Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

After Vimini died, Oliver returned to B. I had been awash in tears since I’d heard the news. Suspended in the near-unreality of grief, hours, nights, entire days had been lost to a rain-smudged haze. At some point I gathered myself enough to decide to make Venetian cookies for her family before the funeral. I was at the store looking for raspberry jam when I saw him.

I thought he was a mirage. Didn’t widows always swear they saw their beloved in a crowd, on the street, in a passing taxicab? That the face of a stranger has a way of warping into the face of the one we lost, then seamlessly back into a stranger, leaving us more marooned and desolate than before? It must have been that Vimini’s death awakened in me the moment I  had become a widow, and returned to me the most profound loss I had ever felt.

He was warm and golden and substantial, as strange in his cold, grey surroundings as a stalk of wheat shivering in a hail storm.

I stood in the aisle, fighting for breath, feeling flayed open and raw. I blinked, waiting for him to disappear, for a more congruous image to take his place. But nothing did. So it was him. There, at the counter, rumpled and red-eyed in a sweater, buying cigarettes.

Oliver.

He turned, and I realized I’d spoken his name out loud. Was he real after all, or had speaking his name summoned him, like an incantation that brought some mythical creature to you in your darkest hour when you need him most?

His eyes searched my face and he broke into a small, sad smile. His lips were chapped, and the sight awakened in me a fierce, protective urge. I wanted to run the pads of my fingers over his lips, smooth back his hair, check his forehead for a fever.

“Elio.” He seemed breathless, and his eyes continued to search my face as though I, and not he, were foreign and spectral and bound to disappear any moment.

“What are you doing here—I mean, I thought you were away at school!”

“Winter break,” I said, by way of an explanation. He continued to stare at me in that strange, searching way.

“I’m so sorry” I finally said. “I know she meant a lot to you.”

“A lot to us,” he said gently. By that, he meant she was meaningful not just to him, or to me, but to the entity created when we were together, a being which was better than either of us. (At least, better than me.)

“Elio, are you okay?” he asked abruptly.

I felt my body involuntarily stiffen. A fire was beginning to rage in the air around us— not the familiar and passionate fire of want, but an insubstantial chemical fire that produced poison and blocked your airways and made speech impossible and truth less possible still.

“I’m—hanging in there.”

“I only ask because you look like you’ve lost a lot of weight.”

“I guess that’s not shocking, dining hall food being what it is,” I managed. “Not exactly giving Mafalda a run for her money.”

“Right.” He tapped his pack of Gauloise against his palm and looked away. “Well, I should go freshen up and pay a visit to the family. It was—well, I have to go. I’ll see you at the funeral?”

Was he so eager to be rid of me? Here was proof of time travel: I could be 17 again in a moment, in the sweetest of summers, watching someone older and cooler and more beautiful swim laps around me in every sense of the phrase.

“I should be on my way home, too.”

I paid for my jam, didn’t collect my change, and biked furiously home.

When I got home, Mafalda watched me move about the kitchen with a mix of distrust and concern, like I was poring over a draft of my suicide note and not a recipe for cookies.

“You shouldn’t be riding your bike, topolino. Not without eating something. You know how worried your mother gets.

 “Lo so, Mafalda. I know.” I avoided eye contact and focused on measuring almond flour. “I’ll eat something later, ok?”

Mafalda sighed, but said nothing. I watched the tendons in my hand move under the skin as I poured.

I loved baking. This was the game of it: to touch it, to be around it, but to never give in to it, never allow it to win. Though sometimes it felt less like a game and more like a test. I felt the way a bank teller might, touching hundreds and thousands each day that could never be hers. Knowing how easy it would be for a bill or two or slip into a pocket and knowing all the same that to give in means your own ruin.

The whole illness was a game; a test; the feather I put opposite my heart on the scale.

Seeing Oliver had made me introspective in a way I desperately wanted to avoid. What would he think if he knew I’d spent the past two years in and out of hospitals, unable to finish a full semester of classes? Or that I hadn’t touched anyone since him, not because I wasn’t over him (although perhaps I wasn’t), but because I hadn’t even thought about it, and in fact hadn’t thought about much at all since the illness took hold?

I tried to focus on adding the right number of drops of food coloring to each batch of dough, watching the blood-red dye fade to a soft, nursery pink as I stirred.

I found myself staring at a bowl of chocolate, slowly melting on the stove. I felt a sudden and compelling urge to grab a spoon and eat it, burning-hot and straight from the metal mixing bowl. But wanting was something I knew well, and reasoning my way out of wanting anything at all was something I knew even better.

I grabbed a bottle of sparkling water and cracked it open. Like all things clear and bright, it promised the feeling of being clean again. By the time I finished chugging half the bottle, I had forgotten I had ever felt tempted to eat.

I finished baking, and slowly realized how badly my feet were aching, and how tired I was. Wanting something I can’t have has always sapped my energy. After all, I had napped nearly every afternoon the summer I met Oliver.

I awoke on the couch, my parents watching me intently from a chair across the room. “How long was I out for?” I yawned. “By the looks of your faces, you would think I slipped into a coma.”

My mother bristled. I knew I had to keep talking to stop her from launching into a pre-prepared lecture. I pulled myself into a seated position and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.

“I saw someone at the market today. Non indovinerai mai chi, you’ll never guess who.”

“Chi, Elio?” My father asked. with the barely-concealed impatience with which one bears a child’s game that has long since grown tiresome for all the adults in the room.

“Oliver.”

My mother softened, and sighed. She reached over to me and tucked a stray hair back into place. “Oh, our cauboi, he must be devastated. But it was good to see him, no?”

I shrugged. “He seemed well, considering.”

My father was silent. He carefully crossed his arms, seated on the arm of the chair.

“Maybe you should talk to him after the service tomorrow. Get coffee, or ice cream. I’m sure he’d want to know what’s going on with you.” My mother continued.

‘What’s going on with me.’ What a lovely little euphemism for having lost my mind, I thought.

I couldn’t possibly sit down and talk with him. it would be too painful. I looked to my father, hoping he, who knew what had happened between Oliver and I, might gently reign in my mother’s expectations. He offered no such help. He didn’t even meet my eyes.

“Maybe,” I conceded. I pulled at a loose thread in my blanket and willed them to walk away.

“Have you eaten yet?” My mother asked, timidly.

I groaned and threw myself down with the blanket over my head. “If I had a dollar for every time you or Mafalda—“

“I’m not allowed to ask? We worry Elio, that’s all—“

“I’ll eat later. I promise, mama. Okay?”

“Okay.” She got up with a sigh and left the room.

My father watched her leave, then slowly settled into her seat. “It will be good for you to see Oliver, I think. Maybe he can— maybe what you shared will make him easier to talk to.”

“Papa, you’ve paid every specialist in the world to talk to me. What makes you think my—what makes you think Oliver will fare any better?”

“Elio, I’ve called in every favor from every physiologist, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, every Lacanian and Jungian I know. I even called the rabbi.”

I burrowed a little deeper under the blanket, my shame mounting “I know, Papa.”

He held out a hand, not unkindly. “Let me finish. The best they can do is study your brain and your body—or, in the case of the rabbi, your soul,” he chuckled quietly. “But Oliver can speak to your heart. At least, I hope he still can.”

Silence sprouted, and multiplied with frightening speed until the room was full to the ceiling with silences.

“Give it a try, will you?”

Chapter Text

The next day was the funeral. I got out of bed, felt the usual head rush as I stood up (a moment of blackness, the world fuzzes back into focus like a television set on a rainy night). Instinctively, as I had done every day since we threw out the family’s bathroom scale, I went to the mirror. I stripped off the baggy pajama pants and soft, worn T-shirt I’d slept in and looked.

I’d long since stopped feeling satisfaction from the growing negative space in my reflection; now I needed to look just to stave off the panic. (Most things were about staving off the panic at this point.) I counted the slats of my ribcage, cupped my hipbones, and felt the hollows beneath my collarbones, then I took a few steps back to examine the gap between my thighs. But the panic still flared up and blazed. My chest bones seemed less visible. I still couldn’t wrap my hands around my thighs at their widest point. I’d caved yesterday, and had eaten some dinner at my mother’s urging. By a rough calculation, that brought the day’s intake to about 600 calories.

Disgusting. Like a needle scratching over the same section of record again and again, the word repeated. Disgusting disgusting disgusting.

I tried to see myself with a fresh gaze, the way a painter closes then opens his eyes to see his work more accurately. How had Oliver seen me, yesterday at the market? What did the Elio of his memory (assuming he ever thought of me. Or, I should say, of my body) have in common with the Elio he had just seen?

I could say with some certainty that I was paler. The objective and obtrusive fact of my bones, visible and jarring, also suggested that I was thinner, though that was somehw hard to see. Had I had dark circles back then? Were the crescents of my fingernails that unnatural blue? It felt almost inconceivable to me that I’d lived without them. Was there really a time before I was always cold, always huddled in blankets and bruising where my bones knocked together? The last time I saw Oliver, I had been tan and warm to the touch. I had been electric, so aware of every sensation. I could swim for hours, let alone go jogging without being afraid of blacking out on the beach. And my mind, which had always moved faster, and with more strength and certainty than my body ever could, constantly spun and unraveled and reconstructed everything I had done or said that day. It was hard to believe I had ever had the energy.

For the briefest moment, I missed that version of myself. I mourned for all the things I could no longer do. But such moments were always elusive, and just as soon as the feeling came, it dissipated. Sure, 17-year-old Elio had energy. But he also ate. In front of people. In restaurants. Without counting the number of bites or referencing a calorie counting book (to be fair, 19-year old Elio didn’t have such a book anymore, but rather I had committed all relevant entries to memory) or cutting each bite into microscopic pieces. The thought of doing any one of those things today filled me with horror and shame. Oh, God— the Elio of two years ago walked around shirtless. In public. I felt retroactive humiliation; the helpless, cringing embarrassment of watching someone with an absurdly inflated self-image.

How brazen I was, how I acted as if my body had ever been something worthy of display. Not that I had ever truly believed that. Rather, like I did with my Jewishness, or my inability to make friends, or my need to overthink every word I spoke, I had always desperately tried to act okay with my body, to act out an easy relationship with it, so no one would ever wonder what was underneath that ease. How poorly concealed my self-loathing had been, even from myself.

More importantly, how had Oliver tolerated to sight of my body back then? I think of all the excess, the pounds that have since disappeared (many of them, but not enough) and marvel at how he looked past them.

Disgusting disgusting disgusting dis—

The moment of self-reflection was over. The thick shadow of shame had settled firmly over me once more.

It occurred to me, once I had taken a shower, that I hadn’t worn a suit in over a year and it was highly unlikely I had any that fit me. I pored over the contents of my closet, and the closest I had to appropriate mourning attire was a black button-down and the bottom half of a black suit. And that wouldn’t even stay up around my waist.

I began to cry, not out of distress at the degree of my weight loss, or for anger at myself for failing to consider this situation beforehand, but because a perverse twinge of pride kept sneaking into my thoughts. Vimini was dead, her life had been snipped short as unceremoniously and as irreversibly as cutting a loose thread from a sweater. The pain of it was so deep, and so immediate. And yet, my mind kept turning to the inches of extra fabric I was clutching. That, and the repeated, invasive thought that grief provided a great pretext for not eating. My G-d, how small my life had become, and how inward-facing.

Pathetic. Selfish and pathetic. A girl is dead, and all you can think about is how your clothes fit. It should have been you.

It should have been me.

I shook my head as though to clear it, wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, and set about punching an extra hole in my belt. Better than nothing.

The funeral was well-attended and held in an old but, by Italian standards, rather unassuming Catholic cathedral. A priest said a few words, then her godmother gave a short and hastily pre-written eulogy. Then, in a twist seemingly specially designed to compound my agony, Oliver mounted the steps to the altar.

My heart doubled in pace. I hadn’t even seen him enter the sanctuary. He was red-eyed but clean-shaven, in an impeccable charcoal suit and black tie.  He cleared his throat. His voice was hoarser than I remembered— was he dehydrated from crying? Or had I misremembered the sound? And was this the beginning of the slow erosion of memory that would eventually take him from me entirely?

“I’d like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi for allowing me the honor of speaking about their daughter. I knew her for only a short time but, as Vimini’s life itself taught us, the brevity of something has no bearing on its importance.

“I am tempted to use phrases like ‘beyond her years’ in speaking about her. That would be inadequate— frankly, Vimini was wise beyond anyone’s years. Certainly beyond mine. But more than inadequate to describe her wisdom, her candor, and her integrity, such clichés would be inaccurate. Vimini’s genius had nothing and everything to do with how relatively little she had experienced of this world. She knew, and I have no doubt knew from her first breaths, a tireless need to find the good in the world. Beyond her desire for knowledge, her incredible memory, her ability to look at information in novel ways, she had that truly remarkable quality: a desire to use her intellect to be good to others. A desire to teach others. About what she felt was beautiful in life. About themselves.

"And her goodness made you want to be good, too. I’ve never been much of a letter writer— In fact, I’ve never been very good at keeping in touch with people I care about at all. But Vimini wrote me every day, and every day I wrote her back. Not out of a desire not to disappoint a child, nor out of obligation because of her illness. I wrote to her because I wanted to be as good as she thought I was, as good as I became when I was around her.

“When I met Vimini, I was staying in B. to work on my first book. I had also recently met the love of my life. I had every excuse I could want to be self-obsessed and walled-off. And any other time, with any other person, I would have been. But not with Vimini. I don’t know if it was her kindness, her startling honesty, or her fascinating mind, but I found new and surprising goodness within myself because I met her. I have never loved someone so quickly, nor found myself so able to protect and share with and learn from that person. Rather than distracting me from my work or my lover, I became smarter and more loving because I had her friendship. Everyone I have ever shown true compassion to, has Vimini to thank, not me. And when my wife gives birth to our first child, all that I have learned about being a father will be from Vimini.

“I guess that’s really what I meant to say with all these words: that the way she loved people created more love. That’s it, I think. To create more love.

“Thank you all for listening.”

By the end of the speech, he and I (and many others) were crying. I had nearly forgotten that Vimini was the one to tell me that Oliver liked me more than I liked him. I remembered the way he took her hand and walked her to the water’s edge. Knowing her had made him better— and, in no small part, knowing her had made him mine. A new, more intense grief ripped through the tissues of my heart.

How had I ever thought I might be over him? I loved the way his suit hung on his broad shoulders. I loved his words— even the awkward ending to his eulogy, an ending whose bluntness reminded me of “Later!” and all the ways he had tried to hide his shyness. I even loved his tears, the silver sheen they gave to his eyes.

After a few more prayers, it was time to say my final goodbye. There was a line of mourners that led to the open casket, and Vimini’s parents— who could be described less as stoic and more as wrung dry of any further tears— stood, probably heavily sedated, beside her.

Friends and relatives, including many of her classmates, lost in frills of black and soaked in tears, gave her cold hands final kisses. I began to hyperventilate with the realization that this would be my last chance to thank her for how she had led Oliver to me, and for being something like a friend or a little sibling, which were relationships that I wanted and could never figure out how to make.

When my turn came, I forced my hands to steady and pressed my lips to her cold, waxen forehead. “I hope you knew that without you, I have no idea who I would be. I would never have had—would never have known that he—that I could...” I tried to whisper something meaningful, but the tears wouldn’t stop coming and I was tripping all over myself.

“She knew.” And there he was.

I couldn’t help myself; I collapsed into him and sobbed against his shirt. He led me away from the casket, shushing me gently.

“Of course she knew, you goose.” He murmured, holding me against his chest like a child.

“How can you be sure?” I whispered.

“How else? We talked about you behind your back constantly.”

I laughed through my tears.

“Do you need to get out of here? We can leave after the burial.” he asked me.

“...I was going to go to the wake. I have cookies to bring the Bianchis.”

“Oh, Mafalda’s cookies. I can’t miss out on those.”

“Actually, I made them.”

“You? The Elio I knew didn’t know a teaspoon from a tablespoon!”

“A lot’s changed.” I smiled and shrugged.

“Yes. I see that.” His smile faded. “Can we drop off the cookies then go get some space? The piazzetta, or ice cream or something?”

“Yeah.” There was no way to say no, not to him. Not when I’d cried against him and heard his voice scraped raw with grief and realized I had never, not for a second, stopped being his. “That sounds good, yeah.”

Chapter Text

I ordered a cappuccino. He ordered a tea and I watched in something like amazement as he added milk and honey to it without thinking. A drop of honey spilled on his finger, and he licked it off instinctively. There was something thrilling; foreign and faintly erotic about the abandon with which his tongue lapped up sweetness. I couldn’t remember the last time I added milk or honey to my tea. With all that had changed, I still admired his ability to be okay with things, casual about things, that I would have agonized over.

We chit-chatted as we looked for a table that got direct sunlight. How were my parents, and how was the second book coming along, and had I read so-and-so’s latest poetry anthology? We lapsed into a silence that felt comfortable enough as we sat down. I sipped my cappuccino, grateful for the modicum of warmth that spread throughout my body.

I could feel his eyes on me as I looked down at my hands on the table. Oh, how I’d missed being seen by him. How I even missed being too shy to look back, to see if the look he gave me was a glacial precursor to laters and maybes , or his kinder gaze, which was a minor miracle each time it fell on me.

“Elio, you have to tell me what’s going on.”

I continued to stare at my hands. What if I looked up and found his vitriolic, red-bathing-suit glare? What if I told him and he rolled his eyes and fired off a dismissive “Grow up”? Or worse, if he took this as confirmation that I was sick and twisted and that what we shared must have been sick as well, some temporary madness peculiar to B. and the peculiar people that live here?

“Are— are you sick? Your parents won’t tell me anything. Elio, I can’t lose her and then—“ he broke off into a hoarse glottal stop.

I hazarded a look up. His eyes were shining, swimming at me as if I were viewing him through a fish tank. Suddenly self-conscious with my eyes upon him, he blinked rapidly, and his eyes returned to their somewhat steely neutral gaze.

Lying wasn’t an option, not when he looked at me like that and my throat was filling with words faster than I could shove them away. Knowing I couldn’t avoid the truth entirely, I opted for a smaller, less lethal confession.

“I left school,” I said.

“Oh.” He was clearly not expecting that. “Your father seemed to think you were happy at NYU.”

I shrugged.

“Well, what are you going to do now?”

Die, I guess.

“Find a college that will transfer my credits and finish my degree, I guess.”

He raised an eyebrow. The Elio he knew never guessed about the future— about anything. The Elio he knew deliberated and worried and debated and changed his mind again and again, yes. But he was never stranded and grasping at thin air like this person, whoever he was, who happened to share that Elio’s name and house and memories.

“Can I come over for dinner tonight?” He asked, somewhat timidly.

“‘Course. You know the professors never miss a chance to entertain. The more the merrier.” I said with forced levity.

“Good. I need to catch up with Mafalda and Manfredi.”

“And Anchise…” I said pointedly, slyly. I remembered the look on the old gardener’s face as he eyed the scrape on Oliver’s hip, the want I saw in him that echoed the want in me.

He grinned for the first time since I’d seen him in the market; thinking, no doubt, of Anchise applying the salve to his injured hip, and probably remembering when I had mouthed that same hip, running my tongue over the medicinal taste. “And Anchise.” he echoed.

Dinner with Oliver. The thought of it had once thrilled me. That summer, I had waited for him to sit down at every meal, barely breathing because I was being choked by that cluster-bomb of want that could be satisfied by the touch of his hand or the sight of his smile, but which threatened to detonate and throw everything I thought I knew into chaos if he failed to materialize. Each second was agony, because if he appeared I wouldn’t be able to breathe, wouldn’t be able to speak without planning each word in advance; and if he didn’t appear, I may as well never breathe again, never speak again, because what was worth saying that he couldn’t hear it?

Now, the thought of dinner with Oliver was torture, purgatory, Hell itself. There was no way, absolutely no way I could eat in front of him. Not when I could remember clearly what I looked like the last time he saw me naked, and the shame and revulsion I felt still overwhelmed me and made me blush just thinking about it. On the other hand, I couldn’t let him see me stare at a plate of vegetables for an hour while my parents tried to nag and cajole me as covertly as possible. Or, if I brought myself to put anything in my mouth, he would take one look at the bizarre rituals I needed to keep the panic away and he would run, convinced utterly that I was sick and delusional and probably not worth the trouble.

The dilemma was solved for me, after a fashion.

By the time we ambled back to the house, talking again about nothing, avoiding each others’ eyes, dinner was about to be served.

“ La muvi star! ” My mother cried, embracing Oliver and taking his face between her hands. “As handsome as ever. And how is your wife?”

“If you ever saw how out of my league she is, you’d have to find a new nickname for me,” he laughed.

“We’ve missed you, Oliver. It’s a shame we couldn’t see you under happier circumstances.”

He nodded solemnly, and my mother kissed him on the cheek and passed him off to my father, who immediately asked about his writings, inquiring whether he’d kept his poker game sharp, and so on. It was clear that my father was doing whatever he could to keep his eyes or thoughts from wandering to me, or the invisible thread between Oliver and me, though he obviously wished to ask, or subtly divine, what we had said (or did , for that matter) to each other during out little chat on the piazzetta.

My father passed Oliver down the receiving line to the kitchen, where Mafalda could barely stop herself from crying out in joy at the sight of him. I pretended to pick up and casually flip through a book, spying through the door both for what Oliver was saying and for what Mafalda was cooking.

I caught a glimpse of Oliver grabbing a cherry tomato from a salad bowl, and Mafalda playfully slapping his hand away and chiding him in Italian. He was smiling, genuinely smiling, a green-bathing-suit grin. My chest filled with longing— I wanted him, but even more, I wanted the ability to make him smile like that again.

Oliver slipped out the kitchen door, most likely off to the garden to find Manfredi and Anchise, while Mafalda set the table.

I eyed the food. Pasta e ceci (no), fresh baked bread (absolutely not), and a green salad (doable, I supposed). My chest loosened a bit.

My parents sat, then me. Then an elation, greater than anything I had expected, filled me as Mafalda set an extra place at the table. Oliver emerged from the garden and took his spot across from me, just like he used to.

I filled my plate with salad and poured myself a glass of ice water. My father, knee-deep in a tangent about Hegel, gave me a pointed look.

My mother cleared her throat. Oliver, picking up on the sudden tension, also turned his attention to me. I could see him quickly deducing what was wrong, his eyes flitting from my mothers face to my plate to me.

I needed a diversion, and quickly. “Oliver,” I said brightly. “I forgot, we have some apricot juice in the fridge. It’s not as good as the fresh-squeezed, of course, but I think we could all use a little summer right now.”

“Oh. Yes, that would be nice. Thank you, Elio.” I had thrown him off, but behind his look of gratitude, I could see wheels still spinning.

I pushed my chair back with a loud scrape. If he could keep looking in my eyes, I felt certain he would know. I threw my napkin on the table and stood up.

And everything went black.

Chapter Text

I was only out for a matter of seconds. This was not my first time losing consciousness. Usually there was a bit of warning, the swirling of my vision as it melted and slid away from me. This time I just dropped. I pried my eyes open and Oliver was kneeling over me.

For just a moment, I thought I must have been dead, and furthermore that I must have been wrong about the existence of heaven. One of his hands was under my head, and the other was on my wrist, feeling for a pulse. He wasn’t looking at me, though, but staring at my parents, and yelling, though the sounds hadn’t yet cohered into words.

“Hey,” I croaked. “Hey. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

He looked down at me, eyes wild. “Elio? Can you hear me?”

“Yeah. I’m alright. I stood up too fast, is all.” I started trying to pull myself into a seated position, but he gently pushed my shoulder back down.

“Did you hit your head? Are you having any double vision? Stomach pain? Dizziness?”

Stomach pain and dizziness? Only for the last year or so, I thought, and almost laughed.

“Oliver. I told you, I just stood up too fast. Didn’t sleep last night. It’s alright,” I forced myself to smile. “I just need a nap, I think.”

He looked to my parents, expecting backup. But they were used to this and knew a trip to the hospital was more hassle than anything.

My father offered his hand and I pulled myself up slowly. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was afraid that Oliver might excuse himself and go running out the door the second I got out of earshot, but the need for sleep overtook my worries. I collapsed on a daybed in the hall and fell into half-consciousness, daydreaming of honey and tongues and the sun on his green bathing suit.

Snatches of conversation floated over to me, half-whispers that stopped me from falling into a sound sleep despite my efforts to block them out:

“...going on with him...”

“We wanted to let him tell you...”

“...how long...?”

“...did he tell you?”

They lapsed back into silence, or at least quieted down enough that I lost what was left of consciousness. When I awoke, I cracked open one eyes and saw Oliver sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, watching me as if I were a coma patient.

Once he saw I was awake, I sat up and hugged my knees.

“Sorry to scare you,” I said softly.

“That’s alright,” he replied, so quietly I could almost convince myself he hadn’t spoken at all.

“I’m okay, I really am. I just didn’t get much sleep, and I haven’t been drinking enough water…“

“It’s been a hard time for all of us.” Did he think all this was a product of grief? Was there a chance to play it off as a temporary sadness and allay his fears? “Did you remember to eat breakfast this morning? I can bring you some food. Wait here—“

“No, no.” I said, aiming for a tone that would convey that I was going to eat soon enough, but simply didn’t want him to be inconvenienced. But my refusal was just a touch too frantic, too quick.

“What, are you trying to lose a few pounds?” He asked like the very notion was ridiculous. He was obviously making a joke, or at least an attempt at one, but I winced visibly nonetheless.

His forced smile faded, and he looked at me with a new intensity. The truth was out.

“Well...” I said, and shrugged. No point in lying now. I could practically see him drawing connections: the way I looked at food, comparing it to some after school special he saw on American tv, or some article he read in a psychoanalytic journal.

“So that’s what this is? You have....anorex—“

“Don’t—say that word. Please.”

If I heard him call me that, it would confirm how sick and sad and small my life was. I had fallen so far from the person he knew, which was the best version of me. 

Maybe my parents had given up, and replaced their image of me with a frail, pathetic caricature. Snd maybe I had given up, resigned to the fact I would never be anything but disgusting and disappointing and far, far too needy. But he couldn’t think of me that way. Not him.

He suddenly stood up and walked through the living room to my father’s study, full of purpose.

He said that word, then he immediately got up and walked out.

Well, that couldn’t have been much clearer, I thought.

In just a minute or two, he was back. He stood over me, and he felt taller than he ever had. His face was stern but his eyes were nervous.

“That was my TA. I’m cancelling my flight home.”

Chapter Text

“Oliver, you can’t do that. You have work— you have a wife.” He had obviously completely lost it. Well, at least I wasn’t the only crazy one here.

“Christmas break is coming. My TA can cover until then. I just need some time to figure this out. We can fix this.” He was getting frantic.

“‘Fix this’?” I arch an eyebrow.

“We can help you. There are doctors,”

“I’ve been to doctors. More than enough for one lifetime. Half of them don’t think men can even have this, the other half can’t figure out why I do it, much less how to get me to stop.”

His breathing slowed. He looked at me intently. “Elio, it doesn’t have to end like this.”

“End?” All it seemed I could do was repeat what he said. Never in my life— not when he retrieved my lemonade glass from where it had fallen, nor when he had held my gaze and eaten the peach on my bedside table— had anyone shown so much care for me. He was at once entirely dominant and incredibly gentle. I didn’t deserve this kindness; I could barely understand it. 

“Elio, if you keep doing this, you will die. Judging by what I’ve seen, you don’t have much longer.”

I found it difficult to swallow. Of course, I had known this in the abstract. But something about his frenzy and his tenderness— it reminded me of the way he sucked my cum from that peach. Both gestures showed me his desperation that I, or some physical trace of me, continue to live on.

“They have resources for this kind of thing—hospitals—in the States. I can call people, I can—“

It isn’t until I speak that I realize I’ve begun to cry. Not breathless sobbing, but a silent and consistent flow of tears chasing each other across the sharpness of my cheekbones and to the floor below. “I’ll do it.”

His eyes shine back at me. “You’ll do it?”

“Yes. God, yes. Please, take me back with you.”

If Oliver was my parents’ favorite houseguest before, he was their personal savior now. There was a lot of bustling as Oliver called in favors and booked plane tickets and my parents spoke to my doctor in hushed tones. In all the commotion, no one seemed to care much whether or not I was eating, or else they were sick of expending the energy to fight with me about it and were eager to foist that job onto some doctor back in the States. And I was certainly not going to take it upon myself to eat. If I would be forced to stop soon anyway, I might as well get the most possible mileage out of my remaining days of freedom.

The only problem is, I don’t want to stop.

When Oliver had broken down and frantically told me it doesn’t have to end like this, I had been overcome with tenderness for him. I would have agreed to anything if it meant he would keep looking at me like that, like I was something precious and unique he wanted to preserve for all eternity. It made me feel that he must, whether he knows it or not, still love me. But wanting to feel that way, or to keep his attention on me, or just to take away that horrible frenzy in his voice as he worried about me, isn’t nearly equivalent to actually wanting to change.

It takes a few days before Oliver finds a psychiatrist he trusts (and who didn’t immediately scoff at the idea of a male anorexic.) A university hospital in New York agrees to take me the second a bed opens up, and I grimace imagining how gravely he must have described my condition to convince them to admit me so quickly.

I quietly pack a bag and wonder what eating disorder treatment (a phrase I could barely tolerate wrapping my mouth around) is going to entail. As I pack my belt, with its inexpertly-bored extra holes to accommodate my shrinking waist, it hits on me again that gaining weight is probably on the top of that list. I instinctively turn to the mirror to scrutinize and measure my body in hopes of staving off the panic. Ribs, hipbones, sternum, thigh gap, tendons in my hands. Their presence, though inadequate (always, always inadequate) is reassuring. I turn back to the bed to retrieve my shirt, when I see Oliver standing in the doorway. I freeze.

My mind screams for my hands to come unstuck, throw the shirt over my head and hide myself from his gaze before I die of shame. But I can’t.

His face, usually so guarded, so careful to misdirect attention, is plainly crestfallen.

“Oh, Elio,” he breathes. Slowly, gingerly, he pushes away from the doorframe, enters my room, and approaches me. He pulls me in for a hug, wrapping his arms around me gently, like he’s afraid of breaking me. His large, steady hands skim along my bare back, feeling every ridge and protrusion of spine and ribcage. He reaches up to my neck and feels the knobs of vertebrae, the tendons, as hesitantly as a concussed person feeling the back of their head for blood.

He lets me go and scrubs a hand over his tired face. I slip my shirt on, though there’s hardly a point when he’s already seen, already cemented the image in his mind of my weakness, of the strangeness and fragility of my body.

He sits on the edge of my bed. “I really, really want this to work, Elio.” He whispers.

Chapter Text

It is, in some way, a relief to land in JFK and see New York again. I had truly enjoyed my time at NYU, or at least had enjoyed being in the city. I had loved the constant, anonymous bustle. Solitude in a crowd is as reassuring as one’s own pulse to a habitual loner like me. I had loved—yet was surprised by how shy and out of place I felt in— the synagogues, the jewish bakeries and delis. I had discovered that going to school in New York isn’t like going to any other school— it thrust you right into the vagaries of real life, shoulder to shoulder with every other subway commuter and fast-walking pedestrian.

My parents, with plenty of hugs and kisses and murmured well-wishes in a handful of different languages, had dropped Oliver and I at an airport in Venice. I felt a pang, less the pain of nostalgia and more a peculiar deja-vu, a flashback to the moment when my mother had dropped us at the train station for that final trip to Rome. Our bags on our shoulders, nervousness at the coming separation buzzing in the air, the bland, pleasant pop music on the car radio— all of it so familiar, yet so dark, inverted as a photonegative. My heat began to hammer as the plane took off— though whether that was nervousness or my low iron levels asserting their presence, I couldn’t tell— but eventually settled down and allowed me to sleep for most of the eight hour flight. I fought the instinct to lean against Oliver as I drifted off; would he have read that as childlike weakness, an improper reference to our past, or as a simple need for comfort, physical and emotional? Still, when he woke me with a gentle shake of my shoulder to tell me we were almost there, I was fitted into his side as snug as a baby on a new mother’s hip.

We sleep in the Marmara Hotel for a night, before Oliver takes me to the hospital in the morning. I ache when I see our twin beds—I never thought I would sleep in the same room as Oliver again, and somehow that thought was preferable to sleeping in the same room as him, but in a separate bed, a white-gold ring on his finger, and myself so far removed from my body I doubted I could even enjoy his touch.

It's around dinnertime when we check in, and I had yet to eat all day. I could see Oliver trying to formulate the question in his mind, once or twice even saw him begin to open his mouth. Something about seeing him, my lover, my protector, a man who was always so sure, at a loss for how to speak to me—me, who wanted nothing more than the sound of his voice, now and forever—spurs me to talk instead.

“Would you like to order room service?” I ask in a small voice.

He blinks at me, with shock and just a bit of mistrust, like maybe this is a setup to some cruel and elaborate joke. “Room service?”

“Yeah. You haven’t eaten since the flight, right?”

“Well—no, I haven’t.”

So I order a salad, and he orders risotto. When it arrives, I wondered what the bellhop thinks of us—we clearly aren’t related, and with our separate beds, how ginger and fatherly Oliver’s glances were, and my body’s complete lack of sexual attractiveness, I assume we seem as far from lovers as two men can. The thought depresses me; I am no longer the type of person Oliver could even conceivably want to sleep with— if I ever was.

I smile weakly at the bellhop and grab my meal off the cart. As Oliver digs in, I tear my lettuce leaves into pieces, then tear those pieces in half, and in half again. I must look like I’m committing a particularly grisly vegetable murder. I know I should be at least faintly ashamed of my bizarre, ritualistic behavior, but it calms the panic, and that’s all I can think about.

I become dimly aware of the scraping of Oliver’s spoon pausing. I can feel his eyes on me—and oh, how I missed the anticipation that had fluttered in my chest when, once upon a time, the feeling of his glance on me held a million possibilities. Now, I know it just holds pity.

“Please eat.”

“I’m trying.”

“I’m not going to leave your side until you’re safe. You know that, right?”

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that all the words and touches I gave him, every gesture I fumbled my way through to bring him closer to me, was all a wan and inadequate substitute for what I wanted to tell him: that he’s the one person I would want to watch me die. The one person I had to say goodbye to. And maybe that’s what we’ll do here. I just never thought it would happen like this.

Chapter Text

I don’t sleep. As the sun rises, I lay with my eyes closed and wait for the sound of his waking.

I let him gently shake my shoulder and pretended to just wake up.

“Good morning, Elio.”

“‘Morning.” I mutter back, voice thick with disuse.

“I had forgotten how much I like to watch you wake up.”

I sit up.

“Careful, professor. I’m the one who acts horribly improper in this relationship, remember?” I say wryly.

His face turns sad.

“Elio, do you—“ He clears his throat. “Is this because of us? I mean, because of what we did?” He was flustered, and not making much sense, but I knew what he meant.

“You mean, because of what that makes me?” Oliver was the first man I’d ever been with, and the shame of how badly I had wanted him still flared up at times.

“What I made you,” he says softly. “If I had…been with someone like me at your age, I would have been a wreck. I probably would have drowned myself in your backyard pool, if I were you.” He smiles grimly, as though he were making a joke, though I know he isn’t. Drowned in the backyard pool, which he used to call Heaven. The idea isn’t so unappealing. I picture my body floating like Ophelia, in his billowy blue shirt, skin waxen and colorless.

The shame felt like drowning sometimes, like it filled my lungs and tried to kill me quietly.

“You didn’t make me anything, Oliver. I didn’t do anything with you that wasn’t already inside me. You know that, don’t you?” I pause. “If you regret what we—“

“No. I don’t regret anything. I just hate the thought that I had anything to do with the pain you’re in.”

“Does your wife know what we did?”

His silence is answer enough.

“Would she want you here if she knew?”

He speaks firmly, but looks down, not meeting my gaze. “I don’t think now is a good time to have this conversation. You have a difficult day ahead of you, I don’t want to make it any more complicated than it has to be.”

“No, Oliver. If this is going to hurt you, I don’t want you to do it. You should go back to your wife, that’s what’s important—“

“That’s what’s important?”

“It’s not your job to play nursemaid to your old flame. This is my problem, you didn’t cause it and you’re not obligated to fix it!”

Silence falls heavily, palpable and cold as snow.

He clears his throat. “Well, they aren’t expecting us until one, which gives us plenty of time to get breakfast.”

“Breakfast?”

“Yes, breakfast. The meal customarily eaten in the morning. Surely you remember it.” There it is: the flat, disinterested, borderline venomous look he used to give me, the one I promised myself to never provoke again.

Two years and forty pounds and miles and miles of distance hadn’t changed his ability to crush me with a glance. I still wanted, more than anything, the benediction of his eyes when they fell on me kindly.

Chapter Text

He keeps his level, almost malicious gaze on me throughout breakfast (cereal and skim milk for me, waffles for Oliver, then several strong coffees as he waits for me to finish) and on the cab ride over. As much as it chills me, I also remember that sometimes malice and boredom are the only masks he can wear that allow him to meet my gaze when he isn’t sure he can. But that was true in sunnier days, and I know cold and dark have ways of destroying all that was built during summertime.

The hospital is a modern and imposing fortress on the Upper East Side. We take the elevator to the eighth floor, and a balding middle-aged doctor with a small smile and tortoiseshell glasses greet us. “Perlman?”

“Yes, this is Elio Perlman. I’m Oliver Weiss, I’m here to see him get settled.” Get settled. As if this place, with its antiseptic smell and flecked tile floors, is a new apartment. I usually love when he speaks in Americanisms, but this just leaves a pit in my stomach.

“I’m Dr. Kauffman, I’m the head physician on the eating disorders unit.” He shakes Oliver’s hand, then mine, in a way I’m accustomed to when I’m with my father. “You’ll see me every Tuesday and Thursday for rounds.”

He leads us around the unit, talking over his shoulder without checking if we’re following, and with the practiced cadence of someone who has done this many, many times. His certainty that we must be following him makes me think of Orpheus, and the ghostlike lightness of my steps proving me to be Eurydice.

“So first we’re going to weigh you and check your vitals, do an EKG, blood and urine panels. Then we’ll take you to your room, and we’ll discuss your treatment plan. Sound good?”

He isn’t actually looking for an answer, so I don’t provide one.

He leads us around, either not hearing or ignoring the intermittent intercom blasts, voices fuzzed beyond recognition summoning such-and-such doctor to this or that unit. He shows me the “group room”, a bland, carpeted void with a few chairs and a sofa. The patients’ rooms, which surprisingly look like they belong in a home, not a hospital. Each room has a bed, a dresser, a cork-board hanging on the wall, and a bathroom attached. “That stays locked until the patients have made sufficient progress,” Dr. Kauffman notes. 

“Oh, I don’t— I mean, I would never—“

“Everyone would never do that—until they would,” he replies.

Oliver looks stricken. This is all too overwhelming, too sick, too wrong. I can practically see him suppressing the urge to run. I want to find some way to assure him: this is too much for me too, if you want to run, I’d understand, you’ve been too kind already. I think about squeezing his hand, but I fear that physical contact will only make him feel more chained to me, more confined.

To my surprise, it’s him and not me who reaches out. He rubs my shoulder, a gesture easily misinterpreted as jocular, chummy. But I remember the last time he touched me like that. What had he said, all those years ago? I touched you. To show you that I liked you. Is that what he wants to tell me? That still likes me, no matter what I am or have become? Is that enough, to have his affection, when I’m not sure I’ll ever have his love, let alone his respect, ever again? It will have to be.

I sign some forms, and Oliver sits gingerly in a plasticky visitor’s chair while Dr. Kauffman examines me. I get my blood pressure and pulse taken laying down, sitting, standing. I grit my teeth as I have to remove my shirt for the EKG. My vision swims every time I change positions, and after giving a few vials of blood, I’m too dizzy to register how bizarre it all is.

“Would you like Mr. Weiss in here to we discuss your treatment plan?”

I shake my head.

“Well, I think these test results are going to be pretty sobering, Mr. Perlman. Your body mass index, which is a measure of your—“

“A measure of body size, which is weight over height squared— or weight over height squared multiplied by 703 if you’re using imperial units.”

He smirks at that. “Quite right. As you’ve clearly done your homework, I’ll level with you, Mr. Perlman. Your BMI is 15.1. You probably know that anything below 18.5 is considered underweight to a clinically significant level. And that anything below 16 is considered severe emaciation. You’re orthostatic, your resting heart rate is extremely low, you have ketones in your urine. Your fingernails are blue, your eyes don’t focus. You have some lanugo growth on your arms, face, and neck. In short, your body is eating itself, shutting itself down in an attempt to stay alive. Do you have any questions about any of this?”

I shake my head.

“Very well. We’ll show you to your room, an orderly will go through your luggage, and then you’ll meet with your therapist and nutritionist before afternoon snack. Oh, and due to your orthostasis and low blood pressure, you’ll be on a limited movement protocol for the foreseeable future.”

“Limited movement protocol?” I raise an eyebrow. The doctor, with his brusqueness and straight-to-business demeanor, doesn’t seem the type to speak in oblique corporate terms. It must be something rather unpleasant.

“Quaint euphemism, isn’t it? It means no stairs, no outside groups or activities, and you’ll have to use a wheelchair if you’re leaving the unit.”

“Excuse me?”

“When you leave the unit for meals, or visitors, or to go to the phlebotomist’s on Wednesdays, a nurse will push you in a wheelchair to avoid you losing consciousness. Your bone density is probably greatly diminished, so a fall could mean a serious fracture.”

“And no walking means no burning calories, right?”

“Oh, I do so love the difficult ones,” Dr. Kauffman smiled and shook his head. “Yes, that is an added bonus.”

I like him. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to be the least bit thrown by the idea of a man being admitted to his eating disorder ward. For another, something about his gruff directness and the sly humor that slid into his voice when he called me one of the difficult ones reminds me of my father. Although, in all honesty, my father is lost as I am when it comes to this illness. Nothing like Dr. Kauffman, with his air of puncture-proof certainty. My father could never talk to someone walking behind him without turning his head, the way the doctor had done. He would need to check and recheck and examine everything. Like, I suppose, me.

“Mr. Perlman. One last thing,” he begins, leaning back in his office chair to look at me. I am suddenly conscious of how ridiculous I must look, sick and out of place and trying not to shiver in my open-backed hospital gown. “I’m not your therapist, so I’ll try to avoid prying into your brain. It’s not my department. But I think I should say that I hope you’re here for yourself. Because you grasp the seriousness of your illness and want to live. Not for anyone else— like your family, or Mr. Weiss, for example.” He tilts his head toward the door, indicating Oliver, sitting and waiting beyond it. Is that an oblique way of saying he knows what Oliver and I are to each other? Or a garden-variety warning that I would have to be more engaged, more enthusiastic about being here?

“Honestly, I’m not certain I want to be here at all.”

“It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be bearable, most of the time. But it will be worth it.” He stands to exit. “I’ll let you get dressed. Oh, and there was one thing in your physical exam that surprised me. Your heartbeat isn’t arrhythmic. It’s beating in perfect time. That’s a relief, huh?”

He leaves, and I find myself smiling. Not only does it buoy my spirits to think that some part of me was still functioning, it reminds me of what my father had said: Oliver can speak to your heart.