Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman Page B

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