Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (24 page)

The first thing I did after our telephone conversation was go up to my room and see what he could possibly have taken that would remind him of me. Then I saw the unyellowed blank spot on the wall. Bless him. He had taken a framed, antique postcard of Monet’s berm dating back to 1905 or so. One of our previous American summer residents had fished it out in a flee market in Paris two years ago and had mailed it to me as a souvenir. The faded colored postcard had originally been mailed in 1914—there were a few hasty, sepia-toned scribbles in German script on the back, addressed to a doctor in England, next to which the American student had inscribed his own greetings to me in black ink—
Think of me someday
. The picture would remind Oliver of the morning when I first spoke out. Or of the day when we rode by the berm pretending not to notice it. Or of that day we’d decided to picnic there and had vowed not to touch each other, the better to enjoy lying in bed together the same afternoon. I wanted him to have the picture before his eyes for all time, his whole life, in front of his desk, of his bed, everywhere. Nail it everywhere you go, I thought.

The mystery was resolved, as such things always are with me, in my sleep that night. It had never struck me until then. And yet it had been staring me in the face for two whole years. His name was Maynard. Early one afternoon, while he must have known everyone was resting, he had knocked at my window to see if I had black ink—he had run out, he said, and only used black ink, as he knew I did. He stepped in. I was wearing only a bathing suit and went to my desk and handed him the bottle. He stared at me, stood there for an awkward moment, and then took the bottle. That same evening he left the flask right outside my balcony door. Any other person would have knocked again and handed it back to me. I was fifteen then. But I wouldn’t have said no. In the course of one of our conversations I had told him about my favorite spot in the hills.

I had never thought of him until Oliver had lifted his picture.

A while after supper, I saw my father sitting at his usual place at the breakfast table. His chair was turned out and facing the sea, and on his lap were the proofs of his latest book. He was drinking his usual chamomile tea, enjoying the night. Next to him, three large citronella candles. The mosquitoes were out with a vengeance tonight. I went downstairs to join him. This was our usual time to sit together, and I had neglected him over the past month.

“Tell me about Rome,” he said as soon as he saw me ready to sit next to him. This was also the moment when he would allow himself his last smoke of the day. He put away his manuscript with something of a tired toss that suggested an eager
now-we-come-to-the-good-part
and proceeded to light his cigarette with a roguish gesture, using one of the citronella candles. “So?”

There was nothing to tell. I repeated what I’d told my mother: the hotel, the Capitol, Villa Borghese, San Clemente, restaurants.

“Eat well too?”

I nodded.

“And drank well too?”

Nodded again.

“Done things your grandfather would have approved of?” I laughed. No, not this time. I told him about the incident near the Pasquino. “What an idea, to vomit in front of the talking statue!

“Movies? Concerts?”

It began to creep over me that he might be leading somewhere, perhaps without quite knowing it himself. I became aware of this because, as he kept asking questions remotely approaching the subject, I began to sense that I was already applying evasive maneuvers well before what was awaiting us around the corner was even visible. I spoke about the perennially dirty, run-down conditions of Rome’s piazzas. The heat, the weather, traffic, too many nuns. Such-and-such a church closed down. Debris everywhere. Seedy renovations. And I complained about the people, and the tourists, and about the minibuses loading and unloading numberless hordes bearing cameras and baseball hats.

“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.