The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (10 page)

“Oh. OK. Yeah.”

We had moved on to other topics and I was sipping the brown
sugary grinds from the bottom of my cup when I started to feel like I could’ve
talked about it. I wanted to talk about it, I had just been surprised.

After we turned out the lights that night, he said, “I’m
supposed to ask you to tell me about being gay.” Maybe he sensed I could talk
about it better in the dark, or maybe he just liked to talk in the dark.

“Like what about it?”

“I don’t know. How was it?”

I laughed. “
How was
it?
That’s what waiters ask you when you’re done with your steak.”

“How was your homosexual youth, sir?
Oh, a little chewy, I’m afraid!
”

“A little chewy!” I laughed until my pillow case was damp
with tears. I’d never imagined being able to joke about this, but with him it
felt natural. When I’d calmed down I said, “I guess it was confusing, mostly.”

“Homosexual youth: chewy and confusing.”

“I’ve never put it into words before.” I looked up in the
dark, where the faint outline of posters glowed. “When I was starting to
realize I definitely
was
—and
that was a long time ago—I got really afraid it would be obvious to
anyone who looked at me. I thought I’d give myself away in every situation.
Like, there was this school dance and it was just
fucked
. I guess I tried to get away from any situation where I’d
have to play a straight kid because I knew I’d bomb at it. Which basically
means you end up acting invisible your whole life because
every
situation is a straight situation.”

“Interesting. I suppose you’re right.”

“And when you have a secret it makes you suspicious that other
people have secrets, too.”

“I bet.”

“In my case you wonder who else is like you. Sometimes you
think maybe you’ve found another one. I had this friend. His name was Boyd. And
I was desperate to know, but that means you have to put
yourself
out there. Risk him knowing about you and then finding out
he isn’t, and meanwhile you’re there flapping in the breeze with your secrets
hanging out. You know? So you resort to tricks, to cover your ass. It’s really
terrible actually. We’re not friends anymore.”

“Wow. Was he? Boyd.”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh.”

“The weirdest thing? It’s that you exist in kind of a
perpetual present or something. There’s no future for you. The things people
tell you about your so-called wedding day and your kids and your white picket
fence or whatever, you know it doesn’t apply to you. I’m not going to get to
have kids, I’m just not, that’s not going to happen for me. And meanwhile you
have to sit there living with that knowledge while people blab their fairy
tales. They
are
like fairy tales, only
the people telling them believe them and you know they’ll never be true. There’s
no version of
your
story. Am I going
to have a
life partner
or whatever?
What does that look like? Nobody tells me those stories. It’s just— I don’t
know.”

“You know, where I grew up, there are a lot of gay people. I
saw them all the time. Couples holding hands and stuff. Some even have kids.”

“I can’t even imagine that. It seems like another planet.”

“It isn’t.”

“I guess, like, with
you
,
I can see myself having a place of my own, or sharing a place with someone.
Maybe I won’t ever find a boyfriend or a quote-unquote
life partner
or whatever. But I can find friends who know the real
me and like me anyway, and that’s a thing that I can have. It’s weird. It feels
like having a
future
.”

Wesley was quiet for a long time. Lights came in through the
window and played on the walls. Finally he said, “Well that’s nice of you to
say, Ollie.” But I think by then I was falling asleep.

***

Picture him friendly but shy. He was quiet in groups,
though in some weird way they revolved around him, the way a courtroom revolves
around a judge whether she’s speaking or not. It must’ve been because he had
the best stories, or because he was exotic (the rest of our hallmates were
Mass-holes like me, and as a San Franciscan he may as well have been an alien),
or because he had a way (with his curtains, with his music) of making a hallway
cohere into a home.

Ours was composed of half of the third floor of Johnson
Hall, Northeast Campus. In a double on the other side of the lounge were the
two freshman girls we met our first day, Kaitlyn and Amy. Next door to them was
a senior, Harriet, who had a room of her own. She was pretty with red hair,
dressed Mod, planned to be a playwright. Across from her was Bruno, an oafish
junior who wasn’t often around, but when he was he loved to tell us the kind of
stories nobody is ever interested to listen to—drinking stories,
driving-around stories. Beside him was Shelley, a pixie of a girl with curly
black hair that bounced when she walked. She was authoritative and competed
with Harriet for the role of hallway matriarch even though Shelley was only a
sophomore.

One night during the second week when it was too stormy to
venture outside, we all sat in the lounge and demonstrated our secret talents.
Amy said she could stand on her head without using her hands, and proved it
after Shelley ran off to get a pillow. Harriet could name the presidents in
eighteen seconds. Kaitlyn could tap dance. Bruno could belch “Stairway to
Heaven.”

While I watched them I wondered what my talent could be. You
could say that in high school I’d had a talent for acting, playing someone
other than who I really was. But at this point I hadn’t mentioned that side of
myself to my hallmates. It seemed easier to coast on the Wesley success for a
while before letting new people in on it.

When my turn came I performed the lightning-fast lyrics of
R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” The
lyrics rattled across my tongue like feet across a crumbling rope bridge while
I watched my hallmates watching me. I felt like I might stumble, but each word
bought me enough time to remember the next one. Word by word I got through. I
ended it slowly, no longer as freaked out by all of them looking at me, and I
dragged out the last line, “
It’s the end
of the world as we
knoooow
iiiit
....
”
Breathless but grinning (because who was this boy who had just been so
visible?), I collapsed onto the sofa beside Harriet.

“And do you feel fine, Ollie?” Kaitlyn said.

“I do!”

Wes was golf-clapping. “Maybe both a gay guy and a rock and
roll god after all,” he said.

Everyone suddenly went quiet, as if he’d unplugged a radio.
They looked from Wes to me, from me to Wes.

Wes whispered, “
Oop
....”

Then Harriet made a little raise-the-roof gesture that felt
to me like the most welcoming thing in the world, and she offered me her bag of
Doritos. Shelley was tapping her chin as if considering whether there were
signs she had missed. Bruno looked concerned, as he always did when someone
else had a good story. Kaitlyn jumped up and hugged me, knocking the Doritos
out of my hand. “I always wanted a gay friend!” she sighed. Only Amy looked
uncomfortable. (Later Harriet told me Amy had had a crush on me.)

“My secret talent is outing my roommate, apparently,” said
Wes, giving an embarrassed cough.

But of course he had done me a favor.

On purpose or by accident, Wesley always seemed to smooth
my path for me. I was starting to love him for it, I knew that, but I wasn’t
in
love with him, and sometimes I
wondered why. The other hallmates recognized him and me as a duo—Ollie
and Wes, Wes and Ollie—but it wasn’t like how it had been with Boyd. It
felt more sustainable, less like it was tumbling toward some sort of explosion.
Having no secrets from Wes let me feel something new: contentment. Nothing
loomed. We just hung out. We were
friends
.

Our evenings were spent in the lounge with the hallmates but
when they started drifting off to bed or to homework and Wesley and I went back
to our room, that’s when I was happiest.

Using my stereo he played me different songs from his CD
collection, songs I’d never heard but should’ve, apparently—a lot of
which I liked, a lot of which I pretended to like. Boards of Canada,
Aphex
Twin. We’d lie on our beds and listen to the
mechanical crunching sounds of the
Richard
D. James Album
. Wes was into old stuff too: Neil Young, Simon &
Garfunkel, Sinatra, Billie Holiday. He liked to play me songs, to be my human
jukebox and my teacher. It seemed so much more important than homework, I
couldn’t deny it. I’d done homework for years. I’d never done this.

“Try this one,” he would say, and he’d play some weird
ambient stuff it must’ve taken nails, water, rocks to create. He’d lie on his
bed with the stereo remote on his belly, listening. When the song was over he’d
pause the disc and say, “Thoughts?”

I always told him I liked it, even when I didn’t think it
was anything much, because I wanted him to keep playing me stuff. I’d pick out
some detail of the song to show I was paying attention.

Sometimes he tossed me the remote and gave me a turn. I
played him R.E.M. songs. I played him “Find the River,” and when it was over he
didn’t say anything, and when I said “Thoughts?” he cleared his voice in such a
way that made me know the song had made him cry.

He told me a lot about his year before UMass, the year he
spent on Cape Cod living in that rented house with his three friends. He showed
me photos he took in those days, black-and-white action photos of late-teenage
fun. The stories that went with the photos were simple and almost mundane and
yet had an air of excitement I could barely relate to. I think his stories
described happiness. He seemed to glow when he was telling me. He seemed a
different version of himself in these stories, different from who he was in
this room and at this school—a do-
er
rather
than a remember-
er
. So much so I sometimes wondered,
with a touch of foreboding, why he had come to UMass at all and not stayed on
Cape Cod. The fancy, cared-for camera he’d used to take all these romantic
pictures was sitting on his desk now. He’d only taken a few shots with it here,
though he held it in his hands a lot, as if to be ready for something
worthwhile.

***

October came, and on the first cold morning I unearthed a
fleece from one of the Tupperware crates under my bed. From his own bed, under
his quilt, Wesley looked at me putting it on.

“I’m going to have to skip class today,” he said. “I didn’t
bring anything warm. I don’t do cold.”

I laughed. “You
do
do
cold. You lived on the Cape. I’ve seen pictures of
you in the snow—you were loving it. Coffee cups in snowbanks, remember?”

“Yeah. I don’t know.” Blankets up to his chin, he stared at
the window while I loaded my books into my backpack. “After your classes,” he
said, “would you want to go to this thrift store in Northampton I heard of?
Harriet mentioned it.”

“Sure, as long as I don’t have to buy anything.”

“Why?”

“I hate thrift stores. Used clothes give me the heebie
jeebies.”

I left him lying in bed. After suffering through two classes
and stopping at the dining hall with Shelley for a grilled cheese, I met him
back at our room. He had the directions to the thrift store, a place called
Garment Alley, written out on a Post-It. He was sitting on his bed looking
through his photo album. It was clear he hadn’t gone to class.

We walked across the Quad and waited for a Northampton bus
at the edge of campus. Picture him wearing a thin sweater, his hands stuffed
deep in the pockets of his jeans. Around us the trees were starting to turn.
Time was flying; I’d already been at UMass six weeks. I could barely remember
anything before it, and almost never tried.

“I should’ve brought my car to school,” I mused. “I didn’t
expect to leave campus so much.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Well, it’s kind of a shitbox. I hit a telephone pole junior
year and it was never the same after that. I think I’ll sell it next summer and
buy a bike.”

“A motorcycle?”

“Oh. No. A bicycle.”

“On the Cape,” he said, “me and the guys shared this old
diesel Jetta. It was a shitbox too but I loved it. When we all moved out we
drew straws for the car.”

“Who won?”

“Not me.”

“I want a Jeep someday, I think.” I stepped to the curb to
look for the bus.

“Like MacGuyver?”

“My friend Boyd had one. I liked it.”

“Boyd, Boyd, Boyd.”

“Boyd, Boyd, Boyd. Where are your friends now?”

He looked off down the street. A bus was approaching but it
wasn’t bound for Northampton, and he shivered. “Jim is back in San Francisco,
Harley is in Montana, and Scoop is in Mexico City.”

“Wow. How’d you end up here in Amherst?”

He sighed. “My parents thought it would be good for me to
get back on track. They said one
gap year
is enough.”

The bus to Northampton arrived. As we rode Wes was telling
me about Jack Kerouac and the Beats, people for whom writing and travel was
everything, was life itself. “Imagine being that passionate about anything?” he
said. I couldn’t.

He stopped talking as the bus crossed the bridge over the
Connecticut River. I watched him look out at the water, that wide blue space
that cut Massachusetts in half and gave a border to New Hampshire and Vermont. “I
miss the ocean,” he said quietly, to himself. On the other side he started
talking about Kerouac again, as if the little interlude had never happened.