André Aciman

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, which meant, Hurt me all you want.

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__ 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__ been rehearsing for days now, Please, don__ hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.

Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency? Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it, black market, grey market, taxed, untaxed, under the table, over the counter.

What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.

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__mells and sounds I__ 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.

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

I think everyone is wounded in their sex,_ I said. __ can__ think of one person who isn__.

What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not her, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You'll kill me if you stop, you'll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me, softly at first, till he said, "Call me by your name and I'll call you by my name," which I'd never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.

We loved with every organ but the heart.

How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.

Two words from him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I__l play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it__ 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...

As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.

What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest. (p. 109)

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. (p. 225)

And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.

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! (p. 225)

We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. "Don't flush," I'd said, "I want to look." What I saw brought out strains of compassion, for him, for his body, for his life, which suddenly seemed so frail and vulnerable. "Our bodies won't have secrets now," I said as I took my turn and sat down. He had hopped into the bathtub and was just about to turn on the shower. "I want you to see mine," I said. He did more. He stepped out, kissed me on the mouth, and, pressing and massaging my tummy with the flat of his hand, watched the whole thing happen.

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 apricates - and near it, if I dared to bite that far, his apricock.