Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (12 page)

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.

That night we all went to bed early. Exhaustion was the order of the day. I must have slept very soundly, because when I awoke they were already removing breakfast from the table.

I found him lying on the grass with a dictionary to his left and a yellow pad directly under his chest. I was hoping he’d look gaunt or be in the mood he’d been in all day yesterday. But he was already hard at work. I felt awkward breaking the silence. I was tempted to fall back on my habit of pretending not to notice him, but that seemed hard to do now, especially when he’d told me two days earlier that he’d seen through my little act.

Would knowing we were shamming change anything between us once we were back to not speaking again?

Probably not. It might dig the ditch even deeper, because it would be difficult for either of us to believe we were stupid enough to pretend the very thing we’d already confessed was a sham. But I couldn’t hold back.

“I waited for you the other night.” I sounded like my mother reproaching my father when he came home inexplicably late. I never knew I could sound so peevish.

“Why didn’t you come into town?” came his answer.

“Dunno.”

“We had a nice time. You would have too. Did you rest at least?”

“In a way. Restless. But okay.”

He was back to staring at the page he had just been reading and was mouthing the syllables, perhaps to show his mind was very focused on the page.

“Are you headed into town this morning?”

I knew I was interrupting and hated myself.

“Later, maybe.”

I should have taken the hint, and I did. But part of me refused to believe anyone could change so soon.

“I was going to head into town myself.”

“I see.”

“A book I ordered has finally arrived. I’m to pick it up at the bookstore this morning.”

“What book?”

“Armance.”

“I’ll pick it up for you if you want.”

I looked at him. I felt like a child who, despite all manner of indirect pleas and hints, finds himself unable to remind his parents they’d promised to take him to the toy store. No need beating around the bush.

“It was just that I was hoping we’d go together.”

“You mean like the other day?” he added, as though to help me say what I couldn’t bring myself to say, but making things no easier by pretending to have forgotten the exact day.

“I don’t think we’ll ever do anything like that again.” I was trying to sound noble and grave in my defeat. “But, yes, like that.” I could be vague too.

That I, an extremely shy boy, found the courage to say such things could come from one place only: from a dream I’d had two, perhaps three nights running. In my dream he had pleaded with me, saying, “You’ll kill me if you stop.” I thought I remembered the context, but it embarrassed me so much that I was reluctant, even vis-à-vis myself, to own up to it. I had put a cloak around it and could only take furtive, hasty peeks.

“That day belongs to a different time warp. We should learn to leave sleeping dogs—”

Oliver listened.

“This voice of wisdom is your most winning trait.” He had lifted his eyes from his pad and was staring me straight in the face, which made me feel terribly uneasy. “Do you like me that much, Elio?”

“Do I like you?” I wanted to sound incredulous, as though to question how he could ever have doubted such a thing. But then I thought better of it and was on the point of softening the tone of my answer with a meaningfully evasive
Perhaps
that was supposed to mean
Absolutely
, when I let my tongue loose: “Do I like you, Oliver? I worship you.” There, I’d said it. I wanted the word to startle him and to come like a slap in the face so that it might be instantly followed with the most languorous caresses. What’s
liking
when we’re talking about
worshipping
? But I also wanted my verb to carry the persuasive knockout punch with which, not the person who has a crush on us, but their closest friend, takes us aside and says,
Look, I think you ought to know, so-and-so worships you.
“To worship” seemed to say more than anyone might dare say under the circumstances; but it was the safest, and ultimately murkiest, thing I could come up with. I gave myself credit for getting the truth off my chest, all the while finding a loophole for immediate retreat in case I’d ventured too far.

“I’ll go with you to B.,” he said. “But—no speeches.”

“No speeches, nothing, not a word.”

“What do you say we grab our bikes in half an hour?”

Oh, Oliver, I said to myself on my way to the kitchen for a quick bite to eat, I’ll do anything for you. I’ll ride up the hill with you, and I’ll race you up the road to town, and won’t point out the sea when we reach the berm, and I’ll wait at the bar in the piazzetta while you meet with your translator, and I’ll touch the memorial to the unknown soldier who died on the Piave, and I won’t utter a word, I’ll show you the way to the bookstore, and we’ll park our bikes outside the shop and go in together and leave together, and I promise, I promise, I promise, there’ll be no hint of Shelley, or Monet, nor will I ever stoop to tell you that two nights ago you added an annual ring to my soul.

I am going to enjoy this for its own sake, I kept telling myself. We are two young men traveling by bike, and we’re going to go to town and come back, and we’ll swim, play tennis, eat, drink, and late at night run into each other on the very same piazzetta where two mornings ago so much but really nothing was said between us. He’ll be with a girl, I’ll be with a girl, and we’re even going to be happy. Every day, if I don’t mess things up, we can ride into town and be back, and even if this is all he is willing to give, I’ll take it—I’ll settle for less, even, if only to live with these threadbare scraps.

We rode our bicycles to town that morning and were done with his translator before long, but even after a hasty coffee at the bar, the bookstore wasn’t open yet. So we lingered on the piazzetta, I staring at the war memorial, he looking out at the view of the speckling bay, neither of us saying a word about Shelley’s ghost, which shadowed our every step through town and beckoned louder than Hamlet’s father. Without thinking, he asked how anyone could drown in such a sea. I smiled right away, because I caught his attempt to backpedal, which instantly brought complicit smiles to our faces, like a passionate wet kiss in the midst of a conversation between two individuals who, without thinking, had reached for each other’s lips through the scorching red desert both had intentionally placed between them so as not to grope for each other’s nakedness.

“I thought we weren’t going to mention—,” I began.

“No speeches. I know.”

When we returned to the bookshop, we left our bikes outside and went in.

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 liked his bookstore manner. He was curious but not entirely focused, interested yet nonchalant, veering between a
Look what I’ve found
and
Of course, how could any bookstore not carry so-and-so!

The bookseller had ordered two copies of Stendhal’s
Armance
, one a paperback edition and the other an expensive hardbound. An impulse made me say I’d take both and to put them on my father’s bill. 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.

He said something about the gift being the best thing he’d received all year. I shrugged my shoulders to make light of perfunctory gratitude. Perhaps I just wanted him to repeat it.

“I am glad, then. I just want to thank you for this morning.” And before he even thought of interrupting, I added, “I know. No speeches. Ever.”

On our way downhill, we passed my spot, and it was I this time who looked the other way, as though it had all but slipped my mind. I’m sure that if I had looked at him then, we would have exchanged the same infectious smile we’d immediately wiped off our faces on bringing up Shelley’s death. It might have brought us closer, if only to remind us how far apart we needed to be now. 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.

But, if on our rides together the following mornings he were to ask, then I’d spill everything.

I’d tell him that though we rode our bicycles every day and took them up to our favorite piazzetta where I was determined never to speak out of turn, yet, each night, when I knew he was in bed, I’d still open my shutters and would step out onto the balcony, hoping he’d have heard the shaking glass of my French windows, followed by the telltale squeak of its old hinges. I’d wait for him there, wearing only my pajama bottoms, ready to claim, if he asked what I was doing there, that the night was too hot, and the smell of the citronella intolerable, and that I preferred to stay up, not sleep, not read, just stare, because I couldn’t bring myself to sleep, and if he asked why I couldn’t sleep, I’d simply say, You don’t want to know, or, in a roundabout way, just say that I had promised never to cross over to his side of the balcony, partly because I was terrified of offending him now, but also because I didn’t want to test the invisible trip wire between us—
What trip wire are you talking about?
—The trip wire which one night, if my dream is too powerful or if I’ve had more wine than usual, I could easily cross, then push open your glass door and say, Oliver, it’s me, I can’t sleep, let me stay with you.
That
trip wire!

The trip wire loomed at all hours of the night. An owl, the sound of Oliver’s own window shutters squeaking against the wind, the music from a distant, all-night discotheque in an adjoining hill town, the scuffling of cats very late at night, or the creak of the wooden lintel of my bedroom door, anything could wake me. But I’d known these since childhood and, like a sleeping fawn flicking his tail at an intrusive insect, knew how to brush them away and fall instantly back to sleep. Sometimes, though, a mere nothing, like a sense of dread or shame, would slip its way out of my sleep and hover undefined about me and watch me sleep and, bending down to my ear, finally whisper,
I’m not trying to wake you, I’m really not, go back to sleep, Elio, keep sleeping
—while I made every effort to recover the dream I was about to reenter any moment now and could almost rescript if only I tried a bit harder.

But sleep would not come, and sure enough not one but two troubling thoughts, like paired specters materializing out of the fog of sleep, stood watch over me: desire and shame, the longing to throw open my window and, without thinking, run into his room stark-naked, and, on the other hand, my repeated inability to take the slightest risk to bring any of this about. 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?

That night, yet again, an answer did come, though it came in a dream that was itself a dream within a dream. I awoke with an image that told me more than I wanted to know, as though, despite all of my frank admissions to myself about what I wanted from him, and how I’d want it, there were still a few corners I’d avoided. In this dream I finally learned what my body must have known from the very first day. We were in his room, and, contrary to all my fantasies, it was not I who had my back on the bed, but Oliver; I was on top of him, watching, on his face, an expression at once so flushed, so readily acquiescent, that even in my sleep it tore every emotion out of me and told me one thing I could never have known or guessed so far: that not to give what I was dying to give him at whatever price was perhaps the greatest crime I might ever commit in my life. I desperately wanted to give him something. By contrast, taking seemed so bland, so facile, so mechanical. And then I heard it, as I knew by now I would. “You’ll kill me if you stop,” he was gasping, conscious that he’d already spoken these selfsame words to me a few nights before in another dream but that, having said them once, he was also free to repeat them whenever he came into my dreams, even though neither of us seemed to know whether it was his voice that was breaking from inside me or whether my memory of these very words was exploding in him. His face, which seemed both to endure my passion and by doing so to abet it, gave me an image of kindness and fire I had never seen and could never have imagined on anyone’s face before. This very image of him would become like a night-light in my life, keeping vigil on those days when I’d all but given up, rekindling my desire for him when I wanted it dead, stoking the embers of courage when I feared a snub might dispel every semblance of pride. The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag.