Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

“This is the cruel thing about the dead. They come back in ways that always catch us off guard, don’t they, Signor Giovanni?” Mother said.

I would sit on this very same spot in the years to come and remember that never in my life had I known the sort of loneliness that you can actually touch on your body.

We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.

I’ll play tennis, they’ll play at lovemaking. Who’s the happier of us? Who knows?

But then, just hearing your flip-flops on the wet pavement of the shower area reminds me that indifference was just a reprieve, not a verdict.

And just as you utter these words, I know with unshakable certainty that those few minutes when we walk hand in hand together are, even in a dream, more real and better than anything I’d ever know in life, and that I would be lying if I called what I’ve been doing all these years living.

“Look at me. Look at me, and talk to me, just talk, I beg you,” she said, and everything I was and everything I had in me to give was already hers to take and stow away if she wished or to toss down the chute if she preferred.

In her mouth truth had no use for velvet sheathes. It spoke serrated daggers. I learned to speak serrated too.

“But I’ll tell you all the same, because you’re the only one on this fucking planet who’ll understand. I may love him. But I’ve never been in love with him, not once, not ever.” “So you have the perfect marriage,” I said. It was meant to keep things light and flippant. Perhaps because I didn’t wish to hear more, or didn’t want her prodding into my own life to pull the rug from under it as well. But she ignored my comment. “Don’t be cruel,” she snapped. “I’m telling you this because you and I are the exact opposite. We’ll stay in love until everything about us rots, down to our teeth, our fingernails, our hair. Which means nothing, of course, since we couldn’t survive a weekend together.”

“And you’re telling me this because…?” She stared at me starkly as if she couldn’t believe I hadn’t guessed already. “Because I’m always thinking of you. Because I think of you every day, all the time. As I know you think of me every day, all the time. Don’t bother denying it. I just know. Which is why I’m so happy to find you here tonight. Maybe because I needed to see you again and just spill it all out for once. And the irony is”—she caught her breath—“there’s nothing either I or you can do about it. So there. And please don’t pretend you’re any different—with or without your Manfred.”

Our love was like stagnant water behind locked sluices. Nothing lived in it.

‘Learn to see what’s not always there to be seen and maybe then you’ll become someone.’

“We’ve misspent our lives—we’re both living the wrong life, you and I. Everything about us is wrong.” “Not fair. We were never wrong. You and I are the only thing right in our lives—it’s everything else that’s wrong.”

When we left the restaurant, we couldn’t let go of our hands and walked hand in hand on Madison Avenue. Neither said anything. We didn’t care. It was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.

“The thought that I could have lived through all the years in between to arrive at this moment on this courtyard with you and still feel I haven’t budged an inch undoes me totally. I’d give anything not to know that the girl who was twenty at the time and who waited for you to come upstairs in the evening would end up having to live through so much nonsense only to find herself back where she started, almost eager to see it happen all over again. It’s as if a part of me had dug its heels in, never left, and simply waited for me to come back.”

As someone said over dinner once, each of us is given at least nine versions of our lives, some we guzzle, others we take tiny, timid sips from, and some our lips never touch.”

“Star love, my love, star love. It may not live but it never dies. It’s the only thing I’m taking with me, and you will too, when the time comes.”

What you need is less skepticism and more courage. Courage, he said, comes from what we want, which is why we take; skepticism from the price we’ll pay, which is why we fail.