by André Aciman
“Fifteen. I counted them last night on my way here.” Then I added: “Actually, that’s not true. I’ve always known.”
“Fifteen it is. Just look at you!
“Look,” he added, “come for a drink, come for dinner, tonight, now, meet my wife, my boys. Please, please, please.”
“I’d love to—”
“I have to drop something in my office, and off we go. It’s a lovely walk along to the parking lot.”
“You don’t understand. I’d love to. But I can’t.”
The “can’t” did not mean I wasn’t free to visit him but that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
He looked at me as he was still putting away his papers in the leather bag.
“You never did forgive me, did you?”
“Forgive? There was nothing to forgive. If anything, I’m grateful for everything. I remember good things only.”
I had heard people say this in the movies. They seemed to believe it.
“Then what is it?” he asked.
We were leaving his classroom and stepped into the commons where one of those long, languorous autumnal sunsets on the East Coast threw luminous shades of orange over the adjoining hills.
How was I ever going to explain to him, or to myself, why I couldn’t go to his home and meet his family, though every part of me was dying to? Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, books, world, life. What had I expected? A hug, a handshake, a perfunctory hail-fellow-well-met, and then the unavoidable Later!?
The very possibility of meeting his family suddenly alarmed me—too real, too sudden, too in-my-face, not rehearsed enough. Over the years I’d lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I’d dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn’t just how distant were the paths we’d taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me—a loss I didn’t mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we’ve stopped thinking of things we’ve lost and may never have cared for.
Or was it that I was jealous of his family, of the life he’d made for himself, of the things I never shared and couldn’t possibly have known about? Things he had longed for, loved, and lost, and whose loss had crushed him, but whose presence in his life, when he had them, I wasn’t there to witness and wouldn’t know the first thing about. I wasn’t there when he’d acquired them, wasn’t there when he’d given them up. Or was it much, much simpler? I had come to see if I felt something, if something was still alive. The trouble was I didn’t want anything to be alive either.
All these years, whenever I thought of him, I’d think either of B. or of our last days in Rome, the whole thing leading up to two scenes: the balcony with its attendant agonies and via Santa Maria dell’Anima, where he’d pushed me against the old wall and kissed me and in the end let me put one leg around his. Every time I go back to Rome, I go back to that one spot. It is still alive for me, still resounds with something totally present, as though a heart stolen from a tale by Poe still throbbed under the ancient slate pavement to remind me that, here, I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have. I could never think of him in New England. When I lived in New England for a while and was separated from him by no more than fifty miles, I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral. The places where he’d lived also felt inanimate, and as soon as I tried thinking of them, they too would float and drift away, no less unreal and spectral. Now, it turned out, not only were New England towns very much alive, but so was he. I could easily have thrust myself on him years ago, married or unmarried—unless it was I who, despite all appearances, had all along been unreal and spectral myself.
Or had I come with a far more menial purpose? To find him living alone, waiting for me, craving to be taken back to B.? Yes, both our lives on the same artificial respirator, waiting for that time when we’d finally meet and scale our way back to the Piave memorial.
And then it came out of me: “The truth is I’m not sure I can feel nothing. And if I am to meet your family, I would prefer not to feel anything.” Followed by a dramatic silence. “Perhaps it never went away.”
Was I speaking the truth? Or was the moment, tense and delicate as it was, making me say things I’d never quite admitted to myself and could still not wager were entirely true? “I don’t think it went away,” I repeated.
“So,” he said. His so was the only word that could sum up my uncertainties. But perhaps he had also meant So? as though to question what could possibly have been so shocking about still wanting him after so many years.
“So,” I repeated, as though referring to the capricious aches and sorrows of a fussy third party who happened to be me.
“So, that’s why you can’t come over for drinks?”
“So, that’s why I can’t come over for drinks.”
“What a goose!”
I had altogether forgotten his word.
We reached his office. He introduced me to two or three colleagues who happened to be in the department, surprising me with his total familiarity with every aspect of my career. He knew everything, had kept abreast of the most insignificant details. In some cases, he must have dug out information about me that could only be obtained by surfing the Web. It moved me. I’d assumed he’d totally forgotten me.
“I want to show you something,” he said. His office had a large leather sofa. Oliver sofa, I thought. So this is where he sits and reads. Papers were strewn about the sofa and on the floor, except for the corner seat, which was under an alabaster lamp. Oliver lamp. I remembered sheets lining the floor in his room in B. “Recognize it?” he asked. On the wall was a framed colored reproduction of a poorly preserved fresco of a bearded Mithraic figure. Each of us had bought one on the morning of our visit to San Clemente. I hadn’t seen mine in ages. Next to it on the wall was a framed postcard of Monet’s berm. I recognized it immediately.
“It used to be mine, but you’ve owned it far, far longer than I have.” We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives.
“It has a long history,” I said.
“I know. When I had it reframed I saw the inscriptions on the back, which is why you can also read the back of the card now. I’ve often thought about this Maynard guy. Think of me someday.”
“Your predecessor,” I said to tease him. “No, nothing like that. Whom will you give it to one day?”
“I had hoped one day to let one of my sons bring it in person when he comes for his residency. I’ve already added my inscription—but you can’t see it. Are you staying in town?” he asked to change the subject as he was putting on his raincoat.
“Yes. For one night. I’m seeing some people at the university tomorrow morning, then I’m off.”
He looked at me. I knew he was thinking of that night during Christmas break, and he knew I knew it. “So I’m forgiven.”
He pressed his lips in muted apology.
“Let’s have a drink at my hotel.”
I felt his discomfort.
“I said a drink, not a fuck.”
He looked at me and literally blushed. I was staring at him. He was amazingly handsome still, no loss of hair, no fat, still jogged every morning, he said, skin still as smooth as then. Only a few sunspots on his hands. Sunspots, I thought, and I couldn’t put the thought away. “What are these?” I asked, pointing at his hand and then touching it. “I have them all over.” Sunspots. They broke my heart, and I wanted to kiss each and every one away. “Too much sun in my salad days. Besides, it shouldn’t be so surprising. I’m getting on. In three years, my elder son will be as old as you were then—in fact
, he’s closer to the person you were when we were together than you are to the Elio I knew then. Talk about uncanny.”
Is that what you call it, when we were together? I thought.
In the bar of the old New England hotel, we found a quiet spot overlooking the river and a large flower garden that was very much in bloom that month. We ordered two martinis—Sapphire gin, he specified—and sat close together in the horseshoe-shaped booth, like two husbands who are forced to sit uncomfortably close while their wives are in the powder room.
“In another eight years, I’ll be forty-seven and you forty. Five years from then, I’ll be fifty-two and you forty-five. Will you come for dinner then?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“So what you’re really saying is you’ll come only when you think you’ll be too old to care. When my kids have left. Or when I’m a grandfather. I can just see us—and on that evening, we’ll sit together and drink a strong eau-de-vie, like the grappa your father used to serve at night sometimes.”
“And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.” But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.
Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber.
Silence.
“God, the way they envied us from across the dinner table that first night in Rome,” he said. “Staring at us, the young, the old, men, women—every single one of them at that dinner table—gaping at us, because we were so happy.
“And on that evening when we grow older still we’ll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we’ll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.”
Silence again.
“Perhaps I am not yet ready to speak of them as strangers,” I said.
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think either of us ever will be.”
“I think we should have another.”
He conceded even before putting up a weak argument about getting back home.
We got the preliminaries out of the way. His life, my life, what did he do, what did I do, what’s good, what’s bad. Where did he hope to be, where did I. We avoided my parents. I assumed he knew. By not asking he told me that he did.
An hour.
“Your best moment?” he finally interrupted.
I thought awhile.
“The first night is the one I remember best—perhaps because I fumbled so much. But also Rome. There is a spot on via Santa Maria dell’Anima that I revisit every time I’m in Rome. I’ll stare at it for a second, and suddenly it’ll all come back to me. I had just thrown up that night and on the way back to the bar you kissed me. People kept walking by but I didn’t care, nor did you. That kiss is still imprinted there, thank goodness. It’s all I have from you. This and your shirt.”
He remembered.
“And you,” I asked, “what moment?”
“Rome too. Singing together till dawn on Piazza Navona.”
I had totally forgotten. It wasn’t just a Neapolitan song we ended up singing that night. A group of young Dutchmen had taken out their guitars and were singing one Beatles song after the other, and everyone by the main fountain had joined in, and so did we. Even Dante showed up again and he too sang along in his warped English. “Did they serenade us, or am I making it up?”
He looked at me in bewilderment.
“They serenaded you—and you were drunk out of your mind. In the end you borrowed the guitar from one of them and you started playing, and then, out of nowhere, singing. Gaping, they all were. All the druggies of the world listening like sheep to Handel. One of the Dutch girls had lost it. You wanted to bring her to the hotel. She wanted to come too. What a night. We ended up sitting in the emptied terrace of a closed caffè behind the piazza, just you and I and the girl, watching dawn, each of us slumped on a chair.”
He looked at me. “Am I glad you came.”
“I’m glad I came too.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
Why was this suddenly making me nervous? “Shoot.”
“Would you start again if you could?”
I looked at him. “Why are you asking?”
“Because. Just answer.”
“Would I start again if I could? In a second. But I’ve had two of these, and I’m about to order a third.”
He smiled. It was obviously my turn to ask the same question, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. This was my favorite Oliver: the one who thought exactly like me.
“Seeing you here is like waking from a twenty-year coma. You look around you and you find that your wife has left you, your children, whose childhood you totally missed out on, are grown men, some are married, your parents have died long ago, you have no friends, and that tiny face staring at you through goggles belongs to none other than your grandson, who’s been brought along to welcome Gramps from his long sleep. Your face in the mirror is as white as Rip Van Winkle’s. But here’s the catch: you’re still twenty years younger than those gathered around you, which is why I can be twenty-four in a second—I am twenty-four. And if you pushed the parable a few years further up, I could wake up and be younger than my elder son.”
“What does this say about the life you’ve lived, then?”
“Part of it—just part of it—was a coma, but I prefer to call it a parallel life. It sounds better. Problem is that most of us have—live, that is—more than two parallel lives.”
Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn’t want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him “You are the only person I’d like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist. Sometimes I have this awful picture of waking up in our house in B. and, looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, He died last night. We missed out on so much. It was a coma. Tomorrow I go back to my coma, and you to yours. Pardon, I didn’t mean to offend—I am sure yours is no coma.”
“No, a parallel life.”
Maybe every other sorrow I’d known in life suddenly decided to converge on this very one. I had to fight it off. And if he didn’t see, it’s probably because he himself was not immune to it.
On a whim, I asked him if he’d ever read a novel by Thomas Hardy called The Well-Beloved. No, he hadn’t. About a man who falls in love with a woman who, years after leaving him, dies. He visits her house and ends up meeting her daughter, with whom he falls in love, and after losing her as well, many years later, runs into her daughter, with whom he falls in love. “Do these things die out on their own or do some things need generations and lifetimes to sort themselves out?”
“I wouldn’t want one of my sons in your bed, any more than I’d like yours, if you were to have one, in my son’s.”
We chuckled. “I wonder about our fathers, though.”
He thought for a while, then smiled.
“What I don’t want is to receive a letter from your son with the bad news: And by the way, enclosed please find a framed postcard my father asked me to return to you. Nor do I want to answer with something like: You can come whenever you please, I am sure he would
have wanted you to stay in his room. Promise me it won’t happen.”
“Promise.”
“What did you write on the back of the postcard?”
“It was going to be a surprise.”
“I’m too old for surprises. Besides, surprises always come with a sharp edge that is meant to hurt. I don’t want to be hurt—not by you. Tell me.”
“Just two words.”
“Let me guess: If not later, when?”
“Two words, I said. Besides, that would be cruel.”
I thought for a while.
“I give up.”
“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”
I stared at him.
It was good we were in a public place.
“We should go.” He reached for his raincoat, which was folded next to his seat, and began to make motions of standing up.
I was going to walk him outside the hotel lobby and then stand and watch him go. Any moment now we were going to say goodbye. Suddenly part of my life was going to be taken away from me now and would never be given back.
“Suppose I walk you to your car,” I said.
“Suppose you came for dinner.”
“Suppose I did.”
Outside, the night was settling fast. I liked the peace and the silence of the countryside, with its fading alpenglow and darkling view of the river. Oliver country, I thought. The mottled lights from across the other bank beamed on the water, reminding me of Van Gogh’s Starlight Over the Rhone. Very autumnal, very beginning of school year, very Indian summer, and as always at Indian summer twilight, that lingering mix of unfinished summer business and unfinished homework and always the illusion of summer months ahead, which wears itself out no sooner than the sun has set.
I tried to picture his happy family, boys immersed in homework, or lumbering back from late practice, surly, ill-tempered thumping with muddied boots, every cliché racing through my mind. This is the man whose house I stayed in when I lived in Italy, he’d say, followed by grumpy harrumphs from two adolescents who couldn’t be bothered by the man from Italy or the house in Italy, but who’d reel in shock if told, Oh, and by the way, this man who was almost your age back then and who spent most of his days quietly transcribing The Seven Last Words of Christ each morning would sneak into my room at night and we’d fuck our brains out. So shake hands and be nice.
