Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

The moment he stepped back into the lobby, I crossed the street and found myself headed toward 107th Street.

  I could not stay on the sidewalk too long. She might look out of her kitchen and catch my eyes glued to her windows. For all I knew, she might have been looking out of her window and staring straight at me. Or perhaps the two of them were. So I walked by in a rush. But having reached the end of her block too soon, I realized that there was nowhere to go, and rather than go the long way around to Broadway and back, I started walking back on Riverside, slowly, then once back to 105th, went up again to 107th, back and forth, again and again, always affecting a busy air, not realizing that there wasn’t a reason in the world why anyone should walk by eight times on Riverside Drive and look so busy at such an ungodly hour of the night.

  My passacaglia, I’d tell her one day, not Leo’s prelude, not your sarabande or your Folías, not Beethoven’s Adagio. Just my passacaglia, my passing along here, and losing my mind.

  Perhaps I should call, I thought. Not to talk. But to remind her I wasn’t out of her life quite yet. I’d let it ring once, then hang up. But I knew myself: having called her and found it wasn’t so difficult, I’d be tempted to repeat the call. It was the sort of thing Inky might do. Take forever to call the first time, call a second time twenty minutes later, then every five minutes, then all the time. If she wanted to speak to me, if she was alone, she’d call back. If she didn’t call back, well, either she’d turned off the phone or she wasn’t going to play this game. In the end, she’d ask him to pick up the phone and tell whoever had called that she was in Chicago. Say I’m in Chicago.

  Had I encouraged them to sleep together?

  Suddenly the lights in the living room are on again.

  She is unable to sleep. She is fuming. She is upset.

  I should call, shouldn’t I?

  What if she knows I am downstairs? She is the sort who would intuit just that. She knows I am downstairs this very moment.

  Or worse yet, what if she simply wants me to spin these thoughts in my head, including the worst one of all: that she isn’t even thinking of me?

  Then the lights go out.

  Only a pale, bluish light near her window. Was it a night-light? Was Clara really the type to use night-lights? Or was it a dusky, weakened incandescent light from another room, or light reflected from a nearby street sign? A candle? God forbid, no, not a candle, not a lava lamp. Clara Brunschvicg would never own a lava lamp!

  Ah, to make love to Clara Brunschvicg by the light of a lava lamp.

  Noir, noir thoughts.

  •

  I did not call that night. The next morning I was awakened by a light pattering on my windowpane, the sound of rainfall, timid and tentative, without the hysteria or conviction of a downpour, like rain on an August afternoon that might stop any moment and restore things to how they’d been minutes earlier. It felt like afternoon. I wouldn’t have minded if I’d woken up six months later. Let time, not me, deal with this.

  I’d had a fitful night, perhaps with weird dreams flaring through a wasteland called sleep, though I couldn’t remember a single dream, save for their collective pall, which lingered in my sleep like smoking stacks on a parched landscape after a great fire. At some point toward dawn I felt the same rapid throbbing in my chest that had made me go to the hospital the day before. But I must have fallen back to sleep. If I have to die, let it be in my sleep.

  By morning, I knew exactly what it was. It didn’t surprise me; what surprised me was its ferocity, its single-minded persistence in every part of my body. No ambiguity, no doubt, no cloud could be summoned to give it a kinder name. This was not a whim. It was a commandment that must have started somewhere in mid-sleep, slogged its way out of one nightmare into the next, and finally worked itself out into this morning’s light. I wanted her and I wanted nothing else in the world. I wanted her without her clothes, with her thighs wrapped around me, her gaze in mine, her smile, my every inch inside her. “Perse me, perse me, Printz, perse me one more time, and another, and another still,” she’d said in my sleep in a language that seemed English but might just as easily have been Farsi or French or Russian. This is all I wanted, and not having it was like watching life drained from my body and, in its place, a false serum injected straight into my neck. It wasn’t going to kill me, and I wasn’t going to die, and things would go on as before, and I’d definitely recover, but not having her was like laughing and drinking while watching every single person I grew up with being taken to the gallows and hanged, until my turn came, and I’d still be laughing.

  My own body was pounding at my door, pushing the door open with the dogged truculence of a crime about to be committed in which I was both felon and victim—open up, open up, or I’ll ram the door down—Perse me, perse me, Printz, perse me one more time, she’d said, to which I finally replied, I’ll perse you with everything I have, just make me make trouble, make me do something, make me hurt you, as I want you to hurt me, Clara, and hurt me hard, because this staying put like two boats tied to a dock is like waiting decades on death row, make me yield to you as I know I must and have been craving to ever since I kissed you and you snubbed me with a No that I want you to take back with the very lips I kissed that night, take back the curse and spit it from your mouth and I will take what you cast out because it was mine before it was yours.

  Part of me did not want to admit any of this, or yield to the impulse, because yielding now would be like letting the enemy dictate terms I’d regret signing no sooner than the ink had dried. This was not like our second night, when shutting my eyes and thinking she was in bed with me had seemed so easy and so natural that I didn’t even bother hiding it from her the next day. Where had that openness gone, why couldn’t I speak to her like this any longer, why with so much in common did my body feel so gridlocked and bottlenecked? The more I knew her, the more fettered my impulses; the more reclusive my body, the more muddled my speech. Could it be that the older I was, the more callow I got? Now that I knew how little there was to fear from others, I was turning shy; candor was more difficult the more fluent my speech. In the alchemy of desire, the more we know, the less we fear, but the less we fear, the less we dare.

  Now, in bed and with the words she’d spoken in my dream still ringing in my ears, I felt as though something had broken the sluices, mocked my inhibitions, and flooded every improvised sandbag I’d put between us. So what if I surrender to her, so what if she knows? I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.

  I decided to call her. Better yet: send her a picture of Sir Lochinvar, bonnet and plume. Top of the morning, greetings and salutations, from prow to aft, starboard and portside, all aboard, beware of our corvus, this is the captain speaking . . .

  Call and pick up where we’d left off two nights ago.

  I ache for you.

  Do people still ache for people?

  Not really.

  Then speak differently.

  I know you’ll want to hang up on me, and you have every reason to, and I know you’ll think I’m drunk or that I’ve lost my mind, but just speak to me, stay on the phone with me, say you know, say you know exactly, because you’re going through it yourself, for if you know, then I know how you’ll take the raspy, churlish snigger in your soul and unbraid it till it loosens into strands of passion, prayer, and thanksgiving.

  I put a pillow between my thighs, said the word Clara, thought of her legs wrapped around my back, and then knew, when there was no turning back, that I was signing over my life to her, that I was handing her all my keys for her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder—after this I would never be able to say it was nothing, or that morning had made me do it.

  Later, I went out in the rain, bought three papers, had breakfast at my crowded Greek deli, then headed for a walk to Columbia, maybe farther. I like rainy days, especially light rainy days that are just barely gray but whose overcast sky does not hang oppressively over the ci
ty. Such days make me feel cheerful, perhaps because they are darker than I and therefore make me seem happy by contrast. This was a good day for a walk. I knew there was no point in checking my e-mail or even expecting a call from her. She wouldn’t call because she knew I wouldn’t have called either, and I didn’t call because I knew she wouldn’t. But I knew she had thought of calling, because I myself had thought of it. She’d want me to make the gesture first, if only to hold it against me, which is why I wouldn’t call, which is also why she wouldn’t call either. It was this twined and tortured shadow-thinking that both paralyzed us and drew us closer. Aren’t we so very, very clever.

  Clara, you are the portrait of my life—we think the same, we laugh the same, we are the same.

  No, we’re nothing similar. It’s just love makes you say this.

  By the time I approached Straus Park, I knew I had absolutely no interest in going any farther uptown, that this whole expedition to Columbia or past Columbia was a ruse to step back into Clara’s world.

  In Straus Park the snow had already started to melt. I stood where I had stood on the day she’d come to meet me. The tenor of our relationship was so different on that day, or on the day before that: the quick dash to the restaurant in the cold, Svetonio, the visit to her home, our Lydian tea, that sacrosanct moment when in the kitchen she put two mugs on the counter and, with a resigned, uneasy air that sprang from the depths of reticence, had said, “I have no cookies. I have nothing to offer.”

  I went back to 105th Street to go over last night’s footsteps. I didn’t know why I was doing it, just as I didn’t know why I trundled down the same area so many times last night. But last night everything seemed shrouded in a spectral fog behind which I took cover, the better not to see the void looming before me. Last night I knew I was a shattered being. Today, I didn’t feel shattered at all. Things must be getting better, I thought, I must be healing and already getting over the hardest part. How fickle the human heart. I was almost about to take myself to task for being so frivolous when I suddenly caught sight of her window. I was jolted by an overwhelming sense of panic. It told me that the wound I thought was already healing hadn’t even been thoroughly inflicted yet, which was why it didn’t hurt so much. The knife wasn’t all the way in yet, things hadn’t started getting worse.

  Through her window I caught sight of the very large plant I’d seen in her living room a few days before. I hadn’t really noticed it at the time. Now I remembered we’d been discussing Rohmer and Beethoven, and she was sitting right under its leaves and I’d been staring at it all the time.

  I decided to walk downtown. I hadn’t crossed the street when an impulse made me pass by the bakery and stop once I noticed that the windows were all fogged up inside. I could use a croissant, I thought. There was a long line, there always was by mid-morning, especially during the holidays.

  This was the spot of two nights ago. To stir the memory of our kiss, I came even closer to the glass and, so as not to arouse suspicion inside the bakery, pretended to be straining my eyes to make out whether the line was long inside, almost pressing my nose flat against the glass. Clara was with me again. Our mysterious hip movements were as alive to me now as they were then. Nothing had changed. It amazed me to think that this bakery not only remembered the night better than I could but, in the tradition of all great bakeries on holidays, it remembered it for me and was offering me the choicest slice, the one with the king’s charm. One could keep this charm for life. Clara would become like one of those diseases that can definitely be overcome but that leave their mark on your skin and, sometimes, disfigure you completely, and you’ll call it a blessing all the same because it opened the way to God.

  If I should ever wish to see her in the weeks to come, the easiest way would be to come here instead of walking around her building. Or I could do both, the way people go to a cemetery to visit one tombstone and, since they’re there already, might as well put flowers on someone else’s too.

  I opened the door and walked into the bakery and, when my turn came, on the spur of the moment decided to buy one of their large fruit tarts. Then, on second thought, added four pastries as well.

  “I could have sworn it was you,” said a man’s voice. I turned around. It was a friend I hadn’t seen in months. He was having breakfast with his girlfriend, seated at a tiny round table. “I saw you peeking in from outside, and for a moment I thought you were about to flatten your whole face at me.”

  He introduced me to Lauren. We shook hands. What was I up to these days? Nothing, I replied. I was headed for a late lunch with some friends on Ninety-fifth Street—hence the cakes.

  The idea of visiting my friends had occurred to me only after I’d purchased the cakes.

  We were almost a week past Christmas and I had yet to find toys for their children, I added. How old were my friends’ children? asked the girlfriend, clearly interested in children. Two and four, I answered. “There are children’s shops a few blocks down.” Was she a schoolteacher? She shook her head.

  I looked at her. What a lovely person. There are children’s shops a few blocks down. A whole lifetime of kindness, sweetness, and goodwill in these eight words. We joked about buying gifts for children we hardly knew at all. She had no handbag; just a coat, which she was wearing buttoned down, both hands digging deep in her coat pockets—tense and uncomfortable, she’d finished her coffee long ago, it seemed. They had the look of a couple who’d had some words.

  “We were headed that way, anyway,” she said. “We’ll walk down with you.” They’d help me pick out toys. Did I mind? Not at all.

  How sweet of her simply to volunteer with a complete stranger. Then I realized why this wasn’t what I wanted at all and why I’d floated the plan of visiting friends on Ninety-fifth Street. I had bought the cakes in the hope of finding the courage to call Clara before announcing I was coming up with a tart and four pastries.

  If I don’t ditch these two now or tell them I’ve changed my mind, I may never drop in on Clara this morning, may never see Clara again, and—who knows—life may take a completely different turn, just because of a pair of toys and a stupid fib concocted with a fruit tart in my hand! Like those tiny, arbitrary accidents that determine the birth of a great piece of music or the destiny of a character in a film—a small nothing, a meaningless fib, and your life spins out of orbit and takes a totally unexpected turn.

  So here I am with a cake and four pastries going to a place I had no intention of visiting and about to buy gifts I couldn’t care less about.

  In the toy shop, all three of us seemed to disband for a while. He was interested in bicycles, while she simply ambled about looking at the cribs and baby furniture, her hands still digging into her coat pockets. I found myself right next to her.

  “I think you should buy a fire engine,” she said, pointing at one under a glass counter.

  How come I hadn’t seen it? It was staring right at me.

  “Because you don’t see, maybe?”

  “Because I don’t see, maybe. Story of my life, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know, would I?” she said.

  The huge fire engine was made of plastic with rounded corners and no sharp edges, which gave the truck a friendly but unintentionally cartoonish character that was not likely to please a boy of four.

  “Does the ladder move?” she asked the owner.

  “It also has a rotating functionality, see, madam?” he said, with a thick Indian accent, showing how the entire ladder assembly could be rotated 360 degrees.

  “But the same model also comes with a nonrotating functionality. Fewer parts, breaks less easily.” He turned his attention to a woman in her fifties and her pregnant daughter. They were wearing identical wigs. They wanted to buy furniture but did not want it delivered before the birth of the baby. “We’re a bit superstitious,” said the mother, speaking for the daughter. “I understand,” he replied with the deferential empathy of someone who’d lived his entire life with supersti
tions far creepier than this.

  Minutes later he was back. “So, which do you want, with rotating functionality or without rotating functionality?”

  By now, Clara would have been tempted to mimic his Indian accent, and together we would have been on the floor and added one or two new words to our clandestine lingo. Want to see a rotating functionality? I’ll show you a rotating functionality if that’s the last thing I do.

  With Lauren I wasn’t sure it was good form. I fiddled with the rotating ladder.

  “Which functionality do you think they’d like?” I said, turning to her and trying as discreetly as I could to coax laughter out of her.

  She smiled.

  “You were the four-year-old boy once, not me.”

  “I think I never grew beyond four.”

  “I wouldn’t know, would I?” Obviously this was her way of acknowledging without really responding to another hasty attempt at bridging the distance between us. Then, probably suspecting she might have snubbed me without meaning to, she added, “You’re not in bad company. Most men seldom grow beyond four.”

  We stood before the fish tank. I noticed she was staring at a fluttering flat Aleutian fish streaked with very loud blues; it looked like an imitation iris about to blossom. She saw me staring at her, looked away, and gently began tapping her fingernails on the glass pane just in front of the fish. The fish didn’t flinch but kept staring at her. She smiled at it, gazed at it more intensely, and then back at me.

  “He’s not taking his eyes off you,” I said.

  “Now, there’s something unusual,” she replied almost distractedly, with a roguish melancholy smile that could have said more about the man she was living with than about all the fish in the Pacific.

  I looked at her and couldn’t resist. “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and, taking my tit for tat like a good sport, continued the flirtation with the fish, which suddenly got flustered.

  “Oh no, he’s gone,” she said, feigning a crushed face. Then she looked at me, as if for confirmation that something unusually sad had indeed happened and that she hadn’t just imagined it. Her fingers were still touching the glass pane. She was lost in thought.