Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“No, but we’ve a score to settle. Later, maybe.”

Eventually we came down the spiral stairs together to find the party in full swing, the crowded living room huddled around the pianist with the throaty voice who’d probably taken a long break and was now back to his old spot singing exactly the same song he’d been singing hours earlier. There was the Christmas tree. There the same old bowl of punch. There the spot where Clara said I looked lost. There, Clara and someone whom she introduced as the Mankiewicz asked everyone to be quiet, stood on two stools, and began singing an aria by Monteverdi. It lasted two minutes. But it would change my life, my way of seeing so many, many things, as the snow and the beam and the empty snowed-in park had already changed me as well. Minutes later, the singer with the throaty voice took over again.

•

Past three in the morning, I finally said that I did have to leave. Handshakes, hugs, kissy-kissy. When I went to the coatroom, I could see that the party was giving no signs of letting up. As I passed by the kitchen, I thought I made out the sweet, chocolaty yet vaguely fried scent of what might easily have been yet another squadron in an endless procession of desserts if it didn’t bear a suggestion of early breakfast.

Beryl followed me to the coatroom. I had lost my stub, and the attendant let me inside the large superpacked coatroom with Beryl. Was she leaving too? No, just wanted to say goodbye and tell me how happy she was we’d met. “I like you,” she finally said, “and I thought to myself: I must tell him.”

“Tell him?” I knew I was smiling.

“Tell him that I’d been looking at him and thinking, If he ever gets around to it, I’ll tell him. Tomorrow, when I’m totally sober, I’ll pretend I never said this, but right now it’s the easiest thing in the world, and I just wanted you to know— voilà!” She was, I could tell, already backtracking. I would have spoken the exact same words to Clara.

I did not speak. Instead, I put an arm around her shoulder and pressed her toward me in an affectionate, friendly hug. But she was yielding to an embrace, not a hug, and before I knew it, I was pushing her behind one of the overstuffed wobbly coat stands and then farther into the inner jungle of fur coats that thronged the room like unstripped hanging carcasses in a slaughterhouse, and hidden behind the packed racks, I began to kiss her on the mouth, my hands all over her body.

No one saw or would have paid us any mind. I knew what she wanted, was glad to show I knew. Neither held back. It would have taken no time.

“Thank God there are others to stop us,” she said in the end.

“I suppose,” I repeated.

“Don’t suppose. You don’t really want this any more than I do.”

There had been, neither on her part, nor on mine, the slightest passion between us, just juices.

When I left the coatroom with my coat, I saw Clara talking to someone in the corridor. Something in me hoped she had seen us together.

“You do know she’s head over heels for you,” said Beryl to me.

“No.”

“Everyone noticed.”

I thought back and couldn’t remember Clara giving me the slightest hint of being head over heels. Was Beryl perhaps making it up to mislead me?

“Must you really go? I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” said Clara, holding a glass in her hand.

“Ciao, lover,” said Beryl, leaving me alone with Clara, but not without a wink meant to give away part of our secret in the coatroom.

“What was that all about?” Clara asked.

“Her way of saying goodbye, I suppose.”

“Did you two have a Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment, is that it?”

“A what?”

“Never mind. Are you really leaving in this snowstorm?”

“Yes.”

“Did you come by car? It’ll be impossible to find a cab on a night like this.”

“I came by bus — I’ll go back by bus.”

“The M 5—my favorite bus in the world. Come. I’ll show you to my bus stop.”

“I—”

There, I was about to do it again, trying to dissuade her, when nothing would have pleased me more.

It took another twenty minutes to find Hans and say goodbye to everyone all over again.

Then the elevator came. We entered it in total silence, strangers wondering what to say, yet dismissing each subject as an obvious silence filler. “This, for your nymphormation, is thirteen,” she said, as if she were talking about a friend we’d brought up earlier and whose building we were now passing by car. “You saw me get off at ten.” She smiled. I smiled back. Why did I feel that another minute of this could crush me? I couldn’t wait for our ride downstairs to be over. But I also knew that our remaining minutes were numbered, and never wanted these to end. I would have wanted her to press the stop button as soon as the doors had closed and say she’d forgotten something, and would I mind holding the door for her. Who knows where all this might have led, especially if some of her friends spied me waiting for her by the open elevator door — Just take off your coat and enough with this going-once, going-twice routine. Or the old, jiggly elevator could stop between floors and trap us in the dark and let this hour be a night, a day, a week, as we’d sit on the floor and open up to each other in ways we hadn’t done all evening long, in the dark, for a night, a day, a week — to sit and listen to the sound of the superintendent banging away at cables and pulleys and not care at all, seeing we were back to Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” and Rilke’s Nikolai Kuzmich, who ended up with so much time on his hands that he could afford to squander it as much as he pleased, in big bills or small — spend, spend, spend, and like him I would ask time for a huge loan and allow this elevator to be stuck forever. They’d lower down food, drinks, a radio even. Our bubble, our dimple in time. But our elevator kept going down: seventh, sixth, fifth. Soon it would be over. Soon, definitely.

When we reached the lobby, I saw the same doorman. He was wearing the same large brown overcoat, whose shaggy long sleeves with yellow piping I still remembered from the time he had pressed the elevator button for me, making me feel at once honored and inept. He was now opening the heavy glass door of the lobby to let new arrivals in. Stamping their feet, shaking their umbrellas, giving their names to two young fashion-model types leafing through page after page of the same single-spaced list of guests on which I’d pointed out my name inscribed by hand on the very last page. The afterthought guest. The afterthought party. The stopgap, afterthought, adventitious night.

I’d been one of these guests hours ago. I was leaving, they were coming in. Would Clara return to the party, find a new stranger standing by the Christmas tree, start all over?

I am Clara. I can do this forever, once more, and once again, and many more times again, like the beam over Manhattan, and the singer with the throaty voice, and the corridor leading down paths unseen till, by miracle, it took you right back to where you’d started.

Before heading out, she undid the knot of my scarf, wrapped it around my neck once, then doubled up the scarf and looped it on itself. Her knot. I loved it.

“You’re not going out like this, are you, Miss Clara?” asked the doorman in a gravelly voice.

“Just for a minute. Would you lend me your umbrella, Boris?”

She was wearing nothing over her crimson blouse. “I call him Boris, after Godunov, or Feodor, after Chaliapin, or Ivan, after the Terrible. Faithful as a Doberman.”

He had meant to hold the umbrella for her. “It’s okay, stay inside, Boris.”

I wanted to lend her my coat. But then my gesture might be deemed overbearing. So, in an effort not to fuss or seem intrusive, I had basically resolved to let her freeze in her see-through crimson shirt. Then, on impulse, I took off my coat and put it around her — intrusive-obtrusive, I didn’t care. I liked doing this.