Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

When the music stopped, I said I wanted to step outside for a few minutes. I didn’t ask her. “I’ll come with you,” she said.

“Where are you two going?” asked Margo, when she saw us leave through the kitchen door.

“To show him the river.”

•

The ground underfoot was hard, with patches of brown earth under the snow. Clara cleared away a tricycle that she said belonged to one of the grandchildren. Miles was his name. “Secret agent?”

“Secret agent,” I said, accepting a cigarette.

“Let me light it for you.”

She lit my cigarette, then took it back before I could even draw my first puff in ages.

“Not on my watch!”

So I wasn’t going to be allowed to smoke.

“What do you think they’re talking about now? Me? You?” I asked.

“Us, most likely.”

I liked our being called us.

In the summer, she said, Hudson County was lush, and people simply sat around here and whiled away entire weekend hours on lounge chairs, while food and drinks kept coming. She loved sunsets in the summer here. She was, I could see, describing Inkytimes in Inkyland.

We ambled through a narrow alley flanked by tall birch trees. White was everywhere. Even the bushes were a pallid, pewter gray, except for the stonework around the house and for the wall lining the length of the wood, verdigris bordering on livid gray. I imagined a carriage stopping here a century ago. As we walked, we began to near what seemed a dirty wooden fence that led to a wooden gangway and farther off to a withered stairway. “The boat basin is down there. Come.”

They had cleaned the Hudson years ago. Now, if you didn’t mind the undertow and the eels, you could swim. Still more trees, bare bushes, more sloping walls lining the property.

Then we spotted the river and, beyond it, the opposite bank, all white and misty, an Impressionist’s winterscape.

It made me think of Beethoven’s late quartets. I asked if she’d ever heard the Busch Quartet play. Maybe as a child at her parents’, she said.

As we approached the river, we began to hear crackling sounds that became louder and louder, clanking away like iron rods being hammered on an anvil. Crick, crack, crack. The ice on the river was breaking, clacking and clattering away, one floe knocking into the other, wrecking that neat white sheet of ice we had been seeing from the distance of the house, block after block of iced Hudson whacking its way downstream, with dark, dirty, glutinous black water underneath. Perhaps the Hudson was giving us its own version of the Siloti — crick, crack, crack, crack.

“I could listen to this for hours,” I said. What I meant was: I could be with you for hours — I could be with you forever, Clara. Everyone else has been make-believe, and maybe you are too, but right now, as I hear our music served on ice, my heart isn’t on ice, as I know yours isn’t either. Why is it that with you, for all your stingers and thistles, I feel so much at home?

“I could listen to this all day,” I repeated.

I had forgotten that in Clara’s world one didn’t rhapsodize about nature, sunsets, rivers, or songs in the shower. One didn’t hold hands either, I supposed.

“You don’t like this?” I asked.

“I like this fine.”

“Oh, just tell me you like it, then.”

She turned toward me, then looked at the ground. “I like it, then,” she said. A mini-concession no sooner made than instantly withdrawn.

How long would lying low last?

And then I don’t know what possessed me, but I asked her: “How long will all this lying low last?”

She must have seen this coming, or had been thinking about it herself, perhaps wondering at that very moment how long before I’d say something like this. Which is perhaps why she didn’t ask why I was asking.

“All winter, for all I know.”

“That long?”

She picked up a stone and hurled it far into the river. I picked one up too and did the same, aiming mine as far as I could. “Bellagio is a stone’s throw away,” I said. “And yet.”

She said she loved the sound of stones striking the ice, especially the heavier ones. She threw another. I lobbed another and another. We stood and watched where they landed.

“Maybe I need time.”

She didn’t quite finish her sentence. But I knew right away.

“You’re an amazing woman, Clara,” I said, “just amazing.”

She didn’t say anything.

“It’s good to hear someone say this.” Then having heard her sentence, she couldn’t help it. “It’s good to hear someone say this.” She parodied her own words.

“Amazing all the same.”

We threw more stones at the ice floes and listened to the ice bark back as though there were penguins who’d hopped up on the floes to forage for their young and thought we had thrown them bread, and what we threw was ice and stones.

On our way back, I held out my hand to her. I hadn’t even thought of it. She gave me hers as we went up the wooden stairs that led to the gangway. Then she let go, or I let go, or we both did.

When we returned, the soup was ready. Margo liked to add cream to the thick golden brew. So did Clara. It was a soup for cold weather, said Margo. A rustic, rectangular table had been set up, Max sitting at the head, Margo to his left, Clara to his immediate right, and I next to her. “I would have wanted Clara at my left,” said Margo, who seemed to be in a happy, chatty mood, “but I didn’t want to separate you.”

What on earth were they thinking? What had they been told?

I tried to give Clara an inquisitive look, but she must have anticipated this and was focusing intently on her soup, trying to show she hadn’t heard the comment I knew she couldn’t have missed. She raved about the soup and, better yet, about the crème fraîche, raved about the curry. “I believe in sixty-minute-not-a-second-more cooking. And that includes dessert,” said Margo. “And I,” interjected Max, “believe that a good wine will rescue anything you dish out with your sixty-minute chow even raccoons won’t touch.”

“Be grateful I’m around to feed your rotting gums.”

“And I to down what we’ll call food in front of our guests.”

Clara was the first to laugh, then Margo and Max, then me.

This was family business as usual, I guessed.

I am sitting where Inky sits, I thought.

The soup and the bread and the cream and the wine, which kept coming, were extraordinary, and soon enough we were being regaled with Max’s latest complaint. His knees. He’d been on archaeological digs in his youth and was now, in his nineties, paying the price for his follies near Ekbatana. “With most people my age, it’s the mind that goes. Mine is intact. But the body’s checking out.”

“How do you know your mind is so intact, old man?” said Clara.

“Do you want me to tell you how?”

“Please.”

“I warn you, it will be obscene, I know him,” cut in Margo.

“Well, about a month ago, because of these damned knees — which incidentally are about to be replaced, so this is the last time they’ll be seeing you — I had to get an MRI. They asked me of course if I wanted to be sedated and if I suffered from claustrophobia. So I laughed in their faces. I survived the Second World War without so much as taking aspirin, now I’m to be sedated simply because they’ll put me in a box with a hole in it? Not me. So in I go. But no sooner am I in there than I realize this is what death must be like. The machine starts such a ghoulish pounding and gonging that I want to ask for sedation. Problem is, I’m not supposed to move; if I do, they cancel the procedure. So I decide to brace myself and go on with it. Except I know my heart is racing like mad, and I can’t think of a single thing but the noise, which, more than ever now, reminds me of the hellish pounding of the dead statue in Don Giovanni: dong, dong, dong! I try to make myself think of the Don, but all I can think of is hell. This is death. I need to think of something quiet and soothing. But quiet and soothing images fail to come. This is when memory rescued me: I decided to count and name every woman I’d slept with, year by year, including those who brought me so little pleasure in bed that I’ve often wondered why they parted the Red Sea if they had no manna to give and certainly wanted none of mine. This, to say nothing of those who wouldn’t take off their clothes, or would do this but certainly not that, or who always had engine trouble, so in the end, though you might have been in bed together, and even fallen asleep, it was never clear whether you had scaled the summit. In any event, I counted them and they added up to—”