by André Aciman
She shook her head—not to mean no, but as though she was shaking me off, meaning, You’ll never catch me, so don’t try. Or: You’re way off, pal.
“So this place has Inky written all over it,” I finally said after waiting for her answer.
“Not Inky.”
“Who, then?” I asked.
“That’s a Door number three question. How much do you charge per hour?”
But she didn’t wait for my answer.
“Me, that’s what’s written all over it. Because this is the spot where it finally hit me that perhaps I didn’t know what love was. Or that I’d practiced the wrong kind. That I’d never know.”
“Did you bring me all the way up here to tell me this?”
This caught her totally by surprise.
“Maybe. Maybe,” she repeated, as if she had never considered the possibility that she’d brought me along to reopen old wounds and help her witness where truth had felled her. Or perhaps she simply wished to see if she’d feel differently with another man. Or was it too soon yet? Lying low and all that.
“I’d sit and watch him drift and drift and drift, as if he were taking me up to that bridge and was going to jump on condition I jumped with him. And I wasn’t going to go up that bridge or jump from it, not with him, not for him, not for anyone, unfortunately; nor was I going to sit around and watch him think of it each time we came here while he stared and said he’d die for me, when the one thing I wanted to tell him the most I couldn’t even say.”
“And that was?”
“So I am paying you by the hour!”
She paused for a moment to catch her breath, or to collect her thoughts—or was she smothering the start of a sob? Or was it a grin?
“That he could go ahead. Mean and nasty. Not that I didn’t care, but that I was never going to love anyone—not him, at any rate. I’d have jumped after him to save him. Maybe. No, not even.” She was playing with her spoon, drawing patterns on the paper napkin. “The rest let’s not talk about.”
“I would have rushed in to save you, wrapped you in all the coats hanging on Edy’s coatrack, screamed for help, breathed into your mouth, saved your life, brought you tea, fed you muffins.” I knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment I’d said it, a lame pass sandwiched in soft-core wit.
“The tea and the coats and muffins I like. The mouth-to-mouth, no, because it’s as I told you last night.”
I stared at her with a startled face. Why say such a thing? I felt I’d been led to the bridge and pushed. Just when she was most vulnerable, most human, at her most candid, out sprang the barbed wire and the serrated fang. Because it’s as I told you last night.
How long would it take me to live this moment down? Months? Years?
We were sitting in what was one of the coziest corners in the world—fireplace, tea, unhindered view of the ancient docks, dead foghorns, quiet coffee shop that probably went back to the days of Coolidge and Hoover and where the distant sounds you heard from deep behind the narrow kitchen window reminded you that there were others on this planet—all the dreamy warmth of a black-and-white romantic film sequence slung along a mean and nasty Hudson. I was tense, awkward, dismayed, trying to seem natural, trying to enjoy her presence, sensing all along that I might have done far better at my local Greek diner, chatted the waitress up, ordered my favorite eggs, read the paper. All of it was wrong now, and I didn’t know how to fix it. It kept breaking.
“Just do me one favor, though, will you?” she said as we were walking along the unpaved icy path toward her car, both of us staring at the ground.
“What?”
“Don’t hate me either.”
The word either, which so clearly subsumed the word we’d been avoiding, struck my pride—just my pride and nothing else—as if pride lined every ridge on my backbone and her word had struck it dead with the quick fell stroke that sends a bull lurching to the dust before it knows what hit it. No weakening of the limbs, no buckling, no teetering in the knees—just dead, pierced, in and out. Not only had I been found out, but what was found out about me was being used against me, as if it were a source of weakness and shame—and it became one precisely because she made me feel she’d used it this way. Does pride bruise more easily than anything else? Why did I hate having everything about me found out, exposed, and put out to dry, like soiled underwear?
I was ashamed both of the hatred I knew myself perfectly capable of, and of the opposite of hatred, which I did not wish to stir up just yet, because I suspected how much of it there was, though placid, like lakes and rivers under ice. Her either had made whatever I felt seem like an indecent breach, a suggestion of slop. Suddenly I wanted to blurt out, “Look, why don’t you go ahead to wherever you’re going, I’ll catch the first train back to the city.” That would have taught her a lesson right there and then. I’d never see her again, never answer the doorbell, never go on drives upstate to rinky-dink luncheonettes where a hungover Captain Haddock is as likely to peep from behind the kitchen curtain as would be an old abortionist come out to dram a shot of rum before whetting his tools on Edy’s broken marble slab by the cash register. Why bother coming this morning, why the ride to God-knows-where, why the simpering Did you think of me last night? when she was telegraphing hands off, now and forever?
“I didn’t upset you, did I?” she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders to mean, You couldn’t if you tried.
Why did I still refuse to acknowledge that she had—why not say something?
“Twice in the same morning—you must think me a real Gorgon.”
“A Gorgon?” I teased, meaning, A Gorgon only?
“You know I’m not,” she said, almost sadly, “you just know I’m not.”
•
“What is your hell, Clara?” I finally asked, trying to speak her language.
She stopped cold, as if I’d thrown her off, or offended her, and had put her in the mood to tell me off. I had asked something no one seemed to have asked before, and it would take a long time before she’d either forgive or forget it.
“My hell?”
“Yes.” Now that I’d asked, there was no turning back. A moment of silence fell between us. The fences, so hastily broken down, had come back up again, only to be pulled down the next minute, and were being raised right back up again.
Was ours a jittery, easy, shallow familiarity, and nothing more? Or did we share the exact same hell, because, like neighbors on the same apartment line, I knew the layout of her home, from the hidden fuse box down to the shelves in her linen closet? “Maybe our hells are not so different after all,” I finally said.
She thought about it.
“If it makes you happy to think so . . .”
In the car she took out her cell phone and decided to call her friend to tell him that we would be there in less than twenty minutes. “No,” she said, after a hasty greeting. Then: “You don’t know him. At a party.” I fastened the seat belt and waited, trying to look nonchalant as though drifting to sleep in the comfort of my reclining seat. “Two days ago.” A complicit glance, aimed in my direction, meant to pacify me. Pause. “Maybe.” He must have asked the same question twice. “I don’t know.” She was growing impatient. “I won’t, I promise. I won’t.” Then, clicking shut her cell phone and looking at me: “I wonder what all that was about,” she said, trying to make light of the questions I’d clearly inferred by her answers.
To change the subject: “When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.
“Last summer.”
“How do you know him?”
“My parents have known him forever. He’s the one who introduced me to Inky.”
“A friend of a friend of a friend?” Why was I trying to be funny when I clearly hated having Inky’s name thrown at me all the time?
“No, not a friend. His grandfather.”
She must have loved scoring this point. She caught the missing question. “We’ve known each other since childhood. If you m
ust know.”
Clara never spoke of Inky in the simple past, as someone permanently locked away in some hardened, inaccessible dungeon of the heart whose key she had tossed in the first moat she crossed no sooner than she left him. She spoke of him in a strange optative mood, the way disenchanted wives speak of husbands who can’t seem to get their act together and should try to pass the bar exam again, or grow up and stop cheating, or make up their minds to have children. She had spoken of him with a grievance that seemed to reach into the present from a past tense that could any moment claim to have a future.
Where did I fit in all this? I should have asked. What on earth was I doing in the car with her? To keep her company so she’d have a warm body to chat with in case she got drowsy? Someone to feed her muffin bits? Was I to devolve into the best-friend sort—the guy you open up to and bare your soul to and walk around naked with because you’ve told him to put away his Guido?
I had never seen it as clearly as I was seeing it now. This was precisely the role I was being cast into, and I was letting it happen, because I didn’t want to upset anything, which was also why I wasn’t going to tell her how much of a Gorgon she’d really been to me. Rollo was right.
“Music?” she asked.
I asked her to play the Handel again.
“Handel it is.”
“Here, this is for you,” she said as soon as she turned on the engine. She handed me a heavy brown paper bag. “What is it?”
“I’m sure it will bring bad memories.”
It was a small snow globe bearing Edy’s name at the bottom. I turned it upside down, then right side up, and watched the snow fall on a tiny log cabin in an anonymous postcard village. It reminded me of us, shielded from everyone and everything that day.
“But they aren’t bad memories for me,” she added. She must have known I’d give everything to kiss the open space between her bare neck and her almost-shoulder when we were sitting in our warm corner at Edy’s. She must have known.
“Romance with snow,” I said, as I stared at the glass globe. “Do you already own one of these?”
It was what I ended up asking instead of Why do you turn on and off like this?
“No, never owned one. I’m not the kind who stows away ticket stubs or old keepsakes; I don’t make memories.”
“You savor and spit, like wine experts,” I said.
She saw where I was headed.
“No, my specialty is heartburn.”
“Remind me never—”
“Don’t be a Printz Oskár!”
•
We arrived at the old man’s house sooner than we figured. The roads were empty, the houses seemed shuttered, as though every family in this part of Hudson County was either hibernating in the city or had flown off to the Bahamas. The house was located at the end of a semicircular driveway. I had imagined a shack, or something unkempt and broken down, held together with the insolent neglect that old age heaps on those who have long given up touching up the world around them. This was a mansion on top of a hill, and right away I guessed that the back overlooked the river. I was right. We stepped out of the car and made our way to the front door. But then Clara had a change of heart and decided to enter by way of a side door, and sure enough, there was the river. We stood outside a large porch with a wrought-iron table and chairs whose cushions had either been removed for the winter season or that disuse and sheer age had totally ruined and which no one bothered to replace. But the wooden path down to the boat dock seemed to have been rebuilt recently—so these people did care for the house, and the cushions on the porch were probably being carefully stowed away during winter. From the porch Clara attempted to open a glass door, but it was locked. So she tapped three times with her knuckles. Once again she put on her little freezing-shoulders performance by rubbing her arms. Why didn’t I believe her? Why not take her at face value? The woman is cold. Why go looking for that something else about her, why the hunt for subtexts? To remember to be cautious? To disbelieve what she’d said to me last night and repeated at least twice this morning?
“Don’t you think it would be wiser to ring the front bell?”
“It just takes them a while. They’re scared of wolves. But I keep telling them all they have here are wild turkeys.”
Sure enough, a Gertrude-type old woman opened the door ever so gingerly. Arthritic hands, bad limp, scoliotic back.
They exchanged hugs and greeted each other in German. I shook the arthritic hand. “And I am Margo,” she said. She led us indoors. She’d been working in the kitchen. A large tabletop displayed scattered hints of a lunch to come. Max would be with us soon, she said. They continued to chatter in German.
I felt totally lost in this house, a stranger.
I wished I had taken the train back to New York. Wished I had never stepped out of the shower, or answered the buzzer, or gone to the movies last night. I could undo all this in a second. Excuse myself, step outside the house, take out my cell phone, call a local car service, dash back into their house, utter a hasty toodle-oo—and then be gone, adiós, Casablanca. You, Margo, Inky, and your whole tribe of limp, pandangst kultur wannabes.
I ducked outside on the pretext of wanting to glimpse the scenery. Then I realized I wasn’t interested in their scenery either, came back in, and shut the kitchen door.
“I just made you coffee,” said the arthritic Margo, handing me a mug with her right hand and, with the other, offering me a packet of sugar held between her thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, her bent and troubled arm almost beseeching me to come closer and take it from her before she dropped it and then fell trying to catch it. I wondered why she was offering me coffee and not Clara; but then I saw that Clara had already helped herself to some and was about to sit at an empty corner of the large kitchen table. The old woman’s pleading, beckoning gesture, at once humble and contrite, had touched me.
“Clara always complains I make very weak coffee,” she said.
“She makes the worst coffee in the world.”
“It’s not bad at all!” I said, as if I’d been asked an opinion and was siding with the host.
“Ach, Clara, he’s so polite,” she said. She was still sizing me up and, so far, approved.
“Who is so polite?” came the voice of an elderly man. Mr. Jäcke Knöwitall himself.
Kisses. Just as I’d expected. Firm handshake, hyperdecorous Old World smile that doesn’t mean a thing, slight bow of the head as he hastened, indeed rushed, to take my hand. I recognized the move instantly. Deference writ all over, except when you turn your back. And yet, unlike his wife, not a trace of a German accent, totally Americanized—A real pleasure to meet you!
“What are these ugly shoes, Max?” asked Clara, pointing at what were obviously orthotic contraptions with rows of Velcro fasteners. It was, I realized, her way of asking about his health.
“See, didn’t I tell you they were ugly!” He turned to his wife.
“They’re ugly because your legs and your knees and every other bone in your wobbly, weather-beaten body is out of whack,” she said. “Last year your hips, this year your knees, next year . . .”
“Leave that part of my anatomy alone, you pernicious viper. It served you well enough in its time.” This, it took me a second to realize, was all for Clara’s benefit. “Sir Lochinvar may no longer be among us, may he rest in peace, but in the middle of the night you can hear his headless torso galloping above our bedroom in search of a dark passage, and if you paid attention, you toothless daughter of scorpions, you’d open your window, offer him your sagging pan-fried eggs, and put your mouth to work.”
Everyone laughed.
“Ach, Max, you’ve become downright lurid,” said his wife, looking in my direction as though imploring me to pay no mind to his latest outcry.
“Dear, dear Clara, I am out of whack with myself, that’s what I am.”
“Complain, complain. His new thing now is he wants to die.”
He ignored her.
“Do I really complain all that much?” He was holding Clara’s hand.
“You always complained, Max.”
“But he complains even more now, all the time” came back old arthritic.
“It’s the Jewish way. Clara, if I were younger,” he began, “if I were younger and had better knees and a better charger and steed—”
Margo asked me if I could help. Naturlich! Would I mind going with her outside? “Put your coat on. And you’ll need gloves.”
Soon I discovered why. I had to get some wood for the stove and bring it into the kitchen. “We love cooking with wood. Ask my husband. What am I saying—ask me.”
Together we walked out toward the shed where the gardener stored the firewood. She complained about the deer, sidestepped their droppings, cursed when she stepped on something that wasn’t mud, then scraped the bottom of her shoe against a boulder. I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking to me or just muttering. Finally, out of the blue: “I am happy to see Clara.” Perhaps it was an opener of sorts, making conversation, or she might just have been talking to herself, so I didn’t respond.
I returned with two logs. In the kitchen, Margo opened the stove and displayed several halved golden butternut squashes glistening with oil and herbs.
Max uncorked both a red and a white. “To while away the time,” he said, and proceeded to pour the white wine into four glasses. Then, pinching the base of his glass between his thumb and his index finger, he swirled the liquid a few times and finally brought it to his lips.
“A sonnet, a miracle,” he said. Clara clinked glasses with Margo and Max and then three times with me, and twice three times more, repeating the old Russian formula in a mock-whisper. No one said anything until he spoke: “All it takes is a senseless round fruit no bigger than a baby’s testicle and you have heaven.”
We were all tasting his wine.
“Now try the other,” he said, proceeding to decanter the pinot into my glass once he saw that I had downed the sauvignon.
“Another small miracle.”