André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

Or nothing at all might happen. He could refuse, and, even if no one found out I had asked him, I’d still be humiliated, and for nothing. He’d know; I’d know.

But I was past humiliation. After weeks of wanting and waiting and — let’s face it — begging and being made to hope and fight every access of hope, I’d be devastated. How do you go back to sleep after that? Slink back into your room and pretend to open a book and read yourself to sleep?

Or: how do you go back to sleep no longer a virgin? There was no coming back from that! What had been in my head for so long would now be out in the real world, no longer afloat in my foreverland of ambiguities. I felt like someone entering a tattoo parlor and taking a last, long look at his bare left shoulder.

Should I be punctual?

Be punctual and say: Whooo-hooo, the witching hour.

Soon I could hear the voices of the two guests rising from the courtyard. They were standing outside, probably waiting for the adjunct professor to drive them back to their pension. The adjunct was taking his time and the couple were simply chatting outside, one of them giggling.

At midnight there wasn’t a sound coming from his room. Could he have stood me up again? That would be too much. I hadn’t heard him come back. He’d just have to come to my room, then. Or should I still go to his? Waiting would be torture.

I’ll go to him.

I stepped out onto the balcony for a second and peered in the direction of his bedroom. No light. I’d still knock anyway.

Or I could wait. Or not go at all.

Not going suddenly burst on me like the one thing I wanted most in life. It kept tugging at me, straining toward me ever so gently now, like someone who’d already whispered once or twice in my sleep but, seeing I wasn’t waking, had finally tapped me on the shoulder and was now encouraging me to look for every inducement to put off knocking on his window tonight. The thought washed over me like water on a flower shop window, like a soothing, cool lotion after you’ve showered and spent the whole day in the sun, loving the sun but loving the balsam more. Like numbness, the thought works on your extremities first and then penetrates to the rest of your body, giving all manner of arguments, starting with the silly ones — it’s way too late for anything tonight — rising to the major ones — how will you face the others, how will you face yourself?

Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Because I wanted to savor and save it for last? Because I wanted the counterarguments to spring on their own, without my having any part in summoning them at all, so that I wouldn’t be blamed for them? Don’t try, don’t try this, Elio. It was my grandfather’s voice. I was his namesake, and he was speaking to me from the very bed where he’d crossed a far more menacing divide than the one between my room and Oliver’s. Turn back. Who knows what you’ll find once you’re in that room. Not the tonic of discovery but the pall of despair when disenchantment has all but shamed every ill-stretched nerve in your body. The years are watching you now, every star you see tonight already knows your torment, your ancestors are gathered here and have nothing to give or say, Non c’andà , don’t go there.

But I loved the fear — if fear it really was — and this they didn’t know, my ancestors. It was the underside of fear I loved, like the smoothest wool found on the underbelly of the coarsest sheep. I loved the boldness that was pushing me forward; it aroused me, because it was born of arousal itself. “You’ll kill me if you stop”—or was it: “I’ll die if you stop.” Each time I heard these words, I couldn’t resist.

I knock on the glass panel, softly. My heart is beating like crazy. I am afraid of nothing, so why be so frightened? Why? Because everything scares me, because both fear and desire are busy equivocating with each other, with me, I can’t even tell the difference between wanting him to open the door and hoping he’s stood me up.

Instead, no sooner have I knocked on the glass panel than I hear something stir inside, like someone looking for his slippers. Then I make out a weak light going on. I remembered buying this night-light at Oxford with my father one evening early last spring when our hotel room was too dark and he had gone downstairs and come back up saying he’d been told there was a twenty-four-hour store that sold night-lights just around the corner. Wait here, and I’ll be back in no time. Instead, I said I’d go with him. I threw on my raincoat on top of the very same pajamas I was wearing tonight.

“I’m so glad you came,” he said. “I could hear you moving in your room and for a while I thought you were getting ready to go to bed and had changed your mind.”

“Me, change my mind? Of course I was coming.”

It was strange seeing him fussing awkwardly this way. I had expected a hailstorm of mini-ironies, which was why I was nervous. Instead, I was greeted with excuses, like someone apologizing for not having had time to buy better biscuits for afternoon tea.

I stepped into my old bedroom and was instantly taken aback by the smell which I couldn’t quite place, because it could have been a combination of so many things, until I noticed the rolled-up towel tucked under the bedroom door. He had been sitting in bed, a half-full ashtray sitting on his right pillow.

“Come in,” he said, and then shut the French window behind us. I must have been standing there, lifeless and frozen.

Both of us were whispering. A good sign.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Sometimes.” He went to the bed and sat squarely in the middle of it.

Not knowing what else to do or say, I muttered, “I’m nervous.”

“Me too.”

“Me more than you.”

He tried to smile away the awkwardness between us and passed me the reefer.

It gave me something to do.

I remembered how I’d almost hugged him on the balcony but had caught myself in time, thinking that an embrace after such chilly moments between us all day was unsuitable. Just because someone says he’ll see you at midnight doesn’t mean you’re automatically bound to hug him when you’ve barely shaken hands all week. I remembered thinking before knocking: To hug. Not to hug. To hug.

Now I was inside the room.

He was sitting on the bed, with his legs crossed. He looked smaller, younger. I was standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed, not knowing what to do with my hands. He must have seen me struggling to keep them on my hips and then put them in my pockets and then back to my hips again.

I look ridiculous, I thought. This and the would-be hug I’d suppressed and which I kept hoping he hadn’t noticed.

I felt like a child left alone for the first time with his homeroom teacher. “Come, sit.”

Did he mean on a chair or on the bed itself?

Hesitantly, I crawled onto the bed and sat facing him, cross-legged like him, as though this were the accepted protocol among men who meet at midnight. I was making sure our knees didn’t touch. Because he’d mind if our knees touched, just as he’d mind the hug, just as he minded when, for want of a better way to show I wanted to stay awhile longer on the berm, I’d placed my hand on his crotch.

But before I had a chance to exaggerate the distance between us, I felt as though washed by the sliding water on the flower shop’s storefront window, which took all my shyness and inhibitions away. Nervous or not nervous, I no longer cared to cross-examine every one of my impulses. If I’m stupid, let me be stupid. If I touch his knee, so I’ll touch his knee. If I want to hug, I’ll hug. I needed to lean against something, so I sidled up to the top of the bed and leaned my back against the headboard next to him.