Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

torpor.

the color on the palms of his hands was the same as the pale, soft skin of his soles, of his throat, of the bottom of his forearms,

Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete’s face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night. It told me things about him I never knew to ask.

What unsettled me, though, was not the fancy footwork needed to redeem myself.

vitrified

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. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.

place my foot where his had left its mark.

cutting, cruel, like a glistening blade instantly retracted the moment its victim caught sight of it.

acquiescence.

I might as well have asked: Do I flip back and forth in just the same way?

P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone;

coming home to a place where everyone is like you, where people know, they just know—coming home as when everything falls into place and you suddenly realize that for seventeen years all you’d been doing was fiddling with the wrong combination.

Had he noticed I was ready not just to yield but to mold into his body?

The soft wind trailing exhalations from our garden up the stairs to my bedroom.

I tried imitating him a few times. But I was too self-conscious, like someone trying to feel natural while walking about naked in a locker room only to end up aroused by his own nakedness.

gita—

How could anyone intuit the manner of someone’s thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this same mode of thinking?

but his ability to intuit things in exactly the way I myself might have intuited them. This, in the end, was what drew me to him with a compulsion that overrode desire or friendship or the allurements of a common religion.

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,

apricate.”

torpid

Nobody in our household ever asked my opinion about anything.

complaisant,

firm, rounded cheeks of the apricot with their dimple in the middle reminded me of how

shoals.

‘precocious,’

oasis of peace.

I had used words intentionally compromising because I knew no one would suspect a false bottom in the arcane palette of shadings I applied to everything I said about him.

desperate kind—until I realized, almost to my shame, that part of me didn’t mind his dying,

Don’t let him have a life other than the life I know he has with us, with me.

What I didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.

urban campus like Columbia’s, where he taught.

Dreaded losing her to him too.

And this was a good thing. It would help my recovery. Perhaps thinking this way was already a sign that recovery was well under way. I had grazed the forbidden zone and been let off easily enough.

derision

Not like me, insidious, sinister, and base.

complicit

Just a word, a gaze, and I was in heaven. To be happy like this maybe wasn’t so difficult after all. All I had to do was find the source of happiness in me and not rely on others to supply it the next time.

shibboleth.

lambent

Coy

propriety.

Boyishness wickedness

gingerly,

diffidence

leukemia.”

postprandial

some of us napping, some working, others reading, the whole world basking away in hushed semitones.

I wanted it with the kind of intoxicated rapture that

Honestly I had drank enough to make me courageous She had long black hair in a silk sheer dress

like the strange scent which had suddenly come over my entire body

Is it your body that I want when I think of lying next to it every night or do I want to slip into it and own it as if it were my own,