by André Aciman
“Seen any of the inner, private courtyards I told you about?”
I guess we had failed to visit the inner, private courtyards he had told us about.
“Paid my respects to Giordano Bruno’s statue?” he asked.
We certainly did. Almost vomited there too that night.
We laughed.
Tiny pause. Another drag from his cigarette.
Now.
“You two had a nice friendship.”
This was far bolder than anything I anticipated.
“Yes,” I replied, trying to leave my “yes” hanging in midair as though buoyed by the rise of a negative qualifier that was ultimately suppressed. I just hoped he hadn’t caught the mildly hostile, evasive, seemingly fatigued Yes, and so? in my voice.
I also hoped, though, that he’d seize the opportunity of the unstated Yes, and so? in my answer to chide me, as he so often did, for being harsh or indifferent or way too critical of people who had every reason to consider themselves my friends. He might then add his usual bromide about how rare good friendships were and that, even if people proved difficult to be with after a while, still, most meant well and each had something good to impart. No man is an island, can’t shut yourself away from others, people need people, blah, blah.
But I had guessed wrong.
“You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was.”
“Oliver was Oliver,” I said, as if that summed things up.
“Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi,” my father added, quoting Montaigne’s all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.
I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë’s words: because “he’s more myself than I am.”
“Oliver may be very intelligent—,” I began. Once again, the disingenuous rise in intonation announced a damning but hanging invisibly between us. Anything not to let my father lead me any further down this road.
“Intelligent? He was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good, and you were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.”
My father had never spoken of goodness this way before. It disarmed me.
“I think he was better than me, Papa.”
“I am sure he’d say the same about you, which flatters the two of you.”
He was about to tap his cigarette and, in leaning toward the ashtray, he reached out and touched my hand.
“What lies ahead is going to be very difficult,” he started to say, altering his voice. His tone said: We don’t have to speak about it, but let’s not pretend we don’t know what I’m saying.
Speaking abstractly was the only way to speak the truth to him.
“Fear not. It will come. At least I hope it does. And when you least expect it. Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it’s not with me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.”
I looked at him. This was the moment when I should lie and tell him he was totally off course. I was about to.
“Look,” he interrupted. “You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”
I couldn’t begin to take all this in. I was dumbstruck.
“Have I spoken out of turn?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Then let me say one more thing. It will clear the air. I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”
He took a breath.
“We may never speak about this again. But I hope you’ll never hold it against me that we did. I will have been a terrible father if, one day, you’d want to speak to me and felt that the door was shut or not sufficiently open.”
I wanted to ask him how he knew. But then how could he not have known? How could anyone not have known? “Does Mother know?” I asked. I was going to say suspect but corrected myself. “I don’t think she does.” His voice meant, But even if she did, I am sure her attitude would be no different than mine.
We said good night. On my way upstairs I vowed to ask him about his life. We’d all heard about his women when he was young, but I’d never even had an inkling of anything else.
Was my father someone else? And if he was someone else, who was I?
Oliver kept his promise. He came back just before Christmas and stayed till New Year’s. At first he was totally jet-lagged. He needs time, I thought. But so did I. He whiled away the hours with my parents mostly, then with Vimini, who was overjoyed to feel that nothing had changed between them. I was starting to fear we’d slip back to our early days when, but for patio pleasantries, avoidance and indifference were the norm. Why had his phone calls not prepared me for this? Was I the one responsible for the new tenor of our friendship? Had my parents said something? Had he come back for me? Or for them, for the house, to get away? He had come back for his book, which had already been published in England, in France, in Germany, and was finally due to come out in Italy. It was an elegant volume, and we were all very happy for him, including the bookseller in B., who promised a book party the following summer. “Maybe. We’ll see,” said Oliver after we’d stopped there on our bikes. The ice cream vendor was closed for the season. As were the flower shop and the pharmacy where we’d stopped on leaving the berm that very first time when he showed me how badly he’d scraped himself. They all belonged to a lifetime ago. The town felt empty, the sky was gray. One night he had a long talk with my father. In all likelihood they were discussing me, or my prospects for college, or last summer, or his new book. When they opened the door, I heard laughter in the hallway downstairs, my mother kissing him. A while later there was a knock at my bedroom door, not the French windows—that entrance was to remain permanently shut, then. “Want to talk?” I was already in bed. He had a sweater on and seemed dressed to go out for a walk. He sat on the edge of my bed, looking as uneasy as I must have seemed the first time when this room used to be his. “I might be getting married this spring,” he said. I was dumbfounded. “But you never said anything.” “Well, it’s been on and off for more than two years.” “I think it’s wonderful news,” I said. People getting married was always wonderful news, I was happy for them, marriages were good, and the broad smile on my face was genuine enough, even if it occurred to me a while later that such news couldn’t possibly bode well for us. Did I mind? he asked. “You’re being silly,” I said. Long silence. “Will you be getting in bed now?” I asked. He looked at me gingerly. “For a short while. But I don’t want to do anything.” It sounded like an updated and far more polished version of Later, maybe. So we were back to that, were we? I had an impulse to mimic him but held back. He lay beside me on top of the blanket with his sweater on. All he had taken off was his loafers.
“How long do you think this will go on?” he asked wryly. “Not long, I hope.” He kissed me on the mouth, but it wasn’t the kiss after the Pasquino, when he’d pressed me hard against the wall on via Santa Maria dell’Anima. I recognized the taste instantly. I’d never realized how much I liked it or how long I’d missed it. One more item to log on that checklist of things I’d miss before losing him for good. I was about to get out from under the blankets. “I can’t do this,” he said, and sprang away. “I can,” I replied. “Yes, but I can’t.” I must have had iced razor blades in my eyes, for he suddenly realized how angry I was. “I’d love nothing better than to take your clothes off and at the very least hold you. But I can’t.” I put my arms around his head and held it. “Then maybe you shouldn’t stay. They know about us.” “I figured,” he said. “How?” “By the way your father spoke. You’re lucky. My father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.” I looked at him: I want one more kiss.
I should, could, have seized him.
By the next morning, things became officially chilly.
One small thing did occur that week. We were sitting in the living room after lunch having coffee when my father brought out a large manila folder in which were stacked six applications accompanied with the passport photo of each applicant. Next summer’s candidates. My father wanted Oliver’s opinion, then passed around the folder to my mother, me, and another professor who had stopped by for lunch with his wife, also a university colleague who had come for the same reason the year before. “My successor,” said Oliver, picking one application above the rest and passing it around. My father instinctively darted a glance in my direction, then immediately withdrew it.
The exact same thing had occurred almost a year, to the day, before. Pavel, Maynard’s successor, had come to visit that Christmas and on looking over the files had strongly recommended one from Chicago—in fact, he knew him very well. Pavel and everyone else in the room felt quite tepid about a young postdoc teaching at Columbia who specialized in, of all things, the pre-Socratics. I had taken longer than needed to look at his picture and was relieved to notice that I felt nothing.
In thinking back now, I couldn’t be more certain that everything between us had started in this very room during Christmas break.
“Is this how I was selected?” he asked with a sort of earnest, awkward candor, which my mother always found disarming.
“I wanted it to be you,” I told Oliver later that evening when I helped him load his things in the car minutes before Manfredi drove him to the station. “I made sure they picked you.”
That night I riffled through my father’s cabinet and found the file containing last year’s applicants. I found his picture. Open shirt collar, Billowy, long hair, the dash of a movie star unwillingly snapped by a paparazzo. No wonder I’d stared at it. I wished I could remember what I’d felt on that afternoon exactly a year ago—that burst of desire followed by its instant antidote, fear. The real Oliver, and each successive Oliver wearing a different-colored bathing suit every day, or the Oliver who lay naked in bed, or who leaned on the window ledge of our hotel in Rome, stood in the way of the troubled and confused image I had drawn of him on first seeing his snapshot.
I looked at the faces of the other applicants. This one wasn’t so bad. I began to wonder what turn my life would have taken had someone else shown up instead. I wouldn’t have gone to Rome. But I might have gone elsewhere. Wouldn’t have known the first thing about San Clemente. But I might have discovered something else which I’d missed out on and might never know about. Wouldn’t have changed, would never be who I am today, would have become someone else.
I wonder now who that someone else is today. Is he happier? Couldn’t I dip into his life for a few hours, a few days, and see for myself—not just to test if this other life is better, or to measure how our lives couldn’t be further apart because of Oliver, but also to consider what I would say to this other me were I to pay him a short visit one day. Would I like him, would he like me, would either of us understand why the other became who he is, would either be surprised to learn that each of us had in fact run into an Oliver of one sort or another, man or woman, and that we were very possibly, regardless of who came to stay with us that summer, one and the same person still?
It was my mother, who hated Pavel and would have forced my father to turn down anyone Pavel recommended, who finally twisted the arm of fate. We may be Jews of discretion, she’d said, but this Pavel is an anti-Semite and I won’t have another anti-Semite in my house.
I remembered that conversation. It too was imprinted on the photo of his face. So he’s Jewish too, I thought.
And then I did what I’d been meaning to do all along that night in my father’s study. I pretended not to know who this chap Oliver was. This was last Christmas. Pavel was still trying to persuade us to host his friend. Summer hadn’t happened yet. Oliver would probably arrive by cab. I’d carry his luggage, show him to his room, take him to the beach by way of the stairway down to the rocks, and then, time allowing, show him around the property as far back as the old railway stop and say something about the gypsies living in the abandoned train cars bearing the insignia of the royal House of Savoy. Weeks later, if we had time, we might take a bike ride to B. We’d stop for refreshments. I’d show him the bookstore. Then I’d show him Monet’s berm. None of it had happened yet.
We heard of his wedding the following summer. We sent gifts and I included a little mot. The summer came and went. I was often tempted to tell him about his “successor” and embroider all manner of stories about my new neighbor down the balcony. But I never sent him anything. The only letter I did send the year after was to tell him that Vimini had died. He wrote to all of us saying how sorry he was. He was traveling in Asia, so that by the time his letter reached us, his reaction to Vimini’s death, rather than soothe an open sore, seemed to graze one that had healed on its own. Writing to him about her was like crossing the last footbridge between us, especially after it became clear we weren’t ever going to mention what had once existed between us, or, for that matter, that we weren’t even mentioning it. Writing had also been my way of telling him what college I was attending in the States, in case my father, who kept an active correspondence with all of our previous residents, hadn’t already told him. Ironically, Oliver wrote back to my address in Italy—another reason for the delay.
Then came the blank years. If I were to punctuate my life with the people whose bed I shared, and if these could be divided in two categories—those before and those after Oliver—then the greatest gift life could bestow on me was to move this divider forward in time. Many helped me part life into Before X and After X segments, many brought joy and sorrow, many threw my life off course, while others made no difference whatsoever, so that Oliver, who for so long had loomed like a fulcrum on the scale of life, eventually acquired successors who either eclipsed him or reduced him to an early milepost, a minor fork in the road, a small, fiery Mercury on a voyage out to Pluto and beyond. Fancy this, I might say: at the time I knew Oliver, I still hadn’t met so-and-so. Yet life without so-and-so was simply unthinkable.
One summer, nine years after his last letter, I received a phone call in the States from my parents. “You’ll never guess who is staying with us for two days. In your old bedroom. And standing right in front of me now.” I had already guessed, of course, but pretended I couldn’t. “The fact that you refuse to say you’ve already guessed says a great deal,” my father said with a snicker before saying goodbye. There was a tussle between my parents over who was to hand their phone over. Finally his voice came through. “Elio,” he said. I could hear my parents and the voices of children in the background. No one could say my name that way. “Elio,” I repeated, to say it was I speaking but also to spark our old game and show I’d forgotten nothing. “It’s Oliver,” he said. He had forgotten.
“They showed me pictures, you haven’t changed,” he said. He spoke about his two boys who were right now
playing in the living room with my mother, eight and six, I should meet his wife, I am so happy to be here, you have no idea, no idea. It’s the most beautiful spot in the world, I said, pretending to infer that he was happy because of the place. You can’t understand how happy I am to be here. His words were breaking up, he passed the phone back to my mother, who, before turning to me, was still speaking to him with endearing words. “Ma s’è tutto commosso, he’s all choked up,” she finally said to me. “I wish I could be with you all,” I responded, getting all worked up myself over someone I had almost entirely stopped thinking about. Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.
Four years later, while passing through his college town, I did the unusual. I decided to show up. I sat in his afternoon lecture hall and, after class, as he was putting away his books and packing loose sheets into a folder, I walked up to him. I wasn’t going to make him guess who I was, but I wasn’t going to make it easy either.
There was a student who wanted to ask him a question. So I waited my turn. The student eventually left. “You probably don’t remember me,” I began, as he squinted somewhat, trying to place me. He was suddenly distant, as if stricken by the fear that we had met in a place he didn’t care to remember. He put on a tentative, ironic, questioning look, an uncomfortable, puckered smile, as if rehearsing something like, I’m afraid you’re mistaking me for somebody else. Then he paused. “Good God—Elio!” It was my beard that had thrown him off, he said. He embraced me, and then patted my furry face several times as if I were younger than I’d even been that summer so long ago. He hugged me the way he couldn’t bring himself to do on the night when he stepped into my room to tell me he was getting married. “How many years has it been?”