by André Aciman
•
We arrived at the Cathedral of St. John long after Mass had started. None of us minded being late. All we did was join the thick crowd bottlenecking the entrance and then just stood there, watching people file through the nave looking for an empty spot among those who were already seated and taking the chalice. The atmosphere was dense with candlelight, music, banners, and the shuffle of infinite footsteps working their way up and down the central aisle. “We’re staying ten minutes, not more,” said Clara as she and I went as far as the cordoned-off ambulatory, then back the way we’d come, squeezing through the crowd, finally running into those of our group who were headed toward the transept. “Runcible Jews,” she said, meaning all of us. We found a tiny free corner to lean on in one of the vaulted chapels and stared at the tourists, as we listened to a New Agey organ piece struggling to sound inspirational.
Perhaps it was the combination of Clara, church, snow, music, our romance with France, and the votive tapers we each lit in silent wish-making that made me think of Eric Rohmer’s films. I asked Clara if she’d ever seen his films. No, never heard of him. Then she corrected herself. Wasn’t he the one where all that people did was talk? Yes, the very one, I replied. I told her there was a Rohmer retrospective playing on the Upper West Side. She asked where. I told her. “To some of these tourists it must be magical indeed, coming all the way to New York City from who knows where and stepping into this Midnight Mass,” she said. She’d been coming here as far back as she could remember. I pictured her with her parents, then schoolmates, lovers, friends, now me. “One day they’ll open up the transept and finish building this cathedral.” I remembered reading somewhere that the cathedral had run out of funds, fired its stonecutters, its masons, put away their tools. In a hundred years they might—but then might not—start rebuilding. “The man who’ll lay the last stone here isn’t even born yet.” These were the party girl’s last words before rounding everyone up and herding us to the main portal. It put things in perspective, I thought. The gas jets of a century ago and the last stonecutter a century from now. Made me feel very, very small—our quags, our party, our unspoken darts and parries, our night on the terrace watching the beam pick its way through this silver gray night as we spoke of eternity, in one hundred years, who’d know, who’d want to know, who’d care? I would. Yes, I would.
On our way back through the snow, she and someone from the party whom I hadn’t met yet darted ahead, holding hands, then started throwing snowballs at each other. There was no traffic headed uptown, which was why we all walked on Broadway itself, feeling like privileged pedestrians reclaiming their city. Finally, when we were about to cross Straus Park, Clara came back to me, put her arm under mine, and insisted that she and I walk through the park, her favorite spot in the world, she said. Why? I asked. Because it was in the middle of everything but really nowhere, just elsewhere—tucked away, safe, nothing touches it, a private alcove where you come to turn your back on the world. Or to lie low, I said, trying to make fun of her, of us—even the statue of Memory was lying low, she said. Indeed, the statue was lost in thought, drifting elsewhere, wrapped in Hopkins’s wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swiveled snow. I want a strong, ice-burning shot of vodka, she said as we were leaving the park. And then I want something sweet, like dessert. But yes, like Hopkins, she added. Why am I so happy tonight? I wanted to ask. Because you’re falling in love with me and we’re watching it happen, the two of us together. In slow, slow motion. Who’d know? you ask. I know.
•
We all crammed in the elevator, dropped our coats at the coat check, and rushed upstairs, back into the greenhouse. Our tables had been cleaned and were laid out for dessert and more drinks. After vodka was poured for everyone, I resolved to wait awhile and after the second round of desserts began to make signs that it was time for me to go. It was already long past two in the morning. The more I feigned veiled uneasiness to signal my imminent departure, the more I felt compelled to hasten it. Perhaps all I wanted really was for Clara to notice and ask me to stay.
Eventually she did. “Are you really leaving?” as if it was something she couldn’t have imagined unless she’d thought of it first.
“What, leaving already?” exclaimed Pablo. “But you’ve just arrived.”
I smiled benignly.
“I”—and there was a loud emphasis on the I—“will pour him another drink.” This was Pavel. “Don’t want you leaving on an empty stomach.”
“We certainly don’t want that,” added Beryl.
“So are you staying or you’re leaving?” asked Pablo.
“Staying,” I conceded, knowing that I wasn’t conceding, since I was doing exactly what I wanted.
“Finally, a decision,” said Clara.
How I loved these people, this greenhouse, this tiny island away from everyone and everything I knew. This shelter from time itself. It could last forever.
“Here,” said Pavel, offering me a large snifter. Just when I was about to take it from him, he withdrew it ever so slightly, and as I got closer to take it, he applied a kiss to my cheek. “I had to,” he said loud enough for everyone to hear. “Besides, it’ll make him so jealous, and I love Pablito when he gets jealous.”
“I must instantly apply the antidote,” said Beryl. “The question is: will he let me?”
“He might.”
“Oh, he definitely might,” said Clara, with implied indifference that unmoored me totally.
“Well, before I plunge, I had better ask,” tittered Beryl.
“It’s not you he wants. But then that’s why he’ll let you kiss him the way she kissed you, big frontal mit frotting too.” Rollo again.
“Who does he want, then?”
“Her,” said Rollo.
“Then I don’t want him,” she retorted.
“She’s lying low,” said Clara, referring to herself.
“And he’s on ice,” I said.
We looked at each other. Mirth and collusion in our heady, seemingly levelheaded words.
“By the way,” she said, “I never told you my full name. It’s Clara Brunschvicg, spelled the French way. And since you did ask, yes, I am listed.”
“Did I ask?”
“You were going to. Or should’ve. Academy two . . .”
She read me so well, whereas I couldn’t begin to scratch her surface.
Brunschweig. Brunschwig, I thought to myself, how does one spell that? Brunswick, Brunchwik, Bushwick.
“Shall I write it down for you?”
“I know how to spell Brunchweig.”
Once again, though reluctantly, I made renewed motions to leave. But it must have been so obvious that I was begging to be asked to stay that one word from Pablo and Beryl and I was seated again with yet another something to drink in my hands.
Beryl dawdled past me, then stopped in front of me.
“Are you angry with me?” I asked.
“No, but we’ve a score to settle. Later, maybe.”
Eventually we came down the spiral stairs together to find the party in full swing, the crowded living room huddled around the pianist with the throaty voice who’d probably taken a long break and was now back to his old spot singing exactly the same song he’d been singing hours earlier. There was the Christmas tree. There the same old bowl of punch. There the spot where Clara said I looked lost. There, Clara and someone whom she introduced as the Mankiewicz asked everyone to be quiet, stood on two stools, and began singing an aria by Monteverdi. It lasted two minutes. But it would change my life, my way of seeing so many, many things, as the snow and the beam and the empty snowed-in park had already changed me as well. Minutes later, the singer with the throaty voice took over again.
•
Past three in the morning, I finally said that I did have to leave. Handshakes, hugs, kissy-kissy. When I went to the coatroom, I could see that the party was giving no signs of letting up. As I passed by the kitchen, I thought I made out the sweet, chocolaty yet vaguely fri
ed scent of what might easily have been yet another squadron in an endless procession of desserts if it didn’t bear a suggestion of early breakfast.
Beryl followed me to the coatroom. I had lost my stub, and the attendant let me inside the large superpacked coatroom with Beryl. Was she leaving too? No, just wanted to say goodbye and tell me how happy she was we’d met. “I like you,” she finally said, “and I thought to myself: I must tell him.”
“Tell him?” I knew I was smiling.
“Tell him that I’d been looking at him and thinking, If he ever gets around to it, I’ll tell him. Tomorrow, when I’m totally sober, I’ll pretend I never said this, but right now it’s the easiest thing in the world, and I just wanted you to know—voilà!” She was, I could tell, already backtracking. I would have spoken the exact same words to Clara.
I did not speak. Instead, I put an arm around her shoulder and pressed her toward me in an affectionate, friendly hug. But she was yielding to an embrace, not a hug, and before I knew it, I was pushing her behind one of the overstuffed wobbly coat stands and then farther into the inner jungle of fur coats that thronged the room like unstripped hanging carcasses in a slaughterhouse, and hidden behind the packed racks, I began to kiss her on the mouth, my hands all over her body.
No one saw or would have paid us any mind. I knew what she wanted, was glad to show I knew. Neither held back. It would have taken no time.
“Thank God there are others to stop us,” she said in the end.
“I suppose,” I repeated.
“Don’t suppose. You don’t really want this any more than I do.”
There had been, neither on her part, nor on mine, the slightest passion between us, just juices.
When I left the coatroom with my coat, I saw Clara talking to someone in the corridor. Something in me hoped she had seen us together.
“You do know she’s head over heels for you,” said Beryl to me.
“No.”
“Everyone noticed.”
I thought back and couldn’t remember Clara giving me the slightest hint of being head over heels. Was Beryl perhaps making it up to mislead me?
“Must you really go? I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” said Clara, holding a glass in her hand.
“Ciao, lover,” said Beryl, leaving me alone with Clara, but not without a wink meant to give away part of our secret in the coatroom.
“What was that all about?” Clara asked.
“Her way of saying goodbye, I suppose.”
“Did you two have a Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment, is that it?”
“A what?”
“Never mind. Are you really leaving in this snowstorm?”
“Yes.”
“Did you come by car? It’ll be impossible to find a cab on a night like this.”
“I came by bus—I’ll go back by bus.”
“The M5—my favorite bus in the world. Come. I’ll show you to my bus stop.”
“I—”
There, I was about to do it again, trying to dissuade her, when nothing would have pleased me more.
It took another twenty minutes to find Hans and say goodbye to everyone all over again.
Then the elevator came. We entered it in total silence, strangers wondering what to say, yet dismissing each subject as an obvious silence filler. “This, for your nymphormation, is thirteen,” she said, as if she were talking about a friend we’d brought up earlier and whose building we were now passing by car. “You saw me get off at ten.” She smiled. I smiled back. Why did I feel that another minute of this could crush me? I couldn’t wait for our ride downstairs to be over. But I also knew that our remaining minutes were numbered, and never wanted these to end. I would have wanted her to press the stop button as soon as the doors had closed and say she’d forgotten something, and would I mind holding the door for her. Who knows where all this might have led, especially if some of her friends spied me waiting for her by the open elevator door—Just take off your coat and enough with this going-once, going-twice routine. Or the old, jiggly elevator could stop between floors and trap us in the dark and let this hour be a night, a day, a week, as we’d sit on the floor and open up to each other in ways we hadn’t done all evening long, in the dark, for a night, a day, a week—to sit and listen to the sound of the superintendent banging away at cables and pulleys and not care at all, seeing we were back to Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” and Rilke’s Nikolai Kuzmich, who ended up with so much time on his hands that he could afford to squander it as much as he pleased, in big bills or small—spend, spend, spend, and like him I would ask time for a huge loan and allow this elevator to be stuck forever. They’d lower down food, drinks, a radio even. Our bubble, our dimple in time. But our elevator kept going down: seventh, sixth, fifth. Soon it would be over. Soon, definitely.
When we reached the lobby, I saw the same doorman. He was wearing the same large brown overcoat, whose shaggy long sleeves with yellow piping I still remembered from the time he had pressed the elevator button for me, making me feel at once honored and inept. He was now opening the heavy glass door of the lobby to let new arrivals in. Stamping their feet, shaking their umbrellas, giving their names to two young fashion-model types leafing through page after page of the same single-spaced list of guests on which I’d pointed out my name inscribed by hand on the very last page. The afterthought guest. The afterthought party. The stopgap, afterthought, adventitious night.
I’d been one of these guests hours ago. I was leaving, they were coming in. Would Clara return to the party, find a new stranger standing by the Christmas tree, start all over?
I am Clara. I can do this forever, once more, and once again, and many more times again, like the beam over Manhattan, and the singer with the throaty voice, and the corridor leading down paths unseen till, by miracle, it took you right back to where you’d started.
Before heading out, she undid the knot of my scarf, wrapped it around my neck once, then doubled up the scarf and looped it on itself. Her knot. I loved it.
“You’re not going out like this, are you, Miss Clara?” asked the doorman in a gravelly voice.
“Just for a minute. Would you lend me your umbrella, Boris?”
She was wearing nothing over her crimson blouse. “I call him Boris, after Godunov, or Feodor, after Chaliapin, or Ivan, after the Terrible. Faithful as a Doberman.”
He had meant to hold the umbrella for her. “It’s okay, stay inside, Boris.”
I wanted to lend her my coat. But then my gesture might be deemed overbearing. So, in an effort not to fuss or seem intrusive, I had basically resolved to let her freeze in her see-through crimson shirt. Then, on impulse, I took off my coat and put it around her—intrusive-obtrusive, I didn’t care. I liked doing this.
Leaning on my arm as she held Boris’s extra-large umbrella for the two of us, she walked past the Franz Sigel memorial statue, both of us hesitating down the stairway that was entirely buried in snow. I used to go snowboarding here, she said.
The quiet, empty Riverside Drive, piled with heavy snow, had grown so narrow it reminded me of an unpaved country road leading to nearby woods that extended for miles before reaching the next small village with its adjoining manor house. You could even stand in the middle of the Drive and never once have to worry about cars, as though on nights such as these a friendlier, quieter, picture-book Manhattan took on life-size dimensions and cast a spell on its otherwise hardened features.
The bus stop stood just across the road. “You might have to wait awhile, I’m afraid,” she said.
Then she took off my coat, gave it back to me, put out her hand, and shook mine.
I am Clara. The handshake.
That coat would never be the same.
Some of her was on my coat now.
Try again: some of me had stayed with her.
Isn’t this why I’d made her wear it?
Correction: there was more of her in me than there was of me.
Yes, that was it. There was more of he
r in me than there was of me.
And I didn’t mind. If she owned me, I didn’t mind. If she’d read my thoughts because she’d worn my coat and could spell each thought out, one by one now, I didn’t mind. If she knew everything I knew, together with all I had yet to know and might never know, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind, I wouldn’t mind.
Soon I saw myself crossing the street. She stood still for a moment, as if to make sure I had gotten there safely, her left arm crossing her chest and clutching her right ribcage to suggest she might turn to ice any moment now but was trying to hold out awhile longer. I had an impulse to say, “Let’s go back—it’s too cold, let’s go back to the party.” I know she would have laughed—at me, at the suggestion, at the sheer joy of it. Just ask me to ask you to go back upstairs. Just ask me and see what I’ll say.
Then, her right hand holding the giant umbrella, she managed to wave a brief goodbye with her left and, turning in the other direction, headed home like the owner of a manor who has kindly escorted a guest to a small unassuming gate, a last farewell chimed by a hidden bell once the gate closes behind him.
•
When the bus came, I’d sit in the seat nearest to the front door, opposite the driver, and watch the scene unfold before me, as I had watched it unfold earlier this evening, except in reverse order. I already wanted to return by bus again, and again, for who knows how many months. I’d take this bus on Sunday mornings, on Saturday afternoons, and Friday nights, and Thursday evenings. I’d take it in the snow, on sunny days in spring, and on the way back on late-autumn evenings when the cast of fading light still glistens on the buildings of Riverside Drive, and I’d think of Clara writing her thesis on Folías and of Clara speaking of Teaneck and “White Nights” to me on the terrace as we watched the beam circle Manhattan. The bus ride would become part of my life. Because it would lead to this very building, or pass by it each time and remind me that any moment now I’d get off two stops up in a fairy-tale blizzard and walk back to a Christmas party where my name was permanently penciled on the guest list. I’d take this bus perhaps long after Clara and Hans and Rollo and Beryl and Pablo and all the rest of them had moved out of New York, because in thinking of this ritual bus ride through time at this very moment, I might finally make myself forget that Clara was still upstairs, that I hadn’t asked how to spell her name, that it was always easier to think of vanished worlds and lost friendships and party leftovers than look forward to Hans’s repeated invitation that I return in seven days.
