The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (15 page)

In the morning while Harriet showered I sat on her bed and
looked out the window, down at the Quad. It was busy with kids on their way to
breakfast and classes. When I spotted Travis heading away from the dorm with his
backpack, with his hands in his pockets and white breath poofing out in front
of him, I went to my room.

His bed was unmade. I took off my clothes and got into it
and jerked off holding a pair of his underwear against my face. When I was done
it occurred to me to roll over and rub the come off my belly against his
sheets, but when I couldn’t even do that I started to cry.

I kept busy that day, hung out in the dining hall and
library between classes, lifted late at the gym, and when I got back to the dorm
that night I went directly to Harriet’s room. My own door was closed and I didn’t
know if Travis was in there yet, though I assumed he was. I’d been carrying my
toothbrush and a change of clothes around with me since morning.

“You don’t mind this, do you Harriet?” I asked, while the
humming little motor blew up the air mattress again.

“I don’t,” she said, “I like our slumber parties.” But she
continued, “We need to get this worked out somehow for your sake, though.”

“I think I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” I said, “yeah.”

But in the dark, tomorrow seemed like too long to wait. I
didn’t want to talk to him, anyway. I wanted to fuck him. Maybe I even wanted
to get fucked by him. I worked myself into silent rage made all the more
confusing by the growing hardness in my sweatpants.

For a while I listened to Harriet’s breathing, and when I
was sure she was asleep, I rolled off the air mattress onto the floor. I felt
for my keys in the pocket of my backpack. Slowly I unlocked her door and
slipped into the hallway, blinking in the fluorescent light. The lounge was
empty. Bruno’s door was ajar and some music was playing in there. My own door
was closed. I touched the knob and gave it a timid turn, but it didn’t move. I
raised my key to the lock. Then I stopped and turned and leaned against the
wall. I was shaking and I could feel the wetness of precome in my underwear.

I took a breath, fitted the key in the lock, and opened the
door. It was dark. I flipped on the light.

“Travis, I want—”

All of his things were gone. That half of the room was as
empty as the day Wesley left. I felt a sort of whiplash of loss. For a minute I
sat on the bare mattress, and then I paced the room for what felt like a long
time. On the whiteboard above my desk, near the mirror where I’d first seen him
looking at me, was a note.
My room is
done. Thanks!
It wasn’t signed.

Thanks!
That was
it.
Thanks!

There was a knock at the door and I jumped.

I stood up straight and puffed out my chest. I wondered what
I would say if it was Travis. I wondered if anything would happen if it was
Travis.

Shivering a little, I opened the door. It was Bruno. He had
on a
Beavis & Butthead
t-shirt.

“Hey,” he said, “I heard you come in. Can you do me a huge favor?”

“Oh. OK.”

“Can I borrow your camera? That nice one?”

“Wesley’s?”

He nodded. “I’m supposed to do this photo project for Media,
and I didn’t get to the equipment dispensary in time and all I own is a
Polaroid and— Hey.” He had noticed the half-empty room behind me. “The RA
is gone, huh?”

“He left today.” Letting the door swing slowly open, I went
over to my desk and picked up my camera. I checked the film roll. There were
still a few pictures left but I popped it out anyway and put the roll on my
desk.

“So you’re single in a single again, huh?” Bruno said with
that
bow-
chicka
-wow
tone. “You must be glad to get your sex palace back.”

“I guess.” I handed him the camera. “Be careful with it. It
was my roommate’s.”

(Age
20)

THE SIX MONTHS BETWEEN THEN & NOW

NOW

I was the opposite of expecting to get dumped—though
I guess that’s what everyone says. Maybe every story about getting dumped is
cliché. The same surprise, the same denial, the same obviousness in hindsight.
In my case even the name is cliché: Johnny. Who hasn’t been dumped by a Johnny?

The end began with me waiting for him in the parking lot of
a shopping plaza outside campus. A bookstore. Lots of glass, colorful signage
lighting the early dark. It was November, my junior year at UMass; the leaves
had turned. I was nervous and it was that exciting kind of nervous, the way you
feel about a boyfriend you’ve only been with three weeks. I was sitting on a
curb, my bike leaning against a trash barrel beside me, yellow-leaved trees
rustling behind me. Shoppers rushed this way and that, and cars crawled by looking
to park. I watched through them, my hands clasped between my knees to keep
warm. I watched the bookstore’s revolving door. It was a Roulette wheel and my
number was Johnny.

Before it slung him out I spotted him inside; a flash of
familiarity had made me focus beyond the glass. He was letting someone exit
ahead of him, then another person, then another. He was either very patient or
too timid to seize his turn, I didn’t know yet, I was still learning. Soon he
slipped into an open wedge and with a spin emerged onto the sidewalk. I could
feel myself smiling. I’d never had an actual boyfriend before.

He looked around, not seeing me yet. He pushed up his sleeve
and checked his watch, exposing a flash of pale skin. He was in his work
clothes, khakis crisp, gray fleece jacket over his blue button-down. He tucked
a flat shopping bag under his arm and zipped up.

When he looked again he spotted me. I waved, a quick rainbow
motion, but I didn’t stand up. Sitting, I thought, made me seem casual and
cool. I wanted to seem that. I had to earn his being here—we were still
too new for obligations. He smiled as he walked toward me. His teeth were
crooked and white.

“Buy anything fun?” I asked, stretching out my leg and
touching a sneaker to his shiny black loafer.

“
Justice League
,
Flash
,
Wonder Woman
this week,” he said, looking down at me. “My one
indulgence.” His speech had a touch of South Carolina in it. He handed me the
bag so I could see. “Were you waiting long? You should’ve come inside.”

“I have my bike,” I said. I pulled the comics out of the bag
and glanced at their covers; I didn’t know anything about comic books but I
liked the bright colors. I handed them back. “And it’s never a wait when I’m
waiting for you,” I added cheesily, blowing my cool. I stood up, wiped mulch
off the back of my jeans and then reached for my bike, bounced the front wheel over
the curb.

Johnny rolled his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe I could
find him worth waiting for, but then he smiled and closed them; he tended to
close his eyes when he smiled. I liked that because it gave me a second to have
his face to myself. The clarity of his fair skin, which looked like it had
never known a zit. The line where his light-brown hair met his forehead and
temples. I knew all the parts of him now—I knew he had a birthmark shaped
like a seahorse in a soft place his underwear covered—but his face was my
favorite. His face was the part of him that looked back at me and knew how I
felt, even if he seemed not to believe it, and that was the novelty of Johnny
for me.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “You hungry?”

“Starving. Should we walk or drive?”

“Let’s drive,” he said. “Do your bike.”

Our codes, our slang; we already had them.
Do your bike.
We’d discovered a week
earlier that if I took off my bike’s front wheel it fit perfectly in the back
seat of his Hyundai. It felt exciting, this discovery—a sign that we fit.

THEN

Before Johnny I hadn’t been fitting, not with any of the flash-flood
of guys I dated sophomore year. That thing with Travis—whatever else it
was, it was a gateway drug to boys. It made me want more and it made me bolder
about finding them. No longer was I content to leave my door open and wait. I
went out with a guy on the floor below mine, then with an off-campus student
named Daryl. I dated a guy Kaitlyn set me up with, and even one Bruno set me up
with (“I know another gay guy,” he had heroically).

None of the guys became more than flings, though—a few
dates and a fadeaway, that was how it worked. Although I fit in their beds I
found it too hard to fit in their lives.

My problem was their context—their details and dramas
and complexities. Every guy had a life that never included me before and now
would have to make room. Meet-cutes and first dates inevitably butted against
the existence of their friends, exes, family, work. Context built up and
overwhelmed me. I didn’t want to hang out with their friends; I had friends. I
didn’t want to meet their parents; I had parents. After all my struggle to
acknowledge to myself and others that I wanted these guys’ attention, why did I
now have to compete for it? I’d waited too long to have to compete.

I had mostly been meeting these guys through friends, and
that was the worst because it brought context immediately: from the start he’s
not quite yours, you’re sharing him with that mutual friend. So I decided to
try my own luck online, with personal ads—tiny thumbnail photos, cursors
manifesting text. Context seemed avoidable there. Which was stupid; they were
the same guys. But that was easy to ignore when you were supplied with dozens
of faces with no context. These guys seemed like nothing more than what they
could be for me. Names, ages, likes and dislikes—these faces had lives
small enough to fit in your pocket. I saw a face named Johnny I thought would
fit perfectly in mine.

We IMed for a week before deciding to meet. I was
optimistic, but cautiously. There’d been little talk of context while we were
IMing but I knew that even if you can hold if off, context eventually rushes in
like cold air with a winter guest. To my relief, he didn’t invite me to a
friend’s party or on a double date or to a brother’s basketball game. He
invited me to Friendly’s for ice cream, just us.

He got to the restaurant first and was in a booth sipping
from a sweating glass of ice water when I arrived. His hand was cold from the
glass when we shook, but then his other, warmer hand clasped the back of mine.

“I’m Johnny,” he said.

“I know,” I laughed as I slid into the booth and wriggled
out of my jacket.

We perused the glossy menus in nervous silence for a while,
and then ordered sundaes. While we waited he tried on my bike helmet and said, “How
do I look?”

“Cute,” I said, watching the blue buckles swing beneath his
smooth chin.

“You rode your bike here?” he said.

“I ride pretty much everywhere. I used to have a car but it
was too cumbersome to keep it on campus.”

“Tell me about your school,” he said, handing me back the
helmet and smoothing his hair with his palm. He knew from IMing that I went to
UMass. He asked about my dorm, my classes, my photography minor. I told him
everything, most of it for the second time, though it was nice this time to see
his face instead of a screen reflecting my own.

Soon the sundaes were set in front of us. He began carving
whipped cream delicately with the tip of his long-handled silver spoon. “I
would love to go to school,” he said wistfully.

“Yeah,” I said, “so you don’t? Why’s that?”

“You’re dripping,” he said, catching a bead of peanut butter
running down the back of my dish.

“Thanks,” I said softly.

He put the spoon in his mouth and licked my peanut butter.
He didn’t seem to mean for it to be erotic, but good god.

“Yeah, I don’t go to school,” he continued. “I was supposed
to. I would like to. Someday.” He smirked. He’d said it the way people say
someday
about owning a Ferrari, about
backpacking through Europe. For him an education seemed something to aspire to,
and I wondered why; for me, I was privileged enough to see it as a dutiful
slog.

I said, “What do you mean, you were
supposed
to?”

It took him a few seconds to answer. “Just decided to go in
a different direction.”

“You said you work for a vet? That must be cool. No exams!”

“A receptionist for a vet,” he corrected, scrunching his
face. “I make teeth-cleaning appointments for cats.” He leaned forward, a
little conspiratorially. “There’s so many lesbians around here, and they’re
very up on dental hygiene for their pets.”

“Wouldn’t your parents help, though?” I said, still too
curious to laugh. “If you did want to go to school?”

He shook his head and then focused on his sundae. He tipped the
dish and showed me the secret cluster of M&Ms he’d uncovered at the bottom.
And from this he seemed to be telling me to drop the school talk. I did, and
reminded myself to be glad of no context.

With him, context turned out to be easy to avoid. He had an
apartment in Amherst but didn’t talk much about it, except to say his roommate
was an older black man named Will. He didn’t say anything more about his job at
the vet. Instead he told me all the ways to slay a dragon. He talked about
being the first human on Mars. About what he would do if he won the lottery,
about buying a copy of
Action Comics
#1. He seemed not to have any past but talked for an hour about his fantastical
future, like a book with nothing on its pages but the promise of an amazing
sequel. I noticed, at some point, two things: how pretty his amber eyes were,
and that they hadn’t left my own face. Not to scan the booths for people he
knew. Not to check his cellphone for missed calls; he didn’t even have a cellphone.
When our ice cream dishes were empty and sitting in rings of melt on the table,
we ordered food, to make it last.

After almost three hours chilling in that Friendly’s booth
my veins felt full of coffee and I wanted to run through the parking lot
wagging my arms, but I contained myself. We walked to his car. He had a white
Hyundai with rust rimming the wheel wells.

“I feel like a villain making you pedal back to your dorm,”
he said. “But I don’t think your bike can fit in my car....”

“It’s cool,” I said, eyeing his small back seat and agreeing
that my bike probably wouldn’t fit. “Biking keeps my muscles hard. I used to
lift weights, and I was pretty big, but I kind of, I dunno, I stopped.”

He blushed and looked down at my tires or my sneakers or the
ground I was standing on. I wanted to kiss him—would’ve tried, except we
were in public.

“I wish I didn’t have work in the morning,” he said, “so
this could go... longer?”

I told him we’d do it again, the sooner the better, and he
made me promise, and I promised. Then I buckled my helmet with the straps that
had hugged his chin, and rode away.

Soon after I got home Shelley came by my room. She had
moved out of Johnson Hall for her senior year and lived in the building next
door, but the prospect of news of my date enticed her to make a trek across the
Quad.

“You look happy!” she said, sitting down on my bed and
fitting one of my pillows behind her. She let me blabber for a few minutes
about my date and then asked to see Johnny’s photo again. I brought it up on my
computer, the little thumbnail from his ad.

“Oh,” she said, “he’s cute.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

She laughed. “So what’s his story?”

“Shelley, I don’t even know. I don’t think he
has
one.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “But that’s bad, right? He’s boring?”

“No, no, it’s good. That’s why I’m happy. He’s not boring.
He’s a blank page. I
love
it.”

When Johnny and I met up again three long nights later I
imagined pulling our dates together like pieces of string and tying them into
one seamless evening, omitting the hours we’d spent apart.

This time I invited him to the UMass dining hall for dinner
after he got off work. I was short on money and I could feed him for free
there.

“Pick a table,” I told him as we entered amid the clatter of
voices and silverware, and he said, “Any table?”

“Fill your plate,” I told him as we wandered the buffet, and
he said, “With whatever I want?”

He seemed to feel out of place and he looked it too, in his
ironed work clothes surrounded by kids in t-shirts and slippers and unimpressed
glares. But he grinned mysteriously while we ate.

“Imagine if I went to UMass too?” he said—whispered,
actually, as though he were afraid of someone nearby laughing at him. “We could
have lunch every single—” He paused, suddenly bashful.

“Minute?” I offered hopefully, and he looked surprised.

It was enough to tell each other that this was mutual. It
was enough for me to know to bring him back to my room.

We crossed the Quad in the chilly evening. I had my own room
that year, and as I closed the door behind us I asked gently what he wanted to
do. I had my nice underwear on under my jeans but was feeling comfortable
enough and secure enough to not be disappointed when he asked if I had cable.

“Of course,” I said. “We get all the channels.”

He took off his shoes and sat cross-legged beside me on my
bed, so our knees were just touching. He was wearing those thin black office
socks, and they looked funny near the toes of my puffy white Hanes. We watched
something on MTV, crept higher to E!, crept higher to Showtime. He put his hand
on my thigh and I started to get hard, but when he didn’t move it any more I
understood the touch was an ends, not a means.

The TV flickered and droned. Johnny surfed higher, to HBO.
It was after 10:00 when I started to fixate on the clock by my bed. I hoped
some magical deadline of lateness would compel him to sleep over. Close to
midnight, when I thought I was safely past that deadline, I yawned and
stretched my legs.