Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

So typical. I nodded.

“I said you don’t trust me. And I’m sure you have your reasons, and I won’t ask what they are. But I also know you: you’ll never ask me what we’re doing here together. And one day you’re going to have to.”

“And when that day comes?”

She pursed her lips, gave another wistful shrug of her shoulders, said nothing.

She wasn’t answering. “Door number three?” I asked.

She nodded.

“That’s my hell,” I said.

“Unfair. It’s mine too.”

I thought I understood. But she was right. One day I’d have to ask her what she meant. And that day, it suddenly hit me, was today, was now. And I didn’t have the courage to ask.

•

“On the house,” said one of the Mexican waiters who, along with the other waiters and cooks, had long finished lunch and cleared the staff’s table. He had placed two squares of what looked like tiramisu and two cups of coffee on the table.

“Do you know what time it is?”

We were both dumbfounded. It was 4:30.

She said she needed to walk. I did too. After coffee we put on our coats, she did her complicated shawl knot, said goodbye to Svetonio, who was back to the sports pages, and we walked out to find a cold setting sun. Everything about her, about today even, was totally unusual. Not paying for lunch, helping the cook in his own restaurant, walking into places and taking over — a home, a kitchen, a restaurant, a life — all these gusted through otherwise ordinary days. This was not just Clara’s style, it was Clara’s world, a life that seemed boundless, extravagant, and every inch festive and unlike mine. And yet here we were, two beings who, for all our differences, seemed to speak the exact same language, liked the exact same things, and led almost identical lives. How could we be in two different rooms, let alone live streets and blocks apart, when we were made to share the same chair? Then I thought of Inky and caught a glimpse of his hell. He too must have thought they were identical beings, and yet there he was, living with the awful proof that being similar, and thinking the same thoughts, and feeling inseparable from someone was nothing more than one of the many screens that loneliness projects on the four walls of our lives.

I told her it was doubtful we would have time for Indian food tonight.

“Why?” she asked.

We laughed. She knew exactly why.

We had slightly more than two hours before 7:10. On the way down Broadway, she stopped by a botanica and asked, in Spanish, if the owner was there. The girl, who was hardly older than fourteen, went in, called her mother, who soon after appeared. “Together or separate?” she asked. “You decide,” said Clara to the fortune-teller. The woman asked me to produce my palm, which I did, reluctantly, never in my life having done anything like this before. It felt no different than entering a slovenly tattoo parlor or opium den, something slightly disturbing, because I might never be the same person on coming out. Worth a shot, I thought. The beefy woman took hold of my left palm with one hand and with the pinky of her other seemed to point at things I wasn’t seeing. Someone very dear to me had bad leg troubles, no, just the right leg. A sibling — and moments later — no, a parent, she said. Very serious leg trouble, she said, raising her head and staring at me. It’s over, she corrected. I withdrew my hand before she had time to say anything more. But you have a good line, she said, by way of compensating for the bad news. She asked for Clara’s hand. The bucket is full, but I see nothing anywhere. Was this a metaphor? Then she whispered something in Clara’s ear. Clara raised her shoulders, to suggest either indifference or that she didn’t know. We walked out humbled and crestfallen creatures.

“What did Madame Sosostris whisper to you?” I asked once we’d left the palm reader’s parlor.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Unfair.”

“Actually, you do, but you really don’t.”

“Inky?” I asked, knowing that, after our lunch, my cards were all on the table.

“Not telling.”

Clara wanted to buy a candy bar, she said. It was five o’clock.

We had two hours, yet strangely enough neither of us felt they were hours we had to kill. We could have walked, stopped in stores, bought presents, kept going, kept going — till when, Clara, till tomorrow, next year, forever?

“I can make tea,” she said.

I couldn’t resist. “You mean walk into a coffee shop, dash into the kitchen, and produce two mugs with Lipton tea bags?”

“No, at my place.”

I had to control a sudden surge of instant panic and bliss. Part of me didn’t wish to go upstairs for fear of what I’d be tempted to do. The other for fear that I’d never even dare.

Boris — if he remembered me — must have suspected that something like this was bound to happen. She stamped her feet as he was holding the door; I did the same, and thanked him with a semiflustered greeting. I was, without realizing it, uneasy and trying not to show it.

We stepped into the elevator. This was where I’d met the woman in the blue overcoat.

The elevator felt and smelled different. I didn’t know this smell. A mid-afternoon-in-a-strange-new-place smell. I had wanted to pretend I was coming here for the first time, that the party had already started, and that I was about to meet Clara any moment now. But before I knew it, we had already reached her floor.

She unlocked the door. Then she removed her coat, unwrapped her complicated shawl, and showed me into the living room, which overlooked the Hudson. I felt that I was back at the party, except that everything had been cleaned up and put back together to look totally different. Partitions had come up where none existed upstairs, furniture had been moved, the artwork looked different, older, the Hudson felt closer, and when I neared the bank of large windows, it seemed to me that even Riverside Drive felt different, more accessible than the far-flung vista that had made me think of Gogol, Byzantium, and Montevideo.

“Give me your coat.”

She took my coat, and what almost moved me — because it seemed so unexpected — was her manner of handling it, as if it were going to break or crease if she didn’t take deferential care of my stupid old coat. Was this a sign? There are no signs, I kept telling myself.

“Come, let’s go to the kitchen. Then I’ll show you around.”

Was she going to show me her bedroom?

The kitchen, like the entire apartment, hadn’t been touched up in decades. Her parents, she explained, had lived there until the day of the accident, and ever since, she’d never had the heart or the time to fix much. There were walls to be broken through, others to put up, wiring to pull out, so many things to be given away. To prove her point, she showed me the gas range and asked me to light it. “Don’t you just turn a knob or press something?” I asked. “No, you use this,” she said, taking out a match from a large matchbox. “Does this thing whistle when the water boils?” “No, it chimes.” She pointed at a very contempo-designed teakettle. A gift. But major renovations would take so much time. “Plus I don’t think I want it changed.” Her whole apartment, it occurred to me, was lying low too.

We stood in the unlit kitchen waiting for the water to boil.

“I have no cookies. I have nothing to offer.”

Girl on perpetual diet, I thought.

She was standing with her arms crossed, leaning back against the kitchen counter, looking, as I began to notice during similar moments of silence between us, mildly uneasy. I wondered why. Was she always curt and abrupt and agitated to cover up her uneasiness — was this her way? Or was she really curt and abrupt, which sometimes coincided with her uneasiness? I felt for her, which was why, as I watched the westering light fall on her figure, I said, “All you need is a dead pheasant and a bruised pomegranate sitting in a blue-rimmed bowl near a clear jar of aquavit and you get a Dutch master’s Girl Leaning against Kitchen Counter.”