Tight Quarters (Out of Uniform 6)

“He’s gone. I’m sorry.” Julio’s phone call was hardly a surprise. He’d called earlier in the morning to say that Oscar’s family had gathered. And Spencer didn’t immediately fall apart. He poured the drink down the sink and went to stand at his bank of windows in the living area for a long time, looking out at the city below. Less than an hour later, the phone rang again, and it too was hardly a shock—his old paper wanted him to write up something about Oscar for Sunday’s edition. Oscar had apparently specially requested that it be Spencer. Details, Old Man, details, right to the end.

And no way was he saying no, nor admitting that he hadn’t written in days. So even though it was still well before cocktail hour, he poured himself some of the whiskey that had been his last present from Oscar and did what he’d been putting off for days now and opened Oscar’s laptop. It booted up just fine, and if he’d been expecting some sort of dramatic, advice-filled note expressly for him, he should have known better.

That was never Oscar’s style. Instead he found impeccably organized files—the laptop every bit as carefully cluttered as his office had been once upon a time. The pictures folder was something he’d return to later, see if there were any that were worth submitting with the article he was supposed to write, but he didn’t want to get lost down that rabbit hole quite yet. The book’s file was easy to find. Heart in his throat, he clicked Open.

“It began, as most things in my life did, with a boy...”

And so Spencer was riveted. The next few hours, he didn’t move, didn’t eat, simply was riveted to Oscar’s long, rambling tale of his life. It needed an editor still, of course, someone to come along and help him cull the side jaunts, to find the narrative at the heart of book. But raw and unfiltered, it was Oscar at his finest.

Spencer laughed out loud to his empty apartment more than a few times, and when he reached the part about the early 1990s when Oscar lost a lover to AIDS, he cried, big, fat, sloppy tears that Oscar would have hated and chided him over. Oscar had never mentioned the lover to him, not once in the twenty years they’d been colleagues and friends. Reading the chapter, though, it was clear that this one was one of the great loves of Oscar’s life. He detailed a road trip up to Napa they’d taken, and Spencer swore he could see the man’s thin hair blowing and hear his laugh at something Oscar said. Their fondness for each other shone through with every word.

“I’m not asking you to be the love of my life here.” Del’s voice, light and teasing, filtered back to him as he took a break from the screen to wipe his eyes.

I want to be. That should have been his reply. He could see it now, could hear the words leaving his throat, yet he knew he never would have been able to utter them. And now it was too late. He wouldn’t be the great love of Del’s life. Del would find someone else, because of course he would. He was young and gorgeous and smart and funny and sexy as hell. Someone else would get that title, be the grand romance, and Spencer would be but a dot on the roadmap of his life, a momentary stopover on the way to the real deal.

But for himself... Yeah, he knew in his bones that this was it for him, the way Oscar’s lover had been the last time he gave his heart away. This had been his great love story, and he had ruined it. He had to live with that now, live with his choices. Bile rising in his throat, he returned to the book, read through to the end.

I thought I wanted to be remembered by my bylines, my stories, my prizes, and by the young careers I helped launch and the paper I put to bed each night, but in the end, I am the man who loved David, Christopher, and Calvin, who never knew but should have. And Roberto, who did.

Fuck. Spencer couldn’t breathe. Memories assaulted him. His first feature. First time on the front page. First magazine feature nationally. First time on the radio. He’d called Oscar after each of those, celebrating his successes. His portfolio, his prizes, his legacy as a journalist. The reputation he’d worked so hard to safeguard. Did any of it really matter?

He’d always assumed that Oscar and he were cut from the same cloth, married to their jobs. Same as Spencer’s father. What a shock to realize that was far from the truth for Oscar. Without really thinking, he picked up his phone and texted his father the question that wouldn’t leave him alone.