The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (12 page)

I watched her watching VH1. “You don’t seem very upset,” I
said curiously.

“I knew this was coming, Ollie,” she said. And maybe she
had, maybe the signs were there; of course the signs were there. But sadness
doesn’t depend on surprise to be sadness, does it?

“Even if you knew,” I said, “aren’t you sad you won’t see
him anymore?” I couldn’t understand her nonchalance. Of all our friends,
Harriet was almost as close to him as I was.

She looked at me and said, “Who knows what can happen in
five years, Ollie, or two years, or sixteen months.” She said it like an adage,
as if it were the answer to all the world’s pain. I didn’t get it. Then she
added, “This is college. It’s the same as life. People leave. Get used to it.”

She changed the channel.

***

After my first and only class on the Tuesday before
Thanksgiving break I went to the bus station to see Wesley off. The dings and
chimes and staticky loudspeaker announcements echoing off the gray walls of
that place called to mind the sounds of an intensive-care unit. While I looked
for Wes part of me wondered if he’d lied to me about the time of his bus so he
could slip away unseen, but soon I found him sitting on a bench in the terminal
wearing his puffy blue jacket. Picture him sitting with his suitcase at his
feet, the suitcase that once looked like it fell from the sky and then spent
three dusty months stashed under a bed.

“How was class?” he said as I sat down.

“Boring,” I replied. I looked up at the Departures board’s
clacking numbers. After he departed, who would ask me how class was? “Is your
bus on time?”

“Looks like it,” he said. “Fifteen minutes. I think that’s
mine,” he added, pointing beyond the big windows to a Greyhound parked
curbside.

He was taking the bus to Worcester Airport, then a plane to
Philadelphia, another plane to San Francisco. It seemed like so much work to
leave; it hurt me that he was willing to do all that work to leave when it
would take no effort to stay.

“I’m not going to cry,” I told him, “so don’t worry.”

“You can cry, Ollie.”

“I know you don’t want people to make a big deal of you
leaving.”

“Yeah. Well. Maybe I’m just a little embarrassed.” He
sighed.

“Don’t be embarrassed. I guess I understand, sort of.”

“All the same, I know it’s hard.”

Minutes crept by. People with tickets in hand started lining
up near the doors, too close to the doors, which kept automatically opening and
closing, letting in gusts of cold air.

“Ever been to California?” he said.

“No, never.”

“You’ll have to come visit,” he said, but he said it
wistfully, with the tone people use to soften long goodbyes. I think he knew he
wouldn’t stay in California for long.

For my own goodbye I had written him a letter during class
that morning. I’d written everything I wanted him to know about what these past
three months meant to me, about what I would remember about them, about how
they changed me. It reminded me of the letter I wrote to my parents, the one I’d
planned to read to them on the drive to college but never did. And this one,
too— When the time came, I didn’t give it to him, didn’t hold it out for
him when they called his bus and we stood up and looked at each other,
roommates, former roommates, because the point of that letter was easy to say,
the important part was easy to get at. The rest was just clutter.

“I love you, Wes,” I said as I pressed my cheek against the
shoulder of his puffy blue jacket.

It wasn’t the same kind of love I had felt for Boyd Wren, or
the kind I would feel for other boys in the future—but if Wesley thought
it was, that was OK, I didn’t mind. Three months had done that for me, just
three after a lifetime, thanks to him.

He rubbed my back gently, then went to his bus.

***

On my way out of the terminal I spotted a familiar face by
the sliding doors. She saw me before I saw her.

“Shelley Cantos,” I said, smiling big even though I still
had tears running down my cheeks, “are you waiting for
me?
”

She told me she’d had an awkward goodbye with Wes before I
got there but had wanted to stick around to make sure I was OK after he left.
We walked back to campus together and she put her arm around my waist because
she was too short to reach my shoulders.

When I got back to the room I noticed two things standing
out in the shocking half-emptiness: On my bed was Wesley’s camera, with a note.
“
Find things to take pictures of. W.
”
And I saw that his bare mattress had a cut in the fireproof vinyl near the foot
of the bed, with a bump of foam sticking out; that he must’ve chosen the bad
bed on the day I arrived early to get the good one. I picked up the camera and
took a photo of his bare mattress. Then I put on
Up
and lay down on his bed, for the first time ever.

After that it was different, it was always different after
that. I returned after Thanksgiving break to a place I had to struggle to make
my own. I had to find comfort in myself, by myself, with no leads to follow. At
first it was terrible. The nights seemed to throb without his voice in the
dark. I spent a lot of hours in the lounge because I didn’t want to be in my
room. I felt like I was on the edge of sinking into something.

A couple of days after break, Bruno sat down on the couch in
the lounge.

“Where’s Wesley?” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen him
since before Thanksgiving.”

I’d been standing near the window watching a snowblower
clear new snow in the Quad, but now I went and sat on the other end of the
couch. “He’s in California,” I said.

“Still?”

“Yeah, still.”

“Like, for good?”

“He dropped out.”

“Huh,” he said. “He was kind of weird, right?”

He started talking about something then, one of his dumb
Bruno stories, but I wasn’t paying attention. People say that when you die your
whole life flashes before your eyes—and why not? Sometimes it happened to
me when I wasn’t even dying. While Bruno talked I remembered every detail of my
short, infinite semester with Wesley. Wesley who could’ve easily been Bruno, or
a
Bruno, but who wasn’t, who was Wesley;
it felt like the biggest stroke of luck in my life. I remembered it all in a
flash, and every detail of that fall semester smelled like eucalyptus, and
sounded like laughing and
Aphex
Twin and R.E.M. Every
one tasted like pastrami, and every one, every one, felt like hot coffee cups
sitting in snowbanks. It must mean something that the first thing that comes to
mind when I think about Wesley, my most vivid memory of Wesley, is one of
his
memories, told to me in the dark,
made real with a whisper, brought to life in a hush.

What I think happened is that Wesley had a happy year on
Cape Cod, adventuring in the snow with his adventurous friends, plunking away
at a community college but doing his thing, peacefully watching his breath
unroll into winter air. And his parents, for whatever reason, decided that wasn’t
good enough, and talked him into structure, into the blazing
mainstreamness
of a place like UMass. And maybe it caught
up with him, faster than he expected. That’s what I think, but who knows. I know
he didn’t stay in San Francisco for long. He spent some time near Big Sur, went
up into Washington; later he wrote to me from Montana. After a while the
letters dwindled; by spring break we lost touch. Harriet was right: This was
college, and people left. Who knew what could happen in two years, or in five?
In the meantime I had Wesley’s camera, and I had lots of pictures to take.

(Age
18)

THE FIRST TIME

Lying on my back on the bare mattress, I pressed my feet
against the wall and pushed. The bed slid away from the wall a foot or two,
scraping across the stiff brown carpet. I pushed again until my legs were
straight and my heels slipped down along the wall and my feet fell onto the
dusty rectangle of carpet that had long been covered by the bed.

No one from Student Affairs had contacted me after Wesley
left, and for weeks afterward I’d had the constant nerve-wracking expectation
that at any moment my phone would ring and they would spring a new roommate on
me.

In January after I’d settled in from winter break, still no
word had come. My hallmates agreed that if I hadn’t been assigned a new
roommate by then, the vacancy had probably slipped under the radar somehow, and
I was probably safe for the rest of the year. Probably. But I was confident
enough now to start a slow sprawl into Wesley’s former space. I started using
his bed to put my stuff on—my Army jacket, my books. I started using his
chair as a footrest when I worked at my desk. Now it was February and I’d
decided to push the two beds together as a final embrace of being alone.

The bed scraped the carpet as I pushed it the last foot, and
the two metal frames met with a clang. Laying my eggcrate across the gap
between the mattresses, I turned the two twins into a double. It was a
makeshift setup because my sheets didn’t fit, but when I was done my hallmates
came by to admire it.

“So luxurious,” Kaitlyn swooned, making a snow-angel motion
on the bed and rumpling up the sheets. “So spacious!”

“Enjoy it, dude,” Harriet said, “because this like
never
happens.”

Bruno came by later and stood in the doorway eating an
apple. He had a single of his own but the singles were glorified closets and I
could tell he was jealous of my vast space, of my gigantic bed.

“You’re single in a single,” he observed while chewing
loudly. “You got your own sex palace here, man.”

That night I lay sprawled on the bed with the phrase
sex palace
throbbing in my mind. It
seemed weird of Bruno to mention sex because it was strange to me to think of
him ever having it, though I was sure he’d probably done it at least once. It
was just as strange to think of myself doing it, and I never had, not even
once, though of course I wanted to. And Bruno’s comment, and the
bow-
chicka
-wow
tone he said it with, watered a seed Wesley himself had planted the first day I
knew him: that I was free to bring a guy home. In the dark I looked across the
empty space, and if I squinted my eyes it was possible to imagine that the
shadow of the pillow was a boy lying there, slick and sweaty from being with
me. I was eighteen, newly out, single in a single, and maybe I was ready to see
what that would be like, having a boy lying there.

But I wondered if Wesley and Bruno, these straight guys who
seemed to take it for granted that I would get laid, could’ve explained to me
how. They were probably not thinking outside of themselves. Everyone knew how
straight guys got laid, but how did gay guys get laid? I had a vague awareness
of parks and
truckstops
as options for meeting gay
men, but what if you wanted more than a blowjob? What if you wanted a
boyfriend?

It seemed an exotic thing to me, a boyfriend—an idea I
could barely wrap my mind around. The closest I had ever come to getting one
had been a disaster. It may even have been all in my head. I hadn’t thought
much since then about trying again. I didn’t know how I would chase a boyfriend
down—but I’d have to try. It’s not like one was going to show up at my
door.

Or maybe one would?

With a sense of fierce liberation I stuck a rainbow sticker
on my door and left the door open to hallway traffic when I was home. The
sticker was four inches square but to me it felt as big as a billboard. It was
half a proud announcement of a part of myself I used to think I’d rather die
than have people know, and half plain old boy-bait for a lonely virgin.

With the sticker seeming to glow on my door I would sit in
the middle of my giant bed, ostensibly doing homework or watching TV or
listening to R.E.M., but really watching people walk by. People came and went—visitors,
friends, guys from other floors—and eventually one of them had to be gay.
He would see the sticker and stop, and fall for me.

At least that’s what I hoped. But it wasn’t working.

“Harriet,” I said one day when she and I were alone in the
lounge, “where do you think I could meet other guys like me?” Harriet was
older, a senior, and I thought she might know, from having been around campus
for so long.

“Gay boys?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“There’s a gay student group,” she said, thinking, “but they’re
sort of really
really
gay, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh,” I said, “yeah,” though I didn’t, really.

“Like aggressively gay,” she added.

“Oh.”

“You could always just try the gym,” she said. “There’s
probably gay boys there, right?”

“I used to lift. I could start up again.” I squeezed a bicep
that had shrunk during the time I’d spent busy with Wes.

“It’d be good,” she said. “It would get you out of your room
a little.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” She smiled.

I started going to the UMass gym after classes every day.
Muscles that had deflated from lack of use during the Wesley-focused semester
popped back to what seemed like full strength after two weeks of lifting, as if
they’d just gone on vacation until I called them back. But I wasn’t meeting any
guys at the gym. If there were gay ones there I couldn’t tell who they were,
and I was afraid of chatting up the wrong one. Instead I started sitting on my
sex-palace bed wearing tank-tops and sleeveless tees, showing off my legs with
shorts in March. I watched the hallway, waiting for a boy to see the rainbow
sticker and enter, and become my boyfriend, and take me. But, you know, none
did.

***

Then fate broke a water pipe, or at least it seemed that
way. Two days after spring break a pipe burst between the third and fourth
floors of the dorm, flooding out the room where our RA Travis lived, five doors
down from mine. I heard about this at lunch from Kaitlyn, who had witnessed him
early that morning frantically dragging his computer equipment into the
hallway, dripping and wearing nothing at all, she claimed, except soaking wet
boxers.

“Oh,” I said, my pastrami sandwich hovering forgotten near
my lips. “Just boxers? What, uh— What color were the boxers?”

She looked at me for a moment and then grinned, as if
finally fully believing I was a boy who liked boys. “He
is
sort of hot, isn’t he,” she said. “Plaid, I think. Blue and gray
plaid.”

“Plaid.”

“The poor guy,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll get him a
hotel?”

I wondered it too. But when I got home from class that day
Travis was not at a hotel, he was in my room, fully clothed now, setting up his
computer on Wesley’s old desk. Soggy clothes hung drying on the headboard rails
of my sex-palace bed, and rumpled textbooks were airing out on the floor. A
pile of his stuff lay against the armoire. I was very confused; at first I even
thought I was in the wrong room. But here was all my stuff too, and there on
the door was my rainbow sticker. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to either
Kaitlyn or me that Travis might get moved into my room—as if my decision
to claim both beds had removed the room from the purview of Student Affairs.

“Oliver, hi,” Travis said. He was wearing jeans and a
stretched-out polo, which showed some reddish chest hair near the buttons. He
was looking at my giant bed, standing with his hands on his hips. “We’ll need
to push these back apart,” he said. “It’s illegal for me to sleep with my
residents.” He laughed, but I still felt confused. “Did you hear about my
flood?”

“Oh. Yeah, I did, yeah. That sucks.”

“So I’ll be living in here for a while, until my ceiling
gets repaired.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. Um. Welcome!”

I cast a sideways glance at the sticker on the door. I would’ve
peeled it off if I’d known he was coming.

My hallmates started giving me crap about rooming with the
RA. They took turns that night in the lounge roasting me about the perks of
such a situation, the things I could get away with, who I could have killed if
they crossed me—as if an RA were a mafioso I now had an
in
with. “The RA’s pet,” Bruno called me
with a smirk. I sat there and took it, smirking back, happy just to have their
company and an excuse not to go in my room. It felt funny being in there. My
room, I was discovering, wasn’t really mine and never had been. The comfort I
felt there with Wesley was about atmosphere, not ownership. Claiming both beds
didn’t make it mine. Travis or anyone else Student Affairs decided to stick
there had every right to be in the room, to come and go, to play music, have
friends over, control the TV. And right from the start I wanted him gone.

“It’s getting late,” Bruno teased, “you better go give the
RA his foot-rub.”

“Yeah
yeah
yeah
.”
I rolled my eyes.

And I wondered,
How
long will it take to fix a ceiling?

“Hey, Oliver,” Travis said, looking over as I entered the
room after the last of my hallmates had drifted out of the lounge.

“Hey, man,” I said, straightly.

Something poppy-punk was playing from his computer speakers.
He was sitting at the desk typing a paper or something in naught but his boxers—the
plaid Kaitlyn had gossiped about—even though it was barely spring and the
room was winter-chilly.

Averting my eyes and sidling toward my desk, I opened my
laptop.

Travis had been attractive at a distance—worth
imagining in the underwear I was seeing now—but got intimidating when he
was five feet away. Outside of the bathroom and the locker room, both of which
were eyes-to-yourself, I’d never been so close to a guy wearing so little. I’d
certainly never had to talk to one. Travis, with all his skin, seemed like a
planet I was orbiting; every move I made around the room was in relation to his
body. I puttered on my laptop for a while and then got into bed, from which I
discreetly watched his smooth back, not muscled but fit enough, and his legs,
crossed at the ankles under his desk.

Travis was very different from Wesley already. Wesley’s
brand of straightness was a gentle, almost feminine straightness—a
straightness easy for a gay boy to be comfortable around. He’d slept in a
t-shirt and sweatpants, even in early September when it was still hot. I never
once saw Wesley shirtless. Travis was, I think Harriet would’ve said,
aggressively straight. Even just sitting there typing, he exuded a masculine
sexuality I had no practice at being around and didn’t know how to respond to.
Travis was all kinds of shirtless and I couldn’t stop stealing glances. After a
little bit I got up and went to the bathroom to masturbate in one of the
stalls.

The next night I went to the gym after dinner and stayed
until it closed at 11:00. It was exhausting but I would’ve stayed even longer
if I could’ve. I hoped Travis would be in bed by the time I got home. In the
hallway I saw a crack of light under my door. I stopped and jingled my keys
against the doorknob before going in. He was in bed but not asleep. He was reading.
He had no shirt on.

“Hey, Oliver,” he said.

“Hey, man,” I said.

Maybe because I could see his arms and I could see they were
smaller than mine, I felt a surge of boldness. I took off my shirt and dropped
it in my laundry bag. Not wearing a shirt seemed to be normal but with mine off
I felt funny, as if I was performing. And I wondered if he would notice me.
Guys always notice other guys’ muscles, and tonight, after killing all that
time in the gym, mine felt extra big.

Putting my wallet and keys in my desk drawer, I caught sight
of Travis in the mirror. He was looking at me. He looked for a second and then
went back to his reading.

Quickly I gathered up my towel and toiletries and went to
shower. I grew confident under the water, massaging my overworked muscles with
my soapy hands. I returned to the room in my underwear with the towel wrapped
around me.

Travis had moved to his desk and was looking at some papers
in a folder. Seeing him, my confidence evaporated again. I may have been bigger
but I felt exposed and silly, trying to be someone I wasn’t, this cavalier bro
who could walk around shirtless. I dropped my bucket of toiletries onto my
dresser, yanked the towel off me, and jumped into bed with the covers pulled
high—all before he turned around.

“Wayne and Paul upstairs are fighting,” he said, closing the
folder and laying it on the desk. He turned in the chair and stretched out his
legs, cracked the knuckles of his toes.

“Yeah? Like, punching?”

“No. Wayne says Paul is being insensitive with the lights.”

“Oh. Yeah? Insensitive?”

“Who knows.” He yawned. “I may have to move one of them. Be
nice to me or I’ll put one in here with you after I leave. Ha.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry, I’m kidding. Though, really, I might have to.”

He stood up and walked over to his bed, flopped onto the
mattress and clicked his reading lamp on. He looked really attractive lit by
the little lamp. The light brought out the blond in his reddish hair, and by
shading his muscles made them look more defined than they probably were. I was
getting hard under the sheet. I wished I’d jerked off in the shower.

“So have you got a boyfriend, Oliver?” Travis said, turning
and looking at me, his hand cupping his cheek, his elbow pressed into his
pillow.