by André Aciman
“Your twin daughters are the loveliest girls in the world,” said Clara. I could tell Clara was leading her on.
“They are, aren’t they,” agreed Muffy, “they’re great.”
“They’re great,” mimicked Clara, brushing her lips against my ear this time, once, twice, three times, “really fucking great.” I could feel every part of my body react to her breath. People who made love to her had her breath all night long.
“We call them le gemelline,” said Muffy, saying the Italian words with a thick American accent.
“You don’t fucking say?” Clara continued to whisper in my ear.
Meanwhile, guests were starting to push us on their way to the buffet tables. Muffy was about to be swallowed by the crowd.
“I think we should get out of the way, or they’ll run us over. I know a shortcut.”
“A shortcut?” I asked.
“Through the kitchen.”
Meanwhile, Pablo, who had spotted Clara, was signaling from among another cluster of people. She told him we were headed to the kitchen from the opposite direction. They’d done this before, it seemed. We’d all meet up in the greenhouse.
I thought of Inky and imagined that Clara wanted to get back to him. But he was nowhere in sight. She wasn’t even making a show of looking for him.
“Where’s the man from the trenches?” I finally asked Clara, giving every indication by my gestures that I was not going to join her for dinner.
I received a blank stare. Would she fail to get the limp joke, or would she cast an indignant look once she’d remembered our lingo? It was taking her a very long while to respond, and I was already tempted to simper apologetically and spell out the shallow thing I’d hinted at, which would sound shallower yet with an explanation.
“I meant Inky,” I said.
“I know what you meant.” Silence. “Home.”
It was my turn to show I did not know what she meant. “Inky went home.”
Was she putting me on? Or shutting me up? None of your business—lay off—you’ve crossed a line? Or was she still trying to find a shortcut to the food and was focusing all her attention on how to get us from here to there before the others? I could sense, though, that she was not just thinking about the passage to the tables. Should I perhaps ask whether something was wrong? “We’ll have to go upstairs by way of the greenhouse and down through another staircase into the back door to the kitchen.” I watched her as she was saying this. I wanted to hold her hand on the spiral staircase as we’d done before and wrap my hand behind her neck and under her hair and tell her everything bursting in me.
“What?”
I shook my head, to mean nothing, meaning everything.
“Don’t!” she said.
There it was, the word I’d been dreading all evening long. I had picked up wisps of it when hinting about Bellagio. Now it had finally come out, undoing Bellagio, dispelling the beam, trouncing the illusion of rose gardens and of Sunday lovers lost in snowbound lands. Don’t. With or without an exclamation mark? Most likely with. Or without. She’d probably said it too many times in her life for it to need one.
On our way through the narrow stairway, she finally blurted the answer to the question I hadn’t dared ask. “Tonight was our valediction forbidding mourning.” She looked behind me.
A crowd of teenagers burst from behind and dashed past us on the way upstairs.
“So, you were saying about Inky?”
“Gone. Left for good.”
I felt sorry for Inky. Here was a man to whom she’d just given all the proof of love a man needs, and a minute later she couldn’t have spoken more disparagingly of a rat. Wasn’t she trying a bit too hard for someone who was just indifferent? Or are there people who no sooner they’re done with you than their love addles into something so unforgiving that what causes intense suffering is not the loss of love, or the ease with which you’re spurned after being given the keys to their home, but the spectacle of being thrown overboard and asked to drown without fussing and spoiling everyone’s fun. Was this what had happened to him? Spurned, kissed, sent packing? Or was she like a strange wildcat that licks your face to hold you down as she devours your insides?
I’d seen his face, tilted slightly sideways as she prepared to kiss him more savagely the second time, every part of his body transformed into one taut sinew. Minutes later she was walking up to me and asking me to sneak upstairs with her.
“He’s probably on his way to his parents’ on a peak in Darien. I told him not to drive in the snow. He said he didn’t care. And frankly—”
We ascended a few more steps.
“I am so tired of him. He’s the healthiest man in the world, and I’m the worst thing for him. There are days when, I swear, all I want is to seize the pumice stone in my bathroom and bash my face in with it, because it reminds me of the face he looks at each day and has no clue what’s inside it, no clue, no clue. He made me stop being who I am; worse yet, I stopped knowing who I was.”
I must have given her a startled and incredulous stare.
“Mean and nasty?”
I shook my head. “I even blame him for failing to make me love him—as if it’s his fault, not mine. Because I tried so hard to love him. And all this time all I wanted was love, not someone else, not another person, not even another person’s love. Maybe I don’t know what others are for either. Maybe all I want is romance. Served chilled. Maybe that’ll do just fine.”
She caught herself.
“Take that into the pit of pandangst.” The party girl smiled uneasily.
I stood behind her on the staircase. It frightened me how similar we were. Just the illusion of having so much in common was enough both to scare me and to give me hope.
“Tell me more.”
“There’s nothing more to tell. There was a time when the lights had gone out of my life and I thought he was the light. Then I realized he wasn’t the light but the hand that turned the darkness off. Then one day I saw there was no light left—not in him, not in me. Then I blamed him. Then me. Now I just like the dark.”
“Hence the lying low.”
“Hence the lying low.”
She stopped looking at me.
“This is my hell,” she added. “It’s not me Inky wants. He wants someone like me. But not me. I’m totally wrong for him, for me too, if you have to know. It’s never really me men want, just someone like me.” A tiny pause. “And I’m wise to it.” It sounded no different than A word to the wise, my friend.
This is my hell. What words for a party girl. Someone like me but not me—where did one learn to say such things or come up with such insights? Experience? Long, long hours alone? Could experience and solitude go together? Was the party girl a recluse posturing as a party girl who was really a recluse—forever rectus and inversus like a fugue from hell?
I am Clara. Same difference.
She opened the door. The balcony overlooked the same view of the Hudson as the terrace two floors below it, except from much higher up. She indicated a narrow passage past the greenhouse. The view was indeed breathtaking, spectral.
“No one knows this, but he’d die for me, if I asked him to.”
What a thing to say.
“And have you asked him?”
“No, but he offers to every day.”
“Would you die for him?”
“Would I die for him?” She was repeating my question, probably to give herself time to think and come up with a plausible answer.
“I don’t even know what the question means—so I suppose not. I used to love the taste of toothpaste and beer on his breath. It turns my stomach now. I used to love the torn elbows on his cashmere sweater. Now I wouldn’t touch it. I don’t like myself very much either.”
I listened, waited for more, but she had stopped speaking.
“Just look at the Hudson,” I said as we stood on the spot staring silently at the blocks of ice.
She had spoken with unusual gravity. I vowe
d to remember her like this. The greenhouse was totally unlit, and for a spellbound moment as I stood on what seemed the top of the world I wanted to tell her to stand with me and watch our silver-gray universe inch its way through space. I was even tempted to say, “Just stay with me awhile here.” I wanted her to help me search for the beam and, having found it, tell me whether she thought it was like an arm transcending time, reaching out into the future to fade into the moonlit clouds, or whether it was one of those rare instances when heaven touches earth and comes down to us to assume our image and speak our language and give us this ration of joy that stands between us and the dark. She too must have been struck by the sight of the skyline, for she stopped of her own accord, looked out toward the southern half of Manhattan, and what finally made me want to hold her with both my hands under her shirt and kiss her on the mouth was the haste with which she grabbed my hand to lead me away, uttering an intentionally perfunctory “Yes, we know, we know, ‘I saw Eternity the other night.’ ”
•
In the kitchen a man wearing a dark burgundy velvet jacket was speaking on his cell phone and looking very concerned. When he saw Clara, he grimaced a silent greeting, and seconds later clicked off the phone without saying goodbye, cursing his lawyer for our benefit. He slipped the phone back into the inside pocket of his blazer and turned to the chef. “Georges, trois verres de vin, s’il vous plaît.”
“Some party!” he said, moving to the breakfast table. “No, sit with me, I need to catch my breath. Parties like this are so out of another era!”
He liked parties. But so gaudy, and all these Germans and Frenchmen, he added, you’d think this was the Tower of Babel. “Thank God we have us. And the music.”
I gathered that music was what bound this inner circle of friends.
All three of us sat down, while several cooks and numberless waiters fretted behind us. In the corner, what could only have been two blond, burly, retired policemen types turned personal drivers and/or bodyguards were eating a last-ditch, haute cuisine rendition of baked lasagna.
Hans looked at us, then pointed a discrete forefinger at Clara, then to me, then back to Clara, as if to ask, “Are you two together?”
She smiled the limpid, self-possessed smile of a very young lawyer who is about to enter a boardroom and is suddenly told by her secretary that her mother is on the phone. That smile—it took me a few seconds—was the equivalent of a blush. She bit her lip as if to say, “I’ll get even with you for this, just you give me a chance.” And then I saw her do it. “Are you okay, Hans?”
“I’m okay,” he muttered, then on second thought, “No, I’m really not okay.”
“The Kvetch?”
“No, not the Kvetch. Just business, business. Sometimes I tell myself I should have remained an accountant in the music business, a simple, stupid accountant. There are people out there who want me ruined. And the way things are going, they may just succeed.”
Then, as though to shake off a languorous cloud of self-pity—“I am Hans,” he said, extending his hand to me. He spoke slowly, as if every word was followed by a period.
It suddenly must have hit Clara that I did not know Hans, or Hans me. This time she’d make the official introductions, though not without saying that she felt like a perfect idiot, thinking I was Hans’s friend when all along I’d been Gretchen’s.
“But I don’t know Gretchen,” I said, trying to show that it had never been my intention to deceive anyone, which is why this was as good a time as any to come clean.
“But then who—?” Clara did not know how to phrase the question, so she turned to Hans for help.
I imagined that within seconds the two beefy ex-policemen eating lasagna would pounce on me, twist my arms, pin me to the ground, handcuff me to the kitchen table, and hold me there till their bejowled pals from the Twenty-fourth Precinct came round.
“I’m here because Fred Pasternak had the invitation messengered to me and told me to come. I suspect he’s stood me up. I didn’t even know of this party until late this afternoon.” In my efforts to exonerate myself and leave no doubt about my credentials, I began to spill more details than necessary, precisely the way liars do when a simple lie would have done well enough. I was also going to add that I hadn’t even wanted to go to a party tonight—and besides, I wasn’t even hungry, and as for their gimp-legged, flat-footed, flossy Eurotartsie fly-by-night crowd gathered round two hosts ignominiously named Hansel and Gretel, they did nothing for me either—so there!
“You are a friend of Pooh Pasternak’s?” So they knew his old nickname as well. “Friends of Pooh’s are always welcome here.” Handshake, arm around my shoulder, the whole chummy locker-room routine. “He was a good friend of my father’s,” I corrected. “Sort of looks after things.”
“The Swiss connection,” joked Hans, making it all sound like a pact sworn in gymnasium English by abandoned boys in a postwar spy novel.
A waiter finally came round with a bottle of white wine and proceeded to uncork it. As he was just about to pour Clara her wine, he turned to me and asked softly, “Beer for you?” I recognized the waiter immediately. No, I’d have wine this time.
When he was gone, I told Hans that his waiter was convinced he had saved my life. How so? he asked. Must have thought I was planning to jump from the nth floor.
I’d made the whole thing up. A good story, I thought, though I couldn’t explain why I’d made it up. Everyone laughed. “You’re not serious, are you?” asked Clara.
I sniggered. Obviously more than one man had threatened to die for her.
“To Pooh,” said Hans. “To Pooh and to all the feisty shysters on this planet, may their tribe increase.” We clinked glasses. “Once more, and once again,” he toasted. “And many more times again,” echoed Clara—obviously, a familiar toast in their world.
To Pooh, who, but for a whim, I thought, might never have forwarded this invitation to me and never made possible an evening that had cast such a spell on my life.
I am Clara, I’ll make you new. I am Clara, I’ll show you things. I am Clara, I can take you places.
I watched one of the cooks behind Hans open what looked like large cans of caviar. He seemed impatient, with the cans, with the opener, with caviar, with kitchens as he scooped out dollop after dollop. His attitude made me think of Clara. She’ll scoop you out of yourself, give you a new look, a new heart, new everything. But to do this, she’ll need to cut into you with one of those can openers that date back to before the rotary model was invented—first a sharp incision, after which comes the tricky, patient, and persistent bloodletting work of prying and maneuvering the pointed shark-finned steel blade up, down, up, down, till it’s worked its way around you and taken you out of yourself.
Will this hurt?
Not at all. That part everyone loves. What hurts is when you’re out and have lost the hand that sprung you from yourself. Then the sardine key, with the can lid all curled around it like a molted old skin, sticks to your heart like a dagger in a murder victim.
I knew that it took more than a party to alter the course of a lifetime. Yet, without being too sure, and perhaps without wanting to be too sure for fear of being proven wrong, without even taking meticulous mental notes for later consumption, I knew I’d forget none of it, from the bus ride, the shoes, the rush past the greenhouse into the kitchen, where Hans pointed first at her, then at me, and then at her again, my made-up story of the suicide attempt, the threat of spending an evening in jail, down to Clara’s rushing to the police station to bounce me out on the very night of Christmas, and the walk into the freezing cold outside the precinct station as she’d ask, Did the handcuffs hurt, did they? Here, let me rub your wrists, let me kiss your wrists, your wrists, your poor, sweet, wretched, God-given hurting wrists.
These I would take with me as I would take the moment when Hans, who wished to get away from his own party, asked Georges if he could be bien gentil to put together three platters and bring them upstairs dans
la serre. For then I knew we were going to retreat to the greenhouse and I’d be closer yet than I’d ever been to Clara, the beam, the stars.
“And yet,” said Hans, standing up, waiting to let us out of the kitchen first, “I could have sworn you two’ve known each other a long time.”
“Hardly,” said Clara.
It took me a moment to realize that neither she nor I believed we’d just met a few hours earlier.
•
Hans turned on the lights in the greenhouse. Awaiting us in what looked like an enclosed half veranda, half greenhouse was a small round table with three dishes whose food was arranged in intricate arabesques. Nearby was a bucket filled with ice in which someone had deposited a bottle with a white cloth strapped around its neck. It gave me no small thrill to think it must be one of the bottles I had brought and that someone had obviously held off serving it until now. Things happened magically here. Inside the napkin that I unrolled was a silver fork, a silver knife, and a spoon bearing initials carved in an outdated florid style. Whose? I whispered to Clara. His grandparents’. Escaped the Nazis. “Escaped Jews, like mine,” she said. Like mine too, I was going to add, especially after unrolling the napkin and thinking back to my parents’ own parties this time of year when everyone had tasted too much wine and Mother said it was time to have supper. The unremembered souls whose florid initials were inscribed on our silverware had never even crossed the Atlantic, much less heard of 106th Street or Straus Park, or of those generations down who’d inherit their spoons one day.
Around us were three small tables that were already laid out but on which nothing had been served yet. What a wonderful spot to have breakfast in every morning. The herbarium stood to my left: spices, lavender, rosemary, shades of Provence all around.
I stared at the white cloth, which had a starched sheen and which seemed to have been washed, fluffed, pressed, and folded by devoted hands.
“So how did you two meet, again?”
“In the living room.”
“No,” she said, before placing her elbow once again on my shoulder, “in the elevator.”
