Call Me by Your Name

by André Aciman

  And yet, among the many things I wished to show him the next time I crossed paths with him was gratitude. One could show gratitude and still not be considered intrusive and heavy-handed. Or does gratitude, however restrained, always bear that extra dollop of treacle that gives every Mediterranean passion its unavoidably mawkish, histrionic character? Can’t let things well enough alone, can’t play down, must exclaim, proclaim, declaim…

  Say nothing and he’ll think you regret having written.

  Say anything and it will be out of place.

  Do what, then?

  Wait.

  I knew this from the very start. Just wait. I’d work all morning. Swim. Maybe play tennis in the afternoon. Meet Marzia. Be back by midnight. No, eleven-thirty. Wash? No wash? Ah, to go from one body to the other.

  Wasn’t this what he might be doing as well? Going from one to the other.

  And then a terrible panic seized me: was midnight going to be a talk, a clearing of the air between us—as in, buck up, lighten up, grow up!

  But why wait for midnight, then? Who ever picks midnight to have such a conversation?

  Or was midnight going to be midnight?

  What to wear at midnight?

  The day went as I feared. Oliver found a way to leave without telling me immediately after breakfast and did not come back until lunch. He sat in his usual place next to me. I tried to make light conversation a few times but realized that this was going to be another one of our let’s-not-speak-to-each-other days when we both tried to make it very clear that we were no longer just pretending to be quiet.

  After lunch, I went to take a nap. I heard him follow me upstairs and shut his door.

  Later I called Marzia. We met on the tennis court. Luckily, no one was there, so it was quiet and we played for hours under the scorching sun, which both of us loved. Sometimes, we would sit on the old bench in the shade and listen to the crickets. Mafalda brought us refreshments and then warned us that she was too old for this, that the next time we’d have to fetch whatever we wanted ourselves. “But we never asked you for anything,” I protested. “You shouldn’t have drunk, then.” And she shuffled away, having scored her point.

  Vimini, who liked to watch people play, did not come that day. She must have been with Oliver at their favorite spot.

  I loved August weather. The town was quieter than usual in the late summer weeks. By then, everyone had left for le vacanze, and the occasional tourists were usually gone before seven in the evening. I loved the afternoons best: the scent of rosemary, the heat, the birds, the cicadas, the sway of palm fronds, the silence that fell like a light linen shawl on an appallingly sunny day, all of these highlighted by the walk down to the shore and the walk back upstairs to shower. I liked looking up to our house from the tennis court and seeing the empty balconies bask in the sun, knowing that from any one of them you could spot the limitless sea. This was my balcony, my world. From where I sat now, I could look around me and say, Here is our tennis court, there our garden, our orchard, our shed, our house, and below is our wharf—everyone and everything I care for is here. My family, my instruments, my books, Mafalda, Marzia, Oliver.

  That afternoon, as I sat with Marzia with my hand resting on her thighs and knees, it did occur to me that I was, in Oliver’s words, one of the luckiest persons on earth. There was no saying how long all this would last, just as there was no sense in second-guessing how the day might turn out, or the night. Every minute felt as though stretched on tenterhooks. Everything could snap in a flash.

  But sitting here I knew I was experiencing the mitigated bliss of those who are too superstitious to claim they may get all they’ve ever dreamed of but are far too grateful not to know it could easily be taken away.

  After tennis, and just before heading to the beach, I took her upstairs by way of the balcony into my bedroom. No one passed there in the afternoon. I closed the shutters but left the windows open, so that the subdued afternoon light drew slatted patterns on the bed, on the wall, on Marzia. We made love in utter silence, neither of us closing our eyes.

  Part of me hoped we’d bang against the wall, or that she’d be unable to smother a cry, and that all this might alert Oliver to what was happening on the other side of his wall. I imagined him napping and hearing my bedsprings and being upset.

  On our way to the cove below I was once again pleased to feel I didn’t care if he found out about us, just as I didn’t care if he never showed up tonight. I didn’t even care for him or his shoulders or the white of his arms. The bottom of his feet, the flat of his palms, the underside of his body—didn’t care. I would much rather spend the night with her than wait up for him and hear him declaim bland pieties at the stroke of midnight. What had I been thinking this morning when I’d slipped him my note?

  And yet another part of me knew that if he showed up tonight and I disliked the start of whatever was in store for me, I’d still go through with it, go with it all the way, because better to find out once and for all than to spend the rest of the summer, or my life perhaps, arguing with my body.

  I’d make a decision in cold blood. And if he asked, I’d tell him. I’m not sure I want to go ahead with this, but I need to know, and better with you than anyone else. I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me.

  Marzia left just before dinnertime. She had promised to go to the movies. There’d be friends, she said. Why didn’t I come? I made a face when I heard their names. I’d stay home and practice, I said. I thought you practiced every morning. This morning I started late, remember? She intercepted my meaning and smiled.

  Three hours to go.

  There’d been a mournful silence between us all afternoon. If I hadn’t had his word that we were going to talk later, I don’t know how I’d have survived another day like this.

  At dinner, our guests were a semi-employed adjunct professor of music and a gay couple from Chicago who insisted on speaking terrible Italian. The two men sat next to each other, facing my mother and me. One of them decided to recite some verses by Pascoli, to which Mafalda, catching my look, made her usual smorfia meant to elicit a giggle from me. My father had warned me not to misbehave in the presence of the scholars from Chicago. I said I would wear the purple shirt given me by a distant cousin from Uruguay. My father laughed it off, saying I was too old not to accept people as they were. But there was a glint in his eyes when both showed up wearing purple shirts. They had both stepped out from either side of the cab at the same time and each carried a bunch of white flowers in his hand. They looked, as my father must have realized, like a flowery, gussied-up version of Tintin’s Thomson and Thompson twins.

  I wondered what their life together was like.

  It seemed strange to be counting the minutes during supper, shadowed by the thought that tonight I had more in common with Tintin’s twins than with my parents or anyone else in my world.

  I looked at them, wondering who was top and who was bottom, Tweedle-Dee or Tweedle-Dum.

  It was almost eleven when I said I was going to sleep and said goodnight to my parents and the guests. “What about Marzia?” asked my father, that unmistakable lambent look in his eyes. Tomorrow, I replied.

  I wanted to be alone. Shower. A book. A diary entry, perhaps. Stay focused on midnight yet keep my mind off every aspect of it.

  On my way up the staircase, I tried to imagine myself coming down this very same staircase tomorrow morning. By then I might be someone else. Did I even like this someone else whom I didn’t yet know and who might not want to say good morning then or have anything to do with me for having brought him to this pass? Or would I remain the exact same person walking up this staircase, with nothing about me changed, and not one of my doubts resolved?

  Or nothing at all might happen. He could refuse, and, even if no one found out I had asked him, I’d still be humiliated, and for nothing. He’d know; I’d know.

  But I was past humiliation. After weeks of wanting an
d waiting and—let’s face it—begging and being made to hope and fight every access of hope, I’d be devastated. How do you go back to sleep after that? Slink back into your room and pretend to open a book and read yourself to sleep?

  Or: how do you go back to sleep no longer a virgin? There was no coming back from that! What had been in my head for so long would now be out in the real world, no longer afloat in my foreverland of ambiguities. I felt like someone entering a tattoo parlor and taking a last, long look at his bare left shoulder.

  Should I be punctual?

  Be punctual and say: Whooo-hooo, the witching hour.

  Soon I could hear the voices of the two guests rising from the courtyard. They were standing outside, probably waiting for the adjunct professor to drive them back to their pension. The adjunct was taking his time and the couple were simply chatting outside, one of them giggling.

  At midnight there wasn’t a sound coming from his room. Could he have stood me up again? That would be too much. I hadn’t heard him come back. He’d just have to come to my room, then. Or should I still go to his? Waiting would be torture.

  I’ll go to him.

  I stepped out onto the balcony for a second and peered in the direction of his bedroom. No light. I’d still knock anyway.

  Or I could wait. Or not go at all.

  Not going suddenly burst on me like the one thing I wanted most in life. It kept tugging at me, straining toward me ever so gently now, like someone who’d already whispered once or twice in my sleep but, seeing I wasn’t waking, had finally tapped me on the shoulder and was now encouraging me to look for every inducement to put off knocking on his window tonight. The thought washed over me like water on a flower shop window, like a soothing, cool lotion after you’ve showered and spent the whole day in the sun, loving the sun but loving the balsam more. Like numbness, the thought works on your extremities first and then penetrates to the rest of your body, giving all manner of arguments, starting with the silly ones—it’s way too late for anything tonight—rising to the major ones—how will you face the others, how will you face yourself?

  Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Because I wanted to savor and save it for last? Because I wanted the counterarguments to spring on their own, without my having any part in summoning them at all, so that I wouldn’t be blamed for them? Don’t try, don’t try this, Elio. It was my grandfather’s voice. I was his namesake, and he was speaking to me from the very bed where he’d crossed a far more menacing divide than the one between my room and Oliver’s. Turn back. Who knows what you’ll find once you’re in that room. Not the tonic of discovery but the pall of despair when disenchantment has all but shamed every ill-stretched nerve in your body. The years are watching you now, every star you see tonight already knows your torment, your ancestors are gathered here and have nothing to give or say, Non c’andà, don’t go there.

  But I loved the fear—if fear it really was—and this they didn’t know, my ancestors. It was the underside of fear I loved, like the smoothest wool found on the underbelly of the coarsest sheep. I loved the boldness that was pushing me forward; it aroused me, because it was born of arousal itself. “You’ll kill me if you stop”—or was it: “I’ll die if you stop.” Each time I heard these words, I couldn’t resist.

  I knock on the glass panel, softly. My heart is beating like crazy. I am afraid of nothing, so why be so frightened? Why? Because everything scares me, because both fear and desire are busy equivocating with each other, with me, I can’t even tell the difference between wanting him to open the door and hoping he’s stood me up.

  Instead, no sooner have I knocked on the glass panel than I hear something stir inside, like someone looking for his slippers. Then I make out a weak light going on. I remembered buying this night-light at Oxford with my father one evening early last spring when our hotel room was too dark and he had gone downstairs and come back up saying he’d been told there was a twenty-four-hour store that sold night-lights just around the corner. Wait here, and I’ll be back in no time. Instead, I said I’d go with him. I threw on my raincoat on top of the very same pajamas I was wearing tonight.

  “I’m so glad you came,” he said. “I could hear you moving in your room and for a while I thought you were getting ready to go to bed and had changed your mind.”

  “Me, change my mind? Of course I was coming.”

  It was strange seeing him fussing awkwardly this way. I had expected a hailstorm of mini-ironies, which was why I was nervous. Instead, I was greeted with excuses, like someone apologizing for not having had time to buy better biscuits for afternoon tea.

  I stepped into my old bedroom and was instantly taken aback by the smell which I couldn’t quite place, because it could have been a combination of so many things, until I noticed the rolled-up towel tucked under the bedroom door. He had been sitting in bed, a half-full ashtray sitting on his right pillow.

  “Come in,” he said, and then shut the French window behind us. I must have been standing there, lifeless and frozen.

  Both of us were whispering. A good sign.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Sometimes.” He went to the bed and sat squarely in the middle of it.

  Not knowing what else to do or say, I muttered, “I’m nervous.”

  “Me too.”

  “Me more than you.”

  He tried to smile away the awkwardness between us and passed me the reefer.

  It gave me something to do.

  I remembered how I’d almost hugged him on the balcony but had caught myself in time, thinking that an embrace after such chilly moments between us all day was unsuitable. Just because someone says he’ll see you at midnight doesn’t mean you’re automatically bound to hug him when you’ve barely shaken hands all week. I remembered thinking before knocking: To hug. Not to hug. To hug.

  Now I was inside the room.

  He was sitting on the bed, with his legs crossed. He looked smaller, younger. I was standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed, not knowing what to do with my hands. He must have seen me struggling to keep them on my hips and then put them in my pockets and then back to my hips again.

  I look ridiculous, I thought. This and the would-be hug I’d suppressed and which I kept hoping he hadn’t noticed.

  I felt like a child left alone for the first time with his homeroom teacher. “Come, sit.”

  Did he mean on a chair or on the bed itself?

  Hesitantly, I crawled onto the bed and sat facing him, cross-legged like him, as though this were the accepted protocol among men who meet at midnight. I was making sure our knees didn’t touch. Because he’d mind if our knees touched, just as he’d mind the hug, just as he minded when, for want of a better way to show I wanted to stay awhile longer on the berm, I’d placed my hand on his crotch.

  But before I had a chance to exaggerate the distance between us, I felt as though washed by the sliding water on the flower shop’s storefront window, which took all my shyness and inhibitions away. Nervous or not nervous, I no longer cared to cross-examine every one of my impulses. If I’m stupid, let me be stupid. If I touch his knee, so I’ll touch his knee. If I want to hug, I’ll hug. I needed to lean against something, so I sidled up to the top of the bed and leaned my back against the headboard next to him.

  I looked at the bed. I could see it clearly now. This was where I’d spent so many nights dreaming of just such a moment. Now here I was. In a few weeks, I’d be back here on this very same bed. I’d turn on my Oxford night-light and remember standing outside on the balcony, having caught the rustle of his feet scrambling to find his slippers. I wondered whether I would look back on this with sorrow. Or shame. Or indifference, I hoped.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Me okay.”

  There was absolutely nothing to say. With my toes, I reached over to his toes and touched them. Then, without thinking, I slipped my big toe in between his big toe and his second toe. He did not recoil, he did not respond. I wanted to
touch each toe with my own. Since I was sitting to his left, these were probably not the toes that had touched me at lunch the other day. It was his right foot that was guilty. I tried to reach it with my right foot, all the while avoiding touching both his knees, as if something told me knees were off bounds. “What are you doing?” he finally asked. “Nothing.” I didn’t know myself, but his body gradually began to reciprocate the movement, somewhat absentmindedly, without conviction, no less awkward than mine, as if to say, What else is there to do but to respond in kind when someone touches your toes with his toes? After that, I moved closer to him and then hugged him. A child’s hug which I hoped he’d read as an embrace. He did not respond. “That’s a start,” he finally said, perhaps with a tad more humor in his voice than I’d wish. Instead of speaking, I shrugged my shoulders, hoping he’d feel my shrug and not ask any more questions. I did not want us to speak. The less we spoke, the more unrestrained our movements. I liked hugging him.

  “Does this make you happy?” he asked.

  I nodded, hoping, once again, that he’d feel my head nodding without the need for words.

  Finally, as if my position urged him to do likewise, he brought his arm around me. The arm didn’t stroke me, nor did it hold me tight. The last thing I wanted at this point was comradeship. Which was why, without interrupting my embrace, I loosened my hold for a moment, time enough to bring both my arms under his loose shirt and resume my embrace. I wanted his skin.

  “You sure you want this?” he asked, as if this doubt was why he’d been hesitant all along.

  I nodded again. I was lying. By then I wasn’t sure at all. I wondered when my hug would run its course, when I, or he, would grow tired of this. Soon? Later? Now?

  “We haven’t talked,” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, No need to.