Eight White Nights Read online

  After waiting five minutes by myself at the bus stop, I began to give up on the bus. I was also afraid I’d look terribly stupid if anyone upstairs saw me waiting like this for a bus that was clearly never going to come.

  I looked up at the rooftop. Scarcely four hours ago I’d been sitting in that same greenhouse. Now it stared down at me as if it didn’t even know me. On our way there she’d opened up a bit and told me about Inky and how, for a while at least, he had put out the darkness in her life. What an odd way of saying it, that was. I had looked outside and promised to remember all this. I was remembering it now. Turn your back on things and they become Bellagio.

  Seeing no hint of traffic from behind the bend farther up the Drive, I walked past the Franz Sigel memorial statue back to Clara’s sidewalk and dawdled there awhile, as if looking for an excuse to linger in her neighborhood, examining each of the surrounding buildings like a latter-day Joseph scoping out lobbies and their doormen while Mary waited in the car, hoping all along that someone might eventually open a window upstairs, yell out my name on this silent night, and utter a peremptory Just come back upstairs—it must be freezing out there.

  I imagined myself immediately heading back into the building, overlooking Ivan’s or Boris’s formalities at the door so as not to appear unenthusiastic to those who’d opened the window and called out my name, all the while trying to retain the hesitant, undecided air of someone who was only acquiescing in the spirit of fellowship with the casual Why not, but just for a short while of a parent about to concede five more minutes of television time.

  Just look at you, you could use a warm drink. Here, let me take your coat, they’d say.

  And before I knew it, I’d shake the very same hands I’d shaken goodbye, including those of the latecomers I’d seen downstairs, as if I were an old friend who made the party just in time for breakfast.

  There, and all this rush to get away from us.

  So why did you leave tonight? as she hands me the same glass she’s been drinking from all evening. That glass, that glass, in a moment I’d be holding that glass.

  I left—I don’t know why I’d left. There are so many reasons. There are no reasons. To strike an attitude. To leave something for later. Didn’t want to overstay the welcome. Didn’t want to show I enjoyed it so much, or that I never wanted it to end.

  Perhaps I had other things to do—

  At four in the morning?

  I have my secrets.

  Even from me?

  Especially from you.

  Remind me never to have anything to do with men who have secrets at four in the morning.

  Remind me never to be tempted to say everything, because I’m dying to.

  Start now. Why did you come back?

  If you ask, Clara, it’s because you know already.

  Tell me just the same.

  Because I didn’t want to go home yet. Because I didn’t want to be alone tonight. Because I don’t know. My heart beat faster and faster as I thought of adding, Because of you.

  Because of me? Spoken in Hans’s slow, deliberate manner.

  How lovely to say Because of you or Because I didn’t want to be alone tonight. Hello, I don’t want to be alone tonight. I want to be with you. And with your friends. In your world. Your house. And stay after everyone’s gone. Be like you, of you, with you—even if you’re lying low, as I’m lying low, as Hans is lying low, as Beryl and Rollo and Inky and everyone else in this city, alive or dead, lies low, low, low, shipwrecked, damaged, and wanting, alone with you till I smell of you, think like you, speak like you, breathe like you.

  Breathe like me? Are you serious?

  I got carried away.

  From the middle of the street I looked up again and made out the partying silhouettes of so many people resting their backs against the frosted windowpanes upstairs, everyone with outstretched elbows, meaning they were holding wineglasses and plates in their hands—would they really be serving breakfast soon, as in some demented intercontinental red-eye?

  Why had Clara taken me downstairs? To end up walking in the snow with me? Or had she meant something else and I had upset her plans by pressing the L for lobby button before she’d had a chance to press her floor? Did I do this to show that her apartment hadn’t crossed my mind? Or was I just trying to make it difficult because it would have been so easy to say, Show me your place.

  Or did I not want to be with anyone tonight? Want to be alone. Want to go home. Yet want to be loved. For the distance between you and me, and, while we’re at it, between me and me, is leagues and furlongs and light-years away.

  I want love, not others. I want romance. I want glitter. I want magic in our lives. Because there is so little of it to go around.

  I thought of others in my place, so many young men, eager and selfless in their love, like Inky, traveling all the way to or back from wherever to stand outside her home, throwing clumps of snow at her window at night till their lungs give out and they waste and die, and all that stays is a song and a frozen footprint.

  As I stood there, I put my hand in my pocket. It was filled with tiny paper napkins. I must have been nervous throughout the evening and, without thinking, stuffing napkins in my pockets each time I put down my glass or finished eating something. I remembered the handkerchief she’d given me during my bout with pepper. What had I done with it?

  In my pocket I also felt the folded oversized invitation card on which the address of the party was printed in spirited filigree. I vaguely recalled, while talking to Clara at the party, that I’d frequently encounter this card in my pocket and would absentmindedly twiddle its corners, experiencing a sudden burst of joy when I put two and two together, and, in the fog of distracted thoughts, remembered that if the card was still damp from the storm, this could only mean I’d just come in from the snow, that the party was still young, that we were hours away from parting, and that there’d be plenty of time for anything to happen. And yet, even if behind these bursts of joy lingered something like light resentment for being dragged to this party, only to be stood up by my father’s friend, still, it may not have been resentment at all but yet another cunning way of allowing my thoughts to stray from where they wished to linger, only to be pulled right back to Clara and to the uncanny suspicion that Pooh might even have orchestrated a bit of what had happened tonight. Father died. I promised to look out for him. Lonely. Doesn’t know what to do with himself. Meet people.

  I began to make my way toward Straus Park on the corner of West End and 106th Street. I wanted to think of her, think of her hand, of her shirt in the cold, that look when nasty humor twisted everything you mistook for harmless and straightforward and reminded you that I sing in the shower was drab, ordinary, flat-footed stuff. I wanted to think of Clara, and yet I was afraid to. I wanted to think of her obliquely, darkly, sparingly, as through the slits of a ski mask in a blizzard. I wanted to think of her provided I thought of her last, as someone I couldn’t quite focus on, someone I was beginning to forget.

  And as I approached one of the lampposts to examine this feeling better and could almost see the lamppost lean its lighted head over my shoulder, as though, in exchange for helping me see things better, it sought comfort for trying so hard to give comfort, I began to think of the lamppost as a person who’d know what this twined feeling of near-bliss and despair was and explain it to me, seeing it had known me for years and surely would understand who I was or why I’d behaved the way I had tonight. It might tell me, if I asked, why life had thrown a Clara my way and watched me thrash about like someone reaching for a buoy that kept sinking. So you know, I wanted to say, you do understand? Oh, I do know and I do understand. And what do we do now? I asked. Do now? You travel all the way to a party and then can’t wait to leave when you’re dying to stay. What do you want me to say? You want guidance? An answer? An apology? There aren’t any. Distemper lacing its voice. The only other person I would speak with, and he is dead.

  On the spot where West End Aven
ue converges with Broadway, I realized there’d be no way to find a cab here either, and as for the downtown M104, chances were no better than with the M5 on Riverside. Thick, luminous, untouched snow lay everywhere. Not a car in sight, while the borders between sidewalks and streets, or between the streets and the park, or between the park and this invisible moment where Broadway and the northernmost tip of West End Avenue converge, all had disappeared. The snow mantled the entire area and made the city look like a boundless frozen lake from which protruded trees and strange undulations, the buried hoods of cars parked around Straus Park.

  Inside the park, frozen, speckling boughs reached out heavenward, a cluttered show of stripped, gnarled, outstretched, earnest hands beckoning from Van Gogh’s olive groves like the tortured shtetlers of Calais huddling in the cold, while the intense white pool reflected at the base of each lamppost made everything seem unsullied, wholesome, and ceremonial, as though the streetlamps had filed up one by one to clear a landing spot for the lost Magi who alight on Christmas Eve.

  How serene and silent the snow—candid snow, I thought, thinking back to Pokorny’s reconstruction of the Indo-European root of the word: *kand—to shine, to kindle, to glow, to flare, from which we get incense and incandescent. There was more candor in snow than in me. Let me light a candle here and think of Clara and of that moment in church, ages ago, when we put in a dollar each and lit candles for God knows whom.

  I undid her knot and rewrapped my scarf around my neck, crossing both ends of the scarf snugly under my coat, the way I’d always done it. It wasn’t cold. I began to wonder whether the snow would stick and hold out till tomorrow. It never did these days. Slowly, as I made my way through the park, I found a bench and came up with a crazy notion. I must sit here. With my glove, I brushed off the snow and finally sat down, extending both legs in front of me like someone taking the sun on an early afternoon after a hearty midday meal.

  I liked it here, and I loved the way both avenues and their adjoining streets seemed to blend in this one spot and, by disappearing in the snow, suddenly revealed that the Upper West Side had undercover harmonies and undisclosed squares that spring on you like stalls in movable marketplaces, new squares that come out with the snow and vanish no sooner than it melts. I could spend the night here and hope the snow stayed all night and all day tomorrow, so that I could return tomorrow night as well and find it lingering still, sit here on this very bench again, as if I had found a ritual and a hub all my own, and wait for the luster of the moment to wash over me again, even if I knew that the luminous patina I was projecting on Straus Park was weather-induced, and alcohol-induced, and love-and sex-induced, an accident and nothing more perhaps, like sitting on this and not another bench, or finding so much beauty because I couldn’t find a cab, or ending up here instead of on Riverside, or biting into a peppercorn instead of crème fraîche, standing, not in the library, where I might have met Beryl first and lived through an entirely different, perhaps better evening, but behind a Christmas tree—suddenly all these incidentals were filled with clarity, radiance, and harmony, hence joy—joy, like snow, that I knew would never last, joy of small miracles when they touch our lives, joy like light on an altar. I knew I would revisit this spot tomorrow night.

  All this in one little word that went far back to a language no one had probably ever spoken: *kand—. The candor of women.

  Yet I knew nothing about her. I knew her first name, could not spell her last, and I’d seen her kiss a man and then a woman. Who was she? What did she do? What was she like? What did others think of her? What did she think of herself, of me? What did she do when she was alone and no one was looking?

  Perhaps all I wanted was to sit and think, and think of nothing, sink into myself, dream, find all things beautiful, and, as I’d never allowed myself to do during the entire evening, to long for her, the way we long for someone we know we don’t stand a chance of meeting again, or of meeting on the exact same terms, but are all the same determined to long for, because longing makes us who we are, makes us better than who we are, because longing fills the heart.

  Fills the heart.

  The way absence and sorrow and mourning fill the heart.

  I didn’t know what all this meant, nor did I trust myself with this, but as I mused over these stray thoughts, I didn’t move, as though something timeless and solemn was taking place, not only in the park itself as I sat there on a cold bench, but in me as well for having entered this deserted, solitary spot called Straus Park, where people like me come to be one with themselves and with everything around them. With the city, the night, and the park, and the loud neon sign hanging over the pharmacy across the park and over the fried-chicken restaurant to the right. The way she stubbed her cigarette and then gently pushed it off the ledge with her shoe, the haunting image of her crimson shirt with its buttons so visibly undone past the sternum that one could guess, and was meant to guess, the shape of her breasts as she spoke to me and tweaked me gently when I’d spoken of love in quags and trenches, only to lure me back into the selfsame quags and trenches and remind me that, with all her confiding airs, she was, in case I forgot, very much the off-limits party girl who just happened to place her elbow on your shoulder when she spoke to you and let you think you and she were one and the same, but not the same, but yet the same and never the same.

  I wanted to feel sorry for myself, wanted to feel sorry for always wanting, wanting, wanting, and never knowing what to do or where to go beyond wanting. I wished to light a candle in Straus Park, as one does in church when one isn’t sure whether one’s praying to ask for something or to give thanks for having gotten it, or just for knowing it exists, for seeing it at such close quarters for the short time it is given us to see that the simple wish to hold on to the memory of its passage in our lives bears all the features, not of longing, or of hope, or even love, but of worship.

  Tonight she was the face I put on my life and how I live it. Tonight she was my eyes to the world looking back at me.

  Tonight I had come so close—one more glance and I’ll kiss you, Clara, as you kissed Beryl, your tongue in her mouth, which is why I kissed Beryl, my tongue, her tongue, your tongue, everyone’s tongue.

  If I had my way, I would plant this imaginary votive taper right here and dig it into the snow as Clara had dug her glass in on the terrace, and I’d let it stand there. And I would light not just one but many such tapers, and stand each one along the rim of the dried flower bed girding the statue of Memory, and I would cover the statue itself, from head to toe, with slim tapers, as they do with Madonnas and saints in tiny street altars in the villages of Spain, Italy, and Greece, till they all glimmered around Straus Park like will-o’-the-wisps on those damp and marshy cemetery grounds where the souls of the dead rise up at night and wander about like glowworms clustering together to stay warm until daybreak, because the dead are good to one another.

  I would sit here and never budge. I would freeze for her. Because tonight she was the face that I put on my life and how I hadn’t learned to live it.

  •

  Perhaps it was the cold that finally brought tears to my eyes; perhaps I’d had too much to drink to know the difference. But as I stared at one of the streetlights nearest me, I began to see double, and the lamppost, from seeming to lean, began to sway, as if it were trying to dislodge itself and would eventually drag itself toward me, shuffling like a beggar on misbegotten limbs, doing what could only seem an imitation moonwalk. He stood there, leaned to and fro, as if to make sure it was indeed me he had spotted, then withdrew and shuffled back and became a streetlamp again. Who was he? And what was he doing on this senseless night? What was I doing out in the cold? Was he another me trundling about here, saying he was taking over, seeing how I’d messed things up for us? Or was he an unfinished me, and how many of these were there who hadn’t seen the light of day yet and might never see it, and how many ached to come back from the past if only to give me garbled solace and distempered advice, not rea
lizing that the crib notes we sneak through time are written in invisible ink, all of these selves thronging around me like a penned-up legion from the underworld thirsting to taste what was so effortlessly and perhaps undeservedly given to me and only me: lifeblood.

  Perhaps I’d light candles around Straus Park for them as well, as ritual stand-ins for what I couldn’t see within me and wished to behold as candles outside of me.

  Then I saw it and touched the speckling twig hanging just above my head. It was crystallized. I tried to pull at it, but it was impossible to break off. What would happen if I pulled harder? The twig might tear somewhat, and I’d probably cut myself. I pictured the blood welling up on my finger and spilling on the snow. I leaned my head all the way back and thought of what my father would say: This isn’t new. You’ve been like this for years. And there’s no one can help you. Life in my blood, soul of my life.

  What would Clara say if she’d seen the state of my bleeding finger? I pictured her coming up to me in her maroon shoes and standing right before me in the snow.

  What is it with you? Let me take a look at this.

  It’s nothing.

  But you’re bleeding.

  Yes, I know. Soldier in the trenches, you know.

  Feeling sorry for yourself?

  I did not answer. But, yes, feeling sorry for myself. Hating myself.

  She rips off a swatch of cloth from her red blouse and swaddles it around my finger, then around my wrist. I am thinking of the Princesse de Clèves wrapping a yellow ribbon around a wooden cane that belonged to the man she loves. That swatch around my stick, my flesh, my Guido, my everything on your hem, on your hand, on your wrist, your wrist, your wrist, your sweet, stained, blessed, God-given wrist. Now look what you did—she smiles—I’m trying to concentrate. You could get a serious infection.