by André Aciman
I was pleased, thrilled, and crushed. I stood at the door and watched all four of them walk down the corridor. I’d never see them again.
What had I wanted from them? For them to like each other so I could sit, sip more prosecco, and then decide whether or not to join their party? Or had I liked them both and couldn’t decide which of the two I wanted more? Or did I want neither but needed to think I did because otherwise I’d have to look into my life and find huge, bleak craters everywhere going back to that scuttled, damaged love I’d told them about earlier that evening.
Micol and her friend Karen were cleaning up in the kitchen. I’d told them to leave the dishes alone. Karen reminded me point-blank that she’d like to speak to me again. “Maybe soon?” she said. “As soon as I’m back in the city,” I said. I lied.
Micol walked her to the elevator then came back, meaning to help tidy up a bit before turning in. I told her not to bother.
“Nice party,” she said.
“Very nice.”
“So, who were those two?”
“Kids.”
She gave me a knowing smile. “I’m going to bed, are you coming?”
I had cleaning up to do, I said, but I’d join her soon enough.
I took my time putting some of the plastic dishes into two contractor bags left over from our packing and, as I was about to turn off the lights in the living room, I found a pack of cigarettes on the side table near the only ashtray in the apartment, probably Karen’s. I took one out of the pack, lit it, turned off all the lights, put the ashtray next to me on the old sofa that was no longer ours, put my feet up on one of the four chairs that would stay behind with their new masters, and began thinking of the Arioso as I remembered hearing it so long ago. Then in the semi-darkened living room I looked out and caught the full moon. My God, how beautiful it was. And the more I stared at it, the more I longed to speak to it.
Didn’t change your life, did I? says good old Johann Sebastian.
Afraid not.
And why not?
Music doesn’t give answers to questions I don’t know how to ask. It doesn’t tell me what I want. It reminds me that I may still be in love, though I’m no longer sure I know what that means, being in love. I think about people all the time, yet I’ve hurt many more than I’ve cared for. I can’t even tell what I feel, though feel something I still do, even if it’s more like a sense of absence and loss, maybe even failure, numbness, or total unknowing. I was sure of myself once, I thought I knew things, knew myself, and people loved that I reached out to touch them when I blustered into their lives and didn’t even ask or doubt that I mightn’t be welcome. Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me.
Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn’t change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead, it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we’ve always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts we’ve buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live.
What do I want? Do you know the answer, Herr Bach? Is there such a thing as a right or wrong life?
I’m an artist, my friend, I don’t do answers. Artists know questions only. And besides, you already know the answer.
In a better world, she’d be sitting next to me on the sofa to my left, and he’d be at my right, an inch away from the ashtray. She kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up next to mine, on the coffee table. My feet, she finally says, sensing we’re all staring at them. Ugly feet, aren’t they? she says. Not ugly at all, I say. I’m holding their hands. I free one hand, but only to let it linger on his forehead. While she leans into my shoulder, he turns around, faces me, then kisses me on the mouth. It’s a long, deep kiss. Neither of us minds that she’s watching. I want her to watch. The kid kisses well. She says nothing at first, then, I want him to kiss me too. He smiles at her, and almost climbing over me kisses her on the mouth. Afterward she says she likes the way he kisses. Agreed, I say. But he smells of cigarettes. My fault, I say. You didn’t like the smell? he asks. I liked it fine, she replies. I kiss her. She doesn’t complain that I smell of tobacco. I’m thinking, Fennel. I want her to taste of his fennel, from his mouth to her mouth to my mouth, and back to his.
Later that night, I went to sleep thinking of the three of us naked in bed. We are hugging, but in the end the two are curled up against me, each with a thigh on one of mine. How easily it might have happened, and so naturally, as though both had come to dinner with little else in mind. Why so many schemes, and so much planning, and such anxieties when, hours earlier, I was standing the bottles in buckets of ice. I loved the thought of his sweat and hers mingled with mine. Yet all I ended up focusing on was their Achilles tendons. Hers, when she’d removed her shoes and put both feet on the coffee table, his when he walked in at the very start of the evening and I spotted him wearing boat shoes without socks. I had no idea how slim and smooth and delicate his feet were. Later, he too had taken off his shoes before placing both feet on the coffee table, one slim, tanned ankle over the other. Look at mine, he’d said, twitching the toes of one foot. We laughed. Boys’ feet, she said. I know, he replied. Once again he moved closer, placed a knee on my thigh, and kissed me.
I don’t recall what I dreamed that night, but I know that, all through the night and through countless flushed and fitful reawakenings, I had loved the two of them, together or separately I couldn’t tell, because there was something so thoroughly real in their unhindered presence in my arms that when I woke in the middle of the night clutching my wife, I felt, as I’d already imagined earlier that evening, that it wouldn’t be far-fetched to start preparing breakfast for the four of us in a kitchen that reminded me of a house in Italy.
I thought of Micol. She had no place in this. Italy was a chapter we never discussed. But she knew. She knew that one day—she just knew, and probably better than I did. I had once wanted to tell her about my old friends, and their house by the sea, and of my room there, and about the lady of the house, who years ago was like a mother to me but who now had dementia and hardly remembered her own name, and about her husband who, before dying, lived in the same house with another woman, who still lives there with a seven-year-old son I’m dying to meet.
I need to go back, Micol.
Why?
Because my life stopped there. Because I never really left. Because the rest of me here has been like the severed tail of a lizard that flays and lashes about, while the body’s stayed behind all the way across the Atlantic in that wonderful house by the sea. I’ve been away for far too long.
Are you leaving me?
I think so.
And the children too?
I’ll always be their father.
And when is this happening?
I don’t know. Soon.
I can’t say I’m surprised.
I know.
* * *
That same night, after the guests had left and Micol had gone to bed, I turned off the light in the entrance and was about to shut the French windows to the balcony when I remembered to blow out the candles. I stepped outside again, stood facing the river, placed both hands on the banister where I’d stood with Erica and Paul earlier in the evening, and stared out across the water. I liked the lights across the Hudson, I liked the fresh breeze, I liked Manhattan this time of year, I liked the sight of the George Washington Bridge, which I knew I’d miss once I was back in New Hampshire but that right now, on this night, still reminded me of Monte Carlo when its sparkling lights reach into Italy at night. Soon, it would be cold on the Upper West Side and there would be days of
rain, but the weather always cleared eventually here and people still milled about the streets late at night when it was cold in this city that never sleeps.
I slid the deck chairs back into their place, picked up a half-empty wine glass from the floor, and spotted another, which had been used as an ashtray and was brimming with butts. How many had been smoking outside? The yoga teacher, Karen, Micol herself, the married couple I’d met at the conference on Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich, the vegans, who else?
Now, as I admired the view and kept watching two tugboats gliding quietly upstream, I thought that one day fifty years from now someone else would surely step outside on this very balcony and stand here admiring this same view, nursing similar thoughts, but it wouldn’t be me. Would he be in his teens or his eighties, or would he be my own age now, and would he, like me, still long for an old and only love, trying not to think of some unknown soul who, just like me tonight some fifty years before, had longed for a beloved and tried, as I caught myself trying and failing after all these years, not to give it a thought.
The past, the future, what masks they are.
And what screens those two were, Erica and Paul.
Everything was a screen, and life itself was a diversion.
What mattered now was unlived.
I looked up at the moon and meant to ask about my life. But her answer came far sooner than I was able to formulate the question. For twenty years you’ve lived a dead man’s life. Everyone knows. Even your wife and your children and your wife’s friend, and the couple you met at a conference on the Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich can read it on your face. Erica and Paul know it, and those scholars who study Greek fire and Greek triremes, even the Pre-Socratics themselves, dead two thousand years ago, can tell. The only one who doesn’t know is you. But now even you know.
You’ve been disloyal.
To what, to whom?
To yourself.
I remembered that a few days earlier, while shopping for boxes and tape, I’d spotted someone I knew across the street. I waved at him but he didn’t wave back and kept walking, though I knew he’d seen me. Maybe he was upset with me. But upset about what? Moments later I saw someone from my department headed to a bookstore. We crossed paths by one of the fruit vendors on the sidewalk and, though he too looked in my direction, he failed to return my smile. A while later I saw a neighbor from my building on the sidewalk; we normally exchange pleasantries in the elevator, but she didn’t say anything or nod back when I acknowledged her. It suddenly occurred to me that the only explanation was that I had died and that this was what death was like: you see people but they don’t see you, and worse yet, you’re trapped being who you were in the moment you died—buying corrugated boxes—and you never changed into the one person you could have been and knew you really were, and you never redressed the one mistake that threw your life off course and now you were forever trapped doing the very last stupid thing you were doing, buying corrugated boxes and tape. I was forty-four years old. I was already dead—and yet too young, too young to die.
After shutting the windows, I thought of Bach’s Arioso again and began to hum it in my head. In moments such as these, when we are all alone and our mind is altogether elsewhere, facing eternity and ready to take stock of this thing called our life and of all we’ve done or half done or left undone, what would my answer be to the questions good old Bach said I already knew the answer to?
One person, one name—he knows, I thought. Right now, he knows, he still knows.
Find me, he says.
I will, Oliver, I will, I say. Or has he forgotten?
But he remembers what I’ve just done. He looks at me, says nothing, I can tell he’s moved.
And suddenly, with the Arioso still in my mind and yet another glass and another of Karen’s cigarettes, I wanted him to play this Arioso for me, followed by the choral prelude, which he’d never played before, and to play it for me, just for me. And the more I thought of his playing, the more the tears began to well in my eyes, and it didn’t matter if it was the alcohol still speaking or my heart, for all I wanted was to hear him now, playing this Arioso on his parents’ Steinway on a rainy summer’s night in their house by the sea, and I would sit close to the piano with a glass of something and I’d be with him and no longer be so thoroughly alone as I’ve been for so many, many years, alone among strangers who did not know a thing about me or about him. I would ask him to play the Arioso and by playing it to remind me of this very night when I snuffed out the candles on the balcony, turned off the lights in the living room, lit a cigarette, and for once in my life knew where I wanted to be and what I had to do.
It would happen as it did the first time or the second or third. Make up a reason that’s believable enough to others and to myself, take a plane, rent a car, or hire someone to take me there, drive up the old familiar roads, which have probably changed over the years or maybe not so much, and that still remember me as I remember them, and before I know it, there it is: the old pine alley, the familiar sound of pebbles crunching under the tires as the car slows to a halt, and then the house. I look up, I think there’s no one, they don’t know I’m coming, although I’ve written that I am, but sure enough, there he is, waiting. I’ve told him not to wait up. Of course I’ll wait up, he replies, and in that Of course, all our years rush back, because there’s a trace of muted irony, which was how he spoke his heart when we were together, meaning You know I’ll always wait up, even if you get here at four a.m. All these years, I’ve waited up, do you think I won’t wait up a few more hours now?
Waiting up is what we’ve done all our lives, waiting up allows me to stand here remembering Bach’s music playing at my end of our planet and letting my thoughts go out to you, for all I want is to think of you, and sometimes I don’t know who’s the one thinking, you or I.
I’m here, he says.
Did I wake you?
Yes.
Do you mind?
No.
Are you alone?
Does it matter? But yes.
He says he’s changed. He hasn’t.
I still run.
Me too.
And I drink a bit more.
Ditto.
But sleep poorly.
Ditto.
Anxiety, a touch of depression.
Ditto, ditto.
You’re coming back, aren’t you?
How did you know?
I know, Elio.
When? Elio asks.
In a couple of weeks.
I want you to.
You think?
I know.
I won’t come up the tree-lined alley as I’d planned. Instead, the plane will land in Nice.
I’ll pick you up by car, then. It will be late morning. Same as the first time.
You remember.
I remember.
And I want to see the boy.
Did I ever tell you his name? My father named him after you. Oliver. He never forgot you.
It will be hot and there’ll be no shade. But the scent of rosemary will be everywhere, and I’ll recognize the cooing of turtledoves and behind the house there’ll be a field of wild lavender and sunflowers raising their befuddled big heads at the sun. The swimming pool, the belfry nicknamed To-Die-For, the monument to the dead soldiers of the Piave, the tennis court, the rickety gate that leads down to the rocky beach, the whetting stone in the afternoon, the unending rattle of cicadas, me and you, your body and mine.
If he asks how long I’m staying, I’ll tell him the truth.
If he asks where I plan to sleep, I’ll tell him the truth.
If he asks.
But he won’t ask. He won’t have to. He knows.
DA CAPO
“Why Alexandria?” Oliver asked as we stopped along the esplanade, watching the sun set beyond the breakwater on our first evening there. The smell of fish, salt, and bracken-still water along the shoreline was overpowering, yet we continued to stand on that stretch o
f the walkway across from the home of our Alexandrian Greek hosts, staring at the spot where everyone said the old lighthouse once stood. Our hosts’ family had lived here for eight generations—the lighthouse, they insisted, couldn’t have been located anywhere else but on the spot where the fortress of Qaitbey stands. But no one knew for sure. Meanwhile, the fading sun was in our eyes, and its color stained the distance with large brushstrokes that were not pink or subdued orange but bright, loud tangerine. Neither of us had seen that color in the sky before.
Why Alexandria? could have meant so many things: from Why is this place as it stands now so central to the history of the West? down to something as whimsical as Why did we choose to come here? I’d wanted to reply, Because everything that’s meant anything to either of us—Ephesus, Athens, Syracuse—probably ended here. I was thinking of the Greeks, of Alexander and his lover Hephaestion, of the Library, and Hypatia, and ultimately of the modern Greek poet Cavafy. But I also knew why he was asking.
We’d left the house in Italy for a three-week tour of the Mediterranean. Our ship stopped in Alexandria for two nights and we were enjoying our last few days before sailing back home. We had wanted to be alone together. Too many people in the house. My mother, who had come to live with us and couldn’t use the stairs any longer, now lived in a room on the ground floor not far enough from ours. Then there was her caregiver. Then Miranda, who stayed in my old bedroom when she wasn’t traveling. And finally Little Ollie, whose room, next to hers, had once belonged to my grandfather. We shared my parents’ old bedroom. I’m sure everyone could hear if you so much as coughed at night.
Nor had it been as easy in Italy as we’d expected at first. We knew things were going to be different but we couldn’t quite grasp how the wish to rush headlong into what we’d once had years before could stir our reluctance to be in bed together. We were in the same house where it had all started—but were we the same? He tried blaming jet lag, and I let him, while he turned his back as I turned off the light before removing my clothes. I mistook the fear of being disappointed for the far more troubling fear of disappointing him. I knew he was thinking along the same lines when he finally turned around and said, “Elio, I haven’t made love to a man in so many years,” adding, as he laughed, “I may have forgotten how.” We’d hoped desire might foil our diffidence, but the sense of awkwardness wasn’t going away. At some point in the dark, feeling the strain between us, I even suggested that perhaps talking might dispel what was holding us back. Was I being unwittingly distant, I asked. No, not distant at all. Was I being difficult? Difficult? No. Then what was it?
