David pursed his lips and his cheeks pinked when I told him I didn’t drink while working. I wasn’t sorry for it – I knew what had come of drinking while serving in the past– but I was sorry for the fact that he had to pay for the drink himself. The wrinkled men were off, distracted by the dimly-lit room of playthings in which they had found themselves.
And then there was David. One hand on the wooden surface of the bar, the other clutching his glass as if it might float away if it were not tethered to him. I had never been to America before, and I never wanted him to stop telling me about New York. The innovation, the liveliness, the new-ness of it all that was apparently captivating, but unmatched by Paris’s beauty. What I really wanted to know, though, was about him – who he was, what he had seen in the world, and what he believed to be true because of it.
I liked him. I liked watching the way his face turned the color of cabernet when I laughed at him for thinking that Americans were so different from Europeans, from us, when here we were, two men standing at the same bar, with the same thoughts turning through our minds.
I left David where he was standing by the bar to serve a few customers at the other end. I refilled their glasses, smiling, but keeping one eye over my shoulder toward him the whole time. I was afraid, for some reason, that David might decide he should walk away. He didn’t know where the other man would go – the more they spoke, the more my suspicion grew that he had nowhere to stay, really, that the ten thousand franc note had been a recently-acquired loan.
But he didn’t leave, and I returned to him a moment later.
He was charming. He was idealistic, like most Americans I had met, but he was idealistic because he thought he had to be. Because he had been taught that way. He believed wholeheartedly in the amorous notion of democracy, in which I saw no romance. He was passionate and incessant. After I asked him who the old man was (Jacques, I would learn), and he laughed, it felt as if a wall between us had been hit with a sledgehammer and crumbled. He was no longer “the American.” He was David, and I was Giovanni, and his laugh was the only thing in that smoky room that seemed tangible.
With this post, I attempted to retell the first conversation that Giovanni and David have from Giovanni’s point of view. I was particularly struck by the quote from the original text: “Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before” (36-37). This revealed the deep perception that comes naturally to Giovanni and that causes him to really understand David so easily. In the first part of the novel, it becomes clear that David craves to be understood by someone else who won’t judge him for the identity which he is still coming to terms with. I wanted to experiment with this scene and tell it from Giovanni’s point of view because it seems like he is that person David needs – he’s honest, he’s witty, and he pushes David to realize who he truly is. By getting inside Giovanni’s head, I was able to attempt to understand how he felt upon meeting David and how mutual their initial attraction was.
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