- you see someone, but you don’t really see him, he’s in the wings. or you notice him, but nothing clicks, nothing “catches,” and before you’re even aware of a presence, or of something troubling you, the six weeks that were offered you have almost passed and he’s either already gone or just about to leave, and you’re basically scrambling to come to terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you’re forced to call i want. how couldn’t i have known, you ask? i know desire when i see it—and yet, this time, it slipped by completely.
- i liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back.
- they are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel i read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds i’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.
- i liked it when our feet were aligned, left with left, and struck the ground at the same time, leaving footprints on the shore that i wished to return to and, in secret, place my foot where his had left its mark.
- so this is who he also is, i said to myself after seeing how he’d flipped from ice to sunshine. i might as well have asked: do i flip back and forth in just the same way? p.s. we are not written for one instrument alone; i am not, neither are you.
- i had been perfectly willing to brand him as difficult and unapproachable and have nothing more to do with him. two words from him, and i had seen my pouting apathy change into i’ll play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it’s time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers wears off layer after layer, because i like doing things for you, will do anything for you, just say the word, i liked you from day one, and even when you’ll return ice for my renewed offers of friendship, i’ll never forget that this conversation occurred between us and that there are easy ways to bring back summer in the snowstorm.
- fire like a pleading that says, please, please, tell me i’m wrong, tell me i’ve imagined all this, because it can’t possibly be true for you as well, and if it’s true for you too, then you’re the cruelest man alive.
- this is not, cannot, had better not be a dream, because the words that came to me, as i pressed my eyes shut, were, this is like coming home, like coming home after years away among trojans and lestrygonians, like coming home to a place where everyone is like you, where people know, they just know—coming home as when everything falls into place and you suddenly realize that for seventeen years all you’d been doing was fiddling with the wrong combination.
- is this why people say “maybe” when they mean “yes,” but hope you’ll think it’s “no” when all they really mean is, please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?
- the summer i learned to love fishing. because he did. to love jogging. because he did. to love octopus, heraclitus, tristan. the summer i’d hear a bird sing, smell a plant, or feel the mist rise from under my feet on warm sunny days and, because my senses were always on alert, would automatically find them rushing to him.
- there may have been nothing there, and i might have invented the whole thing.
- “want to go for a swim?” he asked. “later, maybe,” i said, echoing his word but also trying to say as little as possible before he’d spot i was out of breath. “let’s go now.” he extended his hand to help me get up. i grabbed it and, turning on my side facing the wall away from him to prevent him from seeing me, i asked, “must we?” this was the closest i would ever come to saying, stay.
- after heeding the words i’d been rehearsing for days now, please, don’t hurt me, which meant, hurt me all you want.
- how i loved the way he repeated what i myself had just repeated. it made me think of a caress, or of a gesture, which happens to be totally accidental the first time but becomes intentional the second time and more so yet the third. it reminded me of the way mafalda would make my bed every morning, first by folding the top sheet over the blanket, then by folding the sheet back again to cover the pillows on top of the blanket, and once more yet when she folded the whole thing over the bedspread—back and forth until i knew that tucked in between these multiple folds were tokens of something at once pious and indulgent, like acquiescence in an instant of passion.
- my heart was racing. he must have known.
- there is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well. amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona. love, which exempts no one who’s loved from loving, francesca’s words in the inferno. just wait and be hopeful. i was hopeful, though perhaps this was what i had wanted all along. to wait forever.
- to look up and find you there, oliver. for the day will come soon enough when i’ll look up and you’ll no longer be there.
- and when he wasn’t with me, i didn’t much care what he did so long as he remained the exact same person with others as he was with me. don’t let him be someone else when he’s away. don’t let him be someone i’ve never seen before. don’t let him have a life other than the life i know he has with us, with me. don’t let me lose him. i knew i had no hold on him, nothing to offer, nothing to lure him by. i was nothing.
- having my heart jump when i suddenly heard his voice or saw him seated at his seat when i’d almost given up hoping he’d be among us tonight eventually blossomed like a poisoned flower.
- what i didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.
- was he my home, then, my homecoming? you are my homecoming. when i’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more i want. you make me like who i am, who i become when you’re with me, oliver. if there is any truth in the world, it lies when i’m with you, and if i find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in rome. it never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if i didn’t want to be unhappy, i should learn to beware of such small joys as well.
- “is it better to speak or die?”
- between always and never.
- “i like the way you say things. why are you always putting yourself down?” i shrugged my shoulders. was he criticizing me for criticizing myself? “i don’t know. so you won’t, i suppose.” “are you so scared of what others think?”
- we were too close, i thought, i’d never been so close to him except in a dream or when he cupped his hand to light my cigarette. if he brought his ear any closer he’d hear my heart. i’d seen it written in novels but never believed it until now. he stared me right in the face, as though he liked my face and wished to study it and to linger on it, then he touched my nether lip with his finger and let it travel left and right and right and left again and again as i lay there, watching him smile in a way that made me fear anything might happen now and there’d be no turning back, that this was his way of asking, and here was my chance to say no or to say something and play for time, so that i might still debate the matter with myself, now that it had reached this point—except that i didn’t have any time left, because he brought his lips to my mouth, a warm, conciliatory, i’ll-meet-you-halfway-but-no-further kiss till he realized how famished mine was. i wished i knew how to calibrate my kiss the way he did. but passion allows us to hide more, and at that moment on monet’s berm, if i wished to hide everything about me in this kiss, i was also desperate to forget the kiss by losing myself in it.
- just take me and molt me and turn me inside out, till, like a character in ovid, i become one with your lust, that’s what i wanted. give me a blindfold, hold my hand, and don’t ask me to think—will you do that for me?
- 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.”
- this felt special. like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. this is where i dreamed of you before you came into my life.
- i then asked his assistant for a pen, opened up the hardbound edition, and wrote, zwischen immer und nie, for you in silence, somewhere in italy in the mid-eighties. in years to come, if the book was still in his possession, i wanted him to ache. better yet, i wanted someone to look through his books one day, open up this tiny volume of armance, and ask, tell me who was in silence, somewhere in italy in the mid-eighties? and then i’d want him to feel something as darting as sorrow and fiercer than regret, maybe even pity for me, because in the bookstore that morning i’d have taken pity too, if pity was all he had to give, if pity could have made him put an arm around me, and underneath this surge of pity and regret, hovering like a vague, erotic undercurrent that was years in the making, i wanted him to remember the morning on monet’s berm when i’d kissed him not the first but the second time and given him my spit in his mouth because i so desperately wanted his in mine.
- perhaps in looking the other way, and knowing we had looked the other way to avoid “speeches,” we might have found a reason to smile at each other, for i’m sure he knew i knew he knew i was avoiding all mention of monet’s berm, and that this avoidance, which gave every indication of drawing us apart, was, instead, a perfectly synchronized moment of intimacy which neither of us wished to dispel. this too is in the picture book, i might have said, but bit my tongue instead. no speeches.
- there they were, the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life, hunger and fear, watching over me, saying, so many before you have taken the chance and been rewarded, why can’t you? no answer. so many have balked, so why must you? no answer. and then it came, as ever deriding me: if not later, elio, when?
- “people who read are hiders. they hide who they are. people who hide don’t always like who they are.” “do you hide who you are?” “sometimes. don’t you?” “do i? i suppose.” and then, contrary to my every impulse, i found myself stumbling into a question i might otherwise never have dared ask. “do you hide from me?” “no, not from you. or maybe, yes, a bit.” “like what?” “you know exactly like what.” “why do you say that?” “why? because i think you can hurt me and i don’t want to be hurt.” then she thought for a moment. “not that you mean to hurt anyone, but because you’re always changing your mind, always slipping, so no one knows where to find you. you scare me.”
- every star you see tonight already knows your torment
- i am afraid of nothing, so why be so frightened? why? because everything scares me, because both fear and desire are busy equivocating with each other, with me, i can’t even tell the difference between wanting him to open the door and hoping he’s stood me up.
- to be who i am because of you. to be who he was because of me.
- would i always experience such solitary guilt in the wake of our intoxicating moments together?
- perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. but then perhaps this is what lovers are.
- he must have known exactly what i was feeling. what made me blush in the end was not the natural embarrassment of the moment when i could tell he’d caught me trying to hold his gaze only then to let mine scamper to safety; what made me blush was the thrilling possibility, unbelievable as i wanted it to remain, that he might actually like me, and that he liked me in just the way i liked him.
- we might start but under no condition would we finish.
- perhaps what i liked far more was the evening. everything about it thrilled me. every glance that crossed my own came like a compliment, or like an asking and a promise that simply lingered in midair between me and the world around me.
- “i wish i had one friend i wasn’t destined to lose.”
- the job of poetry, like that of wine, is to help us see double
- nothing else had changed. i had not changed. the world hadn’t changed. yet nothing would be the same. all that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.
- anticipating sorrow to neutralize sorrow—that’s paltry, cowardly stuff, i told myself, knowing i was an ace practitioner of the craft. and what if it came fiercely? what if it came and didn’t let go, a sorrow that had come to stay, and did to me what longing for him had done on those nights when it seemed there was something so essential missing from my life that it might as well have been missing from my body, so that losing him now would be like losing a hand you could spot in every picture of yourself around the house, but without which you couldn’t possibly be you again. you lose it, as you always knew you would, and were even prepared to; but you can’t bring yourself to live with the loss. and hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream of it, hurts just the same.
- “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.”
- but to feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!
- 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.
- 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?
- all i was likely to discover at this point wasn’t just how distant were the paths we’d taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me—a loss i didn’t mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we’ve stopped thinking of things we’ve lost and may never have cared for.
- every time i go back to rome, i go back to that one spot. it is still alive for me, still resounds with something totally present, as though a heart stolen from a tale by poe still throbbed under the ancient slate pavement to remind me that, here, i had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have.
- but this thing that almost never was still beckons, i wanted to tell him. they can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, you could have had this instead. but going back is false. moving ahead is false. looking the other way is false. trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.
- to tell him “you are the only person i’d like to say goodbye to when i die, because only then will this thing i call my life make any sense. and if i should hear that you died, my life as i know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist. sometimes i have this awful picture of waking up in our house in b. and, looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, he died last night. we missed out on so much. it was a coma. tomorrow i go back to my coma, and you to yours. pardon, i didn’t mean to offend—i am sure yours is no coma.”
- “cor cordium, heart of hearts, i’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”
- then i thought of the drive back, late at night, along the starlit river to this rickety antique new england hotel on a shoreline that i hoped would remind us both of the bay of b., and of van gogh’s starry nights, and of the night i joined him on the rock and kissed him on the neck, and of the last night when we walked together on the coast road, sensing we’d run out of last-minute miracles to put off his leaving. i imagined being in his car asking myself, who knows, would i want to, would he want to, perhaps a nightcap at the bar would decide, knowing that, all through dinner that evening, he and i would be worrying about the same exact thing, hoping it might happen, praying it might not, perhaps a nightcap would decide—i could just read it on his face as i pictured him looking away while uncorking a bottle of wine or while changing the music, because he too would catch the thought racing through my mind and want me to know he was debating the exact same thing, because, as he’d pour the wine for his wife, for me, for himself, it would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than i had ever been myself, because when he became me and i became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.
- in the weeks we’d been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. we looked the other way. we spoke about everything but. but we’ve always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. we had found the stars, you and i. and this is given once only.
- i wanted to tell him that the pool, the garden, the house, the tennis court, the orle of paradise, the whole place, would always be his ghost spot. instead, i pointed upstairs to the french windows of his room. your eyes are forever there, i wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days. when there’s a breeze and they swell and i look up from down here or stand outside on the balcony, i’ll catch myself thinking that you’re in there, staring out from your world to my world, saying, as you did on that one night when i found you on the rock, i’ve been happy here. you’re thousands of miles away but no sooner do i look at this window than i’ll think of a bathing suit, a shirt thrown on on the fly, arms resting on the banister, and you’re suddenly there, lighting up your first cigarette of the day—twenty years ago today. for as long as the house stands, this will be your ghost spot—and mine too, i wanted to say.
- twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away. “i’m like you,” he said. “i remember everything.” i stopped for a second. if you remember everything, i wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.
dec 25 2018 ∞
dec 25 2018 +