Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

I wanted him to remember the morning on Monet’s berm when I’d kissed him not the first but the second time and given him my spit in his mouth because I so desperately wanted his in mine.

It might have brought us closer, if only to remind us how far apart we needed to be now.

But sleep would not come, and sure enough not one but two troubling thoughts, like paired specters materializing out of the fog of sleep, stood watch over me: desire and shame, the longing to throw open my window and, without thinking, run into his room stark-naked, and, on the other hand, my repeated inability to take the slightest risk to bring any of this about.

The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag.

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

I wanted to come back years later and believe, if only for a moment, that he had truly spoken these pleading words to me.

“People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

“Ma tu mi vuoi veramente bene, do you really care for me?” she asked. Did it come from nowhere—or was this the same wounded look in need of soothing which had been shadowing our steps ever since we’d left the bookstore? I couldn’t understand how boldness and sorrow, how you’re so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together.

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

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

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

On my way up the staircase, I tried to imagine myself coming down this very same staircase tomorrow morning.

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

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

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

Now this. I was on the cusp of something, but I also wanted it to last forever, because I knew there’d be no coming back from this.

right—this was like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life?

“Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” which I’d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.

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

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

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

Would I always experience such solitary guilt in the wake of our intoxicating moments together?

“This spot is probably what I’ll miss the most.” Then, upon reflection: “I’ve been happy in B.” It sounded like a preamble to farewells.

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

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

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

There was no hint of irony, nothing that didn’t remind me, unless I was mistaken—and I don’t think I was—that what we had between us was the total transparency that exists among friends only. Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

what made me blush was the thrilling possibility, unbelievable as I wanted it to remain, that he might actually like me, and that he liked me in just the way I liked him.

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

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight.

I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn’t dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but didn’t care to read the mile-posts.

This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them.

I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I’d always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

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

Numbered days.

But I had heeded the warning, and as is said of juries who have heard inadmissible evidence before it is stricken from the record, I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.

Suddenly, I began to take mental snapshots of him, picked up the bread crumbs that fell off our table and collected them for my hideaway, and, to my shame, drew lists: the rock, the berm, the bed, the sound of the ashtray.

I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth.

I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future.

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

On that day I had fast-forwarded to the moment when I’d have my room back. Now I wondered what I’d be willing to give up if only to rewind things back to the afternoon in late June

The symmetry of it all, or was it the emptied, seemingly ransacked neatness of his room, tied a knot in my throat.

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

I was happy that the room would revert to me. In my/his room, it would be easier to remember our nights. No, better keep my current room. Then, at least, I could pretend he was still in his, and if he wasn’t there, that he was still out as he so frequently used to be on those nights when I counted the minutes, the hours, the sounds.

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

Leaning out into the evening air, I knew that this might never be given to us again, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.

Find Cupid everywhere in Rome because we’d clipped one of his wings and he was forced to fly in circles.

I wanted no secrets, no screens, nothing between us. Little did I know that if I relished the gust of candor that bound us tighter each time we swore my body is your body, it was also because I enjoyed rekindling the tiny lantern of unsuspected shame.

Shame trailed instant intimacy. Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent and our bodies had run out of tricks?

I don’t know that I asked the question, just as I am not sure I am able to answer it today. Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency? Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it—black market, gray market, taxed, untaxed, under the table, over the counter? All I knew w...

We showered. We wore each other’s clothes. We wore each other’s underwear. It was my idea. Perhaps all this gave him a second wind of silliness, of youth. Perhaps he had already been “there” years earlier and was stopping for a short stay on his return journey home. Perhaps he was playing along, watching me. Perhaps he had never done it with anyone and I’d showed up in the nick of time.