The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (27 page)

Then with a
crank of the key and the last efforts of a nearly depleted battery the Cadillac
burst to life. “There’s a pub I like. Sound good?”

“Sounds great.”

Off we went.
Anders drove slow and got tooted at a couple of times, once for not noticing a
light had turned green.

Over lunch he
asked questions. About my life, about Abbey, about my parents. He must’ve felt
by then that he’d said what he wanted to say, and now he could listen.

When the remnants
of our sandwiches were cleared away we ordered dessert. He had a dish of
vanilla ice cream he ate slowly with tiny scoops while I talked. He paid for
lunch with a crisp fifty-dollar bill. The waitress clearly thought he was my
grandfather.

Driving back
to his house, there was silence between us for the first time since I’d
arrived. It wasn’t an awkward silence but it seemed to me that it must be a
wasteful silence. I kept thinking,
What
else do I want to know? What else do I want to ask?
In a way I felt like I
knew what I needed to know, though; at least the big things. So I wondered what
I would ask in a better, more perfect world where nothing had ever needed to be
secret—what I would ask on a day like today, in a world like that.

“Anders,” I
said, “tell me more about that mean cardinal.”

***

“This has
been such a nice day,” he said as he was steering the big Cadillac back into
the garage. “I’ve had a lot of fun today.”

“Me too. Thank
you for telling me your stories. It means a lot to me. I wondered about you and
my uncle for a long time. I wasn’t sure—no one was really ever sure. My
mother, I mean. But I really wanted Oliver to have been like me.”

“It’s always
good to know you’re not the first,” Anders said. And he added, “And not the
last, too.”

He didn’t
expect to live much longer. He said he’d already had a few close calls but didn’t
elaborate on what exactly his illness was, only that his brains were leaking
out of his ears, which I thought was probably just a figure of speech. But I
had a sense that this day was something he’d been meaning to do and was happy
to cross off his list.

“Now I want to
make sure you get some of Oliver’s things so they won’t get lost in the shuffle
when I’m gone,” he told me as we reentered the house.

He took me down
the hall to the cluttered library and sat down at a desk. “Pull that chair
over,” he said, pointing, and I did, and sat down. A bulging orange envelope
sat on the desk. With fingers swollen from arthritis he turned the envelope
over and unfastened the clasp.

Inside was an
ivory shoehorn, some gold cufflinks, an emerald tie-tack, and my uncle’s
diamond ring, which I supposed was the one my mother had mentioned.

The ring fit
me perfectly on the same finger Anders said Oliver wore it on. “Oh, you have
your uncle’s hands,” he said, so matter-of-fact, as if he’d noticed me wearing
Oliver’s hat or using his wallet.

Also in the
envelope were a scattered cluster of photos, including a copy of the one of my
uncle at my age with his hair slicked back. Most of the rest were photos taken
by Oliver—landscapes of places he had seen in the Army, pictures of their
house, their garden. I thought I’d gotten my picture-taking from Wesley; I
liked that it came from even farther back.

The last item
in the envelope—Anders had to shake it out—was a keychain and two
house keys. For a fretful second I thought Anders was giving me his house.

“I’d have to
say these were his prized possessions,” Anders said, running a finger along the
metal teeth. “He was very proud of our house. He saw a lot of the world but he
was always most proud of this house. He always said that your house key is a
little piece of metal that stands between you and the place you belong.”

Anders started
to get up, and tapped my knee. “Don’t lose that, young man.”

The
afternoon light had faded to a dusky dusk. Anders stood in front of his living-room
window, his hands in the pockets of his sweater, while I put on my shoes and my
coat. I straightened up and hugged him quickly.

“Need to use
the head before you go?” he said, in such a grandfatherly way.

“Nah, I’m
good.”

He followed me
outside and stood on the front porch as I walked to my Jeep. The seashell
driveway crunched nicely under my sneakers. He hadn’t given me his house but I
could imagine myself living in a place like it someday. All these snowbanks
wanted a coffee cup.

“Sometimes I
like to come out and stand out in the cold for five or ten minutes,” Anders
said, watching his breath. “Changes the air in the lungs.” He waved. “Give me a
buzz when you get home, so I know you got home OK.”

***

Anders had
told me that when my uncle was in hospice and the cancer had wreaked havoc on
his brain, his arm slipped off the bed and was dangling against the side,
paralyzed. My uncle noticed his arm missing but had no sense of it having
moved, and he said to Anders, “Where’s my arm?” And Anders said, “It fell off
the bed. Want me to put it back?” And he did.

“I still love
ya
, Andy,” my uncle said.

For all my
worry about poking around in the past, it had uncovered only one life-changing
piece of new information: that my Uncle Oliver had been in love. I was glad to
tell my mom that Oliver hadn’t been different from who she had known, not at
all, he’d simply been more, and the more was nothing more than that he’d been
in love—for a long time, for most of his life, to the day he died. And
what a wonderful thing to find out.

“Do
ya
have someone of your own, Ollie?” Anders had asked while
we were eating ice cream at the pub.

“I guess I’ve
had a lot of
someones
,” I said. “A lot of near
misses. I’ve fired off a lot of arrows but I haven’t hit the bull’s-eye yet.”

Anders
laughed. “It’ll come,” he said, “it’ll come. And I hope you’ll be as happy as
we were.”

Before I had
driven too far from Anders’ house I started to cry, and when it became clear
that this wasn’t a passing thing, that it needed to be let out, I pulled into
the parking lot of a gas station and sobbed. I didn’t even know what I was
crying for, really. Maybe for the bigness of the day, for my awareness of my
part in it. Maybe I was crying for a secret that outlived my uncle by twenty
years, and for the world that had demanded the secret in the first place. Or
for what had been built in spite of that world.

I wiped my
tears and got myself together. The orange envelope was sitting on the seat
beside me. I shook Oliver’s keys out of it and put them in my jeans pocket.

While I drove
I touched the keys through my jeans, pressed the metal against my thigh. Still
there. I touched them again. Still there. At a stoplight I pulled them out of
my pocket and attached them to my own keyring. They swung there from the
ignition, clinking against the steering column. A chime, a note that would’ve
been familiar to him. Every minute or two I’d touch them with my finger. Still
there. Just to make sure. Still there.

Still there.

And—still
here
.

(Age 27–28)

WE ALL GO BACK TO WHERE WE BELONG

The first time I saw Fletcher I must’ve looked like crap;
it’s a wonder he even was interested. I was sweaty and tired and my feet hurt.
My lips were dry and my nose stung from sunburn. My mohawk was down and hanging
in my eyes. It was evening then, and still hot. Sweat was running down my ribs
and my shirt clung to my belly.

I’d been walking around Boston all day, listening to R.E.M. on
my iPod all day, walking my way through what felt like a lifelong time warp,
and I had forgotten to think about looking like anything—good or bad or
anything. My ears were probably red from the earbuds.

It was a day almost everyone remembers now, for one big
reason or another. I remember it for a lot of reasons. Partly I remember it as
the day I first saw him, and partly of course for what happened that night. But
it started as the day my favorite band broke up.

I saw the news on their website that July morning. I was drinking
coffee and eating an English muffin and browsing the news. Such a mundane way
to learn something so big. Shelley had left for work already and I needed to be
leaving myself. I had a boss again, a job to lose, cameras to sell and passport
photos to take. Instead I just sat. Nothing mattered now except the news that
the band that got me through high school and college and the
post-college-whatever had decided to opposite themselves: they were disbanding.
As I digested the news I felt my eyes leave the screen and creep across the
apartment. Everything was looking crooked—the blinds, the picture frames,
the cabinet doors—even though I long ago made sure nothing was. I pushed
the laptop away from me, folded my arms on the table, and put my head down. My
eyes filled with tears.

There’s a line in “Drive” where Michael Stipe sings my
name.
Ollie. Ollie. Ollie
Ollie
Ollie
.
I was sixteen
when I first heard it. I was in my childhood bedroom mourning a lost love,
feeling as lost as I’d ever felt, even more lost than I felt now. And then:
Ollie
Ollie
Ollie
.
The sound was like a welcome and a wake-up call
all at once—and this I promise you is the best mix of anything you can
have in your life, something that gives you a refuge and pushes you out of it,
all at the same time. This is the giving of confidence. That was what R.E.M.
always did for me; they gave me confidence. It seemed in every moment they were
there. You know. You know my stories have had a soundtrack. I marked time with
new albums, new songs. They were part of all my memories. I guess I thought
they always would be. I thought it right up until I found out they wouldn’t.

The words on my laptop screen said in no uncertain terms
that after almost thirty years together the members of R.E.M. were moving on to
pursue other things, and thank you, and goodbye. At the bottom was a link to
one final new song, a farewell, one last hurrah. I hurriedly downloaded it and
clicked play. As the first notes came through the crappy laptop speakers I
realized my elbow was resting on a cold English muffin, the butter thick as
sludge against my skin. I didn’t want to listen this way, with sleep-skewed
hair and crumbs on my lips. This was not the way to listen to the last new
song.
Ollie
Ollie
Ollie
.
After all this time we all deserved more.

I called in sick at the camera store, which was not quite a
lie since my stomach felt crumpled and hard as a ball of tinfoil. I showered
and dressed. I put on my sneakers, grabbed my phone, wallet, and keys, put in
my earbuds, and, with my iPod loaded with the last new song and all of the old
ones, I left the apartment and started walking.

I started with
Murmur
,
their first album. 1983—I would’ve been three. I started along the river,
going in the direction of downtown. My sneakers slapped the sidewalk silently.
I continued with
Reckoning
and
Fables of the Reconstruction
—I
would’ve been four and five. I stopped for an iced coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts.
The air was fresh. The sun moved across the sky.

What do you lose, really, when your favorite band breaks
up? None of the songs that made you love them go anywhere. Nothing is erased or
taken away. It all still belongs to you. “
Nightswimming
.”
“Everybody Hurts.” “Find The River”—the most beautiful song I’d ever
heard, the song that once made Wesley cry. These songs were rooted in my past,
and nothing could ever uproot them. No— What you lose is the future, and
the future is a scary thing to lose. The expectation of landmarks and signposts
evaporates. Concerts, new albums, things to mark your progress—they
disappear. “That’s all. Goodbye.” I’d heard it before and now I was hearing it
again. I had heard it so much, it seemed. I guess when your favorite band
disbands it’s like the end of any relationship. Maybe, for me, Michael Stipe
was just another guy.

***

I walked all day, working myself up for that last new
song. Fifteen studio albums, 691 minutes. I walked along the river into Back
Bay, across the Common, through the North End to the Harbor. The city had a
weird energy that day, almost a crackle, as if it were on the verge of
something. At least that’s what other people say; I’m not sure I felt it myself
at the time. I was my ears and my heart that day, and not much else. I thought
of all the guys I’d met, loved, lost. I thought of my Uncle Oliver and little
Abbey and two young knights, whose photo I still carried in my wallet to remind
me to hope. There had been a song for each of these. And this is why the
disbanding hurt so much: When I met him, whoever he turned out to be, there
would be no song for him.

There were two albums left in my playlist when I decided
to head home. My feet hurt and my shirt was soaked with sweat and my hair was
in my eyes. I didn’t want to walk anymore. I caught an inbound train at
Haymarket station. It was rush-hour now, and crowded, and I made my way slowly
toward the back of the car as commuters churned in and out. The stops ticked
by, almost in time with the remaining songs. Then, somewhere underground
between Boylston and Arlington stations, a funny thing happened. As the last
album faded out, the train glided into sudden slow silence, as though the same
power had been powering both the music and the subway and now was lost. The
lights dimmed, flickered, became yellowish with a hint of emergency.

We sat that way for a few minutes. The last new song was
queued up on my iPod, and all I had to do was click play. The timing felt right—a
time of silence and expectation and in-
betweenness
as
the train sat mysteriously idle— but I couldn’t bring myself to play the
song. When is the right time to have a last time? How do you know?

I felt lost. I was having internal arguments with myself. My
lips may even have been moving, silently acting things out. Suddenly I felt
self-conscious. Someone was probably watching me wag my thumb back and forth
over the iPod buttons, lips moving like a freak.

And I was right: a guy was staring at me. A few feet away,
standing in the
accordioned
space between two train
cars. His dark brown hair was freshly buzzed and his eyes were bright. He was cute.
My type. My age. But I didn’t really care. He had a baby, a boy, strawberry
blond, slung across his chest in one of those carriers, hanging there like a
chubby little gargoyle. I didn’t really care about that either.

I gave him a nod and he nodded back, but his was less of a
greeting and more of a twitch, embarrassed that I’d caught him staring. He
blushed.

“Kiddo seems pretty content,” I said, removing one earbud.

“He’s a good kid.”

I smiled. The kid-holding guy smiled back. From his eyes he
looked too smart for his own good; there was a mischievousness in them.

“Yours?” I said.

“No. Yeah. Long story.” He smiled again but it was more
bashful this time.

“Sounds like,” I said.

I put the earbud back in and pressed play. The last new
song, the farewell song, was slow, quiet, beautiful, almost like a lullaby. Soothing.
I didn’t cry. I thought I would but I didn’t. When the song was done the iPod
screen returned without ceremony to the main library, and I switched it off.

“Color me curious,” I said to the kid-holding guy as I wound
the earbud cords around my fingers.

“Curious about what?”

“His daddy issues.”

“His daddy issues,” the guy repeated, and smirked. “OK....”

His story seemed cautious, or maybe just unrehearsed; the
kid was young and he had probably not been telling it for long. I had trouble
following. Something about his roommates, their kid, the father wasn’t really
the father, not quite, and this kid-holding guy belonged in there somewhere but
I didn’t catch where. He was cute, though, and had nice teeth, and there was
something inviting about him.

“Quite a story,” I said when I sensed he was done, though I
also sensed there was more he’d decided not to say. I took out my uncle’s
keychain and jangled it at the kid. “I have one of my own,” I said.

The kid-holding guy looked surprised. “How old?”

“Four. She’s biologically mine but they live near Seattle. I
donated to my friend and her
lesbian
lover
.” Harriet would’ve smacked me, the way I said it. I couldn’t help it.

“Wow,” the guy said. “That was cool of you.”

“Well, when they put a cup in—uh—well, never
mind.”

He smiled. “I saw you,” he said, or more like blurted. Then
he seemed to try to dilute it with uncertainty. “I think. About a year ago, I
guess. On the T. Around Brighton? It was a really hot day and I was grouchy and
I saw you touch your pocket to make sure you still had your keys. It was a
little thing but for some reason I’ve always remembered it.”

“Just me checking for my keys?” I asked casually. Because he
was cute I chose to be flattered rather than weirded out. I thought about where
I might’ve been going last summer when he saw me. That was the summer Anders
died and my fear of losing my keys had been at an all-time high.

The guy looked down at the kid’s hair. “It sounds weird now
that I say it.”

“I do that a lot,” I said. “Compulsively. I’m always nervous
about losing them. It would be so difficult to replace them and meanwhile, how
would I get into my house?”

He smiled. “That’s what I thought.”

I remembered what Anders had told me about how my uncle felt
about his keys. And I added, “It’s a little piece of metal that stands between
you and the place you belong.”

After a while a guy with a good cell signal spread the
news that the power was out in all of Boston, not just in the subway. There
seemed to be no word yet on when it might be restored.

I said to the kid-holding guy, “We might be down here
forever.”

“This guy’s going to poop a lot sooner than that.”

“So am I,” I laughed.

I wondered what was going on aboveground, above us; what a
powerless city would look like. I hadn’t ever seen a place so big have to rely
on the momentum of civilization. How long would that momentum last? Would there
be car accidents? Looting? I wanted to believe something sweet would come out
of it, something beautiful and full of color, like a rainbow after a storm. But
I was primed to feel that way today—all my senses and emotions were on
high. And maybe it was enough that everyone on the train started clapping
wildly an hour later when the lights came back to full strength and the floor
beneath us started to hum with power.

“Here we go,” I said, grinning. “One big happy family for a
change.”

The train lurched to the next station and the doors opened
and a platform’s worth of waiting commuters tried to pile in. The kid-holding
guy and I were squished together; between us the kid pulled at my shirt.

“I need to transfer to a B train up ahead,” I told the guy. “I
guess I should start making my way out.”

“Good luck,” he said. “It was nice spending the blackout
with you.”

“Same.” I reached for the hand rail and turned to leave,
then turned back to him. “Would you be interested in grabbing a coffee
sometime? You could bring your little friend here.”

His face lit up. “That would be cool. Yeah. I’d like that.”

“I think I have my, uh, card around here somewhere. —That
sounds so pretentious of me.” I pulled a business card out of my wallet and the
photo of the knights came with it. I pushed the photo back in and smoothed the
card a little before handing it over.

“Ollie Wade,” the guy read. He looked up. “Freelance
photography, huh?”

“Ha. Well, no. Formerly freelance. These are leftovers.”

“I’m Fletcher. This is Caleb.”

“Fletcher? Do you make arrows? Zing!” It had seemed witty
coming out of my mouth but now I felt like a dork. “Sorry, I bet you get that
all the time.”

He smiled. “Just once before, actually.”

Over the speaker came the muffled announcement of my stop.

“This is me,” I said. “So I’ll talk to you later?”

“Yeah, definitely.”

“Cool. Call me. Normally I’d say don’t forget, but if you
remembered me after a year, I don’t guess you’ll forget me by tomorrow.”

For everyone else—for me too, ultimately—that became
the day henceforth known as Paint Day, the big reason everyone remembers that
day. After the blackout, through whatever means you find yourself willing to
accept or believe in or find true, old graffiti art long painted-over
reappeared on walls and vehicles and monuments all over Boston. On the wooden
concert bowl of the Hatch Shell, on the white spires of the Zakim Bridge, on
pretty much everywhere a guy could reach to put it—and some places no one
knew how he’d reached. For weeks we all would talk about nothing except that
day, and how the paintings had bloomed with the return of light after the
blackout. No one would forget that day because of it. The kid-holding guy would
not forget that day. But afterward I waited for his call, and I waited. And I
began to realize that he’d forgotten me.