by André Aciman
“All I did was not sleep with her,” I explained.
“Because?”
“Because for once I didn’t want to rush it. Maybe I wanted this to be different. I didn’t want ordinary. Maybe I wanted the romance to last longer.”
Rachel listened.
“What comes after courtship?” I asked.
“Who ever knows. Besides, you’re asking the wrong person.”
I must have stared with a baffled look.
“We’re back together again,” she said. “We were friends, got married, got divorced, became friends again—now he wants to get married.”
“And you?”
“I’m not against it.”
Dangling the leash of her freed dogs, Rachel then crossed her arms and with her boot gave a gentle kick to a clump of clay. “It might actually be a good idea.” Rachel was not given to enthusiasm. This could have been a clamorous endorsement. Then, looking away, and just as I was about to put my two cents in, “What do you think our phantom woman is doing right now?”
“I don’t know. She could be with friends. Maybe another man. Who knows? One thing she is not doing is sitting waiting for my call.”
“Were you supposed to call?”
“No. We make a point of never calling. We’d just meet on impulse, kept it light and improvised.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know that there’s anything I can do.”
“But you must do something.”
I did not answer. I felt like shrugging my shoulders, but I knew she’d see through this too.
“It’s hard to tell what we had. At first I thought she wanted nothing, then that she wanted friendship of a sort, then that she might have wanted much more but wasn’t really sure, now we’re strangers.”
“And I take it you know exactly what you want.”
There was irony in her voice.
“I think I do.”
“You think you do. Put it this way: she’s probably not sure why you’ve been seeing her either. I think she’s very interested, the way you are. She wants friendship, she wants love, she wants everything, and nothing. No different from you. Nothing either of you does is wrong, even if you do nothing. But you should never have said no to her. Find a way to fix it before it’s too late.”
My smirk meant: And how do you propose I do that?
“Look. Perhaps she may not want to end it yet. Or she may want to end it before it sours. Either way, though, you can’t not call her.”
By then her two dogs had reappeared. The other guests were approaching us, Mr. Forsham had lit a pipe. “The phantom lady,” she repeated. “I like that.”
Then, on second thought: “Do me a favor. Go over to that tree where no one can hear you, take out your cell phone, and make the call.”
“And say what?”
“Say something!”
“Chances are she won’t pick up.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I’d do if she called.”
“Just call.” Impatience sealed her words.
She was tousling her collies.
Perhaps Clara had said nothing about me to anyone. Or perhaps she’d spent a good portion of the afternoon as I had, speaking to her friends about someone who was opaque, difficult, fractious, and transparent. Perhaps she’d taken a walk along the marina by the boat basin, where I pictured her with Pablo and Pavel today, discussing me with the same dismayed shrug I had shown Rachel after she’d asked me if I liked Clara and I said immensely, hoping Rachel might think I was probably exaggerating, which would allow me to think I was. Perhaps Clara too was being told that this thing between us was most likely leading nowhere, but that we were headed there with such locked steps that there was no telling where any of it was going. I saw myself taking a few steps on the hardened, cold earth and walking away from Rachel toward the very tree she had pointed out. Here, against my better judgment, I’d force myself to make the phone call as soon as I knew I was no longer within earshot of anyone. I just wanted to call, I’d say. A lapse of a few seconds. Agonizing silence. You just wanted to call? she’d repeat. Well, now you’ve called.
There’d be many voices in the background. Probably she’d be at a late lunch on the marina. Did I think she’d stay home knitting?
Where are you? How are you?
How am I? Is that what you’re asking? How do you think I am?
We’d have a hard time hearing each other. Or we’d pretend not to hear each other. Either way, the breakups on the line would help defuse the tension between us and give a flustered sprightliness to our words. She’d be in the boathouse. Where was I? In the park. It’d be just like us, I’d say, one in Riverside Park, the other in Central Park. It might thaw the chill. I’m so bored. Are you bored too, Clara? I’d ask. Terribly. Was either of us honest, or were we simply exaggerating to show we wished to be together instead? Would I want to come? Did she want me to come? Only if I wanted. Give me an address. She did not know the exact address, but it was on the marina off Seventy-ninth Street. I’d have to call her once I got there, and someone would come out and open the gate to the houseboats.
•
“Did you at least leave a message?” Rachel asked when I told her I wasn’t able to reach Clara.
“Yes,” I said.
“So, if she doesn’t call back, we’ll know.”
“I suppose so.” I must have sounded too vague.
“Did you really leave a message?”
I looked at her.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re really something. Let’s go home. I’ve found this extra-scented tea from Sri Lanka. And we’ve got so many cakes.”
By then it had grown dark.
When Rachel unlocked the door, we were struck by the smell of beef stewed in wine sauce. Her ex-no-longer-her-ex was sitting in total darkness watching the History Channel, drinking bourbon. He thought we had arrived too soon. Bag the tea, we’ll have drinks instead, someone said. There was a rush to one of the closets by the bookcase, glasses were produced, bottles, mini-snacks, including my favorite, pistachios roasted in hot spices. Someone put on a CD, even the Forshams were pleasant to be with. I began to look forward to this evening. From a limping afternoon-evening that was headed into a deep abyss filled with the darkest scree below, this was turning into a night that could last into the wee hours and remain as pleasant and warm as if Clara had promised to show up and might any moment ring the doorbell. It would have been so good if Clara came. I suddenly thought of 7:10. Seven-ten was less than two hours away now. There was still time to decide. What if I did call?
No, I wasn’t going to call—never ask the question again.
But after downing a glass of Scotch, I couldn’t remember why I’d been putting off calling her or why I’d even hesitated. I went into the empty pantry and took out my cell phone. I had the best intentions, I thought. I was simply going to ask her to join us for dinner. Light and simple.
She picked up exactly as I’d imagined: “Speak!”
I told her I was with friends and that I’d love her to join us for drinks. I didn’t say anything about dinner, figuring it might scare her off.
“I can’t.”
It still caught me by surprise. I threw in my one and only trump card. “I’m so bored. I’m bored out of my mind. I’m dying to see you. Say yes.”
“I’m sorry you’re bored. But I can’t. I’m busy.”
No apologies, no explanation, not even feigned regret in her voice. Hard, glacial, petrous.
“Bummer,” I said—my way of coaxing a smile to her voice. But she didn’t respond. Her voice seemed drained of its warmth and humor. Everything came off deadpan, the silence of a cobra that had just bitten and is watching to make sure its victim has collapsed.
She didn’t bring up 7:10. I didn’t either.
The conversation couldn’t have lasted for more than half a minute. It left me stunned—which was exactly why I’d been avoiding callin
g her. Stunned was worse than hurt, worse than snubbed, told off, insulted, or just simply ignored. Stunned was like being totally paralyzed, good for nothing else afterward, scrapped, zombified, eviscerated. I turned off the telephone completely. I didn’t want to hope, didn’t want to think there’d be anything good to expect from this phone. There were never going to be other calls. Serves me right, serves me right.
When I returned to the living room by way of the dining room, I saw that the large country table had already been set, with its usual selection of ill-assorted dishes and glasses. And then I remembered. I’d wanted to tell them to add a place setting for an extra guest. Then I’d gone to make my phone call. Is this the guest? Rachel would have asked. Yes, the guest. I had told no one her name. So where shall we seat the guest, across from you perhaps? I loved Rachel’s irony. This table, though, would never see Clara. Clara would never see Rachel.
•
That night after dinner and our second dog walk later in the park, I did walk up Broadway. On 106th I dawdled about awhile, then strolled around her block once and, for good measure, a second time. Her lights were out, both the first and second time. Obviously she wasn’t home, might not come back, or had gone to bed already. Then I walked to Straus Park and stood there, remembering the candles I’d imagined on the statue a week ago, remembering Officer Rahoon and Manattàn noir and Leopardi’s short poem about life being all bitterness and boredom. Busy, she’d said. What an ugly word. Lethal, flat-footed, snooty, dismissive busy.
The rats have all gone under, I thought. There was something good and soothing about standing here and feeling one with the specter of things, something wholesome in watching life from the bank of the dead, siding with the dead against the living, like standing by the river and hearing, not the Bach, but the hard, glacial, petrous cracking underneath the prelude—hard, glacial, petrous, like her, like me. Outside of time we were so good together, as the dead are good together. Outside of time. In the real world, the meter was always running.
For a while I thought of the man who had pledged to sit outside his beloved’s window for one thousand and one nights, but on the one thousand and first deliberately did not show up. It was his way of spiting her, of spiting himself, as if spite, in the end, and love, its bedfellow, were coiled together like two vipers that bite the hand that feeds them, one with venom, the other with its antidote—the order makes no difference, but the biting must happen twice and hurts both times. I thought of how everything I’d done with Clara, from the very first night to the last, was governed by spite and pride, and, in between, lots of fear and admonition, while the one word that should have mattered most was the one condemned to remain silent, till it too became hard, glacial, and petrous. I had never said the word, had I? To the snow, to the night, to the statue in the park, to my pillow, I had. And I’ll say it now, not because I’ve lost you, Clara, but I’ve lost you because I loved you, because I saw eternity with you, because love and loss are surefire partners too.
EIGHTH NIGHT
Phildonka Madamdasit, say hello.”
The voice mail, when I finally turned on my cell that night, told me what I’d known about Clara from the very start but could never bring myself to accept: that everything I thought about her was always going to be wrong, but that knowing I was wrong was wrong as well. She belonged to another species. Or maybe I did. Or both of us did—which explains why we saw eye to eye on very small matters and timeless ones—but couldn’t seem to connect when it came to middling day-to-day life. There were two Claras: the one who ribbed me and could show up just when I couldn’t have wanted her more, and the other Clara, the one whose next comment you couldn’t foresee but stood in awe of, because the couple of words she might say flipped and sparkled around you like a newly minted coin that was a plea for love or another one of her barbs that start with a smile but could just as easily land you on a stretcher in the ER?
“Phildonka Madamdasit, say hello,” began her message, with traces of suppressed mischief in her voice, as though people were laughing in the background and she was cupping the receiver to prevent me from hearing them. I knew by now that this was her way of underscoring the humor of the moment and, by so doing, communicating a semblance of mirth and sprightliness. “He kept glowering at me until I said whatyoustaringatbustah. The poor fellow got so flustered that he spilled the popcorn on me. You should have seen him apologize, the bulging whites of his eyes wincing contrition as he kept gawking at me.” A moment of silence. “And yes. In case you were wondering and hadn’t figured it out, this is my subtle way of saying that I, Clara, did manage to go to France on the last night of the Eric Rohmer festival, while you, Printz—well, there’s no telling where you went and what you did after you called. Phildonka sends his greetings.” Attempted humor once again. “Needless to say, I’m very très hurt. And the funny thing”—I could hear her smoking, so she must have been calling from home—“the funny thing is that I did call you no more than half an hour after we spoke to tell you that I would have come for drinks. So, yes, I am sorry. But you should cringe with guilt and mortification.”
This was followed by yet another message. “By the way, I called you a million times—but Mister, here, had to turn off his phone again.” When I looked at the screen more carefully, it showed that she had indeed called a million times.
There was a third message: “Just to say I know you were upset last night. I’m sorry. I’m going to bed. So don’t call. Or call if you want. Whatever.”
The jab and the caress. Never one without the other. Venom and antidote.
Yet another voice mail was waiting as I got out of my elevator. It had come an hour later.
“So you’re really not going to call. Great!”
It made me smile.
“This feels worse than heroin addiction.”
A few seconds later, she hung up. Then she hung up again. Finally, another voice mail.
“What I meant was, don’t call. Come to think of it, don’t call at all.” Then silence. Just enough ambiguity in the air for me to suspect something vague but nothing to panic about—until it hit me that she could have meant Never call again. “You’re just pitiful,” she added. It had come from nowhere.
Then, as always, the line went dead. I could tell she’d hung up the phone. This was the last word I had from her. My entire being, our entire week together summed up in one word: pitiful. Suddenly I went numb again.
Pitiful dropped on me like an ancient curse that once uttered cannot be undone, lived down, or forgotten. It hunts you down, finds its mark, and brands you for life. You’ll go down to Hades with the wound still bleeding. Pitiful.
I am pitiful. This is what I am: pitiful. She’s right. One look at me and you’d instantly tell: pitiful. He hides it well, but sooner or later, out it comes, and once you’ve spotted it, you’ll see it everywhere, on his face, his smile, his shoes, the way he bites his fingernails—pitiful.
As always, hers was the last word.
I tried to find holes in her assessment of me as I unlocked my door and saw my pitiful household with its pitiful perpetual bedroom light on, which was meant to let me think someone was already there, waiting for me, and would at any moment jump out of bed on bare feet and greet me with Where have you been all this time? Pitiful because I needed this fantasy to make coming home easier. Pitiful because the person I wished might appear in my pajama shirt and no bottoms was the very person who had just completely brushed me off. Pitiful because she had seen right through all my little shenanigans, my deferrals, demurrals, my struggle to fill each silence when silence became unbearable, because during those moments of silence I felt like a poker player whose bluff is about to be called but who must keep raising the stakes to keep covering up his bluffs, until he forgets whether he is bluffing or what he is really bluffing about and ultimately knows he must and is expected, sooner or later, to fold. Pitiful because, even in tonight’s voice mails, I had let her ride me through an entire spectrum of posts, from
feigned mirth, to hurt avowal, to dignified defeat, and when I could have sworn I had the matter still in hand, she’d finally turned on me, light and swift, venom and scorn. It had barely touched me at first, like a tiny immaterial pinprick far narrower than the point of a needle, but it had pierced my skin and didn’t stop digging and kept growing wider and wider till it became thicker and more viciously serrated than the tooth of a giant white shark. A nothing at first—a giggle on the phone, the illusion of rakish fellowship, and then the slash of a stiletto right across my face.
She Folía. Me Pitiful.
I went over to the CD player and put on the Handel. How I loved this piece. The ice cracking, Clara’s tears, the impromptu kiss when we lingered in the living room that afternoon in the country.
You wished me not to call you; well, I’m calling now.
You woke me up.
I woke you up. You kept me up. We’re even.