Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

I held the glass in my hands. Then took short, gasping, almost sobbing sips.

I watched her face again. Just one more sip, she seemed to say, and then another, and another again — she was talking to a baby, not a drinking buddy. She bore the look of worn-out daughters by the bedside of a very sick parent who for weeks has refused to eat. A second later, and that same mournful, worried look hardened into something cross, as though she’d shrugged me off but was going on with tedious motions of caring until the next shift.

Why the turnabout? The sudden hostility? The feigned indifference, even? Or the quipping with Beryl and Rollo in the background while I lay dying? Stop pretending you do not care.

“Drink more water. Please, just drink.” As I was drinking: “What is it with you?” she said. It was the sweetest thing she might ever have said to me, What’s with your mouth, here, let me rub your lips, let me kiss your lips, your lips, your poor, sweet, wretched, God-given burning lips. I’d take pity in a second.

•

Eventually my eyes began to clear. My mouth was still burning, and I could feel that my lips were quite swollen, but at least I could speak. To every dreamer who’s had a nightmare, this was like dawn. Soon daylight would come, when every chimera withdraws and dissolves into the morning dew like milk in a large cup of warm English Breakfast tea. Perhaps this was not even the end of the ordeal — and part of me, even while I struggled to put it as far behind me as I could, was already hoping that it wasn’t quite over and had begun to miss the confused and silent outpouring of panic and grief that I knew was my way of asking her to take a hard look at what anyone with half a brain would have guessed right away.

It was as though I had finally shown her my body, or done something with it to touch hers. As clumsy as my gesture was, I felt no less relieved than a wounded soldier who is seized by a sudden impulse for his nurse, grabs her warm palm, and holds it to his crotch.

“Better?”

“Better,” I replied.

And as I looked at all of those who had gathered more or less around us, some with their plates and their rolled-up napkins containing silverware dating back to the time Hans’s parents had fled the Old World, I realized that, despite all their banter and their teasing about my reaction to Mankiewicz’s appetizer, this was still one of the most beautiful evenings I’d spent in a very long time. Hans, Pablo, Pavel, Orla, Beryl, Tito, Rollo, unknowns all of them.

Clara reminded everyone it would soon be time to head out to the Midnight Mass. “Just for an hour or so,” she explained.

Next year, someone said.

“We’re also missing Inky,” said Pablo.

“He’s gone.” Rollo was obviously coming to Clara’s rescue.

“Yessssss,” said Clara, to mean, Okay, everyone stop asking.

“I can’t believe it.” This, she later told me, was Pavel.

Someone was shaking his head. Clara and the men in her life!

“Does anyone have any idea how fed up I am with men, each with his little Guido jumping to attention like a water pistol—”

“God spare us,” said Pablo. “We’re back to Clara’s I’m-so-fed-up-with-men routine.”

“Which includes you, Pablo,” she snapped, “you and your puny flibbertigibbet.”

“Leave my dousing rod out of this. It’s been in places where no man’s Guido’s been before. Trust me.”

“How about him?” asked a petulant Beryl, meaning me. “Fed up with him already?”

“I want nothing to do with anyone, not this winter, not this year, I’ll kiss a woman before I kiss another man. I’ll sleep with a woman before I so much as let a man touch me with his stinkhorn.” And to prove her point, she walked up to Beryl’s table, sat next to her, brought her lips very close to hers, gave a few soft pecks, and then began to kiss her deep in the mouth. Neither resisted, both shut their eyes, and the kiss, however whimsically begun, could not have seemed more passionate or more acquiescent.

“There!” said Clara, disengaging without giving Beryl time to recover. “Point taken?” It was not clear which man she was addressing. “And she kisses well too,” said Beryl.

It was a savage kiss. I had assumed lying low meant I am not ready, I want to go home, take me elsewhere, I want to be alone, let me find love without others, let me go back to my walls, my staunch, loyal, steadfast walls. Instead, her kiss had been brutal. We can fuck, but we won’t find love, I won’t find it in me, for you, with anyone. Which is why you’re in my way. She was speaking to me, I was almost certain now. Even your patience wears me out. Everything about you — your silence, your tact, your fucking restraint, and the way you give me slack, hoping I don’t notice, everything rushes me, it’s not love I need, so leave me alone. The two women kissed again.

When they had stopped kissing, Hans spoke first.

“All this is starting to look like a French movie. Everything always makes more sense in French movies.”

Trying not to look too unsettled by the women’s kisses, I said I wasn’t sure. French movies were about not life but the romance of life. Just as they’re not about France but the romance of France. Ultimately French movies are about French movies.

“Your answer is like a French movie too,” Clara said as she made her way back to our table, speaking with impatience in her voice, meaning, Enough with the mind games.

“My life as a French movie — there’s an idea,” said the party girl, who was tired of mind games. “Maybe I should see it tonight.” Then, on second thought: “No, I’ve seen it too many times already. Same plot, same ending.”

“French movies are about urbane Parisians,” said Hans, “not dyspeptic Upper West Side Jews on antidepressants.” There was a stunned moment of silence. “And on that,” he said, standing up and turning to me to shake my hand, “enchanté.” He was leaving the greenhouse. “Come for New Year’s. I mean it. But not a word of it to Monique.”

“Who is Monique?” I asked Clara after he had gone and left us alone at our table.

“His flame-no-longer-his-flame,” explained Clara.

I pondered the information.

“Were you his flame once?”

“I could have been.”

“—but didn’t want to?”

“It’s more complicated.”

“Because of Gretchen?”

“Gretchen would have driven me to it, not stopped me. Because of Gretchen, seriously!”

“I was just curious.”

Then, after a pause: “For your nymphormation, namphibalence strikes women too.”

“And do you feel any now?” I asked, delighting in my own boldness, knowing that she’d know exactly what I was referring to, “because right now I feel absolutely none,” I added.

“I know you don’t.” This was the closest she had ever come to me.

“How do you know?”

“Because I just do.”

“You don’t miss a beat, do you?”

“No. But then that’s why you like me?”

“Remind me never to have anything to do with women who never miss a beat.”

“When do I start reminding you?”

“Start now. No, not now. Now is too lovely and I’m having such a good time.”

And then, before I could add anything more, came the one gesture that could change lives. She brought her hand to my face ever so slowly and, with the back of it, caressed my face on both sides.

“I’m lying so very, very low, you’ve no idea. Not like your typical French movie, I’m afraid. In magazine lingo, I’m this close to being not a well person,” she said, bringing her thumb as close to her forefinger as possible.