Chapter Text
It wasn’t any sound in particular that stirred Micol to wake up in the middle of that warm October night. At least she didn’t think so, and when she listened for noises, there was nothing.
She blinked, eyes adjusting to the dark, and glanced to her husband’s side of the bed: it was empty and untouched.
It must’ve meant that he was still up with their dinner guest, Oliver’s old friend from Italy. The men had probably lost track of time, reminiscing about their youth. Or maybe Oliver had gone to drive the guest back to his hotel. Micol hoped he hadn’t, no matter how deserted their New Hampshire back roads were at that hour of the night. Between the three of them, they had already finished a large bottle of wine over dinner, and when she had bowed out after dessert, Oliver had opened yet another one.
She had said nothing about the wine but had suggested that Oliver invite the guest to stay for the night. The sturdy couch in Oliver’s study at the back of the house was perfectly fine to sleep on. That’s where her mother had always stayed when she’d come to help take care of the boys when they were little, and she’d never complained.
Micol sat up in the bed and stilled, trying to sharpen her hearing.
Nothing.
She reached for her robe and glasses and got up. Slipped past the closed doors of their sons’ bedrooms and went downstairs.
It was dim and quiet in both the kitchen and the dining room, where the guest had played piano for them earlier in the evening. It wasn’t every day that they had touring musicians over for dinner.
“Micol, we need a fifth plate at the dinner table,” Oliver had announced at the door, coming in from work that evening and storming in with an uncharacteristic flare. “This is Elio, Professor Perlman’s son. You remember me telling you about him, right? He’s in town on a tour and came to surprise me at work.”
Oliver had beamed as though he’d found a long-lost treasure and beside him at the doorstep had stood a lean young man in his early thirties with bohemian curly hair and a short, well-groomed beard.
Micol did, indeed, recall Oliver telling her about Elio.
After his summer in Italy, Oliver had come back home subdued, a mood one might’ve associated with heartbreak and an unlucky love. So naturally, Micol had pried about local girls, first in a roundabout way and when that hadn’t yielded anything, she’d asked him straight up. They’d been in one of their off-phases, so it wasn’t an accusation. She simply wanted to figure out what was going on.
He’d kept saying there was no one, but eventually a note signed by someone called Chiara had fallen out from between his papers and he’d pretended perfectly that she had meant nothing. Micol had decided to believe him and by that time, he’d already shown signs of coming back to life. He’d received letters from the family he’d stayed with, and it had given him something else to do than wallow in heartbreak.
His most animated stories had been about the Perlman family anyway: The professor who’d generously shared his knowledge; his wife who’d welcome Oliver into their home just as warmly. And their son, who had been seven years Oliver’s junior but who had unexpectedly proven to be a worthy companion.
“We translated poems together, first into Greek and then back to Latin,” Oliver had told Micol, sitting in his kitchen, polishing his shoes in the morning of his first lecture of the fall semester. “And biked to town almost every day. In the afternoons, while I wrote in the garden, he transcribed music and sometimes played the piano when we took a break. He knew everything there was to know about the styles of different composers. I wish I could’ve written it all down. I would’ve been a walking encyclopedia by the end of the summer.”
Oliver had explained it all matter-of-factly, but Micol had known him long enough to know that this was a remove from his usual friendships. In college, he’d hung out with the track and field team or on the tennis court, where no one knew who his Heraclitus was. And in grad school they’d had a circle of friends, mostly hers, where the men knew the latest football scores but had never heard of the Pantheon.
Micol had thought that Oliver preferred it that way, compartmentalizing his life into manageable sections, but maybe he’d missed sharing this side of him with someone.
And so she had been grateful that the friendship with the professor’s son had continued by correspondence. Over the fall months, as the letters kept arriving, Oliver had seemed more relaxed, like he’d been coming into himself.
Then he’d gone back to Italy on the Christmas break, and while he hadn’t said anything after coming back, the letters had gotten fewer come spring. Maybe they’d had a falling out; maybe Elio had found new friends during the fall semester and hadn’t been around as much. At seventeen, you make friends faster than at twenty-four. Micol couldn’t remember making a new friend herself since college.
A few years later, after their children were born and were old enough, they had taken a trip to Italy as a family. Micol had finally seen the place Oliver had talked about so much that it had all but reached a hallowed status in her mind.
Elio had not been there, however, which seemed to have come as a surprise to Oliver and he hadn’t been able to hide his disappointment. Professor Perlman had explained his son’s absence away with a busy schedule and overlapping summer plans. There had been a hint of an apology in the professor’s tone and he and Oliver had exchanged a look, but Micol had understood. Single and an only child, Elio probably didn’t feel the need to coordinate his plans with anyone, least of all with strangers or people he hadn’t seen in years.
And so Elio had lived on in Oliver’s stories, but Micol had never met him in person, not until tonight.
“That’s a beautiful piano,” Elio had said to no one in particular when he’d placed his leather bag by the door and spotted Micol’s old heirloom instrument.
She had insisted that he would be more than welcome to play it, but he’d resisted, coy, and had only given in after Oliver’s sincere request: “Please do.”
The boys had fidgeted at the table as teenagers do, hungry and waiting for their dinner, and Micol had had to nail them to their spots with her death stare from the doorway.
Oliver, on the other hand, had been transfixed from the first note.
“He used to play that all the time that summer,” he had explained to Micol when he’d come to help her with the roast beef in the kitchen.
It must’ve brought a lot of memories back to him, Micol had deduced. When he’d been younger and life much simpler. Those had been some of the last years when everything had still been possible for them. A lot of doors seemed closed these days, a lot of decisions made and set in stone.
Micol stood in the dark of the dining room, contemplating going back upstairs, when a shard of a warm glow caught her eye.
It came from the direction of their porch, filtering in through the lace curtains draped across the glass pane of their front door. The lace stenciled patterns on the wall as Micol wrapped her robe tighter around her waist and took a discreet peek at the scene outside.
The men sat out front on the wicker couch. Facing each other, half-empty wine glasses on the table, deep in quiet conversation.
Micol glanced at the time on her grandfather’s clock on the wall. It was late. Elio should get going soon, she thought. He had mentioned about taking the train the next day, to continue his tour. He was on the last leg of it, only two cities left before he’d return to Paris where he lived. He’d entertained them with anecdotes from the first half of his tour, about an unexpected reunion in Hartford with his old enemy from conservatory; about a squirrel let loose in a symphony hall in Boston right before the show was about to start.
In his presence, Oliver had transformed into a relaxed being, instead of the workaholic that became testy whenever Micol gingerly enquired about how his current manuscript was progressing. Elio’s arrival had created a gentler atmosphere in their home and thus Micol had decided that she liked him. He kind of also reminded her of a French exchange student that all the girls in her class had had a crush on in high school.
However, if Oliver kept Elio up too late, it would surely affect his concert the following night. Micol’s sister had been on the swim team when they’d been younger and on meet days, their entire family had functioned according to her daily routine. It had to have been the same every time, or she would’ve been off her game.
Surely the men had just lost track of time and would thank her if she went out to remind them.
Micol set her hand on the brass of the door handle and was just about to turn it, when Elio reached toward Oliver with his left hand, tenderly cupping Oliver’s cheek.
At first, Micol wondered how Oliver let him come so close, because it looked rather intimate. Then she stilled, ice water freezing her veins, and stared at the guest that had charmed her all evening with his music and the sparkling conversation.
He was now caressing the jaw of her husband, and Oliver still didn’t stop him.
The look in Elio’s eyes was unmistakable and Micol swallowed against the tightness in her throat.
The memory was something that she’d pushed down, but it jumped up to the very surface now. Years ago when they still lived in New York, she and her mother had witnessed Oliver coming in from work and sorting through his mail by the door. It had been after that first Christmas break after Oliver had come back, in early February. Micol remembered, because she’d vehemently assured Oliver that yes, her mother was only staying in their one-bedroom apartment for the weekend and would certainly leave before Valentine’s Day.
Oliver hadn’t known that the women could see him from the kitchen via the hallway mirror and his eyes had lit up, thumb petting the corner of a particular envelope.
Micol’s mother had craned her neck. “Whose letter is that? Is some woman writing to him?” she had muttered to Micol, peeling the potatoes they were going to have for dinner. “You two should really get started on the wedding planning before something happens. With men like him, there’s always more than one taker.”
Micol had known it was a letter from Italy as she’d picked up the mail herself earlier that day. And at her mother’s suggestion, it had flashed through her mind for a moment: the possibility. But Elio had been practically a child, only seventeen. It hadn’t seemed likely, so she’d brushed it off and gone back to stirring her gravy.
But now? The men were both in their thirties, and seven years wasn’t seven years anymore.
Oliver reached up now and enclosed his hand over Elio’s, holding it to his face under the moonlight. Time stopped, and Micol’s heart pounded like the heaviest bell of a cathedral, her ribcage barely able to contain it. She didn’t want to see any of what was unfolding on the porch, but she couldn’t look away either.
And then Oliver wrapped his fingers around Elio’s, removed the hand from his cheek, and placed it gently back on the couch between them.
Micol breathed again.
Elio pulled back. Held his rejected hand together with the unsinned one in his lap, and Micol almost felt sorry for him. Maybe he’d carried his fondness for Oliver with him all this time, only coming clean now after fifteen years. It could easily have started for him back then already. She remembered the adulation and the way one looks at twenty-somethings, when one is grasping at the first straws of adulthood.
The ache of rejection brought echoes from Micol’s own youth and she couldn’t bear to watch anymore. Oliver had let Elio down tactfully, she was sure of it, but it couldn’t have been easy for Elio either way. The chances were low that he would stay the night after that.
Micol sneaked back to bed, and surely enough, a car started a short while later. She nodded on and off between consciousness and featherlight slumber, waiting for the car and Oliver to return, and pretended to stir from sleep when he eventually did.
“Are you still awake?” Oliver asked when he slipped into the dark bedroom and noticed her shuffling in the bed.
“No, I was asleep,” she lied.
Oliver undressed, got under the covers with her, and kissed her goodnight as usual, but turned away before she had time to snuggle her way into his arms.
Micol watched his motionless back, and wondered whether the long-lost but newly rediscovered friendship between the two men would survive the blow it had gotten that night.