André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

Had we made noise?

He smiled. Nothing to worry about.

I think I might have sobbed even, but I wasn’t sure. He took his shirt and cleaned me with it. Mafalda always looks for signs. She won’t find any, he said. I call this shirt “Billowy,” you wore it on your first day here, it has more of you than me. I doubt it, he said. He wouldn’t let go of me yet, but as our bodies separated I seemed to remember, though ever so distantly, that a while back I had absentmindedly shoved away a book which had ended up under my back while he was still inside me. Now it was on the floor. When had I realized it was a copy of Se l’amore ? Where had I found time in the heat of passion even to wonder whether he’d been to the book party on the same night I’d gone there with Marzia? Strange thoughts that seemed to drift in from long, long ago, no more than half an hour later.

It must have come to me a while later when I was still in his arms. It woke me up before I even realized I had dozed off, filling me with a sense of dread and anxiety I couldn’t begin to fathom. I felt queasy, as if I had been sick and needed not just many showers to wash everything off but a bath in mouthwash. I needed to be far away — from him, from this room, from what we’d done together. It was as though I were slowly landing from an awful nightmare but wasn’t quite touching the ground yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to, because what awaited was not going to be much better, though I knew I couldn’t go on hanging on to that giant, amorphous blob of a nightmare that felt like the biggest cloud of self-loathing and remorse that had ever wafted into my life. I would never be the same. How had I let him do these things to me, and how eagerly had I participated in them, and spurred them on, and then waited for him, begging him, Please don’t stop. Now his goo was matted on my chest as proof that I had crossed a terrible line, not vis-à-vis those I held dearest, not even vis-à-vis myself, or anything sacred, or the race itself that had brought us this close, not even vis-à-vis Marzia, who stood now like a far-flung siren on a sinking reef, distant and irrelevant, cleansed by lapping summer waves while I struggled to swim out to her, clamoring from a whirlpool of anxiety in the hope that she’d be part of the collection of images to help me rebuild myself by daybreak. It was not these I had offended, but those who were yet unborn or unmet and whom I’d never be able to love without remembering this mass of shame and revulsion rising between my life and theirs. It would haunt and sully my love for them, and between us, there would be this secret that could tarnish everything good in me.

Or had I offended something even deeper? What was it?

Had the loathing I felt always been there, though camouflaged, and all I’d needed was a night like this to let it out?

Something bordering on nausea, something like remorse — was that it, then? — began to grip me and seemed to define itself ever more clearly the more I became aware of incipient daylight through our windows.

Like the light, though, remorse, if remorse indeed it was, seemed to fade for a little while. But when I lay in bed and felt uncomfortable, it came back on the double as if to score a point each time I thought I’d felt the last of it. I had known it would hurt. What I hadn’t expected was that the hurt would find itself coiled and twisted into sudden pangs of guilt. No one had told me about this either.

Outside it was clearly dawn now.

Why was he staring at me? Had he guessed what I was feeling?

“You’re not happy,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders.

It was not him I hated — but the thing we’d done. I didn’t want him looking into my heart just yet. Instead, I wanted to remove myself from this bog of self-loathing and didn’t know how to do it.

“You’re feeling sick about it, aren’t you?”

Again I shrugged the comment away.

“I knew we shouldn’t have. I knew it,” he repeated. For the first time in my life I watched him balk, prey to self-doubt. “We should have talked…”

“Maybe,” I said.

Of all the things I could have uttered that morning, this insignificant “maybe” was the cruelest.

“Did you hate it?”

No, I didn’t hate it at all. But what I felt was worse than hate. I didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to think about it. Just put it away. It had never happened. I had tried it and it didn’t work for me, now I wanted my money back, roll back the film, take me back to that moment when I’m almost stepping out onto the balcony barefoot, I’ll go no farther, I’ll sit and stew and never know — better to argue with my body than feel what I was feeling now. Elio, Elio, we warned you, didn’t we?

Here I was in his bed, staying put out of an exaggerated sense of courtesy. “You can go to sleep, if you want,” he said, perhaps the kindest words he’d ever spoken to me, a hand on my shoulder, while I, Judas-like, kept saying to myself, If only he knew. If only he knew I want to be leagues and a lifetime away from him. I hugged him. I closed my eyes. “You’re staring at me,” I said, with my eyes still shut. I liked being stared at with my eyes shut.

I needed him as far away as possible if I was to feel better and forget — but I needed him close by in case this thing took a turn for the worse and there was no one to turn to.

Meanwhile, another part of me was actually happy the whole thing was behind me. He was out of my system. I would pay the price. The questions were: Would he understand? And would he forgive?

Or was this another trick to stave off another access of loathing and shame?

Early in the morning, we went for a swim together. It felt to me that this was the last time we’d ever be together like this. I would go back into my room, fall asleep, wake up, have breakfast, take out my scorebook, and spend those marvelous morning hours immersed in transcribing the Haydn, occasionally feeling a sting of anxiety in anticipating his renewed snub at the breakfast table, only to remember that we were past that stage now, that I’d had him inside me barely a few hours ago and that later he had come all over my chest, because he said he wanted to, and I let him, perhaps because I hadn’t come yet and it thrilled me to watch him make faces and peak before my very eyes.

Now he walked almost knee-deep into the water with his shirt on. I knew what he was doing. If Mafalda asked, he’d claim it got wet by accident.

Together, we swam to the big rock. We spoke. I wanted him to think that I was happy being with him. I had wanted the sea to wash away the gunk on my chest, yet here was his semen, clinging to my body. In a short while, after soap and shower, all my doubts about myself, which had started three years before when an anonymous young man riding a bike had stopped, gotten off, put a hand around my shoulder, and with that gesture either stirred or hastened something that might have taken much, much longer to work itself to consciousness — all these could now finally be washed away as well, dispelled as an evil rumor about me, or a false belief, released like a genie who’d served his sentence and was now being cleansed with the soft, radiant scent of chamomile soap found in every one of our bathrooms.

We sat on one of the rocks and talked. Why hadn’t we talked like this before? I’d have been less desperate for him had we been able to have this kind of friendship weeks earlier. Perhaps we might have avoided sleeping together. I wanted to tell him that I had made love to Marzia the other night not two hundred yards away from where we stood right now. But I kept quiet. Instead we spoke of Haydn’s “It Is Finished,” which I’d just finished transcribing. I could speak about this and not feel I was doing it to impress him or to draw his attention or to put up a wobbly footbridge between us. I could speak about the Haydn for hours — what a lovely friendship this might have been.