Chapter Text
The wind from the open windows creates a low howl, muffling the reedy chirp of cicadas from the surrounding fields. The car engine buzzes and lowers in pitch as I shift the gears. I glance over at Elio slouched in his seat with his feet on the dash, fingers knotted together over behind his head. He’s barely said a word this morning. We’d packed up the Fiat in companionable silence, moving around each other with a practiced fluidity as we stuffed our bags in next to the mounting pile of packages of our various acquisitions, preparing to leave our final stop outside of Genoa and make our way back to the villa in B. We planned to stay there for another week before we’d head to New York, and the Perlmans would visit in mid June before their new research candidate was due to arrive in Italy for the remainder of the summer.
I had paused before I got in and studied him across the roof of the car. “You all right?”
Elio had given me a closed-lip smile and nodded, slipping wordlessly into the passenger seat and snapping his door closed with a muted clunk.
When we are about ten miles out, he throws his feet down and pops up. “Turn here.”
“Huh?”
He reaches over and pats my upper arm, gaze intent on the approaching side road. “Here. Turn left.” He points at the brown sign announcing the name of a small parco comunale.
I steer the car down the road he’s requested, little more than a dirt path that leads to a small parking area inside a grove of trees. No other cars are there. There is a small stream that gurgles its way through the property, one of the many fed by the distant Alps. I coast into a spot in the shade and cut the engine.
Elio lolls his arm out the window and takes a deep breath.
I wait for a few minutes to see what he will do. His posture is relaxed, yet his body seems tense, pensive. What is it, Elio? What’s going on in that brain of yours? Tell me what you’re thinking.
He shrugs one shoulder. “I just…” He meets my eyes sheepishly. “I didn’t want it to end yet, you know?” He gives me the same closed smile as before, and my heart clenches a little bit in my chest. It was the kind of smile one gives to say goodbye, one of sadness or loss.
I get it—I really do. We’ve been in a bubble, he and I. Two blissful weeks of being wrapped in one another without obligations to anyone or anything else. We had been the only two people in the world, dancing with one another on a sun-soaked landscape of paradise, imprinting a stream of memories into my heart that I will hold tight to me long after I perish from this world.
“My parents used to bring me to this park when I was little,” he says, eyes roving over the area through the windshield. “There used to be ducks who would nest here in the spring, and when we’d be in town for Passover, I would make them bring me here so that I could feed them.”
“Ducks?”
His neck is cricked slightly as he digs inward to pull out the memory. “Then, the spring I was eight, the ducks weren’t here. They never showed, and it’s like they knew because later that summer, the park burned. A lightning strike split a tree and sparked the dry grass.” He chuckles and wipes his nose. “I cried so hard. But my dad told me that it was nature’s way. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘in ten years this will all be new again.’” His lips quirk. “I should have known he’d be right."
I reach over and squeeze his leg, an unspoken reassurance, then settle back and prop my knees up around the steering wheel. For a while, we stay like that, listening to the swish of the tree limbs and chirped exchanges of the birds living in their midst.
“I wanted to tell you for a long time,” Elio says suddenly, making me jump a bit. He clears his throat. “Last summer, I mean…a very long time.”
“Tell me what?”
“That I…” His face is turned toward the window so I cannot see his expression. His finger picks at the metal of the door frame. “That you’d fascinated me, that you were the most interesting person I’d ever talked to. That I could never get you out of my mind.” His left arm crosses absently in front of his chest and drops to his lap. “I always felt like such a stupid kid around you, I…I never thought you’d ever feel the same about me, that you’d ever…even notice me.”
“’Stupid kid’? You?” I huff a laugh. “Elio, it is a tribute to your character that you would even entertain the notion that…” I sigh. “I’m quite certain you’ve never been either of those things.” I shake my head and let it rest on the small restraint. This is the man who has captivated me since I first met his eyes and saw his playful smirk, since I’d marveled over his focus and self-possession, since I noticed that his learned father, a man of some renown, spoke to him about topics that matter and listened—truly listened—to his responses. “You intimidated me.”
He just chuckles.
“It’s the truth, Elio! Everything seems to come so easy to you.”
“Stop it, Oliver.” His voice is gruff, as if he thinks I’m teasing him. Or is it that he finally realizes I’m not?
I reach out for his hand and rub his palm over the top of my leg, feeling his fingers bump lightly back and forth over the hem of my shorts. “You’re handsome, funny…had half the girls in town drooling over you. You’re a genius, ridiculously talented…well-read…”
I watch a hawk float high on the humid air. For no reason, I think of my Uncle Ken. He lived in Seminole, Florida and owned a ship charter business on Tampa Bay. I used to visit two weeks of the summer in my early teens to escape Connecticut and help him out, my only chance to spend some time on the water. He would dress me up in a bright polo shirt and white shorts, hair combed back neatly, and make me salute to the tourists on the dock. “You’re a good lookin’ kid, Ollie. Like a regular movie star! That’s all you need in this life. That’ll always get you places, just you remember that!” I did, too. I remembered standing on deck, rolling up lengths of rope around my arm so that the girls would tug their parents over to where we were; he’d fluff up my hair, bleached blonder by the ubiquitous sun, and let them stare at me like a zoo animal. I remembered that no one ever spoke to me about weather fronts or marine life or knot-tying on naval ships of old; no one even wanted to know my name. Instead, they’d smile at me and compliment my blue eyes and strong chin. I grew to despise the phrase “all-American boy.”
I knew my uncle never meant any harm. He probably thought that the experience would build my confidence. But all it did was to make me fold inward; the more they stared, the more I felt invisible. I was merely a curiosity at which to gawk. A billboard. Who I really was never mattered, so I ended up feeling like that’s all I was—a two-dimensional facade who was only pretending to have any depth, like I was a lie, all the way down to my non-existent core.
For my whole life since then, I’ve been looked at plenty, but never really seen. I made sure of it. I made an art of the affable small talk and one-liners that would allow me to work a room from one end to the other without having to stand in one spot the entire time I was there. I never let myself get trapped by exposition, never allowed anyone to probe too deep or know too much; there was no conversation I couldn’t win with a self-deprecating remark and a large grin to counter it, spinning out the door with an offhanded, “Later!” I was happy to play the gilded peacock. It allowed me privacy, anonymity.
Gradually, it became my survival tool, the ultimate in self-protection. No one knew me so no one could affect me; no one could hurt me. Bravado was my favorite outfit, and I wore it everywhere I went—job interviews, dates, classes. Very quickly, I discovered that my uncle was right. I looked the part, and it got me what everyone else wanted. And the more I advanced, the more desperate I became, the more separated I felt from the person I wanted to be, needed to be, before I ceased to exist at all in any form.
Prior to coming to Italy last year, I could feel that I was nearing my end. I could hear the screaming from a distant room in my mind. I’d have been grateful to silence that voice for good than listen to the torture of it for a lifetime more, believing truly that there could be no answer to its pleas. Getting on that plane felt like striking my last match—I’d either start a fire or freeze to death.
Maybe someday I’ll tell Elio that he saved me, literally and figuratively, in every way possible; that the Perlmans and their peaceful estate and their easy, genuine love of ideas and language and music, of me, was the life raft I had sought in the bleak ocean in which I’d been adrift. Perhaps I can find a way to say it all so that I won’t break down into a puddle of sloppy tears and fitful sobs, so that he will understand without being afraid or worried or sad.
Someday.
Someday, I will surrender to him totally.
But today, I scoop up his hand, lace my fingers with his and squeeze tightly, marvel at how it fits into mine perfectly, wonder sincerely how my hand felt before I held it, contemplate if I there was a time I genuinely felt anything before Elio.
“I never wanted to be the guy that just wants,” Elio says distantly. “That pathetic guy who sees it all, sees exactly what he wants right in front of him, but he thinks too hard and ends up watching it drift past him without speaking a word. I wanted to be able to actually do, to act, even though I was scared to death.” He turns to me then. “That’s what you’ve given to me, Oliver. You give me the courage to act, just you being here…loving me…it makes all the rest open up.” His features soften in a shy, lopsided smile. As if I might tease him or deny him. As if I could ever spurn him or resist him in any way.
I open my mouth to reply and choke as my throat closes. I blink rapidly, feeling my eyes swell with tears. “You—you, too, Elio. All of it…you’ve no idea,” I husk out, gripping his hand even tighter, my knuckles white from the strain.
Elio exhales hard and rolls his body away from the passenger door and vaults over the gearshift. He falls into my lap facing me, knees pushed on either side of my seat, nearly touching the back seat in the tiny car. He releases my hand to gather me up. I let him pull me into him, clutching at my back, working his fists down my spine until I have adhered to him, face pressed into the bend of his neck, the point of my nose fitting exactly into to the indentation at the base of his skull.
I breathe out.
My arms fall low, beneath his raised body. I pull him forward and he clicks down as his legs slip on either side of me and allow him to fall truly into my lap, but the angle tugs at his torso and threatens to pull him away.
I breathe in.
His hands grasp bunches of my shirt. Mine do the same to him. Our bodies and our will are the only things holding us together.
I breathe out.
“Thank you for this time, Oliver. For this trip.”
I breathe in.
“It’s the best time I’ve had in my whole life.” A whisper.
I breathe out.
“Thank you for coming back.” A secret.
I breathe in.
“Thank you for not giving up on me.”
I breathe out.
I have a million words for him. They’re smashed up against the underside of my tongue. They swim in the folds of my brain and prickle the inside of my forehead and force out rivers through the openings of my eyes and nose. I know they will find their way out in the days and years to come: When Elio is perched in the window of my apartment—our apartment—finishing a cigarette, one leg bent to the sill, hair mussed from sleep; when he’s hunched over his desk reading Tolstoy or Hawking or Edwin Gordon until the night lightens to dawn; when he brings me coffee and kisses my temple as I chip away at a stack of research papers; when he hops out of the stairwell to the subway and spots me waiting at the corner, and a grin overtakes his face, like we hadn’t just seen each other hours before; when he plays his guitar all night as an endless soft lullaby when I have the flu and my fever won’t let me rest; when he rolls on top of me in the middle of the night, still half asleep, and bites at my neck, moaning his own name into my ear.
Now, I breathe in and hold his air inside my lungs. For just a few minutes more, I hold all of him there—my whole world, balanced on the expanse of my thighs.
Eventually, his arms work their way back up to my shoulders, and he leans against the steering wheel to look into my face. He’s beautiful, torn exquisitely between happiness and melancholy, exhaustion and suspense. His mouth is ajar, the line of his eyebrows angling up, cheeks pink. I skim my thumb across his collarbone. “What time are your parents expecting us?”
“I told them we’d be in before dinner.”
“How about we take a walk, then? Go around the park, see what you remember?”
His eyes are damp, and his face cinches minutely on one side. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
We unfold ourselves from the car, joints cracking, and head for the trail, a dirt line into the trees carpeted in mulched wood chips. We climb the small hill and descend to the edge of the stream. Elio doesn’t say much. He stays close, hand brushing mine as we walk. We are peppered with explosions of cool shade and sudden heat in the exposed spots, but the air is fragrant and sublime, fed by the azaleas and honeysuckle that grow wild in the alcoves of the meadow. We scoop handfuls of water from the stream to drink and cool our skin, then follow its curving passage back to where we’d started.
As we tromp over to the car, I nudge Elio with my shoulder. “Well?”
“What?”
I raise my palms and gesture randomly around me. “Come on, what’s the verdict? How does it compare now to how it was before?”
He stops and stares at me, watches me round to the other side of the car. I pause and raise my eyebrows when I realize he’s not moved. “Elio?”
The smile. “It’s better,” he finally murmurs. “So much better than I’d ever thought it could be.”
Oh, my dear lord—
I couldn’t possibly agree more.
He flings open the door and dives in to start the car. “Andiamo, Americano!” He revs the spluttering engine. “Ho fame!”
I roll my eyes and bite my bottom lip in a pointless effort to keep my heart from exploding in my chest. I drop in next to him and settle back to let Elio take us home.