Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“Meet Clara and Inky,” crooned a woman who was standing next to me and who must have watched me stare at them. “They do it all the time. It’s their shtick.” I was about to shrug my shoulders, meaning I’d seen such things before and certainly wasn’t about to be shocked at the sight of lovers making out at parties, when I realized that it was none other than Muffy Mitford. We began speaking.

Maybe because I had drunk a bit too much already, I turned to her and, out of the blue, asked if her name wasn’t Muffy. It was! How did I know? I proceeded to lie and said we’d met at a dinner party last year. The lie came far too easily to me, but with one thing leading to the next, I discovered that in fact we did know people in common and, to my complete surprise, had in fact met at a dinner party. Didn’t she know the Shukoffs? No, she’d never heard of them. I couldn’t wait to tell Clara.

Then, from a distance, I saw her waving at me. She wasn’t just waving, but was actually headed toward me. I knew, as I watched her come closer, that I had, against all resolutions to the contrary, already forgiven her. I couldn’t identify what this feeling was, because it was a mix of panic, anger, and a flush of hope and expectation so extravagant that, once again, without needing a mirror, I knew from the strain on my face that I was smiling way too broadly. I tried to tame the smile by thinking of something else, sad, sobering things, but no sooner had I started to think of Muffy and her jiggling fertility belt than I felt on the verge of laughter.

It didn’t matter that Clara had disappeared or that I had let her down by not waiting on the terrace. We were like two persons who bump into each other two hours after standing each other up and pick up as if nothing remotely wrong had happened. I wanted to believe that I didn’t care about their kissing, because as long as I wasn’t hoping for anything and didn’t have to worry how to draw her into my life, I would be able to enjoy her company, laugh with her, put an arm around her.

I was, and I knew it even then, like a drug addict who is determined to overcome his addiction in order to enjoy an occasional fix without worrying about addiction. I had quit smoking for the same reason: to enjoy an occasional cigarette.

Clara came right behind me first and was about to whisper something in my ear. I could feel her breath hovering on my neck and was almost ready to lean gently toward her lips. She was making fun of Muffy, then squeezed my shoulder in what I sensed was a motion of sneering collusion meant to induce giggling.

“Your twin daughters are the loveliest girls in the world,” said Clara. I could tell Clara was leading her on.

“They are, aren’t they,” agreed Muffy, “they’re great.”

“They’re great,” mimicked Clara, brushing her lips against my ear this time, once, twice, three times, “really fucking great.” I could feel every part of my body react to her breath. People who made love to her had her breath all night long.

“We call them le gemelline,” said Muffy, saying the Italian words with a thick American accent.

“You don’t fucking say?” Clara continued to whisper in my ear.

Meanwhile, guests were starting to push us on their way to the buffet tables. Muffy was about to be swallowed by the crowd.

“I think we should get out of the way, or they’ll run us over. I know a shortcut.”

“A shortcut?” I asked.

“Through the kitchen.”

Meanwhile, Pablo, who had spotted Clara, was signaling from among another cluster of people. She told him we were headed to the kitchen from the opposite direction. They’d done this before, it seemed. We’d all meet up in the greenhouse.

I thought of Inky and imagined that Clara wanted to get back to him. But he was nowhere in sight. She wasn’t even making a show of looking for him.

“Where’s the man from the trenches?” I finally asked Clara, giving every indication by my gestures that I was not going to join her for dinner.

I received a blank stare. Would she fail to get the limp joke, or would she cast an indignant look once she’d remembered our lingo? It was taking her a very long while to respond, and I was already tempted to simper apologetically and spell out the shallow thing I’d hinted at, which would sound shallower yet with an explanation.

“I meant Inky,” I said.

“I know what you meant.” Silence. “Home.”

It was my turn to show I did not know what she meant. “Inky went home.”

Was she putting me on? Or shutting me up? None of your business — lay off — you’ve crossed a line? Or was she still trying to find a shortcut to the food and was focusing all her attention on how to get us from here to there before the others? I could sense, though, that she was not just thinking about the passage to the tables. Should I perhaps ask whether something was wrong? “We’ll have to go upstairs by way of the greenhouse and down through another staircase into the back door to the kitchen.” I watched her as she was saying this. I wanted to hold her hand on the spiral staircase as we’d done before and wrap my hand behind her neck and under her hair and tell her everything bursting in me.

“What?”

I shook my head, to mean nothing, meaning everything.

“Don’t!” she said.

There it was, the word I’d been dreading all evening long. I had picked up wisps of it when hinting about Bellagio. Now it had finally come out, undoing Bellagio, dispelling the beam, trouncing the illusion of rose gardens and of Sunday lovers lost in snowbound lands. Don’t. With or without an exclamation mark? Most likely with. Or without. She’d probably said it too many times in her life for it to need one.

On our way through the narrow stairway, she finally blurted the answer to the question I hadn’t dared ask. “Tonight was our valediction forbidding mourning.” She looked behind me.

A crowd of teenagers burst from behind and dashed past us on the way upstairs.

“So, you were saying about Inky?”

“Gone. Left for good.”

I felt sorry for Inky. Here was a man to whom she’d just given all the proof of love a man needs, and a minute later she couldn’t have spoken more disparagingly of a rat. Wasn’t she trying a bit too hard for someone who was just indifferent? Or are there people who no sooner they’re done with you than their love addles into something so unforgiving that what causes intense suffering is not the loss of love, or the ease with which you’re spurned after being given the keys to their home, but the spectacle of being thrown overboard and asked to drown without fussing and spoiling everyone’s fun. Was this what had happened to him? Spurned, kissed, sent packing? Or was she like a strange wildcat that licks your face to hold you down as she devours your insides?

I’d seen his face, tilted slightly sideways as she prepared to kiss him more savagely the second time, every part of his body transformed into one taut sinew. Minutes later she was walking up to me and asking me to sneak upstairs with her.

“He’s probably on his way to his parents’ on a peak in Darien. I told him not to drive in the snow. He said he didn’t care. And frankly—”

We ascended a few more steps.

“I am so tired of him. He’s the healthiest man in the world, and I’m the worst thing for him. There are days when, I swear, all I want is to seize the pumice stone in my bathroom and bash my face in with it, because it reminds me of the face he looks at each day and has no clue what’s inside it, no clue, no clue. He made me stop being who I am; worse yet, I stopped knowing who I was.”

I must have given her a startled and incredulous stare.