by André Aciman
•
It felt good to be alone and think of her and coddle the thrill in my mind without letting go. Here, before crossing the street, she had spoken to me of Leo Czernowicz’s lost pianola roll of Handel’s arias and sarabandes as one speaks of unsolved crimes and missing heirlooms. I wondered if the bootprints before me were hers. No one else had stepped on this side of the park since we’d headed toward her building. She had hummed the first few bars, the same voice I’d heard last night. Just a voice, I thought. And yet.
“I’d love to,” I’d said when she asked if I wanted to hear Czernowicz’s lost pianola roll one day.
When I walked into the park from the same exact spot where I’d entered last night, I knew that I would once again step into a realm of silence and ritual—a soft, quiet, limelit world where time stops and where one thinks of miracles, and of quiet beauty, and of how the things we want most in life are so rarely given that when they are finally granted we seldom believe, don’t dare touch, and, without knowing, turn them down and ask them to reconsider whether it’s really us they’re truly being offered to. Wasn’t this what I had done when I prematurely buttoned up my coat in front of her doorman—to show that I could take my leave and not say anything about meeting again, or coming upstairs, staying upstairs? Why go out of my way to show so much indifference, when it would have been obvious to a two-year-old . . . Strange. No, not strange. Typical. The distance of a day had changed nothing between us. I was no closer to her now than I’d been last night. If anything, the distance was greater now and had solidified into something more pointed, craggier.
As I loitered about the park and looked around me, I knew I didn’t mind the sorrow, didn’t mind the loss. I loved lingering in her park, liked the snow, the silence, liked feeling totally rudderless and lost, liked suffering, if only because it brought me back to last night’s vigil and enchantment. Come here as often as you please, come here after every one of your hopes is dashed, and I’ll restore you and make you whole, and give you something to remember and feel good by, just come and be with me, and I’ll be like love to you.
I cleared the snow off the same bench I had used last night and sat down. Let everything be like last night. I crossed my arms and, at the risk of being seen from her window, sat there staring at the bare trees. No one in the park. Just the statue, its lean, sandaled foot hanging from the pedestal, snow resting on her toes. Behind me, I made out the rhythmic rattle of a tire chain, reminding me of old-style patrol cars. A police car did appear from nowhere, turned on 106th, and sidled up to a parked bus. A silent greeting between the two drivers. Then the patrol car swooped around, made a brisk U-turn, and began speeding down West End. Officer Rahoon and two other cops. Good thing he didn’t see me. Officer Rahoon, Muldoon, and Culhoon—three cops in a carriage, three beers and a cabbage. Was that it, then, the magic gone, Cinderella’s back mop-ping floors?
Total silence descended.
The lamppost nearest me stood upon its gleaming pool of light and, once again, seemed to lean toward me as it had done last night, as eager to help, though still without knowing how.
What had it all meant? I wondered—the staring, the chummy-chummy hug-hug and perfunctory two kisses, French-style, the bit about how she knows herself, and telling me not to look so glum, and so much talk of lying low, and mournful hints of love and admonition laced into the sad tale of lost Czernowhiskeys, all of it capped with a bitter I don’t think I need to spell it out, it might ruin things, like venom at the end of a love bite.
Ruin what things? Do me a favor!
Just don’t fall in love with me. Which is when she planted a kiss under my ear—You smell good, uttered almost like a jeer and an afterthought. Venom, venom, venom. Venom and its antidote, like the warm, puffed taste of newly baked bread on a cold morning when the crust suddenly cuts into your gum and turns the most wholesome taste on earth into rank and fulsome gunk. No things, okay? meaning, No sullen faces, no sulky-pouties, no guilt stuff, okay? Because it could turn into her hell. Get real, Schwester! The mopey heiress from Maine didn’t rattle so many keys before unlocking the fortress. The small-time hussy speaks the lingo of eternity—do me a favor! And all that talk of lying low—what prattle and claptrap!
I heard the bus driver turn on his engine. The lights inside the bus flickered on. How snug the foggy orange glow behind the glass panes, a haven from the cold. Just me and the bus driver, the bus driver and me.
Perhaps it was time for me to leave as well, though I didn’t want to yet. And suddenly it came to me. I should call her, shouldn’t I? Just call her. And say what? I’d figure something out. Time I did something—always waiting for others to do—tell the truth for a change, engage, for crying out loud. I don’t want to be alone tonight. There! She’d know what to say to that. She’d keep the conversation going; and even if she had to say no, it would be a kind no, as in: Can’t, lying low, you see? Ah, but to hear her say it that way, Can’t, lying low, you see? like a reluctant caress that starts but then lingers on your face and shoots straight to your mouth and unbuckles your heart. I reached for my cell. She was the last person to call—hours ago. We’d exchanged numbers while still waiting on line, and she said, Let me call you instead, this way you’ll have my number too. This was before the admonition, before Affirmatov had taken our tickets and crushed them in his fist. There was her number. My heart instantly sank, for the task seemed beyond me. What else were you planning to do with me but call? asked my phone, now that I held it in my hand. I imagined the sharp sound of her ten numerals chiming away like metal spikes hammered into splintering rock, followed by the grumbling, minatory drumroll of the ringing itself. Academy 2—fancy people still using Academy as a prefix, I’d said to her, to tease her or imply there was something willfully dated and archaic, even a touch precious in the way she’d given me her phone number. Now it was her number’s turn to make fun of me, like a tiny reptile that looked totally docile in the pet store when the salesman made you rub its tummy with the tip of your finger but that now bites into your fingernail and then tears it out. She justified giving out her telephone number that way, because, she said, this was how her mother would say it and how, to very few people whom she felt comfortable with, she continued to say it—with the implication that you ranked among those who instantly understood that her Old World and your Old World shared a lineage in common, though not necessarily on the same branch, because what was defunct and obsolete in you was retro-swanky-cutting-edge in her, and, despite great-grandparents in common and a language in common, we might not have belonged on the same tree at all. So there! Academy 2 for the happy few.
I thought of her phone number—generations of phone calls from desperate boyfriends. How did it ring when you called her late at night? Could she tell by its ring whether it came from hopelessness or guilt or anger and blame or from shyness that hangs up after three rings? Did jealousy have a telltale ring that shouted louder truths than are dreamt of in caller ID?
Oh, Inky, Inky, Inky. How many times had he called tonight? He’d be calling right now. As I would myself. I imagined calling her. Ringing once. Ringing twice. Suddenly she picks up. Huffing. I can hear the water running in the background. Party’s over, Cinderella’s mopping floors. Inky? No, it’s me. It’s you. It’s me. Me trying not to pull an Inky. But clearly doing just that. How do you say I don’t want to be alone tonight now that I can’t think what to say next? Just like that: I don’t want to be alone tonight. Maybe with a question mark? Maybe not. A woman would be crazy not to let you say all this.
An M104 bus stopped on the corner of 106th and Broadway. I caught it just in time and, before sitting, watched the triangular park fade into the snowstorm. I may never see this place again in the snow. And just as I was beginning to believe it, I knew I was lying to myself. I’d come back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and after that as well, with or without her, with or without Rohmer, and just sit here and hope to find a way to avoid thinking that I’d lost her twi
ce in two nights, sensing all along that hers was the face I’d put up around this park to screen me from myself, from all the lies I round up by night if only to think I’m not alone at dawn.
•
Later that night, I was awakened by the loud bang of a snowplow scraping my street. Suddenly I was filled with a feeling so exquisite that, once again, I could only call it joy, Pascal’s word spoken in his solitary room one night at Port-Royal.
It reminded me of that moment when we’d walked out of the bar after last call and found the snow blanketing 105th Street. Our arms kept rubbing each other until she slipped hers into mine. I’d wished our walk might never end.
I got out of bed and looked out the window and saw how peacefully the snow had blanketed the rooftops and side streets of Manhattan. It was—perhaps because it reminded me so much of Brassaï—a stunning black-and-white spectacle of the rooftops of Paris or of Clermont-Ferrand, or of any French provincial town at night, and the joy that suddenly burst within me cast so limitless a spell in my bedroom as I tiptoed my way to another window next to my desk to glimpse a different view of the world by night that I caught myself trying to avoid making any sound: not let the wood floor creak under my feet, or the old counter-weights on the sash give their telltale thud when I’d raise the window just a crack and let the cold air in, not do anything to disturb the silence that had glided in as on the wingtips of an angel, because, as I stood watching the night, I could so easily make believe that hidden under my comforter lay someone whose sleep was as light and restive as mine. When I’d come back to bed, I’d try not to move much, find a spot on the right side and lie still and wait for sleep, all the while hoping it wouldn’t come until I’d smuggled the image of her naked body into my dreams.
Tomorrow, first thing, I’d rush out, have breakfast, and try to see my friends and tell them about Clara. Then I’d take a stroll through a department store, lunch at the Whitney among throngs of tourists snapping pictures with their jet-set grandparents, shop for Christmas presents on the day after Christmas, all of it punctuated by the diffident premonition that tonight might happen all over again, must happen all over again, may never ever happen again.
Once again, my mind drifted back to that moment when we’d walked out of the bar after last call and found fresh snow on 105th Street. She’d kissed me on the neck and, after telling me never to hope for anything, snuggled her arm into mine, as though to mean Never mind all this but Never forget all this. Now, in the dark, with the memory of her body leaning on mine, all I had to do was say her name and she’d be under the covers, move an inch and I’d encounter a shoulder, a knee, whisper her name again and again till I’d swear she was whispering mine as well, our voices twined in the dark, like those of two lovers in an ancient tale playing courtship games with one and the same body.
THIRD NIGHT
I was in the shower the next morning when I heard the buzzer downstairs. I jumped out of the bathtub, raced past the kitchen door, and yelled a loud “Who is it?” into the intercom, water dripping everywhere.
“It’s me” came the garbled voice in the box, not the doorman’s.
“Me who?” I shouted, exasperated at the deliveryman, as I began frisking for loose bills, first on my dresser, then through last night’s trousers hanging on a chair.
“Me” came the same voice, followed by a moment’s pause. “Me,” it repeated. “Moah.” Another pause. “Me, Shukoff. Me, lying-low. Misosouporsalad. Me, goddamnit! How quickly we forget.”
Silence again.
“I’m driving to Hudson,” she shouted.
I demurred a moment. What about Hudson? Did she want to come up? I asked. The thought of her coming upstairs swept through me like an indecent and almost guilty thrill. Let her see my crumpled world, my socks, my bathrobe, my foul rag-and-bone shop, my life.
“Thanks, but no thanks.” She’d wait in the lobby, she didn’t mind, just don’t take too long—was I sleeping?
“No, shower.”
“What?”
“Sho-wer.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Just hurry,” she cried, as if I had already agreed to come.
“Actually—” I hesitated.
There was a dead silence.
“Actually, what? Are you that busy?” she blurted out.
The static on the intercom couldn’t muffle the irony crackling over each syllable.
“Okay. Okay. I’ll be down in five.”
She must have grabbed the phone from the doorman.
There goes my regular breakfast at the corner Greek diner, I thought. Newspaper waiting by the cash register, crossword puzzle I never care to finish, thimble-sized glass of orange juice as soon as they spot you trundling through the snow, omelet, hash browns, and small tinfoiled packets of very processed jam—they know me there—speak a few words of Helleniki with the waitress, pretend we’re both flirting, which is flirting twice-removed, then stare out and let your mind drift. I could almost hear the sound of the door, with its thumb lock permanently stuck down, followed by the bell and rattle of the glass panel as you shut the door behind you real fast, rubbing your palms from the cold, scanning for an empty table by the window, then sit and wait for that magical moment when you’ll stare out and let your mind drift.
Six hours ago, just six hours ago I was standing outside her building watching her disappear into the elevator.
Now she was standing outside my building, waiting. Suddenly the words I’d spoken to her last night in bed came back to me, word for word. You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended. I wish it had gone on and on, and that we’d kept walking all the way to the river, then headed downtown, and who knows where else by now, past the marina and the boats where she’d once told me Pavel and Pablo lived, to Battery Park City all the way over and across the bridge to Brooklyn, walking and walking right until dawn. Now she was downstairs. You know that walk . . . The words coursed through me like a secret wish I’d failed to expiate last night. I wanted to take the elevator downstairs and, tying the knot of my bathrobe, drip into the main lobby and tell her, You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended, never ended. Just the thought of saying these words to her now as I was hastily drying myself made me want to be naked with her.
When I finally saw her downstairs in the lobby, I complained that eight o’clock was an unseemly hour to drag people out of their homes. “You love it,” she interrupted. “Hop in, we’ll have breakfast on the way. Take a look.”
She indicated the passenger seat of a silver BMW. Two grande coffees stood at a precarious angle, not in the cup holders below the dashboard, but right on the passenger seat itself, as if she had plopped both down in what I took to be her typical impatience with small things. There were also what appeared to be neatly wrapped muffins—“Purchased just around your block,” she said. She had bought them with me and no one else in mind, it seemed, which meant she knew she’d find me, knew I’d be happy to come along, knew I liked muffins, especially when they had this vague scent of cloves. I wondered whom else she’d have barged in on if she hadn’t found me. Or was I already the standby? Why think this way?
“Where to?” I asked.
“We’re visiting an old friend. He lives in the country—you’ll like him.”
I said nothing. Another Inky, I figured. Why bring me along?
“He’s been living there ever since leaving Germany before the war.” She must have inherited this from her parents. They called it the war, not World War II. “Knows everything—”
“—about everything.” I knew the type.
“Just about. Knows every piece of recorded music.”
I pictured a fretful old garmento type hobbling on frayed slippers around a large gramophone. Tell me, Liebchen, what watch? Do you know that land where the citrus blooms? I wanted to make fun of him. “Another Knöwitall Jäcke,” I said.
She caught my skepticism and my attempted humor.
&nbs
p; “He’s lived more lives here and elsewhere than you and I put together multiplied by eight to the power of three.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say. He goes back to a time when the world ganged up on every last Jew, and all that was left of Europe was a tiny spot off a magical lakeside town overlooking a canton in Switzerland. There, my father, Hans, and Fred Pasternak met in elementary school, which was why my father insisted I go to school there for a while. There, for your nymphormation, Max turned the pages for the man who’d once turned them for the man who’d turned them for the last of Beethoven’s pupils. Maybe I worship him.”
I hated her blind adulation. No doubt she hated my senseless wish to deride him. “So don’t you be the knöwitall.” She repeated my word to soften her censure. “We’re going to hear some stuff he’s unearthed—pretty amazing too, if you care to know.”
A chill suddenly hovered between us. To fend it off, we kept quiet. Let the fog pass, let it disperse and drift away and spill out of the car like the cigarette smoke being sucked out of the tiny crack in her window. Our silence told me not just that our thoughts were temporarily elsewhere, or that anger was blocking something between us, but that she, like me, and without wishing to call attention to it, was desperately scrambling to make last-minute repairs to save the moment.