André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

I should, could, have seized him.

By the next morning, things became officially chilly.

One small thing did occur that week. We were sitting in the living room after lunch having coffee when my father brought out a large manila folder in which were stacked six applications accompanied with the passport photo of each applicant. Next summer’s candidates. My father wanted Oliver’s opinion, then passed around the folder to my mother, me, and another professor who had stopped by for lunch with his wife, also a university colleague who had come for the same reason the year before. “My successor,” said Oliver, picking one application above the rest and passing it around. My father instinctively darted a glance in my direction, then immediately withdrew it.

The exact same thing had occurred almost a year, to the day, before. Pavel, Maynard’s successor, had come to visit that Christmas and on looking over the files had strongly recommended one from Chicago — in fact, he knew him very well. Pavel and everyone else in the room felt quite tepid about a young postdoc teaching at Columbia who specialized in, of all things, the pre-Socratics. I had taken longer than needed to look at his picture and was relieved to notice that I felt nothing.

In thinking back now, I couldn’t be more certain that everything between us had started in this very room during Christmas break.

“Is this how I was selected?” he asked with a sort of earnest, awkward candor, which my mother always found disarming.

“I wanted it to be you,” I told Oliver later that evening when I helped him load his things in the car minutes before Manfredi drove him to the station. “I made sure they picked you.”

That night I riffled through my father’s cabinet and found the file containing last year’s applicants. I found his picture. Open shirt collar, Billowy, long hair, the dash of a movie star unwillingly snapped by a paparazzo. No wonder I’d stared at it. I wished I could remember what I’d felt on that afternoon exactly a year ago — that burst of desire followed by its instant antidote, fear. The real Oliver, and each successive Oliver wearing a different-colored bathing suit every day, or the Oliver who lay naked in bed, or who leaned on the window ledge of our hotel in Rome, stood in the way of the troubled and confused image I had drawn of him on first seeing his snapshot.

I looked at the faces of the other applicants. This one wasn’t so bad. I began to wonder what turn my life would have taken had someone else shown up instead. I wouldn’t have gone to Rome. But I might have gone elsewhere. Wouldn’t have known the first thing about San Clemente. But I might have discovered something else which I’d missed out on and might never know about. Wouldn’t have changed, would never be who I am today, would have become someone else.

I wonder now who that someone else is today. Is he happier? Couldn’t I dip into his life for a few hours, a few days, and see for myself — not just to test if this other life is better, or to measure how our lives couldn’t be further apart because of Oliver, but also to consider what I would say to this other me were I to pay him a short visit one day. Would I like him, would he like me, would either of us understand why the other became who he is, would either be surprised to learn that each of us had in fact run into an Oliver of one sort or another, man or woman, and that we were very possibly, regardless of who came to stay with us that summer, one and the same person still?

It was my mother, who hated Pavel and would have forced my father to turn down anyone Pavel recommended, who finally twisted the arm of fate. We may be Jews of discretion, she’d said, but this Pavel is an anti-Semite and I won’t have another anti-Semite in my house.

I remembered that conversation. It too was imprinted on the photo of his face. So he’s Jewish too, I thought.

And then I did what I’d been meaning to do all along that night in my father’s study. I pretended not to know who this chap Oliver was. This was last Christmas. Pavel was still trying to persuade us to host his friend. Summer hadn’t happened yet. Oliver would probably arrive by cab. I’d carry his luggage, show him to his room, take him to the beach by way of the stairway down to the rocks, and then, time allowing, show him around the property as far back as the old railway stop and say something about the gypsies living in the abandoned train cars bearing the insignia of the royal House of Savoy. Weeks later, if we had time, we might take a bike ride to B. We’d stop for refreshments. I’d show him the bookstore. Then I’d show him Monet’s berm. None of it had happened yet.

We heard of his wedding the following summer. We sent gifts and I included a little mot. The summer came and went. I was often tempted to tell him about his “successor” and embroider all manner of stories about my new neighbor down the balcony. But I never sent him anything. The only letter I did send the year after was to tell him that Vimini had died. He wrote to all of us saying how sorry he was. He was traveling in Asia, so that by the time his letter reached us, his reaction to Vimini’s death, rather than soothe an open sore, seemed to graze one that had healed on its own. Writing to him about her was like crossing the last footbridge between us, especially after it became clear we weren’t ever going to mention what had once existed between us, or, for that matter, that we weren’t even mentioning it. Writing had also been my way of telling him what college I was attending in the States, in case my father, who kept an active correspondence with all of our previous residents, hadn’t already told him. Ironically, Oliver wrote back to my address in Italy — another reason for the delay.

Then came the blank years. If I were to punctuate my life with the people whose bed I shared, and if these could be divided in two categories — those before and those after Oliver — then the greatest gift life could bestow on me was to move this divider forward in time. Many helped me part life into Before X and After X segments, many brought joy and sorrow, many threw my life off course, while others made no difference whatsoever, so that Oliver, who for so long had loomed like a fulcrum on the scale of life, eventually acquired successors who either eclipsed him or reduced him to an early milepost, a minor fork in the road, a small, fiery Mercury on a voyage out to Pluto and beyond. Fancy this, I might say: at the time I knew Oliver, I still hadn’t met so-and-so. Yet life without so-and-so was simply unthinkable.

One summer, nine years after his last letter, I received a phone call in the States from my parents. “You’ll never guess who is staying with us for two days. In your old bedroom. And standing right in front of me now.” I had already guessed, of course, but pretended I couldn’t. “The fact that you refuse to say you’ve already guessed says a great deal,” my father said with a snicker before saying goodbye. There was a tussle between my parents over who was to hand their phone over. Finally his voice came through. “Elio,” he said. I could hear my parents and the voices of children in the background. No one could say my name that way. “Elio,” I repeated, to say it was I speaking but also to spark our old game and show I’d forgotten nothing. “It’s Oliver,” he said. He had forgotten.

“They showed me pictures, you haven’t changed,” he said. He spoke about his two boys who were right now playing in the living room with my mother, eight and six, I should meet his wife, I am so happy to be here, you have no idea, no idea. It’s the most beautiful spot in the world, I said, pretending to infer that he was happy because of the place. You can’t understand how happy I am to be here. His words were breaking up, he passed the phone back to my mother, who, before turning to me, was still speaking to him with endearing words. “ Ma s’è tutto commosso , he’s all choked up,” she finally said to me. “I wish I could be with you all,” I responded, getting all worked up myself over someone I had almost entirely stopped thinking about. Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.