by André Aciman
I walked her to her dorm room, she opened the door, said her roommates were sleeping, and before I knew it we were once again kissing violently in the hallway. She had slept with everyone I knew yet had spent more time with me than with all of them put together. She did not let go of my hand and led me into her suite. I kissed her on the sofa and I was already putting my hand under her sweater and could smell the skin of her collarbone when, without warning, something changed. Maybe it was a light in the bathroom, or muffled laughter in her suite, or maybe I’d done something wrong, or had failed who knows what test, but I could tell she was tensing up. Then she said it: “Perhaps it might be better if you thought of leaving before they wake up”—as if what we were about to do might trouble either us or the others, asleep or not. But I said nothing. I walked out of her building and crossed the empty quadrangle all the way back to the library under the glittering Christmas lights on campus, trying but failing to understand what could possibly have made her change her mind so abruptly.
The next day we went our separate ways for Christmas break. A month later, when we came back, we were strangers. We avoided each other everywhere. It lasted another month. “You were so mopey in those days,” she said.
Her taunt didn’t bother me now. I liked being taunted. After years in the real world, I had shed some of my indecision, my fears, hurdles had come down, the risks not a worry—if I get burned, I get burned.
I didn’t tell her that it had taken more than half a year to get over our two-night stint of four years earlier.
We exchanged e-mail addresses, both of us thoroughly aware that neither really meant to drop a line. But we weren’t leaving the party yet. I ended up taking her home. Same six or seven blocks from the party, same cold entrance to her walk-up on a snowbanked Rivington, same hesitation at her stoop in the wee hours of the morning. What surprised me more than going through the motions of the last time was the unruffled ease with which one thing had led to another, as if my hesitation and hers were staged for the benefit of an observer who’d been dogging our footsteps to remind us that according to the old saying no sane person should presume to step into the same river twice.
Her place was the same. Same overheated studio, same scent of a hidden litter box, same clang of the front door that finally slams shut, same old wobbly black fan perched by her windowsill like a stuffed raven I’d once named Nevermore. When she saw me dawdling by her kitchen with my scarf and beanie still on, she said, “Stay tonight.”
She made love the exact same way, told me how she kept hoping I’d stay late at the party but didn’t want to show it in case I wasn’t going to meet her halfway—which is what she’d more or less said on our first night together—and though I knew this would be over and done with by Saturday afternoon, I let myself go as I’d done the last time. “Look at me. Look at me, and talk to me, just talk, I beg you,” she said, and everything I was and everything I had in me to give was already hers to take and stow away if she wished or to toss down the chute if she preferred. “I love how we make love together—you of every man I’ve known. I love what you love,” she then said. And she loved the smell of me, and she wanted me like this every day and every night and every morning of her life, she said. I loved that she spoke to me this way when we made love; it made me speak like this as well. I stood, picked her up, sat her on the kitchen table—we were going to baptize the table, I said. You of every man I’ve known, she repeated.
After sex, I said, “This was fate.”
“This was nice,” she replied, putting things in perspective, meaning, Let’s not overdo it.
Then realizing she might have snubbed me without meaning to, she added, “You haven’t changed.”
“You haven’t either.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“I’ve been through a lot since the last time,” she said as we snuggled naked on the same old love seat afterward. I liked how she called it the last time. “It doesn’t show,” I said. “Trust me, I have.” Did this mean she was less likely to bolt, was more vulnerable, tamer, eager to stay close—had she been badly hurt?
Too many questions. She had a boyfriend, she said.
“Serious?”
“Enough.”
I didn’t bother to ask where that left us. There was no us. When I made a show of getting dressed the next morning, she said I didn’t have to leave yet. The “yet,” a Freudian slip almost, told me it was only a matter of time before she’d remind me it was indeed time.
Naked over breakfast, we talked. Yes, she still did yoga every morning. Yes, I still played tennis before work. No, I hadn’t found anyone. Well, I haven’t either, she said, now downplaying the boyfriend. Staring around the room, I told her I recognized her kitchen table. “You remembered,” she said, surprised that this thing called time had happened to us after all. She came over to my corner of the table where I was eating an English muffin and, seeing me getting hard, lowered herself on my lap, facing me, her bare thighs now straddling mine. I loved how she did this. “I’ve always thought of us just like this, you, me, and an English muffin,” she said. “Why?” I asked, not thinking that this was my turn to echo what she’d just said. “You make me like who I am and what I want.” “Haven’t others?” “Not like you.” “Doesn’t he?” “Him?” So she liked us? I finally asked. “Always have—skimpy, transient, scuttled us,” she added. And there they were, her dark, bruise-colored lips, and there were her eyes that bore into me and made me want to rip myself open with a kitchen knife and put my heart on her parents’ kitchen table for her to see how that little organ wobbled and jiggled when she spoke such intimate words to me. We were still naked, and speaking so honestly to each other aroused me, but neither of us was fooled by the passionate kissing or by what the rest of our bodies were doing. This was candid goodbye talk, and even as she grabbed my cock and lifted herself ever so slightly and slipped it inside her, I knew the meter was running. “Don’t shut your eyes, please, don’t shut your eyes. And hurt me if you want, I don’t care, I don’t care,” she implored.
Later, after I got dressed, “Not going to be mopey, are you?” she asked as we began hugging at her door.
Wasn’t going to be mopey, I replied.
I recognized the stairway. I remember thinking how everything between us was back to the same again, because spending the night together had neither changed nor settled a thing, and that, despite the years and lovers I’d known since college, I was no less vulnerable or any more toughened than I had been on that faraway winter night in February during senior year when we made up and ended up collapsing and sleeping on the same couch while staying up two straight nights translating Orwell into Greek on our joint senior thesis. Time, as far as we were concerned, had altered nothing.
When I reached her main door and stepped onto the sidewalk, the only thing that had changed was not heading straight to the bodega across the street to buy cigarettes. I had quit smoking again. She’d once complained that everything about me reeked of cigarettes. I wanted her to know that I had turned a new leaf and moved on. But I had forgotten to tell her; now there was no point.
We didn’t see each other after that weekend. But our e-mails were incessant. I was trying to show I’d long learned to keep my distance—if that’s what she wanted—that I would never intrude and would remain the sidelined friend who didn’t need to pretend he was just a friend. It could morph into something more if she wanted, or it could as easily be taken down like unsold clothing from a store window heaped in a pile eventually shipped to discount outlets and hurricane survivors. Friendship on consignment, I called it. On spec, she retorted.
But on e-mail we were lovers, as though a fever coursed through our veins. As soon as I saw her name on my screen, I’d be unable to think of anything or anyone else. There was no use pretending I could wait. I would drop whatever I was doing, shut my door if I was at the office, muffle the rest of life around me, and think of her, just her, almost speakin
g her name, which sometimes I caught myself doing when one or two words would gush out of my mouth before I could stop them, words I would repeat verbatim to her on e-mail, hoping they’d fly to her screen and stir her like powerful newfangled meds that have an instant effect on one tiny chamber of the heart without affecting the other three. Ours were gasps, not e-mails. Words that thrilled me even more when I transcribed them from my body to my keyboard and that tore out of me like darts dipped in blood, semen, and wine. I wanted my words to erupt on her, the way hers did on me, like buried bombs detonated remotely when we were least guarded.
At home in the evening, I would reread her e-mails of the day, poring over her words until I was aroused, because part of what stirred me more than her words themselves was knowing that I’d have to disclose my arousal as it was happening in my gut and my groin. My mind would look for that string of words like a dog that sniffs for a bone and, when it finds it, or thinks it has found it, quivers with bliss, even when the bone has been inadvertently tossed. Simply thinking of her late on that Friday night after the party when she said she’d never forgotten what we liked in bed—you of every man I’ve known—would make me want to scream that nothing in my life meant more to me that minute than hearing her say Look at me when you come. I told her that this is what making love to her had meant to me: not that she knew me from inside my head and that being known this way was precisely what I found so arousing every time I thought of our bodies together, but that when we stared at each other in the way she wanted and had taught me to want, she and I were one life, one voice, one big, timeless something broken up into two meaningless parts called people. Two trees grafted into each other by nature, by longing, by time itself.
E-mail does this to people. We fess up more and censor less, because what we say is blurted out and doesn’t really count, like steamy words uttered during sex, spoken with an open heart and a forked tongue. “You are my life,” I finally wrote to her once.
“I know,” she replied.
“Do you really?”
“I do. Why else do you think we keep writing all day?”
So I told her how the very thought of being Englishmuffined when she lowered herself on me at her parents’ table made me so hard when I was alone at night.
An unknown serum coursed between us on the web. There was an us on e-mail.
But e-mail was also our nightmare. “I cannot keep writing,” she said. “It ruins everything else I have.”
And why should this hold me back? I thought. I wanted everything else in her life ruined. I wanted it soiled, damaged, dismembered. She resented when I crossed the line and spilled into her private life. I resented that she held off spilling into mine. Within minutes of intense arousal, a misplaced word or an inflection not quite aligned to the other would suddenly flare between us, undoing the spell. There’d be something like a tacit sneer in her words or derision in mine, neither of us able to contain our bile or quell the other’s. It would take days to recover the tremulous stirrings of desire. “See, I’m being nice,” she’d write, fully conscious of the fleeting irony in her words. I didn’t like her tart or caustic tone. It killed the passion of the one night I did not want to forget.
Weeks later we made up. But there were bruises everywhere. We tried to feed the fire with humor, tried oblique passes and implied apologies, but we could tell the embers were dying. We’d been riding on auxiliary all this time, always catching up to something that had probably never even been there or was simply locked down in all but some mythical vault of our invention. This should have stopped weeks earlier, she wrote. This should never have started, I replied. It never did, she shot back. It never stood a chance, did it? Nope! Thought so.
In her mouth truth had no use for velvet sheathes. It spoke serrated daggers. I learned to speak serrated too.
After three such flare-ups, we stopped writing. Neither wished to resume the correspondence, and if we did, neither knew how to work around the unavoidable scuffles lying ahead. Apology felt paltry, candor perfunctory. We let go.
“I just knew I’d find you here,” she said when we met four years later at a book party on Park Avenue. She seemed ecstatic to run into me, and seeing she wasn’t hiding it, I showed it too. She was with her author. Where is he? I asked. She pointed to a man in his early forties who looked more like a film star. He was talking to three women. “Looks very dashing and unmopey to me,” I said, throwing in the old word to show I hadn’t forgotten. “Yes, and vain, you won’t believe,” she retorted, sarcasm dripping from all her features. We were back to normal, as though we’d had breakfast that very morning and dinner the night before. This was a six-to-eight party. Was I staying till the very end? she asked. Only if she was. We chuckled. “Are you and he…?” I didn’t finish the question.
“You’re out of your mind,” she replied. All that remained was for her to lose her author by eight and she was good to go.
“Good writer?” I asked.
“Between us?”
That said it all. She was in top form, sparkling and more frisky than ever, and I loved it. I asked if that small place across from her house was still there.
“The Italian kitchen with the nice waiter?”
“Yes.”
“Bologna.”
Why did I pretend to forget the name?
“Yes, as far as I know.” But she didn’t live downtown any longer. Where was she living now? Off Lexington Avenue, she said, basically a few blocks away from the book party. Is there a good place around here for dinner? Was this my way of asking her out to dinner? Yes, it was, I replied. There were plenty. “But I can whip something up real fast.” She’d received a case of great Bordeaux from her author. “So stick around.” I stuck around.
The years hadn’t changed us. We walked to her home. She managed to cook something fast, using, she said, an already opened bottle of the same red for the veal, which was a crime, she said. Then we sat on the very same couch. Sill the same cat. Still the same wineglasses, still the same table she’d inherited from her parents. In Peter Cooper Village, right? I asked. In Peter Cooper Village, she repeated, to show she remembered that I remembered and was no longer impressed. Had anyone died? What a question! No, no one had died. What about the big black fan that looked like an indignant raven caught, scraped, and stuffed without ever having quite died? He had to go. And the latest boyfriend—boyfriendz? I corrected. None worth mentioning. What else was new? I asked. She smiled, I smiled. “Between us, you mean?” How I loved the way she zeroed in on the unspoken drift in what I didn’t always dare to say. “I’m still the same—and you?” she asked, as if referring to an old acquaintance she wasn’t sure I remembered. “Haven’t changed one bit,” I replied, “never have, never will.” “Thought so,” she said. “And I didn’t mean my looks.” “I know what you meant.” Our awkward, tentative smiles spoke the rest. She was standing holding a wineglass by the kitchen door. Eventually I caved in, I wanted to cave in right away. It gave me an erotic, almost indecent, premature thrill to kiss her now without waiting for the perfect moment. She kissed me as passionately. Perhaps because it was easier to kiss than to speak. I wanted to say I’d been waiting years for this, that I couldn’t hold out another four if this was to be our last time. We were too happy to speak.
Two days. Then we argued. I wanted to go to the movies on Saturday night; she preferred Sunday afternoon. Theaters were too crowded on Saturdays, she said. But that’s why I liked theaters on Saturday nights. I liked a crowd. Sunday afternoons were depressing. Besides, I hated stepping out of the theater into an overcast twilit Sunday lurching to its unavoidable death. Neither of us budged. It would have been so easy to give in, but we didn’t, and the more we dug in our heels, the more difficult was yielding. To prove my point that night, I went to the movies alone, then headed back to my place and didn’t call her. The next day, she went to see the same film and didn’t call me. Our hasty explanations by e-mail Monday morning lasted no more than two minutes. Then e-mail blac
kout.
When we spoke again, neither remembered which movie we’d argued about on that faraway weekend of four years earlier. We laughed. Obviously we had issues, I said, trying to gloss over the episode and make light of how absurdly we’d behaved—I behaved, I corrected. She could think of better words than “issues.” Stupidity? Definitely. Yours or mine? I asked, once again trying to spin mischief into our conversation all the while allowing her to fire the first shot. “Yours, of course.” Then, having scored, “But maybe mine as well,” she said. Or just our usual tiff in a teapot.
The room in the Upper West Side apartment thronged with people and was extremely loud. She wanted to introduce me to her husband, who was in another, equally crowded room. You? she asked, clearly meaning had I come with someone? I was with Manfred. He’s here too? She smiled, I smiled back. Then we looked at each other and, because of the polite silence hovering between us, we burst out laughing. It wasn’t life with Manfred that made us laugh, though maybe laughter was as good a way as any of putting the subject on the table. We laughed because it was instantly obvious that each of us had been keeping distant tabs on the other’s life. I knew about her husband, she knew about Manfred. Maybe we laughed simply because of the ease with which we could now be on such good terms tonight after the way we’d parted the last time. “I knew I’d find you here,” she said.
“How?”
“I had them invite you.”
We laughed.
“But then you probably figured I was behind the invitation, which is why you came.”
