Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

I know nothing about you. I don’t know your name, where you live, what you do. But I see you naked every morning. I see your cock, your balls, your ass, everything. I know how you brush your teeth, I know how your shoulder blades flex in and out when you shave, I know that you’ll take a quick shower after shaving and that your skin glows when you come out, know exactly how you’ll wrap a towel around your waist, and, for that short moment that I crave every morning in the tennis house, how you’ll drop your towel on the bench and stand naked after drying yourself. Even when I’m not looking, I love knowing that you’re naked right next to me, love thinking that you want me to know you’re naked, that you couldn’t possibly be unaware that I long for your naked body and that every night I lull myself to sleep, thinking that I’m cradled in your arms and you in mine.

I never look, don’t want to look, don’t want to be caught looking, don’t even want you to know I’m struggling not to look, though I can hear your stream and, for a brief moment, if only I had the courage, am tempted to slip a bare foot in its way to know the warmth from your body.

My mouth wants to go everywhere on your body. I want to taste you, I want to know you with my mouth.

To the rest of the world I might be the most cheerful person who ever leaves the tennis courts in the morning. I’ll stroll over to the 96th Street subway station, maybe run into a neighbor, joke with the neighbor, hope you’re following not far behind, which always gives me a thrill, even when I know you’re not following. Part of me wants you to see me happy, wants you to be envious of what could make me so happy. I carry this alleged happiness all the way to my office, and there I’ll greet everyone with so expansive a smile that it hovers on the brink of laughter. I can’t tell whether it’s real or contrived happiness, but it spills into every aspect of my life. Everywhere I go I affect joy, and by some strange miracle, this counterfeit joy brightens me up as well as those whose lives I touch. People look at me and I know what they think: He’s got a life. I flirt with everyone, but it’s really you I’m flirting with.

Thinking that I could steal one fraction of a second to place a cheek on the damp down on your chest after you’ve just showered gives more meaning and brings more joy than anything else I’ve wanted or done in a long time. I think of your skin all day, all the time.

I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what’s called a broken heart.

Sometimes, though rarely, when you hit a ball hard, you’ll grunt. I love to hear your muffled grunt. It makes me think that this is how you groan when you come. I like thinking of you coming. It brings you down to earth, makes you human, gives a sound to exertions that might otherwise slip unnoticed. I want to see your face when you come. I look at myself in the mirror as we’re shaving almost shoulder to shoulder in the tennis house and imagine you’re sending me the nod. I wonder what it must be like to be you, to look in the mirror whenever I catch my reflection and simply nod two to three times. To have your skin, your lips, the palms of your hands, your cock, your balls.

I look at your ass, your cock, your face, and feel nothing. The circuit is always the same: from attraction to tenderness to obsessive longing, and then to surrender, desuetude, apathy, fatigue, and finally scorn. 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.

If my timing is right, I’ll keep shaving and observe you in the mirror. But just sensing you are scarcely inches behind me is enough to send my heart racing and bring me to the brink of doing something foolish, like leaning back to feel your chest, or turning around to let you see that I’m getting hard. I like when my heart races, when I start to forget things, when I cease to care and all I want is for you to reach over to me, and without warning rest your towel, rest the light stubble of your unshaved chin against my back and lock me in your arms, your cock tucked between my cheeks, staring at ourselves in the mirror as though after a good night together. This is when I must think other thoughts, this is when I push my cock against the rim of the sink to keep it in check.

This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.

You smile when you speak to me. I suppose I smile too. Then just a day later you were bending down to pick up something and I spied, if for the most fleeting second, your anus. It too brought out a feeling verging on compassion, partly because I felt I had trespassed by just looking and partly because it made me know for the first time that you were kind, vulnerable, soft. I should never have looked. When I thought about it, it made me feel I’d infringed on something wholesome and private and ever so chaste about you, like an instance of the holy that suddenly flares before our eyes and then leaves us speechless, humbled, and shaken.

“What?” I asked, echoing your words. “Nothing.” Then after a pause, “I think I’m beginning to understand you.” “Oh? Tell me more, because I’m not sure I do.” “You’re not easy,” you said. “And you are?” “I suppose not.”

But then, in my dream, you do something more startling yet. Not only are you not taken aback by my bold caress in front of your partner, but you actually yield to my palm, because you like this, and by leaning into my hand, you’re trying to make my hand stay there.

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. The happiness that came with the dream stayed with me all day.

When I saw you after my dream, it was impossible to go through with anything I’d resolved. You were chilly again, as though you’d intercepted my dream and were so horrified that you thought it best to put distance between us. I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don’t fly out and rat on one another’s dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves. Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren’t willing to hide while dreaming. I wished you’d taken a second look at me and said, You dreamt of me last night, didn’t you?

“So you’ve known. About me, I mean.” “I am not sure. But I think so.” How delicately you phrased this. “And?” “And nothing. I think about you.” And then you added, “A lot, actually.” Yours, I realize, is the first real card on the table. I admire this. Mine had been just a joker.

I lower my right hand under the armrest of my chair and grasp your left hand, which is also dangling below your armrest. You didn’t expect this, and I can sense that part of you wishes I hadn’t done it. But I don’t want to let go, not now. “I’m living with someone too,” I said. “But everything you’ve said, I could say too.” “So say it.”

“We’ve been together for almost a year,” I say, “but it’s you I think of—even when we’re making love.” Nothing will shut me up now. “Especially when we’re making love.” “And?” I grow silent. “I want to know.” “And nothing. Do you really want the graphic details?” “No,” you say. “Actually, yes, I do.” I loved how you said this.

“I know your tennis schedule, I know what train you take after tennis, I know where you live, I can go on and on. I know all about Maud too, she’s also on Facebook.” I’ll never forget the moment when it finally dawned on me that we are mirror images of each other. And yet … so many months, so much time wasted.

“But you know I’ll be here. You know I’ll wait. And you know why.” “Why?” “You already know why.” I couldn’t resist. My hand touched your face, and better than in my dream, this time you didn’t just smile, nor did you just lean into my palm. You cupped your hand over mine and let our hands rest there together. “I have so much to say.” “Me too.”

It makes me happy. And it makes me miserable. By the fourth glass of wine, I become aware of myself struggling not to tell everyone at the dinner table, I’m luckier than all of you sitting here tonight, I’m in love, desperately in love, and this is total agony, and none of you is helping, because from the look on your faces, none of you knows a thing about love, and frankly, neither did I until now.

And I am the most miserable man alive, and more so because no one at this dinner table has the slightest notion of what’s tearing me up. And yet, what if each of us at this very table were a monsoon-ravaged island trying to look its best, with all of our coconut trees bending to the winds till hopelessness breaks their backs and you can hear each one crash and all their mealy, hardheaded coconuts pelt the ground, and still we’ll keep our spirited good cheer and add a lilting sprint to our gait on the way to the office every morning, because we’re each waiting for someone’s voice to tear us out of our bleak and blistered lives and say, Follow me, Brother. Follow me, Sister.

“You are my life,” I finally wrote to her once. “I know,” she replied. “Do you really?” “I do. Why else do you think we keep writing all day?” So I told her how the very thought of being Englishmuffined when she lowered herself on me at her parents’ table made me so hard when I was alone at night.

She wanted to introduce me to her husband, who was in another, equally crowded room. You? she asked, clearly meaning had I come with someone? I was with Manfred. He’s here too? She smiled, I smiled back. Then we looked at each other and, because of the polite silence hovering between us, we burst out laughing.

We loved without conviction, without purpose, without tomorrow. On spec, as she’d said once.

The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren’t unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will.

Quantum theory is more resilient, I thought. For every life we live, there are at least eight others we can’t begin to touch, much less know the first thing about. Maybe there is no true life or false life—just rehearsals for parts we might never be lucky enough to play.

He didn’t blunt my desire for her but stoked it and made me want her even more. All he did, though, was dull the urgency. But that reasoning perhaps was as much a mask as the others. In the end, and without ever admitting it to myself, I’d grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.

You want something from me, but you don’t know what it is. Perhaps all I am is an idea with a body. There was always something missing. Your hell—and it’s mine too—is that even when you’re with Manfred, you’ll want to be with me again. You and I don’t love the way others do—we run on empty.”