André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

I put on a tank top but decided to stay naked and get under the sheet.

I awoke to the sound of someone unhooking the latch of the shutters and then hooking it back behind him. As in my dream once, he was tiptoeing toward me, not in an effort to surprise me, but so as not to wake me up. I knew it was Oliver and, with my eyes still closed, raised my arm to him. He grabbed it and kissed it, then lifted the sheet and seemed surprised to find me naked. He immediately brought his lips to where they’d promised to return this morning. He loved the sticky taste. What had I done?

I told him and pointed to the bruised evidence sitting on my desk.

“Let me see.”

He stood up and asked if I’d left it for him.

Perhaps I had. Or had I simply put off thinking how to dispose of it?

“Is this what I think it is?”

I nodded naughtily in mock shame.

“Any idea how much work Anchise puts into each one of these?”

He was joking, but it felt as though he, or someone through him, was asking the same question about the work my parents had put into me.

He brought the half peach to bed, making certain not to spill its contents as he took his clothes off.

“I’m sick, aren’t I?” I asked.

“No, you’re not sick — I wish everyone were as sick as you. Want to see sick?”

What was he up to? I hesitated to say yes.

“Just think of the number of people who’ve come before you — you, your grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, and all the skipped generations of Elios before you, and those from places far away, all squeezed into this trickle that makes you who you are. Now may I taste it?”

I shook my head.

He dipped a finger into the core of the peach and brought it to his mouth.

“Please don’t.” This was more than I could bear.

“I never could stand my own. But this is yours. Please explain.”

“It makes me feel terrible.”

He simply shrugged my comment away.

“Look, you don’t have to do this. I’m the one who came after you, I sought you out, everything that happened is because of me — you don’t have to do this.”

“Nonsense. I wanted you from day one. I just hid it better.”

“Sure!”

I lunged out to grab the fruit from his hand, but with his other hand he caught hold of my wrist and squeezed it hard, as they do in movies, when one man forces another to let go of a knife.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Then let go.”

I watched him put the peach in his mouth and slowly begin to eat it, staring at me so intensely that I thought even lovemaking didn’t go so far.

“If you just want to spit it out, it’s okay, it’s really okay, I promise I won’t be offended,” I said to break the silence more than as a last plea.

He shook his head. I could tell he was tasting it at that very instant. Something that was mine was in his mouth, more his than mine now. I don’t know what happened to me at that moment as I kept staring at him, but suddenly I had a fierce urge to cry. And rather than fight it, as with orgasm, I simply let myself go, if only to show him something equally private about me as well. I reached for him and muffled my sobs against his shoulder. I was crying because no stranger had ever been so kind or gone so far for me, even Anchise, who had cut open my foot once and sucked and spat out and sucked and spat out the scorpion’s venom. I was crying because I’d never known so much gratitude and there was no other way to show it. And I was crying for the evil thoughts I’d nursed against him this morning. And for last night as well, because, for better or worse, I’d never be able to undo it, and now was as good a time as any to show him that he was right, that this wasn’t easy, that fun and games had a way of skidding off course and that if we had rushed into things it was too late to step back from them now — crying because something was happening, and I had no idea what it was.

“Whatever happens between us, Elio, I just want you to know. Don’t ever say you didn’t know.” He was still chewing. In the heat of passion it would have been one thing. But this was quite another. He was taking me away with him.

His words made no sense. But I knew exactly what they meant.

I rubbed his face with my palm. Then, without knowing why, I began to lick his eyelids.

“Kiss me now, before it’s totally gone,” I said. His mouth would taste of peaches and me.

I stayed in my room long after Oliver left. When I finally awoke, it was almost evening, which put me in a grumpy mood. The pain was gone, but I had a resurgence of the same malaise I’d experienced toward dawn. I didn’t know now if this was the same feeling, resurfacing after a long hiatus, or if the earlier one had healed and this was a totally new one, resulting from the afternoon’s lovemaking. Would I always experience such solitary guilt in the wake of our intoxicating moments together? Why didn’t I experience the same thing after Marzia? Was this nature’s way of reminding me that I would rather be with her?

I took a shower and put on clean clothes. Downstairs, everyone was having cocktails. Last night’s two guests were there again, being entertained by my mother, while a newcomer, another reporter, was busily listening to Oliver’s description of his book on Heraclitus. He had perfected the art of giving a stranger a five-sentence précis that seemed invented on the spur of the moment for the benefit of that particular listener. “Are you staying?” asked my mother.

“No, I’m going to see Marzia.”

My mother gave me an apprehensive look, and ever so discreetly began to shake her head, meaning, I don’t approve, she’s a good girl, you should be going out together as a group. “Leave him alone, you and your groups,” was my father’s rebuttal, which set me free. “As it is, he’s shut up in the house all day. Let him do as he pleases. As he pleases! ”

If he only knew.

And what if he did know?

My father would never object. He might make a face at first, then take it back.

It never occurred to me to hide from Oliver what I was doing with Marzia. Bakers and butchers don’t compete, I thought. Nor, in all likelihood, would he have given it another thought himself.

That night Marzia and I went to the movies. We had ice cream in the piazzetta. And again at her parents’ home.

“I want to go to the bookstore again,” she said when she walked me toward the gate to their garden. “But I don’t like going to the movies with you.”

“You want to go around closing time tomorrow?”

“Why not?” She wanted to repeat the other night.

She kissed me. What I wanted instead was to go to the bookstore when it had just opened in the morning, with the option of going there that same night.

When I returned home the guests were just about to leave. Oliver was not home.

Serves me right, I thought.

I went to my room and, for lack of anything else to do, opened my diary.

Last night’s entry: “I’ll see you at midnight.” You watch. He won’t even be there. “Get lost”—that’s what “Grow up” means. I wish I’d never said anything.

On the nervous doodlings I had traced around these words before heading out to his room, I was trying to recover the memory of last night’s jitters. Perhaps I wanted to relive the night’s anxieties, both to mask tonight’s and to remind myself that if my worst fears had suddenly been dispelled once I’d entered his room, perhaps they might end no differently tonight and be as easily subdued once I’d heard his footsteps.

But I couldn’t even remember last night’s anxieties. They were completely overshadowed by what followed them and seemed to belong to a segment of time to which I had no access whatsoever. Everything about last night had suddenly vanished. I remembered nothing. I tried to whisper “Get lost” to myself as a way of jump-starting my memory. The words had seemed so real last night. Now they were just two words struggling to make sense.