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I’d cut myself off from any news of Elio after that fateful phone call at the Hanukkah following that summer. I couldn’t…I couldn’t stand the sound of his name, the thought that I’d ruined something in him, that he’d pay for the mistakes that were mine. Or worse, somehow, that he was fine, that he’d been little changed by our summer and had already forgotten me.
I wasn’t sure which I feared more, which hurt more, but I couldn’t deal with either thought so I asked Pro not to tell me anything about him unless the news was dire.
And he’d honored that wish.
So when Elenor, whose office was next to mine, knocked on my door late of a Thursday in February, with a smile on her face and two tickets in her hand, I did not expect what was coming.
“Ollie,” She said, smiling. “I know how much you like classical music and…well, ever since Liz…you’ve been so down. So, I thought it might be nice if you’d come with me this Saturday. I’ve got two tickets to see E.”
I was sure my stare was blank, but she seemed unfazed. Elenor usually was in the face of my intractability. She’d been an acquaintance for most of the time I'd taught at Columbia, but when my wife left me two years ago, she’d become the rock upon which my grief crashed. We’d been close friends ever since. It helped that she and I were…both friends of Dorothy, after a fashion.
Although, I hadn’t much interest in men or women lately.
“Who is E?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Only the newest thing on the international stage. E is a composer, who also plays piano, guitar, and violin. He sings too, but only the one song.”
“And you thought I’d enjoy this, why?” I raised an eyebrow at her. I couldn’t imagine spending a Saturday night listening to some old codger play classical music. I could hardly stand to listen to piano anymore, the ghost of Elio’s nimble fingers and transcriptions aching in my lungs.
“No, see. I’m not taking no for an answer. You don’t have plans, which you told me yesterday. So you’re going. End of story.” I stared at her. “Nope. You can widen your eyes and pout at me all you want, but a puppy dog gaze isn’t going to work this time. You owe me. Remember the thing with the cactus?”
I can feel the heat rising in my face at the mere mention of The Thing With The Cactus, which was a card I knew she was going to play forever. I was beat before I could even argue my way out of it.
I inhaled slowly through my nose, resigned to an evening spent in agony. “Fine.”
Just the thought of it conjured up memories of Elio, hunched at his table or laying in the grass, riding his bike, in the pool or playing tennis. And those images always, always led to memories of him between my thighs, above me or below me, shoved roughly against the wall of that alley off the Santa Maria dell’Anima. His skin glistening with sweat, his cock sticky-sweet from the juice of the peach I’d eaten.
The memories used to make me hard. Those first few months back in the States, a memory of Elio could creep up on me and I’d be achingly hard in minutes. But by then, I had been ten years and all they brought at that point was pain. An ache in my bones instead of my cock, one that seemed only to grow with the fullness of time. They say time heals all wounds.
Mine seemed to have been infected because time was only making it all worse.
Elizabeth couldn’t, wouldn’t put up with it, with me any more. She’d walked out two years ago and taken my boys with her. I saw them on weekends and special occasions. I saw her even less frequently.
She knew what she was getting into when she'd married me. She’d seen the photograph I kept in my wallet. I had no sympathy for her and no tolerance of whatever pain our situation might have caused her. I offered to let her back out. I told her the truth when she’d asked me. She’d married me anyway, knowing I’d never fall in love with her.
Any love I might have had for her curdled and drained away in the divorce, leaving only bitterness in its wake.
But that was how marriages went nowadays, wasn’t it?
Elenor’s snort brought me back to the present. She was shaking her head at me. “You were thinking about Your Person again.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. Her conviction that whenever I disappeared inside my own head, I was thinking about some unnamed lost love was…disturbingly accurate, but extremely annoying.
I would not share Elio with her. I would not describe him to her. I wouldn’t even gender him to her. So she’d taken to short-handing the entire idea of him in order to avoid the guessing game that she knew she'd never win.
“What time does the concert begin? Would you like me to pick you up?”
She laughed. “Let’s just meet there. You never know if someone might catch your eye.” She winked, as she always did when she hinted that I needed to get out more.
I shrugged and she went away again. She wasn’t wrong. I needed to…get my shit together. I was a thirty four year old man and I was still pining for a summer love from ten years before. I was basically the heroine in a Harlequin. Only I had an ex-wife and two kids.
I knew I needed to let him go, to move on. He’d have long since forgotten me by now. I remembered telling him that I didn’t want to ruin him or mess him up some how. Ironic then that he messed me up, instead.
The impending concert meant that Friday and most of Saturday was spent fighting off memories of Elio. By Saturday afternoon, I’d given up tilting windmills and settled onto my sofa with that old leather-bound copy of Armance .
I raised the book to my lips and kissed Elio’s words. For you, in silence. I wished he’d never written them. I wished he had inscribed every piece of paper I’d had with me that summer. I wished he was there beside me so we could break his silence together. I had been foolish for requesting it. I didn’t know how precious his words were, how much my soul needed his voice, his wit, his love in order to flourish.
I felt withered inside. As though the landscape beneath my skin was not made of muscle and sinew and bones and blood, but of a garden left to die by inches in the autumn winds. I was merely waiting for the winter frost to kill me, because summer was forever gone from me and neither was there any hope of spring.
I sat on that couch clutching Elio’s gift to me for nearly two hours, before I shook myself out of the malaise that settled over me and rose to dress. Elenor had said it was black tie, so I put on the suit that my mother commissioned for me when my father passed. It was the only formalwear I owed and I was, briefly, glad for it.
The concert hall was surprisingly overflowing with bodies and I didn’t even manage to catch a glimpse of the posters for the composer. Who was this E who could pack a house like this?
Elenor materialized at my elbow almost as soon as I arrived and pulled me inside. She pressed a drink into my hand. I ignored it. She laughed at me, as always, and we turned to head to our seats.
In between the two double doors leading down to the seats was a poster. Eight feet high, it towered over me.
I dropped my drink.
It was Elio. The composer causing such a stir, this E, was Elio. I couldn’t breath. Elenor was, I think, trying to get my attention, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the poster. Elio, Elio, Elio. He was in the building with me. He was beautiful. At twenty seven, his jawline was even more prominent. His hair was longer. My hands ached. I remembered the silken texture of those curls and wondered if it still felt that way.
I was raw, an exposed wire that might catch fire at any moment.
“Oliver! My God. What the hell is wrong with you!?”
Elenor’s voice finally managed to break through to me. I turned to look at her. When had I started crying?
“It’s him.”
She just gaped at me. “What on earth are you talking about?”
I gasped a breath. My voice was papery and thin. It shook. “Ellie, that’s him…That’s…Why didn’t you tell me E stood for Elio?”
She frowned at me. “E doesn’t stand for anything. It’s the only thing…Wait. HIM him? As in, Your Person, him? Are you fucking with me, Oliver?”
I laughed, a little broken thing, and looked back at the poster. “God. Ellie. I haven’t seen him in ten years. He’s still so beautiful.”
Her eyes were very round as she glanced from the poster to me and back again. Finally she shook herself. “Alright. You owe me such an explanation for this. We’ll go for margaritas. You’re buying. But right now, you need to get it together. We’re going to in there and listen to your boy play and then we’re going to go backstage and see him.”
The very idea of it seemed so impossible that I just nodded. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to coordinate my limbs well enough to make it to our seats without stumbling.
I honestly couldn’t say I managed it or I didn’t. I don’t remember. We were in the lobby and then in our seats, with nothing between but Elio's face.
The hall hushed moments later as Elio stepped out onto the stage. He seemed taller than I remembered. God, seeing him again hurt. It tore the scabs off all the old wounds and I was bleeding, but I couldn’t look away, couldn’t even tell whether or not there were other people in the hall with us. He was all I could see. The blood pounding in my ears drowned out his words, his first song and second.
I caught parts of the music, snatches that brought the ghost of a hot Italian sun on my skin, the taste of peaches and apricot juice to my tongue. I wasn’t sure if I was still weeping. I wasn’t sure I still existed inside my body. It seemed to me at the moment that I was split into two parts. One, my body sitting in its seat, the other inhabiting Elio, dancing with his fingers cross the piano keys.
Finally, he stood and my heartbeat calmed enough to hear him speak. “I always close with a very specific song. It is the only song that I am willing to sing. I collaborated on this piece with a very good friend of mine, a composer by the name of Jonathan Larson. So I beg your indulgence while I preform ‘Without You’. As always this song is dedicated to someone I knew once for a beautiful, long ago Italian summer.”
My breath stuttered to a halt. He couldn’t mean me. He couldn't possibly be talking about…remembering…
He sat at the piano and started playing a simple melody. It was hauntingly sad. A corresponding pain welled in me and I fought the urge to go to him, to pull him into my arms, and spend the rest of my life apologizing for this, for causing this in him.
He opened his mouth and sang.
Without you,
the ground thaws
the rain falls
the grass grows…
I was crying again. Some far corner of my mind considered that I was going to have an emotional hangover in the morning. As the music filled the hall, I wondered why I couldn’t simply reach out and touch his sorrow.
Without you,
the seeds root
the flowers bloom
The stars gleam
the poets dream
without you
The Earth turns
the sun burns
but I die,
without you
My lungs seized and I heard the echo of Elio’s voice in my head, begging, You’ll kill me if you stop over and over, desperate and dangerously sincere.
I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t stand any more of it. I thought I might shatter into a thousand pieces and they’d never find all the parts of me. That I would simply crumble to dust right here. Elio’s soft, torn-open voice was going to destroy me if he kept singing.
The mind churn
The heart yearns.
The tears dry
without you
Life goes on
but I'm gone
'cause I die,
Without you…
I wanted to stagger to my feet and scream my own name at him. I wanted to touch him. I needed to tell him that I wasn’t gone. I’d never gone, because I’d spent the last ten years trapped in B. In the piazzetta, at the bookstore, on the Berm, always on the Berm.
The audience lurched into a standing ovation as the final note faded away and I pushed my way out of the row, not caring if Elenor followed behind.
I stumbled into the lobby and nearly fell to my hands and knees. I was going to be sick. I could feel the bile pressing into the back of my throat. I pressed myself against the wall and fought it down.
“Oliver. My god. Oliver, you’re falling apart.”
I simply shook my head. She was right. “I..I need to see him. I need…”
She nodded and pulled me across the lobby to a door, beside which was standing a security officer. She smiled sweetly at him and asked very politely if he could send a message to whoever was nearest to E.
He eyed her for a moment before grunting, noncommittal. Elenor looked at me. I swallowed. My throat felt like I’d been screaming. “Tell Elio Perlman that Oliver needs to see him.”
The man blinked and narrowed his eyes before pulling out a radio and speaking into it. There was no response over the radio, but an agonizing moment later, the door burst open and Elio himself was standing in it.
The crowds hadn’t yet realized that he wasn’t doing an encore and so the lobby was empty. Elio stood, chest heaving, staring at me.
I swayed toward him, wanting so desperately to reach out. Instead, I met his gaze and breathed, “Oliver.”
It was as though the word electrified him. He shivered all over and threw himself at me. His arms around my neck were vice-like and he kept whispering, “Elio, Elio, Elio,” into my ear.
The security guard cleared his throat loudly. “Sir, you might want to… move someplace a little less…exposed. The lobby will only stay clear so long.”
Elio shuddered against me, as though balking at the idea of letting go, but let go he did. I kept a grip on his hand and he pulled me through the door. Elenor trailed at my back.
We didn't make it to his dressing room, because on the way I spotted a familiar face. I froze and even Elio’s forward momentum didn’t manage to move me.
When Marzia saw me, her whole face lit up and she came pelting over for a hug. I returned it, bewildered and aching again. Why was Marzia here?
“Oliver! My god, you’ve hardly changed at all. Why did you never visit? We all missed you terribly.” She shot a glance at Elio. “Some more than others.”
I managed a smile for her, but it was, I think, pained and not entirely sincere. “Life, I suppose. I never meant to leave forever.” I too looked at Elio. Praying that he’d understand, knowing that he wouldn’t. “You look well. Both of you.”
"Thank you." She smiled at me, cheshire cat. “I will answer the question that you will not ask, though your body is asking it for you. No, Elio and I are not…whatever it is you are imagining right now. You’ve slept with him more recently than I have.”
Marzia…never one to hide from the truth, and it seemed to have only gotten more pronounced. Elenor gasped.
“And now, because I know that Elio will merely stew in his remembered teenage angst all night, until you go away again, I will ask what he will not.” She turned to Elenor. “Are you his wife, then? The one he left Elio behind for?”
My entire torso seemed to seize up at that. “Marzia, you know it wasn’t like that.”
Elenor shook her head, wide eyed, but happy to ignore me. Because in a way, she was exactly right. It was like that. “I’m not.”
Marzia grinned.
Elenor blinked, looking dazed. “In fact, he doesn’t have a wife. He got divorced to years ago. Because of him.” She pointed to Elio.
Elio was staring at me. “Is that true, Oliver?”
I could feel my mouth curl into a wry smile, even as my eyes drank in the sight of him. He was still holding my hand. “Which part? All of it, most likely. Yes, Liz left me. Yes, it was because I was still so desperately in love with you. Elio…Oliver, I can’t…I’ve spent the last decade trapped in an Italian villa, in heaven, on the Berm, with you. I can’t escape from you and I never wanted to. You haunt my waking moments and you walk through my dreams. Se non l’amore, che cosa?” If not love, what? by which I meant, if this is not love, what is, but also, if we do not live for love, what else is there?
He stared at me, short of breath and greedy, but still he did not move toward or say anything in response.
I wanted to tell him I remembered everything. I wanted to tell him that I could still taste him, still feel his body in mine and mine in his. I wanted to tell me that I would never, ever stop loving him until till the ocean was folded and hung up to dry. But I couldn’t say any of that. It might not be 1983 anymore, but there were some things that I simply could not tell him with so many people milling around us.
So I played the only card I had left. “You never died, because I never stopped. Elio…”
He choked on a sob and suddenly we were in each others arms and to hell with the people. He peppered my face with kisses before finding my mouth and licking his way into it, much like he’d done on the Berm that long ago day. I wanted to cry, maybe I already was. I wanted it to never ever end.
Finally, Marzia coughed pointedly and I became aware of the silence around us. I pulled back, flushing and ashamed that I’d let this happen in such a public venue. We’d been better at hiding this when we were hardly more than kids.
Elio laughed, a high delighted sound and stared around at all the people who were gaping. “This man is the one for whom Without You was written, so fuck off.”
His words or the edge of joy in his voice rocked them from their stupor and everyone started moving again. Including us. Marzia led us to a room off stage left. “I know you two want nothing more than to screw each other’s brains out after ten years apart, but we’re all going to be responsible adults and talk this out first. Unlike last time. Oui?”
We piled into the room. Elio pulled me over to a couch and pushed me down onto it, before settling his long body over me. The feeling of having him in my arms again was dream-like, ethereal. He seemed likely to disappear at any moment. But he was so warm under my hands. I couldn’t stop touching him. As we lay across the couch, I ran my hands up and down his back. I burrowed under his clothing, loosening it and leaving him in complete disarray, to find skin. A hand, flesh to flesh, on his back, fingers fitted into the nobs of his spine was bliss.
One of his hands settled on my chest to brace him, but he buried the other in my hair, carding his fingers through it and making my eyes go half-lidded. I was certain I could remain just as I was for the remainder of my life.
When we looked up again, Marzia and Elenor were both sitting staring at us.
Marzia laughed again. “Now boys, you could at least wait until we’ve left to…” She gestured at us before grinning wickedly at Elio. “Not that Elio minds that kind of thing. Did you not once leave my bed for his? My body for his? Did you shower before that midnight meeting, Elio, or did you still smell of me?”
Elio flushed a bright, painful scarlet and avoided both our eyes. If she’d brought that particular incident at any other time, it would no doubt have been painful, nearly as much as it had been at the time, but now? I am content.
“I could smell you on him, taste you on his skin.”
It was Marzia’s turn to flush and Elio’s head jerked up. His gaze met mine and I stare back, passive. “I’m sorry. God, I was…so incredibly cruel. To both of you, but especially to you, Oliver. I never even thought to hide what I was doing. Never pretended I wasn’t sleeping with both of you. I’m more sorry for that than you can ever know.”
Some little wounded part of my heart swelled and then mended at his words. I smiled at him. “It hurt. Knowing that…well, that I wasn’t enough for you. No matter how obsessive our love was, it wasn’t…there was something in you that I could not satisfy. That you never thought enough of me to talk to me about it."
Marzia looked at me, compassion and kinship in her eyes. Elenor is staring at us in wonder, but there are tears pooling on her lids.
Elio looked like I’d slapped him. “Is that what you thought? That you were somehow not enough for me? That I thought so little of you? I’m crueler than I thought I was. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You never would have understood because you never understood my actions. You spent the first several weeks I stayed with you thinking that I was sleeping with Chiara and then every other girl within walking radius of the villa. You were…I thought at the time that you were merely projecting your own actions onto me.”
Marzia scowled. “He was not sleeping with anyone, but me. He was…vierge, a virgin, when he first came to my bed. You were the first man to fuck him and the first man he’d ever fucked.”
I could feel the blood in my cheeks at her pronouncement, but god was it good to hear. It shouldn’t have mattered. I knew that it shouldn’t.
Elio tapped my collarbone and I looked back at him. “You’re both probably right to some degree. It doesn’t matter. Why didn’t you say something? You should have told me!”
I laughed at him, the indignation in his voice, his anger at himself on my behalf. It was absurd. “I would have continued on indefinitely, if I could have. I would have stayed silent while you slept with every person in B, if that’s what you wanted, as long as I had something of you for myself. Even if it was just mornings in heaven and the occasional transcription. If, after that first night together, the only thing you ever wanted me for was to discuss whether the knight should speak or die, or to bike with you to the Berm, I would have gladly done it.”
Tears welled in Elio’s eyes and spilled down his cheeks. “I never deserved you. I was cruel and careless, but then so were you. You disappeared back to America for months and then called only once to tell me you were getting married. Father told me that you didn’t even want him to talk about me. I thought you were ashamed, of me, of what we’d done, shared. I thought you hated me. I could have born anything else, but that.”
I pulled his face to my mouth and licked away the tears, beyond caring about Elenor and Marzia sitting there with us. “I’m sorry. I was a coward. I’m so sorry that I hurt you that way. I never wanted either of us to pay for sleeping together and yet, here we are. I’m sorry for the phone call. I’m sorry for walking away. I’m sorry for never coming back. I’m sorry.” I murmured my apologies against his cheeks. “I never stopped loving you. I remember everything, all of it. Did you stop? Elio, Oliver, did you stop loving me? You’ll kill me, if you stopped. Did you forget me? Do you have someone waiting back home for you?”
His sob this time was a broken thing, made from bittersweet memories and the ghost pain. “I never did, Oliver. Elio. I never ever stopped. I promise you I didn’t…But…” He turned his head away and lay down fully, pressing his chin to my shoulder. “I do have someone waiting for me at home.”
Marzia’s expression was compassionate again and I hated it. I wanted to gouge her eyes from her head to make her stop looking at me that way.
I hated that my newly remade world was shaking to ruin again around me and Marzia was simply staring at me like she knew how I felt, like she could fathom the agony that twisted my guts.
“So it’s all too late anyway. Of course it is. I’m not sure why I thought it wouldn’t be.” My voice is empty, hollow sounding, like there was nothing in my chest left to temper it.
“No.” Elio’s voice was sharp. Final. It burned sweetly inside me. “No. It’s not too late. It’s…I just…I won’t break up with her over the phone. I won’t do to someone else what you did to me. Okay?” The abrupt elation overcame the guilt that that remark stirred in me. “It was agony enough when I knew it was coming, but not to know…I have two shows remaining on the tour, before I head back to New York.”
I blinked. “You’re living in New York?”
I was stunned. I thought perhaps the shock I felt was a byproduct of having my entire life gutted and remade twice in the span of a couple hours.
But the thought that Elio had, all this time, been living in my city…I had never seen him. How had I never seen him? How was any of it possible?
How were we even here now? Or was I dreaming? Would I wake up to find that I had fallen asleep on the couch with Armance clutched in my hands and dreamed it all?
If I was dreaming, I hoped never to awaken.
“Yes, I’ve been living in New York since college. I went to Juilliard and then did some graduate work at Columbia.”
The shock couldn’t get worse, so this revelation barely registered. “The fact that you were attending my school and never thought to drop by and say hello is actually one of the most painful things you could have told me, I think.”
Elio shook his head, tears still dripping down his face, but this time I made no move to lick them away. “I couldn’t bare it. I couldn't face you, knowing that I could never have you, that you were close enough to touch and yet farther away from me than you’d ever been. I couldn’t. I think I might have thrown myself off the Tappan Zee.”
“God.” I was suddenly jolted out of my shocked stupor. “Never say that again. Never ever say that.”
He nodded at me, but I could see that he’d meant it. My arms around him tightened reflexively.
Elenor chose that moment to insert herself back into the conversation. “So what does this all mean for the two of you? You live in the same city. Elio intending to breakup with his girlfriend. Oliver is single. Are you going to try dating?”
I couldn't wrap my head around that question. Date Elio? What an absurd thought.
Elio lifted his head and turned to blink at her, owlish. “Date? Um…” He looked back at me, flushing a little. “I was going to…um…suggest you move in with me. I’ve got a three bedroom apartment. I converted one bedroom into a music room, but you could turn the guest room into an office. But maybe that’s…too fast. We could...date, if you want?”
I laughed. I could feel my laughter shake through him. “Elio, we went from ignoring each other at breakfast to fucking in the space of a day. If you want to be technical, I’ve known you a grand total of six weeks. I ate your peach. I think the time for worrying about too fast is long passed.”
Elenor wrinkled her nose. “Is a peach a metaphor for something or do I not want to know?”
Elio’s eyes went wide and his cheeks went scarlet again. He looked almost sun-burned. “No. Oliver…”
“It’s not a metaphor. It was an actual peach. And I'm quite sure you don't want to know.”
Elio breathed out a relieved sigh and collapsed onto my chest again. I could feel his heartbeat against my ribs. His skin was warm and smooth under the pads of my fingers. I could lean down and kiss him if I wanted. I thought if I strained hard enough, I might be able to hear the sound of the surf crashing against the rocks passed the old gate. It was summer again.
It was summer again and the prospect of the season changing didn’t seem to bleak after all.