by André Aciman
Once again he stood up, and put on some music.
I listened for a moment. “Brazilian?”
“Correct.” He seemed very pleased with himself. He had bought the CD the day before, he said.
By my smile, he knew I’d inferred the reason for the purchase.
Did I understand Portuguese, he asked.
Some, did he?
Not a word.
It made us laugh. We were both nervous.
We talked mostly about old partners. His had been an architect who eventually moved to Montreal years ago. “Yours?” he asked. “And I don’t mean the marriage canard.” So he did remember the man who’d got away and thrown my life off course. I told him that my longest relationship was with a kid I’d known in elementary school whom I met almost fifteen years later in a gay bar on the seedy outskirts of Rome. What astounded me was that he confessed to having a crush on me when we were eight. I told him I’d been totally fascinated by him when I was nine. Why hadn’t he said anything? Why hadn’t I? Why hadn’t either of us known about ourselves? All we wanted to do was make up for lost time. I think we could not believe how lucky we were to have reconnected.
“How long were you together?”
“Less than two years.”
“Why did you separate?”
“I used to think it was good old ordinary domesticity that killed what we had. But it was more than that. He wanted to adopt a child, he even wanted me to father the child. What he wanted was a family.”
“And you didn’t?”
“I don’t know that I didn’t. I just knew that I wasn’t ready, I was entirely devoted to music and still am. The real truth is, I couldn’t wait to live alone again.”
He gave me a quizzical look: “Is this by any chance meant as a warning to me?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I smiled to cover up my embarrassment. His question was totally premature. But then, in his place, I would have asked the same thing.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything, but I’m looking at all this from the other end. Age. I’m sure it’s crossed your mind more than once.”
“Age is no problem.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I told you so on Sunday. How quickly we forget.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re losing your memory.”
“I was flustered.”
“And I wasn’t?”
“I’ve thought of you ever since we said good night outside the brasserie. I went to bed thinking of you, woke up thinking of you, and was in a trance all of Monday, basically kicking myself. I can’t even bring myself to believe you’re sitting under my roof.”
He stopped speaking, looked at me, and just said, “And I want to kiss you.”
I was more surprised this time than when we kissed on stepping into the elevator. It made me feel we had never kissed before and that the shadow of uneasiness while walking home with him without being able to hold hands had not been dispelled. He put down his glass, moved over to me, and kissed me lightly on the lips, almost diffidently, while, like the obliging soundtrack to our earlier kiss, I kept hearing behind the faint Brazilian singer playing in our room the sound of the elevator coming down to remind me that kissing to the sound of an old elevator going up and down the stairwell was like kissing under the patter of falling rain on a rooftop in the country, and that I liked the sound and didn’t want it to end because I felt snug, protected, and safe under its spell, because, without intruding on us, it gave a voice to the world outside his living room and reminded me that all this was not just happening in my mind. What he was really asking perhaps was for us to take our time and not hurry, and, if need be, backtrack if things went faster than either of us wanted. This I had never done before. Then he kissed me a second time, also lightly.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“Much. Just hold me again, please.” I wanted to be held and to wrap my arms around him. I liked the texture of his sweater on my face, the smell of wool, and, behind the wool around his underarms, a faint scent that could only have been his body’s.
So I whispered the words of the song in Portuguese:
De que serve ter o mapa se o fim está traçado
De que serve a terra à vista se o barco está parado
De que serve ter a chave se a porta está aberta
“Translate,” he said.
What good is the map if the end’s already known?
What good is landfall if the boat stalls?
What good is a key if the door’s wide open?
He loved this, he said, and asked me to repeat the words, which I did.
Soon, he said, “Let’s lie down.” He showed me to the bedroom. I was about to unbutton my shirt, but “Don’t,” he said, “let me do it.” I wanted to be naked before him but didn’t know how to say this. So I let him unbutton my shirt without touching any of his clothing. He didn’t seem to mind. “It’s because”—and he hesitated—“I want this to be very special,” he said.
And as we lay down, we embraced and sought each other’s mouths. But I could sense we were still unsteady and off-balance. Something was missing. It was not passion we lacked; it was conviction. Had we, perhaps, slowed things down to a halt? Had I failed him? Were we changing our minds? He must have felt it as well; it’s something no one can conceal or fail to pick up. He stared at me and all he said was, “Will you let me make you happy, just let me, I so want to.”
“Do anything you want. You make me happy as it is.”
Hearing this he could not wait and kissed me again and began to finish unbuttoning my shirt. “Mind if I take your shirt off?” What a question, I thought as I nodded. Then, as he helped me: “I love your skin, I love your chest, your shoulders, your smell. Are you still cold?” he asked, all the while gently caressing my chest.
“No,” I said, “not any longer.”
Then, once again he surprised me: “I’d love us to take a hot shower.”
I must have looked at him with totally baffled eyes. “Why not, if you want to.”
We stood up, and stepped into his bathroom. It was larger than my entire living room.
I couldn’t believe the number of bottles lining the floor of his large, enclosed glass shower. “Two for you, two for me,” he said, producing four folded navy towels. In an effort to bring some humor to the situation as we were getting undressed and already touching, I asked if they served breakfast here in the morning. “And how,” he replied. “A complimentary breakfast is included for all hotel guests.” We were naked and hard when we kissed again.
“Shut your eyes and trust me,” he said. “I want to make you happy.” I didn’t know what he was up to but I did as he asked. I heard him grab a cloth, and I immediately recognized the scent of the shower gel, because it smelled of chamomile, which reminded me of my parents’ home and, despite the weather outside tonight, it took me right back to our summers in Italy, which made me feel at home in this home that wasn’t my home. He began to rub my body, and I let myself go with the feeling. “Don’t open your eyes,” he cautioned as he palmed my face gently with soap and then asked if he could shampoo my hair, to which I said of course he could, and while the shampoo sat on my hair after he’d rubbed it in, I heard him wash himself, only then to feel his fingers rubbing and prodding my skull time and time again. “Don’t cheat and look,” he said, and I could tell from his voice that he was smiling, almost laughing at what the two of us were doing in the shower.
After the shower, and while my eyes were still shut, he opened the glass door and helped me step out slowly, then insisted on drying my body, my hair, my back, and underarms, and then walked me to the bedroom and asked me to lie on his bed. I loved knowing I was naked and being stared at, loved being coddled this way, loved when he started rubbing a lotion on me that felt wonderful each time he poured more of it on his palm and touched me everywhere. I felt like a toddler being washed and dried by his parent, which also took me back to my very e
arliest childhood when my father would shower with me in his arms. I must have been one or so—why was all this coming to me now, and why did it suddenly release me from a box whose lid had been depriving me of air and of light and sound and of the scent of flowers and herbs in the summertime? Why was I being pulled out of myself as though I’d been a prisoner whose jailer happened to be none other than myself and me alone? And what was this product that I’d never felt on my skin before? What did I want from this man and what was I going to give him in return? Was he doing all this because I’d told him I was nervous, because I’d warned him I found beginnings difficult? I let him do as he pleased, because I liked it so much and felt so desirable that I desired him even more in return, more than I’d done the moment I’d seen him in church and held back from embracing his chest. I thought I knew what he was about to do, but what he did next, once again, came as a complete surprise, so that when he finally asked me to open my eyes and look straight into his, I was entirely all his and when he kissed me again and again I didn’t need to say or think of anything, I didn’t need to do a thing except give myself over to someone who seemed to know me, and know my body and what it craved far better than I did, because he must have known it the moment he’d spoken to me in church and I’d touched his hand, known when he’d asked me to wait for him outside the church and then invited me to dinner, known when he stopped short of where we might have been headed that night and abruptly said good night, known everything about me when he saw me blush so easily and then pushed the matter just a tad farther to see how I’d react, known that I’d lost my soul for so long and was now finding I’d owned it all along but didn’t know where to look for it or how to find it without him—Lost my soul, lost my soul, I wanted to say, and then heard myself mutter the words, Lost my soul, all these years. “Don’t,” he said, as though fearing I was on the point of tears. “Just say I’m not hurting you,” he said. I nodded. “No, say, ‘You’re not hurting me,’ say it because you mean it.” “You’re not hurting me,” I said. “Say it again, say it many times.” And I said, “You’re not hurting me,” because I meant it, “you’re not hurting me, you’re not hurting me, you’re not, you’re not,” and then realized that even as I spoke these words more times than he had asked, that what he’d also done was help me leave behind—everything I had brought with me that night, my thoughts, my music, my dreams, my name, my loves, my scruples, my bike, everything else was dumped on my jacket and my backpack in the living room or stuffed into the bag that was strapped to my bike that was locked to a signpost that was all the way downstairs before we’d taken the elevator, which once again, now when we were making love, gave out its telltale squeal, because who knows which tenant in the building had pressed a button to call the elevator downstairs and would soon step inside, click shut the slim doors behind him, and ride his wobbly way up to who knows which floor, and I didn’t care what floor that was, because if I thought these muddled thoughts it was because I was trying and failing each time to think that I wasn’t losing my grip when I knew damn well that I was just desperately holding on to mere slivers of reality and feeling them slip from me, and feeling ecstatic each time they did, because I loved that he was seeing this happen to me, and I wanted him to see this on my face even while he was doing the most generous thing in the world, which was to wait and still wait while I kept repeating he wasn’t hurting me, wasn’t hurting me, just as he’d asked me to, until I caught myself begging him not to wait, because this was the polite thing to ask, hoping he’d decide for me as well, because by now his body knew mine better than it knew itself.
* * *
There’d been only a very short awkward hiccup in what had been a moment of perfect intimacy between two men who until then hadn’t seen each other naked. It had happened in the shower when he was holding my penis and my eyes were shut because of the soap. “I don’t know how to ask this,” he had said, “but—” And then he hesitated again.
“Yes?” He was making me nervous now and I couldn’t even open my eyes.
“Are you Jewish?” he finally asked.
“Seriously?” I replied, almost laughing. “Can’t you tell?”
“I was trying to base my guess on other facts besides the obvious.”
“The obvious says it pretty loudly. How many Jews or Muslims have you seen naked?”
“None,” he replied. “You are my very first.”
His sudden candor aroused me even more, which was why I pressed his body against mine.
* * *
“Fabiola,” he explained right after we were jolted from sleep by the sound of the service door banging. “She always lets the wind slam it shut.” When I looked at my watch it was already past eight a.m. and I had to teach at eleven. But I felt very lazy. He, however, had already released me from his embrace and was sitting up, while his feet, I thought, kept searching for his slippers.
“Come back to bed,” I said.
“What, more?” he asked, feigning shock. I had loved being held in his arms with my back turned to him and his breath on my neck. I wasn’t holding back.
There had been a moment of hesitation just after we’d made love that night when I felt it was time to get dressed to leave. “You’re not getting out of bed, are you?” he had asked.
“Bathroom,” I said.
I was lying.
“Not leaving though.”
“Not leaving.” But I was lying here as well.
I had meant to leave, even if I’d be doing it out of habit. I was going to explain that I always leave after sex, either because I want to or because I sense my host can’t wait to see me gone, because I myself almost always want to see occasionals out the door afterward. Hurry up with the socks, stuff them in your pockets if you have to, just go. I’d even mastered the art of the civil if totally perfunctory way of delaying my hasty exit, the way a host may sometimes feign reluctance to see you turn down a glass of water or a bite of something while you’re racing out from his world, from his things, from the smell of his hair, his sheets, his towels. Here the matter was slightly odd, and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really want to get out of bed but didn’t know how to read, much less trust the look of surprise on his face. And yet, as I’d noticed from the time we were walking to his apartment and relishing how our hands kept nearing yet missing each other, this hadn’t exactly been slam-dunk sex either.
After we made love that night he said we should head out to grab a bite to eat. “I’m starving.” “Me too,” I echoed. “But we should hurry.” Neither of us had realized that it was past midnight. “Do we look like we’ve been fucking?” “Yes,” I said. “Maybe people will know.” “I want them to know.” “So do I.”
We had dinner in a small but noisy place that tended to stay open late. The waiters knew him there, and some of the regulars knew him as well. It gave the two of us a shared thrill to sense they suspected what we’d been up to not fifteen minutes earlier.
* * *
“I want one more hug,” I said that morning.
“Just a hug?”
Before I knew it, I had my legs wrapped tight around his waist.
“And so may I ask you something?” he said, his face no more than an inch away from mine, with one palm on my forehead brushing my hair away from my eyes.
I had no idea what he had in mind—perhaps, I figured, something to do with our bodies or something a touch awkward, about performance, or would it be about protection?
“Are you busy this evening?”
The question almost made me laugh. “Totally free,” I said.
“Then how about our little bistro?”
“What time?”
“Nine?”
I nodded.
I had forgotten the precise address of the place. He named the street. Then, while trying not to sound too self-important, he said they sometimes kept a free table for him there. “I frequently bring clients there for lunch or dinner.”
“And others?”
He smi
led.
“If you only knew.”
The maid must have been told he had a guest—probably while I was in the shower—because when he showed me to the dining room, breakfast was served for two. Coffee and a host of wonderful things, breads, cheeses, and jams that seemed homemade. He said he liked quince jam and fig jam. Most people liked berries and marmalades. “But suit yourself.”
He had to rush to his office. “Nine then?”
We left together. I told him I was going to ride home to change and then head to the conservatory, after which I had a lunch scheduled with a colleague. I don’t know why I provided so much information about my day. He listened, he watched me unlock the bike, admired its frame again, told me to fold it and bring it inside the next time, then he stood there, and, unlike the first time, watched as I rode away.
But it was still too early in the day. So I rode down one street and then another, crossed the bridge, not caring where I was headed, eager to find a bakery where I might stop, sit, have another cup of coffee and think of him, I didn’t want the events of the morning to brush away the feeling or the memory of last night, of how we kissed savagely in the end while all I liked hearing was the silence and the comforting wheezing of the old elevator going up and down reminding me each time that we were no longer the last who’d used it.
