Eight White Nights by André Aciman

Author:André Aciman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429934800
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FOURTH NIGHT

What is your hell?” I had planned to ask her. It would have been my way of drawing her out and helping her lower her defenses. I liked it when she spoke about herself. I liked when she cried, liked when we sat inside the booth at Edy’s in the dark and I had almost held her hand and kissed both palms at the same time, liked her when, past midnight after the movies, she said they made good fries at our usual place, because she knew I wanted to be back there and, better yet, be at the same table, side by side, and pick up where we’d left off our talk of Rohmer and the men and women who were all about the obvious but had lost their way around it. I liked the way she skipped out of the movie theater in between films and found an open newspaper vendor who sold M&Ms, because we’d forgotten those we had poured out into a small ziplock bag in Margo’s kitchen. Meanwhile, she had also found the time to buy two grandes. Morning and evening, she said. I assumed she’d also taken the time to check her messages. How many times had he called? I asked. Just eight—and that’s not counting the messages he left on her home phone. Wasn’t she curious to know what he’d said in them? She knew what he’d said in each. I would much rather have seen her pity and kiss him than prove she could churn kindness into venom.

After we’d said goodbye at night, I’d made myself promise not to expect her to call me the next day, not to expect to see or hear from her in who knows how long, and certainly never to think of calling her. Unless I had good reason to. The best reason sprung on me hours later, but I didn’t heed it.

At first I wanted to call her and tell her that . . . that I was happy to have spent the day with her and, in the process, make a few references to the day’s markers—Bach, strudel gâteau, Rohmer again, and the sudden appearance of the Prince Oscar along the Henry Hudson lying in wait for us, or the goodbye kiss it was no less awkward to seek than to avoid.

But call and say what? That I took back every joke made at Herr Jäcke’s expense? That I’d spent an amazing day precisely as she foretold? That there’s so much to say? So, say it. I don’t know where to start. Is this going to take forever? I just wish you’d come home with me now, tonight, this moment. Why didn’t you ask me then, Oskár? Because I just couldn’t, because you’re so fucking forbidding with your hot-cold, fireice, speak-don’t-speak airs. Because I can’t make out where you are, who you are. Printz Oskár! Clara Brunschvicg! Good night. Good night. There’d be a moment of silence. Clara Brunschvicg . . . What? Clara Brunschvicg—Don’t say it, she’d interrupt.

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