Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“Yes, wonderful.”

“Anything with the beer?”

I shook my head. I remembered the Mankiewiczes and decided to stay clear of anything resembling appetizers. But the thought and his kindness touched me. “Some nuts maybe.”

“I’ll get those and the beer right away.”

Then, when he’d almost reached the French doors again, he turned toward me, holding his salver with other empty glasses on it: “Everything all right?”

I must look positively distressed for a waiter to inquire how I’m doing. Or was he making sure I wasn’t planning to jump — boss’s orders: Keep an eye out and make sure no one gets funny ideas.

A couple at the other end of the terrace facing the southern tip of Manhattan was giggling. The man held his arm on her shoulder and with his other hand had managed to rest his refilled glass on the balustrade. The same hand, I saw, was also holding a cigar.

“Miles, are you hitting on me?” the woman asked.

“To be honest — I don’t know” came the man’s debonair answer.

“If you don’t know, then you are.”

“I suppose I am, then.”

“I never know with you.”

“Honestly, I never know with me either.”

I smiled. The waiter looked around for stray glasses and ashtrays, and then stood there almost as if debating whether to take a cigarette break. I looked at his clothes — the Prussian-blue necktie and loud yellow button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up all the way to his biceps — what a strange outfit.

“Beer!” he exclaimed self-mockingly, as if he’d neglected an important mission, and proceeded to pick up more empty glasses.

But I didn’t really want a beer. This party wasn’t for me. I should just leave.

What else was there to look forward to tonight? Bus, snow, walk all the way back to 112th Street, peer one last time at the cathedral and, through the snow, watch it fill for the Midnight Mass, then close the book on the evening. She had said something about heading out there tonight. I imagined the quick dash to the cathedral, the music, the coats, the huge crowd within, Clara and friends, Clara and Company, all of us huddled together. Let’s go back to the party, she’d say. Even Rollo would agree, Yes, let’s go back.

Better leave now before anyone cornered me for dinner, I thought, leave the terrace, go back upstairs, sneak into the coatroom, hand in my coat stub, and slink away as furtively as I had arrived.

But before I’d taken a step to go, the glass door opened again and out came the waiter with more wine and my bottle of beer. He put the wine on a table, then placed the beer between his thighs and instantly pulled the cap off. He had also brought Miles and girlfriend two martinis.

Then, for the last time, I spotted the beam circling over Manhattan. Half an hour ago I was standing here with Clara thinking of Bellagio, Byzantium, St. Petersburg. The elbow resting on my shoulder, the burgundy suede shoes gently brushing off the snow, the Bloody Mary on the balustrade — it was all still there! What had happened to Clara?

I had forgotten whether I had tacitly agreed to wait for her on the terrace. It was getting colder, and, who knows, perhaps asking me to stay put on the terrace may have been Clara’s cocktail-party way either of drifting away without seeming to or of casting me in the role of the one who’s left behind, who waits, who lingers, who hopes.

Perhaps I finally decided to leave the terrace to spite her. To prove that this wasn’t going anywhere, that I had never staked the flimsiest hope.

When I finally emerged from the congested staircase upstairs, the size of the crowd had more than tripled. All these people, and all that hubbub, the music and glitz, and all these rich-and-famous Euro snobs looking as though they’d just stepped off private helicopters that had landed on an unknown strip on Riverside and 106th Street. Suddenly I realized that these imposing, double-parked limousines lining the curb all the way to Broadway and back and around the block were carrying people who were headed to no other party but ours, and that, therefore, I had all along been at the very party to which I wanted to be invited instead. The tanned women who wore loud jewelry and clicked about the parquet floor on spiked heels, the dashing young men who hurried about the huge room wearing swanky black suits with dark taupe open-collar shirts, the older men who tried to look like them by putting on clothes their bedecked new wives claimed they’d look much younger in. Bankers, bimbos, Barbies — who were these people?

The waiters and waitresses, it finally dawned on me, were all blond model types wearing what was in fact a uniform: bright yellow shirt with sleeves rolled all the way up, wide floating blue neckties, and very tight, very low-cut khakis with a rakish suggestion of a slightly unzipped fly. The cross between deca-and tacky-chic made me want to turn and say something to someone. But I didn’t know a soul here. Meanwhile, the waiters were urging the sea of guests to work their way to either end of the large hall, where caterers had begun serving dinner behind large buffet tables.

In a tiny corner three elderly women sat cooped up around a tea table, like three Graeae sharing one eye and a tooth among them. A waiter had brought three plates filled with food for them and was about to serve them wine. One of the ladies held what looked like a needle to her neighbor. Checking blood-sugar levels before mealtime.

I saw Clara again. She was leaning against one of the bookcases in the same crowded library where she’d pointed out her old desk and where, at the risk of drawing too close to what I thought was the real, private Clara, I’d pictured her writing her thesis and, from time to time, removing her glasses and casting a wistful, faraway glance at the dying autumnal light shimmering over the Hudson. Facing her now, a young man her age had placed both palms to her hips and was pressing her whole body against his, kissing her deep in the mouth, his eyes shut in a stubborn, willful, violent embrace. To interfere if only by staring seemed an infraction. No one was looking, everyone seemed quite oblivious. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, especially once I noticed that his hands were not just holding her but were clasping her hips from under the shirt, touching her skin, as if the two had been slow-dancing and had stopped to kiss, until I spotted something more disturbing and more riveting yet: that it was she who was kissing him, not the other way around. He was merely responding to her tongue, swooning under its fierce, invasive fire, like a baby bird lapping its feed from its mother’s bill. When they finally relaxed their embrace, I saw her stare into his eyes and caress him ever so languorously on the face, a slow, lingering, worshipping palm rubbing his forehead first, then sliding down on his cheek in an expression of tenderness so heartrending, so damp to the touch, that it could draw love from a block of granite. If ever this suggested how she made love when she took off her crimson shirt and removed her suede shoes and was lost to her senses, then, until this very precise moment in my entire life, I had probably never understood what lovemaking was, nor what it was for, nor how to go about it, had never made love to anyone, much less been made love to. I envied them. I loved them. And I hated myself for envying and loving them. Before I had time to wish them to stop doing more of what they were doing, or to go on doing it for a while longer, I watched him press his pelvis against hers, as they began kissing all over again. His hand had now disappeared under her shirt. If only his hand were mine. If only I could be there, be there, be there.

So much for lying low. What a lame excuse. With all her talk of limbo and love in times of twilight and pandangst, the party girl had just caved in. And I thought she harbored a tragic sentiment of life shrouded in cocktail chitchat. All she was was a Euro chick mouthing empty vocables picked up chez Madame Dalmedigo’s finishing school for wayward girls.