call me by your name

I'd never heard anyone use "later" to say goodbye before.

It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the

veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or

hear from you again.

It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear

it still today. Later!

I shut my eyes, say the word, and I'm back in Italy, so

many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway,

watching him step out of the cab, billowy blue shirt, wide-

open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere.

Suddenly he's shaking my hand, handing me his backpack,

removing his suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my

father is home.

It might have started right there and then: the shirt, the

rolled-up sleeves, the rounded balls of his heels slipping in

and out of his frayed espadrilles, eager to test the hot gravel

path that led to our house, every stride already asking,

Which way to the beach?

This summer's houseguest. Another bore.

Then, almost without thinking, and with his back already

turned to the car, he waves the back of his free hand and

utters a careless Later! to another passenger in the car who

has probably split the fare from the station. No name added,

no jest to smooth out the ruffled leave-taking, nothing. His

one-word send-off: brisk, bold, and blunted—take your pick,

he couldn't be bothered which.

You watch, I thought, this is how he'll say goodbye to us

when the time comes. With a gruff, slapdash Later!

Meanwhile, we'd have to put up with him for six long I was thoroughly intimidated. The unapproachable sort.

I could grow to like him, though. From rounded chin to

rounded heel. Then, within days, I would learn to hate him.

This, the very person whose photo on the application

form months earlier had leapt out with promises of instant

affinities.

Taking in summer guests was my parents' way of helping

young academics revise a manuscript before publication. For

six weeks each summer I'd have to vacate my bedroom and

move one room down the corridor into a much smaller room

that had once belonged to my grandfather. During the

winter months, when we were away in the city, it became a

part-time toolshed, storage room, and attic where rumor had

it my grandfather, my namesake, still ground his teeth in his

eternal sleep. Summer residents didn't have to pay

anything, were given the full run of the house, and could

basically do anything they pleased, provided they spent an

hour or so a day helping my father with his correspondence

and assorted paperwork. They became part of the family,

and after about fifteen years of doing this, we had gotten

used to a shower of postcards and gift packages not only

around Christmastime but all year long from people who

were now totally devoted to our family and would go out of

their way when they were in Europe to drop by B. for a day

or two with their family and take a nostalgic tour of their old

digs.

At meals there were frequently two or three other guests,

sometimes neighbors or relatives, sometimes colleagues,

lawyers, doctors, the rich and famous who'd drop by to see

my father on their way to their own summer houses.

Sometimes we'd even open our dining room to the

occasional tourist couple who'd heard of the old villa and

simply wanted to come by and take a peek and were totally enchanted when asked to eat with us and tell us all about

themselves, while Mafalda, informed at the last minute,

dished out her usual fare. My father, who was reserved and

shy in private, loved nothing better than to have some

precocious rising expert in a field keep the conversation

going in a few languages while the hot summer sun, after a

few glasses of rosatello, ushered in the unavoidable

afternoon torpor. We named the task dinner drudgery—and,

after a while, so did most of our six-week guests.

Maybe it started soon after his arrival during one of those

grinding lunches when he sat next to me and it finally

dawned on me that, despite a light tan acquired during his

brief stay in Sicily earlier that summer, the color on the

palms of his hands was the same as the pale, soft skin of his

soles, of his throat, of the bottom of his forearms, which

hadn't really been exposed to much sun. Almost a light pink,

as glistening and smooth as the underside of a lizard's belly.

Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete's face

or an instance of dawn on a stormy night. It told me things

about him I never knew to ask.

It may have started during those endless hours after

lunch when everybody lounged about in bathing suits inside

and outside the house, bodies sprawled everywhere, killing

time before someone finally suggested we head down to the

rocks for a swim. Relatives, cousins, neighbors, friends,

friends of friends, colleagues, or just about anyone who

cared to knock at our gate and ask if they could use our

tennis court—everyone was welcome to lounge and swim

and eat and, if they stayed long enough, use the

guesthouse. Or perhaps it started on the beach. Or at the tennis court. Or

during our first walk together on his very first day when I

was asked to show him the house and its surrounding area

and, one thing leading to the other, managed to take him

past the very old forged-iron metal gate as far back as the

endless empty lot in the hinterland toward the abandoned

train tracks that used to connect B. to N. "Is there an

abandoned station house somewhere?" he asked, looking

through the trees under the scalding sun, probably trying to

ask the right question of the owner's son. "No, there was

never a station house. The train simply stopped when you

asked." He was curious about the train; the rails seemed so

narrow. It was a two-wagon train bearing the royal insignia, I

explained. Gypsies lived in it now. They'd been living there

ever since my mother used to summer here as a girl. The

gypsies had hauled the two derailed cars farther inland. Did

he want to see them? "Later. Maybe." Polite indifference, as

if he'd spotted my misplaced zeal to play up to him and was

summarily pushing me away.

But it stung me.

Instead, he said he wanted to open an account in one of

the banks in B., then pay a visit to his Italian translator,

whom his Italian publisher had engaged for his book.

I decided to take him there by bike.

The conversation was no better on wheels than on foot.

Along the way, we stopped for something to drink. The

bartabaccheria was totally dark and empty. The owner was

mopping the floor with a powerful ammonia solution. We

stepped outside as soon as we could. A lonely blackbird,

sitting in a Mediterranean pine, sang a few notes that were

immediately drowned out by the rattle of the cicadas.

I took a long swill from a large bottle of mineral water,

passed it to him, then drank from it again. I spilled some on

my hand and rubbed my face with it, running my wet fingers

through my hair. The water was insufficiently cold, not fizzy

enough, leaving behind an unslaked likeness of thirst. What did one do around here?

Nothing. Wait for summer to end.

What did one do in the winter, then?

I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist

and said, "Don't tell me: wait for summer to come, right?"

I liked having my mind read. He'd pick up on dinner

drudgery sooner than those before him.

"Actually, in the winter the place gets very gray and dark.

We come for Christmas. Otherwise it's a ghost town."

"And what else do you do here at Christmas besides roast

chestnuts and drink eggnog?"

He was teasing. I offered the same smile as before. He

understood, said nothing, we laughed.

He asked what I did. I played tennis. Swam. Went out at

night. Jogged. Transcribed music. Read.

He said he jogged too. Early in the morning. Where did

one jog around here? Along the promenade, mostly. I could

show him if he wanted.

It hit me in the face just when I was starting to like him

again: "Later, maybe."

I had put reading last on my list, thinking that, with the

willful, brazen attitude he'd displayed so far, reading would

figure last on his. A few hours later, when I remembered that

he had just finished writing a book on Heraclitus and that

"reading" was probably not an insignificant part of his life, I

realized that I needed to perform some clever backpedaling

and let him know that my real interests lay right alongside

his. What unsettled me, though, was not the fancy footwork

needed to redeem myself. It was the unwelcome misgivings

with which it finally dawned on me, both then and during

our casual conversation by the train tracks, that I had all

along, without seeming to, without even admitting it,

already been trying—and failing—to win him over.

When I did offer—because all visitors loved the idea—to

take him to San Giacomo and walk up to the very top of the

belfry we nicknamed To-die-for, I should have known better than to just stand there without a comeback. I thought I'd

bring him around simply by taking him up there and letting

him take in the view of the town, the sea, eternity. But no.

Later!

But it might have started way later than I think without my

noticing anything at all. 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 was going for the devious smile that

would suddenly light up his face each time he'd read my

mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin.

At dinner on his third evening, I sensed that he was

staring at me as I was explaining Haydn's Seven Last Words

of Christ, which I'd been transcribing. I was seventeen that

year and, being the youngest at the table and the least

likely to be listened to, I had developed the habit of

smuggling as much information into the fewest possible

words. I spoke fast, which gave people the impression that I

was always flustered and muffling my words. After I had

finished explaining my transcription, I became aware of the

keenest glance coming from my left. It thrilled and flattered

me; he was obviously interested—he liked me. It hadn't

been as difficult as all that, then. But when, after taking my

time, I finally turned to face him and take in his glance, I met a cold and icy glare—something at once hostile and

vitrified that bordered on cruelty.

It undid me completely. What had I done to deserve this?

I wanted him to be kind to me again, to laugh with me as he

had done just a few days earlier on the abandoned train

tracks, or when I'd explained to him that same afternoon

that B. was the only town in Italy where the corriera, the

regional bus line, carrying Christ, whisked by without ever

stopping. He had immediately laughed and recognized the

veiled allusion to Carlo Levi's book. 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.

He was going to be a difficult neighbor. Better stay away

from him, I thought. To think that I had almost fallen for the

skin of his hands, his chest, his feet that had never touched

a rough surface in their existence—and his eyes, which,

when their other, kinder gaze fell on you, came like the

miracle of the Resurrection. You could never stare long

enough but needed to keep staring to find out why you

couldn't.

I must have shot him a similarly wicked glance.

For two days our conversations came to a sudden halt.

On the long balcony that both our bedrooms shared, total

avoidance: just a makeshift hello, good morning, nice

weather, shallow chitchat.

Then, without explanation, things resumed.

Did I want to go jogging this morning? No, not really.

Well, let's swim, then.

Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new,

the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the

fumbling around people I might misread and don't want to

lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate

cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted

by, the screens I put up as though between me and the

world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never

really coded in the first place—all these started the summer

Oliver came into our house. 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.

Or perhaps it started after his first week, when I was thrilled

to see he still remembered who I was, that he didn't ignore

me, and that, therefore, I could allow myself the luxury of

passing him on my way to the garden and not having to

pretend I was unaware of him. We jogged early on the first

morning—all the way up to B. and back. Early the next

morning we swam. Then, the day after, we jogged again. I

liked racing by the milk delivery van when it was far from

done with its rounds, or by the grocer and the baker as they

were just getting ready for business, liked to run along the

shore and the promenade when there wasn't a soul about

yet and our house seemed a distant mirage. 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.

This alternation of running and swimming was simply his

"routine" in graduate school. Did he run on the Sabbath? I

joked. He always exercised, even when he was sick; he'd

exercise in bed if he had to. Even when he'd slept with

someone new the night before, he said, he'd still head out

for a jog early in the morning. The only time he didn't

exercise was when they operated on him. When I asked him what for, the answer I had promised never to incite in him

came at me like the thwack of a jack-in-the-box wearing a

baleful smirk. "Later."

Perhaps he was out of breath and didn't want to talk too

much or just wanted to concentrate on his swimming or his

running. Or perhaps it was his way of spurring me to do the

same—totally harmless.

But there was something at once chilling and off-putting

in the sudden distance that crept between us in the most

unexpected moments. It was almost as though he were

doing it on purpose; feeding me slack, and more slack, and

then yanking away any semblance of fellowship.

The steely gaze always returned. One day, while I was

practicing my guitar at what had become "my table" in the

back garden by the pool and he was lying nearby on the

grass, I recognized the gaze right away. He had been staring

at me while I was focusing on the fingerboard, and when I

suddenly raised my face to see if he liked what I was

playing, there it was: cutting, cruel, like a glistening blade

instantly retracted the moment its victim caught sight of it.

He gave me a bland smile, as though to say, No point hiding

it now.

Stay away from him.

He must have noticed I was shaken and in an effort to

make it up to me began asking me questions about the

guitar. I was too much on my guard to answer him with

candor. Meanwhile, hearing me scramble for answers made

him suspect that perhaps more was amiss than I was

showing. "Don't bother explaining. Just play it again." But I

thought you hated it. Hated it? Whatever gave you that

idea? We argued back and forth. "Just play it, will you?" "The

same one?" "The same one."

I stood up and walked into the living room, leaving the

large French windows open so that he might hear me play it

on the piano. He followed me halfway and, leaning on the

windows' wooden frame, listened for a while. "You changed it. It's not the same. What did you do to

it?"

"I just played it the way Liszt would have played it had he

jimmied around with it."

"Just play it again, please!"

I liked the way he feigned exasperation. So I started

playing the piece again.

After a while: "I can't believe you changed it again."

"Well, not by much. This is just how Busoni would have

played it if he had altered Liszt's version."

"Can't you just play the Bach the way Bach wrote it?"

"But Bach never wrote it for guitar. He may not even have

written it for the harpsichord. In fact, we're not even sure it's

by Bach at all."

"Forget I asked."

"Okay, okay. No need to get so worked up," I said. It was

my turn to feign grudging acquiescence. "This is the Bach as

transcribed by me without Busoni and Liszt. It's a very

young Bach and it's dedicated to his brother."

I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred

him the first time, and each time I played it, I was sending it

to him as a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him,

as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take

no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an

extended cadenza. Just for him.

We were—and he must have recognized the signs long

before I did—flirting.

Later that evening in my diary, I wrote: I was exaggerating

when I said I thought you hated the piece. What I meant to

say was: I thought you hated me. I was hoping you'd

persuade me of the opposite—and you did, for a while. Why

won't I believe it tomorrow morning? 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.

What I forgot to earmark in that promise was that ice and

apathy have ways of instantly repealing all truces and

resolutions signed in sunnier moments.

Then came that July Sunday afternoon when our house

suddenly emptied, and we were the only ones there, and fire

tore through my guts—because "fire" was the first and

easiest word that came to me later that same evening when

I tried to make sense of it in my diary. I'd waited and waited

in my room pinioned to my bed in a trancelike state of terror

and anticipation. Not a fire of passion, not a ravaging fire,

but something paralyzing, like the fire of cluster bombs that

suck up the oxygen around them and leave you panting

because you've been kicked in the gut and a vacuum has

ripped up every living lung tissue and dried your mouth,

and you hope nobody speaks, because you can't talk, and

you pray no one asks you to move, because your heart is

clogged and beats so fast it would sooner spit out shards of

glass than let anything else flow through its narrowed

chambers. Fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and I'll die if he doesn'that you were suddenly gone and though it seemed too true

to be a dream, yet I was convinced that all I wanted from

that day onward was for you to do the exact same thing

you'd done in my sleep.

The next day we were playing doubles, and during a break,

as we were drinking Mafalda's lemonades, he put his free

arm around me and then gently squeezed his thumb and

forefingers into my shoulder in imitation of a friendly hug-

massage—the whole thing very chummy-chummy. But I was

so spellbound that I wrenched myself free from his touch,

because a moment longer and I would have slackened like

one of those tiny wooden toys whose gimp-legged body

collapses as soon as the mainsprings are touched. Taken

aback, he apologized and asked if he had pressed a "nerve

or something"—he hadn't meant to hurt me. He must have

felt thoroughly mortified if he suspected he had either hurt

me or touched me the wrong way. The last thing I wanted

was to discourage him. Still, I blurted something like, "It

didn't hurt," and would have dropped the matter there. But I

sensed that if it wasn't pain that had prompted such a

reaction, what other explanation could account for my

shrugging him off so brusquely in front of my friends? So I

mimicked the face of someone trying very hard, but failing,

to smother a grimace of pain.

It never occurred to me that what had totally panicked

me when he touched me was exactly what startles virgins on

being touched for the first time by the person they desire:

he stirs nerves in them they never knew existed and that

produce far, far more disturbing pleasures than they are

used to on their own.

He still seemed surprised by my reaction but gave every

sign of believing in, as I of concealing, the pain around my

shoulder. It was his way of letting me off the hook and of pretending he wasn't in the least bit aware of any nuance in

my reaction. Knowing, as I later came to learn, how

thoroughly trenchant was his ability to sort contradictory

signals, I have no doubt that he must have already

suspected something. "Here, let me make it better." He was

testing me and proceeded to massage my shoulder. "Relax,"

he said in front of the others. "But I am relaxing." "You're as

stiff as this bench. Feel this," he said to Marzia, one of the

girls closest to us. "It's all knots." I felt her hands on my

back. "Here," he ordered, pressing her flattened palm hard

against my back. "Feel it? He should relax more," he said.

"You should relax more," she repeated.

Perhaps, in this, as with everything else, because I didn't

know how to speak in code, I didn't know how to speak at

all. I felt like a deaf and dumb person who can't even use

sign language. I stammered all manner of things so as not to

speak my mind. That was the extent of my code. So long as I

had breath to put words in my mouth, I could more or less

carry it off. Otherwise, the silence between us would

probably give me away—which was why anything, even the

most spluttered nonsense, was preferable to silence. Silence

would expose me. But what was certain to expose me even

more was my struggle to overcome it in front of others.

The despair aimed at myself must have given my

features something bordering on impatience and unspoken

rage. That he might have mistaken these as aimed at him

never crossed my mind.

Maybe it was for similar reasons that I would look away

each time he looked at me: to conceal the strain on my

timidity. That he might have found my avoidance offensive

and retaliated with a hostile glance from time to time never

crossed my mind either.

What I hoped he hadn't noticed in my overreaction to his

grip was something else. Before shirking off his arm, I knew I

had yielded to his hand and had almost leaned into it, as if

to say—as I'd heard adults so often say when someone happened to massage their shoulders while passing behind

them—Don't stop. Had he noticed I was ready not just to

yield but to mold into his body?

This was the feeling I took to my diary that night as well: I

called it the "swoon." Why had I swooned? And could it

happen so easily—just let him touch me somewhere and I'd

totally go limp and will-less? Was this what people meant by

butter melting?

And why wouldn't I show him how like butter I was?

Because I was afraid of what might happen then? Or was I

afraid he would have laughed at me, told everyone, or

ignored the whole thing on the pretext I was too young to

know what I was doing? Or was it because if he so much as

suspected—and anyone who suspected would of necessity

be on the same wavelength—he might be tempted to act on

it? Did I want him to act? Or would I prefer a lifetime of

longing provided we both kept this little Ping-Pong game

going: not knowing, not-not knowing, not-not-not knowing?

Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can't say "yes," don't

say "no," say "later." 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?

I look back to that summer and can't believe that despite

every one of my efforts to live with the "fire" and the

"swoon," life still granted wonderful moments. Italy.

Summer. The noise of the cicadas in the early afternoon. My

room. His room. Our balcony that shut the whole world out.

The soft wind trailing exhalations from our garden up the

stairs to my bedroom. 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. I could have denied so many things—that I longed to

touch his knees and wrists when they glistened in the sun

with that viscous sheen I've seen in so very few; that I loved

how his white tennis shorts seemed perpetually stained by

the color of clay, which, as the weeks wore on, became the

color of his skin; that his hair, turning blonder every day,

caught the sun before the sun was completely out in the

morning; that his billowy blue shirt, becoming ever more

billowy when he wore it on gusty days on the patio by the

pool, promised to harbor a scent of skin and sweat that

made me hard just thinking of it. All this I could have

denied. And believed my denials.

But it was the gold necklace and the Star of David with a

golden mezuzah on his neck that told me here was

something more compelling than anything I wanted from

him, for it bound us and reminded me that, while everything

else conspired to make us the two most dissimilar beings,

this at least transcended all differences. I saw his star almost

immediately during his first day with us. And from that

moment on I knew that what mystified me and made me

want to seek out his friendship, without ever hoping to find

ways to dislike him, was larger than anything either of us

could ever want from the other, larger and therefore better

than his soul, my body, or earth itself. Staring at his neck

with its star and telltale amulet was like staring at

something timeless, ancestral, immortal in me, in him, in

both of us, begging to be rekindled and brought back from

its millenary sleep.

What baffled me was that he didn't seem to care or notice

that I wore one too. Just as he probably didn't care or notice

each time my eyes wandered along his bathing suit and

tried to make out the contour of what made us brothers in

the desert.

With the exception of my family, he was probably the

only other Jew who had ever set foot in B. But unlike us he

let you see it from the very start. We were not conspicuous Jews. We wore our Judaism as people do almost everywhere

in the world: under the shirt, not hidden, but tucked away.

"Jews of discretion," to use my mother's words. To see

someone proclaim his Judaism on his neck as Oliver did

when he grabbed one of our bikes and headed into town

with his shirt wide open shocked us as much as it taught us

we could do the same and get away with it. I tried imitating

him a few times. But I was too self-conscious, like someone

trying to feel natural while walking about naked in a locker

room only to end up aroused by his own nakedness. In town,

I tried flaunting my Judaism with the silent bluster that

comes less from arrogance than from repressed shame. Not

him. It's not that he never thought about being Jewish or

about the life of Jews in a Catholic country. Sometimes we

spoke about just this topic during those long afternoons

when both of us would put aside work and enjoy chatting

while the entire household and guests had all drifted into

every available bedroom to rest for a few hours. He had lived

long enough in small towns in New England to know what it

felt like to be the odd Jew out. But Judaism never troubled

him the way it troubled me, nor was it the subject of an

abiding, metaphysical discomfort with himself and the

world. It did not even harbor the mystical, unspoken promise

of redemptive brotherhood. And perhaps this was why he

wasn't ill at ease with being Jewish and didn't constantly

have to pick at it, the way children pick at scabs they wish

would go away. He was okay with being Jewish. He was okay

with himself, the way he was okay with his body, with his

looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books,

music, films, friends. He was okay with losing his prized

Mont Blanc pen. "I can buy another one just like it." He was

okay with criticism too. He showed my father a few pages he

was proud of having written. My father told him his insights

into Heraclitus were brilliant but needed firming up, that he

needed to accept the paradoxical nature of the

philosopher's thinking, not simply explain it away. He was okay with firming things up, he was okay with paradox. Back

to the drawing board—he was okay with the drawing board

as well. He invited my young aunt for a tête-à-tête midnight

gita—spin—in our motorboat. She declined. That was okay.

He tried again a few days later, was turned down again, and

again made light of it. She too was okay with it, and, had she

spent another week with us, would probably have been okay

with going out to sea for a midnight gita that could easily

have lasted till sunrise.

Only once during his very first few days did I get a sense

that this willful but accommodating, laid-back, water-over-

my-back, unflappable, unfazed twenty-four-year-old who was

so heedlessly okay with so many things in life was, in fact, a

thoroughly alert, cold, sagacious judge of character and

situations. Nothing he did or said was unpremeditated. He

saw through everybody, but he saw through them precisely

because the first thing he looked for in people was the very

thing he had seen in himself and may not have wished

others to see. He was, as my mother was scandalized to

learn one day, a supreme poker player who'd escape into

town at night twice a week or so to "play a few hands." This

was why, to our complete surprise, he had insisted on

opening a bank account on the very day of his arrival. None

of our residents had ever had a local bank account. Most

didn't have a penny.

It had happened during a lunch when my father had

invited a journalist who had dabbled in philosophy in his

youth and wanted to show that, though he had never

written about Heraclitus, he could still spar on any matter

under the sun. He and Oliver didn't hit it off. Afterward, my

father had said, "A very witty man—damn clever too." "Do

you really think so, Pro?" Oliver interrupted, unaware that

my father, while very easygoing himself, did not always like

being contradicted, much less being called Pro, though he

went along with both. "Yes, I do," insisted my father. "Well,

I'm not sure I agree at all. I find him arrogant, dull, flat footed, and coarse. He uses humor and a lot of voice"—

Oliver mimicked the man's gravitas—"and broad gestures to

nudge his audience because he is totally incapable of

arguing a case. The voice thing is so over the top, Pro.

People laugh at his humor not because he is funny but

because he telegraphs his desire to be funny. His humor is

nothing more than a way of winning over people he can't

persuade.

"If you look at him when you're speaking, he always looks

away, he's not listening, he's just itching to say things he's

rehearsed while you were speaking and wants to say before

he forgets them."

How could anyone intuit the manner of someone's

thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this

same mode of thinking? How could he perceive so many

devious turns in others unless he had practiced them

himself?

What struck me was not just his amazing gift for reading

people, for rummaging inside them and digging out the

precise configuration of their personality, but his ability to

intuit things in exactly the way I myself might have intuited

them. This, in the end, was what drew me to him with a

compulsion that overrode desire or friendship or the

allurements of a common religion. "How about catching a

movie?" he blurted out one evening when we were all sitting

together, as if he'd suddenly hit on a solution to what

promised to be a dull night indoors. We had just left the

dinner table where my father, as was his habit these days,

had been urging me to try to go out with friends more often,

especially in the evening. It bordered on a lecture. Oliver

was still new with us and knew no one in town, so I must

have seemed as good a movie partner as any. But he had

asked his question in far too breezy and spontaneous a

manner, as though he wanted me and everyone else in the

living room to know that he was hardly invested in going to

the movies and could just as readily stay home and go over his manuscript. The carefee inflection of his offer, however,

was also a wink aimed at my father: he was only pretending

to have come up with the idea; in fact, without letting me

suspect it, he was picking up on my father's advice at the

dinner table and was offering to go for my benefit alone.

I smiled, not at the offer, but at the double-edged

maneuver. He immediately caught my smile. And having

caught it, smiled back, almost in self-mockery, sensing that

if he gave any sign of guessing I'd seen through his ruse

he'd be confirming his guilt, but that refusing to own up to

it, after I'd made clear I'd intercepted it, would indict him

even more. So he smiled to confess he'd been caught but

also to show he was a good enough sport to own up to it and

still enjoy going to the movies together. The whole thing

thrilled me.

Or perhaps his smile was his way of countering my

reading tit for tat with the unstated suggestion that, much

as he'd been caught trying to affect total casualness on the

face of his offer, he too had found something to smile about

in me—namely, the shrewd, devious, guilty pleasure I

derived in finding so many imperceptible affinities between

us. There may have been nothing there, and I might have

invented the whole thing. But both of us knew what the

other had seen. That evening, as we biked to the movie

theater, I was—and I didn't care to hide it—riding on air.

So, with so much insight, would he not have noticed the

meaning behind my abrupt shrinking away from his hand?

Not notice that I'd leaned into his grip? Not know that I

didn't want him to let go of me? Not sense that when he

started massaging me, my inability to relax was my last

refuge, my last defense, my last pretense, that I had by no

means resisted, that mine was fake resistance, that I was

incapable of resisting and would never want to resist, no

matter what he did or asked me to do? Not know, as I sat on

my bed that Sunday afternoon when no one was home

except for the two of us and watched him enter my room and ask me why I wasn't with the others at the beach, that if

I refused to answer and simply shrugged my shoulders

under his gaze, it was simply so as not to show that I

couldn't gather sufficient breath to speak, that if I so much

as let out a sound it might be to utter a desperate

confession or a sob—one or the other? Never, since

childhood, had anyone brought me to such a pass. Bad

allergy, I'd said. Me too, he replied. We probably have the

same one. Again I shrugged my shoulders. He picked up my

old teddy bear in one hand, turned its face toward him, and

whispered something into its ear. Then, turning the teddy's

face to me and altering his voice, asked, "What's wrong?

You're upset." By then he must have noticed the bathing

suit I was wearing. Was I wearing it lower than was decent?

"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. Just stay with me.

Let your hand travel wherever it wishes, take my suit off,

take me, I won't make a noise, won't tell a soul, I'm hard and

you know it, and if you won't, I'll take that hand of yours and

slip it into my suit now and let you put as many fingers as

you want inside me.

He wouldn't have picked up on any of this?

He said he was going to change and walked out of my

room. "I'll meet you downstairs." When I looked at my

crotch, to my complete dismay I saw it was damp. Had he

seen it? Surely he must have. That's why he wanted us to go

to the beach. That's why he walked out of my room. I hit my

head with my fist. How could I have been so careless, so

thoughtless, so totally stupid? Of course he'd seen. I should have learned to do what he'd have done. Shrugged

my shoulders—and been okay with pre-come. But that

wasn't me. It would never have occurred to me to say, So

what if he saw? Now he knows.

What never crossed my mind was that someone else who

lived under our roof, who played cards with my mother, ate

breakfast and supper at our table, recited the Hebrew

blessing on Fridays for the sheer fun of it, slept in one of our

beds, used our towels, shared our friends, watched TV with

us on rainy days when we sat in the living room with a

blanket around us because it got cold and we felt so snug

being all together as we listened to the rain patter against

the windows—that someone else in my immediate world

might like what I liked, want what I wanted, be who I was. It

would never have entered my mind because I was still under

the illusion that, barring what I'd read in books, inferred

from rumors, and overheard in bawdy talk all over, no one

my age had ever wanted to be both man and woman—with

men and women. I had wanted other men my age before and

had slept with women. But before he'd stepped out of the

cab and walked into our home, it would never have seemed

remotely possible that someone so thoroughly okay with

himself might want me to share his body as much as I ached

to yield up mine.

And yet, about two weeks after his arrival, all I wanted

every night was for him to leave his room, not via its front

door, but through the French windows on our balcony. I

wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the

balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was

never locked, being pushed open as he'd step into my room

after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers,

undress me without asking, and after making me want him

more than I thought I could ever want another living soul,

gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to

another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I'd been rehearsing for days now, Please,

don't hurt me, pelling skin from his tanned shoulders, which had acquired the light

golden hue of a wheat field in late June. How I wished I could

do that.

"Tell his father that I crumpled his papers. See what he

says then."

Looking over his manuscript, which Oliver had left on the

large dining table on his way upstairs, Chiara shouted from

below that she could do a better job translating these pages

than the local translator. A child of expats like me, Chiara

had an Italian mother and an American father. She spoke

English and Italian with both.

"Do you type good too?" came his voice from upstairs as

he rummaged for another bathing suit in his bedroom, then

in the shower, doors slamming, drawers thudding, shoes

kicked.

"I type good," she shouted, looking up into the empty

stairwell.

"As good as you speak good?"

"Bettah. And I'd'a gave you a bettah price too."

"I need five pages translated per day, to be ready for

pickup every morning."

"Then I won't do nu'in for you," snapped Chiara. "Find

yuhsef somebuddy else."

"Well, Signora Milani needs the money," he said, coming

downstairs, billowy blue shirt, espadrilles, red trunks,

sunglasses, and the red Loeb edition of Lucretius that never

left his side. "I'm okay with her," he said as he rubbed some

lotion on his shoulders.

"I'm okay with her," Chiara said, tittering. "I'm okay with

you, you're okay with me, she's okay with him—"

"Stop clowning and let's go swimming," said Chiara's

sister.

He had, it took me a while to realize, four personalities

depending on which bathing suit he was wearing. Knowing

which to expect gave me the illusion of a slight advantage.

Red: bold, set in his ways, very grown-up, almost gruff and ill-tempered—stay away. Yellow: sprightly, buoyant, funny,

not without barbs—don't give in too easily; might turn to red

in no time. Green, which he seldom wore: acquiescent, eager

to learn, eager to speak, sunny—why wasn't he always like

this? Blue: the afternoon he stepped into my room from the

balcony, the day he massaged my shoulder, or when he

picked up my glass and placed it right next to me.

Today was red: he was hasty, determined, snappy.

On his way out, he grabbed an apple from a large bowl of

fruit, uttered a cheerful "Later, Mrs. P." to my mother, who

was sitting with two friends in the shade, all three of them in

bathing suits, and, rather than open the gate to the narrow

stairway leading to the rocks, jumped over it. None of our

summer guests had ever been as freewheeling. But

everyone loved him for it, the way everyone grew to love

Later!

"Okay, Oliver, later, okay," said my mother, trying to

speak his lingo, having even grown to accept her new title

as Mrs. P. There was always something abrupt about that

word. It wasn't "See you later" or "Take care, now," or even

"Ciao." Later! was a chilling, slam-dunk salutation that

shoved aside all our honeyed European niceties. Later!

always left a sharp aftertaste to what until then may have

been a warm, heart-to-heart moment. Later! didn't close

things neatly or allow them to trail off. It slammed them

shut.

But Later! was also a way of avoiding saying goodbye, of

making light of all goodbyes. You said Later! not to mean

farewell but to say you'd be back in no time. It was the

equivalent of his saying "Just a sec" when my mother once

asked him to pass the bread and he was busy pulling apart

the fish bones on his plate. "Just a sec." My mother, who

hated what she called his Americanisms, ended up calling

him Il cauboi—the cowboy. It started as a putdown and soon

enough became an endearment, to go along with her other

nickname for him, conferred during his first week, when he came down to the dinner table after showering, his

glistening hair combed back. La star, she had said, short for

la muvi star. My father, always the most indulgent among

us, but also the most observant, had figured the cauboi out.

"É un timido, he's shy, that's why," he said when asked to

explain Oliver's abrasive Later!

Oliver timido? That was new. Could all of his gruff

Americanisms be nothing more than an exaggerated way of

covering up the simple fact that he didn't know—or feared

he didn't know—how to take his leave gracefully? It

reminded me of how for days he had refused to eat soft-

boiled eggs in the morning. By the fourth or fifth day,

Mafalda insisted he couldn't leave the region without tasting

our eggs. He finally consented, only to admit, with a touch of

genuine embarrassment that he never bothered to conceal,

that he didn't know how to open a soft-boiled egg. "Lasci

fare a me, Signor Ulliva, leave it to me," she said. From that

morning on and well into his stay with us, she would bring

Ulliva two eggs and stop serving everyone until she had

sliced open the shell of both his eggs.

Did he perhaps want a third? she asked. Some people

liked more than two eggs. No, two would do, he replied, and,

turning to my parents, added, "I know myself. If I have three,

I'll have a fourth, and more." I had never heard someone his

age say, I know myself. It intimidated me.

But she had been won over well before, on his third

morning with us, when she asked him if he liked juice in the

morning, and he'd said yes. He was probably expecting

orange or grapefruit juice; what he got was a large glass

filled to the rim with thick apricot juice. He had never had

apricot juice in his life. She stood facing him with her salver

flat against her apron, trying to make out his reaction as he

quaffed it down. He said nothing at first. Then, probably

without thinking, he smacked his lips. She was in heaven.

My mother couldn't believe that people who taught at world-

famous universities smacked their lips after downing apricot juice. From that day on, a glass of the stuff was waiting for

him every morning.

He was baffled to know that apricot trees existed in, of all

places, our orchard. On late afternoons, when there was

nothing to do in the house, Mafalda would ask him to climb

a ladder with a basket and pick those fruits that were almost

blushing with shame, she said. He would joke in Italian, pick

one out, and ask, Is this one blushing with shame? No, she

would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame,

shame comes with age.

I shall never forget watching him from my table as he

climbed the small ladder wearing his red bathing trunks,

taking forever to pick the ripest apricots. On his way to the

kitchen—wicker basket, espadrilles, billowy shirt, suntan

lotion, and all—he threw me a very large one, saying,

"Yours," in just the same way he'd throw a tennis ball across

the court and say, "Your serve." Of course, he had no idea

what I'd been thinking minutes earlier, but the firm, rounded

cheeks of the apricot with their dimple in the middle

reminded me of how his body had stretched across the

boughs of the tree with his tight, rounded ass echoing the

color and the shape of the fruit. Touching the apricot was

like touching him. He would never know, just as the people

we buy the newspaper from and then fantasize about all

night have no idea that this particular inflection on their

face or that tan along their exposed shoulder will give us no

end of pleasure when we're alone.

Yours, like Later!, had an off-the-cuff, unceremonious,

here, catch quality that reminded me how twisted and

secretive my desires were compared to the expansive

spontaneity of everything about him. It would never have

occurred to him that in placing the apricot in my palm he

was giving me his ass to hold or that, in biting the fruit, I

was also biting into that part of his body that must have

been fairer than the rest because it never apricated—and

near it, if I dared to bite that far, his apricock. In fact, he knew more about apricots than we did—their

grafts, etymology, origins, fortunes in and around the

Mediterranean. At the breakfast table that morning, my

father explained that the name for the fruit came from the

Arabic, since the word—in Italian, albicocca, abricot in

French, aprikose in German, like the words "algebra,"

"alchemy," and "alcohol"—was derived from an Arabic noun

combined with the Arabic article al- before it. The origin of

albicocca was al-birquq. My father, who couldn't resist not

leaving well enough alone and needed to top his entire

performance with a little fillip of more recent vintage, added

that what was truly amazing was that, in Israel and in many

Arab countries nowadays, the fruit is referred to by a totally

different name: mishmish.

My mother was nonplussed. We all, including my two

cousins who were visiting that week, had an impulse to clap.

On the matter of etymologies, however, Oliver begged to

differ. "Ah?!" was my father's startled response.

"The word is actually not an Arabic word," he said.

"How so?"

My father was clearly mimicking Socratic irony, which

would start with an innocent "You don't say," only then to

lead his interlocutor onto turbulent shoals.

"It's a long story, so bear with me, Pro." Suddenly Oliver

had become serious. "Many Latin words are derived from the

Greek. In the case of 'apricot,' however, it's the other way

around; the Greek takes over from Latin. The Latin word was

praecoquum, from pre-coquere, pre-cook, to ripen early, as

in 'precocious,' meaning premature.

"The Byzantines borrowed praecox, and it became

prekokkia or berikokki, which is finally how the Arabs must

have inherited it as al-birquq."

My mother, unable to resist his charm, reached out to him

and tousled his hair and said, "Che muvi star!"

"He is right, there is no denying it," said my father under

his breath, as though mimicking the part of a cowered Galileo forced to mutter the truth to himself.

"Courtesy of Philology 101," said Oliver.

All I kept thinking of was apricock precock, precock

apricock.

One day I saw Oliver sharing the same ladder with the

gardener, trying to learn all he could about Anchise's grafts,

which explained why our apricots were larger, fleshier,

juicier than most apricots in the region. He became

fascinated with the grafts, especially when he discovered

that the gardener could spend hours sharing everything he

knew about them with anyone who cared to ask.

Oliver, it turned out, knew more about all manner of

foods, cheeses, and wines than all of us put together. Even

Mafalda was wowed and would, on occasion, defer to his

opinion—Do you think I should lightly fry the paste with

either onions or sage? Doesn't it taste too lemony now? I

ruined it, didn't I? I should have added an extra egg—it's not

holding! Should I use the new blender or should I stick to

the old mortar and pestle? My mother couldn't resist

throwing in a barb or two. Like all caubois, she said: they

know everything there is to know about food, because they

can't hold a knife and fork properly. Gourmet aristocrats with

plebian manners. Feed him in the kitchen.

With pleasure, Mafalda would have replied. And indeed,

one day when he arrived very late for lunch after spending

the morning with his translator, there was Signor Ulliva in

the kitchen, eating spaghetti and drinking dark red wine

with Mafalda, Manfredi, her husband and our driver, and

Anchise, all of them trying to teach him a Neapolitan song. It

was not only the national hymn of their southern youth, but

it was the best they could offer when they wished to

entertain royalty.

Everyone was won over. Chiara, I could tell, was equally smitten. Her sister as well.

Even the crowd of tennis bums who for years had come early

every afternoon before heading out to the beach for a late

swim would stay much later than usual hoping to catch a

quick game with him.

With any of our other summer residents I would have

resented it. But seeing everyone take such a liking to him, I

found a strange, small oasis of peace. What could possibly

be wrong with liking someone everyone else liked? Everyone

had fallen for him, including my first and second cousins as

well as my other relatives, who stayed with us on weekends

and sometimes longer. For someone known to love spotting

defects in everyone else, I derived a certain satisfaction from

concealing my feelings for him behind my usual

indifference, hostility, or spite for anyone in a position to

outshine me at home. Because everyone liked him, I had to

say I liked him too. I was like men who openly declare other

men irresistibly handsome the better to conceal that they're

aching to embrace them. To withhold universal approval

would simply alert others that I had concealed motives for

needing to resist him. Oh, I like him very much, I said during

his first ten days when my father asked me what I thought of

him. I had used words intentionally compromising because I

knew no one would suspect a false bottom in the arcane

palette of shadings I applied to everything I said about him.

He's the best person I've known in my life, I said on the

night when the tiny fishing boat on which he had sailed out

with Anchise early that afternoon failed to return and we

were scrambling to find his parents' telephone number in

the States in case we had to break the terrible news.

On that day I even urged myself to let down my

inhibitions and show my grief the way everyone else was

showing theirs. But I also did it so none might suspect I

nursed sorrows of a far more secret and more desperate kind

—until I realized, almost to my shame, that part of me didn't

mind his dying, that there was even something almost exciting in the thought of his bloated, eyeless body finally

showing up on our shores.

But I wasn't fooling myself. I was convinced that no one

in the world wanted him as physically as I did; nor was

anyone willing to go the distance I was prepared to travel for

him. No one had studied every bone in his body, ankles,

knees, wrists, fingers, and toes, no one lusted after every

ripple of muscle, no one took him to bed every night and on

spotting him in the morning lying in his heaven by the pool,

smiled at him, watched a smile come to his lips, and

thought, Did you know I came in your mouth last night?

Perhaps even the others nursed an extra something for

him, which each concealed and displayed in his or her own

way. Unlike the others, though, I was the first to spot him

when he came into the garden from the beach or when the

flimsy silhouette of his bicycle, blurred in the midafternoon

mist, would appear out of the alley of pines leading to our

house. I was the first to recognize his steps when he arrived

late at the movie theater one night and stood there looking

for the rest of us, not uttering a sound until I turned around

knowing he'd be overjoyed I'd spotted him. I recognized him

by the inflection of his footfalls up the stairway to our

balcony or on the landing outside my bedroom door. I knew

when he stopped outside my French windows, as if debating

whether to knock and then thinking twice, and continued

walking. I knew it was he riding a bicycle by the way the

bike skidded ever so mischievously on the deep gravel path

and still kept going when it was obvious there couldn't be

any traction left, only to come to a sudden, bold, determined

stop, with something of a declarative voilà in the way he

jumped off.

I always tried to keep him within my field of vision. I

never let him drift away from me except when he wasn't

with me. 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.

Just a kid.

He simply doled out his attention when the occasion

suited him. When he came to my assistance to help me

understand a fragment by Heraclitus, because I was

determined to read "his" author, the words that sprang to

me were not "gentleness" or "generosity" but "patience"

and "forbearance," which ranked higher. Moments later,

when he asked if I liked a book I was reading, his question

was prompted less by curiosity than by an opportunity for

casual chitchat. Everything was casual.

He was okay with casual.

How come you're not at the beach with the others?

Go back to your plunking.

Later!

Yours!

Just making conversation.

Casual chitchat.

Nothing.

Oliver was receiving many invitations to other houses. This

had become something of a tradition with our other summer

residents as well. My father always wanted them to feel free

to "talk" their books and expertise around town. He also

believed that scholars should learn how to speak to the

layman, which was why he always had lawyers, doctors,

businessmen over for meals. Everyone in Italy has read

Dante, Homer, and Virgil, he'd say. Doesn't matter whom you're talking to, so long as you Dante-and-Homer them

first. Virgil is a must, Leopardi comes next, and then feel free

to dazzle them with everything you've got, Celan, celery,

salami, who cares. This also had the advantage of allowing

all of our summer residents to perfect their Italian, one of the

requirements of the residency. Having them on the dinner

circuit around B. also had another benefit: it relieved us from

having them at our table every single night of the week.

But Oliver's invitations had become vertiginous. Chiara

and her sister wanted him at least twice a week. A cartoonist

from Brussels, who rented a villa all summer long, wanted

him for his exclusive Sunday soupers to which writers and

scholars from the environs were always invited. Then the

Moreschis, from three villas down, the Malaspinas from N.,

and the occasional acquaintance struck up at one of the

bars on the piazzetta, or at Le Danzing. All this to say

nothing of his poker and bridge playing at night, which

flourished by means totally unknown to us.

His life, like his papers, even when it gave every

impression of being chaotic, was always meticulously

compartmentalized. Sometimes he skipped dinner

altogether and would simply tell Mafalda, "Esco, I'm going

out."

His Esco, I realized soon enough, was just another version

of Later! A summary and unconditional goodbye, spoken not

as you were leaving, but after you were out the door. You

said it with your back to those you were leaving behind. I

felt sorry for those on the receiving end who wished to

appeal, to plead.

Not knowing whether he'd show up at the dinner table

was torture. But bearable. Not daring to ask whether he'd be

there was the real ordeal. 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. Seeing him and

thinking he'd join us for dinner tonight only to hear his peremptory Esco taught me there are certain wishes that

must be clipped like wings off a thriving butterfly.

I wanted him gone from our home so as to be done with

him.

I wanted him dead too, so that if I couldn't stop thinking

about him and worrying about when would be the next time

I'd see him, at least his death would put an end to it. I

wanted to kill him myself, even, so as to let him know how

much his mere existence had come to bother me, how

unbearable his ease with everything and everyone, taking

all things in stride, his tireless I'm-okay-with-this-and-that,

his springing across the gate to the beach when everyone

else opened the latch first, to say nothing of his bathing

suits, his spot in paradise, his cheeky Later!, his lip-

smacking love for apricot juice. If I didn't kill him, then I'd

cripple him for life, so that he'd be with us in a wheelchair

and never go back to the States. If he were infessor. Couldn't "Nobody asked you anything," snapped Chiara, who had

overheard and was not about to be criticized by a cook.

"Don't you talk to me that way or I'll split your face in

two," said our Neapolitan cook, raising the palm of her hand

in the air. "She's not seventeen yet and she goes about

having bare-breasted crushes. Thinks I haven't seen

anything?"

I could just see Mafalda inspecting Oliver's sheets every

morning. Or comparing notes with Chiara's housemaid. No

secret could escape this network of informed perpetue,

housekeepers.

I looked at Chiara. I knew she was in pain.

Everyone suspected something was going on between

them. In the afternoon he'd sometimes say he was going to

the shed by the garage to pick up one of the bikes and head

to town. An hour and a half later he would be back. The

translator, he'd explain.

"The translator," my father's voice would resound as he

nursed an after-dinner cognac.

"Traduttrice, my eye," Mafalda would intone.

Sometimes we'd run into each other in town.

Sitting at the caffè where several of us would gather at

night after the movies or before heading to the disco, I saw

Chiara and Oliver walking out of a side alley together,

talking. He was eating an ice cream, while she was hanging

on his free arm with both of hers. When had they found the

time to become so intimate? Their conversation seemed

serious.

"What are you doing here?" he said when he spotted me.

Banter was both how he took cover and tried to conceal

we'd altogether stopped talking. A cheap ploy, I thought.

"Hanging out."

"Isn't it past your bedtime?"

"My father doesn't believe in bedtimes," I parried.

Chiara was still deep in thought. She was avoiding my

eyes. Had he told her the nice things I'd been saying about

her? She seemed upset. Did she mind my sudden intrusion

into their little world? I remembered her tone of voice on the

morning when she'd lost it with Mafalda. A smirk hovered on

her face; she was about to say something cruel.

"Never a bedtime in their house, no rules, no supervision,

nothing. That's why he's such a well-behaved boy. Don't you

see? Nothing to rebel against."

"Is that true?"

"I suppose," I answered, trying to make light of it before

they went any further. "We all have our ways of rebelling."

"We do?" he asked.

"Name one," chimed in Chiara.

"You wouldn't understand."

"He reads Paul Celan," Oliver broke in, trying to change

the subject but also perhaps to come to my rescue and

show, without quite seeming to, that he had not forgotten

our previous conversation. Was he trying to rehabilitate me

after that little jab about my late hours, or was this the

beginnings of yet another joke at my expense? A steely,

neutral glance sat on his face.

"E chi è?" She'd never heard of Paul Celan.

I shot him a complicit glance. He intercepted it, but there

was no hint of mischief in his eyes when he finally returned

my glance. Whose side was he on?

"A poet," he whispered as they started ambling out into

the heart of the piazzetta, and he threw me a casual Later!

I watched them look for an empty table at one of the

adjoining caffès.

My friends asked me if he was hitting on her.

I don't know, I replied.

Are they doing it, then?

Didn't know that either.

I'd love to be in his shoes.

Who wouldn't? But I was in heaven. That he hadn't forgotten our

conversation about Celan gave me a shot of tonic I hadn't

experienced in many, many days. It spilled over everything I

touched. Just a word, a gaze, and I was in heaven. To be

happy like this maybe wasn't so difficult after all. All I had to

do was find the source of happiness in me and not rely on

others to supply it the next time.

I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks

Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that

were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and

kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Celan Jewish,

Oliver Jewish—we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an

otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling

around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one

and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows

the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken

away from such intimacy is galut, the Hebrew word for exile

and dispersal. 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.

But on that same night I used the heady elation of the

moment to speak to Marzia. We danced past midnight, then

I walked her back by way of the shore. Then we stopped. I

said I was tempted to take a quick swim, expecting she

would hold me back. But she said she too loved swimming at

night. Our clothes were off in a second. "You're not with me

because you're angry with Chiara?"

"Why am I angry with Chiara?" "Because of him."

I shook my head, feigning a puzzled look meant to show

that I couldn't begin to guess where she'd fished such a

notion from.

She asked me to turn around and not stare while she

used her sweater to towel her body dry. I pretended to sneak

a clandestine glance, but was too obedient not to do as I was

told. I didn't dare ask her not to look when I put my clothes

on but was glad she looked the other way. When we were no

longer naked, I took her hand and kissed her on the palm,

then kissed the space between her fingers, then her mouth.

She was slow to kiss me back, but then she didn't want to

stop.

We were to meet at the same spot on the beach the

following evening. I'd be there before her, I said.

"Just don't tell anyone," she said.

I motioned that my mouth was zipped shut.

"We almost did it," I told both my father and Oliver the next

morning as we were having breakfast.

"And why didn't you?" asked my father.

"Dunno."

"Better to have tried and failed…" Oliver was half

mocking and half comforting me with that oft-rehashed saw.

"All I had to do was find the courage to reach out and touch,

she would have said yes," I said, partly to parry further

criticism from either of them but also to show that when it

came to self-mockery, I could administer my own dose,

thank you very much. I was showing off.

"Try again later," said Oliver. This was what people who

were okay with themselves did. But I could also sense he

was onto something and wasn't coming out with it, perhaps

because there was something mildly disquieting behind his fatuous though well-intentioned try again later. He was

criticizing me. Or making fun of me. Or seeing through me.

It stung me when he finally came out with it. Only

someone who had completely figured me out would have

said it. "If not later, when?"

My father liked it. "If not later, when?" It echoed Rabbi

Hillel's famous injunction, "If not now, when?"

Oliver instantly tried to take back his stinging remark.

"I'd definitely try again. And again after that," came the

watered-down version. But try again later was the veil he'd

drawn over If not later, when?

I repeated his phrase as if it were a prophetic mantra

meant to reflect how he lived his life and how I was

attempting to live mine. By repeating this mantra that had

come straight from his mouth, I might trip on a secret

passageway to some nether truth that had hitherto eluded

me, about me, about life, about others, about me with

others.

Try again later were the last words I'd spoken to myself

every night when I'd sworn to do something to bring Oliver

closer to me. Try again later meant, I haven't the courage

now. Things weren't ready just yet. Where I'd find the will

and the courage to try again later I didn't know. But

resolving to do something rather than sit passively made me

feel that I was already doing something, like reaping a profit

on money I hadn't invested, much less earned yet.

But I also knew that I was circling wagons around my life

with try again laters, and that months, seasons, entire years,

a lifetime could go by with nothing but Saint Try-again-later

stamped on every day. Try again later worked for people like

Oliver. If not later, when? was my shibboleth.

If not later, when? What if he had found me out and

uncovered each and every one of my secrets with those four

cutting words?

I had to let him know I was totally indifferent to him. What sent me into a total tailspin was talking to him a few

mornings later in the garden and finding, not only that he

was turning a deaf ear to all of my blandishments on behalf

of Chiara, but that I was on the totally wrong track.

"What do you mean, wrong track?"

"I'm not interested."

I didn't know if he meant not interested in discussing it,

or not interested in Chiara.

"Everyone is interested."

"Well, maybe. But not me."

Still unclear.

There was something at once dry, irked, and fussy in his

voice.

"But I saw you two."

"What you saw was not your business to see. Anyway, I'm

not playing this game with either her or you."

He sucked on his cigarette and looking back at me gave

me his usual menacing, chilly gaze that could cut and bore

into your guts with arthroscopic accuracy.

I shrugged my shoulders. "Look, I'm sorry"—and went

back to my books. I had overstepped my bounds again and

there was no getting out of it gracefully except by owning

that I'd been terribly indiscreet.

"Maybe you should try," he threw in.

I'd never heard him speak in that lambent tone before.

Usually, it was I who teetered on the fringes of propriety.

"She wouldn't want to have anything to do with me."

"Would you want her to?"

Where was this going, and why did I feel that a trap lay a

few steps ahead?

"No?" I replied gingerly, not realizing that my diffidence

had made my "no" sound almost like a question.

"Are you sure?" Had I, by any chance, convinced him that I'd wanted her

all along?

I looked up at him as though to return challenge for

challenge.

"What would you know?"

"I know you like her."

"You have no idea what I like," I snapped. "No idea."

I was trying to sound arch and mysterious, as though

referring to a realm of human experience about which

someone like him wouldn't have the slightest clue. But I had

only managed to sound peevish and hysterical.

A less canny reader of the human soul would have seen

in my persistent denials the terrified signs of a flustered

admission about Chiara scrambling for cover.

A more canny observer, however, would have considered

it a lead-in to an entirely different truth: push open the door

at your own peril—believe me, you don't want to hear this.

Maybe you should go away now, while there's still time.

But I also knew that if he so much as showed signs of

suspecting the truth, I'd make every effort to cast him adrift

right away. If, however, he suspected nothing, then my

flustered words would have left him marooned just the same.

In the end, I was happier if he thought I wanted Chiara than

if he pushed the issue further and had me tripping all over

myself. Speechless, I would have admitted things I hadn't

mapped out for myself or didn't know I had it in me to admit.

Speechless, I would have gotten to where my body longed to

go far sooner than with any bon mot prepared hours ahead

of time. I would have blushed, and blushed because I had

blushed, fuddled with words and ultimately broken down—

and then where would I be? What would he say?

Better break down now, I thought, than live another day

juggling all of my implausible resolutions to try again later.

No, better he should never know. I could live with that. I

could always, always live with that. It didn't even surprise

me to see how easy it was to accept. And yet, out of the blue, a tender moment would erupt so

suddenly between us that the words I longed to tell him

would almost slip out of my mouth. Green bathing suit

moments, I called them—even after my color theory was

entirely disproved and gave me no confidence to expect

kindness on "blue" days or to watch out for "red" days.

Music was an easy subject for us to discuss, especially

when I was at the piano. Or when he'd want me to play

something in the manner of so-and-so. He liked my

combinations of two, three, even four composers chiming in

on the same piece, and then transcribed by me. One day

Chiara started to hum a hit-parade tune and suddenly,

because it was a windy day and no one was heading for the

beach or even staying outdoors, our friends gathered around

the piano in the living room as I improvised a Brahms

variation on a Mozart rendition of that very same song. "How

do you do this?" he asked me one morning while he lay in

heaven.

"Sometimes the only way to understand an artist is to

wear his shoes, to get inside him. Then everything else flows

naturally."

We talked about books again. I had seldom spoken to

anyone about books except my father.

Or we talked about music, about the pre-Socratic

philosophers, about college in the U.S.

Or there was Vimini.

The first time she intruded on our mornings was precisely

when I'd been playing a variation on Brahms's last

variations on Handel.

Her voice broke up the intense midmorning heat.

"What are you doing?"

"Working," I replied.

Oliver, who was lying flat on his stomach on the edge of

the pool, looked up with the sweat pouring down between his shoulder blades.

"Me too," he said when she turned and asked him the

same question.

"You were talking, not working."

"Same thing."

"I wish I could work. But no one gives me any work."

Oliver, who had never seen Vimini before, looked up to

me, totally helpless, as though he didn't know the rules of

this conversation.

"Oliver, meet Vimini, literally our next-door neighbor."

She offered him her hand and he shook it.

"Vimini and I have the same birthday, but she is ten

years old. Vimini is also a genius. Isn't it true you're a

genius, Vimini?"

"So they say. But it seems to me that I may not be."

"Why is that?" Oliver inquired, trying not to sound too

patronizing.

"It would be in rather bad taste for nature to have made

me a genius."

Oliver looked more startled than ever: "Come again?"

"He doesn't know, does he?" she was asking me in front

of him.

I shook my head.

"They say I may not live long."

"Why do you say that?" He looked totally stunned. "How

do you know?"

"Everyone knows. Because I have leukemia."

"But you're so beautiful, so healthy-looking, and so

smart," he protested.

"As I said, a bad joke."

Oliver, who was now kneeling on the grass, had literally

dropped his book on the ground.

"Maybe you can come over one day and read to me," she

said. "I'm really very nice—and you look very nice too. Well,

goodbye." She climbed over the wall. "And sorry if I spooked you—

well—"

You could almost watch her trying to withdraw the ill-

chosen metaphor.

If the music hadn't already brought us closer together at

least for a few hours that day, Vimini's apparition did.

We spoke about her all afternoon. I didn't have to look for

anything to say. He did most of the talking and the asking.

Oliver was mesmerized. For once, I wasn't speaking about

myself.

Soon they became friends. She was always up in the

morning after he returned from his morning jog or swim, and

together they would walk over to our gate, and clamber

down the stairs ever so cautiously, and head to one of the

huge rocks, where they sat and talked until it was time for

breakfast. Never had I seen a friendship so beautiful or more

intense. I was never jealous of it, and no one, certainly not I,

dared come between them or eavesdrop on them. I shall

never forget how she would give him her hand once they'd

opened the gate to the stairway leading to the rocks. She

seldom ever ventured that far unless accompanied by

someone older.

When I think back to that summer, I can never sort the

sequence of events. There are a few key scenes. Otherwise,

all I remember are the "repeat" moments. The morning ritual

before and after breakfast: Oliver lying on the grass, or by

the pool, I sitting at my table. Then the swim or the jog.

Then his grabbing a bicycle and riding to see the translator

in town. Lunch at the large, shaded dining table in the other

garden, or lunch indoors, always a guest or two for lunch

drudgery. The afternoon hours, splendid and lush with

abundant sun and silence. Then there are the leftover scenes: my father always

wondering what I did with my time, why I was always alone;

my mother urging me to make new friends if the old ones

didn't interest me, but above all to stop hanging around the

house all the time—books, books, books, always books, and

all these scorebooks, both of them begging me to play more

tennis, go dancing more often, get to know people, find out

for myself why others are so necessary in life and not just

foreign bodies to be sidled up to. Do crazy things if you

must, they told me all the while, forever prying to unearth

the mysterious, telltale signs of heartbreak which, in their

clumsy, intrusive, devoted way, both would instantly wish to

heal, as if I were a soldier who had strayed into their garden

and needed his wound immediately stanched or else he'd

die. You can always talk to me. I was your age once, my

father used to say. The things you feel and think only you

have felt, believe me, I've lived and suffered through all of

them, and more than once—some I've never gotten over and

others I'm as ignorant about as you are today, yet I know

almost every bend, every toll-booth, every chamber in the

human heart.

There are other scenes: the postprandial silence—some of

us napping, some working, others reading, the whole world

basking away in hushed semitones. Heavenly hours when

voices from the world beyond our house would filter in so

softly that I was sure I had drifted off. Then afternoon tennis.

Shower and cocktails. Waiting for dinner. Guests again.

Dinner. His second trip to the translator. Strolling into town

and back late at night, sometimes alone, sometimes with

friends.

Then there are the exceptions: the stormy afternoon

when we sat in the living room, listening to the music and to

the hail pelting every window in the house. The lights would

go out, the music would die, and all we had was each other's

faces. An aunt twittering away about her dreadful years in

St. Louis, Missouri, which she pronounced San Lui, Mother trailing the scent of Earl Grey tea, and in the background, all

the way from the kitchen downstairs, the voices of Manfredi

and Mafalda—spare whispers of a couple bickering in loud

hisses. In the rain, the lean, cloaked, hooded figure of the

gardener doing battle with the elements, always pulling up

weeds even in the rain, my father signaling with his arms

from the living room window, Go back, Anchise, go back.

"That man gives me the creeps," my aunt would say.

"That creep has a heart of gold," my father would say.

But all of these hours were strained by fear, as if fear

were a brooding specter, or a strange, lost bird trapped in

our little town, whose sooty wing flecked every living thing

with a shadow that would never wash. I didn't know what I

was afraid of, nor why I worried so much, nor why this thing

that could so easily cause panic felt like hope sometimes

and, like hope in the darkest moments, brought such joy,

unreal joy, joy with a noose tied around it. The thud my

heart gave when I saw him unannounced both terrified and

thrilled me. I was afraid when he showed up, a next story Tommorow