Find Me

by André Aciman

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you think he minds I’m barging in?”

  “I can’t see how. He’s been pestering me to find someone after my divorce.”

  “And have you found someone?”

  “I think I have. She said she’d stay with me.”

  “Who’s going to stay with you?” asked Elio, carrying a receipt and struggling to catch the attention of one of the men behind the espresso machines.

  “She is.”

  “Have you told her what she’s getting into?”

  “No. She’ll be horrified soon enough.”

  Seconds later three cups were placed on the counter in front of us.

  “I came here three years ago trying to have a private vigil with a girl and it was a disaster,” said Elio.

  “How so?” asked Miranda.

  Elio explained that as he was trying to experience her presence at the café as something meaningful, especially since the place already bore the imprint of other events in his life, they had an argument. She kept saying that there was nothing special about the kind of coffee they brewed here, he countered by saying that this was not about the coffee at all but about being here to have the coffee. Their disagreement not only ruined the vigil but made him hate her. They sipped their coffee as fast as they could and walked out in separate directions and never saw each other again.

  “Yet quite a few years ago here is where I had my first inkling of what my life as an artist living among artists would be like. My father and I come here each time he’s in Rome.”

  “And have your years as an artist been what you expected?” Miranda asked.

  “I’m superstitious, so I should watch what I say,” he replied, “but they’ve been very reassuring—my years as a pianist, that is. The rest, well, we don’t discuss the rest.”

  “And yet it’s the rest I want to know about,” I said, catching myself almost echoing Miranda’s father. At this point, Miranda recognized that the conversation was veering to the personal and excused herself to look for the bathroom.

  “The rest, Dad,” he went on, “is a closed book these days. But the first time I came here I was seventeen and I was with people who read a lot, loved poetry, were deeply involved in cinema, and knew all there is to know about classical music. They inducted me into their clan and every vacation I had from school and later from university I’d come to Rome to stay with them and just learn.”

  I said nothing, but he caught the look in my eye.

  “But more than my friendship with them, you above everyone else made me who I am today. We never had secrets you and I, you know about me, and I know about you. In this I consider myself the luckiest son on earth. You taught me how to love—how to love books, music, beautiful ideas, people, pleasure, even myself. Better yet you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us. This much I know, young as I am. It’s just that I forget the lesson sometimes.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “Because I can see you now—not as my father, but as a man in love. I’ve never seen you like this. It makes me very happy, almost envious to see you. You are so young suddenly. It must be love.”

  If it hadn’t occurred to me until then, I knew now that I was indeed the luckiest father alive. People were milling around us, some trying to wedge their way to the counter. None of them seemed to intrude on our intimate moment together. We were having a quiet fireside chat in one of Rome’s most bustling cafés.

  “Love is easy,” I said. “It’s the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both. But what you may not know is that you taught me far more than I’ve taught you! These vigils, for instance, are perhaps nothing more than my desire to tread in your footsteps, to share with you anything and everything and be in your life as I always want you to be in mine. I’ve taught you how to earmark moments where time stops, but these moments mean very little unless they’re echoed in someone you love. Otherwise they stay in you and either fester all through your life or, if you’re lucky—and very few are—you’re able to pass them on in something called art, in your case music. But above all it was always your courage I envied, how you trusted your love for music and later your love for Oliver.”

  At that moment, Miranda was back among us and put her arm around me.

  “I never had that trust, either in my loves or, if you’d believe it, in my work,” I continued, “but I found it almost inadvertently the moment this young lady invited me to lunch yesterday, while all I kept saying to her was, No thank you, no, I couldn’t possibly, no, no—but she didn’t believe me, and she didn’t let me coil back into my little conch.”

  I was glad we’d spoken. “As you said, we have never had secrets, you and I. I hope we never do.”

  We left Sant’Eustachio after quickly gulping our three sips of coffee each and were headed toward the Corso.

  “So where to next?” asked Miranda.

  “I suppose Via Belsiana,” I guessed, remembering that Elio and I always ended up on Via Belsiana to do what he called the If Love walk to a bookstore, in memory of a book of poems published ten years earlier.

  “No, not Via Belsiana today. I want to take you somewhere I’ve never taken you before.”

  “Is this recent then?” I asked, hoping he’d let me in on his latest romance.

  “Not recent at all. But it marks a moment where for a short while I held life in my hands and was never the same afterward. Sometimes I think that my life stopped here and will only restart here.”

  He seemed absorbed in thought. “I have no idea if Miranda is up for this and perhaps neither are you. But we’ve confided enough already not to stop now. So let me take you there. It’s just a two-minute walk away.”

  When we reached Via della Pace I thought he was about to take us to one of my favorite churches in the area. Instead, no sooner had we sighted the church than he made a right turn and took us to Via Santa Maria dell’Anima. Then, after a few steps, and just as I’d done with Miranda the day before, he stopped at a corner where a very old lamp was built into a wall. “I never told you this, Dad, but I was drunk out of my mind one night, I had just vomited by the statue of the Pasquino and couldn’t have been more dazed in my life yet here as I leaned against this very wall, I knew, drunk as I was, that this, with Oliver holding me, was my life, that everything that had come beforehand with others was not even a rough sketch or the shadow of a draft of what was happening to me. And now ten years later, when I look at this wall under this old streetlamp, I am back with him and I swear to you, nothing has changed. In thirty, forty, fifty years I will feel no differently. I have met many women and more men in my life, but what is watermarked on this very wall overshadows everyone I’ve known. When I come to be here, I can be alone or with people, with you for instance, but I am always with him. If I stood for an hour staring at this wall, I’d be with him for an hour. If I spoke to this wall, it would speak back.”

  “What would it say?” asked Miranda, totally taken in by the thought of Elio and the wall.

  “What would it say? Simple: ‘Look for me, find me.’”

  “And what do you say?”

  “I say the same thing. ‘Look for me, find me.’ And we’re both happy. Now you know.”

  “Maybe what you need is less pride and more courage. Pride is the nickname we give fear. You were afraid of nothing once. What happened?”

  “You’re wrong about my courage,” he said. “I’ve never even had the courage to call him, to write to him, much less to visit him. All I can do when I’m alone is whisper his name in the dark. But then I laugh at myself. I just pray I’ll never whisper it when I’m with someone else.”

  Miranda and I were quiet. She went up to him and kissed him on the cheek. There was nothing to say.

  “Whispering someone’s name happened to me only once, but I think it marked me for life,” I said, turning to Miranda, who right away understood.

  “In his case
… but can I tell him?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  “In his case he whispered another woman’s name to the woman he was sleeping with,” said Miranda. “What weird families we all belong to!”

  There was nothing to add.

  Minutes later we decided to head off for a glass of wine at Sergetto’s.

  We arrived just as the enoteca was opening and had our choice of tables, so we sat where we’d sat the night before. “See, I caught the vigil bug as well,” said Miranda. I liked that not all the lights were lit and that the place was dim, which made it seem later than it was. The man at the bar recognized us right away and asked if we wanted the same red. I asked Elio if a Barbaresco was good for him as well. He nodded, then reminded us that this evening he was driving back to Naples with a friend. He had come all the way to Rome to see me.

  “What kind of a friend?” I asked.

  “A friend with a car,” he answered, miming a dry look and shaking his head, meaning I was totally on the wrong track.

  When the wine arrived, the waiter went back to the counter and brought some snacks. “On the house,” he said.

  “Must be because I tipped him nicely last night. We were probably the very last to leave before they closed.”

  We toasted one another’s happiness.

  “You never know, we might come to tomorrow’s concert after we go to the Archaeological Museum—if we do go.”

  “Please, please do. I’ll have two tickets for you waiting at the box office.” Then he put on his sweater and stood up. “I will say one thing. You said it to me once years ago, now it’s my turn: I envy the two of you. Please don’t ruin it.”

  I was with the two people I cared for the most in the world.

  We kissed goodbye. Then I sat down again facing Miranda. “I think I am extremely happy.”

  “Same here. We could do this for the rest of our lives.”

  “We could.”

  “What’s the first thing you want to do next week when we’ll be at the beach if the weather holds?”

  “I want to take a taxi at the train station, get home, put on a bathing suit, climb down the rocks, and dive with you into the water.”

  “I left my bathing suit in Florence.”

  “There are plenty in the house. Better yet: we’ll swim in the nude.”

  “In November?”

  “In November the water’s still warm.”

  CADENZA

  “You’re blushing,” he said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  He gave an amused, disbelieving glance from across the table. “Are you sure?”

  I thought for a few seconds and then gave in. “I guess I am, aren’t I?”

  I was young enough to hate being read so easily, especially during an awkward silence with someone who was close to twice my age, but I was sufficiently grown-up to welcome having a blush say something I was reluctant to disclose. Then I looked at him.

  “You’re blushing too,” I said.

  “I know.”

  This was about two hours later.

  I’d met him during intermission at a chamber music concert at the Church of Sainte U. on the Right Bank. It was an early-November Sunday, not chilly, but not warm, just your basic overcast autumnal evening that starts too early and presages the long winter months to come. Many in the audience were already seated inside the church and were wearing gloves; others hadn’t removed their coats. Yet despite the chill there was something snug in the air, as people quietly made their way down the pews, clearly in anticipation of the music. It was my first time inside this church and I had chosen a seat in the very back, in case the playing wasn’t to my liking and I wanted to leave without disturbing anyone.

  I was curious to hear what might be the very last performance of the Florian Quartet. The youngest member must have been in his late seventies. They played regularly in that church, but I had never heard them live before and knew them only from their rare, out-of-print recorded music and a few performances on the Web. They had just finished playing a Haydn quartet and after intermission were going to play Beethoven’s C-sharp Minor. Unlike the others in church—and there were no more than forty or so in attendance that Sunday—I was a latecomer and had bought my ticket from one of the nuns seated at a small table by the entrance. Almost everyone else had gotten theirs by mail and entered the church holding large vouchers, which they’d been asked to keep unfolded while a hunched, elderly nun dutifully copied everyone’s full name with an old green fountain pen. She was at least eighty years old and must have been doing this for ages, probably with the same pen and in the same tremulous, archaic script. The small bar code numbers on the vouchers probably reflected the younger image that the church wanted to project to new parishioners, but the old nun was having a hard time recopying them before stamping each voucher. No one said anything about her slow pace but there were a few indulgent smiles exchanged among those who hadn’t had their vouchers validated.

  During the intermission, I was waiting in line by the entrance for mulled cider, which the same nun was now scrupulously dispensing into plastic cups with a ladle she was barely able to lift when it was full. Everyone donated much more than the €1 written on a paper sign on the bulletin board next to the large vat of hot cider. I was never a fan of mulled cider, but everyone else seemed to be, so I stood there and when my turn came, I put five euros into her bowl, for which she thanked me profusely. The old nun was sharp. She could tell it was my first time in her church and asked if I’d enjoyed the Haydn. I uttered an enthusiastic yes.

  He had been standing in front of me in line, and after I paid for my cider, he simply turned around and asked, “Why is someone so young interested in the Florian Quartet? They are so old.” Then, perhaps realizing that the question had dropped from nowhere, he added, “The second violin—must be in his eighties. The others are hardly any younger.”

  He was tall, slim, elegantly put together, with a gray mane of hair that fringed the collar of his blue blazer.

  “I’ve been interested in the cellist and I figured that as it’s rumored they’re traveling later this year before possibly disbanding, our paths might never cross again. So here I am.”

  “Doesn’t someone your age have better things to do?”

  “Someone my age?” I asked, surprise and stung irony in my tone.

  A moment of silence hung awkwardly between us. He shrugged his shoulders, probably his way of apologizing without saying anything, and seemed about to turn and walk to the area by the two portals where people were smoking, others chatting and stretching their legs. “Feet always get cold inside a church,” he said as he turned around and headed to the door. It was a closing, throwaway sentence.

  Then realizing I might have snubbed him with my tone, I asked, “Are you a fan of the Florian?”

  “Not really. I’m not even a fan of chamber music. But I know quite a bit about them because my father loved classical music and subsidized their concerts in this church, and I’ve been doing the same now, though frankly I prefer jazz. But I come here because I used to tag along with him on Sunday evenings when I was young, and I still come every few weeks or so to sit and listen, and perhaps to imagine I’m with my father for a while—but I’m sure all this must seem a rather silly reason to sit and listen to their playing.”

  What instrument had his father played, I asked.

  The piano.

  “My father never played at home. But on weekends, when we’d stay in the country, he’d go to the other end of the house late at night and from my bedroom upstairs, I’d hear the piano as though it were being played by a furtive waif who’d stop the moment he heard footsteps creaking on the floorboards. He never spoke about his playing, nor did my mother ever bring it up, and the best I learned to do in the morning was to say I’d dreamed the piano was playing itself again. I think he wished he’d continued as a professional pianist, just as I’m sure he wished I’d grow to love classical music. He was the type who seldom force
d his views on others, much less spoke to total strangers—totally unlike his son, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.” At which he chuckled. “He was too tactful to ask me to join him on Sundays for these concerts, and was probably resigned to going alone. But my mother didn’t want him out by himself at night, so she’d ask me to come with him. Eventually it became a habit. After the concert he’d buy me a pastry. We’d sit together at a place nearby, and, when I was a bit older, we’d head out afterward and have dinner. But he never spoke about his time as a pianist, and besides, my mind was altogether elsewhere in those years. Sunday evenings were always reserved for last-minute homework, so coming here with him meant I’d have to stay up doing work I could have finished much earlier. But I was glad to be with him, more than I liked the music, and as you see, I’m still bound by routine. I’ve spoken too much, haven’t I.”

  “Do you play?” I asked, to let him know that I didn’t mind his talking.

  “Not really. I followed in my father’s footsteps. He was a lawyer, his father was a lawyer, I became a lawyer. Neither my father nor I wanted to be lawyers, and yet … Life!” He smiled wistfully. It was the second time that he’d smiled and then shrugged his shoulders. His was a broad, endearing, and sudden smile that caught you off guard, but given the irony underscoring the word life, there was little mirth in it. “And which instrument do you play?” he asked, suddenly turning to me. I didn’t want our conversation to end and was surprised to sense he didn’t want it to either.

  “Piano,” I answered.

  “Vocation or avocation?”

  “Vocation. I hope.”

  He seemed to think for a while.

  “Don’t give up, young man, don’t.”

  So saying he put a wise, gently patronizing arm around my shoulder. I don’t know why, but I reached for the hand that had rested on my shoulder and touched it. It had happened so seamlessly that I looked at him and we both smiled, which allowed his hand, which would most likely have left the spot, to stay just a moment longer. He turned but then looked at me once more, and I felt a sudden urge to hurl myself against him and put my arms around his upper waist right under his jacket. He must have felt something along those lines as well, because in the awkward silence that followed what he’d just said, he kept staring and I was staring back, totally undaunted, until it hit me that perhaps I had read all the signals wrong and I began to want to look away. I liked that his eyes lingered on me still, it made me feel handsome and desirable, something soft, caressing that I wanted to hold in place and didn’t want to escape from except by burrowing into his chest. I liked the promise, in his gaze, of something totally kind and guileless.