If Not Later, When?

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“Later!” The word, the voice, the attitude.

I’d never heard anyone use “later” to say goodbye before. It sounded

harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again.

It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today.

Later!

I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy, so many years ago,

walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab,

billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere.

Suddenly he’s shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his

suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home.

It might have started right there and then: the shirt, the rolled-up

sleeves, the rounded balls of his heels slipping in and out of his frayed

espadrilles, eager to test the hot gravel path that led to our house, every

stride already asking, Which way to the beach?

This summer’s houseguest. Another bore.

Then, almost without thinking, and with his back already turned to the

car, he waves the back of his free hand and utters a careless Later! to

another passenger in the car who has probably split the fare from the

station. No name added, no jest to smooth out the ruffled leave-taking,

nothing. His one-word send-off: brisk, bold, and blunted—take your pick,

he couldn’t be bothered which.

You watch, I thought, this is how he’ll say goodbye to us when the time

comes. With a gruff, slapdash Later!

Meanwhile, we’d have to put up with him for six long weeks.

I was thoroughly intimidated. The unapproachable sort.

I could grow to like him, though. From rounded chin to rounded heel.

Then, within days, I would learn to hate him.

This, the very person whose photo on the application form months

earlier had leapt out with promises of instant affinities.

Taking in summer guests was my parents’ way of helping young

academics revise a manuscript before publication. For six weeks each

summer I’d have to vacate my bedroom and move one room down the

corridor into a much smaller room that had once belonged to my

grandfather. During the winter months, when we were away in the city, it

became a part-time toolshed, storage room, and attic where rumor had it my

grandfather, my namesake, still ground his teeth in his eternal sleep.

Summer residents didn’t have to pay anything, were given the full run of

the house, and could basically do anything they pleased, provided they

spent an hour or so a day helping my father with his correspondence and

assorted paperwork. They became part of the family, and after about fifteen

years of doing this, we had gotten used to a shower of postcards and gift

packages not only around Christmastime but all year long from people who

were now totally devoted to our family and would go out of their way when

they were in Europe to drop by B. for a day or two with their family and

take a nostalgic tour of their old digs.

At meals there were frequently two or three other guests, sometimes

neighbors or relatives, sometimes colleagues, lawyers, doctors, the rich and

famous who’d drop by to see my father on their way to their own summer

houses. Sometimes we’d even open our dining room to the occasional

tourist couple who’d heard of the old villa and simply wanted to come by

and take a peek and were totally enchanted when asked to eat with us and

tell us all about themselves, while Mafalda, informed at the last minute,

dished out her usual fare. My father, who was reserved and shy in private,

loved nothing better than to have some precocious rising expert in a field

keep the conversation going in a few languages while the hot summer sun,

after a few glasses of rosatello, ushered in the unavoidable afternoon torpor.

We named the task dinner drudgery—and, after a while, so did most of our

six-week guests.

Maybe it started soon after his arrival during one of those grinding

lunches when he sat next to me and it finally dawned on me that, despite a

light tan acquired during his brief stay in Sicily earlier that summer, 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, which hadn’t really been

exposed to much sun. Almost a light pink, as glistening and smooth as the

underside of a lizard’s belly. 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

It may have started during those endless hours after lunch when

everybody lounged about in bathing suits inside and outside the house,

bodies sprawled everywhere, killing time before someone finally suggested

we head down to the rocks for a swim. Relatives, cousins, neighbors,

friends, friends of friends, colleagues, or just about anyone who cared to

knock at our gate and ask if they could use our tennis court—everyone was

welcome to lounge and swim and eat and, if they stayed long enough, use

the guesthouse.

Or perhaps it started on the beach. Or at the tennis court. Or during our

first walk together on his very first day when I was asked to show him the

house and its surrounding area and, one thing leading to the other, managed

to take him past the very old forged-iron metal gate as far back as the

endless empty lot in the hinterland toward the abandoned train tracks that

used to connect B. to N. “Is there an abandoned station house somewhere?”

he asked, looking through the trees under the scalding sun, probably trying

to ask the right question of the owner’s son

to be continued

“No, there was never a station

house. The train simply stopped when you asked.” He was curious about

the train; the rails seemed so narrow. It was a two-wagon train bearing the

royal insignia, I explained. Gypsies lived in it now. They’d been living there

ever since my mother used to summer here as a girl. The gypsies had hauled

the two derailed cars farther inland. Did he want to see them? “Later.

Maybe.” Polite indifference, as if he’d spotted my misplaced zeal to play up

to him and was summarily pushing me away.

But it stung me.

Instead, he said he wanted to open an account in one of the banks in B.,

then pay a visit to his Italian translator, whom his Italian publisher had

engaged for his book.

I decided to take him there by bike.

The conversation was no better on wheels than on foot. Along the way,

we stopped for something to drink. The bartabaccheria was totally dark

and empty. The owner was mopping the floor with a powerful ammonia

solution. We stepped outside as soon as we could. A lonely blackbird,

sitting in a Mediterranean pine, sang a few notes that were immediately

drowned out by the rattle of the cicadas.

I took a long swill from a large bottle of mineral water, passed it to him,

then drank from it again. I spilled some on my hand and rubbed my face

with it, running my wet fingers through my hair. The water was

insufficiently cold, not fizzy enough, leaving behind an unslaked likeness of

thirst.

What did one do around here?

Nothing. Wait for summer to end.

What did one do in the winter, then?

I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said,

“Don’t tell me: wait for summer to come, right?”

I liked having my mind read. He’d pick up on dinner drudgery sooner

than those before him.

“Actually, in the winter the place gets very gray and dark. We come for

Christmas. Otherwise it’s a ghost town.”

“And what else do you do here at Christmas besides roast chestnuts and

drink eggnog?”

He was teasing. I offered the same smile as before. He understood, said

nothing, we laughed.

He asked what I did. I played tennis. Swam. Went out at night.

Jogged.

Transcribed music. Read

He said he jogged too. Early in the morning. Where did one jog around

here?

Along the promenade, mostly. I could show him if he wanted.

It hit me in the face just when I was starting to like him again: “Later,

maybe.”

I had put reading last on my list, thinking that, with the willful, brazen

attitude he’d displayed so far, reading would figure last on his.

A few hours

later, when I remembered that he had just finished writing a book on

Heraclitus and that “reading” was probably not an insignificant part of his

life, I realized that I needed to perform some clever backpedaling and let

him know that my real interests lay right alongside his. What unsettled me,

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

When I did offer—because all visitors loved the idea—to take him to

San Giacomo and walk up to the very top of the belfry we nicknamed To￾die-for, I should have known better than to just stand there without a

comeback. I thought I’d bring him around simply by taking him up there

and letting him take in the view of the town, the sea, eternity. But no. Later!

But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing

anything at all. You see someone, but you don’t really see him, he’s in the

wings. Or you notice him, but nothing clicks, nothing “catches,” and before

you’re even aware of a presence, or of something troubling you, the six

weeks that were offered you have almost passed and he’s either already

gone or just about to leave, and you’re basically scrambling to come to

terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for

weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you’re

forced to call I want. How couldn’t I have known, you ask? I know desire

when I see it—and yet, this time, it slipped by completely. I was going for

the devious smile that would suddenly light up his face each time he’d read

my mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin.

At dinner on his third evening, I sensed that he was staring at me as I

was explaining Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, which I’d been

transcribing. I was seventeen that year and, being the youngest at the table

and the least likely to be listened to, I had developed the habit of smuggling

as much information into the fewest possible words. I spoke fast, which

gave people the impression that I was always flustered and muffling my

words. After I had finished explaining my transcription, I became aware of

the keenest glance coming from my left. It thrilled and flattered me; he was

obviously interested—he liked me. It hadn’t been as difficult as all that,

then. But when, after taking my time, I finally turned to face him and take

in his glance, I met a cold and icy glare—something at once hostile and

vitrified that bordered on cruelty.

It undid me completely. What had I done to deserve this? I wanted him

to be kind to me again, to laugh with me as he had done just a few days

earlier on the abandoned train tracks, or when I’d explained to him that

same afternoon that B. was the only town in Italy where the corriera, the

regional bus line, carrying Christ, whisked by without ever stopping.

to be continued

He

had immediately laughed and recognized the veiled allusion to Carlo Levi’s

book. I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly

inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held

back.

He was going to be a difficult neighbor. Better stay away from him, I

thought. To think that I had almost fallen for the skin of his hands, his chest,

his feet that had never touched a rough surface in their existence—and his

eyes, which, when their other, kinder gaze fell on you, came like the miracle

of the Resurrection. You could never stare long enough but needed to keep

staring to find out why you couldn’t.

I must have shot him a similarly wicked glance.

For two days our conversations came to a sudden halt.

On the long balcony that both our bedrooms shared, total avoidance:

just a makeshift hello, good morning, nice weather, shallow chitchat.

Then, without explanation, things resumed.

Did I want to go jogging this morning? No, not really. Well, let’s swim,

then.

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. 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.

Or perhaps it started after his first week, when I was thrilled to see he

still remembered who I was, that he didn’t ignore me, and that, therefore, I

could allow myself the luxury of passing him on my way to the garden and

not having to pretend I was unaware of him. We jogged early on the first

morning—all the way up to B. and back. Early the next morning we swam.

Then, the day after, we jogged again. I liked racing by the milk delivery van

when it was far from done with its rounds, or by the grocer and the baker as

they were just getting ready for business, liked to run along the shore and

the promenade when there wasn’t a soul about yet and our house seemed a

distant mirage. I liked it when our feet were aligned, left with left, and

struck the ground at the same time, leaving footprints on the shore that I

wished to return to and, in secret, place my foot where his had left its mark.

This alternation of running and swimming was simply his “routine” in

graduate school. Did he run on the Sabbath? I joked. He always exercised,

even when he was sick; he’d exercise in bed if he had to. Even when he’d

slept with someone new the night before, he said, he’d still head out for a

jog early in the morning. The only time he didn’t exercise was when they

operated on him. When I asked him what for, the answer I had promised

never to incite in him came at me like the thwack of a jack-in-the-box

wearing a baleful smirk. “Later.”

Perhaps he was out of breath and didn’t want to talk too much or just

wanted to concentrate on his swimming or his running. Or perhaps it was

his way of spurring me to do the same—totally harmless.

But there was something at once chilling and off-putting in the sudden

distance that crept between us in the most unexpected moments. It was

almost as though he were doing it on purpose; feeding me slack, and more

slack, and then yanking away any semblance of fellowship.

The steely gaze always returned. 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. He gave me a bland smile, as though to say, No

point hiding it now.

Stay away from him.

He must have noticed I was shaken and in an effort to make it up to me

began asking me questions about the guitar. I was too much on my guard to

answer him with candor. Meanwhile, hearing me scramble for answers

made him suspect that perhaps more was amiss than I was showing. “Don’t

bother explaining. Just play it again.” But I thought you hated it. Hated it?

Whatever gave you that idea? We argued back and forth. “Just play it, will

you?” “The same one?” “The same one.”

I stood up and walked into the living room, leaving the large French

windows open so that he might hear me play it on the piano.

He followed

me halfway and, leaning on the windows’ wooden frame, listened for a

while.

“You changed it. It’s not the same. What did you do to it?”

“I just played it the way Liszt would have played it had he jimmied

around with it.”

to be continued