oward the end of July things finally came to a head. It seemed clear that after Chiara there had been a succession of cotte, crushes, mini-crushes, one-night crushes, flings, who knows. To me all of it boiled down to one thing only: his cock had been everywhere in B. Every girl had touched it, that cock of his. It had been in who knows how many vaginas, how many mouths. The image amused me. It never bothered me to think of him between a girl’s legs as she lay facing him, his broad, tanned, glistening shoulders moving up and down as I’d imagined him that afternoon when I too had wrapped my legs around his pillow.

Just looking at his shoulders when he happened to be going over his manuscript in his heaven made me wonder where they’d been last night. How effortless and free the movement of his shoulder blades each time he shifted, how thoughtlessly they caught the sun. Did they taste of the sea to the woman who had lain under him last night and bitten into him? Or of his suntan lotion? Or of the smell that had risen from his sheets when I went into them?

How I wished I had shoulders like his. Maybe I wouldn’t long for them if I had them?

Muvi star.

Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are “being” and “having” thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher. When had they separated us, you and me, Oliver? And why did I know it, and why didn’t you? Is it your body that I want when I think of lying next to it every night or do I want to slip into it and own it as if it were my own, as I did when I put on your bathing suit and took it off again, all the while craving, as I craved nothing more in my life

that afternoon, to feel you slip inside me as if my entire body were your bathing suit, your home? You in me, me in you…

Then came the day. We were in the garden, I told him of the novella I had just finished reading.

“About the knight who doesn’t know whether to speak or die. You told me already.”

Obviously I had mentioned it and forgotten.

“Yes.”

“Well, does he or doesn’t he?”

“Better to speak, she said. But she’s on her guard. She senses a trap somewhere.”

“So does he speak?”

“No, he fudges.”

“Figures.”

It was just after breakfast. Neither of us felt like working that day. “Listen, I need to pick up something in town.”

Something was always the latest pages from the translator.

“I’ll go, if you want me to.”

He sat silently a moment.

“No, let’s go together.”

“Now?” What I might have meant was, Really? “Why, have you got anything better to do?” “No.”

“So let’s go.” He put some pages in his frayed green backpack and slung it over his shoulders.

Since our last bike ride to B., he had never asked me to go anywhere with him.

I put down my fountain pen, closed my scorebook, placed a half-full glass of lemonade on top of my pages, and was ready to go.

On our way to the shed, we passed the garage.

As usual, Manfredi, Mafalda’s husband, was arguing with Anchise. This time he was accusing him of dousing the tomatoes with too much water, and that it was all wrong, because they were growing too fast. “They’ll be mealy,” he complained.

“Listen. I do the tomatoes, you do the driving, and we’re all happy.”

“You don’t understand. In my day you moved the tomatoes at some point, from one place to another, from one place to the other”—he insisted—“and you

planted basil nearby. But of course you people who’ve been in the army know everything.”

“That’s right.” Anchise was ignoring him.

“Of course I’m right. No wonder they didn’t keep you in the army.” “That’s right. They didn’t keep me in the army.”

Both of them greeted us. The gardener handed Oliver his bicycle. “I straightened the wheel last night, it took some doing. I also put some air in the tires.”

Manfredi couldn’t have been more peeved.

“From now on, I fix the wheels, you grow the tomatoes,” said the piqued driver.

Anchise gave a wry smile. Oliver smiled back.

Once we had reached the cypress lane that led onto the main road to town, I asked Oliver, “Doesn’t he give you the creeps?”

“Who?”

“Anchise.”

“No, why? I fell the other day on my way back and scraped myself pretty badly. Anchise insisted on applying some sort of witch’s brew. He also fixed the bike for me.”

With one hand on the handlebar he lifted his shirt and exposed a huge scrape and bruise on his left hip.

“Still gives me the creeps,” I said, repeating my aunt’s verdict.

“Just a lost soul, really.”

I would have touched, caressed, worshipped that scrape.

On our way, I noticed that Oliver was taking his time. He wasn’t in his usual rush, no speeding, no scaling the hill with his usual athletic zeal. Nor did he seem in a rush to go back to his paperwork, or join his friends on the beach, or, as was usually the case, ditch me. Perhaps he had nothing better to do. This was my moment in heaven and, young as I was, I knew it wouldn’t last and that I should at least enjoy it for what it was rather than ruin it with my oft-cranked resolution to firm up our friendship or take it to another plane. There’ll never be a friendship, I thought, this is nothing, just a minute of grace. Zwischen Immer und Nie. Zwischen Immer und Nie. Between always and never. Celan.

When we arrived at the piazzetta overlooking the sea, Oliver stopped to buy cigarettes. He had started smoking Gauloises. I had never tried Gauloises and asked if I could. He took out a cerino from the box, cupped his hands very near my face, and lit my cigarette. “Not bad, right?” “Not bad at all.” They’d

remind me of him, of this day, I thought, realizing that in less than a month he’d be totally gone, without a trace.

This was probably the first time I allowed myself to count down his remaining days in B.

“Just take a look at this,” he said as we ambled with our bikes in the midmorning sun toward the edge of the piazzetta overlooking the rolling hills below.

Farther out and way below was a magnificent view of the sea with scarcely a few stripes of foam streaking the bay like giant dolphins breaking the surf. A tiny bus was working its way uphill, while three uniformed bikers straggled behind it, obviously complaining of the fumes. “You do know who is said to have drowned near here,” he said.

“Shelley.”

“And do you know what his wife Mary and friends did when they found his body?”

“Cor cordium, heart of hearts,” I replied, referring to the moment when a friend had seized Shelley’s heart before the flames had totally engulfed his swollen body as it was being cremated on the shore. Why was he quizzing me?

“Is there anything you don’t know?”

I looked at him. This was my moment. I could seize it or I could lose it, but either way I knew I would never live it down. Or I could gloat over his compliment—but live to regret everything else. This was probably the first time in my life that I spoke to an adult without planning some of what I was going to say. I was too nervous to plan anything.

“I know nothing, Oliver. Nothing, just nothing.” “You know more than anyone around here.”

Why was he returning my near-tragic tone with bland ego-boosting? “If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter.”

I was treading water, trying neither to drown nor to swim to safety, just staying in place, because here was the truth—even if I couldn’t speak the truth, or even hint at it, yet I could swear it lay around us, the way we say of a necklace we’ve just lost while swimming: I know it’s down there somewhere. If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.

But if he understood, then he must have suspected, and if he suspected he would have been there himself, watching me from across a parallel lane with his steely, hostile, glass-eyed, trenchant, all-knowing gaze.

He must have hit on something, though God knows what. Perhaps he was trying not to seem taken aback.

“What things that matter?”

Was he being disingenuous?

“You know what things. By now you of all people should know.” Silence.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I thought you should know.”

“Because you thought I should know.” He repeated my words slowly, trying to take in their full meaning, all the while sorting them out, playing for time by repeating the words. The iron, I knew, was burning hot.

“Because I want you to know,” I blurted out. “Because there is no one else I can say it to but you.”

There, I had said it.

Was I making any sense?

I was about to interrupt and sidetrack the conversation by saying something about the sea and the weather tomorrow and whether it might be a good idea to sail out to E. as my father kept promising this time every year.

But to his credit he didn’t let me loose.

“Do you know what you’re saying?”

This time I looked out to the sea and, with a vague and weary tone that was my last diversion, my last cover, my last getaway, said, “Yes, I know what I’m saying and you’re not mistaking any of it. I’m just not very good at speaking. But you’re welcome never to speak to me again.”

“Wait. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Ye-es.” Now that I had spilled the beans I could take on the laid-back, mildly exasperated air with which a felon, who’s surrendered to the police, confesses yet once more to yet one more police officer how he robbed the store.

“Wait for me here, I have to run upstairs and get some papers. Don’t go away.”

I looked at him with a confiding smile.

“You know very well I’m not going anywhere.”

If that’s not another admission, then what is? I thought.

As I waited, I took both our bikes and walked them toward the war memorial dedicated to the youth of the town who’d perished in the Battle of the Piave during the First World War. Every small town in Italy has a similar

memorial. Two small buses had just stopped nearby and were unloading passengers—older women arriving from the adjoining villages to shop in town. Around the small piazza, the old folk, men mostly, sat on small, rickety, straw-backed chairs or on park benches wearing drab, old, dun-colored suits. I wondered how many people here still remembered the young men they’d lost on the Piave River. You’d have to be at least eighty years old today to have known them. And at least one hundred, if not more, to have been older than they were then. At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief— or do they hound you till the bitter end? At one hundred, siblings forget, sons forget, loved ones forget, no one remembers anything, even the most devastated forget to remember. Mothers and fathers have long since died. Does anyone remember?

A thought raced through my mind: Would my descendants know what was spoken on this very piazzetta today? Would anyone? Or would it dissolve into thin air, as I found part of me wishing it would? Would they know how close to the brink their fate stood on this day on this piazzetta? The thought amused me and gave me the necessary distance to face the remainder of this day.

In thirty, forty years, I’ll come back here and think back on a conversation I knew I’d never forget, much as I might want to someday. I’d come here with my wife, my children, show them the sights, point to the bay, the local caffès, Le Danzing, the Grand Hotel. Then I’d stand here and ask the statue and the straw-backed chairs and shaky wooden tables to remind me of someone called Oliver.

When he returned, the first thing he blurted out was, “That idiot Milani mixed the pages and has to retype the whole thing. So I have nothing to work on this afternoon, which sets me back a whole day.”

It was his turn to look for excuses to dodge the subject. I could easily let him off the hook if he wanted. We could talk about the sea, the Piave, or fragments of Heraclitus, such as “Nature loves to hide” or “I went in search of myself.” And if not these, there was the trip to E. we’d been discussing for days now. There was also the chamber music ensemble due to arrive any day.

On our way we passed a shop where my mother always ordered flowers. As a child I liked to watch the large storefront window awash in a perpetual curtain of water which came sliding down ever so gently, giving the shop an enchanted, mysterious aura that reminded me of how in many films the screen would blur to announce that a flashback was about to occur.

“I wish I hadn’t spoken,” I finally said.

I knew as soon as I’d said it that I’d broken the exiguous spell between us. “I’m going to pretend you never did.”

Well, that was an approach I’d never expected from a man who was so okay with the world. I’d never heard such a sentence used in our house.

“Does this mean we’re on speaking terms—but not really?” He thought about it.

“Look, we can’t talk about such things. We really can’t.” He slung his bag around him and we were off downhill.

Fifteen minutes ago, I was in total agony, every nerve ending, every emotion bruised, trampled, crushed as in Mafalda’s mortar, all of it pulverized till you couldn’t tell fear from anger from the merest trickle of desire. But at that time there was something to look forward to. Now that we had laid our cards on the table, the secrecy, the shame were gone, but with them so was that dash of unspoken hope that had kept everything alive these weeks.

Only the scenery and the weather could buoy my spirits now. As would the ride together on the empty country road, which was entirely ours at this time of day and where the sun started pounding exposed patches along the route. I told him to follow me, I’d show him a spot most tourists and strangers had never seen.

“If you have time,” I added, not wishing to be pushy this time.

“I have time.” It was spoken with a noncommittal lilt in his voice, as though he had found the overplayed tact in my words slightly comical. But perhaps this was a small concession to make up for not discussing the matter at hand.

We veered off the main road and headed toward the edge of the cliff. “This,” I said by way of a preface meant to keep his interest alive, “is the

spot where Monet came to paint.”

Tiny, stunted palm trees and gnarled olive trees studded the copse. Then through the trees, on an incline leading toward the very edge of the cliff, was a knoll partly shaded by tall marine pines. I leaned my bike against one of the trees, he did the same, and I showed him the way up to the berm. “Now take a look,” I said, extremely pleased, as if revealing something more eloquent than anything I might say in my favor.

A soundless, quiet cove stood straight below us. Not a sign of civilization anywhere, no home, no jetty, no fishing boats. Farther out, as always, was the belfry of San Giacomo, and, if you strained your eyes, the outline of N., and farther still was something that looked like our house and the adjoining villas,

the one where Vimini lived, and the Moreschi family’s, with their two daughters whom Oliver had probably slept with, alone or together, who knew, who cared at this point.

“This is my spot. All mine. I come here to read. I can’t tell you the number of books I’ve read here.”

“Do you like being alone?” he asked.

“No. No one likes being alone. But I’ve learned how to live with it.”

“Are you always so very wise?” he asked. Was he about to adopt a condescending, pre-lecture tone before joining everyone else on my needing to get out more, make more friends, and, having made friends, not to be so selfish with them? Or was this a preamble to his role as shrink/part-time-friend-of-the-family? Or was I yet again misreading him completely?

“I’m not wise at all. I told you, I know nothing. I know books, and I know how to string words together—it doesn’t mean I know how to speak about the things that matter most to me.”

“But you’re doing it now—in a way.”

“Yes, in a way—that’s how I always say things: in a way.”

Staring out at the offing so as not to look at him, I sat down on the grass and noticed he was crouching a few yards away from me on the tips of his toes, as though he would any moment now spring to his feet and go back to where we’d left our bicycles.

It never occurred to me that I had brought him here not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember. Here I would come to escape the known world and seek another of my own invention; I was basically introducing him to my launchpad. All I had to do was list the works I’d read here and he’d know all the places I’d traveled to.

“I like the way you say things. Why are you always putting yourself down?”

I shrugged my shoulders. Was he criticizing me for criticizing myself? “I don’t know. So you won’t, I suppose.” “Are you so scared of what others think?”

I shook my head. But I didn’t know the answer. Or perhaps the answer was so obvious that I didn’t have to answer. It was moments such as these that left me feeling so vulnerable, so naked. Push me, make me nervous, and, unless I push you back, you’ve already found me out. No, I had nothing to say in reply.

But I wasn’t moving either. My impulse was to let him ride home by himself.

I’d be home in time for lunch.

He was waiting for me to say something. He was staring at me.

This, I think, is the first time I dared myself to stare back at him. Usually, I’d cast a glance and then look away—look away because I didn’t want to swim in the lovely, clear pool of his eyes unless I’d been invited to—and I never waited long enough to know whether I was even wanted there; look away because I was too scared to stare anyone back; look away because I didn’t want to give anything away; look away because I couldn’t acknowledge how much he mattered. Look away because that steely gaze of his always reminded me of how tall he stood and how far below him I ranked. Now, in the silence of the moment, I stared back, not to defy him, or to show I wasn’t shy any longer, but to surrender, to tell him this is who I am, this is who you are, this is what I want, there is nothing but truth between us now, and where there’s truth there are no barriers, no shifty glances, and if nothing comes of this, let it never be said that either of us was unaware of what might happen. I hadn’t a hope left. And maybe I stared back because there wasn’t a thing to lose now. I stared back with the all-knowing, I-dare-you-to-kiss-me gaze of someone who both challenges and flees with one and the same gesture.

“You’re making things very difficult for me.” Was he by any chance referring to our staring?

I didn’t back down. Neither did he. Yes, he was referring to our staring. “Why am I making things difficult?”

My heart was beating too fast for me to speak coherently. I wasn’t even ashamed of showing how flushed I was. So let him know, let him.

“Because it would be very wrong.”

“Would?” I asked.

Was there a ray of hope, then?

He sat down on the grass, then lay down on his back, his arms under his head, as he stared at the sky.

“Yes, would. I’m not going to pretend this hasn’t crossed my mind.” “I’d be the last to know.”

“Well, it has. There! What did you think was going on?”

“Going on?” I fumbled by way of a question. “Nothing.” I thought about it some more. “Nothing,” I repeated, as if what I was vaguely beginning to get a hint of was so amorphous that it could just as easily be shoved away by my repeated “nothing” and thereby fill the unbearable gaps of silence. “Nothing.”

“I see,” he finally said. “You’ve got it wrong, my friend”—chiding condescension in his voice. “If it makes you feel any better, I have to hold back. It’s time you learned too.”

“The best I can do is pretend I don’t care.”

“That much we’ve known for a while already,” he snapped right away.

I was crushed. All these times when I thought I was slighting him by showing how easy it was to ignore him in the garden, on the balcony, at the beach, he had been seeing right through me and taken my move for the peevish, textbook gambit it was.

His admission, which seemed to open up all the sluiceways between us, was precisely what drowned my budding hopes. Where would we go from here? What was there to add? And what would happen the next time we pretended not to speak but were no longer sure the frost between us was still sham?

We spoke awhile longer, then the conversation petered out. Now that we had put our cards on the table, it felt like small talk.

“So this is where Monet came to paint.”

“I’ll show you at home. We have a book with wonderful reproductions of the area around here.”

“Yes, you’ll have to show me.”

He was playing the role of the patronizing understudy. I hated it.

Each leaning on one arm, we both stared out at the view.

“You’re the luckiest kid in the world,” he said.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

I let him ponder my statement. Then, perhaps to fill the silence that was becoming unbearable, I blurted out, “So much of it is wrong, though.”

“What? Your family?”

“That too.”

“Living here all summer long, reading by yourself, meeting all those dinner drudges your father dredges up at every meal?” He was making fun of me again.

I smirked. No, that wasn’t it either.

He paused a moment.

“Us, you mean.”

I did not reply.

“Let’s see, then—” And before I knew it, he sidled up to me. We were too close, I thought, I’d never been so close to him except in a dream or when he

cupped his hand to light my cigarette. If he brought his ear any closer he’d hear my heart. I’d seen it written in novels but never believed it until now. He stared me right in the face, as though he liked my face and wished to study it and to linger on it, then he touched my nether lip with his finger and let it travel left and right and right and left again and again as I lay there, watching him smile in a way that made me fear anything might happen now and there’d be no turning back, that this was his way of asking, and here was my chance to say no or to say something and play for time, so that I might still debate the matter with myself, now that it had reached this point—except that I didn’t have any time left, because he brought his lips to my mouth, a warm, conciliatory, I’ll-meet-you-halfway-but-no-further kiss till he realized how famished mine was. I wished I knew how to calibrate my kiss the way he did. But passion allows us to hide more, and at that moment on Monet’s berm, if I wished to hide everything about me in this kiss, I was also desperate to forget the kiss by losing myself in it.

“Better now?” he asked afterward.

I did not answer but lifted my face to his and kissed him again, almost savagely, not because I was filled with passion or even because his kiss still lacked the zeal I was looking for, but because I was not so sure our kiss had convinced me of anything about myself. I was not even sure I had enjoyed it as much as I’d expected and needed to test it again, so that even in the act itself, I needed to test the test. My mind was drifting to the most mundane things. So much denial? a two-bit disciple of Freud would have observed. I squelched my doubts with a yet more violent kiss. I did not want passion, I did not want pleasure. Perhaps I didn’t even want proof. And I did not want words, small talk, big talk, bike talk, book talk, any of it. Just the sun, the grass, the occasional sea breeze, and the smell of his body fresh from his chest, from his neck and his armpits. Just take me and molt me and turn me inside out, till, like a character in Ovid, I become one with your lust, that’s what I wanted. Give me a blindfold, hold my hand, and don’t ask me to think—will you do that for me?

I did not know where all this was leading, but I was surrendering to him, inch by inch, and he must have known it, for I sensed he was still keeping a distance between us. Even with our faces touching, our bodies were angles apart. I knew that anything I did now, any movement I’d make, might disturb the harmony of the moment. So, sensing there was probably not going to be a sequel to our kiss, I began to test the eventual separation of our mouths, only to

realize, now that I was making mere motions of ending the kiss, how much I’d wanted it not to stop, wanted his tongue in my mouth and mine in his—because all we had become, after all these weeks and all the strife and all the fits and starts that ushered a chill draft each time, was just two wet tongues flailing away in each other’s mouths. Just two tongues, all the rest was nothing. When, finally, I lifted one knee and moved it toward him to face him, I knew I had broken the spell.

“I think we should go.”

“Not yet.”

“We can’t do this—I know myself. So far we’ve behaved. We’ve been good. Neither of us has done anything to feel ashamed of. Let’s keep it that way. I want to be good.”

“Don’t be. I don’t care. Who is to know?”

In a desperate move which I knew I’d never live down if he did not relent, I reached for him and let my hand rest on his crotch. He did not move. I should have slipped my hand straight into his shorts. He must have read my intention and, with total composure, bordering on a gesture that was very gentle but also quite glacial, brought his hand there and let it rest on mine for a second, then, twining his fingers into mine, lifted my hand.

A moment of unbearable silence settled between us.

“Did I offend you?”

“Just don’t.”

It sounded a bit like Later! when I’d first heard it weeks earlier—biting and blunted, and altogether mirthless, without any inflection of either the joy or the passion we’d just shared. He gave me his hand and helped me stand up again.

He suddenly winced.

I remembered the scrape on his side.

“I should make sure it doesn’t get infected,” he said.

“We’ll stop by the pharmacist on the way back.”

He didn’t reply. But it was about the most sobering thing we could have said. It let the intrusive real world gust into our lives—Anchise, the mended bike, the bickering over tomatoes, the music score hastily left under a glass of lemonade, how long ago they all seemed.

Indeed, as we rode away from my spot we saw two tourist vans heading south to N. It must have been nearing noon.

“We’ll never speak again,” I said as we glided down the never-ending

slope, the wind in our hair.

“Don’t say that.”

“I just know it. We’ll chitchat. Chitchat, chitchat. That’s all. And the funny thing is, I can live with that.”

“You just rhymed,” he said.

I loved the way he’d flip on me.

Two hours later, at lunch, I gave myself all the proof I needed that I would never be able to live with that.

Before dessert, while Mafalda was clearing away the plates and while everyone’s attention was focused on a conversation about Jacopone da Todi, I felt a warm, bare foot casually brush mine.

I remembered that, on the berm, I should have seized my chance to feel if the skin of his foot was as smooth as I’d imagined it. Now this was all the chance I’d get.

Perhaps it was my foot that had strayed and touched his. It withdrew, not immediately, but soon enough, as though it had consciously waited an appropriate interval of time so as not to give the impression of having recoiled in panic. I too waited a few seconds more and, without actually planning my move, allowed my foot to begin seeking the other out. I had just begun searching for it when my toe suddenly bumped into his foot; his had hardly budged at all, like a pirate ship that gave every indication of having fled miles away but was really hiding in a fog no more than fifty yards away, waiting to pounce as soon as the chance presented itself. I had barely enough time to do anything with my foot when, without warning, without giving me time to work my way to his or to let mine rest at a safe distance again, softly, gently, suddenly his foot moved over to mine and began caressing it, rubbing it, never holding still, the smooth round ball of his heel holding my foot in place, occasionally bringing its weight to bear but lightening it right away with another caress of the toes, indicating, all the while, that this was being done in the spirit of fun and games, because it was his way of pulling the rug out from under the lunch drudges sitting right across from us, but also telling me that this had nothing to do with others and would remain strictly between us, because it was about us, but that I shouldn’t read into it more than there was. The stealth and stubbornness of his caresses sent chills down my spine. A sudden giddiness overtook me. No, I wasn’t going to cry, this wasn’t a panic attack, it wasn’t a “swoon,” and I wasn’t going to come in my shorts either, though I liked this very, very much, especially when the arch of his foot lay on top of

my foot. When I looked at my dessert plate and saw the chocolate cake speckled with raspberry juice, it seemed to me that someone was pouring more and more red sauce than usual, and that the sauce seemed to be coming from the ceiling above my head until it suddenly hit me that it was streaming from my nose. I gasped, and quickly crumpled my napkin and brought it to my nose, holding my head as far back as I could. “Ghiaccio, ice, Mafalda, per favore, presto,” I said, softly, to show that I was in perfect control of the situation. “I was up at the hill this morning. Happens all the time,” I said, apologizing to the guests.

There was a scuffle of quick sounds as people rushed in and out of the dining room. I had shut my eyes. Get a grip, I kept saying to myself, get a grip. Don’t let your body give the whole thing away.

“Was it my fault?” he asked when he stepped into my bedroom after lunch. I did not reply. “I’m a mess, aren’t I?”

He smiled and said nothing.

“Sit for a second.”

He sat at the far corner of my bed. He was visiting a hospitalized friend who was injured in a hunting accident.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“I thought I was. I’ll get over it.” I’d heard too many characters say the same thing in too many novels. It let the runaway lover off the hook. It allowed everyone to save face. It restored dignity and courage to the one whose cover had been completely blown.

“I’ll let you sleep now.” Spoken like an attentive nurse.

On his way out he said, “I’ll stick around,” the way people might say, I’ll leave the light on for you. “Be good.”

As I tried to doze, the incident on the piazzetta, lost somewhere amid the Piave war memorial and our ride up the hill with fear and shame and who knows what else pressing on me, seemed to come back to me from summers and ages ago, as though I’d biked up to the piazzetta as a little boy before World War I and had returned a crippled ninety-year-old soldier confined to this bedroom that was not even my own, because mine had been given over to a young man who was the light of my eyes.

The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that’s what you are, light of my life. I didn’t know what light of my eyes meant, and part of

me wondered where on earth had I fished out such claptrap, but it was nonsense like this that brought tears now, tears I wished to drown in his pillow, soak in his bathing suit, tears I wanted him to touch with the tip of his tongue and make sorrow go away.

I didn’t understand why he had brought his foot on mine. Was it a pass, or a well-meaning gesture of solidarity and comradeship, like his chummy hug-massage, a lighthearted nudge between lovers who are no longer sleeping together but have decided to remain friends and occasionally go to the movies? Did it mean, I haven’t forgotten, it’ll always remain between us, even though nothing will come of it?

I wanted to flee the house. I wanted it to be next fall already and be as far away as I could. Leave our town with its silly Le Danzing and its silly youth no one in his right mind would wish to befriend. Leave my parents and my cousins, who always competed with me, and those horrible summer guests with their arcane scholarly projects who always ended up hogging all the bathrooms on my side of the house.

What would happen if I saw him again? Would I bleed again, cry, come in my shorts? And what if I saw him with someone else, ambling as he so often did at night around Le Danzing? What if instead of a woman, it was a man?

I should learn to avoid him, sever each tie, one by one, as neurosurgeons do when they split one neuron from another, one thought-tormented wish from the next, stop going to the back garden, stop spying, stop heading to town at night, wean myself a bit at a time each day, like an addict, one day, one hour, one minute, one slop-infested second after the other. It could be done. I knew there was no future in this. Supposing he did come into my bedroom tonight. Better yet, supposing I had a few drinks and went into his and told him the plain honest truth square in your face, Oliver: Oliver, I want you to take me. Someone has to, and it might as well be you. Correction: I want it to be you. I’ll try not to be the worst lay of your life. Just do with me as you would with anyone you hope never to run into again. I know this doesn’t sound remotely romantic but I’m tied up in so many knots that I need the Gordian treatment. So get on with it.

We’d do it. Then I’d go back to my bedroom and clean up. After that, I’d be the one to occasionally place my foot on his, and see how he liked that.

This was my plan. This was going to be my way of getting him out of my system. I’d wait for everyone to go to bed. Watch for his light. I’d enter his room from the balcony.

Knock knock. No, no knocking. I was sure he slept naked. What if he wasn’t alone? I’d listen outside the balcony before stepping in. If there was someone else with him and it was too late to beat a hasty retreat, I’d say, “Oops, wrong address.” Yes: Oops, wrong address. A touch of levity to save face. And if he was alone? I’d walk in. Pajamas. No, just pajama bottoms. It’s me, I’d say. Why are you here? I can’t sleep. Want me to get you something to drink? It’s not a drink I need. I’ve already had enough to find the courage to walk from my room to your room. It’s you I’ve come for. I see. Don’t make it difficult, don’t talk, don’t give me reasons, and don’t act as if you’re any moment going to shout for help. I’m way younger than you and you’d only make a fool of yourself by ringing the house alarm or threatening to tell my mommy. And right away I’d take off my pajama bottoms and slip into his bed. If he didn’t touch me, then I’d be the one to touch him, and if he didn’t respond, I’d let my mouth boldly go to places it’d never been before. The humor of the words themselves amused me. Intergalactic slop. My Star of David, his Star of David, our two necks like one, two cut Jewish men joined together from time immemorial. If none of this worked I’d go for him, he’d fight me back, and we’d wrestle, and I’d make sure to turn him on as he pinned me down while I wrapped my legs around him like a woman, even hurt him on the hip he’d scraped in his bicycle fall, and if all this didn’t work then I’d commit the ultimate indignity, and with this indignity show him that the shame was all his, not mine, that I had come with truth and human kindness in my heart and that I was leaving it on his sheets now to remind him how he’d said no to a young man’s plea for fellowship. Say no to that and they should have you in hell feet first.

What if he didn’t like me? In the dark they say all cats…What if he doesn’t like it at all? He’ll just have to try, then. What if he gets really upset and offended? “Get out, you sick, wretched, twisted piece of shit.” The kiss was proof enough he could be pushed that way. To say nothing of the foot? Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona.

The foot. The last time he’d brought out such a reaction in me was not when he’d kissed me but when he’d pressed his thumb into my shoulders.

No, there’d been another time yet. In my sleep, when he came into my bedroom and lay on top of me, and I pretended to be asleep. Correction there again: in my sleep I’d heaved ever so slightly, just enough to tell him, Don’t leave, you’re welcome to go on, just don’t say I knew.

When I awoke later that afternoon, I had an intense desire for yogurt. Childhood memories. I went to the kitchen and found Mafalda lazily stowing away the china, which had been washed hours earlier. She must have napped too, and just awakened. I found a large peach in the fruit bowl and began to pare it.

“Faccio io,” she said, trying to grab the knife from my hand.

“No, no, faccio da me,” I replied, trying not to offend her.

I wanted to slice it and then cut the pieces into smaller pieces, and the smaller pieces into yet smaller ones. Till they became atoms. Therapy. Then I picked a banana, peeled it ever so slowly, and then proceeded to slice it into the thinnest slices, which I then diced. Then an apricot. A pear. Dates. Then I took the large container of yogurt from the refrigerator and poured its contents and the minced fruit into the blender. Finally, for coloring, a few fresh strawberries picked from the garden. I loved the purr of the blender.

This was not a dessert she was familiar with. But she was going to let me have my way in her kitchen without interfering, as if humoring someone who’d been hurt enough already. The bitch knew. She must have seen the foot. Her eyes followed me every step of the way as if ready to pounce on my knife before I slit my veins with it.

After blending my concoction, I poured it into a large glass, aimed a straw into it as if it were a dart, and proceeded toward the patio. On my way there, I stepped into the living room and took out the large picture book of Monet reproductions. I placed it on a tiny stool by the ladder. I wouldn’t show him the book. I’d just leave it there. He’d know.

On the patio, I saw my mother having tea with two sisters who had come all the way from S. to play bridge. The fourth player was due to arrive any minute.

In the back, from the garage area, I could hear their driver discussing soccer players with Manfredi.

I brought my drink to the far end of the patio, took out a chaise longue, and, facing the long balustrade, tried to enjoy the last half hour of full sun. I liked to sit and watch the waning day spread itself out into pre-dusk light. This was when one went for a late afternoon swim, but it was good to read then as well.

I liked feeling so rested. Maybe the ancients were right: it never hurt to be bled from time to time. If I continued to feel this way, later I might try to play one or two preludes and fugues, maybe a fantasy by Brahms. I swallowed more

of the yogurt and put my leg on the chair next to mine.

It took me a while to realize that I was striking a pose.

I wanted him to come back and catch me ever so relaxed. Little did he know what I was planning for tonight.

“Is Oliver around?” I said, turning to my mother.

“Didn’t he go out?”

I didn’t say anything. So much for “I’ll stick around,” then.

In a while, Mafalda came to remove the empty glass. Vuoi un altro di questi, did I want another of these? she seemed to say as though referring to a strange brew whose foreign, un-Italian name, if it had one, was of no interest to her.

“No, maybe I’ll go out.”

“But where will you go at this time?” she asked, implying dinner. “Especially in the state you were in at lunch. Mi preoccupo, I worry.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“I’d advise against it.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Signora,” she shouted, trying to enlist my mother’s support.

My mother agreed it was a bad idea.

“Then I’ll go for a swim.”

Anything but count the hours until tonight.

On my way down the stairway to the beach, I encountered a group of friends. They were playing volleyball on the sand. Did I want to play? No, thank you, I’ve been sick. I left them alone and ambled toward the large rock, stared at it for a while, and then looked out to the sea, which seemed to aim a rippling shaft of sunlight on the water directly toward me, as in a Monet painting. I stepped into the warm water. I was not unhappy. I wanted to be with someone. But it didn’t trouble me that I was alone.

Vimini, who must have been brought there by one of the others, said she heard I’d been unwell. “We sick ones—,” she began.

“Do you know where Oliver is?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I thought he went fishing with Anchise.”

“With Anchise? He’s crazy! He almost got killed the last time.” No response. She was looking away from the setting sun. “You like him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He likes you too—more than you do, I think.”

Was this her impression?

No, it was Oliver’s.

When had he told her?

A while ago.

It corresponded to the time when we had almost stopped speaking to each other. Even my mother had taken me aside that week and suggested I be more polite with our cauboi—all that walking in and out of rooms without even a perfunctory hello, not nice.

“I think he is right,” said Vimini.

I shrugged my shoulders. But I had never been visited by such powerful contradictions before. This was agony, for something like rage was brimming over inside me. I tried to still my mind and think of the sunset before us, the way people about to be given a polygraph like to visualize serene and placid settings to disguise their agitation. But I was also forcing myself to think of other things because I did not want to touch or use up any thoughts bearing on tonight. He might say no, he might even decide to leave our house and, if pressed, explain why. This was as far as I would let myself think.

A horrible thought gripped me. What if, right now, among some of the townsfolk he had befriended, or among all those people who clamored to invite him for dinner, he were to let out, or just hint at, what had happened during our bike ride into town? In his place, would I have been able to keep a lid on such a secret? No.

And yet, he had shown me that what I wanted could be given and taken so naturally that one wonders why it needed such hand-wringing torment and shame, seeing it was no more complicated a gesture than, say, buying a pack of cigarettes, or passing a reefer, or stopping by one of the girls behind the piazzetta late at night and, having settled on a price, going upstairs for a few minutes.

When I returned after swimming, there was still no sign of him. I asked. No, he wasn’t back. His bike was in the same place where we’d left it just before noon. And Anchise had returned hours ago. I went up to my room and from my balcony tried to make my way through the French windows of his room. They were shut. All I saw through the glass was the shorts he had been wearing at lunch.

I tried to remember. He was wearing a bathing suit when he came into my bedroom that afternoon and promised to stick around. I looked out of the balcony hoping to spot the boat, in case he had decided to take it out again. It

was moored to our wharf.

When I came downstairs, Father was having cocktails with a reporter from France. Why don’t you play something? he asked. “Non mi va,” I said, “don’t feel like it.” “E perché non ti va?” he asked, as though taking issue with the tone of my words. “Perché non mi va!” I shot back.

Having finally crossed a major barrier this morning, it seemed I could openly express the petty stuff that was on my mind right now.

Perhaps I too should have a drop of wine, said my father.

Mafalda announced dinner.

“Isn’t it too early for dinner?” I asked.

“It’s past eight.”

My mother was escorting one of her friends who had come by car and had to leave.

I was grateful that the Frenchman was sitting on the edge of his armchair, as though on the verge of standing up to be shown to the dining room, yet still sitting down, not budging. He was holding an empty glass in both hands, forcing my father, who had just asked him what he thought of the upcoming opera season, to remain seated while he finished answering him.

Dinner was pushed back by another five to ten minutes. If he was late for dinner, he wouldn’t eat with us. But if he was late that meant he was having dinner elsewhere. I didn’t want him to have dinner anywhere but with us tonight.

“Noi ci mettiamo a tavola, we’ll sit down,” said my mother. She asked me to sit next to her.

Oliver’s seat was empty. My mother complained that he should at least have let us know he wasn’t coming for dinner.

Father said it might be the boat’s fault again. That boat should be totally dismantled.

But the boat was downstairs, I said.

“Then it must be the translator. Who was it who told me he needed to see the translator this evening?” asked my mother.

Must not show anxiety. Or that I cared. Stay calm. I didn’t want to bleed again. But that moment of what seemed like bliss now when we’d walked our bikes on the piazzetta both before and after our talk belonged to another time segment, as though it had happened to another me in some other life that was not too different from my own, but removed enough to make the few seconds that kept us apart seem like light-years away. If I put my foot on the floor and

pretend that his is just behind the leg of the table, will that foot, like a starship that has turned on its cloaking device, like a ghost summoned by the living, suddenly materialize from its dimple in space and say, I know you’ve beckoned. Reach and you’ll find me?

Before long, my mother’s friend, who, at the last minute, decided to stay for dinner, was asked to sit where I’d sat at lunch. Oliver’s place setting was instantly removed.

The removal was performed summarily, without a hint of regret or compunction, the way you’d remove a bulb that was no longer working, or scrape out the entrails of a butchered sheep that had once been a pet, or take off the sheets and blankets from a bed where someone had died. Here, take these, and remove them from sight. I watched his silverware, his place mat, his napkin, his entire being disappear. It presaged exactly what would happen less than a month from now. I did not look at Mafalda. She hated these last-minute changes at the dinner table. She was shaking her head at Oliver, at my mother, at our world. At me too, I suppose. Without looking at her I knew her eyes were scanning my face to pounce on mine and make eye contact, which was why I avoided lifting my eyes from my semifreddo, which I loved, and which she knew I loved and had placed there for me because, despite the chiding look on her face that was stalking my every glance, she knew I knew she felt sorry for me.

Later that night, while I was playing something on the piano, my heart leapt when I thought I’d heard a scooter stop by our gate. Someone had given him a ride. But I could have been mistaken. I strained for his footsteps, from the sound of gravel underfoot to the muted flap of his espadrilles when he climbed the stairway leading to our balcony. But no one came into the house.

Much, much later, in bed, I made out the sound of music coming from a car that had stopped by the main road, beyond the alley of pines. Door opens. Door slams shut. Car pulls away. Music begins to fade. Just the sound of the surf and of gravel gently raked by the idle steps of someone who’s deep in thought or just slightly drunk.

What if on the way to his room he were to step into my bedroom, as in:

Thought I’d stick my head in before turning in and see how you’re feeling.

You okay?

No answer.

Pissed?

No answer.

You are pissed?

No, not at all. It’s just that you said you’d stick around.

So you are pissed.

So why didn’t you stick around?

He looks at me, and like one adult to another, You know exactly why.

Because you don’t like me.

No.

Because you never liked me.

No. Because I’m not good for you.

Silence.

Believe me, just believe me.

I lift the corner of my sheets.

He shakes his head.

Just for a second?

Shakes it again. I know myself, he says.

I’d heard him use these very same words before. They meant I’m dying to, but may not be able to hold back once I start, so I’d rather not start. What aplomb to tell someone you can’t touch him because you know yourself.

Well, since you’re not going to do anything with me—can you at least read me a story?

I’d settle for that. I wanted him to read me a story. Something by Chekhov or Gogol or Katherine Mansfield. Take your clothes off, Oliver, and come into my bed, let me feel your skin, your hair against my flesh, your foot on mine, even if we won’t do a thing, let us cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread out against the sky, and read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it’s always themselves they can’t stand being alone with…

Traitor, I thought as I waited to hear his bedroom door squeak open and squeak shut. Traitor. How easily we forget. I’ll stick around. Sure. Liar.

It never crossed my mind that I too was a traitor, that somewhere on a beach near her home a girl had waited for me tonight, as she waited every night now, and that I, like Oliver, hadn’t given her a second thought.

I heard him step onto the landing. I had left my bedroom door intentionally ajar, hoping that the light from the foyer would stream in just enough to reveal my body. My face was turned toward the wall. It was up to him. He walked past my room, didn’t stop. Didn’t even hesitate. Nothing.

I heard his door shut.

Barely a few minutes later, he opened it. My heart jumped. By now I was sweating and could feel the dampness on my pillow. I heard a few more footsteps. Then I heard the bathroom door click shut. If he ran the shower it meant he’d had sex. I heard the bathtub and then the shower run. Traitor. Traitor.

I waited for him to come out of the shower. But he was taking forever. When I finally turned to take a peek at the corridor, I noticed that my room

was completely dark. The door was shut—was someone in my room? I could make out the scent of his Roger & Gallet shampoo, so near me that if I so much as lifted my arm I knew I’d touch his face. He was in my room, standing in the dark, motionless, as though trying to make up his mind whether to rouse me or just find my bed in the dark. Oh, bless this night, I thought, bless this night. Without saying a word, I strained to make out the outline of the bathrobe I had worn so many times after he’d used it, its long terrycloth belt hanging so close to me now, rubbing my cheek ever so lightly as he stood there ready to let the robe drop to the floor. Had he come barefoot? And had he locked my door? Was he as hard as I was, and was his cock already pushing out of the bathrobe, which was why the belt was just about caressing my face, was he doing it on purpose, tickling me in the face, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t ever stop. Without warning the door began to open. Why open the door now?

It was only a draft. A draft had pushed it shut. And a draft was pulling it open. The belt that had so impishly tickled my face was none other than the mosquito net rubbing by my face each time I breathed. Outside, I could hear the water running in the bathroom, hours and hours seemed to have gone by since he’d gone to take a bath. No, not the shower, but the flushing of the toilet. It didn’t always work and would periodically empty itself when it was just about to overflow, only to refill and be emptied, again and again, all through the night. When I stepped out onto the balcony and made out the delicate light blue outline of the sea, I knew it was already dawn.

I woke up again an hour later.

At breakfast, as was our habit, I pretended not even to be aware of him. It was my mother who, on looking at him, first exclaimed, Ma guardi un po’ quant’è pallido, just look how gaunt you look! Despite her bluff remarks she continued using the formal address when speaking to Oliver. My father looked up and continued reading the paper. “I pray to God you made a killing last night, otherwise I’ll have to answer to your father.” Oliver cracked open the top of his soft-boiled egg by tapping it with the flat of his teaspoon. He still

hadn’t learned. “I never lose, Pro.” He was speaking to his egg the way my father had spoken into his newspaper. “Does your father approve?” “I pay my own way. I’ve paid my way since prep school. My father couldn’t possibly disapprove.” I envied him. “Did you have a lot to drink last night?”

“That—and other things.” This time he was buttering his bread.

“I don’t think I want to know,” said my father.

“Neither does my father. And to be perfectly frank, I don’t think I care to remember myself.”

Was this for my benefit? Look, there’s never going to be anything between us, and the sooner you get it through your head, the better off we’ll all be.

Or was it all diabolical posturing?

How I admired people who talked about their vices as though they were distant relatives they’d learned to put up with because they couldn’t quite disown them. That and other things. I don’t care to remember—like I know myself—hinted at a realm of human experience only others had access to, not I. How I wished I could say such a thing one day—that I didn’t care to remember what I’d done at night in full morning glory. I wondered what were the other things that necessitated taking a shower. Did you take a shower to perk yourself up because your system wouldn’t hold up otherwise? Or did you shower to forget, to wash away all traces of last night’s smut and degradation? Ah, to proclaim your vices by shaking your head at them and wash the whole thing down with apricot juice freshly prepared by Mafalda’s arthritic fingers and smack your lips afterward!

“Do you save your winnings?”

“Save and invest, Pro.”

“I wish I’d had your head at your age; I would have spared myself many mistaken turns,” said my father.

“You, mistaken turns, Pro? Frankly, I can’t picture you even imagining a mistaken turn.”

“That’s because you see me as a figure, not a human being. Worse yet: as an old figure. But there were. Mistaken turns, that is. Everyone goes through a period of traviamento—when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”

My mother sighed melodiously, her way of warning present company that this could easily turn into an improvised lecture from the great man himself.

Oliver proceeded to crack another egg.

He had big bags under his eyes. And he did look gaunt.

“Sometimes the traviamento turns out to be the right way, Pro. Or as good a way as any.”

My father, who was already smoking at this point, nodded pensively, his way of signifying that he was not an expert on such matters and was more than willing to yield to those who were. “At your age I knew nothing. But today everyone knows everything, and everyone talks, talks, talks.”

“Perhaps what Oliver needs is sleep, sleep, sleep.”

“Tonight, I promise, Signora P., no poker, no drinking. I’ll put on clean clothes, go over my manuscript, and after dinner we’ll all watch TV and play canasta, like old folks in Little Italy.

“But first,” he added, with something of a smirk on his face, “I need to see Milani for a short while. But tonight, I promise, I’ll be the best-behaved boy on the whole Riviera.”

Which was what happened. After a brief escape to B., he was the “green” Oliver all day, a child no older than Vimini, with all her candor and none of her barbs. He also had an enormous selection of flowers sent from the local flower shop. “You’ve lost your mind,” my mother said. After lunch, he said he would take a nap—the first, and last, during his entire stay with us. And indeed he did nap, because when he woke up at around five, he looked as flush as someone who had lost ten years of his life: ruddy cheeks, eyes all rested, the gauntness gone. He could have passed for my age. As promised, that night we all sat down—there were no guests—and watched television romances. The best part was how everyone, including Vimini, who wandered in, and Mafalda, who had her “seat” near the door of the living room, talked back to every scene, predicted its end, by turns outraged by and derisive of the stupidity of the story, the actors, the characters. Why, what would you have done in her place? I would have left him, that’s what. And you, Mafalda? Well, in my opinion, I think she should have accepted him the first time he asked and not shilly-shallied so long. My point exactly! She got what was coming to her. That she did.

We were interrupted only once. It was a phone call from the States. Oliver liked to keep his telephone conversations extremely short, curt almost. We heard him utter his unavoidable Later!, hang up, and, before we knew it, he was back asking what he’d missed. He never commented after hanging up. We never asked. Everyone volunteered to fill him in on the plot at the same time,

including my father, whose version of what Oliver had missed was less accurate than Mafalda’s. There was a lot of noise, with the result that we missed more of the film than Oliver had during his brief call. Much laughter. At some point, while we were intently focused on the high drama, Anchise walked into the living room and, unrolling a soaking old T-shirt, produced the evening’s catch: a gigantic sea bass, instantly destined for tomorrow’s lunch and dinner, with plenty for everyone who cared to join in. Father decided to pour some grappa for everyone, including a few drops for Vimini.

That night we all went to bed early. Exhaustion was the order of the day. I must have slept very soundly, because when I awoke they were already removing breakfast from the table.

I found him lying on the grass with a dictionary to his left and a yellow pad directly under his chest. I was hoping he’d look gaunt or be in the mood he’d been in all day yesterday. But he was already hard at work. I felt awkward breaking the silence. I was tempted to fall back on my habit of pretending not to notice him, but that seemed hard to do now, especially when he’d told me two days earlier that he’d seen through my little act.

Would knowing we were shamming change anything between us once we were back to not speaking again?

Probably not. It might dig the ditch even deeper, because it would be difficult for either of us to believe we were stupid enough to pretend the very thing we’d already confessed was a sham. But I couldn’t hold back.

“I waited for you the other night.” I sounded like my mother reproaching my father when he came home inexplicably late. I never knew I could sound so peevish.

“Why didn’t you come into town?” came his answer.

“Dunno.”

“We had a nice time. You would have too. Did you rest at least?” “In a way. Restless. But okay.”

He was back to staring at the page he had just been reading and was mouthing the syllables, perhaps to show his mind was very focused on the page.

“Are you headed into town this morning?” I knew I was interrupting and hated myself. “Later, maybe.”

I should have taken the hint, and I did. But part of me refused to believe anyone could change so soon.

“I was going to head into town myself.”

“I see.”

“A book I ordered has finally arrived. I’m to pick it up at the bookstore this morning.”

“What book?”

“Armance.”

“I’ll pick it up for you if you want.”

I looked at him. I felt like a child who, despite all manner of indirect pleas and hints, finds himself unable to remind his parents they’d promised to take him to the toy store. No need beating around the bush.

“It was just that I was hoping we’d go together.”

“You mean like the other day?” he added, as though to help me say what I couldn’t bring myself to say, but making things no easier by pretending to have forgotten the exact day.

“I don’t think we’ll ever do anything like that again.” I was trying to sound noble and grave in my defeat. “But, yes, like that.” I could be vague too.

That I, an extremely shy boy, found the courage to say such things could come from one place only: from a dream I’d had two, perhaps three nights running. In my dream he had pleaded with me, saying, “You’ll kill me if you stop.” I thought I remembered the context, but it embarrassed me so much that I was reluctant, even vis-à-vis myself, to own up to it. I had put a cloak around it and could only take furtive, hasty peeks.

“That day belongs to a different time warp. We should learn to leave sleeping dogs—”

Oliver listened.

“This voice of wisdom is your most winning trait.” He had lifted his eyes from his pad and was staring me straight in the face, which made me feel terribly uneasy. “Do you like me that much, Elio?”

“Do I like you?” I wanted to sound incredulous, as though to question how he could ever have doubted such a thing. But then I thought better of it and was on the point of softening the tone of my answer with a meaningfully evasive Perhaps that was supposed to mean Absolutely, when I let my tongue loose: “Do I like you, Oliver? I worship you.” There, I’d said it. I wanted the word to startle him and to come like a slap in the face so that it might be instantly followed with the most languorous caresses. What’s liking when we’re talking about worshipping? But I also wanted my verb to carry the persuasive knockout punch with which, not the person who has a crush on us, but their

closest friend, takes us aside and says, Look, I think you ought to know, so-and-so worships you. “To worship” seemed to say more than anyone might dare say under the circumstances; but it was the safest, and ultimately murkiest, thing I could come up with. I gave myself credit for getting the truth off my chest, all the while finding a loophole for immediate retreat in case I’d ventured too far.

“I’ll go with you to B.,” he said. “But—no speeches.” “No speeches, nothing, not a word.”

“What do you say we grab our bikes in half an hour?”

Oh, Oliver, I said to myself on my way to the kitchen for a quick bite to eat, I’ll do anything for you. I’ll ride up the hill with you, and I’ll race you up the road to town, and won’t point out the sea when we reach the berm, and I’ll wait at the bar in the piazzetta while you meet with your translator, and I’ll touch the memorial to the unknown soldier who died on the Piave, and I won’t utter a word, I’ll show you the way to the bookstore, and we’ll park our bikes outside the shop and go in together and leave together, and I promise, I promise, I promise, there’ll be no hint of Shelley, or Monet, nor will I ever stoop to tell you that two nights ago you added an annual ring to my soul.

I am going to enjoy this for its own sake, I kept telling myself. We are two young men traveling by bike, and we’re going to go to town and come back, and we’ll swim, play tennis, eat, drink, and late at night run into each other on the very same piazzetta where two mornings ago so much but really nothing was said between us. He’ll be with a girl, I’ll be with a girl, and we’re even going to be happy. Every day, if I don’t mess things up, we can ride into town and be back, and even if this is all he is willing to give, I’ll take it—I’ll settle for less, even, if only to live with these threadbare scraps.

We rode our bicycles to town that morning and were done with his translator before long, but even after a hasty coffee at the bar, the bookstore wasn’t open yet. So we lingered on the piazzetta, I staring at the war memorial, he looking out at the view of the speckling bay, neither of us saying a word about Shelley’s ghost, which shadowed our every step through town and beckoned louder than Hamlet’s father. Without thinking, he asked how anyone could drown in such a sea. I smiled right away, because I caught his attempt to backpedal, which instantly brought complicit smiles to our faces, like a passionate wet kiss in the midst of a conversation between two individuals who, without thinking, had reached for each other’s lips through the scorching red desert both had intentionally placed between them so as not to grope for

each other’s nakedness.

“I thought we weren’t going to mention—,” I began.

“No speeches. I know.”

When we returned to the bookshop, we left our bikes outside and went in. This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret

haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life.

I liked his bookstore manner. He was curious but not entirely focused, interested yet nonchalant, veering between a Look what I’ve found and Of course, how could any bookstore not carry so-and-so!

The bookseller had ordered two copies of Stendhal’s Armance, one a paperback edition and the other an expensive hardbound. An impulse made me say I’d take both and to put them on my father’s bill. I then asked his assistant for a pen, opened up the hardbound edition, and wrote, Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in silence, somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties.

In years to come, if the book was still in his possession, I wanted him to ache. Better yet, I wanted someone to look through his books one day, open up this tiny volume of Armance, and ask, Tell me who was in silence, somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties? And then I’d want him to feel something as darting as sorrow and fiercer than regret, maybe even pity for me, because in the bookstore that morning I’d have taken pity too, if pity was all he had to give, if pity could have made him put an arm around me, and underneath this surge of pity and regret, hovering like a vague, erotic undercurrent that was years in the making, I wanted him to remember the morning on Monet’s berm when I’d kissed him not the first but the second time and given him my spit in his mouth because I so desperately wanted his in mine.

He said something about the gift being the best thing he’d received all year. I shrugged my shoulders to make light of perfunctory gratitude. Perhaps I just wanted him to repeat it.

“I am glad, then. I just want to thank you for this morning.” And before he even thought of interrupting, I added, “I know. No speeches. Ever.”

On our way downhill, we passed my spot, and it was I this time who looked the other way, as though it had all but slipped my mind. I’m sure that if I had looked at him then, we would have exchanged the same infectious smile we’d immediately wiped off our faces on bringing up Shelley’s death. It might have brought us closer, if only to remind us how far apart we needed to be now. Perhaps in looking the other way, and knowing we had looked the other

way to avoid “speeches,” we might have found a reason to smile at each other, for I’m sure he knew I knew he knew I was avoiding all mention of Monet’s berm, and that this avoidance, which gave every indication of drawing us apart, was, instead, a perfectly synchronized moment of intimacy which neither of us wished to dispel. This too is in the picture book, I might have said, but bit my tongue instead. No speeches.

But, if on our rides together the following mornings he were to ask, then I’d spill everything.

I’d tell him that though we rode our bicycles every day and took them up to our favorite piazzetta where I was determined never to speak out of turn, yet, each night, when I knew he was in bed, I’d still open my shutters and would step out onto the balcony, hoping he’d have heard the shaking glass of my French windows, followed by the telltale squeak of its old hinges. I’d wait for him there, wearing only my pajama bottoms, ready to claim, if he asked what I was doing there, that the night was too hot, and the smell of the citronella intolerable, and that I preferred to stay up, not sleep, not read, just stare, because I couldn’t bring myself to sleep, and if he asked why I couldn’t sleep, I’d simply say, You don’t want to know, or, in a roundabout way, just say that I had promised never to cross over to his side of the balcony, partly because I was terrified of offending him now, but also because I didn’t want to test the invisible trip wire between us—What trip wire are you talking about?—The trip wire which one night, if my dream is too powerful or if I’ve had more wine than usual, I could easily cross, then push open your glass door and say, Oliver, it’s me, I can’t sleep, let me stay with you. That trip wire!

The trip wire loomed at all hours of the night. An owl, the sound of Oliver’s own window shutters squeaking against the wind, the music from a distant, all-night discotheque in an adjoining hill town, the scuffling of cats very late at night, or the creak of the wooden lintel of my bedroom door, anything could wake me. But I’d known these since childhood and, like a sleeping fawn flicking his tail at an intrusive insect, knew how to brush them away and fall instantly back to sleep. Sometimes, though, a mere nothing, like a sense of dread or shame, would slip its way out of my sleep and hover undefined about me and watch me sleep and, bending down to my ear, finally whisper, I’m not trying to wake you, I’m really not, go back to sleep, Elio, keep sleeping— while I made every effort to recover the dream I was about to reenter any

moment now and could almost rescript if only I tried a bit harder.

But sleep would not come, and sure enough not one but two troubling thoughts, like paired specters materializing out of the fog of sleep, stood watch over me: desire and shame, the longing to throw open my window and, without thinking, run into his room stark-naked, and, on the other hand, my repeated inability to take the slightest risk to bring any of this about. There they were, the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life, hunger and fear, watching over me, saying, So many before you have taken the chance and been rewarded, why can’t you? No answer. So many have balked, so why must you? No answer. And then it came, as ever deriding me: If not later, Elio, when?

That night, yet again, an answer did come, though it came in a dream that was itself a dream within a dream. I awoke with an image that told me more than I wanted to know, as though, despite all of my frank admissions to myself about what I wanted from him, and how I’d want it, there were still a few corners I’d avoided. In this dream I finally learned what my body must have known from the very first day. We were in his room, and, contrary to all my fantasies, it was not I who had my back on the bed, but Oliver; I was on top of him, watching, on his face, an expression at once so flushed, so readily acquiescent, that even in my sleep it tore every emotion out of me and told me one thing I could never have known or guessed so far: that not to give what I was dying to give him at whatever price was perhaps the greatest crime I might ever commit in my life. I desperately wanted to give him something. By contrast, taking seemed so bland, so facile, so mechanical. And then I heard it, as I knew by now I would. “You’ll kill me if you stop,” he was gasping, conscious that he’d already spoken these selfsame words to me a few nights before in another dream but that, having said them once, he was also free to repeat them whenever he came into my dreams, even though neither of us seemed to know whether it was his voice that was breaking from inside me or whether my memory of these very words was exploding in him. His face, which seemed both to endure my passion and by doing so to abet it, gave me an image of kindness and fire I had never seen and could never have imagined on anyone’s face before. This very image of him would become like a night-light in my life, keeping vigil on those days when I’d all but given up, rekindling my desire for him when I wanted it dead, stoking the embers of courage when I feared a snub might dispel every semblance of pride. The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that

happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag.

These words made me long for things and try things I would never have thought myself capable of.

Regardless of how much he wished to have nothing to do with me, regardless of those he’d befriended and was surely sleeping with each night, anyone who’d revealed his entire humanity to me while lying naked under me, even in my dream, could not be any different in real life. This was who he truly was; the rest was incidental.

No: he was also the other man, the one in the red bathing suit.

It was just that I couldn’t allow myself to hope I’d ever see him wearing no bathing suit at all.

If on our second morning after the piazzetta I found the courage to insist on going to town with him though it was obvious he didn’t even want to speak with me, it was only because as I looked at him and saw him mouthing the words he had just written on his yellow pad, I kept remembering his other, pleading words: “You’ll kill me if you stop.” When I offered him the book in the bookstore, and later even insisted on being the one to pay for our ice cream because buying an ice cream also meant walking our bikes through the narrow, shaded lanes of B. and therefore being together awhile longer, it was also to thank him for giving me “You’ll kill me if you stop.” Even when I ribbed him and promised to make no speeches, it was because I was secretly cradling “You’ll kill me if you stop”—far more precious now than any other admission from him. That morning, I’d written it down in my diary but omitted to say I had dreamt it. I wanted to come back years later and believe, if only for a moment, that he had truly spoken these pleading words to me. 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.

As we sped downhill past my spot, past the olive groves and the sunflowers that turned their startled faces to us as we glided past the marine pines, past the two old train cars that had lost their wheels generations ago but still bore the royal insignia of the House of Savoy, past the string of gypsy vendors screaming murder at us for almost grazing their daughters with our bikes, I turned to him and yelled, “Kill me if I stop.”

I had said it to put his words in my mouth, to savor them awhile longer before squirreling them back in my hideaway, the way shepherds take their

sheep out uphill when it’s warm but rush them back indoors when the weather cools. By shouting his words I was fleshing them out and giving them longer life, as though they had a life of their own now, a longer and louder life that no one could govern, like the life of echoes once they’ve bounced off the cliffs of B. and gone to dive by the distant shoals where Shelley’s boat slammed into the squall. I was returning to Oliver what was his, giving him back his words with the implicit wish that he repeat them back to me again, as in my dream, because now it was his turn to say them.

At lunch, not a word. After lunch he sat in the shade in the garden doing, as he announced before coffee, two days’ work. No, he wasn’t going to town tonight. Maybe tomorrow. No poker either. Then he went upstairs.

A few days ago his foot was on mine. Now, not even a glance.

Around dinner, he came back down for a drink. “I’ll miss all this, Mrs. P.,” he said, his hair glistening after his late-afternoon shower, the “star” look beaming all over his features. My mother smiled; la muvi star was welcome ennnnni taim. Then he took the usual short walk with Vimini to help her look for her pet chameleon. I never quite understood what the two of them saw in each other, but it felt far more natural and spontaneous than anything he and I shared. Half an hour later, they were back. Vimini had scaled a fig tree and was told by her mother to go wash before dinner.

At dinner not a word. After dinner he disappeared upstairs.

I could have sworn that sometime around ten or so he’d make a quiet getaway and head to town. But I could see the light drifting from his end of the balcony. It cast a faint, oblique orange band toward the landing by my door. From time to time, I heard him moving.

I decided to call a friend to ask if he was headed to town. His mother replied that he’d already left, and yes, had probably gone to the same place as well. I called another. He too had already left. My father said, “Why don’t you call Marzia? Are you avoiding her?” Not avoiding—but she seemed full of complications. “As if you aren’t!” he added. When I called she said she wasn’t going anywhere tonight. There was a dusky chill in her voice. I was calling to apologize. “I heard you were sick.” It was nothing, I replied. I could come and pick her up by bike, and together we’d ride to B. She said she’d join me.

My parents were watching TV when I walked out of the house. I could hear my steps on the gravel. I didn’t mind the noise. It kept me company. He’d hear

it too, I thought.

Marzia met me in her garden. She was seated on an old, wrought-iron chair, her legs extended in front of her, with just her heels touching the ground. Her bike was leaning against another chair, its handlebar almost touching the ground. She was wearing a sweater. You made me wait a lot, she said. We left her house via a shortcut that was steeper but that brought us to town in no time. The light and the sound of bustling nightlife from the piazzetta were brimming over into the side alleys. One of the restaurants was in the habit of taking out tiny wooden tables and putting them on the sidewalk whenever its clientele overflowed the allotted space on the square. When we entered the piazza the bustle and commotion filled me with the usual sense of anxiety and inadequacy. Marzia would run into friends, others were bound to tease. Even being with her would challenge me in one way or another. I didn’t want to be challenged.

Rather than join some of the people we knew at a table in the caffès, we stood in line to buy two ice creams. She asked me to buy her cigarettes as well.

Then, with our ice-cream cones, we began to walk casually through the crowded piazzetta, threading our way along one street, then another, and still another. I liked it when cobblestones glistened in the dark, liked the way she and I ambled about lazily as we walked our bikes through town, listening to the muffled chatter of TV stations coming from behind open windows. The bookstore was still open, and I asked her if she minded. No, she didn’t mind, she’d come in with me. We leaned our bikes against the wall. The beaded fly curtain gave way to a smoky, musty room littered with overbrimming ashtrays. The owner was thinking of closing soon, but the Schubert quartet was still playing and a couple in their mid-twenties, tourists, were thumbing through books in the English-language section, probably looking for a novel with local color. How different from that morning when there hadn’t been a soul about and blinding sunlight and the smell of fresh coffee had filled the shop. Marzia looked over my shoulder while I picked up a book of poetry on the table and began to read one of the poems. I was about to turn the page when she said she hadn’t finished reading yet. I liked this. Seeing the couple next to us about to purchase an Italian novel in translation, I interrupted their conversation and advised against it. “This is much, much better. It’s set in Sicily, not here, but it’s probably the best Italian novel written this century.” “We’ve seen the movie,” said the girl. “Is it as good as Calvino, though?” I shrugged my shoulders. Marzia was still interested in the same poem and was actually

rereading it. “Calvino is nothing in comparison—lint and tinsel. But I’m just a kid, and what do I know?”

Two other young adults, wearing stylish summer sports jackets, without ties, were discussing literature with the owner, all three of them smoking. On the table next to the cashier stood a clutter of mostly emptied wine glasses, and next to them one large bottle of port. The tourists, I noticed, were holding emptied glasses. Obviously, they’d been offered wine during the book party. The owner looked over to us and with a silent glance that wished to apologize for interrupting asked if we wanted some port as well. I looked at Marzia and shrugged back, meaning, She doesn’t seem to want to. The owner, still silent, pointed to the bottle and shook his head in mock disapproval, to suggest it was a pity to throw away such good port tonight, so why not help him finish it before closing the shop. I finally accepted, as did Marzia. Out of politeness, I asked what was the book being celebrated tonight. Another man, whom I hadn’t noticed because he’d been reading something in the tiny alcove, named the book: Se l’amore. If Love. “Is it good?” I asked. “Pure junk,” he replied. “I should know. I wrote it.”

I envied him. I envied him the book reading, the party, the friends and aficionados who had come in from the surrounding areas to congratulate him in the little bookstore off our little piazzetta in this little town. They had left more than fifty emptied glasses behind. I envied him the privilege of putting himself down.

“Would you inscribe a copy for me?”

“Con piacere,” he replied, and before the owner had handed him a felt-tip pen, the author had already taken out his Pelikan. “I’m not sure this book is for you, but…” He let the sentence trail into silence with a mix of utter humility tinted with the faintest suggestion of affected swagger, which translated into, You asked me to sign and I’m only too happy to play the part of the famous poet which we both know I’m not.

I decided to buy Marzia a copy as well, and begged him to inscribe it for her, which he did, adding an endless doodle next to his name. “I don’t think it’s for you either, signorina, but…”

Then, once again, I asked the bookseller to put both books on my father’s bill.

As we stood by the cashier, watching the bookseller take forever to wrap each copy in glossy yellow paper, to which he added a ribbon and, on the ribbon, the store’s silver seal-sticker, I sidled up to her and, maybe because

she simply stood there so close to me, kissed her behind the ear.

She seemed to shudder, but did not move. I kissed her again. Then, catching myself, I whispered, “Did it bother you?” “Of course not,” she whispered back.

Outside, she couldn’t help herself. “Why did you buy me this book?” For a moment I thought she was going to ask me why I’d kissed her. “Perché mi andava, because I felt like it.”

“Yes, but why did you buy it for me—why buy me a book?” “I don’t understand why you’re asking.”

“Any idiot would understand why I’m asking. But you don’t. Figures!”

“I still don’t follow.”

“You’re hopeless.”

I gazed at her, looking totally startled by the flutters of anger and vexation in her voice.

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll imagine all sorts of things—and I’ll just feel terrible.”

“You’re an ass. Give me a cigarette.”

It’s not that I didn’t suspect where she was headed, but that I couldn’t believe that she had seen through me so clearly. Perhaps I didn’t want to believe what she was implying for fear of having to answer for my behavior. Had I been purposely disingenuous? Could I continue to misconstrue what she was saying without feeling entirely dishonest?

Then I had a brilliant insight. Perhaps I’d been ignoring every one of her signals on purpose: to draw her out. This the shy and ineffectual call strategy.

Only then, by a ricochet mechanism that totally surprised me, did it hit me. Had Oliver been doing the same with me? Intentionally ignoring me all the time, the better to draw me in?

Wasn’t this what he’d implied when he said he’d seen through my own attempts to ignore him?

We left the bookstore and lit two cigarettes. A minute later we heard a loud metallic rattle. The owner was lowering the steel shutter. “Do you really like to read that much?” she asked as we ambled our way casually in the dark toward the piazzetta.

I looked at her as if she had asked me if I loved music, or bread and salted butter, or ripe fruit in the summertime. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I like to read too. But I don’t tell anyone.” At last, I thought, someone who speaks the truth. I asked her why she didn’t tell anyone. “I don’t know…” This was more

her way of asking for time to think or to hedge before answering, “People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

“Do you hide who you are?”

“Sometimes. Don’t you?”

“Do I? I suppose.” And then, contrary to my every impulse, I found myself stumbling into a question I might otherwise never have dared ask. “Do you hide from me?”

“No, not from you. Or maybe, yes, a bit.” “Like what?”

“You know exactly like what.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why? Because I think you can hurt me and I don’t want to be hurt.” Then she thought for a moment. “Not that you mean to hurt anyone, but because you’re always changing your mind, always slipping, so no one knows where to find you. You scare me.”

We were both walking so slowly that when we stopped our bicycles, neither took note. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. She took her bike, placed it against the door of a closed shop, and, leaning against a wall, said, “Kiss me again?” Using my kickstand, I stood the bike in the middle of the alley and, once we were close, I held her face with both hands, then leaned into her as we began to kiss, my hands under her shirt, hers in my hair. I loved her simplicity, her candor. It was in every word she’d spoken to me that night —untrammeled, frank, human—and in the way her hips responded to mine now, without inhibition, without exaggeration, as though the connection between lips and hips in her body was fluid and instantaneous. A kiss on the mouth was not a prelude to a more comprehensive contact, it was already contact in its totality. There was nothing between our bodies but our clothes, which was why I was not caught by surprise when she slipped a hand between us and down into my trousers, and said, “Sei duro, duro, you’re so hard.” And it was her frankness, unfettered and unstrained, that made me harder yet now.

I wanted to look at her, stare in her eyes as she held me in her hand, tell her how long I’d wanted to kiss her, say something to show that the person who’d called her tonight and picked her up at her house was no longer the same cold, lifeless boy—but she cut me short: “Baciami ancora, kiss me again.”

I kissed her again, but my mind was racing ahead to the berm. Should I propose it? We would have to ride our bikes for five minutes, especially if we

took her shortcut and made our way directly through the olive groves. I knew we’d run into other lovers around there. Otherwise there was the beach. I’d used the spot before. Everyone did. I might propose my room, no one at home would have known or for that matter cared.

An image flitted through my mind: she and I sitting in the garden every morning after breakfast, she wearing her bikini, always urging me to walk downstairs and join her for a swim.

“Ma tu mi vuoi veramente bene, do you really care for me?” she asked. Did it come from nowhere—or was this the same wounded look in need of soothing which had been shadowing our steps ever since we’d left the bookstore?

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.

While kissing her more passionately now, and with our hands straying all over each other’s bodies, I found myself composing the note I resolved to slip under his door that night: Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you.

By the time I was ready to slip the note under his door it was already dawn. Marzia and I had made love in a deserted spot on the beach, a place nicknamed the Aquarium, where the night’s condoms would unavoidably gather and be seen floating among the rocks like returning salmon in trapped water. We planned to meet later in the day.

Now, as I made my way home, I loved her smell on my body, on my hands. I would do nothing to wash it away. I’d keep it on me till we met in the evening. Part of me still enjoyed luxuriating in this newfound, beneficent wave of indifference, verging on distaste, for Oliver that both pleased me and told me how fickle I ultimately was. Perhaps he sensed that all I’d wanted from him was to sleep with him to be done with him and had instinctively resolved to have nothing to do with me. To think that a few nights ago I had felt so strong an urge to host his body in mine that I’d nearly jumped out of bed to seek him out in his room. Now the idea couldn’t possibly arouse me. Perhaps this whole thing with Oliver had been canicular rut, and I was well rid of it. By contrast,

all I had to do was smell Marzia on my hand and I loved the all-woman in every woman.

I knew the feeling wouldn’t last long and that, as with all addicts, it was easy to forswear an addiction immediately after a fix.

Scarcely an hour later, and Oliver came back to me au galop. To sit in bed with him and offer him my palm and say, Here, smell this, and then to watch him sniff at my hand, holding it ever so gently in both of his, finally placing my middle finger to his lips and then suddenly all the way into his mouth.

I tore out a sheet of paper from a school notebook.

Please don’t avoid me.

Then I rewrote it:

Please don’t avoid me. It kills me.

Which I rewrote:

Your silence is killing me.

Way over the top.

Can’t stand thinking you hate me.

Too plangent. No, make it less lachrymose, but keep the trite death speech.

I’d sooner die than know you hate me.

At the last minute I came back to the original.

Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you.

I folded the piece of lined paper and slipped it under his door with the resigned apprehension of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. There was no turning back now. Iacta alea est, Caesar had said, the die is cast. It amused me to think that the verb “to throw,” iacere in Latin, has the same root as the verb “to ejaculate.” No sooner had I thought this than I realized that what I wanted was to bring him not just her scent on my fingers but, dried on my hand, the imprint of my semen.

Fifteen minutes later I was prey to two countervailing emotions: regret that I had sent the message, and regret that there wasn’t a drop of irony in it.

At breakfast, when he finally showed up after his jog, all he asked without raising his head was whether I had enjoyed myself last night, the implication being I had gone to bed very late. “Insomma, so-so,” I replied, trying to keep my answer as vague as possible, which was also my way of suggesting I was minimizing a report that would have been too long otherwise. “Must be tired, then,” was my father’s ironic contribution to the conversation. “Or was it poker that you were playing too?” “I don’t play poker.” My father and Oliver exchanged significant glances. Then they began discussing the day’s workload.

And I lost him. Another day of torture.

When I went back upstairs to fetch my books, I saw the same folded piece of lined notebook paper on my desk. He must have stepped into my room using the balcony door and placed it where I’d spot it. If I read it now it would ruin my day. But if I put off reading it, the whole day would become meaningless, and I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else. In all likelihood, he was tossing it back to me without adding anything on it, as though to mean: I found this on the floor. It’s probably yours. Later! Or it might mean something far more blunted: No reply.

Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight.

That’s what he had added under my words.

He had delivered it before breakfast.

This realization came with a few minutes’ delay but it filled me with instant yearning and dismay. Did I want this, now that something was being offered? And was it in fact being offered? And if I wanted or didn’t want it, how would I live out the day till midnight? It was barely ten in the morning: fourteen hours to go…The last time I had waited so long for something was for my report card. Or on the Saturday two years ago when a girl had promised we’d meet at the movies and I wasn’t sure she hadn’t forgotten. Half a day watching my entire life being put on hold. How I hated waiting and depending on the whim of others.

Should I answer his note?

You can’t answer an answer!

As for the note: was its tone intentionally light, or was it meant to look like an afterthought scribbled away minutes after jogging and seconds before breakfast? I didn’t miss the little jab at my operatic sentimentalism, followed by the self-confident, let’s-get-down-to-basics see you at midnight. Did either bode well, and which would win the day, the swat of irony, or the jaunty Let’s get together tonight and see what comes of it? Were we going to talk—just talk? Was this an order or a consent to see me at the hour specified in every novel and every play? And where were we going to meet at midnight? Would he find a moment during the day to tell me where? Or, being aware that I had fretted all night long the other night and that the trip wire dividing our respective ends of the balcony was entirely artificial, did he assume that one of us would eventually cross the unspoken Maginot Line that had never stopped anyone?

And what did this do to our near-ritual morning bike rides? Would

“midnight” supersede the morning ride? Or would we go on as before, as though nothing had changed, except that now we had a “midnight” to look forward to? When I run into him now, do I flash him a significant smile, or do I go on as before, and offer, instead, a cold, glazed, discreet American gaze?

And yet, among the many things I wished to show him the next time I crossed paths with him was gratitude. One could show gratitude and still not be considered intrusive and heavy-handed. Or does gratitude, however restrained, always bear that extra dollop of treacle that gives every Mediterranean passion its unavoidably mawkish, histrionic character? Can’t let things well enough alone, can’t play down, must exclaim, proclaim, declaim…

Say nothing and he’ll think you regret having written.

Say anything and it will be out of place.

Do what, then?

Wait.

I knew this from the very start. Just wait. I’d work all morning. Swim. Maybe play tennis in the afternoon. Meet Marzia. Be back by midnight. No, eleven-thirty. Wash? No wash? Ah, to go from one body to the other.

Wasn’t this what he might be doing as well? Going from one to the other. And then a terrible panic seized me: was midnight going to be a talk, a

clearing of the air between us—as in, buck up, lighten up, grow up!

But why wait for midnight, then? Who ever picks midnight to have such a conversation?

Or was midnight going to be midnight?

What to wear at midnight?

The day went as I feared. Oliver found a way to leave without telling me immediately after breakfast and did not come back until lunch. He sat in his usual place next to me. I tried to make light conversation a few times but realized that this was going to be another one of our let’s-not-speak-to-each-other days when we both tried to make it very clear that we were no longer just pretending to be quiet.

After lunch, I went to take a nap. I heard him follow me upstairs and shut his door.

Later I called Marzia. We met on the tennis court. Luckily, no one was there, so it was quiet and we played for hours under the scorching sun, which

both of us loved. Sometimes, we would sit on the old bench in the shade and listen to the crickets. Mafalda brought us refreshments and then warned us that she was too old for this, that the next time we’d have to fetch whatever we wanted ourselves. “But we never asked you for anything,” I protested. “You shouldn’t have drunk, then.” And she shuffled away, having scored her point.

Vimini, who liked to watch people play, did not come that day. She must have been with Oliver at their favorite spot.

I loved August weather. The town was quieter than usual in the late summer weeks. By then, everyone had left for le vacanze, and the occasional tourists were usually gone before seven in the evening. I loved the afternoons best: the scent of rosemary, the heat, the birds, the cicadas, the sway of palm fronds, the silence that fell like a light linen shawl on an appallingly sunny day, all of these highlighted by the walk down to the shore and the walk back upstairs to shower. I liked looking up to our house from the tennis court and seeing the empty balconies bask in the sun, knowing that from any one of them you could spot the limitless sea. This was my balcony, my world. From where I sat now, I could look around me and say, Here is our tennis court, there our garden, our orchard, our shed, our house, and below is our wharf—everyone and everything I care for is here. My family, my instruments, my books, Mafalda, Marzia, Oliver.

That afternoon, as I sat with Marzia with my hand resting on her thighs and knees, it did occur to me that I was, in Oliver’s words, one of the luckiest persons on earth. There was no saying how long all this would last, just as there was no sense in second-guessing how the day might turn out, or the night. Every minute felt as though stretched on tenterhooks. Everything could snap in a flash.

But sitting here I knew I was experiencing the mitigated bliss of those who are too superstitious to claim they may get all they’ve ever dreamed of but are far too grateful not to know it could easily be taken away.

After tennis, and just before heading to the beach, I took her upstairs by way of the balcony into my bedroom. No one passed there in the afternoon. I closed the shutters but left the windows open, so that the subdued afternoon light drew slatted patterns on the bed, on the wall, on Marzia. We made love in utter silence, neither of us closing our eyes.

Part of me hoped we’d bang against the wall, or that she’d be unable to smother a cry, and that all this might alert Oliver to what was happening on the other side of his wall. I imagined him napping and hearing my bedsprings and

being upset.

On our way to the cove below I was once again pleased to feel I didn’t care if he found out about us, just as I didn’t care if he never showed up tonight. I didn’t even care for him or his shoulders or the white of his arms. The bottom of his feet, the flat of his palms, the underside of his body—didn’t care. I would much rather spend the night with her than wait up for him and hear him declaim bland pieties at the stroke of midnight. What had I been thinking this morning when I’d slipped him my note?

And yet another part of me knew that if he showed up tonight and I disliked the start of whatever was in store for me, I’d still go through with it, go with it all the way, because better to find out once and for all than to spend the rest of the summer, or my life perhaps, arguing with my body.

I’d make a decision in cold blood. And if he asked, I’d tell him. I’m not sure I want to go ahead with this, but I need to know, and better with you than anyone else. I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me.

Marzia left just before dinnertime. She had promised to go to the movies. There’d be friends, she said. Why didn’t I come? I made a face when I heard their names. I’d stay home and practice, I said. I thought you practiced every morning. This morning I started late, remember? She intercepted my meaning and smiled.

Three hours to go.

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

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

Thompson twins.

I wondered what their life together was like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should I be punctual?

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

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

At midnight there wasn’t a sound coming from his room. Could he have

stood me up again? That would be too much. I hadn’t heard him come back. He’d just have to come to my room, then. Or should I still go to his? Waiting would be torture.

I’ll go to him.

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

Or I could wait. Or not go at all.

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

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

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

I knock on the glass panel, softly. My heart is beating like crazy. I am afraid of nothing, so why be so frightened? Why? Because everything scares me, because both fear and desire are busy equivocating with each other, with me, I can’t even tell the difference between wanting him to open the door and hoping he’s stood me up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both of us were whispering. A good sign.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Sometimes.” He went to the bed and sat squarely in the middle of it. Not knowing what else to do or say, I muttered, “I’m nervous.” “Me too.”

“Me more than you.”

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

It gave me something to do.

I remembered how I’d almost hugged him on the balcony but had caught

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

Now I was inside the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You okay?” he asked.

“Me okay.”

There was absolutely nothing to say. With my toes, I reached over to his

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

“Does this make you happy?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

“We haven’t talked,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, No need to.

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

I did not give him an answer. Without nodding, I had already brought my

mouth to his, just as I’d kissed Marzia the night before. Something unexpected seemed to clear away between us, and, for a second, it seemed there was absolutely no difference in age between us, just two men kissing, and even this seemed to dissolve, as I began to feel we were not even two men, just two beings. I loved the egalitarianism of the moment. I loved feeling younger and older, human to human, man to man, Jew to Jew. I loved the night-light. It made me feel snug and safe. As I’d felt that night in the hotel bedroom in Oxford. I even loved the stale, wan feel of my old bedroom, which was littered with his things but which somehow became more livable under his stewardship than mine: a picture here, a chair turned into an end table, books, cards, music.

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

He got under the covers too and, before I knew it, started to undress me. I had worried about how I’d go about undressing, how, if he wasn’t going to help, I’d do what so many girls did in the movies, take off my shirt, drop my pants, and just stand there, stark-naked, arms hanging down, meaning: This is who I am, this is how I’m made, here, take me, I’m yours. But his move had solved the problem. He was whispering, “Off, and off, and off, and off,” which made me laugh, and suddenly I was totally naked, feeling the weight of the sheet on my cock, not a secret left in the world, because wanting to be in bed with him was my only secret and here I was sharing it with him. How wonderful to feel his hands all over me under the sheets, as if part of us, like an advance scouting party, had already arrived at intimacy, while the rest of us, exposed outside the sheets, was still struggling with niceties, like latecomers stamping their feet in the cold while everyone else is warming hands inside a crowded nightclub. He was still dressed and I wasn’t. I loved being naked before him. Then he kissed me, and kissed me again, deeply this second time, as if he too was finally letting go. At some point I realized he’d been naked for a long while, though I hadn’t noticed him undress, but there he was, not a part of him wasn’t touching me. Where had I been? I’d been meaning to ask the tactful health question, but that too seemed to have been answered a while ago, because when I finally did find the courage to ask him, he replied, “I already told you, I’m okay.” “Did I tell you I was okay too?” “Yes.” He smiled. I looked away, because he was staring at me, and I knew I was flushed, and I

knew I’d made a face, though I still wanted him to stare at me even if it embarrassed me, and I wanted to keep staring at him too as we settled in our mock wrestling position, his shoulders rubbing my knees. How far we had come from the afternoon when I’d taken off my underwear and put on his bathing suit and thought this was the closest his body would ever come to mine. Now this. I was on the cusp of something, but I also wanted it to last forever, because I knew there’d be no coming back from this. When it happened, it happened not as I’d dreamed it would, but with a degree of discomfort that forced me to reveal more of myself than I cared to reveal. I had an impulse to stop him, and when he noticed, he did ask, but I did not answer, or didn’t know what to answer, and an eternity seemed to pass between my reluctance to make up my mind and his instinct to make it up for me. From this moment on, I thought, from this moment on—I had, as I’d never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all of my life and I’d misplaced it and he had helped me find it. The dream had been right—this was like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life? which was another way of asking, Where were you in my childhood, Oliver? which was yet another way of asking, What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not he, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You’ll kill me if you stop, you’ll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from his mouth to my mouth back into his mouth, swapping words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me, softly at first, till he said, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” which I’d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.

Had we made noise?

He smiled. Nothing to worry about.

I think I might have sobbed even, but I wasn’t sure. He took his shirt and cleaned me with it. Mafalda always looks for signs. She won’t find any, he said. I call this shirt “Billowy,” you wore it on your first day here, it has more of you than me. I doubt it, he said. He wouldn’t let go of me yet, but as our

bodies separated I seemed to remember, though ever so distantly, that a while back I had absentmindedly shoved away a book which had ended up under my back while he was still inside me. Now it was on the floor. When had I realized it was a copy of Se l’amore? Where had I found time in the heat of passion even to wonder whether he’d been to the book party on the same night I’d gone there with Marzia? Strange thoughts that seemed to drift in from long, long ago, no more than half an hour later.

It must have come to me a while later when I was still in his arms. It woke me up before I even realized I had dozed off, filling me with a sense of dread and anxiety I couldn’t begin to fathom. I felt queasy, as if I had been sick and needed not just many showers to wash everything off but a bath in mouthwash. I needed to be far away—from him, from this room, from what we’d done together. It was as though I were slowly landing from an awful nightmare but wasn’t quite touching the ground yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to, because what awaited was not going to be much better, though I knew I couldn’t go on hanging on to that giant, amorphous blob of a nightmare that felt like the biggest cloud of self-loathing and remorse that had ever wafted into my life. I would never be the same. How had I let him do these things to me, and how eagerly had I participated in them, and spurred them on, and then waited for him, begging him, Please don’t stop. Now his goo was matted on my chest as proof that I had crossed a terrible line, not vis-à-vis those I held dearest, not even vis-à-vis myself, or anything sacred, or the race itself that had brought us this close, not even vis-à-vis Marzia, who stood now like a far-flung siren on a sinking reef, distant and irrelevant, cleansed by lapping summer waves while I struggled to swim out to her, clamoring from a whirlpool of anxiety in the hope that she’d be part of the collection of images to help me rebuild myself by daybreak. It was not these I had offended, but those who were yet unborn or unmet and whom I’d never be able to love without remembering this mass of shame and revulsion rising between my life and theirs. It would haunt and sully my love for them, and between us, there would be this secret that could tarnish everything good in me.

Or had I offended something even deeper? What was it?

Had the loathing I felt always been there, though camouflaged, and all I’d needed was a night like this to let it out?

Something bordering on nausea, something like remorse—was that it, then? —began to grip me and seemed to define itself ever more clearly the more I became aware of incipient daylight through our windows.

Like the light, though, remorse, if remorse indeed it was, seemed to fade for a little while. But when I lay in bed and felt uncomfortable, it came back on the double as if to score a point each time I thought I’d felt the last of it. I had known it would hurt. What I hadn’t expected was that the hurt would find itself coiled and twisted into sudden pangs of guilt. No one had told me about this either.

Outside it was clearly dawn now.

Why was he staring at me? Had he guessed what I was feeling?

“You’re not happy,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders.

It was not him I hated—but the thing we’d done. I didn’t want him looking into my heart just yet. Instead, I wanted to remove myself from this bog of self-loathing and didn’t know how to do it.

“You’re feeling sick about it, aren’t you?” Again I shrugged the comment away.

“I knew we shouldn’t have. I knew it,” he repeated. For the first time in my life I watched him balk, prey to self-doubt. “We should have talked…”

“Maybe,” I said.

Of all the things I could have uttered that morning, this insignificant “maybe” was the cruelest.

“Did you hate it?”

No, I didn’t hate it at all. But what I felt was worse than hate. I didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to think about it. Just put it away. It had never happened. I had tried it and it didn’t work for me, now I wanted my money back, roll back the film, take me back to that moment when I’m almost stepping out onto the balcony barefoot, I’ll go no farther, I’ll sit and stew and never know—better to argue with my body than feel what I was feeling now. Elio, Elio, we warned you, didn’t we?

Here I was in his bed, staying put out of an exaggerated sense of courtesy. “You can go to sleep, if you want,” he said, perhaps the kindest words he’d ever spoken to me, a hand on my shoulder, while I, Judas-like, kept saying to myself, If only he knew. If only he knew I want to be leagues and a lifetime away from him. I hugged him. I closed my eyes. “You’re staring at me,” I said, with my eyes still shut. I liked being stared at with my eyes shut.

I needed him as far away as possible if I was to feel better and forget—but I needed him close by in case this thing took a turn for the worse and there was no one to turn to.

Meanwhile, another part of me was actually happy the whole thing was behind me. He was out of my system. I would pay the price. The questions were: Would he understand? And would he forgive?

Or was this another trick to stave off another access of loathing and shame?

Early in the morning, we went for a swim together. It felt to me that this was the last time we’d ever be together like this. I would go back into my room, fall asleep, wake up, have breakfast, take out my scorebook, and spend those marvelous morning hours immersed in transcribing the Haydn, occasionally feeling a sting of anxiety in anticipating his renewed snub at the breakfast table, only to remember that we were past that stage now, that I’d had him inside me barely a few hours ago and that later he had come all over my chest, because he said he wanted to, and I let him, perhaps because I hadn’t come yet and it thrilled me to watch him make faces and peak before my very eyes.

Now he walked almost knee-deep into the water with his shirt on. I knew what he was doing. If Mafalda asked, he’d claim it got wet by accident.

Together, we swam to the big rock. We spoke. I wanted him to think that I was happy being with him. I had wanted the sea to wash away the gunk on my chest, yet here was his semen, clinging to my body. In a short while, after soap and shower, all my doubts about myself, which had started three years before when an anonymous young man riding a bike had stopped, gotten off, put a hand around my shoulder, and with that gesture either stirred or hastened something that might have taken much, much longer to work itself to consciousness—all these could now finally be washed away as well, dispelled as an evil rumor about me, or a false belief, released like a genie who’d served his sentence and was now being cleansed with the soft, radiant scent of chamomile soap found in every one of our bathrooms.

We sat on one of the rocks and talked. Why hadn’t we talked like this before? I’d have been less desperate for him had we been able to have this kind of friendship weeks earlier. Perhaps we might have avoided sleeping together. I wanted to tell him that I had made love to Marzia the other night not two hundred yards away from where we stood right now. But I kept quiet. Instead we spoke of Haydn’s “It Is Finished,” which I’d just finished transcribing. I could speak about this and not feel I was doing it to impress him or to draw his attention or to put up a wobbly footbridge between us. I could

speak about the Haydn for hours—what a lovely friendship this might have been.

It never occurred to me, as I was going through the heady motions of feeling over and done with him and even a tad disappointed that I had so easily recovered after a spell of so many weeks, that this desire to sit and discuss Haydn in so unusually relaxed a manner as we were doing right now was my most vulnerable spot, that if desire had to resurface, it could just as easily sneak in through this very gate, which I’d always assumed the safest, as through the sight of his near-naked body by the swimming pool.

At some point he interrupted me.

“You okay?”

“Fine. Fine,” I replied.

Then, with an awkward smile, as if correcting his initial question: “Are you okay everywhere?”

I smiled back faintly, knowing I was already clamming up, shutting the doors and windows between us, blowing out the candles because the sun was finally up again and shame cast long shadows.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. Sore.”

“But did you mind when I—?”

I turned my face the other way, as though a chill draft had touched my ear and I wished to avoid having it hit my face. “Do we need to speak about it?” I asked.

I had used the same words that Marzia had uttered when I wished to know if she liked what I’d done to her.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

I knew exactly what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to go over the moment when I’d almost asked him to stop.

Now all I thought of, as we spoke, was that today I’d be walking with Marzia and each time we’d try to sit somewhere I would hurt. The indignity of it. Sitting on the town’s ramparts—which was where everyone our age congregated at night when we weren’t sitting in the caffès—and be forced to squirm and be reminded each time of what I’d just done that night. The standing joke among schoolboys. Watch Oliver watch me squirm and think, I did that to you, didn’t I?

I wished we hadn’t slept together. Even his body left me indifferent. On the rock where we sat now I looked at his body as one looks at old shirts and

trousers being boxed for pick up by the Salvation Army.

Shoulder: check.

Area between inner and outer elbow that I’d worshipped once: check.

Crotch: check.

Neck: check.

Curves of the apricot: check.

Foot—oh, that foot: but, yes, check.

Smile, when he’d said, Are you okay everywhere: yes, check that too.

Leave nothing to chance.

I had worshipped them all once. I had touched them the way a civet rubs itself on the objects it covets. They’d been mine for a night. I didn’t want them now. What I couldn’t remember, much less understand, was how I could have brought myself to desire them, to do all I’d done to be near them, touch them, sleep with them. After our swim I’d take that much-awaited shower. Forget, forget.

As we were swimming back, he asked as though it were an afterthought, “Are you going to hold last night against me?”

“No,” I answered. But I had answered too swiftly for someone who meant what he was saying. To soften the ambiguity of my no, I said I’d probably want to sleep all day. “I don’t think I’ll be able to ride my bike today.”

“Because…” He was not asking me a question, he was supplying the answer.

“Yes, because.”

It occurred to me that one of the reasons I’d decided not to distance him too quickly was not just to avoid hurting his feelings or alarming him or stirring up an awkward and unwieldy situation at home, but because I was not sure that within a few hours I wouldn’t be desperate for him again.

When we reached our balcony, he hesitated at the door and then stepped into my room. It took me by surprise. “Take your trunks off.” This was strange, but I didn’t have it in me to disobey. So I lowered them and got out of them. It was the first time I’d been naked with him in broad daylight. I felt awkward and was starting to grow nervous. “Sit down.” I had barely done as I was told when he brought his mouth to my cock and took it all in. I was hard in no time. “We’ll save it for later,” he said with a wry smile on his face and was instantly gone.

Was this his revenge on me for presuming to be done with him?

But there they went—my self-confidence and my checklist and my craving

to be done with him. Great work. I dried myself, put on the pajama bottoms I had worn last night, threw myself on my bed, and didn’t awake till Mafalda knocked at my door asking whether I wanted eggs for breakfast.

The same mouth that was going to eat eggs had been everywhere last night.

As with a hangover, I kept wondering when the sickness would wear off.

Every once in a while, sudden soreness triggered a twinge of discomfort and shame. Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It’s the asshole, stupid.

When he came down for breakfast he was wearing my bathing suit. No one would have given it another thought since everyone was always swapping suits in our house, but this was the first time he had done so and it was the same suit I had worn that very dawn when we’d gone out for a swim. Watching him wearing my clothes was an unbearable turn-on. And he knew it. It was turning both of us on. The thought of his cock rubbing the netted fabric where mine had rested reminded me how, before my very eyes, and after so much exertion, he had finally shot his load on my chest. But what turned me on wasn’t this. It was the porousness, the fungibility, of our bodies—what was mine was suddenly his, just as what belonged to him could be all mine now. Was I being lured back again? At the table, he decided to sit at my side and, when no one was looking, slipped his foot not on top of but under mine. I knew my foot was rough from always walking barefoot; his was smooth; last night I had kissed his foot and sucked his toes; now they were snuggled under my callused foot and I needed to protect my protector.

He was not allowing me to forget him. I was reminded of a married chatelaine who, after sleeping with a young vassal one night, had him seized by the palace guards the next morning and summarily executed in a dungeon on trumped-up charges, not only to eliminate all evidence of their adulterous night together and to prevent her young lover from becoming a nuisance now that he thought he was entitled to her favors, but to stem the temptation to seek him out on the following evening. Was he becoming a nuisance going after me? And what was I to do—tell my mother?

That morning he went into town alone. Post office, Signora Milani, the usual rounds. I saw him pedal down the cypress lane, still wearing my trunks. No one had ever worn my clothes. Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings

need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier’s bone together, the other man’s heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.

The very thought of this suddenly made me want to drop everything I would do today and run to him. I waited about ten minutes, then took out my bike and, despite my promise not to go biking that day, headed out by way of Marzia’s home and scaled the steep hillside road as fast as I could. When I reached the piazzetta I realized I had arrived minutes after him. He was parking his bike, had already purchased the Herald Tribune, and was heading for the post office—his first errand. “I had to see you,” I said as I rushed to him. “Why, something wrong?” “I just had to see you.” “Aren’t you sick of me?” I thought I was—I was about to say—and I wanted to be—“I just wanted to be with you,” I said. Then it hit me: “If you want, I’ll go back now,” I said. He stood still, dropped his hand with the bundle of unsent letters still in it, and simply stood there staring at me, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea how glad I am we slept together?”

I shrugged my shoulders as though to put away another compliment. I was unworthy of compliments, most of all coming from him. “I don’t know.”

“It would be just like you not to know. I just don’t want to regret any of it —including what you wouldn’t let me talk about this morning. I just dread the thought of having messed you up. I don’t want either of us to have to pay one way or another.”

I knew exactly what he was referring to but pretended otherwise. “I’m not telling anyone. There won’t be any trouble.”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m sure I’ll pay for it somehow, though.” And for the first time in daylight I caught a glimpse of a different Oliver. “For you, however you think of it, it’s still fun and games, which it should be. For me it’s something else which I haven’t figured out, and the fact that I can’t scares me.”

“Are you sorry I came?” Was I being intentionally fatuous?

“I’d hold you and kiss you if I could.”

“Me too.”

I came up to his ear as he was just about to enter the post office and

whispered, “Fuck me, Elio.”

He remembered and instantly moaned his own name three times, as we’d done during that night. I could feel myself already getting hard. Then, to tease him with the very same words he’d uttered earlier that morning, I said, “We’ll save it for later.”

Then I told him how Later! would always remind me of him. He laughed and said, “Later!”—meaning exactly what I wanted it to mean for a change: not just goodbye, or be off with you, but afternoon lovemaking. I turned around and was instantly on my bike, speeding my way back downhill, smiling broadly, almost singing if I could.

Never in my life had I been so happy. Nothing could go wrong, everything was happening my way, all the doors were clicking open one by one, and life couldn’t have been more radiant: it was shining right at me, and when I turned my bike left or right or tried to move away from its light, it followed me as limelight follows an actor onstage. I craved him but I could just as easily live without him, and either way was fine.

On my way, I decided to stop at Marzia’s house. She was headed to the beach. I joined her, and we went down to the rocks together and lay in the sun. I loved her smell, loved her mouth. She took off her top and asked me to put some sunscreen on her back, knowing that my hands would inevitably cup her breasts. Her family owned a thatched cabana by the beach and she said we should go inside. No one would come. I locked the door from the inside, sat her on the table, took off her bathing suit, and put my mouth where she smelled of the sea. She leaned back, and lifted both legs over my shoulders. How strange, I thought, how each shadowed and screened the other, without precluding the other. Barely half an hour ago I was asking Oliver to fuck me and now here I was about to make love to Marzia, and yet neither had anything to do with the other except through Elio, who happened to be one and the same person.

After lunch Oliver said he had to go back to B. to hand Signora Milani his latest corrections. He cast an instant glance in my direction but, seeing I hadn’t responded, was already on his way. After two glasses of wine, I couldn’t wait to take a nap. I grabbed two huge peaches from the table and took them with me, and kissed my mother along the way. I’d eat them later, I said. In the dark bedroom, I deposited the fruit on the marble tabletop. And then undressed

totally. Clean, cool, crisp-starched, sun-washed sheets drawn tight across my bed—God bless you, Mafalda. Did I want to be alone? Yes. One person last night; then again at dawn. Then in the morning, another. Now I lay on the sheets as happy as a stiff-grown, newly sprung sunflower filled with listless vigor on this sunniest of summer afternoons. Was I glad to be alone now that sleep was upon me? Yes. Well, no. Yes. But maybe not. Yes, yes, yes. I was happy, and this was all that mattered, with others, without others, I was happy.

Half an hour later, or maybe sooner, I was awakened by the rich brown cloistral scent of coffee wafting through the house. Even with the door closed I could smell it and I knew this wasn’t my parents’ coffee. Theirs had been brewed and served a while ago. This was the afternoon’s second brew, made in the Neapolitan espresso coffeemaker in which Mafalda, her husband, and Anchise made coffee after they too had lunched. Soon they would be resting as well. Already a heavy torpor hung in the air—the world was falling asleep. All I wanted was for him or Marzia to pass by my balcony door and, through the half-drawn shutters, make out my naked body sprawled on the bed. Him or Marzia—but I wanted someone to pass by and notice me, and up to them to decide what to do. I could go on sleeping or, if they should sidle up to me, I’d make room for them and we’d sleep together. I saw one of them enter my room and reach for the fruit, and with the fruit in hand, come to my bed and bring it to my hard cock. I know you’re not sleeping, they’d say, and gently press the soft, overripe peach on my cock till I’d pierced the fruit along the crease that reminded me so much of Oliver’s ass. The idea seized me and would not let go.

I got up and reached for one of the peaches, opened it halfway with my thumbs, pushed the pit out on my desk, and gently brought the fuzzy, blush-colored peach to my groin, and then began to press into it till the parted fruit slid down my cock. If Anchise only knew, if Anchise knew what I was doing to the fruit he cultivated with such slavish devotion every day, him and his large straw hat and his long, gnarled, callused fingers that were always ripping out weeds from the parched earth. His peaches were more apricots than peaches, except larger, juicier. I had already tried the animal kingdom. Now I was moving to the kingdom of plants. Next would come minerals. The idea almost made me chuckle. The fruit was leaking all over my cock. If Oliver walked in on me now, I’d let him suck me as he had this morning. If Marzia came, I’d let her help me finish the job. The peach was soft and firm, and when I finally succeeded in tearing it apart with my cock, I saw that its reddened core

reminded me not just of an anus but of a vagina, so that holding each half in either hand firmly against my cock, I began to rub myself, thinking of no one and of everyone, including the poor peach, which had no idea what was being done to it except that it had to play along and probably in the end took some pleasure in the act as well, till I thought I heard it say to me, Fuck me, Elio, fuck me harder, and after a moment, Harder, I said! while I scanned my mind for images from Ovid—wasn’t there a character who had turned into a peach and, if there wasn’t, couldn’t I make one up on the spot, say, an ill-fated young man and young girl who in their peachy beauty had spurned an envious deity who had turned them into a peach tree, and only now, after three thousand years, were being given what had been so unjustly taken away from them, as they murmured, I’ll die when you’re done, and you mustn’t be done, must never be done? The story so aroused me that practically without warning the orgasm was almost upon me. I sensed I could just stop then and there or, with one more stroke, I could come, which I finally did, carefully, aiming the spurt into the reddened core of the open peach as if in a ritual of insemination.

What a crazy thing this was. I let myself hang back, holding the fruit in both hands, grateful that I hadn’t gotten the sheet dirty with either juice or come. The bruised and damaged peach, like a rape victim, lay on its side on my desk, shamed, loyal, aching, and confused, struggling not to spill what I’d left inside. It reminded me that I had probably looked no different on his bed last night after he’d come inside me the first time.

I put on a tank top but decided to stay naked and get under the sheet.

I awoke to the sound of someone unhooking the latch of the shutters and then hooking it back behind him. As in my dream once, he was tiptoeing toward me, not in an effort to surprise me, but so as not to wake me up. I knew it was Oliver and, with my eyes still closed, raised my arm to him. He grabbed it and kissed it, then lifted the sheet and seemed surprised to find me naked. He immediately brought his lips to where they’d promised to return this morning. He loved the sticky taste. What had I done?

I told him and pointed to the bruised evidence sitting on my desk. “Let me see.”

He stood up and asked if I’d left it for him.

Perhaps I had. Or had I simply put off thinking how to dispose of it? “Is this what I think it is?”

I nodded naughtily in mock shame.

“Any idea how much work Anchise puts into each one of these?”

He was joking, but it felt as though he, or someone through him, was asking the same question about the work my parents had put into me.

He brought the half peach to bed, making certain not to spill its contents as he took his clothes off.

“I’m sick, aren’t I?” I asked.

“No, you’re not sick—I wish everyone were as sick as you. Want to see sick?”

What was he up to? I hesitated to say yes.

“Just think of the number of people who’ve come before you—you, your grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, and all the skipped generations of Elios before you, and those from places far away, all squeezed into this trickle that makes you who you are. Now may I taste it?”

I shook my head.

He dipped a finger into the core of the peach and brought it to his mouth.

“Please don’t.” This was more than I could bear.

“I never could stand my own. But this is yours. Please explain.” “It makes me feel terrible.”

He simply shrugged my comment away.

“Look, you don’t have to do this. I’m the one who came after you, I sought you out, everything that happened is because of me—you don’t have to do this.”

“Nonsense. I wanted you from day one. I just hid it better.” “Sure!”

I lunged out to grab the fruit from his hand, but with his other hand he caught hold of my wrist and squeezed it hard, as they do in movies, when one man forces another to let go of a knife.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Then let go.”

I watched him put the peach in his mouth and slowly begin to eat it, staring at me so intensely that I thought even lovemaking didn’t go so far.

“If you just want to spit it out, it’s okay, it’s really okay, I promise I won’t be offended,” I said to break the silence more than as a last plea.

He shook his head. I could tell he was tasting it at that very instant. Something that was mine was in his mouth, more his than mine now. I don’t know what happened to me at that moment as I kept staring at him, but suddenly I had a fierce urge to cry. And rather than fight it, as with orgasm, I simply let myself go, if only to show him something equally private about me as well. I

reached for him and muffled my sobs against his shoulder. I was crying because no stranger had ever been so kind or gone so far for me, even Anchise, who had cut open my foot once and sucked and spat out and sucked and spat out the scorpion’s venom. I was crying because I’d never known so much gratitude and there was no other way to show it. And I was crying for the evil thoughts I’d nursed against him this morning. And for last night as well, because, for better or worse, I’d never be able to undo it, and now was as good a time as any to show him that he was right, that this wasn’t easy, that fun and games had a way of skidding off course and that if we had rushed into things it was too late to step back from them now—crying because something was happening, and I had no idea what it was.

“Whatever happens between us, Elio, I just want you to know. Don’t ever say you didn’t know.” He was still chewing. In the heat of passion it would have been one thing. But this was quite another. He was taking me away with him.

His words made no sense. But I knew exactly what they meant.

I rubbed his face with my palm. Then, without knowing why, I began to lick his eyelids.

“Kiss me now, before it’s totally gone,” I said. His mouth would taste of peaches and me.

I stayed in my room long after Oliver left. When I finally awoke, it was almost evening, which put me in a grumpy mood. The pain was gone, but I had a resurgence of the same malaise I’d experienced toward dawn. I didn’t know now if this was the same feeling, resurfacing after a long hiatus, or if the earlier one had healed and this was a totally new one, resulting from the afternoon’s lovemaking. Would I always experience such solitary guilt in the wake of our intoxicating moments together? Why didn’t I experience the same thing after Marzia? Was this nature’s way of reminding me that I would rather be with her?

I took a shower and put on clean clothes. Downstairs, everyone was having cocktails. Last night’s two guests were there again, being entertained by my mother, while a newcomer, another reporter, was busily listening to Oliver’s description of his book on Heraclitus. He had perfected the art of giving a stranger a five-sentence précis that seemed invented on the spur of the moment for the benefit of that particular listener. “Are you staying?” asked my mother.

“No, I’m going to see Marzia.”

My mother gave me an apprehensive look, and ever so discreetly began to shake her head, meaning, I don’t approve, she’s a good girl, you should be going out together as a group. “Leave him alone, you and your groups,” was my father’s rebuttal, which set me free. “As it is, he’s shut up in the house all day. Let him do as he pleases. As he pleases!”

If he only knew.

And what if he did know?

My father would never object. He might make a face at first, then take it back.

It never occurred to me to hide from Oliver what I was doing with Marzia. Bakers and butchers don’t compete, I thought. Nor, in all likelihood, would he have given it another thought himself.

That night Marzia and I went to the movies. We had ice cream in the piazzetta. And again at her parents’ home.

“I want to go to the bookstore again,” she said when she walked me toward the gate to their garden. “But I don’t like going to the movies with you.”

“You want to go around closing time tomorrow?” “Why not?” She wanted to repeat the other night.

She kissed me. What I wanted instead was to go to the bookstore when it had just opened in the morning, with the option of going there that same night.

When I returned home the guests were just about to leave. Oliver was not home.

Serves me right, I thought.

I went to my room and, for lack of anything else to do, opened my diary. Last night’s entry: “I’ll see you at midnight.” You watch. He won’t even

be there. “Get lost”—that’s what “Grow up” means. I wish I’d never said anything.

On the nervous doodlings I had traced around these words before heading out to his room, I was trying to recover the memory of last night’s jitters. Perhaps I wanted to relive the night’s anxieties, both to mask tonight’s and to remind myself that if my worst fears had suddenly been dispelled once I’d entered his room, perhaps they might end no differently tonight and be as easily subdued once I’d heard his footsteps.

But I couldn’t even remember last night’s anxieties. They were completely overshadowed by what followed them and seemed to belong to a segment of time to which I had no access whatsoever. Everything about last night had suddenly vanished. I remembered nothing. I tried to whisper “Get lost” to

myself as a way of jump-starting my memory. The words had seemed so real last night. Now they were just two words struggling to make sense.

And then I realized it. What I was experiencing tonight was unlike anything I’d experienced in my life.

This was much worse. I didn’t even know what to call this.

On second thought, I didn’t even know what to call last night’s jitters either.

I had taken a giant step last night. Yet here I was, no wiser and no more sure of things than I’d been before feeling him all over me. We might as well not even have slept together.

At least last night there was the fear of failing, the fear of being thrown out or called the very name I had used on others. Now that I had overcome that fear, had this anxiety been present all along, though latent, like a presage and a warning of killer reefs beyond the squall?

And why did I care where he was? Wasn’t this what I wanted for both of us—butchers and bakers and all that? Why feel so unhinged just because he wasn’t there or because he’d given me the slip, why sense that all I was doing now was waiting for him—waiting, waiting, waiting?

What was it about waiting that was beginning to feel like torture?

If you are with someone, Oliver, it is time to come home. No questions asked, I promise, just don’t keep me waiting.

If he doesn’t show up in ten minutes, I’ll do something.

Ten minutes later, feeling helpless and hating myself for feeling helpless, I resolved to wait another this-time-for-real ten minutes.

Twenty minutes later, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put on a sweater, walked off the balcony, and came downstairs. I’d go to B., if I had to, and check for myself. I was on my way to the bike shed, already debating whether to head out to N. first, where people tended to stay up and party much later than in B., and was cursing myself for not putting air in the tires earlier this morning, when suddenly something told me I should stop dead in my tracks and try not to disturb Anchise, who slept in the hut nearby. Sinister Anchise— everyone said he was sinister. Had I suspected it all along? I must have. The fall from the bike, Anchise’s peasant ointment, the kindness with which he took care of him and cleaned up the scrape.

But down below along the rocky shore, in the moonlight, I caught sight of him. He was sitting on one of the higher rocks, wearing his sailor’s white-and-blue-striped sweater with the buttons always undone along his shoulder which

he’d purchased in Sicily earlier in the summer. He was doing nothing, just hugging his knees, listening to the ripples lap against the rocks below him. Looking at him now from the balustrade, I felt something so tender for him that it reminded me how eagerly I had rushed to B. to catch him before he’d even made it into the post office. This was the best person I’d ever known in my life. I had chosen him well. I opened the gate and skipped down the several rocks and reached him.

“I was waiting for you,” I said.

“I thought you’d gone to sleep. I even thought you didn’t want to.” “No. Waiting. I just turned the lights off.”

I looked up to our house. The window shutters were all closed. I bent down and kissed him on his neck. It was the first time I had kissed him with feeling, not just desire. He put his arm around me. Harmless, if anyone saw.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Thinking.”

“About?”

“Things. Going back to the States. The courses I have to teach this fall. The book. You.”

“Me?”

“Me?” He was mimicking my modesty.

“No one else?”

“No one else.” He was silent for a while. “I come here every night and just sit here. Sometimes I spend hours.”

“All by yourself?”

He nodded.

“I never knew. I thought—”

“I know what you thought.”

The news couldn’t have made me happier. It had obviously been shadowing everything between us. I decided not to press the matter.

“This spot is probably what I’ll miss the most.” Then, upon reflection:

“I’ve been happy in B.”

It sounded like a preamble to farewells.

“I was looking out towards there,” he continued, pointing to the horizon, “and thinking that in two weeks I’ll be back at Columbia.”

He was right. I had made a point never to count the days. At first because I didn’t want to think how long he’d stay with us; later because I didn’t want to face how few were his remaining days.

“All this means is that in ten days when I look out to this spot, you won’t be here. I don’t know what I’ll do then. At least you’ll be elsewhere, where there are no memories.”

He squeezed my shoulder to him. “The way you think sometimes…You’ll be fine.”

“I might. But then I might not. We wasted so many days—so many weeks.” “Wasted? I don’t know. Perhaps we just needed time to figure out if this is

what we wanted.”

“Some of us made things purposely difficult.” “Me?”

I nodded. “You know what we were doing exactly one night ago.” He smiled. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“I’m not sure either. But I am glad we did.” “Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be okay.” I slipped a hand into his pants. “I do love being here with you.”

It was my way of saying, I’ve been happy here as well. I tried to picture what happy here meant to him: happy once he got here after imagining what the place might look like, happy doing his work on those scorching mornings in heaven, happy biking back and forth from the translator, happy disappearing into town every night and coming back so late, happy with my parents and dinner drudgery, happy with his poker friends and all the other friends he had made in town and about whom I knew nothing whatsoever? One day he might tell me. I wondered what part I played in the overall happiness package.

Meanwhile, tomorrow, if we went for an early morning swim, I might be overcome again with this surfeit of self-loathing. I wondered if one got used to that. Or does one accrue a deficit of malaise so large that one learns to find ways to consolidate it in one lump feeling with its own amnesties and grace periods? Or does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like an intruder, become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell—so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who’ll relieve it at night?

The next morning we went swimming together. It was scarcely past six o’clock, and the fact that it was so early gave an energized quality to our exercise. Later, as he performed his own version of the dead-man’s float, I

wanted to hold him, as swimming instructors do when they hold your body so lightly that they seem to keep you afloat with barely a touch of their fingers. Why did I feel older than he was at that moment? I wanted to protect him from everything this morning, from the rocks, from the jellyfish, now that jellyfish season was upon us, from Anchise, whose sinister leer, as he’d trundle into the garden to turn on the sprinklers, constantly pulling out weeds wherever he turned, even when it rained, even when he spoke to you, even when he threatened to leave us, seemed to tease out every secret you thought you’d neatly buried from his gaze.

“How are you?” I asked, mimicking his question to me yesterday morning. “You should know.”

At breakfast, I couldn’t believe what seized me, but I found myself cutting the top of his soft-boiled egg before Mafalda intervened or before he had smashed it with his spoon. I had never done this for anyone else in my life, and yet here I was, making certain that not a speck of the shell fell into his egg. He was happy with his egg. When Mafalda brought him his daily polpo, I was happy for him. Domestic bliss. Just because he’d let me be his top last night.

I caught my father staring at me as I finished slicing off the tip of his second soft-boiled egg.

“Americans never know how to do it,” I said.

“I am sure they have their way…,” he said.

The foot that came to rest on mine under the table told me that perhaps I should let it go and assume my father was onto something. “He’s no fool,” he said to me later that morning as he was getting ready to head up to B.

“Want me to come with?”

“No, better keep a low profile. You should work on your Haydn today. Later.”

“Later.”

Marzia called that morning while he was getting ready to leave. He almost winked when he handed me the telephone. There was no hint of irony, nothing that didn’t remind me, unless I was mistaken—and I don’t think I was—that what we had between us was the total transparency that exists among friends only.

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.

But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

When I think back to our last ten days together, I see an early-morning swim, our lazy breakfasts, the ride up to town, work in the garden, lunches, our afternoon naps, more work in the afternoon, tennis maybe, after-dinners in the piazzetta, and every night the kind of lovemaking that can run circles around time. Looking back to these days, I don’t think there was ever a minute, other than the half hour or so he spent with his translator, or when I managed to steal a few hours with Marzia, when we weren’t together.

“When did you know about me?” I asked him one day. I was hoping he’d say, When I squeezed your shoulder and you almost wilted in my arms. Or, When you got wet under your bathing suit that one afternoon when we chatted in your room. Something along those lines. “When you blushed,” he said. “Me?” We had been talking about translating poetry; it was early in the morning, during his very first week with us. We had started working earlier than usual that day, probably because we already enjoyed our spontaneous conversations while the breakfast table was being laid out under the linden tree and were eager to spend some time together. He’d asked me if I’d ever translated poetry. I said I had. Why, had he? Yes. He was reading Leopardi and had landed on a few verses that were impossible to translate. We had been speaking back and forth, neither of us realizing how far a conversation started on the fly could go, because all the while delving deeper into Leopardi’s world, we were also finding occasional side alleys where our natural sense of humor and our love for clowning were given free play. We translated the passage into English, then from English to ancient Greek, then back to gobbledygenglish to gobbledygitalian. Leopardi’s closing lines of “To the Moon” were so warped that it brought bursts of laughter as we kept repeating the nonsense lines in Italian—when suddenly there was a moment of silence, and when I looked up at him he was staring at me point-blank, that icy, glassy look of his which always disconcerted me. I was struggling to say something, and when he asked how I knew so many things, I had the presence of mind to say something about being a professor’s son. I was not always eager to show off my knowledge, especially with someone who could so easily intimidate me. I had nothing to fight back with, nothing to add, nothing to throw in to muddy the waters between us, nowhere to hide or run for cover. I felt as exposed as a stranded lamb on the dry, waterless plains of the Serengeti.

The staring was no longer part of the conversation, or even of the fooling around with translation; it had superseded it and become its own subject, except that neither dared nor wanted to bring it up. And yes, there was such a

luster in his eyes that I had to look away, and when I looked back at him, his gaze hadn’t moved and was still focused on my face, as if to say, So you looked away and you’ve come back, will you be looking away again soon?— which was why I had to look away once more, as if immersed in thought, yet all the while scrambling for something to say, the way a fish struggles for water in a muddied pond that’s fast drying up in the heat. He must have known exactly what I was feeling. What made me blush in the end was not the natural embarrassment of the moment when I could tell he’d caught me trying to hold his gaze only then to let mine scamper to safety; what made me blush was the thrilling possibility, unbelievable as I wanted it to remain, that he might actually like me, and that he liked me in just the way I liked him.

For weeks I had mistaken his stare for barefaced hostility. I was wide of the mark. It was simply a shy man’s way of holding someone else’s gaze.

We were, it finally dawned on me, the two shyest persons in the world. My father was the only one who had seen through him from the very start. “Do you like Leopardi?” I asked, to break the silence, but also to suggest

that it was the topic of Leopardi that had caused me to seem somewhat distracted during a pause in our conversation.

“Yes, very much.”

“I like him very much too.”

I’d always known I wasn’t speaking about Leopardi. The question was, did he?

“I knew I was making you uncomfortable, but I just had to make sure.”

“So you knew all this time?”

“Let’s say I was pretty sure.”

In other words, it had started just days after his arrival. Had everything since been pretense, then? And all these swings between friendship and indifference—what were they? His and my ways of keeping stealthy tabs on each other while disclaiming that we were? Or were they simply as cunning a way as any to stave each other off, hoping that what we felt was indeed genuine indifference?

“Why didn’t you give me a sign?” I said.

“I did. At least I tried.”

“When?”

“After tennis once. I touched you. Just as a way of showing I liked you. The way you reacted made me feel I’d almost molested you. I decided to keep my distance.”

Our best moments were in the afternoon. After lunch, I’d go upstairs for a nap just when coffee was about to be served. Then, when the lunch guests had left, or slunk away to rest in the guesthouse, my father would either retire to his study or steal a nap with my mother. By two in the afternoon, an intense silence would settle over the house, over the world it seemed, interrupted here and there either by the cooing of doves or by Anchise’s hammer when he worked on his tools and was trying not to make too much noise. I liked hearing him at work in the afternoon, and even when his occasional banging or sawing woke me up, or when the knife grinder would start his whetstone running every Wednesday afternoon, it left me feeling as restful and at peace with the world as I would feel years later on hearing a distant foghorn off Cape Cod in the middle of the night. Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a “crime” to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn’t have it all life long, he said. Then the rolling fields of the valley leading up to the hills seemed to sit in a rising mist of olive green: sunflowers, grapevines, swatches of lavender, and those squat and humble olive trees stooping like gnarled, aged scarecrows gawking through our window as we lay naked on my bed, the smell of his sweat, which was the smell of my sweat, and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was, and all around us Mafalda’s chamomile-scented laundry detergent, which was the scent of the torrid afternoon world of our house.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn’t dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but didn’t care to read the mile-posts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a total creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I’d always know that on those

afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

One morning, though, I awoke and saw the whole of B. overborne by dark, lowering clouds racing across the sky. I knew exactly what this spelled. Autumn was just around the corner.

A few hours later, the clouds totally cleared, and the weather, as though to make up for its little prank, seemed to erase every hint of fall from our lives and gave us one of the most temperate days of the season. But I had heeded the warning, and as is said of juries who have heard inadmissible evidence before it is stricken from the record, I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more. Suddenly, I began to take mental snapshots of him, picked up the bread crumbs that fell off our table and collected them for my hideaway, and, to my shame, drew lists: the rock, the berm, the bed, the sound of the ashtray. The rock, the berm, the bed…I wished I were like those soldiers in films who run out of bullets and toss away their guns as though they would never again have any use for them, or like runaways in the desert who, rather than ration the water in the gourd, yield to thirst and swill away, then drop their gourd in their tracks. Instead, I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda’s superstitious world, anticipating the worst was as sure a way of preventing it from happening.

When we went on a walk one night and he told me that he’d soon be heading back home, I realized how futile my alleged foresight had been. Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway.

Oliver was leaving for the States the second week of August. A few days into the month, he said he wanted to spend three days in Rome and use that time to work on the final draft of his manuscript with his Italian publisher. Then he’d fly directly home. Would I like to join him?

I said yes. Shouldn’t I ask my parents first? No need, they never said no. Yes, but wouldn’t they…? They wouldn’t. On hearing that Oliver was leaving earlier than anticipated and would spend a few days in Rome, my mother asked

—with il cauboi’s permission, of course—if I might accompany him. My father was not against it.

My mother helped me pack. Would I need a jacket, in case the publisher wished to take us out to dinner? There’d be no dinner. Besides, why would I be asked to join? I should still take a jacket, she thought. I wanted to take a backpack, travel as everyone my age did. Do as you please. Still, she helped me empty and repack the backpack when it was clear there wasn’t room for everything I wanted to take along. You’re only going for two to three days. Neither Oliver nor I had ever been precise about our last days together. Mother would never know how her “two to three days” cut me that morning. Did we know which hotel we were planning to stay in? Pensione something or other. Never heard of it, but then who was she to know, she said. My father would have none of it. He made the reservations himself. It’s a gift, he said.

Oliver not only packed his own duffel bag but on the day we were to catch the direttissimo to Rome he managed to take out his suitcase and place it on the exact same spot in his bedroom where I had plopped it down the day of his arrival. On that day I had fast-forwarded to the moment when I’d have my room back. Now I wondered what I’d be willing to give up if only to rewind things back to the afternoon in late June when I took him on the de rigueur tour of our property and how, with one thing leading to the next, we’d found ourselves approaching the empty scorched lot by the abandoned train tracks where I received my first dose of so many Later!s. Anyone my age would much rather have taken a nap than trekked to the back reaches of our property on that day. Clearly, I already knew what I was doing.

The symmetry of it all, or was it the emptied, seemingly ransacked neatness of his room, tied a knot in my throat. It reminded me less of a hotel room when you wait for the porter to help you take your things downstairs after a glorious stay that was ending too soon, than of a hospital room after all your belongings have been packed away, while the next patient, who hasn’t been admitted yet, still waits in the emergency room exactly as you waited there yourself a week earlier.

This was a test run for our final separation. Like looking at someone on a respirator before it’s finally turned off days later.

I was happy that the room would revert to me. In my/his room, it would be easier to remember our nights.

No, better keep my current room. Then, at least, I could pretend he was still in his, and if he wasn’t there, that he was still out as he so frequently used

to be on those nights when I counted the minutes, the hours, the sounds.

When I opened his closet I noticed that he had left a bathing suit, a pair of underwear, his chinos, and a clean shirt on a few hangers. I recognized the shirt. Billowy. And I recognized the suit. Red. This for when he’d go swimming one last time this morning.

“I must tell you about this bathing suit,” I said when I closed his closet door.

“Tell me what?”

“I’ll tell you on the train.”

But I told him all the same. “Just promise to let me keep it after you’re gone.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, wear it a lot today—and don’t swim in it.” “Sick and twisted.”

“Sick and twisted and very, very sad.”

“I’ve never seen you like this.”

“I want Billowy too. And the espadrilles. And the sunglasses. And you.” On the train I told him about the day we thought he’d drowned and how I

was determined to ask my father to round up as many fishermen as he could to go look for him, and when they found him, to light a pyre on our shore, while I grabbed Mafalda’s knife from the kitchen and ripped out his heart, because that heart and his shirt were all I’d ever have to show for my life. A heart and a shirt. His heart wrapped in a damp shirt—like Anchise’s fish.