The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (16 page)

“Oh,” he said, pulling his hand from my thigh and glancing
around for the clock, almost bewildered, as if he’d just woken up, “it’s late.”

Softly, because our faces were close, I said, “You can just—
If you want to— You’re welcome to stay over.” He leaned away from me and
I could see he was considering doing the
Oh
I couldn’t really
thing, but that only meant he wanted to stay. “We don’t
have to do anything,” I added. “But I’d be happy if you stayed.”

“Let’s not, uh, rule anything out,” he said, and then he
raised his eyes toward the ceiling and let out a short whistle.

I picked out some of my shorts and a t-shirt for him so he
could change out of his work clothes. Then I went to the bathroom and scrubbed
my teeth and tongue to minty freshness while pacing past the shower stalls and
willing my heartbeat to slow.
Let’s not
rule anything out
, he had said, which meant I was going to get laid. By
him
, by Johnny, slayer of dragons.

When I got back to my room he was wearing my clothes. I felt
a wave of quiet comfort come over me. I guess for a person like me, a person
wary of context, there was no better image than the one I was seeing: a guy
with so little of his own context that he was dressed in my clothes.

He was taller than I was, and the shorts, which were
knee-length on me, hit him mid-thigh, showing off his long, lean bare legs,
dusted with wiry brown hairs.

“Could I borrow some mouthwash or something?” he asked, idly
touching the faded UMass logo on his t-shirt.

I lent him my bucket of toiletries. While he was in the
bathroom I carefully folded the pants he’d left balled up on my floor—29x36
was the size—and smoothed them over a hanger along with his red-and-blue
gingham shirt. I hung his clothes in my armoire and lined up his shoes in front
of it, with his socks draped over them to air out.

After what seemed like a long time he returned smelling of
Icy Mint Blast.

I was standing beside the bed but lacked the boldness to get
into it. I was used to being on some sort of horny autopilot in these
situations but around Johnny I felt hyper aware of everything. Casually,
leaning against the dresser with one hand in the pocket of my shorts to camouflage
my erection, I told him I’d hung up his clothes.

He surprised me by looking surprised. “You—hung them
up?”

“Well I mean— I didn’t want them to get wrinkled.”

Touching one hand to his cheek, he stood looking at me as
though I were a puzzle, as though something about me didn’t make sense to him
and needed figuring out. Finally he looked down, smoothing my t-shirt against
his flat belly. “I need to set an alarm for work tomorrow,” he said. “Can I use
your clock?”

While he was programming it I hopped into bed. Then from
under the covers I watched him poke around my room. I watched him trace his
thin fingers down the spines of my tapes and CDs, look at photos pinned to the
wall of me and my friends, and pick up the cameras that had taken them. He
seemed to be stalling, too. I rolled over and faced the wall to give him some
privacy.

It was only a minute later that he climbed under the covers
carefully, quietly, as if I were already asleep and he didn’t want to disturb
me—though of course I wasn’t asleep and would not sleep. I reached up and
shut off the reading lamp clamped to the headboard.

“Enough room?” I whispered.

He said yes, though he was probably hanging over the edge.
We lay side by side, him on his back, me on my side, stiff as strangers in an
elevator. It was the kind of awkwardness you can appreciate, though, and savor,
because you know it’ll only feel this way once, and as soon as the first kiss
happens it’ll be over and it’ll never come back, this all-consuming moment of
will-we-or-won’t-we
. Soon it did end: he
turned his head and kissed my ear. Then he rolled over and yanked the
jersey-cotton sheet over his head. “That was so lame of me!” he laughed from beneath.

Spooning against him, because
will-we-or-won’t-we
had become
we-are
,
I told him it wasn’t lame at all. His bare legs were like fuzzy silk, and his
back was so warm. I scrubbed my nose against his hair. He squeezed my feet
between his feet.

“This is nice,” I said, feeling him inside my own clothes.

“This
is
nice,” he
replied.

We stayed that way for a little bit and then he moved his
bum back and forth against me, noticing or confirming my hardness. He stopped
and was quiet.

“There’s something I want you to know about me, Ollie,” he
whispered, “before we go any further. OK?”

“Oh,” I said, “OK,” and I got scared. It wasn’t his words so
much as his tone, and the implication that even though he was in bed with
someone this whatever-it-was still had a grip on his thoughts. My boner
softened as my mind went to AIDS, herpes, cancer. He wanted to tell me he saw
ghosts. He was a Communist, a vampire. He was molested. He molested. He did
time. He had a boyfriend. Oh no, did he have a boyfriend?

Finally he said, “I’m sort of... on my own.”

“You’re on your own?”

I didn’t know what he could mean. I was holding him.

NOW

With his comic books and my rattling bike stowed in the
back seat behind us, he drove out of the bookstore parking lot. Our agenda was
food.

“What’re you in the mood for?” he said, fiddling with a
loose knob on his dashboard. Cold air started pouring against my shins.

“We could do that Irish place in Northampton?”

“OK.”

We headed that way, but it was rush hour and the traffic on
Route 9 was thick, so instead of going all the way to Northampton we
detoured to a pizza place in Hadley that Shelley and I went to a lot. In the
booth while we waited for our pizza he cupped his hand under his chin and
looked at me thoughtfully, with what I would later decide was regret. It made
me uncomfortable.

“So how was— How was work today?” I said.

He leaned back and folded his hands on the table. He looked
tired. “The phones rang so much. Never-ending pussycat dental issues.” Sighing,
he went on. “People are crazy, Ollie, aren’t they? The cruel things they’ll do
to other people, and in the next breath they’ll make a
dentist
appointment for a
cat
.”

“Probably not the same people,” I laughed.

“No, Ollie. The same people.”

Our waiter approached our table with a pizza but it was a
false alarm; it was for the people beside us.

“I talked to my sister today,” he said after a minute of
what seemed like contemplation, a time during which I felt unsure what to say.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s concerned about what I’m doing for Thanksgiving. The
holidays get hard for me.”

“I’m sure they do. It’s OK. I just assumed you would come to
my family’s.”

He sniffed hard, as if I was being silly. “Ollie, I can’t do
that. You can’t just take me in.”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t we?”

“We’ve only been dating a few weeks. It’s too—fast.”

“So? They love you. They
will
take you in. My mom is probably relieved that I have someone as amazing as you.
They can be your new family.”

“
Ollie
,” he said.
He looked down at his hands.

THEN

Johnny’s story, the story he told me as he lay in my bed
wearing my clothes, went like this, like something out of a sad pop-up book:
Two years earlier, when Johnny was seventeen years and six months old, Johnny’s
parents found out that Johnny was gay. He wasn’t sure how they found out, what
evidence they uncovered, but he knew the moment he came home from school one
day that they knew. They didn’t say anything but he could tell. His house fell
into a three-day silence—his mother seemed perpetually away with his
little sister, and his father seemed to leave the garage only to get food from
the kitchen.

On the third day, Johnny told me, his parents came into his
bedroom and asked him if it was true that he was
that way
. It was his father who asked, but it was a statement, not
a question—they had already decided. Johnny said yes, it was true. His
father started to yell. His mother didn’t say anything, just lowered her eyes
as the life drained out of her face.

On the fourth day, Johnny’s parents told Johnny that when he
turned eighteen, on his eighteenth birthday, they wanted him to leave the
family and not speak to them or his little sister again. After delivering this
news with eyes hard in spite of tears, they left, shutting Johnny’s door
quietly behind them.

While he was telling me this his body felt stiff against
mine. I imagined I could feel goosebumps on him. But when he spoke there was no
emotion in his voice.

“It was a pretty tough six months,” he said, and laughed
stiffly, “believe me.”

I didn’t know what to say. That story from that voice, from
this boy— I was shaking. He must’ve felt it because he reached back and
squeezed my shoulder and told me it was OK.

“Luckily I had time to graduate,” he continued, “but college
was out; I had no money for it. On my birthday they told me to take my car and
they gave me three thousand dollars. They said goodbye. It was almost like a
little ceremony.” And he went on, “I’d heard there are a lot of gay people in
this part of the country. It seemed as good a place as any.”

“But— I— Wasn’t there someone in South Carolina
you could’ve stayed with? Like, other family? Friends?”

“You don’t really want to stick around after something like
that,” he said, shaking his head against the pillow.

I squeezed him tighter because I thought he needed it, or
because I needed it, and I felt more angry than I’d ever felt. I wanted to find
his parents and kill them—
kill
them, that’s the honest truth. They deserved execution. I wanted to rescue his
sister from them, put her up for adoption. I didn’t know how they could do that
to him. But what was most confusing to me was that he didn’t seem to hate them.

“They just don’t understand,” he whispered.

“What about your sister?” I asked, leaning up on one elbow.
Light from my screensaver lit the side of his face and I looked for tears but
didn’t see any. “Have you talked to her?”

“Officially she’s not allowed to talk to me. But sometimes I
chat online with her at work when she’s at her friend Lisa’s house.”

“Jesus, Johnny.”

I wanted him to cry. I sent telepathic pleas for him to
break down and cry. I would’ve known what to do with that. Crying would’ve been
something to be resolved, a surmountable distance to
better
. But he wasn’t crying. And I didn’t think he was going to.
So instead, because I didn’t know what else to do, I asked him a question I’m
proud of asking, because even though it sounds a little strange, a little like
I was taking advantage, I know that in that moment it was the right thing to
say.

He smiled at me and said that yes, we could, and we took off
our clothes.

NOW

We split the big pizza and ended up talking about music. Thanksgiving
was off the table for now, though I knew I would try again soon. He told me
that Whitney Houston’s album
I’m Your
Baby Tonight
was underappreciated. I told him she would never hold a candle
to R.E.M. Because he seemed sadder tonight than usual, and because the holidays
loomed, I also told him I loved him. I thought it would make him feel better
and safer to know it. A magical fix, and it had the virtue of being true. But
when I said it he winced, as though I’d slipped a knife into his side.

THEN

In the morning he pulled his arm out from under me, banged
his hand around beside the bed, and shut off the beeping alarm clock. I felt
groggily sad that he needed to leave. I turned my head on the pillow we were
sharing and pressed my lips against his smooth shoulder. They lingered there
until he pulled away and the blanket flopped back on top of me. Through
half-open eyes I watched him being naked in my room, moving around in front of
the blue-lit window, his thin limbs lanky as he reached for something.

I heard some beeps. A moment later I heard him say he wasn’t
feeling well. I heard the clack of my phone returning to its cradle. The
blankets lifted up in a puff of cold air, then an instant warmth as he settled
against me.

“Oh,” I said happily, my eyes closing again.

At 10:00, after sleeping for three hours more, we emerged
naked from the jersey-cotton sheets. Sitting on my bed, we ate everything I had
in my room: a box of animal crackers, a Snickers, half a bottle of flat
Mountain Dew. Around 11:00 we had sex again, happy this time, no tears, and he
laughed when I blew raspberries against his neck after we had come. At noon we
watched Oprah. At 1:00 I asked him to be my boyfriend. He got out of bed and
stood looking out the window for a while, then he turned to me and said yes.

He was beautiful, funny, playful, sexy, smart, strong,
vulnerable—Johnny was the dictionary. But his complexity seemed to begin
and end within himself. His story, tragic as it was, meant that he was free of
other context, and because of that I saw how easily he would fit in my life.
His parents were monsters and what they had done to him made me furious, but I
felt uniquely suited to work with it. I wanted to be needed and he would need
me in a way other guys with other contexts never would. Short of a few
coworkers and a nine-to-five, I was all Johnny had in the world.

I brought him around campus and introduced him to my friends—to
Shelley, to Kaitlyn, to Bruno. I even had him meet my parents. I showed him my
context, all of it. I saw him as someone who could wear my whole life the way
he’d worn my clothes. I didn’t realize that it was too much, that I was
becoming what I’d avoided in other guys. I was overwhelming him. I was making
middle-school dating mistakes when I was twenty, with a guy who really
mattered. I was still learning, and I was screwing up when it mattered. This
was the tragedy of growing up a closeted gay boy: you’ve had no practice when
it matters.