Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“If it’s any consolation, I like this too,” she said, staring over at the distant woods across the river, as if they had more to do with our enjoyment of the moment than we did ourselves. Was she doing exactly what I had just done, paying us a compliment while undoing it by redirecting her gaze to the spectacle of bluffs beyond, or was she trying to raise the subject in a manner I didn’t dare to yet?

“I’m sure you couldn’t care less, but I used to come here with Inky.”

“What, chez Edy’s?” Why did I keep making fun of the place, why?

“When they were kids, he and his brother would ride their boat here, fish, get drunk, then head back home before dark. Inky and I would drive up here, park the car, loll about awhile, and I’d watch him miss the old days, till we got into the car again and rode back to the city. Such a lost, lost soul.”

“You’re a lost soul too?”

“Nope!” she snapped without letting me finish what I didn’t even know I was attempting to ask. It meant, Don’t even try. Trenches, pits, the dales of pandangst were party talk.

“Are you here now to be with him?”

“No. I told you already. We’re over.”

Dumb, dumb question.

“So why are you bringing him up now?”

“No need to be upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“You’re not upset? You should see yourself.”

I decided to joke about it and picked up the tiny metal milk dispenser and, as though to determine what an upset face looked like, examined my reflection in it, once, twice, three times.

Then I saw it. In the rush to meet her this morning, I had completely forgotten to shave. This, after making a deliberate effort to take my time in coming down, to show I wasn’t racing down the stairs to meet her.

Did she want me to say I was upset? Was this, then, an “opener” of sorts, her way of forcing me to admit what I felt each time she spoke of him, so that she might yet again remind me that I had overstepped the bounds? Was she using her constantly resurrected ex to remind me of the trench between us?

“I don’t look upset at all,” I said, pretending to argue with her remark.

“Just let it go.”

Why did she bring me to the brink each time I thought it was safe to take a step closer?

“Inky would just sit here and simply stare at the bridge over there.”

“Stare at the bridge? Why?”

“Because his brother jumped off it.”

I felt for the three of them.

“And what did you do while he stared?” I asked, not knowing what else to ask.

“Hoped he’d forget. Hoped it would stop haunting him. Hoped I could make a difference. Hoped he’d say something. But he’d just sit there and stare, blank, always blank. Until I realized he was telling me in his own subtle, tormented way that if I wanted to and kept at him, I could make him jump too.”

Yes, I could see how Clara could bring anyone to jump.

“So why do you come here?”

“I like the salty-dog grunginess.” She too could affect being intentionally flippant.

“Be serious. Do you miss him?” I proposed, as if to help her see the answer staring her in the face.

She shook her head — not to mean no, but as though she was shaking me off, meaning, You’ll never catch me, so don’t try. Or: You’re way off, pal.

“So this place has Inky written all over it,” I finally said after waiting for her answer.

“Not Inky.”

“Who, then?” I asked.

“That’s a Door number three question. How much do you charge per hour?”

But she didn’t wait for my answer.

“Me, that’s what’s written all over it. Because this is the spot where it finally hit me that perhaps I didn’t know what love was. Or that I’d practiced the wrong kind. That I’d never know.”

“Did you bring me all the way up here to tell me this?”

This caught her totally by surprise.

“Maybe. Maybe,” she repeated, as if she had never considered the possibility that she’d brought me along to reopen old wounds and help her witness where truth had felled her. Or perhaps she simply wished to see if she’d feel differently with another man. Or was it too soon yet? Lying low and all that.

“I’d sit and watch him drift and drift and drift, as if he were taking me up to that bridge and was going to jump on condition I jumped with him. And I wasn’t going to go up that bridge or jump from it, not with him, not for him, not for anyone, unfortunately; nor was I going to sit around and watch him think of it each time we came here while he stared and said he’d die for me, when the one thing I wanted to tell him the most I couldn’t even say.”

“And that was?”

“So I am paying you by the hour!”

She paused for a moment to catch her breath, or to collect her thoughts — or was she smothering the start of a sob? Or was it a grin?

“That he could go ahead. Mean and nasty. Not that I didn’t care, but that I was never going to love anyone — not him, at any rate. I’d have jumped after him to save him. Maybe. No, not even.” She was playing with her spoon, drawing patterns on the paper napkin. “The rest let’s not talk about.”

“I would have rushed in to save you, wrapped you in all the coats hanging on Edy’s coatrack, screamed for help, breathed into your mouth, saved your life, brought you tea, fed you muffins.” I knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment I’d said it, a lame pass sandwiched in soft-core wit.

“The tea and the coats and muffins I like. The mouth-to-mouth, no, because it’s as I told you last night.”

I stared at her with a startled face. Why say such a thing? I felt I’d been led to the bridge and pushed. Just when she was most vulnerable, most human, at her most candid, out sprang the barbed wire and the serrated fang. Because it’s as I told you last night.

How long would it take me to live this moment down? Months? Years?

We were sitting in what was one of the coziest corners in the world — fireplace, tea, unhindered view of the ancient docks, dead foghorns, quiet coffee shop that probably went back to the days of Coolidge and Hoover and where the distant sounds you heard from deep behind the narrow kitchen window reminded you that there were others on this planet — all the dreamy warmth of a black-and-white romantic film sequence slung along a mean and nasty Hudson. I was tense, awkward, dismayed, trying to seem natural, trying to enjoy her presence, sensing all along that I might have done far better at my local Greek diner, chatted the waitress up, ordered my favorite eggs, read the paper. All of it was wrong now, and I didn’t know how to fix it. It kept breaking.

“Just do me one favor, though, will you?” she said as we were walking along the unpaved icy path toward her car, both of us staring at the ground.

“What?”

“Don’t hate me either.”

The word either, which so clearly subsumed the word we’d been avoiding, struck my pride — just my pride and nothing else — as if pride lined every ridge on my backbone and her word had struck it dead with the quick fell stroke that sends a bull lurching to the dust before it knows what hit it. No weakening of the limbs, no buckling, no teetering in the knees — just dead, pierced, in and out. Not only had I been found out, but what was found out about me was being used against me, as if it were a source of weakness and shame — and it became one precisely because she made me feel she’d used it this way. Does pride bruise more easily than anything else? Why did I hate having everything about me found out, exposed, and put out to dry, like soiled underwear?

I was ashamed both of the hatred I knew myself perfectly capable of, and of the opposite of hatred, which I did not wish to stir up just yet, because I suspected how much of it there was, though placid, like lakes and rivers under ice. Her either had made whatever I felt seem like an indecent breach, a suggestion of slop. Suddenly I wanted to blurt out, “Look, why don’t you go ahead to wherever you’re going, I’ll catch the first train back to the city.” That would have taught her a lesson right there and then. I’d never see her again, never answer the doorbell, never go on drives upstate to rinky-dink luncheonettes where a hungover Captain Haddock is as likely to peep from behind the kitchen curtain as would be an old abortionist come out to dram a shot of rum before whetting his tools on Edy’s broken marble slab by the cash register. Why bother coming this morning, why the ride to God-knows-where, why the simpering Did you think of me last night? when she was telegraphing hands off, now and forever?