Sweetly, Before the Mystery Ends (Call Me By Your Name)

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SWEETLY, BEFORE THE MYSTERY ENDS

Fandom: Call Me By Your Name

Summary: Oliver wonders how it’s possible that everything he’s ever written now sounds stupid.

Characters: Elio, Oliver, Annella

Words: 2,100

Notes:

A Yuletide treat foriomixit.

Dear iomixit/asuralucier, I was browsing through Yuletide letters, and your prompt about how much Oliver needs a hug grabbed my mind and wouldn’t let go. I wasn’t necessarily planning to write in this fandom, and yet here we are. :-) Happy Yuletide!

Title from (of course) Sufjan Stevens, from the song “John My Beloved.”

Uncountable thanks to Karios, for in-depth and thoughtful betareading!


Read on AO3, or here below:

 

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Elio is sprawled on his back on the grass, reading as always. His right leg crooks at the knee, his left hand holds his book up over his head, and all of him is drenched in sunlight. With a small part of his brain, Oliver is making a bad pretense of studying his manuscript, and the rest of him is watching Elio.

Surely Elio can feel him watching. But he never gives any sign of noticing, never even turns his head. His gangly limbs are all unconscious ease and summer indolence, and one dark curl clings damply to his forehead. The scribbled words on the page dance in front of Oliver’s eyes, mocking him. How is it possible that everything he’s ever written now sounds so stupid?

He could take these pages to Professor Perlman. He can always go to Professor Perlman. And Pro would be kind, and encouraging, and could probably even make Oliver feel capable of finding a solution to this snarl of academese in his hands.

But what Oliver really wants is the pull-no-punches advice of someone who lives all the time with this struggle to make words say what you mean. Someone like a novelist, or… Or a translator.

Oliver leans over and grabs his sunglasses, where he’d dropped them on the grass between him and Elio, then scoops up the manuscript and slides his espadrilles on, letting the heels squash flat under his feet.

“Later,” he says to Elio as he flips his shades down over his face, and only then does Elio look up and roll his eyes.

There’s a bead of sweat halfway down Elio’s nose, and his skin is golden in the sunlight. How is it possible that all that intelligence, all that musical genius, hides inside the guise of a teenager rolling his eyes at Oliver, and daring him with every glance to be something bolder than he is, to be something more real?

Oliver strolls toward the house. Now he feels Elio’s eyes on him, now that his back is turned. He imagines Elio watching him the way he watches Elio, greedy to devour every memory, already despairing at how the details will fade around the edges in ten years, in twenty.

Why is he thinking of Elio thinking of him in twenty years?

Truth be told, he’s been trying since the day he arrived not to think about Elio like this. Elio, Professor Perlman’s son, seventeen. Precocious, yes, very, but when all’s said and done, still seventeen.

Inside the house now, Oliver passes through the kitchen and snags an apricot from the counter. It’s at that perfect moment of ripeness, firm yet yielding to the touch, rosy and golden. It must be something about the soil here, Oliver thinks. He wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that this color doesn’t even exist anywhere outside of Italy.

He eats the apricot in two bites, the juice a burst of exquisite sweetness on his tongue, the angular pit a pleasing oddity in his mouth until he spits it out again. Paradise, that’s what this place is. A paradise filled with perfect fruit.

Oliver makes for the living room, which always seems to hold a mingled scent of old books and warm spices. As if nowhere in the Perlman home can these two things be entirely untangled, the intellectual pursuits and the sensual pleasures. And strange, noticeably strange, how right it all feels. As if this life is what he’s always been meant for, and it only took until now to catch up to himself.

Dangerous, thinking that way.

In the living room, Annella is sitting on the sofa, holding a book in one hand and scribbling notes on a pad of paper with the other. Oliver is struck once again by the resemblance between mother and son: dark hair, warm eyes, and book in hand. The building blocks of a Perlman.

“Hi, Mrs. Perlman,” he says.

She glances up, sees the pages in his hand, and smiles. “Oliver,” she says, making the vowels of his name rich and warm. “My goodness, really, call me Annella. Here, come sit.” She pats the sofa beside her, marks her place in the book and sets it aside. “Working on your manuscript?” she asks, once he’s settled and has his legs stretched out in front of him.

“Or trying to,” he says, feeling his usual urge to deflect the kind concern in her voice with self-deprecation.

“Is the work not going well?”

“To be honest? No, not great.” Then he hastens to add, “I don’t mean working with Pro! That’s fantastic. My own writing, though.” He holds up the sheaf of papers in his hand and flaps it back and forth. “The pages that have been translated into Italian read so beautifully. They flow, they’re almost musical. And then I look back at what I wrote, the original stuff in English, and it sounds so workmanlike. Not the writing of someone who should even be trying to write a book.”

“Oliver.” Annella smiles and reaches over to pat his hand. “Did you not know? We all hate our work as soon as it’s complete.”

“What?” He laughs in disbelief. Sure, that might true for some people, but Annella? Her work must be perfect. He can’t imagine it any other way.

Annella taps a finger on the notepad she’s set aside. “We pour our hearts into our work, so how can we not be disappointed when we see its flaws? But our work comes from us, who are imperfect, so it too can never be perfect.” She tilts her head, studying him. “Sometimes, you will hate your work, Oliver. But you also must have enough gentleness in you to forgive it.”

In the silence after she says this, sounds from outside carry in through the open windows: birds calling and trees rustling, the endless, busy drone of high summer. Oliver thinks of Elio, out there sprawled on the grass, effortlessly brilliant at so many things. No wonder Elio dares to throw himself into life with such boldness, with parents who talk like this.

Oliver’s father only ever talks about success and perfection. Bad enough that Oliver has chosen this odd academic profession. He’d better at least be the very best at it.

“I know what I’ve said isn’t very helpful,” Annella says, then laughs at Oliver’s surprised expression. “Well, you must admit it’s not very encouraging, if all I can tell you is that things will sometimes be unpleasant, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.”

He grins, acknowledging the truth of that.

“So let me say this instead: don’t write for an imagined horde of strangers, gathering around to tear your work apart. Imagine instead a single reader, someone who is excited by your ideas and eager to take them in. And then write towards that eagerness.”

He thinks of Elio, of course. Imagines Elio holding his book in his hands, when it’s finally complete. Elio lying on the grass like he is right now, or on the sunbaked stones around the old pool, or maybe in winter, curled up in a thick sweater in front of the fireplace. He imagines Elio smiling as he reads, maybe laughing at the more pretentious bits, but also eager, just as Annella says: eager and happy simply because this is Oliver’s book and he is holding it.

“And then,” Annella says, breaking gently into his thoughts, “even then, remember that you cannot expect perfection. But you are allowed to expect tenderness, and connection, and joy.”

Oliver wonders uncomfortably if they are still talking about writing.

But then she adds, her smile mischievous now, “Besides, Italian is a famously beautiful language. How, indeed, could the original ever compete with the translation?”

Oliver laughs. “Well, there we go, now you’ve eased my mind. Why didn’t you say that from the start?”

But she looks at him like she knows perfectly well what it looks like when he’s bluffing his way through a fear of failure, and she’s only too polite to mention it. It’s frightening, meeting that look. Not as frightening as meeting Elio’s demanding stares, no, but a close second.

“Uh, anyway,” he says, still trying to keep it light. “I suppose one day I’ll make my peace with not being an Italian speaker, right?”

“Oh, Oliver,” Annella says, as if answering a different question entirely. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

He feels sweat prickle at the back of his neck. They’re still talking about writing, right? Academics and writing and the mysteries of language. That’s all this is about.

Annella reaches up with one hand and ruffles Oliver’s hair, the way he’s seen her do countless times to Elio.

And he must lean into her touch, or give some unconscious sign of how long it’s been since anyone reached out to him so gently, because the next thing he knows she’s drawing him in, one arm around his back and the other still resting on his hair, until his head has found her shoulder. The fabric of her blouse is smooth under his cheek, her hand on his head is warm, and Oliver sighs without being able to stop himself.

Annella murmurs something in French, too low and fast for him to have any hope of catching the meaning, but it sounds like an endearment, motherly and gentle. It sounds the kind of thing no one has said to him for a long time.

He ought to pull away. But Annella doesn’t seem uncomfortable. She seems perfectly content, in fact, to hold him like this, as if he were her own son. And so, against all his better judgment, Oliver stays in the embrace, her hand smoothing back his hair and the faint, citrus-y scent of her perfume swirling up to him from her shoulder. He closes his eyes.

When they finally pull away, she’s smiling, but somehow a little sad, too, and she reaches up a hand to rest against his cheek. “I’m very glad you’ve come to us, Oliver,” she says. “I hope you know that. And I hope you know that in the end, you will be all right.”

She gives his cheek a last little pat, then lets go.

And what do you even say to that? What do you say when someone so wise and kind looks you right in the eyes and says something like that? Out of his depth, Oliver very nearly laughs it off with a flippant comment. Like usual.

But he checks that impulse. Instead, he says, “I’m glad to be here, too. I’m really grateful to you and Pro for having me.”

“It’s very much our pleasure,” Annella tells him.

“And you know what, Mrs. P? I think I should get back out there and work.” Oliver unfolds himself from the sofa, feeling strangely euphoric and full of confidence. His work won’t be perfect, he knows that. But he can make it better than it was.

Annella nods. “Just don’t forget, Oliver. You deserve not only hard work, but also joy.”

“Thanks, Mrs. P.”

Annella smiles and reaches to pick up her book again. But he can swear he feels her eyes still on him as he leaves the room.

Oliver makes his way back along the hall and through the kitchen, his thoughts now going in very different directions than when he passed through here just a few minutes ago. He thinks of Annella’s words and feels buoyed, ready to roll up his metaphorical sleeves and get to work. He thinks of Elio reading on the grass, his limbs sprawled and his mind engaged. Suddenly Oliver wants very much to write a book worthy of being read by those laughing, curious eyes.

He wishes he could be here to see that, Elio reading his book on some imagined future day like this one. But no, it will be fall by then, and Oliver will be in New York with the leaves falling down. While the Perlmans’ villa remains, a perfect bubble out of time.

He reaches the back door of the house and pauses before he steps outside, looking out over it all: the lawn, the fruit trees, the great sensuous wildness of this place. What a gift it must be to come here every year. What a gift it is to come here at all.

Lingering there in the doorway, Oliver takes a deep breath, as if he could take this summer inside himself and hold it there forever.


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This is part one of the series "He Thinks of Elio." Continue to part two, Be My Rest, Be My Fantasy.

 

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