Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (13 page)

These words made me long for things and try things I would never have thought myself capable of.

Regardless of how much he wished to have nothing to do with me, regardless of those he’d befriended and was surely sleeping with each night, anyone who’d revealed his entire humanity to me while lying naked under me, even in my dream, could not be any different in real life. This was who he truly was; the rest was incidental.

No: he was also the other man, the one in the red bathing suit.

It was just that I couldn’t allow myself to hope I’d ever see him wearing no bathing suit at all.

If on our second morning after the piazzetta I found the courage to insist on going to town with him though it was obvious he didn’t even want to speak with me, it was only because as I looked at him and saw him mouthing the words he had just written on his yellow pad, I kept remembering his other, pleading words: “You’ll kill me if you stop.” When I offered him the book in the bookstore, and later even insisted on being the one to pay for our ice cream because buying an ice cream also meant walking our bikes through the narrow, shaded lanes of B. and therefore being together awhile longer, it was also to thank him for giving me “You’ll kill me if you stop.” Even when I ribbed him and promised to make no speeches, it was because I was secretly cradling “You’ll kill me if you stop”—far more precious now than any other admission from him. That morning, I’d written it down in my diary but omitted to say I had dreamt it. I wanted to come back years later and believe, if only for a moment, that he had truly spoken these pleading words to me. What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

As we sped downhill past my spot, past the olive groves and the sunflowers that turned their startled faces to us as we glided past the marine pines, past the two old train cars that had lost their wheels generations ago but still bore the royal insignia of the House of Savoy, past the string of gypsy vendors screaming murder at us for almost grazing their daughters with our bikes, I turned to him and yelled, “Kill me if I stop.”

I had said it to put his words in my mouth, to savor them awhile longer before squirreling them back in my hideaway, the way shepherds take their sheep out uphill when it’s warm but rush them back indoors when the weather cools. By shouting his words I was fleshing them out and giving them longer life, as though they had a life of their own now, a longer and louder life that no one could govern, like the life of echoes once they’ve bounced off the cliffs of B. and gone to dive by the distant shoals where Shelley’s boat slammed into the squall. I was returning to Oliver what was his, giving him back his words with the implicit wish that he repeat them back to me again, as in my dream, because now it was his turn to say them.

At lunch, not a word. After lunch he sat in the shade in the garden doing, as he announced before coffee, two days’ work. No, he wasn’t going to town tonight. Maybe tomorrow. No poker either. Then he went upstairs.

A few days ago his foot was on mine. Now, not even a glance.

Around dinner, he came back down for a drink. “I’ll miss all this, Mrs. P.,” he said, his hair glistening after his late-afternoon shower, the “star” look beaming all over his features. My mother smiled;
la muvi star
was welcome
ennnnni taim.
Then he took the usual short walk with Vimini to help her look for her pet chameleon. I never quite understood what the two of them saw in each other, but it felt far more natural and spontaneous than anything he and I shared. Half an hour later, they were back. Vimini had scaled a fig tree and was told by her mother to go wash before dinner.

At dinner not a word. After dinner he disappeared upstairs.

I could have sworn that sometime around ten or so he’d make a quiet getaway and head to town. But I could see the light drifting from his end of the balcony. It cast a faint, oblique orange band toward the landing by my door. From time to time, I heard him moving.

I decided to call a friend to ask if he was headed to town. His mother replied that he’d already left, and yes, had probably gone to the same place as well. I called another. He too had already left. My father said, “Why don’t you call Marzia? Are you avoiding her?” Not avoiding—but she seemed full of complications. “As if you aren’t!” he added. When I called she said she wasn’t going anywhere tonight. There was a dusky chill in her voice. I was calling to apologize. “I heard you were sick.” It was nothing, I replied. I could come and pick her up by bike, and together we’d ride to B. She said she’d join me.

My parents were watching TV when I walked out of the house. I could hear my steps on the gravel. I didn’t mind the noise. It kept me company. He’d hear it too, I thought.

Marzia met me in her garden. She was seated on an old, wrought-iron chair, her legs extended in front of her, with just her heels touching the ground. Her bike was leaning against another chair, its handlebar almost touching the ground. She was wearing a sweater. You made me wait a lot, she said. We left her house via a shortcut that was steeper but that brought us to town in no time. The light and the sound of bustling nightlife from the piazzetta were brimming over into the side alleys. One of the restaurants was in the habit of taking out tiny wooden tables and putting them on the sidewalk whenever its clientele overflowed the allotted space on the square. When we entered the piazza the bustle and commotion filled me with the usual sense of anxiety and inadequacy. Marzia would run into friends, others were bound to tease. Even being with her would challenge me in one way or another. I didn’t want to be challenged.

Rather than join some of the people we knew at a table in the caffès, we stood in line to buy two ice creams. She asked me to buy her cigarettes as well.

Then, with our ice-cream cones, we began to walk casually through the crowded piazzetta, threading our way along one street, then another, and still another. I liked it when cobblestones glistened in the dark, liked the way she and I ambled about lazily as we walked our bikes through town, listening to the muffled chatter of TV stations coming from behind open windows. The bookstore was still open, and I asked her if she minded. No, she didn’t mind, she’d come in with me. We leaned our bikes against the wall. The beaded fly curtain gave way to a smoky, musty room littered with overbrimming ashtrays. The owner was thinking of closing soon, but the Schubert quartet was still playing and a couple in their mid-twenties, tourists, were thumbing through books in the English-language section, probably looking for a novel with local color. How different from that morning when there hadn’t been a soul about and blinding sunlight and the smell of fresh coffee had filled the shop. Marzia looked over my shoulder while I picked up a book of poetry on the table and began to read one of the poems. I was about to turn the page when she said she hadn’t finished reading yet. I liked this. Seeing the couple next to us about to purchase an Italian novel in translation, I interrupted their conversation and advised against it. “This is much, much better. It’s set in Sicily, not here, but it’s probably the best Italian novel written this century.” “We’ve seen the movie,” said the girl. “Is it as good as Calvino, though?” I shrugged my shoulders. Marzia was still interested in the same poem and was actually rereading it. “Calvino is nothing in comparison—lint and tinsel. But I’m just a kid, and what do I know?”

Two other young adults, wearing stylish summer sports jackets, without ties, were discussing literature with the owner, all three of them smoking. On the table next to the cashier stood a clutter of mostly emptied wine glasses, and next to them one large bottle of port. The tourists, I noticed, were holding emptied glasses. Obviously, they’d been offered wine during the book party. The owner looked over to us and with a silent glance that wished to apologize for interrupting asked if we wanted some port as well. I looked at Marzia and shrugged back, meaning, She doesn’t seem to want to. The owner, still silent, pointed to the bottle and shook his head in mock disapproval, to suggest it was a pity to throw away such good port tonight, so why not help him finish it before closing the shop. I finally accepted, as did Marzia. Out of politeness, I asked what was the book being celebrated tonight. Another man, whom I hadn’t noticed because he’d been reading something in the tiny alcove, named the book:
Se l’amore. If Love
. “Is it good?” I asked. “Pure junk,” he replied. “I should know. I wrote it.”

I envied him. I envied him the book reading, the party, the friends and aficionados who had come in from the surrounding areas to congratulate him in the little bookstore off our little piazzetta in this little town. They had left more than fifty emptied glasses behind. I envied him the privilege of putting himself down.

“Would you inscribe a copy for me?”

“Con piacere,” he replied, and before the owner had handed him a felt-tip pen, the author had already taken out his Pelikan. “I’m not sure this book is for you, but…” He let the sentence trail into silence with a mix of utter humility tinted with the faintest suggestion of affected swagger, which translated into,
You asked me to sign and I’m only too happy to play the part of the famous poet which we both know I’m not.

I decided to buy Marzia a copy as well, and begged him to inscribe it for her, which he did, adding an endless doodle next to his name. “I don’t think it’s for you either, signorina, but…”

Then, once again, I asked the bookseller to put both books on my father’s bill.

As we stood by the cashier, watching the bookseller take forever to wrap each copy in glossy yellow paper, to which he added a ribbon and, on the ribbon, the store’s silver seal-sticker, I sidled up to her and, maybe because she simply stood there so close to me, kissed her behind the ear.

She seemed to shudder, but did not move. I kissed her again. Then, catching myself, I whispered, “Did it bother you?” “Of course not,” she whispered back.

Outside, she couldn’t help herself. “Why did you buy me this book?”

For a moment I thought she was going to ask me why I’d kissed her.

“
Perché mi andava
, because I felt like it.”

“Yes, but why did you buy it for me—why buy
me
a book?”

“I don’t understand why you’re asking.”

“Any idiot would understand why I’m asking. But you don’t. Figures!”

“I still don’t follow.”

“You’re hopeless.”

I gazed at her, looking totally startled by the flutters of anger and vexation in her voice.

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll imagine all sorts of things—and I’ll just feel terrible.”

“You’re an ass. Give me a cigarette.”

It’s not that I didn’t suspect where she was headed, but that I couldn’t believe that she had seen through me so clearly. Perhaps I didn’t want to believe what she was implying for fear of having to answer for my behavior. Had I been purposely disingenuous? Could I continue to misconstrue what she was saying without feeling entirely dishonest?

Then I had a brilliant insight. Perhaps I’d been ignoring every one of her signals on purpose: to draw her out. This the shy and ineffectual call strategy.

Only then, by a ricochet mechanism that totally surprised me, did it hit me. Had Oliver been doing the same with me? Intentionally ignoring me all the time, the better to draw me in?

Wasn’t this what he’d implied when he said he’d seen through my own attempts to ignore him?

We left the bookstore and lit two cigarettes. A minute later we heard a loud metallic rattle. The owner was lowering the steel shutter. “Do you really like to read that much?” she asked as we ambled our way casually in the dark toward the piazzetta.

I looked at her as if she had asked me if I loved music, or bread and salted butter, or ripe fruit in the summertime. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I like to read too. But I don’t tell anyone.” At last, I thought, someone who speaks the truth. I asked her why she didn’t tell anyone. “I don’t know…” This was more her way of asking for time to think or to hedge before answering, “People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

“Do you hide who you are?”

“Sometimes. Don’t you?”

“Do I? I suppose.” And then, contrary to my every impulse, I found myself stumbling into a question I might otherwise never have dared ask. “Do you hide from me?”

“No, not from you. Or maybe, yes, a bit.”

“Like what?”

“You know exactly
like what
.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why? Because I think you can hurt me and I don’t want to be hurt.” Then she thought for a moment. “Not that you mean to hurt anyone, but because you’re always changing your mind, always slipping, so no one knows where to find you. You scare me.”

We were both walking so slowly that when we stopped our bicycles, neither took note. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. She took her bike, placed it against the door of a closed shop, and, leaning against a wall, said, “Kiss me again?” Using my kickstand, I stood the bike in the middle of the alley and, once we were close, I held her face with both hands, then leaned into her as we began to kiss, my hands under her shirt, hers in my hair. I loved her simplicity, her candor. It was in every word she’d spoken to me that night—untrammeled, frank, human—and in the way her hips responded to mine now, without inhibition, without exaggeration, as though the connection between lips and hips in her body was fluid and instantaneous. A kiss on the mouth was not a prelude to a more comprehensive contact, it was already contact in its totality. There was nothing between our bodies but our clothes, which was why I was not caught by surprise when she slipped a hand between us and down into my trousers, and said, “
Sei duro, duro
, you’re so hard.” And it was her frankness, unfettered and unstrained, that made me harder yet now.