10

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. Neither haggled, just as neither spoke of thrift or extravagance.

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.

As I sat there working on transcriptions at my round table in the

morning, what I would have settled for was not his friendship, not anything.

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. Chiara, one of the girls

who three years ago was shorter than I and who just last summer couldn’t

leave me alone, had now blossomed into a woman who had finally mastered

the art of not always greeting me whenever we met. 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.”

He was willing to oblige. “Let me just put away these papers. Otherwise

his father”—and with his hands carrying papers he used his chin to point at

me—“will skin me alive.”

“Talking about skin, come here,” she said, and with her fingernails

gently and slowly tried to pull a sliver of peeling skin from his tanned

shoulders, which had acquired the light golden hue of a wheat field in late

June. How I wished I could do that.

“Tell his father that I crumpled his papers. See what he says then.”

Looking over his manuscript, which Oliver had left on the large dining

table on his way upstairs, Chiara shouted from below that she could do a

better job translating these pages than the local translator. A child of expats

like me, Chiara had an Italian mother and an American father. She spoke

English and Italian with both.

“Do you type good too?” came his voice from upstairs as he rummaged

for another bathing suit in his bedroom, then in the shower, doors

slamming, drawers thudding, shoes kicked.

“I type good,” she shouted, looking up into the empty stairwell.

“As good as you speak good?”

“Bettah. And I’d’a gave you a bettah price too.”

“I need five pages translated per day, to be ready for pickup every

morning.”

“Then I won’t do nu’in for you,” snapped Chiara. “Find yuhsef

somebuddy else.”

“Well, Signora Milani needs the money,” he said, coming downstairs,

billowy blue shirt, espadrilles, red trunks, sunglasses, and the red Loeb

edition of Lucretius that never left his side. “I’m okay with her,” he said as

he rubbed some lotion on his shoulders.

“I’m okay with her,” Chiara said, tittering. “I’m okay with you, you’re

okay with me, she’s okay with him—”

“Stop clowning and let’s go swimming,” said Chiara’s sister.

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. Yellow: sprightly, buoyant,

funny, not without barbs—don’t give in too easily; might turn to red in no

time. 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. P.” to my mother, who was sitting with two friends in

the shade, all three of them in bathing suits, and, rather than open the gate

to the narrow stairway leading to the rocks, jumped over it. None of our summer guests had ever been as freewheeling. But everyone loved him for

it, the way everyone grew to love Later!

“Okay, Oliver, later, okay,” said my mother, trying to speak his lingo,

having even grown to accept her new title as Mrs. P. There was always

something abrupt about that word. It wasn’t “See you later” or “Take care,

now,” or even “Ciao.”

to be continued

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