Chapter Text
I didn’t discover loneliness until I went away to college. I had always loved the solitude of reading or listening to music or even just lounging around and marinating in my own thoughts. I blamed Oliver, for awakening loneliness in me. It was as though he had come along and uncovered a secret room in me that I had never noticed before, and filled it with joy for a few short weeks, and then boarded it up behind him when he left. When I left my parents and my high school friends behind and headed for Boston, I found myself without friends or family for the first time, and became keenly aware of that cavity inside me - that empty, boarded-up room.
It wasn’t as though there were no new friends to be made. I got on well with my fellow students, and went out for drinks with them after class, and I laughed and chatted with them easily. But as soon as we went our separate ways I felt that ache of loneliness return, unsatiated. I curled my body up around it at night, in the single bed of the studio apartment my parents had rented for me. It crept out into my music, filling every song with minor keys.
He had gotten married. My parents attended the wedding. I stayed at home, studying for my final exams, burying myself in my notes even though I had already been accepted to the New England Conservatory. I had a strange notion that Oliver could see me, somehow, and I wanted him to see nothing but a good student hunched over his desk, highlighting passages in his textbook and taking careful notes. I didn’t want him to see me lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling blankly, wondering if now - at that very moment - he was being told, you may kiss the bride, and doing so happily.
I developed a taste for rough, impersonal sex - mostly with men, mostly older men. There was one man I saw pretty regularly. I had met him outside a nightclub and he had teasingly called me a twink, a label that I hated. I took him back to my apartment and fucked him hard, spitefully, and then later he did the same to me. He twisted his fingers viciously in my hair and yanked on it, and I came so hard that I was left shaking for about a minute afterwards.
The sex I had at college was so different from what I’d had with Oliver that it felt like another act entirely. Oliver had looked in my eyes, touched my cheek, kissed me deeply, whispered wonderful things to me while he moved between my legs and I desperately pulled him closer. With people who were not Oliver, any of those things felt inauthentic and saccharine, and so I twisted my face away from kisses and begged men to use me, to simply take what they needed, and they were usually all too happy to oblige.
In the morning, when I would wake up alone, I would drum my fingers on my bare, sticky stomach and think to myself, You’ve ruined me, Oliver. You’ve messed me up. Just like you were afraid you would. But it was a clinical thought, devoid of emotion. I didn’t feel ashamed after sex any more. It was just something that I did - like eating breakfast, or brushing my teeth.
If nothing else, I was at least vigilant about using protection. That past summer, at the villa, I had come down from breakfast one morning to find my father reading a French newspaper with an uncharacteristically sorrowful expression, my mother standing behind him, reading over his shoulder and looking equally troubled.
“What’s up?” I’d asked.
My father sighed, folded the newspaper, and handed it to me. “Poor man,” he’d said. “Such a brilliant mind. What a loss.”
I looked down at the page and was alarmed to see a face I recognized. Michel Foucault, who was a personal acquaintance of my parents, had passed away, and his death was rumored to have been brought on by AIDS. I could vaguely recall meeting him at one party or another, and had written a paper on his work for school the previous year. He was the first person that I actually knew who had died from the disease - though, sadly, he would not be the last.
Foucault’s death may well have saved my life. I had not given much thought to the risks of sex when I was with Oliver, and we had never used a condom. At the time there was no test for the disease - you only found out you had it when you started dying. And so my insistence upon using condoms with other men was born less out of fear that I might contract AIDS, and more out of a quiet certainty that I was carrying it already. After all, I felt like I had been infected with something. I wondered if perhaps the ennui that plagued me since that summer was actually my body sensing the approach of death.
When the test finally became available, in my second year of college, I went out and took it at the earliest possibility. It was negative. I was overwhelmed by the relief, but it was more for Oliver than it was for myself. I could only have gotten it from him, so if I had tested positive, it would have meant that Oliver was dying too.
I had told my parents I was getting tested, and I called them up with the good news straight away. I considered writing to Oliver as well - burying the information at the bottom of a general letter of pleasantries and updates on my education and inquiries about his life. Just a little note at the bottom - by the way, in case you were wondering or worried, I got tested and I’m fine. It would be the kind thing to do, to set his mind at ease in case he had thought of me while reading those terrible headlines.
But I never wrote the letter. The consideration of it awoke doubt in me - doubt in my recollections of that summer. At the time it had seemed like a grand, enormous, all-encompassing thing, but I had a flair for melodrama and exaggeration that so often came with a creative mind. What if, I wondered, this deep and powerful romance had been entirely my own invention? What if Oliver had not spared a single thought for me since he called to let me know that he was getting married? What if that very phone call had been his way of telling me to back off, to grow up, to leave him alone for good? What if Oliver had never really cared for me at all?
I fluctuated between thinking that such a thing was impossible and believing it to be true with an absolute certainty. Oliver had just been a horny guy on holiday who had fucked the nearest available person - who just so happened to be the son of his hosts, living conveniently in the next room. And I, being the high-strung 17 year-old that I was, had gotten carried away and dreamed up an epic love story that had not ever really existed.
I took a kind of vicious pleasure in the thought. I imagined myself telling the story to people, though I never actually did such a thing. Oh, it was so embarrassing, my imagined version of myself laughed self-deprecatingly, surrounded by a table full of thrilled listeners. I was completely obsessed with this poor guy. Followed him around like a puppy dog, thinking we were like Romeo and Juliet. And all he wanted was to get laid.
So confident was I in this account that by the time I saw Oliver again, I had cultivated a kind of hatred for him - or at least, the cruel and arrogant fictionalized version of him. It didn’t help that I was caught off-guard. I was at a fundraising party for the college, being trotted around like a show pony by my tutors and introduced to wealthy donors, shaking hands and smiling. Then I turned and, in the crowd, I saw Oliver. He was chatting animatedly with one of the Deans, and he had his arm casually around the waist of a lovely woman whose modest dress was distended a little by pregnancy.
It was like a lump of ice had been suddenly teleported into my stomach. I knew that he was from New England - he had told me as much - but quite understandably I had never actually expected to run into him. Yet here he was, barely changed, only perhaps a little squarer around the jaw and a little broader across the shoulders.
I had longed to see him again for years. Now, I dreaded the thought of him spotting me. I could not talk to him. I could not make pleasantries. I could not chit-chat. I felt sick, sick. I quickly looked away, terrified that he might catch someone staring at him in his peripheral vision and turn around to see who it was. I ducked into the crowd, moved around the nearest corner so that I would be hidden from view, and then fled the party without bothering to grab my coat - which had both my keys and wallet in its pocket - from the cloakroom.
Once I got away, I wandered aimlessly for a while, and then finally used the spare change in my trouser pocket to call up a guy I had been seeing. I asked him if I could come over to his place.
“It’s pretty late,” he said, after a pause. “You sound weird. You’re not having some kind of crisis, are you?”
The distaste in his voice filled me with an odd kind of relief. “I wouldn’t be calling you if I was having a crisis,” I replied rudely.
He laughed, and told me to come over.
I traipsed back to the party a couple of hours later, just as the last few people were leaving. My hair was mussed and my clothes were rumpled, and I didn’t care. I picked up my coat and pulled my pack of cigarettes out of the pocket while I was still putting it on, ignoring the cloakroom attendant’s raised eyebrows. I lit a cigarette on my way out of the building, and then sat down on a low wall, wincing a little at the after-effects of the night’s rough treatment. My whole body ached. I breathed out a haze of smoke and looked up at the stars through it.
“Elio?”
I wasn’t surprised at all. It was inevitable. I shouldn’t have stopped. I should have walked out and just kept walking.
Oliver was standing at the bottom of the steps leading down from the building, his wife at his side, his coat around her shoulders and his arm protectively around her waist. I waited for the same panic I had felt earlier to engulf me, and was pleased when it didn’t. It still worked, then: having sex with someone else to numb my feelings for Oliver.
“Oliver,” I greeted, the tip of my cigarette wagging up and down as I spoke without taking it out of my mouth.
He looked utterly stunned, and a little concerned. Perhaps I looked more debauched than I had realized. “Were you at the fundraiser? I didn’t see you.”
“Left early,” I explained casually, hopping down off the wall. “Came back for my coat.” Since Oliver seemed to have been shocked out of his manners, I covered for him by holding out my hand to his wife. “Elio Perlman.”
“Oh,” she said, the confusion clearing from her forehead and leaving an expression of understanding. “You’re Sammy and Annella’s son!”
“Guilty as charged.”
“I’ve heard so much about you!” She didn’t say whether she had heard about me from Oliver, or from my parents. I assumed the latter.
“Mostly good things, I hope.”
“All good things. So nice to meet you.”
I smiled - the big, false smile that I had learned to put on at my parent’s gatherings, when I was forced to socialize. Then, abruptly, I said, “Wish I could stay and chat, but I’m kind of exhausted. Better head home. Good to see you again, Oliver. Nice to meet you…” I realized that, since Oliver had never gotten around to introducing us, I still didn’t know his wife’s name.
She told me, filling in the hanging end of my sentence. I forgot the name almost immediately. I spared a glance at Oliver, whose expression was unguarded and somewhat distraught, then turned away and started walking with a slight spring in my step, feeling strangely elated. I relished the soreness in my muscles, the lazy satiety of the recently-fucked. I didn’t care about my wrinkled clothes and messy hair. I didn’t care what he thought of them. I didn’t care, I didn’t care, I didn’t care.
“Elio!”
Footsteps behind me, jogging. I slowed down, but kept walking for several more paces - out of spite, more than anything else - before I finally stopped and turned. Oliver caught up to me, a little out of breath.
“Oliver,” I greeted again. I looked over his shoulder. “Where’s…?” Shit, I really had forgotten her name.
“Oh, she’s waiting in the car. She’s been on her feet all night. I said I just wanted to make sure you were OK.”
I blinked at him, feigning polite befuddlement. “Do I not seem OK?”
“Elio!” He laughed - exasperated, not amused. He opened his mouth to say something, then hesitated, then at last continued, “You don’t seem very surprised to see me.”
I shrugged.
He frowned, then pulled a face and jerked his shoulders in a little mockery of my shrug. He was starting to get pissed off. “Are you drunk?” he ventured.
“I’m fine. Just tired, like I said. I’ll see you around.” I turned away from him, suddenly eager to escape.
“‘See you around’?” he quoted disbelievingly, reaching out and grabbing my shoulder - the first time he’d touched me in over three years. “Just wait. Stop walking away from me.”
“What do you want from me, Oliver?” I asked, wearily.
“I want to invite you over for dinner,” he said, brandishing the offer like a challenge. “I’m not just here visiting. I got offered a teaching post at Harvard.”
I softened a little at that. “Congratulations,” I said, quietly. “Really, that’s wonderful news.”
He nodded, relaxing a little as well. “We bought a house in Cambridge. We’re still fixing it up a little, but the kitchen works fine. Please, Elio. Come over for dinner. I promised your father I’d reach out to you once we got settled in.”
I was just starting to waver when he said that last part, and my body went cold again. I promised your father. So, his desperation - his chasing me down the street - was all just in service of a promise to someone else.
“Thank you for the offer,” I replied stiffly. “But I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Oliver’s face clouded in anger, then. “You’re acting like a child,” he snapped. “I haven’t done anything wrong, Elio.”
I had been ready for him to say something like that. “Have you told her about us?” I asked.
His expression was answer enough.
“So what you actually want me to do is come over to your house and lie to your wife for you.”
“Oh for god’s sake. I’m not asking you to lie…”
“Alright, then. So if she asks me about that summer, I should tell her about what we did every night.”
“Or you could behave like a civilized human being, and…”
“Lie?”
“Leave those parts out!”
But he seemed to know that he was defeated. His arms were folded across his chest - partly as a defense against the cold, and partly as a defense against my accusations. He looked angry still, but also very upset, and the sight made me a little sick to my stomach.
“Like I said,” I replied at last. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.” I considered saying later, but it would be too familiar, too much like an inside joke. “Goodnight, Oliver.”
I walked away. This time, he didn’t follow me.