starfishstar | Wasted My Life Playing Dumb (Call Me By Your Name)

Third and nearly final fic in the series...

WASTED MY LIFE PLAYING DUMB

Fandom: Call Me By Your Name

Summary: Oliver walks through New York, and everything is Elio.

Characters: Elio/Oliver

Words: 3,300

Notes:

The title is a line from “The Only Thing” by, yes of course, Sufjan Stevens.

This one draws a bit more from book canon as well as film canon (e.g. that Elio and Oliver do keep in touch in the ensuing months, and have talked about at least trying to meet up again).

Thank you so much to Karios, whose feedback on an early draft of this fic made this much better than it was, and who was kind enough to check over the final draft, too.

Explanations of Yiddish words in the end notes. :-)

Read on AO3, or here below:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

1.

He thinks of Elio, and it changes the way he moves through the city.

Before, Oliver would lope through the streets, brusque as any New Yorker, his mind elsewhere. Now he walks the long blocks and the short blocks, walks the restlessness that’s had hold of him since the summer, and every mundane sight he passes – every street corner, every bodega with its harsh light spilling out into night, every tree with its leaves sifting down – these sights snag him in memories.

That New York should make him think of Elio is, of course, absurd. Elio doesn’t belong here; he belongs to Lombardy, to sun-drenched summer, to careless days sprawled by the pool. Elio has nothing, nothing, to do with New York as fall descends on the city, drowning the trees in russet and gold and fire.

And yet, Oliver finds Elio everywhere.

He thinks of him when he stops at the Turkish corner store, imagining how Elio would charm the gruff old man behind the counter, knowing how Elio would devour the chocolate halvah Oliver buys there.

He thinks of Elio when he’s in his own tiny kitchen chopping vegetables, knowing Elio would probably tell him he’s doing it wrong somehow. He thinks of Elio when he turns on the faucet in the bathroom each morning, imagining how Elio, if he lived here, would barge in without invitation, and come and cover Oliver’s hand with his own, gazing up into his face with a secret, impish smile.

Oliver thinks of Elio when he sees the old woman from the building across the street, her apartment opposite Oliver’s. As long as he’s lived here he’s seen this woman but not seen her, dismissed her as mere background to his life. Now, he watches from above as she makes her way along the sidewalk to her door, her shoulders stooped, a bag of shopping weighing down one arm. She fumbles with her key and disappears into the building; then a minute or two later she reappears in an upstairs window, like a very precise ghost.

He can just make out her motions as she puts her groceries away with care, shepherding each item to its proper place, her movements unhurried in the small space of her kitchen. Oliver sees Elio in that self-contained loneliness, that determination in the face of a sometimes fearful world.

One of Oliver’s colleagues, another postdoc, loans him a cassette by some Cuban folk singer.

Silvio Rodríguez, the colleague says, seriously, listen and tell me his voice doesn’t reach inside you.

Oliver takes it out of politeness, at first. And then he listens again and again, until he’s afraid he’ll wear out the tape, his Walkman hooked into his belt loop as he walks and walks through New York.

Te amaré, te amaré si estoy muerto
Te amaré al día siguiente además
Te amaré, Te amaré como siento
Te amaré con adiós, con jamás

It’s the wrong language, from the wrong part of the world, nothing to do with Italy. It doesn’t mean anything. He just likes the way it sounds.

Oliver makes a copy of the tape before giving it back, and while he’s at it he makes a second copy, too. Before he can think about it too much, definitely no need to think about it too much, he sends the second copy off in a manila envelope, to Elio on the other side of the world.

I will love you, love you even if I die,
I will love you the next day as well,
I will love you, love you as I feel,
I will love you with good-bye and never again.

It’s something Elio might like, he tells himself, that’s all. Something Elio would be sentimental about, wouldn’t he, pretty poetry over the delicate notes of a piano.

That thought conjures up Elio’s hands on the keys, coaxing out infinite varieties of phrasing, Elio’s head bent over the great dark curve of his instrument. Elio tilting his head, catching the melody once and then playing it back, rendered flawlessly and yet somehow also made into his own.

Oliver walks and walks, with this unforgivingly delicate song in his headphones, and every mundane sight he passes demands of him: Is it better to speak or to die?

His life is good, his work is going smoothly, his book is finally ready for press. He lives in the greatest city in the world. There’s no good reason why he tosses and turns at night, gets out of bed to prop his elbows on his windowsill and stare out at the city’s fire escapes, those graceful rows and rows of them gleaming pale under the moon.

It’s not death to choose a good life, the life that’s laid out in front of him. What shame is there in that?

Te amaré, te amaré si estoy muerto

Oliver runs his thumb along the rough edge of the windowsill, where the paint is chipping away in jagged flakes. He leans against the window frame and looks out over the nighttime city. And, inevitably, he thinks of Elio.

Elio, who opened up a part of him he hasn’t figured out how to close away again. Elio, who saw what Oliver had been trying to hide, or maybe hadn’t even known he was hiding, and with hands and smile and hungry eyes drew it out into the light.

Elio, who was so wide open to the world: too young, maybe, to have learned not to tumble into heartbreak with his eyes wide open. Elio, who was pure boldness, reaching out for what he desired and damn the consequences.

But Oliver is older, and should be wiser. He has no excuse not to know by now who he is.

Oliver spent a summer in Italy, but he also spent another life, a not-quite-parallel track skewing subtly away from the real one: a phantom twin existence in which he was still Oliver, still a scholar, still taught classes and read poetry and grappled with Heraclitus, but also was…

Well. Something he is not. Or chooses not to be. That’s all it is, in the end. And yet the shadow of it lives in him, beautiful but damning.

And Elio, Elio, Elio, whispering his own name. Elio’s tongue in the hollow below Oliver’s shoulder blade, Elio’s eyes following Oliver as he dove into the pool on hot afternoons when sunlight drenched the world and the summer promised never to end.

Elio on the balcony at night with the leaves rustling all around, leaning against the railing and looking out over the grounds of the villa, his private perfect world.

As Oliver leans against the window now in this, a very different world.

A fire truck wails somewhere nearby, approaching and then fading into the distance. A light goes on across the way, the light of the old woman whose name Oliver has never known. She can’t sleep either, then. Maybe she’s gotten up to take a book down from the shelf, to read away the quiet hours. Oliver wonders if he’ll ever manage to be like that, so at peace in this imperfect world.

“You should come for Hanukkah,” Elio said once, splashing in the pool on one of those eternal summer afternoons. He was teasing but not teasing, offering the possibility that the summer didn’t have to be only a summer. And Oliver himself had joked with the Perlmans, as they said goodbye that last day on the piazzetta, that he’d be back for good just as soon as he could stop home and pack his bags.

Parallel world. Shadow twin. And Elio’s hand in his, their fingers mirror images, tangling together out of sight of prying eyes.

That first night they were together, that terrifying and perfect first night, he held Elio all through the dark, quiet hours, cradled him in his arms until dawn crept in on them. The man who did that, he too was Oliver.

In the not-quite-dark of the never-silent city, Oliver flings himself back into bed, though he doesn’t sleep. He turns his pillow sideways, long-ways, upside down, nothing is right. Of course nothing is right.

“You should come,” Elio said, as though this were easy. As though this were something people do.

Oliver wakes in the half-light of dawn, unsure if he’s really slept at all. He carries himself through the day’s first motions, brushing his teeth (Elio at his side, turning the faucet on and off to tease him), pouring cereal (Elio, shaking his head at an American’s idea of breakfast).

He leaves his apartment too early, telling himself it isn’t restlessness, it’s just that he can get a head start on some research if he heads to campus now. The early slanting sunlight on the trees as he walks is heartrendingly beautiful, the way it turns yellow leaves to flaming gold.

This is a life. This can be a good life.

On his way back home that afternoon, he finds himself coming up alongside his elderly neighbor as she makes her way along the sidewalk, once again bowed under the weight of her shopping.

“Let me carry that for you,” Oliver offers. It seems only right to address her as a person, finally, after all this time of treating her very existence as a metaphor.

She glances up, suspicious and sharp, and Oliver is aware of how he looms over her. He flashes his brightest smile, the one he knows very well had all the girls around the Perlmans’ villa swooning. La muvi star indeed – well, maybe he can put it to good use for once.

The woman sizes him up, like she sees exactly what he’s doing with that smile and disregards it completely. Nonetheless she says, “That would be very kind, thank you. I’m only going as far as that building there.”

So he takes her grocery bag, and slows his steps to match hers the rest of the way up the block. Oliver explains that he lives across the street, and the woman nods, unimpressed by this thread of connection between them.

“Thank you, young man,” she says, when they reach her door. “I’ll take it from here.”

It’s an odd sort of letdown: to have connected with a stranger at last, only to have it end so abruptly. But he grins and says, “My pleasure, any time you need!”

She nod, and he nods, and she disappears into her building. A ghost to his life once again.

And then, unexpectedly, they become friends.

Over the next weeks, they cross paths a few more times, and Oliver helps with packages and grocery bags. He finally learns her name (Esther) and she finally takes pity on his eagerness and invites him in for tea.

She’s Jewish, Oliver knew that from the first time she opened her mouth. She has that unmistakable cadence of a New York Jewish grandmother, which always makes Oliver feel fond and nostalgic. Even if it’s borrowed nostalgia, since he’s the first of his family to actually live in New York.

This borrowed Jewish grandmother serves Oliver tea in delicate teacups, and thick slices of babka on plates to match. True to form for Jewish grandmothers everywhere, she urges him to eat, and then eat more.

He learns that Esther’s husband died almost a decade ago, they had no children, and she lives alone. Yet she seems content, here in her snug, small apartment.

Oliver can’t bring himself to call her only by her first name, and she flat-out declines to be Mrs. Bernbaum, or even Mrs. B. Finally he settles on Bubbe Esther, and she smiles.

In that first proper conversation over tea, she’s immediately and comprehensively nosy about his life, but she’s so straightforward about it that Oliver can’t even be annoyed. Does he have a girlfriend? Where does he work? Where do his parents live? Why is he so far away from them?

“Not that far,” he protests, laughing. “A few hours’ drive, that’s all.”

Esther shakes her head and nudges the plate of babka closer to him.

“I can introduce you to some nice girls,” she says. “Plenty of nice families go to my shul, and you seem like a nice young man.”

Oliver must twitch, or make some miniscule movement he can’t suppress, because she gives him a long, assessing look, and then she doesn’t say anything more about nice girls.

His scalp prickles. He hates this, hates wondering what people must think of him if they suspect. Not everyone is as blithely approving as the Perlmans.

Because there’s this truth that lurks inside him. It’s the truth of Elio, and the truth about Oliver himself. The truth that yes, he did have a girlfriend, back in that other world before the summer. Back when there were things he thought he was sure of.

And then, as if Oliver weren’t already lost enough in memory, he learns that Esther plays the piano.

He noticed the small upright piano right away, where it hugs the wall of her tiny apartment. But it takes some asking, and then some further nudging, before Esther finally admits that yes, she does play. “But I’m terrible these days,” she insists. “Once, I was passable, maybe. But with this arthritis, you don’t want to hear anything I could play.”

It takes what seems like most of the afternoon to convince her that, yes, really, he does want to hear. It doesn’t matter how good or bad; he simply misses the sound of the piano, of music played live in a room for people to hear.

She’s so much the opposite of Elio, small and frail and perfectly upright on the piano bench, where Elio would be slouching, his gangly limbs in every direction. And it’s true that her fingers on the keys are hesitant, with none of Elio’s attacking fervor.

And yet, and yet.

There’s a love there, a love for the beautiful mystery of music, that Oliver would know anywhere. His throat is tight just thinking of Elio playing that damn Bach suite in every possible variation, teasing Oliver with his effortless evocations of beauty.

Esther’s eyes, when she finishes playing and turns to him, are far too perceptive. She must see in his face all that he’s remembering. But she only pours him another cup of tea and urges him to take another slice of cake, if you’re too full, maybe eat just a little one.

“Where will you celebrate Hanukkah, Olivereleh?” Esther asks, during one of his afternoon visits sometime in November. Oliver’s name doesn’t lend itself well to Yiddish diminutives, but Esther is nothing if not determined.

“Oh,” Oliver shrugs, turning up his smile to soften the dismissiveness of his words. “I don’t know.”

He’s Jewish, sure, but he’s not the “rush home to celebrate every holiday with the family” sort of observant. Or maybe it’s just that his family isn’t in any way that sort of family.

He expects Esther, as she often does, to prod at him for not living nearer to his parents. She’s always so forthright with her criticisms that he can’t even manage to be annoyed.

But instead she says, “Isn’t there someone you would like to see?” And it’s clear that this time she doesn’t mean family.

How does she know so much about him, merely by looking? How does she see?

“I –” Oliver says, then stops again. “I…”

There’s nothing he could say that isn’t either perilously revealing, or a lie.

But he knows his face isn’t hiding anything. He’s thinking, suddenly, of the letters he and Elio have exchanged. Oh, not many of them, and always very circumspect. Neither of them committing to anything that couldn’t later be revoked as necessary. They share vague hopes and reminiscences, thoughts on philosophers and poetry. Elio hasn’t reiterated the hope of Hanukkah, but Oliver knows it hangs there between them.

It would be both so easy and so impossible, to simply decide to fly to Italy over the semester break.

The timing of Hanukkah is terrible this year. It starts early, at the end of November, which means the last night falls already a few days before the end of classes, let alone the end of exams. But maybe he could get someone to cover his last couple of days of teaching, if he called it a family event he had to make it to. If he cut out a few days early here, he could make it there just in time for the last night of Hanukkah, a night that’s sure to be a proper Perlman feast. It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it.

Clearly he’s thought about it.

“I had an uncle who was like you,” Esther says. She’s sitting at her little table amidst the teacups; Oliver is on the piano bench with one leg slung on either side of it, idly touching the keys. His head jerks up, but when he looks over at her she’s wielding the teapot with great concentration, for all the world as if the need to direct a fresh stream of tea into her cup is the only reason she’s currently granting Oliver a reprieve from her far too incisive gaze.

“Oh?” he asks, his voice as steady as he can make it. “Like me in what way?”

“He left behind somebody he cared about, when the family came to America.” She sets down the teapot and lifts her cup, the picture of serenity, and says her next sentence without letting a trace of irony show. “This person my uncle loved was another man, if that doesn’t offend you to hear. They were boys together in the same shtetl in Poland. My uncle – my mother’s older brother – was a young man when the family fled and came here. The other man’s family stayed behind.”

“What did your uncle do?” Oliver’s throat is tight. “Did he ever see that man again?”

Esther glances at him. She says, in a gentler voice than he’s ever heard her use, “It was 1895, Olivereleh. Jews who made it to America never looked back. Uncle Hayim married a woman here in New York whose family were landsmen from the same part of Poland.”

Oliver feels the tragedy of it pool in the back of his throat like bile. His voice comes out as nearly a whisper. “Was he happy?”

In the muted light of the apartment he could swear Esther’s eyes, too, are wet. “He was happy enough, I think. He was a kind man, and a wonderful father. My sister and I spent nearly every weekend with our cousins at their apartment. There were always people coming and going there, lots of laughter.” She sets her teacup down very precisely on the table in front of her, and looks at Oliver. “It’s a life. But is it enough?”

Is it better to speak or to die?

He knows what Elio would say to that, and probably Pro and Mrs. P, too: What is Oliver even living for, if he’s going to spend it hiding from his real life?

Real life.

It seems that in these last months somehow he’s changed about that, about which one is the real life and which is the shadow.

Oliver leans forward very suddenly on the piano bench, tilting two of the legs up from the floor behind him. “I think I need to go make a call to Italy, right now,” he says. “Does that sound crazy?”

Esther’s smile lights up her face. “All the best things in life are a little crazy, bubeleh.”

“Well.” Oliver slaps his palms against his legs and stands. He starts for the apartment door, then doubles back and leans down over Esther. She’s so petite, sitting there on her little chair, with her teacups and her tidy plates. He presses a kiss to her soft cheek.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “I don’t think you can ever know how much – just, thank you.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

End notes:

The song quoted is “Te Amaré” by Silvio Rodríguez, from his 1979 album “Rabo de Nube.” The English translation is by Rina Benmayor and Juan Flores, and I first came across the song in “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza” by Gloria Anzaldúa.

This fic is dedicated to all the Jewish grandmothers, including both of my own.

A Yiddish glossary:

babka = sweet yeast cake, often with chocolate or other flavorings swirled through the dough
bubbe = grandmother
bubeleh = a term of endearment for a child; I was called this sometimes, but I wasn’t sure if it could be applied to boys as well as girls, i.e. if it could be plausibly used for Oliver…but a little internet research tells me yes ;-) (there’s also tateleh for boys and mameleh for girls)
halvah = dense, crumbly sweet made from tahini (sesame paste); variations exist all over the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Eastern Europe; personally, I know it from my New York Jewish family, and also from Turkey
landsmen = people from the same town or region
shul = synagogue
shtetl = small village where Jews lived in Eastern Europe

And the -l / -ele / -eleh endings are among the many possible Yiddish diminutive endings for making nicknames out of names.

(My Yiddish knowledge is of a fourth-generation only-occasionally-overheard sort, so please forgive any imperfections!)

This is part three of the series "He Thinks of Elio". (Part one was Sweetly, Before the Mystery Ends, part two was Be My Rest, Be My Fantasy.) The fourth and final part is: Sea Lion Caves in the Dark.

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