Work Text:
The concrete of the bench is cold beneath my legs. I inhale slowly through my nose and feel the tingle of the dry air behind my forehead before I puff it out in a cloud which dissipates like a phantom into the darkness around me.
I can hear the melancholy trickle of the fountain nearby, and in an instant I am fourteen years old and crouched in the ferns of the woods near our family home, watching the creek that would form after heavy rains, curling down its old bed the way it had before the dam was built a hundred miles away which strangled it at the source and left this stretch of forest deserted.
I loved to watch the water unfurl. It swayed between the rocks with ease, guided all the way by the dictates of the landscape. It never wondered which way to turn; it never fought to go where it wasn’t welcome. It merely traveled its path, the simple bed that had been carved there in a different age, and if the rocks eventually shifted, if the dirt decided to give way, the water would obey and swirl into the gap without fuss or hesitation.
I envied it.
My life would have been better, I knew, if I could learn to do as the water did. I wished fervently to be the son who did not want to take violin lessons instead of pitch in the summer baseball league. I was desperate to want the simplicity of math calculations when my heart cried out for Chaucer and Ovid. I hated appreciating the richness and beauty of my neighbor’s Chagall, instead of drooling over the size of her breasts.
No son of mine is going to study in Spain amongst peasants, for what has distant culture to do with business? I was destined for an internship with Smith and Ferguson, not language immersion in Catalonia.
Your mother has arranged it. You will pick her up at 7:00. So why did I spend my time at my junior prom trying to convince Heather Langille that Orwell was a visionary of the American political future? She didn’t seem to mind. She was nice. She nodded at the right times and sipped her punch. We drove to a lookout above an empty canyon, and I undid her bra and stuck my tongue in her mouth, lazily debating with myself all the while if Debussy were the greatest of French composers. When I arrived home just before dawn with my tie undone and Heather’s pink lipstick on the collar of my white shirt, my father looked straight into my eyes, then smiled wolfishly and clutched my shoulder.
It was the most affection I’d gotten from him since my coach had told him that I threw like Sandy Koufax.
So I devoted myself to the role. I went to parties and ran for student offices at school and kept the kitchen phone ringing with invitations and offers. I was the team captain and the Homecoming king; I won scholarships and got my name in the paper. My undergraduate years were a tumultuous flood of new things—dangerous ideas of philosophy and abstraction, foreign films and language classes, punctuated by parched summers at home full of the twittering brunches of my mother’s card club and serious discussions of race wars from my father’s coworkers. There were blonde girls from Texas that I lavished with attention and artists from Greece or Italy whom I’d breathe in at night to remind myself of why I bothered to exist at all.
And whenever the rains came, I returned to that spot in the woods to watch the stream run again, the water knowing just what to do, obeying its guideposts all smooth and sure and thoughtless. It was beautiful.
It wasn’t until the summer I turned twenty-two that I decided to follow the path of the water and to hike to its termination point down the hillside. The stream bed curved into the center of the forest to a quiet grove of white pine that would hiss in the winds that never managed to reach my face on the forest floor. In the center of the grove was a shallow pond where the water collected. It had no outlet, so it curdled into a gully and became a breeding spot for mosquitos and a yellow fungus that bubbled up at its edges. Several dead tree limbs angled out of it, stripped of their bark, and the whole area reeked of mold.
I had expected to discover an ebullient meeting with another crystalline run, drawing out the quiet woodland animals who avoided the river where the humans swam. Or perhaps a heroic aquatic leap from a small cliff as a sprinkling waterfall, misting into a green valley which would shimmer prismatic colors when the sun peaked through the clouds.
On that day, I nearly vomited in the broken, dead needles at my feet. I ran home, shaking for reasons I could not define. My mother sent me immediately to bed, and when I emerged from my room three days later, I had completed three applications to graduate schools around the country.
A little over a year later, I came to Italy and met Elio.
My father was a man who believed in what he could see and what he could count. He had the mind of an accountant who dealt in earthly certainties. On his desk sat a Newton’s cradle, and at the time, it made perfect sense. Newton was a revolutionary who defined for humanity the concept of gravity; it is considered a constant, an invisible force with a predictable, measurable action, a numerical value to be used in all number of equations.
But Einstein changed physics again, changed the landscape of what we thought we knew. Special relativity and quantum entanglement, what he called “spooky action at a distance,” when the motion of one electron is irrevocably changed by another, the indefinable and unseen link that keeps them moving at the same rate, in the same direction.
They are bound.
Science is not my field. Its language is no more complex than that of literature or art, but it has the reassurance of being proven. Theories become facts, numerical constants upon which the rest of us can depend. We set our lives by their standards, like the movement of the tides or the ghostly path of the moon through the night sky. It makes the universe feel orderly, manageable, predictable.
But it’s not.
The universe is a boiling pot of chaos, one solar wind shy of entropy, of collapse. Chance, confusion, fortuitous alignment—these play as much as a role as mathematics. Nothing is certain, save mortality. Even the stars cannot escape it, and when their fires die and the whole collapses on itself, the gravity remains. The density of a neutron star eclipses its original form; from supernova to black hole, gravity will take what it’s owed, even to the very rays of light that wish to pass it.
My motion has changed, too. Should thousands of miles and thousands of hours separate us, I feel him. I sway to the music of his voice, his laughter. I follow his steps, though I cannot see where he goes. My heart pulses to the presses of his fingers against my skin, to the flutter of his eyelashes when I kiss the inside of his wrist, the shell of his ear, the curve of his hipbone.
Heaven.
That’s what he called our space, that trampled, threadbare patch of grass and shade around the pool where we’d spent hours full of each other in the summer air, silent and laden with lazy philosophy and his enchanted lilts of music, pouring his genius into the dots and lines of his composition book. I could hear them all in my head, every tortured legato phrase, every staccato burst. I would hold my book above my face to keep the sun away and warm myself with the soft movement of his eyes across the page, reading every twitch of his face and indulgent roll of his lips. They would move in rounded, pink waves so subtle I was sure he was unaware he was doing it, like an actor memorizing a climactic soliloquy, playing with the inflection of each syllable, caressing the words to milk every drop of wonder from the lines.
Suddenly his mouth would quirk. Success. And he would jerk his head up, as if wanting to share his triumph.
Perhaps it was only to prove something to me, what I already knew—that he was clever and wondrous and without question the most interesting and confounding work of art I had ever studied in my entire life.
With my entire life.
One time I was unable to look away, and his face flushed, joy warring with embarrassment at being watched, at being found out, at having it confirmed that we were never working separately out there, that we were never slaves to silence or distance or time.
We were one.
It was true, and in that moment, he knew it and I knew it. His mouth had opened slightly, in a kind of wonder, of disbelief. I nodded in return, a bare inclination of my head, but he saw it—Elio saw everything—and he knew.
An entire conversation passed our eyes then, a negotiation of sincerity and depth on the other’s part. An agreement of amazement and gratitude and desire.
A vow.
In that one moment, the fear which had settled into my bones over the long years of artifice and self-loathing, the polite detachment with which I’d encased myself in order to exist within my own fallow life was forced out; in a rush, the demon was exorcised by a rite older even than that priestly incantation that should have freed me from the unholy lust I’d coveted from the moment Elio had taken my hand in greeting. I was freed by an angel, bearing a halo of soft curls, whose name is a prayer, whose nimble fingers painted an unseen mark of protection on the eager space of my forehead.
Elio filled in the wanton gaps in the lattice of my bones and sweetened the marrow with his own blood. He became the interstitial beats of my heart, the voice in my head to guide me to everything good and worthwhile in the entire world.
I am startled by a warm pressure against my back. It makes my spine straighten, pushing the snow that had collected in my lap onto the tops of my shoes. I shift backward into the warmth. Strong arms wind around my waist as a puff of warm air hits my ear. “What are you thinking about out here?”
A smile ripples across my lips before I can stop it. I tilt my head back and take in the perfect fingers of the tree branches steepled in white, a soft mantle that instantly has turned what was empty and gnarled in the frigid darkness into a hushed and glorious Eden that twinkles its own light up to the crescent moon.
I turn my head slightly to catch Elio’s eye, deep and dark under the strip of the Milky Way seeping into view over his head. I could hide nothing from that eye, so I answer honestly. “You.”
The pale skin around his temple creases as he smiles. I feel his arms tighten around me and long fingers tuck under the flaps of my jacket. “Good.”
I laugh outright and nuzzle against his cheek. He is so warm, and his coat smells of burning wood from the fireplace. He is beautiful. His skin is smooth cream. I want to crawl inside of him and live the rest of my days sheltered by it.
“You trying to escape my uncle’s politics?” He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lights one, sending a lethargic curl of smoke over his head.
“No, just needed some air. That malbec was too good. Thought I was in danger of drifting off, and that was before the joys of the autonomous collective crept its way into the room.”
He releases his grip to slump down next to me on the bench facing the opposite direction. He takes another draw, then passes the cigarette to me. He leans against me and fits his chin onto my shoulder. “I missed you.”
“Did you?” I watch the end of the cigarette glow orange as I inhale.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he angles his neck like a swan and presses his lips to the thin skin behind my ear. My eyes fall closed. God, does he know that he controls me? Does he comprehend that he plays me as effortlessly as he plucks on the strings of his guitar on a thick summer afternoon? Can he see I am helpless to resist?
He whispers in my ear, “Shall I convince you?”
My insides liquefy with want. My mouth is drawn to his, a trick of gravity. My tongue traces the seam of his lips and parts it, tastes his prosecco and a silky flavor that is his alone. My free hand buries itself in his hair, cradling the back of his head. When he pulls back, my fingers trace his jawline and his swollen lips. The pad of my thumb caresses up his cheekbone, and I look up, directly into his eyes.
It is a heady experience being the sole focus of his intense gaze, so passionate and discerning; it cuts me open, flays my heart on a platter, offers me up to him without defense. I am his, and when his eyes pierce mine, this is all that I have to show him because it is all I have, period.
I smooth my thumb over his velvet eyebrow. “Did you imagine this, Elio? That summer, all those years ago, did you think that this is what we would be?”
His head tilts slightly, but his gaze does not waver. “It had to be.”
I swallow and stub out the cigarette. “Why?”
His hand slides up to press into my chest. It covers my heart, so he has to know that it is racing. “Because long before you asked me for my name, I’d already given you the rest of me. If you’d gone for good, you’d have taken me with you anyway.”
I exhale heavily. Had I been holding my breath? My hand comes up to cover his own. Our fingers tangle together. “Oliver.” My lips shape into the word, barely audible in the space between us.
His gaze falls to my mouth. “Elio.”
I can’t help but kiss him again. And again. And again. Until I feel lightheaded and overwhelmed with a need to drag him to his room—our room—and worship him properly, until he is sweating and quivering and spent.
He knows me too well. His lips quirk into a smile and he squeezes our joined hands. “Later,” he assures.
He stands and brushes the snow from the feathers of my hair. “Let’s get back. Mafalda refuses to bring out the chocolate rugelach until you are there, and my parents refuse to leave the table until they get it.”
I chuckle and rise, circling the bench to stand next to him. “Will you play the Brahms sonata for me?”
His eyebrow raises. “Number 3?”
I nod.
“The second movement?”
I nod.
He bites his bottom lip. “That depends. Will you—“
“Yes.”
His eyes widen slightly, and I bite back a grin. Catching Elio by surprise is nearly impossible, so when I manage to do it, it’s all I can do not to crow in triumph. “But I haven’t even said—“
“Yes.”
“But what if I—“
“Yes.” My hands come to rest on his hips. “Yes, Elio Perlman. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
He stares at me, eyes roving around my face, reading what he needs to there. Finally, he smiles broadly. “Deal.”
He slips his arm around my shoulders, and we follow our path back to the warm glow of the villa.