Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

We were almost a week past Christmas and I had yet to find toys for their children, I added. How old were my friends’ children? asked the girlfriend, clearly interested in children. Two and four, I answered. “There are children’s shops a few blocks down.” Was she a schoolteacher? She shook her head.

I looked at her. What a lovely person. There are children’s shops a few blocks down. A whole lifetime of kindness, sweetness, and goodwill in these eight words. We joked about buying gifts for children we hardly knew at all. She had no handbag; just a coat, which she was wearing buttoned down, both hands digging deep in her coat pockets — tense and uncomfortable, she’d finished her coffee long ago, it seemed. They had the look of a couple who’d had some words.

“We were headed that way, anyway,” she said. “We’ll walk down with you.” They’d help me pick out toys. Did I mind? Not at all.

How sweet of her simply to volunteer with a complete stranger. Then I realized why this wasn’t what I wanted at all and why I’d floated the plan of visiting friends on Ninety-fifth Street. I had bought the cakes in the hope of finding the courage to call Clara before announcing I was coming up with a tart and four pastries.

If I don’t ditch these two now or tell them I’ve changed my mind, I may never drop in on Clara this morning, may never see Clara again, and — who knows — life may take a completely different turn, just because of a pair of toys and a stupid fib concocted with a fruit tart in my hand! Like those tiny, arbitrary accidents that determine the birth of a great piece of music or the destiny of a character in a film — a small nothing, a meaningless fib, and your life spins out of orbit and takes a totally unexpected turn.

So here I am with a cake and four pastries going to a place I had no intention of visiting and about to buy gifts I couldn’t care less about.

In the toy shop, all three of us seemed to disband for a while. He was interested in bicycles, while she simply ambled about looking at the cribs and baby furniture, her hands still digging into her coat pockets. I found myself right next to her.

“I think you should buy a fire engine,” she said, pointing at one under a glass counter.

How come I hadn’t seen it? It was staring right at me.

“Because you don’t see, maybe?”

“ Because I don’t see, maybe. Story of my life, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” she said.

The huge fire engine was made of plastic with rounded corners and no sharp edges, which gave the truck a friendly but unintentionally cartoonish character that was not likely to please a boy of four.

“Does the ladder move?” she asked the owner.

“It also has a rotating functionality, see, madam?” he said, with a thick Indian accent, showing how the entire ladder assembly could be rotated 360 degrees.

“But the same model also comes with a nonrotating functionality. Fewer parts, breaks less easily.” He turned his attention to a woman in her fifties and her pregnant daughter. They were wearing identical wigs. They wanted to buy furniture but did not want it delivered before the birth of the baby. “We’re a bit superstitious,” said the mother, speaking for the daughter. “I understand,” he replied with the deferential empathy of someone who’d lived his entire life with superstitions far creepier than this.

Minutes later he was back. “So, which do you want, with rotating functionality or without rotating functionality?”

By now, Clara would have been tempted to mimic his Indian accent, and together we would have been on the floor and added one or two new words to our clandestine lingo. Want to see a rotating functionality? I’ll show you a rotating functionality if that’s the last thing I do.

With Lauren I wasn’t sure it was good form. I fiddled with the rotating ladder.

“Which functionality do you think they’d like?” I said, turning to her and trying as discreetly as I could to coax laughter out of her.

She smiled.

“You were the four-year-old boy once, not me.”

“I think I never grew beyond four.”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” Obviously this was her way of acknowledging without really responding to another hasty attempt at bridging the distance between us. Then, probably suspecting she might have snubbed me without meaning to, she added, “You’re not in bad company. Most men seldom grow beyond four.”

We stood before the fish tank. I noticed she was staring at a fluttering flat Aleutian fish streaked with very loud blues; it looked like an imitation iris about to blossom. She saw me staring at her, looked away, and gently began tapping her fingernails on the glass pane just in front of the fish. The fish didn’t flinch but kept staring at her. She smiled at it, gazed at it more intensely, and then back at me.

“He’s not taking his eyes off you,” I said.

“Now, there’s something unusual,” she replied almost distractedly, with a roguish melancholy smile that could have said more about the man she was living with than about all the fish in the Pacific.

I looked at her and couldn’t resist. “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

She shrugged her shoulders and, taking my tit for tat like a good sport, continued the flirtation with the fish, which suddenly got flustered.

“Oh no, he’s gone,” she said, feigning a crushed face. Then she looked at me, as if for confirmation that something unusually sad had indeed happened and that she hadn’t just imagined it. Her fingers were still touching the glass pane. She was lost in thought.

If she were Clara, my heart would have gone out to her and I would have kissed her, because there was something incredibly moving in her sorrow. “Can I call you sometime?” I asked.

“Sure,” she replied, her face still glued to the fish tank. I wasn’t sure she understood.

“I mean: can I call you?”

“Sure,” she repeated with the exact same casual air that continued to find fish far more important and that seemed to say, I heard you the first time.

Her number couldn’t have been easier to remember. The whole thing had happened in less than ten seconds.

“Anything else you care to look at?”

I shook my head and decided to buy two of the rotating models. The owner of the store asked his son to gift wrap the boxes. “Wrap them separately, Nikil, not together, not together, I said.” I was ready to burst out laughing and was trying to control the quivering on my lips. She must have thought I was smiling broadly for the joy such gifts would bring the two boys.

“Put yourself in the place of the boys when you walk in with these huge packages,” she said.

I tried to and was only able to think back to my childhood. A stranger walks into my parents’ living room with a wrapped box a few days after Christmas. I’m not sure the box is for me, so I contain my excitement, and to master it rush to my bedroom. Meanwhile, the stranger mistakes my quick exit for indifference or, worse yet, for arrogance. I wanted him to coax me out of my bedroom, while he wanted to see excitement and gratitude. When I am no longer able to contain myself and ask someone if the box is for me, they tell me “Probably,” but that the guest has already left and taken the gift with him.

“Maybe this is why we like Christmas so much. It brings out the child in us,” I finally said.

“Which is a good thing?” she asked.

“Which is a very good thing.”

I liked her very much.

“I can’t wait to call you,” I said.

She gave an absentminded shrug, as if to say, You men, all the same! There wasn’t the least touch of guile in her, unless absentmindedness itself was its most rarefied form. She might have been saying, You mean to call, but you won’t. “Call me this afternoon. I’m not doing anything.”