André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

I looked at the bed. I could see it clearly now. This was where I’d spent so many nights dreaming of just such a moment. Now here I was. In a few weeks, I’d be back here on this very same bed. I’d turn on my Oxford night-light and remember standing outside on the balcony, having caught the rustle of his feet scrambling to find his slippers. I wondered whether I would look back on this with sorrow. Or shame. Or indifference, I hoped.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Me okay.”

There was absolutely nothing to say. With my toes, I reached over to his toes and touched them. Then, without thinking, I slipped my big toe in between his big toe and his second toe. He did not recoil, he did not respond. I wanted to touch each toe with my own. Since I was sitting to his left, these were probably not the toes that had touched me at lunch the other day. It was his right foot that was guilty. I tried to reach it with my right foot, all the while avoiding touching both his knees, as if something told me knees were off bounds. “What are you doing?” he finally asked. “Nothing.” I didn’t know myself, but his body gradually began to reciprocate the movement, somewhat absentmindedly, without conviction, no less awkward than mine, as if to say, What else is there to do but to respond in kind when someone touches your toes with his toes? After that, I moved closer to him and then hugged him. A child’s hug which I hoped he’d read as an embrace. He did not respond. “That’s a start,” he finally said, perhaps with a tad more humor in his voice than I’d wish. Instead of speaking, I shrugged my shoulders, hoping he’d feel my shrug and not ask any more questions. I did not want us to speak. The less we spoke, the more unrestrained our movements. I liked hugging him.

“Does this make you happy?” he asked.

I nodded, hoping, once again, that he’d feel my head nodding without the need for words.

Finally, as if my position urged him to do likewise, he brought his arm around me. The arm didn’t stroke me, nor did it hold me tight. The last thing I wanted at this point was comradeship. Which was why, without interrupting my embrace, I loosened my hold for a moment, time enough to bring both my arms under his loose shirt and resume my embrace. I wanted his skin.

“You sure you want this?” he asked, as if this doubt was why he’d been hesitant all along.

I nodded again. I was lying. By then I wasn’t sure at all. I wondered when my hug would run its course, when I, or he, would grow tired of this. Soon? Later? Now?

“We haven’t talked,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, No need to.

He lifted my face with both hands and stared at me as we had done that day on the berm, this time even more intensely because both of us knew we’d already crossed the bar. “Can I kiss you?” What a question, coming after our kiss on the berm! Or had we wiped the slate clean and were starting all over again?

I did not give him an answer. Without nodding, I had already brought my mouth to his, just as I’d kissed Marzia the night before. Something unexpected seemed to clear away between us, and, for a second, it seemed there was absolutely no difference in age between us, just two men kissing, and even this seemed to dissolve, as I began to feel we were not even two men, just two beings. I loved the egalitarianism of the moment. I loved feeling younger and older, human to human, man to man, Jew to Jew. I loved the night-light. It made me feel snug and safe. As I’d felt that night in the hotel bedroom in Oxford. I even loved the stale, wan feel of my old bedroom, which was littered with his things but which somehow became more livable under his stewardship than mine: a picture here, a chair turned into an end table, books, cards, music.

I decided to get under the covers. I loved the smell. I wanted to love the smell. I even liked the fact that there were things on the bed that hadn’t been removed and which I kept kneeing into and didn’t mind encountering when I slipped a foot under them, because they were part of his bed, his life, his world.

He got under the covers too and, before I knew it, started to undress me. I had worried about how I’d go about undressing, how, if he wasn’t going to help, I’d do what so many girls did in the movies, take off my shirt, drop my pants, and just stand there, stark-naked, arms hanging down, meaning: This is who I am, this is how I’m made, here, take me, I’m yours. But his move had solved the problem. He was whispering, “Off, and off, and off, and off,” which made me laugh, and suddenly I was totally naked, feeling the weight of the sheet on my cock, not a secret left in the world, because wanting to be in bed with him was my only secret and here I was sharing it with him. How wonderful to feel his hands all over me under the sheets, as if part of us, like an advance scouting party, had already arrived at intimacy, while the rest of us, exposed outside the sheets, was still struggling with niceties, like latecomers stamping their feet in the cold while everyone else is warming hands inside a crowded nightclub. He was still dressed and I wasn’t. I loved being naked before him. Then he kissed me, and kissed me again, deeply this second time, as if he too was finally letting go. At some point I realized he’d been naked for a long while, though I hadn’t noticed him undress, but there he was, not a part of him wasn’t touching me. Where had I been? I’d been meaning to ask the tactful health question, but that too seemed to have been answered a while ago, because when I finally did find the courage to ask him, he replied, “I already told you, I’m okay.” “Did I tell you I was okay too?” “Yes.” He smiled. I looked away, because he was staring at me, and I knew I was flushed, and I knew I’d made a face, though I still wanted him to stare at me even if it embarrassed me, and I wanted to keep staring at him too as we settled in our mock wrestling position, his shoulders rubbing my knees. How far we had come from the afternoon when I’d taken off my underwear and put on his bathing suit and thought this was the closest his body would ever come to mine. Now this. I was on the cusp of something, but I also wanted it to last forever, because I knew there’d be no coming back from this. When it happened, it happened not as I’d dreamed it would, but with a degree of discomfort that forced me to reveal more of myself than I cared to reveal. I had an impulse to stop him, and when he noticed, he did ask, but I did not answer, or didn’t know what to answer, and an eternity seemed to pass between my reluctance to make up my mind and his instinct to make it up for me. From this moment on, I thought, from this moment on — I had, as I’d never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all of my life and I’d misplaced it and he had helped me find it. The dream had been right — this was like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life? which was another way of asking, Where were you in my childhood, Oliver? which was yet another way of asking, What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not he, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You’ll kill me if you stop, you’ll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from his mouth to my mouth back into his mouth, swapping words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me, softly at first, till he said, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” which I’d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.