To see someone proclaim his Judaism on his neck as Oliver did when he grabbed one of our bikes and headed into town with his shirt wide open shocked us as much as it taught us we could do the same and get away with it. I tried imitating him a few times. In town, I tr'ed flaunting my Judaism with the silent bluster that comes less rotn arrogance than from repressed shame. Not him. It's not that he never thought about being Jewish or about the life of Jews in a Catholic country. Sometimes we spoke about just this topic during those long afternoons when both of us would put aside work and enjoy chatting while the entire household and guests had all drifted into every available bedroom to rest for a few hours. He had lived long enough in small towns in New England to know what it felt like to be the odd Jew out.

But Judaism never troubled him the way it troubled me, nor was it the subject of an abiding, metaphysical discomfort with himself and the world. It did not even harbor the mystical, unspoken promise of redemptive brotherhood. He was okay with being Jewish. He was okay with himself, the way he was okay with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends. He was okay with losing his prized Mont Blanc pen. He showed my father a few pages he was proud of having written. My father told him his insights into Heraclitus were brilliant but needed firming up, that he needed to accept the paradoxical nature of the philosopher's thinking, not simply explain it away. He was okay with firming things up, he was okay with paradox. Back to the drawing board—he was okay with the drawing board as well. She declined. That was okay. He tried again a few days later, was turned down again, and again made light of it.

She too was okay with it, and, had she spent another week with us, would probably have been okay with going out to sea for a midnight gita that could easily have lasted till sunrise. Only once during his very first few days did I get a sense that this willful but accommodating, laid-back, water-over-my-back, unflappable, unfazed twenty-four-year-old who was so heedlessly okay with so many things in life was, in fact, a thoroughly alert, cold, sagacious judge of character and situations. Nothing he did or said was unpremeditated. He was, as my mother was scandalized to learn one day, a supreme poker player who'd escape into town at night twice a week or so to "play a few hands. None of our residents had ever had a local bank account. Most didn't have a penny. It had happened during a lunch when my father had invited a journalist who had dabbled in philosophy in his youth and wanted to show that, though he had never written about Heraclitus, he could still spar on any matter under the sun.

He and Oliver didn't hit it off. Afterward, my father had said, "A very witty man—damn clever too. I find him arrogant, dull, flat-footed, and coarse. He uses humor and a lot of voice"—Oliver mimicked the man's gravitas—"and broad gestures to nudge his audience because he is totally incapable of arguing a case. The voice thing is so over the top, Pro. People laugh at his humor not because he is funny but because he telegraphs his desire to be funny. His humor is nothing more than a way of winning over people he can't persuade. How could he perceive so many devious turns in others unless he had practiced them himself? 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.

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. It bordered on a lecture. Oliver was still new with us and knew no one in town, so I must have seemed as good a movie partner as any. But he had asked his question in far too breezy and spontaneous a manner, as though he wanted me and everyone else in the living room to know that he was hardly invested in going to the movies and could just as readily stay home and go over his manuscript. The carefee inflection of his offer, however, was also a wink aimed at my father: he was only pretending to have come up with the idea; in fact, without letting me suspect it, he was picking up on my father's advice at the dinner table and was offering to go for my benefit alone.

I smiled, not at the offer, but at the double-edged maneuver. He immediately caught my smile. 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. Or perhaps his smile was his way of countering my reading tit for tat with the unstated suggestion that, much as he'd been caught trying to affect total casualness on the face of his offer, he too had found something to smile about in me—namely, the shrewd, devious, guilty pleasure I derived in finding so many imperceptible affinities between us. There may have been nothing there, and I might have invented the whole thing. But both of us knew what the other had seen. So, with so much insight, would he not have noticed the meaning behind my abrupt shrinking away from his hand?

Not notice that I'd leaned into his grip? Not know that I didn't want him to let go of me? Not sense that when he started massaging me, my inability to relax was my last refuge, my last defense, my last pretense, that I had by no means resisted, that mine was fake resistance, that I was incapable of resisting and would never want to resist, no matter what he did or asked me to do? Never, since childhood, had anyone brought me to such a pass. Bad allergy, I'd said. Me too, he replied. We probably have the same one. Again I shrugged my shoulders. He picked up my old teddy bear in one hand, turned its face toward him, and whispered something into its ear. Then, turning the teddy's face to me and altering his voice, asked, "What's wrong? You're upset. Was I wearing it lower than was decent? Just stay with me. Let your hand travel wherever it wishes, take my suit off, take me, I won't make a noise, won't tell a soul, I'm hard and you know it, and if you won't, I'll take that hand of yours and slip it into my suit now and let you put as many fingers as you want inside me.

He wouldn't have picked up on any of this? He said he was going to change and walked out of my room. Had he seen it? Surely he must have. That's why he wanted us to go to the beach. That's why he walked out of my room. I hit my head with my fist. How could I have been so careless, so thoughtless, so totally stupid? I should have learned to do what he'd have done. Shrugged my shoulders—and been okay with pre-come. But that wasn't me. It would never have occurred to me to say, So what if he saw? Now he knows. It would never have entered my mind because I was still under the illusion that, barring what I'd read in books, inferred from rumors, and overheard in bawdy talk all over, no one my age had ever wanted to be both man and woman—with men and women.

I had wanted other men my age before and had slept with women. But before he'd stepped out of the cab and walked into our home, it would never have seemed remotely possible that someone so thoroughly okay with himself might want me to share his body as much as I ached to yield up mine. And yet, about two weeks after his arrival, all I wanted every night was for him to leave his room, not via its front door, but through the French windows on our balcony. I seldom stayed in my room during the day. Instead, for the past summers I had appropriated a round table with an umbrella the back garden by the pool. Maynard, before him, had also worked in his room. Oliver needed company. He began by sharing my table but eventually grew to like throwing a large sheet on the grass and lying on it, flanked by loose pages of his manuscript and what he liked to call his "things": lemonade, suntan lotion, books, espadrilles, sunglasses, colored pens, and music, which he listened to with headphones, so that it was impossible to speak to him unless he was speaking to you first.

Sometimes, when I came downstairs with my scorebook or other books in the morning, he was already sprawled in the sun wearing his red or yellow bathing suit and sweating. We'd go jogging or swimming, and return to find breakfast waiting for us. But I plan to return early this afternoon for a much longer aprication. Here was someone who lacked for nothing. I couldn't understand this feeling. I envied him. Then his reply would come, almost a sigh, without a single muscle moving in his body. Then kissed his ankles and his knees. How often had I stared at his bathing suit while his hat was covering his face? He couldn't possibly have known what I was looking at. Or: "Oliver, are you sleeping? How I loved the way he repeated what I myself had just repeated.

It reminded me of the way Mafalda would make my bed every morning, first by folding the top sheet over the blanket, then by folding the sheet back again to cover the pillows on top of the blanket, and once more yet when she folded the whole thing over the bedspread—back and forth until I knew that tucked in between these multiple folds were tokens of something at once pious and in- dulgent, like acquiescence in an instant of passion. Silence was always light and unobtrusive on those afternoons. My heart was racing. He must have known. Profound silence again. There was nothing I loved more in life than to sit at my table and pore over my transcriptions while he lay on his belly mark- ing pages he'd pick up every morning from Signora Milani, his translator in B. Not to me. He thought for a while as though weighing my words.

I felt ill at ease, looked away, and finally muttered the first thing that came to mind: "Kind? Or perhaps I wasn't seeing clearly enough where all this was headed and pre- ferred to let the matter slide. Silence again. Until the next time he'd speak. How I loved it when he broke the silence between us to say something—anything—or to ask what I thought about X, or had I ever heard of Y? Nobody in our household ever asked my opinion about anything. And yet here he was in his third week with us, asking me if I'd ever heard of Athanasius Kircher, Giuseppe Belli, and Paul Celan. I don't get it. Dad's a university professor. I grew up without TV. Get it now? I even liked the way he told me off. One day while moving my notebook on the table, I accidentally tipped over my glass. It fell on the grass. It didn't break. I didn't know where to find the words to thank him.

He let just enough time go by for me to register that his answer might not be casual or carefree. I wanted to, I imagined him repeating—kind, complaisant, effusive, as he was when the mood would suddenly strike him. Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play forever, I'm asking for very little, and I swear I'll ask for nothing more. What did I want? And why couldn't I know what I wanted, even when I was perfectly ready to be brutal in my admissions? Perhaps the very least I wanted was for him to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me, that I was no less human than any other young man my age. I would have been satisfied and asked for nothing else than if he'd bent down and picked up the dignity I could so effortlessly have thrown at his feet. I was Glaucus and he was Diomedes.

In the name of some obscure cult among men, I was giving him my golden armor for his bronze. Fair exchange. The word "friendship" came to mind. But friendship, as defined by everyone, was alien, fallow stuff I cared nothing for. What I may have wanted instead, from the moment he stepped out of the cab to our farewell in Rome, was what all humans ask of one another, what makes life livable. It would have to come from him first. Then possibly from me. There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well.

Amor ch'a null'amato amar perdona. Love, which exempts no one who's loved from loving, Francesca's words in the Inferno. Just wait and be hopeful. I was hopeful, though perhaps this was what I had wanted all along. To wait forever. Just to look up and find him there, suntan lotion, straw hat, red bathing suit, lemonade. To look up and find you there, Oliver. For the day will come soon enough when I'll look up and you'll no longer be there. By late morning, friends and neighbors from adjoining houses frequently dropped in. Everyone would gather in our garden and then head out together to the beach below.

Our house was the closest to the water, and all you needed was to open the tiny gate by the balustrade, take the narrow stairway down the bluff, and you were on the rocks. Once, she and her younger sister dropped in with the rest, picked up Oliver's shirt on the grass, threw it at him, and said, "Enough. We're going to the beach and you're coming. Otherwise his father"—and with his hands carrying papers he used his chin to point at me—"will skin me alive. How I wished I could do that. See what he says then. A child of expats like me, Chiara had an Italian mother and an American father. She spoke English and Ital- ian with both. And I'd'a gave you a bettah price too. He had, it took me a while to realize, four personalities depending on which bathing suit he was wearing. Knowing which to expect gave me the illusion of a slight advantage. Red: bold, set in his ways, very grown-up, almost gruff and ill-tempered— stay away. Green, which he seldom wore: acquiescent, eager to learn, eager to speak, sunny—why wasn't he always like this?

Blue: the afternoon he stepped into my room from the balcony, the day he massaged my shoulder, or when he picked up my glass and placed it right next to me. Today was red: he was hasty, determined, snappy. On his way out, he grabbed an apple from a large bowl of fruit, uttered a cheerful "Later, Mrs. None of our summer guests had ever been as freewheeling. But everyone loved him for it, the way everyone grew to love Later! There was always something abrupt about that word. It wasn't "See you later" or "Take care, now," or even "Ciao. was a chilling, slam-dunk salutation that shoved aside all our honeyed European niceties. always left a sharp aftertaste to what until then may have been a warm, heart-to-heart moment. didn't close things neatly or allow them to trail off. It slammed them shut. But Later! was also a way of avoiding saying goodbye, of making light of all goodbyes. You said Later! not to mean fare- well but to say you'd be back in no time.

It was the equivalent of his saying "Just a sec" when my mother once asked him to pass the bread and he was busy pulling apart the fish bones on his plate, "just a sec. It started as a putdown and soon enough became an endearment, to go along with her other nickname for him, conferred during his first week, when he came down to the dinner table after showering, his glistening hair combed back. La star, she had said, short for la muvi star. My father, always the most indulgent among us, but also the most observant, had figured the cauboi out. Oliver timidol That was new. Could all of his gruff Americanisms be nothing more than an exaggerated way of covering up the simple fact that he didn't know—or feared he didn't know— how to take his leave gracefully?

It reminded me of how for days he had refused to eat soft-boiled eggs in the morning. He finally consented, only to admit, with a touch of genuine embarrassment that he never bothered to conceal, that he didn't know how to open a soft-boiled egg. From that morning on and well into his stay with us, she would bring Ulliva two eggs and stop serving everyone until she had sliced open the shell of both his eggs. Did he perhaps want a third? she asked. Some people liked more than two eggs. No, two would do, he replied, and, turning to my parents, added, "I know myself. If I have three, I'll have a fourth, and more.

It intimidated me. But she had been won over well before, on his third morning with us, when she asked him if he liked juice in the morning, and he'd said yes. He had never had apricot juice in his life. She stood facing him with her salver flat against her apron, trying to make out his reaction as he quaffed it down. He said nothing at first. Then, probably without thinking, he smacked his lips. She was in heaven. My mother couldn't believe that people who taught at world-famous universities smacked their lips after downing apricot juice. From that day on, a glass of the stuff was waiting for him every morning. He was baffled to know that apricot trees existed in, of all places, our orchard. On late afternoons, when there was nothing to do in the house, Mafalda would ask him to climb a ladder with a basket and pick those fruits that were almost blushing with shame, she said.

No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age. I shall never forget watching him from my table as he climbed the small ladder wearing his red bathing trunks, taking forever to pick the ripest apricots. On his way to the kitchen — wicker basket, espadrilles, billowy shirt, suntan lotion, and all — he threw me a very large one, saying, "Yours," in just the same way he'd throw a tennis ball across the court and say, "Your serve. Touching the apricot was like touching him. Yours, like Later! It would never have occurred to him that in placing the apricot in my palm he was giving me his ass to hold or that, in biting the fruit, I was also biting into that part of his body that must have been fairer than the rest because it never apricated — and near it, if I dared to bite that far, his apricock.

In fact, he knew more about apricots than we did — their grafts, etymology, origins, fortunes in and around the Mediter- ranean. The origin of albicocca was al-birquq. My father, who couldn't resist not leaving well enough alone and needed to top his entire performance with a little fillip of more recent vintage, added that what was truly amazing was that, in Israel and in many Arab countries nowadays, the fruit is referred to by a totally different name: mishmish. My mother was nonplussed. We all, including my two cousins who were visiting that week, had an impulse to clap. On the matter of etymologies, however, Oliver begged to differ. In the case of 'apricot,' however, it's the other way around; the Greek takes over from Latin. The Latin word was praecoquum, from pre-coquere, pre-cook, to ripen early, as in 'precocious,' meaning premature. All I kept thinking of was apricock precock, precock apricock. One day I saw Oliver sharing the same ladder with the gardener, trying to learn all he could about Anchise's grafts, which explained why our apricots were larger, fleshier, juicier than most apricots in the region.

Oliver, it turned out, knew more about all manner of foods, cheeses, and wines than all of us put together. Even Mafalda was wowed and would, on occasion, defer to his opinion—Do you think I should lightly fry the paste with either onions or sage? Doesn't it taste too lemony now? I ruined it, didn't I? I should have added an extra egg—it's not holding! Should I use the new blender or should I stick to the old mortar and pestle? My mother couldn't resist throwing in a barb or two. Like all cau-bois, she said: they know everything there is to know about food, because they can't hold a knife and fork properly. Gourmet aristocrats with plebian manners. Feed him in the kitchen. With pleasure, Mafalda would have replied.

It was not only the national hymn of their southern youth, but it was the best they could offer when they wished to entertain royalty. Everyone was won over. Her sister as well. With any of our other summer residents I would have resented it. But seeing everyone take such a liking to him, I found a strange, small oasis of peace. What could possibly be wrong with liking someone everyone else liked? Everyone had fallen for him, including my first and second cousins as well as my other relatives, who stayed with us on weekends and sometimes longer. For someone known to love spotting defects in everyone else, I derived a certain satisfaction from concealing my feelings for him behind my usual indifference, hostility, or spite for anyone in a position to outshine me at home. Because everyone liked him, I had to say I liked him too.

To withhold universal approval would simply alert others that I had concealed motives for needing to resist him. Oh, I like him very much, I said during his first ten days when my father asked me what I thought of him. 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. He's the best person I've known in my life, I said on the night when the tiny fishing boat on which he had sailed out with Anchise early that afternoon failed to return and we were scrambling to find his parents' telephone number in the States in case we had to break the terrible news.

On that day I even urged myself to let down my inhibitions and show my grief the way everyone else was showing theirs. But I wasn't fooling myself. I was convinced that no one in the world wanted him as physically as I did; nor was anyone willing to go the distance I was prepared to travel for him. No one had studied every bone in his body, ankles, knees, wrists, fingers, and toes, no one lusted after every ripple of muscle, no one took him to bed every night and on spotting him in the morning lying in his heaven by the pool, smiled at him, watched a smile come to his lips, and thought, Did you know I came in your mouth last night? Unlike the others, though, I was the first to spot him when he came into the garden from the beach or when the flimsy silhouette of his bicycle, blurred in the midafternoon mist, would appear out of the alley of pines leading to our house.

I was the first to recognize his steps when he arrived late at the movie theater one night and stood there looking for the rest of us, not uttering a sound until I turned around knowing he'd be overjoyed I'd spotted him. I recognized him by the inflection of his footfalls up the stairway to our balcony or on the landing outside my bedroom door. I knew when he stopped outside my French windows, as if debating whether to knock and then thinking twice, and continued walking. I always tried to keep him within my field of vision. I never let him drift away from me except when he wasn't with me. And when he wasn't with me, I didn't much care what he did so long as he remained the exact same person with others as he was with me.

Don't let him be someone else when he's away. Don't let him be someone I've never seen before. Don't let him have a life other than the life I know he has with us, with me. Don't let me lose him. I knew I had no hold on him, nothing to offer, nothing to lure him by. I was nothing. Just a kid. When he came to my assistance to help me understand a fragment by Heraclitus, because I was determined to read "his" author, the words that sprang to me were not "gentleness" or "generosity" but "patience" and "forbearance," which ranked higher. Moments later, when he asked if I liked a book I was reading, his question was prompted less by curiosity than by an opportunity for casual chitchat.

Everything was casual. He was okay with casual. How come you're not at the beach with the others? Go back to your plunking. Just making conversation. Casual chitchat. Oliver was receiving many invitations to other houses. This had become something of a tradition with our other summer residents as well. My father always wanted them to feel free to "talk" their books and expertise around town. He also believed that scholars should learn how to speak to the layman, which was why he always had lawyers, doctors, businessmen over for meals. Everyone in Italy has read Dante, Homer, and Virgil, he'd say. Doesn't matter whom you're talking to, so long as you Dante-and-Homer them first. Virgil is a must, Leopardi comes next, and then feel free to dazzle them with everything you've got, Celan, celery, salami, who cares.

Having them on the dinner circuit around B. also had another benefit: it relieved us from having them at our table every single night of the week. But Oliver's invitations had become vertiginous. Chiara and her sister wanted him at least twice a week. A cartoonist from Brussels, who rented a villa all summer long, wanted him for his exclusive Sunday soupers to which writers and scholars from the environs were always invited. Then the Moreschis, from three villas down, the Malaspinas from N. All this to say nothing of his poker and bridge playing at night, which flourished by means totally unknown to us. Sometimes he skipped dinner altogether and would simply tell Mafalda, ''Esco, I'm going out. A summary and unconditional goodbye, spoken not as you were leaving, but after you were out the door.

You said it with your back to those you were leaving behind. I felt sorry for those on the receiving end who wished to appeal, to plead. Not knowing whether he'd show up at the dinner table was torture. But bearable. Not daring to ask whether he'd be there was the real ordeal. Having my heart jump when I suddenly heard his voice or saw him seated at his seat when I'd almost given up hoping he'd be among us tonight eventually blossomed like a poisoned flower. I wanted him gone from our home so as to be done with him. I wanted him dead too, so that if I couldn't stop thinking about him and worrying about when would be the next time I'd see him, at least his death would put an end to it.

I wanted to kill him myself, even, so as to let him know how much his mere existence had come to bother me, how unbearable his ease with everything and everyone, taking all things in stride, his tireless I'm-okay-with-this-and-that, his springing across the gate to the beach when everyone else opened the latch first, to say nothing of his bathing suits, his spot in paradise, his cheeky Later! If he were in a wheelchair, I would always know where he was, and he'd be easy to find. I would feel superior to him and become his master, now that he was crippled. Then it hit me that I could have killed myself instead, or hurt myself badly enough and let him know why I'd done it. If I hurt my face, I'd want him to look at me and wonder why, why might anyone do this to himself, until, years and years later—yes, Later! Sometimes it was Chiara who had to be eliminated. I knew what she was up to. At my age, her body was more than ready for him.

More than mine? I wondered. 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. I dreaded to think how experienced he himself was. If he could make friends so easily within weeks of arriving here, you had only to think of what life at home was like. Just imagine letting him loose on an urban campus like Columbia's, where he taught. The thing with Chiara happened so easily it was past reckoning. With Chiara he loved heading out into the deep on our twin-hulled rowboat for a gita, with him rowing while she lounged in the sun on one of the hulls, eventually removing her bra once they had stopped and were far from shore.

I was watching. I dreaded losing him to her. Dreaded losing her to him too. Yet thinking of them together did not dismay me. It made me hard, even though I didn't know if what aroused me was her naked body lying in the sun, his next to hers, or both of theirs together. From where I stood against the balustrade along the garden overlooking the bluff, I would strain my eyes and finally catch sight of them lying in the sun next to one another, probably necking, she occasionally dropping a thigh on top of his, until minutes later he did the same. They hadn't removed their suits. I took comfort in that, but when later one night I saw them dancing, something told me that these were not the moves of people who'd stopped at heavy petting. Actually, I liked watching them dance together. Perhaps seeing him dance this way with someone made me realize that he was taken now, that there was no reason to hope.

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. But when my heart jolted the next morning when I saw him at our usual spot in the garden, I knew that wishing them my best and longing for recovery had nothing to do with what I still wanted from him. Did his heart jolt when he saw me walk into a room? I doubted it. Did he ignore me the way I ignored him that morning: on purpose, to draw me out, to protect himself, to show I was nothing to him? Or was he oblivious, the way sometimes the most perceptive individuals fail to pick up the most obvious cues because they're simply not paying attention, not tempted, not interested? When he and Chiara danced I saw her slip her thigh between his legs. And I'd seen them mock-wrestle on the sand. When had it started?

And how was it that I hadn't been there when it started? And why wasn't I told? Why wasn't I able to reconstruct the moment when they progressed from x to y? Surely the signs were all around me. Why didn't I see them? I began thinking of nothing but what they might do together. I would have done anything to ruin every opportunity they had to be alone. I would have slandered one to the other, then used the reaction of one to report it back to the other. But I also wanted to see them do it, I wanted to be in on it, have them owe me and make me their necessary accomplice, their go-between, the pawn that has become so vital to king and queen that it is now master of the board. He thought I was being coy. She said she could take care of herself. I described her naked body, which I'd seen two years before.

I wanted him aroused. It didn't matter what he desired so long as he was aroused. I described him to her too, because I wanted to see if her arousal took the same turns as mine, so that I might trace mine on hers and see which of the two was the genuine article. Except I like to go it alone, if you don't mind. It would allow us to warm up to one another through her, to bridge the gap be- tween us by admitting we were drawn to the same woman. Perhaps I just wanted him to know I liked girls. But don't. It put me in my place. No, he's the noble sort, I thought. Not like me, insidious, sinister, and base. Which pushed my agony and shame up a few notches. Now, over and above the shame of desiring him as Chiara did, I respected and feared him and hated him for making me hate myself. Neither did he. When I eventually brought up jogging, because the silence on the matter had become unbearable, he said he'd already gone. Indeed, for the past few mornings, I had become so used to finding him waiting for me that I'd grown bold and didn't worry too much about when I got up.

That would teach me. The next morning, though I wanted to swim with him, com-"ng downstairs would have looked like a chastened response to a casual chiding. So I stayed in my room. Just to prove a point. I heard him step lightly across the balcony, on tiptoes almost. He was avoiding me. I came downstairs much later. We stopped talking. Even when we shared the same spot in the morning, talk was at best idle and stopgap. You couldn't even call it chitchat. It didn't upset him. He probably hadn't given it another thought.

How is it that some people go through hell trying to get close to you, while you haven't the haziest notion and don't even give them a thought when two weeks go by and you haven't so much as exchanged a single word between you? Did he have any idea? Should I let him know? The romance with Chiara started on the beach. Then he neglected tennis and took up bike rides with her and her friends in the late afternoons in the hill towns farther west along the coast. It threw me back to age six. I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, Go ahead, I couldn't care less. But no sooner had they left than I scrambled upstairs and began sobbing into my pillow. At night sometimes we'd meet at Le Danzing. There was never any telling when Oliver would show up. He just bounded onto the scene, and just as suddenly disappeared, sometimes alone, sometimes with others.

When Chiara came to our home as she'd been in the habit of doing ever since childhood, she would sit in the garden and stare out, basically waiting for him to show up. Then, when the minutes wore on and there was nothing much to say between us, she'd finally ask, "C'e Oliver? Or: He's in the library with my dad. Tell him I came by. Mafalda shook her head with a look of compassionate rebuke. Couldn't she have found someone her own age? Thinks I haven't seen anything? Or comparing notes with Chiara's housemaid. I looked at Chiara. I knew she was in pain. Everyone suspected something was going on between them.

In the afternoon he'd sometimes say he was going to the shed by the garage to pick up one of the bikes and head to town. An hour and a half later he would be back. The translator, he'd explain. Sometimes we'd run into each other in town. Sitting at the caffe where several of us would gather at night after the movies or before heading to the disco, I saw Chiara and Oliver walking out of a side alley together, talking. When had they found the time to become so intimate? Their conversation seemed serious. Banter was both how he took cover and tried to conceal we'd al- together stopped talking. A cheap ploy, I thought. Chiara was still deep in thought. She was avoiding my eyes. Had he told her the nice things I'd been saying about her? She seemed upset. Did she mind my sudden intrusion into their little world? I remembered her tone of voice on the morning when she'd lost it with Mafalda. That's why he's such a well-behaved boy. Don't you see? Nothing to rebel against. Was he trying to rehabilitate me after that little jab about my late hours, or was this the beginnings of yet another joke at my expense?

I shot him a complicit glance. He intercepted it, but there was no hint of mischief in his eyes when he finally returned my glance. Whose side was he on? I watched them look for an empty table at one of the adjoining caffes. My friends asked me if he was hitting on her. I don't know, I replied. Are they doing it, then? Didn't know that either. I'd love to be in his shoes. Who wouldn't? But I was in heaven. It spilled over everything I touched. 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. I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I'm with you and we're well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who 1 am, who I become when you're with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I'm with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome. It never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn't want to be unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well. But on that same night I used the heady elation of the moment to speak to Marzia.

We danced past midnight, then I walked her back by way of the shore. Then we stopped. But she J said she too loved swimming at night. Our clothes were off in a second. She asked me to turn around and not stare while she used her sweater to towel her body dry. I pretended to sneak a clandestine glance, but was too obedient not to do as I was told. I didn't dare ask her not to look when I put my clothes on but was glad she looked the other way. When we were no longer naked, I took her hand and kissed her on the palm, then kissed the space between her fingers, then her mouth. We were to meet at the same spot on the beach the following evening. I'd be there before her, I said. I motioned that my mouth was zipped shut. I was showing off. This was what people who were okay with themselves did. But I could also sense he was onto something and wasn't coming out with it, perhaps because there was something mildly disquieting behind his fatuous though well-intentioned try again later.

He was criticizing me. Or making fun of me. Or seeing through me. It stung me when he finally came out with it. Only someone who had completely figured me out would have said it. And again after that," came the watered-down version. But try again later was the veil he'd drawn over If not later, when? I repeated his phrase as if it were a prophetic mantra meant to reflect how he lived his life and how I was attempting to live mine. By repeating this mantra that had come straight from his mouth, I might trip on a secret passageway to some nether truth that had hitherto eluded me, about me, about life, about others, about me with others. Try again later were the last words I'd spoken to myself every night when I'd sworn to do something to bring Oliver closer to me. Try again later meant, I haven't the courage now. Things weren't ready just yet. Where I'd find the will and the courage to try again later I didn't know. But I also knew that I was circling wagons around my life with try again laters, and that months, seasons, entire years, a lifetime could go by with nothing but Saint Try-again-later stamped on every day.

Try again later worked for people like Oliver. If not later, when? was my shibboleth. What if he had found me out and uncovered each and every one of my secrets with those four cutting words? I had to let him know I was totally indifferent to him. But not me. There was something at once dry, irked, and fussy in his voice. Anyway, I'm not playing this game with either her or you. I shrugged my shoulders. I had overstepped my bounds again and there was no getting out of it gracefully except by owning that I'd been terribly indiscreet. I'd never heard him speak in that lambent tone before. Usually, it was I who teetered on the fringes of propriety. I looked up at him as though to return challenge for challenge.

But I had only managed to sound peevish and hysterical. A less canny reader of the human soul would have seen in my persistent denials the terrified signs of a flustered admission about Chiara scrambling for cover. Maybe you should go away now, while there's still time. But I also knew that if he so much as showed signs of suspecting the truth, I'd make every effort to cast him adrift right away. If, however, he suspected nothing, then my flustered words would have left him marooned just the same. In the end, I was happier if he thought I wanted Chiara than if he pushed the issue further and had me tripping all over myself. Speechless, I would have admitted things I hadn't mapped out for myself or didn't know I had it in me to admit. Speechless, I would have gotten to where my body longed to go far sooner than with any bon mot prepared hours ahead of time. I would have blushed, and blushed because I had blushed, fuddled with words and ultimately broken down — and then where would I be?

What would he say? Better break down now, I thought, than live another day juggling all of my implausible resolutions to try again later. No, better he should never know. I could live with that. I could always, always live with that. It didn't even surprise me to see how easy it was to accept. And yet, out of the blue, a tender moment would erupt so suddenly between us that the words I longed to tell him would almost slip out of my mouth. Green bathing suit moments, I called them—even after my color theory was entirely disproved and gave me no confidence to expect kindness on "blue" days or to watch out for "red" days. Music was an easy subject for us to discuss, especially when I was at the piano. He liked my combinations of two, three, even four composers chiming in on the same piece, and then transcribed by me. One day Chiara started to hum a hit-parade tune and suddenly, because it was a windy day and no one was heading for the beach or even staying outdoors, our friends gathered around the piano in the living room as I improvised a Brahms variation on a Mozart rendition of that very same song.

Then everything else flows naturally. I had seldom spoken to anyone about books except my father. Or we talked about music, about the pre-Socratic philosophers, about college in the U. Or there was Vimini. The first time she intruded on our mornings was precisely when I'd been playing a variation on Brahms's last variations on Handel. Her voice broke up the intense midmorning heat. Oliver, who was lying flat on his stomach on the edge of the pool, looked up with the sweat pouring down between his shoulder blades. But no one gives me any work. Vimini is also a genius. I bring you the latest information on collegelearners. com where you can download call me by your name book pdf without any cost or registration. What are you waiting for? All the solution manual you need, now at your fingertips on collegelearners. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference.

But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable. André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust.

Download Call Me By Your Name full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online free Call Me By Your Name ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available! Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.

The film tie-in edition to the already highly acclaimed Luca Guadagnino-directed film of one of the great love stories of our time. Elio believes he has left behind his first love - but as an affair with an older man intensifies, his thoughts turn to the past and to Oliver. Oliver, a college professor, husband and father, is preparing to leave New York. The imminent trip stirs up longing and regret, awakening an old desire and propelling him towards a decision that could change everything. In Call Me By Your Name, we fell in love with Oliver and Elio.

Find Me returns to these unforgettable characters, exploring how love can ripple out from the past and into the future. A New York Times Bestseller In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting. Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award—winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies. Call Me By Your Name is a profound movie about first love, desire, heartbreak, and self acceptance. Inspired by the thousands of members of the Call Me By Your Name Global Facebook Group and the hundreds of postings on the Call Me By Your Name Support Group on Twitter, I asked people from around the world how this film changed their lives.

Here are their poignant stories. Profits from this paperback go to The Trevor Project, the leading national organization focused on crisis and suicide prevention efforts among LGBT youth. In Enigma Variations, Aciman maps the most inscrutable corners of passion, proving to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, he casts a sensuous, shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of those who may want to offer only what we crave from them. Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others.

in the first and most famous of these films, to the puzzled, sympathetic and always hopeful young man of the later ones"--Page 4 of cover. Like the city it springs from, Montreal Noir is an intriguing mix of culture, identities, and neighborhoods with one thing in common: the dark side of human nature. This collection presents stories by Patrick Senécal, Tess Fragoulis, Howard Shrier, Michel Basilières, Robert Pobi, Samuel Archibald, Geneviève Lefebvre, Ian Truman, Johanne Seymour, Arjun Basu, Martin Michaud, Melissa Yi, Catherine McKenzie, Peter Kirby, and Brad Smith. Stories from across the many sub-genres of mystery: police procedural, thriller, private eye, psychological suspense, and hard-boiled crime. Skip to content. Call Me By Your Name Download Call Me By Your Name full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Call Me by Your Name. Author : André Aciman Publsiher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux Total Pages : Release : Genre : Fiction ISBN : GET BOOK.

Download Call Me by Your Name Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle. Author : André Aciman Publsiher : Picador Total Pages : Release : Genre : Bildungsromans ISBN : GET BOOK. Find Me. Author : André Aciman Publsiher : Unknown Total Pages : Release : Genre : Gay men ISBN : GET BOOK. Download Find Me Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle. Author : Barb Mirell Publsiher : Unknown Total Pages : Release : Genre : Electronic Book ISBN : GET BOOK. Enigma Variations. Download Enigma Variations Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle. Four by Truffaut. Download Four by Truffaut Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle. Montreal Noir. Author : John McFetridge,Jacques Filippi Publsiher : Akashic Books Total Pages : Release : Genre : Fiction ISBN : GET BOOK.

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He couldn't possibly have known what I was looking at. It told me things about him I never knew to ask. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It was moments such as these that left me feeling so vulnerable, so naked. After a while: "I can't believe you changed it again. Me too, he replied. How often had I stared at his bathing suit while his hat was covering his face?

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