Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

  A good sign, I thought.

  This is when she took out a recording of Handel’s piano suites. I said nothing, fearing that mentioning music might suddenly bring up her aging cyborg with the giant phonograph. She’s putting on the Handel to fill the silence with something. To show she is aware of the tension, to show she isn’t aware of it, to smooth the ruffles the way a beautiful woman in an elevator once rubbed a hand across the front of my sports lapel to undo a fold in my collar. A conversation opener. Not a conversation opener.

  She must have realized what I was thinking.

  I smiled back.

  If she cradled a mirror version of my unspoken You know that walk, last night, what would it be? I know what you’re thinking. It’s nothing like yours. It’s only the tension makes you want to read my thoughts. Or was it harsher yet: You had no right speaking of Herr Jäcke that way—look what you’ve done to us now.

  We were on Riverside Drive. Soon we would near the 112th Street statue, where, for a while that seemed to last forever two days earlier, I’d enjoyed feeling stranded in the snowstorm. I tried to remember the evening and the snowed-up hillock and the St. Bernard coming out of nowhere, then the elevator, the party, the tree, the woman. Now I was riding in Clara’s car, eager to put the tension behind us. I watched Tilden’s statue come and go. It had seemed so timeless, so blissfully medieval under the snow two days ago; now it scarcely remembered who I was as I sped by in the sports coupe, neither he nor I able to share a thought in common. Later, I promised, maybe we’ll reconnect on my way back, and I’ll stop and ponder the passage of time. See this statue, it and I . . . I would have told her, my way of reminding her how we’d stood on a balcony and watched eternity the other night—the shoe, the glass, the snow, the shirt, Bellagio, almost everything about her aching to turn into poetry. It was poetry, wasn’t it, the walk that night, and the walk last night, You know that walk on 106th Street? I’d been thinking about you all day, all day.

  “Ugly day, isn’t it?”

  I loved overcast gray days, I said.

  Actually, she did too.

  Why say ugly, then?

  She shrugged my question away.

  Probably because it seemed the easiest thing to say? Because we’ll say anything to defuse the tension? For a moment she seemed elsewhere and far away.

  Then, within seconds and without warning—as though this was where she’d been headed even before putting on the Handel, before the tension in the car, perhaps even before buzzing me or before buying the two grandes around the corner—“So”—and right away I knew what she was going to say, I just knew—“Did you think of me last night?” she asked, staring straight before her, as if too busy to look in my direction, though it was clear she’d see through anything I said.

  There was no point beating around the bush. “I slept with you last night.”

  She didn’t say anything, didn’t even cast a sidelong glance.

  “I know,” she replied in the end, like a psychiatrist pleased to see that the medication prescribed almost absentmindedly at the end of one session had had its intended effect by the start of the next. “Maybe you should have called.”

  That came out of nowhere. Or was this her way of pushing what I presumed was the limit between strangers? She was frank when it came to delicate issues. Like me, perhaps, she found admissions easy and bold questions easier yet, but working up to them was probably torment and torture, the way it’s not passion people hide but progressive arousal. Truth jutted out like shards of glass; but it came from an inner skirmish, perhaps because its origin was closer to fear than violence.

  “Would you have wanted me to?” I asked.

  Silence. Then, just as abruptly: “There are muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag to your left.”

  She knew how to play this.

  “Ah, muffins and bagels in the white-gray paper bag to my left,” I echoed, to reassure her that her intentionally obvious evasion wasn’t lost on me, but that I wouldn’t press any further.

  I took forever to examine the contents of the white-gray paper bag. The last thing I had eaten was Clara’s garlic cheese sandwich almost half a day earlier.

  “Permission to eat in car?”

  “Permission granted.”

  I broke off part of the crusty top of the buttery cranberry muffin and held it out to her. She took it and, with her mouth full, bowed twice, to signal thanks.

  “Permission to try other muffin for sake of variety?”

  With her mouth still full and, on the brink of laughter, she simply nodded I go ahead.

  “Must absolutely ferret out the other contents of . . . this here white-gray paper bag to my left.”

  She seemed to shrug a shoulder in mock-laughter. We were over our moment of tension.

  Her cell phone rang.

  “Speak,” she said.

  It was someone asking her a question. “Can’t, I’m in the car. Tomorrow.” She clicked off. Then turned off her phone.

  Silence. “I like this breakfast-on-the-go situation,” I finally said. But she spoke at the same time as I did. “And you didn’t call last night because . . . ?”

  So we’re back to that, I thought. She wasn’t letting it go—was this a good sign, then? And if it was, why did I feel this rush of something terribly awkward and uneasy between us, especially since I had nothing more to be ashamed of after my avowal of moments earlier. Or had I made the avowal to shock her enough that it would freeze the subject on the spot, show I could speak the whole truth if I wanted to, but also on condition we slammed the door on it? The last thing I wanted was to tell her why I hadn’t called, though this and only this was the thing I wished to tell her most now. I wanted to tell her about last night too, how I’d woken up to her when I remembered the light down on her skin at the bar and how the thought of it was still with me when she buzzed me downstairs and I’d wanted to run down in my bathrobe and expose the effect of her voice on my body.

  “Because I wasn’t sure you’d want me to,” I ended up saying.

  Why hadn’t I called her? Was I simply pretending not to want to tell her? Or did I not even know how to begin telling her? What could I tell you, Clara? That I’d abide by your rules even though I didn’t want to? That I didn’t call because I didn’t know what I’d say after It’s me, I don’t want to be alone tonight?

  “Why didn’t I call?” I finally repeated in an effort at candor. The words that unexpectedly came to my rescue were her very own from last night: “Just lying low, Clara. Like you, I suppose. Don’t want to disturb the universe.” I knew it was a cop-out. I was looking straight in front of me, as she was doing, trying to give my admission a tongue-in-cheek air of premeditated but all too visibly suppressed mischief. Had I meant to scorn lying low? Was I using it against her? Or was I taking my fragile copout back by suggesting they were copycat words, not mine, just hers? Or was I trying to show we had more in common than she suspected—though I couldn’t begin to know what that was? Or did I have nothing up my sleeve but desperately needed her to think I did, so that I might believe so myself?

  It did not occur to me until I’d uttered her lying low that I was far closer to the truth about my condition in the car or last night or at the party or in life even than I wished to convey with my mock-struggle to affect an impish look.

  But I also sensed that I hadn’t yet told her why I never called and that perhaps she was waiting for an answer.

  “Look, I think I’m going to need to say something,” I finally began, not knowing where I was going with this, except that saying it with protest and gravity in my voice gave me the impression I was obeying an impulse to speak out meaningful and inexorably honest words that were sure to banish all ambiguity between us.

  “You’re going to need no such thing,” she snapped, making fun of the verb to need, which I’d forgotten she hated.

  “I was just going to say that most of us are in a repair shop of one sort or another.”

  She looked at
me.

  “No, you weren’t.”

  Had she, once again, seen through me before I could? Or, as I preferred to think, was she thinking I was making fun of her in a delayed revenge for last night’s cold shower when she cautioned me not to ruin things?

  To undo the damage I added, “Everyone lies low these days, including those who live happily ever after—they’re lying low too. To be honest, I no longer even know what the phrase means.” Had she asked, I would have found a way of explaining that I had simply taken cover in her words like a child snuggling under a grown-up’s blanket in the middle of a cold night. Borrowing your words, to burrow in your world, in your blanket, Clara, that’s all. Because they explain everything and they explain nothing, because, much as it hurts me to say it, there’s greater truth when you breathe than when I speak, because you’re straight and I’m all coils, because you’ll dash through minefields, unblinking, while I’m stuck here in the trenches on the wrong bank.

  “I think I’m going to need to start asking you for another piece of muffin.”

  We laughed.

  •

  We were not far from the Henry Hudson and would be sidling the river all the way north, she said, especially since she hated the Taconic. And as we drove, eating breakfast on the fly, the way we’d had dinner on the fly last night, I began to think that perhaps what brought us together was none other than a longing to lie low with someone desperate to do the same, someone who asked for very little and might offer a great deal provided you never asked—we were like two convalescents comparing temperature charts, swapping medications, one and the same blanket on both our laps, happy we’d found each other and ready to open up in ways we’d seldom done before, provided each knew convalescence didn’t last forever.

  “So, did you think of me last night?” I tossed the question back at her.

  “Did I think of you?” she repeated, seemingly puzzled, with the air of an unspoken How totally inappropriate! “Maybe,” she finally replied. “I don’t remember.” Then, after a pause, “Probably not.” But the look of guile that I myself had affected a moment earlier told me she meant the exact opposite as well: “Probably not. I don’t remember.” Then, after a pause, “Maybe.”

  In this game, which had once again erupted between us, did one score more points by feigning indifference? Or by feigning to feign indifference? Or by showing she had cleverly spotted but sidestepped what was an obvious trap and, in doing so, had managed to throw it back at me war-in-the-trenches style just before it exploded in midair? Or did she score higher points by showing that she was, yet once more, the bolder and more honest of the two, if only because scoring points was the farthest thing from her mind?

  I looked at her again. Was she counterfeiting a repressed grin now? Or was she simply grinning at the scoreboard I was busily checking in my desperate attempt to catch up to her?

  I held out a piece of muffin for her, meaning, Peace. She accepted. There was now less to say than when there’d been tension between us. So I stared out at the river till I caught sight of a large, stationary cargo ship anchored right in the middle of the Hudson, with the words Prince Oscar painted in large mock-Gothic red-and-black script.

  “Prince Oscar!” I said to break the silence.

  “I’ll have another piece of Prince Oscar,” she replied, thinking I had for some reason decided to call the muffin Prince Oscar.

  “No, the ship.”

  She looked to her left.

  “You mean Printz Oskár!”

  “Who is he?”

  “Never heard of him. An obscure royal cadet in a Balkan country that no longer exists.”

  “Except in Tintin books,” I added. Or in old Hitchcock movies, she countered. Or he’s a short, stubby, monocled South American dictatóremperadór type who tortures prepubescent girls in front of their fathers, then rapes their grandmothers. Neither of us was succeeding in making the joke come alive. We were speeding along the Drive when a car suddenly swerved into our lane from the right.

  “Printz Oskár up your mother’s,” she yelled at the car.

  Her BMW swooped over to the fast lane and sped up to the car that had cut in front of us. Clara stared at the driver in the adjacent car and mouthed another insult: Preeeeentz-os-kááááááááááár!

  The driver turned his face to us, leered, and, exhibiting his left palm, flicked and then waved his middle finger at us.

  Without wasting another second, Clara smirked back and, out of the blue, shook her hand and made a totally obscene gesture. “Printz Oskár to you, dickhead!” The man seemed totally trounced by the gesture and raced ahead of us.

  “That’ll teach him.”

  Her gesture left me more startled than the driver. It seemed to come from an underworld I would never have associated with her or with Henry Vaughan or with the person who’d spent months poring over Folías and then in the wee hours sang Monteverdi’s “Pur ti miro” for us. I was shaken and speechless. Who was she? And did people like this really exist? Or was I the weirdo, so easily shocked by such a gesture?

  “Any Printz Oskár left?” she queried, holding out her right hand.

  What on earth did she mean?

  “Un petit Printz muffín.”

  “Coming up.”

  “I think there might be another Printz left,” she said.

  “Already eaten up.”

  She stared at the two cups of coffee.

  “Mind putting one more sugar in my Oskár?”

  She must have sensed her gesture had upset me. Calling everything Printz Oskár was her way of defusing my remaining shock over her gesture. But it also reminded me how easy it was to create a small world of our own together, with its own lingo, inflections, and humor. Another day together and we’d add five new words to our vocabulary. In ten days we wouldn’t be speaking English any longer. I liked our lingo, liked that we had one.

  Just ahead of us another large barge came into view. It reminded me of the giant barge anchored among the floes off 106th Street on the night of the party. I’d been thinking of the word worship back then.

  “Another Printz Oskár,” I said, my turn to speak our lingo.

  “This is more like King Oskár,” she corrected as we watched what turned out to be a dinosaur barge with a very tiny, cocky head jutting at its very, very back, immense, ugly, brainless. There was no way such a thing could have crossed the Atlantic on its own. Probably came down another river. Clara sipped her coffee. “You stirred it good.”

  She removed the Handel.

  “Bach?” she said, as if to ask whether I minded Bach.

  “Bach is good.”

  She slipped the CD in. We listened to the piano. “We’ll be hearing this very piece again when we get there, so get ready.”

  “You mean at Herr Knöwitall’s house?”

  “Don’t be a Printz, will you. You’ll like him, I promise, and I know he’ll like you too.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, seemingly absorbed by the Bach and all the while pretending I was struggling to withhold a dismissive comment about Herr Knöwitall.

  “What if he turns out to be a total bore?” I finally said, unable to hold back.

  “What if you turn out to like him? I just want you to know him. Not too much to ask. Stop being so difficult.”

  I liked being told to stop being difficult. It brought us closer, as though she had thrown five or six sofa cushions at me before laying her head on me. What I liked wasn’t just the air of familiarity and reproof that brought us closer; it wasn’t even the sarcasm with which she finally said “You’re a terrible Printz Oskár!” meaning a terrible snob, terribly childish, obtuse—but because “Stop being so difficult” is precisely what everyone had always said to me. She was speaking my language from way back. It was like finding the sound of one’s childhood in an emptied apartment, or the scent of cloves and grandmother spices in the muffin bag Clara had brought this morning.

  “Here, take this piece,” I said, on finding a small
, hidden muffin.

  “You have it.”

  I insisted. She thanked me exactly as she had the first time, by nodding her head in front of her.

  Clara liked speeding in her sports car. The Saw Mill Parkway in the light fog suddenly opened up, an endless stretch to places unknown and unseen and that I wished might remain so forever.

  “Are you good at math?”

  “Not bad.” Why was she asking?

  “Finish this sequence then: one, two, three, five, eight . . .”

  “Easy. It’s the Fibonacci sequence. Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four . . .”

  A few moments later. “How about this one: one, three, six, ten, fifteen . . .”

  It took a while.

  “Pascal’s triangle: twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-six . . .”

  Always curt and snappy. “Now try this sequence: fourteen, eighteen, twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-four . . .”

  I thought hard for a moment. But I couldn’t solve it.

  “Can’t.”

  “It’s staring you in the face.”

  I tried all sorts of hasty calculations. Nothing. Why was she always good at making me feel so clumsy and clueless?

  “Can’t,” I repeated.

  “Forty-two, fifty, fifty-nine, sixty-six . . .” She was giving a few hints.

  “How do you figure?”

  “The stops on the Broadway local. You don’t see what’s right in front of you, do you?”

  “Seldom do.”

  “Figures.”

  Clara Brunschvicg, I wanted to say, what is the Brunschvicg sequence? “Clara, I didn’t call last night because I chickened out, okay? I’d even taken out my télyfön, but then thought you wouldn’t want me to. So I didn’t.”

  “So you made love to me instead.”

  “So I made love to you instead.”

  •

  She had picked the right day. Everything was white. Not a chance that the sun was going to break through today. And yet despite the hoarfrost, which cast a chill layer around us from the sloping hood of her silver-gray car to the silver-white lane, something warm had settled between us in the car—part Clara’s mood, part the breakfast she had brought along, part Christmas, and part the afterglow of last night that seemed to have gathered around Did you think of me last night? like an aura on a saint’s figure, solemn and speechless.