Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  “It’s freezing cold, and I can’t believe you made me leave my house.”

  She knew she’d surprise me. But no sooner did I see her materialize at Straus Park than we burst out laughing hysterically. Partly because she was making fun of our overdrawn radio silence; or because it was obvious that our embattled stillness was nothing more than a clash of wills, a bogus cold war. What a relief to admit it with laughter—and move on.

  “Were you working?” I was hoping she’d say no.

  “Yes. But it was taking too long, and with all you made me drink last night, I could barely focus.”

  “Are you still pissed?”

  “Depends what for.”

  “Did you eat?” She made it clear she was changing a delicate subject, though I was not quite sure what precisely that subject was. Standard MO.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Want to do ethnic?”

  Within minutes, I knew, there’d be new people in our lives, new ways of naming things, new foibles to pick up on in a storehouse of characters sprung out from the mind of a girl I couldn’t begin to understand except by thinking she was my spitting image, but my image in reverse, the mirror image of her own replica.

  We walked down Broadway, examining several places along the way as possible restaurants for lunch, and yet, for one reason or another, dismissing each. The truth is, neither of us was hungry and would have settled for an intimate café. I missed the sextant and the oversized meerschaum pipe and the picture of a lurching bull. There were, as usual this time of the year, lots of people about, lots of tourists and young residents of the many two-star hotels that had sprouted around the neighborhood. Every place was full, and there was a ferment in the air, which gave our walk its hasty, spirited pace.

  Clara decided she needed to buy candy. Did one really buy candy at her age? “I like candy, okay?” At some point, we decided to take the crosstown bus and head to the East Side. But did we want to run into more crowds of people? There’s the Guggenheim, I said. Did we really want to go to the Guggenheim? Actually no. We could go to France, I suggested. But at this time in the afternoon? It would be all wrong.

  “Yes—about the movies,” she started, “I know this will upset things, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it tonight,” she said.

  Did she mean upset things or upset me?

  “Bummer,” I said, trying to show I’d taken the news with no less equanimity than if I’d received a “regrets only” from someone I’d invited reluctantly. “It won’t be fun without you.” I couldn’t have found a dumber comeback.

  It hurt. The question was where. I didn’t mind going alone—I had always liked going to the movies alone. I just didn’t like having to cancel what, without totally admitting it to myself, I’d taken for granted. I didn’t like finding, as I always knew I’d eventually find, that she had another life, that I played no part in that life, and that the part I played in her lying-low phase was so small that no one, other than Max and Margo, and the few who’d seen us together at the party, had the slightest inkling I existed. Perhaps what I didn’t like was having to change my life back to what it had been before Clara. Four nights, and I’m hooked. Is that it?

  A dead silence had fallen between us.

  I was afraid this would happen. But so soon?

  “I’ll live. Trust me.”

  Silence again. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me why I can’t come? With most people not asking means they’re dying to ask.”

  I was trying not to ask so as not to seem curious or cranky. Nor did I want to sound indifferent. I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps I didn’t want to know what she did when I wasn’t with her. I cared only for what we did together—or so I wished to believe. What she did with others didn’t matter, especially if it did not interfere with our being together. In this, it took me a while to realize, I was thinking and behaving like every jealous man.

  “You really don’t want to know?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Obviously you’re dying to tell me.”

  “Otherpeoples,” she said. Her way of remaining vague and all too specific at the same time.

  But it hit me hard, as though she’d finally taken a large spade and with it shoved dirt at my face. The streets became gray, and the sky became gray, and the festive people crowding the stores around the crosstown stop on Broadway lost their color and became gray, and life, having lost the dimple in its smile, had turned sullen and gray.

  Once again, I decided to have nothing more to do with her. This was the time to put that resolution into effect. This is when it should happen: man may be buckling at the knees, man may have aimed too high, but man splits now. Why bother having lunch under the circumstances?

  “Do they serve tea in your house?”

  I looked at her in total surprise.

  “Yes, all the Twinings in the world. It’s just that the pre-check-in crew arrives tomorrow, so the place is a mess.”

  “Is there a clean corner?”

  “There should be.”

  “And il y a things to eat?”

  “Very old ham, green-flecked cheese, and the potatoes in the bottom drawer have grown trees. Always wine, though.”

  How could she do this? From ice to scalding hot. Suddenly a party erupted in our lives.

  On Broadway we stopped and decided to stock up on food. The store was mobbed, but neither of us minded. Two cheeses, one, no two, baguettes, one ripe avocado, some ham, raw and cooked. Why the avocado? Goes with the ham and mustard. Did I have mustard? Yes, but very old. By God, when were you last in the rose garden? Told you, aeons ago. Some fruit? Winter or summer fruit? Does it matter, they’re all imported from faraway places whose fruit matures nowhere but on board the giant dark containers piled on beaten-down tankers called Prince Oscar that shuttle up and down the Atlantic to bring berries of all colors and no taste to people ready to sit around Yule logs and sing carols over spiked fruit punch. “All right, all right, je get it,” she said. Did we have milk? We did, I said, and made a humbled shame-face, but it might have turned to yogurt. At the last minute we remembered what would have made all the difference in the world: caviar and sour cream. We were, once again, playing house. How about some junk? Junk and candy, she said.

  By the time we were done, we had filled two large grocery bags. “Suddenly I’m hungry,” she said. I was starving.

  “Before we go any farther, is the kitchen clean?” she asked as we entered my building.

  Was she asking if my sheets were clean?

  “Señora Venegas comes twice a week. But she is not allowed to touch anything in the refrigerator or in my study.”

  I got out of the elevator, forgot to tell her that its doors shut very, very quickly, and suddenly saw Clara with her package violently shoved out of the elevator by the closing door. “The fucking door. The fucking nerve.” She kept cursing at the door all the way down the corridor to my apartment.

  She fell in love with my rug. She had an idea, she said. “Let’s picnic in the corner room. I’ll take care of everything, you take care of the wine and the music.” For a second we stood next to each other, looking out at the view of the park. Another overcast white day bursting with inner joy.

  She found a tablecloth in the linen closet. “What’s this?”

  “From Roussillon. Bought it as a present, never gave it, things fizzled, kept it instead.”

  On her way to the kitchen she spotted a photograph of my father and me when I was four. It was taken on our trip to Berlin. We’re in the Tiergarten, he and I. And next to it is a black-and-white picture of him with his father on the same exact spot. “Return of the Jew.”

  “Revenge of the Jew.”

  “You look like him.”

  “I would hope not.”

  “Didn’t you like him?”

  “I was crazy about him. But I don’t think he knew happiness.”

  “With what happened after this picture was taken, difficult to imagine hap
piness anywhere.”

  “He had his chance. I think.”

  “You think.”

  “I know.”

  “And?”

  “He let it go.”

  “Meaning?” Why the sudden interest in my father?

  “Meaning he didn’t think he was worthy enough. Meaning he knew love once and only once, yet never got close enough or risked enough to go after someone who might have asked for nothing more than his love. Meaning he had waited too long but didn’t know that life was willing to wait out the hurdles it had thrown his way.”

  “Amphibalence Senior?”

  “If you wish.”

  “When did he die?”

  “Last year.”

  She got closer to the picture.

  “I was born the summer this was taken,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Let her know that I too had done the math, that I’d already thought, Did I know, as I was ambling in a small park in the Tiergarten with my father, that somewhere in a hospital in Manhattan someone who’d be named Clara . . . ?

  What I didn’t tell her and would never have dared hint at was that I was also thinking, Did he know, as an anonymous photographer was busy snapping our photo, that the one person I wished he’d meet someday would stand before his picture and ask me about him? Did he know that the Persian rug we bought together at an auction sale one Sunday five years ago would inspire Clara to make a picnic?

  “How do you know so much about his private life?”

  “Because we had very few secrets. Because he was so unhappy sometimes he couldn’t afford secrets. Because he went over all mistaken turns in his life so I wouldn’t make the same ones myself when the time came.”

  “And have you?”

  “That’s a Door number three question.”

  “Has the time come?”

  “That’s another Door number three question.”

  “And?”

  “And—since we’re into ramming doors open—let’s say the matter is being weighed even as we speak.”

  “Deep. Very, very très deep.”

  We uttered it at the same time: “Vishnukrishnu!”

  She took the tablecloth from Roussillon, threw it briskly on the rug with one determined flap that made the cloth rustle like a pennant on a windy day. I put on my favorite recording of the Goldberg Variations, uncorked a bottle of red, and watched her bring plate after plate from the kitchen. Then came the puzzling moment. There were no napkins, neither cloth nor paper ones. We looked everywhere. That Venegas woman probably uses them to wipe her nose with. Was there a roll of paper towels anywhere? “I looked everywhere,” said Clara, “es gibt kein paper towels.” She’d checked all the cabinets in the kitchen—Nada, she said. There was, I said, only one solution left. I hadn’t even finished saying it when she burst out into hysterical laughter.

  “Can you think of a better option?” I asked.

  She shook her head, still unable to contain the laughter.

  “It’s your house, you get it.”

  So I found a full roll and brought it to our picnic, placed it next to her.

  “I can’t believe you’re making me eat with a roll of toilet paper staring at me. To your health and a Happy New Year.” I reached over and placed what turned out to be a prolonged kiss below her ear. “And many more times again, many, many.”

  I loved the way she had removed her boots and was reclining on the floor facing me, with one bare tanned foot on the other, staring at me with her lingering, sometimes sullen gaze. Once or twice she’d caught me staring at her feet, and I could tell she liked that; she knew what I was thinking, and I knew she knew, and I loved it. A week ago they were on sand, now they’re on my rug. We were no longer just friends, and there was clearly much more between us than ordinary man-woman friendship, but I didn’t know what any of this was or where it was headed or whether it had already crested and this was all we were ever going to be together. For the first time in days I was willing to see that what stood between us was not a gray, barren no-man’s-land littered with craters and mines but something else, though uncharted and as silent and snow-hushed as the Nativity itself, filled with the hopeful, aching mirth that lasts no longer than improvised truces when guns go silent on December 25, and enemy soldiers climb out of their trenches to light a cigarette, but then forget to light another.

  At some point I said I’d let her hear all the Silotis I’d been able to buy.

  “Which is the best?” she asked.

  “Yours.”

  “My point exactly.”

  •

  Our picnic lasted over two hours, especially since she turned on the television and, without either of us meaning to, we watched The Godfather, starting from the murder of Sollozzo and of the crooked policeman till the near-end, when Michael Corleone has everyone eliminated and tells his brother-in-law, whom he’s about to have killed as well, “Ah, that little farce you played with my sister. You think that would fool a Corleone?” “Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?” she repeated. Afterward, we listened to my new versions of the Handel. We discussed Rohmer again, but stayed clear of tonight’s films. I didn’t want to know where she was going after our picnic, did not want to ask, did not want specifics. Knowing might hurt more than aching to know.

  “What is it that he says?” I asked. “Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?”

  I loved how she said it. “Say it again.”

  “Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?”

  But then, just as she was about to pour me more red wine, she tipped over her glass, which had been standing quite steadily on a large dictionary. The little that remained in her glass left a small red pool on the carpet that soon disappeared into the dark-hued lozenges of the Persian rug. Her sudden apologies reminded me of the spontaneous and effusive Clara I’d seen when she had turned around and kissed me in Max’s dining room. I tried to calm her, told her not to worry, and rushed into the kitchen to find a rag.

  “Dab, don’t rub. Dab,” she repeated.

  I tried to do as told.

  “You’re still rubbing, not dabbing.”

  “You do it, then.”

  “Let me,” she said, first imitating my rubbing motions far from the rug, then showing me how it should be done.

  “Now I need salt,” she said.

  I gave her the salt shaker.

  She laughed at me. Where did I keep the salt?

  I brought her a giant box of kosher salt. Clara poured a generous mound on the wine stain.

  “Why on earth do you have such a giant box of salt but no food in the house?”

  “Rose garden lived here and cooked a lot—which also explains the very large containers of spices. Food’s lying low these days,” I added.

  “What did she do?”

  “Cooked big dinners.”

  “No, I mean what did she do to get booted from the rose garden?”

  “Told me I should dab, not rub.”

  “And where is she now?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Gone.”

  I looked at the neat little mound she’d carefully evened with the flat of her fingers and which bore four finger-length furrows that I knew I’d never have the heart to remove. I shall keep this forever and ask Mrs. Venegas not to even think of touching or of vacuuming the salt. And if she does remove it, I’m sure I’ll have the stain to remember this day by, the way people put plaques at the site where a meteor struck the earth but left no trace of itself save for the crater bearing its name now. She was the meteor, I the gaping hollow. On December 28 Clara and I picnicked on my floor, and here’s the proof. As soon as she’d leave—I knew myself—I’d stare at those tiny creases marking the spaces between her fingers and say to myself, Clara was here.

  “Hopefully there won’t be a stain.”

  “Hopefully,” I said, “there will.”

  “Printz,” she said reproachfully. Both of us understood. After a short pause, she suddenly added, “Dish
es!”

  We brought the dishes back to the kitchen, and she dropped them in the sink.

  “We forgot dessert,” she said.

  “No, we didn’t. I bought chocolate lesbians.”

  “I didn’t see.”

  “Surprise! But on one condition—”

  “What condition?” Concern rippling down her face. I knew I’d made her nervous.

  “On condition you say, ‘Ah, you think that would fool a Corleone?’ ”

  My heart was racing.

  “The things you think of!”

  She opened the three packs of cookies and laid them out by twos. If you wedged each one in between your toes, I’d bring my mouth there and bite each one—The things I think of, you said?

  “Still want tea?” I asked.

  “Quick tea,” she said. “I have to get going soon.”

  I don’t know what had made me think she’d forget about her date with otherpeoples. How silly of me. But how totally insensitive of her to remember. Part of me went so far as to believe that she enjoyed breaking our little routine, enjoyed throwing me off, enjoyed watching me hope she’d forgotten, only then to yank me back to reality and remind me that she hadn’t.

  But I also knew that to ascribe such motives was like attributing an intention to a storm or looking for a meaning behind the sudden death of a friend with whom we’d been playing tennis just two hours earlier.

  We boiled water in the microwave oven—two minutes. Then dipped Earl Grey tea bags in the boiling water—one minute. Within seven minutes, we were done with tea. Bad sex tea. Very, very bad sex tea, she repeated, not Lydian at all.

  Then she stood up and went to one of the windows to watch yet another white cold gray winter day wear itself out. She didn’t say anything about Rohmer. I didn’t say anything either.

  I left the door to my apartment ajar and walked her to the end of the corridor, where we waited in an awkward silence for the elevator to arrive. We never made plans when saying goodbye, and this was no different, except that not saying anything about tomorrow had strained the air between us and given an unnatural, almost hostile cast to our silence, as though what we were hiding was not our reluctance to formalize our friendship or to reinvent it each time it brought us closer; what we were hiding was the guilty diffidence of those who have no intention of meeting again and are desperately avoiding the subject. When the elevator did come, we were back to an abrupt and hasty peck.