Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  Why even bother asking why this was different?

  In the men’s room I had taken a moment to check if there were messages for me. She had called eight times but never left a message. Why did I assume that she’d lied to me when she claimed she’d called so many times? Because you don’t trust me, because you’re afraid of me. Afraid of what, though? Afraid. Afraid because I could be better than you. Afraid because, unlike love with others, you’ve no clue where this is going. Afraid that, contrary to what you desperately want to believe, you’ll never want this to end. Afraid—and you’re only beginning to get a glimpse of it now—that I’m the real deal, Printz, and that this hindrance and disturbance we thought was a rock between us is what bound us from the get-go. Today you like me more than you know. But what you’re scared to death of is wanting me more tomorrow.

  I’d known her for only five days, but I already knew that this was the stuff of planets and of lives moved by fate, gods, and by the nebulae of ghosts who have come and gone, keening over loves that time won’t expiate or pleas bring back. You’ve sprung like a curse on my land, Clara, it will take my blood generations to wash you away.

  Clara, I was lying, I am not afraid of being disappointed, I am afraid of what I’ll have and don’t deserve or wouldn’t know what to do with, much less learn to fight for each day. And yes, afraid you are better than I am. Afraid I’ll love you more tomorrow than I do tonight, and then where will I be?

  “Tomorrow is Full Moon in Paris,” she said.

  I did not reply. She intercepted my silence before I did.

  “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

  She knew, she knew.

  “You don’t know if there’ll be a tomorrow?”

  “Do you know?”

  “I make no promises.”

  “Neither do I.” I was boasting.

  “Printz, sometimes you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Our knives were drawn again.

  “For the record, though—”

  “Yes . . .” There it was, as always, the little threat that pricks your pulse and sends it racing into panic mode.

  “Just for the record, so you won’t fault me for not saying it now: I’m more in love with you than you know. More in love than you are.”

  We kissed again. Neither of us cared who was watching. No one bothered to watch when it came to couples in this bar. This was the woman who was going to make love to me tonight. And she was going to make love to me, not like this, but more than just like this. All that stood between us was our sweaters. Then we’d be naked together, her thighs against my thighs, face-to-face, very face-to-face, and we’d pick up just where we’d have left off at the bar and go on talking and laughing and talking as we’d make love, and go on and on till morning and exhaustion. This was, and the thought came from so far away that I could easily put it on hold for a while, the first and only woman I’d ever wanted to make love to.

  •

  It had snowed outside. The snow on the stoop to the bar made me think of our first night together when we’d left the party and she wore my coat for a few minutes and had then given it back to me, after which I slogged my way down the stairs by the monument onto Riverside Drive, thinking to myself that perhaps I’d left the party too soon and should have stayed awhile longer, who cares if they think I’ve enjoyed the party and am eager to stay for breakfast! Later, I had changed my mind and walked to Straus Park, where all I did was sit and think and remember the minutes when we had come back after Mass and she’d pointed out her bench to me. So many years on this planet, and never once felt anything like this.

  “Wait,” she said, before leaving the bar. “I need to tie my shawl.”

  Soon her face was almost entirely wrapped in her shawl. All one could see was the top of her eyes and part of her forehead.

  At the corner of the street, I put my arm around her and let her mold into me as she always did when we walked together. Then, without caring how long it had taken her to cover her face, I snuck my hand into the shawl and held her face, pushing the shawl all the way back to expose her head and to kiss her again. She leaned her back against the bakery store window and let me kiss her, and all I could feel then was my crotch against hers, pushing ever so mildly, then pushing again, as she yielded first and then pushed back, softly, because this is what we’d been rehearsing all along, and this too was a rehearsal. This was why they’d invented sex, and this was why people made love and went inside each other’s body and then slept together, because of this and not for any of the many reasons I’d imagined or been guided by during my entire life. How many other things would I discover I didn’t know the first thing about tonight? People made love not because they wanted to but because something far older than time itself and yet way smaller than a ladybug ordained it, which was why nothing in the world felt more natural or less awkward between us than for her to feel my hardness rubbing against her or our hips caught in a rhythm all their own. For the first time in my life I wasn’t out to seduce anyone or pretend that I wasn’t; I had arrived there long before.

  But perhaps I had arrived too soon, and my mind was lagging behind, like a limping child slowing down those who had gone ahead of him.

  “This is my bakery. I buy coffee here,” she said.

  Why did it matter? I thought.

  “And the muffins?”

  “Sometimes muffins too.” We kissed again.

  Inside the park, she stood by the statue. “Isn’t this the most beautiful statue in the world?”

  “Without you it means nothing,” I said.

  “It’s my childhood, my years in school, everything. We met here this morning, and here we are again. It has so much of you.”

  Clara’s world.

  In the cold night I began to dread our arrival and was hoping to defer it—not, as I had hoped on previous nights, because arrival meant saying goodbye after perfunctory pecks and the perfunctory hug—but because tonight I’d have to say what I lacked the courage to say, what I wasn’t even sure I wanted to say: “I’m dying to come upstairs, Clara, I just need time.”

  She looked at me as we approached the door to her building. She’d sensed something. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Then what is it? What’s happened?”

  I was the girl, she was the man.

  I stopped on the sidewalk with her still in my arms. I couldn’t find the right words, so I blurted the first thing that came to mind.

  “It’s too soon, too sudden, too fast,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to rush it. Don’t want to mess this up.”

  Perhaps I didn’t want her to think I was like everyone else, and was determined to prove it to her.

  Or was it boorish Boris and his so-you’re-finally-gonna-get-some-tonight smirk that I wished to avoid?

  Or was it just that I wanted to let the romance last awhile longer and ripen on its vine?

  “So you’ll leave me alone and go home in this weather? Sleep on the couch if you must.”

  “We’ve seen too many Rohmer movies.”

  “You’re making such a terrible mistake—”

  “I just need a day.”

  “He needs a day.”

  She had withdrawn from my arm. “Is there something I should know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you . . .” And I could tell she was looking for the right words but couldn’t find them: “Are you damaged? Am I not what you like?”

  “For your nymphormation, I am not damaged. And as for that other thing—you’re so off track.”

  “Still, such a mistake.”

  We were both very cold by then, and it was good that Boris had opened the lobby door a crack.

  “Kiss me again.”

  Boris’s presence for some reason cramped me, but not her. Still, I kissed her on the mouth, then once again, and as though she remembered the gesture that had brought
us closer than we’d ever been before, she lowered my turtleneck, exposed my throat, and placed a long kiss there. “I love your smell.” “And I love everything, just everything about you—that simple.” She looked at me. “Idiot.” She was quoting Maud from the film. “I know.” “Just don’t forget. First thing tomorrow morning—call me,” she added, making a gesture she often parodied by extending her thumb and index finger. “Otherwise, you know me: I go into high pandangst, and there’s no telling what can happen.” I tried to humor her. “Printz, I shouldn’t tell you, because you don’t deserve it, but you’re the best thing that’s happened to me this year.”

  SIXTH NIGHT

  That night, in Straus Park, I almost did light a cigarette. It was too cold to sit and it had started snowing, so I could stand there for only a short while before moving on. One day, I’ll grow tired of this. One day, I’ll pass by and forget to stop.

  I called her as soon as I arrived home. No, she wasn’t sleeping. Didn’t want to lose the feeling either. No, same spot, by the window, men’s pajamas. She sounded sleepy and exhausted, but no different than when I’d left her. I can still smell you, she said, and it will be like sleeping with you. I felt she was drifting off, perhaps I was keeping her up. “No, don’t go yet, I like that you called.” Maybe I’d done the right thing, she said. “Calling?” I asked. “Calling too.”

  There were long silences on the phone. I told her I’d never felt anything like this for anyone. “I have,” she said, and, after a momentary interruption, added “for you.” I could see her smile rippling on her tired features, the dimples when she smiled, her hand when she rubbed her palm over her forehead. I want to be naked with you. It’s not like you weren’t asked.

  We said good night, but neither got off the phone, so we kept urging the other to hang up, and each time we said good night, a long silence would follow. Clara? Yes. You’re not hanging up. I’m hanging up now. Long silence. But she wouldn’t hang up. Did it take you an hour to get home? Almost. What crazy ideas you have, Printz, going home like this, you would have made me happy, and I’d have made you happy too. Good night, I said. Good night, she said. But I didn’t hear a click, and when I asked if she was still on the line, I heard a smothered giggle. “Clara B., you’re crazy.” “I’m crazy? You’re crazy.” “I’m crazy for you.” “Obviously not crazy enough.”

  I did not want to miss her by calling too late the next morning. But I didn’t want to call too early either. I waited to take my shower for a while, but then, for good measure, took both my phones into the bathroom in case she called either one. As for breakfast, no way I was going to leave home before speaking to her. This was when I came up with the idea of buying an assortment of muffins and scones nimbly stacked in a white paper bag folded at the top. That’s right. Two coffees and an assortment of muffins, scones, and goodies, nimbly stacked . . .

  On my way to the shower I spotted the mound of salt on the carpet still bearing the grooved imprints of Clara’s fingers. My God, she had been here less than twenty-four hours ago—here, in this very apartment, sitting on this very carpet, barefoot, with chocolate cookies wedged in between her toes. The idea seemed unreal, impossible to grasp, as if some higher order had suddenly descended to pay a visit to my arid, dull, sublunary landfill. Yesterday we were together, I kept repeating.

  I watched the stain and feared that it might lose its luster and meaning, that she too, as a result, might begin to retreat, ebbing like a lakeshore town when just hours earlier it seemed a stroll away.

  When I bought this rug, the idea of a Clara couldn’t even have crossed my mind, and yet that Sunday in late May with my father when I bid on the rug at an auction before moving here is now indissolubly fused to this spill, as though she and the rug and my father, who wanted me to learn how to buy things at an auction, because one had to learn these things, had run on three totally seemingly unrelated paths that were destined to converge on this very stain, the way the pictures of the cages in the Tiergarten would lose their meaning now unless joined to that of a baby born that same year one summer thousands of miles away.

  I loved reading my life this way—in the key of Clara—as if something out there had arranged its every event according to principles that were more luminous and more radiant than those of life itself, events whose meaning was made obvious retrospectively, always retrospectively. What was blind luck and arbitrary suddenly had an intention. Coincidence and happenstance were not really chaotic but the mainsprings of an intelligence I had better not disturb or intrude upon with too many questions. Even love, perhaps, was nothing more than our way of cobbling random units of life into something approaching meaning and design.

  How nimble, how natural, how obvious her suggestion that we have lunch at my place. It would never have occurred to me. How simple her way of coming up to me at the party. Left to my own devices, I’d have spent the whole evening trying to speak to her and finally given up on hearing her tell someone something casual, caustic, and cruel.

  I looked at the salt on the rug and renewed my promise never to touch it. This was proof that we’d been happy together, that we could spend entire days and not once grow tired of the other.

  Of course, I feared that the joy I felt, like certain trees, had taken root at the edge of a craggy cliff. They may crane their necks and turn their leaves all they want toward the sun, but gravity has the last word. Please don’t let me be the one to pull this tree down. There is so much sarcasm and drought in me, to say nothing of fear, pride, disbelief, and an evil disposition ready to spite myself if only to prove I can do without so many of the things that life puts on the table that I’ll even be the first to push the poor sapling into the water. Don’t do it. If anything, let her.

  I thought once again of last night and how our hips had moved together. Too soon, too sudden, too fast. What an idiot!

  Compare this to: You’re the best thing that’s happened to me this year. You could take these words to a broker and buy put options in a bullish market and still make a killing—words whose hidden luster I recovered and would let go of so as to recapture them over and over, the way someone finds his fingers returning time and again to a pleasurable round object on a string of tiny hexagonal worry beads. Even when I forgot these words, I knew they were waiting close by, like a cat rubbing its back against your closed door. I’d even delay letting it in, knowing that as soon as I changed my mind, it would immediately rush in and jump on my lap—You’re the best thing that’s happened to me this year.

  I had a vision of Clara wearing glasses still, in her men’s pajamas and white socks, but nothing else. “So this is no longer too soon, too sudden, too fast?” she’d ask. “Fuck too soon, too sudden,” I’d say, struggling with the urge to undo the drawstring of her jammies—drop the jammies, keep the socks, off with the glasses, and let me see you naked in the morning light, my north, my south, my strudel gâteau, Oskár and Brunschvicg ready to rollick, coiled up like reptiles flailing and agile. I wonder if the coffee would get cold. Split the muffins and bless the crumbs, the sticky buns, the icing on the cake, and stay in bed, reach out for the coffee until arousal sweeps over us again, and we’ll call it making strudel gâteau.

  In the shower this morning, hands off Guido.

  “So did you make love to me last night?” she’d ask. “I most certainly did not,” I’d say. Did not.

  By nine I was walking out the door when the phone rang. I hoped I’d still answer with last night’s tired, intimate, unguarded voice, perhaps I’d even try to affect it if it wouldn’t come naturally. But it was only a deliveryman. The thrill with which I had rushed to answer told me how much I wanted it to be Clara, today like yesterday, like the day before, like every other day this week. I wondered if she’d sound as languid and hoarse as she did last night, heedless of everything that didn’t bear on us—or would she be back to her blithe and sprightly self again, light and swift, alert and caustic, untamed rebuke all set to sting?

  The delivery was taking
longer than necessary. “He’s already on his way,” said the doorman when I called downstairs. I waited. By now it was past nine. I waited some more. Then I buzzed downstairs and told the doorman to see why the delivery was taking so long. I hung up. The phone rang again. “Yes!!!” I said. “Didn’t you know I was going to call?” Obviously I must have sounded miffed and was sending the totally wrong signal. Her voice, as I suspected, was entirely sober. “Funny, I was just on my way to bring you muffins and coffee.” But I knew I had picked something up in her voice. I couldn’t quite tell what had tipped me off, but I knew that something didn’t bode well. “That’s so sweet, but I have to be all the way downtown. I was just about to walk out the door.”

  Why didn’t I trust the drawn-out, doleful all the way downtown that wished to suggest that going downtown was an unwelcome and painful task that was surely going to ruin her entire morning?

  Why had she called, then? To make contact, to keep last night alive, to reassure the two of us that nothing had changed? Or was it because I had taken too long to call and she’d gone into high pandangst? Or was hers a preemptive admission, truth as cover-up, which explained the peremptory haste and the diversionary blandspeak of her all the way downtown?

  What made me furious was how I always let events and others dictate how my day was going to turn out. Passivity? Timidity? Or was it every man’s diffidence, which invents honorable obstacles to avoid asking for fear of being turned down? I could have offered to go with her, but I didn’t. And I could have told her I’d meet her immediately afterward, but I didn’t. Clara, sensing I wasn’t about to do either, may have suspected I wasn’t so eager to see her. But that didn’t make sense: Why would I offer to bring her breakfast if I wasn’t eager to see her? But then, why was I making it so easy for her not to change her plans downtown? To hide my disappointment?