The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (25 page)

I like to think that what Angel and I had shared that day
was obvious and observable, and that Shelley could immediately sense something
had happened between him and me, but she didn’t seem to notice and if she had
any suspicions she never mentioned them to me. I never told her how I chose our
apartment either; she never would’ve let me hear the end of it about Angel and
me having unprotected sex. On that score we had been risky and were lucky; in
the end all Angel gave me were memories.

It was almost still night when he put his hand on the air
mattress, wobbling me awake. He was squatting on the floor beside me, his
elbows resting on his thick knees. Beside him on the floor was the olive green
hulk of his duffel bag.

“Hey,” he whispered, “Ollie, I’m heading to the airport. The
cab is here. Just wanted to say see
ya
.”

I leaned up on an elbow, which squished deeply into the
softening mattress. “Can I go with you?”

He blinked. “To the Army?”

“To the airport.”

“Nah. I got it.” It was matter-of-fact.

“You sure?”

“I got it, Ollie.” A little less matter-of-fact.

“OK, Angel.”

He looked at me for a long time. I thought he might reach
out and touch my hair the way he had last night, but he didn’t. He stood up. I
reached out and held his ankle.

“Did we make it harder?” I said, looking up at him, dark and
kind of unknowable in the shadows of Shelley’s dim studio.

“Yes. We did.”

“Do you regret that?”

“No. We’re tough. Hard is good.”

I wanted to pull him down for a kiss, a last kiss to say
goodbye, but I didn’t. Hard was good, but maybe harder wasn’t. You had to know
when to call it a day, when to let things go and move on—not to a new
life but to a new stage of the only one you’ve got. And that sort of thing was
becoming my specialty.

The kitchen light went out and the door opened and closed.

It would’ve been easy, lying there with the memory of his
skin still on my hand, to think only of what I was losing, only of what had
slipped away, come too late, been not quite right enough to be perfect. It
would’ve been easy to cry.

But I wasn’t crying. I was grinning and I couldn’t stop
grinning. “Angel Cantos,” I whispered to myself, and full-on guffawed into my
pillow. “Angel Cantos. Oh my
god
.”

(Age
26)

THE KEY-TOUCHING GUYS

I got my
name from an uncle I never knew, or hardly knew—Uncle Oliver died when I
was six. My mother’s brother. He was a mysterious figure to me while I was
growing up, partly because I think he’d been mysterious to my mom, too. He was
eighteen years older than she was and they spent only one year—the first
of her life—living under the same roof. He wasn’t a brother she’d fought
with or giggled in forts with, he was a brother who brought her trinkets from a
place called Korea, who took her at the wide-eyed age of eleven to visit New
York City for two days.

Those were the
ways I knew him too, from those stories from before I was born, and from
stories from when I was a toddler. The one about how Uncle Oliver—never
Ollie, always Oliver—held my infant self on his lap in a cake pan because
he was afraid he would drop me. The one about how he paced the aisles of Toys R
Us for an hour choosing a birthday gift for me, and settled on a remote control
car I was too little to operate. He didn’t know about kids, my mother would
tell me, and he didn’t particularly like them, but he was proud of me and proud
that I had his name.

After he was
gone—cancer, 1986—and there were no new stories, Uncle Oliver still
loomed large for me, the way I suppose namesakes always do. A hat he had worn
when he was in the Army turned up in my grandfather’s attic and then didn’t
leave my head for a year. Photos he’d taken during the war turned up, too. For
me an Uncle Oliver grew from the grave of the one I’d been too young to know.
Mine was a soldier Oliver, a forever-young Oliver who never bothered to get
old. A world traveler. An adventuring hero in a family where people rarely left
Massachusetts. I was happy for my namesake to be that. Every little boy likes
that. But as I got older and started to know I was different from other boys I
started to look for something more from Uncle Oliver, something from a part of
his life I hadn’t thought much about until then, something more mysterious than
what any battlefield relic or shadowy Army self-portrait could tell me.

Since his
mid-twenties Uncle Oliver had lived with a man named Anders. They had met in
high school, or college, or the military—no one was sure, exactly, least
of all my mother, who would’ve been learning to ride a bike at that time. And
maybe everyone forgot to imagine a time before Anders because Anders seemed to
have always been there, a part of the family. My own few memories of my uncle
included Anders. He was there when the remote control car was given at my
birthday. He was probably there for the cake-pan incident. He was always there.

As I got older
I thought about this more and more. I must’ve thought that if Uncle Oliver had
been gay, and had survived and grown up and found Anders, there was some hope
for me. But it was hope for hope, because I didn’t know what exactly their
relationship had been, and it felt too hard to ask. Anders had kept in touch
with my family for a few years after Oliver died, but time and the passing of
my grandparents frayed the connection. By the time I was old enough to want to
talk to him it had been years since he’d last been in touch.

A few months
after I came out to my parents and thus was free to bring up the topic I asked
my mother if Uncle Oliver was like me. It was winter, we were in the car on the
way to buy supplies for my spring semester at UMass. She sighed and looked at
me, and pushed her sunglasses up over her hair.

“I don’t know,
Ollie,” she said reluctantly, sounding a little defeated. I had never asked her
the question before but it seemed as though it hadn’t been terribly far from
her mind.

“OK.”

“When we
learned about you, it made me wonder about Oliver and Anders. I hadn’t ever
thought about it, if you can believe that. They never said anything. But of
course they wouldn’t, not in my family. We weren’t— We weren’t known for
talking about things like that; you know how stiff and English your
grandparents were. Anders was always around, but— I guess we all just
assumed they were friends.” She paused. “I don’t know if he was like you,
Ollie. I’m sorry.”

“OK.”

After that we
were quiet for a few miles of winding, snow-lined road. Finally we turned into
the parking lot of Bradlees, a department store that was having a sale.

“Oh, it’s
crowded,” my mom said, though many of the spaces were filled with piles of
plowed snow and not with cars. She parked and shut off the car. With the keys
in her hand, she said, “You must think I’m stupid for not knowing, Ollie, but
it was a different time, it wasn’t on the radar. People certainly didn’t ask
about it. But I think if he was, he would’ve told me. I guess that’s the reason
I think he wasn’t.” She pursed her lips, then looked at me apologetically. “Ollie,
I really think they were just friends.”

“OK.”

“He would’ve
loved you, though, even if he wasn’t like you.”

“I know.” I
cleared my voice. “Let’s go shop.”

When I got
back to school after winter break there was a letter waiting for me from my
mom. She must’ve mailed it a day or two after our conversation about Oliver and
it beat me to Amherst. It contained Anders’ contact information from her
address book, the most current phone number and street address she had.
In case you want to ask him
, she’d
written. I did want to ask him, but this was my mom’s past more than it was
mine, and if it wasn’t something she wanted to seek out herself, I didn’t think
I had a right to dig into it. Oliver may have been my namesake, but he was her
brother.

For years I
put the mystery out of my mind—or at least toward the back. I went
through college; I graduated; I lived in Amherst and took photos of people in
silly costumes; I moved to Boston and started a freelance photography business
thing. The Oliver question always nibbled, but whenever I pulled out the letter
with Anders’ information (more likely to have grown outdated with each passing
year), a little voice inside me always whispered,
Better not to mess in this
. I knew that things that were merely
unspoken had a way of needing a framework of full-on secrets to
stay
merely unspoken. For example, it
hadn’t slipped past me that if Oliver was gay, it lent questions to the
circumstances of his death. A gay man who died from a drawn-out disease at age
fifty in 1986 maybe did not really have cancer. Things I wanted to know might
be tied up with things I never wanted to find out.

It seemed
better just to wonder. After all, wondering has a lot of upsides. No one who’s
made peace with wondering can ever really get disappointed.

When I was
twenty-six something unexpected happened that took it out of my hands. An email
came through the website I had set up for my freelance photography.

Dear Oliver, “Ollie,”

I wonder if you remember me. You were
just a boy the last time I saw you. My name is Anders Verity and I was a great
friend of your Uncle Oliver. I’m an old man now and I’m on my way to pushing up
daisies and I wonder, might I call you some time? Or you can call me. I do hope
to hear from you.

He left his
phone number and signed it,
Anders
.

I stared at
the email for so long my screensaver came on. The screen seemed to pulse, or
maybe it was my heartbeat behind my eyes. I thought about deleting the email
and forgetting about it. Then I showed it to Shelley. I decided not to let it
go any further than her. Then I changed my mind.

“That’s so
odd,” my mom said over the phone when I told her. “It’s been fifteen years at least.
What do you think he wants?”

“I don’t know.”

I could almost
hear her thinking. “There was a ring,” she said, “of your uncle’s. Anders
wanted it, I never knew why. He said he would leave it back to us in his will.”

“Well he said
he’s ready to start pushing up daisies. Maybe he’s getting an early start.”

“Are you going
to call him?”

I tried to
judge from her tone whether she wanted me to. All the stuff with Abbey had
taken a toll on us, and we weren’t as close these days as we used to be. I
found her harder to read.

“Yeah,” I
said, “I think I am. Is that OK?”

She didn’t say
yes or no. “Let me know what he says,” was all she said.

The next day
after holding my phone in my hands for a while I dialed the number Anders had
given me; it was the same one I’d had on paper all these years. I was
fidgeting. I felt that by acknowledging his email I was opening a box that didn’t
belong to me, and I wasn’t sure why it had been offered.

There was a
click and a pause, and his voice, when he answered, was familiar. It had the
soft Worcester twang my grandmother’s had had, the speech equivalent of the
soft filters they used to put on the lenses of movie cameras.

“Anders? This
is Ollie Wade calling. I got your email.”

There was a
long pause. “Oh Ollie, I’m so glad, how wonderful.”

“How are you
doing? My mom says hello.”

“Oh, how nice,
I’m so glad to hear from you both.”

“It’s been a
long time.”

“A very long
time.”

“How are you,
Anders?”

“I’m good, I’m
good! Well I’m dying, but I’m good!” He laughed.

“Oh, I’m—
I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be
sorry, I’m old, it happens.” And he added, “Tell me about yourself! You do
photography? I typed your name in Google and I saw you do photography.”

I gave him a
rundown, a flash-fiction version of my stories: how I got started taking
pictures, the kinds of things I photographed. All the while wondering what the
real reason for this call was, and if I could steer it toward the question I’d
wanted answered since I was like fourteen.

“You sound
just like your uncle, Ollie, do
ya
know that?”

“I do?”

“I would’ve
thought—” He laughed. “Well, you sound just like him.”

“That makes me
feel good.”

“I’d recognize
Oliver’s voice anywhere. We were— We were very close, your uncle and me,
very close. There were no secrets between us.” His voice trailed off, almost as
if into memory, or maybe just into the unspoken.

I wondered if
he was steering, or trying to, and if I could help him. “You may have seen I
photograph a lot of gay weddings,” I blurted. “It’s because I’m gay.” I wanted
him to know that if he was like me, he could tell me.

“Oh,” he said,
and he was quiet for a minute, and then when he spoke again there was a new
warmth in his voice. “And I’m glad you do. Men like us need to stick together.
Oliver and me, we—never had a ceremony.”

So just as
easy as that, almost nonchalantly, a question I’d had half my life had an
answer. And when I knew the answer I almost had to remember that it had ever
been a question.

“I’d just love
to see
ya
, Ollie,” Anders went on.

“Yeah, I’d
like to see you too!” Could he hear that I had tears in my eyes?

“Your Internet
says you live in Boston?”

“Brighton,
yeah.”

“I don’t know
that I can drive all that way anymore. I’m on the Cape. Harwich. Know it?”

“I think so,
yeah. I can come to you, that’s no problem.”

“I’d like
that. I have some things of your uncle’s, I’d like to give them to you. It’s
why I looked you up.”

We chose a
Saturday and said goodbye. I put down the phone and looked out the window, my
arms crossed on the sill, watching cars go by, thinking.

After a long
time I picked up my phone and called my mother. I told her I’d talked to
Anders. I said, “They were—together. They were a couple.”

I had never
outed anyone before but I recognized the same void I felt whenever I told
someone who’d known me a long time that I was gay. The words, once uttered,
hung there between us, and then, once understood, ricocheted backward into
memory, recoloring the past.

When she
replied her voice sounded hard, annoyed. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell me.”

“He just—
I don’t want you to feel like you didn’t really know him, or anything
—
”

“Did he think
I wouldn’t approve? That I would turn away? He was my brother, I only had one.”

“Something
tells me he didn’t think he was actually hiding much from you. He always
brought Anders around. That was his life; you saw it. You knew they went
together like bacon and eggs—that was probably all he felt he had to tell
you. I think to tell you they were
together
would’ve been to him like telling you what they did in the
—like,
privately
. It was a different time,
like you said. He shared his life with you.”

“It must’ve
been so
hard
for Anders. After Oliver
died, we went through their house, your grandparents and me, and we sorted
Oliver’s things—and my god, they were Anders’ things, too. But we didn’t
know. Why didn’t he tell me?”