Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“Thanks, but no thanks.” She’d wait in the lobby, she didn’t mind, just don’t take too long — was I sleeping?

“No, shower.”

“What?”

“Sho-wer.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Just hurry,” she cried, as if I had already agreed to come.

“Actually—” I hesitated.

There was a dead silence.

“Actually, what? Are you that busy?” she blurted out.

The static on the intercom couldn’t muffle the irony crackling over each syllable.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll be down in five.”

She must have grabbed the phone from the doorman.

There goes my regular breakfast at the corner Greek diner, I thought. Newspaper waiting by the cash register, crossword puzzle I never care to finish, thimble-sized glass of orange juice as soon as they spot you trundling through the snow, omelet, hash browns, and small tinfoiled packets of very processed jam — they know me there — speak a few words of Helleniki with the waitress, pretend we’re both flirting, which is flirting twice-removed, then stare out and let your mind drift. I could almost hear the sound of the door, with its thumb lock permanently stuck down, followed by the bell and rattle of the glass panel as you shut the door behind you real fast, rubbing your palms from the cold, scanning for an empty table by the window, then sit and wait for that magical moment when you’ll stare out and let your mind drift.

Six hours ago, just six hours ago I was standing outside her building watching her disappear into the elevator.

Now she was standing outside my building, waiting. Suddenly the words I’d spoken to her last night in bed came back to me, word for word. You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended. I wish it had gone on and on, and that we’d kept walking all the way to the river, then headed downtown, and who knows where else by now, past the marina and the boats where she’d once told me Pavel and Pablo lived, to Battery Park City all the way over and across the bridge to Brooklyn, walking and walking right until dawn. Now she was downstairs. You know that walk . . The words coursed through me like a secret wish I’d failed to expiate last night. I wanted to take the elevator downstairs and, tying the knot of my bathrobe, drip into the main lobby and tell her, You know that walk on 106th Street? I wish it hadn’t ended, never ended. Just the thought of saying these words to her now as I was hastily drying myself made me want to be naked with her.

When I finally saw her downstairs in the lobby, I complained that eight o’clock was an unseemly hour to drag people out of their homes. “You love it,” she interrupted. “Hop in, we’ll have breakfast on the way. Take a look.”

She indicated the passenger seat of a silver BMW. Two grande coffees stood at a precarious angle, not in the cup holders below the dashboard, but right on the passenger seat itself, as if she had plopped both down in what I took to be her typical impatience with small things. There were also what appeared to be neatly wrapped muffins—“Purchased just around your block,” she said. She had bought them with me and no one else in mind, it seemed, which meant she knew she’d find me, knew I’d be happy to come along, knew I liked muffins, especially when they had this vague scent of cloves. I wondered whom else she’d have barged in on if she hadn’t found me. Or was I already the standby? Why think this way?

“Where to?” I asked.

“We’re visiting an old friend. He lives in the country — you’ll like him.”

I said nothing. Another Inky, I figured. Why bring me along?

“He’s been living there ever since leaving Germany before the war.” She must have inherited this from her parents. They called it the war, not World War II. “Knows everything—”

“—about everything.” I knew the type.

“Just about. Knows every piece of recorded music.”

I pictured a fretful old garmento type hobbling on frayed slippers around a large gramophone. Tell me, Liebchen, what watch? Do you know that land where the citrus blooms? I wanted to make fun of him. “Another Knöwitall Jäcke,” I said.

She caught my skepticism and my attempted humor.

“He’s lived more lives here and elsewhere than you and I put together multiplied by eight to the power of three.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do say. He goes back to a time when the world ganged up on every last Jew, and all that was left of Europe was a tiny spot off a magical lakeside town overlooking a canton in Switzerland. There, my father, Hans, and Fred Pasternak met in elementary school, which was why my father insisted I go to school there for a while. There, for your nymphormation, Max turned the pages for the man who’d once turned them for the man who’d turned them for the last of Beethoven’s pupils. Maybe I worship him.”

I hated her blind adulation. No doubt she hated my senseless wish to deride him. “So don’t you be the knöwitall.” She repeated my word to soften her censure. “We’re going to hear some stuff he’s unearthed — pretty amazing too, if you care to know.”

A chill suddenly hovered between us. To fend it off, we kept quiet. Let the fog pass, let it disperse and drift away and spill out of the car like the cigarette smoke being sucked out of the tiny crack in her window. Our silence told me not just that our thoughts were temporarily elsewhere, or that anger was blocking something between us, but that she, like me, and without wishing to call attention to it, was desperately scrambling to make last-minute repairs to save the moment.

A good sign, I thought.

This is when she took out a recording of Handel’s piano suites. I said nothing, fearing that mentioning music might suddenly bring up her aging cyborg with the giant phonograph. She’s putting on the Handel to fill the silence with something. To show she is aware of the tension, to show she isn’t aware of it, to smooth the ruffles the way a beautiful woman in an elevator once rubbed a hand across the front of my sports lapel to undo a fold in my collar. A conversation opener. Not a conversation opener.

She must have realized what I was thinking.

I smiled back.

If she cradled a mirror version of my unspoken You know that walk, last night, what would it be? I know what you’re thinking. It’s nothing like yours. It’s only the tension makes you want to read my thoughts. Or was it harsher yet: You had no right speaking of Herr Jäcke that way — look what you’ve done to us now.

We were on Riverside Drive. Soon we would near the 112th Street statue, where, for a while that seemed to last forever two days earlier, I’d enjoyed feeling stranded in the snowstorm. I tried to remember the evening and the snowed-up hillock and the St. Bernard coming out of nowhere, then the elevator, the party, the tree, the woman. Now I was riding in Clara’s car, eager to put the tension behind us. I watched Tilden’s statue come and go. It had seemed so timeless, so blissfully medieval under the snow two days ago; now it scarcely remembered who I was as I sped by in the sports coupe, neither he nor I able to share a thought in common. Later, I promised, maybe we’ll reconnect on my way back, and I’ll stop and ponder the passage of time. See this statue, it and I . . I would have told her, my way of reminding her how we’d stood on a balcony and watched eternity the other night — the shoe, the glass, the snow, the shirt, Bellagio, almost everything about her aching to turn into poetry. It was poetry, wasn’t it, the walk that night, and the walk last night, You know that walk on 106th Street? I’d been thinking about you all day, all day.