Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“What’s this?” she said, holding the mangled stubs in an open palm. The man did not answer. “He chewed them with his hands,” she added as we took our seats. Once again she revealed the white paper bag. “I got coffee.” “Did you get one for me too?” I asked, pretending I hadn’t heard the first time. “No, I only do things for me,” she snapped as she handed me mine, with a look that said, Needs constant reassurance. I watched her remove the plastic cover, add the sugar, stir it, and, after placing the cover back on the cup, lift the tab. “I like coffee.”

It sounded like a bashful admission.

I liked coffee too, I said. It was good coffee. I liked coffee in movie theaters. I also liked where we were seated. This is just perfect, I caught myself saying.

“Do you think I was mean to him?”

“Who?”

“The bouncer. Gave me the dirtiest look since last he boozed Stolies in Bratislavovich. He mad.”

We waited for the theater to grow dark. Another surprise. She dug deeper in the same paper bag and produced two halves of a large sandwich. “Very très goormay,” she whispered, taking an indirect swipe at Manhattan’s love affair with the finer things of the palate. The sudden smell of garlic cheese and prosciutto was overpowering. Once again she burst out laughing. Someone asked us to be quiet.

Then we sank deeper into our seats. “This isn’t going to be boring, is it?” she said as the credits began to roll.

“Might be deadly.”

“Good. Just wanted to make sure we’re in this together.”

An abrupt “Shush” shot out from behind us again.

“Shush yourself!”

Then suddenly we were in the black-and-white universe I’d been longing for all day. The town of Clermont-Ferrand around Christmas, the man studying Pascal where Pascal was born, the drive down the crowded narrow streets of a provincial French town lightly decorated with Christmas lights. The blond girl. The dark girl. The church. The café. Would Clara really like this?

I didn’t dare look in her direction. Did people go together to the movies to see movies or to be together, or because they liked each other and this is what one did sometimes when one liked someone — one went to the movies with her, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Did one switch from watching the movie to being together, and at what point did one stop switching from one to the other? Why was I even asking all this? Did asking automatically put me in the camp of those who wonder about being natural and who suspect others do not nurse the same doubts about themselves, or did others secretly hope that everyone was as diffident as they were? Was she thinking about being natural? Or was she just watching the movie?

She was staring intently at the screen, as though resolved to ignore me now. Then, without warning, she ribbed me with her elbow, all the while sucking in her cheeks and looking straight before her, chewing words that were sure to be nasty. I had seen her do it with Rollo on the terrace in a moment of suppressed anger. Why had she nudged me that way?

Then I got it. Clara was not upset at all. She was struggling not to burst out laughing, and by ribbing me as she was doing a second time now, she was making sure I was aware of her struggle and, better yet, passing it on to me.

“What possessed me to ask for garly cheese — what was I thinking?”

I was about to throw in a possible guess when she ribbed me yet again, waving me away with her hand, as though anything I might breathe was sure to make her explode. Tears of suppressed laughter were welling up in her eyes — which finally gave me a case of the giggles as well. “Want more garly ?” she began. It was my turn to brush her away.

It took me a few seconds to note that she had spun out a new version of a word I thought was intimate kitchenspeak between us. Can’t get too cozy with her.

The film. Blond girl. Dark girl. Blond girl is virtuous, dark girl a temptress. Catholic man refuses to be snared. Snowbound on Christmas Eve, the man is forced to spend the night in dark girl’s apartment, in her bedroom, finally in her bed. Nothing happens, but toward dawn, when the flesh is weak and he is just about to make a move, she jumps out of bed. “I prefer men who know what they want.” That same morning, outside a café, man runs into blond girl.

At intermission, Clara suddenly got up and said she had to make a phone call.

•

Left alone, I looked around in the dimly lit darkness of the movie theater, watching people arrive, mostly in pairs. A group of four men and a woman filed in, each drinking from a huge cup, unable to decide where to sit, until one of them pointed to the back and whispered, “How about there?” A couple stood up to let them squeeze through. One of the five turned to the other and said, “Say thank you.” “Thank you,” played along the other. The atmosphere was charged with subdued excitement. People had come from all around the city for this film and, despite their differences, knew they shared something, though it was impossible to tell exactly what. It might have been their love for Eric Rohmer’s films. Or their love of France, or of the idea of France, or of those confused, intimate, random moments in our lives that Rohmer had borrowed for an hour or so; he’d drawn them out, scaled down their roughness, removed all accidentals, given them a rhythm, a cadence, a wisdom even, and then projected them onto a screen and promised to return them to us after the show, though slightly altered, so that we’d have our lives back, but seen from the other side — not as they were, but as we’d always imagined they should be, the idea of our lives.

I tried to imagine these five friends huddled in a corner at the Starbucks next door as they waited for the first film to end and then rushing to catch the last show. Here they were now. One of them produced a bag of doughnuts, which he had smuggled into the theater under his coat and was now passing around. Within a minute or so, another girl holding a giant container of popcorn wandered into the theater, looked momentarily lost, then spotted her group and walked up the stairs toward them. “I also got these,” she said, producing two large yellow boxes of M&Ms.

I liked being lost in this crowd, liked these people who had escaped the swarming, cold, floodlit city to this quiet oasis on the Upper West Side where each hoped to catch a glimpse of an imaginary, inner France. I liked knowing that Clara was out in the hallway somewhere and would be coming back — liked thinking that the world could be shut out for a few hours and, as soon as she was back from wherever she had gone to make her phone call, sitting close together like passengers in a crowded ferry boat, we would once again drift into this strange, beguiling fantasy world of Rohmer’s invention that might be more in us than in the films themselves. I looked around at the groups and couples in the theater: some were clearly happier than others — happier than I, than people who were not lovers, though it was still good to be among them. I liked the idea that dropping Rohmer’s name in the wee hours of the morning last night had made her want to see this film with me.

This was not how I had imagined my evening. Now I was thrilled that this was the course it had taken, that someone had unexpectedly turned up, and that this someone should be Clara, Clara with whom laughter was easier than with anyone else, Clara who knew how to make things happen long before I was aware of wanting them, and who, with two theater tickets purchased before my arrival, had given me the best Christmas present I’d received since childhood — a present that could turn into air, for Clara could have gone to phone another man at this very moment and, being impulsive, could just as easily come back to pick up her things and leave me stranded in my seat. Sorry, have to run, enjoyed the film — great seeing you.