by André Aciman
Usually, I forget, or try to put away what happened at night, which isn’t difficult since things seldom last more than an hour or two. Sometimes it’s as though it hadn’t occurred at all, and I’m happy not to remember.
Sitting down on this very clear morning, I liked watching all these people headed to work while feeling I was on an extended Christmas Day. The sex had had nothing unusual about it, but I liked how he had paid attention to everything, from the moment he handed me the towels to the way he cared for my body, my pleasure, mindful of everything, and always so tactful and kind, with something verging on deference for the young body that was half his age. Even the way he’d kept rubbing and caressing my hand and then my wrist, asking for trust and little else when my eyes were shut, just rubbing my wrists, which he held down gently on the bed, the kindest gesture known to man. Why had no one ever held my wrists that way and brought me so much joy with such minute and seemingly insignificant caresses? If he forgot, I would ask him to rub my wrists just as he’d done before.
I put down the paper and without thinking had raised the collar of my fleece jacket and felt it rub my face. It reminded me of his unshaven cheek this morning, when we’d made love again. I wanted my coat to smell of him. What aftershave did he wear? It was so faint, but I wanted to know. I would learn to rub his cheek with mine tomorrow morning.
And then I thought of my father who said he’d be in Paris for Christmas in a few weeks. I wondered if Michel and I would still be together by then. I wanted my father to meet him and wondered what he’d think of him. He and Miranda had promised to bring along the boy this time—it was time I saw my younger brother again, he said. I would take them to my café here, and if Michel were still a presence in my life, Miranda and I would simply sit back and watch both men figure out who was the younger of the two.
I spent the rest of the day in a mild daze. Three students plus a lecture prepared fifteen minutes before class. At lunch all I kept thinking of was dinner that night, the single malts, the nuts and salted biscuits, and the moment when he’d once again offer two towels for me and two for him. Would he be as hospitable tonight or would he have changed into someone I didn’t know? I hoped my best shirt was well pressed, and, when I checked, I found it was. I had a mind to put on a tie but decided against it. I combed my hair but I couldn’t wait for him to brush my forehead with his hand. Then on my way out, I ran to my local cobbler to have my shoes shined.
I think I’m happy. That’s what I was going to say to him. I think I’m happy. I knew I should avoid saying this on our third evening, but I didn’t care. I wanted to say it.
When I arrived at the restaurant that night I didn’t find him and realized to my extreme embarrassment that I didn’t know his surname. It left me feeling completely flustered. I would never dare say that I had come to meet Michel or Monsieur Michel. But before I had a chance to utter something that was bound to mortify me, one of the waiters recognized me and right away took me to what had been our table three nights earlier. It occurred to me that, despite Michel’s denial, I was not the first young man to have walked into the brasserie looking slightly awkward and whom the help had been trained to spot as yet another of his guests. I was a touch miffed, but decided not to nurse a grudge or let the feeling fester. Perhaps I was making it all up. And maybe I was, because when I was shown to his table not five steps away from the door, there he was, already seated, nursing an aperitif. In my confused state I’d failed to notice he’d been staring at me all along.
We hugged. And then, unable to control myself, I told him, “I’ve spent the most wonderful day of the year.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I still haven’t figured out why,” I said, “but it may have something to do with last night.”
“Last night and this morning for me.” He smiled. I liked that he wasn’t reluctant to show he had appreciated our hasty little morning sequel. I liked his mood, his smile, liked everything. A moment of silence and I couldn’t hold back: “You’re wonderful, I’ve been meaning to tell you, you’re just wonderful!”
As soon as I unfolded my napkin, it hit me. I had lost my appetite. “I’m not at all hungry,” I said.
“Now you’re the one who is wonderful.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not hungry either but I wasn’t going to say it. Let’s just go home. Maybe a snack. A single malt?”
“A single malt. With nuts and salted things?”
“Definitely nuts and salted things.”
He turned to the headwaiter: “Apologies to the chef, but we’ve changed our mind. À demain.”
When we reached his home, we ditched the idea of a drink or a snack. We took off our clothes, left them on the floor, skipped the shower, and went straight to bed.
Thursday that week we met again at nine at the same restaurant.
Friday for lunch.
And then for dinner as well.
After breakfast that Saturday, he said he was going to drive to the country and that I was welcome to join him—if I was free, he added with that guarded and typically unassuming, ironic lilt in his voice meant to show he was perfectly prepared to accept I had a life outside of our meetings and that he was never going to ask why, where, when, or with whom. But having spoken, he probably felt he might as well go all the way: “We could come back on Sunday evening just in time for our one-week anniversary concert.” I couldn’t tell what was making him slightly uneasy, the invitation to spend the weekend with him or the open admission that the two of us already had an anniversary to celebrate. To tidy things with his usual reserve he quickly added that, if I wished to join him, he could drop me at my flat, wait in the car while I packed a few warm things—it gets cold at night—and we’d be off.
“Where to?” I asked, which was my hasty way of saying, Of course I’ll come.
“I have a home about an hour away from the city.”
I joked and said I felt like Cinderella.
“How so?”
“When does the clock strike midnight? When does the honeymoon end?” I asked.
“It ends when it ends.”
“Is there an expiration date?”
“The manufacturers haven’t determined an expiration yet. So we’re on our own. And besides, this is different,” he said.
“Don’t you say this to everyone?”
“I do. And I have. But you and I have something very special, and for me totally unusual. If you’ll let me, I hope to prove it to you this weekend.”
“A likely story,” I said. We both laughed.
“The irony is that I may even succeed in proving it—and then where will we be?” He looked at me. “And that—if you care to know—is the part that scares me more than a little.”
I could have asked him to elaborate, but, once again, felt that this could lead into territory neither of us wished to enter.
The home, when we finally reached it more than an hour later, wasn’t Brideshead but it wasn’t Howards End either. “I grew up here,” he said. “It’s big, it’s old, and it’s always, always cold. Even the bikes are old and rickety, nothing like yours. There’s a lake down beyond the wood and I like it there. It’s where I recharge. I’ll show you around later. Plus there’s an old Steinway.”
“Great. But is it tuned?”
He looked slightly embarrassed. “I had it tuned.”
“When, though?”
“Yesterday.”
“For no reason, I suppose.”
“For no reason.”
We both smiled. It was moments of sudden and radiant intimacy like these that made me want to shout, It’s been years since I’ve been like this with anyone.
I put my arm around his shoulder. “So you knew I’d come.”
“Not knew. Hoped.”
He showed me around the house, then walked me to the large parlor.
We didn’t exactly step inside but stood at the doorway like two characters looking on as Velázquez paints his two monarchs. T
he ageless wooden floor around the large Persian rugs was gleaming gold and was clearly the beneficiary of years of buffing. One could smell the wax polish. “I’ll always remember,” said Michel, “how it used to get so lonely in the fall at the start of each school year when we’d come to spend weekends here. Those days felt like never-ending rainy Sundays that start at nine in the morning and never let up until winter comes and we’d be driving back to Paris by four feeling sapped and silent in the car. My parents hated each other but never said it. The only thing that stirred any joy—and it was more relief than joy—was Sunday evening when we’d unlock the door to our flat in town, turn on one light after the other, until life seemed to pick up its pace with the promise of a concert, which was when my whole world rose from its induced stupor called schoolwork, called dinner, called Mother, called silence and loneliness, and, worst of all, perpetual boyhood. I wouldn’t wish my childhood or adolescence in this house on anyone. Life was like a waiting room at a doctor’s office and my turn never came.”
He saw me smile. “All I ever did here was homework and masturbate. I think there isn’t a room in this whole mansion where I didn’t do homework.”
“And masturbate.”
It made us both laugh.
We were having a simple, almost frugal lunch in the dining room. From what I inferred, he normally drove here late on Saturday mornings and would leave by Sunday afternoon. “Habit,” he explained.
The L-shaped house was large, and its façade was late-eighteenth-century Palladian: very plain and unassuming, almost bland in its predictable symmetries, which probably explained its restrained yet welcoming grace. And then came the mysterious right-angle wing, which created an intimate space that yielded a well-tended, semi-enclosed Italian garden. The mansard roof with its dormer windows immediately made me think of a cold room up there where the lonely boy who would one day become my lover sat at his desk and dutifully did his homework while nursing all manner of lurid thoughts. I felt for the boy. His mother always made him bring his homework along; so there was little else to do here, much less to enjoy, he said.
I asked him about his school days. He’d attended the Lycée J. “I hated it,” he said, “but my father would sometimes drop by and arrange to take me out for a few hours. It was to be our secret. He too had studied there, so walking with him around the neighborhood on a weekday and going in and out of stores was like sliding into a buoyant, grown-up world I was not entitled to, while I’m sure that slipping into my little world was his way of reliving his years as a lycéen, only to thank his lucky stars for keeping them forever locked behind him. He wouldn’t be surprised, he said, if I hated school. When one afternoon I showed him into my empty classroom, he was baffled to see that not a thing had changed since the days before the war. The overpowering smell of the old wooden desks still lingered in the room, he said, and that dusky slant of failing afternoon light that could smother every indecent thought in a boy’s mind still swept over the dust on the dark brown furniture in my dark brown smelly classroom of Lycée J.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Miss him? Not really. Maybe because, unlike my mother, who died eight years ago, he never really died for me. He’s just absent. Sometimes it’s almost as though he might change his mind and slip in through a back door somewhere. Which is why I’ve never really mourned him. He’s still around—just elsewhere.” He thought for a moment.
“I’ve kept most of his things, his neckties especially, his rifles, golf clubs, even his old wooden tennis rackets. I used to think I was keeping them as mementos, the way I’d sealed two of his sweaters in plastic bags so that they might retain his scent. It’s not death I refuse, but extinction. I’ll never use his warped wooden racket, still strung with old catgut. The main reason I lament not being closer to my son now that he has children is not because I know I would have made an excellent grandfather, but because I wish he had met my father, and loved him as I did, so that now my son and I could sit together on November days like here today and remember him. There is no one to remember my father with.”
“Could this be my role?” I asked completely naively.
He did not respond.
“But I should tell you that if there is one thing I regret now almost thirty years later it’s that he never met you. Today this weighs on me, as if a link is missing in my life, I don’t know why. Perhaps this is why I wanted to bring you here this weekend.”
I was going to ask whether it wasn’t perhaps too soon to meet his parents—and the thought brought a smile to my face—but I decided not to say anything, not because my ironic comment wouldn’t sit well at that moment, but because a voice told me that it wasn’t too soon, indeed it was about time I met or, rather, heard about his parents.
“You’re scaring me a bit,” I said, “because it means that I’ll never pass muster unless your father approves, and since he’ll never know me, you’ll never approve?”
“Wrong. I know he’d approve. That’s not it. I think it would have made him happy to know I’ve been happy this whole week.” He stopped a moment. “Or is this too much pressure for those of your generation?”
I shook my head and smiled, meaning You’re so off the mark about me and my generation!
“I’ve been blabbering on so much about my father that I’m sure you must think I have a father fixation. I hardly think of him. But I do dream of him. They are usually very sweet and soothing dreams. So here’s a funny thing: he even knows about you. It was he who in a dream steered me away from visiting piano bars to go directly to the conservatory instead. Clearly my subconscious speaks through him.”
“Would you have sought me out anyway?”
“Probably not.”
“What a waste that would have been.”
“Would you have come to this Sunday’s concert?”
“You already asked me this.”
“But you never answered.”
“I know.”
He nodded, meaning My point exactly.
After lunch he asked if I wanted to try the piano. I sat down, played a few quick chords to test it, assumed a very grave air, and then started to play “Chopsticks.” He laughed. Before I knew what possessed me, I started to improvise on “Chopsticks” until I stopped and played a chaconne composed recently in the old style. I played it beautifully because I was playing it for him, because it suited autumn, because it spoke to the old house, to the boy in him still, and to the years between us I was hoping to erase.
When I stopped I asked him to tell me exactly what he had been doing when he was my age.
“Probably working in my father’s law firm, being completely miserable, because I hated it, but also because there was no one, just no one special in my life except for the … occasionals.”
Then, from nowhere, he asked when was the last time I’d had sex.
“Promise not to laugh?”
“No.”
“Last November.”
“But that’s a year ago.”
“And even then…”
But I didn’t finish the sentence.
“Well, the last time I brought someone to this house I was probably your age and he spent one night here and I never saw him again.” He stopped short of finishing what he was about to say. He must have immediately figured what had just crossed my mind: that when he invited his lover here I wasn’t born yet. Then, to change the subject, he added, “I’m sure my father would have loved the piece you played.”
“Why did your father stop playing?”
“I’ll never know. He played for me only once. I must have been fifteen or sixteen. He told me it was a very difficult piece. By then he had given up entirely on my musical aptitude. He sat at this very piano one day when Mother was away in Paris and there it was: a short piece played, in my opinion, magnificently, La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell by Liszt. I knew right away, without a doubt, that my father was indeed a great pianist. I had seen many pictures of him in tails sitting at a piano or standing af
ter bowing to an audience. But I had never really come face-to-face with his life as a pianist. It was a closed door. The question I’ll never be able to answer is why he stopped playing, or why he never discussed it. Even when I told him once that I thought I’d heard him playing at night and that the music had drifted to my bedroom from a distant wing of the house, he denied it. ‘It must have been a record,’ he said. After he was done playing the Liszt that one time he simply asked, ‘Did you like it?’ I didn’t know what to say. All I muttered was, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ He never expected me to say such a thing. He nodded a few times, but I could tell he was moved. Then he closed the piano, and never played for me again.”
“Puzzling.”
“But he wasn’t a closed man at all. He liked to talk about women, especially when I was in my mid-to-late teens after one of those concerts in the church. He would speak about music but then sometimes he’d drift and end up talking about love, about the women he’d known in his younger days, and he’d speak about this intangible thing called pleasure, which no one ever really knows how to talk about, and which explains why I learned more about both pleasure and desire from him while we were walking back home from a concert than from those who were meant to help me discover what they were. He was a man who cultivated pleasure, though I doubt it was with my mother. He said so himself one day when he told me that it was far better to pay for a good half hour with a woman you might never see again than to spend time with one who leaves you more lonely after you’ve had a few minutes flouncing between her legs. He spoke that way. He was funny.
“One day after our Sunday concert he said that if I wanted he knew of a place where a woman could easily teach me what adults did together. I was curious and scared, but he told me where, whom to ask for, and gave me money for good measure.
“A week later we were back to our Sunday evenings together and laughing on the way. ‘So it happened?’ was all he asked. ‘It happened,’ I replied. It brought us closer still. A few weeks later I found a different kind of pleasure that he most likely knew nothing about. In retrospect, I regret never having told him about it. But in those days…”
