nchise was waiting for me at the station. I spotted him as soon as the train made its prolonged curve around the bay, slowing down and almost grazing the tall cypresses that I loved so much and through which I always caught an ever-welcoming preview of the glaring midafternoon sea. I lowered the window and let the wind fan my face, catching a glimpse of our lumbering engine car far, far ahead. Arriving in B. always made me happy. It reminded me of arrivals in early June at the end of every school year. The wind, the heat, the glinting gray platform with the ancient stationmaster’s hut permanently shuttered since the First World War, the dead silence, all spelled my favorite season at this deserted and beloved time of day. Summer was just about to start, it seemed, things hadn’t happened yet, my head was still buzzing with last-minute cramming before exams, this was the first time I was sighting the sea this year. Oliver who?

The train stopped for a few seconds, let off about five passengers. There was the usual rumble, followed by the loud hydraulic rattle of the engine. Then, as easily as they had stopped, the cars squeaked out of the station, one by one, and slithered away. Total silence.

I stood for a moment under the dried wooden cantilever. The whole place, including the boarded hut, exuded a strong odor of petrol, tar, chipped paint, and piss.

And as always: blackbirds, pine trees, cicadas.

Summer.

I had seldom thought of the approaching school year. Now I was grateful that, with so much heat and so much summer around me, it still seemed months away.

Within minutes of my arrival, the direttissimo to Rome swished in on the opposite track—always punctual, that train. Three days ago, we had taken the exact same one. I remembered now staring from its windows and thinking: In a few days, you’ll be back, and you’ll be alone, and you’ll hate it, so don’t let anything catch you unprepared. Be warned. I had rehearsed losing him not just to ward off suffering by taking it in small doses beforehand, but, as all superstitious people do, to see if my willingness to accept the very worst might

not induce fate to soften its blow. Like soldiers trained to fight by night, I lived in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness came. Rehearse the pain to dull the pain. Homeopathically.

Once again, then. View of the bay: check.

Scent of the pine trees: check.

Stationmaster’s hut: check.

Sight of the hills in the distance to recall the morning we rode back to B.

and came speeding downhill, almost running over a gypsy girl: check.

Smell of piss, petrol, tar, enamel paint: check, check, check, and check. Anchise grabbed my backpack and offered to carry it for me. I told him not

to; backpacks were not made to be carried except by their owners. He didn’t understand why exactly and handed it back to me.

He asked if the Signor Ulliva had left.

Yes, this morning.

“Triste,” he remarked.

“Yes, a bit.”

“Anche a me duole, I too am saddened.”

I avoided his eyes. I did not want to encourage him to say anything or even to bring up the subject.

My mother, when I arrived, wanted to know everything about our trip. I told her we had done nothing special, just seen the Capitol and Villa Borghese, San Clemente. Otherwise we’d just walked around a lot. Lots of fountains. Lots of strange places at night. Two dinners. “Dinners?” my mother asked, with an understated triumphant see-I-was-right-wasn’t-I? “And with whom?” “People.” “What people?” “Writers, publishers, friends of Oliver’s. We stayed up every night.” “Not even eighteen years old, and already he leads la dolce vita,” came Mafalda’s acid satire. My mother agreed.

“We’ve fixed up your room the way it was. We thought you’d like finally to have it back.”

I was instantly saddened and infuriated. Who had given them the right? They’d clearly been prying, together or separately.

I always knew I’d eventually have my room back. But I had hoped for a slower, more extended transition to the way things used to be before Oliver. I’d pictured lying in bed struggling to work up the courage to make it across to his room. What I had failed to anticipate was that Mafalda would have already changed his sheets—our sheets. Luckily I’d asked him again to give me Billowy that morning, after I’d made sure he wore it all through our stay in

Rome. I had put it in a plastic laundry bag in our hotel room and would in all likelihood have to hide it from anyone’s prying reach for the rest of my life. On certain nights, I’d remove Billowy from its bag, make sure it hadn’t acquired the scent of plastic or of my clothes, and hold it next to me, flap its long sleeves around me, and breathe out his name in the dark. Ulliva, Ulliva, Ulliva —it was Oliver calling me by his name when he’d imitate its transmogrified sound as spoken by Mafalda and Anchise; but it’d also be me calling him by his name as well, hoping he’d call me back by mine, which I’d speak for him to me, and back to him: Elio, Elio, Elio.

To avoid entering my bedroom from the balcony and finding him missing, I used the inner stairwell. I opened the door to my room, dropped my backpack on the floor, and threw myself on my warm, sunlit bed. Thank goodness for that. They had not washed the bedspread. Suddenly I was happy to be back. I could have fallen asleep right then and there, forgetting all about Billowy and the smell, and about Oliver himself. Who can resist sleep at two or three in the afternoon in these sunlit parts of the Mediterranean?

In my exhaustion, I resolved to take out my scorebook later in the afternoon and pick up the Haydn exactly where I’d left off. Either this or I’d head over to the tennis courts and sit in the sun on one of those warm benches that were sure to send a shiver of well-being through my body, and see who was available for a game. There was always someone.

I had never welcomed sleep so serenely in my life. There’d be plenty of time for mourning, I thought. It will come, probably on the sly, as I’ve heard these things always do, and there won’t be any getting off lightly, either. Anticipating sorrow to neutralize sorrow—that’s paltry, cowardly stuff, I told myself, knowing I was an ace practitioner of the craft. And what if it came fiercely? What if it came and didn’t let go, a sorrow that had come to stay, and did to me what longing for him had done on those nights when it seemed there was something so essential missing from my life that it might as well have been missing from my body, so that losing him now would be like losing a hand you could spot in every picture of yourself around the house, but without which you couldn’t possibly be you again. You lose it, as you always knew you would, and were even prepared to; but you can’t bring yourself to live with the loss. And hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream of it, hurts just the same.

Then a strange idea got hold of me: What if my body—just my body, my heart—cried out for his? What to do then?

What if at night I wouldn’t be able to live with myself unless I had him by

me, inside me? What then?

Think of the pain before the pain.

I knew what I was doing. Even in my sleep, I knew what I was doing. Trying to immunize yourself, that’s what you’re doing—you’ll end up killing the whole thing this way—sneaky, cunning boy, that’s what you are, sneaky, heartless, cunning boy. I smiled at the voice. The sun was right on me now, and I loved the sun with a near-pagan love for the things of earth. Pagan, that’s what you are. I had never known how much I loved the earth, the sun, the sea— people, things, even art seemed to come second. Or was I fooling myself?

In the middle of the afternoon, I became aware that I was enjoying sleep, and not just seeking refuge in it—sleep within sleep, like dreams within dreams, could anything be better? An access of something as exquisite as pure bliss began to take hold of me. This must be Wednesday, I thought, and indeed it was Wednesday, when the cutlery grinder sets up shop in our courtyard and begins to hone every blade in the household, Mafalda always chatting him up as she stands next to him, holding a glass of lemonade for him while he plies away at the whetstone. The raspy, fricative sound of his wheel crackling and hissing in the midafternoon heat, sending sound waves of bliss up my way to my bedroom. I had never been able to admit to myself how happy Oliver had made me the day he’d swallowed my peach. Of course it had moved me, but it had flattered me as well, as though his gesture had said, I believe with every cell in my body that every cell in yours must not, must never, die, and if it does have to die, let it die inside my body. He’d unlatched the partly opened door to the balcony from the outside, stepped in—we weren’t quite on speaking terms that day; he didn’t ask if he could come in. What was I going to do? Say, You can’t come in? This was when I raised my arm to greet him and tell him I was done pouting, no more pouting, ever, and let him lift the sheets and get into my bed. Now, no sooner had I heard the sound of the whetstone amid the cicadas than I knew I’d either wake up or go on sleeping, and both were good, dreaming or sleeping, one and the same, I’d take either or both.

When I awoke it was nearing five o’clock. I no longer wanted to play tennis, just as I had absolutely no desire to work on the Haydn. Time for a swim, I thought. I put on my bathing suit and walked down the stairway. Vimini was sitting on the short wall next to her parents’ house.

“How come you’re going for a swim?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I just felt like it. Want to come?”

“Not today. They’re forcing me to wear this ridiculous hat if I want to stay

outside. I look like a Mexican bandit.”

“Pancho Vimini. What will you do if I go swimming?”

“I’ll watch. Unless you can help me get onto one of those rocks, then I’ll sit there, wet my feet, and keep my hat on.”

“Let’s go, then.”

You never needed to ask for Vimini’s hand. It was given naturally, the way blind people automatically take your elbow. “Just don’t walk too fast,” she said.

We went down the stairway and when we reached the rocks I found the one she liked best and sat next to her. This was her favorite spot with Oliver. The rock was warm and I loved the way the sun felt on my skin at this time of the afternoon. “Am I glad I’m back,” I said.

“Did you have a good time in Rome?”

I nodded.

“We missed you.”

“We who?”

“Me. Marzia. She came looking for you the other day.” “Ah,” I said.

“I told her where you went.”

“Ah,” I repeated.

I could tell the child was scanning my face. “I think she knows you don’t like her very much.”

There was no point debating the issue.

“And?” I asked.

“And nothing. I just felt sorry for her. I said you’d left in a great rush.” Vimini was obviously quite pleased with her guile. “Did she believe you?”

“I think so. It wasn’t exactly a lie, you know.” “What do you mean?”

“Well, you both left without saying goodbye.” “You’re right, we did. We didn’t mean anything by it.” “Oh, with you, I don’t mind. But him I do. Very much.” “Why?”

“Why, Elio? You must forgive me for saying so, but you’ve never been very intelligent.”

It took me a while to see where she was headed with this. Then it hit me.

“I may never see him again either,” I said.

“No, you still might. But I don’t know about me.”

I could feel my throat tightening, so I left her on the rock and began to edge my way into the water. This was exactly what I’d predicted might happen. I’d stare at the water that evening and for a split second forget that he wasn’t here any longer, that there was no point in turning back and looking up to the balcony, where his image hadn’t quite vanished. And yet, scarcely hours ago, his body and my body…Now he had probably already had his second meal on the plane and was preparing to land at JFK. I knew that he was filled with grief when he finally kissed me one last time in one of the bathroom stalls at Fiumicino Airport and that, even if on the plane the drinks and the movie had distracted him, once alone in his room in New York, he too would be sad again, and I hated thinking of him sad, just as I knew he’d hate to see me sad in our bedroom, which had all too soon become my bedroom.

Someone was coming toward the rocks. I tried to think of something to dispel my sorrow and fell upon the ironic fact that the distance separating Vimini from me was exactly the same that separated me from Oliver. Seven years. In seven years, I began thinking, and suddenly felt something almost burst in my throat. I dove into the water.

It was after dinner when the phone rang. Oliver had arrived safely. Yes, in New York. Yes, same apartment, same people, same noise—unfortunately the same music streaming from outside the window—you could hear it now. He put the receiver out the window and allowed us to get a flavor of the Hispanic rhythms of New York. One Hundred and Fourteenth Street, he said. Going out to a late lunch with friends. My mother and father were both talking to him from separate phones in the living room. I was on the phone in the kitchen. Here? Well, you know. The usual dinner guests. Just left. Yes, very, very hot here too. My father hoped this had been productive. This? Staying with us, explained my father. Best thing in my life. If I could, I’d hop on the same plane and come with the shirt on my back, an extra bathing suit, a toothbrush. Everyone laughed. With open arms, caro. Jokes were being bandied back and forth. You know our tradition, explained my mother, you must always come back, even for a few days. Even for a few days meant for no more than a few days—but she’d meant what she said, and he knew it. “Allora ciao, Oliver, e a presto,” she said. My father more or less repeated the same words, then added, “Dunque, ti passo Elio—vi lascio.” I heard the clicks of both extension phones signal that no one else was on the line. How tactful of my father. But the all-too-sudden freedom to be alone across what seemed a time barrier froze me.

Did he have a good trip? Yes. Did he hate the meal? Yes. Did he think of me? I had run out of questions and should have thought better than to keep pounding him with more. “What do you think?” was his vague answer—as if fearing someone might accidentally pick up the receiver? Vimini sends her love. Very upset. I’ll go out and buy her something tomorrow and send it by express mail. I’ll never forget Rome so long as I live. Me neither. Do you like your room? Sort of. Window facing noisy courtyard, never any sun, hardly any room for anything, didn’t know I owned so many books, bed way too small now. Wish we could start all over in that room, I said. Both leaning out the window in the evening, rubbing shoulders, as we did in Rome—every day of my life, I said. Every day of mine too. Shirt, toothbrush, scorebook, and I’m flying over, so don’t tempt me either. I took something from your room, he said. What? You’ll never guess. What? Find out for yourself. And then I said it, not because it was what I wanted to say to him but because the silence was weighing on us, and this was the easiest thing to smuggle in during a pause—and at least I would have said it: I don’t want to lose you. We would write. I’d call from the post office—more private that way. There was talk of Christmas, of Thanksgiving even. Yes, Christmas. But his world, which until then seemed no more distant from mine than by the thickness of the skin Chiara had once picked from his shoulders, had suddenly drifted light-years away. By Christmas it might not matter. Let me hear the noise from your window one last time. I heard crackle. Let me hear the sound you made when…A faint, timid sound—on account of because there were others in the house, he said. It made us laugh. Besides, they’re waiting for me to go out with them. I wished he had never called. I had wanted to hear him say my name again. I had meant to ask him, now that we were far apart, whatever had happened between him and Chiara. I had also forgotten to ask where he’d put his red bathing suit. Probably he had forgotten and taken it away with him.

The first thing I did after our telephone conversation was go up to my room and see what he could possibly have taken that would remind him of me. Then I saw the unyellowed blank spot on the wall. Bless him. He had taken a framed, antique postcard of Monet’s berm dating back to 1905 or so. One of our previous American summer residents had fished it out in a flee market in Paris two years ago and had mailed it to me as a souvenir. The faded colored postcard had originally been mailed in 1914—there were a few hasty, sepia-toned scribbles in German script on the back, addressed to a doctor in England, next to which the American student had inscribed his own greetings to

me in black ink—Think of me someday. The picture would remind Oliver of the morning when I first spoke out. Or of the day when we rode by the berm pretending not to notice it. Or of that day we’d decided to picnic there and had vowed not to touch each other, the better to enjoy lying in bed together the same afternoon. I wanted him to have the picture before his eyes for all time, his whole life, in front of his desk, of his bed, everywhere. Nail it everywhere you go, I thought.

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

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

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

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

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

“Eat well too?”

I nodded.

“And drank well too?”

Nodded again.

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

“Movies? Concerts?”

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

“Seen any of the inner, private courtyards I told you about?”

I guess we had failed to visit the inner, private courtyards he had told us about.

“Paid my respects to Giordano Bruno’s statue?” he asked.

We certainly did. Almost vomited there too that night.

We laughed.

Tiny pause. Another drag from his cigarette.

Now.

“You two had a nice friendship.”

This was far bolder than anything I anticipated.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to leave my “yes” hanging in midair as though buoyed by the rise of a negative qualifier that was ultimately suppressed. I just hoped he hadn’t caught the mildly hostile, evasive, seemingly fatigued Yes, and so? in my voice.

I also hoped, though, that he’d seize the opportunity of the unstated Yes, and so? in my answer to chide me, as he so often did, for being harsh or indifferent or way too critical of people who had every reason to consider themselves my friends. He might then add his usual bromide about how rare good friendships were and that, even if people proved difficult to be with after a while, still, most meant well and each had something good to impart. No man is an island, can’t shut yourself away from others, people need people, blah, blah.

But I had guessed wrong.

“You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was.”

“Oliver was Oliver,” I said, as if that summed things up.

“Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi,” my father added, quoting Montaigne’s all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.

I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë’s words: because “he’s more myself than I am.”

“Oliver may be very intelligent—,” I began. Once again, the disingenuous rise in intonation announced a damning but hanging invisibly between us. Anything not to let my father lead me any further down this road.

“Intelligent? He was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good, and you were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.”

My father had never spoken of goodness this way before. It disarmed me. “I think he was better than me, Papa.”

“I am sure he’d say the same about you, which flatters the two of you.”

He was about to tap his cigarette and, in leaning toward the ashtray, he reached out and touched my hand.

“What lies ahead is going to be very difficult,” he started to say, altering his voice. His tone said: We don’t have to speak about it, but let’s not pretend we don’t know what I’m saying.

Speaking abstractly was the only way to speak the truth to him.

“Fear not. It will come. At least I hope it does. And when you least expect it. Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it’s not with me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.”

I looked at him. This was the moment when I should lie and tell him he was totally off course. I was about to.

“Look,” he interrupted. “You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing

so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”

I couldn’t begin to take all this in. I was dumbstruck.

“Have I spoken out of turn?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Then let me say one more thing. It will clear the air. I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”

He took a breath.

“We may never speak about this again. But I hope you’ll never hold it against me that we did. I will have been a terrible father if, one day, you’d want to speak to me and felt that the door was shut or not sufficiently open.”

I wanted to ask him how he knew. But then how could he not have known? How could anyone not have known? “Does Mother know?” I asked. I was going to say suspect but corrected myself. “I don’t think she does.” His voice meant, But even if she did, I am sure her attitude would be no different than mine.

We said good night. On my way upstairs I vowed to ask him about his life. We’d all heard about his women when he was young, but I’d never even had an inkling of anything else.

Was my father someone else? And if he was someone else, who was I?

Oliver kept his promise. He came back just before Christmas and stayed till New Year’s. At first he was totally jet-lagged. He needs time, I thought. But so did I. He whiled away the hours with my parents mostly, then with Vimini, who was overjoyed to feel that nothing had changed between them. I was starting to fear we’d slip back to our early days when, but for patio pleasantries, avoidance and indifference were the norm. Why had his phone calls not prepared me for this? Was I the one responsible for the new tenor of our friendship? Had my parents said something? Had he come back for me? Or for them, for the house, to get away? He had come back for his book, which had

already been published in England, in France, in Germany, and was finally due to come out in Italy. It was an elegant volume, and we were all very happy for him, including the bookseller in B., who promised a book party the following summer. “Maybe. We’ll see,” said Oliver after we’d stopped there on our bikes. The ice cream vendor was closed for the season. As were the flower shop and the pharmacy where we’d stopped on leaving the berm that very first time when he showed me how badly he’d scraped himself. They all belonged to a lifetime ago. The town felt empty, the sky was gray. One night he had a long talk with my father. In all likelihood they were discussing me, or my prospects for college, or last summer, or his new book. When they opened the door, I heard laughter in the hallway downstairs, my mother kissing him. A while later there was a knock at my bedroom door, not the French windows— that entrance was to remain permanently shut, then. “Want to talk?” I was already in bed. He had a sweater on and seemed dressed to go out for a walk. He sat on the edge of my bed, looking as uneasy as I must have seemed the first time when this room used to be his. “I might be getting married this spring,” he said. I was dumbfounded. “But you never said anything.” “Well, it’s been on and off for more than two years.” “I think it’s wonderful news,” I said. People getting married was always wonderful news, I was happy for them, marriages were good, and the broad smile on my face was genuine enough, even if it occurred to me a while later that such news couldn’t possibly bode well for us. Did I mind? he asked. “You’re being silly,” I said. Long silence. “Will you be getting in bed now?” I asked. He looked at me gingerly. “For a short while. But I don’t want to do anything.” It sounded like an updated and far more polished version of Later, maybe. So we were back to that, were we? I had an impulse to mimic him but held back. He lay beside me on top of the blanket with his sweater on. All he had taken off was his loafers. “How long do you think this will go on?” he asked wryly. “Not long, I hope.” He kissed me on the mouth, but it wasn’t the kiss after the Pasquino, when he’d pressed me hard against the wall on via Santa Maria dell’Anima. I recognized the taste instantly. I’d never realized how much I liked it or how long I’d missed it. One more item to log on that checklist of things I’d miss before losing him for good. I was about to get out from under the blankets. “I can’t do this,” he said, and sprang away. “I can,” I replied. “Yes, but I can’t.” I must have had iced razor blades in my eyes, for he suddenly realized how angry I was. “I’d love nothing better than to take your clothes off and at the very least hold you. But I can’t.” I put my arms around his head and held it. “Then maybe you shouldn’t stay. They know about

us.” “I figured,” he said. “How?” “By the way your father spoke. You’re lucky. My father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.” I looked at him: I want one more kiss.

I should, could, have seized him.

By the next morning, things became officially chilly.

One small thing did occur that week. We were sitting in the living room after lunch having coffee when my father brought out a large manila folder in which were stacked six applications accompanied with the passport photo of each applicant. Next summer’s candidates. My father wanted Oliver’s opinion, then passed around the folder to my mother, me, and another professor who had stopped by for lunch with his wife, also a university colleague who had come for the same reason the year before. “My successor,” said Oliver, picking one application above the rest and passing it around. My father instinctively darted a glance in my direction, then immediately withdrew it.

The exact same thing had occurred almost a year, to the day, before. Pavel, Maynard’s successor, had come to visit that Christmas and on looking over the files had strongly recommended one from Chicago—in fact, he knew him very well. Pavel and everyone else in the room felt quite tepid about a young postdoc teaching at Columbia who specialized in, of all things, the pre-Socratics. I had taken longer than needed to look at his picture and was relieved to notice that I felt nothing.

In thinking back now, I couldn’t be more certain that everything between us had started in this very room during Christmas break.

“Is this how I was selected?” he asked with a sort of earnest, awkward candor, which my mother always found disarming.

“I wanted it to be you,” I told Oliver later that evening when I helped him load his things in the car minutes before Manfredi drove him to the station. “I made sure they picked you.”

That night I riffled through my father’s cabinet and found the file containing last year’s applicants. I found his picture. Open shirt collar, Billowy, long hair, the dash of a movie star unwillingly snapped by a paparazzo. No wonder I’d stared at it. I wished I could remember what I’d felt on that afternoon exactly a year ago—that burst of desire followed by its instant antidote, fear. The real Oliver, and each successive Oliver wearing a different-colored bathing suit every day, or the Oliver who lay naked in bed, or who leaned on the window ledge of our hotel in Rome, stood in the way of the troubled and confused image I had drawn of him on first seeing his snapshot.

I looked at the faces of the other applicants. This one wasn’t so bad. I began to wonder what turn my life would have taken had someone else shown up instead. I wouldn’t have gone to Rome. But I might have gone elsewhere. Wouldn’t have known the first thing about San Clemente. But I might have discovered something else which I’d missed out on and might never know about. Wouldn’t have changed, would never be who I am today, would have become someone else.

I wonder now who that someone else is today. Is he happier? Couldn’t I dip into his life for a few hours, a few days, and see for myself—not just to test if this other life is better, or to measure how our lives couldn’t be further apart because of Oliver, but also to consider what I would say to this other me were I to pay him a short visit one day. Would I like him, would he like me, would either of us understand why the other became who he is, would either be surprised to learn that each of us had in fact run into an Oliver of one sort or another, man or woman, and that we were very possibly, regardless of who came to stay with us that summer, one and the same person still?

It was my mother, who hated Pavel and would have forced my father to turn down anyone Pavel recommended, who finally twisted the arm of fate. We may be Jews of discretion, she’d said, but this Pavel is an anti-Semite and I won’t have another anti-Semite in my house.

I remembered that conversation. It too was imprinted on the photo of his face. So he’s Jewish too, I thought.

And then I did what I’d been meaning to do all along that night in my father’s study. I pretended not to know who this chap Oliver was. This was last Christmas. Pavel was still trying to persuade us to host his friend. Summer hadn’t happened yet. Oliver would probably arrive by cab. I’d carry his luggage, show him to his room, take him to the beach by way of the stairway down to the rocks, and then, time allowing, show him around the property as far back as the old railway stop and say something about the gypsies living in the abandoned train cars bearing the insignia of the royal House of Savoy. Weeks later, if we had time, we might take a bike ride to B. We’d stop for refreshments. I’d show him the bookstore. Then I’d show him Monet’s berm. None of it had happened yet.

We heard of his wedding the following summer. We sent gifts and I included a little mot. The summer came and went. I was often tempted to tell him about his

“successor” and embroider all manner of stories about my new neighbor down the balcony. But I never sent him anything. The only letter I did send the year after was to tell him that Vimini had died. He wrote to all of us saying how sorry he was. He was traveling in Asia, so that by the time his letter reached us, his reaction to Vimini’s death, rather than soothe an open sore, seemed to graze one that had healed on its own. Writing to him about her was like crossing the last footbridge between us, especially after it became clear we weren’t ever going to mention what had once existed between us, or, for that matter, that we weren’t even mentioning it. Writing had also been my way of telling him what college I was attending in the States, in case my father, who kept an active correspondence with all of our previous residents, hadn’t already told him. Ironically, Oliver wrote back to my address in Italy—another reason for the delay.

Then came the blank years. If I were to punctuate my life with the people whose bed I shared, and if these could be divided in two categories—those before and those after Oliver—then the greatest gift life could bestow on me was to move this divider forward in time. Many helped me part life into Before X and After X segments, many brought joy and sorrow, many threw my life off course, while others made no difference whatsoever, so that Oliver, who for so long had loomed like a fulcrum on the scale of life, eventually acquired successors who either eclipsed him or reduced him to an early milepost, a minor fork in the road, a small, fiery Mercury on a voyage out to Pluto and beyond. Fancy this, I might say: at the time I knew Oliver, I still hadn’t met so-and-so. Yet life without so-and-so was simply unthinkable.

One summer, nine years after his last letter, I received a phone call in the States from my parents. “You’ll never guess who is staying with us for two days. In your old bedroom. And standing right in front of me now.” I had already guessed, of course, but pretended I couldn’t. “The fact that you refuse to say you’ve already guessed says a great deal,” my father said with a snicker before saying goodbye. There was a tussle between my parents over who was to hand their phone over. Finally his voice came through. “Elio,” he said. I could hear my parents and the voices of children in the background. No one could say my name that way. “Elio,” I repeated, to say it was I speaking but also to spark our old game and show I’d forgotten nothing. “It’s Oliver,” he said. He had forgotten.

“They showed me pictures, you haven’t changed,” he said. He spoke about his two boys who were right now playing in the living room with my mother,

eight and six, I should meet his wife, I am so happy to be here, you have no idea, no idea. It’s the most beautiful spot in the world, I said, pretending to infer that he was happy because of the place. You can’t understand how happy I am to be here. His words were breaking up, he passed the phone back to my mother, who, before turning to me, was still speaking to him with endearing words. “Ma s’è tutto commosso, he’s all choked up,” she finally said to me. “I wish I could be with you all,” I responded, getting all worked up myself over someone I had almost entirely stopped thinking about. Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

Four years later, while passing through his college town, I did the unusual. I decided to show up. I sat in his afternoon lecture hall and, after class, as he was putting away his books and packing loose sheets into a folder, I walked up to him. I wasn’t going to make him guess who I was, but I wasn’t going to make it easy either.

There was a student who wanted to ask him a question. So I waited my turn. The student eventually left. “You probably don’t remember me,” I began, as he squinted somewhat, trying to place me. He was suddenly distant, as if stricken by the fear that we had met in a place he didn’t care to remember. He put on a tentative, ironic, questioning look, an uncomfortable, puckered smile, as if rehearsing something like, I’m afraid you’re mistaking me for somebody else. Then he paused. “Good God—Elio!” It was my beard that had thrown him off, he said. He embraced me, and then patted my furry face several times as if I were younger than I’d even been that summer so long ago. He hugged me the way he couldn’t bring himself to do on the night when he stepped into my room to tell me he was getting married. “How many years has it been?”

“Fifteen. I counted them last night on my way here.” Then I added:

“Actually, that’s not true. I’ve always known.”

“Fifteen it is. Just look at you!

“Look,” he added, “come for a drink, come for dinner, tonight, now, meet my wife, my boys. Please, please, please.”

“I’d love to—”

“I have to drop something in my office, and off we go. It’s a lovely walk along to the parking lot.”

“You don’t understand. I’d love to. But I can’t.”

The “can’t” did not mean I wasn’t free to visit him but that I couldn’t bring

myself to do it.

He looked at me as he was still putting away his papers in the leather bag. “You never did forgive me, did you?”

“Forgive? There was nothing to forgive. If anything, I’m grateful for everything. I remember good things only.”

I had heard people say this in the movies. They seemed to believe it.

“Then what is it?” he asked.

We were leaving his classroom and stepped into the commons where one of those long, languorous autumnal sunsets on the East Coast threw luminous shades of orange over the adjoining hills.

How was I ever going to explain to him, or to myself, why I couldn’t go to his home and meet his family, though every part of me was dying to? Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, books, world, life. What had I expected? A hug, a handshake, a perfunctory hail-fellow-well-met, and then the unavoidable Later!?

The very possibility of meeting his family suddenly alarmed me—too real, too sudden, too in-my-face, not rehearsed enough. Over the years I’d lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I’d dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn’t just how distant were the paths we’d taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me—a loss I didn’t mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we’ve stopped thinking of things we’ve lost and may never have cared for.

Or was it that I was jealous of his family, of the life he’d made for himself, of the things I never shared and couldn’t possibly have known about? Things he had longed for, loved, and lost, and whose loss had crushed him, but whose presence in his life, when he had them, I wasn’t there to witness and wouldn’t know the first thing about. I wasn’t there when he’d acquired them, wasn’t there when he’d given them up. Or was it much, much simpler? I had come to see if I felt something, if something was still alive. The trouble was I didn’t want anything to be alive either.

All these years, whenever I thought of him, I’d think either of B. or of our last days in Rome, the whole thing leading up to two scenes: the balcony with its attendant agonies and via Santa Maria dell’Anima, where he’d pushed me

against the old wall and kissed me and in the end let me put one leg around his. Every time I go back to Rome, I go back to that one spot. It is still alive for me, still resounds with something totally present, as though a heart stolen from a tale by Poe still throbbed under the ancient slate pavement to remind me that, here, I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have. I could never think of him in New England. When I lived in New England for a while and was separated from him by no more than fifty miles, I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral. The places where he’d lived also felt inanimate, and as soon as I tried thinking of them, they too would float and drift away, no less unreal and spectral. Now, it turned out, not only were New England towns very much alive, but so was he. I could easily have thrust myself on him years ago, married or unmarried— unless it was I who, despite all appearances, had all along been unreal and spectral myself.

Or had I come with a far more menial purpose? To find him living alone, waiting for me, craving to be taken back to B.? Yes, both our lives on the same artificial respirator, waiting for that time when we’d finally meet and scale our way back to the Piave memorial.

And then it came out of me: “The truth is I’m not sure I can feel nothing. And if I am to meet your family, I would prefer not to feel anything.” Followed by a dramatic silence. “Perhaps it never went away.”

Was I speaking the truth? Or was the moment, tense and delicate as it was, making me say things I’d never quite admitted to myself and could still not wager were entirely true? “I don’t think it went away,” I repeated.

“So,” he said. His so was the only word that could sum up my uncertainties. But perhaps he had also meant So? as though to question what could possibly have been so shocking about still wanting him after so many years.

“So,” I repeated, as though referring to the capricious aches and sorrows of a fussy third party who happened to be me.

“So, that’s why you can’t come over for drinks?” “So, that’s why I can’t come over for drinks.” “What a goose!”

I had altogether forgotten his word.

We reached his office. He introduced me to two or three colleagues who happened to be in the department, surprising me with his total familiarity with every aspect of my career. He knew everything, had kept abreast of the most

insignificant details. In some cases, he must have dug out information about me that could only be obtained by surfing the Web. It moved me. I’d assumed he’d totally forgotten me.

“I want to show you something,” he said. His office had a large leather sofa. Oliver sofa, I thought. So this is where he sits and reads. Papers were strewn about the sofa and on the floor, except for the corner seat, which was under an alabaster lamp. Oliver lamp. I remembered sheets lining the floor in his room in B. “Recognize it?” he asked. On the wall was a framed colored reproduction of a poorly preserved fresco of a bearded Mithraic figure. Each of us had bought one on the morning of our visit to San Clemente. I hadn’t seen mine in ages. Next to it on the wall was a framed postcard of Monet’s berm. I recognized it immediately.

“It used to be mine, but you’ve owned it far, far longer than I have.” We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives.

“It has a long history,” I said.

“I know. When I had it reframed I saw the inscriptions on the back, which is why you can also read the back of the card now. I’ve often thought about this Maynard guy. Think of me someday.”

“Your predecessor,” I said to tease him. “No, nothing like that. Whom will you give it to one day?”

“I had hoped one day to let one of my sons bring it in person when he comes for his residency. I’ve already added my inscription—but you can’t see it. Are you staying in town?” he asked to change the subject as he was putting on his raincoat.

“Yes. For one night. I’m seeing some people at the university tomorrow morning, then I’m off.”

He looked at me. I knew he was thinking of that night during Christmas break, and he knew I knew it. “So I’m forgiven.”

He pressed his lips in muted apology.

“Let’s have a drink at my hotel.”

I felt his discomfort.

“I said a drink, not a fuck.”

He looked at me and literally blushed. I was staring at him. He was amazingly handsome still, no loss of hair, no fat, still jogged every morning, he said, skin still as smooth as then. Only a few sunspots on his hands. Sunspots, I thought, and I couldn’t put the thought away. “What are these?” I asked,

pointing at his hand and then touching it. “I have them all over.” Sunspots. They broke my heart, and I wanted to kiss each and every one away. “Too much sun in my salad days. Besides, it shouldn’t be so surprising. I’m getting on. In three years, my elder son will be as old as you were then—in fact, he’s closer to the person you were when we were together than you are to the Elio I knew then. Talk about uncanny.”

Is that what you call it, when we were together? I thought.

In the bar of the old New England hotel, we found a quiet spot overlooking the river and a large flower garden that was very much in bloom that month. We ordered two martinis—Sapphire gin, he specified—and sat close together in the horseshoe-shaped booth, like two husbands who are forced to sit uncomfortably close while their wives are in the powder room.

“In another eight years, I’ll be forty-seven and you forty. Five years from then, I’ll be fifty-two and you forty-five. Will you come for dinner then?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“So what you’re really saying is you’ll come only when you think you’ll be too old to care. When my kids have left. Or when I’m a grandfather. I can just see us—and on that evening, we’ll sit together and drink a strong eau-de-vie, like the grappa your father used to serve at night sometimes.”

“And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.” But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.

Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber.

Silence.

“God, the way they envied us from across the dinner table that first night in Rome,” he said. “Staring at us, the young, the old, men, women—every single one of them at that dinner table—gaping at us, because we were so happy.

“And on that evening when we grow older still we’ll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and

whom we admire and want to help along. And we’ll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.”

Silence again.

“Perhaps I am not yet ready to speak of them as strangers,” I said.

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think either of us ever will be.” “I think we should have another.”

He conceded even before putting up a weak argument about getting back home.

We got the preliminaries out of the way. His life, my life, what did he do, what did I do, what’s good, what’s bad. Where did he hope to be, where did I. We avoided my parents. I assumed he knew. By not asking he told me that he did.

An hour.

“Your best moment?” he finally interrupted.

I thought awhile.

“The first night is the one I remember best—perhaps because I fumbled so much. But also Rome. There is a spot on via Santa Maria dell’Anima that I revisit every time I’m in Rome. I’ll stare at it for a second, and suddenly it’ll all come back to me. I had just thrown up that night and on the way back to the bar you kissed me. People kept walking by but I didn’t care, nor did you. That kiss is still imprinted there, thank goodness. It’s all I have from you. This and your shirt.”

He remembered.

“And you,” I asked, “what moment?”

“Rome too. Singing together till dawn on Piazza Navona.”

I had totally forgotten. It wasn’t just a Neapolitan song we ended up singing that night. A group of young Dutchmen had taken out their guitars and were singing one Beatles song after the other, and everyone by the main fountain had joined in, and so did we. Even Dante showed up again and he too sang along in his warped English. “Did they serenade us, or am I making it up?”

He looked at me in bewilderment.

“They serenaded you—and you were drunk out of your mind. In the end you borrowed the guitar from one of them and you started playing, and then, out of nowhere, singing. Gaping, they all were. All the druggies of the world listening like sheep to Handel. One of the Dutch girls had lost it. You wanted to bring her to the hotel. She wanted to come too. What a night. We ended up

sitting in the emptied terrace of a closed caffè behind the piazza, just you and I and the girl, watching dawn, each of us slumped on a chair.”

He looked at me. “Am I glad you came.” “I’m glad I came too.” “Can I ask you a question?”

Why was this suddenly making me nervous? “Shoot.” “Would you start again if you could?” I looked at him. “Why are you asking?”

“Because. Just answer.”

“Would I start again if I could? In a second. But I’ve had two of these, and I’m about to order a third.”

He smiled. It was obviously my turn to ask the same question, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. This was my favorite Oliver: the one who thought exactly like me.

“Seeing you here is like waking from a twenty-year coma. You look around you and you find that your wife has left you, your children, whose childhood you totally missed out on, are grown men, some are married, your parents have died long ago, you have no friends, and that tiny face staring at you through goggles belongs to none other than your grandson, who’s been brought along to welcome Gramps from his long sleep. Your face in the mirror is as white as Rip Van Winkle’s. But here’s the catch: you’re still twenty years younger than those gathered around you, which is why I can be twenty-four in a second—I am twenty-four. And if you pushed the parable a few years further up, I could wake up and be younger than my elder son.”

“What does this say about the life you’ve lived, then?”

“Part of it—just part of it—was a coma, but I prefer to call it a parallel life. It sounds better. Problem is that most of us have—live, that is—more than two parallel lives.”

Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn’t want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him “You are the only person I’d like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist. Sometimes I have this awful picture of waking up in our house in B. and, looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, He died last night. We missed out on so much. It was a coma. Tomorrow I go

back to my coma, and you to yours. Pardon, I didn’t mean to offend—I am sure yours is no coma.”

“No, a parallel life.”

Maybe every other sorrow I’d known in life suddenly decided to converge on this very one. I had to fight it off. And if he didn’t see, it’s probably because he himself was not immune to it.

On a whim, I asked him if he’d ever read a novel by Thomas Hardy called The Well-Beloved. No, he hadn’t. About a man who falls in love with a woman who, years after leaving him, dies. He visits her house and ends up meeting her daughter, with whom he falls in love, and after losing her as well, many years later, runs into her daughter, with whom he falls in love. “Do these things die out on their own or do some things need generations and lifetimes to sort themselves out?”

“I wouldn’t want one of my sons in your bed, any more than I’d like yours, if you were to have one, in my son’s.”

We chuckled. “I wonder about our fathers, though.” He thought for a while, then smiled.

“What I don’t want is to receive a letter from your son with the bad news: And by the way, enclosed please find a framed postcard my father asked me to return to you. Nor do I want to answer with something like: You can come whenever you please, I am sure he would have wanted you to stay in his room. Promise me it won’t happen.”

“Promise.”

“What did you write on the back of the postcard?” “It was going to be a surprise.”

“I’m too old for surprises. Besides, surprises always come with a sharp edge that is meant to hurt. I don’t want to be hurt—not by you. Tell me.”

“Just two words.”

“Let me guess: If not later, when?”

“Two words, I said. Besides, that would be cruel.”

I thought for a while.

“I give up.”

“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”

I stared at him.

It was good we were in a public place.

“We should go.” He reached for his raincoat, which was folded next to his

seat, and began to make motions of standing up.

I was going to walk him outside the hotel lobby and then stand and watch him go. Any moment now we were going to say goodbye. Suddenly part of my life was going to be taken away from me now and would never be given back.

“Suppose I walk you to your car,” I said. “Suppose you came for dinner.” “Suppose I did.”

Outside, the night was settling fast. I liked the peace and the silence of the countryside, with its fading alpenglow and darkling view of the river. Oliver country, I thought. The mottled lights from across the other bank beamed on the water, reminding me of Van Gogh’s Starlight Over the Rhone. Very autumnal, very beginning of school year, very Indian summer, and as always at Indian summer twilight, that lingering mix of unfinished summer business and unfinished homework and always the illusion of summer months ahead, which wears itself out no sooner than the sun has set.

I tried to picture his happy family, boys immersed in homework, or lumbering back from late practice, surly, ill-tempered thumping with muddied boots, every cliché racing through my mind. This is the man whose house I stayed in when I lived in Italy, he’d say, followed by grumpy harrumphs from two adolescents who couldn’t be bothered by the man from Italy or the house in Italy, but who’d reel in shock if told, Oh, and by the way, this man who was almost your age back then and who spent most of his days quietly transcribing The Seven Last Words of Christ each morning would sneak into my room at night and we’d fuck our brains out. So shake hands and be nice.

Then I thought of the drive back, late at night, along the starlit river to this rickety antique New England hotel on a shoreline that I hoped would remind us both of the bay of B., and of Van Gogh’s starry nights, and of the night I joined him on the rock and kissed him on the neck, and of the last night when we walked together on the coast road, sensing we’d run out of last-minute miracles to put off his leaving. I imagined being in his car asking myself, Who knows, would I want to, would he want to, perhaps a nightcap at the bar would decide, knowing that, all through dinner that evening, he and I would be worrying about the same exact thing, hoping it might happen, praying it might not, perhaps a nightcap would decide—I could just read it on his face as I pictured him looking away while uncorking a bottle of wine or while changing the music, because he too would catch the thought racing through my mind and want me to know he was debating the exact same thing, because, as he’d pour the wine for

his wife, for me, for himself, it would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself. In the weeks we’d been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way. We spoke about everything but. But we’ve always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

Last summer he finally did come back. It was for an overnight visit, on his way from Rome to Menton. He arrived by cab down the tree-lined driveway, where the car stopped more or less where it had stopped twenty years before. He sprang out with his laptop, a huge athletic duffel bag, and a large gift-wrapped box, obviously a present. “For your mother,” he said when he caught my glance. “Better tell her what’s in it,” I said as soon as I helped put his things down in the foyer. “She suspects everyone.” He understood. It saddened him.

“Old room?” I asked.

“Old room,” he confirmed, even though we’d arranged everything by e-mail already.

“Old room it is, then.”

I wasn’t eager to go upstairs with him and was relieved to see Manfredi and Mafalda shuffle out of the kitchen to greet him as soon as they’d heard his taxi. Their giddy hugs and kisses defused some of the uneasiness I knew I’d feel as soon as he’d settled down in our house. I wanted their overexcited welcome to last well into the first hour of his stay. Anything to prevent us from sitting face-to-face over coffee and finally speaking the unavoidable two words: twenty years.

Instead, we’d leave his things in the foyer and hope Manfredi would bring them upstairs while Oliver and I took a quick walk around the house. “I’m sure you’re dying to see,” I’d say, meaning the garden, the balustrade, and the view of the sea. We’d work our way behind the pool, back into the living room where the old piano stood next to the French windows, and finally we would return to the foyer and find that his things had indeed already been carried

upstairs. Part of me might want him to realize that nothing had changed since he’d been here last, that the orle of paradise was still there, and that the tilting gate to the beach still squeaked, that the world was exactly as he’d left it, minus Vimini, Anchise, and my father. This was the welcoming gesture I meant to extend. But another part of me wanted him to sense there was no point trying to catch up now—we’d traveled and been through too much without each other for there to be any common ground between us. Perhaps I wanted him to feel the sting of loss, and grieve. But in the end, and by way of compromise, perhaps, I decided that the easiest way was to show I’d forgotten none of it. I made a motion to take him to the empty lot that remained as scorched and fallow as when I’d shown it to him two decades before. I had barely finished my offer—“Been there, done that,” he replied. It was his way of telling me he hadn’t forgotten either. “Maybe you’d prefer to make a quick stop at the bank.” He burst out laughing. “I’ll bet you they never closed my account.” “If we have time, and if you care to, I’ll take you to the belfry. I know you’ve never been up there.”

“To-die-for?”

I smiled back. He remembered our name for it.

As we toured the patio overlooking the huge expanse of blue before us, I stood by and watched him lean on the balustrade overlooking the bay.

Beneath us was his rock, where he sat at night, where he and Vimini had whiled away entire afternoons together.

“She’d be thirty today,” he said.

“I know.”

“She wrote to me every day. Every single day.”

He was staring at their spot. I remembered how they’d hold hands and scamper together all the way down to the shore.

“Then one day she stopped writing. And I knew. I just knew. I’ve kept all her letters, you know.”

I looked at him wistfully.

“I’ve kept yours too,” he immediately added, to reassure me, though vaguely, not knowing whether this was something I wanted to hear.

It was my turn. “I have all of yours too. And something else as well. Which I may show you. Later.”

Did he not remember Billowy, or was he too modest, too cautious, to show he knew exactly what I was referring to? He resumed staring into the offing.

He had come on the right day. Not a cloud, not a ripple, not a stir in the

wind. “I’d forgotten how much I loved this place. But this is exactly how I remember it. At noon it’s paradise.”

I let him talk. It was good to see his eyes drift into the offing. Perhaps he too wanted to avoid the face-to-face.

“And Anchise?” he finally asked.

“We lost him to cancer, poor man. I used to think he was so old. He wasn’t even fifty.”

“He too loved it here—him and his grafts and his orchard.” “He died in my grandfather’s bedroom.”

Silence again. I was going to say My old room, but I changed my mind. “Are you happy you’re back?”

He saw through my question before I did.

“Are you happy I’m back?” he retorted.

I looked at him, feeling quite disarmed, though not threatened. Like people who blush easily but aren’t ashamed of it, I knew better than to stifle this feeling, and let myself be swayed by it.

“You know I am. More than I ought to be, perhaps.”

“Me too.”

That said it all.

“Come, I’ll show you where we buried some of my father’s ashes.”

We walked down the back stairwell into the garden where the old breakfast table used to be. “This was my father’s spot. I call it his ghost spot. My spot used to be over there, if you remember.” I pointed to where my old table used to stand by the pool.

“Did I have a spot?” he asked with a half grin.

“You’ll always have a spot.”

I wanted to tell him that the pool, the garden, the house, the tennis court, the orle of paradise, the whole place, would always be his ghost spot. Instead, I pointed upstairs to the French windows of his room. Your eyes are forever there, I wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days. When there’s a breeze and they swell and I look up from down here or stand outside on the balcony, I’ll catch myself thinking that you’re in there, staring out from your world to my world, saying, as you did on that one night when I found you on the rock, I’ve been happy here. You’re thousands of miles away but no sooner do I look at this window than I’ll think of a bathing suit, a shirt thrown on on the fly, arms resting on the banister, and you’re suddenly there, lighting up your first

cigarette of the day—twenty years ago today. For as long as the house stands, this will be your ghost spot—and mine too, I wanted to say.

We stood there for a few seconds where my father and I had spoken of Oliver once. Now he and I were speaking of my father. Tomorrow, I’ll think back on this moment and let the ghosts of their absence maunder in the twilit hour of the day.

“I know he would have wanted something like this to happen, especially on such a gorgeous summer day.”

“I am sure he would have. Where did you bury the rest of his ashes?” he asked.

“Oh, all over. In the Hudson, the Aegean, the Dead Sea. But this is where I come to be with him.”

He said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“Come, I’ll take you to San Giacomo before you change your mind,” I finally said. “There is still time before lunch. Remember the way?”

“I remember the way.”

“You remember the way,” I echoed.

He looked at me and smiled. It cheered me. Perhaps because I knew he was taunting me.

Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.

“I’m like you,” he said. “I remember everything.”

I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.