André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

Maybe we’d have a balcony. I could use a balcony. Sit on its cool marble steps and watch the sun set over Rome. Mineral water. Or beer. And tiny snacks to munch on. My father had booked us one of the most luxurious hotels in Rome.

Oliver wanted to take the first taxi. I wanted to take a bus instead. I longed for crowded buses. I wanted to go into a bus, wedge my way into the sweating mass of people, with him pushing his way behind me. But seconds after hopping on the bus, we decided to get out. This was too real , we joked. I backed out through the incoming press of infuriated home-goers who couldn’t understand what we were doing. I managed to step on a woman’s foot. “ E non chiede manco scusa , doesn’t even say he’s sorry,” she hissed to those around her who had just jostled their way into the bus and were not letting us squeeze out.

Finally, we hailed a cab. Noting the name of our hotel and hearing us speak English, the cabby proceeded to make several unexplained turns. “ Inutile prendere tante scorciatoie , no need for so many shortcuts. We’re in no rush!” I said in Roman dialect.

To our delight the larger of our adjoining bedrooms had both a balcony and a window, and when we opened the French windows, the glistening domes of numberless churches reflected the setting sun in the vast, unencumbered vista below us. Someone had sent us a bunch of flowers and a bowl filled with fruit. The note came from Oliver’s Italian publisher: “Come to the bookstore around eight-thirty. Bring your manuscript. There’s a party for one of our authors. Ti aspettiamo, we’re awaiting you.”

We had not planned on doing anything except go for dinner and wander the streets afterward. “Am I invited, though?” I asked, feeling a tad uncomfortable. “You are now,” he replied.

We picked at the bowl of fruit sitting by the television cabinet and peeled figs for each other.

He said he was going to take a shower. When I saw him naked I immediately got undressed as well. “Just for a second,” I said as our bodies touched, for I loved the dampness that clung all over his. “I wish you didn’t have to wash.” His smell reminded me of Marzia’s, and how she too always seemed to exude that brine of the seashore on those days when there isn’t a breeze on the beaches and all you smell is the raw, ashen scent of scalding sand. I loved the salt of his arms, of his shoulders, along the ridges of his spine. They were still new to me. “If we lie down now, there’ll be no book party,” he said.

These words, spoken from a height of bliss it seemed no one could steal from us, would take me back to this hotel room and to this damp ferragosto evening as both of us leaned stark-naked with our arms on the windowsill, overlooking an unbearably hot Roman late-late afternoon, both of us still smelling of the stuffy compartment on the southbound train that was probably nearing Naples by now and on which we’d slept, my head resting on his in full view of the other passengers. Leaning out into the evening air, I knew that this might never be given to us again, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. He too must have had the same thought as we surveyed the magnificent cityscape, smoking and eating fresh figs, shoulder to shoulder, each wanting to do something to mark the moment, which was why, yielding to an impulse that couldn’t have felt more natural at the time, I let my left hand rub his buttocks and then began to stick my middle finger into him as he replied, “You keep doing this, and there’s definitely no party.” I told him to do me a favor and keep staring out the window but to lean forward a bit, until I had a brainstorm once my entire finger was inside him: we might start but under no condition would we finish. Then we’d shower and go out and feel like two exposed, live wires giving off sparks each time they so much as flicked each other. Look at old houses and want to hug each one, spot a lamppost on a street corner and, like a dog, want to spray it, pass an art gallery and look for the hole in the nude, cross a face that did no more than smile our way and already initiate moves to undress the whole person and ask her, or him, or both, if they were more than one, to join us first for drinks, for dinner, anything. Find Cupid everywhere in Rome because we’d clipped one of his wings and he was forced to fly in circles.

We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. “Don’t flush,” I’d said, “I want to look.” What I saw brought out strains of compassion, for him, for his body, for his life, which suddenly seemed so frail and vulnerable. “Our bodies won’t have secrets now,” I said as I took my turn and sat down. He had hopped into the bathtub and was just about to turn on the shower. “I want you to see mine,” I said. He did more. He stepped out, kissed me on the mouth, and, pressing and massaging my tummy with the flat of his palm, watched the whole thing happen.

I wanted no secrets, no screens, nothing between us. Little did I know that if I relished the gust of candor that bound us tighter each time we swore my body is your body , it was also because I enjoyed rekindling the tiny lantern of unsuspected shame. It cast a spare glow precisely where part of me would have preferred the dark. Shame trailed instant intimacy. Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent and our bodies had run out of tricks?

I don’t know that I asked the question, just as I am not sure I am able to answer it today. Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency?

Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it — black market, gray market, taxed, untaxed, under the table, over the counter?

All I knew was that I had nothing left to hide from him. I had never felt freer or safer in my life.

We were alone together for three days, we knew no one in the city, I could be anyone, say anything, do anything. I felt like a war prisoner who’s suddenly been released by an invading army and told that he can start heading home now, no forms to fill out, no debriefing, no questions asked, no buses, no gate passes, no clean clothes to stand in line for — just start walking.

We showered. We wore each other’s clothes. We wore each other’s underwear. It was my idea.

Perhaps all this gave him a second wind of silliness, of youth.

Perhaps he had already been “there” years earlier and was stopping for a short stay on his return journey home.

Perhaps he was playing along, watching me.

Perhaps he had never done it with anyone and I’d showed up in the nick of time.

He took his manuscript, his sunglasses, and we shut the door to our hotel room. Like two live wires. We stepped outside the elevator door. Broad smiles for everyone. To the hotel personnel. To the flower vendor in the street. To the girl in the newspaper kiosk.

Smile, and the world smiles back. “Oliver, I’m happy,” I said.

He looked at me in wonderment. “You’re just horny.”

“No, happy.”

Along the way we caught sight of a human statue of Dante cloaked in red with an exaggerated aquiline nose and the most scornful frown limned on all his features. The red toga and the red bell cap and the thick-rimmed wooden spectacles gave his already stern face the wizened look of an implacable father confessor. A crowd had gathered around the great bard, who stood motionless on the pavement, his arms crossed defiantly, the whole body standing erect, like a man waiting for Virgil or for an overdue bus. As soon as a tourist threw a coin into a hollowed-out, antique book, he simulated the besotted air of a Dante who’s just spied his Beatrice ambling across the Ponte Vecchio and, craning his cobralike neck, would right away moan out, like a street performer spitting fire,