Eight White Nights Read online

  “In the elevator?”

  And then I remembered. Of course. I had indeed noticed someone in the elevator. I remembered the doorman who showed me to the elevator and, sticking his large uniformed arm behind the sliding door, had pressed the button for me, making me feel at once honored and inept before a woman wearing a dark blue raincoat who was busily stamping the snow off her boots. I’d caught myself hoping she’d be one of the guests, but then stopped wishing it when she’d stepped out floors before. I was so thoroughly persuaded I would never see her again that I failed to comprehend how the woman sitting before me now in the greenhouse was the exact same one whose eyes, now that it was all coming back to me, had stared me down in the elevator with a gaze that hissed something between “Don’t even think of it!” and “So, we’re not doing chitchat either, right?” Did Clara introduce herself at the party because she felt we’d already broken the ice in the elevator? Or did good things happen to me precisely because I’d given up on them? Or is there design in our stars provided we’re blind to it, or, as in the case of oracles, provided it speaks with a coiled tongue?

  Had we spoken in the elevator? I asked.

  Yes, we had.

  What had we said?

  “You said something about how strange it was to find a building in Manhattan with a thirteenth floor.”

  What had she said in reply?

  Did so stupid a pickup line merit a reply?

  What if I hadn’t asked about the thirteenth floor?

  That’s a Door number 3 question. And, I already told you, tonight I’m not doing those.

  Had she gone to another party in the same building, then?

  She lived in the same building.

  •

  I live here. At first it sounded like I live here, dummy. But then I immediately realized that it came like an admission of something very private, as though my question had backed her into a corner, and this corner was none other than the four walls within which she lived her life, with Inky, and her clothes, her cigarettes, her pumice stone, her music, her shoes. She lives in this building, I thought. This is where Clara lives. Even her walls, from which she has no secrets and which hear everything when she is alone with all four of them, and speaks to them because they’re not half as deaf as people make them out to be, know who Clara is, and I, and Inky, and all those who’ve caused her torment and torture, haven’t a clue.

  I live here. As if she’d finally confided something I would never have known unless she was forced to admit it—whence the slightly peeved and bruised whine with which she’d said it, meaning: But it was never a secret, why didn’t you ask before?

  Then I had a sudden change of heart. Could Inky have gone home there now instead of heading out to Darien? Was he pouting for her downstairs? Where were you all this time? Upstairs. I waited, and waited, and waited. You shouldn’t have left the party, then. You knew I’d wait. What happened to Connecticut? Too much snow. So you’re staying tonight? Yep.

  “Wait a minute,” said Hans. “You mean you were having drinks together and didn’t know you had already met in the elevator?”

  I nodded, a helpless, ineffectual nod.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  I could feel the blood coursing to the very tips of my ears.

  “He’s—blushing,” Clara whispered audibly.

  “Blushing doesn’t always mean one’s hiding anything,” I said.

  “Blushing doesn’t always mean one’s hiding anything,” Hans repeated in his usual deliberate manner, lacing my words with humor. “If I were Clara, I’d take all this as a compliment.”

  “Just look at him, he’s blushing again,” she said.

  I knew that denying a blush would right away set off an avalanche of mini-blushes.

  “Blushing, flushing, flustered. All you men.”

  I was about to counter when it happened again. In the midst of our bantering, I mistook a raised biscuit for a cube of sushi sitting on a bed of rice and ended up dunking it in some sauce and gulping down yet another slice of peppered hell. This time it came without any warning whatsoever from Clara. No sooner had I bit into it than I immediately sensed this was no wafer or raw fish or pickled cabbage but something else, something surly and ill-tempered that had only started a process that could last for a very long time, forever even. And in the midst of it, I hated myself, because after biting into it, I knew I should have spat it out instantly, even if there was nowhere to spit in the greenhouse but into my napkin. Without knowing why, I decided to swallow it instead.

  This was worse than fire. It scorched everything in its wake. Suddenly, I saw my life and where it was headed. I felt like a man who wakes up in the middle of the night and, under cover of darkness, finds that most of the defenses normally in place by daylight have deserted him like the poor, underpaid, straggling porters they are. The monsters he tames by day are untethered, belching dragons, and before him, as he sweats under his blanket, he suddenly sees—like someone who opens a hotel window in the middle of the night and looks out at the unfamiliar view overlooking an emptied village—how bleak and mirthless his life has been, how it’s always missed its mark and cut corners at every turn, straying like a ghost ship from harbor to haven without ever stopping at the one port he’s always known was home, because, in the middle of this fateful night, he suddenly realizes something else as well: that the very thought of home turns out to be little else than stopgap, everything is stopgap, even thinking is stopgap, as are truth, and joy, and lovemaking, and the words themselves he tries to land on his feet with each time he feels the ground slip from under him—stopgap, each one. What have I done, he asks, how sinister my joys, how shallow my crafty roundabouts, which cheat me of my very own life and make me live quite another, what have I done, singing in the wrong key, saying things in the wrong tense, and in a language that speaks to everyone I know but moves me not a whit?

  Who is he when he opens his window and looks out to Bellagio and is all alone at night and no one watches—not his shadow self, not his chorus of lampposts with their heads ablaze, not the person who now sleeps in his bed and has no sense that what he’s staring at with so much gall in his heart is his life on the other bank, the life that’s almost there, the life we spend staring at and grew to think was only meant to be stared at, not lived, the life that never happens, because, unbeknownst to us, it’s being stared at from the bank of the dead to the land of the living? Who is he when the very language he disclaims is the only one he speaks, when the life he cheats is the only one there is?

  I wanted to think of Muffy and her two gemelline, trying to coax laughter in my heart. But no laughter sprang. I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks again, but I was in too much agony to think whether they were tears of pain, of sorrow, gratitude, love, shame, panic, revulsion—for I felt all these at once, the fear of crying, and the shame of crying, and the shame of my own shame, and the fear of my body giving out on me each time it blushed, and hesitated, and spoke out of turn, or couldn’t find something to say instead of nothing—always looking for something instead of nothing, something instead of nothing.

  So that it all came down to this, didn’t it—this moment, these tears, this dinner in a greenhouse, this party, this woman, this fire in my gut, this roof garden, and this glass dome a world apart with its visionary expanse of the Hudson in midwinter and that tireless celestial beam, which kept resurfacing each time you thought someone had finally pulled the plug on it and which now traveled the sky like a lazy presage of the many wastelands in store for me and of the wasted landfills straight behind—all of it added up to one thing: that if to some, being human comes naturally, to others, it is learned, like an acquired habit or a forgotten tongue that they speak with an accent, the way people live with prosthetic pieces, because between them and life is a trench that no footbridge, no corvus can connect, because love itself is in question, because otherpeoples are in question, because some of us—and I felt myself one in the greenhouse—are green c
ard–bearing humanoids thrust among earthlings. We know it, they don’t. And part of what we want so desperately is for them finally to know this—but not to know. And what kills us in the end is finding that they’ve always known, because they themselves feel no differently, which is why if knowing all this had passed for a consolation once, now it was a consolation from hell, for then, in my father’s words, there was no hope and things were far worse than we feared.

  All I could think of as I sat there with my eyes still closed was fear—fear exposed, fear of daring and being caught daring, fear of wanting and hoping so badly, but never badly enough to dare anything worth getting caught fretting for, fear of letting Clara know everything, fear of never being forgiven—fear of spitting out this piece of Mankiewicz as though it were a lie I’d choked on all evening long but didn’t know what to replace it with, fear that I might mull this lie a while longer, as I’d done all life long, until it lost its pungency and became as ordinary as the water of life itself.

  “This is so awful,” I heard Clara say.

  I looked at her imploringly as if to say, Give me a few more minutes, don’t start the sparring yet, wait for me, just let me catch my breath.

  I heard the hubbub of voices coming nearby.

  Hans rang a bell for water.

  It took me a few seconds to realize I must have fainted or done something quite like it, because when I opened my eyes, I saw that others had joined Hans and Clara and were already taking their seats at the adjoining tables.

  “You shouldn’t talk,” said Clara, as one might tell someone lying on the sidewalk that he shouldn’t move until an ambulance arrived.

  The waiter had already brought a glass brimming with ice cubes and handed it to Clara. On her face sat the mildly impatient, steady gaze of a skilled torturer who is long familiar with the undesirable effects of interrogations and who always finds a vial of smelling salts nearby, to bring back the prisoner to his pain.

  I held the glass in my hands. Then took short, gasping, almost sobbing sips.

  I watched her face again. Just one more sip, she seemed to say, and then another, and another again—she was talking to a baby, not a drinking buddy. She bore the look of worn-out daughters by the bedside of a very sick parent who for weeks has refused to eat. A second later, and that same mournful, worried look hardened into something cross, as though she’d shrugged me off but was going on with tedious motions of caring until the next shift.

  Why the turnabout? The sudden hostility? The feigned indifference, even? Or the quipping with Beryl and Rollo in the background while I lay dying? Stop pretending you do not care.

  “Drink more water. Please, just drink.” As I was drinking: “What is it with you?” she said. It was the sweetest thing she might ever have said to me, What’s with your mouth, here, let me rub your lips, let me kiss your lips, your lips, your poor, sweet, wretched, God-given burning lips. I’d take pity in a second.

  •

  Eventually my eyes began to clear. My mouth was still burning, and I could feel that my lips were quite swollen, but at least I could speak. To every dreamer who’s had a nightmare, this was like dawn. Soon daylight would come, when every chimera withdraws and dissolves into the morning dew like milk in a large cup of warm English Breakfast tea. Perhaps this was not even the end of the ordeal—and part of me, even while I struggled to put it as far behind me as I could, was already hoping that it wasn’t quite over and had begun to miss the confused and silent outpouring of panic and grief that I knew was my way of asking her to take a hard look at what anyone with half a brain would have guessed right away.

  It was as though I had finally shown her my body, or done something with it to touch hers. As clumsy as my gesture was, I felt no less relieved than a wounded soldier who is seized by a sudden impulse for his nurse, grabs her warm palm, and holds it to his crotch.

  “Better?”

  “Better,” I replied.

  And as I looked at all of those who had gathered more or less around us, some with their plates and their rolled-up napkins containing silverware dating back to the time Hans’s parents had fled the Old World, I realized that, despite all their banter and their teasing about my reaction to Mankiewicz’s appetizer, this was still one of the most beautiful evenings I’d spent in a very long time. Hans, Pablo, Pavel, Orla, Beryl, Tito, Rollo, unknowns all of them.

  Clara reminded everyone it would soon be time to head out to the Midnight Mass. “Just for an hour or so,” she explained.

  Next year, someone said.

  “We’re also missing Inky,” said Pablo.

  “He’s gone.” Rollo was obviously coming to Clara’s rescue.

  “Yessssss,” said Clara, to mean, Okay, everyone stop asking.

  “I can’t believe it.” This, she later told me, was Pavel.

  Someone was shaking his head. Clara and the men in her life!

  “Does anyone have any idea how fed up I am with men, each with his little Guido jumping to attention like a water pistol—”

  “God spare us,” said Pablo. “We’re back to Clara’s I’m-so-fed-up-with-men routine.”

  “Which includes you, Pablo,” she snapped, “you and your puny flibbertigibbet.”

  “Leave my dousing rod out of this. It’s been in places where no man’s Guido’s been before. Trust me.”

  “How about him?” asked a petulant Beryl, meaning me. “Fed up with him already?”

  “I want nothing to do with anyone, not this winter, not this year, I’ll kiss a woman before I kiss another man. I’ll sleep with a woman before I so much as let a man touch me with his stinkhorn.” And to prove her point, she walked up to Beryl’s table, sat next to her, brought her lips very close to hers, gave a few soft pecks, and then began to kiss her deep in the mouth. Neither resisted, both shut their eyes, and the kiss, however whimsically begun, could not have seemed more passionate or more acquiescent.

  “There!” said Clara, disengaging without giving Beryl time to recover. “Point taken?” It was not clear which man she was addressing. “And she kisses well too,” said Beryl.

  It was a savage kiss. I had assumed lying low meant I am not ready, I want to go home, take me elsewhere, I want to be alone, let me find love without others, let me go back to my walls, my staunch, loyal, steadfast walls. Instead, her kiss had been brutal. We can fuck, but we won’t find love, I won’t find it in me, for you, with anyone. Which is why you’re in my way. She was speaking to me, I was almost certain now. Even your patience wears me out. Everything about you—your silence, your tact, your fucking restraint, and the way you give me slack, hoping I don’t notice, everything rushes me, it’s not love I need, so leave me alone. The two women kissed again.

  When they had stopped kissing, Hans spoke first.

  “All this is starting to look like a French movie. Everything always makes more sense in French movies.”

  Trying not to look too unsettled by the women’s kisses, I said I wasn’t sure. French movies were about not life but the romance of life. Just as they’re not about France but the romance of France. Ultimately French movies are about French movies.

  “Your answer is like a French movie too,” Clara said as she made her way back to our table, speaking with impatience in her voice, meaning, Enough with the mind games.

  “My life as a French movie—there’s an idea,” said the party girl, who was tired of mind games. “Maybe I should see it tonight.” Then, on second thought: “No, I’ve seen it too many times already. Same plot, same ending.”

  “French movies are about urbane Parisians,” said Hans, “not dyspeptic Upper West Side Jews on antidepressants.” There was a stunned moment of silence. “And on that,” he said, standing up and turning to me to shake my hand, “enchanté.” He was leaving the greenhouse. “Come for New Year’s. I mean it. But not a word of it to Monique.”

  “Who is Monique?” I asked Clara after he had gone and left us alone at our table.

  “His flame-no-longer-his-flame,�
�� explained Clara.

  I pondered the information.

  “Were you his flame once?”

  “I could have been.”

  “—but didn’t want to?”

  “It’s more complicated.”

  “Because of Gretchen?”

  “Gretchen would have driven me to it, not stopped me. Because of Gretchen, seriously!”

  “I was just curious.”

  Then, after a pause: “For your nymphormation, namphibalence strikes women too.”

  “And do you feel any now?” I asked, delighting in my own boldness, knowing that she’d know exactly what I was referring to, “because right now I feel absolutely none,” I added.

  “I know you don’t.” This was the closest she had ever come to me.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I just do.”

  “You don’t miss a beat, do you?”

  “No. But then that’s why you like me?”

  “Remind me never to have anything to do with women who never miss a beat.”

  “When do I start reminding you?”

  “Start now. No, not now. Now is too lovely and I’m having such a good time.”

  And then, before I could add anything more, came the one gesture that could change lives. She brought her hand to my face ever so slowly and, with the back of it, caressed my face on both sides.

  “I’m lying so very, very low, you’ve no idea. Not like your typical French movie, I’m afraid. In magazine lingo, I’m this close to being not a well person,” she said, bringing her thumb as close to her forefinger as possible.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t read magazines.”

  She let the comment pass.

  “Can I say something?”

  “By all means,” I said, feeling a knot tightening in my stomach.

  “I’d be so wrong for anyone these days,” she added, meaning for you.

  I looked at her.

  “At least you’re honest. Are you honest?”

  “Seldom.”

  “That’s honest.”

  “Not really.”

  After that, people began to interrupt us, and unavoidably Clara’s attention was drawn to the others in the greenhouse, which was when she reminded us of the Midnight Mass.