Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

I thought I liked her irked and groused manner, but this was too much. I began to think of poor Inky, and of his tears over the phone, and of the men who cry for the Claras they love — a man who weeps on the phone must be in the bowels of despair. Had she told him she was with me?

“No, he thinks I’m in Chicago,” she whispered.

I looked at her with baffled eyes, not because she had lied, but at the absurdity of the lie. “I’m just not going to answer my phone,” she said. This seemed to ease her mind, as though she had suddenly stumbled on the one solution capable of dispelling all her worries. She put her glasses back on, took a sip from her coffee, sat back, and was clearly ready to enjoy the second film. “Why would he keep calling if he thinks you’re in Chicago?” I asked.

“Because he knows I’m lying.”

She was staring straight in front of her, making it clear she was intentionally not looking in my direction. Then with a huff—

“Because he likes to hear my voice on the outgoing message, okay? Because he likes to leave long messages on my answering machine that I erase no sooner than I hear them and are sheer torture when I’m there with someone and he knows I am, but goes on yapping and yapping away until I lose my patience and pick up. Because he knows I’m fed up. Okay?”

This was rage speaking.

“Because he lingers on the sidewalk and spies on me, and waits for my lights to go on.”

“How do you know?”

“He tells me.”

“I don’t think I want to touch this,” I said with marked, overstated irony, meaning I didn’t want to risk adding anything that would further upset her, and was now graciously backtracking with a hint of humor to ease our passage into movie mode.

“Don’t.” She cut me short.

Don’t stung me to the quick. She’d spoken this word once last night, and it had had the same chilling effect. It shut me up. It stayed with me for the remainder of the second film, a cold, blunt admonition not to meddle or try to ingratiate myself with the intrusive goodwill of people who pry and wheedle their way into private zones where they aren’t invited. Worse yet, she was mixing me up with him.

“He prowls downstairs, and whenever he sees my lights come on, eventually he calls.”

•

“I feel for him,” I said when we sat after the movie at a bar close to her home. She liked Scotch and french fries. And she liked coming here, occasionally, with friends. They served Scotch in a wineglass here. I liked Scotch and ended up picking at her fries.

“Then you feel for him.” Silence. “Feel for him all you want. You and everyone else.”

Silence again.

“The truth is, I feel for him too,” she added a moment later. She thought awhile longer. “No. I don’t feel a thing.”

We were sitting at a small, old, square wooden table in the back of a bar-restaurant that she said she liked because late on weeknights, especially when the place was empty, they would sometimes let you smoke. She had a wineglass in front of her, both elbows spread on the table, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, and between us, a tiny lighted candle, sitting in a paper bag like a tiny kitten curled in a rolled-down sock. She had pulled the sleeves of her sweater up, and one could make out a shade of down along her bony wrists, which were red from the cold. It was an oversized home-knit sweater made of very thick, brushed wool stitches. I thought of heather, and of large winter shawls, and of flushed naked bodies wrapped in sheepskin. “Let’s talk of something else, can we?” She seemed mildly annoyed, bored, vexed.

“Like what?” I asked.

Did she actually believe in choreographed conversation?

“Why not talk about you.”

I shook my head to mean, You’re joking, right?

She shook her head to mean, Absolutely not joking. “Yes, that’s it,” she said, as she dismissed any possibility of hesitation on my part. “We’ll talk about you.”

I wondered whether she suddenly perked up and was leaning over the table toward me because she was truly curious about me or because she was enjoying this sudden turn from pity-the-woman-with-the-wrong-ex-boyfriend to hard-nosed cross-examiner.

“There’s so little to say.”

“Tell!”

“Tell. .” I repeated her command, trying to make light of it. “Tell what?”

“Well, for one thing, tell why there’s so little to say.”

I didn’t know why there was so little to say. Because there’s so little about me I care to talk about before knowing it’s quite safe to — and even then. .? Because the person I am and the person I wish I were at this very moment in the bar aren’t always on speaking terms? Because I feel like a shadow right now and can’t fathom why you can’t see this? What was she really asking me to say?

“Anything but bland pieties.”

“No bland pieties — promise!”

She seemed thrilled by my reply and was eagerly anticipating what I was about to say, like a child who’s just been promised a story.

“And?”

“And?” I asked.

“And keep going. .”

“Depends what you charge.”

“A lot. Ask around. So, why is there so little to say?”

I wanted to say that I didn’t know where to go with her question and that, because its candor made evasion an unworthy option, I was drawing a complete blank — a complete blank that I didn’t want to talk about so soon, the complete blank sitting between us, Clara, that is crying to be talked about. A Rosetta stone in the rose garden, that’s what I am. Give me a pumice stone, and it’ll be my turn to bash every evasion in my mouth. My pumice stone, your pumice stone, I should have brought mine along tonight and dumped it on the table and said, “Ask the pumice stone.” Did she want to know what I’d done in the past five years, where I’d been, whom I’d loved or couldn’t love, what my dreams were, those at night and those by day, those I wouldn’t dare own up to, a penny for my thoughts? Ask the pumice stone.

“And don’t give me the obituary you. Give me the real you.”

Ask the pumice stone, Clara, ask the pumice stone. It knows me better than I do myself.

I raised my eyes, more flustered than ever. It was then that I felt the words almost slip from my mouth. She was looking at me longer than I expected. I returned her gaze and held her eyes awhile, thinking that perhaps she was lost in thought and had absentmindedly let her glance linger on mine. But her silence had interrupted nothing, and she wasn’t absent at all. She was just staring.

I averted my eyes, pretending to be absorbed in deep, faraway thoughts that I didn’t quite know how to confide. I watched her fingers fold the corners of her square paper napkin around the base of her wineglass. When I looked up, her gaze was still glued on me. I still hadn’t said a thing.

I wondered whether this was how she was with everyone — simply stares, doesn’t stuff silence with words, looks you straight in the face, and then bores through each of your frail little bulwarks, and, without shifting her glance, begins smiling a lukewarm, impish smile that seems almost amused that you’ve finally figured she’s figured you out.

Should I stare back? Or was there no challenge in her gaze, no unspoken message to be intercepted or deciphered? Perhaps it was the stare of a woman whose beauty could easily overwhelm you, but then, rather than withdraw after achieving its effect, simply lingered on your face and never let go till it read every good or bad thought it knew it would find and had probably planted there, straining the conversation, promising intimacy before its time, demanding intimacy as one demands surrender, breaking through the lines of casual conversation long before preliminary acts of friendship had been put in place, daring you to admit what she’d known all along: that you were easily flustered in her presence, that she was right, all men are ultimately more uneasy with desire than the women they desire.