by André Aciman
I was running for cover, not realizing that I had just given away my hiding place.
She interrupted me. “So this is awkward for you?”
The this was us, I presumed. There was something savage and cruel in her question, as though she was striking back at something I’d said that had offended her. But it also seemed that all she wanted was to expose me, to expose me for the sheer, perverse pleasure of doing so. Two nights ago she’d warned me not to hint at any of this—why was she raising the subject when I was clearly trying to avoid it? Her six clipped words So this is awkward for you? were a straight indictment of everything I was; they made me feel like a slithery trickster who should be punished for beating around the bush when he’d already been warned to stay off the grass.
And yet I knew she was right. She’d seen through me and zeroed in on the one thing I feared most: the awkwardness that sprang up between us each time she looked me in the eye and made it so difficult to speak to her or find the courage not to deny that awkwardness did indeed exist between us. I didn’t even want her to see how easily I blushed the instant I felt I’d strayed from indirect speech. Was I hiding desire? Or that I didn’t feel I deserved to desire?
Why had she ever asked me this? To unsaddle me even more, in case I presumed too much? To egg me on, if I presumed too little? To rob the moment of its luster? To bring out the truth? To make me doubt everything about us? Or, as I was perfectly willing to accept, was all this taking place in my head only?
I looked at her. I knew I could risk everything by saying something marginally wanton or clever. The Claras of this world seldom give men second chances. Say the wrong thing and they’re gone. Say nothing and they’re equally gone. She’ll put on a dark skirt, a crimson blouse, and, with her daunting good looks and many shirt buttons undone, find any man at the first party she’ll care to get herself invited to. I was staring at her unbuttoned light green shirt now. No wonder she was wearing such a heavy shawl. There was nothing underneath. Why the unbuttoned shirt? Do I look or do I look away? I’ll look.
“Now this is getting really awkward, Printz. Is this another Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment?”
Keep a lid on and out fly the barbs, I thought.
“You mean my silence?” I asked.
“I meant your staring. But the silence too.”
“Let’s change the subject, then,” I said.
“And run away? No, talk to me about awkwardness. I want to learn.”
I cleared my throat.
She removed the cover dish from the chicken plate and served me two slices of chicken and herself two. “Three tiny potatoes for you, three for me, one more for you, because every man about to make a speech deserves a potato, five sprigs of asparagus for you, three for me, because I need to make room for what I’m about to receive from him, and finally, a bit of gravy for you and some for me to wash things down with. Okay, I’m listening.” Then, realizing she’d omitted something, she added, “And don’t ruin the moment.”
“I was thinking of how lucky I was to have gone to Hans’s party.”
“Ye-es.” Cautious encouragement to keep going.
“Lucky for me, I mean, not for you.”
“Of course.”
We laugh. We know why we laugh. We pretend not to know. Realize we’re both pretending. Standard fare. I love it. Aren’t we so very, very clever.
“Maybe I don’t feel awkward at all with you, but feel that I should. Maybe the twinge of awkwardness sitting between us right now is nothing more than intimacy deferred. Or waiting to happen. Or failing to happen.”
“And?”
“And something tells me we both feel that this could easily be the best part, which is why we’re both reluctant to fight it. This may just be the rose garden. What comes after could be trenches.”
“And?”
Was I even speaking the truth? Was I lying? Why couldn’t I believe a word I was saying?
“And?” she insisted.
“And this is where I wish Beethoven might step in and make this moment last forever, this lunch, this conversation, even these twinges of awkwardness. I want nothing to change and everything to last.”
“And?” At this point she was teasing, and I was loving it.
“And here’s a thought: In a year from now, when we go to Hans’s party, will we go there as strangers?”
“Well, I am no stranger to Hans.”
“I didn’t mean Hans and you.”
She elbowed me.
“I know what you meant. Chances are we will have had a few arguments, maybe strong disagreements, ratted on each other—I’m almost certain—and probably hung up and sworn never to speak again—but I harbor no grudges and make up way too easily, so the asshole who’ll ruin things will be you, not me.”
“Ruin? Ruin what?”
I had finally managed to corner her.
“See—you’re doing it now—ruining things, this time by pretending.”
So there was no boxing her in anywhere.
“Well, what if I am an asshole? What then?”
“You mean will I make allowances, and try to understand, and get under your skin and feel your pain, and see the world with your eyes and not through my own blinkered, selfish point of view?”
Why was she sidetracking?
“Put it this way: What if things suddenly die, or are about to, and with their death the desire to keep them alive dies as well—what will you do then?”
Without meaning to, I felt that I had cornered her once again.
“I will let you know they’re about to die, but I won’t do a thing more.”
“So, it is conceivable that we will meet at Hans’s party next year—what am I saying?—next week, and though we’ll stand this far apart, we could be total strangers.”
I was sounding peevish.
“Why are you doing this?”
Suddenly she wasn’t being flippant at all. “We’re having this most wonderful lunch, probably one of the best I’ve had all year, and look at us: we’re playing chess—worse than chess, because chess pieces move, but you’re freezing us on the spot, like two blocks of ice stuck under a bridge. The idiots get past all our roadblocks and find all manner of shortcuts. The one or two lifemates end up ruining things, and I’m the one who’s blamed. Shall I keep going, or shall I flip channels?”
“Please, please, keep going and don’t change channels.”
“Unlike you, you mean.” A little dart—light and swift. Light and swift, just as I liked her. I let it slide. “See, I know what you want, and the funny thing is, I can bring it to you, but I also know you: you want promises more than what I have to bring, and promises I can’t make. Nor, for that matter, can you—not these days. Let’s not fool ourselves; this ain’t the rose garden.”
I was stunned by her candor.
“Have I spoken out of turn?” she asked.
“Nope. As always, you’ve nailed it on the head. Sometimes I wonder why I can’t speak like you.”
“Want to know why?”
“Dying to know why.”
“It’s very simple, Printz. You don’t trust me.”
“Why don’t I trust you? Tell me.”
“Really, really want me to tell you, Mr. Vindalu?”
“Yes.”
“Because you know I can hurt you.”
“And you know this for a fact?” I was trying to recover my dignity.
She nodded.
Why couldn’t I be like her?
I reached out and held her hand in mine, then lowered my head, opened her palm, and kissed it. How I loved that hand, exactly as it was, as I felt it, as it smelled. It belonged to that shirt which belonged to that face, to this woman who had always been me but might never want me. I felt her hand go limp in mine; she was suffering me to touch it and would do no more.
“Why?” I said.
She shrugged her shoulders to mean, God knows.
“I don’t always think I’m a good person. But telling peopl
e this only makes them want to prove me wrong, and the more they try to prove me wrong, the more I want to push them away, but the more I push them away, the guiltier I get, the nicer I become, the more they think I’ve changed. It never lasts. In the end I learn to hate both myself and them for things that should have lasted no longer than a few hours.” She reflected on this. “Maybe a few nights. Inky and I could have stayed friends.”
“This is the most twisted thing you’ve said so far.”
“What, that being kind to people makes me want to hurt them? Or that hurting them makes me want to be kind?”
“Both. I won’t ask you why you’re telling me all this—”
She didn’t let me finish. “Perhaps my hell is having to say all and not knowing if I should be quiet instead, and yours, unless I’m all wrong, is to listen and not know whether I mean it.”
“Amphibalence?”
She looked at me with something like gratitude in her gaze. “Amphibalence indeed. But let me put this on the table, but you can’t raise me, okay?”
So typical. I nodded.
“I said you don’t trust me. And I’m sure you have your reasons, and I won’t ask what they are. But I also know you: you’ll never ask me what we’re doing here together. And one day you’re going to have to.”
“And when that day comes?”
She pursed her lips, gave another wistful shrug of her shoulders, said nothing.
She wasn’t answering. “Door number three?” I asked.
She nodded.
“That’s my hell,” I said.
“Unfair. It’s mine too.”
I thought I understood. But she was right. One day I’d have to ask her what she meant. And that day, it suddenly hit me, was today, was now. And I didn’t have the courage to ask.
•
“On the house,” said one of the Mexican waiters who, along with the other waiters and cooks, had long finished lunch and cleared the staff’s table. He had placed two squares of what looked like tiramisu and two cups of coffee on the table.
“Do you know what time it is?”
We were both dumbfounded. It was 4:30.
She said she needed to walk. I did too. After coffee we put on our coats, she did her complicated shawl knot, said goodbye to Svetonio, who was back to the sports pages, and we walked out to find a cold setting sun. Everything about her, about today even, was totally unusual. Not paying for lunch, helping the cook in his own restaurant, walking into places and taking over—a home, a kitchen, a restaurant, a life—all these gusted through otherwise ordinary days. This was not just Clara’s style, it was Clara’s world, a life that seemed boundless, extravagant, and every inch festive and unlike mine. And yet here we were, two beings who, for all our differences, seemed to speak the exact same language, liked the exact same things, and led almost identical lives. How could we be in two different rooms, let alone live streets and blocks apart, when we were made to share the same chair? Then I thought of Inky and caught a glimpse of his hell. He too must have thought they were identical beings, and yet there he was, living with the awful proof that being similar, and thinking the same thoughts, and feeling inseparable from someone was nothing more than one of the many screens that loneliness projects on the four walls of our lives.
I told her it was doubtful we would have time for Indian food tonight.
“Why?” she asked.
We laughed. She knew exactly why.
We had slightly more than two hours before 7:10. On the way down Broadway, she stopped by a botanica and asked, in Spanish, if the owner was there. The girl, who was hardly older than fourteen, went in, called her mother, who soon after appeared. “Together or separate?” she asked. “You decide,” said Clara to the fortune-teller. The woman asked me to produce my palm, which I did, reluctantly, never in my life having done anything like this before. It felt no different than entering a slovenly tattoo parlor or opium den, something slightly disturbing, because I might never be the same person on coming out. Worth a shot, I thought. The beefy woman took hold of my left palm with one hand and with the pinky of her other seemed to point at things I wasn’t seeing. Someone very dear to me had bad leg troubles, no, just the right leg. A sibling—and moments later—no, a parent, she said. Very serious leg trouble, she said, raising her head and staring at me. It’s over, she corrected. I withdrew my hand before she had time to say anything more. But you have a good line, she said, by way of compensating for the bad news. She asked for Clara’s hand. The bucket is full, but I see nothing anywhere. Was this a metaphor? Then she whispered something in Clara’s ear. Clara raised her shoulders, to suggest either indifference or that she didn’t know. We walked out humbled and crestfallen creatures.
“What did Madame Sosostris whisper to you?” I asked once we’d left the palm reader’s parlor.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Unfair.”
“Actually, you do, but you really don’t.”
“Inky?” I asked, knowing that, after our lunch, my cards were all on the table.
“Not telling.”
Clara wanted to buy a candy bar, she said. It was five o’clock.
We had two hours, yet strangely enough neither of us felt they were hours we had to kill. We could have walked, stopped in stores, bought presents, kept going, kept going—till when, Clara, till tomorrow, next year, forever?
“I can make tea,” she said.
I couldn’t resist. “You mean walk into a coffee shop, dash into the kitchen, and produce two mugs with Lipton tea bags?”
“No, at my place.”
I had to control a sudden surge of instant panic and bliss. Part of me didn’t wish to go upstairs for fear of what I’d be tempted to do. The other for fear that I’d never even dare.
Boris—if he remembered me—must have suspected that something like this was bound to happen. She stamped her feet as he was holding the door; I did the same, and thanked him with a semiflustered greeting. I was, without realizing it, uneasy and trying not to show it.
We stepped into the elevator. This was where I’d met the woman in the blue overcoat.
The elevator felt and smelled different. I didn’t know this smell. A mid-afternoon-in-a-strange-new-place smell. I had wanted to pretend I was coming here for the first time, that the party had already started, and that I was about to meet Clara any moment now. But before I knew it, we had already reached her floor.
She unlocked the door. Then she removed her coat, unwrapped her complicated shawl, and showed me into the living room, which overlooked the Hudson. I felt that I was back at the party, except that everything had been cleaned up and put back together to look totally different. Partitions had come up where none existed upstairs, furniture had been moved, the artwork looked different, older, the Hudson felt closer, and when I neared the bank of large windows, it seemed to me that even Riverside Drive felt different, more accessible than the farflung vista that had made me think of Gogol, Byzantium, and Montevideo.
“Give me your coat.”
She took my coat, and what almost moved me—because it seemed so unexpected—was her manner of handling it, as if it were going to break or crease if she didn’t take deferential care of my stupid old coat. Was this a sign? There are no signs, I kept telling myself.
“Come, let’s go to the kitchen. Then I’ll show you around.”
Was she going to show me her bedroom?
The kitchen, like the entire apartment, hadn’t been touched up in decades. Her parents, she explained, had lived there until the day of the accident, and ever since, she’d never had the heart or the time to fix much. There were walls to be broken through, others to put up, wiring to pull out, so many things to be given away. To prove her point, she showed me the gas range and asked me to light it. “Don’t you just turn a knob or press something?” I asked. “No, you use this,” she said, taking out a match from a large matchbox. “Does this thing whistle when the water boils?” “No, it chimes.” She pointed at a
very contempo-designed teakettle. A gift. But major renovations would take so much time. “Plus I don’t think I want it changed.” Her whole apartment, it occurred to me, was lying low too.
We stood in the unlit kitchen waiting for the water to boil.
“I have no cookies. I have nothing to offer.”
Girl on perpetual diet, I thought.
She was standing with her arms crossed, leaning back against the kitchen counter, looking, as I began to notice during similar moments of silence between us, mildly uneasy. I wondered why. Was she always curt and abrupt and agitated to cover up her uneasiness—was this her way? Or was she really curt and abrupt, which sometimes coincided with her uneasiness? I felt for her, which was why, as I watched the westering light fall on her figure, I said, “All you need is a dead pheasant and a bruised pomegranate sitting in a blue-rimmed bowl near a clear jar of aquavit and you get a Dutch master’s Girl Leaning against Kitchen Counter.”
“No, Girl Making Tea with Man in Kitchen.”
“Maybe girl suspicious of man in kitchen.”
“Girl doesn’t know what to think.”
“Girl very beautiful in kitchen. Man very, very happy.”
“Girl happy man in kitchen.”
“Man and girl talking real stupid.”
“Maybe man and girl seen too many Rohmer films.”
We laughed. “I haven’t spoken to anyone the way I speak with you. You’re the only one I laugh with nowadays.” There was nothing to add to this except to look her straight in the face.
She opened one of the cabinets to get the sugar. I saw an assortment of about two dozen different steel butcher knives. Her father, she explained, loved to cook on weekends. Now they were all bundled up and heaped on the top shelf. One teaspoon for me and two for her. I could tell she was uneasy.
“Girl will put on CD man gave her,” she said, “then the two will go to France.” This was how she referred to Rohmer’s films.
The chime of the teakettle, I said, sounded like a World War II air-raid siren. She said she hadn’t noticed, but, yes, it did sound like an air-raid siren.