by André Aciman
“Why? It’s the truth.”
“You’re the one who put the rock there four nights ago, not me.”
“Maybe. But I had no idea it would turn into such a convenient rock for you as well.”
Was this the truth, or had Clara seen something I’d been avoiding? Did the rock between us really work for me? Was my habit of deferring and doubting and reading into so many things simply my way of keeping my distance by drawing closer? What doubts, what fears was I cloaking? Had I, perhaps, been blaming her flippant mood, or her string of other-peoples, or her caustic tongue, the better to blame the tip of an iceberg that hardly stood between us when it was really my miles and masses of hardened ice underneath that would cause the real damage?
“Look,” I began, as I shifted in my place. Perhaps I was trying to change the drift of our talk, or perhaps I wanted the two of us to think I was finally about to say something momentous that might stem the downhill course of where we seemed to be headed. Perhaps I wanted to throw her off by sounding very solemn and serious—this was going to be a time for calling a spade a spade. In fact, I had no idea what I was about to say.
“The other night I read you loud and clear, and ever since, I have not strayed. I haven’t even raised the subject. I said it already: we’re like two blocks of ice trapped under a bridge—you’re lying low, and I’m too frozen on the spot to risk anything. Let me just say, though, that this is unlike anything I’ve known. You read me better than I read myself, and part of the joy of being together is just that: discovering that you and I are the same person in two bodies, like identical twins.”
This was worse than I sing in the shower. The same person in two bodies—seriously?
“We’re not twins.” Clara overlooked nothing. “I know you’d like to think it, but we’re not. We’re very similar, but we’re also very different. One of us will always lapse into wanting more—”
“And this someone is me, of course, right?”
“It’s me too, if you cared enough to look.”
“I do care enough to look—what did you think?”
“Then you should have seen it coming, Printz.”
Clara made me order another round of fries.
“You’re not going to eat more fries by yourself?”
“You order a pecan pie and we’ll share both. With whipped cream—the kind that comes in a spray can.” The carefree gesture with which she threw her hair back said she was going all out tonight.
The waitress must have grimaced at the suggestion of the spray can. But then something told me that Clara asked for it precisely for its shock value.
Then she did something she’d never done before. She took my hand and placed it on her cheek. “Better,” she said, as if she were just speaking to herself, or to a friend with whom she was trying to make up. I let my hand rest on her cheek, then caressed her neck, right under her ear, the exact spot where I had kissed her so feverishly when she arrived in the theater a few hours before and, in the heat of the moment, must have caught her totally unprepared for my kisses. Even now, she didn’t seem to mind; she leaned into my hand, like a kitten whose cheek you might have rubbed absentmindedly but who then wants more of the same. “But I have to tell you something.” All I could do was stare at her, saying nothing, just keep caressing her face now that I saw I could. Then, without thinking at all, I let my finger touch her lips, and from her lips let it move to her teeth—I loved her teeth, and though I knew that this had crossed the line and gone beyond the harmless hand on a cheek she’d asked from me, still, I was no longer the owner of that hand, she was, for she kissed my finger first, then held it delicately between her teeth, and then touched it with the point of her tongue. I loved her forehead and rubbed it as well, and the skin of her eyelids, I loved it too, everything, everything, and that smile that made silence come and go and made my heart skip the instant it left her face. What were we doing? “I want us to speak,” she began, “because I want you to know something.” I had no idea what she meant, but knew that if she seemed to be yielding with one side of her, she was just about ready to take back everything with the other. “Time for a secret agent,” she said.
“Wait.” I put my hand in my coat pocket and pulled out a sealed packet of her brand.
“You’re joking!” She tapped the pack, then opened it. “I won’t ask what this was doing in your pocket.”
“Don’t bother, you know already.”
I’ve always envied people who put their cards on the table—even when they don’t have a hand—people who are willing to call a conveniently ambiguous situation by its name if only to clear the air. She was right: I didn’t trust her, I feared being set up. Any moment now, she’d tell me the one thing I dreaded most. You do know what I want to say? I think so. What? And I’d fall for the oldest trick in the world. Chastened by her frank gaze and by that hint of reprobation to come, I caught myself tempted to preempt her, if only to say it myself and not hear it from her. That we should cool it, maybe see other people, not misread this for what it’s not, it’s not you, it’s me—I’d been expecting this speech for days already. Then, by way of capping all this, I finally said, “I know you have a whole life outside of Rohmer and me.” It was meant to show I harbored no jealousy or illusions. But I also wanted her to read that the same might be said regarding aspects of my life about which she knew very, very little.
“Can I be blunt?” So she wasn’t going to let me diffuse what she had started to say. “Yesterday afternoon when you came by I could have asked you and I know you would have said yes—but it would have been more by way of consent, just as had you insisted after you tried to rape and bludgeon me last night, I’d have agreed, but that would have been no more than a lukewarm yes. By the time we left the bar last night, you knew I was of two minds anyway—and don’t deny it.”
I was about to affect surprise. But she cut me short. “Don’t bother. You knew.”
This was more frank than anything I’d expected. She was honing in on everything, and I suddenly felt this wave of anxiety wash over me, because I didn’t know yet whether she was about to bring out into the open everything we’d left tactfully unsaid during our evenings together or whether she was simply going to eviscerate me and expose me for the shifty, jittery, wanting man I’d always known I was.
“Why call it consent if we’re both willing?” I threw in.
“Because you and I both know there is something holding us back, and neither of us knows what it is. If I cared less, I’d say I didn’t want to get hurt, but I don’t give a damn about getting hurt, just as I don’t care if you get hurt. If I cared less, I’d also say it would ruin our friendship. But I don’t give a fuck about friendship either.”
“I thought we did have a friendship, or were working up to one.”
“Friendships are for other people, and neither of us wants friendship. We’re too close for friendship.”
Was there no hope for anything, then? Suddenly all I could think of was the word heartbreak. You’re breaking my heart, Clara, and these are cruel and cutting words that cause heartache, and rupture of blood vessels. My heart was indeed racing. This was so sad that, for the first time in my life, I suddenly found myself on the verge of crying because a woman had said no to me before I’d even had a chance to ask anything. Or had I asked her already? Hadn’t I been asking for days now? Did men really cry like this—and if they did, where had I been all my life? I’ll always hate you for this, for bringing me to the abyss and forcing me to stare down, the way they force a detainee to watch the brutal execution of his cellmate, only to be told after, but not before he’s witnessed the atrocity, that they had no plans to execute him at all, in fact he was free to go.
She must have noticed. Maybe she’d already seen it once this very afternoon with Inky. “Please don’t,” she said, as she had the last time, “because if you start, I’ll start, and once this happens, then all signals get crossed, all systems go down, and we’ll be back to even before we starte
d this conversation.”
“Maybe I’d rather be where we were before we started. This talk is going to places I’m not going to like.”
“Why? You’re not surprised. I’m not surprised.”
It swept through me before I knew what was happening. This was going to be totally out of order, and it might bring everything we’d been saying down to a crappy, hackneyed plane, but I had nothing left to lose, no dignity, no ammunition, no water in my gourd, and I felt it was worth throwing this last vestige of pride into the fire the way, on very cold days, a freezing bohemian poet might throw his manuscript into the fire, to stay warm, find love, spite art, and show fate a thing or two.
“Let’s just face it,” I said, “you’re just not attracted. Just say that the physical thing isn’t there. I don’t do it for you. Say it. It won’t tear me up. But it will clear the air.”
“You’re always playing, even when you’re serious. It has nothing to do with physical attraction. If anything, it’s because I am attracted that we’ve come this far.”
This was news! Had I so thoroughly misread her that it had to hit me in the face—or was this her turn to play with me, play any card, so long as she averted the silence she probably hated as much as I did.
“So, according to you, all this should flatter me,” I said. I was being ironic. Or perhaps I wanted her to say it once more in clear and plain language.
“Flattery is irrelevant. I don’t give a fuck about flattery, and neither do you. It’s not what either of us wants.”
“Why, do you know what you want?”
“Do you?”
“I think I do. I’ve wanted it from the very first, and you’ve known it.”
“Not true. You’re knocking at a door, but you’re not even sure you want it opened.”
“How about you?”
“I’m not knocking, I’ve pushed open the door already. But I can’t say I’ve stepped in either.”
“Maybe it’s because you don’t trust me.”
“Maybe.”
And then it hit me. “You’re not afraid of getting hurt, or of being rejected, are you?” I said. “You’re terrified of what you may not find. You’re afraid of being disappointed.”
“Aren’t you?” she asked right away, as though she’d known it all along.
“Petrified,” I replied. I was exaggerating.
“Petrified,” she repeated. “This doesn’t flatter either of us, does it? Or maybe we’re just two grown-up scaredy-cats. Just scaredy-cats.”
I didn’t like where this was going either.
“Petrified or not, let me say this, then,” I said. “I think of you all the time. All the time, all the time, all the time. It’s a fact of life. I’m just happy this is a magical, snow globe, holiday week—but I’ve been with you every minute of every day. I eat with you, I shower with you, I sleep with you. My pillow is tired of hearing your name.”
It didn’t seem to surprise her.
“Do you call it Clara?”
“I call it Clara, I tell it things I’ve told no one in my life, and if I have more to drink tonight, what I have to tell you will make it difficult to face you again tomorrow.”
The heavy silence brooding between us told me I had overplayed my hand and made a dreadful mistake. How to backpedal now?
“If you need to know, it’s hardly any different here,” she said, almost reluctantly, something like halting sorrow straining her voice, the equivalent of a helpless shrug during a moment where words fail. Was she bluffing? Or was she raising the stakes? “I say your name when I’m alone.”
Was this the same girl who didn’t sing in the shower?
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” I asked.
“You never said anything, Mr. Amphibalence, me-Door-number-three man.”
“I was playing by your rules.”
“What rules?”
I looked at her more baffled than ever. The admonitions, the roadblocks, the subtle warnings—were they nothing?
The fries arrived. She squeezed a dollop of ketchup onto them, and then added more. She was about to say something. Before speaking, though, she picked up a fry with her thumb and forefinger and, while it awaited its baptismal ketchup, she kept staring at it, lost in what looked like stray thoughts and misgivings, as though her fry had become an amulet or a sacred relic or a bone fragment from a patron saint who was being asked to guide her in this difficult pass. “I’ll say this much, and you’re free to believe me or not, to laugh at me or not, but I’m ready to go all the way with you,” she said. “This afternoon I left your home feeling I was making the worst mistake of my life, because I didn’t feel I’d ever be able to repair it. The minute I saw Inky, I had to run away on any pretext, not sure I’d find you, not sure you’d be alone, not sure you’d even be happy to see me again, but I chanced it and I came. I left a million messages, if you care to check.”
I hadn’t checked, precisely because I did not want to find none waiting.
“I kept hoping you’d call, which is why in the end I left the house and went to the gym.”
“Now that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And you turned off your télyfön for the same reason, I suppose.”
There was no point denying it.
“It’s as I said, Printz: I’m ready.”
I didn’t know what she meant exactly, but was afraid to ask. What was clear was that her sentence had the assertive dare of a Your move.
“Could you just kiss me now and not argue so much?”
She leaned over toward me, reached for my neck, lowered my turtleneck, and kissed me straight on the neck—something unusually long and sensual for a first kiss.
“I’ve been staring at your skin for an hour. I needed to taste it,” she said, palming the skin around my eyes.
“And I’ve been staring at your teeth for days now.”
This was the first of many kisses. Her breath tasted of bread and Viennese butter cookies.
•
Last call was on the house, courtesy of the waitress, who’d been working the late shift every night this week. We were sitting on the banquette, unable to move, fearing that any movement or change might break the spell and pull us back to doubts and heartbreak waiting around the corner. When Clara returned from the bathroom, she put her arms around me and immediately resumed kissing me on the mouth. I could not believe how fast things were moving. “You taste fantastic,” I said.
Then she told me: “Just don’t make me think this is happening in my head. Because I know you,” she said. “And I know myself. I want this, but I also know what you’ll drive me to do, and I pray, pray, you don’t.” I had no idea what she meant. “Don’t you have any trust, any faith?” I asked. “None.” In moments of extreme tenderness she spoke with a serrated tongue.
It occurred to me she must have thought the same of me. Had she asked me if I trusted anyone, I would have said the exact same thing.
As some point I said I had to go to the bathroom. “If you take more than one minute, I’ll go into high pandangst and think you’ve escaped through some back, rat-infested alley, and I’ll just leave—because I know I can’t take it.”
“I’m just going to pee, okay?”
But on the way to the bathroom the thought did occur to me: I’ll sleep with her tonight, then tomorrow we’ll see. I wondered if she could get even more passionate in bed than she’d been already on the banquette, or would she suddenly turn out to be the type who needed this done, and that done, and more of this and less of that, and no biting please, or was it going to be beastly lovemaking where we’d tear each other’s clothes off as soon as we were behind the elevator door and out of her doorman’s sight? Or would there be candlelight, with Straus Park behind us and the Prince Oscar looking after us outside our window as we stood naked together and watched the night like two sleepless starlings listening again and again, and many more times again to Beethoven’s “Song of Thanksgiving”? Or would it be as it always was with her: chill
winter gusts in a minefield of scalding geysers? In the bathroom I caught sight of my face in the mirror and smiled at myself. I had drunk three, no four Scotches. “Hi,” I finally said out loud. “Hi,” he responded. Then I looked down at Signor Guido, my patient foster-child of silence. “Who’s the man?” I finally asked. “You’re the man,” I said as I watched him perform his ancillary function. “Who loves you?” “You do,” he said, still wearing a simper on his bald pate. “This is your moment, and tonight is your night, you intrepid scalawag, you.”
While standing in front of the urinal, I rested my forehead against the cool, glistening steel pipe connected to the flusher, where condensation had collected, and simply stood there, enjoying its cooling feel as I pushed my forehead into the large hexagonal steel nut, now smiling at myself each time I heard the words repeated in my mind: Who’s the man? You’re the man. Who’s the man? You’re the man. I was almost on the point of bursting out laughing. The most beautiful moment of my life happened before a urinal. Just please, please don’t make me stop loving her, don’t make me squelch this or wake up sated and indifferent. Don’t.
When I returned to Clara, she looked totally alarmed.
“What did you do to your face? Did you fall?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I was too busy trying not to look unsteady as I sat back down. “You have something that looks like a gash—no, a bruise—on your forehead. She was touching it, lovingly. Could this woman who could cut me with two syllables show such tenderness for my forehead? I touched my forehead. No doubt about it; there was an indentation in my skin. Was I bleeding badly? How could this have happened? Then I remembered. The steel nut—I must have been leaning forever against the large nut on the steel pipe.
“Just looking at it makes me want to touch you. What took you so long? What were you really doing in there, Printz?”
“Clara Brunschvicg, you shock me.”
And we kissed again. In the fog of our caresses and lovemaking, I understood why people bring their mouths together. This is why people kiss, I kept thinking, the way an alien from distant constellations might say to himself, after trying out a human body, So this is why they do it. What had I been doing before? I wanted to ask. Whom had I filled my life with all this time? And what had all these women been doing in it? Why, for which reason, what pleasure, what end, when it was so very clear that small love was taken and less given back? Had everyone been a Sunday filler? What rose gardens had I slumbered through and what could we have been swapping in the din-filled Exchanges of Love? Or did it not matter, so long as we kept the ships coming and commerce going and the piers bustling—people, action, places, cargo, buy, sell, borrow—yet everyone, in the end, always, always alone when night falls on the dale of pandangst.
