Timothée Chalamet, if you are reading this: it is fiction. Written July 2021.
I am not in love with Timothée Chalamet.
I thought I was when Call Me By Your Name was in theaters, but, then again, who wasn’t. There is nothing like a pretty boy having pretty sex in a pretty summer house. I thought about masturbating. I bought a bag with peaches on it, and learned how to say, how much does a beer cost? in Italian.
But I am not in love with Timothée Chalamet. The closest emotion I can find for him is jealousy. I am jealous that he received an Oscar nomination at 22 (I am now 23 and my first novel languishes, unsold); I am jealous that his character in Call Me By Your Name lives in a trilingual Italian paradise (I only speak French and English); my eating disorder is jealous of his tall, fat-less boy body, and wishes it were her own.
But what am I going to do about that, I say to myself, turning the key in my great aunt’s old car, drive four hours to Cleveland to skin this actor and wear his body as my own? It would be too big; he is taller than me. His forehead and toes would crumble and crust up. And besides, I think, I don’t have a good knife.
My great aunt’s old car is a beige sedan so generic that I consistently lose it in parking lots. It can’t turn for shit (I can’t turn for shit), and the GPS console freaks out whenever I drive on any road paved after 2006. Luckily, the road from Cincinnati to Cleveland is a straight, flat route I know by heart. Cleveland is the hometown of my college roommate, and we used to drive up to visit her family.
I pull out of the suburbs into familiar fields of soybeans and corn. A landmark billboard rises into view. HELL IS REAL, it says. In a few minutes, the Cincy NPR station will flicker into static, then Christian rock stations, and the billboard’s warning will come true.
When the time comes, I turn off the radio and begin a tally of roadkill vs. roadside properties that still have their Trump 2020 signs up. This quickly gets depressing. Roadkill wins (barely), but more than this, I find it unbelievable that anyone could still believe in something, and believe that it is true for more than a year, more than an hour, even.
My own thoughts feel horrible and existential and impossible to solve. They are mine and not-mine, like a stranger from the internet, befriended during quarantine. Like, sure, we are friends, but I have never met them in person. What if they are nothing like what I think they are? What if I think they are my friend, but in person their eyes are not green, or they admit that they actually hate all of the things I thought we had in common?
What if the way they leave my messages unread translates into real-life conversation, and there are agonizing gaps of silence, where my skin crawls in discomfort and my brain aches from the search for words, and I tell myself, under my breath, to stop looking at the message, because looking at it does not mean they will read it, and they will say, what are you talking about, we are eating tacos in real life? Can’t you tell me what you mean? Can’t you just tell me the truth?
Here are the facts. Timothée Chalamet is in Cleveland to shoot a film about teenage cannibals in the 1980s. I find this ironic, since Chalamet’s former co-star has recently been embroiled in reports of a cannibalistic fetish. So while the film may not put much distance between search terms “Chalamet” and “Cannibalism,” it will bring jobs to Cleveland, which has one city councilperson, quote, “very pleased.”
I think back to all of the places I’ve been in Cleveland: the local university, the art museum, my roommate’s parents’ house. My roommate took me to a cute tea house in Cleveland, once — would the tea house be Timothée’s vibe? No; he seems like more of a coffee drinker. He’s from New York City. They love coffee there. I can’t remember whether the tea house serves coffee or not.
I imagine him standing on a street corner, maybe near the tea house, maybe not. He is wearing an overpriced sweatshirt, as in most paparazzi photos, and sunglasses, even though it’s been cloudy every time I’ve been in Cleveland, and I expect this trip to be the same. I will walk up to him from the side — not straight up, as that will leave an awkward stretch of time in which we could accidentally make eye contact, thus ruining the spontaneity of the moment. I also wouldn’t approach him from the back, as then I’d need to tap his shoulder to get his attention, and that would be an impolite invasion of personal space.
No, no, an oblique approach is best. Excuse me, I’d say with my mask on, sorry to bother you, to show respect, but are you Timothée Chalamet?
I imagine that he’d speak like the kind of arty boy I’d go on a coffee date with in 2019. Haha, yeah, what’s up, or something like that… the small talk part of the fantasy bores me.
I skip ahead.
Me: What are you doing in Cleveland?
Timothée: So, do you live here?
And so on and so it goes.
We’d continue to trade questions, maybe walk into the tea house together, and, inevitably, the conversation would turn to my time in France. He’s French, I speak French. It’s something we have in common.
I’d order a tall glass of house-made hibiscus, with a sprig of mint bobbing in the bright red liquid. He would find an espresso in the bottom corner of the menu. It’s a warm, but sunless day. We sit outside at the tables under a gingham umbrella. People pass us on the sidewalk, but do not notice anything unusual. They do not think, how strange that these internet strangers met in person. How strange that one of them is very famous and one is very, very, small. I take a long sip of my tea. My words are for Timothée Chalamet alone.
Yeah, no, I studied abroad in France last year… in Paris, of course. I laugh aloud, but the sound is thin, and faint in my nose. Can I speak… bah, oui, je parle français, bien sûr…
But it is too difficult to continue like this in my head.
Even mentally, I have to think my tongue around the foreign sounds. It is a thick feeling, as difficult and unfamiliar as a stranger’s tongue in my mouth. A missing vocab word is heavy, pressing, impenetrable. It scratches my lips like stubble on someone’s unshaven face, at 2 am, at a bar, in the before-times. Hands in their hair as they tell me about their boat, and how we should totally go out on it sometime. I am squinting into their eyebrows, trying to remember what they said their name was. If their friend took a Snapchat video of us. What is the French for, I will regret this very much in the morning?
In English, it is easy. I continue my monologue aloud to the digital pointer on the GPS. It is blinking, confused, over what it thinks should be another field outside of Columbus. Keep up, robot, I think. We are talking to Timothée Chalamet.
“Why did I leave France? Why, why did anyone do anything last March? I was supposed to stay for the entire academic year, and I intended to stay past my graduation and find a job there. But you know how things went…”
The whir of the engine echoes as I press uphill. I feel like laughing and crying at the same time. Timothée Chalamet makes some noncommittal shrug. Maybe he says he’s sorry.
“I kept busy, of course. I graduated from school, became unemployed, moved back to my parents’ house, learned to knit socks, read the entirety of Les Misérables in French twice over…”
Timothée Chalamet finds this last detail impressive, just as any coffee date boy would when I told them I was a writer, or artist, or both. His satisfaction fills me like a single beer will; I am lightweight, giddy on the approval of others.
I was magnificently charismatic in the before-times, at times to the point of ruination, or near self-compromise. There was full-compromise, once or twice, a tongue in my mouth, feelings confessed accidentally and on purpose. I did not even need to be drunk to do it.
For in the throes of a good flirtation, I cannot help myself.* It is a coffee date. The ambiance is fabulous. I love the turn of conversation, the twist of innuendo and subtext of esoteric film references and indie band lyrics. It is a rush of caffeinated attention and admiration. I thrive under these conditions, to a point.
[*I am a Gemini, if that adds to your understanding of this detail.]
The point is not fixed, but circumstantial. It can be physical: an arm touched too many times, an attempt to brush an eyelash from my cheek. Or, it can be virtual. It’s an invitation to their band’s show, or to come over and watch a film (yeah, right), or even a text good morning, sometimes that is it. In all of its forms, the point is that point at which the flirtation threatens to continue to run its course, to turn into something beyond, to cross from verbal to emotional at last into a physical relationship.
And this is the point at which my interest shrivels. What was once fun becomes crippling, too close. It is something overwhelming and hated that I must escape at any cost. I’ll shed my skin, fake a move to France, develop an allergy to coffee. Sometimes, I’ll tell close-to-the-truth and say, I just want to be friends, if that’s alright. This earns a cool, oh, or, that’s not where I thought this was going, or, most often, nothing. An absence of text and sound, an empty road without even an exit for Cleveland to leave a mark. I give nothing, I receive nothing, I feel nothing. I do it again.
The road to Cleveland splits off in two directions: one towards downtown, the other towards the eastern suburbs. I take the suburban road, on autopilot from the roommate days, and soon find myself in front of her parents’ house. Or, I should say, their old house. A car that is not theirs sits in the driveway, and a realtor’s SOLD sign punctures the front lawn. I park my car across the street. My roommate didn’t tell me that her family had moved.
Or maybe she did. I do not remember it, but I feel fine. This displacement is just one in a series, now. A string of places that meant something because someone or something once lived there. Friends’ old apartments; my apartment; the memories that live in our favorite bars and restaurants. But the apartments, the venues are no longer ours. They belong to the new tenants, and we shift forward in space to new places to call our own.
In the after, the point is different. What was once distant becomes intimate, but in a way that is no longer unbearable. There is no threat of physicality. I can tell a thousand secrets in a text message. Anything that could be too close must be kept six feet away.
No one questions my behavior.
I put concealer on my face for video chats. I watch my own face on the call, always with my head at the right tilt, perfect angle, I am most beautiful this way. This did not matter to me in the before-times. Or, at least, it did not matter as much.
There are two ways that I am most beautiful online. One is an almost-three-quarters profile, with my chin tilted down, a bit demure. In the other, the web camera looks up my nostrils, slightly, in a way that makes my features seem tall and chiseled. Both poses are comfortable, yet unnatural. I do not think that anyone looks at me like this in real life.
In the after, there is no point to reach because you cannot touch it. You cannot touch me, can never touch me, and so, I love you. I love you because I cannot touch you and so I am not afraid of you.
I wonder if I would reach the point with Timothée Chalamet, and which point that would be. I have never seen this person in real life — would the simple act of seeing be enough to trigger my disgust? Is the shock from image to reality too great? Like a virtual friend, would he no longer be mine? Unposed, unfiltered, unreal and unwanted.
Perhaps it is for the best that I am not in the before-times, but the difficult, uncertain after. The small things matter too much and also not at all.
I am in the after, half-vaccinated in an oversized Cleveland t-shirt, Birkenstocks, and hand-knit socks. I park my car by the tea house that might sell coffee. I wait, mask on, phone in hand, until a tall boy, about my age, walks down the street. He is wearing sunglasses, and a thrifted button down instead of a sweatshirt.
I’m not sure that I am ready to meet him. I open the car door all the same.
