Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

Part of me did not want to admit any of this, or yield to the impulse, because yielding now would be like letting the enemy dictate terms I’d regret signing no sooner than the ink had dried. This was not like our second night, when shutting my eyes and thinking she was in bed with me had seemed so easy and so natural that I didn’t even bother hiding it from her the next day. Where had that openness gone, why couldn’t I speak to her like this any longer, why with so much in common did my body feel so gridlocked and bottlenecked? The more I knew her, the more fettered my impulses; the more reclusive my body, the more muddled my speech. Could it be that the older I was, the more callow I got? Now that I knew how little there was to fear from others, I was turning shy; candor was more difficult the more fluent my speech. In the alchemy of desire, the more we know, the less we fear, but the less we fear, the less we dare.

Now, in bed and with the words she’d spoken in my dream still ringing in my ears, I felt as though something had broken the sluices, mocked my inhibitions, and flooded every improvised sandbag I’d put between us. So what if I surrender to her, so what if she knows? I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.

I decided to call her. Better yet: send her a picture of Sir Lochinvar, bonnet and plume. Top of the morning, greetings and salutations, from prow to aft, starboard and portside, all aboard, beware of our corvus, this is the captain speaking. .

Call and pick up where we’d left off two nights ago.

I ache for you.

Do people still ache for people?

Not really.

Then speak differently.

I know you’ll want to hang up on me, and you have every reason to, and I know you’ll think I’m drunk or that I’ve lost my mind, but just speak to me, stay on the phone with me, say you know, say you know exactly, because you’re going through it yourself, for if you know, then I know how you’ll take the raspy, churlish snigger in your soul and unbraid it till it loosens into strands of passion, prayer, and thanksgiving.

I put a pillow between my thighs, said the word Clara, thought of her legs wrapped around my back, and then knew, when there was no turning back, that I was signing over my life to her, that I was handing her all my keys for her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder, her teeth, her eyes, her shoulder — after this I would never be able to say it was nothing, or that morning had made me do it.

Later, I went out in the rain, bought three papers, had breakfast at my crowded Greek deli, then headed for a walk to Columbia, maybe farther. I like rainy days, especially light rainy days that are just barely gray but whose overcast sky does not hang oppressively over the city. Such days make me feel cheerful, perhaps because they are darker than I and therefore make me seem happy by contrast. This was a good day for a walk. I knew there was no point in checking my e-mail or even expecting a call from her. She wouldn’t call because she knew I wouldn’t have called either, and I didn’t call because I knew she wouldn’t. But I knew she had thought of calling, because I myself had thought of it. She’d want me to make the gesture first, if only to hold it against me, which is why I wouldn’t call, which is also why she wouldn’t call either. It was this twined and tortured shadow-thinking that both paralyzed us and drew us closer. Aren’t we so very, very clever.

Clara, you are the portrait of my life — we think the same, we laugh the same, we are the same.

No, we’re nothing similar. It’s just love makes you say this.

By the time I approached Straus Park, I knew I had absolutely no interest in going any farther uptown, that this whole expedition to Columbia or past Columbia was a ruse to step back into Clara’s world.

In Straus Park the snow had already started to melt. I stood where I had stood on the day she’d come to meet me. The tenor of our relationship was so different on that day, or on the day before that: the quick dash to the restaurant in the cold, Svetonio, the visit to her home, our Lydian tea, that sacrosanct moment when in the kitchen she put two mugs on the counter and, with a resigned, uneasy air that sprang from the depths of reticence, had said, “I have no cookies. I have nothing to offer.”

I went back to 105th Street to go over last night’s footsteps. I didn’t know why I was doing it, just as I didn’t know why I trundled down the same area so many times last night. But last night everything seemed shrouded in a spectral fog behind which I took cover, the better not to see the void looming before me. Last night I knew I was a shattered being. Today, I didn’t feel shattered at all. Things must be getting better, I thought, I must be healing and already getting over the hardest part. How fickle the human heart. I was almost about to take myself to task for being so frivolous when I suddenly caught sight of her window. I was jolted by an overwhelming sense of panic. It told me that the wound I thought was already healing hadn’t even been thoroughly inflicted yet, which was why it didn’t hurt so much. The knife wasn’t all the way in yet, things hadn’t started getting worse.

Through her window I caught sight of the very large plant I’d seen in her living room a few days before. I hadn’t really noticed it at the time. Now I remembered we’d been discussing Rohmer and Beethoven, and she was sitting right under its leaves and I’d been staring at it all the time.

I decided to walk downtown. I hadn’t crossed the street when an impulse made me pass by the bakery and stop once I noticed that the windows were all fogged up inside. I could use a croissant, I thought. There was a long line, there always was by mid-morning, especially during the holidays.

This was the spot of two nights ago. To stir the memory of our kiss, I came even closer to the glass and, so as not to arouse suspicion inside the bakery, pretended to be straining my eyes to make out whether the line was long inside, almost pressing my nose flat against the glass. Clara was with me again. Our mysterious hip movements were as alive to me now as they were then. Nothing had changed. It amazed me to think that this bakery not only remembered the night better than I could but, in the tradition of all great bakeries on holidays, it remembered it for me and was offering me the choicest slice, the one with the king’s charm. One could keep this charm for life. Clara would become like one of those diseases that can definitely be overcome but that leave their mark on your skin and, sometimes, disfigure you completely, and you’ll call it a blessing all the same because it opened the way to God.

If I should ever wish to see her in the weeks to come, the easiest way would be to come here instead of walking around her building. Or I could do both, the way people go to a cemetery to visit one tombstone and, since they’re there already, might as well put flowers on someone else’s too.

I opened the door and walked into the bakery and, when my turn came, on the spur of the moment decided to buy one of their large fruit tarts. Then, on second thought, added four pastries as well.

“I could have sworn it was you,” said a man’s voice. I turned around. It was a friend I hadn’t seen in months. He was having breakfast with his girlfriend, seated at a tiny round table. “I saw you peeking in from outside, and for a moment I thought you were about to flatten your whole face at me.”

He introduced me to Lauren. We shook hands. What was I up to these days? Nothing, I replied. I was headed for a late lunch with some friends on Ninety-fifth Street — hence the cakes.

The idea of visiting my friends had occurred to me only after I’d purchased the cakes.