by André Aciman
It took me a while to realize that I was striking a pose.
I wanted him to come back and catch me ever so relaxed. Little did he know what I was planning for tonight.
“Is Oliver around?” I said, turning to my mother.
“Didn’t he go out?”
I didn’t say anything. So much for “I’ll stick around,” then.
In a while, Mafalda came to remove the empty glass. Vuoi un altro di questi, did I want another of these? she seemed to say as though referring to a strange brew whose foreign, un-Italian name, if it had one, was of no interest to her.
“No, maybe I’ll go out.”
“But where will you go at this time?” she asked, implying dinner. “Especially in the state you were in at lunch. Mi preoccupo, I worry.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“I’d advise against it.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Signora,” she shouted, trying to enlist my mother’s support.
My mother agreed it was a bad idea.
“Then I’ll go for a swim.”
Anything but count the hours until tonight.
On my way down the stairway to the beach, I encountered a group of friends. They were playing volleyball on the sand. Did I want to play? No, thank you, I’ve been sick. I left them alone and ambled toward the large rock, stared at it for a while, and then looked out to the sea, which seemed to aim a rippling shaft of sunlight on the water directly toward me, as in a Monet painting. I stepped into the warm water. I was not unhappy. I wanted to be with someone. But it didn’t trouble me that I was alone.
Vimini, who must have been brought there by one of the others, said she heard I’d been unwell. “We sick ones—,” she began.
“Do you know where Oliver is?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I thought he went fishing with Anchise.”
“With Anchise? He’s crazy! He almost got killed the last time.”
No response. She was looking away from the setting sun.
“You like him, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He likes you too—more than you do, I think.”
Was this her impression?
No, it was Oliver’s.
When had he told her?
A while ago.
It corresponded to the time when we had almost stopped speaking to each other. Even my mother had taken me aside that week and suggested I be more polite with our cauboi—all that walking in and out of rooms without even a perfunctory hello, not nice.
“I think he is right,” said Vimini.
I shrugged my shoulders. But I had never been visited by such powerful contradictions before. This was agony, for something like rage was brimming over inside me. I tried to still my mind and think of the sunset before us, the way people about to be given a polygraph like to visualize serene and placid settings to disguise their agitation. But I was also forcing myself to think of other things because I did not want to touch or use up any thoughts bearing on tonight. He might say no, he might even decide to leave our house and, if pressed, explain why. This was as far as I would let myself think.
A horrible thought gripped me. What if, right now, among some of the townsfolk he had befriended, or among all those people who clamored to invite him for dinner, he were to let out, or just hint at, what had happened during our bike ride into town? In his place, would I have been able to keep a lid on such a secret? No.
And yet, he had shown me that what I wanted could be given and taken so naturally that one wonders why it needed such hand-wringing torment and shame, seeing it was no more complicated a gesture than, say, buying a pack of cigarettes, or passing a reefer, or stopping by one of the girls behind the piazzetta late at night and, having settled on a price, going upstairs for a few minutes.
When I returned after swimming, there was still no sign of him. I asked. No, he wasn’t back. His bike was in the same place where we’d left it just before noon. And Anchise had returned hours ago. I went up to my room and from my balcony tried to make my way through the French windows of his room. They were shut. All I saw through the glass was the shorts he had been wearing at lunch.
I tried to remember. He was wearing a bathing suit when he came into my bedroom that afternoon and promised to stick around. I looked out of the balcony hoping to spot the boat, in case he had decided to take it out again. It was moored to our wharf.
When I came downstairs, Father was having cocktails with a reporter from France. Why don’t you play something? he asked. “Non mi va,” I said, “don’t feel like it.” “E perché non ti va?” he asked, as though taking issue with the tone of my words. “Perché non mi va!” I shot back.
Having finally crossed a major barrier this morning, it seemed I could openly express the petty stuff that was on my mind right now.
Perhaps I too should have a drop of wine, said my father.
Mafalda announced dinner.
“Isn’t it too early for dinner?” I asked.
“It’s past eight.”
My mother was escorting one of her friends who had come by car and had to leave.
I was grateful that the Frenchman was sitting on the edge of his armchair, as though on the verge of standing up to be shown to the dining room, yet still sitting down, not budging. He was holding an empty glass in both hands, forcing my father, who had just asked him what he thought of the upcoming opera season, to remain seated while he finished answering him.
Dinner was pushed back by another five to ten minutes. If he was late for dinner, he wouldn’t eat with us. But if he was late that meant he was having dinner elsewhere. I didn’t want him to have dinner anywhere but with us tonight.
“Noi ci mettiamo a tavola, we’ll sit down,” said my mother. She asked me to sit next to her.
Oliver’s seat was empty. My mother complained that he should at least have let us know he wasn’t coming for dinner.
Father said it might be the boat’s fault again. That boat should be totally dismantled.
But the boat was downstairs, I said.
“Then it must be the translator. Who was it who told me he needed to see the translator this evening?” asked my mother.
Must not show anxiety. Or that I cared. Stay calm. I didn’t want to bleed again. But that moment of what seemed like bliss now when we’d walked our bikes on the piazzetta both before and after our talk belonged to another time segment, as though it had happened to another me in some other life that was not too different from my own, but removed enough to make the few seconds that kept us apart seem like light-years away. If I put my foot on the floor and pretend that his is just behind the leg of the table, will that foot, like a starship that has turned on its cloaking device, like a ghost summoned by the living, suddenly materialize from its dimple in space and say, I know you’ve beckoned. Reach and you’ll find me?
Before long, my mother’s friend, who, at the last minute, decided to stay for dinner, was asked to sit where I’d sat at lunch. Oliver’s place setting was instantly removed.
The removal was performed summarily, without a hint of regret or compunction, the way you’d remove a bulb that was no longer working, or scrape out the entrails of a butchered sheep that had once been a pet, or take off the sheets and blankets from a bed where someone had died. Here, take these, and remove them from sight. I watched his silverware, his place mat, his napkin, his entire being disappear. It presaged exactly what would happen less than a month from now. I did not look at Mafalda. She hated these last-minute changes at the dinner table. She was shaking her head at Oliver, at my mother, at our world. At me too, I suppose. Without looking at her I knew her eyes were scanning my face to pounce on mine and make eye contact, which was why I avoided lifting my eyes from my semifreddo, which I loved, and which she knew I loved and had placed there for me because, despite the chiding look on her face that was stalking my every glance, she knew I knew she felt sorry for me.
Later that night, while I was playing someth
ing on the piano, my heart leapt when I thought I’d heard a scooter stop by our gate. Someone had given him a ride. But I could have been mistaken. I strained for his footsteps, from the sound of gravel underfoot to the muted flap of his espadrilles when he climbed the stairway leading to our balcony. But no one came into the house.
Much, much later, in bed, I made out the sound of music coming from a car that had stopped by the main road, beyond the alley of pines. Door opens. Door slams shut. Car pulls away. Music begins to fade. Just the sound of the surf and of gravel gently raked by the idle steps of someone who’s deep in thought or just slightly drunk.
What if on the way to his room he were to step into my bedroom, as in: Thought I’d stick my head in before turning in and see how you’re feeling. You okay?
No answer.
Pissed?
No answer.
You are pissed?
No, not at all. It’s just that you said you’d stick around.
So you are pissed.
So why didn’t you stick around?
He looks at me, and like one adult to another, You know exactly why.
Because you don’t like me.
No.
Because you never liked me.
No. Because I’m not good for you.
Silence.
Believe me, just believe me.
I lift the corner of my sheets.
He shakes his head.
Just for a second?
Shakes it again. I know myself, he says.
I’d heard him use these very same words before. They meant I’m dying to, but may not be able to hold back once I start, so I’d rather not start. What aplomb to tell someone you can’t touch him because you know yourself.
Well, since you’re not going to do anything with me—can you at least read me a story?
I’d settle for that. I wanted him to read me a story. Something by Chekhov or Gogol or Katherine Mansfield. Take your clothes off, Oliver, and come into my bed, let me feel your skin, your hair against my flesh, your foot on mine, even if we won’t do a thing, let us cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread out against the sky, and read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it’s always themselves they can’t stand being alone with…
Traitor, I thought as I waited to hear his bedroom door squeak open and squeak shut. Traitor. How easily we forget. I’ll stick around. Sure. Liar.
It never crossed my mind that I too was a traitor, that somewhere on a beach near her home a girl had waited for me tonight, as she waited every night now, and that I, like Oliver, hadn’t given her a second thought.
I heard him step onto the landing. I had left my bedroom door intentionally ajar, hoping that the light from the foyer would stream in just enough to reveal my body. My face was turned toward the wall. It was up to him. He walked past my room, didn’t stop. Didn’t even hesitate. Nothing.
I heard his door shut.
Barely a few minutes later, he opened it. My heart jumped. By now I was sweating and could feel the dampness on my pillow. I heard a few more footsteps. Then I heard the bathroom door click shut. If he ran the shower it meant he’d had sex. I heard the bathtub and then the shower run. Traitor. Traitor.
I waited for him to come out of the shower. But he was taking forever.
When I finally turned to take a peek at the corridor, I noticed that my room was completely dark. The door was shut—was someone in my room? I could make out the scent of his Roger & Gallet shampoo, so near me that if I so much as lifted my arm I knew I’d touch his face. He was in my room, standing in the dark, motionless, as though trying to make up his mind whether to rouse me or just find my bed in the dark. Oh, bless this night, I thought, bless this night. Without saying a word, I strained to make out the outline of the bathrobe I had worn so many times after he’d used it, its long terrycloth belt hanging so close to me now, rubbing my cheek ever so lightly as he stood there ready to let the robe drop to the floor. Had he come barefoot? And had he locked my door? Was he as hard as I was, and was his cock already pushing out of the bathrobe, which was why the belt was just about caressing my face, was he doing it on purpose, tickling me in the face, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t ever stop. Without warning the door began to open. Why open the door now?
It was only a draft. A draft had pushed it shut. And a draft was pulling it open. The belt that had so impishly tickled my face was none other than the mosquito net rubbing by my face each time I breathed. Outside, I could hear the water running in the bathroom, hours and hours seemed to have gone by since he’d gone to take a bath. No, not the shower, but the flushing of the toilet. It didn’t always work and would periodically empty itself when it was just about to overflow, only to refill and be emptied, again and again, all through the night. When I stepped out onto the balcony and made out the delicate light blue outline of the sea, I knew it was already dawn.
I woke up again an hour later.
At breakfast, as was our habit, I pretended not even to be aware of him. It was my mother who, on looking at him, first exclaimed, Ma guardi un po’ quant’è pallido, just look how gaunt you look! Despite her bluff remarks she continued using the formal address when speaking to Oliver. My father looked up and continued reading the paper. “I pray to God you made a killing last night, otherwise I’ll have to answer to your father.” Oliver cracked open the top of his soft-boiled egg by tapping it with the flat of his teaspoon. He still hadn’t learned. “I never lose, Pro.” He was speaking to his egg the way my father had spoken into his newspaper. “Does your father approve?” “I pay my own way. I’ve paid my way since prep school. My father couldn’t possibly disapprove.” I envied him. “Did you have a lot to drink last night?”
“That—and other things.” This time he was buttering his bread.
“I don’t think I want to know,” said my father.
“Neither does my father. And to be perfectly frank, I don’t think I care to remember myself.”
Was this for my benefit? Look, there’s never going to be anything between us, and the sooner you get it through your head, the better off we’ll all be.
Or was it all diabolical posturing?
How I admired people who talked about their vices as though they were distant relatives they’d learned to put up with because they couldn’t quite disown them. That and other things. I don’t care to remember—like I know myself—hinted at a realm of human experience only others had access to, not I. How I wished I could say such a thing one day—that I didn’t care to remember what I’d done at night in full morning glory. I wondered what were the other things that necessitated taking a shower. Did you take a shower to perk yourself up because your system wouldn’t hold up otherwise? Or did you shower to forget, to wash away all traces of last night’s smut and degradation? Ah, to proclaim your vices by shaking your head at them and wash the whole thing down with apricot juice freshly prepared by Mafalda’s arthritic fingers and smack your lips afterward!
“Do you save your winnings?”
“Save and invest, Pro.”
“I wish I’d had your head at your age; I would have spared myself many mistaken turns,” said my father.
“You, mistaken turns, Pro? Frankly, I can’t picture you even imagining a mistaken turn.”
“That’s because you see me as a figure, not a human being. Worse yet: as an old figure. But there were. Mistaken turns, that is. Everyone goes through a period of traviamento—when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”
My mother sighed melodiously, her way of warning present company that this could easily turn into an improvised lecture from the great man himself.
Oliver proceeded to crack another egg.
He had big bags under his eyes. And he did look gaunt.
&nbs
p; “Sometimes the traviamento turns out to be the right way, Pro. Or as good a way as any.”
My father, who was already smoking at this point, nodded pensively, his way of signifying that he was not an expert on such matters and was more than willing to yield to those who were. “At your age I knew nothing. But today everyone knows everything, and everyone talks, talks, talks.”
“Perhaps what Oliver needs is sleep, sleep, sleep.”
“Tonight, I promise, Signora P., no poker, no drinking. I’ll put on clean clothes, go over my manuscript, and after dinner we’ll all watch TV and play canasta, like old folks in Little Italy.
“But first,” he added, with something of a smirk on his face, “I need to see Milani for a short while. But tonight, I promise, I’ll be the best-behaved boy on the whole Riviera.”
Which was what happened. After a brief escape to B., he was the “green” Oliver all day, a child no older than Vimini, with all her candor and none of her barbs. He also had an enormous selection of flowers sent from the local flower shop. “You’ve lost your mind,” my mother said. After lunch, he said he would take a nap—the first, and last, during his entire stay with us. And indeed he did nap, because when he woke up at around five, he looked as flush as someone who had lost ten years of his life: ruddy cheeks, eyes all rested, the gauntness gone. He could have passed for my age. As promised, that night we all sat down—there were no guests—and watched television romances. The best part was how everyone, including Vimini, who wandered in, and Mafalda, who had her “seat” near the door of the living room, talked back to every scene, predicted its end, by turns outraged by and derisive of the stupidity of the story, the actors, the characters. Why, what would you have done in her place? I would have left him, that’s what. And you, Mafalda? Well, in my opinion, I think she should have accepted him the first time he asked and not shilly-shallied so long. My point exactly! She got what was coming to her. That she did.
We were interrupted only once. It was a phone call from the States. Oliver liked to keep his telephone conversations extremely short, curt almost. We heard him utter his unavoidable Later!, hang up, and, before we knew it, he was back asking what he’d missed. He never commented after hanging up. We never asked. Everyone volunteered to fill him in on the plot at the same time, including my father, whose version of what Oliver had missed was less accurate than Mafalda’s. There was a lot of noise, with the result that we missed more of the film than Oliver had during his brief call. Much laughter. At some point, while we were intently focused on the high drama, Anchise walked into the living room and, unrolling a soaking old T-shirt, produced the evening’s catch: a gigantic sea bass, instantly destined for tomorrow’s lunch and dinner, with plenty for everyone who cared to join in. Father decided to pour some grappa for everyone, including a few drops for Vimini.