Not yet sure what she wants, Hella decides to travel in Spain while considering David’s proposal. In Paris, David meets Hella, whom he asks to marry him. After returning from the Army, David travels to Paris with the hopes of to escaping the pressure he feels from his father to become a certain kind of man. Hoping to make his father happy, David eventually joins the Army, where he has a secret affair with another soldier who is discharged because everyone discovers that he’s gay. At one point he crashes his car while driving drunk, and this event encourages his father to have a frank talk with him about what he’s going to do in life. And yet, he starts acting out as a teenager, bullying Joey and spending his time getting drunk with friends. This is especially important to David because he knows he’s the only thing his father has, since David’s mother died when he was five. Consequently, he hurries home in the morning and avoids Joey for the rest of the summer, thinking that his attraction to other men will not only threaten his masculine identity, but also break his father’s heart.

At a sleepover one night, he and Joey kiss and become sexually intimate, and though he enjoys this experience, David can’t come to terms with what he’s done.

In this memory, he is a teenager in Brooklyn spending every summer day with a boy named Joey. David felt (and still feels) strongly for Giovanni, and he laments his inability to embrace these feelings-an inability he believes led to Giovanni’s imprisonment and execution.ĭavid remembers his first sexual encounter with another man. This makes him think about Giovanni, an Italian man he fell in love with while living in Paris. Alone, he gets drunk and stares out at the darkness, thinking about the demise of his relationship with Hella and realizing that he never truly loved her. An American man named David peers out the window of a house he rented with his fiancée, Hella, in the South of France.

Giovanni's room cover