by André Aciman
She gave a mild laugh, but wasn’t falling for the diversion.
“Does music always make you cry?”
But my question was a weak diversion, and she wasn’t falling for it either.
“I’m not ready,” she finally said.
I knew exactly what she meant. Might as well bring it out into the open.
“Because I am?” I asked, as though to undo any pretense that I might be.
Were we saying yes by saying no?
Or was it the other way around? Saying no to mean yes to say no?
“What messes,” she said.
“Well, at least we know we’re safe messes.”
She took this in. I thought I had finally comforted her.
“I don’t know that I am—safe, that is. Perhaps neither of us is.”
Even in the midst of tears, I could heed the light, windblown cheep of rusted barbed wire dangling on a long country fence.
I took out my handkerchief and gave it to her.
She grabbed it as though it were a jug of ice water in July, wiped her tears several times, then crumpled it tightly in her fist.
I feared she might hold this moment against me.
“You’re the only person I know”—she hesitated a moment, making me think she was about to say something ever so sweet about me—“who still uses handkerchiefs.”
“What do most people use, their fingers?” I asked.
“Some do. Most use tissues. Others gloves.”
I could sense that maybe humor wasn’t going to work.
“I’m just afraid I may never see this house.”
She was on the verge of tears again.
“What if we promise to be back here in a week—together?”
She looked at me point-blank and said nothing, the same vague, absent look on her face, which told me she either didn’t trust my motives or that she simply lacked the will to remind me how quixotic was my plan. For all I knew, she had other things lined up for next week, things I wasn’t part of—for all I knew, this should have been the time to bring up her admonition yet again, but she didn’t have the strength or the heart to do so now.
“Why not, you’ll pick me up, bring me breakfast, and sing for me in the car.”
“You’re such a Printz Oskár.”
When she gave me back my handkerchief, I could feel its dampness. I put it back in my pocket, hoping it might never dry.
“You’re the best person to have Vishnukrishnus with,” she finally said. “Today was my turn; yesterday, yours.”
“Keep talking like this and you’ll make me have one this minute.”
“What wrecks,” she said.
•
On the way back we listened to Handel’s sarabande again and again. I knew that this would be our song, the song of December 26, and that wherever I’d be in the years to come, if, like a traveler in the desert I should lose my bearings one night, all I would have to do was think of this sarabande as played by a man who had disappeared into the hinterland of time, and like an anthropologist piecing bone fragments together one by one, I’d be able to bring back who I was on this day, where I’d been, what I’d wanted most in life, and how I’d fallen for it and almost touched it. As we listened to the music quietly, I thought of how she and I had stepped down the ramp onto the riverbed and heard the ice break, and how that too was forever laced into that moment on the rug when I realized, as I’d never done since meeting her, that the remainder of my life could hang on that tune and that it would take nothing but a misplaced breath to make my life go one way or the other.
“Clara Brunschvicg,” I said.
“Yes, Printz Oskár?”
“Clara Brunschvicg, I’ll never forget you,” I was going to say. But then I thought it sounded too wistful. “Clara Brunschvicg, I could so easily fall in love with you—if I haven’t already.” No, too laden. “Clara Brunschvicg, I could do this for the rest of my life—me and you, alone together, whenever, wherever, forever. Spend every minute the way we’ve done today, winter, car, ice, stones, soup, because one hundred years from now, those minutes are all we’ll have to show for ourselves, all we’re ever going to want to pass on to others, and frankly, in one hundred years they’ll all forget or won’t care or know how to remember, and I don’t want to end up like my father with dreams of love and of a better life he’d been robbed of or is still sailing out to. I don’t want to pass by your building in thirty years and, looking up, say to myself or to the person I’ll be with that day, You see this building? There my life stopped. Or there my life split. Or there life turned on me, so that the person looking at the building right now and talking to you is, ever since that one winter so many years ago, still on hold; the hand holding your hand is a phantom limb, and the rest of me is prosthetic, too, and I’m a shadow and she’s a shadow, and, as in Verlaine’s poem, we’ll still speak shadow words of our shadow love while the decades trawl past us as we stay put and hold our breath. The real me is frozen on this block and chances are will outlive me by many years until he turns into one of those family legends that gets retold on ritual anniversaries and from tragedy become a font of laughter and ridicule. So, tell me the one about the man who was named after a large tanker, they’ll say, the way I’d ask my father about ancestors who’d had their heads lopped off.”
“What were you going to say?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not what you were going to say,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” I replied.
At which we laughed. “Aren’t we so very, very clever, Printz.”
“We are, we are.”
•
The same thing happened twice again that day.
We were speeding down the country road on our way back to the city. It was past sunset, and we watched a pale, listless color line the white Hudson we’d been staring at all day. We’d been driving for around half an hour when the tiny town began to come into view. Neither of us said anything, and it seemed we’d both forgotten and were going to pass in silence. Clara, who was driving, looked at me. Then she began to pick up speed, and I could tell she was smiling. She was bluffing.
“Want to pass it up?” she asked.
“No. I was going to ask you to stop.”
“Lipton tea that good?”
I nodded.
“You know we’re not being very good,” she said.
“I know. But a cup of tea never hurt anyone.”
We parked the car exactly where we’d parked that morning. I ordered two teas just as I’d done before. Clara went to the bathroom. I chose the same spot by the wood-paneled wall. The fire was still burning in the fireplace. And she knew exactly where I’d be. Except that this time as soon as she sat down I told her to scoot over, because I wanted to sit next to her. She didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t let much time go by before asking, “So tell me about her.” Did she really want to know? I asked. Yes, she really wanted to know. And as though to entice me, she snuggled into the corner between the end of the seat and the glass panel with the darkling view of the Hudson right behind her. I met her right after college, I said. The love of your life? No, not the love of my life. So why are you telling me about her? You’ll see if you let me finish. She was a dancer, but by day an editor, a good cook, and three times a week a single mother. She was older than I was. By how much? Ten years—and don’t interrupt. She cooked meals for me that I’d never eaten before, with sauces that would seem to require chefs and sous-chefs days to prepare but which she’d whip up in a matter of minutes. Here I was almost a vegetarian eating steak dinners every night. It took me a while to realize why she was feeding me so much protein. She, on the other hand, never ate. She smoked all the time. So we’d have those fabulous dishes on the tea table, and I would eat and eat and eat, while she sat next to me on the floor and watched me chomp away. She was probably bulimic, or anorexic, or both, except that you’d never know it, because she was always bingeing in secret. She was also addicted to seda
tives, laxatives, antidepressants.
“What was good about her?”
“For a while everything.”
“Then?”
“I stopped loving her. I tried not to stop, but I couldn’t. From not loving her I started not wanting to listen to her, then to not wanting to touch her, to hating the sound of her laugh or the rattle of her keys when she came home, or the sound of her slippers when she woke up in the middle of the night and went into the living room for a smoke, and sat there in the dark because I said the light bothered me, down to the click of the television when she’d turn it off, which meant she was coming back to bed. It was horrible. I was horrible. So I left her.”
“Are you not good for people, either?”
“I don’t think I am. And she knew it. One day, toward the end, she said, ‘I’m someone you won’t remember having loved. You’ll walk out on me and won’t give it a second thought.’ And she was right.”
I fell silent.
“Well, go on with your story.”
“Late last winter, out of the blue, one evening I got a call from her. We’d not spoken in three or four years. She said she wanted to see me—no, needed to see me. Well, I knew she hadn’t borne me a child in secret, I knew she wasn’t short of money, and I knew she hadn’t uncovered an STD she had to tell all her old lovers about. She just needed to see me, that’s all. The man of my life, she called me. It tickled me somewhat. We made a lunch date, but it fell through, then another, which also fell through. And then she never called again, and I didn’t either. A few months ago, through a series of coincidences, I found out she had died. The news of her death still haunts me, or perhaps I want it to.”
“And?”
“And nothing. She’d found out she was very sick and needed to reach out to someone who’d mattered and say a few things she’d never had the courage to say before. Now that the veil was shed and there was no room for pride or other nonsense, all she wanted was to spend a few hours together.”
There was a moment of silence between us.
“I thought she was lonely and had run down a list of old flames, old friends,” I added.
“I wonder whom I’ll call when my time comes. Not Inky, that’s for sure. Who would you call?”
“That’s a Door number three question. And we don’t do those in diners and grills.”
“I hear pandangst.”
I gave her a look that said, You should know.
She replied, I most certainly do know.
She straightened up and sipped from her tea, holding both palms around her mug.
I wanted to grab both her hands, put them together, and hold them in between my own and then spread them open as one opens the pages of a hymnal and kiss each palm.
I told her I liked watching her drink tea.
“And I love your forehead,” she said.
I looked out the window, feeling that this working-class diner had something unbelievably magical, as if it understood that for us to be together and feel comfortable here it had to be as ordinary and unassuming and as run-down as anything in a Hopper painting, like Lipton tea, like the plaid faux-linen curtains that kept rubbing her hair, and the thick chipped earthenware mugs we drank from. I wondered if she and I were not like Hopper’s perpetual convalescents—Hopper people, vacuous, stunned, frozen Hopper people, resigned to hidden injuries that might never heal but that have long since ceased to stir either sorrow or pain. I wasn’t sure I liked the Hopper analogy. But this, I realized, was exactly what she meant by lying low. Staying put like Hopper’s people, sitting upright at a slight distance from things like jittery lemurs scoping out an all-too-familiar landscape called life with neither interest nor indifference.
“I can see why she called you, though.”
It took a few moments for me to realize she was referring to my old flame.
“Why?”
“No why. I can just see it.”
•
“It’s getting late,” I said.
And suddenly, as soon as I’d said this, I knew she knew why I’d said it.
“At what time does it start?”
“Seven-ten, didn’t you know?”
“Am I invited?”
I looked at her. “Who’s the Printz Oskár now?”
“So we’re going to the movies?”
“Yes,” I said, as if I were finally yielding to a request she’d been struggling to make all day.
“So we’re going to the movies.”
It took me a while to understand what the near-imperceptible lilt in her voice meant when she said “So we’re going to the movies.” She was either enacting or genuinely expressing the excitement of children whose parents on a bleary Sunday afternoon suddenly decide to put on their coats and herd everyone to the movies. We’re going to the movies, I repeated after her, the way a schoolmate who’d been visiting me after school, rather than being sent back to his parents in the evening, was invited to come along to the movies.
We had less than an hour to drive to the city and find a parking space. Or we could park in her garage and hail a cab. “It could be done,” she said. Or I could jump out and buy tickets while she parked nearby. Could we call the theater and have them save two spots under our name? Which name? Your name. My name. “You know what name,” she said.
We were now speeding along the highway, and in no time spotted the lights of the George Washington Bridge glimmering over the vast and tranquil Hudson. “The city,” she said, the way anyone might say on spotting a familiar lighthouse signaling the way home. I remembered the tension in the car earlier that morning, and the muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag, and the Bach version we’d listened to and how it all belonged to another time warp. “Look to your right,” she said, having spotted it before I did. And there it was, exactly where we’d left it earlier this morning, anchored smack in the middle of the Hudson, the Prince Oscar, our beacon, our lodestar, our emblem, our double, our namesake, our spellbound word for the things we had no words for—love of my life, my dear, dear Prince Oscar, dear, troubled ship that you are, lord of all ships in the catalog of ships, give us a sign, tell us, oh, boatswain, what of this night, tell us of this land of dreams you ferry passengers to, tell us what’s to become of us, what’s to become of me—can you hear?
It had seen us come and go and, for a minute now, seemed to light up its deck to hail us from far away across the Hudson, as if to say, You mortals, you lucky, holy pair who remembered me tonight when you could so easily have looked the other way and made light of my years, take a good look at this damp, ferruginous, scrap-metal tub stuck out in the middle of my hoary winters, don’t think I don’t know what it means to be young, to hope, to fear, to crave, as you come and go, and may come and go again on this drive, I who have seen riversides aplenty and gone up and down the world like so many phantom ships before me, oh, never become ghost ships, marking your years with layers of rust till the water seeps through and you’re nothing but a slough and a hollow hull stranded after many wrong turns and shallow bends, till the rudder is no longer quite yours, and the rust is no longer quite yours, and you won’t remember you were a ship once—yours is the real journey, not mine. Oh, don’t take me away and unbolt me as they unbuckle the dead, but think of me as both the light and the way, and remember this day, for the time comes only once in a lifetime and the rest, in thirty years, is good for nothing except to remember that time.
“Printz Oskár,” she finally said.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Printz Oskár.”
“Yes!” I repeated.
“Nothing, I like saying it.”
The girl is in love with me, and she doesn’t even know it.
•
I thought of the evening awaiting us. Two films, the walk in the snow to the same bar, where we’d take the same seats, though side by side this time, and order the same drink, talk, laugh, dance to the same song, maybe twice, and then the dreaded walk home past my spot in Straus Park, w
here I’d want to tell her, or maybe not, about my spot in the park, all of it followed by the perfunctory good-night kiss at her door, which would most likely try to seem perfunctory, though maybe not, and finally, after watching her disappear into her elevator with Boris minding the foyer, my walk back to the park, where I’d stop tonight as well, sit on my bench if it wasn’t wet, and just stare at the fountain, look at the trees in the middle of this nothing park off Broadway, and wonder which part I liked best, spending the entire day with Clara or coming all alone here to think of the Clara I’d just spent the entire day with—hoping not to have an answer, because all answers were right till they turned and proved the question wrong, the way so many things were right and then wrong and then right again, till all we had was our nightly colloquy, with the candles lit around us and our shadow selves rubbing shoulders as we’d done at Edy’s, and in our pub, and during lunch, and when we listened to the music, and washed the dishes, and sat together in the theater, shoulder to shoulder, speaking shadow words each to each.
On my way home that night, I received a text message.
PRINTZ OSKAR ONE DAY I’M GOING TO HAVE TO SEND YOU A TEXT MESSAGE
FOURTH NIGHT
What is your hell?” I had planned to ask her. It would have been my way of drawing her out and helping her lower her defenses. I liked it when she spoke about herself. I liked when she cried, liked when we sat inside the booth at Edy’s in the dark and I had almost held her hand and kissed both palms at the same time, liked her when, past midnight after the movies, she said they made good fries at our usual place, because she knew I wanted to be back there and, better yet, be at the same table, side by side, and pick up where we’d left off our talk of Rohmer and the men and women who were all about the obvious but had lost their way around it. I liked the way she skipped out of the movie theater in between films and found an open newspaper vendor who sold M&Ms, because we’d forgotten those we had poured out into a small ziplock bag in Margo’s kitchen. Meanwhile, she had also found the time to buy two grandes. Morning and evening, she said. I assumed she’d also taken the time to check her messages. How many times had he called? I asked. Just eight—and that’s not counting the messages he left on her home phone. Wasn’t she curious to know what he’d said in them? She knew what he’d said in each. I would much rather have seen her pity and kiss him than prove she could churn kindness into venom.