Find Me

by André Aciman

“No, not work. It’s my father. He’s not well.” Then, raising her eyes at me: “Might explain the glumness, I suppose.” “Is it serious?” “I think so.” “I’m sorry,” I said. She shrugged her shoulders. “Life!” Then, changing her tone: “And you? Business or pleasure?”

I was about to compliment her on her ability to read people so well when her phone rang. Boyfriend, of course! What else. I’d grown so used to constant cell phone interruptions, that it was no longer possible for me to meet students over coffee or talk to my colleagues or to my son even without a mobile phone call barging in. Saved by the phone, silenced by the phone, shunted by the phone.

prettify

“I don’t know if I’m the type who even likes people, much less falls in love with them.” I could just see it in the two of them: the same embittered, impassive, injured hearts. “Is it that you don’t like people, or that you just grow tired of them and can’t for the life of you remember why you ever found them interesting?”

To walk back the compliment, I added, “It’s just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can’t have. It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.”

We lost track of where we were headed and as a result stayed where we started.”

“Aren’t those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we’ve given up hoping they could.”

“No. So, why the shrink?” I asked, eager to change the subject. “Me? Loneliness. I can’t stand being by myself yet I can’t wait to be alone. Look at me. I am alone here on a train, happy to be with my book, away from a man I won’t ever love, but I would much rather talk to a stranger. No offense, I hope.”

Watching her hold her cigarette, I couldn’t stop from saying: “As a French poet once said, some people smoke to put nicotine in their veins, others to put a cloud between them and others.” But then thinking she’d interpret it as a caustic remark, I quickly turned the tables on myself. “We all have ways of putting up screens to keep life at bay. I use paper.”

None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough.

“What these men have to offer I already have. And everything they want they don’t deserve, or I may not have in me to give. That’s the sad part.”

“Like I don’t think you’re a very happy man. But then you’re a bit like me: some people may be brokenhearted not because they’ve been hurt but because they’ve never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them.”

disabused

She reminded me of someone who storms into your life, just as she’d done in her father’s living room, and right away fluffs your pillows, tears open the windows, straightens two old paintings you’ve stopped seeing though they’d never budged from your mantelpiece for years, and with a deft foot flattens the ripples on an ancient rug, only to remind you, once she’s added flowers to a vase that’s been standing empty for ever so long that, in case you were still struggling to downplay her presence, you wouldn’t dare ask for more than a week, a day, an hour of this. How close had I come to someone so real, I thought. How close. Was it too late?

And always, as ever, the clock is ticking. In the end, I stopped waiting, because I stopped believing that you’d stray into my life because I no longer trusted you existed. Everything else happened in my life—Miss Margutta, my marriage, Italy, my son, my career, my books—but you didn’t. I stopped waiting and learned to live without you.

And this time, standing in my old lobby whose smell I knew so well, I wanted to tell her how strange it was to be back here and feel that the years in between were simply a no-man’s-land of such small, trivial joys, all of it like rust over my life. I want to scrape off the rust, start here again, and redo the whole thing with you.

I shook my head. Instead, I quoted words by Goethe: “Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you.”

“Of course I have a secret. We all do,” I said. “Each of us is like a moon that shows only a few facets to earth, but never its full sphere. Most of us never meet those who’ll understand our full rounded self. I show people only that sliver of me I think they’ll grasp. I show others other slices. But there’s always a facet of darkness I keep to myself.” “I want to know that facet of darkness, tell it to me now. You first, because mine is far worse than anything you’ll say.”

I kissed her deep in the mouth, which was a signal we both understood, for it was, from time immemorial, the gift of one human to another human.

friable

Chateaubriand,

“God lets me in, of course. ‘You’re in, good man,’ he says. But then I ask, ‘Pardon, Your Lordship, but what good is heaven to me now?’

My problem is discovering what not faking is—and this is difficult and scary for me, because my bearings are always pitched to who I ought to be, not to who I am, to what I should have, not to what I never knew I craved, to life as I found it, not to the life I’ve let myself think was only a dream.

Elio explained that as he was trying to experience her presence at the café as something meaningful, especially since the place already bore the imprint of other events in his life, they had an argument. She kept saying that there was nothing special about the kind of coffee they brewed here, he countered by saying that this was not about the coffee at all but about being here to have the coffee. Their disagreement not only ruined the vigil but made him hate her.

“But more than my friendship with them, you above everyone else made me who I am today. We never had secrets you and I, you know about me, and I know about you. In this I consider myself the luckiest son on earth. You taught me how to love—how to love books, music, beautiful ideas, people, pleasure, even myself. Better yet you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us. This much I know, young as I am. It’s just that I forget the lesson sometimes.” “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “Because I can see you now—not as my father, but as a man in love. I’ve never seen you like this. It makes me very happy, almost envious to see you. You are so young suddenly. It must be love.”

“Love is easy,” I said. “It’s the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both. But what you may not know is that you taught me far more than I’ve taught you! These vigils, for instance, are perhaps nothing more than my desire to tread in your footsteps, to share with you anything and everything and be in your life as I always want you to be in mine. I’ve taught you how to earmark moments where time stops, but these moments mean very little unless they’re echoed in someone you love. Otherwise they stay in you and either fester all through your life or, if you’re lucky—and very few are—you’re able to pass them on in something called art, in your case music. But above all it was always your courage I envied, how you trusted your love for music and later your love for Oliver.”

Then, after a few steps, and just as I’d done with Miranda the day before, he stopped at a corner where a very old lamp was built into a wall. “I never told you this, Dad, but I was drunk out of my mind one night, I had just vomited by the statue of the Pasquino and couldn’t have been more dazed in my life yet here as I leaned against this very wall, I knew, drunk as I was, that this, with Oliver holding me, was my life, that everything that had come beforehand with others was not even a rough sketch or the shadow of a draft of what was happening to me. And now ten years later, when I look at this wall under this old streetlamp, I am back with him and I swear to you, nothing has changed. In thirty, forty, fifty years I will feel no differently. I have met many women and more men in my life, but what is watermarked on this very wall overshadows everyone I’ve known. When I come to be here, I can be alone or with people, with you for instance, but I am always with him. If I stood for an hour staring at this wall, I’d be with him for an hour. If I spoke to this wall, it would speak back.”

“Maybe what you need is less pride and more courage. Pride is the nickname we give fear. You were afraid of nothing once. What happened?”

waif

avocation?”

oblique

diffident

“Fate, if it exists at all,” he said, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns that may not be patterns at all but that hint at a vestigial meaning still being worked out. My father, your father, the piano, always the piano, and then you, like my son, but not like my son, and this Jewish thread running through both our lives, all of it reminds me that our lives are nothing more than excavation digs that are always tiers deeper that we thought. Or maybe it’s nothing, just nothing.

“Then maybe when you get to be my age and the dearth of things life has to offer becomes more evident by the day, maybe then you can start noticing those tiny accidents that turn out to be miracles and that can redefine our lives and cast an incandescent luster over things that, in the great scheme of things, could easily be meaningless. But this is not meaningless.”

Or maybe it’s my way of atoning for not making time to know the man who’d stopped playing music. But how many of us ever make time to know who our parents really were? How many sunken layers deep are those we thought we knew simply because we loved them?”

Fate doesn’t always respect what we believe is the end of a life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters unresolved and left hanging everywhere. Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw. As the French poet says, Le temps d’apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it’s already too late. And yet there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. What could be more gratifying than to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we loved and who loves us enough. In my case, I’d like to think it will be you, even if we’re no longer together. It’s like already knowing who will be the one who’ll shut my eyes. I want it to be you, Elio.”

Or was music just a premonition of this thing called life, life made more palpable, life made more real—or less real—because there was music and incantation trapped in its folds?

Music doesn’t give answers to questions I don’t know how to ask. It doesn’t tell me what I want. It reminds me that I may still be in love, though I’m no longer sure I know what that means, being in love. I think about people all the time, yet I’ve hurt many more than I’ve cared for. I can’t even tell what I feel, though feel something I still do, even if it’s more like a sense of absence and loss, maybe even failure, numbness, or total unknowing. I was sure of myself once, I thought I knew things, knew myself, and people loved that I reached out to touch them when I blustered into their lives and didn’t even ask or doubt that I mightn’t be welcome. Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me. Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn’t change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead, it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we’ve always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts we’ve buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live.

So much time had passed, so many years, and who knew how many of them might turn out to have been the wasted years that, unbeknownst to us, end up making us better people. No wonder I was moved. The child was like our child, and seemed so emphatically prophesied that everything suddenly became clear to me—because there was a reason for the boy’s name, because Oliver had always been of my blood and had always lived in this house, been of this house and of our lives. He was already here before coming to us, before my birth, before they set down the first stone generations ago, and our years in between then and now were but a hiccup in that long itinerary called time. So much time, so many years, and all the lives we’d touched and left behind, as though they could just as easily have never happened, though happen they did—time, as he’d said before we hugged and went to sleep so late that night, time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.

“You’re never going back,” I whispered. “Tell me you’re not leaving.” Quietly, he grabbed my arm and pulled me down to my seat at the head of the table. “I’m not leaving. Stop thinking like that.” I wanted to tell him about what had happened twenty years before, the good, the bad, the very good, and the terrible. There’d be time to say these things. I wanted to bring him up-to-date, to let him know everything, as I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to tell him how on seeing the white of his arms on his very first day among us, all I’d wanted was to be held by them and to feel them on my bare waist.

But recently, he went on, and perhaps because he was elsewhere that year, it came to him that the situation was entirely reversed, that he was a Poseidonian on all but one day a year and that the lure of bygone days had never left him, that he had forgotten nothing and didn’t want to forget, and that even if he couldn’t write or call to see whether I too had forgotten nothing, still, he knew that though neither of us sought out the other it was only because we had never really parted and that, regardless of where we were, who we were with, and whatever stood in our way, all he needed when the time was right was simply to come and find me.