Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

He called this making memories, for the day when, he’d say. What day? I’d ask, to tease him. For the day you know when.

Even when I was asleep, I loved hearing his footsteps crunching the gravel leading to our house. It meant he was back, and the world was whole again.

Like the Greek gods who were constantly feuding with one another using mortals as their pawns, she was haranguing me to beat up on him. He must have realized what she was doing, which is why he smiled at me when she wasn’t looking, meaning, Put up with it for now. Tonight, you and I will head out for ice cream and make memories by the castle.

Yet the real damage was not in the cutting words she wished she hadn’t spoken and that I would never forget. The damage was to our love: it had lost its warmth, its spontaneity, and become a willed, conscious, rueful love. She was pleased to see I still loved her; I was pleased to see how readily both she and I were fooled. The two of us were aware of being pleased, which intensified our truce.

of love, which happens only once in life, and thereafter is never quite spontaneous or impulsive,

All our rituals were disbanded and void. Summer didn’t belong to me here.

I remembered everything. The wanting to cry, especially, and the waiting to see him because the waiting and hoping were unbearable, the wish to hate everything about him because one short glance from him and suddenly you felt totally distraught and couldn’t smile or laugh or find joy in anything.

The hands of a musician. I wanted to touch his hands, not just because I wanted to see if the pink of his palms was as smooth to the touch as his hands promised, but because, suddenly, I wanted to place my palms under the care of each of his. Unlike his eyes, his hands did not intimidate—instead they welcomed. I wanted his long knuckles and almondine fingernails to slip in between each of my fingers and hold them down in a warm and lasting display of good fellowship, and with this gesture alone repeat the promise that one day, perhaps sooner than I hoped, I too would be a grown man with hands like his, wearing glasses like his, letting a glint of mirth and mischief radiate through my features to tell the world I was an expert at something and a very, very good man.

I loved hearing him speak, especially when I pointed at something and he’d lean next to me to explain. My mother was right. I loved his voice, especially when he was so close that he seemed to breathe on me and speak in whispers. He knew so much and yet, when he’d sigh before answering, he sounded so vulnerable and so wary of the unexpected turns things took sometimes.

What I liked was not only having to put my cards on the table and disclosing a very private fact about myself but, for the first time, I had spoken with someone about things I thought troubled me and no one but me. I liked speaking like this.

I wanted to come back on the morrow and work with him, sit face-to-face with him as we’d done today, and occasionally draw closer to him to get a whiff of his underarms, which smelled like mine but much, much stronger. I liked that he wasn’t wearing a shirt, just an apron, with his chest ever so visible. I could look at the rest of him all I wanted now without worrying about his eyes or not being able to hold his gaze. I just didn’t want him to know I was staring.

His hand followed the grain in the wood, and the smell of his shop and of his underarms was, like incense, wholesome and good, because one had to be selfless and unsparing in one’s work, he said, and there was piety in his gesture, and everything about him told you he was honest, humble, and good.

I didn’t move. I could now feel his breath, he was going to kiss me. He brought his finger to his mouth, put some spit on its tip, and applied it to the spot of my cheek. I would have done anything he asked at that moment. “Just another touch, be patient, it won’t burn,” he had said, and I trusted him, and I liked trusting him, and my mother’s warning didn’t for a second matter to me, because what coursed through my mind at that very moment was that instead of rubbing my cheek with that rag he should have rubbed my cock ever so gently with it, and if it burned, as I knew it would, so be it, so long as I let him hold it in the palm of his hand as he’d done with both my hands the other day.

We make assumptions about how our lives are being charted without knowing that we’re even making these assumptions—which is the beauty of assumptions: they anchor us without the slightest clue that what we’re doing is trusting that nothing changes. We believe that the street we live on will remain the same and bear its name forever. We believe that our friends will stay our friends, and that those we love we’ll love forever. We trust and, by dint of trusting, forget we trusted.

I thought I was crying because of the pain or because I was starting to panic. But I knew that there was another reason, though I couldn’t fathom the reason or why it had brought me to tears. There was sorrow in the chapel and in my heart and across the water toward the mainland and more sorrow in my body, because I didn’t know my body and the very simple thing I needed at the moment. And I thought of the years ahead of me and knew that this was never going to go away, that even if the burning subsided and wore itself off, I would never live down the shame or ever forgive myself or him for making me do this. 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. I threw the rag on the ground and before entering the house made sure to wash my hand, arms, and knees, using the gardener’s faucet and his dirty bar of soap.

I told them that I was running upstairs to change, took everything off, left all my wet clothes on the floor, and came right downstairs in my bathrobe and stood in the doorway, thinking, I worship this man.

He lifted his face and looked over in my direction and cast something that might almost have been the flicker of a complicit smile, and then looked down at the box he held in his hand before setting it upon the refurbished desk, saying nothing. It meant, Let it be our secret. So we had a secret. But the real secret was not that I had gone to see him almost every afternoon but that he sensed I didn’t want my parents to know. This was the secret. It never occurred to me to wonder why he hadn’t brought up my visits, or why he hadn’t acknowledged my role in polishing the box.

What I loved seeing was the ease with which he spoke to my father, as so many others did in San Giustiniano. I had never confided in anyone this way, not even my father. What it also told me was that this way of baring one’s soul with people was itself the very essence of friendship, which was something I knew nothing about and was precisely what I craved from Nanni, except that I wanted it with his face, from his hands, his smell. Perhaps I wasn’t capable of such trust or of eliciting it in others. Besides, I was just a kid, and I knew it. Did others even think about friendship as much as I did, or did they simply trust you and become your friend naturally? What had ever come naturally to me?

What if, instead of going to school one winter morning, I took the ferry from the mainland and dropped in on him? Would he put me up, help me dry my feet if it rained that day, lend me something to wear until my clothes were dry? I’d work with him, have lunch with him, and take a long nap on his bed in that ratty brown sweater of his that felt of him and smelled of him and spoke of him in the coarse, sacred tongue of things.

Say his name in the winter when we were back in the city, and I would suddenly feel a thousand pinpricks tickling the crown of my head. I loved his name. It meant far, far more to me than it did to anyone else. No one would understand, much less explain why it filled me with stealthy plea sure, with anguish and shame.

And then, as if something were being torn out of my lungs and needed to be said, I finally found a moment when he was alone to tell him. “I’ve never had friends, you’ve been my only friend,” I said, speaking these words without even realizing I had said them. What I’d meant to say was, I was your friend, I wish you’d stayed mine. Instead we hugged as we always did, except that he said, “Scusa il sudore, pardon the sweat.” But that was exactly what I wanted on my face. I wouldn’t tell my parents about this. They wouldn’t understand. No one would.

Once, my knee touched his and made a point of pressing against it. His withdrew. So, to punish him and demean him in my mind, I began to think of him naked under his apron, and I liked thinking of him naked. I knew it was wrong, even cruel, but I couldn’t stop myself, I liked looking at his crotch. While nursing these disturbing images, I suddenly caught him staring at me. Had he watched my eyes roaming all over his body when he stood up? Was he going to be upset that I had stared?

Then I saw him still staring at me. And his eyes were so beautiful and, as it hit me for the first time, so thoroughly green, that I had to look at them some more. My impulse had always been to look away to avoid his eyes, but they held me, and I wanted to be held by them, for they were ordering me not to turn away this time, for this was why adults stared each other in the eye: you looked straight back and there was no running away for cover, because you were invited to stare too, because it was no longer a breach of any kind, it was a breach not to stare—which is when I realized that what I’d been craving all this time was his eyes, not his hands, not his voice, not his knees, or even his friendship, just his eyes, for I wanted his eyes to rest forever on me the way they were doing just now, because I loved the way they hovered over my face and eventually landed on my eyes like the hand of a holy man who is about to touch your eyelids, your forehead, your whole face, because his eyes kept swearing I was the dearest thing in the world, because there was piety, grace, and beneficence in his gaze that favored me with its beauty and told me there was no less piety, beauty, and grace in mine.

I didn’t understand what devi meant that day. But thinking back now to that one word and to the way he’d spoken it, I must have sensed somewhere that this was the first time in my life that someone had treated me not as the child I still was or as a child who’d stayed out playing with friends one evening without letting his parents know he’d be late for supper, but as someone who on that very hour had strayed from being just a boy to becoming a desirable young man, who had tempted, maybe even threatened, someone quite older. On that day, without knowing the first thing, I’d been let into someone’s life as surely as I’d drawn him into mine. It took years to suspect he had struggled.

For the next few years, what that devi meant kept changing like the colors on a mood stone. Sometimes it was like a slap and a warning; sometimes like the shrug of a friend who chooses to overlook a slip and pretends to forget; and sometimes, it burned through me like muted, imperiled consent. Go away is what one said to the devil, when the devil is already in us, and what he meant with that look in his eyes as he watched me walk away was, If you don’t leave now, I won’t fight you.

This was my first encounter with time. I became a person that evening, and I had him to thank. And blame.

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.

Nanni was right about one thing. I knew nothing at all. But had I not eventually learned about the ways of physical love through gossip, hearsay, and foul words, God only knows what I would have invented once seized by the urge to touch another human being.

Would I have the courage to speak to my father about Nanni—and not only about his Nanni but also about mine? What I wanted was to spot my father sitting at a small table at his favorite caffè, arrive late as he always complained I did, and before ordering anything, take a seat and say to him, “I think he’s alive.” “Who?” “The man you and I loved. He lives in Canada.” And then it hit me for the first time in my life. My father must have always known what had happened to Nanni, and that if I’d wanted to know, all I needed was to ask him. A blockhead indeed, I thought, almost laughing at my old tutor’s word.

I replied two years later. “Dear Nanni,” I wrote. “We received your package about five years ago. But it is only now that I’m writing to you. I don’t know why it took so long to write back. My father died six years ago. We never spoke about you. But I knew. Perhaps you never knew this, but I was more like my father with you than you suspected. Or perhaps you knew. Yes, I’m sure you knew. You’ve been with me all my life.” I didn’t expect a reply.

In the picture Nanni and my father are standing in bathing suits with the sea behind them. Nanni’s right arm is resting on my father’s shoulders, while his other hand is holding my father’s left shoulder. My father, his arms crossed, is smiling broadly, and so is Nanni, both trim and athletic. Only then did I realize that though my father was at least twenty years older than Nanni, in the picture they look so much alike that they could be brothers. I had never thought of my father as a handsome man, and yet, in this new light, he was more than just handsome. It had taken me years to see how much alike the two of them were.

Her right hand rests on the table, fondling the salt shaker, doing nothing, waiting. I know that gesture. She wants him to hold her hand. They’re talking, but they’re staring. They’re making love, for Christ’s sake.

She can’t have enough of him. They’re past holding back, past awkward admissions, past the restless unease of people who are irresistibly drawn to each other but haven’t made love yet. These are people who’ve just started sleeping together and can’t hold off touching, everything is about touching. They’re playing at residual flirtation long after courtship has served its purpose.

You head out to a business lunch one day, he stares at you, you let your gaze linger on his, and suddenly, after just a half glass of wine, you catch your breath and the words slip out of your mouth, and you can’t believe what you’ve said, and the strange thing is he’s no less rapt than you are, until one of you breaks down and finally asks, Is this really happening? and the other replies, I think it is.

But as I keep walking toward the courts, I realize that I don’t share his despair. The thought of Maud and her beau zipping their way up to the nth floor in his Midtown high-rise co-op doesn’t disturb me. I can see the two of them walking down a long corridor until they finally reach his apartment door, a bit awkward and hesitant, yet grateful that their steps are muffled by the thick carpeting. The cuff links, the necktie, the image of her legs wrapped around his bare waist, don’t disturb me either. I’ll play tennis, they’ll play at lovemaking. Who’s the happier of us? Who knows?

The worst is going to be watching her lie to me and, knowing she’s lying, helping her sidestep the small traps I might unintentionally lay down, and by steering her away from them credit myself both for being so magnanimous and so very clever. I must never let on that I know.

The beauty of romance. Could I live with her after this? The real question is: Could she? The truth is: I could.

Something, however, did surprise me in the stubborn ferocity with which we ground into each other’s bodies. She kept playing with my hair as if she meant to pull it out. I had attributed all this to midsleep, unbridled, savage sex. Then while shaving, it hit me. She was making love to someone else’s body, to someone else’s rhythm, not to mine.

It’s the woman sitting by the large mirror who knows that the man sitting next to her is struggling to keep his hands on the table. The things you say. I just want to hold you. Had I ever spoken to her this way? With her there were no balconies to scale, no struggle to win her over, no dashing histrionics, no rivals, no door to ram down or to bolt shut Fragonard-style once I’d stepped into her bedroom that first time after we’d played tennis. The door was always open, and everything had come so naturally, so easily, just as it had in midsleep the other night. We crossed the bridge and didn’t even see the water underneath.

“You must be very good at what you do.” I decide not to answer. But I don’t mind the flattery. I know what he’s up to. We’ve been exchanging mock potshots. He is targeting, I am deflecting. But this is not hostile at all. This is almost like flirting.

She is beautiful, she hangs on every word he speaks, she’s so in love, and the irony is that she may not even know how hopelessly smitten she is, while the other irony is that I’m not upset, though I should be and could easily see how another man would yell or slam his palm on the dining table in front of all the guests and, later that night, run his fist through the bedroom door when she locks him out because he’s become impossible to live with.

With her eyes closed, she loves placing her knees on my shoulders, which are his shoulders now, one knee first, then the other knee, her vagina pleading for him, which is where I know his left hand is right now, getting her all worked up as she struggles to keep her composure without altering that dreamy model’s look that says I am all jewels, I am all ears, I am all yours, all the way.

By now I am in total agony. Maud and Gabi are clearly touching, cannot but touch. The Mediterranean macho has gone one further, and after moving his seat closer to Maud’s, he lets his left arm rest on the carved crest rail of her chair. Right away she brings her hand to the table, to telegraph there’s nothing going on here. But then, as if there’s been a change of mind, it goes back into hiding behind the skirt of the tablecloth. Oh, vile, deceitful woman. I am reminded of Pagliacci, which we’ve seen together this winter. He’s the lover, she’s the harlot, and I, in case there was a doubt, the clown.

And again I think of young Manfredi of Sicily and of my Manfred who comes out gleaming from the shower room every morning and who knows I’m looking because he is so hung.

I like this surge, as if a part of me already wishes to run my fist through a door to prove to her how it feels, because anger fills my lungs and makes me want to puff out my chest and be a man, the way I was a man when I finally told Manfred to move out of the way because I wanted to be the one to put away Harlan’s strategic lob with a perfectly aimed overhead slam, which in fact was my proudest moment this afternoon, this day, this month, this year, especially after Manfred put both hands on his hips and, nodding approbation, said, “Wow!” That admiring and spontaneous Wow, uttered ever so gallantly in his soft, mellifluous German voice, filled me with such bliss that moments after hearing it I said, “Buy you a beer.”

If he’s putting his arm around the back of her seat, I don’t mind if it reaches me too. And as if he’s heard me think this, or maybe because I might have moved closer to him without even knowing it, his arm drops on my shoulder, and his hand is now rubbing my neck with tenuous, absentminded motions that could easily have mistaken me at first for the leather edge of the sofa. It’s as though he wishes to assuage all my worries about Maud and at the same time stir something else in me, and I can’t tell which it is, and I like not knowing, and I don’t want him to stop, and I lean my head forward to let him rub my neck more deeply and let his hand linger there as long it pleases and undo all those knots, while I shut my eyes to relish the soothing massage, which I know he knows may not just be a massage, though maybe that’s all it is, a massage. Without looking, I know she’s guessed.

and she looks so unlike the woman I saw at the restaurant this afternoon. Is this the person I bring out when she’s alone with me, listless and fatigued? Am I even good for her? Am I enough?

“Why would it be too funny?” “Why? I could think of a hundred reasons.” “Name one.” “You mean you couldn’t tell?” I look at her. And she looks at me. I am feeling totally stumped, but finally I see what I was just starting to guess, or had already guessed except that I am still reluctant to let on that I have. Perhaps there’s a side of me that doesn’t want all my doubts about the two of them so hastily dispelled, though there’s yet another part that doesn’t want her to see I’ve immediately intuited what she’s barely had time to imply. “Oh, that,” I say, downplaying her disclosure by feigning indifferent surprise. “Oh, that!” she almost mimics. “Seriously?” A moment of silence. “For a while I thought you two had something going on.” “Puh-lease! So this is why you were Mister Grumpy all evening?” “Was I Mister Grumpy?” “Big-time.” She imitates my face when I’m pouting. We both laugh. “Why do you think he asked if we were in love?” Maud asks. “Why? Because he had too much to drink? Because he had designs on you?” “No, dear. On you.” I try to look baffled. But I know she can tell.

“Were you smitten?” she asks. I don’t want to lie. “For a moment.” “For a moment,” she repeats, gentle irony lilting in her voice, as though realizing that, despite my tone, what I’ve just said was not spoken in passing.

“Am I going to lose you?” she asks, and then pauses, as if wondering whether I’m no longer paying attention. “Because I don’t want to lose you.” I say nothing. But I don’t know if what I’m about to say is the truth.