by André Aciman
Fancy Mozart’s librettist buried in Queens, she said.
And in a Christian cemetery too, I replied. He was born Jewish but later converted. Maria García’s family was not really of Gypsy origin either but more than likely of Converso descent, I said.
She knew a woman who claimed to be of Converso descent.
Out came the story of an old, rather pious Catholic woman she knew who, on the Jewish High Holidays each year, made sure all the Christian images and icons in her house were turned to face the wall. “When do you think we should go?”
“Go where?” I asked.
“To the cemetery!” meaning, Where else?
Could things be so easy, I thought, or was I missing something?
I’d let her know, I said. I’d meant to say, Not all of us are freelancers, but suppressed it. Maybe early next week—but I avoided saying this too. I would have had to check my cell phone’s calendar and I didn’t want the formality of the gesture to cool what had all the makings of a spontaneous outing to Maspeth.
But the silence and the time it took to say I’ll let you know had already cast a chill. The unasked, the unspoken, sat between us. Her bewildered look was the question, my silence the answer.
When she continued to stare at me with that bold, inquisitive gaze that lingered on me as though she had more warmth in her heart than she wished to show, I knew that what had rippled between was a disquieting instant of awkwardness and of opportunity lost. Perhaps we should have talked about it right then and there. Perhaps it needed bringing up. But neither of us said anything.
When we separated, I gave her a kiss and then hugged her. She walked away, but then turned around. “I want a real hug,” she said.
* * *
WE HAD MET three times already and never once spoken or inquired about the other’s life. Ours were the cobbled lanes; major arteries we steered clear of. On Abingdon Square the snow kept piling up and made me wish we could spend endless hours together in our coffee shop, do nothing but sit there and hope that neither made the slightest effort to lift the spell. Provided we stayed put, and provided it snowed, we could manage to meet just like this next week, and the week after, and the week after that as well—she and I together at this same corner table by the window, with our coats bunched up on a third chair.
Tread softly. Do nothing. Spoil nothing.
Two days later I decided to push things a bit. Did she want to have drinks?
My dearest, I’d love to. Just let me get a couple of things out of the way. I’ll let you know.
Early the next morning: I’m free tonight.
Yes, but tonight I may not be, I e-mailed back. I can do drinks but then I have a dinner to go to. How about six?
Let’s make it five thirty. Gives us more time together.
Fine, I wrote back, there’s a bar off Abingdon, not far from our café.
So it’s ours now?
On Bethune. All right? I said, overlooking her humor but hoping my hasty reply told her that the tiny lilt in “ours” wasn’t lost on me and that it pleased me.
On Bethune it is, my dear.
Seldom had anyone been so willful and acquiescent at the same time. Was this a sign? Or was she just the accommodating sort?
When we met again a week later, we ordered two Hendrick’s gins. “The rest of this week is not going to be good for me,” she said. “Actually, it’s going to be pretty awful.”
Well, I thought, finally something’s coming out.
The week wasn’t so hot for me either. I alleged a dinner in Brooklyn and cocktail parties that were excruciatingly boring, give or take a few people.
“Give or take?”
I shrugged my shoulders. Was she teasing me? Why was her week going to be so dreadful?
“I’m going to have to break up with my boyfriend.”
I looked at her, trying not to show how startled I was. Most people throw in boyfriend to tell you they’re taken.
I hadn’t known she had a boyfriend. Was he that terrible?
“No, not terrible. We’ve just outgrown each other, that’s all,” she said. “I met him at a writers’ colony last summer, we did what everyone does in those places. But once we were back in the city, it just dragged—we fell into a rut.”
“Is it that hopeless?” I asked.
Why was I playing friend-analyst? And why the disappointed inflection in the word “hopeless,” as though the news pained me?
“Let’s say it’s just me. Plus—”
She hesitated.
Plus?
“Plus I’ve met someone else.”
I thought for a moment.
“Well, in that case, maybe you should break up and clear the air. Does he know?”
“Actually, neither of them knows.”
She leveled her eyes at me with a confiding, semi-rueful shrug of the shoulder that meant something like Life. You know how it is.
Why wasn’t I asking more prodding questions? Why was I refusing to pick up the hint? What hint? Why let her drop this bombshell and pretend I wasn’t even fazed? All I ended up saying was “I am sure things will work themselves out.”
“I know. They always do,” she replied, at once grateful that I’d left things vague enough yet sorry, perhaps, that I’d dropped the matter a bit sooner than she might have wished.
At seven she reminded me I had to be at a dinner party to dine with my give-or-take friends in Brooklyn. She remembered the wording. I liked it.
I wished I could bring her along to such dinner parties. She’d have them eating out of her hand, women included. As we stood outside the bar, I stared at her hoping she’d see how sorry I was that we were separating so early in the evening. She reached over to kiss me as she always did, on both cheeks. Without thinking, I found myself kissing her forehead, then hugging her. I felt the spur of arousal. This was not just in my head. And she had hugged me back, tightly too.
As I walked her to what had become the undeclared spot where we’d say goodbye, something told me she should have asked about the dinner party. I had railed too much against dinner parties for her not to have made a passing comment. But she had shown no interest even in asking where it was being held—for the same reason, perhaps, that I hadn’t asked a single question about the new boyfriend. Perhaps, like me, she didn’t want to appear interested. On Abingdon Square, we took everything that had anything to do with the rest of our lives and turned its face to the wall. My life, her life, like everything that didn’t bear on why we kept meeting here, we simply staved off, never brought up, put a padlock on. On Abingdon Square we led a spare, hypothetical life, a life apart, between Hudson and Bleecker, between five thirty and seven.
After saying goodbye, I watched her walk downtown and, for a few moments, lingered on the square, thinking that I could easily stop taking the train, move in somewhere not far from here, start a new life right next to the bar, take her to the movies on weekday evenings, find other things to do, and, if this worked, watch her become famous, more beautiful, have children, until the day she’d step into my study and say we’d outgrown each other and fallen into a rut. Life. Can’t be helped. You know how it is, she’d say, and, FYI, I’m moving to Paris. Even this didn’t scare me. The vision of this alternate life was outlined on the large glass pane of the bar where she and I could easily spend so many more hours together. When she looked back at me after crossing the street, I liked being caught just standing there, watching her go her way. I liked that she had turned around and then, without being prompted, waved. I liked the sudden arousal when I hugged her, and for the first time since we’d met, I thought of her naked. It had come unbidden.
That Saturday evening, in a crowded movie theater, I watched a young couple ask those seated in our row to move one seat over. You could tell they were on their first date by the tentative way they took their seats and then hesitated on how to go about sharing their bag of popcorn. I envied them, envied their awkwardness, envied their back-and-forth questions and answers.
I wished she and I were together in this very same movie theater. With a bag of popcorn. Or waiting on line outside with our coats on, eager for our show to begin. I wanted to see Last Year at Marienbad with her, take her to hear The Art of the Fugue, listen to the Shostakovich Piano and Trumpet Concerto together and wonder who of us was the piano and who the trumpet, she or I, trumpet and piano as we’d sit and read the lays of Marie de France on quiet Sundays and hear her say things I’d never known about Maria Malibran, and then, on impulse, throw on a few layers and head out together to see something really stupid, because a stupid movie with super moronic special effects can work wonders on drab Sunday evenings. The vision grew and began to touch the other corners of my life: new friends, new places, new rituals, a new life whose contours I could almost begin to touch.
There was a moment while I helped her with her coat when I could have said something. The unspoken, the untold, the unasked, just a few words, and everything would have gone up in smoke. But I knew, as I watched her make her way through the crowd, that she was as grateful for my silence as I was for hers. I asked her once which she’d like to be in the Shostakovich concerto, the piano or the trumpet. The piano is blithe and spirited, she told me; the trumpet wails. Which did I think I was?
* * *
FROM GERMANY CAME a short e-mail from Manfred: You’re back to stalking. What you need is less skepticism and more courage. Courage, he said, comes from what we want, which is why we take; skepticism from the price we’ll pay, which is why we fail. What you need is to spend some time with her, not in a café, not in a bar or a movie theater. She’s not sixteen. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be disappointed, but you’ll move on, and that’ll be the end of that. When I told him that my skepticism was hardly misplaced, considering she had already told me there was someone waiting in the wings, his reply couldn’t have been more heartening: That someone could be you. And if it’s not, just thinking it might be can move mountains. This woman is real. You are real.
I tried to find a way to pry open the block between us. But the more I realized how much I wanted her, the more the idea of her new beau began to muddy my thinking, the more her blandishing dearests began to irk me. Everything I liked about her, everything she wrote and said had the ring of hollow appeasements thrown around to prevent me from drawing closer. There was nothing up front about her. I became guarded and oblique.
Twenty-four hours after our gins, I wrote saying I wished I’d stayed and had dinner with her in our neighborhood rather than gone to that dumb dinner party.
Dearest, did you have as terrible a time as all that? What about the give-or-take friends you like so much?
I liked sarcasm. Wish I had brought you along with me—would have livened the company, thawed winter, dusted the old bookcases still in place after Duncan’s death—and it would have made me so happy.
Would it have made you that happy?
So very, very happy.
I wanted to tell her about dinner in my friends’ carpeted dining room overlooking Lower Manhattan’s skyline with a scenic view of the East River, all of us talking about Diego, who was still cheating on Tamar but had chosen to stay with her because he couldn’t think of life without her, or of Mark, who had left Maud for a much younger woman, claiming that all he wanted was just another go. One complicit glance from her across the table, had she been present that night, and we would have burst out laughing together, repeating just another go on the sidewalk as we were heading back to Abingdon Square.
We were neither friends, nor strangers, nor lovers, just wavering, as I wavered, as I wished to think she wavered, each grateful for the other’s silence as we watched the evening drift into night on this tiny park that was neither on Hudson, nor on Bleecker, nor on Eighth Avenue, but a tangent to all three, as we ourselves were, perhaps, nothing more than tangents in each other’s life. In a blizzard, we’d be the first to go, we’d have nowhere to go. Ours, I began to fear, was a script without parts.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, past midnight: My dearest, I haven’t been happy once this week. It’s been very rough. And the worst isn’t over. I want you to think of me.
Think of you? I’m always thinking of you, I wrote as soon as I was up at five thirty the next morning. Why do you think I’m up so early?
Later that same day: My dearest, let’s have drinks soon.
Done.
“I wish I could do something to help. Have you told him where he stands?” was my tentative foot forward.
“I’ve told him everything. I’m not afraid of telling people the truth.”
I wish I knew how to tell people the truth.
I wanted her to say something like But I thought you did tell the truth. You turned down my article when you didn’t like it, didn’t you? You’ve always told me the truth.
I wasn’t talking about that kind of truth.
Then, what kind? she’d have asked, and I’d have told her. All I needed was an opening.
I could just hear Manfred: Find the opening. Make the opening. Life throws thousands of them—you just don’t see them. It took two years with me. Don’t make the same mistake.
“Truth is difficult sometimes, and I don’t always like being straightforward,” she said, “but I always tell the truth when it matters.” She had sidestepped my flimsy little trap, deftly.
A few days later she wrote saying a family emergency was taking her to DC. Meanwhile she had finished her piece on Malibran.
How many words?
Too many.
I’d love to see it.
But you know I can’t publish it with you.
I know that. I don’t care who runs your story. But I care about everything you do, write, think, say, eat, drink, everything, can’t you tell?
This was as straightforward as I could be. If my meaning wasn’t clear, then obviously she wasn’t eager to know it.
Dearest, your feelings for me touch me deeply. I do listen to everything you say. Surely, you know this. I just hope I’m worthy of you. I’ll e-mail the manuscript as soon as I’ve revised it for the nth time. Your loyal and devoted me.
Manfred: Stop talking shop with her. This is not about work.
What he didn’t see was that as she and I continued to write to each other, my e-mails were becoming ever more cryptic: too many smoke signals and plenty of allusions to the point where I no longer knew what I kept hinting at; what mattered was for her to know I was hinting, that hinting had become my only language, that I wasn’t saying what needed to be said.
Peeved by her inability to respond in a manner less oblique than mine, I didn’t write for three days.
Dearest, what’s wrong?
I could almost feel the smooch you give grumpy granddaddy when he wants to seem hurt.
Manfred: You’ve been seeing each other far too many times to assume she doesn’t already know. She wouldn’t have met you a second, certainly not a third time if she didn’t already want what you want. No man I’ve ever known—you included—spends more than a minute with another man without knowing they both want the same thing. She likes you, she doesn’t like the twenty- or thirtysomething idiots who surround her. If anything, she probably feels no less puzzled or hampered than you are. Just cut the coffee face-to-face interviews and sleep with her. Get drunk if you have to and tell her what you told me the first time.
The following Friday we decided to have dinner. I’d found a restaurant on West 4th Street and made reservations for six thirty. That early? she quipped. I knew exactly why she was smiling and what she was asking. The place gets overcrowded, I explained. “Overcrowded,” she replied, echoing my own word, to mean Understood. Tart and snide. At least this much is clear between us, I thought. Knowing that she saw through everything was an irresistible turn-on. A woman who knows what you’re thinking must think what you’re thinking.
If the weather didn’t change, it might snow again, and the snow would slow things down and put a halo on an ordinary dinner date and give our evenin
g the luster and magic that snow always casts on otherwise drab evenings in this part of the city.
On my way to the restaurant I already knew I’d never forget the sequence of streets as I took my time on West 4th Street. First Horatio, then Jane, then West 12th, then Bethune, Bank Street, West 11th, Perry, Charles, West 10th. The picturesque buildings with their tiny, picturesque high-end stores, the people heading home in the cold, the cold lampposts shedding their scant light on the glinting slate sidewalks. I caught myself envying all young lovers living in their tiny apartments here, all the while reminding myself, You do know what you’re doing, you know where this is likely to go tonight. I loved every minute of the walk. Manfred: She knows what this is about. She knows and she’s telling you she knows. The worst that could happen at this point was being invited upstairs after dinner and explaining that I could stay but couldn’t spend the night. No, I corrected myself, the worst was walking back along these same streets a few hours from now after making love to her and wondering whether I was any happier than I’d been before dinner, now that I had left her and was crossing Charles, Perry, Bank, in reverse order.
Then it hit me. The very worst would be walking back these same streets without having spoken or come close to speaking. The worst was watching nothing change. This is when I’d feel the cruel stab of delayed irony as I’d recall rehearsing my clever little exit line about sleeping with her but not spending the night. It would have to sound unrehearsed, a tad fumbled even, if only to dull the awkwardness. Fumble if you must, said my inner Manfred.
* * *
SHE SHOWED UP wearing a short black dress and high-heeled boots, looking much taller than I remembered. She had dressed up and was wearing jewelry. When she came to our table after negotiating her way through the crowded bar area, I told her she looked ravishing. We kissed on both cheeks and I on her forehead, as I always did. Any doubts about what we meant to each other were instantly dismissed. This moment of sudden clarity in my incipient new life thrilled me and dispelled my inhibitions. How silly of me to have even considered taking my time getting here.
