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Nothing

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11

Later! was a chilling, slam-dunk salutation that

shoved aside all our honeyed European niceties. Later! always left a sharp

aftertaste to what until then may have been a warm, heart-to-heart moment.

Later! 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 farewell 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.” My mother, who hated what she called

his Americanisms, ended up calling him Il cauboi—the cowboy. 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. “É un timido, he’s shy, that’s why,” he said when asked to explain

Oliver’s abrasive Later!

Oliver timido? 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. By the fourth or fifth day, Mafalda insisted he couldn’t

leave the region without tasting our eggs. 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. “Lasci fare a

me, Signor Ulliva, leave it to me,” she said. 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.” I had never

heard someone his age say, I know myself. 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

was probably expecting orange or grapefruit juice; what he got was a large

glass filled to the rim with thick apricot juice. 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 worldfamous 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. He would joke in Italian,

pick one out, and ask, Is this one blushing with shame? 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.” Of course, he had no idea what I’d been thinking minutes earlier,

but the firm, rounded cheeks of the apricot with their dimple in the middle

reminded me of how his body had stretched across the boughs of the tree

with his tight, rounded *** echoing the color and the shape of the fruit.

Touching the apricot was like touching him. He would never know, just as

the people we buy the newspaper from and then fantasize about all night

have no idea that this particular inflection on their face or that tan along

their exposed shoulder will give us no end of pleasure when we’re alone.

Yours, like Later!, had an off-the-cuff, unceremonious, here, catch

quality that reminded me how twisted and secretive my desires were

compared to the expansive spontaneity of everything about him. It would

never have occurred to him that in placing the apricot in my palm he was

giving me his *** 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 Mediterranean. At the

breakfast table that morning, my father explained that the name for the fruit

came from the Arabic, since the word—in Italian, albicocca, abricot in

French, aprikose in German, like the words “algebra,” “alchemy,” and

“alcohol”—was derived from an Arabic noun combined with the Arabic

article al- before it. 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.