André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

I wanted to look at her, stare in her eyes as she held me in her hand, tell her how long I’d wanted to kiss her, say something to show that the person who’d called her tonight and picked her up at her house was no longer the same cold, lifeless boy — but she cut me short: “ Baciami ancora , kiss me again.”

I kissed her again, but my mind was racing ahead to the berm. Should I propose it? We would have to ride our bikes for five minutes, especially if we took her shortcut and made our way directly through the olive groves. I knew we’d run into other lovers around there. Otherwise there was the beach. I’d used the spot before. Everyone did. I might propose my room, no one at home would have known or for that matter cared.

An image flitted through my mind: she and I sitting in the garden every morning after breakfast, she wearing her bikini, always urging me to walk downstairs and join her for a swim.

“ Ma tu mi vuoi veramente bene , do you really care for me?” she asked. Did it come from nowhere — or was this the same wounded look in need of soothing which had been shadowing our steps ever since we’d left the bookstore?

I couldn’t understand how boldness and sorrow, how you’re so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it.

While kissing her more passionately now, and with our hands straying all over each other’s bodies, I found myself composing the note I resolved to slip under his door that night: Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you .

By the time I was ready to slip the note under his door it was already dawn. Marzia and I had made love in a deserted spot on the beach, a place nicknamed the Aquarium, where the night’s condoms would unavoidably gather and be seen floating among the rocks like returning salmon in trapped water. We planned to meet later in the day.

Now, as I made my way home, I loved her smell on my body, on my hands. I would do nothing to wash it away. I’d keep it on me till we met in the evening. Part of me still enjoyed luxuriating in this newfound, beneficent wave of indifference, verging on distaste, for Oliver that both pleased me and told me how fickle I ultimately was. Perhaps he sensed that all I’d wanted from him was to sleep with him to be done with him and had instinctively resolved to have nothing to do with me. To think that a few nights ago I had felt so strong an urge to host his body in mine that I’d nearly jumped out of bed to seek him out in his room. Now the idea couldn’t possibly arouse me. Perhaps this whole thing with Oliver had been canicular rut, and I was well rid of it. By contrast, all I had to do was smell Marzia on my hand and I loved the all-woman in every woman.

I knew the feeling wouldn’t last long and that, as with all addicts, it was easy to forswear an addiction immediately after a fix.

Scarcely an hour later, and Oliver came back to me au galop . To sit in bed with him and offer him my palm and say, Here, smell this, and then to watch him sniff at my hand, holding it ever so gently in both of his, finally placing my middle finger to his lips and then suddenly all the way into his mouth.

I tore out a sheet of paper from a school notebook.

Please don’t avoid me.

Then I rewrote it:

Please don’t avoid me. It kills me.

Which I rewrote:

Your silence is killing me.

Way over the top.

Can’t stand thinking you hate me.

Too plangent. No, make it less lachrymose, but keep the trite death speech.

I’d sooner die than know you hate me.

At the last minute I came back to the original.

Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you .

I folded the piece of lined paper and slipped it under his door with the resigned apprehension of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. There was no turning back now. Iacta alea est , Caesar had said, the die is cast. It amused me to think that the verb “to throw,” iacere in Latin, has the same root as the verb “to ejaculate.” No sooner had I thought this than I realized that what I wanted was to bring him not just her scent on my fingers but, dried on my hand, the imprint of my semen.

Fifteen minutes later I was prey to two countervailing emotions: regret that I had sent the message, and regret that there wasn’t a drop of irony in it.

At breakfast, when he finally showed up after his jog, all he asked without raising his head was whether I had enjoyed myself last night, the implication being I had gone to bed very late. “ Insomma , so-so,” I replied, trying to keep my answer as vague as possible, which was also my way of suggesting I was minimizing a report that would have been too long otherwise. “Must be tired, then,” was my father’s ironic contribution to the conversation. “Or was it poker that you were playing too?” “I don’t play poker.” My father and Oliver exchanged significant glances. Then they began discussing the day’s workload. And I lost him. Another day of torture.

When I went back upstairs to fetch my books, I saw the same folded piece of lined notebook paper on my desk. He must have stepped into my room using the balcony door and placed it where I’d spot it. If I read it now it would ruin my day. But if I put off reading it, the whole day would become meaningless, and I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else. In all likelihood, he was tossing it back to me without adding anything on it, as though to mean: I found this on the floor. It’s probably yours. Later! Or it might mean something far more blunted: No reply.

Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight .

That’s what he had added under my words.

He had delivered it before breakfast.

This realization came with a few minutes’ delay but it filled me with instant yearning and dismay. Did I want this, now that something was being offered? And was it in fact being offered? And if I wanted or didn’t want it, how would I live out the day till midnight? It was barely ten in the morning: fourteen hours to go…The last time I had waited so long for something was for my report card. Or on the Saturday two years ago when a girl had promised we’d meet at the movies and I wasn’t sure she hadn’t forgotten. Half a day watching my entire life being put on hold. How I hated waiting and depending on the whim of others.

Should I answer his note?

You can’t answer an answer!

As for the note: was its tone intentionally light, or was it meant to look like an afterthought scribbled away minutes after jogging and seconds before breakfast? I didn’t miss the little jab at my operatic sentimentalism, followed by the self-confident, let’s-get-down-to-basics see you at midnight . Did either bode well, and which would win the day, the swat of irony, or the jaunty Let’s get together tonight and see what comes of it ? Were we going to talk — just talk? Was this an order or a consent to see me at the hour specified in every novel and every play? And where were we going to meet at midnight? Would he find a moment during the day to tell me where? Or, being aware that I had fretted all night long the other night and that the trip wire dividing our respective ends of the balcony was entirely artificial, did he assume that one of us would eventually cross the unspoken Maginot Line that had never stopped anyone?

And what did this do to our near-ritual morning bike rides? Would “midnight” supersede the morning ride? Or would we go on as before, as though nothing had changed, except that now we had a “midnight” to look forward to? When I run into him now, do I flash him a significant smile, or do I go on as before, and offer, instead, a cold, glazed, discreet American gaze?