Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

For a moment, I thought I caught a mild, questioning nod. Was I imagining things? Or was she about to say something but then thought better of it and retracted it just in time?

Still, someone had to say something. I’d brace myself before taking the bold plunge.

“Do you always stare at men like this?”

I nipped the words just in time. But a moment more under her gaze and I would have broken down and said something more desperate, anything to ward off the silence and choke the chaos of words welling up inside me, words that were still totally unknown to me and seemed to skulk in the backdrop like tiny unfledged, unsprung, jittery creatures caught in their larval stage and that, given the opportunity, would spill out of me and reveal more about me than I knew myself — how I felt, what I wanted, what I couldn’t even suggest or hint at, opening a door I dreaded but was willing to venture through if only I knew how to shut it afterward. Was I going to say anything simply to say something? Is this what people do? Say something instead of nothing, go with the moment? Or, in an effort to avoid taking chances, was I going to utter something unintended and irrelevant: “Do you always ask people to tell you about themselves?” I nipped this as well.

“What a silly, unrealistic movie,” I found myself saying, not sure why I had said it, or to which of the two films I was referring, especially since I knew I liked both films and didn’t necessarily consider realism a virtue. I had said it with an air of resigned gravity and preoccupation, attributing the vague dismay in my voice to something awkward and disturbing in the films themselves.

I was simply trying to conceal my inability to come out and say something that didn’t bear on the two of us.

She misunderstood me completely. “Unrealistic because no one sleeps together in Rohmer’s films?” she asked.

I shook my head with a hint of troubled irony, meaning she was so off base that I’d rather erase my misguided attempt at casual conversation and start all over with something else. She let a moment pass.

“You mean because we’re not sleeping together tonight?” she said.

It came from nowhere. But there it was. She hadn’t misunderstood a thing. Or, if I thought she had, it was only because she had taken the words from my mind and given them a spin that wouldn’t have occurred to me so soon but was the only one eager to be heard.

“It had occurred to me,” I said, pretending I wasn’t startled by her thunderbolt. I was attempting an amused smile that meant to overstate her reading of the situation and by so doing to suggest how far off the mark it fell — my way of parrying her dart with an equally pointed admission of my own. She right away dismissed it with an arch smile to mean I thought as much —a variation on what the woman on the terrace had asked her companion when he put an arm around her while holding a cigar in his other hand. Are you hitting on me?

The silence that rose between us as quickly as steam from a sprinkled clump of dry ice made it clear that neither had anything to add and that we both wanted the subject swept aside by whatever means. “Nev-er mind,” she intoned, with the self-mocking strain of people who have ventured too far but who, to smooth ruffled waters, are merely pretending to be unhinged by their boldness. Her smile either underscored her outspoken remark or suggested she did not believe I was as unfazed by it as I wished to seem. “That was just in case,” she said, raising her eyes at me once more. And then it came: “In case I hadn’t made it clear last night. I’m just lying low,” she added, something almost helpless and modest in her voice. She had used the exact same tone last night, lacing, as she always seemed to do in difficult moments, straight talk with double-talk, blandspeak with sadspeak. But this time she wasn’t saying it about herself or about her reclusion from those around her; she was saying it to me, staving me off, shooing me away. It occurred to me that if she was with me on this Christmas night, it was precisely because she was lying low. We would never have met, or spoken, or stood on the terrace together, much less been to the movies or sat in a bar as we were doing now, if she wasn’t in Rekonvaleszenz and if I hadn’t taken on the role of night nurse, the visitor who stays long past visiting hours, the last hand that gently turns the lights down after the patient’s finally dozed off.

As she explained when I walked her home later that night and watched her look for ways to underscore the words lying low, she was always this far from crying, she said, indicating, as she’d done last night, the distance between her thumb and her forefinger. But when we finally reached the entrance to her building, the girl who could come this close to crying would suddenly turn on me and remind me, with goading raillery, not to look so glum. I’d been forewarned, hadn’t I? Suddenly the distance between us was wider than the distance between ice poles.

•

I had tried, at the bar, to open up and tell her why I liked Rohmer. How I’d discovered him at an age when I knew next to nothing about women or about myself—

“You’re sitting too far away, I can’t hear you,” she had said. Which is why I brought my face closer to the candle, realizing that I had been sitting almost a whole table width away from her. She didn’t like you to drift. At one point I noticed that while talking to her all you had to do was to sound vaguely tired or let your thoughts seem to stray during a moment of silence and she would immediately look hurt. If I persisted, however, she would punish my distraction first by pretending to be lost in thought herself and then by looking bored or far too interested in what the people next to our table were saying. She played this game better than anyone. “Maybe I should be thinking of going home,” she said, before suggesting we have a second drink. Then: “Finish what you were saying.” This was how she flattered you. The films, I thought, were about men who loved without passion, for no one seemed to suffer in them. “Rohmer’s men talk a good game around love, the better to tame their desires, their fears. They overanalyze things, as though analysis might open up the way to feeling, is a form of feeling, is better than feeling. In the end, they crave the small things, having given up on the big ones—”

“Have you known the big ones?” she interrupted me, honing once again on the unstated subject of our conversation.

I thought awhile. There was a time when I could have sworn I’d known them. Now, in truth, I didn’t think I had. “Sometimes I think I have. Have you?” I asked, still trying to stay vague.

“Sometimes I think I have.” She was mimicking me again. I loved how she did this.

We both laughed — because she had mimicked me quite well, because my answer was indeed hollow, and was meant to sound hollow, because by laughing she herself was hinting she’d have tried to dodge the question, seeing that she too might never have known the big ones and that we had both lied about knowing them to sound a touch less icy than we feared we seemed.

Last call came. We ordered a third round. Not one thing had gone wrong.

“Promise me something, though,” she said after I’d just repeated I was pleased we’d met tonight.

I looked at her and said nothing, not entirely certain I understood, trying to look surprised at whatever she was about to say, even if the use of her “though” was like an uneasy warning of gunfire to come.

She hesitated before speaking. Then she changed her mind.

“I don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.