Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

I spotted her right away. She was standing outside the movie theater. A crowd was gathered around the box office, and the line of ticket holders extended halfway down the block. From the island in the middle of Broadway, I dove across even before the light changed. When I looked at the crowd again, she was gone. I was almost certain it was Clara.

I had spent the whole day thinking of her, and already twice — at lunch, and later at Starbucks — could have sworn I’d seen her drift in and out of my field of vision, as though wishful thoughts had raced ahead of me and pasted her features on anyone bearing a resemblance. Now running into her a third time today would ruin the spontaneity and allow me to say things I’d had plenty of time to rehearse hours earlier — anything from the initial shock and bliss of bumping into her to the pretense that I was having a hard time placing her— Oh yes, last night, Hans’s party, of course —to a desperate, overzealous desire to restore that initial shock and resist all camouflage by blurting out something seemingly unstudied: I’ve been thinking of you all day, all day, Clara.

All day I’d been doing just that. Looking for one store that was open on Christmas Day and finding all of them closed, lunching with Olaf, who badmouthed his wife in one unending screed, in the packed greasy spoon because everything else was closed, trying to shop for Christmas presents on Christmas Day, the whole day punctuated by hazy premonitions that last night might happen all over again. I had spent the entire day totally spellbound by our parting in the snow, wearing, but not wearing, my coat, saying goodbye with a handshake after she’d walked me to the bus stop and rushed back to her building, handing the doorman the umbrella she had borrowed, not turning, but then turning back at the last moment, every last part of me clinging to the memory of her elbow resting on my shoulder at the party, her burgundy suede shoes kicking off the snow, the cigarette, the ex-boyfriend, the Bloody Mary she had scarcely touched and later abandoned on the balcony while I’d stared at her open blouse, wondering all night why in someone so tanned was the base of her breasts so fair. I’ve been thinking of you all day, all day.

Would I have the courage to say this?

I caught myself making a wish: I would tell her I’d been thinking of her all day provided she materialized on Broadway and Ninety-fifth tonight. Humbled, hopeful, happy, I’d tell her however it came out.

Or this: I was just thinking of you — with a waggish smile in my voice, almost as though I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. She’d know how to read this.

For good measure, I already assumed a flustered, unfocused air allegedly caused by my bold dash across Broadway — which would also justify my failure to notice her any sooner.

I was hoping it would be you — but then I said it couldn’t be — yet here you are.

While I was trying out these phrases like someone matching neckties to a shirt, I made every effort not to look in the direction of the crowd. I didn’t want her to know that I had already spotted her and was simply pretending. I wanted to think she’d recognize me first and be the first to seek the other out.

But there was another reason for not looking in her direction. I didn’t want to dispel the illusion or undo the thrill of running into her. I wanted to hold on to that illusion and, like a well-behaved Orpheus determined to keep his end of the bargain, I wanted to think that she’d already seen me and was just now making her way toward me, provided I didn’t look back. I wanted to cup my hands around this tiny, furtive, shameful hope as if all I had to do then was look away, keep looking away, and so long as I kept up with the pretense, she’d come behind me, place both palms on my eyes, and say, Guess who? The more I resisted turning in her direction, the more I could feel her breath graze the back of my neck, closer and closer, the way she had let her lips almost touch my ears at the party each time she’d whisper to me. There was something so enthralling about waiting and hoping, without so much as giving a hint I knew I was being watched, that I even caught myself trying not to hope so much — she couldn’t possibly be there tonight, what was I thinking! — realizing all along that this sobering strain of counterhope was not just my way of seeing that life seldom grants us what it knows we want, but also my own twisted way of courting its goodwill by pretending to forget it likes nothing better than to grant us our wish once we’ve all but given up and embraced despair.

Hope and counterhope. First you think you’ve spotted her, then you can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, and in between both options you’re instantly rummaging for things to say, for an attitude to strike — hide the joy — show the joy — show you’re hiding the joy — show you’re showing every last strain of joy. Then you spot someone who simply looks like her. The illusion is shattered. It’s someone else.

But then, because the things you thought you’d say thrilled you and seemed to blanket the cold evening around you, you suddenly catch yourself wanting to undo the thrill yourself rather than have others do it for you. Perhaps, you begin to think, it’s just as well this way; such encounters never happen, it’s pointless to think they might, and besides, the quiet evening at the movies you’d been looking forward to all day was finally being given to you, and just as you’d planned. You and the movies are going to sit and spend hours together, though, because of a face half perceived in the crowd, perhaps something might indeed happen between you and the film, as though the film could in its own strange way bring to life the very things you’ve been asking by granting them onscreen instead.

Later, after seeing the film, I’d probably find the lingering mirage of her presence around the box-office window. The mirage had already begun to cast its radiance around the whole evening, and I knew that if the illusion of having seen her was something I could take with me to the movies and snuggle up with for a few hours, the movie in return would allow me, once I stepped out onto the sidewalk, to take home with me the sense that the thing that happens between men and women in films had indeed happened to me tonight.

Perhaps this last illusion was nothing more than a desperate attempt to buoy my spirits before giving up on the day and locking myself in the theater for five hours. By midnight, I thought, it would be tomorrow already — and this strange Christmas Day that had started in a fairy-tale greenhouse and couldn’t have felt more aimless afterward was finally being let go of, like an unmoored punt starting to drift with the rising tide of the day-to-day.

After the movies, I’d take a bus, or walk home, or take a cab farther downtown, or stop somewhere along the way, if for no other reason than to see faces before calling it a night.

To see faces as opposed to not seeing any at all. Faces. People. Midnight people, otherpeoples who’ll brave a storm to buy cigarettes, walk a dog, grab a bite, get the paper, or, like me, see faces.

I began to think of places I’d wander to after seeing the film. A bar-and-grill. Or Thai Soup.

I had good memories of Thai Soup.

Trench soup she’d have called it, with beef pandangst. How I missed her way of taking something, then turning it upon itself, and then turning it back to how it was before, knowing it would never be the same afterward.

Then I saw her.

I wanted to sound surprised — but not totally thrown off — as if I’d expected something of the sort but had let the matter slip and never given it another thought.