky’s crying,” she said. Did she want to leave? No. He always cried. Why had she called him, then? Because he was leaving too many messages on her voice mail. “I shouldn’t have called.” Someone again shushed us from behind. “Shush yourself!” she snapped.
I thought I liked her irked and groused manner, but this was too much. I began to think of poor Inky, and of his tears over the phone, and of the men who cry for the Claras they love—a man who weeps on the phone must be in the bowels of despair. Had she told him she was with me?
“No, he thinks I’m in Chicago,” she whispered.
I looked at her with baffled eyes, not because she had lied, but at the absurdity of the lie. “I’m just not going to answer my phone,” she said. This seemed to ease her mind, as though she had suddenly stumbled on the one solution capable of dispelling all her worries. She put her glasses back on, took a sip from her coffee, sat back, and was clearly ready to enjoy the second film. “Why would he keep calling if he thinks you’re in Chicago?” I asked.
“Because he knows I’m lying.”
She was staring straight in front of her, making it clear she was intentionally not looking in my direction. Then with a huff—
“Because he likes to hear my voice on the outgoing message, okay? Because he likes to leave long messages on my answering machine that I erase no sooner than I hear them and are sheer torture when I’m there with someone and he knows I am, but goes on yapping and yapping away until I lose my patience and pick up. Because he knows I’m fed up. Okay?”
This was rage speaking.
“Because he lingers on the sidewalk and spies on me, and waits for my lights to go on.”
“How do you know?”
“He tells me.”
“I don’t think I want to touch this,” I said with marked, overstated irony, meaning I didn’t want to risk adding anything that would further upset her, and was now graciously backtracking with a hint of humor to ease our passage into movie mode.
“Don’t.” She cut me short.
Don’t stung me to the quick. She’d spoken this word once last night, and it had had the same chilling effect. It shut me up. It stayed with me for the remainder of the second film, a cold, blunt admonition not to meddle or try to ingratiate myself with the intrusive goodwill of people who pry and wheedle their way into private zones where they aren’t invited. Worse yet, she was mixing me up with him.
“He prowls downstairs, and whenever he sees my lights come on, eventually he calls.”
•
“I feel for him,” I said when we sat after the movie at a bar close to her home. She liked Scotch and french fries. And she liked coming here, occasionally, with friends. They served Scotch in a wineglass here. I liked Scotch and ended up picking at her fries.
“Then you feel for him.” Silence. “Feel for him all you want. You and everyone else.”
Silence again.
“The truth is, I feel for him too,” she added a moment later. She thought awhile longer. “No. I don’t feel a thing.”
We were sitting at a small, old, square wooden table in the back of a bar-restaurant that she said she liked because late on weeknights, especially when the place was empty, they would sometimes let you smoke. She had a wineglass in front of her, both elbows spread on the table, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, and between us, a tiny lighted candle, sitting in a paper bag like a tiny kitten curled in a rolled-down sock. She had pulled the sleeves of her sweater up, and one could make out a shade of down along her bony wrists, which were red from the cold. It was an oversized home-knit sweater made of very thick, brushed wool stitches. I thought of heather, and of large winter shawls, and of flushed naked bodies wrapped in sheepskin. “Let’s talk of something else, can we?” She seemed mildly annoyed, bored, vexed.
“Like what?” I asked.
Did she actually believe in choreographed conversation?
“Why not talk about you.”
I shook my head to mean, You’re joking, right?
She shook her head to mean, Absolutely not joking. “Yes, that’s it,” she said, as she dismissed any possibility of hesitation on my part. “We’ll talk about you.”
I wondered whether she suddenly perked up and was leaning over the table toward me because she was truly curious about me or because she was enjoying this sudden turn from pity-the-woman-with-the-wrong-ex-boyfriend to hard-nosed cross-examiner.
“There’s so little to say.”
“Tell!”
“Tell . . .” I repeated her command, trying to make light of it. “Tell what?”
“Well, for one thing, tell why there’s so little to say.”
I didn’t know why there was so little to say. Because there’s so little about me I care to talk about before knowing it’s quite safe to—and even then . . . ? Because the person I am and the person I wish I were at this very moment in the bar aren’t always on speaking terms? Because I feel like a shadow right now and can’t fathom why you can’t see this? What was she really asking me to say?
“Anything but blan
d pieties.”
“No bland pieties—promise!”
She seemed thrilled by my reply and was eagerly anticipating what I was about to say, like a child who’s just been promised a story.
“And?”
“And?” I asked.
“And keep going . . .”
“Depends what you charge.”
“A lot. Ask around. So, why is there so little to say?”
I wanted to say that I didn’t know where to go with her question and that, because its candor made evasion an unworthy option, I was drawing a complete blank—a complete blank that I didn’t want to talk about so soon, the complete blank sitting between us, Clara, that is crying to be talked about. A Rosetta stone in the rose garden, that’s what I am. Give me a pumice stone, and it’ll be my turn to bash every evasion in my mouth. My pumice stone, your pumice stone, I should have brought mine along tonight and dumped it on the table and said, “Ask the pumice stone.” Did she want to know what I’d done in the past five years, where I’d been, whom I’d loved or couldn’t love, what my dreams were, those at night and those by day, those I wouldn’t dare own up to, a penny for my thoughts? Ask the pumice stone.
“And don’t give me the obituary you. Give me the real you.”
Ask the pumice stone, Clara, ask the pumice stone. It knows me better than I do myself.
I raised my eyes, more flustered than ever. It was then that I felt the words almost slip from my mouth. She was looking at me longer than I expected. I returned her gaze and held her eyes awhile, thinking that perhaps she was lost in thought and had absentmindedly let her glance linger on mine. But her silence had interrupted nothing, and she wasn’t absent at all. She was just staring.
I averted my eyes, pretending to be absorbed in deep, faraway thoughts that I didn’t quite know how to confide. I watched her fingers fold the corners of her square paper napkin around the base of her wineglass. When I looked up, her gaze was still glued on me. I still hadn’t said a thing.
I wondered whether this was how she was with everyone—simply stares, doesn’t stuff silence with words, looks you straight in the face, and then bores through each of your frail little bulwarks, and, without shifting her glance, begins smiling a lukewarm, impish smile that seems almost amused that you’ve finally figured she’s figured you out.
Should I stare back? Or was there no challenge in her gaze, no unspoken message to be intercepted or deciphered? Perhaps it was the stare of a woman whose beauty could easily overwhelm you, but then, rather than withdraw after achieving its effect, simply lingered on your face and never let go till it read every good or bad thought it knew it would find and had probably planted there, straining the conversation, promising intimacy before its time, demanding intimacy as one demands surrender, breaking through the lines of casual conversation long before preliminary acts of friendship had been put in place, daring you to admit what she’d known all along: that you were easily flustered in her presence, that she was right, all men are ultimately more uneasy with desire than the women they desire.
For a moment, I thought I caught a mild, questioning nod. Was I imagining things? Or was she about to say something but then thought better of it and retracted it just in time?
Still, someone had to say something. I’d brace myself before taking the bold plunge.
“Do you always stare at men like this?”
I nipped the words just in time. But a moment more under her gaze and I would have broken down and said something more desperate, anything to ward off the silence and choke the chaos of words welling up inside me, words that were still totally unknown to me and seemed to skulk in the backdrop like tiny unfledged, unsprung, jittery creatures caught in their larval stage and that, given the opportunity, would spill out of me and reveal more about me than I knew myself—how I felt, what I wanted, what I couldn’t even suggest or hint at, opening a door I dreaded but was willing to venture through if only I knew how to shut it afterward. Was I going to say anything simply to say something? Is this what people do? Say something instead of nothing, go with the moment? Or, in an effort to avoid taking chances, was I going to utter something unintended and irrelevant: “Do you always ask people to tell you about themselves?” I nipped this as well.
“What a silly, unrealistic movie,” I found myself saying, not sure why I had said it, or to which of the two films I was referring, especially since I knew I liked both films and didn’t necessarily consider realism a virtue. I had said it with an air of resigned gravity and preoccupation, attributing the vague dismay in my voice to something awkward and disturbing in the films themselves.
I was simply trying to conceal my inability to come out and say something that didn’t bear on the two of us.
She misunderstood me completely. “Unrealistic because no one sleeps together in Rohmer’s films?” she asked.
I shook my head with a hint of troubled irony, meaning she was so off base that I’d rather erase my misguided attempt at casual conversation and start all over with something else. She let a moment pass.
“You mean because we’re not sleeping together tonight?” she said.
It came from nowhere. But there it was. She hadn’t misunderstood a thing. Or, if I thought she had, it was only because she had taken the words from my mind and given them a spin that wouldn’t have occurred to me so soon but was the only one eager to be heard.
“It had occurred to me,” I said, pretending I wasn’t startled by her thunderbolt. I was attempting an amused smile that meant to overstate her reading of the situation and by so doing to suggest how far off the mark it fell—my way of parrying her dart with an equally pointed admission of my own. She right away dismissed it with an arch smile to mean I thought as much—a variation on what the woman on the terrace had asked her companion when he put an arm around her while holding a cigar in his other hand. Are you hitting on me?
The silence that rose between us as quickly as steam from a sprinkled clump of dry ice made it clear that neither had anything to add and that we both wanted the subject swept aside by whatever means. “ Nev-er mind,” she intoned, with the self-mocking strain of people who have ventured too far but who, to smooth ruffled waters, are merely pretending to be unhinged by their boldness. Her smile either underscored her outspoken remark or suggested she did not believe I was as unfazed by it as I wished to seem. “That was just in case,” she said, raising her eyes at me once more. And then it came: “In case I hadn’t made it clear last night. I’m just lying low,” she added, something almost helpless and modest in her voice. She had used the exact same tone last night, lacing, as she always seemed to do in difficult moments, straight talk with double-talk, blandspeak with sadspeak. But this time she wasn’t saying it about herself or about her reclusion from those around her; she was saying it to me, staving me off, shooing me away. It occurred to me that if she was with me on this Christmas night, it was precisely because she was lying low. We would never have met, or spoken, or stood on the terrace together, much less been to the movies or sat in a bar as we were doing now, if she wasn’t in Rekonvaleszenz and if I hadn’t taken on the role of night nurse, the visitor who stays long past visiting hours, the last hand that gently turns the lights down after the patient’s finally dozed off.
As she explained when I walked her home later that night and watched her look for ways to underscore the words lying low, she was always this far from crying, she said, indicating, as she’d done last night, the distance between her thumb and her forefinger. But when we finally reached the entrance to her building, the girl who could come this close to crying would suddenly turn on me and remind me, with goading raillery, not to look so glum. I’d been forewarned, hadn’t I? Suddenly the distance between us was wider than the distance between ice poles.
•
I had tried, at the bar, to open up and tell her why I liked Rohmer. How I’d discovered him at an age when I knew next to nothing about women or about myself—
“You’re sitting too far
away, I can’t hear you,” she had said. Which is why I brought my face closer to the candle, realizing that I had been sitting almost a whole table width away from her. She didn’t like you to drift. At one point I noticed that while talking to her all you had to do was to sound vaguely tired or let your thoughts seem to stray during a moment of silence and she would immediately look hurt. If I persisted, however, she would punish my distraction first by pretending to be lost in thought herself and then by looking bored or far too interested in what the people next to our table were saying. She played this game better than anyone. “Maybe I should be thinking of going home,” she said, before suggesting we have a second drink. Then: “Finish what you were saying.” This was how she flattered you. The films, I thought, were about men who loved without passion, for no one seemed to suffer in them. “Rohmer’s men talk a good game around love, the better to tame their desires, their fears. They overanalyze things, as though analysis might open up the way to feeling, is a form of feeling, is better than feeling. In the end, they crave the small things, having given up on the big ones—”
“Have you known the big ones?” she interrupted me, honing once again on the unstated subject of our conversation.
I thought awhile. There was a time when I could have sworn I’d known them. Now, in truth, I didn’t think I had. “Sometimes I think I have. Have you?” I asked, still trying to stay vague.
“Sometimes I think I have.” She was mimicking me again. I loved how she did this.
We both laughed—because she had mimicked me quite well, because my answer was indeed hollow, and was meant to sound hollow, because by laughing she herself was hinting she’d have tried to dodge the question, seeing that she too might never have known the big ones and that we had both lied about knowing them to sound a touch less icy than we feared we seemed.
Last call came. We ordered a third round. Not one thing had gone wrong.