Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

Perhaps I was right not to sleep with her last night: had she pulled any of this after making love to me, I’d have slit my throat with one of her father’s kitchen knives, killed myself first, then her.

Or maybe I was no different than she was. She had simply beaten me to it. I remembered that moment when, alone in the bathroom at the bar last night, I’d planned to slip away after making love to her. This is about tonight, I had kept telling myself, but make no promises about tomorrow. We were each other’s mirror image. Is this why I wanted her so badly?

“Maybe talking to someone might help,” said the intern.

I had never “talked” to someone before, I said.

“I’m surprised,” he said.

Why was he surprised? Because I was a visibly self-tormented, insecure, prone-to-self-hatred, depressive type you’d never think of leaving alone before an open window on the eleventh floor?

“No, it’s just that everyone has a setback at one point or another.”

And my point was now, right? A setback. Was this the polite way of naming what had happened to me? A setback. I see eternity one day, and the next we’re talking setbacks?

All I could think of asking was how long they were planning on keeping me there.

Till my heartbeat was back to normal.

Here was a prescription for more of these. And: No caffeine. No drinking. Lay off cigarettes too.

Six days with the world’s most beautiful woman and I was a wreck headed for the loony bin.

Suddenly I heard my phone ring.

“It’s the télyfön,” I said.

“I’m going to need to ask you not to use your cell here.”

I could just imagine Clara responding to such contemptible bland-speak: Are you needing to ask me now, or are you going to need to ask me in some fabricated moment in an undefined, politely ambiguous future?

“I have to take this call,” I told the doctor. “It’s from”—and I whispered the word— “the heartbreak.”

“Well, make it very brief, and don’t get all wired up again.”

“I am all wired up,” I said, pointing to the wires of the cardiogram still suctioned to my body.

“I’m free,” she said. As always she cut to the chase, then greeted you.

I looked about me and couldn’t help snickering: But I’m not.

Oh?

I’m actually tied up. Then, realizing the joke had gone far enough—“I’ve got wires stuck in every part of my body.”

“What are you talking about?”

She was yelling, and I was hoping that junior-internist here might get a sense of the madwoman I’d been up against these past few days.

“I’m in a hospital.”

A grapeshot of questions. She was coming over.

No need to. I can take care of myself. They’re letting me go.

Where was she?

On Printz Street — added emphasis — about to hail a cab headed uptown. Was using my nickname a good sign, or was she just making nice to cover up being downtown still?

I put a finger on the mouthpiece of my cell phone. “How long before I can walk?” I asked.

The young resident made an almost disappointed smirk. Time to remove these wires, put my clothes on, fill out the paperwork.

“Can you meet me downstairs in my building?”

“I can do that.”

I can do that. What on earth did I can do that mean? Did she have to speak Amphibabble too? Didn’t everyone?

Was she coming because she was eager to, wanted to, or was hers a lukewarm acquiescence bordering on indifference?

Finally, there it was: Don’t keep me waiting long.

•

“What were you doing in the hospital?” she asked.

She was sitting on a sofa in the lobby of my building. She had removed her shawl and her coat, so she had to have been waiting for a while. When she stood up, she looked absolutely stunning. Slender, dark colors everywhere, her hazel-eyed beauty simply forbidding. Diamond stud sitting on her sternum. Last time I’d seen it was ages ago. All of it reminded me that whatever bridges we’d crossed last night had been completely blown up this morning. The corvus had tumbled off the ship.

“I’m just staying for a few minutes. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

Did she want to come upstairs?

“Yes, but only for a few minutes.”

I felt weak and sapped. I had no stomach for emotional haggling and tussling. I was just relieved to see her in the very same place where we’d picnicked twenty-four hours before. But she was chilly, wasn’t sitting. The meter was obviously running.

“So, are you going to tell me what happened?” she asked once we were in the elevator.

From the way she framed the question, I could tell she’d already guessed the answer. There was no point hiding the truth.

“Call it recurrent shell shock from my years in the trenches.”

“In the what?”

“In the bog, in the quag, the trenches.”

She nodded. But she seemed to have forgotten. Or perhaps she hadn’t. “It was a panique attack,” I finally said, hoping she’d pick up the rhyme with garlique. She shook her head.

She took her time getting out of the elevator, and once again was brusquely shoved out by the door. “This is not the time.” She turned to the elevator, then kicked it in the equivalent of its shin. “Fucking beast. Fucking, fucking beast.”

We burst out laughing.

I opened the door. Thank God I had tidied up the place this morning. Someone next door was cooking what appeared to be a late-afternoon soup. How I wished we’d had breakfast together this morning.

I turned on the lights. The day had aged so fast.

She dropped her coat on one of the chairs, yet another sign that she wasn’t staying long. “I’ll make tea.”

Had they given me something?

Yes, they’d given me something.

“I disappear a few hours and you end up in the ER. Nice.”

I looked at her. I didn’t have to say anything.

“You’re blaming me, aren’t you?”

“No, not blaming. But the tone this morning was so different from last night’s, it sent me into a tailspin.”

“So you are blaming me.”

“It’s not a question of blaming. It’s more like I don’t recognize me, and I don’t recognize you.”

“That’s right.”

“ That’s right what?”

“We change. We change our minds.”

“That fast?”

“Maybe.”

“What happened to yesterday?”

“You’re one to ask.” She paused for a second. “Besides, I can’t be tied to yesterday.”

She walked over to where she must have stowed away the chocolate cookies, found the box exactly where she’d left it yesterday, and freely took two out. It thrilled me that she was behaving as if she were at home. At other times, though, I’d seen her take out a dish and stack four to six of these cookies, arranged, as I suddenly remembered from our very first night, in a Noah’s ark formation.

Neither of us had made a gesture to boil water. She’d obviously given up on tea and had headed directly for the cookies. Bad sex tea. Very, very bad sex tea, I remembered.

“Look, I don’t want us to fight.”

Obviously I must have raised my voice when asking about yesterday.

“What makes you think I want to?”

“Well, you’re obviously upset.”

“Any idea why I might be?”

“Why don’t you tell me, since you’re about to anyway.”

From the tone of her voice I could tell she’d been through this exact conversation endless times before. She dreaded its coming and could probably spot all of its signposts, its shortcuts, cross streets, tangents, and escape routes long before I could.

“I’m sure you already know what I have to say.”