Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“Do I make you nervous?”

She thought for a moment.

“Do you want me to say yes — or no? I can go both ways.”

I smiled. I couldn’t think of a nerve-racking moment in my life I’d enjoyed more. I nodded.

“Deep, very très deep,” she said. “Way too much Vishnukrishnu Vindalu Paramashanti stuff going on between us.”

I said nothing. I knew what she meant. But I had no idea whether she welcomed the intimacy or wanted it stopped.

“Cemetery town,” I interrupted, pointing out the row of cemeteries in Westchester. “I know,” she said.

I looked outside and realized we were in fact fast approaching the cemetery where my father was buried. I knew I was not going to raise the subject and would let it drop as soon as we’d passed the town. Had I known her better or felt less cramped, perhaps I would have asked her to take the next exit, turn around, find a florist along the way, and join me for a short visit there.

He would have liked her. Pardon me for not standing, frankly this here is really not good for anyone’s back. And turning to me, At least this one, with her spunk and her pseudo-hussy airs, is no ballbuster heiress.

I wondered if the day would come when I’d trust asking Clara to park the car and take a few minutes to stop by his grave. Why didn’t I? She wouldn’t have hesitated to take me to her father’s, or to mine if I’d asked. Why hadn’t I called last night? Why couldn’t I just say, Will you let me tell you about my father someday?

I’d never spoken about him. Would I remember to think of him again on our way back? Or would I choose to hate myself for burying him with a second death, the death of silence and shame, which I already knew was a crime against me, not him, against truth, not love. The wages of grief are paid in large bills and, later, in loose change; those of silence and shame no loanshark will touch.

•

A while later, and without warning, she veered right onto an exit and entered what seemed a tiny old fishing village with an antique masthead signaling the center of town. Then, in front of a secluded 1950s candy store not ten yards from a gas station, she parked the car. “We’ll stop for a short while.” A faded shingle up a brick staircase announced a place called Edy’s.

I liked the nippy air that greeted us as soon as we stepped out of the car.

Edy’s was a totally deserted blue-collar luncheonette. “Norman Rockwell goes Podunk,” I said. “Tea?” Clara asked. “Tea is good,” I said, determined to play along. Clara immediately dropped her coat on a Formica table by a large window facing the Hudson. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

I always envied people who never thought twice about saying they were going to the bathroom.

The fifty-plus waitress, whose name was embroidered in cursive pink on a striped blue apron, brought two empty thick mugs from which dangled two Lipton tea tags. Her left index finger was stuck through the handles of the two mugs, while her other hand held a round glass pitcher of hot water. “Edy?” I asked by way of thanking her. “That’s me,” she replied, depositing the mugs on the Formica table and pouring the boiling water.

I took the seat facing the least appealing of the two outside views: a floating shed, which looked more like an abandoned ice-fishing hut. Then I changed my mind when I realized that Clara’s side featured a tilted, rusted, trellised pier. Then I changed my mind again: perhaps the view of the floating barge at the bottom of the gully wasn’t so ugly after all. I couldn’t make up my mind until I sensed a fireplace with a burning log in the back of the coffee shop. Suddenly the illusion of bay windows. I picked up both mugs and moved them to the sheltered corner booth by the fireplace. Even the view was better from here. Two tiny paintings hung between the relics of a sextant and an oversized meerschaum pipe: an imitation Reynolds portrait and a picture of a lurching bull with a matador’s saber pierced up his spine.

When Clara came over, she sat down and cupped the mug with both palms in a gesture suggesting she loved nothing better than the touch of a warm mug between her hands.

“I would never have discovered this spot in a million years,” I said.

“No one would.”

She sat, as she had last night, with both elbows on the table.

Your eyes, your teeth, Clara. I had never been stirred by her teeth before, but I wanted to touch them with my finger. Never seen her eyes in daylight before. I sought them out and feared them and struggled with them. Tell me you know I’m staring at you, that you just know, that you want me to, that you too are thinking we’ve never been together in daylight before.

Perhaps I was making her uncomfortable, for she resumed the affectation of trying to relieve something like frostbite on her hands by caressing her mug. An arm around her shoulders, an arm around her oversized sweater hanging off her bare, cashmered shoulders. That could be done easily enough, why not with Clara?

She sat up, as though she had read my mind and didn’t want me to stray down this path again.

I said something humorous about the old Jäcke. She didn’t answer, or wasn’t paying attention, or was simply brushing aside my limp attempt at blithe chitchat.

I envy people who ignore all attempts at small talk.

An arm to touch your shoulder. Why weren’t we sitting next to each other instead of face-to-face like strangers? Perhaps I should have waited for her to sit first and then sat next to her. What idiocy my changing seats and the commotion about the view of the floating barge and of the trellised pier, back to the floating barge — what did views have to do with anything?

She leaned her head against the large sealed windowpane, trying to avoid touching the dusty tartan curtains. She looked pensive. I was about to lean my head against the window as well, but then decided against it; she’d think I was trying to mimic her, though I’d thought of it first. It would have seemed too premeditated an attempt to seem lost in the same cloud. Instead, I slouched back, almost touching her feet under the table.

She crossed her arms and stared outside. “I love days like this.”

I looked at her. I love the way you are right now. Your sweater, your neck, your teeth. Even your hands, the meek, untanned, warm, luminous palm of each hand resting cross-armed, as if you too were nervous.

“So talk to me.”

“So talk to you.”

I fiddled with a sugar packet. For a change it seemed it was she who needed to fill the silence, not I. And yet it was I who felt like a crab that had just molted its shell: without pincers, without wit, without darting steps, just a hapless mass with aching phantom limbs.

“I like being here like this too,” I said — being here, with you, having tea in the middle of nowhere, next to an abandoned gas station in the heart of soddy, cabin-town America — does it matter? “And this too, I like,” I added, letting my gaze land on the iced white shore and the bluffs beyond, as though they too had something to do with liking being here like this. “Being here the way we are right now,” I threw in as an afterthought, “though all this might have absolutely nothing to do with you, of course,” I added slyly.

She smiled at my attempted afterthought.

“Nothing to do with me at all.”

“Absolutely not,” I insisted.

“I couldn’t agree more.”

She started laughing — at me, at herself, at the joy that came from being together so early in the day, at both our willfully transparent attempts to play down the joy.

“Time for a third secret agent,” she added, taking a cigarette and proceeding to light it.

Teeth, eyes, smile.