Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (18 page)

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.

And then I realized it. What I was experiencing tonight was unlike anything I’d experienced in my life.

This was much worse. I didn’t even know what to call this.

On second thought, I didn’t even know what to call last night’s jitters either.

I had taken a giant step last night. Yet here I was, no wiser and no more sure of things than I’d been before feeling him all over me. We might as well not even have slept together.

At least last night there was the fear of failing, the fear of being thrown out or called the very name I had used on others. Now that I had overcome that fear, had this anxiety been present all along, though latent, like a presage and a warning of killer reefs beyond the squall?

And why did I care where he was? Wasn’t this what I wanted for both of us—butchers and bakers and all that? Why feel so unhinged just because he wasn’t there or because he’d given me the slip, why sense that all I was doing now was waiting for him—waiting, waiting, waiting?

What was it about waiting that was beginning to feel like torture?

If you are with someone, Oliver, it is time to come home. No questions asked, I promise, just don’t keep me waiting.

If he doesn’t show up in ten minutes, I’ll do something.

Ten minutes later, feeling helpless and hating myself for feeling helpless, I resolved to wait another
this-time-for-real
ten minutes.

Twenty minutes later, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put on a sweater, walked off the balcony, and came downstairs. I’d go to B., if I had to, and check for myself. I was on my way to the bike shed, already debating whether to head out to N. first, where people tended to stay up and party much later than in B., and was cursing myself for not putting air in the tires earlier this morning, when suddenly something told me I should stop dead in my tracks and try not to disturb Anchise, who slept in the hut nearby. Sinister Anchise—everyone said he was sinister. Had I suspected it all along? I must have. The fall from the bike, Anchise’s peasant ointment, the kindness with which he took care of him and cleaned up the scrape.

But down below along the rocky shore, in the moonlight, I caught sight of him. He was sitting on one of the higher rocks, wearing his sailor’s white-and-blue-striped sweater with the buttons always undone along his shoulder which he’d purchased in Sicily earlier in the summer. He was doing nothing, just hugging his knees, listening to the ripples lap against the rocks below him. Looking at him now from the balustrade, I felt something so tender for him that it reminded me how eagerly I had rushed to B. to catch him before he’d even made it into the post office. This was the best person I’d ever known in my life. I had chosen him well. I opened the gate and skipped down the several rocks and reached him.

“I was waiting for you,” I said.

“I thought you’d gone to sleep. I even thought you didn’t want to.”

“No. Waiting. I just turned the lights off.”

I looked up to our house. The window shutters were all closed. I bent down and kissed him on his neck. It was the first time I had kissed him with feeling, not just desire. He put his arm around me. Harmless, if anyone saw.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Thinking.”

“About?”

“Things. Going back to the States. The courses I have to teach this fall. The book. You.”

“Me?”

“Me?” He was mimicking my modesty.

“No one else?”

“No one else.” He was silent for a while. “I come here every night and just sit here. Sometimes I spend hours.”

“All by yourself?”

He nodded.

“I never knew. I thought—”

“I know what you thought.”

The news couldn’t have made me happier. It had obviously been shadowing everything between us. I decided not to press the matter.

“This spot is probably what I’ll miss the most.” Then, upon reflection: “I’ve been happy in B.”

It sounded like a preamble to farewells.

“I was looking out towards there,” he continued, pointing to the horizon, “and thinking that in two weeks I’ll be back at Columbia.”

He was right. I had made a point never to count the days. At first because I didn’t want to think how long he’d stay with us; later because I didn’t want to face how few were his remaining days.

“All this means is that in ten days when I look out to this spot, you won’t be here. I don’t know what I’ll do then. At least you’ll be elsewhere, where there are no memories.”

He squeezed my shoulder to him. “The way you think sometimes…You’ll be fine.”

“I might. But then I might not. We wasted so many days—so many weeks.”

“Wasted? I don’t know. Perhaps we just needed time to figure out if this is what we wanted.”

“Some of us made things purposely difficult.”

“Me?”

I nodded. “You know what we were doing exactly one night ago.”

He smiled. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“I’m not sure either. But I am glad we did.”

“Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be okay.” I slipped a hand into his pants. “I do love being here with you.”

It was my way of saying, I’ve been happy here as well. I tried to picture what
happy here
meant to him: happy once he got here after imagining what the place might look like, happy doing his work on those scorching mornings in
heaven
, happy biking back and forth from the translator, happy disappearing into town every night and coming back so late, happy with my parents and
dinner drudgery
, happy with his poker friends and all the other friends he had made in town and about whom I knew nothing whatsoever? One day he might tell me. I wondered what part I played in the overall happiness package.

Meanwhile, tomorrow, if we went for an early morning swim, I might be overcome again with this surfeit of self-loathing. I wondered if one got used to that. Or does one accrue a deficit of malaise so large that one learns to find ways to consolidate it in one lump feeling with its own amnesties and grace periods? Or does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like an intruder, become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell—so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who’ll relieve it at night?

The next morning we went swimming together. It was scarcely past six o’clock, and the fact that it was so early gave an energized quality to our exercise. Later, as he performed his own version of the dead-man’s float, I wanted to hold him, as swimming instructors do when they hold your body so lightly that they seem to keep you afloat with barely a touch of their fingers. Why did I feel older than he was at that moment? I wanted to protect him from everything this morning, from the rocks, from the jellyfish, now that jellyfish season was upon us, from Anchise, whose sinister leer, as he’d trundle into the garden to turn on the sprinklers, constantly pulling out weeds wherever he turned, even when it rained, even when he spoke to you, even when he threatened to leave us, seemed to tease out every secret you thought you’d neatly buried from his gaze.

“How are you?” I asked, mimicking his question to me yesterday morning.

“You should know.”

At breakfast, I couldn’t believe what seized me, but I found myself cutting the top of his soft-boiled egg before Mafalda intervened or before he had smashed it with his spoon. I had never done this for anyone else in my life, and yet here I was, making certain that not a speck of the shell fell into his egg. He was happy with his egg. When Mafalda brought him his daily
polpo
, I was happy for him. Domestic bliss. Just because he’d let me be his top last night.

I caught my father staring at me as I finished slicing off the tip of his second soft-boiled egg.

“Americans never know how to do it,” I said.

“I am sure they have their way…,” he said.

The foot that came to rest on mine under the table told me that perhaps I should let it go and assume my father was onto something. “He’s no fool,” he said to me later that morning as he was getting ready to head up to B.

“Want me to come with?”

“No, better keep a low profile. You should work on your Haydn today. Later.”

“Later.”

Marzia called that morning while he was getting ready to leave. He almost winked when he handed me the telephone. There was no hint of irony, nothing that didn’t remind me, unless I was mistaken—and I don’t think I was—that what we had between us was the total transparency that exists among friends only.

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.

But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

When I think back to our last ten days together, I see an early-morning swim, our lazy breakfasts, the ride up to town, work in the garden, lunches, our afternoon naps, more work in the afternoon, tennis maybe, after-dinners in the piazzetta, and every night the kind of lovemaking that can run circles around time. Looking back to these days, I don’t think there was ever a minute, other than the half hour or so he spent with his translator, or when I managed to steal a few hours with Marzia, when we weren’t together.

“When did you know about me?” I asked him one day. I was hoping he’d say,
When I squeezed your shoulder and you almost wilted in my arms.
Or,
When you got wet under your bathing suit that one afternoon when we chatted in your room.
Something along those lines. “When you blushed,” he said. “Me?” We had been talking about translating poetry; it was early in the morning, during his very first week with us. We had started working earlier than usual that day, probably because we already enjoyed our spontaneous conversations while the breakfast table was being laid out under the linden tree and were eager to spend some time together. He’d asked me if I’d ever translated poetry. I said I had. Why, had he? Yes. He was reading Leopardi and had landed on a few verses that were impossible to translate. We had been speaking back and forth, neither of us realizing how far a conversation started on the fly could go, because all the while delving deeper into Leopardi’s world, we were also finding occasional side alleys where our natural sense of humor and our love for clowning were given free play. We translated the passage into English, then from English to ancient Greek, then back to gobbledygenglish to gobbledygitalian. Leopardi’s closing lines of “To the Moon” were so warped that it brought bursts of laughter as we kept repeating the nonsense lines in Italian—when suddenly there was a moment of silence, and when I looked up at him he was staring at me point-blank, that icy, glassy look of his which always disconcerted me. I was struggling to say something, and when he asked how I knew so many things, I had the presence of mind to say something about being a professor’s son. I was not always eager to show off my knowledge, especially with someone who could so easily intimidate me. I had nothing to fight back with, nothing to add, nothing to throw in to muddy the waters between us, nowhere to hide or run for cover. I felt as exposed as a stranded lamb on the dry, waterless plains of the Serengeti.