Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

It was the unwelcome misgivings with which it finally dawned on me, both then and during our casual conversation by the train tracks, that I had all along, without seeming to, without even admitting it, already been trying—and failing—to win him over.

Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don’t want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place—all these started the summer Oliver came into our house.

This book is perfumed with the sense of a young romantic. Hopeful and wishful, but I worry unrealistic.

One day, while I was practicing my guitar at what had become “my table” in the back garden by the pool and he was lying nearby on the grass, I recognized the gaze right away. He had been staring at me while I was focusing on the fingerboard, and when I suddenly raised my face to see if he liked what I was playing, there it was: cutting, cruel, like a glistening blade instantly retracted the moment its victim caught sight of it.

Maybe it was for similar reasons that I would look away each time he looked at me: to conceal the strain on my timidity. That he might have found my avoidance offensive and retaliated with a hostile glance from time to time never crossed my mind either.

Interesting negotiation of the “male gaze.”

What struck me was not just his amazing gift for reading people, for rummaging inside them and digging out the precise configuration of their personality, but his ability to intuit things in exactly the way I myself might have intuited them.

I am not a pro-Freud type, but hello projection. Except Elio’s version of projection here is desparate to find and maintain common ground between himself and Oliver. I can’t help but feel the danger here. It’s not just the age-gap, but the way that Oliver is that bothers me. It’s his cool ability to read and manipulate people that is scary. Combine that with a young love interest, and you’ve got a scary concoction.

I smiled, not at the offer, but at the double-edged maneuver. He immediately caught my smile. And having caught it, smiled back, almost in self-mockery, sensing that if he gave any sign of guessing I’d seen through his ruse he’d be confirming his guilt, but that refusing to own up to it, after I’d made clear I’d intercepted it, would indict him even more. So he smiled to confess he’d been caught but also to show he was a good enough sport to own up to it and still enjoy going to the movies together. The whole thing thrilled me.

I try not to highlight entire passages because good grief, but the mind games Elio allows himself to play are insane. Does this flat white man really have the capability to maneuver such brain elastics?? This becomes the scary part. The fact that Oliver senses how Elio waits with bated breath. It’s a preying on the inexperienced and youthful.

I was hopeful, though perhaps this was what I had wanted all along. To wait forever.