Find Me

by André Aciman

  “Time,” he replied. As always, this was all he said. Did he need time, I asked, almost ready to move far away from him on our bed. No, he replied.

  It took me a while to understand that what he’d meant was that too much time had gone by.

  “Just hug me,” I finally said.

  “And see where that goes?” he immediately quipped, inflecting each word with irony. I could tell he was nervous.

  “Yes, and see where that goes,” I echoed. I remembered the afternoon when I’d visited him in his class five years earlier and he’d touched my cheek with his palm. I would have slept with him in no time if he’d asked. So why hadn’t he? “Because you would have laughed at me. Because you might have said no. Because I wasn’t sure you’d forgiven me.”

  We didn’t make love that night, but falling asleep in his arms and hearing him breathe, and recognizing the scent of his breath after so many years and knowing that I was finally in bed with my Oliver without either of us moving away as we released our hold, was exactly what made me realize that despite two decades we were not a day older than the two young men we’d been so long ago under this same roof. In the morning he gave me a look. I didn’t want silence to bridge the gap. I wanted him to speak. But he wasn’t going to speak.

  “Is this morning … or is this for me?” I finally asked. “Because right now mine’s real.”

  “Same here,” he said.

  And it was I, not he, who remembered how he liked it started. “I’ve only done this with you,” he said, confirming what we both knew was happening between us. “But I’m still nervous,” he added.

  “I’ve never known you to be.”

  “I know.”

  “I must tell you something too—” I started because I wanted him to know.

  “What?”

  “I’ve saved all this for you.”

  “What if we were never to be together again?”

  “That was never going to happen.” Then I couldn’t help myself: “You know what I like.”

  “I know.”

  “So you didn’t forget.”

  He smiled. No, he hadn’t.

  At dawn, after sex, we went swimming as we’d done years earlier.

  When we returned the house was still sleeping.

  “I’ll make coffee.”

  “I would love coffee,” he said.

  “Miranda likes it Neapolitan style. We’ve been brewing coffee that way for ages now.”

  “Fine” was his send-off as he headed to the shower. After filling the coffeepot I started boiling water for the eggs. I put down two place mats, one on the long side of the kitchen table, the other at the head. Then I put four slices of bread in the toaster but didn’t start it. By the time he was back, I told him to watch for the coffee but not to turn over the pot once the coffee was ready. I loved his hair when it was combed but still wet. I’d forgotten that look in the morning. Not two hours earlier we weren’t quite sure we’d ever make love again. I stopped fiddling with breakfast and looked at him. He knew what I was thinking and smiled. Yes, the unease that had scared us was behind us now, and as though to confirm this, before leaving the kitchen to take a shower, I placed a lingering kiss on his neck. “I haven’t been kissed like that in so long,” he said. “Time,” I said, using his word to rib him.

  After I’d showered and was back in the kitchen, to my surprise I found Oliver and Oliver seated next to each other on the long side of the table. I dropped six eggs in the boiling water for the three of us. As they discussed a film we’d seen the night before on television, it was clear that Little Ollie had taken an instant liking to Oliver.

  I buttered the warm toast for everyone and watched Oliver cut off the top of the eggshell for Little Ollie and then his as well. “You know who taught me how to do this?” he asked.

  “Who?” asked the boy.

  “Your brother. Every morning he used to cut the egg for me. Because I didn’t know how it was done. They don’t teach you this in America. I’ve been cutting the eggs for my two sons as well.”

  “You have sons?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What are their names?”

  He told him.

  “And do you know whom you’re named after?” Oliver finally asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  As soon as I heard these last few words, something tightened in my throat. This underscored so many things we hadn’t said, or hadn’t had time to say, or couldn’t find the words to say, yet here it was, like a final chord resolving an unfinished melodic air. So much time had passed, so many years, and who knew how many of them might turn out to have been the wasted years that, unbeknownst to us, end up making us better people. No wonder I was moved. The child was like our child, and seemed so emphatically prophesied that everything suddenly became clear to me—because there was a reason for the boy’s name, because Oliver had always been of my blood and had always lived in this house, been of this house and of our lives. He was already here before coming to us, before my birth, before they set down the first stone generations ago, and our years in between then and now were but a hiccup in that long itinerary called time. So much time, so many years, and all the lives we’d touched and left behind, as though they could just as easily have never happened, though happen they did—time, as he’d said before we hugged and went to sleep so late that night, time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.

  And as I was pouring his coffee and hovering behind him it crossed my mind that I shouldn’t have showered after this morning’s lovemaking, that I wanted every trace of him still on me, because we hadn’t even spoken about what we’d done at dawn yet and I wanted to hear him repeat what he’d said to me while we were making love. I wanted to tell him about our night, and how I was sure neither of us had slept as soundly as we’d claimed. Without speech, our night could so easily disappear, as he himself could just as easily disappear. I don’t know what seized me, but after I poured his coffee, I lowered my voice and almost kissed his earlobe. “You’re never going back,” I whispered. “Tell me you’re not leaving.”

  Quietly, he grabbed my arm and pulled me down to my seat at the head of the table. “I’m not leaving. Stop thinking like that.”

  I wanted to tell him about what had happened twenty years before, the good, the bad, the very good, and the terrible. There’d be time to say these things. I wanted to bring him up-to-date, to let him know everything, as I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to tell him how on seeing the white of his arms on his very first day among us, all I’d wanted was to be held by them and to feel them on my bare waist. I’d told him some of this while we lay in bed hours earlier. “You’d been on an archaeological dig in Sicily, and your arms were so tanned, I noticed them for the first time in our dining room—but the undersides of your arms were so white, and streaked with veins, like marble, and they seemed so delicate. I wanted to kiss each arm, and lick each arm.” “Even then?” “Even then. Will you just hug me now?” “And see where that goes?” he’d asked, and it was good we’d held each other and hadn’t done anything more that night. He must have read my thoughts, because this was when he put an arm over my shoulder, brought me close to him, and, turning to the boy, said: “Your brother is such a wonderful person.”

  The boy looked at us. “You think?”

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes, I do.” The boy smiled. He knew, as I knew and Oliver knew, that irony was the language of the house.

  And then without warning, the boy asked: “Are you a good person too?”

  Even Oliver was moved and had to catch his breath. The child was our child. The two of us knew it. And my father, who no longer was alive, knew it just as well, had known all along.

  * * *

  “Can you believe that the old lighthouse stood here, that we are standing hardly a ten-minute walk away from it?”

  We were in Alexandria for another night, then headed f
or Naples—our gift to ourselves, or as Miranda called it, our honeymoon, before Oliver was to start teaching at the Sapienza, in Rome. But as we stood staring at the sun and watching families, friends, and people stroll along the esplanade, I wanted to ask if he remembered the moment when we’d sat on a rock one evening and looked out to the sea days before he was to return to New York. Yes, he remembered, he said, of course he remembered. I asked if he recalled the nights we’d spent in Rome exploring the city into the wee hours. Yes, he remembered that too. I was going to say that that trip had changed my life, not only because we had spent our time in total freedom together, but because Rome had allowed me to taste the life of an artist, which I craved but didn’t know I was meant to live. We got so drunk yet hardly slept that first night in Rome. And we met so many poets, artists, editors, actors. But then he stopped me. “We’re not going to feed off the past, are we?” he asked in his usual laconic manner that told me I had strayed into territory that held no promise for the future. He couldn’t have been more right. “I’ve had to sever many ties and burn bridges I know I’ll pay dearly for, but I don’t want to look back. I’ve had Micol, you’ve had Michel, just as I’ve loved a young Elio and you a younger me. They’ve made us who we are. Let’s not pretend they never existed, but I don’t want to look back.”

  * * *

  Earlier that day we had been to Cavafy’s home on what was once rue Lepsius, later renamed rue Sharm el Sheikh, and now known as rue C. P. Cavafy. We laughed at the change of street names, at how the city, so inexorably ambivalent since the dawn of its founding three hundred and some years before Christ, couldn’t even make up its mind what to call its own streets. “Everything comes in layers here,” I said. He didn’t respond.

  What surprised me as soon as we walked into the sultry apartment that had once been the great poet’s home was hearing Oliver rattle off his greeting to the attendant in perfect Greek. How and when had he learned modern Greek? And how many more things didn’t I know about his life, and how many didn’t he know about mine? He’d taken a crash course, he said, but what truly helped was the sabbatical he’d spent in Greece with his wife and sons. The boys acquired the language in no time, while his wife had stayed home a lot, reading the Durrell brothers on a sunlit deck and picking up snippets of Greek from their cleaning lady, who spoke no English.

  Cavafy’s apartment, which was now a makeshift museum, felt drab and desultory despite the open windows. The neighborhood itself was drab. There was scant light as we entered and, with the exception of scattered sounds rising from the street, the dead silence in the home sat heavily on the spare, old furniture that had most likely been picked up from some abandoned storage house. Yet the apartment reminded me of one of my favorite poems by the poet, about a band of afternoon sunlight falling across a bed in which the poet, in his younger days, used to sleep with his lover. Now, as the poet revisits the premises years later, all the furniture is gone, the bed is gone, and the apartment has been turned into a business office. But that ray of sunlight that was once spread over the bed has not left him and stays forever in his memory. His lover had said he’d be back within a week; but he never returned. I felt the poet’s sorrow. One seldom recovers.

  We were both disappointed by the assortment of cheaply made photo-portraits of a grim-looking Cavafy that lined the walls. To commemorate the visit, we bought a volume of poems in Greek. When we sat next to each other in an old Greek pastry shop overlooking the bay, Oliver began reading aloud one of the poems to me, first in Greek and then in his own hasty translation. I couldn’t remember reading that poem before. It was about a Greek colony in Italy that the Greeks called Poseidonia and that was later renamed Paistos by the Lucanians and still later Paestum by the Romans. Over the centuries and so many generations after they’d settled, these Greeks eventually lost the memory of their Greek heritage and of the Greek language, and acquired Italianate customs instead—except for one day each year when, on that ritual anniversary, the Poseidonians would celebrate a Greek festival with Greek music and Greek rites to recall, as best each could, the forgotten customs and language of their forebears, realizing to their profound sorrow that they’d lost their magnificent Greek heritage and were no better than the Barbarians the Greeks were wont to scorn. By sundown that day they’d be cradling the very scraps of their residual Greek identity only to watch it vanish by sunup the next day.

  It was then, as we ate the sweet pastries, that it occurred to Oliver that just like the Poseidonians, the few remaining Alexandrian Greeks today—our hosts, the attendant in the museum, the very old waiter in our pastry shop, the man who had sold us an English-language newspaper this morning—all had acquired new customs, new habits, and spoke a language that smacked of obsolescence compared to the Greek spoken nowadays on the mainland.

  But Oliver told me something I will never forget: that on the sixteenth of November each year—my birthday—though married and the father of two sons, he would take time out to remember the Poseidonian in himself and to consider what life would have been had we stayed together. “I feared I was starting to forget your face, your voice, your smell, even,” he said. Over the years he had found his own ritual spot not far from his office, overlooking a lake where he would take a few moments on that day to think of our unlived life, his with mine. The vigil, as my father would have called it, never lasted long enough and it disrupted nothing. But recently, he went on, and perhaps because he was elsewhere that year, it came to him that the situation was entirely reversed, that he was a Poseidonian on all but one day a year and that the lure of bygone days had never left him, that he had forgotten nothing and didn’t want to forget, and that even if he couldn’t write or call to see whether I too had forgotten nothing, still, he knew that though neither of us sought out the other it was only because we had never really parted and that, regardless of where we were, who we were with, and whatever stood in our way, all he needed when the time was right was simply to come and find me.

  “And you did.”

  “And I did,” he said.

  “I wish my father were alive today.”

  Oliver looked at me, was silent a while, then said: “So do I, so do I.”

  ALSO BY ANDRÉ ACIMAN

  FICTION

  Call Me by Your Name

  Eight White Nights

  Harvard Square

  Enigma Variations

  NONFICTION

  Out of Egypt: A Memoir

  False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory

  Entrez: Signs of France (with Steven Rothfeld)

  The Light of New York (with Jean-Michel Berts)

  Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

  AS EDITOR

  Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

  The Proust Project

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  André Aciman is the author of Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, False Papers, Alibis, and Enigma Variations, and the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Tempo

  Cadenza

  Capriccio

  Da Capo

  Also by André Aciman

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  120 Broadway, New York 10271

  Copyright © 2019 by André Aciman

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2019

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72210-4

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