Find Me

by André Aciman

I felt I needed to add something else here, as though all this digging and excavating into the life of Ariel Waldstein were also bringing to light a subject that might seem totally incidental but that I knew was subliminally related if only because it involved the passage of time and the rediscovery of a beloved person.

I could almost sense where this could head and was already reluctant to fathom any deeper for fear that Michel’s thoughts were already inclined that way. He didn’t bring it up, I didn’t either. But I was sure it had crossed his mind.

“Well, I didn’t want to presume,” he said. “Stop!” “I can’t help it.” “But why?” “Because the young teenager still lingers inside me, and occasionally utters a few words, then ducks and goes into hiding. Because he’s afraid of asking, because he thinks you’ll laugh that he asked, because even trusting is difficult. I’m shy, I’m scared, and I’m old.”

I nodded. I loved that he was able to read me so well, yet I feared what he was reading. “Being with you reminds me of him,” I said. “If I meet him, the first thing I’ll want to do is tell him about you.”

“No, because you and he are the standard. Now that I think of it, there’s only been the two of you. All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I’ve been without him.”

“But what if there are no descendants, what if the line stopped with him, what if there isn’t a trace of him and there is not a thing more to learn?” “Then we’ll have done a good deed. The stone will be in memory of all those who perished and couldn’t even smuggle a word of warning or of love or even their name before the gas chamber.

Was Michel’s father perhaps atoning for not having helped to save Ariel? Since I couldn’t give you and your loved ones shelter, I’ll never play again. Or: After what they’ve done to you, music is dead to me. I could just hear the older man imploring: But you must play. For the love of me, never stop, play this then.

And once again I thought of my life. Was there anyone who would send me a cadenza one day and say, I am gone, but please find me, play for me?

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn’t deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played.

The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. 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 ...

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.

It’s like already knowing who will be the one who’ll shut my eyes. I want it to be you, Elio.”

For a moment, and just as I was listening to Michel speak, it occurred to me that there was only one person on this planet that I’d like to have my eyes shut by. And he, I hoped, without saying a word to me for years, would cross the glo...

“God, I did tell you how much I wanted you to hold me and ask me to come home with you that night? I was almost on the point of saying something but then I held back.”

I shook my head. “I get cold when I’m nervous.” “Why are you nervous?” “I don’t want this to end.” “Why should it?” “No reason.” “You are the one card I was almost cheated of in this lifetime. Tonight it will be three weeks, and it could so easily not have happened at all. I need—” But then he stopped.

“You need?” “I need another week, another month, another season, meaning another lifetime. Give me winter. Come spring, you’ll fly away on tour. Beneath all the layers we uncovered today, I know there is one person for you, and I don’t believe it’s me.”

Sometimes, after watching him rinse out the toothpaste, I wanted to know how fennel after salad tasted in his mouth.

We weren’t courting each other but an implicit something seemed to hover between us. Our frail pontoon bridge was built over shy afternoon pleasantries and then hastily dismantled the next morning with scarcely a greeting when we happened to take the same stairway. I wanted something, and I suspect he did too.

Above all I liked her forehead, which was not flat but rounded and which hinted at thoughts I couldn’t put into words but wanted to know better, because there was a wry afterthought visibly floating on her features every time she flashed a smile.

If everyone had left the room, we wouldn’t have noticed and would have gone on talking about this or that book, this movie or that play, every subject flowing into the other with never a disagreement.

The libido accepts all currencies, and vicarious pleasures have an over-the-counter exchange rate that is considered reliable enough to pass for real. No one ever went bankrupt borrowing someone else’s pleasure. We go bankrupt only when we want no one.

But this, I knew from experience, was the moment when the bold question is asked, or doesn’t even need to be asked, because the answer can only be yes.

“And some of our fondest desires end up meaning more to us unrealized than tested—don’t you think?”

I looked at them, and they looked at me. I liked awkward moments like these. Sometimes all I needed was to draw them out and not rush to nip them in the bud.

“I’m sure there must have been someone who bruised you once, or scarred you.” “There was,” I replied. “Some people leave us scuttled and damaged.” I thought awhile. “In my case I’m the one who did the scuttling, yet I’m the one who never recovered.”

I’ll be losing all this, the way I’d lose my small New York rituals, acquired without my knowledge, and that I’d learn to miss when I was elsewhere.

I’d never envied him. Now I’d trade his lot for mine in a second.

It was her dark eyebrows and large, hazel eyes that drew me—they didn’t just stare at you, they asked something of you and then lingered as though actually expecting an answer, to which your speechless, blank stare spelled a failure to respond.

Someone had opened the piano and was already playing what I instantly recognized as a piece attributed to Bach.

Elio.

I admired the carefree ease with one’s body that comes from a confident disposition that is used to finding good fellowship everywhere. It reminded me of my younger days when I too assumed that others not only wouldn’t mind but actually hoped I’d reach out to touch them.

“It’s because you’re leaving,” he repeated, and everyone heard, and the sheer humanity in the tone of his voice tore something out of me that I couldn’t show or express among so many guests.

And he was playing it for me, and everyone could see he was playing it for me, and what broke my heart was that I knew, as he must have known, that what is so dreadful about farewells and departures is the near certainty that we’ll never see each other again.

What he didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, was that this same Arioso was what I’d heard played for me some twenty years before whe...

Are you listening to his playing? I asked the one person who was absent, but never absent for me. I’m listening. And you know, you do know I’ve been floundering all these years. I know. But so have I. What lovely music you used to play for...

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?

want I can play it again for you? Or perhaps what he might have meant was this: If the music doesn’t change you, dear friend, it should at least remind you of something profoundly yours that you’ve probably lost track of but that actually never went away and still answers when beckoned by the right notes, like a spirit gently roused from a prolonged slumber with the right touch of a finger and the right silence between the notes.

Someone had spoken similar words two decades before: This is the Bach as transcribed by me.

Or perhaps all I wanted was for them to bring back something from my past, because it was the past, or something like the past, like memory, or maybe not just memory, but tiers and layers deeper, like life’s invisible watermark that I still wasn’t seeing.

Then once again his voice. It’s me, isn’t it, it’s me you’re looking for, me the music summons up tonight.

We were close, yet distant too, the reckless fire, the zest, the mad laughter, the dash to Arrigo’s Night Bar to order fries and two martinis, how quickly they’d vanished over the years.

I try to remind him each time that he has no reason to forgive me.

You fool, it takes two of them to make one of me. I can be man and woman, or both, because you’ve been both to me. Find me, Oliver. Find me.

And all there is, is you. All I think of is you. Are you thinking of me tonight? Did I wake you? He doesn’t answer.

and I’ll be no more than a shadow clutching to this very wall that won’t see me tomorrow, still not letting go, like a fly struggling against the draft that must whoosh it away. Would they remember?

I was pleased, thrilled, and crushed. I stood at the door and watched all four of them walk down the corridor. I’d never see them again.

Or did I want neither but needed to think I did because otherwise I’d have to look into my life and find huge, bleak craters everywhere going back to that scuttled, damaged love I’d told them about earlier that evening.

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...