His smell reminded me of Marzia’s, and how she too always seemed to exude that brine of the seashore on those days when there isn’t a breeze on the beaches and all you smell is the raw, ashen scent of scalding sand.

Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in silence, somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties.

Soon she'd spot the bruise behind the inflection. I blamed her for not seeing the bruise so I wouldn't be blamed for hiding it from her.

I was exaggerating when I said I thought you hated the piece. What I meant to say was: I thought you hated me. I was hoping you'd persuade me of the opposite - and you did, for a while. Why won't I believe it tomorrow morning?

And the worst thing is that, with all your experience and your sense of irony and your ability to overcome shyness wherever it threatens to crop up, you feel totally stranded. I didn't know their language, didn't know the language of their hearts, didn't even know my own. I saw veils everywhere: what I wanted, what I didn't know I wanted, what I didn't want to know I wanted, what I'd always known I wanted. This is either a miracle. Or it is hell.

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.

Wish we could start all over in that room, I said. Both leaning out the window in the evening, rubbing shoulders, as we did in Rome—every day of my life, I said. Every day of mine too. Shirt, toothbrush, score, and I'm flying over, so don't tempt me either.

Oliver was Oliver,' I said, as if that summed things up.'Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi,' my father added, quoting Montaigne's all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë's words: because 'he's more myself than I am.

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.