Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

What do you want from me? She couldn’t have sounded more exasperated.

  What did I want from her? What I wanted from her was her. Naked. In my bed. Or better yet, I wanted to hear my buzzer ring, watch her come out of the elevator with her shawl still wrapped around her face, the way she’d worn it when we kissed by the bakery, cursing at the elevator door when it slammed shut behind her to remind her it wasn’t scared of her. Damn your fucking elevator door. And damn your fucking cell phone too. The courage to come up to my apartment at two in the morning. She had it. Did I have the courage to call her now? Yes? No?

  Pitiful.

  I had an impulse to prove myself wrong, but then thought better of it.

  After my shower, I put on my bathrobe and immediately grabbed the phone. So what if it was past two in the morning? Either way, it’s already lost.

  I liked calling while still wet. It gave a totally impulsive and informal air to the call, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world; I could focus on my toes, my ears, or her voice, the whole thing relaxed and candid.

  “I can’t sleep,” I said as soon as she picked up.

  “Who’s sleeping?” she retorted, clearing her throat, as if to mean Who ever goes to sleep these days? It seemed to clear the slightest inflection of hostility from her voice. But there was sleep in her voice. Hoarse, raw, listless, like the smell of a woman’s breath when you wake up at night and her head is on your pillow. Was she embarrassed to be caught sleeping past two in the morning?

  “Besides, I knew it was going to be you.”

  Why not Inky? I was on the verge of asking, when I realized that her answer might be Because he is right here with me.

  So I didn’t ask.

  I could have asked why she knew I’d be calling so late. Instead, I told her I had just come out of the shower and was about to go to bed. “I wanted to call because I didn’t want to leave things where we’d left them last night.”

  She made an amused semi-grunt. She was agreeing things couldn’t be worse. So there was no chance I’d imagined it.

  “Can you talk?” I asked.

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Had she, perhaps, fallen back to sleep?

  “You mean am I alone?”

  Such razor-sharp clarity, even in mid-sleep.

  “Yes.”

  All I had meant to ask her was whether she was up to talking. As always, she’d read the real meaning behind my question.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Her equivalent of This is your quarter; speak. She was giving me an exceptional but necessarily brief audience. So many seconds, but not an instant more. Always with the meter running.

  “I was going to say—” But I didn’t know what I was going to say and couldn’t think that fast. “I just wish we were a week ago. I wish we were still at the party and had never left and were trapped there forever.”

  “The things you come up with, Printz.” This was sleep talking. “You mean, as in that Buñuel movie—”

  Was sleep making her unusually conciliatory?

  “Trapped forever, snowbound forever, as in Maud’s house.” And then I said it. “I wish this was two nights ago.”

  “And last night.”

  My heart started thumping as soon as she corrected me. In the dark living room I stood facing the night and the dark sea of Central Park. “I’m staring out the window. I’m staring at the salt on the carpet. And I wish you were with me now.”

  “You want me to be with you now?”

  Why did she sound so surprised?

  “I want you to be with me now . . . and always. There,” I added, as if, using a pair of pliers on my gums, I had managed to pull out an impacted tooth.

  “And you want me because?”

  I should have known that the triumph in my avowal wouldn’t last. Something sharp and unkind in the rise of her question came like two fingertips snuffing the candlelit amity I’d just found in her voice. Irony, which I loved and found comfort in and which had drawn us together from the very start and made us think we were two lost souls adrift in a shallow, flat-footed world, was not a friend. It cut the incipient warmth between us like a pointed spur wounding the belly of a loyal and beloved pony.

  “I don’t know why. There are so many answers. Because I’ve never known anyone like you or been this way with anyone, never this close, or this exposed. Never like this, because every time I turn over my cards and show you my hand—I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because chances are you’ll never forgive me—but just telling you who I am and how I feel as I’m doing right now makes me hard.” I knew I’d been deferring the word, as though trying to test my sentence before finally deciding to speak it.

  “Hard?”

  I sensed I had caught her totally off guard. Was she really going to ask me not to be obscene?

  “Printz.” She sounded heartbroken. Or profoundly disappointed. Or was this still her sleep speaking, or had she read right through me and seen the cost, the yearning, and ache behind this word—taken sex, which was the easy admission, to the heartbreak of sex, which was the impossible and far more difficult one? Or was this just her way of mulling over a tamer version of You’re more pitiful than ever now, her preamble to a long reprimand meant to cut off my balls and slice them into julienne strips.

  “Why, Printz?” I said, imitating the strain in her voice, not sure yet whether this was my way of taking back and playing down my admission or of making her feel silly for taking it at face value. Or was I trying to get her to say something she wasn’t saying, hadn’t quite said, might never say, or that she’d just vaguely glossed over a second ago and needed to clarify so that the two of us might seize its full meaning?

  “Why? Partly because this is hurting you, and I don’t want you being hurt like this.”

  “And partly?” Come what may, by now I was ready for anything.

  “And partly”—she was obviously hesitating, as though she was about to raise the ante and break new, dangerous, painful terrain between us, taking those julienne strips we’d been exchanging and mincing them down into sheer slithers—“because I don’t want you calling me tomorrow morning and saying, Clara, I made love to you last night.”

  I was devastated. I felt hurt, exposed, embittered, embarrassed, like a crawfish whose shell has been slit with a lancet and removed but whose bared, gnarled body is being held out for everyone to see before being thrown back naked into the water to be laughed at and shamed by its peers.

  “You didn’t have to make fun of me, nor did you have to hurt me that way.” This was the first time I told her I was hurt. “As you said, I may be pitiful indeed, and this is clearly my big, over-the-top, mushy-gushy, sulky-pouty thing limping on its last leg—”

  There was a moment of silence, not because she was dutifully hearing me out or humoring my little tantrum, but as though she couldn’t wait to break in.

  “Did I make it go away?”

  In a second she had won me all over again.

  “Most certainly did.”

  I could hear her smile.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Why are you?” Then after a moment, out of the blue, as if she’d seen a connection that I hadn’t: “What are you wearing now?” she asked.

  “Was wearing bathrobe, now in bed.”

  My heart, which was already pounding, was going like mad. I hated this, but I also loved it, as though part of me were staring at a river from a very tall bridge, knowing that I was securely fastened to a bungee cord and that fear, more than jumping, was the thriller. Still, the silence was unbearable, and I found myself saying the first thing that came to mind so as not to say what I wished to say.

  “You remember, the striped blue-and-white bathrobe hanging on the back of the bathroom door?”

  It took me forever to utter this one bland, halting, breathless, complicated sentence.

  “Yes, I remember. Old, thick terry cloth—it smelled good.”

  Same one, I was going to a
dd.

  It smelled good, she had said.

  What made her smell it?

  “No reason. Curious.”

  “Do you do this often?”

  “I grew up with dogs.”

  An intentionally makeshift excuse. She must have sensed I was groping for a quick comeback.

  “If I knew you better, I’d go down forbidden grounds.”

  “You know me more than anyone I’ve known in my life,” I said. “There’s nothing you’re thinking that I haven’t already thought of.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, then.”

  “You and I enjoy the same shame.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Clara, I can be at your front door in less than ten minutes.”

  “Not tonight. I like it like this. Maybe it’s my turn to say—what was it?—too soon, too sudden.”

  It thrilled me to know she remembered.

  “Besides, I’m supermedicated and zombified and fading,” she added.

  “I can take rejection.”

  “It’s not rejection.”

  Had anything ever gone better between us? Was this Clara speaking or was it the medicine? Her breath was on my face again. I wanted the wet of her lips on my face.

  “Why didn’t you come for drinks?” I asked.

  “Because you gave me the silliest reason to.”

  “Why didn’t you say so, then?”

  “Because I was angry.”

  “Why were you angry?”

  “Because you’re always so slippery, always avoiding things.”

  “You’re the one who can never be pinned down.”

  “I don’t turn off my phone.”

  “Why didn’t you give me a hint, then?”

  “Because we’ve run out of hints, because I’m tired of double-talk.”

  “What double-talk?”

  “Printz, you’re doing it now.”

  She was right.

  Long silence.

  “Clara?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me something nice.”

  “Tell you something nice.” She paused. “I wish you’d been there when I called out your name in the theater.”

  She was breaking my heart, and I couldn’t even begin to say why.

  “Were you going to come for drinks tonight?”

  “I had hoped to, Mister-I’ll-turn-off-my-phone-to-show-her-who’s-who.”

  This time she took my breath away.

  Without warning, tears began welling in my eyes. What on earth was coming over me? This had never happened to me, and certainly not on the phone, naked.

  “Sometimes I’m terrified you’ll know me long before I know you.”

  “I’m no different. It scares me too.”

  Silence.

  “Why are you letting me do this?” I asked.

  “Because tomorrow when I see you I don’t want us to be like today.”

  “What if you’re different again tomorrow?”

  “Then you’ll know I don’t mean it.”

  “But haven’t we been through this already?”

  “Yes. And you should have known it then too. Are you thinking of me now?”

  “I am. I am,” I repeated.

  “Good.”

  •

  The sky was overcast once more the next day, the last day of the year, giving the morning light that luminous, bleached quality we’d been having all week long and which skimmed the surface of the city like the inside fleece of a white shearling coat draped munificently around the sun. It made you long for more snow and for wintergreen and wool-lined gloves and the delicate scent of waxed gift paper lingering all during Christmas week. I couldn’t have been happier. I got out of bed, put on old clothes, and headed off to my Greek diner around the corner, hoping it might be full, or empty, it didn’t matter which, because in the mood I was in, drafty, stuffy, grungy or not, all were good and welcome. When I opened the door and was greeted in Greek by the usual hostess cradling a giant menu in her arms, everything felt lithe and buoyant, as if a weight had finally been lifted and I was allowed to love the world again. I liked being like this. I liked being alone like this. I liked winter. I’d been yearning to do this for a whole week. Breakfast without cares. I’d have buttered Belgian waffles first, orange juice, then a second cup of coffee; then I’d get back home, shower, change—or was there any point in changing before heading uptown to her lobby, where we’d arranged to meet before going to shop for extras for tonight’s party?

  But I also knew there was another reason why I was happy. As if something had been finally cleared between us. A few hours before that, the year was hurtling to a dark and ugly finish. Now, merely a phone call later, life seemed to have been restored to me and things seemed so promising that, once again, I found myself refusing to look over to the brighter side for fear I’d dispel its magic or be proven wrong. How long before she and I found yet another way to bring back the darkness that had shrouded me all day yesterday and then sat on me till two this morning? How long before despair again? Lauren in the bakery, laughter in the kitchen, the walk with the dogs, sundown in the park, and dinner, during which I kept thinking, A plate, a spoon, a knife, why isn’t Clara with us tonight?—all of it so very dark.

  But even these enforced reminders of yesterday’s gloom were little else than a smoke screen I was putting up between me and the crowning moment I meant to revisit ever since going to bed last night. I’d been saving this for later, putting it off each time I seemed about to give in to the thrill of opening the surprise package I was taking my time unwrapping.

  Now, with my head resting on the steamed windowpane as I watched people and children trundle along the narrow strip of shoveled snow on the sidewalk, I let my mind drift awhile. “Why did you let me do this, Clara?” I’d asked. All she’d offered was an evasive “Me?” I’d fumbled for words and could tell I was blushing, yet I’d struggled not to lie to her or cover up or deflect the truth or do anything but stay in the moment. Weren’t these her words, in the moment? All I had thought of saying was How do we end this conversation? Or: How do we never end this conversation? But I’d spoken neither sentence.

  “Printz?” she’d finally said.

  “What?” I blurted out to mean, What more do you want from me?

  “In case you’re wondering.” There was another moment of silence: “I didn’t mind.”

  “Clara,” I said, “don’t go yet.”

  “I’m not going. On second thought, aren’t you supposed to turn over and fall asleep?”

  It had made both of us laugh.

  In the end, what made me happier was not just how close we’d suddenly grown to each other but that I’d heeded the impulse to call her. Another second and the year would have ended abysmally. Bravo, Printz, I wanted to say, as if what thrilled me now was less the woman on the phone than kudos for finding the courage to call her.

  But just as I was thinking of her, the conversation between us began to pulverize, like an underground mummy exposed to air. By tomorrow, will this be nothing or will this be the best we’ve ever had? Tonight’s party seemed hours away, and Lord knows, a nothing could undo everything. Undo what, I thought, undo what? I kept asking, as if resolved to see that nothing had changed for the better since last night, and that perhaps it was time to stop banking on a moment of heat caught in mid-sleep. Will she even remember, I thought, or would I be back to pitiful?

  Or was I simply trying to scare myself?

  While eating a waffle, which I drenched in real syrup, I remembered how the conversation had taken a different turn. I’d meant to ask why she had called me pitiful. Instead, I’d stopped myself and asked why she hadn’t come to dinner. This one question led to the next and to the next after that, not because we were saying anything special to each other, but because question and answer, however to the point, allowed us to speak in rhythms and near-whispers that bound us closer and followed a course that had less to do with our words than with the tenor of our wo
rds, of our voices. Anything we said last night, any course taken, however arbitrary, would have taken us there and nowhere else, unavoidably.

  “Why didn’t you come for dinner?”

  “Because you said you were bored, and it sounded so false.”

  “Why didn’t you say so, then?”

  “Because you’d take it the wrong way, and we’d have argued.”

  “Why didn’t you help me save the evening, then?”

  “Because there was so much double-talk, and I knew you were punishing me.”

  “What double-talk?”

  “This double-talk, Printz. The kind that stands in the way of so many things.”

  “What things?”

  “You know exactly what things.”

  “Why not give me a sign?”

  “A sign? Meeting you on a freezing cold night, going upstate the next day, spending every minute with you—you needed a sign?”

  “Do you have any idea what hearing you say all this does to me?”

  There’d been a silence between us. And I knew what it was. Not lack of words, but lack of ways to avoid saying the words both of us knew needed to be said.

  “What you want I want,” she’d finally said.

  “Do you know me so well?”

  “I know what you think, how you think, I even know what you’re thinking this very instant.”

  I could have said any number of things to throw her off course. But I didn’t.

  “You’re not saying anything, and you’re not denying anything, which tells me I’m right in exactly the way you want. Admit it.”

  “I admit it,” I said. I felt as naked as a newborn, thrilled with life, thrilled with my living body, thrilled by my nakedness, which I’d have given over to her in a second.

  “If I wasn’t so zombified right now, I’d ask you to come with your coat and your bathrobe and your snowshoes, and not a thing more. Because I want you all the way—and you, Misteramphibalenceman, can take this any way you want—from my mouth to your mouth.”

  Nothing she had said to me before had stirred me as much. It was as if she had spoken directly to my heart and through the airwaves reached for my cock.

  The silence settling between us said everything.

  I didn’t want to say good night yet.