Eight White Nights E-Book

André Aciman

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A powerfully original novel of modern love by the author of Call Me By Your Name. An unforgettable journey through the experience of time and desire, where passion and fear and the sheer craving to ask for love and to show love can forever alter who we are. A man in his late twenties goes to a large Christmas party in Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three words: 'I am Clara.' Over the following seven days, they meet every evening in the snowy city. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly and won't hazard a move. The tension between them builds, marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust. Moving both closer together, then further apart, this amorous dance builds towards a New Year's Eve charged with magic, the promise of renewal and love.

Leseprobe

EIGHT WHITE NIGHTS

ALSO BY ANDRÉ ACIMAN

FICTION

Call Me by Your Name

NON-FICTION

The Light of New York (with Jean-Michel Berts)

Out of Egypt: A Memoir

False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory

Entrez: Signs of France (with Steven Rothfeld)

AS EDITOR

The Proust Project

Letters of Transit: Refections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

EIGHT WHITE NIGHTS

André Aciman

First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © André Aciman, 2010

The moral right of André Aciman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84887 620 0 eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 305 5

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

For Philip,

luz y dulzura

CONTENTS

First night

Second Night

Third Night

Fourth Night

Fifth Night

Sixth Night

Seventh Night

Eight Night

FIRST NIGHT

Halfway through dinner, I knew I’d replay the whole evening in reverse—the bus, the snow, the walk up the tiny incline, the cathedral looming straight before me, the stranger in the elevator, the crowded large living room where candlelit faces beamed with laughter and premonition, the piano music, the singer with the throaty voice, the scent of pinewood everywhere as I wandered from room to room, thinking that perhaps I should have arrived much earlier tonight, or a bit later, or that I shouldn’t have come at all, the classic sepia etchings on the wall by the bathroom where a swinging door opened to a long corridor to private areas not intended for guests but took another turn toward the hallway and then, by miracle, led back into the same living room, where more people had gathered, and where, turning to me by the window where I thought I’d found a quiet spot behind the large Christmas tree, someone suddenly put out a hand and said, “I am Clara.”

I am Clara, delivered in a flash, as the most obvious fact in the world, as though I’d known it all along, or should have known it, and, seeing I hadn’t acknowledged her, or perhaps was trying not to, she’d help me stop the pretense and put a face to a name everyone had surely mentioned many times before.

In someone else, I am Clara would have sprung like a tentative conversation opener—meek, seemingly assertive, overly casual, distant, aired as an afterthought, the verbal equivalent of a handshake that has learned to convey firmness and vigor by overexerting an otherwise limp and lifeless grip. In a shy person, I am Clara would require so much effort that it might leave her drained and almost grateful when you failed to pick up the cue.

Here, I am Clara was neither bold nor intrusive, but spoken with the practiced, wry smile of someone who had said it too many times to care how it broke the silence with strangers. Strained, indifferent, weary, and amused—at herself, at me, at life for making introductions the tense, self-conscious things they are—it slipped between us like a meaningless formality that had to be gotten over with, and now was as good a time as any, seeing that the two of us were standing away from those who had gathered in the middle of the room and who were about to start singing. Her words sprung on me like one of those gusts that clear through obstacles and throw open all doors and windows, trailing April blossom in the heart of a winter month, stirring everything along their path with the hasty familiarity of people who, when it comes to other people, couldn’t care less and haven’t a thing to lose. She wasn’t bustling in nor was she skipping over tedious steps, but there was a touch of crisis and commotion in her three words that wasn’t unwelcome or totally unintended. It suited her figure, the darting arrogance of her chin, of the voile-thin crimson shirt which she wore unbuttoned to her breastbone, the swell of skin as smooth and forbidding as the diamond stud on her thin platinum necklace.

I am Clara. It barged in unannounced, like a spectator squeezing into a packed auditorium seconds before curtain time, disturbing everyone, and yet so clearly amused by the stir she causes that, no sooner she’s found the seat that will be hers for the rest of the season than she’ll remove her coat, slip it around her shoulders, turn to her new neighbor, and, meaning to apologize for the disruption without making too much of it, whisper a conspiring “I am Clara.” It meant, I’m the Clara you’ll be seeing all year long here, so let’s just make the best of it. I am the Clara you never thought would be sitting right next to you, and yet here I am. I’m the Clara you’ll wish to find here every one day of every month for the remainder of this and every other year of your life—and I know it, and let’s face it, much as you’re trying not to show it, you knew it the moment you set eyes on me. I am Clara.

It was a cross between a ribbing “How couldn’t you know?” and “What’s with the face?” “Here,” she seemed to say, like a magician about to teach a child a simple trick, “take this name and hold it tight in your palm, and when you’re home alone, open your hand and think, Today I met Clara.” It was like offering an elderly gentleman a chocolate-hazelnut square just when he was about to lose his temper. “Don’t say anything until you’ve bitten into it.” She jostled you, but instantly made up for it before you’d even felt it, so that it wasn’t clear which had come first, the apology or the little jab, or whether both weren’t braided in the same gesture, spiraling around her three words like frisky death threats masquerading as meaningless pranks. I am Clara.

Life before. Life after.

Everything before Clara seemed so lifeless, hollow, stopgap. The after-Clara thrilled and scared me, a mirage of water beyond a valley of rattlesnakes.

I am Clara. It was the one thing I knew best and could always come back to each time I’d want to think of her—alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous. Everything about her radiated from these three words, as though they were a pressing bulletin mysteriously scribbled on the back of a matchbook that you slip into a wallet because it will always summon an evening when a dream, a would-be life, suddenly blossomed before you. It could be just that, a dream and nothing more, but it stirred so fierce a desire to be happy that I was almost ready to believe I was indeed happy on the evening when someone blustered in, trailing April blossom in the heart of a winter month.

Would I still feel this way on leaving the party tonight? Or would I find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so that they’d start to bother me and allow me to snuff the dream till it tapered off and lost its luster and, with its luster gone, remind me once again, as ever again, that happiness is the one thing in our lives others cannot bring.

I am Clara. It conjured her voice, her smile, her face when she vanished into the crowd that night and made me fear I’d already lost her, imagined her. “I am Clara,” I’d say to myself, and she was Clara all over again, standing near me by the Christmas tree, alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous.

I was—and I knew it within minutes of meeting her—already rehearsing never seeing her again, already wondering how to take I am Clara with me tonight and stow it in a drawer along with my cuff links, collar stays, my watch and money clip.

I was learning to disbelieve that this could last another five minutes, because this had all the makings of an unreal, spellbound interlude, when things open up far too easily and seem willing to let us into the otherwise closed circle that is none other than our very own life, our life as we’ve always craved to live it but cheat it at each turn, our life finally transposed in the right key, retold in the right tense, in a language that speaks to us and is right for us and us alone, our life finally made real and luminous because it’s revealed, not in ours, but in someone else’s voice, grasped from another’s hand, caught on the face of someone who couldn’t possibly be a stranger, but, because she is nothing but a stranger, holds our eyes with a gaze that says, Tonight I’m the face you put on your life and how you live it. Tonight, I am your eyes to the world looking back at you. I am Clara.

It meant: Take my name and whisper it to yourself, and in a week’s time come back to it and see if crystals haven’t sprouted around it.

I am Clara—she had smiled, as though she’d been laughing at something someone had just said to her and, borrowing the mirth started in another context, had turned to me behind the Christmas tree and told me her name, given me her hand, and made me want to laugh at punch lines I hadn’t heard but whose drift corresponded to a sense of humor that was exactly like mine.

This is what I am Clara meant to me. It created the illusion of intimacy, of a friendship briefly interrupted and urgently resumed, as though we’d met before, or had crossed each other’s path but kept missing each other and were being reintroduced at all costs now, so that in extending her hand to me, she was doing something we should have done much sooner, seeing we had grown up together and lost touch, or been through so much, perhaps been lovers a lifetime ago, until something as trivial and shameful as death had come between us and which, this time, she wasn’t about to let happen.

I am Clara meant I already know you—this is no ordinary business—and if you think fate doesn’t have a hand in this, think twice. We could, if you wish, stick to ordinary cocktail pleasantries and pretend this is all in your head, or we can drop everything, pay attention to no one, and, like children building a tiny tent in the middle of a crowded living room on Christmas Eve, enter a world beaming with laughter and premonition, where everything is without peril, where there’s no place for shame, doubt, or fear, and where all is said in jest and in whimsy, because the things that are most solemn often come under the guise of mischief and merrymaking.

•

I held her hand a touch longer than is usual, to say I had gotten the message, but let it go sooner than warranted, fearing I’d invented the message.

That was my contribution, my signature to the evening, my twisted reading of a plain handshake. If she knew how to read me, she’d see through this affectation of nonchalance and catch the other, deeper nonchalance, which I am reluctant to dispel especially in the presence of someone who, with three words and barely a glance, could easily hold the key to all my hideaways.

It did not occur to me that people who bolt into your life could as easily bolt out of it when they’re done, that someone who breaks into a concert hall seconds before the music starts may all of a sudden stand up and disturb everyone all over again on realizing she is sitting in the wrong row and doesn’t care to wait until the intermission.

I looked at her. I looked at her face. I knew that face. “You look familiar,” I was going to say.

“You look lost,” she said.

“Does it show?” I answered. “Don’t most people look lost at parties?”

“Some more than others. Not him.” She pointed at a middle-aged gentleman talking with a woman. He was leaning against what must have been a false, chamfered pillar with a Corinthian-style topstone, holding a clear drink in his hand, almost slouching against the pillar as though he had all the time in the world. “Doesn’t look lost at all. Neither does she.”

I am Clara. I see through people.

Mr. and Mrs. Shukoff, she baptized them; Mr. and Mrs. Shukoff couldn’t wait to rip their clothes off, he said with a wink as he gulped down his drink, give me a second and I’m ready for blastoff.

Shukoff: people you couldn’t shake off but wished you could, she explained. We laughed.

Then, in a manner that couldn’t have been less discreet, Clara indicated a sixty-something woman who was wearing a long red dress with black patent-leather pumps. “Santa Claus’s grandmother. Just look at that,” she said, pointing to a wide, gold-buckled, patent-leather belt strapping Grandma’s tummy. She wore what must have been a sparkling blond wig whose sides, matted and hardened like two baby boar horns, curled around her ears. From her earlobes dangled two sliced large pearls mounted on tiny gold plates—miniature UFOs without the little green men, she said. Clara instantly baptized her Muffy Mitford. Then proceeded to demolish Muffy Mitford, enlisting me in the process, as though she never doubted I would join in the character assassination.

Muffy spoke with a warble in her voice. Muffy wore light blue shaggy froufrou slippers at home, I said. Muffy wore a housedress underneath, always a housedress underneath, she said. Muffy had an unshorn poodle named Suleiman. And a husband nicknamed Chip. And her son—what else—Pip. And her daughter, Mimi. No, Buffy, rhymes with Muffy. Muffy Beaumont. Née Montebello. No, Belmont. Let’s face it, Schoenberg, said Clara. Muffy had an English housemaid. From Shropshire. No, Nottingham. No, East Anglia. East Coker. Little Gidding, I said. Burnt Norton, she corrected, and, on second thought, from the Islands. Majorca, she said. With a name like Monserrat, I said. “No, no. Dolores Luz Berta Fatima Consuelo Jacinta Fabiola Inez Esmeralda”—one of those names that never end, because their magic lies in their lilt and cadence as they soar and surge and finally come cascading on a surname as common as the sand on the beaches of Far Rockaway: Rodriguez—which sent us roaring as we saw Muffy laugh and agitate her hips to the rhythm of the singer with the throaty voice, jiggling the limp end of her belt like a fertility symbol dangling from her midriff, her martini glass all empty—and she said with a wink as she gulped down her drink, pour me another and watch me turn pink.

“You’re a friend of Hans’s, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Why—how can you tell?”

“You’re not singing. I’m not singing.” Then, seeing I hadn’t quite seized her explanation, she added, “Friends of Hans don’t sing. Only Gretchen’s friends sing.” She wiped her lips with a napkin, as though to stifle the last flutters of a private joke she wasn’t about to share but whose ripples you weren’t meant to miss. “Simple,” she said, pointing not so discreetly to those gathered around the piano, where a crowd was singing away exuberantly around the man with the throaty voice.

“Gretchen must be the more musical of the two, then,” I added non-committally, just to say something, anything, even if it limped its way to unavoidable silence. Clara’s reply took the wind out of my words. “Gretchen, musical? Gretchen wouldn’t know music if it farted in her ears. Just look at her, nailed to the back of the door, greeting all her guests because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself.” I suddenly remembered the lame handshake, the perfunctory greeting, the kiss on the cheek that grazes your ear so as not to smear her makeup.

The words startled me, but I let them pass, not knowing how to answer or counter them. “Just look at their faces, though,” she threw in, pointing at the singers. I looked at their faces. “Would you sing simply because it’s a Christmas party and everyone’s yuling about like overgrown goldfish sucking on eggnog?”

I said nothing.

“Seriously,” she added—so this wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Just look at all these Euro Shukoffs. Don’t they all look like people who always sing at Christmas parties?”

I am Clara. I get nasty.

“But I sing—sometimes,” I threw in disingenuously, trying to sound no less bland or naive than those who thought it was the most natural thing in the world to sing at parties. Perhaps I wanted to see how she’d take back her hostility, now that she had inadvertently caught me in its fire. Or perhaps I was just teasing her and didn’t want her to know how much her cynical assessment of sing-along fellowship echoed my own.

“But I sing,” she said, arching an eyebrow as though I’d said something complex and difficult. She nodded somewhat as she pondered the deeper meaning of my words, and still seemed to be weighing them, when it suddenly hit me: she wasn’t talking about herself; she was mimicking what I had just said to her—But I sing—and was throwing it back at me with the taunting lilt of derision, like a crumpled gift being returned in its now dented box.

“So you sing,” she said, still considering the matter. Or was she already backpedaling after her poisoned dart?

“Yes. I sing, sometimes—” I replied, trying not to sound too smug or too earnest. I pretended I hadn’t picked up on the goading irony in her voice and was about to add “in the shower”—but immediately sensed that, in Clara’s universe, singing in the shower was precisely what everyone confessed to when they cagily admitted that they liked to sing sometimes. It would have been such a predictable thing to say. I could already hear her unstitching every cliché in my sentence.

“So you sing,” she started. “Let’s hear you, then.”

I was caught off guard. I shook my head.

“Why? Doesn’t sing well with others?” she asked.

“—something like that.” Could do better was a lame repartee to her report-card banter, which is why I suppressed it. But now I had nothing else to say.

Another moment of hesitation. Then, looking over my shoulder, she broke the silence: “Want to hear me sing?”

Her words sounded almost like a dare. I imagined she was joking and that, after showing such an aversion to Gretchen’s friends and their sing-along yuling, the last thing she’d do now was to start singing. But before I had finally put the right spin to my words and answered her, she had already joined the chorus, but with a voice I would never have matched to her face and couldn’t believe was hers, because it bordered total effusion, as though, in singing at that moment right next to me, she was revealing another, deeper side to remind me that everything I’d thought about her so far—from bustling wind to poisoned dart to quips and derision—might be mistaken, that “caustic” had a meeker side, that “dangerous” could turn apprehensive and tenderhearted, that she was so full of other, more surprising turns that it was pointless to keep up with any or try to second-guess them, or put up a struggle against someone whose curt, offhanded I am Clara reminded me that there were people in the world who, for all their gruff arrogance, can, with scarcely a few notes, easily persuade you they are inherently kind, candid, and vulnerable—with unsettling reminders, though, that their ability to flip from one to the other is what ultimately makes them deadly.

I was transfixed—transfixed by the voice, by the person, by my total failure to master the situation, by the pleasure I felt in being so easily swept over, helpless, clueless. Her singing didn’t just come out of her body. It seemed to tear things out of mine, like an ancient admission I was still incapable of and which reached back to childhood, like the echo of forgotten tales finally breaking into song. What was this feeling, and where was it coming from? Why did hearing her sing or staring at her unbuttoned crimson shirt with her overexposed, gleaming neckline make me want to live under its spell, close to her heart, below her heart, next to my heart, a peek at your heart; that small pendant, I wanted it in my mouth.

Like a Ulysses grown wise to the Sirens’ trick, part of me still groped for reasons not to be taken in, not to believe. A voice so perfect could make her too perfect.

It didn’t take long to realize that what I was feeling was not just admiration; nor was it awe, or envy. The word worship—as in “I could worship people like her”—hadn’t crossed my mind yet, though later that evening, when I stood with her watching a glowing moonlit barge moored across the white Hudson, I did turn to worship. Because placid winterscapes lift up the soul and bring down our guard. Because part of me was already venturing into an amorphous terrain in which a word here, a word there—any word, really—is all we have to hold on to before surrendering to a will far mightier than our own. Because in the busy, crowded room, as I listened to her sing, I found myself toying with a word so overused and hackneyed, so safe, that I was tempted to ignore it, which is also why I chose it: interesting.

She was interesting. Not for what she knew, or for what she said, or for who she was, even, but for how she saw and twisted things, for the implied, complicit jeer in her voice, for how she seemed to both admire and put you down, so that you didn’t know whether she had the sensibility of gleaming velvet or of sandpaper. She is interesting. I want to know more, hear more, get closer to.

But interesting was not the word I wanted. One more drink and the word struggling to be heard, when it finally came to me, would have spilled out so naturally, so effortlessly, and in a manner so uninhibited that, staring at her skin as I stood speaking to her by the fireplace, I felt no less bashful or hampered than a dreamer who enters a crowded subway car, greets his fellow passengers, and doesn’t feel the slightest shame on looking down at his feet and realizing he is not wearing shoes, no socks either, no trousers, and that he is totally naked from the waist down.

I made conversation to avoid saying what I wanted to say, the way only the tongue-tied say too much when they lack the courage to say just what’s enough and not a word more. To stop myself, I shut my mouth. I tried to let her do the talking. Then, not to interrupt or say the word, I bit my tongue and held it in place. I bit, not its tip, but its midsection, a large, domineering bite that might even have hurt had I paid it any mind but which held my tongue without altering the outward shape of my mouth. And yet I so wanted to interrupt her, to interrupt her the way one does when one knows one is about to intrude and shock someone with a word that is at once exquisite, reckless, and obscene.

The word sprang so many times to my mouth. I loved the room, loved the snow on Riverside Drive, loved the George Washington Bridge speckling the distance like a drooping necklace on a bare neck, loved her necklace too, and the neck that wore it, I would have said.

I wanted to tell her how much I had loved her voice, perhaps with no reason other than to begin saying other things as well, shy, tentative things that I hoped might grow bold and lead elsewhere once I got started. But no sooner had I mentioned her singing than she cut me short.

“I was a music major,” she said, clearly snuffing my compliment, yet underscoring it by the very impatience with which she seemed to ignore it. It meant, Don’t feel obligated to say anything. I know. I’ve trained for this.

“I’m moving into another room. Too noisy, too stuffy here.”

A pensive okay was all I could offer. Was this it, then?

“Let’s go into the library. It’s quieter there.”

She wants me to follow her. I remember being amused by the thought: So she wants me to follow.

The library, which turned out to be equally crowded, had huge, rare, leatherbound volumes neatly stacked around its walls, interrupted by windows and what looked like a balcony facing the river. During the day this particular French window must have let in the most tranquil sweeps of light. “I could spend the rest of my life in this room.”

“Many people could. See that desk over there?”

“Yes.”

The desk was covered with hors d’oeuvres.

“I wrote my master’s thesis there.”

“With all that food around?”

She threw me a hasty nod, instantly dismissing the attempted joke. “I have good memories of this room. I was in this room for a whole year, from nine to five. They even let me come here on weekends. I can remember summer and fall here. I can remember looking out and seeing snow. Then it was April. It went so fast.”

For a moment I pictured Clara arriving dutifully every winter morning to sit and write all day. Did she wear glasses? Was she totally focused on her project, or did she look bored when she was alone all day? Did her mind drift, did Clara dream of love in the heart of midwinter afternoons? Was there sorrow in her life?

“Do you really miss your thesis days? Most people hate even thinking of them.”

“I don’t miss them. But I don’t hate them.”

My question didn’t seem to interest her. I had set her up to tell me she wished to go back to those days. Or wished she’d never lived through them at all. Instead, what came was the most levelheaded response. I thought of saying, What a lovely, straightforward outlook you have, but held back in case I seemed condescending or, worse yet, sarcastic. In her place I’d probably have said I hated those days but missed each one. I would have tossed the idea for effect, perhaps to tease something out of her, or out of myself, or to test whether she had a feel for paradox and see how far we could grope about together in the murky terrain of guarded ambiguities uttered in attempted small talk.

But I felt that this sort of thing wouldn’t pass muster in her world either—saying you missed things you hated, hated those you loved, wanted what you’d turn down in no time—all these were affected torsions and spray-painted screens that would stir a withering nod goodbye from her.

I am Clara. Tell me another.

“And what was it on?”

“The thesis?”

“Yes.”

“On the table, of course, what else?”

So she was returning the favor. Thank you.

“No, seriously,” I said.

“You mean was it a dialogical treatment of marginalized women living in a hegemonic, monolingual world colonized by phalocratic institutions?”

Very funny.

“Well, it wasn’t,” she added.

Momentary silence.

“Am I supposed to keep asking?”

“No one asked you to ask anything. But, yes, you’re supposed to keep asking.”

For a moment I thought I’d lost her. I smiled back. “What was the thesis on, then?”

“You really want to know?”

“No, I’m only asking because I’m supposed to ask, remember?”

“On Folías. A musical genre. Totally without interest.”

“Folías? Would someone like me know this music?”

“Someone like you—” She repeated my phrase as though it were a strange fruit whose unusual taste she was still mulling before passing judgment, which is why she said, “We’re so sharp, so clever. Why, am I already supposed to guess who someone like you is?”

Right through me. She’d caught my trick question even before I had—my attempt to bring us closer, get her to say something about me.

I am Clara. Nice try.

“I’m sure you’ve heard Folías before, though you may not know it.”

And suddenly there it was again, her voice rising above the din in the crowded library, singing the somber opening bars of Handel’s famous sarabande. I, who had never understood why men love women to sing for them, saw the cobwebs clear before me.

“Recognize it?”

I did, but I didn’t answer. Instead: “I love your voice,” I blurted, hesitating whether to say anything else or, if still possible, to take it back. I was, once again, walking naked from my shirttails down, thrilled by my own daring.

“It’s a standard melody set to a standard chord progression, very similar to a passacaglia. Want some fruit punch?” she broke in, as though nipping both my compliment and the rising intimacy hesitating in the wings. She had uttered these words so abruptly that, once again, I felt she did indeed want me to notice she was changing topics, but that she wanted me to notice it only if I’d picked up her poorly disguised aversion to compliments.

I smiled at the maneuver. She caught my smile. And, having caught it, smiled back almost in self-mockery, sensing that if she gave any sign of guessing I had seen through her feigned abruptness she’d be admitting that my reading of her feint was closer to the truth than she might have wished. So she smiled both to own that she’d been caught and to show that our game was really so much fun: We’re so sharp, so clever, the two of us, aren’t we?

Or perhaps her smile was her way of countering my reading tit for tat, and that, much as she’d been caught, she too had found something to smile about in me—namely, the guilty pleasure I derived from the ebb and flow of what wasn’t being said. There may have been nothing there, and perhaps both of us knew it and were simply going through the motions of making contact by tossing empty signals. But I was—and I didn’t care to hide it—wearing a big smile that bordered on laughter.

Had she seen through this as well? And could she tell I wanted her to know it?

Nervous hesitation hovered between us, like the quiver of a jibe she considered for a moment but then immediately suppressed. Was she really going to call me on my smile and make me spell out what could have been my totally twisted reading of hers? Who are you, Clara?

For a moment, and perhaps to play with worst outcomes as a way to avert them, I began to consider the woman in the wide-open crimson shirt from the distance of the years to come, as though I were waving at her from the wrong end of a spyglass. As someone lost. As someone I’d met at a faraway party once and never saw again and soon forgot. Someone I could have changed my life for. Or who’d have thrown it so thoroughly off course that it would take years and a lifetime, generations, to recover. Just by looking at her from the distance of time, I could already foresee hollow January weekday evenings and all-day Sundays without her. Part of me had run ahead of me and was already coming back with news of what had happened long after I’d lost her: the walk to and from her house, whose whereabouts I knew nothing of, the view from her window, which I’d give everything to see again but that overlooked places I’d probably never seen, the sound of her coffee grinder in the morning, the smell around her cat’s litter box, the squeak of the service door when you put out the garbage late every night and heard the clatter of the neighbor’s triple lock, the smell of her sheets and of her towels, an entire world drifting away before I touched it.

I suddenly stopped myself, knowing, by an inverse logic familiar to superstitious people, that the very foretaste of sorrows to come presumed a degree of joy beforehand and would no doubt stand in the way of the very joy I was reluctant to consider for fear of forfeiting it. I felt no different than a castaway who, on glimpsing a sailboat from a high perch on his deserted island, omits to light a pyre because he’s spied too many such ships before and doesn’t want his hopes dashed again. But then, on urging himself to light a fire just the same, he begins to have second thoughts about the strangers on board who could prove more dangerous than the pythons and Komodo dragons he’s learned to live among. Weekday evenings alone weren’t so terrible. Hollow Sundays weren’t bad either. Nothing would come of this, I kept saying. Besides, thinking that I’d already lost her might ease the tension between us and allow me to regain my footing and act a bit more confidently.

What I didn’t want to feel was hope and, behind the hope, a craving so fierce that anyone watching me would instantly guess I was utterly and undeniably smitten.

I didn’t mind her knowing. I wanted her to know. Women like Clara know you’re smitten, expect you to be, can spot every one of your feckless attempts to disguise it. What I didn’t want to show was my struggle to keep my composure.

To parry her gaze, I tried to look elsewhere and seem distracted. I wanted her to ask why I’d suddenly drifted from her, wanted her to worry that she could lose me as easily as I knew I could lose her. But I also wanted her to laugh at me for doing precisely what I was doing. I wanted her to see through my pretended indifference and expose every one of my little maneuvers and, by so doing, show she was plenty familiar with this game, because she’d played it herself many times, was playing it right now, maybe. I bit my tongue again as brash thoughts welled up within me and clamored to speak. Here I was, a shy man pretending to be shy.

“Punch?” she repeated like someone who snaps a finger in front of you and brings you back among the living by saying Boo! “Them who sing fetches,” she added, all set to go and fetch me some punch.

I told her she didn’t have to bring me anything; I’d get some myself. I knew I was being unnecessarily fussy and that I could easily have accepted her offer. But I was unable to extricate myself once I had started down that slope. I seemed determined to show I was more uncomfortable having someone bring me a drink than flattered that she’d offered to.

“I just want to,” she replied. “I’ll even throw in some goodies on a plate . . . if you let me go now before these singing yahoos come and gobble everything up,” she added, as though this were her closing inducement.

“You don’t have to, really.”

Perhaps what I wanted was not so much to spare her the errand as to prevent her from moving; the faintest step might throw us off—anything could come between us—we might lose our spot in the library and never recover our giddy pace.

She asked again. I caught myself insisting that I’d get the punch myself. I was beginning to sound coy and fatuous.

Then it happened, exactly as I feared.

“Oh well,” she shrugged, meaning, Suit yourself. Or worse: Hang it. Her voice was still buoyed by the mirth that had sprung up between us moments earlier; but there was a metallic chime somewhere, less like the lilt of irony and good cheer than like the downscale click of a file cabinet being slammed shut.

I instantly regretted her change of heart.

“And where would these goodies be?” I fumbled by way of resurrecting her original offer, thinking there was food elsewhere in the apartment.

“Oh, just stay put and I’ll get you some”—feigned exasperation bubbling in her voice. I caught sight of her neckline as she slipped on her levity again like a reversible coat, the flip side of hang it, sandpaper turned to velour. I wondered if rubbing people the wrong way was not her way of sidling up to them, her way of defusing tension by discharging so much of her own that if she got any closer it would be to dismiss you, but that in going through motions of dismissal she was actually sneaking up on you like a feral cat who doesn’t want you to know it doesn’t mind being petted.

I am Clara. She affected to snap. I affected to obey. In the packed, dark room where everyone’s shadow merged with everyone else’s, we couldn’t have chosen roles that came more naturally.

With this air of chronic turmoil, she got you to mean exactly what she had in mind for you, not because she liked to have her way, but because everything about her seemed so unusually charged, craggy, and barbed that not to give in to her jostling was like snubbing everything she was. Which is how she cornered you. To question her manner was to slight not just the manner but the person behind the manner. Even her way of arching her eyebrows, which warned you she required instant submission, could, if questioned, be likened to the rough plumage with which tiny birds puff themselves up to three times their size, the better to conceal their fear of not getting things simply by asking for them.

All this may have been wishful thinking on my part. She might be concealing nothing at all. She held nothing back, puffed up nothing, feared no one. It was just I who needed to think this way.

Perhaps Clara was exactly who she appeared to be: light and swift, alert, caustic and dangerous. Just Clara—no roles, no catch-me-if-you-can, no waggish sidling up to strangers or stealthy angling for friendship and chitchat. One of the drawbacks that came from being just who she was and saying just what she felt was to let those who were not used to such candor think it was a pose, that she had learned to hide her shyness better than most, but that she was no less tentative or apprehensive underneath, and that all this fretful behavior, starting from the way she let her elbow rest on my shoulder to mean just stop arguing when I quibbled over punch to the hand that came out of nowhere, was a sham, the way certain diamonds sparkle for a moment and are quite conveniently deemed glass, until we take a second look and slap our foreheads and ask whatever made us think they were fakes. The sham was in us, not them.

There are people who come on to you with friction. Chafing starts intimacy; and strife, like spite, is the shortest distance to the heart.

Before you finish your sentence, they nip it from your mouth and give it an entirely different spin, making it seem you had been secretly hinting at things you never knew you wanted and would easily have lived without but that you now crave, the way I craved that cup of punch—and with goodies thrown in, exactly as she’d promised, as though the whole evening and much, much more hung on that cup of punch.

Would she forgive my wishy-washiness? Or had she read it as a triumph of her will? Or was she thinking in altogether different terms? And what were these terms, and why couldn’t I begin to think in them?

She was gone in a second. I had lost her.

I should have known.

•

“Did you really want punch?” she asked when she returned, carrying a plate on which she’d arrayed a selection of Japanese appetizers in a scatter of tiny squares that only Paul Klee would have imagined. The crowd, she explained, had made ladling the punch too difficult. “Ergo, no punch.” Sounded like Ergo, lump it.

I was tempted to hold this against her, not just because I was suddenly disappointed, or because the word ergo itself seemed a tad chilling despite the lighthearted way she’d said it, but as though the whole exchange about getting, not getting, and then going to get the punch had one purpose: to trifle with me, to bait me, to raise my hopes only to dash them. Now, to absolve herself for not keeping her promise, or for not caring to, she was trying to make it seem I’d never cared for punch—which was the truth.

I noticed that she had sorted the appetizers in pairs and placed them in neat little rows around the plate, as though she’d carefully lined them up for Noah’s ark—her way of making up for neglecting the punch, I thought. The tuna-avocado miniature rolls—male and female—the kiwi-tile fish—male and female—the seared scallop with a sprig of mache on a bed of slithered turnips with tamarind jelly and a dab of lemon rind on top—male and female made He them. No sooner had I told her why the extravagant miscellany had made me smile than I realized there was something daring in my remark about the paired appetizers that were about to propagate and fill the earth—except that before I had time to backpedal, I caught something else neighboring this idea that moved me in my stomach as if I’d been buoyed up and let down on a high wave: not male and female, not male and female shifting on the cold banks of the Black Sea, filing up to book passage on Noah’s Circle Line, but male and female as in you and me, you and me, just you and me, Clara, waiting our turn, which turn, whose turn, say something now, Clara, or I’ll speak out of turn and I haven’t had enough to drink to find the courage to say it. I wanted to touch her shoulder, wanted to rub the length of her neck with my lips, kiss her under her right ear and under the left ear and along her breastbone, and thank her for arranging this plate, for knowing what I’d think, for thinking it with me, even if none of it had crossed her mind.

“On second thought—” I began, uncertain whether to add anything, and yet hesitating, because I knew that hesitating would catch her attention.

“What?”—mock vexation crackling in her voice.

“Actually, I hate punch,” I said.

It was her turn to laugh.

“In that case,” also spoken haltingly—she too knew how to play the waiting game and make me hold my breath for her next word—“I detest—as in de-test—punch, sangria, ladely-lady drinks, daiquiri, harakiri, vache qui rit. They make me womit.” It was her way of pulling the rug from under your feet just when you thought you had one-upped the last of her comebacks. I am Clara. I can do you one better.

What neither asked—because each already suspected the other’s answer—was why we’d fussed so much over punch if neither cared for it.

Once again, not asking could only betray we’d both thought of asking and decided not to. We smiled at our implied truce, smiled for smiling, smiled because we knew, and wanted the other to know, we’d right away own up to why we’d tussled over punch if the other so much as hinted at the question.

“I’m not even sure I’ve ever liked people who like punch,” I added.

“Oh, if that’s where you’re going,” she said, clearly not about to be outdone, “I might as well come clean: I’ve never been crazy about parties that have a bowl of punch sitting right in the middle of them.”

I liked her like this.

“And the people who attend parties where a bowl of punch sits right in the middle, do you like them?”

“Do I like otherpeoples?” She paused. “Is this what you’re asking?”

I guessed this was what I was asking.

“Seldom,” she said. “Most people are Shukoffs. Except those I like. And before I get to like them, they’re Shukoffs too.”

I craved to know where I ranked on the Scale of Shukoff, but didn’t dare ask.

“What makes you want to know Shukoffs?”

I liked using her lingo.

“You really want to know?”

Couldn’t wait to know.

“Boredom.”

“Boredom behind a Christmas tree?”

With my innocent zap, I wanted nothing more than to show I enjoyed recalling how we’d met and that this moment was very much with me, that I didn’t want to let it go yet.

“Maybe.” She hesitated. Perhaps she did not like to agree with people so easily and preferred putting forth a maybe before a yes. I was already hearing the faint rumblings of a drumroll coming to a rise. “But then just think how boring this party would be without me.”

I loved this.

“I’d probably have already left,” I said.

“I’m not keeping you, am I?”

And there it was again, the message that wasn’t the real message but might just as easily have been the real message all along.

Something comforting, almost heartwarming in this undertow of bristles and snags aroused me and made me feel she was a kindred spirit who’d alighted with me in the same afterlife, taken the words from my mouth, and, by saying them back to me, given them a life and a spin they’d never have had I kept them to myself. Under guise of spitfire mini-tantrums, her words suggested something at once kind and welcoming, like the rough folds of a trusted and forgiving blanket that takes us as we are and knows how we sleep, what we’ve been through, what things we dream of and so desperately crave and are ashamed to own up to when we’re alone and naked with ourselves. Did she know me that well?

“Most people remain Shukoffs,” I said, not knowing whether I meant it. “But I could be wrong.”

“Are you always this amphibalent?” she taunted.

“Aren’t you?”

“I invented the word.”

I am Clara. I invent riddles and their cheats.

I looked away, perhaps to avoid looking at her. I scanned the faces in the library. The large room was filled with just the sort of people who go to parties where a bowl of punch sits in the middle of their shiftless chatter. I remembered her scornful just-look-at-these-faces and tried to cast a withering glance in their direction. The gesture gave me a pretext to keep looking elsewhere.

“Otherpeoples,” I said, to fill the silence, repeating the word we’d tacitly agreed to give them, as though this one word summed up everything we’d felt about everyone else and would nail the coffin on our indictment of mankind whole. We were fellow aliens conspiring to renew our reluctant courtship with Earthlings.

“Otherpeoples,” she echoed, still holding the plate, whose contents neither of us had touched yet. She hadn’t offered it to me, and I didn’t dare.

What threw me off was the way she’d said otherpeoples. It didn’t seem as disenchanted as I had hoped, but had paled into something soulful, verging on sorrow and mercy.

“Are otherpeoples as terrible as all that?” she asked, looking up to me for an answer, as though I was the expert who had led her through a landscape that wasn’t really hers and for which she had little affinity or much patience, but that she’d strayed in simply because our conversation had drifted that way. Was she disagreeing with me politely? Or worse yet: rebuking me?

“Terrible? No,” I replied. “Necessary? I don’t know.”

She gave it some thought. “Some are. Necessary, that is. At least to me they are. Sometimes I wish they weren’t—though we’re always alone in the end.”

Again she spoke these words with such mournful candor and humility that she seemed to own up to a weakness in herself, which she had tried but failed to overcome. Her words stung me to the quick, because they reminded me that we were not two intergalactic wayfarers who had landed in the same afterlife but that I was the alien and she the first native who’d run into me and extended a friendly hand and was about to take me into town and introduce me to her friends and parents. She, I gathered, liked others and knew how to put up with Shukoffs till they stopped being Shukoffs.

“So much for otherpeoples,” she added, with a pensive, faraway gaze, as though still nursing unresolved feelings about them. “Sometimes they’re all that stands between us and the ditch to remind us we’re not always alone, even when there are trenches between us. So, yes, they are important.”

“I know,” I said. Perhaps I had gone too far in my wholesale indictment of mankind and this was the time to backpedal. “I too hate being alone.”

“Oh, I don’t mind being alone at all,” she corrected. “I like being alone.”

Had she snubbed yet another one of my efforts to align my outlook to hers? Or, in my attempt to understand her in terms of myself, had I simply failed to hear what she was saying? Was I desperately trying to think she was like me so that she might be less of a stranger? Or was I trying to be like her to show we were closer than we seemed?

“With or without them, it’s always pandangst.”

“Pandangst?”

“Pandemic anxiety—last seen stalking the Upper West Side on Sunday evening. But there were two unreported sightings this afternoon. I hate afternoons. This is the winter of pandangst.”

Suddenly I saw it, should have seen it all along. She didn’t mind being alone, didn’t mind it the way only those who’re never alone long to be alone. Solitude was totally foreign to her. I envied her. Probably, her friends and, I assumed, her lovers or would-be lovers didn’t make it easy for her to be alone—a condition she didn’t quite mind but enjoyed complaining about, as only those who’ve been everywhere in the world readily admit they’ve never seen Luxor or Cádiz.

“I’ve learned to take the best others have to offer.” This was the person who goes over to perfect strangers and just greets them with a handshake. No arrogance in her words—rather the muted dejection over an implied long list of setbacks and disappointments. “I take what they have to give wherever I find it.”

Pause.

“And the rest?”

This may not have been her drift, but I thought I’d picked up the suggestion of an undisclosed but rattling at the tail end of her sentence like a warning and a lure.

“The rest gets tossed?” I offered, trying to show that I was sufficiently experienced in the ways of love to have caught her meaning and that I too was guilty of taking what I needed from people and dumping the rest.

“Tossed? Perhaps,” she responded, still unconvinced by what I was offering for her consideration.

Perhaps I was being harsh and unfair, for this may not have been what she’d meant to add. She had absentmindedly gone along with my suggestion when all she’d meant to say, perhaps, was “I take people just as they are.”

Or was this a more pointed warning yet—I take what I need where I find it, so watch yourself—a warning I had momentarily failed to heed because it didn’t agree with her distressed look of a few seconds earlier?

I was on the point of changing tack and suggesting that perhaps we never toss away or let go of anything in life, much less unlove those we never loved at all.

“Perhaps you are right,” she interrupted. “We keep people for when we’ll need them, to tide us over, not because we want them. I don’t think I’m always good for people.”

She reminded me of birds of prey who keep their quarry alive but paralyzed, to feed their young on.

What happened to those who had only the best taken from them and the rest junked?

What happened to a man after Clara was done with him?

I am Clara. Not always good for people.

Was this her way of drawing me out, or was it a warning asking to be disbelieved?

Was her life a flea-ridden trench dressed up as a high-end boutique?

Maybe, she said. Some of us have spent our entire lives in the trenches. Some of us tussle, and hope, and love so near the trenches that we stink of them.

This was her contribution to my image of trenches. Coming as it did from a woman like her, it struck me as too dark, too bleak, not quite believable. Did she, with the unbuttoned shirt, single pendant, and gleaming tanned body just back from the Caribbean really nurse so tragic a view of life? Or was this her spin on the demonic image I’d concocted to keep the conversation going between us?

What did she mean by love in the trenches? Life with someone? Life without love? Life trying to invent someone and finding the wrong one each time? Life with too many? Life with very few, or none that mattered? Or was it the life of single people—its highs and lows, as we bivouac from place to place in large cities in search of something we’re no longer sure we’d call love if it sprang on us from a nearby trench and screamed its name was Clara?

Trenches. With or without people. Trenches just the same. Dating, especially. She hated dating. Torment and torture, the pit of pandangst. De-tested dating. Would rather womit than date.

Trenches on Sunday afternoons. This, we agreed, was truly the pits, the mother of all gutters and foxholes. Les tranchées du dimanche. Which suddenly gave them the luster of a twilit France. Ville d’Avray. Corot. Eric Rohmer.

Saturdays weren’t too great either, I said. Saturday breakfast, in or out, always a sense that others are happier—being others. Then the unavoidable two-hour Laundromat where you feel you could just as easily shed your skin and throw it in with your socks, and, like a crustacean hiding in a rock while a new identity is being spun for you, hope to reinvent yourself from what comes out of the dryer.

She laughed.

Her turn: The trenches, the slough of amphibalence, the quag of awkward, the bog of boredom: hurting, being hurt, the cold, lame handshake of estranged lovers who come out to inspect the damage, smoke a cigarette together, play friends, then head back to life without love.

Mine: Those who hurt us most are sometimes those we’ve loved the least. Come Sundays in the quag, we miss them too.

Hers: The quag when sleep doesn’t come soon enough and you wish you were with someone, anyone. Or with someone else. Or when someone is better than no one, but no one better yet.

Mine: The quag when you walk by someone’s home and remember how miserable you were but how truly miserable you are now that you no longer live there. Days that go down into some high-speed funnel but which you’d trade back to have all over again, this time slower, though you’d probably give anything never to have lived them at all.

“High amphibalence.”

“The days I haven’t spent in the quag recently I can count on one hand,” I said. “The days in the rose garden on one finger.”

“Are you in the quag now?”

She didn’t mince words.

“Not in the quag,” I replied. “Just—on hold. On ice. Maybe in overhaul, possibly recall.”

The phrase amused her. She got my drift well enough, even if our meanings and metaphors were growing ever more tangled.

“So when were you in the rose garden last?”

How I loved the way the question cut to the chase and brought out what we’d been hinting at all along.

Should I tell her? Had I even understood her question? Or should I assume we were speaking the same language? I could say: This right now is the rose garden. Or: I’d never expected to see the rose garden so soon.

“Not since mid-May,” I heard myself say. How easy to let this out in the open. It made my fear of speaking about myself seem so trivial, so cagey, every word I’d speak now seemed charged with thrill and denudedness.

“And you?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Lying low, just lying low these days—like you, I suppose. Call it in hibernation, in quarantine, in time-out—for my sins, for my whatevers. In Rekonvaleszenz,” she said, imitating the fastidiously halting lisp of Viennese analysts determined to use a polysyllabic Teutolatinate for on the rebound. “I’m being reconditioned too. Not a party person, really.”

It took me totally by surprise. In my eyes, she personified party people. What was I getting wrong? Fearing our messages were getting all coiled and twisted, I asked, “We are speaking about the same thing, aren’t we?”

Amused, and without missing a beat: “We know we are.”

This didn’t clarify matters, but I loved the disclosure of conspiracy, by far the most stirring and exhilarating thing between us.

I looked at her as she began to head toward the other end of the library, where two bookcases of visibly untouched Pléiades volumes stood. She didn’t look like someone in torment and torture at all.

“What do you think?”

“Of these books?”

“No, of her.”

I looked at the blond woman she was indicating. Her name was Beryl, she said.

“I don’t know. Nice, I suppose,” I said. I could tell Clara would have preferred a devastating bashing on the spot. But I also wanted her to know that I was merely pretending to be naive and was just holding out before delivering my own demolition job. She didn’t give me time.

“Skin’s as white as aspirin, cankles the size of papayas, and her knees have knocked each other senseless—don’t you notice anything?” she said. “She’s walking on her hindquarters. Look.”

Clara mimicked the woman’s gait, holding both her arms with the plate limply in midair as though they belonged to a dog straining to act human.

I am Clara. I invented the hatchet.

“Everyone says she waddles.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Look at her legs the next time.”

“What next time?” I said, trying to show I’d already dismissed and filed her away.

“Oh, knowing her, there’ll be a next time soon enough—she’s been eyeing you for a while.”

“Me?”

“Like you didn’t know.”

Then, without warning: “Let’s go downstairs. It’s quieter,” she said, indicating a spiral staircase I had totally failed to notice but had not stopped staring at all the time I’d been speaking to her in the library. I liked spiral staircases. How couldn’t I have registered its existence? I am Clara. I blind people.

•

This was not an apartment; it was a palace pretending to be an apartment. The stairway was crowded with people. Leaning against the railing was a young man dressed in a tight black suit whom she obviously knew and who, after exclaiming a loud, almost histrionic “Clariushka!” put both arms around her while she struggled to hold the plate away from him with a mock-expression that said, “Don’t even think of it, they’re not for you.”

“Seen Orla anywhere?”

“All you have to do is look for Tito,” she snickered.

“Nasty, nasty, nasty. Rollo was asking about you.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Love to Pavel.”

That was Pablito, she said. Did she know everyone here? Not a party person? Seriously? And did everyone have a nickname?

As we proceeded downstairs, she gave me her hand. I felt our palms caress, sensing all along that there was as much good fellowship as unkindled passion in this tireless rubbing of fingers. Neither really acknowledged it or wanted it stopped. This was no more than a play of hands, which is why neither bothered to stop or hide the tenuous, guilty pleasure of prolonged touching.

Downstairs, she navigated the crowd and led me to a quieter spot by one of the bay windows, where three tiny cushions seemed waiting for us in an alcove. She was about to place the dish between us, but then sat right next to me, holding the plate on her lap. It was meant to be noticed, I thought, and therefore open to interpretation.

“Well?”

I didn’t know what she meant.

All I could think of was her collarbone and its gleaming suntan. The lady with the collarbone. The shirt and the collarbone. To a collarbone. This collarbone in two hundred years would, if it was cold in the icy silence of the tomb, so haunt my days and chill my dreaming nights that I would wish my own heart dry of blood. To touch and run a finger the length of her collarbone. Who was this collarbone, what person, what strange will came out to stop me when I wished my mouth on this collarbone? Collarbone, collarbone, are you not weary, will I be grieving over collarbones unyielding? I stared at her eyes and was suddenly speechless, my mind in disarray. The words weren’t coming. My thoughts were all tousled and scattered. I couldn’t even put two thoughts together and felt like a parent trying to teach an unsteady toddler how to walk by holding both his hands and asking him to put one foot before the other, one word before the other, but the child wasn’t moving. I stumbled from one thing to the other, then stood frozen and speechless, couldn’t think of anything.