by André Aciman
She was in my head again, and I loved it.
“How is it?” she finally asked. I knew exactly what she meant. But seeing I was apparently drawing a blank, she added, “I mean with Manfred.” “Ordinary. Domestic. Sundays, we fold the laundry,” I said. “And your husband?” I asked as we threaded our way through the crowd. “The type I always end up with: bigheaded, blustery, and when we’re alone together insufferably mopey. All men are mopey, I’ve decided, or didn’t you know?”
“I was always mopey. Since senior year,” I said, trying to blunt her barb.
“Since forever,” she corrected.
“Actually, he’s too macho to be mopey in public.” She looked in the direction of her husband. “It hasn’t been easy,” she finally said. I could sense something unsettling coming.
“You didn’t ask,” she said, as though uncertain how to proceed.
“But—?” I threw in, urging her on with the obviously missing word.
“But I’ll tell you all the same, because you’re the only one on this fucking planet who’ll understand. I may love him. But I’ve never been in love with him, not once, not ever.”
“So you have the perfect marriage,” I said. It was meant to keep things light and flippant. Perhaps because I didn’t wish to hear more, or didn’t want her prodding into my own life to pull the rug from under it as well. But she ignored my comment.
“Don’t be cruel,” she snapped. “I’m telling you this because you and I are the exact opposite. We’ll stay in love until everything about us rots, down to our teeth, our fingernails, our hair. Which means nothing, of course, since we couldn’t survive a weekend together.”
“And you’re telling me this because…?”
She stared at me starkly as if she couldn’t believe I hadn’t guessed already.
“Because I’m always thinking of you. Because I think of you every day, all the time. As I know you think of me every day, all the time. Don’t bother denying it. I just know. Which is why I’m so happy to find you here tonight. Maybe because I needed to see you again and just spill it all out for once. And the irony is”—she caught her breath—“there’s nothing either I or you can do about it. So there. And please don’t pretend you’re any different—with or without your Manfred.”
I didn’t know that this was how she felt about me or about her husband or, for that matter, about poor Manfred whom she’d just cut down with a blunt your. But at the book party, with all the noise and the speechifying and the brouhaha over the rave review in the coming Sunday paper, all I wanted was to leave the apartment, race downstairs, and stand outside on the curb with the cold wind fanning my face and drown everything she’d just told me.
She was right. We’d always been in love, she and I. But what had we done with our love? Nothing. Perhaps because the model for such love didn’t exist, and neither of us had either the faith, the courage, or the will to come up with one. We loved without conviction, without purpose, without tomorrow. On spec, as she’d said once.
Faking love was easy enough; thinking I wasn’t faking, easier yet. But neither she nor I was fooled. So we bickered with our love the way we bickered with each other—but at what cost? I couldn’t undo or tear it out, but by dint of swatting it down like an insect that wouldn’t die, I could harm it, damage it, till whatever there was between us had all but addled. Nothing killed it. But was it ever alive? And when you looked up close, was ours even love? And if not love, then what? Broken, battered, blighted, wasted love shuddering in a cold alley like an injured pet that had lost its owner and scarcely survived a run-in with a bad dog, was this really love?—without heart, without kindness, without charity, without love, even. Our love was like stagnant water behind locked sluices. Nothing lived in it.
In the crowded room with the view of the Hudson, the realization that ours was a stillborn love began to cramp something in me. It wasn’t going to kill me, but I wanted to find a corner somewhere in this large apartment where I could be alone and hate myself. I tried to open one of the windows, but it was painted shut. Typical, I thought, casting a blistering verdict on people who never let a gust of fresh air into their homes.
“This is Eric, my husband,” she said.
We shook hands.
“Great speech,” I said.
“Did you really think so?”
“Terrific!”
More party talk.
When the party was over and everyone else had left, the four of us thanked the host and, on impulse, decided to have dinner together. We had no reservations, and after a few hurried phone calls in the cold, Manfred eventually found a table at a small place in TriBeCa. We hailed a cab, the husband gallantly offering to sit in front next to the driver while the three of us snuggled tightly in the back, with me cramped in the middle. As we raced down the West Side Highway, I remember thinking, I could hold both their hands, I could hold his hand and I could hold her hand, and neither might care what I did with the other’s so long as I didn’t let go. She must have felt something very similar, for she rested a docile, inattentive open palm on her knee in a manner so trusting and acquiescent that it was almost asking me to do something with it, which is why I couldn’t help but reach out to her gloved hand and press it in mine before releasing it. The letting go of it so soon was meant to suggest friendship, only friendship, but it wasn’t friendship only, and seeing that the hand was lying still on her thigh where I’d just left it, I reached out for it again and slipped my fingers between hers. She seemed grateful and returned the pressure. Manfred’s face wasn’t moving at all, which told me he had seen and was trying to show that he hadn’t. I reached for his hand, he let me hold it. He was humoring me. He’d heard about her many times and was probably struggling not to let it faze him.
As soon as we were seated in the restaurant, we ordered a bottle of red wine. It arrived with chunks of Parmesan cheese—old-world style. I could live off just these two, she said, meaning wine and cheese. And bread, I said. And bread of course. We complained about the weather. Plans for the summer? Manfred asked. They liked to travel. As far as possible, explained the husband. We preferred the Cape. They had a two-year-old daughter. We had cats. We had talked of adoption, and an old girlfriend had even offered. But in the end cats were easier. We liked action movies and TV series from Scandinavia. They liked to play Scrabble.
“You really want to know?” she said when I finally asked how life was with a child. Her worst time of the day was winter afternoons at the office on the forty-seventh floor, when the world started closing in on you with one crisis after another, plus, of course, panicked phone calls from her babysitter and, let’s not forget, her aging parents in Florida. You stop belonging to yourself, she said. “I belong to my child, my husband, my home, my work, my babysitter, my cleaning lady. The time that remains, like after-tax dollars, doesn’t last longer than a two-minute sonata by Scarlatti.”
“And you don’t even like Scarlatti,” I said.
“How did you know?” she asked.
I remembered.
“At night, I don’t fall asleep. I crash,” she added, capping her complaints with a smile. “It would never have occurred to me when we were back in college spending all those nights translating Animal Farm into ancient Greek for Ole Brit that I’d hear myself whining like this.” She was toying with a long bread stick but wasn’t eating it.
“How do you two know each other?” her husband interrupted. It was his way of breaking the silence but also of deflecting the sudden melancholic drift in his wife’s speech. His question told me that she had either never mentioned me or that he had never paid attention. “We meet every four years,” I said. “Bissextilely,” she added. But then, not knowing whether Manfred might take the word the wrong way, I could see her trying to backpedal. “Every four years,” she repeated. I liked how she’d done this. “We exchange notes, catch up, argue,” she continued, injecting a touch of levity in the word “argue” to blot out its more somber implication. Then we disap
pear, I added. But never a hard feeling, she said. No, never a hard feeling. “These two!” exclaimed Manfred. “They’ve known each other for ages,” he added to sum up and move things along. Her husband couldn’t resist quoting Hartley: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” It was his little dig and postscript to our brief exchange. Either he had guessed everything or figured there was nothing worth guessing.
But his words summarized everything about us. “Yes, the past is a foreign country,” I said, “but some of us are full-fledged citizens, others occasional tourists, and some floating itinerants, itching to get out yet always aching to return.
“There’s a life that takes place in ordinary time,” I said, “and another that bursts in but just as suddenly fizzles out. And then there’s the life we may never reach but that could so easily be ours if only we knew how to find it. It doesn’t necessarily happen on our planet, but is just as real as the one we live by—call it our ‘star life.’ Nietzsche wrote that estranged friends may become declared enemies but in some mysterious way continue to remain friends, though on a totally different sphere. He called these ‘star friendships.’”
I regretted this as soon as I’d spoken.
Chloe immediately seized on my unintended reference to our own friendship, and so tried to divert the subject by saying that Nietzsche had written this in The Gay Science. But fearing that Manfred might once again take this the wrong way, she quickly reminded everyone that she had not only bought me the book but forced me to read it. When? I asked, pretending to have forgotten. Senior year, for Christ’s sake.
We each gave the short version of our college days. Husband and Manfred had great memories. I offered a lapidary sketch. Then, because she had brought up Ole Brit, we ended up talking about the course. “Our senior seminars on Tuesday evenings in the winter with the twelve of us—his disciples, as he’d call us—were unforgettable,” she said. “We sat cross-legged around his coffee table on his Persian rug, sipping his wife’s mulled cider, some of us smoking, I forever chewing on a cinnamon stick, and good Ole Brit—whose real name was Rault Wilkinson—declaiming, or rather, conducting his words with the point of his curved pipe in his left hand.” “Magical hours,” I said. “Totally,” she agreed.
“I learned to love commas from the rise and fall of his voice,” I said. “Unforgettable voice when he read aloud to us. Four years of college and the very best I took with me was a love for commas.”
I knew she’d agree about the commas. I had heard her say this years ago and was repeating it to her now, hoping it might draw us closer in case she forgot it was really her observation. I wanted her to miss those days with me, wanted her to think, He always thinks as I do, he’s never stopped loving me.
Then I told them about one night years ago when we’d been discussing Ethan Frome, and after passing around the two pumpkin pies his wife had cut up in large wedges with a generous helping of crème anglaise on each, Ole Brit finally spoke about the author herself and said the book was started not in English but in French. Did any of us know why? he had asked. No one knew why. Because she wanted to master French, he explained. She was living in Paris at the time and had hired a young tutor. We still have his markings on the pages. So here she was, he said, writing a courtly, seventeenth-century French tale peopled with rugged, tobacco-chewing lumberjack types who are forever browbeaten by their wives and sledding away to their local saloon to drown their torment in rye and beef jerky.
“I forget the plot,” I said, but I remembered the snow and I remembered the tremulous love of Ethan and Mattie as they sat at the kitchen table nervously struggling to avoid touching hands. I particularly remembered the golden bowl.
“You mean the pickle dish,” her husband corrected.
I thanked him. “Edith Wharton,” I continued, “had lived in New England a great portion of her life and yet suddenly, because of an affair with someone who was not her husband, at the age of forty-six she penned these nine words in her diary: l have drunk the wine of life at last. Ole Brit loved that sentence. ‘Think of the courage it takes to say such a thing to yourself at an age when most people have long drunk and sobered up from the wine of life. And think of the despair in her last two words—at last—as though she had all but given up and was ever grateful to this man who appeared in her life in the nick of time.’
“After mulling over his own words, Ole Brit asked how many of us had actually drunk from the wine of life.
“Most in that room raised their hands, thoroughly persuaded they’d experienced life-changing bliss. Only two failed to raise their hands.”
“Me and you,” she said, after a moment of silence, as though that said it all, had always said it all. Silence hovered over our table.
“Actually, a third hand didn’t go up that evening,” I finally said.
“I don’t remember a third hand.”
“Ole Brit himself. Happily married, father, venerated dean, scholar, writer, wealthy world traveler—and there he was, not raising his hand either, yet not unwilling to let us see that he hadn’t, all the while pretending to be busy replenishing his pipe so as not to seem too obvious in abstaining from the count of hands. It struck me. It made me think that he was living the wrong life, not his own. I saw a man crushed by one big, undying string of regrets. All the honors in the world, but not the wine. I felt sorry for him. He was, we sort of gathered from a remark he’d once borrowed from Lawrence Durrell, ‘wounded in his sex.’ We all fell in love with the expression, because it meant everything and nothing. I can’t on Thursday, because I’m wounded in my sex. Margaret finally realized she’d been wounded in her sex. The report from the committee members wounded him in his sex. I couldn’t hand in my paper on time ’cause I was wounded in my sex.
“One night the lights in his house went out. They frequently did on stormy nights, and they would go out everywhere in our college town. It was very spooky but also amazingly snug. We drew closer and bonded better in the dark. Even with the lights out, we continued to talk, some as always seated on the rug, others on two sofas, he with his pipe in his armchair. We loved his voice in the dark. Soon after the lamp failed, his wife walked in with an old kerosene light. ‘I looked but we had no candles,’ she apologized. He thanked her, as he always did, very sweetly. In the end, one of the girls in our group couldn’t help it. ‘You have the perfect life,’ she said, ‘perfect house, perfect wife, perfect family, perfect job, perfect children.’ I don’t know how, but without hesitating he trounced the remark: ‘Learn to see what’s not always there to be seen and maybe then you’ll become someone.’ That sentence stayed with me forever.
“Three years later, I came back and lived in their house for around ten days. I wasn’t a student, but it was easy to slip back into the old mold, sit in on his evening seminar with a new cohort of disciples, leaf through the same books again, then, when everyone had left, help him clear the dishes and stack them in the dishwasher. It wasn’t long afterward, while I was helping him dry the glasses, that he confided his name was not Rault Wilkinson at all, but Raúl Rubinstayn. Despite his Oxonian credentials, he wasn’t even a Brit. Born in Czernowitz and raised in, of all places, Peru.”
“Is he still alive?” the husband asked, interrupting my short idyll.
“He is,” I replied. “What was strange that night is that after discussing Ethan Frome as he’d done three years earlier with us, he raised the same question about the wine of life. This time only two hands did not go up. And then I knew, I just knew. And when he shot me a quick glance, he knew that I knew.
“We joked about the wine of life as we were drinking wine after his seminar. ‘It doesn’t exist,’ he finally said. ‘I’m not sure it doesn’t,’ I replied, trying not to disagree with him. ‘You’re still young. And because you’re young, you may be the one who’s right.’ It occurred to me then that he, past his fifties, was perhaps younger than I was.”
No one said anything, perhaps I had bored them going on abo
ut my college days. In the silence of the moment, I thought back to that winter when I stepped out of Ole Brit’s house by myself one night and remembered how Chloe and I used to cross the quadrangle together and count its nine lampposts, naming each after one of the nine Muses as a joke, using the mnemonic TUM PECCET. Thalia, Urania, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Erato, Clio, Calliope, Euterpe, Terpsichore. His courses had defined our lives that year, as though his dimly lit living room in that large house on the sloping road off the quadrangle could shut out the real world and open up quite another. Suddenly, everything seemed lodged in the past, and I missed those days.
I remembered another evening, when I caught him standing outside on the porch staring out at the deserted quadrangle. It had just snowed and the place couldn’t have looked more peaceful or more timeless. I told him not to worry and promised I’d shovel the snow in the morning. “It’s not that,” he said. I knew it wasn’t. He put his arm on my shoulder, which he never did, because he wasn’t the touchy-feely sort. “I’m looking at all this and I’m thinking that one day I won’t be here to see it and I know I’ll miss it, even if I won’t have a heartbeat to miss anything. I miss it now for the-days-when, the way I miss places I’ve never traveled to or things I’ve never done.” “What things that you’ve never done?” “You’re young and you’re very handsome—how could you possibly understand?” He removed his arm. He lived in a future that wouldn’t be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn’t been his either. There was no turning back and no going forward. I felt for him.
The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren’t unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we’ve left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we’re given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we’ve long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We’re torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.
