by André Aciman
“Why?”
“Why? Because we were having a good time together. Because if you think it’s a marvelous thing we both ended up at Hans’s party, don’t you think that I think so too? Don’t you think that if you’ve never wanted to be known by anyone the way I know you it’s because I may want the same from you?”
“So why not let me kiss you?”
“I don’t have to explain. I don’t even want to try. I’m cold. Let’s grab a cab.”
“Why not tell me you’d rather not kiss me instead of pushing me away as if I’d tried to rape you or had the plague.”
“You scared me, okay? You wouldn’t understand. Could we not talk about it now?”
“We never talk about anything.”
“That’s not fair.”
She listened for me to say something. But I didn’t know what to think, except that I was happy to be heading back home.
“This is my hell. This is my hell,” she kept repeating, “and you’re making it worse.”
“Your hell? Think of mine!”
I shook my head, at myself, at her. “Well, it’s too cold. And we both need a drink.”
I couldn’t understand, but she snuck right back under my armpit and put one arm around my waist, as if nothing at all had happened. “There’s a taxi coming.”
We hailed a cab, got in, watched the cab suddenly skid in the snow as it made a totally unflappable U-turn and was soon speeding uptown. “It got terribly cold, horrible weather,” uttered Clara through the glass partition. The man was quietly and serenely putting out his cigarette, listening to soft jazz. “Amerikon wezer,” he replied. “You don’t say,” she commented, trying to sound earnestly intrigued by the cabbie’s view of American weather. “Did you hear that,” she turned to me, “Amerikon wezer.”
When we got out on 105th Street, we were in stitches.
We rushed indoors, found our usual shoulder-to-shoulder spot on the bench which she called our banquette, where I ordered two single malts and french fries, while she hastened to the bathroom.
Minutes later, she was back. “You won’t believe what someone left in there,” she said, this time truly bursting with laughter. “It’s too disgusting, as if the entire Third World had come to take a dump in this bathroom.”
Did she need to go elsewhere?
No, she had used the men’s room.
Were there any men in the men’s room?
“Yes,” she said. “This guy.”
And she pointed to a lanky-looking young man at the bar who probably needed a drink to recover from the shock. “And don’t look at me like that,” she said out loud to him. “You didn’t see nothing, and if you did, consider yourself lucky.”
Cheers, we said when our drinks came, once more, and once again, and many more times again.
I looked at her and couldn’t help asking, “Are we just laughing or are we really very happy?”
“Did you by any chance see a Rohmer film tonight? Just give us Juan Dola, mista. And let’s dance.”
•
As had become our habit every night, we left the bar well after two in the morning. The walk home never lasted long enough, and the cold didn’t help. What was not unpleasant was watching how the two of us, while very conscious of the windchill, tried not to pick up our pace. We had drunk more than usual, and as we walked, my arm was around her shoulders. Was anything ever going to be unconscious between us?
The problem was how to say goodbye. Kissing was out of the question. Not kissing, too staged. A normal peck, totally perfunctory. “I know this is awkward,” she said, “but I think we’d better not say good night.” As always, on the same wavelength.
So we shouldn’t kiss at all and forgo all motions of saying good night—that’s an idea, I thought, almost admiring her ability to avoid a yet more awkward moment at her door. Meanwhile, not a word about my aborted kiss, not a word about the song, nothing about the tango we’d danced four times tonight. Why wasn’t I surprised? “Maybe you’re right,” I said. And maybe she was. With her hands deep in her coat pockets, she darted forward to where Boris stood, while I, after waiting a few seconds to see that she got in, spun around and headed toward Broadway. “Well, it’s been nice,” she had said, clearly aware she was using formal Hollywood dating lingo. But without a trace of irony.
Later, when I reached the park, I began to think that perhaps it was time not to see Clara any longer, that this had gone far enough and should go no further. Too much chaos, too many doubts, and far too, too many jabs and darts, everything bathed in a caustic brew that could peel off the outer layers of your body and leave you no less denuded than a newborn mollusk. End it, I thought, just end it. She’ll mind, probably, but of all people, she’ll recover faster than you ever will. Within hours, she’ll forget to remember, then forget she’s forgotten. As for me, it would take a while. Perhaps it was time to reconsider my own lying-low practice.
For the first time in weeks, I found myself itching to buy a pack of cigarettes. Was I going to call them secret agents? Yes, why not, at least for the time being. But my name would never again be Oskár.
The park by night, as always, felt as welcoming as a church on a rainy day when you have an extra ten minutes to yourself during lunch and, because you don’t belong to the faith and have no ritual to perform there, simply step in as you please, asking for nothing, expecting nothing, giving out nothing—just an empty pew, where you sit and think, just sit and think and hope you can intone something like a silent hymn.
I had passed by here just before one o’clock today, thinking to myself that tonight, after walking her home, I would indeed stop by here. If things went better than that, then I’d send the park good-night thoughts. The park would understand. As Tilden understood. As my father understood when I failed to send parting thoughts on rushing back to the city last night. But things had not gone well. Now I was back, no closer to her than I’d been on our first night. Two floors up, and three floors down. Just treading water, as always treading water. How I hated this feeling. I sat in the freezing cold for a few moments, knowing I’d have to leave soon, trying all the same to summon up the splendor of the party and how everything seemed touched by luster and legend that night. No more magic, none left, none here. My Magi with their heads ablaze—gone home. Go home, Oskár, go home.
I stood up and watched the city at three in the morning, the city I loved at three more than at any other time perhaps. It knew nothing about any of this, did it? Nor could it do anything to help, except watch and go about its business and from time to time look up again, the way zebras continue to graze and watch as their predators quietly scour the plain for their young. Go home, Oskár.
I decided to get another drink at our pub and sat at the bar. Perhaps all I wanted was to stay in her neighborhood. There was almost no one left inside, just the waitress and two men sitting at the bar, and a couple farther down. Would I ever in my life be able to come back here and not think of her? Or come back here and not hate my life, myself?
I was, I recalled, sitting exactly where the lanky young man had been standing after inadvertently sharing the bathroom with Clara. I had enjoyed her cutting words to him. Even he was far better off than I was right now. I looked over to what had been our table. They had already snuffed out the candles in that corner. The whole place reminded me of an emptied theater when management allows you to go back to retrieve the small umbrella left under your seat—but all the actors, from King Lear to Lady Windermere to the cleanup crew, have gone home already, including the underpaid mopping crew who’s already taken the subway and is on its way to the outer reaches of town, counting the minutes before each man can sit to eat the food his good wife has kept warm for him.
Traces of our presence were everywhere. This is where she and I had talked of Rohmer’s films, ordering more drinks than either of us was in the habit of drinking, her head on my shoulder, my arm sometimes around her shoulders, neither daring to go beyond that. Just looking at the bench
with the cushion that might still be bearing the imprint of our bodies brought everything back.
I ordered a drink. “Fucking winter,” the barman said. The old toothless man sitting at the far end of the bar liked that. “Fucking winter,” he repeated, “you bet!” I immediately thought of Amerikon wezer and almost choked on the laughter as it worked its way up my throat. Had I ever laughed so much with anyone lately? And what was it about laughter that I loved so much—silly, slapstick, childish, fatuous laughter that it was. Amerikon wezer, she had repeated to the cabbie, making a face as if to say, Fancy that, Amerikon wezer! How I’d wanted to kiss her then.
I took out a dollar and put it in the jukebox. It would be just like me to come back and play our song again. I stood there, transfixed by the door of the bar, listening to the song, not caring a bit what the people who’d seen us dance together might think I was doing now, all by myself, en soledad. So she didn’t let him have his way with her, did she, and after all their dancing and boozing—not caring, because nothing mattered to me now but that moment when she put her hand to my face two nights ago with so much kindness—yes, kindness—that thinking of it now could make the tears come again—not tears of self-pity, or of self-hatred, or self-anything, or even love, though it must have been something like love, because two beings, two objects, two cells, two planets cannot come so close and not be altered by a hindrance and a disturbance called love. I could have let myself cry because prolonged confusion could do this each time. And perhaps being all alone here and wanting to remember the doleful tenor of her gesture when she rubbed her palm along my face after singing the words in my ear, only to ask for another dollar seconds later, made me think, almost against my will, that all this must surely be love and had always been love, her love, my love, our love. I played the song once more. Strange how she hadn’t said a word about it on our way home. Not a word about my kiss either. And certainly nothing about the way we’d held each other at the bar. Nothing. The whole thing swept under, forgotten, not talked about—as if they were all just tangents and detours.
We hadn’t taken a step forward since this afternoon, when we stood in the kitchen wrapped in a cloud of awkwardness. Who had put the cloud there, and why, with all our experience in matters of intimacy, were we so frozen and unable to shoo it away? I think we’d better not say good night—who ever says something as cramped and flat-footed as that? I think we’d better not say good night.
•
I sat at the bar and had started drinking my Scotch when it finally hit me.
What a dreadful fool! I kicked the stool next to mine. Then to cover the kick I made it seem that I had accidentally banged it while crossing my legs. I think we’d better not say good night did not mean we shouldn’t kiss goodbye, it meant I don’t want us to say goodbye yet. Why hadn’t she said yet? Is yet such a hard word to say? Why hadn’t she said it clearly? Or had she said it more than just clearly and I had simply failed to hear it because I couldn’t believe I was being offered what I’d always wanted and, because I’d wanted it, felt unworthy of it.
Or had I understood her meaning exactly but pretended to disbelieve it so as to have her repeat it a second time, perhaps with greater emphasis—which Claras don’t do?
Suddenly, and more than anything right now, I wanted to call her and hear her raucous sleepy voice and, in hearing it, say to that raucous sleepy voice what I would with difficulty have said to her sparkling daytime voice, things one only mutters in unfettered half-sleep to those who’ll heed it in half-sleep themselves: I don’t care if I wake you up, I want to be with you now, in your bed, under your blanket, in your sweater, life is so very cold tonight, I’ll sleep in the next room if I have to, but I don’t want to be without you, not tonight.
Should I call her now? Past three in the morning?
After our walk, it might have been easier to call. But at three? Only in emergencies do people call at three. Yes, but wasn’t this an emergency? Only drunks call this an emergency. Well, I am drunk, and if ever there was an emergency, this was it. There! Call her and say, I can’t think of being without you tonight. That sounded more like a suicide note, or a marriage proposal. Aren’t both the same? I asked, thinking of Olaf, already suppressing a chuckle.
What I couldn’t wait to read was the e-mail or text message I knew was bound to come any moment now. Surely it would be cruel and tart in that typically off-putting, cutting, Clara way of hers. But if only not to do what she’d already done last night, she wouldn’t send an e-mail right away. She’d keep me waiting long enough so that I wouldn’t find sleep, and when I did find it, I’d still wake up to check. Then I realized that if my sense of her—or of fate—was in any way accurate, she would not send me a text message at all tonight. Let silence have its full effect, let silence be the poison, let silence be the message.
But she had another torture in store for me, one that allowed me to suspect, without knowing for certain, that all this was happening in my mind, and in my mind only, and that these twisted riddles being spun around me had nothing to do with her and personified my gnarled relationship with myself, with her, with life itself.
But I wasn’t going to fall for this. I wasn’t being paranoid, I thought—she’s the one who’s doing this to me. So I decided to turn off my phone—to show her.
Then, snuffing these thoughts from my mind, sprung the quantum theorem from hell. Two options, but not both at the same time. If I turned my cell phone back on, I would find either no message from her or one that said such cruel things that it would leave me stunned and reeling for days. But if I didn’t check and kept my cell phone off, I would never read the message that started with,
DEAR OSKAR DONT BOTHER CALLING OR WRITING OR TAKING OFF YOUR SHOES JUST BRING YOURSELF OVER AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN I DONT CARE WHAT TIME IT IS I DONT CARE IF YOU WANT TO OR NOT DONT CARE WHAT I SAID TODAY OR YESTERDAY OR THE NIGHT BEFORE I JUST WANT YOU WITH ME TONIGHT AND I PROMISE I WONT SLEEP UNTIL I HEAR THE RING OF MY BUZZER DOWNSTAIRS DONT BOTHER CALLING OR WRITING OR TAKING OFF YOUR SHOES JUST THE BUZZER THE BUZZER THE BUZZER DOWNSTAIRS.
Like Orpheus I could not resist turning on my phone and checking my messages. But, as with Orpheus, no sooner had I checked than the message she would have sent disappeared instantly.
FIFTH NIGHT
The one question I woke up to and couldn’t shake off and took with me to the shower, to my corner Greek diner, and then on the long way back home without ever being able to answer was: Is she not going to call me at all today or is she just pretending not to call?
After breakfast, to stop myself from hoping—or was it to spite myself for hoping?—I decided to turn off my phone again and found myself dawdling on Broadway under the pretense that I had plenty of time and nothing to do this morning. But my reason for not wanting to get back too soon was too obvious to ignore: I wanted to prove—to myself, to her, to the gods themselves—that I was in no rush to know whether she had written or called or come by, because the last thing I wanted to know this morning was that she had made no effort to call or see me. In the end, what brought me to the brink of shame—because it was the one thing I wanted most—was to hear her admission that she was going through the exact same torment and torture herself. Had she come by car, she would have found my buzzer silent; had she called, she’d have reached voice mail; had she run into me and asked where I’d been, I would have been evasive. Then it hit me that this was exactly what she wanted me to go through—and I found comfort in this. She wanted me to juggle all these doubts because she herself was juggling them at this precise moment.
In my mind—and perhaps in mine only—it all boiled down to one question: Who was going to pick up the phone and call first; who was the author, and who the victim of silence? And was hers just silence or, like mine, was it disguised chatter? Where did tacit end and silent start? Clearly, a Door number 3 question.
There was, however, one last hope, even if it came at the end of what would surely be a long and twisted day: the unspok
en 7:10. Not saying anything about 7:10, however, was either a sign or no sign, but no sign was itself a sign as well.
How to break this radio silence?
I could take the Staten Island ferry, and as soon as I stood on the freezing deck before the Statue of Liberty, call and say, Guess where I am—and send her a picture to prove it. But I also imagined her reply: gruff and unresponsive, Your point being? Or I could stand on the Brooklyn Bridge or sit on one of the pews inside the Cathedral of St. John, scarcely ten blocks from her home. And your point being?
Or—and this is what I did—at around 2:00 p.m. I sent her a picture of the statue of Memory in Straus Park. This is where you can find me. I’ll wait awhile, a very long while. But by then bring an ice pick.
I waited for her to call me back. But she did not. So things had degenerated far worse than I feared. She wasn’t talking to me. Perhaps she had turned off her phone. But then that too was a sign, wasn’t it?—especially if she kept hers turned off for the same reason, which would make it the loudest sign of all.
I ran through a series of wished-for scenarios. The best consisted in her sending me a picture of where she was at this very instant. No text. Just her way of explaining why she couldn’t meet me. For some reason I imagined her sending me a photo of the Temple of Dendur. Bergdorf’s. The road to Darien. A bathroom bowl.
Then I began to wish that her reply might come in the form of Leo Czernowicz playing the Bach.
Then that she’d call me back, saying, What?
What do you mean “What?” I’d reply.
You called.
Are you free?
Why?
If you’re busy, I’ll call some other time. What did you want?
I called to apologize.
For?
You know exactly what for.
You already did. What else?
Nothing else.
•