by André Aciman
“Skin’s as white as aspirin, cankles the size of papayas, and her knees have knocked each other senseless—don’t you notice anything?” she said. “She’s walking on her hindquarters. Look.”
Clara mimicked the woman’s gait, holding both her arms with the plate limply in midair as though they belonged to a dog straining to act human.
I am Clara. I invented the hatchet.
“Everyone says she waddles.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Look at her legs the next time.”
“What next time?” I said, trying to show I’d already dismissed and filed her away.
“Oh, knowing her, there’ll be a next time soon enough—she’s been eyeing you for a while.”
“Me?”
“Like you didn’t know.”
Then, without warning: “Let’s go downstairs. It’s quieter,” she said, indicating a spiral staircase I had totally failed to notice but had not stopped staring at all the time I’d been speaking to her in the library. I liked spiral staircases. How couldn’t I have registered its existence? I am Clara. I blind people.
•
This was not an apartment; it was a palace pretending to be an apartment. The stairway was crowded with people. Leaning against the railing was a young man dressed in a tight black suit whom she obviously knew and who, after exclaiming a loud, almost histrionic “Clariushka!” put both arms around her while she struggled to hold the plate away from him with a mock-expression that said, “Don’t even think of it, they’re not for you.”
“Seen Orla anywhere?”
“All you have to do is look for Tito,” she snickered.
“Nasty, nasty, nasty. Rollo was asking about you.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Love to Pavel.”
That was Pablito, she said. Did she know everyone here? Not a party person? Seriously? And did everyone have a nickname?
As we proceeded downstairs, she gave me her hand. I felt our palms caress, sensing all along that there was as much good fellowship as unkindled passion in this tireless rubbing of fingers. Neither really acknowledged it or wanted it stopped. This was no more than a play of hands, which is why neither bothered to stop or hide the tenuous, guilty pleasure of prolonged touching.
Downstairs, she navigated the crowd and led me to a quieter spot by one of the bay windows, where three tiny cushions seemed waiting for us in an alcove. She was about to place the dish between us, but then sat right next to me, holding the plate on her lap. It was meant to be noticed, I thought, and therefore open to interpretation.
“Well?”
I didn’t know what she meant.
All I could think of was her collarbone and its gleaming suntan. The lady with the collarbone. The shirt and the collarbone. To a collarbone. This collarbone in two hundred years would, if it was cold in the icy silence of the tomb, so haunt my days and chill my dreaming nights that I would wish my own heart dry of blood. To touch and run a finger the length of her collarbone. Who was this collarbone, what person, what strange will came out to stop me when I wished my mouth on this collarbone? Collarbone, collarbone, are you not weary, will I be grieving over collarbones unyielding? I stared at her eyes and was suddenly speechless, my mind in disarray. The words weren’t coming. My thoughts were all tousled and scattered. I couldn’t even put two thoughts together and felt like a parent trying to teach an unsteady toddler how to walk by holding both his hands and asking him to put one foot before the other, one word before the other, but the child wasn’t moving. I stumbled from one thing to the other, then stood frozen and speechless, couldn’t think of anything.
Let her know all this. For I also loved this. One more minute and I won’t even want to hide how thoroughly her stare had thrown me off and worn me down and made me want to spill everything. One more minute and I’ll break down and want to kiss her and ask to kiss her, and if she says no, absolutely not, then I don’t know, but knowing me, I’ll ask again. And I know she knows.
“So,” she interrupted, “tell me about the six-and-a-half-month babe in the rosebush.”
She’d taken the trouble to calculate the months. And wanted me to know it. Or was this a red herring purposely thrown in to muddy things further and give her—or me—an easy out of the silence we’d gotten ourselves in?
I didn’t want to talk about the babe in the rosebush.
“Why not? Sulky-pouty?”
I shook my head, as in: You’re way off base. I was trying to come up with something clever.
“Do you find love often?” I blurted out, turning the tables, thrilled by what I’d suddenly dared to ask. There was no turning back now.
“Often enough. Or some version of it. Often enough to keep looking for it,” she replied instantly, as though the question hadn’t surprised her or taken her aback. But then: “Do you?” she asked, suddenly tearing the veil I thought I had deftly placed between us. Her switch from questioned to questioner was too abrupt and, as I scrambled to fashion a good answer, I caught her smiling again, as if my hasty reference to last May’s rose garden had come to haunt me and stood between me and the shroud I was wrestling to put on. The more I groped for an answer, the more I heard her mimic the ticking sounds of a quiz show clock. If she hadn’t before, she made it clear she’d already intuited my answer but wasn’t letting me off so fast. I wanted to explain how I didn’t know whether it was harder to find love in others or in oneself, that love in the dale of pandangst wasn’t exactly love, shouldn’t be confused with, mistaken for, but she snapped—
“Time’s up!”
I watched her hold an imaginary stopwatch in her hand, with her thumb pressing down on the rest button.
“But I thought I had a few seconds left.”
“The sponsors of the show regret to inform their esteemed guest that he has been disqualified on grounds of—”
She was giving me one last chance to bow out with dignity.
Again I fumbled for something sparkling and clever to wriggle out of this corner, realizing all the while that my lack of wit stood as much against me now as did my inability to tell the truth and break the leaden silence between us.
“—on grounds of?” she continued, still holding the imaginary stopwatch in her hand.
“On grounds of amphibalence?”
“On grounds of amphibalence it is, precisely. As a consolation prize the house is pleased to have arranged this medley of appetizers on this here plate, which we urge our honorable guest to try tasting before this here show hostess gobbles everything up.”
I put out two timid fingers to the plate.
“These are the best, they have no garlique. Hate garlique.”
“We do?”
“Very much.”
There was no point in saying that I, like those who liked singing in the shower, liked garlic.
“We hate garlique too, then.”
Then she indicated a tiny piece of glazed meat over which a thin serrated leaf stood up like the mane of a groomed seahorse. “Eat it . . . elaborately!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, as if you were eating something that requires stupor and veneration.”
Why did I feel that everything she was saying to me was a veiled, notso-veiled reference to her, to us?
“What are they?” I asked, pointing at a square fragment of the Paul Klee arrangement.
“We do not ask, we put our hand out, and we reach for.”
Her mouth was full and she was chewing slowly, implying she relished every bite. What a strange person. Was she going to be yet another one of these women who need to remind everyone they are sensual tornadoes held in check by mild civilities at the cocktail hour?
“Mankiewicz,” she whispered a minute later.
“Mankiewicz,” I echoed back, as if the word had a deeper meaning I couldn’t fathom but which I took to be synonymous with exquisite. For a moment I thought she was referring to someone in the room. Or was it the appetizer itself, whose name I hadn’t hear
d correctly? Or was this a mantra spoken only in moments of delectation? Mankiewicz.
“Qui est Mankiewicz?”
“Mankiewicz made these.”
“Doesn’t sound japonais.”
“Isn’t japonais.”
Then it was the turn of a tiny meatball, which she cautioned was to be dipped ever so delicately in the tiny dab of very spicy Senegalese sauce on the plate. “Just a graze, not more.”
“Love spices.”
“Loves spices.”
I was about to drop the meatball into my mouth when she asked me to wait.
Was she going to impose one of those intricate rituals that people who’ve just come back from the exotic spots adopt and try to foist on their baffled dinner guests?
“I must warn you, it’s very, very spicy.”
“How do you know?”
“Trust me.”
I loved the way we echoed each other’s words—and not just our words but the tone of our words, as if in exchanging these curt tit for tats we were being drawn into a magnetic field that required only that we yield to it. Our exchange made me think of a hand rubbing the soft down on someone’s velvet sleeve, back and forth, with the nap, against the nap, with the nap, against the nap, as though the meaningless words we volleyed between us were nothing more than stray objects picked up without notice and swapped from one hand to the other, from one person to the next, and all that mattered was the traffic and the gesture, the give and take, not the words, not the things, just the back and forth.
“Mankiewicz,” I said, as if toasting his health with his meatball and uttering an obscure spell meant to ward off evil. It reminded me of deep-sea divers who sit on the edge of a rowboat and mutter a one-word mantra before raising both thumbs and jumping head down, fins up.
“Mankiewicz,” she whispered in mock sullenness.
It would take me a while to realize that I should have heeded her warning, because a scalding sensation began to take hold of me, rising all over my scalp, then rippling down my nape. Tears welled in my eyes, and even before I knew what to do with them—hold them back, strike an attitude, spit out the food—they overflowed, streaming down my cheeks, while the fire in my mouth intensified each time I bit the food or tried to send it down. I fumbled for my handkerchief, feeling helpless and mortified, and then terribly frightened, because no matter how long I waited for the fire to subside, none of it was going away—because even after I’d swallowed the whole meatball, it kept getting worse, as though the first burst hadn’t even been a fire, and had nothing to do with the meatball itself, but was a preamble to a conflagration yet to come. Could it get any worse than this? Would I get sick? Would there be permanent damage to my body? I wanted to regain my composure and tell her what was happening to me, but my silence, my tears, my agony must have already told her enough. I threw my head back and found it resting on the windowpane, a chilly sensation which felt so welcome at that moment that, in my befuddled state, I understood why people loved huskies and why huskies thrived in cold weather and why, if I had my wish, I’d want nothing more than to become a husky too, roaming freely on the ice-cold banks of the Hudson immediately outside our window. Ask me again, Clara, whether I’m naked in the trenches now and I’ll tell you how deep and deadly is this dun-colored ditch I’ve fallen into and how desperately I’m struggling to come out; all I want is snow, ice, more ice.
Clara was staring at me uneasily, as if I had fainted and was just coming to. She offered me a piece of bread, which, I realized, she had purposely placed on the plate, to follow the peppered meatball. I suddenly wished her mouth was on fire as well. I wanted her to feel as flustered, shaken, and naked as I felt just now, so that I wouldn’t be alone in this, and with fire in both our mouths and tears streaming on our faces we might find one more thing to draw us closer—no words, no quips, no speeches—just our mouths burning as one mouth together, making love before we even knew we were.
Yet there she sat, leaning toward me, tranquil and collected, smiling probably, like a nurse bending down to wipe the sweat off a wounded soldier’s face with a damp sponge. I thought of how the soldier might reach out to hold her hand and, because he’s lost so much blood, opens up his heart to someone who, in other circumstances, would never have given him the time of day. Was she worried? Or would she wait for me to get better before jeering at me, I warned you, didn’t I, but did he listen—did he listen? Just touch my face with these lips, Clara, touch me with your lips, your jeering, taunting lips, touch me with your thumb, Clara, dig into my mouth and pull out the fire, with your thumb and your tongue.
What made things worse was the shame of it. Was there anything I could do to dispel the indignity of being just a writhing human body? I tried to comfort myself by spinning feel-good platitudes—that our body is who we are, that our body knows us better than we do, that showing all was far better than my smokescreen of words, that this went to the heart of things. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.
Or perhaps things were more complicated than I thought. For part of me liked nothing better than to show her how I was put together and where things easily came apart—the thrill of laying myself as bare and open as an anatomy book where you lift one transparency after the other to show the color of fire in my gullet and of the quiet hysteria coiled around the telltale organs of shame, the pleasure of my shame, of my petty, paltry, startled shame—a shame one puts on and tries hard to believe exists and even struggles to overcome, when, all along, as in nudist colonies, it was left in a locker with our watch and our wallet.
I tried to mumble something to cover up my agitation. But, like the stag in Ovid, had no voice left, or, sensing that something between a husky squawk and a puny squeal would come out and embarrass me further, I feigned having lost all speech. I wanted to moan. I wanted us to moan together, to moan and moan and moan, as if we’d become doe and hart, doe and hart, moaning together in a winter-blown forest where lovers never part.
So here was her piece of bread. And here I was, trying to show it was totally unnecessary, that I’d been through this before and would come out whole, just give me a moment, I’ll be done in a sec, just let me save face, stop staring—the wounded soldier stanching and stitching the wound himself—there!
But she sat like a watchful nurse who is paid by the hour and won’t leave until the patient swallows every last pill the doctor prescribed.
“Here, take this piece of bread,” she said, “and hold it in your mouth, it might help.” I am Clara, the merciful.
And I took it the way one might take a handkerchief, without struggle, without pride, because I knew—and this was the part I concealed behind a forced smile—that I had, against my will, against all odds, and against all explanations, come so close to it that my one concern now was to make sure that the seizure which seemed about to erupt in my throat wouldn’t be a sob.
I finally swallowed the bread. She watched me gulp it in silence.
She turned around and looked out the window. She reminded me of someone taking my pulse while looking away, counting the seconds with a faraway gaze. I didn’t know what to do, so I turned around as well and stared out at the Hudson, our shoulders touching—we knew better than to make too much of this, part of me now eager to show that silence is perfectly acceptable between strangers who meet at a party and need a moment to catch their breath. We didn’t say anything about the view, or about the people she knew or didn’t know in the room, or about the lights speckling the New Jersey shoreline, or about the mournful slabs of ice working their way downstream like a flock of scattered ewes shepherded by a large stationary barge that followed them with its vigilant floodlights.
Outside, on Riverside Drive, solitary lampposts stood out in pools of light, glistening on the snow, like the lost chorus of a Greek play, each a stranded magus with his head ablaze. We’re too far, they seemed to say, and we cannot hear, but we know, we’ve always known about you.
•
She liked fresh air, she sa
id. She opened the French windows a crack, letting a cold draft steal into the room. Then she stepped out onto what turned out to be a very large terrace and proceeded to light a cigarette. I followed. Did I smoke? I made a motion to accept, but then remembered I’d decided to quit smoking just around the time of the six-and-a-half-month babe. I gave a hasty explanation. She apologized, she’d never offer again, she said. I tried not to interpret whether the word again boded well, but decided not to extort hidden meanings in everything she said. “I call them secret agents.”
“Why?”
“Secret agents always smoke in movies.”
“Does this mean you have many secrets?”
“You’re fishing.”
Stupid, stupid me!
She mimicked the motions of a postwar agent lighting up as he scurries through the dark, cobbled lanes of old Vienna.
Outside, a pale silver hue hovered over the city. It hadn’t stopped snowing all evening. She stood by the balustrade, moved her foot, and dreamily brushed aside some of the snow with her maroon suede pump, then gently swept it off the ledge. I watched the snow scatter in the wind.
I liked the gesture: shoe, suede, snow, ledge, the whole thing done distractedly, with a cigarette between her fingers.
I had never realized that there was a kind of beauty in stepping on fresh snow and leaving tracks. I always try to avoid the snow, am good to my shoes.
From our high perch, the silver-purple city looked aerial and distant and superterrestrial, a beguiling kingdom whose beaming spires rose silently through the twilit winter mist to parley with the stars. I watched the fresh furrowed tracks on Riverside Drive, the scattered lampposts with their heads ablaze, and a bus crawling through the snow, tilting its way past the knoll off 112th and Riverside before shuffling off, snow padding its lank shoulders, an empty, Stygian vessel headed toward destinations and sights unseen. I am like Clara, it said, I’ll take you places you never knew.
A waiter opened the sliding door to the terrace and asked if we wanted anything to drink. Spotting a Bloody Mary on his tray, Clara, without hesitating, said she’d take that one. Before he had time to protest, she had already lifted it from his tray. I am Clara. I take things. The drink matched the color of her shirt. Then she stood the wide-rimmed glass on the balustrade, digging its base and part of its slim neck into the snow either to keep it cold or to prevent it from tipping over with the first wind. When she was done smoking, she stubbed out her cigarette with her shoe, and then, just as she’d done with the snow, gently swept it off the ledge. I knew I’d never forget this moment. The shoes, the glass, the terrace, the ice floes plying down the Hudson, the bus shuffling up the Drive. Sweet Hudson, I thought, run softly, till I end my song.
