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1.
“There’s nothing like the Island,” Noah said.
Our lead cellist had been saying this for weeks now, since his summer share in one of the big houses on Ocean Walk had come through. “Especially in August, when the beautiful people are in town and the party lasts all summer long.”
We descended into the subway at 66th Street. The Columbus Circle rush hour parted before Noah’s cello case like the sea before Moses, and we managed to shoehorn ourselves onto the southbound 1 train before it left the station.
While I wedged myself between the graffitied door and the armpit of a sweating, heavyset Wall Street type, Noah continued, “Why don’t you come with us? You’re not expected back in Paris this summer, are you?”
“I told the Conservatoire I’d be back early for the fall term,” I hedged.
As Noah knew, I’d taken a leave of absence to make my Stateside recital debut at the Met’s January showcase, after which I’d joined the East Coast’s best and brightest at the Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society. I was planning to see out the season’s concerts, but hadn’t counted on the Manhattan summer being this oppressive — sweltering and static, heat coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk, tenement walls exhaling dirt and grime. In the subway, this microcosm of the city, the air was almost unbreathable, the commuters swaying glassy-eyed under the flickering light, as if we were being ferried across the Styx.
“Ah, one city’s much like another in the summer, even Paris: too many people, not enough ventilation.” Noah’s spectacles had fogged in the humidity, but behind the cloudy lenses I could see his blue eyes crinkling. “You have a couple of weeks of vacation coming up in August, don’t you?”
“Won’t your hosts mind?” Not to mention Noah’s sometime boyfriend, an older attorney who would occasionally whisk him off to the Hamptons for the weekend.
“Not at all. The house has twelve rooms, and there’s more sleeping space in the den.” Noah winked. “That is, assuming anyone has time to sleep.”
I’d never been one for the East Coast party scene, but I had to admit Noah’s descriptions sounded tempting: an island haven, where we could finally breathe freely. I’d been keeping a strict routine in New York, faithfully adhering to the Conservatoire’s classically-rigorous practice schedule. After all that, to take the summer off, and escape the city!
Of course, the summers of my youth had been spent in B—., on Italy's Ligurian coast, where the Alps plunged into the Mediterranean and the air was thick with the scent of apricots and new grass. My parents’ house, with its tree-lined driveway, its garden and balustrade, the orle of paradise, the tilting gate that led to the beach and beyond.
I had been too busy to visit them last summer, the year Marzia got married to a doctor who was everything I wasn’t. The year before that, I had been in the Cote d’Azur, trying to make it work with Mathieu. In my absence, my parents continued gamely as before, evaluating the proposals for summer interns from their graduate applicant pool, selecting one lucky candidate to welcome into their home.
It was a welcome that I myself had extended to a tall postdoc from Columbia University, who’d arrived on that tree-lined driveway eight years ago: billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, tanned skin everywhere. He’d been mine that summer. We’d shared a grassy berm and adjoining rooms and my old bed; a too-brief time on a fantasy island that had been just large enough for the both of us.
And then he’d left, and afterwards all summers, and our house and B—. itself, were never the same. Like I would never be the same.
I returned to the stifling confines of the New York subway car and Noah’s curious gaze. Not for the first time, I wondered if he liked me in that way, and if so, whether that was why he’d asked me to join him. I didn’t know how I felt about it.
Then I shrugged to myself. Did it matter? Long Island was a very far cry from the berm in B—. where Monet once used to paint, but maybe it would be a refuge from the stifling heat and complex demands of the city and all its constraints.
Noah clearly sensed I was weakening. He squeezed my shoulder with his free hand, meaningfully. “Look, people visit Fire Island to discover something new. It’s never let me down. I bet you’ll love it too.”
2.
August saw us arrive on Fire Island by ferry. We were welcomed by Scott and Tom, the couple who’d rented the large home overlooking the dunes of Ocean Walk. The open-plan house with its dramatic sloping frontage came with a back-story — formerly owned by the principals of the Broadway play The Fantasticks, it was famous for an accidental threesome, when a handsome young architect moved in on the project and also into the master bedroom.
Noah’s attorney also showed up at the house, unexpectedly. To give them some privacy, I went exploring the Island on my own.
A historic sanctuary, from a time when same-sex activity was still illicit and gay communities highly policed; home to queer writers like Patricia Highsmith, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote. Thirty-two miles of car-free, pristine sand, centuries-old maritime forests, far removed from the noise and distractions of the city.
It was almost like I was seventeen again, alone with a book and a bicycle under a cloudless summer sky. The air was freshly-blown from the sea. I could pretend I was as alone as I’d been in Liguria; I could even have pretended I was alone with Oliver, as I’d been that last summer in Liguria.
Eight years was a long time: enough to acquire to two children, and a tenure-track professorship. A life he’d pursued, a life he’d clearly preferred. And as for me, I had Bach and my students and the Chamber Music Society. I’d made it enough. Over the years, I’d lodged him in my permanent past, stuffed with memories and mothballs like a taxidermized trophy which I’d dust off in between my occasional lovers to reminisce or rail over and then put back on the mantelpiece when I was done.
Deliberately, I steered my way back to Cherry Grove beach, where I spent the rest of the day watching barely-clad swimmers frolic on the sand.
It fascinated me, seeing the beautiful men, the women with their arms around each other’s necks, lovers openly embracing as the waves lapped the shore. They were comfortable in their own skins and in each other’s arms in a way I’d seen sometimes in France and Italy but not in America.
Once again, I heard Oliver’s voice in my ear, something he’d said to me eight years ago: My father would have had me institutionalized if he found out about us. I knew not everyone enjoyed the same loving, laissez-faire upbringing which I’d taken for granted. And Noah, not eight hours ago, as we set foot on the jetty of Great South Bay: “We’ve always had this island.” Now, I finally realized what that meant, and how important it was.
When I returned to the house at Ocean Walk, it was dinnertime. The sun had set and the August moon was shining down on the brightly-lit deck. A barbeque was underway, with a dozen young men opening beers and pretending to set the table and generally getting underfoot. Scott was in command at the grill, wearing an apron and nothing else. He winked at me and handed me a bottle of Bass Pale Ale.
Noah and his attorney were snuggled on the far end of the deck. I was pretty sure I didn’t like Noah in that way, but all the same the sight was unsettling. This island wasn’t a place to be alone, and I was, in the moment, unequivocally alone.
I eventually withdrew indoors. Our hosts had a Steinway, and I took refuge behind its keys. First, I essayed the last allegretto movement of Beethoven's D minor sonata, which I’d been working on for a masterclass in the fall. The first measures went smoothly enough, but — thanks to the afternoon of sun, or the last hour of drinking — my right hand was stiff on the cadenza passage of sixteenth notes that preceded the recapitulation, and eventually I steered to a discreet halt.
“Hey. Hey, gorgeous!”
Slowly, I became aware that this wasn’t a commentary on my playing, but that I was being addressed. I looked up from the piano to confront my interloper.
Tall, lithe, wearing a blue shirt that was open in front, and green Speedos. Tanned skin everywhere. Hair the same color as a Greek god’s. His chiseled face was untouched by years and time. He could have been Oliver’s younger brother; he could have been Oliver at seventeen, the same age I had been when Oliver and I first met.
“I’m Micah,” he said, drawing out the syllables as if speaking to someone beautiful and stupid, after I had gaped silently at him without asking his name or telling him mine.
I got ahold of myself. “How old are you, Micah?” Internally, I winced to hear the schoolmarm’s tone in which I’d asked it.
To his credit, the boy didn’t seem put off. “Old enough.”
“Is seventeen old enough?” I asked, and the kid turned bright red as my guess hit home. I also remembered I was now the same age as Oliver had been when we first met.
“Depends on what you’re into. Me, I like older men.”
“I know the feeling.” I thought about Professor Jean-Marie at the Sorbonne, and Mathieu. And, of course, Oliver, always Oliver. I was nowhere near drunk enough to deal with the memories, let alone this conversation; I rose from the piano, finished my beer, and headed back outside in search of another.
Micah followed me, the remnants of his embarrassment still flushing his face. I couldn’t say it wasn’t attractive. “Have you ever dated anyone younger?”
“My first girlfriend. After her, no.” Albeit that Marzia had always been older than her years, smarter than I’d ever be, and wise enough to leave me for my own good.
“There’s always a first time,” Micah said. In the open, the moonlight limned his lithe young body and highlighted the endowment under his trunks. Thankfully, my board shorts provided me with better coverage. “What’s your name?”
Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine, Oliver’s memory whispered in my ear. I shook the temptation from my metaphorical sandals and introduced myself with a formal handshake.
“Noah has the most gorgeous friends. You have such pretty eyes, Elio. No one should be alone at night on Fire Island. Are you lonely?”
What I was was horny, no thanks to him. I opened my mouth to tell this gorgeous boy that I was perfectly content as I was, but what I said instead was, “I am, but not for you.”
Around us, men were whispering and whooping, knocking back beers, caressing each other’s bare skin. Micah’s eyes gleamed in the low light.
I was horny, and not drunk enough, but I knew what I had to do: turn down the kid as gently as I could, and head to my bunk alone.
3.
I woke to the sound of fast breath, and skin on skin. For a staggering instant I couldn’t remember who I was in bed with — no! No, I’d sent Micah away — before I realized that the sounds were coming from the adjoining bunk.
I opened my eyes, and was temporarily blinded by the noonday sun as it streamed in through the open window and fell in bright squares across the floor. The sky outside was a blaze of blue.
Inside the room, in the next bed, Noah lay face up, the sheets thrown off, his eyes squeezed shut, his bare torso bent backwards as if it were a bow. Between his thighs, a dark head, bobbing slowly, lavishing him with lips and tongue. The undulating movements of their bodies in the sunlight, were accompanied by the sighs of pleasure— yes, oh, yes — that had roused me from my sleep.
It was too early for this, and it was long past time for breakfast. I scrambled out of bed, grabbing my clothes as I went.
In the massive open-plan dining room, a late brunch was underway. I put my shirt on and joined the sleepy, hungover partygoers at the picnic table. Eggs, bacon and coffee made me feel more myself. In that vein, I flexed my right hand, and decided not to chance the Beethoven again. Instead, I sought refuge in my usual Bach, selecting the crowd-pleasing Suite No. 2 in B, to a round of generous applause.
“Play some Broadway next,” Scott suggested, explaining that impresario Jerry Herman had been a resident on Fire Island. I played I Am What I Am from Herman’s La Cage Aux Folles with what I considered appropriate panache.
“Glorious! As luck would have it, there’s a Birdcage-themed pool party on this afternoon at the Botel, you can play this there!” Tom exclaimed. That hotel, built by former Ziegfeld girl Peggy Fears, was an avowed Fire Island icon, as was the afternoon ‘tea dance’ that had originated there in the ‘60s. Everyone was invited, of course, as per the Fire Island convention.
When we finally made it out to the Botel in our cabaret outfits — I’d borrowed a pair of angel wings to wear with my swimming shorts — it was immediately apparent that there would be no opportunity for show tunes. A deejay was spinning Studio 54-esque funk records, and the scantily-clad tea dancers crowded around the famous pool to show off their moves.
If I couldn’t play piano, I might as well drink. As the afternoon waned, Noah found me propping up the bar, having consumed enough of Fire Island’s famous rocket fuel and the Botel’s cabaret-themed cocktails to make the world fuzzy and pink around the edges like it was about to catch on fire.
“There you are! I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding us, Elio.”
Belatedly, I remembered that grenadine didn’t suit me. “Just trying to give you guys some privacy,” I said, summoning two more grenadine cocktails for the hell of it, one for each of us.
“That’s so sweet! But unnecessary. Spencer was, uh, actually hoping to get to know you a bit better,” and, drunk as I was, there was no mistaking the speculative look in Noah’s eye. Well, that answered the question about whether Noah liked me in that way; at least it sounded as if Noah’s boyfriend did.
And how did I feel? Maybe it was the alcohol talking, but I couldn’t say I wasn’t at least flattered. I’d never before considered a threesome, but it seemed that on Fire Island, anything was possible. And that there was a first time for everything.
Of course, I’d had my first time with Oliver, a first time that had been everything. He’d taught me that there were no taboos in bed; over the course of that summer, he’d helped me cast them off one by one. If he were here now, would he approve of Noah’s romantic offer? Would he willingly surrender me to another man’s embrace; would he want to watch?
Noah must have seen the conflict play out across my face, because he patted me awkwardly on the wing. “No hard feelings,” he said. “Maybe you’ve already got your eye on someone here? That gorgeous blond last night seemed really taken with you.”
I swallowed my drink, remembering Micah’s blue eyes and the nearness of my escape. “He’s too young, it wouldn’t be right,” I said, just as Oliver had tried to convince himself eight years ago.
What would I do if Micah pressed his suit with me, as I had pressed it with Oliver — sending him anguished mash notes, meeting his conciliatory I’ll meet you so far and no further hug with famished kisses and a shameless crotch grab? Would I finally give in, as Oliver had surrendered to my blandishments at last?
The sun was setting. As the deejay changed the record, I looked out across the pool and saw him under the Botel’s iconic blue and red canvas: the height, the blond hair, the tanned skin, the same blue shirt as last night. The long, downward-flowing lines of him that echoed my first and forever lover.
In another quirk of the universe, the song that was playing was also familiar. The apocalyptic tones of Robert Butler — who’d given life to that ‘80s anthem, Love My Way — were raised in a tune from this new decade:
This day is not my life
The passing time is not my life
The thorn that's in my side
Is all these scenes that we regret
The wasted words we can't forget
Shame, will shake this house
Shame, will shake this house
He swayed with the music; he lifted his arms, lifted his face into the light, and suddenly I couldn’t feel my fingers. The grenadine sloshed out of my glass, the world tilted alarmingly on its side.
On Fire Island, anything was possible.
Eight years had changed him like a purifying fire, had put silver in his hair and cut glass into his cheekbones. But I would have recognized him on any dark night in the teeming world.
Oliver.
Somehow, I got my legs under me and staggered into the open. The other partygoers faded into nothingness around us. I didn’t dare take my eyes off him lest he vanish into the air, into thin air.
He squinted somewhat as I approached, trying to place me, his expression distant, as if we’d met somewhere he didn’t care to remember, a questioning look in his blue eyes, an uncomfortable puckered smile on his mouth, as if preparing to tell me that I’d mistaken him for someone else. Then he stopped, shaken.
“Good God — Elio!”
It was the wings that had thrown him off, he said, that and the beard; he petted my furry face as if I were even younger than I’d been that summer. Then he folded me into his arms and embraced me like he had on that train platform in Cluzone.
Just like that time, he let me go too quickly. This time, I was ready, and released him on my own. I managed to step back without falling over. My skin burned from where it had too-briefly pressed against his: brow, breast-bone, everything in between.
“How long has it been — eight years?” Maybe he’d been counting, too. “Just look at you! What are you doing on Fire Island?”
I didn’t recognize my voice. “Taking a break from the Chamber Music Society in New York.” I shouldered my courage, which at this point was mostly Dutch, and asked, “How about you? Are you here with your family?”
“No. They’re back in New Hampshire.” He pursed his lips, hesitating as the sun finally sank under the horizon. He murmured, “I need to tell you…” Finally, the confession, in the dark, under the stars: “I’ve left Dartmouth. I’ve left my wife.”
He said it in the same flat way as when he’d told me he was getting married — a flatness that was part defiance, part guilt. This current bombshell landed exactly the same way, eight years later: a gut-punch. I managed to smile, sick to the stomach.
“When did you do it?” I could barely get the words out.
“Last month.” He paused; he saw what was in my face. In a rush, he exclaimed, “Why don’t you come to our beach house on Cherry Grove, come meet my friends, come have dinner with me. I’ll explain everything.”
“I’d love to…” It was a blatant lie. I was really going to be sick; I didn’t want to do it in front of him. It would remind me of that night in Bergamo when we’d been filled with too much grappa and scotch and a love we’d never have again. The cocktails lurched in my belly, and I held them down by sheer force of will.
I tried again. “I’d love to, but I can’t.” I meant: I couldn’t listen to him talk about his wife and meet his friends and his new girlfriend or new boyfriend and not feel anything. To the contrary, I felt every last thing: the rising moon, the 50 percent proof rocket fuel in my veins, the salty air on my skin. The aching gulf of eight long years that separated us.
“What? Why not,” he asked, puzzled. He’d forgotten, of course he had. Eight years was a lifetime ago, and yesterday was a blind and neglectful miasma, and tomorrow would be the clean slate he clearly desired. I wished I could forget, too; regrettably, I remembered it all.
Just when I thought this encounter couldn’t be more of a disaster, his companion showed up. Slender and brunette, wearing the tiniest of string bikinis, her uncertain smile reminded me of Chiara’s that night at the disco in B—., when they’d danced the night away in each other’s arms.
“Oliver, who’s this?” I felt it go through me like a hail of arrows, like incendiary fire: her proprietary hand on his bare arm, her dark, hesitant gaze; my teenage jealousy from eight years ago, and now.
Bile rose up my throat. “I’m no one,” I said, stiffly, and made my escape, into the dark and the stars that we once shared together.
4.
I’d never drunk Fire Island rocket fuel before. It was a lethal combination with the grenadine cocktails. My head hurt like it hadn’t hurt in eight years, when my teenaged self had woken in Bergamo, reeling from too much drink and from too much love. I staggered into the bathroom and puked violently into the bowl.
This time, though, there was no Oliver to hold my head and tenderly wash my face with water; no Oliver to kiss and — once I’d convinced him I was now entirely empty in all possible ways known to man — to get on my knees for, and drink down like a restorative.
Just as well, I told myself firmly, as I flushed the evidence of my shame away. Oliver was here on Fire Island, with a woman who wasn’t the wife he’d left me to marry, the wife he’d dated on and off but whom he’d never once mentioned when we’d been together. Perhaps he’d felt he couldn’t tell me about her; perhaps he’d thought I wouldn’t have understood.
Had he told her about me? I didn’t know what I wanted the answer to be. I also didn’t know if I wanted to see him again, or if what I wanted was to get on the next ferry and then the plane to JFK and not stop until I was back home in Paris.
I got dressed and picked my way over the sleeping bodies in the bedroom. Noah and his attorney were dead to the world, with Micah curled up at the foot of their bunk like a blond cherub. At least the severity of my hangover spared me from wondering whether I’d taken advantage of him last night.
I couldn’t face breakfast, or the morning sun. Instead, I made my way over to the Steinway with my coffee.
I could play the Arioso with my eyes closed, sick to the stomach and sick at heart, and I did that, my fingers finding the way on their own, back eight years and then forward again. Bach’s Capriccio, On the Departure of his Beloved Brother, for the sibling who was leaving for the front lines. Eight years ago, I’d played this piece for Oliver with the upbeat tempo of a young Bach, and then the cocksure, self-important takes by an imaginary Busoni and Liszt. Today I played it andante, a grieving elegy, a rhythm that echoed all the impending solitude of farewells and departures.
Of course, Bach had not farewelled his brother in this way, as if it was the last time the pianist would see his beloved sibling. But I played it as if it had accompanied the last time I said goodbye to Oliver, on the platform of the Stazione di Cluzone, before the train took him from me, never to be seen again. Until now.
Now, as before, the music summoned him. When I finally opened my eyes, I found Oliver standing in the doorway of the living room, together with half the house and a tousled, burningly-curious Micah.
“Can’t you just play the Bach the way Bach wrote it?” He’d asked this question in a different life.
“This is the way Bach would have written it if he’d thought he’d never see his brother again. Or,” and my voice was sour, like the contents of my unsettled digestive tract, “if he’d known Johann would return as someone forever changed, someone who hid things from him.”
Childishly, it pleased me to see this sally strike home. Oliver said, painfully, “You never did forgive me, did you?”
“Forgive? There was nothing to forgive. If anything, I’m grateful. I remember good things only.” I had heard people say this in the movies. They seemed to believe it.
“I hope that’s true.” He forced a smile. “Let me take you to breakfast, Elio. I seem to remember what it takes to cure your hangover.”
If you truly remembered, you’d recall fellatio worked pretty well. I didn’t say it, though. I also wasn’t sure I wanted to go to breakfast with him, but I wanted even less to face the curious questions of the gathered crowd.
We ended up riding our bikes to McGuire’s, a casual beachfront diner with a view of the Great South Bay. It was nothing like riding our bikes together down the winding lanes of B—., and yet it echoed all the same: the endless summer sky, the fresh air, the smell of his skin, so close and yet so far away.
We ordered juice and eggs; there were even apricots, though not the sweet tangy ones that still grew in my mother’s garden. My splitting headache eased, and I rallied a little. Against my better judgment, I said, “So, tell me what you didn’t get to last night. You tracked me down this morning so you could say it, didn’t you?”
“I came looking for you this morning because I wanted to see you,” Oliver said, prevaricating. “I didn’t like where we left it last night. Fire Island is the last place I’d expected to see you! You’re always jetting around the world: Paris, Milan, your tour with the Conservatoire… and of course your recital at the Met.”
Despite myself, I was flattered that he’d followed my career this closely. “I stayed in New York after the recital.” I hesitated, but curiosity got the better of me. “If you knew I was in the States, why didn’t you call?”
He blushed attractively. He was even more handsome than he’d been in his twenties, skin as smooth as it had been eight years ago, only a few sun spots on his hands. I wanted to kiss each and every one away. He fudged, like he always did: “You didn’t call me, either.”
“You know why I didn’t, Oliver.” He’d had a wife, a family, a home; I hadn’t planned to wreck any of it. It seemed he’d done that all by himself now, anyway. “You said it happened last month?”
“Really, it started last summer. I came to the Island for a conference, and stayed for Frank O’Hara. His poems changed my life. I went home, and looked at my scholarship — the last decade of my life, spent with people and philosophies that had been dead for thousands of years.”
“As opposed to a poet who’s only been dead for twenty-five?” Of course I knew about O’Hara, an American poet who’d been killed in a traffic accident here in the 1960s, and, as it happened, an unabashedly out man. “So you quit your job because you wanted to be a poet, like him?”
“That makes it sound like I fell in love with a dead man! No, I quit my job because I discovered I wanted more from life than teaching. It was like that summer in B—., that week in Bergamo, when we met writers and poets and painters. I saw that again on Fire Island last summer, and more.”
Of course there had been more. One didn’t leave one’s wife and family just because one wanted to change careers. I let myself see it: the young Adonis he must have met at one of the famous Cherry Grove tea dances, who would have taken Oliver into his slender arms and reminded him how sweet it was to make love to a man. I swallowed down enough of my jealousy to remark, “Sounds like the classic Island party.”
“Yes, like that party at the bookstore!” I realized he was talking about Bergamo. “The painters and writers who lived and breathed the artists’ life… And how they envied us from across the dinner table, staring at us — the young, the old, men, women, every single one of them, gaping at us, because we were so happy.” He paused; he couldn’t meet my eyes. “It was one of the last times I remember being so happy.”
It was the same for me: that dinner with Oliver’s Italian publisher, and before, climbing the Serio Falls in Valbondione, dancing on the Piazza Padre Reginaldo Giuliani to the Psychedelic Furs, kissing him beside the fountain on the Piazza Vecchia. I should have been gratified he’d felt the same, but I wasn’t. He’d left me the day after. It had been one of his happiest times, and he’d still decided to leave — choosing instead to get married, to live a conventional life with a conventional wife.
I became aware of an ominous rumbling under my breast-bone, like a gradual shifting of tectonic plates, slow-fomenting. But Oliver was still talking.
“Coming to the Island was like waking from a coma. You look around, and realize you’re sleepwalking through your work and life and marriage, and your wife has checked out years ago. Like that knight from the Heptameron, who asked whether it was better to speak or die? I had to speak, to act — to pull the plug, to wake up from the coma.”
I wasn’t sure I could believe him. Had his old life been just going through the motions, on artificial support? And if that were true, what about my own?
He paused for a long time, as if weighing something, and then met my gaze with some difficulty. Asked, very slowly, “Would you start over, if you could?”
Would I have wanted to find him single again like this, his marriage over, waiting for me, craving to be taken back to B—.? Both our lives on the same artificial respirator, marking time until we’d finally reunite and scale our way back to the Piave memorial? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t deny the part of me that wanted exactly that.
But the reality was this: Oliver might have had an artistic and sexual reawakening on Fire Island last summer, and decided to leave his old life, but he hadn’t once thought to look for me. He’d come back to the Island this summer to explore his new freedom, but not with me.
The rumbling, the fomenting, finally rose to the surface: an eruption of molten lava, a towering rage that could have razed the city of Pompeii to the ground.
“It doesn’t matter what I want. It never has. It wasn’t enough to make you stay eight years ago. You showed me what we could have had, the life we were meant to have, and then you left, and after that no one else could compare. And when your marriage ended, you didn’t call, you didn’t come looking — you’d forgotten! That’s the worst part: not that you left, but that you forgot.”
My headache had returned, brighter than the noonday sun. The words tore out of me as if they came from the core of Mount Vesuvius itself.
“You said I hadn’t forgiven you. But you never once said you were sorry.”
I’d managed to overturn my glass of water in my rage. He looked at me across the waterlogged table top, open-mouthed, his face set in lines of dismay that made him look older than his age. I had to look away; I glanced down, which was when I saw drops of red collecting on the water’s surface, like heaven was weeping bloody tears.
Heaven wasn’t weeping, it wasn’t raining, but blood was dripping — from Oliver’s nose onto his shirt, onto the table, an unstoppable rivulet of shame that echoed my own nosebleeds past, my own old shame.
I jumped up and handed him my napkin; a waiter brought him ice and a wedge of napkins. He bled into the napkins and held the ice to his face. “The ancients said it never hurts to be bled from time to time,” I remarked, the same thing he’d said when this happened to me.
Eventually, he managed to staunch the flow. He kept his head tilted back, exhausted. I leaned back in my chair as well too, and discovered my anger had become something else.
He mumbled, around the blood-stained cotton, “I haven’t forgotten. I remember everything, Elio.”
I wanted to believe him, I really did. But: “It’s no use.”
“Why not?”
He looked lost enough to almost make me want to comfort him, to go to him with a fresh napkin and clean his blotchy face. Almost. I kept my hands in my lap instead.
“Like you said, we were happy that week in Bergamo, that whole summer. Happier than I ever thought we’d be in life; happier than I’ve ever been again. And now we’re living the rest of our lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, afraid to use it up… We can’t go back to that time, Oliver. We found the stars together, you and I, when we were young, but it’s a gift given only once, because no one could survive it a second time.”
As I said it, I was still aware of that which almost never was, beckoning to me. We could never undo it, never unwrite it or unlive it; it was just stuck, like a vision of fireflies in a summer field towards evening that kept saying, You could have had this instead. But there was no going back, not with so many wasted years between us. All that was left to us now was to move ahead with our cotton swabs and our mothballed memories and the rest of our separate lives.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. His eyes were still damp; I’d never heard him sound this defeated.
I got the bill, a testament to how our old positions had reversed. “We should get you home. Can you ride, or should I call you a cab?”
He could ride, he said; he managed to walk, quite steadily, to the yard where we’d left our bikes. He reached for my hand to say goodbye, and I let him clasp it for old times’ sake. His parting shot: “I’m giving a reading tomorrow night — Frank’s work, and some of my own. Please come, Elio.”
5.
I went, of course. I wouldn’t have heard the last of it from our hosts and Noah and even young Micah if I hadn’t. Also, truth be told, I wanted to find out more about the man who had so thoroughly up-ended Oliver’s life, something I hadn’t managed myself.
“Frank dated the smartest, kindest guys, and shouted it from New York’s rooftops — in the 1950s, even! A true cultural icon of ours, gone too soon,” Scott said, shoving A City Winter and Other Poems into my hands.
The reading was at the Whyte Hall community center. I crossed wooden boardwalks under canopies of trees and past vintage cottages, to the small open pavilion where Fire Island’s newest poet was holding court. The afternoon sunlight haloed him like the traditional gold laurel wreath he would have received if he’d found favor from the ancients.
“I owe these early drafts to Frank O’Hara, dynamic leader of the ‘New York School’ of poets, a group that included John Ashbery, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler. The painters of the ‘50s and ‘60s used the title, but the poets made it their own.”
I had always loved the sound of his voice. Still laconic, with the nonchalant air that used to frustrate me, but now I recognized the depth of feeling in its undercurrents that maybe no one else here could.
His eyes shone with the same light he’d previously reserved for Plutarch. “Frank’s poems were a window into his intoxicating, immense love for life. As he said himself: Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous. His heart — and he wrote, you can't plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry— was always open; he was just grateful he got to drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much.”
A shiver went through me, despite the afternoon’s warmth. Had I ever thought him aloof? It was hard to believe indifference could exist alongside such passion, albeit that it was borrowed from a man who’d been dead for twenty-five years.
“Discovering Frank — discovering the world through his eyes — made me open my own heart again: to art, and to love, and to this great adventure of life.”
I stared at him. It was good that we were in a public place, or I might have been tempted to do something reckless.
The poem he’d chosen to read was A True Account Of Talking To The Sun At Fire Island, a charming, almost-hallucinogenic conversation between a poet and his muse. It was enough to inspire a dozen college professors to pick up their pen, and write, just write:
Just keep right on, I like it.
And don't worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on the jungle,
you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was
waiting for you to get to work.
And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won't be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me.
His own drafts were in the same vein: honest, colloquial, charming. “My editor told me not to give up my day job, but desperation’s the only way the work gets better,” he joked.
Afterwards, he introduced me to that editor: Mira Romaine, the dark-eyed woman from the Botel party. She was much more soberly dressed this evening, and had even accessorized with an armful of statuesque redhead. I shook her hand, feeling like ten thousand kinds of idiot.
“Beach party tonight,” the redhead said, “the biggest one yet! It’s a cool theme, too: The Land of Make Believe.”
I found Oliver’s gaze. “Let’s just have a quiet dinner,” I said, and Oliver nodded, blushing as if he’d been nervous of my answer.
We found a quaint place on the boardwalk, not far from the Madison Hotel, where we could watch the sun go down over the Great South Bay. We steered clear of more personal topics, wary after yesterday’s fight. Instead, we talked about safer things: my parents, my concert schedule, his boys. How a college professor’s salary seemed like extravagance now he had to wrangle rent and alimony on a poet’s meager advance.
An hour, then two. Two burgers, two cokes for me and a Rum-and-coke for him. Two lives on life support, fingers on the paddles, wondering if we’d have the courage to pull the plug and flip the switches and reach for the electricity that might shock us back to life.
The night was settling fast, the moon and stars bright in the bruised-black sky. We left our bikes and strolled out onto the white sand. Along the beach, in the distance, I could see colorful neon lights and hear the distant sound of 90s deejay mix: the Land of Make Believe was clearly in full swing.
“Let’s head that way,” I said, pointing away from the music, and he complied, hands in his pockets, walking a little ahead of me along a shoreline that was nothing like the bay of B—. and Van Gogh’s Starlight over the Rhone that used to remind me of unfinished summer business and unfinished homework and the illusion of summer months ahead.
“You know, we’re not far away from where it happened,” he remarked, finally, and then had to describe it for me: the 3 am party, the overloaded taxi stranded in the sand near Crown Walk, the young relief driver coming to the rescue along the pitch-black beach, not seeing the poet until it was too late.
“What a terrible waste!”
“Yes and no. He lived life to the fullest, he loved with all of his broken heart. Living in a coma, on a ventilator, tearing himself apart so he could feel nothing — now, that would have been a waste!” He shook his head. “I hope I don’t offend you. I’m sure your life is no coma.”
I wanted to tell him that what I had — family, Bach, students, occasionals — was enough. And they had been enough, at least before coming to the Island, and seeing him again.
Instead, I said, “No, a parallel life, from the one we could have had.”
Maybe every other regret I’d known in other lives suddenly decided to converge on this one. I had to fight them off. From the way his eyes clouded up, it looked as if he felt them too.
Like O’Hara’s beach taxi, we didn’t see the group until we were almost upon them: three young men and a girl dancing on the sand, bottles of beer at their feet, a nearby radio playing post-punk new wave rock. Perhaps, like us, they were also fleeing the Land of Make Believe party crowd.
“Join us!” the girl said, laughing, and we fell in to the beat. R.E.M., Nirvana, and then the Psychedelic Furs. Love My Way, our song about love without boundaries: that summer when we’d found it with each other. We found ourselves dancing, like we’d danced together drunkenly in the Piazza Vecchia eight years ago. I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol all day, but the night and Oliver’s closeness had the same intoxicating effect.
Eventually, the youngsters picked up their beer bottles and radio and headed inland. Considerately, seeing as Oliver and I obviously wanted to stay, they left us one of their beach mats, on which we sprawled, looking out to sea.
Oliver stared out at pattern the dark waves made on the dark shore and recited, from memory,
"I miss you always when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with tears that seem mine
although I never weep
and hold you in my heart with a very real
humor you'd be proud of…
if there is a place further from me
I beg you do not go there.”
The longing wasn’t just O’Hara’s; it floored me. Oliver continued, still in that contemplative tone, “One of his last poems, the one they read at his funeral, is about a captain setting sail to look for his lover at last. He says he trusts in the sanity of his vessel, and that if it sinks, it may well be in answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.”
Again, I couldn’t say a word. I thought he’d forgotten; instead, he’d held me in his heart, had recognized his feelings for me in another poet’s journey.
“I made a choice eight years ago. A mistake. It threw my life off course, and not just my life. Our kids are everything, but I shouldn’t have gone ahead with the wedding. I should have told you about her, I should have been honest with her from the start. It wasn’t fair to her, and it wasn’t fair to you, either.”
The revelation astonished me. But then I'd always assumed he would always stay in the marriage he'd chosen instead of me — he had always tried to be a good person; he was the best person I'd ever known. Maybe he would have stayed, too, if not for that visit last year to this island and the freedoms that could be found here, which included the freedom to redress a long-ago mistake.
He continued, “You know how happy I was that summer: smoking too many cigarettes and loving you too much. I told myself you needed the space to spread your wings, to live your own life free from anything that might hold you back. But really I was afraid of the life we could have had together. I was the idiot who didn’t understand what I was leaving behind.”
I should have understood it, too. He had left the best part of himself in Italy, as well as me. He would always feel its lack, like a phantom limb; he’d have no peace until he returned to reclaim it. Perhaps now he’d returned, he would also let himself lay claim to something else that had been left behind, together with the life he could have had and the person he should have been. And as for me, perhaps I would put aside my sufficiency of family, Bach, students — my own fear and my pent-up fury — and let him claim it.
I wasn’t holding my breath, but he wasn’t done surprising me. His voice shaking, he laid one last secret bare. “I didn’t come looking for you not because I’d forgotten. It was because I didn’t think you could ever forgive me. Because I didn’t deserve to be forgiven. I don’t deserve to have the life I threw away when I left you. I’m sorry, Elio.”
This was more apology than I’d received from anyone in eight years, maybe in all of my life; it was the truest thing anyone had said to me in this life. I couldn’t remain insensible to it. I said, to the stars and the beach and to Frank O’Hara, “Maybe you're right. Maybe you didn’t deserve to be with me before. But if you want, you can try to earn it now.”
His eyes shone in the moonlight. He took my face in his hands. The bowl of happiness was in my grasp, and I drank deep.
He kissed me on the mouth, we breathed each other in. It was the kiss of a lifetime, from another lifetime: the life we should have had if he’d made a different choice eight years ago. I could feel him start to unravel, the years and time slipping away, and I let myself go, too.
Eventually, he drew away. I could feel him shivering in the humid night, taste the salt on his lips as he said, “We missed out on so much.”
“We’re still the same, we haven’t drifted. We can still have that life.”
Our world might not have stayed the same as it had been eight years ago, but it hadn't changed beyond all recognition either. It was neither one nor the other, but something different, something new.
I took his hand. “Show me you truly remember, Oliver.”
When we were both naked, our limbs entangled, with no parts of his body that weren’t touching mine, I asked him one long-harbored question, and he laughed out loud.
“You goose, there’s been no one else. Not last summer, not now.”
It had been eight years, and in all that time, even with Fire Island’s freedoms, he hadn't made love to another man. He had saved that best part of himself for me.
I wasn’t going to waste it. I kissed him everywhere, and his body awakened to itself and to mine again — and I remembered, too. He was my secret conduit to myself, the catalyst that allowed me to become who I was: the steel pin that kept a soldier's bone together, the other man's heart that made us more us than before the transplant. I remembered what it was like to be who I was because of him, to be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer knowing whether it was his cock or mine that was in my mouth; remembered that realm I’d only found once before, with him, murmuring my own name as if it were his.
Elio, Elio, Elio.
“You were the best of all my days,” he gasped out, and came as well.
6.
It was early when we finally awoke. The sky was still mostly dark; the tide had come in, dampening the remnants of last night’s clothing that we’d used as makeshift blankets. The summer night was balmy, and anyway I didn’t feel the cold: at Oliver’s side, I was on fire again, with a fire that I’d not known in eight years. I wasn’t hungry, either, satiated by love, the food of the gods. We lay in each other’s arms and listened to the sound of the lapping waves, the eternal voices which had finally led us to one another.
As the stars began to fade and the sky above began to lighten, it similarly dawned on me that by returning to me, by my allowing him to return to me, I’d also let him return to me my true self.
The future lay ahead of us like the daylight on the horizon. He sat up, and mischievously addressed the rising sun:
"You ought to look up more often.
And always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt."
“What happens next?” Though, in truth, I didn’t need to ask. Whether we’d journey to Paris, or return to Liguria, or stay here on Fire Island, home to painters and partygoers, to history and freedom, we would make our way toward the artists’ life that he had found in Bergamo and which I had made my own.
We weren’t the same as those two young men who’d met and fallen in love for the first time in B—. We'd never have the life we could have had if he hadn’t left me on that train platform in Cluzone; what we’d found that summer could have been given once only. But here on the Island, we’d discovered something new in those stars and in ourselves. The path not taken eight years ago, the path he took last year, the paths we chose last week, had all brought us to this place, and to a new life that might be even more right for us.
He smiled at me, framed by the new day.
“Let’s find out,” he said, and, holding my gaze, reaching for my hand, once again he called me by his name.