Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

Later, when I reached the park, I began to think that perhaps it was time not to see Clara any longer, that this had gone far enough and should go no further. Too much chaos, too many doubts, and far too, too many jabs and darts, everything bathed in a caustic brew that could peel off the outer layers of your body and leave you no less denuded than a newborn mollusk. End it, I thought, just end it. She’ll mind, probably, but of all people, she’ll recover faster than you ever will. Within hours, she’ll forget to remember, then forget she’s forgotten. As for me, it would take a while. Perhaps it was time to reconsider my own lying-low practice.

For the first time in weeks, I found myself itching to buy a pack of cigarettes. Was I going to call them secret agents? Yes, why not, at least for the time being. But my name would never again be Oskár.

The park by night, as always, felt as welcoming as a church on a rainy day when you have an extra ten minutes to yourself during lunch and, because you don’t belong to the faith and have no ritual to perform there, simply step in as you please, asking for nothing, expecting nothing, giving out nothing — just an empty pew, where you sit and think, just sit and think and hope you can intone something like a silent hymn.

I had passed by here just before one o’clock today, thinking to myself that tonight, after walking her home, I would indeed stop by here. If things went better than that, then I’d send the park good-night thoughts. The park would understand. As Tilden understood. As my father understood when I failed to send parting thoughts on rushing back to the city last night. But things had not gone well. Now I was back, no closer to her than I’d been on our first night. Two floors up, and three floors down. Just treading water, as always treading water. How I hated this feeling. I sat in the freezing cold for a few moments, knowing I’d have to leave soon, trying all the same to summon up the splendor of the party and how everything seemed touched by luster and legend that night. No more magic, none left, none here. My Magi with their heads ablaze — gone home. Go home, Oskár, go home.

I stood up and watched the city at three in the morning, the city I loved at three more than at any other time perhaps. It knew nothing about any of this, did it? Nor could it do anything to help, except watch and go about its business and from time to time look up again, the way zebras continue to graze and watch as their predators quietly scour the plain for their young. Go home, Oskár.

I decided to get another drink at our pub and sat at the bar. Perhaps all I wanted was to stay in her neighborhood. There was almost no one left inside, just the waitress and two men sitting at the bar, and a couple farther down. Would I ever in my life be able to come back here and not think of her? Or come back here and not hate my life, myself?

I was, I recalled, sitting exactly where the lanky young man had been standing after inadvertently sharing the bathroom with Clara. I had enjoyed her cutting words to him. Even he was far better off than I was right now. I looked over to what had been our table. They had already snuffed out the candles in that corner. The whole place reminded me of an emptied theater when management allows you to go back to retrieve the small umbrella left under your seat — but all the actors, from King Lear to Lady Windermere to the cleanup crew, have gone home already, including the underpaid mopping crew who’s already taken the subway and is on its way to the outer reaches of town, counting the minutes before each man can sit to eat the food his good wife has kept warm for him.

Traces of our presence were everywhere. This is where she and I had talked of Rohmer’s films, ordering more drinks than either of us was in the habit of drinking, her head on my shoulder, my arm sometimes around her shoulders, neither daring to go beyond that. Just looking at the bench with the cushion that might still be bearing the imprint of our bodies brought everything back.

I ordered a drink. “Fucking winter,” the barman said. The old toothless man sitting at the far end of the bar liked that. “Fucking winter,” he repeated, “you bet!” I immediately thought of Amerikon wezer and almost choked on the laughter as it worked its way up my throat. Had I ever laughed so much with anyone lately? And what was it about laughter that I loved so much — silly, slapstick, childish, fatuous laughter that it was. Amerikon wezer, she had repeated to the cabbie, making a face as if to say, Fancy that, Amerikon wezer! How I’d wanted to kiss her then.

I took out a dollar and put it in the jukebox. It would be just like me to come back and play our song again. I stood there, transfixed by the door of the bar, listening to the song, not caring a bit what the people who’d seen us dance together might think I was doing now, all by myself, en soledad. So she didn’t let him have his way with her, did she, and after all their dancing and boozing —not caring, because nothing mattered to me now but that moment when she put her hand to my face two nights ago with so much kindness — yes, kindness — that thinking of it now could make the tears come again — not tears of self-pity, or of self-hatred, or self-anything, or even love, though it must have been something like love, because two beings, two objects, two cells, two planets cannot come so close and not be altered by a hindrance and a disturbance called love. I could have let myself cry because prolonged confusion could do this each time. And perhaps being all alone here and wanting to remember the doleful tenor of her gesture when she rubbed her palm along my face after singing the words in my ear, only to ask for another dollar seconds later, made me think, almost against my will, that all this must surely be love and had always been love, her love, my love, our love. I played the song once more. Strange how she hadn’t said a word about it on our way home. Not a word about my kiss either. And certainly nothing about the way we’d held each other at the bar. Nothing. The whole thing swept under, forgotten, not talked about — as if they were all just tangents and detours.

We hadn’t taken a step forward since this afternoon, when we stood in the kitchen wrapped in a cloud of awkwardness. Who had put the cloud there, and why, with all our experience in matters of intimacy, were we so frozen and unable to shoo it away? I think we’d better not say good night —who ever says something as cramped and flat-footed as that? I think we’d better not say good night.

•

I sat at the bar and had started drinking my Scotch when it finally hit me.

What a dreadful fool! I kicked the stool next to mine. Then to cover the kick I made it seem that I had accidentally banged it while crossing my legs. I think we’d better not say good night did not mean we shouldn’t kiss goodbye, it meant I don’t want us to say goodbye yet. Why hadn’t she said yet ? Is yet such a hard word to say? Why hadn’t she said it clearly? Or had she said it more than just clearly and I had simply failed to hear it because I couldn’t believe I was being offered what I’d always wanted and, because I’d wanted it, felt unworthy of it.

Or had I understood her meaning exactly but pretended to disbelieve it so as to have her repeat it a second time, perhaps with greater emphasis — which Claras don’t do?

Suddenly, and more than anything right now, I wanted to call her and hear her raucous sleepy voice and, in hearing it, say to that raucous sleepy voice what I would with difficulty have said to her sparkling daytime voice, things one only mutters in unfettered half-sleep to those who’ll heed it in half-sleep themselves: I don’t care if I wake you up, I want to be with you now, in your bed, under your blanket, in your sweater, life is so very cold tonight, I’ll sleep in the next room if I have to, but I don’t want to be without you, not tonight.