Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (14 page)

I wanted to look at her, stare in her eyes as she held me in her hand, tell her how long I’d wanted to kiss her, say something to show that the person who’d called her tonight and picked her up at her house was no longer the same cold, lifeless boy—but she cut me short: “
Baciami ancora
, kiss me again.”

I kissed her again, but my mind was racing ahead to the berm. Should I propose it? We would have to ride our bikes for five minutes, especially if we took her shortcut and made our way directly through the olive groves. I knew we’d run into other lovers around there. Otherwise there was the beach. I’d used the spot before. Everyone did. I might propose my room, no one at home would have known or for that matter cared.

An image flitted through my mind: she and I sitting in the garden every morning after breakfast, she wearing her bikini, always urging me to walk downstairs and join her for a swim.

“
Ma tu mi vuoi veramente bene
, do you really care for me?” she asked. Did it come from nowhere—or was this the same wounded look in need of soothing which had been shadowing our steps ever since we’d left the bookstore?

I couldn’t understand how boldness and sorrow, how
you’re so hard
and
do you really care for me?
could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it.

While kissing her more passionately now, and with our hands straying all over each other’s bodies, I found myself composing the note I resolved to slip under his door that night:
Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you
.

By the time I was ready to slip the note under his door it was already dawn. Marzia and I had made love in a deserted spot on the beach, a place nicknamed the Aquarium, where the night’s condoms would unavoidably gather and be seen floating among the rocks like returning salmon in trapped water. We planned to meet later in the day.

Now, as I made my way home, I loved her smell on my body, on my hands. I would do nothing to wash it away. I’d keep it on me till we met in the evening. Part of me still enjoyed luxuriating in this newfound, beneficent wave of indifference, verging on distaste, for Oliver that both pleased me and told me how fickle I ultimately was. Perhaps he sensed that all I’d wanted from him was to sleep with him to be done with him and had instinctively resolved to have nothing to do with me. To think that a few nights ago I had felt so strong an urge to host his body in mine that I’d nearly jumped out of bed to seek him out in his room. Now the idea couldn’t possibly arouse me. Perhaps this whole thing with Oliver had been canicular rut, and I was well rid of it. By contrast, all I had to do was smell Marzia on my hand and I loved the all-woman in every woman.

I knew the feeling wouldn’t last long and that, as with all addicts, it was easy to forswear an addiction immediately after a fix.

Scarcely an hour later, and Oliver came back to me
au galop
. To sit in bed with him and offer him my palm and say, Here, smell this, and then to watch him sniff at my hand, holding it ever so gently in both of his, finally placing my middle finger to his lips and then suddenly all the way into his mouth.

I tore out a sheet of paper from a school notebook.

Please don’t avoid me.

Then I rewrote it:

Please don’t avoid me. It kills me.

Which I rewrote:

Your silence is killing me.

Way over the top.

Can’t stand thinking you hate me.

Too plangent. No, make it less lachrymose, but keep the trite death speech.

I’d sooner die than know you hate me.

At the last minute I came back to the original.

Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you
.

I folded the piece of lined paper and slipped it under his door with the resigned apprehension of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. There was no turning back now.
Iacta alea est
, Caesar had said, the die is cast. It amused me to think that the verb “to throw,”
iacere
in Latin, has the same root as the verb “to ejaculate.” No sooner had I thought this than I realized that what I wanted was to bring him not just her scent on my fingers but, dried on my hand, the imprint of my semen.

Fifteen minutes later I was prey to two countervailing emotions: regret that I had sent the message, and regret that there wasn’t a drop of irony in it.

At breakfast, when he finally showed up after his jog, all he asked without raising his head was whether I had enjoyed myself last night, the implication being I had gone to bed very late. “
Insomma
, so-so,” I replied, trying to keep my answer as vague as possible, which was also my way of suggesting I was minimizing a report that would have been too long otherwise. “Must be tired, then,” was my father’s ironic contribution to the conversation. “Or was it poker that you were playing too?” “I don’t play poker.” My father and Oliver exchanged significant glances. Then they began discussing the day’s workload. And I lost him. Another day of torture.

When I went back upstairs to fetch my books, I saw the same folded piece of lined notebook paper on my desk. He must have stepped into my room using the balcony door and placed it where I’d spot it. If I read it now it would ruin my day. But if I put off reading it, the whole day would become meaningless, and I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else. In all likelihood, he was tossing it back to me without adding anything on it, as though to mean:
I found this on the floor. It’s probably yours. Later!
Or it might mean something far more blunted:
No reply.

Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight
.

That’s what he had added under my words.

He had delivered it before breakfast.

This realization came with a few minutes’ delay but it filled me with instant yearning and dismay. Did I want this, now that something was being offered? And was it in fact being offered? And if I wanted or didn’t want it, how would I live out the day till midnight? It was barely ten in the morning: fourteen hours to go…The last time I had waited so long for something was for my report card. Or on the Saturday two years ago when a girl had promised we’d meet at the movies and I wasn’t sure she hadn’t forgotten. Half a day watching my entire life being put on hold. How I hated waiting and depending on the whim of others.

Should I answer his note?

You can’t answer an answer!

As for the note: was its tone intentionally light, or was it meant to look like an afterthought scribbled away minutes after jogging and seconds before breakfast? I didn’t miss the little jab at my operatic sentimentalism, followed by the self-confident, let’s-get-down-to-basics
see you at midnight
. Did either bode well, and which would win the day, the swat of irony, or the jaunty
Let’s get together tonight and see what comes of it
? Were we going to talk—just talk? Was this an order or a consent to see me at the hour specified in every novel and every play? And where were we going to meet at midnight? Would he find a moment during the day to tell me where? Or, being aware that I had fretted all night long the other night and that the trip wire dividing our respective ends of the balcony was entirely artificial, did he assume that one of us would eventually cross the unspoken Maginot Line that had never stopped anyone?

And what did this do to our near-ritual morning bike rides? Would “midnight” supersede the morning ride? Or would we go on as before, as though nothing had changed, except that now we had a “midnight” to look forward to? When I run into him now, do I flash him a significant smile, or do I go on as before, and offer, instead, a cold, glazed, discreet
American
gaze?

And yet, among the many things I wished to show him the next time I crossed paths with him was gratitude. One could show gratitude and still not be considered intrusive and heavy-handed. Or does gratitude, however restrained, always bear that extra dollop of treacle that gives every Mediterranean passion its unavoidably mawkish, histrionic character? Can’t let things well enough alone, can’t play down, must exclaim, proclaim, declaim…

Say nothing and he’ll think you regret having written.

Say anything and it will be out of place.

Do what, then?

Wait.

I knew this from the very start. Just wait. I’d work all morning. Swim. Maybe play tennis in the afternoon. Meet Marzia. Be back by midnight. No, eleven-thirty. Wash? No wash? Ah, to go from one body to the other.

Wasn’t this what he might be doing as well? Going from one to the other.

And then a terrible panic seized me: was midnight going to be a talk, a clearing of the air between us—as in, buck up, lighten up, grow up!

But why wait for midnight, then? Who ever picks midnight to have such a conversation?

Or was midnight going to be
midnight
?

What to wear at midnight?

The day went as I feared. Oliver found a way to leave without telling me immediately after breakfast and did not come back until lunch. He sat in his usual place next to me. I tried to make light conversation a few times but realized that this was going to be another one of our let’s-not-speak-to-each-other days when we both tried to make it very clear that we were no longer just pretending to be quiet.

After lunch, I went to take a nap. I heard him follow me upstairs and shut his door.

Later I called Marzia. We met on the tennis court. Luckily, no one was there, so it was quiet and we played for hours under the scorching sun, which both of us loved. Sometimes, we would sit on the old bench in the shade and listen to the crickets. Mafalda brought us refreshments and then warned us that she was too old for this, that the next time we’d have to fetch whatever we wanted ourselves. “But we never asked you for anything,” I protested. “You shouldn’t have drunk, then.” And she shuffled away, having scored her point.

Vimini, who liked to watch people play, did not come that day. She must have been with Oliver at their favorite spot.

I loved August weather. The town was quieter than usual in the late summer weeks. By then, everyone had left for
le vacanze
, and the occasional tourists were usually gone before seven in the evening. I loved the afternoons best: the scent of rosemary, the heat, the birds, the cicadas, the sway of palm fronds, the silence that fell like a light linen shawl on an appallingly sunny day, all of these highlighted by the walk down to the shore and the walk back upstairs to shower. I liked looking up to our house from the tennis court and seeing the empty balconies bask in the sun, knowing that from any one of them you could spot the limitless sea. This was my balcony, my world. From where I sat now, I could look around me and say, Here is our tennis court, there our garden, our orchard, our shed, our house, and below is our wharf—everyone and everything I care for is here. My family, my instruments, my books, Mafalda, Marzia, Oliver.

That afternoon, as I sat with Marzia with my hand resting on her thighs and knees, it did occur to me that I was, in Oliver’s words, one of the luckiest persons on earth. There was no saying how long all this would last, just as there was no sense in second-guessing how the day might turn out, or the night. Every minute felt as though stretched on tenterhooks. Everything could snap in a flash.

But sitting here I knew I was experiencing the mitigated bliss of those who are too superstitious to claim they may get all they’ve ever dreamed of but are far too grateful not to know it could easily be taken away.

After tennis, and just before heading to the beach, I took her upstairs by way of the balcony into my bedroom. No one passed there in the afternoon. I closed the shutters but left the windows open, so that the subdued afternoon light drew slatted patterns on the bed, on the wall, on Marzia. We made love in utter silence, neither of us closing our eyes.

Part of me hoped we’d bang against the wall, or that she’d be unable to smother a cry, and that all this might alert Oliver to what was happening on the other side of his wall. I imagined him napping and hearing my bedsprings and being upset.

On our way to the cove below I was once again pleased to feel I didn’t care if he found out about us, just as I didn’t care if he never showed up tonight. I didn’t even care for him or his shoulders or the white of his arms. The bottom of his feet, the flat of his palms, the underside of his body—didn’t care. I would much rather spend the night with her than wait up for him and hear him declaim bland pieties at the stroke of midnight. What had I been thinking this morning when I’d slipped him my note?

And yet another part of me knew that if he showed up tonight and I disliked the start of whatever was in store for me, I’d still go through with it, go with it all the way, because better to find out once and for all than to spend the rest of the summer, or my life perhaps, arguing with my body.

I’d make a decision in cold blood. And if he asked, I’d tell him. I’m not sure I want to go ahead with this, but I need to know, and better with you than anyone else. I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me.

Marzia left just before dinnertime. She had promised to go to the movies. There’d be friends, she said. Why didn’t I come? I made a face when I heard their names. I’d stay home and practice, I said. I thought you practiced every morning. This morning I started late, remember? She intercepted my meaning and smiled.