Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

Poor old man, I thought, as I watched him wither away into the pallid silver night, loved by few and hardly thought of since.

“Look downstairs, don’t they look mammoth-sized?” said Clara.

From high above, a seemingly endless procession of larger-than-life stretch limousines was stopping at the curb of the building, unloading skittish passengers in high heels, and then inching on along the snow to allow the car directly behind to unload more passengers, only to move on to let the car after do the same. Something in me buoyed at the sight of the extravagant display of black cars glistening in the white night. I felt I’d stepped into a strange, high-tech version of Nevsky Prospekt.

The cars did not go away but were double-parked the length of 106th Street. By the statue of Franz Sigel, a group of drivers had come out to chat and smoke. In Russian, most likely. Two were wearing long, dark overcoats, wraiths lifted from Gogol’s underworld about to hum Russian songs together.

Where were all these people going? The sight of the cars lined up ever so regally made me wish I’d gone to their party instead. All these posh jet-set types arriving in twos and threes. What wonderful lives these people must live, what splendor, I kept thinking, almost neglecting Clara, who was leaning on the balustrade next to me, equally mesmerized by the spectacle. I felt something verging on pleasure in seeing how easily I’d been distracted and made to think about other things instead of her. This was Hollywood grandeur, and I wished to see it from up close. Then, realizing I had neglected my father, I felt ashamed of myself, especially after I’d summoned him up, only to be caught thinking of stretch limousines.

•

Clara and I did eventually speak about the beam, and about the guests downstairs, and about other things, and I did ask about this or that to keep the conversation afloat, until I mentioned, in passing, that standing on this terrace with her reminded me of my parents’ balcony and how on New Year’s each year my father would stack and chill wine bottles, how we’d blind-test the year’s vintage that very night with friends and partners, as we all waited to see which wine was voted best, the wine tasting always getting out of hand, Mother rushing back and forth, making sure the vote was in before her husband delivered the same annual speech in rhyming couplets minutes before midnight — until Mount Sinai. “Why the balcony?” she interrupted. Obviously what interested her was why I’d confused both balconies and put her in the picture. Perfect place to chill white wine and soda when it’s not quite freezing outside. Someone would always help me set the bottles, cover up the labels, hand out improvised score sheets. “The babe in the rosebush?” she asked. I shrugged complacently to mean yes, maybe, why ask, not always a teasing matter, I didn’t care for the joke. She had lost both parents in a car accident four years earlier. That was her snarky comeback to my miffed response to her irony.

I am Clara. Don’t tread on me.

She told me about her last year in college, the icy road in Switzerland, the lawyers, the nights she couldn’t sleep; she needed someone to sleep with, anyone, no one, so many. Mid-guilty-giggle just as I was growing solemn for her.

It was wan and hapless talk, without brio, certainly without the heady banter that had wrapped us like incense in a moonlit shrine. These were probably the trenches we’d made light of before, and during renewed pauses that thumped like heavy footballs portending the end, I found myself already struggling to take mental notes of the evening, as if a curtain were gradually being dropped on us and I had to salvage whatever I could and think of ways to live down our moments together without being too hard on myself. I’d have to sort through what to rescue and let go of, and to coddle what promised to keep radiating in the morning, like party glow-sticks beaming with last night’s laughter and premonition.

I wanted to cull must-remember moments — the shoe, the glass, the terrace, the ice floes plying down the Hudson — all of which I’d want to take along, doggie-bag style, the way, after a dinner party, you remember to ask for a slice of cake for someone who is working on deadline, or for the driver downstairs, or for a sick brother or housebound relative who couldn’t make it tonight, or for that part of us that ultimately enjoys care packages more than dinners and seldom goes anywhere but prefers to send shadow versions of itself out into the world like unmanned drones scoping questionable terrain, keeping the best part of ourselves home, as some do when they wear false jewels in public but leave the genuine article in a vault, or as others do when they start “reliving” moments even as they’re living them in real time, in the real world, as I was doing right now. The body goes out into the world, but the heart’s not always in it.

And I thought of my father again, asking me to sit at the edge of his bed last year and tell him everything I’d seen, whom had I danced with— Names, names, he’d say, I want names, I want faces, your presence is like a gift to me, better to hear you than watch a thousand shows on television. He didn’t care how late I dropped by. So what if I can’t sleep now, we both know I’ll make up for it soon enough. Had he been alive tonight I’d have started with three words and taken the whole evening from the top. I am Clara. Sounds very real-world, he’d have said.

Was she real-world?

Was she others?

Did she worry I could be?

Or do Claras never worry about such things?

Because they know. Because they are the world, in the world, of the world. Because they’re here and now. Whereas I’m all over the place, whereas I’m nowhere, whereas I’m lifelike. Whereas I this, whereas I that.

Whereas I wanted to think of this as an encounter that had yet to gel, or hadn’t quite happened yet and was still being fleshed out by some celestial artificer who wasn’t getting his act together and hadn’t thought things through and would let us improvise our lines until a better craftsman took the matter in hand and let us have a second go at things.

I wanted to go back and imagine her as someone who hadn’t told me her name yet, or who’d already appeared to me, but the way people appear in dawn dreams before turning up for real the next day. Who knows, I might be given a second chance at all this. But on two conditions: that I end up at an entirely different party and that I forget I’d ever been to this one. Like someone coming back from a hypnotist or from a previous life, I’d meet new people, people I didn’t know I hadn’t met yet and couldn’t wait to meet, and almost wished I’d met instead, and would promise never ever to forget or live without until someone came out of nowhere and said something awkward by way of an introduction and reminded me of a woman I’d met once before, or crossed paths with but kept missing and was being reintroduced to at all costs now, because we had grown up together and lost touch, or been through so much, perhaps been lovers a lifetime ago, until something as trivial and stupid as death had come between us and which, this time, neither of us was about to let happen. Tell me your name is Clara. Are you Clara? Is your name Clara? Clara, she’d say, no, I’m not Clara.

“I love snow,” she finally said.

I stared at her without saying anything.

I was going to ask her why.

Then I thought of saying I envied people who could say they loved snow without feeling awkward or self-conscious, like writing poetry that rhymes. But that seemed unnecessarily fussy. I decided to look for something else to say.

And while I scrambled yet once more to fill the silence with something — anything — it hit me that if she could say she loved snow, it was probably because she too might have found the silence between us unbearable and decided it was more hackneyed to suppress a simple thought than to come right out with it.