The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (19 page)

“Same, Ollie. Same exact thing.”

***

Two knights sat in the waiting area. They were side by
side on the bench, their armored legs sticking out stiffly in front of them. I
could see the colorful soles of their sneakers under the flaps of toe metal.
Red and yellow—Nike knights. They sat with their helmets in their laps.
One knight was idly plucking the bristly red brush that ran like a mohawk along
the crown of his helmet. That knight was a redhead, the other was blond; they
had the same ducktail haircuts. With their bodies covered in bulky armor it was
hard to tell how old they were, but their faces looked boyish, young enough to
need a ride to the mall. It was the last day of February vacation.

I slipped my appointment list back in my pocket. The knights
were whispering to each other when I said, “You dudes ready?” And I gestured
for them to come around back to the studio.

The metal velcroed to their arms and legs clanged loudly as
they got up and followed me.

“I’m guessing you guys want the castle backdrop? My castle
is ripped, so we’ll need to steal hers.” I pointed at Patrice, who was shooting
an elderly couple dressed as ancient Egyptians.

“Actually,” the redheaded knight said, “we want the tropical
beach one?” He looked to the blond, who nodded.

“Ah, OK,” I laughed. “I guess even knights need to go on
vacation once in a while, right?”

“Not vacation,” the same one said. He let it hang for a
second while some kind of boldness built inside him, then he added, “They’re on
their honeymoon.”

The blond knight reached out and pressed the back of his
gloved hand against the redhead’s hip, uncomfortably, as if to hold him back
and keep him from saying anything more.

I stared at them much longer than I should’ve, long enough
to make me worry they would think I was like other people who stared. I couldn’t
help it.

“How— How old are you guys?”

“Fifteen,” the redhead said. “Well Colin will be fifteen
next month.” Colin, the blond, was looking down at his armored feet.

Fourteen. This boy, this Colin, this hero of mine, was
fourteen.
Dwight’s death had reminded me
that we can be snuffed out at any moment, that life was short. And sometimes I
was afraid that I waited too long to start living mine, that I missed things
because of it that I’ll never get back. Things these boys had. Was it only
time, only my place in history’s progressing march, that had kept me from being
like these two boys? Or did they have some greater bravery, some greater
willingness to be who they were, that it took me much longer to muster?

“So OK, the beach, the beach. Let’s find you guys the beach.”
I pulled down a few backdrops looking for it—the space station, the laser
maze, the rainforest, the Eiffel Tower, the torn castle. I found the beach,
pulled it all the way down to the floor, to the colorful soles of their sneakers.
“Of course knights would honeymoon at the beach. That’s really sweet. You guys
are adorable.”

Colin looked at me and I saw a wall come down a little
behind his eyes.

“You dudes decide how you want to stand for the pictures.
Let me get a sunlight gel in this light here so we can make it look really
real, like a real beach. Like a sunny day.”

They decided they wanted to stand side by side with their
helmets on, with their faceplates down, nothing fancy. I took a few shots that
way but it seemed funny to me that their faces weren’t showing.

“Dude who’s not Colin—” I pointed.

“Robbie.”

“Robbie, turn a little to your left for me, your armor is
giving me lens flares.”

He did, and then he said, “Smile, boy,” from inside his
helmet, touching Colin’s glove. It took me a second to understand—at
first I thought he’d said “
Smile, Boyd.
”
I ran my hand over my hair and took a deep breath before snapping another few
pictures.

“I’m good,” I said then, and the knights started to step
away from the backdrop. “Wait— Do you want to do one with your helmets
off? Don’t you want to see your faces?”

The redhead, Robbie, flipped up his faceplate. “We’re doing
it like this so Colin can have the picture beside his bed, like in his room,
and no one will know who it is. But he’ll know. Like, you know, for secret.”

“For secret. I hear you,” I said. “My parents had a hard
time with it too.” It wasn’t exactly the truth but maybe I wished it was. Maybe
it would’ve explained why I waited so much longer than Robbie and Colin.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “It’s not part of the package
you picked, but if you want to do one with your helmets off I’ll throw in a
couple wallet-size photos and you can keep them just for secret. I think
someday you’re going to want to see how happy you were together.”

After a second Colin spoke. “Yeah, that would be cool,” he
said. He had a cute, little voice for a boy so brave.

They took off their helmets and held them at their sides.

“OK, smile on three, ready....” I did a countdown but I didn’t
even need to. Those boys were already smiling.

(Age
24)

ABBEY’S MOHAWK

In the dawn, in the dark, I put down my phone and
whispered, half to myself, “I’m having a baby.”

Even whispered, some things are loud enough to make a person
thrash awake and sit up. The guy in my bed beside me did. The sheet bunched
around his naked lap. His hair was askew. He blurted, croaky from sleep, “I
used a condom!”

I looked at him. I was pretty sure his name was Dylan. “What?”

In the low light he looked back at me, squinted his eyes,
reached for the eyeglasses perched on a stack of photo albums by my bed, put
them on, looked at me again. “Oh,” he said. “
Phew
. You’re a guy.”

I said again, laughing a little this time, “What?”

He sighed. “I’m bi. It’s a consideration.” He flopped back
down on the pillow and shivered. “You know, pregnancy. I got nervous there for
a second.”

“Don’t worry.” I patted his arm. “I’m not the one pregnant.
And you’re not the father.”

“Who is?”

“I am.”

Dylan—that was indeed his name, I discovered after
tentatively trying it out while he hurriedly dressed—hopped out of my
apartment with his sneakers untied and his t-shirt on backward. I suspected
that if for some reason the door hadn’t opened for him he would’ve put a
Dylan-shaped hole in it. I stood looking at it for a minute after it swung
closed behind him.

“I’m not even going to ask,” said Corey, my roommate, as I
entered the kitchen, where he was pouring a measured amount of whey powder into
the blender. The gallon tub of whey sat on the counter alongside an ice tray
and an array of diced fruit. I plucked a chunk of banana off the cutting board.

Since our other roommate Theo moved out to live with his
girlfriend last year it’d just been the two of us here. We weren’t exactly friends
and we had no special dynamic, like the Odd Couple or something, but Corey,
never very welcoming when he’d had a fellow straightboy around to keep up
appearances for, had loosened up a little around me lately. He no longer seemed
quite as put off by my gayness, and sometimes even asked questions when he
smelled a story. Other times, like now, he only fished.

“My kid was born this morning,” I said, leaning against the
sink. “I think that guy wanted to blast out of here before I could make him a
step-father.”

“So you’re a dad?”

“I’m a father.” I ate the chunk of banana. “I’ve reproduced,
isn’t that wild?” Corey, a manly man, had not reproduced, and I got a certain
satisfaction out of rubbing in the fact that the homo had done it first. Corey
didn’t even have a girlfriend. “It’s a girl.”

“Wow. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

He dumped some ice and the cut-up fruit into the blender and
then switched it on. We stood there watching it puree, saying nothing.

***

It was an important distinction: I was a father and not a
dad. That was the arrangement. I’d known it going in, agreed to it—it
sounded fine.

The conception of the idea, if not the actual baby, happened
on a bench outside the Chocolate Emporium in Northampton, where my old college
pal Harriet and I were eating obscenely big ice cream sundaes. It was
September, a blistering Indian summer day, and ice cream kept dribbling down
the sides of our dishes and splattering in our laps, which we’d covered with
napkins to keep our shorts clean.

Four years older than me, Harriet had lived in Spain for a
few years after graduating from UMass, and there she’d met a fellow expat named
Trudy. It shocked me when Harriet first told me they were in love, since I’d
never known she could find that in a woman, though in hindsight it seemed
fitting. In college she had earnestly labeled me
cute
without an ounce of seeming to feel it herself. I’d told
myself it was because I was gay, that she wasn’t wasting any time pursuing me.
It turned out it was because she was, too.

She and Trudy came back to America, to Amherst, when
same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts that spring. Harriet was
twenty-eight by then, Trudy a few years older, and they were ready for “the
next step.” In my mind that meant marriage. Our new right, unimaginable even a
few years earlier, seemed both exotic and fragile, something to sign up for
quickly and then hang on to for dear life. It hadn’t occurred to me at that
point that you could get married and then need another step.

“We’ve been looking at donors,” Harriet said, however,
sucking a lump of gleaming fudge off her red plastic spoon.

“Donors?” I said. “You mean like blood donors?”

“Blood donors, Ollie, really?” She turned and looked at me,
her eyes wide with amusement behind her Mod glasses. She laughed. “
Sperm
donors, silly.”

“I was kidding, Harriet, obviously.” I hadn’t been kidding. “So
you want to have a kid?”

“Believe me, Oliver, that’s the only thing Trudy and I want
with sperm.”

“What does looking for donors entail?”

“Well, it—”

“Is it fun? I feel like I could get into it, if you need
help.”

“God, you need a boyfriend,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We
went to an agency. There’s a book of profiles. We’ve got it narrowed down to a
couple guys. It’s so hard to choose.”

“So it’s all going to be anonymous, then?”

“We think it’s the best way. I’m not totally sold on the
idea of the kid not knowing who her father is—or who
his
father is—but Trudy and I want to be the parents.
Exclusively, you know?”

“That makes sense. So who’ll get
preggo
?”

“Me.”

“Ah.” I ate a bite of ice cream.

“I hate that word,” she laughed. “
Preggo
.
”

“
With child
. Is
that better?”

“It’ll do.”

We were quiet for a few minutes, and my mind wandered back
to when I was a little freshman with a pushy RA, and Harriet had taken care of
me, given me a place to stay. When our spoons were starting to scratch at the
bottom of our
styrofoam
dishes I said, “You’ll be a
good mom, Harriet.”

“Thank you. I think I will. I think I’m ready.”

We tossed our trash and walked up Main Street. We walked
up through the campus grounds of girls-only Smith College, where I reminded
Harriet to be wary of roving bands of horny lesbians.

“They’ll be able to tell you want a baby,” I said, “by your
pheromones.”

She started laughing, and she laughed so hard she had to sit
down right there in the grass, even though my joke was barely funny. I think
the talk of a baby had made her happy, giddy. It did seem to lighten everything
somehow. Even I was happy to be thinking of something I’d always believed would
be closed to me because I was gay.

There’s a lake on the Smith campus at the bottom of a steep,
grassy embankment, and we sat on the grass watching girls paddle canoes.

I lay back beside Harriet with my arms behind my head and my
eyes closed, and I listened to her tell about the two donors she and Trudy were
trying to choose between. I tried to picture the donors and couldn’t. Anonymous
men had no faces no matter what else you knew about them. A faceless lawyer, a
faceless teacher. A
cum laude
graduate, but faceless. A triathlete, but faceless. I didn’t like either of
them. I probably didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I was jealous that
a faceless man would step in and do for my friend what I was capable of doing
too.

“Well,” Harriet said finally, when the sun was starting to
go down behind the green hills, “I suppose I should be getting home.”

“I’d do it for you, Harriet, if you want,” I said. Although
I hadn’t thought about ever saying such a thing until a few minutes earlier, I
can’t say it surprised me. Maybe it was something I’d been thinking about for
years without noticing.

Harriet, now standing, turned her head very slowly and
looked down at me where I lay in the grass. “Do what, Oliver?”

I laughed and felt my face get a little red. I sat up. “If
all you want is for someone to put sperm in a cup, I can do that for you.”

She sat down again in the grass with a heavy
oomph
, as though I’d pulled the ground
out from under her. The continued blankness on her face instinctually made me
start trying to persuade her.

“I mean, you know me better than any of those guys in some
dumb book,” I said. “I’m smart-
ish
, I’m decently
attractive (you said so yourself, once), and I’ve always been healthy. I’m a
little twitchy in the brain but it’s never really held me back. I mean, I’d do
it for you, is what I’m saying.”

Her blank expression broke and she laughed. “Ollie, don’t be
silly.”

“What’s silly about it? I’m not being silly.”

She looked out at the girls in the canoes as though they were
holding all of her attention, but I think she just didn’t know where to look. “You’re—really
serious?”

I
felt
serious, I
really did. “Why not?”

Still she was looking vaguely at the lake, or past it at the
hills, or beyond those at the future. She was quiet.

“Harriet?”

“Why would you want to do that, Ollie? You’re twenty-three
years old.”

“I’m twenty-four last month.”

She huffed. “The point is, you’re too young.”

“Too young to squirt in a cup? The key thing, Harriet, is
that I’m not at a point where I want more than to squirt in a cup. You told me
you’re not looking for the donor to be a dad. Would you want me to be a dad?”

“... We’re not looking for a dad.”

“So.” I held up my hands. “I’m just putting it out there,
lady.”

“I think—” And then she stopped. And then she began
again, after putting her hand on my knee. “I think everyone will need to take a
lot of time to think about this.”

But around the edges of her lips she was smiling.

***

I have a daughter, so you know what we decided. I got
together with Harriet and Trudy four times over the next few weeks to hash
things out, to get everyone clear on expectations. They wanted the kid, if
there turned out to be a kid, to know I was the father but my role in his or
her life would be more like that of an uncle or a family friend—I could
have a relationship but no say in the raising. They couldn’t promise to stay in
Amherst or even Massachusetts after the kid was born, if a kid was ever born.
The kid, if there ever was a kid, wouldn’t have my last name.

I agreed to it all. Even the idea that they might move away
didn’t much phase me. I imagined that if I had a kid and rarely saw her it
wouldn’t be much different from not having one at all. And they looked so
happy.

A whirlwind began, of blood tests, of legal documents signed
and of rights released, of masturbating in little rooms under harsh lighting
into little plastic cups. Harriet got pregnant in November, after two tries.
She told me the news over the phone while I was photographing some pilgrims at
Fantasy
Foto
and my first thought was,
I work
. It was the same thought I had
when I lost my virginity, when my inner nerves fired into wakefulness.
I work
, I thought,
my body works
.

***

I told my parents in January, after Harriet said she was
far enough along to tell. It was a Sunday; I was visiting them in Lee for the
afternoon. Big puffy snowflakes blew around in the air without falling, and the
center of town, in its smallness, felt like the inside of a snowglobe. We were
out for a late lunch at the Italian place beside the bank, across the street
from the auto-body shop where I worked in high school. Through the steamed
windows of the restaurant I saw a guy I’d worked with standing in the auto-body
lot, wearing blue coveralls with a rag hanging out of his pocket. It surprised
me that he would still work there after all this time—but of course
all this time
had only been six years.
Six years, and look, I was going to be a father.

If every six years were as big for me as these last six, who
would I possibly be in twelve? In twenty-four? I would have a grown-up child in
twenty-four.

I told my parents this after we ordered. I hadn’t needed to
write anything down for a speech. The news came out easily, almost skipped out,
as if on a giddy breeze.

My mother just stared at me, her forehead wrinkles smoothing
as her brows slowly sank. My father calmly put his bread down beside a buttery
knife. He said, “You think you’re prepared to raise a kid?”

“That’s— Dad—” I probably had let my excitement
get ahead of the details. I should’ve led with the arrangements, the contract,
the waivers. “I’m not going to raise him,” I explained. “This will be Harriet
and Trudy’s kid, I’m just supplying the—you know. Making it possible for
them to make a family.”

“Of course you’re going to help raise him,” my mother said. “This
will be your baby, too. It’ll be
ours
.”

“No, I signed papers,” I said, looking back and forth
between my parents. I felt like this was going off the rails and I didn’t know
how to get it back. “I’m— He’s going to be Harriet’s and Trudy’s.
Exclusively.”

Disbelief and quiet rage were blooming in my father’s eyes,
and he looked at me as though I was the stupidest person he’d ever seen. “You
signed—? What kind of papers did you sign, Oliver?”

I took a gulp of water. “I read them carefully, they weren’t
long. It’s fine. I’m basically an anonymous donor even though it’s not
anonymous. They’ll be the parents. I’ll just be Ollie.”

My mother took a deep breath. My father rubbed his face. “
You’ll just be Ollie?
What the hell does
that mean?” My mother put her hand on his arm because his voice was getting
loud.

“I don’t know, that I
have no parental rights to the—”