by André Aciman
“Shocked? Disgusted?”
“No.”
She threw away what was left of her ice cream. “I hate the cone part,” she said.
Then, changing topics as we were nearing the hotel, she said, “This is not about tonight only.”
“Not for me either.”
“Just saying,” she said. “I have to make a phone call. Don’t you?”
I shook my head. “What will you tell him?”
“Who, my father? He’s long asleep.”
“Your boyfriend!”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Is there absolutely no one you need to call?”
I looked at her. “Hasn’t been in a long time.”
“Just making sure.”
“Let’s go to my hotel.”
She finished her phone call in less than thirty seconds. “Hasty and perfunctory,” I remarked.
“Just like his sex. He said he wasn’t surprised. He shouldn’t be. That was it. I told him, No discussion.”
I liked No discussion. One day she’d use No discussion with me as well.
As soon as we entered my hotel room, I caught sight of my duffel bag sitting on the luggage rack by a narrow desk. There was only one chair in the room. I remembered packing my bag very early that morning in what suddenly seemed an entirely other lifetime. I remembered its spot near the sofa in her father’s home. The bellhop must have brought it up sometime in the afternoon and left it here. A quick look around told me the room was much smaller, even if I always ask for this one. So I apologized to Miranda and said that I liked this room every time I was in Rome because of the balcony. “It’s literally seven times the size of the room. The view of Rome is amazing.” So I opened the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony. She followed. It was nippy outside, but the view was like her father’s, stunning. All the domes of the Roman churches were aglow and had come into view. But the room still felt smaller than I remembered, and there was hardly any space to walk around the large bed. There wasn’t even enough light in the room. Yet nothing bothered me. I loved it this way. I threw a sidelong glance at her; nothing seemed to bother her.
I wanted to hold her, then I came up with a singular idea. I was not going to undress just yet. Nor was I going to tear her clothes off the way they do in the movies.
“I want to see you naked, I just want to see. Take off the T-shirt, the shirt, the jeans, the undies, the hiking boots.”
“Even the hiking boots and the socks?” she quipped. But she listened, offered no resistance, and proceeded to undress, until she was all naked, standing barefoot on the threadbare carpet that must have been at least twenty years old.
“You like?” she asked.
Since our room faced the courtyard and was exposed to all the other rooms in the hotel I was worried that the other guests might see. But then, Let them. She didn’t care either. And placing both hands behind the nape of her neck, she assumed a pose that showed off her breasts. They were not big but they were firm.
“Now it’s your turn.”
I hesitated.
“I don’t want shame, I don’t want secrets. Everything is out tonight. No shower, no brushing of teeth, no mouthwash, no deodorant, no anything. I’ve told you my deepest secret, and you’ve told me yours. By the time we’re done, there mustn’t be a living wedge between us, or between us and the world, because I want the world to know us for who we are together. Otherwise there’s no point, and I might as well go back to my daddy now.”
“Don’t go back to your daddy.”
“I won’t go back to my daddy,” she said as the two of us smiled and then laughed. I tendered my left wrist to her, and she began helping remove my cuff links. I hadn’t asked her to do this, but she had guessed. I had a feeling she’d done it with other men. I didn’t mind.
When I was totally naked, I approached her and for the first time felt her skin, her entire body against mine.
This is what I’ve always wanted. This and you. Then, because she saw me hesitate, she took my right hand and placed it between her legs, saying, “It’s yours, I told you, I don’t want the shadow of anything between us, and no half measures. I make no promises, but I’ll go all the way with you. Tell me you’ll do the same, tell me now, and don’t take your hand off. If you’re not ready to go all the way—”
“—you’ll go back to Daddy. I know, I know.”
Talking like this aroused me.
“Now just look at the lighthouse,” she said.
I liked her name for it.
I removed the duffel bag from the luggage rack, sat on the rack, and no sooner did I sit down, than she came and sat on my lap and slowly allowed me to penetrate her. “Better now?” she said as we held each other in a very tight embrace. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, anything. Don’t move, though.” And so saying she squeezed me, which made me pull her even closer. She was teasing me and, holding my head and staring straight at me as she’d done in the coffee shop, finally said, “Just so you know, I have never in all my years been so close to anyone. Have you?”
“Not ever.”
“Such a liar,” and she squeezed me again.
“You do this once more,” I said, “and I won’t focus on anything you say.”
“What, this?”
“I warned you.”
“She was just saying hello.”
But unable to hold ourselves back, we began making love in earnest, eventually finding it more comfortable on the bed. “This is all I have, this is all I am,” she said.
Later, as we continued to make love, I caressed her face and smiled at her. “I’m holding back,” I said. “Me too.” She smiled and after touching herself, brought her damp hand to my face, to my cheek and my forehead: “I want you to smell of me.” And she touched my lips, my tongue, my eyelids, and I kissed her deep in the mouth, which was a signal we both understood, for it was, from time immemorial, the gift of one human to another human.
“Where did they invent you?” I said when we were resting. What I meant to say was I didn’t know what life was before this. So I quoted Goethe again.
* * *
“I hope you enjoyed the show,” she told the window when a bit later she looked outside and saw that the shutters had stayed open. I shrugged my shoulders. Neither of us cared.
I was about to move.
“Don’t go yet. I want us to stay like this.” She looked to her left. Neither of us had noticed that a streetlight was shining red and green into our room. “Film noirish,” I said.
“Yes, except that I don’t want this to turn into one of those Hollywood films where the sobered professor returns meek and chastened to the life he left behind and all he shared with the anonymous lady on the train was a shallow little quiver that couldn’t even pass for a heartthrob.”
“Never!”
But she looked upset and I thought there were tears welling in her eyes. “Everything I have is yours. Not much, I know,” she said. I let a palm rub the tears down from the side of her face.
“Everything you have I’ve never had. What more is there to want? The question should be: Why am I what you want, when you can do so much better? Children, for instance?”
“Well, that’s a no-brainer. I do want a child. But I want it from you and no one else—even if we never see each other after this weekend or after the beach house, or whatever. I think I must have definitely known outside Villa Albani—maybe even before.”
“When?”
“Right after you almost kissed me but held back.”
“I held back?”
“Did you ever!”
The thought of a child flooded over. “I want your child too. And I want it now.” Then I caught myself. “But I shouldn’t presume.”
“Presume, for God’s sake!”
“I’m selfish enough to take everything you’re offering.”
“Can you do crazy then?” she asked. “Because I can.”
“What do you mean by crazy?”
> “To do in this lifetime everything you couldn’t do in your humdrum, day-to-day, sterile, other life? Do you want to do it with me—now?”
“Yes. But can you actually drop everything—your dad, your work?” I asked, almost aware that I sounded like someone looking for excuses to put off making a decision.
“I have my two cameras. It’s really all I need. The rest I’ll buy anywhere.”
She asked if I was sleepy. I wasn’t. Did I want to take a short walk? Love to, I said. Via Giulia when it’s empty is a dreamland. “There’s a wine bar to the right at the very end.”
“Shower?” I asked.
“Don’t you dare!” she said.
We got dressed quickly. She was wearing what she’d worn on the train. I had brought a pair of chinos that I was only too happy to put on.
Outside the hotel the street was almost deserted.
“I love phantom Rome when it’s empty and looks like this.”
“Remind you of anything?”
“Not really. You?”
“No. And I don’t want it to.”
We were holding hands.
“What do you want your new life to be?”
I didn’t know what to say. “I want it to be with you. If those we know won’t have us the way we are, let’s get rid of them. I want to read every book you’ve read, hear the music you love, go back to the places you know and see the world with your eyes, learn everything you cherish, start life with you. When you go to Thailand, I’ll come along, and when I give a lecture or a reading, you’ll be there in the last row, just as you were today—and don’t ever disappear again.”
“The world according to you and me. Are we spending the rest of our lives in a cocoon? Can we be this foolish?”
“Do you mean what happens when we wake up from this? No idea. But I want to change so many things about myself.”
“Such as?” she asked.
I had always wanted a leather jacket, just like hers. And I always wanted clothes that didn’t make me look like a Sundayfied churchgoer who’s removed his necktie on the way to the golf course. And I wanted to change my name to my nickname, and what did she think if I shaved my head or wore an earring. Above all I wanted to stop writing history—maybe a novel.
“Anything!”
“Let’s never wake up from this.”
We were walking up Via Giulia. She was right. It was deserted and I loved the absolute silence and the glazed sheen on the sampietrini at night and the one or two streetlights that cast their exiguous orange spill over Rome. My son had told me once about Rome by night. I’d never seen it this way before.
“So when did you know—about me?” she asked.
“I told you already.”
“Then tell me again.”
“On the train. I noticed you right away. But I didn’t want to look. The whole grumpy thing was a sham. And you?”
“On the train too. There’s a man who knows life, I thought, I didn’t want us to stop talking.”
“Little did you know.”
“Little did I know I’d be walking down this street still wet with you.”
“The things you say. I smell of you all over.”
She reached over to my neck and licked it. “You do make me love who I am.” Then on further thought: “I hope the day never comes when you make me hate myself. Now tell me again when you knew about us.”
“There was also this other moment by the fish stand,” I continued, “when you kept pointing at the fish you wanted and had craned your body forward, which was when I glimpsed your neck, your cheek, your ear, and caught myself wanting to caress every part of exposed skin from your breastbone up. I even thought of you naked making love to me. Then I pushed it away—What’s the use, I thought.”
“So what’s the nickname you want to be called by?”
“It’s not Sami,” I said. Then I told her. No one had called me this since I was nine or ten except for old relatives and distant cousins, some of whom are still alive. When I write to them, I still sign my name that way. Otherwise they wouldn’t know who I was.
* * *
After we were back, it would come to me in waves that night. This was still unreal—and there was nothing to compare it to—unreal because I knew enough to fear such fevers never last—unreal because it made everything around me feel equally frail, my life, my friends, my relatives, my work, myself.
We were lying very close together. “One body,” she said. “Except when we eat or go to the bathroom,” I added. “Not even!” she quipped. And with each of us coiled into the other with a thigh between the other’s thighs, closing my eyes for a while, I began to see how this was altogether different from how it had been with so many women I’d known in my life and how our bodies themselves could be so ductile to everything we asked and sought of them, provided we asked and sought. What baffled me most, when I remembered the years of my life, was the distance we travel to lock our doors after scarcely leaving them ajar on our very first night with a stranger. She was right about this: the more we know someone, the more we shut the doors between us—not the other way around. “The thing that scares me,” I began with my eyes still shut. “The thing that scares you?” she asked, already seeming to deride what I was about to tell her. “Of the two of us—” I started, but she stopped me right away. “Don’t say it, don’t,” she cried, suddenly releasing herself from my embrace and shoving a palm almost violently over my mouth. At first I wasn’t sure, but moments later, even as I relished the swiftness of her gesture, I tasted blood in my mouth. “I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt or to offend you,” she exclaimed. “It’s not that.” “Then what is it?” So I told her there was blood in my mouth and that it reminded me of sparring with a schoolmate in kindergarten and tasting something strange in my mouth and knowing for the first time that it must be blood. “I like the taste because of you.” It took me all the way back to beginnings. And suddenly I saw it: I’d been alone for ever so long, even when I thought I wasn’t alone—and the taste of something as real as blood was far, far better than the taste of just nothing, of wasted and barren years, so many years. “Then hit me,” she said all of a sudden. “Are you mad?” “I want you to hit me back.” “What, so we’re even?” “No, because I want you to slap me on the face.” “What for?” “Just slap me, for God’s sake, and stop asking so many questions. Haven’t you ever slapped anyone before?” “No,” I said, almost apologizing for not having hurt a fly, let alone another human being. “Then do this!” And with these three words she struck her cheek savagely with the flat of her hand. “This is how it’s done. Now do it!” I aped the gesture and gave her face a soft tap. “Harder, much, much harder, front and backhand.” So I slapped her once, which startled her, but she straightaway turned the other cheek, to indicate that I should slap the other as well, which I did, and she said, “Again.” “I don’t like hurting people,” I said. “Yes, but now we are as close as people who’ve lived three hundred years together, it’s your language too, whether you like it or not. You love the taste, I love it too, now kiss me.” She kissed me and I kissed her. “Did I hurt you?” “Never mind. Did it make you hard?” “Yes.” “Good.” “My lighthouse,” she gasped, reaching down my body and holding me firmly. “This is who we’ll be even when we’re seen fully clothed and prettified in public, you inside me, all cum and juices.”
“And don’t fool yourself, this isn’t honeymoon sex,” she had said when we sat at the enoteca that she’d meant to show me. We had found a table in the corner and ordered two glasses of red. Then a plate of goat cheeses, and once done with the cheeses, a plate of cold cuts, and then two more glasses of wine. “This is how I want us always to be.”
“Twelve hours ago we were complete strangers. I was a man drifting to sleep and you were the lady with the lapdog.”
I looked around the place. I’d never been there before.
“Tell me something, anything,” she said.
“I love seeing Rome throu
gh your eyes. I want to come back here tomorrow night with you.”
“Me too,” she said.
Neither of us said another word. We were among the very last to leave before closing time.
* * *
There were few hotel guests this time of year, and the personnel dressed in white jackets the next morning were busy confabulating and joking with one another while cheesy loud music was playing in the background.
“I hate background music and I hate their yapping,” she said, indicating the help. She did not hesitate in turning around to one of the waiters who happened to be close by to ask if they could lower their voices. He was startled by the complaint but did not answer or apologize; he simply cowered and walked back to where another waiter and two waitresses were standing chuckling loudly. Right away they got quiet.
“I’ve grown to hate this hotel,” I said, “but I come here each time I’m in Rome because of the balcony attached to my room. On warm days, I love sitting under the umbrella to read. Later in the evening I have drinks with friends either on my balcony or in the larger terrace upstairs above the third floor. It’s simply heavenly there.”
After breakfast, we crossed the bridge and were about to head toward the Aventine but then changed our minds and came back along the Lungotevere. It was still early Saturday morning, and Rome was very quiet. “There used to be a movie theater here.” “It closed ages ago.” “And there used to be a bric-a-brac shop hereabouts somewhere. I bought a small backgammon set once, made in Syria, all inlaid mother-of-pearl mosaics. A friend borrowed it, then broke it or lost it—I never saw it again.” She sought my hand as we ambled near Campo de’ Fiori. Nearby, the fish vendor was busy setting up. The wine store still hadn’t opened. It felt like ages since we’d come here to buy fish.