by André Aciman
“Promise me something, though,” she said after I’d just repeated I was pleased we’d met tonight.
I looked at her and said nothing, not entirely certain I understood, trying to look surprised at whatever she was about to say, even if the use of her “though” was like an uneasy warning of gunfire to come.
She hesitated before speaking. Then she changed her mind.
“I don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.
She knew I knew.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know, it might just ruin things.”
I took my time, sensing that my initial assumption had been totally correct. It had never occurred to me that we had so many things that could be ruined if I failed to promise what she was asking of me. I thought we had a scatter of small disconnected things between us—not Things with a capital T, and certainly not as many as she was implying!
“Things?” I asked, with something like an amused expression on my face, as though I had considered but then hushed an impulse to mimic her word. I knew I was being disingenuous and that I was desperately trying to find something else to say, perhaps to stave off what I was inferring from her and wished might remain ambiguous yet. But I didn’t want to deny it either.
“Things,” I repeated, as though her meaning had finally sunk in and that I was going to comply with her wishes.
“It won’t ruin things,” I replied. I tried to soften the conscious irony I was spreading on her words even before they had left my mouth, as though her concerns about us had never occurred to me before and, come to think of it now, were a touch amusing. Perhaps I was trying to dispel her doubts about me but didn’t want them totally dismissed either. I was taking cover in the truth. “Besides, you might be entirely wrong,” I added.
A short silence.
“I don’t think so.”
There was almost a note of apology in her eyes—apology for the unspoken slight directed at me. “Point taken,” I said. “Admonition forbidding mourning noted,” I conceded.
She squeezed my hand across the table and, before I could return the grasp, withdrew hers. She seemed relieved that she had finally set things straight between us and proceeded to light another cigarette by raising the stump of the candle and bringing it close to her face, determined to enjoy her third glass of Scotch. That face in candlelight, I thought!
I had never seen her face in such light before. Smoking, which she did by turning her face away from yours without ever averting her eyes, gave her silence a willful, omniscient air that I found difficult to hold.
We clinked glasses three times. Then three times again. And a third set of threes, “for good measure,” she said, “three times the Trinity.” “Repeat after me: Ekh raz, yescho raz, yescho mnogo, mnogo raz . . .” She repeated the Russian phrase once more, slowly, word for word. Once more, and once again, and many more times again. I remembered her toast with Hans. Who knew in whose arms she’d learned it?
•
This was when I made that passing comment on Rohmer’s movies. I had said it to fill the silence, but it gave our conversation a strange spin. Her impulsive reading, brutally frank, had simply exposed the drift of our conversation. Not sleeping together—this was the missing term. It unsaddled and deflated everything. I tried to rescue appearances.
“What is unrealistic is that in Rohmer love may just be an alibi, a convenient metaphor—but as for love, none of his characters really trusts it, much less believes in it, or feels it, including the film director, and even the spectators, though all of us keep going through the motions of knocking at love’s door, because outside of love we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Outside of love, we’re out in the cold.”
She thought awhile. Was she going to make fun of me again?
“Is everyone out in the cold, then?”
“I suppose some more than others. But everyone knocks.”
“Even if love is an alibi . . . a metaphor?”
She was making fun of me.
“I don’t know. Some knock at a door. Others at a wall. And some keep tapping gently at what they hope is a trapdoor, even if you never hear telltale sounds from the other side.”
“Are you tapping now?”
“Am I tapping now? Good question. I don’t know, maybe I am.”
“Any telltale sounds?”
“None so far—all I’m hearing are lying low sounds.”
“That was no gentle tap.” She laughed uneasily.
I ended up laughing as well. For a second I thought she was reproaching me for using lying low against her. I was already trying to come up with some form of apology when I realized she was simply deriding what I thought was a deft and delicate pass.
“Trenches are empty, land scorched, all things lite, I thought I told you.”
Was this reproof in her stare? Or was it apology? And why did she keep staring at me?
It was to stop blushing that I finally found myself saying, “Here I am looking at you, Clara, and I don’t know whether to tell you that I love staring at you as I’m doing now or whether I should just keep quiet, say nothing, and curl up into the most abstinent silence.”
“A woman would be crazy not to let you go on.”
“And a man would be crazier not to ask you to stop him.”
“Is this Rohmer, or you?”
“Who knows. I stare at you and my heart is racing and you’re staring back at me, and all I keep thinking is: Trenches are empty, land scorched, keep it lite, and Mind the road signs.”
She made a motion to interrupt. I immediately stopped.
“No, keep going.”
What an amazing woman.
“And now I’ve been made to feel like a street performer.”
“Oh, stop. We’ve had our intensely spiritual Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment for tonight.” She stood up, took out a dollar bill from her purse, walked over to the jukebox, and right away pressed a series of buttons—obviously “her” song. I had expected her to come back to our table and finish her drink, but she stood by the jukebox as though inspecting the list of songs. I stood up and went to her. The music started, it was a tango.
The raucous words of the song cast a spell as soon as I heard them. They rose out of the late-night stillness in the almost emptied bar like a wool blanket being unfolded from a linen closet on a cold night, when the only sound you hear is hail and rattling windowpanes. Clara knew the words, and before I saw what was happening or had a chance to resist or even make a show of resisting, there I was, being asked to lead in a dance I vaguely remembered from my early college days. We danced by the jukebox not three yards away from the entrance to the bar, and we danced much slower than a tango is meant to be danced, but who cared, for there we were, the jukebox and us and the rare faces of passersby on the sidewalk who happened to look in from behind the frosted windows, dancing, as in a Hopper painting, under a lighted green Heineken sign, while one or two of the remaining waiters went about the business of refilling ketchup bottles—we thought we danced perfectly, we thought this was heaven, we thought tango had brought us closer in three seconds than all the words we’d been sparring with since 7:10. And then it happened. After the song, she stood still for a second and, with her hand still in mine, almost in jest—or was it in jest?—said Perdoname, and right then and there began singing out the words in Spanish, and she sang them for me, a cappella, with that voice that tore everything inside me, staring at me the way singers do when they unhinge you totally as you stand there helpless and bared, and all you have is a shaken self and tears running down your cheeks. And she watched this, and she didn’t stop singing, as if she knew, as she began to wipe my eyes with her palm, that this couldn’t have been more natural and was exactly what should happen when one human being stops dancing, holds your hand, and then sings to you, for you, sings because music, like a machete in the jungle, cuts through everything and goes straight to that place still called the heart.
“Don’t, please, don’t,” she whisper
ed, then, changing her mind, went back to “Perdoname,” her song.
“Perdoname,” she said,
Si el miedo robó mi ilusión
Viniste a mi
No supe amar
Y sólo queda esta canción
I knew I’d never forget this. It’s the story of a man who, fearing love, chose to “protect his heart.” “You came to me but I didn’t know how to love, all I have now is this song,” he says. Was Clara speaking to me—or was this coincidence? Did I have Juan Dola, she asked? Who was Juan Dola? “One dollar! Really!” Feigned exasperation. I took one out and watched her push the same buttons on the jukebox. “One more time,” she said.
Is it me she’s dancing with?
It is me.
Why wasn’t there a thing about her I disliked?
“It’s a good thing I’m not your type and you’re not mine either,” she said, as we took our seat after the second dance.
I laughed at the maneuver.
“So, I’ll live with it. Let it be my hell.” I was trying to echo her words from last night.
I helped her with her coat. As she turned around and wrapped her shawl over her head, there was a fleeting moment when all we’d been saying seemed to come to a point. She hesitated. “So you’re not going to listen to me, are you?”
“Listen to what?” I was going to say, feigning once again not to have followed her drift for fear of admitting we were always, always on the same wavelength. Or I could have said, “You know I can’t, and I won’t.”
Instead, I ended up saying something so totally unlike me that it scared and enthralled me at once, as if I were suddenly wearing not my regular clothes but a soldier’s uniform, with saber, stars, medals, and epaulettes, but no boots and no undies. I liked being unlike me, hoped that this being unlike me was not an ephemeral visit to a costume ball or a day trip into an unknown landscape that would vanish as soon as my return ticket expired, but an indefinite voyage out that I had neglected to undertake all life long, and now its time had come. Being unlike me was being me. Except that I didn’t quite know how to yet. Perhaps this was why I’d been so tongue-tied with her; part of me was still discovering in erratic starts and sallies and in all manner of inadvertent ways, this unknown new character who had been waiting in the wings so long and who, for the first time in his life, was going to risk stepping up. Part of me didn’t know him yet, didn’t know how far to go with him. I was still trying him on for size, as if he were a new pair of shoes that I liked but wasn’t sure went along with the rest of me. Was I learning to walk all over again—learning to become human? What had I been all this time, then—a stilt walker? A reversible human?
It took me a second to realize that I was afraid of something else as well: not just of growing to like this new me, of becoming totally attached to him, of giving him more and more slack and, with him, discovering all manner of new worlds, but of finding that he existed only in her presence, that she, and only she, could bring him out, and that I was like a genie without a master who recoils into his millennial spout, condemned to wait and wait for a chance to come out and see daylight when the next right person comes along from behind a Christmas tree and says her name is Clara. I did not want to grow attached to him and then find that he wouldn’t last longer than Cinderella’s livery. I was like someone who doesn’t speak French but who, in the presence of a Frenchwoman one evening, turns out to be the most loquacious French speaker, only to find that she’d gone back home the next morning and that, without her, he’ll never speak a word of French again.
The way she faced me with her wool shawl covering her ears and part of her face made me answer her warning with something uncharacteristically reckless.
“So, you’re really not going to listen to me, are you?” she asked.
“Don’t want to listen.”
“Doesn’t want to?”
“Doesn’t want to at all.”
This could easily have been our last moment together. “Just don’t fall in love with me, please!”
“Won’t fall in love with you, please.”
She looked at me, drew closer, and kissed me on the neck. “You smell good.”
“Walk home with me,” she said.
Outside the bar, it was snowing. A faint, quiet amber glow had fallen on Broadway, coating the dirty sidewalks of 105th Street with a sense of quiet joy that reminded me of the film we’d just seen and of Pascal’s own words: Joy, joy, joy. Traffic was scarce—buses and cabs, for the most part—while from a distance, as though emanating from neighborhoods far away, came the muffled metallic clang of a snowplow quietly plying its way downtown. She slipped her arm through mine. I had hoped she’d do just that. Was this just fellowship, then?
When we walked past the Korean twenty-four-hour fruit vendor, she said she wanted to buy cigarettes. “Read this,” she added, pointing to a misspelled sign that read TANGELINES and right next to it MERONS. She burst out laughing. “Just fancy how they’d spell blueberries and blood oranges,” she said, laughing louder and louder before the befuddled Mexican helper pruning flowers at this ungodly hour of the night. It scared me to think what she’d find about me the moment my back was turned. No, she’d do it to my face.
We reached her building sooner than I wanted. I decided there was no point in tarrying, and although I buttoned the last button of my winter coat to show that I was indeed heading into the cold after dropping her and was already bracing myself against the weather, she seemed to be trying to linger awhile longer as we stood outside, pointing to a view of the Hudson, finally saying that she would ask me upstairs but she knew herself and thought that perhaps we had better say good night now. We hugged—it was her idea, though the embrace seemed a bit too expansive to suggest anything more passionate or less chaste. I let the hug wane on its own. It was a friend’s or a sibling’s embrace, a feel-better gesture followed by a hasty send-off kiss on both cheeks. She lifted up my coat collar to cover my ears, staring me in the face, almost hesitating again, like a mother saying goodbye to a child who’ll probably have a terrible time on his first day at school. “You don’t mind?” she said, as though alluding to something we had been discussing earlier. I shook my head, wondering to myself how, even in saying as simple a thing as good night, she could still remain cryptic and explicit in one and the same breath.
“Let me walk you to where we said goodbye last night.”
Was she into replaying scenes too? Were we pretending it was last night? Or was she doing it for me? Or to get me away from the lobby of her building? I told her I was taking a cab tonight. “’Cuz, bus, he no show up last night.”
“He no show?”
“No show.”
“Then you should have come back upstairs.”
“I was dying to.”
“Party went on till morning. You should have stayed.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to?”
“After your little performance? Me so pressed, me so busy, misosouporsalad. Get me my coat, get me my scarf, must rush, must go, flit, flit, flit.”
She walked me to the statue where we’d parted last night. My turn, I said. I walked her back to her building. Her face swaddled in the shawl, her hands in her coat pockets, shivering. Posture: vulnerable and beseeching, could break your heart if you didn’t know better.
“Just don’t do it,” she added, with that same touch of apology and fair warning in her voice, shattering our momentary elegy in the cold with the caustic snub of a love sonnet carved on granite with barbed wire. She placed a palm on my cheek, and without thinking, I kissed it—soft, soft palm of her hand. She removed it—not swiftly, as if I had crossed an imaginary line, but almost reluctantly, so as not to call attention to it, which stung me more, for it made her lingering gesture seem deliberate, as though her way of censuring my kiss was to overlook it, gracing withdrawal with tokens of indecision—not unflattering, but chastening just the same.
Whoever minded having the palm of his hand kissed? Even if last night
’s beggar woman kissed the inside of my hand, I’d have let her. I gave her an awkward glance, meaning, I know, I know, lying low.
“You did it all wrong,” she explained.
I was dumbfounded. What now?
“Scarf!”
“What about scarf?”
“I hate this knot.”
She untied my scarf and redid the knot the way she liked.
The knot will stay with me till I get home, I know myself. I’d probably want to keep it awhile longer, even with the heat full throttle at home. Get naked with Clara’s knot, get naked with Clara’s knot. Tied me up in knots, that’s what. Last night I’d intentionally undone my scarf to show I had my own way of doing things, thank you very much. But that was last night.
Ivan-Boris-Feodor opened the door for her. I said I would call. But I wanted her to think I wasn’t sure I would. Perhaps I wanted to think so myself. Then she went inside. I watched her step into the elevator.
I remembered the scent of loud perfumes in the corridor fused to that vague, old-elevator smell that had welcomed me to her building. Last night.
I stood there gathering my thoughts, trying to decide whether to walk up to the 110th Street train station or simply hail a cab, wondering which of the dark windows in her building would light up within minutes of our goodbye. I should stay awhile and see which window it was. But what I really wanted was to see her rush out the door looking for me. Something even told me the same impulse had crossed her mind and that she was debating it right then and there, which could be why she hadn’t turned on her lights yet. I waited a few seconds more. Then I remembered I didn’t know which side of the building her apartment faced.
I walked to the corner of 106th and West End, convinced more than ever now that I must never see her again.
I crossed over to Straus Park, following the flakes of snow that were massing like a frenzy of bees swarming in the halo of a streetlamp, growing ever more dense as I looked beyond them uptown and over toward the river and the distant lights of New Jersey. I pictured her in that oversized sweater. All evening long, even at the movies, it had made me think of a rough wool blanket with room for two in it. I wondered what the world smelled of under that blanket, was it my world with its usual, day-to-day odors or a totally alien, unfamiliar world with scents as new and thrilling as those of equatorial fruit—what did life feel like from Clara’s side, from under her sweater, how different was our city when stared at through the lattice of her stitches—how did one think of things when one was Clara, did one read minds, did one always stare people down when one was Clara? Did one shush people when they complained? Or was one like everyone else? What had I looked like when she stared at me with her shawl covering all but her face, thinking to herself, Ah, he’s dying to kiss me, I know, wants to put his hands under my shirt the way Inky did last night, and he thinks I can’t tell his Guido’s up to no good.
