The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (9 page)

“We got rid of
that printer two Christmases ago.”

“But then,
not
surprised. When you’re a parent you
notice things, I guess. Maybe you don’t notice you’re noticing
at the
time
, but in a flash you’ll
remember
it all. Dots connect
.
That dance....”

“You knew since
two Christmases?”

“We wanted to
wait. To give you a chance to tell us on your own.”

He looked out
across the lake, again giving me a chance to say something, and when I didn’t
he continued. “Am I right that you haven’t told anybody?”

I nodded. No
one.

“I hoped maybe
you and Boyd— For a while there during your junior year, you two seemed—
You really seemed
—
”

“I thought we
were— Maybe. Daddy
—
But I couldn’t....”

He cleared his
throat, nodded, looked again across the water at the sun. “The reason I bring
it up now. W
hy we decided not to wait anymore.
Your mom wanted me to. And I wanted to, of course. But the reason I
bring it up, Ollie, is because I don’t want you to miss out on anything. Not
anymore. College i
s too important and it goes by so,
so
fast.
”

We looked at each other for a long time and I didn’t know
what to say. Finally h
e took out
a pocket knife, opened it, and cut the fishing line in his lap. Then he flung
the wet clump of lily pads, with the lure still lodged in it somewhere, back
into the water.

“Telling your
father you’re gay,” he said, “I guess that’s about the hardest thing you’d ever
have to do.” He wiped the knife on his sleeve, fold
ed it
and put it back in his pocket, then
reached and took his fishing pole back from me. “Everything after that’s a
piece of cake, right? So I figured I’d do the heavy lifting for you. I didn’t
know how to make things easier for you when you were younger. But there. I’ve
done this.”

“Yeah,” I
said, and I looked down at my hands, at the callouses from the weights.

There are
home movies of me learning to
swim, in this very lake, back when the
water was clearer and it had a beach
.
My dad shot them from the
shoreline, his pant legs rolled up and his
feet submerged
, and you can watch
me
almost drown
repeatedly, dozens of times,
as I tried to swim from one red buoy to the
next in the shallow water
.
Coughing, snot on my lips, I
w
ould
stand up after each failure
and wade back to the starting buoy and try
again.
When I was older, around t
welve
, I asked him why he’d been taking
movies when he should’ve been in the water helping me. I remember he was quiet
for a few seconds, then he pointed at the TV—at the moment, famous in my
family, when I suddenly was no longer
drowning
. At the cartoonish grin on my face as I
swam
.

“I wanted you
to know you could do it,” he said.

Our row back was quiet and I felt like a stranger to him
now, and to myself—a new person I had no practice at being, in a
different life I hadn’t earned. Did he think I could not have done it this
time? Did he see some weakness in me he knew I would’ve come up against in the
last moment, just as the words were touching my lips? Why else would he have
stepped in just as I was going to show him? Did he know, surer than me, that I’d
have nothing to show?

“I was going to tell you,” I wanted to say as I rowed, “really,”
but that would almost be meaningless. All it would mean was that I hadn’t.

The wind picked up and made my cheeks feel cold where the
tears had been.

My dad leaned over the side of the boat and dangled his
fingers in the water. He looked serene and unburdened, his fatherly duty done.
Somewhere in the past ten minutes he had stopped rubbing his spine.

He looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back as much as I
could. I was out now, yet
I felt
small and unsure of myself despite my biceps, my legs. In fact there was no
connection at all between my muscles and my courage. I had imagined they were
one and the same, or could be. Although I knew exactly what I could lift on the
bench, the rest of it— Really, I’d never know
.

(Age
18)

SO LONG EUCALYPTUS

Lots of things come to mind when I think about Wesley. One
of the first is eucalyptus. Eucalyptus-scented oil he would pour from a little
vial—
plink
plink
plink
—into a spray-bottle of water and then
spritz around our dorm room. From wherever I was sitting I would watch him,
often backlit against one of our two big windows, spritzing.

Picture the misty puff of the stuff in the sunbeams. Picture
the clear plastic bottle, a finger on its trigger, clasped in a thin bony hand.
Picture a spindly wrist, tattooed on the veiny side with a blue lighthouse.
Picture his twiggy arm and his slightly hunched shoulders, his boyish face with
blue eyes and constellation of freckles across the nose, framed by shaggy,
honey-colored hair he was trying to grow long. Picture him tall and slim. If he
were a tree he’d be a willow, though he was often lying down. His bed, against
the whitewashed wall across the narrow room from mine, was made up with a faded
paisley quilt, fitted tight on the twin-long mattress like a military cot.

Wesley was
spartan
but thoughtful,
eccentric in an understated way: He’d brought only his most important
possessions from home but considered a vial of eucalyptus oil to be among them.
Our room, perfumed with the potion he spritzed everywhere, was all Wes, from
the tapestry he purchased at a Tibetan store and spread out on our floor to
cover the drab carpet, to the chunky olive-green curtains he sewed himself to
give our room a more homey feel. He had done it all with my help, and although
I was never offered a choice it wouldn’t have occurred to me to suggest
anything different. Wes was like that, and I was like me.

I had arrived on move-in day a quivering freshman, intent
on getting to the dorm early and first to get dibs on the better bed, if there
was one; the better desk, if one was preferable. My new roommate, who had
introduced himself in a letter two weeks earlier, was coming to UMass from
California; I was only coming from Lee. I expected to have the place to myself
for at least a night.

But instead of the empty room I was expecting, when I opened
the door I found a suitcase spilled open on one of the beds, as if it’d been
dropped to earth from a passing plane. Push-pinned to the wall above that bed
was a curling Kandinsky print, though I didn’t know who Kandinsky was at the time.
Colored circles in colored squares.

My shoulders slumped. The strap on the duffel bag I was
carrying slipped down and settled around my hips like a yoke. I stumbled across
the threshold dragging it behind me, with a nineteen-inch TV in my hands and a laptop
bag dangling from my arm. Without getting too close, as if something might pop
out, I peered into the open suitcase, looking for clues about this boy I’d be
living with.

“Oliver?”

The voice came from behind me. I turned, already knowing it
had to be my new roommate—who else here would know my name? He had on
jeans, a faded blue t-shirt with the word
Sennheiser
in white across the
front. A hand towel was draped over his shoulder as though he’d been doing
dishes or something somewhere. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed
that he wasn’t hot.

“That’s me,” I said. “Wesley?”

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

He entered the room with his hand held out to shake, then he
seemed to realize my arms were full.

“Need some help with... anything?” he asked, eyeing the TV
and then lifting my laptop bag’s strap from the crook of my elbow instead.
Shifting the TV to one hand, I extended my arm so he could slide the laptop bag
off. “I guess you don’t, really?” He was looking at my muscles; people looked
at them. “Glad you brought a TV,” he said, “I couldn’t fit one in my carry-on.”

He put my laptop—the most prized and intimate of my
possessions since it was the only place I’d ever really been me—gently on
the desk he’d chosen to be mine.

“Thanks,” I said.

He added, “My parents are shipping out some more of my
stuff, but I had to be choosy.”

“Mine are down at the car, with pretty much everything else
I own.”

He laughed, crossed his skinny arms across
Sennheiser
. “Did
you bring a stereo?”

“Of course.”

“Can I use it sometimes?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“Cool.”

That first afternoon after my parents drove away I had an
almost throbbing awareness of being in college. A deep sense that my life had
lurched irrevocably forward whether I was ready or not, and that now everything
would be different—whether I was ready or not. Alone in my room
unpacking, I listened to the voices of Wesley and some of our new hallmates in
the lounge next door. I listened for clues about whether I would fit in with
them, whether I would belong here. A pair of girls—freshmen roommates
from down the hall—had already popped into our room to introduce
themselves as Kaitlyn and Amy. They had wanted to know where I was from, what
my major was, was I
so excited
. In
the background of my every answer was the secret that had been a secret to
everyone until a fishing trip with my father twenty-four hours ago. I didn’t
want to bring the secret to college but one slip, one deflective answer to a question
like
Do you have a girlfriend back home?
,
and then it would be a secret here, too.

Rarely would I ever miss high school but that afternoon
while the sun lowered across the Quad and I listened to these new kids in the
lounge I missed high school and the anonymity that twelve years with the same
kids in a small town affords you. By high school everyone in Lee had learned
everything they wanted to know about me, and I could stalk the halls
unquestioned, basically invisible. No one was going to ask me anything. Here at
UMass they were already asking; they were curious; I was as new to them as they
were to me. So I unpacked slowly alone in my room, maybe to give them time to
be less new before I had to talk to them.

After a while Wesley returned to our room and shut the door—an
action that had a flavor of intimacy I wasn’t prepared for. As an only child I
had never shared a room with anyone, let alone a boy. I was standing barefoot
on my bed amid a clutter of unpacked things, hanging my R.E.M. posters on my
wall and on my half of our tape-cratered ceiling.

“You should’ve come hung out with us,” he said, looking past
me up at my posters. “They all seem really nice. That Kaitlyn is
nutso
.”

“I will. Definitely. I just want to get unpacked first. It’s
hard for me to relax until things are—you know, settled.”

Wesley said, “You must really like R.E.M.” He turned and
took a single long step toward his bed and sat down. He leaned against his wall
under the Kandinsky print and cupped one knee in his threaded fingers.
Everything he’d brought was already put away. He seemed so organized and sure
of himself. I was spilling out all over.

“Yeah. I do like them.” I looked up into the wrinkled paper
at the face of my idol. I had wondered so hard what would give me my first
opportunity to come out here, what twist of conversation, what sudden question—and
now that there was one right above me, like a gift from the sky, it felt
fitting. Years ago I had found something and now in this important moment it
was with me. Looking at the ceiling I said, “Michael Stipe is gay and he’s a
rock and roll god and so am I.”

“A rock and roll god?” Wesley said without hesitating.

I looked down at him. “Gay.” My knee almost buckled, but
held firm.

“Ah.”

The firmness turned quickly to rigidness. “Is that going to
be a problem for you?” I said. It was too defensive, but I didn’t know how this
was done. I tensed my shoulder muscles and inhaled, a bull ready to charge if
Wesley flashed a cape.

He just smirked, though. “I’ll survive. To be honest it’d be
cooler if you were a rock and roll god, too.”

Relaxing a little, I said, “You don’t care?”

“About what?” He had turned and was straightening his
Kandinsky.

“My... gayness?”

“I don’t have a problem with it. I’m from San Francisco, it’s
old news. I care if you snore, I don’t care who you date. Unless I guess if you
bring a guy home to get busy while I’m trying to sleep.” He laughed.

I turned to the wall and pressed the puttied corners of
another poster. I felt my cheeks flushing. I was going to be able to get busy
with people here—Wesley had given me permission, just by suggesting it.
He expected me to meet boys.

“So he’s a gay guy? Michael Stipe.”

“He calls it queer,” I said.

“I didn’t know.”

“Rooming with me you’ll pick up a few things about R.E.M.,”
I laughed. I stepped back to admire my posters and laughed again in sheer
relief. I had come out to my new roommate and now I was laughing! And I
thought,
Dear young Ollie. Dear lonely,
scared young Ollie: There’s a time in your future—years, weeks, minutes
into your future—when you’ll have come out to your new roommate and then
you’ll be laughing. You can’t imagine this but it’ll be true.

I jumped happily off the bed and landed in a squat on the
floor.

Wesley said, “Now that the ceiling’s decorated it makes me
realize how bland this carpet is. Maybe I’ll try to find us a tapestry to put
down, give the room some spice.”

I thought,
Dear young
Ollie: There’s a time in your future—years, weeks, minutes into your
future—when you’ll have told your life’s most tortured secret to your new
roommate, and seconds later he’ll decide the room needs more spice.

Wesley was almost a vegetarian, he said, but he had an
inescapable love of pastrami. Picture him that first night sitting cross-legged
on his bed, a pastrami sub and a sheet of curling white deli paper open on his
lap. Picture him saying, “I’m not even going to feel guilty about this,” before
biting into it. On the stereo was R.E.M., the
New Adventures in Hi-Fi
album. He’d invited me to put one on.

Later when we turned out the lights it occurred to me that
this was my first sleepover since that one with Dwight Macklin sophomore year.
Dwight hadn’t talked. Wesley did the opposite of not talking. Among the things
he asked me in the dark was what I thought about Allen Ginsberg. I said I’d
never heard of him. Saying nothing, he got up and I could hear him rummaging on
his desk. A minute later something sailed across the room with a fluttering
sound and landed on me.

“You’re lucky I packed it,” he said. “I almost didn’t. We’ll
talk about it when you’re done.”

In the light from the Quad that leaked through the windows I
flipped the pages of
Howl
.

“Also a gay man,” Wesley said, fluffing his pillow. “Not a
rock and roll god—though a bit of a rockstar in his own right.”

***

Thus began my education at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. Classes hadn’t even started yet. Before they did, there was a week’s
worth of University orientation stuff (things like trust falls and RA
introductions, I guess), which Wesley called crap. He said we should skip it
all in favor of actually learning something. I think I would’ve gone along with
anything he suggested, and for a week we walked around campus and downtown
Amherst by ourselves, rode the bus into Northampton, walked down to the banks
of the Connecticut River, while I worried that the school wouldn’t even know we’d
arrived.

Wes had a good sense of things, had an adventurer’s spirit,
and seemed to know his way around Massachusetts. Although he was from San
Francisco he had lived the previous year on Cape Cod with three buddies in an
old rented house. He talked about that year a lot. The whole thing seemed
intensely romantic to me. I couldn’t get enough of his stories of going to
laundromats in blizzards and of making lattes at the little shop in East Dennis
where he
barista’d
; of sitting his own coffee cups in
snowbanks to cool them on mornings when he had nothing to do but sit on some
steps and watch the snow. He’d taken classes at Cape Cod Community that year
and so now was technically a sophomore at UMass. To me he seemed even older, a
world-wise soul I always wanted to impress.

Picture him scoffing, in the dining hall kitchen where we
were walking with our trays one day, “You don’t drink
coffee
?” He was appalled by this in a way he never was when I didn’t
know a book or a band.

“I guess I never really thought about it before,” I said. “My
parents do.”

“Think about it now,” he said. “It’s the stuff of life.”

He set his tray down and got some for himself. Poured it,
creamed it, added sugar, stirred. In the reflection of the big silver coffee
machine while the steaming brown liquid dribbled into my first cup, I could see
myself grinning.

Mine was over-sweetened, had too much milk, was lukewarm—was
somehow delicious. I nursed it, leaning back in the dining-hall chair with the
front legs lifting off the floor. I was dreamily thinking of coffee cups in
snowbanks, like in Wes’s stories.

“What’s it been like being gay?” he said suddenly. He was
drawing shapes in spilled sugar with his finger.

“What’s it—like?” I stammered.

We hadn’t mentioned my gayness since the first night, and
once the news was out I suppose I fell back into my
closety
groove—it was so much more habitual than an out groove. I may have even
forgotten I’d told him.

He added, “When did you come out?”

“Like, last Sunday. My dad confronted me in a boat.” I lifted
my coffee to my lips and was probably using it to hide my face. There were a
lot of people in the dining hall. “Can you, maybe, ask me again tonight? I don’t
know if I can talk about it here, like—”