The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (17 page)

NOW

Piece by piece our pizza disappeared like a countdown
around the dented platter. By the time the check came Johnny was all but
silent. I knew I’d screwed up by telling him I was in love with him, I just
didn’t know why it was bad.

“I didn’t mean to put pressure on you,” I said as I counted
bills from my wallet.

“No,” he said, “it’s fine, it’s something everyone wants to
hear. It’s a nice thing, Ollie.”

“You don’t seem like you wanted to hear it, Johnny.”

“I guess I’ve just been in a petulant mood all day,” he
said. “It’s not your fault. Thank you for getting the pizza.”

“You’re cute even when you’re petulant.”

He smiled weakly.

We pulled on our jackets and left the restaurant. Outside
the wind blew orange and yellow leaves around the parking lot, which the pizza
place shared with a dry cleaner and a hot-tub store that isn’t there anymore. I
stuck my hands in my pockets and walked close enough to him so that our elbows
touched.

“Wanna go back to my dorm and make out?” I said. “That’ll
make you un-petulant.”

“I don’t know,” he said, though I could tell he didn’t want
to, he was just stalling. “Let’s sit down over there, OK?” He motioned with his
chin to a low brick retaining wall at the edge of the lot.

“But your car is over there.” I pointed away from where he
was heading.

“I know, just—”

We sat down on the brick wall, and Johnny broke up with me
there. He did it so quickly and gently, like a magician yanking a tablecloth
without disturbing the china, that I wasn’t aware at first that it had even
happened.

When I did realize, though, I stared at the ground, watching
leaves roll across the tops of my sneakers. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he said quietly. “No, Ollie, of course not.” He
crossed his arms and leaned forward, away from me.

“I do love you,” I said, “I wasn’t just saying it to try to
make you feel better. It’s true.” My nose was running and I wiped it with my
glove. “I can be everything you lost. There’s enough room in my life to hold
you.”

Once it was said, that too didn’t seem like the right thing
to say. When he didn’t respond I started tumbling over promises and pleas,
trying to find whatever would fix things. “I’ll give you all the space you
need, if that’s what you need,” I promised. “Please don’t end this when it’s
just starting. I don’t want to lose you.”

He closed his eyes but this time he wasn’t smiling. If the
best things I could think of were hurting him, what could I do? Should I have
told him I hated him? Should I have hit him?

“You don’t have to be on your own anymore, Johnny,” I said. “You
don’t.”

“I wasn’t looking for a relationship,” he said, more
businesslike after clearing his voice. “I was just online for a hookup. I didn’t
mean for this to get like this.”

“Like this what? Serious? But it doesn’t have to be serious.”
That sounded good, at least to my ears, and I repeated it like a great idea,
like a discovery—like our salvation. “It doesn’t have to be serious,
right! We can just hang out. Then we can be together.”

He looked at me but by that point it was as though he were looking
through glass. Like a person looking through a pet-store window at a puppy he
knows better than to bring home.

“Let’s go undo your bike,” he said.

Halfway to his car I stopped and pretended to have to fix
my shoelace. I was afraid that if we got any closer to his getaway, I really
would lose him.

“I think we should test out being friends,” I said. “Give it
a try.”

“Ollie—”

“Friend Johnny, would you like to go hang out at my dorm?” I
bounced my eyebrows, trying to keep it light but feeling like I was cracking in
half. “We could play some
Mario Kart
!”

“Ollie, I think—” He was looking down at the pavement.
“You deserve someone less damaged than me.”

“You’re not damaged. It’s not your fault your parents are
awful.” It didn’t get a reaction and I swung to a different tact: “I’m damaged
too! Have I told you about my crooked lines? I have obsessions. I call them my
ticks!”

He was walking again. I followed. He unlocked his car and
pulled out my front wheel, handed it to me. I took it. Then he pulled out the rest
of my bike, and when I wouldn’t take it he laid it on the ground. My helmet
rocked in the sand and a pedal spun slowly.

“Thank you for everything, Ollie. You’re very sweet and I
had fun.”

“That’s not fair. You can’t just say thank you and say you’re
too damaged and all this stuff and then break up with me.”

“If life was fair I’d be in South Carolina right now, Ollie,
and we never would’ve met at all.” His voice made it sound like the most
obvious thing in the world, and maybe it was. He opened his door and started to
get in. “It’s best if you just forget about me.” Then he looked up, his face a
sort of blank surprise, as if he couldn’t believe he’d done it. “That’s all.
Goodbye.”

When my hands stopped being as useless as my voice I
reassembled my bike as fast as I could and rode after him, my front wheel
rattling dangerously. I could see his car a little way down Route 9, in a
line of traffic caught by a red light.

I sped out of the parking lot and across the street. I
almost got hit. Two cars honked and one guy yelled. I caught up with Johnny at
the light. I didn’t say anything; he just looked at me through the glass and
said, “I can’t.”

The cars in front of him were starting to move now. My mouth
was dry and my hands were hanging limply on the handlebars. My heart was
pounding. With my bike cutting across the yellow lines, I watched his
taillights shrink down the street as traffic moved by on both sides of me,
honking. A car went by dragging its muffler.

That was the last time I saw Johnny. He blocked my IMs
later that same night, did not respond to my emails. He was ignoring me, and it
hurt, and I truly began to understand that the worst thing you can do to a
person is to ignore them. To treat them like they don’t even exist. Johnny
should’ve known that. Maybe he did. I knew it now, too. And I knew that just
because a guy’s family doesn’t interrupt your dinner doesn’t mean they’re not
all sitting in your booth. Sometimes no context is the biggest context of all.

For a long time—through the rest of junior year and
through senior year and even after I graduated from UMass—I saw his face
in random faces. I smelled his smell when I passed certain basement windows
puffing air sweetened with a certain fabric softener. For a long time I waited
for the call or the email or the IM that would say he was wrong, he was sorry
for abandoning me, for cutting me off and leaving me on my own. But it didn’t
happen. The fact that I was still waiting to be taken back was proof, to me,
that he was still waiting, too.

(Age
22)

HONEYMOON FOR KNIGHTS

Two princesses sat in the waiting area. I guessed they
were about seven and five. The older one, decked in frilly pink nylon and a
tall, conical hat with pink ribbons streaming from the point, was swinging her
legs and wore a shit-eating grin. The younger, in yellow, was spread out on the
bench, pressing her face into the coat sleeve of a gray-haired woman who sat
between the two girls; she was pounding the woman’s thigh with a little fist.

The woman told the yellow princess to settle down and the
pink one smiled harder, swung her legs harder beneath the bench.

A cowboy, leather chaps tight across his college-jock
thighs, had emerged from one of the costume rooms and now sat down on the bench
near the younger princess. Both girls looked up. He tipped his pinto-patterned
hat at them and they smiled. The older one blushed, too. Who could blame her?

I reached in my pocket for my appointment list, unfolded it
and gave it a look. The two girls were my 1:00 but there were no single boys on
the list. He could be a walk-in, but people never did this type of thing by
themselves; they needed goading. And sure enough, a helmeted astronaut soon
sauntered over to the smiling cowboy, did a fashion-show twirl and swung its
bulky hips. I got excited—was this a gay couple? Then the astronaut
removed its helmet and shook out its hair and revealed itself to be a girl. I
felt disappointed, stupid, a little embarrassed for assuming.

The astronaut sat down beside the cowboy. Beyond them
outside the store, mall shoppers passed back and forth at a steady pace, as
though the shiny beige floor were a moving sidewalk. They carried bags and
drinks, pushed strollers. The light from the orange
Orange
Julius sign blended with the pink from the Spencer’s Gifts sign and cast
everything in a pallid, funereal glow.
Muzak
played.
It was February vacation and the weather was shitty; everyone in the world had
come to the Holyoke Mall. Three teenagers stood in line for pretzels and
watched an unattended three-year-old run around screaming.

I could see it all through an open doorway from where I sat
in back-of-house of Fantasy
Foto
. I ate a curly fry
from Arby’s—my lunch. Beside me my coworker Patrice dropped an empty
yogurt container into the trash and picked up a camera. She breathed on the
lens and wiped it with a microfiber cloth.

“I’ll trade you the princesses for those other two,” I said
out of the corner of my mouth.

“No chance, Wade,” Patrice said, not even looking at them. “I
already earned my wings today after that dog pissed on my tripod. Anyway, you’re
good with the little kids.”

“I was just hoping to pose the cowboy with his shirt off.”

Now she looked out into the waiting area. “Ooh.”

“This job has few perks, Patrice. I take ‘
em
where I can get ‘
em
.” I put
the appointment list back in my pocket and ate another fry. “Well, if you won’t
trade, you need to let me shoot at your station. The princesses are going to
want the castle, and mine is ripped.” In my other pocket my cellphone started
vibrating. I pulled it out. “It’s my mom. Weird.”

“Maybe she sensed you eating
french
fries as your lunch again.” She held the camera lens up to the light to check
for smudges. “Be nice to her and I’ll pose Cowboy shirtless for you. Just don’t
leer from across the studio.”

“I’ve never leered in my life.”

I answered the phone.

“Fries,” I said. My mom had asked what I was eating for
lunch, a question which had followed other
mothery
pleasantries. “I can’t talk long, Mom. I’m getting low on my minutes. Was there
a reason you called?”

“Would you get a real phone, Oliver, please? You obsess
about those minutes. I just bought you some more at Christmas, didn’t I?”

“They disappear; I’m popular. Anyway, if I had a real phone
you wouldn’t be able to call me at work.”

She sighed. In the waiting area the older princess got up
and did a cartwheel that knocked off her conical hat. I figured she was trying
to impress the cowboy.

“I need to go, Mom. My next
glamtastic
supremes
are getting restless out there.”

“Oliver, before you go— Did you hear about Dwight?”

“Dwight who?” I dropped my empty fries bag into the trash.

“Dwight Macklin, your old friend from when you were little.
The one who stopped talking.”

“No. What about him?”

“He was in an accident,” she said, and she sighed. And now I
knew why she had called. “Did he ever start talking again?”

“I don’t know. He must have, that was like ten years ago.
You know I don’t keep in touch with anyone from high school. What kind of
accident?”

“Car. A drunk ran a stop sign and hit him. Very sad.”

“Wow. That’s terrible.”

“I wanted to let you know in case you want to go to the
calling hours.”

“Calling hours? Wait, he’s
dead?
” Patrice looked up looking concerned.

“Oh. Yes, Ollie. On impact, they say.”

“Jesus.”

“I don’t like to think about it.” She sighed again. I could
imagine her nervously winding the phone cord around her fingers, turning the
tips of them blue. “Lois Branch told me about it in the market this afternoon.
All I could picture was you in that car, Ollie. I’m sorry, I guess I just
wanted to hear your voice.”

“Wow. Dwight is dead. Huh.” I watched the older princess
turn another cartwheel. The astronaut clapped.

“It’s very sad,” my mother continued. “I’ll send you the
obituary. It’s on a website. I’ll email you the thing, the link. It has the information.
I think you should probably go to the calling hours. These things are
important.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Do you think you’ll go?”

“I don’t know, Mom, I’ll think about it.”

When I got back to work I was glad for the princesses and I
didn’t think of the cowboy again much.

***

Since graduating from UMass I had lived in an apartment in
Amherst with two guys I never knew very well. Straight guys. I had answered an
ad. I had my own room in the apartment and they shared the second bedroom.
Though they were jockish, intimidating, I thought at first their bunk beds were
a cover for a secret romance. But they weren’t gay, the guys only needed the
money and so had bought the bunks and sublet one of their rooms. Often enough I
saw one or the other of them sexiled on the living-room couch.

One of them, Corey, I didn’t talk to much at all. He treated
me like a neighbor you wave to each morning but never make an effort to get to
know. The other, Theo, was a mechanic who seemed grateful and relieved to
discover that I’d worked in an auto-body shop during high school—he
latched on to that fact and with Theo I talked about cars. He had fat hands and
a burly laugh and he seemed not to know what to make of me, of my gayness, of
the fact that I sometimes brought guys home, but he did what he could. Still, I
understood that if they’d known I was gay before they rented to me, they would
not have rented to me.

It was a crowded apartment but I often felt isolated there.
At night I could hear them talking and laughing in their bunks like college
boys, and it felt strange to be in another room apart from them. Often their
voices made me think of my former roommates and hallmates, made me want to live
a life where I could live with them again. But on that night, after my mom called
about Dwight, I wasn’t thinking of college, I was thinking back farther.

I’d told my mom I would think about it but really at first
I had no intention of going to Dwight’s funeral. I didn’t see the point. Dwight
was dead and I hadn’t even seen the guy since before I started shaving. In the
dark I lay with my arms behind my head, looking up at the ceiling at my R.E.M.
posters, battered now, and wrinkled, but still some sort of guide. Next door
Corey and Theo were laughing hysterically about something.

You don’t go to funerals for the dead, though. It’s not like
they’ll know. It’s not like they’ll look back at you from the plush confines of
the casket and check your name off a list. You go to funerals for the living.
If I went, it might be so his parents in their time of tragedy could believe
their son had made an impression throughout his short life, that he had had
friends, that he would be remembered and missed. And if they were going to be
made to feel that way, there weren’t many people from Dwight’s youth who could
make them feel it. Because the truth was, back when I knew him, Dwight had not
made an impression. He had not really had friends, and when he moved away he
had not really been missed. It was up to me—and, I suspected, maybe one
other person from Lee. A person who, for all I knew, wasn’t even still alive
himself.

In the end, if I’m honest, that one other person is the only
reason I decided to go.

I made plans to leave work early on the day of the funeral—Patrice
agreed to cover my shift in exchange for me doing all of her animal shoots for
the next month. On my way home I stopped for a haircut—a haircut for a
funeral. At home I shaved and cleaned up my eyebrows, feeling a bit like a
douche but wanting to be prepared. I had already picked out my clothes, an
outfit that could do double duty as mournful and hip.

After I showered I stood in front of the hallway mirror
putting on my tie. Corey, the one I hardly ever talked to, who was home for
some reason, saw it and said, “Job interview?”

“Funeral for a friend,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “sorry.” There was a long pause. “Young guy?”

“Yeah.”

He bit at his lip. “Was it—? Never mind, sorry.”

“Car accident,” I said, but I knew he’d been thinking of
AIDS.

I left my tie loose. I had a two-hour drive—Dwight’s
service was in Newton, just outside Boston, through which I’d once traveled on
a rainbow subway. Today it was gray and cloudy, would probably rain. February
was a shit month. I drove along the Mass Pike, a wet black ribbon, from Amherst
to Newton. I was starting to feel like my life would be easier if I lived in
Boston. R.E.M. on the stereo, of course—the
Out of Time
album. I was thinking about him. Not Dwight.

Newton was a clusterfuck of rotaries but I found my way to
the funeral home eventually and was still way early. The calling hours were
from 4:00 to 7:00; it was only 3:20. After sitting in the parking lot for a
while with the windshield wipers switching back and forth, I decided it was
awkward to be sitting there so long. So I drove across the street to a Dunkin’
Donuts, whose sign had been glowing-up the raindrops on my passenger window.

I ran from my Jeep into the
Dunkins
,
careful not to let my fresh haircut get wet. Inside I ordered a coffee, drank
it slowly, looked out at the funeral home through the big steamy windows. I
wondered if I would recognize him when I finally laid eyes on him. It had been
so long with no word. Or would I be too startled? Would it feel too odd? With
all the apparatus of the funeral around us. With the coffin. With Dwight lying
there dead. Would his face have anything in common with the one I fell in love
with?

Across the street two cars pulled into the funeral home lot
from the same direction. The passengers got out and stood looking at each other
vacantly in the drizzle for a minute before putting their arms around each
other and heading toward the entrance. They had to turn on a ramp and briefly
faced my direction before going inside. I recognized Dwight’s parents—older,
grayer—among them.

A few minutes later another car arrived and I watched the
people go inside. This Dunkin’ Donuts was a good spot to see everyone who
entered the funeral home. If he came I’d be able to see him from here. I
ordered a second coffee and returned quickly to the window, focusing past my own
reflection, sipping more slowly this time—I couldn’t keep drinking coffee
for three hours or my heart would explode when I saw him.

By 4:30 the parking lot was half full with a steady turnover
of comings and goings. People were entering and leaving the funeral home in
groups that sometimes got jumbled and I began to feel nervous that I might miss
him. I pitched the near-empty coffee in the trash and pulled out my keys, and
drove back across the street. I parked near the back and sat, saw a place open
up right near the entrance ramp and moved there to take it. It was almost 5:00
now. I waited in my car until 6:00, then I went inside.

It was busier now that the workday was over. I stood in a
line that moved slowly down a long hallway wallpapered with flowers. I could
see everyone in front of me up to a corner that turned, and from time to time I’d
look back to see what new people had gotten in line. Very few were around my
age; it was mostly people who looked like friends of Dwight’s parents.
Self-righteously I told myself it was good I had come.

After turning the corner I could see into the main room,
where Dwight’s family was arranged in a receiving line that stemmed away from
the casket—his parents, probably an uncle and aunt, a grandmother and grandfather.
I’d been worried the image of Dwight lying in his casket would conjure one of
my last memories of him—the moment I was sitting on him on his bed, his
sweatshirt clenched in my fists, bashing him against the mattress so hard his
glasses fell off. But the casket was closed.

“Oh,” I said in surprise, and my voice cracked. And I
actually gulped. A hot rock of spit thudded into my stomach. I must’ve been
imagining old-people funerals—peaceful sleeping corpses—but this
wasn’t one of those. Dwight was my age, and people my age didn’t pass away
sweetly in their sleep. Dwight had been mangled by metal and glass so
completely that he had died. What had been left of him? Had the bespectacled
boy I once knew ended up in pieces? I reached for the back of a chair, feeling
delirious with shame. I had gotten a haircut? I had cleaned up my eyebrows?