Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (15 page)

Three hours to go.

There’d been a mournful silence between us all afternoon. If I hadn’t had his word that we were going to talk later, I don’t know how I’d have survived another day like this.

At dinner, our guests were a semi-employed adjunct professor of music and a gay couple from Chicago who insisted on speaking terrible Italian. The two men sat next to each other, facing my mother and me. One of them decided to recite some verses by Pascoli, to which Mafalda, catching my look, made her usual
smorfia
meant to elicit a giggle from me. My father had warned me not to misbehave in the presence of the scholars from Chicago. I said I would wear the purple shirt given me by a distant cousin from Uruguay. My father laughed it off, saying I was too old not to accept people as they were. But there was a glint in his eyes when both showed up wearing purple shirts. They had both stepped out from either side of the cab at the same time and each carried a bunch of white flowers in his hand. They looked, as my father must have realized, like a flowery, gussied-up version of Tintin’s Thomson and Thompson twins.

I wondered what their life together was like.

It seemed strange to be counting the minutes during supper, shadowed by the thought that tonight I had more in common with Tintin’s twins than with my parents or anyone else in my world.

I looked at them, wondering who was top and who was bottom, Tweedle-Dee or Tweedle-Dum.

It was almost eleven when I said I was going to sleep and said goodnight to my parents and the guests. “What about Marzia?” asked my father, that unmistakable lambent look in his eyes. Tomorrow, I replied.

I wanted to be alone. Shower. A book. A diary entry, perhaps. Stay focused on midnight yet keep my mind off every aspect of it.

On my way up the staircase, I tried to imagine myself coming down this very same staircase tomorrow morning. By then I might be someone else. Did I even like this someone else whom I didn’t yet know and who might not want to say good morning then or have anything to do with me for having brought him to this pass? Or would I remain the exact same person walking up this staircase, with nothing about me changed, and not one of my doubts resolved?

Or nothing at all might happen. He could refuse, and, even if no one found out I had asked him, I’d still be humiliated, and for nothing. He’d know; I’d know.

But I was past humiliation. After weeks of wanting and waiting and—let’s face it—begging and being made to hope and fight every access of hope, I’d be devastated. How do you go back to sleep after that? Slink back into your room and pretend to open a book and read yourself to sleep?

Or: how do you go back to sleep no longer a virgin? There was no coming back from that! What had been in my head for so long would now be out in the real world, no longer afloat in my foreverland of ambiguities. I felt like someone entering a tattoo parlor and taking a last, long look at his bare left shoulder.

Should I be punctual?

Be punctual and say: Whooo-hooo, the witching hour.

Soon I could hear the voices of the two guests rising from the courtyard. They were standing outside, probably waiting for the adjunct professor to drive them back to their pension. The adjunct was taking his time and the couple were simply chatting outside, one of them giggling.

At midnight there wasn’t a sound coming from his room. Could he have stood me up again? That would be too much. I hadn’t heard him come back. He’d just have to come to my room, then. Or should I still go to his? Waiting would be torture.

I’ll go to him.

I stepped out onto the balcony for a second and peered in the direction of his bedroom. No light. I’d still knock anyway.

Or I could wait. Or not go at all.

Not going suddenly burst on me like the one thing I wanted most in life. It kept tugging at me, straining toward me ever so gently now, like someone who’d already whispered once or twice in my sleep but, seeing I wasn’t waking, had finally tapped me on the shoulder and was now encouraging me to look for every inducement to put off knocking on his window tonight. The thought washed over me like water on a flower shop window, like a soothing, cool lotion after you’ve showered and spent the whole day in the sun, loving the sun but loving the balsam more. Like numbness, the thought works on your extremities first and then penetrates to the rest of your body, giving all manner of arguments, starting with the silly ones—it’s way too late for anything tonight—rising to the major ones—how will you face the others, how will you face yourself?

Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Because I wanted to savor and save it for last? Because I wanted the counterarguments to spring on their own, without my having any part in summoning them at all, so that I wouldn’t be blamed for them?
Don’t try, don’t try this, Elio.
It was my grandfather’s voice. I was his namesake, and he was speaking to me from the very bed where he’d crossed a far more menacing divide than the one between my room and Oliver’s.
Turn back. Who knows what you’ll find once you’re in that room. Not the tonic of discovery but the pall of despair when disenchantment has all but shamed every ill-stretched nerve in your body. The years are watching you now, every star you see tonight already knows your torment, your ancestors are gathered here and have nothing to give or say,
Non c’andà
, don’t go there.

But I loved the fear—if fear it really was—and this they didn’t know, my ancestors. It was the underside of fear I loved, like the smoothest wool found on the underbelly of the coarsest sheep. I loved the boldness that was pushing me forward; it aroused me, because it was born of arousal itself. “You’ll kill me if you stop”—or was it: “I’ll die if you stop.” Each time I heard these words, I couldn’t resist.

I knock on the glass panel, softly. My heart is beating like crazy. 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.

Instead, no sooner have I knocked on the glass panel than I hear something stir inside, like someone looking for his slippers. Then I make out a weak light going on. I remembered buying this night-light at Oxford with my father one evening early last spring when our hotel room was too dark and he had gone downstairs and come back up saying he’d been told there was a twenty-four-hour store that sold night-lights just around the corner.
Wait here, and I’ll be back in no time.
Instead, I said I’d go with him. I threw on my raincoat on top of the very same pajamas I was wearing tonight.

“I’m so glad you came,” he said. “I could hear you moving in your room and for a while I thought you were getting ready to go to bed and had changed your mind.”

“Me, change my mind? Of course I was coming.”

It was strange seeing him fussing awkwardly this way. I had expected a hailstorm of mini-ironies, which was why I was nervous. Instead, I was greeted with excuses, like someone apologizing for not having had time to buy better biscuits for afternoon tea.

I stepped into my old bedroom and was instantly taken aback by the smell which I couldn’t quite place, because it could have been a combination of so many things, until I noticed the rolled-up towel tucked under the bedroom door. He had been sitting in bed, a half-full ashtray sitting on his right pillow.

“Come in,” he said, and then shut the French window behind us. I must have been standing there, lifeless and frozen.

Both of us were whispering. A good sign.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Sometimes.” He went to the bed and sat squarely in the middle of it.

Not knowing what else to do or say, I muttered, “I’m nervous.”

“Me too.”

“Me more than you.”

He tried to smile away the awkwardness between us and passed me the reefer.

It gave me something to do.

I remembered how I’d almost hugged him on the balcony but had caught myself in time, thinking that an embrace after such chilly moments between us all day was unsuitable. Just because someone says he’ll see you at midnight doesn’t mean you’re automatically bound to hug him when you’ve barely shaken hands all week. I remembered thinking before knocking: To hug. Not to hug. To hug.

Now I was inside the room.

He was sitting on the bed, with his legs crossed. He looked smaller, younger. I was standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed, not knowing what to do with my hands. He must have seen me struggling to keep them on my hips and then put them in my pockets and then back to my hips again.

I look ridiculous, I thought. This and the would-be hug I’d suppressed and which I kept hoping he hadn’t noticed.

I felt like a child left alone for the first time with his homeroom teacher. “Come, sit.”

Did he mean on a chair or on the bed itself?

Hesitantly, I crawled onto the bed and sat facing him, cross-legged like him, as though this were the accepted protocol among men who meet at midnight. I was making sure our knees didn’t touch. Because he’d mind if our knees touched, just as he’d mind the hug, just as he minded when, for want of a better way to show I wanted to stay awhile longer on the berm, I’d placed my hand on his crotch.

But before I had a chance to exaggerate the distance between us, I felt as though washed by the sliding water on the flower shop’s storefront window, which took all my shyness and inhibitions away. Nervous or not nervous, I no longer cared to cross-examine every one of my impulses. If I’m stupid, let me be stupid. If I touch his knee, so I’ll touch his knee. If I want to hug, I’ll hug. I needed to lean against something, so I sidled up to the top of the bed and leaned my back against the headboard next to him.

I looked at the bed. I could see it clearly now. This was where I’d spent so many nights dreaming of just such a moment. Now here I was. In a few weeks, I’d be back here on this very same bed. I’d turn on my Oxford night-light and remember standing outside on the balcony, having caught the rustle of his feet scrambling to find his slippers. I wondered whether I would look back on this with sorrow. Or shame. Or indifference, I hoped.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Me okay.”

There was absolutely nothing to say. With my toes, I reached over to his toes and touched them. Then, without thinking, I slipped my big toe in between his big toe and his second toe. He did not recoil, he did not respond. I wanted to touch each toe with my own. Since I was sitting to his left, these were probably not the toes that had touched me at lunch the other day. It was his right foot that was guilty. I tried to reach it with my right foot, all the while avoiding touching both his knees, as if something told me knees were off bounds. “What are you doing?” he finally asked. “Nothing.” I didn’t know myself, but his body gradually began to reciprocate the movement, somewhat absentmindedly, without conviction, no less awkward than mine, as if to say,
What else is there to do but to respond in kind when someone touches your toes with his toes?
After that, I moved closer to him and then hugged him. A child’s hug which I hoped he’d read as an embrace. He did not respond. “That’s a start,” he finally said, perhaps with a tad more humor in his voice than I’d wish. Instead of speaking, I shrugged my shoulders, hoping he’d feel my shrug and not ask any more questions. I did not want us to speak. The less we spoke, the more unrestrained our movements. I liked hugging him.

“Does this make you happy?” he asked.

I nodded, hoping, once again, that he’d feel my head nodding without the need for words.

Finally, as if my position urged him to do likewise, he brought his arm around me. The arm didn’t stroke me, nor did it hold me tight. The last thing I wanted at this point was comradeship. Which was why, without interrupting my embrace, I loosened my hold for a moment, time enough to bring both my arms under his loose shirt and resume my embrace. I wanted his skin.

“You sure you want this?” he asked, as if this doubt was why he’d been hesitant all along.

I nodded again. I was lying. By then I wasn’t sure at all. I wondered when my hug would run its course, when I, or he, would grow tired of this. Soon? Later? Now?

“We haven’t talked,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, No need to.

He lifted my face with both hands and stared at me as we had done that day on the berm, this time even more intensely because both of us knew we’d already crossed the bar. “Can I kiss you?” What a question, coming after our kiss on the berm! Or had we wiped the slate clean and were starting all over again?

I did not give him an answer. Without nodding, I had already brought my mouth to his, just as I’d kissed Marzia the night before. Something unexpected seemed to clear away between us, and, for a second, it seemed there was absolutely no difference in age between us, just two men kissing, and even this seemed to dissolve, as I began to feel we were not even two men, just two beings. I loved the egalitarianism of the moment. I loved feeling younger and older, human to human, man to man, Jew to Jew. I loved the night-light. It made me feel snug and safe. As I’d felt that night in the hotel bedroom in Oxford. I even loved the stale, wan feel of my old bedroom, which was littered with his things but which somehow became more livable under his stewardship than mine: a picture here, a chair turned into an end table, books, cards, music.

I decided to get under the covers. I loved the smell. I wanted to love the smell. I even liked the fact that there were things on the bed that hadn’t been removed and which I kept kneeing into and didn’t mind encountering when I slipped a foot under them, because they were part of his bed, his life, his world.

He got under the covers too and, before I knew it, started to undress me. I had worried about how I’d go about undressing, how, if he wasn’t going to help, I’d do what so many girls did in the movies, take off my shirt, drop my pants, and just stand there, stark-naked, arms hanging down, meaning: This is who I am, this is how I’m made, here, take me, I’m yours. But his move had solved the problem. He was whispering, “Off, and off, and off, and off,” which made me laugh, and suddenly I was totally naked, feeling the weight of the sheet on my cock, not a secret left in the world, because wanting to be in bed with him was my only secret and here I was sharing it with him. How wonderful to feel his hands all over me under the sheets, as if part of us, like an advance scouting party, had already arrived at intimacy, while the rest of us, exposed outside the sheets, was still struggling with niceties, like latecomers stamping their feet in the cold while everyone else is warming hands inside a crowded nightclub. He was still dressed and I wasn’t. I loved being naked before him. Then he kissed me, and kissed me again, deeply this second time, as if he too was finally letting go. At some point I realized he’d been naked for a long while, though I hadn’t noticed him undress, but there he was, not a part of him wasn’t touching me. Where had I been? I’d been meaning to ask the tactful health question, but that too seemed to have been answered a while ago, because when I finally did find the courage to ask him, he replied, “I already told you, I’m okay.” “Did I tell you I was okay too?” “Yes.” He smiled. I looked away, because he was staring at me, and I knew I was flushed, and I knew I’d made a face, though I still wanted him to stare at me even if it embarrassed me, and I wanted to keep staring at him too as we settled in our mock wrestling position, his shoulders rubbing my knees. How far we had come from the afternoon when I’d taken off my underwear and put on his bathing suit and thought this was the closest his body would ever come to mine. Now this. I was on the cusp of something, but I also wanted it to last forever, because I knew there’d be no coming back from this. When it happened, it happened not as I’d dreamed it would, but with a degree of discomfort that forced me to reveal more of myself than I cared to reveal. I had an impulse to stop him, and when he noticed, he did ask, but I did not answer, or didn’t know what to answer, and an eternity seemed to pass between my reluctance to make up my mind and his instinct to make it up for me. From this moment on, I thought, from this moment on—I had, as I’d never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all of my life and I’d misplaced it and he had helped me find it. The dream had been right—this was like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life? which was another way of asking, Where were you in my childhood, Oliver? which was yet another way of asking, What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not he, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You’ll kill me if you stop, you’ll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from his mouth to my mouth back into his mouth, swapping words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me, softly at first, till he said, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” which I’d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.