by André Aciman
Later, after showering and getting dressed, I looked at you and, from seemingly nowhere, said that I didn’t know your name. I did this perhaps to show you I was fully aware that you had used my name for the first time that morning and that the gesture did not go unnoticed. You immediately told me your name. I would never have guessed. I don’t know why, but I kept thinking it was going to be Friedrich, or Heinz, or Heinrich, or Otto. And because this is what people do when they exchange names, I reached out and shook your hand. I liked what I felt when I touched your hand. I knew that I’d feel some sort of signal race from you to me. Or perhaps I wanted to think I felt it. But feel something I did. I was not going to keep your hand in mine, but I wanted to, and I know, by the way you were polite enough not to withdraw yours too soon, that perhaps you had felt something as well. Suddenly, and I loved this, I had become the older schoolmate who sends the younger one to buy cigarettes. I loved your intimidated smile. And I loved this about us: we were swapping roles. He’s shy, I thought.
“Let’s grab a drink one of these days.”
“Why not, I’d like that.”
I had wanted to kiss your hand, to lace my five fingers in all five of yours and know the softness of your palm. Nothing like that happened, of course. But I did look you straight in the eyes hoping you’d know.
I went to work in a halo of bliss. What I failed to notice was that you were walking right behind me by no more than ten paces. I saw this not when I went down the stairs to the subway, or even when I reached the platform, but on the train itself. You had gotten in through another door and had found a seat in the same car. I was standing reading the paper. If you saw me, you were back to your usual silent and averted gaze. We don’t speak outside the tennis courts. I didn’t want to push things or be obtrusive, so I pretended to be lost in thought while reading the paper. I apologized to someone sitting down when I felt my paper graze her face, but I said it loudly enough for you to hear. I’d been doing this for two years in the locker room: talk to anyone, but talk to no one but you. Perhaps I expected you’d make a motion to talk. But then you didn’t need my voice to know I was on the train. You already knew, the way I knew.
And there you were seated, casting that same lifeless, faraway gaze I’d seen on the courts once before as you stared blankly at the nameless humanity in the car. Your legs were slightly parted and you had the back of each hand resting on each thigh with the palms up, in a gesture so helpless, so passive, conveying such resigned acquiescence in your slumped posture that it hurt me to watch an athlete sit that way. I wanted to say something, anything, to break through all our hurdles and ask what was the matter and why were you staring with so forlorn and vacant a gaze at those around you. But who could have dared such a thing? So I pretended to go on reading.
Here I was reexperiencing these old stirrings of tenderness for you when it occurred to me that despite all my vigilance, I was so rapt by the article in the paper that I’d failed to notice we had reached your stop and that you had already left the car, probably brushing right past me without saying a word.
What snuffed the joy I felt that morning once I reached my office building was what you’d said when I asked about drinks. “I’d like that.” Yours, I remembered, was not a yes. It was polite humbug.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, ON my computer, I did some sleuthing. Not knowing your last name, I typed in “Manfred,” the name of your private school in Queens located near the subway stop to which I’d once followed you, the word “tennis.” Nothing came up. So I tried a host of words, removed others, added others, even went so far as to follow an old hunch and checked American army bases in Germany. Nothing again. Finally I typed in “Oberlin” and “Manfred” and computed graduation years. And suddenly, to my complete surprise, there was your picture with your full name.
From this I couldn’t resist asking more questions. Where did you live in New York? What had people said about you? Did you have a Facebook? Who were your friends? I read everything.
Not only did an address pop up with a telephone number, but on social media up came the name of someone who might be your partner. When I entered his name, the name “Thucydides” came up. Then “Professor, Classics.” You hadn’t lied. He’d already published a monograph on Thucydides.
I envied the two of you. I could just picture your meeting during freshman orientation week, then I saw you coming back together from the library late at night, every night. Perhaps you’d meet in the library after dinner. Then one winter night on the way back from the library to your dorm he stopped, sat down on one of the benches even though it was freezing, and said, “I just need to know, Manfred. Do you have feelings for me?”
* * *
WHAT CHANGED BETWEEN us was the dissolution of what seemed a war of nerves. Now it was you who’d start conversations. My plodding Fine to your How was your weekend? turned into a litany of things you had done or gone to see. I found out about your father and his bone marrow transplant, and about the sorry state of the central air-conditioning in your apartment on 95th Street, and about your elder brother who had gone back to Germany, and the black-and-white films you and your partner liked to watch on Turner Classic Movies. You didn’t speak about sports, didn’t even ask if I had watched the French Open. Rather than overlook the decaying state of the tennis house as you’d done before, you began to make fun of the grimy sink where we shaved, the puddles we had to wade through to put on our clothes, the homeless men who would sneak into the tennis house early in the morning to shower or wash their clothes in the very sinks where we’d just shaved and brushed our teeth. “If only my colleagues at school knew we hobnobbed with the homeless every morning.”
In fact, one day a homeless man walked in and dumped his dirty clothes in one of the sinks. “What did I tell you,” you said. “Hi, Paul,” said the homeless man. “Hi, Benny,” I said.
As we walked back to our lockers, I told you that Benny’s was a very sad story. He had worked as a bartender, but after drugs and one misfortune following another, he ended up homeless. Lost his license, his home, his wife, his children, and yet had read all the Russian classics and could recite all the ingredients of every cocktail ever concocted this side of the Atlantic. “He’s trying to work his way back,” I said, adding a touch more earnestness in what I was saying, perhaps to show that under the veneer of mischief and sarcasm, I was really a good soul. You said nothing. But I liked talking to you as we were getting dressed, because you’d have to face me and thus offer a frontal view of your body, your chin, your pecs, your abs, your eyes. I didn’t want to look any lower, so I kept staring at your chest, but staring at your chest made me want to touch it, so I stared at your face, which I wanted to kiss, until I’d looked below your waist before your eyes could follow mine—all this as we’re talking about the lapsed bartender who was trying to make a comeback.
“Paul?” said Benny, who had come out into the locker area after wringing his clothes in one of the deeper sinks.
“What is it?”
He seemed uncomfortable speaking in front of you and signaled for me to approach him, finally whispering, “Can you help me out?”
I walked back to my locker, secretly took out my wallet, and sidling back to the bathroom, handed him a few bills. I didn’t want you to see. But I did want you to see that I had made an effort to hide that I’d given the poor man money.
“You gave him money,” you said when I was back at my locker.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“He’s a good man,” I finally said.
To which you replied, “Another ‘Metropolitan Diary’ moment.”
We smiled at each other.
“Well, we’re even, then.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I gave him something too.”
It turns out you’d given him far more than I had.
I smiled at you and shook my head with mock reproof.
“What?” you
asked, not letting the matter go.
I wanted to say that we thought along the same lines, liked the same things, were more alike than either of us knew. Instead, I ended up saying something entirely different. “That was a lovely gesture and far more discreet than mine.”
It ranked among the most saccharine banalities ever to come out of my mouth.
You said nothing.
“What?” I asked, echoing your words.
“Nothing.” Then after a pause, “I think I’m beginning to understand you.”
“Oh? Tell me more, because I’m not sure I do.”
“You’re not easy,” you said.
“And you are?”
“I suppose not.”
We stood there speechless, trying to avoid staring at each other, and though we were both fully dressed and ready to leave the tennis house, it seemed to me that neither of us wanted to leave with the other.
I said I needed to pee. I was giving you the exit line you needed to leave the locker room without me. I felt I was doing the right thing.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Saturday morning, as I’m heading to the farmers’ market, my fantasies take over. It’s a lovely, clear, summery beach day, and I’m thinking of what you might have done last night and whether you’re gone for the weekend. The weather was still a bit cool, but I had an image of the summerhouse I’m sure you share with your friends and I pictured all of you having drunk too much last night. Yet everyone knows you’re an early riser, and last night your friends asked you to get some milk in the morning, maybe bagels and things, and don’t forget a few treats, someone ordered. Dreamily, you step out of the house to face this gorgeous morning. You’re the only one up in the house and the only one on the lane. This is good. The weather is good. The lanes are quiet, and the silence doesn’t let up. I can hear your flip-flops on the dusty slabs. You’re happy. Last night, great dinner, good friends, nice talk, good wines, great sex. You haven’t showered and you don’t plan to until after your first swim in the ocean. All you did before heading out was put on the shorts you wore last night and a T-shirt, no underwear. This is heaven. You’re going to surprise everyone by buying something like a cake—why not, you think, especially made locally with strange berries and grains found nowhere but here. I envy you the errand. Suddenly, I am there with you and would love to walk with you, because we’ve never walked together, and going to get bagels and things plus a treat on a Saturday morning at the beach seems so easy, so uncomplicated, such a source of clear, simple, undiluted joy.
Yet another part of me wishes that you’d asked me instead to pick up milk and breakfast for everyone. I know that once I walk out of the house you’ll find a way to talk about me to those who are already up having coffee. They must have heard our moaning last night from the other end of the house, and someone is sure to say something, possibly comical, The two of you making the beast with two backs, did you two ever consider catching your breath? Everyone laughs, partly because I’m new among your friends. And you laugh with them, but then, on impulse, you pick yourself up and dash out of the house, and before I’m twenty paces on the lane, you’re running after me, I wanted to come with you. I look back and smile.
But there’s another Saturday scenario: you say you’ll head out to get breakfast and ask me to stay in. Have coffee with Esmeralda. I’ll take care of things, you say. No sooner have you walked out and closed the screen door behind you than we start talking. I’m new to this scene, so Esmeralda hands me freshly brewed coffee.
Be good to him, she says, don’t hurt him.
But I am good to him.
Do you love him?
Do I love him? I’m crazy about him.
That doesn’t seem to satisfy her.
Two other risers totter into the kitchen and help themselves to coffee.
But do you care for him? asks one of the two.
I can repeat this scene in my mind all day.
Everything tells me you care for me. And yet never a sign from you.
That same Saturday night I finally dream of you. I am walking with Maud around the Lincoln Square area. We are just leaving the movie theater when we run into you and your partner on the same sidewalk. It’s late in the summer and you’ve been gone from the courts for more than a week, so seeing you standing in front of me startles me so much that, without even thinking or rehearsing our usual lukewarm hello, rather than shake your hand, I let my palm reach out to you and touch your cheek. I would never have dared this, but part of me can already tell this is probably a dream and knows it’s not unseemly to do this in dreams, especially when one’s not seen the other for more than a week. Perhaps it’s your tanned neck exposed down to your shiny breastbone that stirs the impulse.
But then, in my dream, you do something more startling yet. Not only are you not taken aback by my bold caress in front of your partner, but you actually yield to my palm, because you like this, and by leaning into my hand, you’re trying to make my hand stay there. We shake hands right after, perhaps to cover up what has just happened, and then make introductions left and right. Maud and your partner begin discussing how much they liked the film. “He certainly didn’t,” you say, pointing at me. “You don’t say!” says Maud, making a joke at my expense. We ask which way you two are walking. It happens to be ours as well. At some point, she and he drift ahead while the two of us lag behind, almost intentionally putting distance between them and us. We’ve never walked together, yet here we are, more together than we’d ever been in two years. You grab my hand and don’t let go. Surely this is a dream, I think. “Haven’t seen you in ages,” you say. “Let’s walk together.”
“But what about them?” I ask, mistaking your meaning, only then to realize that I haven’t mistaken it at all.
“They’ll live,” you say.
And just as you utter these words, I know with unshakable certainty that those few minutes when we walk hand in hand together are, even in a dream, more real and better than anything I’d ever know in life, and that I would be lying if I called what I’ve been doing all these years living.
The happiness that came with the dream stayed with me all day.
I resolved one thing. The next time I saw you I’d do exactly what I’d done in my dream. I’d touch your cheek, either on the courts, or in the tennis house, or in the locker room, but something like this had to happen.
Or else.
Or else what? Shoot myself? Seriously?
When I saw you after my dream, it was impossible to go through with anything I’d resolved. You were chilly again, as though you’d intercepted my dream and were so horrified that you thought it best to put distance between us. I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don’t fly out and rat on one another’s dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves. Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren’t willing to hide while dreaming. I wished you’d taken a second look at me and said, You dreamt of me last night, didn’t you?
When I saw you again the next morning, the element of surprise, which would have justified a seemingly spontaneous show of affection, was undercut by your immediate complaint about the poor maintenance of the courts. Then on Thursday you didn’t show up at all. I’d have to wait forever, till Monday.
And yet the joy of having run into you in a dream was still not wearing off, nor could I hide that joy; it touched every hour of my days, so that what I grew to fear was not that you wouldn’t turn out to be the person I met in a dream, but that the joy that came from the dream the moment you held my hand and said Let’s walk together would, without warning, without my knowing it even, gradually and unavoidably evaporate. How to coddle it, how not to let it go …
Early Friday afternoon, I decided to head to the courts. It was an unusually warm day for early spring, and I wanted to put everyth
ing that had happened to me that day behind me and enjoy the weather. I had spare clothes in my locker and had no need to go home to change. Then, as I was entering the tennis house, there you were, Manfred. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, I almost never go to the courts at that time, and, as it turned out, neither do you. You had left school early and hadn’t reserved a court. You asked me and Harlan if we could play doubles with you if you found a fourth partner. A fourth would be easy to find, I said. As luck would have it, you spotted the elderly gentleman who had once asked you to play but had never dared ask again. He readily accepted and rushed to his locker to pick up his racket. It was clear that you hate asking people for anything. You seemed so diffident and unsettled in asking me to play with you that to put you at ease, and perhaps because Harlan was present when you asked, all I could do was raise my palm and let it stay on your cheek and say it was perfectly okay, really okay. You didn’t shy away from the gesture, nor did you lean into it. But you smiled and I smiled. We didn’t say a word.
“This makes me very happy,” I ended up saying. “We’ve never played before.”
“I know,” you said, “me too.”
Neither of us was quite sure what the other meant, but, as in dreams, our words could be taken in so many ways, which was fine too, because we liked thinking they had more than one meaning, one obvious, one not so obvious, one hinted at but so muddled that neither of us knew which to grasp, because each was so laced into the others that all three ultimately meant one and the same thing.
“Maybe we can grab that drink afterward,” I said. Perhaps I was pushing things.
“Oh, yes, that drink,” you said, as though to show you hadn’t forgotten there’d been a vague allusion to a drink once and that it hadn’t escaped you at all. For a second I thought you were making light either of the idea of a drink or of its coded meaning. Your empathic irony surprised me. Were you going to be difficult before turning me down?