Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

“I think I do. But go ahead,” she added, with an implied If it makes you feel any better.

“Maybe there’s no point.”

“Maybe not”—meaning, Suit yourself.

“Let’s just say I’m sorry you changed so fast.”

She stared at her cookie like a child being chastised, or like someone trying to gain time, collect her thoughts, and come up with the right answer. Or just sitting out a cloud. How I wished that she’d tell me I was completely off the mark, that she hadn’t changed at all since last night, that I should stop putting words in her mouth and making her say things she hadn’t meant to say at all.

“Maybe that’s my hell.”

“What’s your hell?”

“Always letting people down.”

“Do you blame them?”

“No. I can’t say I do. I set them up for it, then I let them down.”

She made it sound that setting people up for disappointment was far worse than the disappointment that rushed them to the hospital.

I stared at her. “Just tell me one thing.”

“What?”

Her What had come too quickly, as if it were concealing a timorous What now behind a seemingly confident, open-faced Ask-anything-you-don’t-scare-me-of-course-I’ll-answer.

“Was it because we didn’t make love last night?”

“That would make me cruel and spiteful. It had nothing to do with last night.”

“Then it’s worse than I thought.”

“Maybe we just got carried away. Or maybe we ended up wanting the same thing — but for entirely different reasons.”

“Your reason was not my reason?”

“I don’t think it was.” Then, to soften her words but to show that softening them was not going to change her mind: “Maybe it wasn’t.”

“And you’d warned me against that.”

“I did.”

“And I listened.”

“You did.”

“Until you told me that I shouldn’t have.”

“Until I told you that you shouldn’t have.”

“We’re a mess, aren’t we?”

“A big mess.”

I was standing in front of her, and suddenly put both hands on her face, rubbing this face with its lips and hazel eyes that meant more to me than sunlight, speech, and anything inside or outside this room. I kissed her, knowing, with a certainty I had never encountered before, that she would kiss me as passionately and as desperately as I longed to kiss her, and that she would do this because the escape hatches between us were wide open and tomorrow was no longer in our vocabulary. It would be aimless, desultory lovemaking, safe and shiftless — with, once again, my usual blend of goodwill and tact, not the stuff of last night.

She kissed my neck as she had last night. I loved the way her hips moved with mine, the way we held each other tight, not letting the air creep between us. We were, it took a second to notice, almost dancing. Or was it lovemaking and I didn’t know it?

I unbuttoned her shirt and let my hand travel under it. For the first time ever, my hand touched the breast I’d been dreaming of for days. She didn’t resist at all, but she wasn’t participating. I let her be. Moments, just moments later, she was already buttoning her shirt.

“Please don’t,” I asked. I want to see you naked, want to think of you when you’re gone, want never, ever to forget that you stood naked in this room by the failing light of the day rubbing yourself against me, with your breath that smells of bread and of old Vienna and of the bakery by your house where last night you and I, just you and I—

“I really have to go.”

I’d known this from the very start. She had looked dressed up downstairs. Not just dressed up for the long lunch she seemed happy to have cut short when she called me at the hospital, but dressed for something that was due to occur yet and about which she hadn’t said a word.

And then I saw it. She had kissed me no less savagely than she’d kissed Inky or Beryl at the party. She probably didn’t know how to kiss otherwise — which was why so many got hooked and tangled. They took for large bills what for her was loose change. She probably made love no differently. What was a mere gesture — consent, as she called it — for others was the full monty, the once-in-a-lifetime you get to tell your grandchildren about when they’re old enough to ask about the woman who called you by the name of a ship.

I wondered if there was or might soon be a third party who was going to be given minute-by-minute dispatches of this fellow called Printz, who came after another called Inky was spurned, kissed, sent packing. Pretty soon I’d be leaving messages on her answering machine, or calling her at the movies, while she’d ask whomever it was she was with to look at the caller ID and mutter a muffled curse on being told my full name. It’s Printz, she’d say.

I wanted to be cruel to her. Say something that would scar her for years, or at the very least stick on her like a stain or a bruise that was sure to ruin her whole evening.

Clara, I feel this is the last time I’m going to see you.

Clara, the moment you walk out my door it will be as though we’d never met.

Clara, I don’t want this to tailspin — I want to save it — help me save it before my ego or yours gets the better of it.

Clara, do you read me?

“Don’t go now,” I said.

“You don’t want me to go?”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Was she about to tell me? “Listen, last night was last night. As you said: Too soon, too sudden, too fast. It ends there.”

“I don’t want it to end. This is not just about last night. It’s what we both know is bigger than either of us — it’s about our life, I don’t know how else to say it. You are my life.”

“You are my life,” she repeated — clearly not the sort of thing one said in Clara’s world. It went with not singing in the shower, not rhapsodizing over sunsets, what else?

I hated her.

“Do you enjoy making me sound stupid? Maybe I am stupid.”

“Maybe I am stupid,” she mimicked. “Two home runs in a row, Printz. Now it’s my turn — and I don’t know if you’re going to like it.”

“With or without tea,” I interrupted, reaching for humor, however lamely.

“Teatime is long past. Here is what I have to say, and live with it as you please.”

“Shoot.” A touch of fading irony in my voice, but I was buckling up for the worst.

“The truth is this. And I’m not the only one who says it. The sooth-sayer woman said it too. I care for you. Call it what you will — love, if it pleases you. You, however, just want to get me out of your system, and if mistaking this for love helps you, you’ll call it love. I want you in my system, not out. I know what I want from you and I know what I have to give for it. You haven’t got the foggiest idea what you want and certainly not what you’re ready to offer. You haven’t thought that far, because your mind isn’t really interested — your ego, yes, and your body, maybe, but the rest of you, not a clue. All you’ve been giving me so far is the hurt, sorry puppy face and the same unasked question in your gaze each time there’s a pause between us. You think it’s love. It’s not. What I have is real and it’s not going away. That’s what I have to say. Now can I go?”

She had so persuaded me that I started to believe her. She loved me, I did not love her. She knew what she wanted, I had no idea. Made perfect sense.

“Just stay, will you? Don’t go yet.”

“No, I can’t. I promised I’d meet someone.”

“Someone? Is this a friend of the friend who lives all the way downtown?” I was trying to show I was mimicking her.