Chapter Text
It sounds utterly ridiculous now, but I started out by hating him.
By despising the way he acted like he was no more of a stranger in that town than we were; the way he sat confidently at the dinner table even though he had only just arrived. The way he smiled jovially at my parents and repeated how grateful he was for everything—the food, the drink, the opportunity, the summer ahead of him—and yet, he barely looked in my direction. How arrogant from someone who would get my room for the next six weeks.
That was my fifth summer upstate. We had been going to the house since I was thirteen. My father had struck a deal with the owner, his colleague from the astronomy department at Columbia, that we could stay there for the month of July and most of August, provided we look after the quaint, outdated observatory come quaint, outdated astronomy museum that resided next to the house.
The deal had served us well thus far. We were in the outskirts of the town, far away enough from the main road that there was a visitor once or twice a month, at most, at the museum. And even those were usually just people who had gotten lost and were happily on their way again as soon as we had advised them to turn left, not right, at the old silo on the main road. And so we—my mother, my father, and I—could spend our summers in peace, on a beautiful hilltop and several hours away from the oppressive heat and humidity of Manhattan.
The peace was guaranteed until the summer of 1983 when my father had decided to take in an intern.
The intern was to help with both the upkeep of the museum and my father’s research, but I didn’t understand why he needed one in the first place. We had managed just fine before, and the intern wasn’t even from any of his classes at Columbia but a physics major from an obscure university in New Hampshire. It made no sense.
“Why are we taking a stranger here, to ruin our summer?” I had asked.
My father had explained, in his best professorial tone, that it’d be useful to have an extra pair of hands around to clean the old telescope and to file his articles that he could never keep track of.
“And he is also working on some kind of a thesis, so I’m sure he will be out of your way a lot.”
It turned out the intern was out of my way a lot. At the dinner on the first evening, he exchanged pleasantries with my mother and discussed the premise of his thesis with my father, and then he had been shown to his room, the second nicest bedroom in the house, while I had been downgraded to the small spare room across from him.
But after that, I barely saw him for the next two days. I suspected my father was getting him started in the observatory building across the yard, showing him his office on the ground floor and then proudly taking him to the museum space upstairs. I imagined my father showing him around the room, blowing dust off of the artifacts. They had been procured as donations from different institutes or personal collections of my father’s colleagues, and the pièce de résistance was a large telescope.
It was an old model but it still worked perfectly, and it was my favorite thing in the whole place. Paradoxically, realizing how vast the universe was and in contrast, how small, isolated and alone the Earth, it made me feel less odd and less alone. I was a speck of dust in the eyes of others, but so was everyone else in the eyes of the great galaxy.
During the summers there, I didn’t mind being alone. I liked to read, and I played the piano that we had painstakingly moved into the house so that I could continue practicing. In the city, I didn’t mind solitude either, as long as I was allowed to blend in with the faceless crowds. It only got complicated when my parents asked me to socialize.
“Elio, why don’t you invite one of your classmates over this weekend?” Or, “Elio, Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg are coming over for dinner and they are bringing Hannah. Surely you will try and keep her company?”
I had tried, and the kids had been close to my age, or also played the piano, or were also only children, but they didn’t care for my jokes or my books and I didn’t understand their disregard for Bach. Time and time again, I came to the conclusion that I was less lonely in my own company.
My parents who socialized with a wide circle of people in the city didn’t understand that, and even upon the intern’s arrival they had nudged me: “Maybe you and Oliver will become friends. He’s only three years older than you.”
I didn’t have high hopes. He was aloof, overly confident, ran his hand through his hair but was nonchalant about how it fell after, and left from places with only a curt Later! trailing after him like on his third day with us, when I tried to show him the garden in the back.
I had asked him about it at lunch, before he had had time to disappear into the museum building again.
“Yes, Elio?”
The way he said my name was different from anyone else’s and I hadn’t decided yet whether I liked it or not. I figured I would need to hear him say it a few more times.
I asked if he’d like to see my mother’s pride and joy, the orchard with the pear trees and cherries and apples.
“That sounds great.”
The sun was at its high point and the leaves provided scarce shade when I showed him the ordinary Bartletts, but also the Juliennes and the precocious Moonglows. They weren’t ready yet, but I tore one Moonglow off of the tree to show him.
“See? These produce fruit a year or so earlier than the others.”
He took the pear from my hand, his thumb brushing over mine by accident and I buried my hand in my pocket.
“Have you and your parents been here for many years?” he asked, just to ask something, because surely my father had told him our history with the place by now.
“Five years. My father’s friend tipped him off about this house and he hates the city in the summer, so here we are.”
“It’s nice out here. I like it. The peace and quiet.”
I took him through the rows of cherries and he went along with it, feigning interest either to be polite or because he didn’t know how to get out of this impromptu tour. The apples were in the last row and I needed to stand on my tiptoes to reach up to the branch. My shirt rode up.
“These are my favorites,” I said and instinctively tugged the hem of my t-shirt back down before he could see the large birthmark below my ribs. I had been teased about it as a child and had learned to keep it covered.
He didn’t say anything, so I turned to look and caught him looking at me instead of the pale, unripe apples.
“Here, on the tree,” I said, shaking the branch pointedly, hoping the birthmark hadn’t disgusted him and he looked at me funny, gave the pear back to me and said:
“Okay, thanks for the tour. Later!”
He left, with long strides in the rustling, overgrown grass. My mother had tried to get my father to mow it for days.
Was it me? Had I done something?
I watched him walk through the orchard, across the yard, and into the observatory and I wasn’t sure if I even liked him, but I didn’t like the thought that he might’ve been upset with me. Or worse yet, bored.
The weeks of July went by the same way as they had every summer, except whenever I climbed up the narrow, wooden stairs to the old observatory to pay a visit to my beloved telescope, I no longer got to do that in peace.
He was always there, dusting the glass display cases or sitting at the desk reading or writing, presumably both for his thesis.
My mother had brought him a table lamp to set off the darkness that flooded in from the big windows after sunset. The windows covered every wall of the circular room and as the building sat on top of a hill, the views always made me feel like I was on the top of the world. The observatory wasn’t a large space, but the presence of history and the smell of scholars—or dust, as my mother put it—enchanted me. Had the floors been any less squeaky or the desks any less scratched it wouldn’t have been the same.
The first few times I went up there that summer, he mostly left me alone, but then one evening he asked whether I knew if there were any erasers up there. I said I didn’t think so. Maybe in my father’s study downstairs, but not up here, no.
“You should have brought your own,” I said and thought whether it would be too much if I ran back to my room to get him one.
Then he asked if really no visitors came here, ever.
“Not really. A couple of times we get a retired couple who remember this place from when it was still in use. Or a young family who are driving around, trying to find quirky places to show their disinterested kids.”
“Why are the kids disinterested?”
“Because this is a strange place. No one gets it.”
“You seem to.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“You come here every night,” he explained.
Did I? Well, on Monday I had thought it best to check if Oliver was really careful with everything, since he was alone up here all night, writing, and many of our museum pieces were fragile and priceless.
On Tuesday, I had come after dark to take a quick look at Polaris on the telescope. And Oliver had asked what I was doing, and we had gotten into a conversation about Venus, too, so then I had come on Wednesday morning to show him the morning star. And the day after, I had come just because I hadn’t felt like reading or practicing but had still wanted to do something before bed.
I shrugged. So what if I came here often? I had no interest in admitting he was right.
“Are you looking at the North Star again tonight?”
“Polaris,” I corrected him.
“Yes, the North Star.”
“It’s only the North Star right now. Kochab was the North Star two thousand years ago. And in another two thousand years from now, it will be Errai. Twelve-thousand years from now, Vega. It has to do with the precession of the equinoxes,” I added when he started to look puzzled.
“How do you know all this?”
“Astronomy professor for a father.”
He turned to his desk again and left me be.
I set up the telescope with care as always, starting with a low-power eyepiece, adding a higher magnification one and finally a Barlow lens after the finder had settled on the bright glint of Polaris.
Always there, never burning out.
For a seventeen-year-old, the world and self were in eternal flux, so knowing something was constant, safely looking down on me from the sky every night, was something to hold on to. Finding the light amidst the darkness calmed me and helped with the creeping restlessness.
After I had taken my time with my old friend, I took a look at Oliver. I watched his back for a while, broad and hunched over his papers, the hair at the nape of his neck already growing out of its neat straight line. My mother might offer to cut it for him at some point.
He was entrenched in his writing and I didn’t want to bother him so I said, only in passing: “Do you want to see, too?”
He put down his pencil, came over and I moved to the side, letting him sit by the telescope.
“Yes, there it is,” he said looking through the eyepiece and smiled.
I had only gotten him to smile a couple of times. He had an inscrutable face with me, he saved all his smiles for my parents. He smiled at my mother a lot, thankful for her cooking and this morning, for her offer to do his laundry.
“Thank you, Mrs. Perlman, but I’ve lived at the dorms for three years now, so I have learned to do my own laundry. Unlike Elio here, I’m sure,” he had nudged me.
It was clearly an insult masked as a joke, wasn’t it? I should’ve been offended at his suggestion that even at seventeen, almost eighteen, I was still an incapable child, not aware of the ways of the world or of the simple act of washing one’s clothes. I should’ve been outraged.
Instead, the part of my arm where his had touched, had felt like white fire and I had said nothing.
In addition to the museum space upstairs, I occasionally wandered into my father’s study, too, on the first floor of the observatory building. The first time I did it, my father acted like it was the biggest surprise of his life.
Arms spread, he welcomed me: “Elio! My stranger of a son, come in!”
“Why are you being like that?” I rolled my eyes, and took out a book from his shelf, opened it to a random page.
“Because you never come here! Oh, please, sit down! What made you decide to grace us with your company today?”
His theatricality made Oliver lift his gaze from the stack of articles he was cataloging across the room, and I instantly regretted coming in.
“I come here all the time,” I muttered and said nothing about the fact that Oliver hadn’t been upstairs when I had checked.
I sat down, continued to leaf through the book I had picked out, seeing none of the words but instead, Oliver’s legs in the corner of my vision, bare because of the annoyingly short shorts he insisted on wearing day in, day out, much more hair on his long shins than on mine. I was able to take it for about ten minutes and left.
The next day, my father said nothing when I came in again, only pulled out a chair for me, but Oliver looked up, his face lighting up with a tenth of a smile that he was too slow to hide. That smile kept me there for an hour and a half, if only to annoy him.
Two days later, my father was not there.
“Oh, it’s just you,” Oliver said, exasperated, when he looked up from the pile of papers.
He might as well have hurled a bucket of ice at me.
“I can go.” I started to leave but he apologized.
“Sorry, no, I just thought you were your father.” He sighed. “I’m afraid I need his help, I can’t get these papers to behave. I don’t know where he wants me to file these. These don’t match any of the categories we have.”
“Can I?” I suggested, tentative.
“Be my guest.” He handed me the article and raised his palms, gave up.
I took a look at my father’s scribblings at the top of the page. “See, this is from Proceedings in Astronomy. It belongs there,” I pointed at the binder marked with the title of the journal.
“I thought it was Progress in Astronomy. And there’s no category for that.”
“His handwriting isn’t the clearest,” I concurred. “I should know.”
“What do you mean?”
“One time I got out of gym for the entire semester when the teacher misread my father’s note.”
Oliver grinned. “You definitely haven’t used that to your advantage, right?”
“I had him write all the notes to my teachers from then on.”
“You don’t like gym?”
“I like jogging. I like riding my bike. I don’t like being forced to play in a team, or to have basketballs hit my face.”
“I prefer tennis. And jogging. I go for a run every morning.”
That explained why he was never in his room when I woke up. Not that I had checked, of course.
His next question shocked me.
“Would you like to go for a jog together some time?”
“Me?”
He tilted his head like one of us was taking the other for an idiot. “Yes, you,” he mocked me.
“I guess. Sure.”
I wasn’t really used to running with anyone else, but how bad could it be? Besides, he was probably just asking to be polite. He didn’t really intend to follow up on his offer. Or request. I wasn’t sure which one it was.
“Great. Tomorrow at seven?”