Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  I knew I was letting the whole day—and Clara along with it—slide like sand between my fingers. Her uncompromising tone had snuffed out my desire to put up a fight or even attempt to.

  “Where will you be around lunchtime?” I asked.

  I was expecting something like At a place where people eat.

  “Well, I’m having lunch with a friend.”

  I didn’t like this at all. She had used the word friend to avoid using a name. I knew she knew I’d see through this. Was this, yet again, an instance of tit for tat? What made it worse—and what drew me like a moth to a flame—was that, even if she was trying to avoid being more specific about her friend, she knew I’d think she was doing it on purpose.

  “What if I call as soon as we’re done? How’s that?”

  But How’s that? was not so neutral either. It could mean Happy now? Or it could mean: See, I can be nice. Now, be a good boy and take this offer before I take it back. She was, it seemed to me, willing to meet me halfway, but not more, even though both of us knew this wasn’t halfway at all. It sounded like a final concession made to a temperamental child before one lost patience and resorted to warnings. How’s that? could easily mean Take that!

  I wanted to see her now, before ten in the morning. But she was saying she’d call me around three.

  I already sensed that, at the earliest, we’d meet at the movie theater—if then.

  What was I to do with myself all this time? Hope? Worry? Fight her? Sit staring blankly at my walls, at my carpet, at my windows, like one of those hollowed-out Hopper characters? Trundle up and down Broadway? Start calling friends I’d been too happy to neglect? Swim in my bathtub? Live with myself?

  Wasn’t this what I had been doing—living with myself—and hating every minute of it?

  “Bummer!”

  She heard it too. Not just the catch in my voice, but the extent of my distress and my hapless attempt to put a lilt on it.

  “Bümer?” she said, making light of the word, which was always her way of deflecting tension.

  Meanwhile, the two cases of wine arrived. I signed for them and tried to put more authority in my voice. But there was no hiding the whimper, even in front of the deliveryman.

  “I was just about to come over . . .” I let the thought trail. There was no point. She had already conceded with the promise of a call. No need to push.

  “Where will you be?” she asked.

  “Sitting in the dark by my télyfön.”

  We laughed. But I already knew that at no time today would I enter a building where I’d risk losing the phone signal.

  •

  It was 9:30. At 9:30 on our third day together we were already past Hastings. Now it felt so very far away. Even the scones, the coffee, the obscene gesture that had totally disarmed me felt far away. I wanted Clara today. Clara so as not to be without Clara. Clara to screen me from things that may have nothing to do with Clara but that found in her a stand-in for life’s inflections. Her image would be before my eyes all day now. To walk about the city and project her image on every store, every building, everything. Run into people and wish you were with her instead. Meet a friend and want to talk of nothing else. Share the elevator with neighbors and wish to unburden every sorrow if only they asked, How are you today?

  We’d agreed to call each other by mid-afternoon. I couldn’t prevent myself from saying it: Don’t make me wait forever.

  I won’t.

  Firmly, but summarily spoken, and with attitude—meaning, Let it go, hon. By the very tone in her promise, I inferred not only that she probably wasn’t going to call me but that she’d made up her mind precisely because of my way of asking. Whiny and mopey. I might as well have said: If you don’t call me, I’ll kill myself.

  “That’ll be good,” I said, trying to muster a decisive, chummy-business air myself.

  “That’ll be very güd,” she echoed back, instantly poking holes in my bogus firmness.

  We hung up.

  I immediately wanted to call her back. What would be so terrible about calling someone right back and speaking frankly about the things eating you—the dashed hopes, the worries stoked, wishes left hanging and then nipped before you’d even had time to nurse them and coddle them and get to know them better? Crush and rip, how easily it came to her. Nip and rip. This would have been my morning with her, our morning. Had we spent the night together, she’d never have pulled that friend all the way downtown. Had I spent the night, we might be sleeping still, sleeping after strudel gâteau, sleeping then strudel gâteau again. Eventually, I’d sneak out to buy muffins and scones and go back to lovemaking on our bed of crumbs, our bed of cum, breath of my bread on her bed in her mouth, languid, tender, and raucous her voice, as it was last night after so many cigarettes, the Clara who’d say I was the best thing that happened this year, the Clara who seemed about to break terrible news to me but ended up telling me she spoke my name in the dark—and I believed her, and still did—the Clara who called me idiot in French and meant it, in German, in Russian, in English.

  This was definitely going to be the ugliest day of the year. I had hated this year—now I had every reason to want to put it behind me, put her behind me, forget her, forget the party, Straus Park, Leo and strudel and the ice cackling away on the frozen Hudson to the rhythm of the Bach-Siloti prelude. Forget. And if I couldn’t forget, then learn to hate. Suddenly I wanted to find a way not just to hate but to hurt her. Or rather, not so much to hurt her as to watch her suffer. She wants to play rough? I’ll show her rough. I’ll not answer my phone. I’ll go to the movies with someone else. And then head out to the same bar afterward. That’s what I’ll do. But I thought we had a date. Fat chance! Just you barging in on people when you want to and spilling your venom all over their lives, trashing and sweeping everything they hold for dear life, and in your wake, when you’re over and done with them, nothing but stains and salt on a rug, a glass trinket from a factory workers’ den called Edy’s, and the taste of your mouth on their breath, taste of your mouth in my mouth, the bread of your mouth, the food of your mouth, the crumbs from your mouth that I’d pick up one by one, just leave them at my door, bloodstained and winestained and heaped with salt and dollops of bile, and I’ll watch over them and bury my seed in them. I wanted you to call me, to want me, to be patient and kind to me. Not this friend downtown malarkey.

  But what was I thinking! What if I had offered what she’d offered me last night and waited for a call that never came this morning? What if she’s doing what I had been doing myself from the very start? What could possibly have made her beg me not to keep her waiting last night at the bar while I went to the bathroom if I hadn’t already signaled that I was Mr. Reluctance Amphifibbing personified?

  •

  This, I could tell, was not going to be a good day. I’d have to put myself on hold, find a quiet spot somewhere, and, like an animal about to hibernate, stop breathing, hold still, make no plans, just wait for her call.

  By eleven, I couldn’t stand it. I tidied up the place a bit, if only to start working. But working at home was not what I wanted, so I put everything aside, decided to pay some bills, tried to answer some e-mails. But I couldn’t focus on anything. I picked up my wallet and keys, put my coat on, and headed out.

  Life without Clara had officially started. Going down in the elevator where I’d heard her laugh so loudly, I repeated to myself: Life without Clara has officially started.

  I knew that there was no reason to despair, that we might be back to the movies this very evening, but I also suspected that something had cracked and that I had better start rehearsing the loss now.

  It occurred to me that rehearsing loss to dull the loss might bring about the very loss I was hoping to avert.

  What crazy ideas you have, Printz.

  The thought amused me. Just trying to think the worst-case scenario would most likely bring it on; the anger I felt each time I thought of losing her would, if she suspected it in my voice or o
n my face, turn her against me.

  I walked down Central Park West and then decided to cross over to the East Side and head to the Met. I liked walking on the bridle path, liked the chalk white city on winter mornings that could take a miserable day and white out the sun long before sunset. I even liked the frozen, whey-hued ground that made me focus on my steps as I crunched my way across the park, step by step, like an invalid learning to walk again, her image before me all the time, and the sound of my footsteps going crick, crack, crack, crick, crack, crack, how I had loved that day. We’d enjoy this too if we were together, she forever nipping every moment of effusion by adding a livelier form of effusion herself. She and I just crunching along together, step by step, each trying to be the first to break the icicles along the way.

  You’ll never forgive me for last night, will you?

  I never held last night against you. But maybe you’re right.

  Don’t keep saying that.

  I could feel it coming—this whitening of the landscape gradually closing in around me and spreading out like stage fog, wrapping the entire city in the oppressive color of eggshell and blanched almond verging on the dirty gray-white of industrial cataracts humming away in the distance. The oppressive whiteness of the day swimming before my eyes.

  I was going to be alone all day. Who knows, tomorrow as well. And the worst was, there was no one I wanted to be with to stave off the loneliness. I could have called people. But I didn’t want them. I could go to the movies early today, but movies, especially after the past four nights, would drive the point home even more fiercely now, as though even movies, from being my staunch allies, had gone over to her side now. Why were people so easily available to her? Why did someone forged in the same smithy as I need to gather so many people around her? The answer scared me: because she’s not you, not your twin. Simple. Or is it that she can be of your ilk and everyone else’s as well? The woman she is with them is totally unknown to you, and what she’ll share with them or want from them has names she’s never even told you.

  No doubt about it. I’ll be alone all day and learn to look things squarely in the face. It may not have much to do with her. It had to do with wanting, and waiting, and hoping, and never knowing why or what I wanted. And this creature made of flesh and blood and a will so strong it could bend a steel rod simply by staring it down, was she another metaphor, an alibi, a stand-in for the things that never worked out, for what draws close but never yields? I was drowning, not swimming to Bellagio. I was on the outskirts of things, and being on the outskirts of things was how I lived life, while she . . . well, while she’d simply flipped on me. Yes, that was the cheap, petty, sordid word for it: she’d flipped on me. From extreme this to extreme that. Tit for tat.

  And the worst part of it was that there were no explanations.

  When I reached the East Side, I watched the traffic lights turn red, one after the other—pip, pip, pip—their blotchy red halos suddenly reaching all the way down into the Sixties, casting a premature evening spell, which seemed to wipe off this entire big mistake of a day to restore a semblance of peace by sundown.

  But when I watched the lights suddenly turn green again and the day prove far younger than I’d hoped, I saw that I was hours away from her promised mid-afternoon call, five long grudging hours, with the weight of five long winter afternoons before I’d leave the Met, watching the tourists wander through corridors abutting each to each, leading to an overwhelming question—Are you losing your mind, Printz?

  I looked at the green lights dotting Fifth Avenue. They seemed so cheerful, like office receptionists blinking their false eyelashes while uttering tame, perfunctory, upbeat greetings to clients who’ve lost everything, a poinsettia at one end of their desks and bonsai evergreens at the other, festive and mirthless, like all season’s greetings, like today, like Christmas itself, like Christmas parties, with and without Claras or a bowl of punch sitting right in the middle of them. If you didn’t bring your own warmth, these lights had none to give. They just glittered like party sparklers across the city, bringing neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. All these words, words, words coming to haunt me, not rescuing, just waving—why was I losing my mind?

  Could I really be losing my mind if I knew I was losing my mind? Tell me, Clara.

  Ask the pumice stone.

  Tell me why.

  It’s quantum stuff, dear, for the answer is both yes, you could be, and no, you couldn’t, but not the two at the same time.

  But if I know that the answer is yes and no, but not the two at the same time, am I still losing my mind?

  Hieronimo doesn’t know, Hieronimo won’t tell.

  I knew what I was doing. Cobbling fragments together the way my father, once he began losing his memory under the spell of morphine and more morphine yet, would quote long stretches from Goethe and Racine to show he remembered each in the original. I was reaching out to the poets like a cripple lurching for a cane.

  The Met, when I arrived, was mobbed with tourists. Everyone was milling about me like flat, two-dimensional cardboard figurines capable of producing stentorian sounds when speaking French, German, Dutch, Japanese, and Italian, their children especially. People fretted their way about the great hall like souls awaiting transmigration in this great Grand Central of God’s kingdom. They’re all craving to be New Yorkers this time around, I thought, suddenly struck by the notion that I would give anything to be a native of their own sunless, pallid cities, Montevideo, St. Petersburg, Bellagio, how distant they all seemed this morning. Wipe this life clean and start all over again, less shipwrecked, less wanting, less damaged.

  Are you damaged? Am I not what you like?

  Really, lady!

  Suddenly, all these aimless, jittery foreign souls threading their way about me seemed to strap on billboards like sandwich men, displaying large playing-card portraits on their fronts and backs, some parading as kings, others as queens, and still others as jacks. The handsome jack of hearts and the queen of spades. The Gorgon and the Joker. You Gorgon, me Joker. There are places on this planet where they stone women like you. Then the man slits his own throat or hurls himself off a bluff.

  I had never hated myself so much as I did now. I’d brought this on myself, hadn’t I? Me with my quixotic too soon, too sudden, too fast shit, and she with her cheap, petty, sordid flips. My shit and her flip. Flip for shit. Tit for tat. Flit for ship. Ship that slipped, that got away. A whole life summed up by bip, bip, bip, and crick, crick, crack.

  I was losing my mind, and the more I grew aware of it, the worse it became. I tried letting my thoughts drift to other subjects and settle on anything that might strike a cheerful note—one good thought, my kingdom for one good thought—but everything my mind landed on seemed to start out quietly enough, only to rouse satanic images, three good thoughts morphed into three blind mice. Three queens of diamonds walked by me, twittering away in a strange tongue, followed by a king of spades and two jacks with tiny electric gadgets sulking each to each. King stopped me and, pointing to timid number 2 wife, asked for directions to the bathroom. I must have turned away in shell shock. You’re a Shukoff, I said. You rude, mister. Me very sorry, most very, very sorry indeed, I said. How I missed her, how I loved her, how I wanted to laugh with her—all I want is to laugh with you, Clara, hold you, make love to you, laugh with you, and if we do nothing else in life but spend each day sans friends, sans children, sans work, and speak of Vaughan and Handel and strudel gâteau and a lifetime of nonsense words studding our love like medals on the tattered uniforms of White Russian generals turned panhandlers after they’ve had everything taken away from them by the revolution, it would still be the right life for me. I wonder what she’d say when I told her. I’d have to tell her, had to tell her, for this fat doting husband/father, who’d asked directions to the vaterklosèt, was more important to me now than anything in this entire museum, for all I wanted was to take out my cell phone and tell her of my b
rush with the king of spades and his number 2 wife keeling with pipi trouble.

  Suddenly I felt the need to stop and hold on to something and make sure the world around me wasn’t reeling. Must leave the museum. I rushed out into the cold and saw the steps of the Met before me spill like the Spanish Steps all the way down onto Fifth Avenue, turning white-gray before me like the cold waters of Venice flooding the embankments and reaching down to the pretzel vendors, whose diminutive trucks seemed bolted to an ever-receding sidewalk. I directed my path down to one of the vendors. Heading toward him gave me a direction. When I finally reached his stand, I saw him spread mustard on one of those large salted pretzels. The sight turned my stomach, and I felt something surge in me, something like nausea, but not nausea, more like seasickness after a forgotten nightmare. The sweat was collecting on my face, despite the cold. I grabbed a pole around which a rider had chained his bicycle. I could hear my heart racing. And what didn’t help was the antiphonal whine of a bus bickering with its inability to kneel for an old lady with a cane, as if heart and bus were busy arguing like the piano and violin in the Kreutzer Sonata, talking back each to each, tit for tat, pip for pip, shit for flip, all loose ends tied together into a crusty warm pretzel with bilious mustard dolloped on top, the whole pretzel resting on my nose like a pair of binoculars, my eyes are your eyes to my eyes, your tongue and my tongue is one tongue, and your teeth on my lips, your teeth, your teeth, what beautiful God-given teeth you have, you have, you have.