Eight White Nights

by André Aciman

I was—there was no question—losing it, yet obviously faking composure quite well. No one was staring at me, no one even noticed me, so I wasn’t about to embarrass myself. I finally understood why people who have heart attacks in public suffer on many counts: for the pain, for the shame, for the pure fear of falling to pieces in full view of every tourist and every messenger and hot-dog vendor. Just don’t let me soil myself. If I have to die of a broken heart, let me go gently and vanish at dusk through narrow streets and put an end to this bungled life that started on the wrong foot. Was I dying?

  No sooner had the question crossed my mind than I decided to rush myself to Mount Sinai. I hopped into a cab and told the driver to take me to the emergency room. I knew the drill well from taking my father there several times. Simply tell the guard that you’re having chest pains and they roll out the red carpet and let you bypass all the stops. Indeed, they immediately put me on a bed. Next to me with his mother was a ten-year-old boy who was bleeding from the leg while a nurse was patiently removing shards of glass with a pair of surgical tweezers, speaking softly, telling him that there were a couple more, and a couple more pieces after that, but that he was such a brave boy, not one tear, not one, she kept saying with her comforting Jamaican lilt as she dabbed the wound ever so softly with a piece of gauze held delicately in between her thumb and her index finger.

  The resident intern was wearing Crocs.

  I explained that my heart was racing.

  I had nausea too.

  A strange film was clouding over my eyes. As if fog were closing in. Was closing in. Were, was, I couldn’t decide which.

  “Any disorientation?” he asked.

  Big-time, I answered, thinking back to the stairway spilling down from the Met over into the lagoon on the way to the Lido. Ever been to the Lido, Doc?

  He ordered a regular cardiogram.

  I had expected an echocardiogram, maybe an angiogram. I was dying, wasn’t I?

  Ten minutes later: “Everything checks out fine. You’re a very healthy man.”

  “I thought I was having a heart attack.”

  “You were having a panic attack.”

  I looked at him.

  “Maybe you’ve got too much on your mind?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Family issues?”

  I was single.

  Love troubles—heartbreak?

  I suppose.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I was about to tell him when I realized that Tell me about it meant Say no more, we’ve all been there.

  If all this was as common as he let on, why hadn’t I experienced this before?

  Because you’ve never loved anyone, Printz.

  What had I been doing these past eight-and-twenty years, then?

  Barely been alive, Printz, barely been to the rose garden. Waiting for me, that’s what. You came to life when we stepped onto the balcony on that first night and stood watching the beam together, you and I, Printz, and you watched my suede shoe kick the cigarette butt down to floors measureless to man, you and I leaning together on the parapet like two notes on the same staff, both of one mind, as you stared at my breast in my very crimson blouse.

  Where had I been all this time?

  Where were you? You were waiting. Except you grew to love the waiting more than the love you waited for.

  You see, Doctor, I was just pretending to be like others who find love if they look hard enough for it. But I wasn’t like them. I was just pretending. I’m like her. It’s love I want, not others.

  “Take this,” he said, producing a Xanax in his palm like a magician bringing his hand to your ear to retrieve a coin. He watched me swallow it with the help of a tiny plastic cup of water, then tapped the front of my shoulder a few times and let his palm rest there in a sympathetic gesture of fellowship and male solidarity: We’re all in this together, bro. The last time someone had touched me on the shoulder was less than twelve hours ago. “You’ll be all right. Just rest awhile.” He grabbed a stool and sat next to me to take my pulse again. Just having someone sit next to me like this was comforting.

  He reminded me of Officer Rahoon. Officer Rahoon, whom I’d totally forgotten, but who stood over me now as policemen do when they gather around your stretcher in the ER, filling regulation forms and papers, their walkie-talkies squawking away loudly, as they seek to comfort you while confabulating about this or that hockey player last night with the Filipino head nurse. His apparition now made me think of a me who had stopped being me; Rahoon was the last person to see me before I’d molted that old self on the night after the party. Perhaps I’d gone back to Straus Park that night and sat there the way snakes seek out a hidden, scraggly rock against which to squeeze and rub their old skin off. Perhaps this was why I liked to return there every night, and had wanted to come back there last night as well, because there was a part of me that either didn’t want to let go of its old slough or hadn’t shed it completely, and coming back felt safer than going forward. Two steps forward, three steps back. Story of my life too, Clara. This was where I would heal, not here in a hospital. Suddenly I was dying to go back and sit in the park. Just sit and find myself, just sit and learn why I kept coming back to Clara’s world.

  Perhaps I was right not to sleep with her last night: had she pulled any of this after making love to me, I’d have slit my throat with one of her father’s kitchen knives, killed myself first, then her.

  Or maybe I was no different than she was. She had simply beaten me to it. I remembered that moment when, alone in the bathroom at the bar last night, I’d planned to slip away after making love to her. This is about tonight, I had kept telling myself, but make no promises about tomorrow. We were each other’s mirror image. Is this why I wanted her so badly?

  “Maybe talking to someone might help,” said the intern.

  I had never “talked” to someone before, I said.

  “I’m surprised,” he said.

  Why was he surprised? Because I was a visibly self-tormented, insecure, prone-to-self-hatred, depressive type you’d never think of leaving alone before an open window on the eleventh floor?

  “No, it’s just that everyone has a setback at one point or another.”

  And my point was now, right? A setback. Was this the polite way of naming what had happened to me? A setback. I see eternity one day, and the next we’re talking setbacks?

  All I could think of asking was how long they were planning on keeping me there.

  Till my heartbeat was back to normal.

  Here was a prescription for more of these. And: No caffeine. No drinking. Lay off cigarettes too.

  Six days with the world’s most beautiful woman and I was a wreck headed for the loony bin.

  Suddenly I heard my phone ring.

  “It’s the télyfön,” I said.

  “I’m going to need to ask you not to use your cell here.”

  I could just imagine Clara responding to such contemptible blandspeak: Are you needing to ask me now, or are you going to need to ask me in some fabricated moment in an undefined, politely ambiguous future?

  “I have to take this call,” I told the doctor. “It’s from”—and I whispered the word—“the heartbreak.”

  “Well, make it very brief, and don’t get all wired up again.”

  “I am all wired up,” I said, pointing to the wires of the cardiogram still suctioned to my body.

  “I’m free,” she said. As always she cut to the chase, then greeted you.

  I looked about me and couldn’t help snickering: But I’m not.

  Oh?

  I’m actually tied up. Then, realizing the joke had gone far enough—“I’ve got wires stuck in every part of my body.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She was yelling, and I was hoping that junior-internist here might get a sense of the madwoman I’d been up against these past few days.

  “I’m in a hospital.”

  A grapeshot of questions. She was coming ov
er.

  No need to. I can take care of myself. They’re letting me go.

  Where was she?

  On Printz Street—added emphasis—about to hail a cab headed uptown. Was using my nickname a good sign, or was she just making nice to cover up being downtown still?

  I put a finger on the mouthpiece of my cell phone. “How long before I can walk?” I asked.

  The young resident made an almost disappointed smirk. Time to remove these wires, put my clothes on, fill out the paperwork.

  “Can you meet me downstairs in my building?”

  “I can do that.”

  I can do that. What on earth did I can do that mean? Did she have to speak Amphibabble too? Didn’t everyone?

  Was she coming because she was eager to, wanted to, or was hers a lukewarm acquiescence bordering on indifference?

  Finally, there it was: Don’t keep me waiting long.

  •

  “What were you doing in the hospital?” she asked.

  She was sitting on a sofa in the lobby of my building. She had removed her shawl and her coat, so she had to have been waiting for a while. When she stood up, she looked absolutely stunning. Slender, dark colors everywhere, her hazel-eyed beauty simply forbidding. Diamond stud sitting on her sternum. Last time I’d seen it was ages ago. All of it reminded me that whatever bridges we’d crossed last night had been completely blown up this morning. The corvus had tumbled off the ship.

  “I’m just staying for a few minutes. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  Did she want to come upstairs?

  “Yes, but only for a few minutes.”

  I felt weak and sapped. I had no stomach for emotional haggling and tussling. I was just relieved to see her in the very same place where we’d picnicked twenty-four hours before. But she was chilly, wasn’t sitting. The meter was obviously running.

  “So, are you going to tell me what happened?” she asked once we were in the elevator.

  From the way she framed the question, I could tell she’d already guessed the answer. There was no point hiding the truth.

  “Call it recurrent shell shock from my years in the trenches.”

  “In the what?”

  “In the bog, in the quag, the trenches.”

  She nodded. But she seemed to have forgotten. Or perhaps she hadn’t. “It was a panique attack,” I finally said, hoping she’d pick up the rhyme with garlique. She shook her head.

  She took her time getting out of the elevator, and once again was brusquely shoved out by the door. “This is not the time.” She turned to the elevator, then kicked it in the equivalent of its shin. “Fucking beast. Fucking, fucking beast.”

  We burst out laughing.

  I opened the door. Thank God I had tidied up the place this morning. Someone next door was cooking what appeared to be a late-afternoon soup. How I wished we’d had breakfast together this morning.

  I turned on the lights. The day had aged so fast.

  She dropped her coat on one of the chairs, yet another sign that she wasn’t staying long. “I’ll make tea.”

  Had they given me something?

  Yes, they’d given me something.

  “I disappear a few hours and you end up in the ER. Nice.”

  I looked at her. I didn’t have to say anything.

  “You’re blaming me, aren’t you?”

  “No, not blaming. But the tone this morning was so different from last night’s, it sent me into a tailspin.”

  “So you are blaming me.”

  “It’s not a question of blaming. It’s more like I don’t recognize me, and I don’t recognize you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s right what?”

  “We change. We change our minds.”

  “That fast?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What happened to yesterday?”

  “You’re one to ask.” She paused for a second. “Besides, I can’t be tied to yesterday.”

  She walked over to where she must have stowed away the chocolate cookies, found the box exactly where she’d left it yesterday, and freely took two out. It thrilled me that she was behaving as if she were at home. At other times, though, I’d seen her take out a dish and stack four to six of these cookies, arranged, as I suddenly remembered from our very first night, in a Noah’s ark formation.

  Neither of us had made a gesture to boil water. She’d obviously given up on tea and had headed directly for the cookies. Bad sex tea. Very, very bad sex tea, I remembered.

  “Look, I don’t want us to fight.”

  Obviously I must have raised my voice when asking about yesterday.

  “What makes you think I want to?”

  “Well, you’re obviously upset.”

  “Any idea why I might be?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, since you’re about to anyway.”

  From the tone of her voice I could tell she’d been through this exact conversation endless times before. She dreaded its coming and could probably spot all of its signposts, its shortcuts, cross streets, tangents, and escape routes long before I could.

  “I’m sure you already know what I have to say.”

  “I think I do. But go ahead,” she added, with an implied If it makes you feel any better.

  “Maybe there’s no point.”

  “Maybe not”—meaning, Suit yourself.

  “Let’s just say I’m sorry you changed so fast.”

  She stared at her cookie like a child being chastised, or like someone trying to gain time, collect her thoughts, and come up with the right answer. Or just sitting out a cloud. How I wished that she’d tell me I was completely off the mark, that she hadn’t changed at all since last night, that I should stop putting words in her mouth and making her say things she hadn’t meant to say at all.

  “Maybe that’s my hell.”

  “What’s your hell?”

  “Always letting people down.”

  “Do you blame them?”

  “No. I can’t say I do. I set them up for it, then I let them down.”

  She made it sound that setting people up for disappointment was far worse than the disappointment that rushed them to the hospital.

  I stared at her. “Just tell me one thing.”

  “What?”

  Her What had come too quickly, as if it were concealing a timorous What now behind a seemingly confident, open-faced Ask-anything-you-don’t-scare-me-of-course-I’ll-answer.

  “Was it because we didn’t make love last night?”

  “That would make me cruel and spiteful. It had nothing to do with last night.”

  “Then it’s worse than I thought.”

  “Maybe we just got carried away. Or maybe we ended up wanting the same thing—but for entirely different reasons.”

  “Your reason was not my reason?”

  “I don’t think it was.” Then, to soften her words but to show that softening them was not going to change her mind: “Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “And you’d warned me against that.”

  “I did.”

  “And I listened.”

  “You did.”

  “Until you told me that I shouldn’t have.”

  “Until I told you that you shouldn’t have.”

  “We’re a mess, aren’t we?”

  “A big mess.”

  I was standing in front of her, and suddenly put both hands on her face, rubbing this face with its lips and hazel eyes that meant more to me than sunlight, speech, and anything inside or outside this room. I kissed her, knowing, with a certainty I had never encountered before, that she would kiss me as passionately and as desperately as I longed to kiss her, and that she would do this because the escape hatches between us were wide open and tomorrow was no longer in our vocabulary. It would be aimless, desultory lovemaking, safe and shiftless—with, once again, my usual blend of goodwill and tact, not the stuff of last night.

  She kissed my neck as she had last night. I loved the way her hip
s moved with mine, the way we held each other tight, not letting the air creep between us. We were, it took a second to notice, almost dancing. Or was it lovemaking and I didn’t know it?

  I unbuttoned her shirt and let my hand travel under it. For the first time ever, my hand touched the breast I’d been dreaming of for days. She didn’t resist at all, but she wasn’t participating. I let her be. Moments, just moments later, she was already buttoning her shirt.

  “Please don’t,” I asked. I want to see you naked, want to think of you when you’re gone, want never, ever to forget that you stood naked in this room by the failing light of the day rubbing yourself against me, with your breath that smells of bread and of old Vienna and of the bakery by your house where last night you and I, just you and I—

  “I really have to go.”

  I’d known this from the very start. She had looked dressed up downstairs. Not just dressed up for the long lunch she seemed happy to have cut short when she called me at the hospital, but dressed for something that was due to occur yet and about which she hadn’t said a word.

  And then I saw it. She had kissed me no less savagely than she’d kissed Inky or Beryl at the party. She probably didn’t know how to kiss otherwise—which was why so many got hooked and tangled. They took for large bills what for her was loose change. She probably made love no differently. What was a mere gesture—consent, as she called it—for others was the full monty, the once-in-a-lifetime you get to tell your grandchildren about when they’re old enough to ask about the woman who called you by the name of a ship.

  I wondered if there was or might soon be a third party who was going to be given minute-by-minute dispatches of this fellow called Printz, who came after another called Inky was spurned, kissed, sent packing. Pretty soon I’d be leaving messages on her answering machine, or calling her at the movies, while she’d ask whomever it was she was with to look at the caller ID and mutter a muffled curse on being told my full name. It’s Printz, she’d say.

  I wanted to be cruel to her. Say something that would scar her for years, or at the very least stick on her like a stain or a bruise that was sure to ruin her whole evening.

  Clara, I feel this is the last time I’m going to see you.

  Clara, the moment you walk out my door it will be as though we’d never met.