Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

The thought did not displease me. It freed me from thinking I had to go with Clara only. If Clara did happen to go tonight, well, she’d find me with Lauren, and if not with Lauren, then with friends, and frankly, I’d rather be with good friends than with a prickly Clara out to remind me how little she needed me, with all the friends and all the men in her life, and all her comings and goings uptown and downtown that made me feel like a puny, far-flung planet demoted from satellite to testy asteroid. God knows what she’d been telling her friends about me. Or was she like me: not saying a word about us to anyone for fear of seeing the dying wick of friendship snuffed by the merest breath of gossip? Say nothing, smile, and move on. Say nothing because you’re aching to tell the world but fear no one could possibly understand, but if they did understand, then there’d be nothing special to understand in the first place, would there? Say nothing because you don’t want to see where hope trails off and loses luster and, like a lumpy bolide tailspinning to earth, finally thumps down on the desolate, dark folds of the Siberian tundra. Say nothing, because the two of us were perfectly ready to say there was indeed nothing.

And yet Clara would be crushed on seeing me with Lauren in a place where we both knew we’d meet if all other plans failed. This was sacred.

Or would Clara burst out laughing, and so loudly that I’d better think twice before going to the movies with Lauren.

And then it hit me. Clara could easily show up at the movies with someone else. The thought sent me into an instant frenzy, and I could see myself free-falling into a pit of anger and despair. What would I say if I saw her with another man? Leaning on his shoulder once they sat down. Or standing together at the entrance, drinking coffee, trying to decide where to sit, chatting up Phildonka about Amerikon wezer . After the movies, if it’s still raining, they’ll wait outside the main entrance to the theater.

Where would I be, then?

To forestall this new wave of anxiety, I came up with a brilliant compromise: I would be willing to give up Lauren altogether on condition that Clara not show up with another man.

The idea had come to me the moment I imagined Clara putting herself in my place and guessing that I’d probably want to go to the movies with another woman tonight. She must have figured, however, that I’d renounce taking someone if she too agreed not to go with another person. I could just see her sorting this knot out, smiling abstractly at my smile once she saw how, in this as well, our thoughts ran on the same lane. This kind of thinking aroused me. Thinking she was thinking what I was thinking, and enjoying it, as I was enjoying it, reminded me of our hug by the bakery past three in the morning. I wanted to be with her now, both of us partly naked in one of the bedrooms upstairs in Rachel’s house, tripping over the fire trucks as we finally locked one of the bedroom doors, Perse me, perse me hard, harder, harder still.

Maybe I wasn’t going to call Lauren after all.

“Why not?”

Someone else intervened: “Just give me this Lauren’s number, and I’ll call her.”

“And tell her what?”

“Tell her for starters that she’s always welcome to come here. There’s always a plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork here for new friends.”

How I loved the sounds of these words: A plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork. Where would I be without them?

There was a time when I too was a stranger here. Rachel might have told Julia the same exact words about me: Tell him there’ll always be a plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork here for him.

Clara was right: others were important, and sometimes they’re all that stands between us and the ditch. Why wouldn’t such an idea have occurred to me — that others were important — why did I have to fish it out from under a sheet of ice in an ice-fishing hut? A plate, a spoon, a knife, and a fork.

Would that they had said this about Clara now.

“You’re not saying anything, and I don’t like it,” said Rachel, breaking the silence around me with another one of her prods.

“I’m eating,” I replied, trying to suggest that if I was quiet it was also my way of avoiding saying anything unkind to the Forshams.

“You’re so weird today. You’re hiding something, I know it,” she said, continuing to speak to me.

“And?”

“I think we should toss him in a blanket.”

“Someone get a blanket.”

Rachel’s four-year-old boy, whose loyalty I thought I’d purchased with a fire truck, was the first to race upstairs. He returned with his five-by-three-foot blanky.

Someone insisted they find a real blanket.

“Okay, I’ll tell everything,” I said.

Which was when I realized that the one thing I wanted most right then was to talk to everyone, the Forshams included, about Clara — tell the world about this woman who with three words six days ago had jiggled my universe and turned it to Jell-O.

Rachel’s ex replenished my wine.

I took a sip and for a moment was quiet, because I didn’t know how to begin. “There is someone,” I said. “Or, at least, there was. I don’t think there is any longer.”

“A phantom woman. I love it. And?”

“We met on Christmas Eve.”

“Yes, and?”

“And nothing. We went out a few times. Nothing happened. Now it’s over.”

Silence.

Rachel’s ex: Did you steal the jewels?

Mrs. Forsham: What a terrible question.

Me: I did not steal her jewels. But she offered to let me see them.

The ex: And?

Me: I took a rain check.

A man named David: He’s lost his mind.

The ex again: Do you even like her?

My answer caught me by complete surprise. “Immensely,” I said.

Julia: So what’s wrong with her?

Me: She’s flighty, arrogant, prickly, caustic, mean, dangerous, maybe perfect.

The ex: I see a very long winter. Go to the cave, open sesame, plunder the jewels, handle the thieves.

A moment of silence.

Rachel: You’re not going to call Lauren?

Me: I’m not going to call Lauren.

Rachel: Not nice.

•

Later that afternoon we decided to walk the dogs. I walked next to Rachel on our way to the park and told her about my evenings with Clara after the movies, the hours at the bar, the dancing by the jukebox, the walk back through Straus Park, the nights when I was sure all was lost, the heartthrob when I was proven wrong, the night when life put everything on the table, then took everything back and put the cards away.

We were walking into the park, as we always did when we went out as a group, and were headed to the tennis courts and beyond that toward the tennis house, which, by early twilight that day, seemed already sunk in darkness, its two puny lamps scarcely lighting the way across the bridge leading over to the icy reservoir. All I need is for the ice to start cracking and I’ll want to run away, be elsewhere. But we were already elsewhere, lost in a winterborne forest, away from the tall buildings off Ninety-third and Central Park West, cast in Corot’s winterscapes, where twilight had blurred the colors to pallid earth tones right in the very heart of Manhattan. Another country, another century, our two dogs scampering around on the grounds of a small provincial French town. This part of Manhattan had never seen me with Clara and should not have reminded me of her. But because it reminded me of places she and I had invoked on the terrace that night, my mind was immediately drawn to her. It would be nice to go to France from here. Walk down Ninety-fifth, buy something quick to eat along the way, and be there in plenty of time. I wanted her to be with us now. This wasn’t elsewhere at all. The set was right, but the play and the players all wrong.