Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“So you made love to me instead.”

“So I made love to you instead.”

•

She had picked the right day. Everything was white. Not a chance that the sun was going to break through today. And yet despite the hoarfrost, which cast a chill layer around us from the sloping hood of her silver-gray car to the silver-white lane, something warm had settled between us in the car — part Clara’s mood, part the breakfast she had brought along, part Christmas, and part the afterglow of last night that seemed to have gathered around Did you think of me last night? like an aura on a saint’s figure, solemn and speechless.

“And I kept hoping you’d call.”

“Instead, you showed up.”

“Instead, I showed up.”

Still, what gumption to drop in on someone with breakfast-on-the-go and never a worry he’d say no. This was how she’d introduced herself. This was how she waited at the movie theater. This is how she lived, did everything. I envied her.

This is how she behaved with everyone. Skipping out on people, then barging back in. Speak, she’d say, and then as suddenly click off. Something told me that as late as it got last night and as often as she’d avoid picking up her phone while with me, she’d still found time to call Inky after I’d dropped her off. Then there was the old man we were visiting. He had no idea she was going to show up that morning, much less with a stranger. You mean you’ll just idle into his driveway, honk a few times to give him time to wash his face, comb his hair, and put in dentures, and shout Yooohooo, guess who’s here!

No, she was going to call him as soon as we left Edy’s.

Who’s Edy? I asked, more baffled than ever. You’ll see. Silence. Did I like not knowing anything? No, I didn’t. Actually, I loved nothing better and was just discovering it. This was like playing blindman’s bluff and never wanting my blindfold removed.

Perhaps I got to love having my hours messed and tousled with, because dicing up my days and my habits into scattered pieces that you couldn’t do anything with until she was there to put them together for you was her way of shaking things up, spinning you around, and then turning you inside out like an old sock — your heart a laundered sock looking for its mate — I didn’t just think of you last night, Clara, ask me, make me tell you and I will, I’m dying to anyway.

I didn’t know where we were headed, or when we’d be coming back. I didn’t want to catch myself thinking about tomorrow either. There might not be a tomorrow. Nor did I want to ask too many questions. Perhaps I was still fighting back, knowing that fighting back is the dead-giveaway gesture of those who’ve long ago already surrendered. I wanted to seem totally nonchalant in the car, but knew that the stiffness in my neck and shoulders had started the moment I’d gotten in. It had probably been there last night at the movies as well. And at the bar. And on our walk. Everything was urging me to say something, not something bold or clever, but something simple and true. A strange narrow door was being left open, and all I had to do was flash my pass and push through. Instead, I felt like a passenger timorously walking up to a metal detector. You deposit your keys, then your watch, your change, your wallet, belt, shoes, télyfön, and suddenly realize that without them you’re as bare and vulnerable as a broken tooth. A stiff neck and a broken tooth. Who was I without my things in their tiny, little places, without my little morning rituals, my little breakfast in my crammed little Greek diner, my cultivated sorrows and my cunning small ways of pretending I hadn’t recognized that the woman downstairs screaming Me, Shukoff. Me, goddamnit! was the very one I’d taken to bed with me last night and, in the dark, thrown every caution when I’d asked her not to take her sweater off so that I might slip into it as well, because, in thinking of our naked bodies shrouded in wool together, part of me knew it was safe to break down the sluices and let my mind run wild with her, now that I’d blown two chances two nights running and had, in all likelihood, lost her for good?

“You’re drifting.”

“I’m not drifting.”

She too hated people who drifted.

“You’re quiet, then.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Tell it to the barges.” She paused. “Tell me something I don’t know.” Still looking straight ahead of her.

“I thought you knew everything there was to know about me.”

I was trying to remind her of last night’s admonition at the bar.

“Then tell me something I want to hear.”

The privilege of drivers: to say the boldest things without ever looking at you.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m sure you can think of something.”

Did I get where she was going with this? Or was I just imagining?

“Like walking you home last night and hoping to think of one more way to avoid saying goodbye because there was still so much to say? Like not knowing why the film seemed tied to us in so many knots? Like wanting everything all over again? Like that?”

She didn’t answer.

“Like do you want me to go on, or should I stop?”

I meant it to sound both as a warning of an avalanche to come as well as to show that I was just playing with her, that however close I got, I would never be the first to remove the specter she had put between us.

“Like you can stop whenever you please,” she said.

That would teach me to ask for help in navigating the shoals between us.

“Where do they make people like you, Clara?”

At first she did not answer. “Where?” she asked, as though she didn’t understand the question. “Why do you ask?”

“Because it’s so hard to figure you out.”

“I have no secrets. I lay my cards out. I have with you.”

“It’s not secrets I’m thinking of. It’s how you get me to say things I’d never tell anyone.”

“Oh, spare me the Printz Oskár!”

I let a few seconds elapse.

“Spared!” as though I was conceding the point to humor her only, though I felt at once snubbed, yet relieved.

She laughed. “I can’t believe it’s me who’s blushing, not you,” she said.

“Permission to change subject?” I said, handing her the last piece of muffin found at the bottom of the paper bag.

“The things you come up with, Printz.”

•

I loved these little towns along the Hudson, especially on such an ashen, white day. Two decades ago, some of them may have been no bigger than industrial hamlets with sunken wharves and skeletal jetties. Now, like everything else around the city, they had blossomed into picturesque weekend villages. Off the road and perched on an incline was a little inn. I envied its occupants, its owners, those sitting in small dining rooms reading the morning paper this Christmas week.

No. I liked being in the car.

Yes, but to be in the dining room with her in one of those bed-and-breakfasts. Or better yet: to be there waiting for her to come downstairs and take her seat right next to mine at our table. And suppose it snowed heavily tonight and we had nowhere to sleep but here. .

“So tell me something else — anything, Printz.”

“Clara B., it’s difficult keeping up with you. You’re constantly changing lanes on me.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re headed to one place and one place only—”

“—and have been warned repeatedly there are major repairs up ahead—”

“—and don’t forget the roadblocks,” she corrected, seemingly jesting as well.

Clara was a fast driver, but not reckless; I caught her several times changing lanes to allow impatient drivers through. But she didn’t let them through out of courtesy. “They make me nervous.” I had a hard time picturing her nervous.