by André Aciman
I asked if she had a teapot available, because I was going to make tea as in My Night at Maud’s. She had tea bags only, she said, though surely there must be a teapot around—probably very old and very dirty.
Tea bags would do, I said, and proceeded to pour hot water into two mugs, one bearing the name of a city in Umbria, the other of a store in SoHo. “Let it sit a moment, then we’ll pour the water out.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Not a clue. But I will drop an Earl Grey tea bag into each mug.”
The scent filled the kitchen.
Let’s go into the living room, she said, carrying her mug and the CD. She opened a cabinet, turned on the CD player, and before long there it was, the hymn from the Adagio in all of its piercing, heartrending beauty. I love Earl Grey tea, I said. So did she. “Time for a secret agent.”
The sofa, which was new, was placed directly in front of the bay of windows, so that one could see the Hudson while drinking. What a view, I said. I loved the tea, I loved the Hudson, loved the Beethoven, and I loved the Rohmer tea-in-the-afternoon thing. Outside, where the snow was still untouched by tires or footmarks, was where Clara used to sled with her friends after school.
“Now tell me why the Beethoven is you again.”
“Again with the Beethoven!” I was enjoying this.
“Just try, Printz. It’s you because . . . ?” she asked, imitating bated breath.
“Because the Heiliger Dankgesang was written while Beethoven was convalescing and, like me, like you, like everyone really, was lying very low. He had come close to dying and was grateful to be alive.”
“And . . . ?”
“And it’s about a simple handful of notes, plus a sustained, overextended hymn in the Lydian mode, which it loves and doesn’t wish to see end, because it likes repeating questions and deferring answers, because all answers are easy, because it’s not answers and clarity, or even ambiguity, that Beethoven wants. What he’s after is deferral and distended time, a grace period that never expires and that comes like memory, but isn’t memory, all cadence and no chaos. And he’ll keep repeating and extending the process until he’s left with five notes, three notes, one note, no note, no breath. Maybe art is just that, life without death. Life in the Lydian mode.”
The silence between us told me that, in her mind, Clara had right away substituted the word life with another word. Hence her silence.
“Tea in the Lydian mode. Sunset in the Lydian mode . . .” I added to stir some humor between us, at which she almost snickered, meaning: I know what you’re doing, Printz. “Yes, that too,” she said.
I looked over the room. There must have been twenty pillows on the sofas and armchairs, and, in one of the corners by the window, two large plants. The armchairs looked old, but not dowdy, as if the rest of the room were trying to adjust to the new sofa without straining itself. Every electrical outlet seemed packed with what looked like a grape bunch of plugs sticking out of it.
“Is this where you did your homework as a little girl?”
“Homework I did in the dining room, right over there. But I liked this spot for reading. Even when we had guests, I’d sit on an ottoman in the corner and slink away to St. Petersburg. This is also where I played the piano.”
“Perfect childhood?”
“Uneventful. I don’t have bad memories, or great ones either. I just wished my parents had lived longer. I don’t miss them, though.”
I tried to imagine her bedroom. I wondered why she had decided to write her master’s thesis in Hans’s apartment instead of right here.
“Because they made me breakfast and lunch. You’d be surprised how quickly time flies when people cook for you and look after you. I spent six months up there writing away, paying attention to no one.”
I remembered the desk and the room upstairs where I’d waited for her to bring back appetizers, fearing she’d never return, though come back she did, bearing goodies, as she called them, arranged in a Noah’s ark formation—two by two, meaning one for you and one for me, and another for you and me—a room where I kept thinking, Let’s just sit here in this tiny alcove all our own and reinvent the world in our image, with our own firmament extending no farther than the table where all these strangers stood confabulating around the singer with the throaty voice, like aliens who had dematerialized around us and whose shadow was all that remained of them. I had promised to wait another fifteen minutes and not a minute more before leaving the party, but on seeing Clara return with the large dish in her hand, I’d begun to think that this was better than a dream and who was I to meddle with dreams, as I watched those fifteen minutes extend past three in the morning, which was, as everyone led me to believe even on my first night here, yet too early for anyone to leave. That little room seemed the closest I’d ever get to Clara. Now I had come back to the same spot, down by a few flights, a few sunken city layers deeper, and we were still on the surface, still above sea level. I wondered how much farther underground Inky’s soul roamed in this building’s netherworld.
“Above that little room, however, was the balcony.”
The poet was Vaughan and the spot Bellagio and, in between, a lady’s suede shoe stubbing a cigarette that tailspun its way down onto the snow-banked driveway where Igors and Ivans stood smoking like displaced double agents recalling the Cold War.
Remember? Could I ever forget?
The rooms and balconies stacked one on top of the other seemed like versions of a vague and mysterious design presaging something about me or about her or about our time together that I wasn’t quite grasping yet. Was I closer to that something on her floor or was I farther from it than I’d been there three days earlier? Did each floor point to a weaker or to a louder echo of itself? Or was it the echoing effect that was beckoning me right now, rising and falling from floor to floor, like snakes and ladders, like Beethoven’s overextended hymn, which comes on and then withers and then comes back again, timeless, spellbound, and imperishable?
So this is awkward, she had said at the restaurant. I wouldn’t touch that, but I knew she was pleading with me to speak, to go beyond, just say something.
The arrangement of rooms and windows on the same corner line made me think of the elements of the periodic table, all of them lined up in neat rows and columns according to a logic that is totally cryptic and yet, once arranged numerically, no less predictable than fate itself to those who know the cypher. Sodium (atomic number 11) is the uppermost floor with the greenhouse, and right under it is potassium (19), where I nearly passed out, and right under it rubidium (37), the floor with the balcony and the Bloody Mary, and under that cesium (55), Clara’s world. Couldn’t one organize one’s life along a periodic table under the assumption that if one calculated the rule behind the 11, 19, 37, 55 sequence, one could easily predict that the next element would be number 87—francium? Weren’t we going to Rohmer’s France in less than two hours?
She liked things improvised; I liked design.
“And what does this room correspond to on the ground floor?” I asked. “The lobby.” “And below that?” “Storage room, superintendent’s digs.” “And below that?” I asked, as if trying to determine where fate might take me if I were to roam from floor to floor like a flying Dutchman trapped for eternity in the freight elevator. “Bicycle room. Laundry room. China,” she replied.
Here I am trying to determine that there is no below after rock bottom, no after-omega, that beyond the person I see in Clara there is no other person, and yet how like her to tell me that rock bottom does not exist, that there are as many Claras as there are buried tiers and legends on our planet. And how about me?
“Man thinking about first night, wondering what would have happened had he gotten off on wrong floor and gone to a different party.”
“Man would have met different Dutch lady.”
“Yes, but what does present Dutch lady think of that?”
“Man is fishing, so Dutch lady says Go fish.”
How I loved her mind. To every north, my south, to every secret, its sharer, to every glove the partner.
“Printz,” she said. She had stood up to put away our two cups in the kitchen and had momentarily looked out to the darkling view of the Hudson from one of the other large windows in the living room.
“What?” I asked.
“I think you should come and have a look. Here,” she said, producing to my complete surprise a pair of what looked like World War II binoculars. “Look over there.” She pointed toward the George Washington Bridge.
“Is it what I think it is?” I asked.
“I think it might be.”
“Let’s give it five minutes. Maybe it will pass by.”
We waited in suspense, listening to the closing segment of the Beethoven.
But the ship was not drawing any closer, and for all we knew, it might have been stationary; it was already too dark to make out its name. It was also late, and unless we hurried, we’d miss the movies. So she tied her shawl, told me where to find my coat. From the bathroom, I heard her strum a few bars of the Handel on her piano. It meant—or so I wished to think—we could stay indoors, we could order in, we could sit still till it got dark, yet never budge to turn on the lights, because just moving a muscle would break the spell. We should take a cab, I suggested. Absolutely not, we’re walking, she replied.
“So this was you,” she said in the elevator. It took me a moment to realize she was still harping on the Beethoven.
“This was me,” I said almost shyly, without conviction, as though held to an admission I’d made without thinking earlier in the day and now wished I could take back.
“Next time I’ll play you a few sarabandes on the piano. They too have me written all over them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sarabandes are fast and slow. Someone once said sarabandes are danced two steps forward and three steps back—story of my life, if you ask me.”
•
We took a shortcut down West End Avenue, which, unlike Riverside, had already been plowed, with the snow gathered in high banks along the curbs. The walk was all downhill, and when we got there, the ticket holders’ line was longer than we’d anticipated. Someone said they weren’t sold out. When we got our tickets, all I hoped was that we wouldn’t be separated. And if we were? We walk out, she said. We recognized some faces from the previous evenings. Clara, as became her habit, said she’d try to get something from a nearby Starbucks. We liked the slice of lemon cake she had bought last night. In line, I started talking with a couple standing in front of us. She had seen many Rohmer films; he had seen only a few. They had come the night before as well, but he wasn’t convinced. She thought that tonight’s films might actually persuade him of the director’s genius. Did I think he was a genius? He could be, I said. But real people never behaved, much less talked, that way in the real world, he said. “Well,” interrupted Clara, who had gathered the gist of the man’s objections as soon as she joined me on line, “Monet’s paintings look nothing like the real world, nor would we want them to. What’s the real world got to do with art, anyway?”
That seemed to shut him up.
Perhaps the poor man was trying to make conversation. They were so clearly on their second date.
“I wonder where seven-ten with the sloping crew cut is tonight. Oh, there he is.”
I gave him our tickets, and she smiled at him. “Danko, filo donka,” she said in mock-German, a clownish simper on her face. He growled in silence as he had done two nights before. He could sense she was making fun of him.
“I don’t like your attitude,” he finally said. “I love yours,” she retorted. She didn’t know whether to call him Fildanko or Fildenko. So she decided to call him Phildonka, with a ph. She was laughing all to herself, until we saw Phildonka’s face peer at the audience through the slit in the thick, dark curtain and, with the beam of his flashlight, point to an empty seat behind us. “Madam, the seat,” he said, which Clara instantly parodied into madamdasit. “Can you see?” I asked when the credits came on. “Not a bit.” Then she repeated Phildonka madamdasit, and neither of us could stop laughing.
Midway through the Le rayon vert the situation became totally untenable. She opened her purse and produced a nip, which she twisted open and pressed on me to drink from. “What is it?”
“Oban,” she whispered. My neighbor turned his head to me, then looked at the screen, as though determined never to look our way again. “I think we got caught,” she whispered. “He tell Phildonka, you watch, Phildonka get furious.” Suppressed laughter.
Later, the film stopped rolling. At first people sat quietly in their spots, then they began to grow impatient, finally erupting in hisses and taunts that grew louder and louder, as in a high school auditorium. I told her that Phildonka was all at once ticket collector, usher, popcorn maker, and projectionist, which sent her roaring out loud, shouting, “Phildonka, fixitdamovie!” Everyone was now staring at us, and the more they stared, the more she laughed. “Fixitdamovie,” she hollered, everyone joining in the laughter. This the woman who leaned against her kitchen counter a few hours ago and looked so uneasy during an awkward silence between us that all she could do was speak in pidgin English. Same Clara, new Clara, old Clara, the Clara who shut people up and put them in their place, the Clara who stares and weeps, the Clara who, on weekday afternoons after school, would dash out of her building on 106th Street and scamper down the stairway by the Franz Sigel memorial statue to join the other children and sled down the hill or head toward Straus Park, where they all sat on one bench, ratting on their parents—Clara who mourned her parents in silence when she heard the news, but then changed clothes and went to a party—Clara never outgrew the comfort of those hours when her parents drank tea with friends by the large bay of windows facing the Hudson and all she had to do was sneak in among them with a book, and all, all was well and safe in this medieval town along the Rhine which her parents and grandparents had resurrected this side of the Atlantic. Was there a periodic table for her, as she floated her way up, down, and across her various little squares, her Folía and her solemn sarabande wrapped in one and put under a panino press like a sandwich cubano sold on the corner of her block? Or was she like me—but so much better than me?
“What do we do now?” I asked. “I dunno. What do you want to do?” “I think we should have a real drink.” In our rush to leave the theater before something might make us change our minds, she barely had time to throw her scarf over her head or tie her knot. “What happened to the complicated knot?” I asked. Leave the complicated knot alone, she said as she snuggled under my arm, then under my armpit, before I could even put my arm around her. “Let’s catch a cab,” I said. “Usual place?” “Absolutely.”
But the cabs were not coming on the uptown side, so we walked across to catch those headed downtown. This was exactly the corner where I’d spotted her two nights ago. The light was red, so we had to wait, and in the island in the middle of Broadway she began chanting with teeth clattering in the cold, “Phildonka, Phildonka, thy ’larum afar / Gives brings hope to the valiant, and promise of war.”
“Who?” I asked. “Byron.” She couldn’t let go of the word until she saw a cabbie drive by wearing a turban the size of a pumpkin, so that instead of shouting “Hey, cab,” she yelled out, “Da cab, da cab, madamdacab,” into the night, watching the bearded cabbie speed by us with a fare in the backseat no less turbaned than the driver himself. This brought us to such a paroxysm of laughter in the freezing cold that I caught myself thinking, This is all nonsense, but this nonsense is the closest I ever got to happiness or to another human being, and without thinking turned to her and kissed her on the mouth.
She pulled back immediately. Even a hand accidentally put over fire could not have recoiled this fast. She uttered the word no almost before my lips had touched hers, as if she’d been expecting something of the sort and had an answer already prepared. She reminded me of some
one who has her thumb already poised on the head of the mace spray can in her coat pocket, determined to spray and ask questions later, only to realize that the man who walked over to her one night was none other than a lost tourist who’d meant to ask for street directions.
For the first time in my life I felt as though I had tried to assault a woman, or was judged to have attempted it. Had she accompanied the gesture with a slap, I would have been less stunned.
This was not only the first time that I had ever met with resistance while trying to kiss a woman, but the first time where the kiss had come so spontaneously and in so involuntary and unrehearsed a manner that to have it thrown back at me so brusquely felt like an affront to every moment we’d shared for the past four days, an affront to candor, to friendship, to our humanity itself, to everything I was, to the me I was only too happy to let her see. Could my kiss have come so unexpectedly as to have shocked her? Could it have been such an offense? Could it—or could I—have been so repellent?
I did not know how she was taking all this and wanted to make sure it wouldn’t spoil things between us. So I apologized. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”
“No need to apologize. I should have seen this coming. It’s my fault.”
It seemed I was less guilty than I feared. But my innocence was more galling yet. I had misread our giddiness for something it was not.
“Clara, I really hope you’re not offended.”
“I am not offended, I said. You behaved like a fourteen-year-old. No need to apologize like one too.”
That was it. I was apologizing from my heart. This was a gratuitous snub.
“I think I’m going to get you a cab,” I said, “then I’m going to head home as well.”
She was more flummoxed by this than by my kiss.
“Don’t go home like this.”
“You didn’t have to put me down.”
“You didn’t have to kiss me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Just don’t go home, don’t do it.” She looked at me. “It’s so fucking cold. Let’s have a drink. I don’t want this to happen.”
