by André Aciman
When the elevator door opened again, I instantly made out the muffled hubbub of a party. A tilting coatrack, filled to capacity, stood outside a door that had been purposely left ajar. I assumed this was the place. I wasn’t expecting a large party. I should never have brought wine, I thought. I took off my coat and laid it on the hat rest, taking a moment before making my way in.
Inside my hosts’ apartment someone had turned off the lights in the living room and everyone gave a startled “Ahhl” as we all stared at the lights on Riverside Drive. From the darkness within I caught sight of the glistening shoreline of New Jersey, and right below our building, in Riverside Park, solitary lampposts stood in glistening pools of silent light, each like a stranded ghost with its head ablaze. A lonely barge was sailing downstream—and as though shadowing it on land, an M5 bus, with yellow lights on, drifted downtown as well.
A while later that evening, the woman I’d seen on the elevator suddenly reappeared, walking in with a large key ring which she casually deposited in a brass bowl on the mantelpiece, clearly a neighbor who’d been invited to dinner and had taken her time arriving. It took us a minute to realize where we had already met. She, like me, pretended not to remember. I took that as a good sign.
We sat next to each other on the sofa, and together went out to smoke on the terrace, coming back to sit at the dining table, where host and hostess, changing seating arrangements at the last minute, had decided to put us together.
During coffee and dessert, fearing the spell might soon wear off, I decided that, once I left that night, I would play the evening in reverse, taking it back to the moment when I had purchased the wine and inadvertently hopped on the M5 and watched one strange block after the other unfold like a novel I had barely started and hoped might never ever end. I remembered the Saint Bernard, and the view of the cathedral, and the laughter of children sledding down Tilden’s mound that had made me think I had walked into an enchanted town. All of these seemed part of a larger design, as though each in its own small way had presaged our meeting and would wait till late in the snow to hear of how things had gone between us.
Later still, when it was time to leave, she showed me to the elevator; then she took me downstairs to the lobby and, perhaps because it was such a beautiful night and the snow had begun to subside and neither of us had finished talking, she borrowed the doorman’s umbrella and offered to accompany me to the corner of Riverside and 112th Street, where she indicated the downtown bus stop across the Drive. She asked once more whether I wouldn’t prefer a taxi I said no.
She walked me to the hillock and, nearing Tilden, shook my hand, the way the owner of a manor might escort her guest to a small unassuming gate and watch him walk away, with a last farewell chimed by the hidden bell once the gate closed.
Soon, like a carriage with a faithful coachman who’d been told to wait in a hidden stable nearby, an empty bus appeared. I sat behind the driver and watched him skip one stop after the other racing down the curves on Riverside. In no time we’d reached Seventy-second; the sound of her voice was still fresh in my mind
I saw her again after that—always arriving on the M5, always hoping to land into that strange snowy night again, forever trying to coax her on certain evenings to take the bus with me while it was still winter, if only to share my imaginary Leipzig. But neither that winter nor the next did we walk out into the snow again.
That was many years ago. Ever since, I have taken the M5 out of curiosity, hoping for the day when I’d realize that perhaps I cared more for the bus ride and Leipzig and Samuel J. Tilden than I did for her, because there was more of me in these than there ever was in her.
Yet perhaps it wasn’t even the bus ride I loved but the memory of those painful evenings when I’d find myself on the M5 and would let the bus pass by a stop that was no longer mine, sometimes only to change my mind and get off a few blocks up and amble back among the solitary lampposts, feeling very much like a stranded ghost with his head ablaze, scanning her windows and thinking back to my first night, and the last, and the night I thought I’d never be asked upstairs, and the night I feared my nights were numbered there, the night I felt unwanted but was nevertheless asked to stay, the night I suddenly looked outside and, if just to spite her, said I envied those strolling outside, the night I swore would be my last, the night I staked everything to have it be the first again, the night I longed to be alone, the night I feared I might soon be.
On those evenings, as on those moments in life when our hull is cracked and we’re forced to molt everything we’ve got till we’re as naked as a newborn and begin the slow, difficult work of reinventing a new skin with the very little we’ve got left each time, I felt so exposed that, like the isolated baby monkey in the experiment, I found that I could get attached to anything—a thought, a habit, a song; everything I touched or read or so much as leaned my head against became dearer to me than was the person in that apartment whose lights at night were more beguiling and intractable than a light from a vanished star.
I would let a few days pass. But I always came back. Perhaps I wanted to start all over again and thought that by dint of hopping on the M5 I might one day pass through the right portals of time and be asked to step back a year. Or perhaps I simply wanted to run into her on the bus, which never happened.
And yet, by taking the M5’s route in the evening, I eventually got to know the buildings on Riverside one by one, projecting on each a different shade of lovesickness, forever enlisting the sympathy of asphalt and stone along this meandering stretch of Manhattan. I found myself giving each building a new tale, a new name, new residents, a different address even, not by altering its number, but by decrypting the unsuspected Bach cantata number or the Mozart Köchel designation behind each one, because this was my way of warming up to them in a season when everything else felt so cold, because this was the closest I would ever come to piety or prayer, because this was my way of seeking order in chaos, my way of making a city that seemed so hostile and alien share something that was mine. Thus, the lanky number 80 on the corner of Riverside and Eightieth Street, known as the Riverside Tower Hotel, suddenly reminded me of Bach’s 80th Cantata, Ein feste Burg, my favorite cantata (BWV 80); and number 140, on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street, the huge Art Deco building called the Normandy, so reminiscent of the French liner Normandie, which burned and was scuttled off a Manhattan pier, evokes Bach’s Wachet auf (BWV 140), while across the street, at number 137, the stately, more conservative white forefront of the Clarendon, named after the seventeenth-century English memorialist who died in France, would draw me not only to Lobe den Herren (BWV 137), which I had never heard until then, but also to Mozart’s Divertimento in B flat, otherwise known as K. 137. On Riverside and Eighty-fifth, however, Cantata 131—Aus der Tiefe rufe ich, Herr—lost to Beethoven’s C Sharp major quartet, Opus 131, while I could never decide whether her building, 395 Riverside Drive, on the corner of 112th, belonged to Bach’s O Welt, sieh hier dein Leben (BWV 395) or to Mozart’s Capriccio for Piano (K. 395). Across the street, at 625 West 112th—the last building on West 112th Street, which I’d stare at from our windows every evening, because those who lived there seemed to live such serene lives while ours seemed to peter out by the day—something forever intrigued me: it was just one number shy of K. 626, the last piece of music Mozart would ever compose, his unfinished Requiem Mass. It occurs to me now that since we lived across the street, K. 626 would most probably have been us, had her corner building not had a Riverside Drive address instead. I keep promising to go and check one day. But I know I never will.
All I do instead is make up excuses simply to ride the M5: the scenic route, the road to memory, the yearning and dream-making as I let my mind drift when I ride up or down Riverside Drive, thinking of it as the ultimate urban promenade and wondering if there isn’t something mildly shameful in being seen going out of my way to take public transportation. Sometimes, before going home, I get off the subway at Seventy-second and Broadway
, and waiting in the milling crowd outside the last remaining subway house in Manhattan, I’ll simply stand there, taking it all in, facing the vest-pocket park called Verdi Square, the Ansonia, and, farther right, the dull spill of lights off the eastern wall of the Apple Bank Building, and before me the two main arteries of the Upper West Side—Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue—knowing that when it’s time to take the bus, I’ll pretend, if only for an instant, that I have yet to make a quick stop, as I did on that day so many years ago, at a liquor store on Seventy-second Street. But the liquor store no longer exists, the way the Eclair, the West Side’s famous Viennese pastry shop, no longer exists, the way the Embassy, our favorite movie theater, no longer exists either, swallowed as it was by a large co-op building called the Alexandria.
And as I continue to stand by the metal bar, which prevents pedestrians from spilling onto the busy intersection, I look northward and find that, strangely enough, I do not mind that all things must go, that the very spot where we ended up saying goodbye without even knowing we were saying goodbye that night was once a bar but is now a clothing store, having been a flower shop, then a grocery for a while. Indeed, staring at the fleet of buses which come up Broadway but must separate in four different directions on Seventy-second, I am suddenly filled not just with a sense of immense gratitude—gratitude to be alive in this city and at this moment, gratitude for the friends I’ve made, and for those I love—but also with a longing for all those unknown faces and unknown ways of getting to unknown spots in the city, all of them, now, the faces and places, known and unknown, forever beckoning in the evening light with what Stendhal, in his book On Love, once called a promise of bliss.
Three Tales
Pensione Eolo
In 1984 I thought I’d be living in Europe. After more than fifteen years in the United States, the time had finally come for me to return to a continent I had long considered my home. I remember now the joy on first receiving the job offer by mail, a joy I held on to at first like a lover to a new love, secretly, repeating the news to no one, not even to myself, partly for fear of ruining the spell, and partly to renew that access of joy each time I managed to forget I had already opened that much-awaited letter, which began, not, as I forced myself to believe, with the familiar “We regret …” but with the insidious, baffling, treacherous “We are pleased to inform you …” These repeated bursts of joy made everything about that early-winter evening on the Upper West Side seem luminous, as though hazy premonitions of Europe had suddenly been released by the letter and were now infusing everything, from the late-autumnal cast of light on Broadway, to the sound of traffic, of people, down to the peculiar pre-dinner rush around Butler Library, where I liked to work before heading off to my favorite café on Amsterdam Avenue.
By virtue of pretending to suppress the joy, I had almost managed to unearth another emotion, one that doesn’t have a name and which may be not even an emotion but the shadow of an emotion, and which hovered about like the other face of joy, its tactful underside, its surrogate, silent partner, something like an undefined languor which finally surfaced when I eventually managed to remind myself that, once in Europe, I’d be missing Christmas in New York that year.
I was longing for something I already had, all the while sensing that this manufactured nostalgia for New York was but another way of re-releasing a joy that had, by virtue of these antics and torsions, suddenly turned coy and reluctant on me.
For months I’d toyed with the thought of returning to Italy. I had pictured myself heading for an island which, by early fall, would already be cleared of tourists, though warm enough for a quick swim in the afternoon or an al fresco late dinner in what could still pass for a nightlife among the natives and hardened expats. A local café/trattoria, the return of the fishermen by sunset, the early-evening fog, the unavoidable emptying of the town square once it grows cold each year, those bleak hours spent correcting English- and French-language high-school homework by a weak light or, as I feared, under the powerful neon glare with which islanders sometimes hope to brighten their lives. Ours was to be a tiny, respectable hotel, Pensione Eolo, named after the god of the winds. From the windows you’d catch a glimpse of the tiny marina where the ferry stops twice each day. Pensione Eolo remains half-shut during the fall and winter months. On Sundays the locals would use the main dining room for family luncheons and wedding parties. Otherwise, all four of us would dine in a converted TV room with a large, communal table: a marine biologist, a music teacher from Hungary, and a young ex-nun from Trentino who teaches Latin and whom everyone calls Suor Angelica because she still intends to renew her vows. She and I would have adjacent rooms, but there’d be a partition in the balcony. Sometimes, while grading homework, a whiff of tobacco would waft through my open windows from hers. On Saturday evenings, she’d sit on her balcony and smoke, watching the crowd of young folks and families thin out as everyone headed for the only movie theater in this part of town. She says she doesn’t like new movies. Sometimes I see her sitting by herself behind the glass window at Caffè Gianciotto, spooning a large tortoni. One day I’ll have to ask her why she never gets lonely.
The mail here is unspeakably slow, and my lifeline to New York dries up every so many weeks. There is no local library. I must subscribe to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and New York magazine. My mind turns back to the late sixties, when, as a student newly arrived in the United States, I continued to purchase French and Italian magazines so as not to let go of Europe, knowing all along, however, that I’d unavoidably lose touch and that despite my promises to hold on to the old, the new invariably had ways of demoting old things. I had already seen it happen once before, when, almost against my will, as an adolescent new to Italy, I had gradually begun to let go of Alexandria in favor of Rome.
Now, however, I began to fear that once in Europe I’d want to know exactly what was playing at the Met, at the Thalia, the Film Forum, the 92nd Street Y, or what new building had gone up on the Upper West Side, which restaurants had opened, which bookstores closed. I wanted to be there and witness whatever changes were bound to happen, and not just hear of them through friends, or have them sprung on me when I’d eventually return. I wanted the city to go into deep hibernation, not breathe, not change, the way those who are about to die would like everyone alive to doze away with them in a collective slumber until the Day of Judgment, or the way spurned lovers want the world to stop loving and the places they remember with love in their hearts to remain intact, as they themselves promise to alter nothing in their lives, not the buses they used to ride or the clothes they used to wear, until the day their beloved is finally restored to them.
In this state of anticipated nostalgia, which is how those who fear homesickness try to immunize themselves against it—by experiencing it in small, persistent doses beforehand—I found myself missing The New York Times and, of all things, the one thing I never used to read regularly, the “Metropolitan Diary,” where average New Yorkers report on the odd, jittery, unhinged character of life in the Big Apple. Would I really be able to withstand stumbling on this or that overheard conversation at such-and-such a familiar place and not ache to rush down a few blocks and see for myself?
Before I knew what I was doing, I had begun to jot down my own “Metropolitan Diary,” little entries that tried to capture life and love on the Upper West Side. These were my Zettelschriften, snatches and snapshots of what was to be my own portable New York.
My notebooks were littered with these Manhattan marginalia: moments of being, spots of time, epiphanies: places in New York which, by virtue of my impending trip, were now retroprospectively blended into my little island off the western coast of Italy.
Thus, inspired by Joyce’s brief “Giacomo Joyce,” one day I wrote:
Suor Angelica: Thought of her again tonight as I stepped out of the 96th Street subway station. It was snowing when I came out. Walked an additional few blocks on my way home simply to think of her, toyed with my picture of
Pensione Eolo: small, modest, out-of-season pensione, corner room mine, next to Suor Angelica’s, overlooking the marina. January: cardigan weather. Both of us teachers at the nuns’ school. We go by bike each day. Mother Superior frowning at us—you are growing too familiar with each other. She’s right of course. Look the young ex-nun in the eye, which gets her all perturbed, till Angelica finally drops me a note on my way to class one day, furtive must-see-you-immediately, in confidenza, she says. She doesn’t mind I’m late when I knock. What courage, though, when she says she may still wish to renew her vows. Forgot people could shake like that. How different, how infinitely more passionate than P., who’s busy leafing through stacks of balance sheets in the bedroom, the TV turned on loud, knowing it disturbs me, waiting for me to apologize about something or other, which I still won’t do, as I sit and invent this woman in Italy whose one flustered glance, as she debates the matter of her vows, is worth a hundred nights in Manhattan.
What I was doing was throwing myself out there, into the future, only to turn around and seize the here and now. Perhaps what I wanted all along was New York. Or perhaps what I wanted was to think that I liked New York, or that I could only think so provided I spun the world enough times not to have to know whether I belonged anywhere.
Expatriation, like love, is not only a condition that devastates and reconfigures the self; it is, like love, a trope, a figure with which we try to explain, to narrate profound psychological disruptions in terms of very measurable entities: a person, a place, an event, a moment, etc.
Nostalgia is one such metaphor.
By missing Manhattan, I learn to long for it, to love it, though I am now conscious that I’m losing Manhattan because I’m about to revisit a place I’ve always suspected I loved more than Manhattan but will not really allow myself to think I’ll be able to revisit unless it, too, like Manhattan, becomes a site of nostalgia, something I can lose, might lose, have lost. Place, in this very peculiar context, means something only if it is tied to its own displacement. I posit one point, but then I posit a second, which sends me back to the first, which then sends me back again to the second, and so on. Nothing is stable; every signal emitted turns on me and comes back with the same questioning glance with which it was emitted. Everything becomes a mirror image of itself and of something else. I am, insofar as I can speak of an I, a tiny thinking image caught in a hall of mirrors, thinking, among other things, about halls of mirrors. I am, for all I know, a hall of mirrors.