Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“Bellagio,” I said.

“What about Bellagio?”

“Bellagio’s a tiny village at the tip of a land mass in Lake Como.”

“I know Bellagio. I’ve been to Bellagio.”

Zapped again.

“On special evenings, Bellagio is almost a fingertip away, an illuminated paradise, just a couple of oar strokes from the western shore of Lake Como. On other nights it seems not a furlong but leagues and a lifetime away, unattainable. This right now is a Bellagio moment.”

“What is a Bellagio moment?”

Are we speaking in code, you and I, Clara? I was treading on eggshells. If part of me didn’t know where I was going with this, another felt that I was intentionally seeking dangerous terrain.

“Really want to know?”

“Maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Then you’ve already guessed. Life on the other bank. Life as it’s meant to be, not as we end up living it. Bellagio, not New Jersey. Byzantium.”

“You were right the first time.”

“When?”

“When you said I’d already guessed. I didn’t need the explanation.”

Snubbed and zapped again.

Silence fell upon us.

“Mean and nasty,” she finally said.

“Mean and nasty?” I asked, though I knew exactly what she meant. Suddenly, and without knowing it, I didn’t want us to get too close, too personal, didn’t want us to start talking about the tension between us. She reminded me of a man and woman who meet on a train and begin talking of meeting strangers on a train. Was she the type who discusses what she feels in the very company of the stranger who makes her feel it?

“Mean and nasty, Clara. It’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

I shook my head. I preferred silence. Until it became intolerable again. Was I by any chance pouting without knowing it? I was pouting.

“What?” she asked.

“I am looking for my star.” Change the subject, move on, let it go, put smoke between us, say anything.

“So we have stars now?”

“If there’s fate, there’s a star.”

What kind of talk was this?

“So this is fate?”

I did not answer. Was this yet another derisive way of slamming the door on me? Or of ramming it open? Was she challenging me to say something? Or to keep my mouth shut? Was I going to be evasive again?

All I wanted was to ask, Clara, what is happening to us?

She’d not answer, of course or, if she did, she’d come back with a snub and a spur, carrot and stick.

Do I really have to tell you? she’d ask.

Then tell me what is happening to me. Should be obvious enough by now.

Maybe I’m not going there either.

As ever, silence and arousal. Don’t speak if you don’t know, don’t speak if you do know.

“And by the way,” she said, “I do believe in fate. I think.”

Was this now the equivalent of a nightclub floozy talking Kabbalah?

“Maybe fate has an on and an off button,” I said, “except that no one knows when it’s on or off.”

“Totally wrong. The button is on and off at the same time. That’s why it’s called fate.” She smiled and gave me a got-you-didn’t-I? stare.

How I wished that the staring between us might rouse my courage to pass a finger on her lips, let it rest on her bottom lip, and then, having left it there, begin to touch her teeth, her front teeth, her bottom teeth, then slip that finger ever so slowly into her mouth and touch her tongue, her moist and restless, feral tongue, which spoke such twisted, barbed-wire things, and feel it quiver, like quicksilver and lava brewing in the underground, thrashing the mean and nasty thoughts it was forever coming up with in that cauldron called Clara. I wanted my thumb in her mouth, let my thumb take the venom when she bites, let my thumb tame the tongue, let the tongue be wildfire, and in our death brawl let that tongue seek my tongue now that I’d stirred its wrath.

•

To justify the silence, I tried to seem thoroughly rapt by the beam, as though this blurry shaft of light traveling through the bruise gray night did indeed mirror something bruised and gray in me as well, as if it were half prying through a nightworld all my own, searching not just for something for me to say to her, or for the shadow meaning of what was happening to us, but for some dark, blind, quiet spot within me that the ray, as in all prisoner-of-war films, seemed to probe but to miss each time it circled the sky. I couldn’t speak, because I couldn’t see, because the ray itself, like a cross between a one-handed clock that cannot tell time and a compass magnetized to no poles, reminded me of me: it didn’t really know where it was going, couldn’t grope its way around, and wouldn’t find anything out there to bring back to this terrace for us to talk about. Instead, it kept pointing to the bluffs across the Hudson, as though something far more real lay across the bridge, on the other side, as though life stood out there, and this here was merely lifelike.

How distant she suddenly seemed, so many locked doors and hatches away, so many life-tales, so many people who had stood between us over the years like the quags and quarries each one was and remained so still, as she and I stood on this terrace. Was I a trench in someone else’s life? Was she in mine?

To persuade us that my silence was not the result of an inability to come up with anything to say but that I was truly distracted by brooding, somber thoughts that I wasn’t about to share, I let my mind conjure my father’s face, when I’d gone to see him late at night after a party last year, his ordering me to sit at the edge of his bed to tell him everything I’d seen and eaten that night— And start from the very top, not midway as you always do, and then finding a way to say it: I see you so seldom now, or I never see you with anyone, or When I see you with someone she never lasts long enough for me to remember her name, and just when I thought I had deftly dodged the larger question about the weeks and days remaining to him, to hear him add that old bromide about children, I’ve waited so long, but more I cannot. At least tell me there’s someone. Then, with distemper in his voice, There’s no one, is there? There’s no one, I’d say. Their names, again, Alice, Jean, Beatrice, and that ballbuster heiress from Maine with the big feet who helped us stack the wines on the balcony and couldn’t even wrap a napkin around the silverware because she smoked so much?

Livia, I said.

Why so disaffected, so disengaged? His words. MTH , he’d say. Marry the heiress, then. And all I could think of saying was: Everything she has I never wanted. Everything I wanted she doesn’t have. Or what was even crueler: Everything she has I already have.

From the scumble of grays and silvers on the horizon, I forced myself to conjure his face, but he kept wanting to drift back into the night — I need you now, I kept saying, tugging and pulling at an imaginary cord to my father, until, for a split second, the lank, sick face I’d summoned flashed through my mind again and, in its wake, a vision of many tubes hooked to a respirator in a cancer ward at Mount Sinai Hospital. I wanted to be stirred by this image so that something like the shadow of suppressed sorrow might settle on my face and justify my inability to say anything to the one person who had me completely tongue-tied.

I looked at Clara’s Bloody Mary sitting on the balustrade and thought of the grisly inhabitants of Homer’s underworld when they shuffle and drag their aching bunions toward a trough of fresh blood, meant to draw them out of their grottoes: “There are more of us where I come from, and some you wouldn’t care to see — so let me be, son, let me be. The dead are good to one another, that’s all you need to know.”