“Where is Lukas, I wonder,” Yngve said, loud enough that the soccer team heard him. “Do you know, Cole?”
“He’s with Nate, I think,” Cole said, but he was still staring at Vincent. Yngve flinched. Lukas and Yngve had been more or less in love with each other since their first year, but Yngve was straight and eventually Lukas got tired of pining and found himself a boyfriend who was in vet school. It was an odd but also correct choice, Wallace thought. Sometimes, at parties, when Yngve got very drunk, he said things like Sleeping with a vet is like bestiality. Like, it’s not even a real discipline. Lukas would just shrug and let it go. Yngve had a girlfriend anyway. Wallace felt sorry for both of them. It seemed more miserable than was strictly necessary.
“Are they coming?”
“Not if they’re smart,” Vincent said.
The ice cream had turned to a white slurry. Gnats had left the vines on the retaining wall to dart with purpose through the dark at their food. Wallace fanned them away.
“You didn’t have to come. You could have stayed at home,” Cole said.
“These are my friends too.”
“Now they are. Now they’re your friends.”
“What did you just say to me?”
Wallace glanced at Yngve, who looked terrified; and at Miller, who looked impassive, as if he were sitting at another table entirely. Wallace nodded at Cole and Vincent, but Miller just shrugged. Not surprising. In fact, Wallace himself knew better than to get involved in this sort of skirmish, but he felt bad, like it was his fault. Yngve nudged Miller, but his supreme apathy would not be disturbed. Vincent breathed hard and fast. Water rocked against the hulls of the boats tied near the shore.
“No one is quitting. No one is leaving. We’re having a damn good time,” Wallace said.
“Yeah, right,” was Vincent’s reply, but Cole cracked a smile. “Don’t be such a crybaby.”
“I’m not. No one’s crying,” Cole said, wiping his eyes with the heel of his palm.
“Poor baby, poor baby,” Yngve said as he reached over and ran his hand through Cole’s hair. “Are you gonna make it?”
“Leave it,” Cole said. He sounded terribly small. He was laughing, but he was crying too. They all tried very hard not to see that, tried to pretend that the moisture in his eyes was something else. Poor Cole, Wallace thought, always so close to the surface. Watching him wipe at his eyes made Wallace’s throat hot.
“Well, looks like he’s going to pull through,” Wallace said. These were his friends, the people who knew him best and cared for him most in the world. They were once more sitting in that awful, full silence, except this time Wallace was sure that it was his fault. He had caused the argument, him and his big mouth. But the funny thing, the joke of it that even he was only just now starting to understand, was that he had said only a part of the truth. Yes, he thought about leaving, and yes, he hated it here sometimes. But running through that feeling like hard, resolute bone was something else: It wasn’t so much that he wanted to leave graduate school as that he wanted to leave his life. The truth of that feeling fit under his skin like a new, uncomfortable self, and he couldn’t get rid of it once he acknowledged it. It was all the same, gray waiting, a fear of not being able to take it all back.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Wallace,” Yngve said, and Wallace tried to smile. He was breathless with the knowledge of it. Yngve did not return Wallace’s smile. Cole tipped forward to look at him. Vincent too. Miller even, furtively, from his food, eating the jalapeños in big handfuls.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Really.” His throat was tight. There was not enough air. He could feel himself sinking under.
“You want some water or something?” Vincent asked.
“No, no. Yes. I’ll get it,” Wallace said, croaked. He stood up. Balanced himself with his hand as the world swung loose. He shut his eyes. There was a palm on his forearm. Cole reaching out, but Wallace pulled himself away. “Hey, don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“I’ll come with you,” Cole said.
“I said stay. Relax.” Wallace grinned, his gums on fire. His teeth ached. He broke away from the table, but he could tell they were watching him still. He made for the lake. He would gather himself until he could once again present to his friends a reasonable semblance of happiness.
* * *
• • •
AT THE EDGE OF THE WATER, stone steps descended to the murky bottom of the lake. They were made from a kind of harsh, unfinished stone that had been smoothed by the water and the foot traffic. There were, two or three arm lengths away from Wallace, other people sitting too, watching the moon rise. And on the distant shore, past where the peninsula, furred with pine and spruce trees, hooked into the lake like a thumb, there were houses raised up on great stilts, the lights in the windows like the eyes of some large birds. Wallace had thought at times when he took the lakeshore path at night, looking through the scrim of trees, that all those houses did look like a flock of enormous birds crouching on the other side. He had never been over there himself, had never had a reason to cross the lake to that rarefied and separate part of town.
The small boats had come in and been set on their racks, draped for the night. The larger boats were taken out farther down, near the boathouse, where Wallace sometimes took walks in the other direction, to where the grass grew wild and the trees were denser and heavier. There was a covered bridge and a family of geese living there. Sometimes, he saw their big gray wings spreading out beneath him as they glided across the water. Other times, he saw them lazily and confidently striding in the shade toward the soccer fields and picnic grounds, like stern game wardens. But at this time of the evening the geese were away, and the gulls had returned to their nests, and Wallace had the edge of the water to himself except for the other anonymous watchers nearby. He glanced at them briefly and wondered what shapes their lives held, if they were content, if they were mad or frustrated. They looked like people anywhere: white and in ugly, oversize clothes, sunburned and chapped and smiling with large, elastic mouths. The young people were long and tan, and they laughed as they pushed on one another. Farther back, the great mass of people spread out over the pier like moss. The water beneath him splashed up a little, wetting the edges of his shorts. The stone was slimy and cool. A band was starting up behind him. Their instruments twanged as they whirred to life.
Wallace hugged his knees and put his chin on his arms. He slid his feet out of his canvas shoes and let the lake wash up to his ankles. It was cold, though not as cold as he had expected or would have liked. There was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling around under the surface. There were stretches of days when the lakes were closed because of the algae. It sometimes secreted neurotoxins that could be fatal. Or harbored parasitic organisms that clasped on to swimmers and sucked them dry, or gave them diseases that caused their bodies to tear themselves apart from the inside. The water here could be dangerous even if you didn’t know it. But there were no warnings posted. Whatever was in the water was not yet at a level thought dangerous to people. The water stank more now that he was close to it, like alcohol, powerfully astringent and chemical.
It reminded him of the black water that had stared at him from the drain of his parents’ sink all those years ago. Black and round, like a perfect pupil gazing up at him, smelling sour, like something gone bad. His father had also kept buckets of still water. I’m saving that, he’d say when Wallace tried to pour it out. Saving it the way one saved old clothes or bottles or pens with no ink or broken pencils. Because you never knew what might happen that would make the trash worth keeping. The water in the buckets was as dark as tar because leaves had fallen from the roof into it and had broken down. Sometimes, he saw the frail brown remnants of the stalks, after all the green had been eaten away. At the right angle, it was possible to see the writhing forms of m
osquito larvae as they flitted just along the surface. His father had told him once that they were tadpoles. Wallace had believed him. He had cupped his hands in the slimy water and had squinted close, trying to discern the tadpoles. But of course, they had only been mosquitos.
Dark water.
There was a knot of tension high in his chest, something hard and coiled. It felt like a black ball stuck to the inside of his lungs. His stomach hurt too. He had eaten nothing but soup all day. The surface of his hunger was rough, like a cat’s tongue. Pressure gathered in the backs of his eyes.
Oh, he thought when he realized what it was: tears.
In that moment, there was a body next to him. Wallace turned, for an instant expecting to see his father’s face, conjured up out of memory, but instead, it was Emma, who had come at last with her fiancé, Thom, and their dog, Scout, a shaggy, happy thing.
She put an arm around his shoulders and laughed. “What are you doing over here?”
“Taking in the sights, I reckon,” he said, trying to match her laugh. He hadn’t seen Emma in a week or more. She worked two floors down, in a lab situated at the end of a long dark hallway. Every time Wallace had visited her—to go to lunch, or to drop something off—he had felt like he was passing out of the biosciences building and into some forbidden place, as if he’d gotten lost and had been sucked into some curious adjacent dimension. The walls were empty except for an occasional bulletin board where yellowed fliers and posters from the 1980s hung as though the opportunities they offered were still new. Emma and Wallace had become friends by virtue of the fact that neither of them was a white man in their program. It had been four years of shared looks over the tops of the heads of tall boys with their upright, sturdy confidence and loud voices and brash propositions. It had been four years of quiet conversations in that long dark hall, moments when it seemed that things might get easier for them. She smoothed her dark curly hair from her face and looked at him. He felt as thin as Cole’s napkins in that moment.
“Wallace, what’s wrong?” she asked. Her palm was soft on his wrist. He cleared the wet from his throat.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said. His eyes stung.
“Wallace, what happened?” Emma had a small face with large features and an olive complexion that sometimes led people to think, in certain lighting, that she was not white. But she was white, if of an ethnic variety. Her grandparents on one side were Bohemian, or Czech, as it was called now. On the other side they were Sicilian. Her chin was keen like Yngve’s, but it lacked a dimple. Her hand didn’t fit all the way around Wallace’s wrist, but she held him tightly just the same.
“It’s nothing,” he said again, and tried to mean it this time because he didn’t know exactly what it was that bothered him. What could he say except that it was nothing?
“Doesn’t look like it, mister.”
“My dad died,” he said because it was as true as any other thing, except when he said it, he did not feel relieved. Rather, it jolted him, like a sudden cry in a quiet room.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.” Then, collecting herself, shaking her head, she said, “I’m sorry, Wallace. I’m sorry for your loss.”
He smiled because he was not sure how to meet someone’s sympathy for him. It always seemed to him that when people were sad for you, they were sad for themselves, as if your misfortune were just an excuse for them to feel what it was they wanted to feel. Sympathy was a kind of ventriloquism. His father had died hundreds of miles away. Wallace had not told anyone. His brother had called him. Then had come the social media posts from family members, those concerned and those just after information, that ugly, frothing spectacle of public mourning. It was strange, Wallace thought as he smiled at Emma, because he didn’t feel a crushing sense of loss—no, when he thought of his father’s death, he felt the way he always felt when someone didn’t show up for lab in the morning. But perhaps that wasn’t the truth of it either. He didn’t know what to feel, and so he tried not to feel anything. It seemed more honest that way. A real feeling.
“Thank you,” he said, because what else did one say when caught in the confines of someone else’s sympathy?
“Wait,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder at the table where the boys were sitting, now occupied with Scout, who was enjoying being petted. “Do they not know?”
“Nobody does.”
“Fuck,” she said. “Why?”
“Because it was easier, I guess. You know?”
“No, Wallace. I don’t know. When is the funeral?”
“Weeks ago,” he said, and she looked positively startled by this. “What?”
“Did you go?” she asked.
“No, I didn’t. I had work,” he said.
“Jesus Christ. Did the she-demon say no?”
Wallace laughed, and his voice skipped out over the water ahead of them. What a thought. That he might have told his adviser and she might have told him not to go. It was tempting to let Emma believe that because it was something Simone might have done. But then it would probably get back to Simone, and he’d have that mess to deal with.
“No,” he said. “She’s not that bad, you know. She wasn’t even in town.” Simone was tall and striking, a woman of terrifying intelligence. She was not particularly demonic. More like a constant hot wind that, after a while, wore Wallace down.
“Don’t protect her,” Emma said, narrowing her eyes. “Did she fucking say you couldn’t go to your own dad’s funeral? That’s sick.”
“No,” he said, still laughing, doubling over and grabbing his stomach. “It wasn’t like that. I just didn’t have the time.”
“It was your dad, Wallace,” Emma said. The laughter in him died. He felt chastened by that. Yes, it was his father. He knew that. But the trouble with these people, with his friends, with the world, was that they thought things had to be a certain way with family. They thought you had to feel something for them, and it had to be the same thing that everyone felt or else you were doing it wrong. How could he laugh at the thought of not going to his father’s funeral? How strange could he be? Wallace did not think he was strange. He did not think he was wrong or bad for laughing, either, but he made his face into a calm mask of quiet, still sadness.
“Fucking hell,” she said. She was angry for his sake. She kicked at the water, sent it flashing into the night, drops of silver fading to black. She then put her other arm around him and hugged him. He closed his eyes and sighed. Emma began to cry a little, and he put his arms around her back and held her close.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, but her crying only intensified as she shook her head. She kissed his cheek and hugged him more fiercely.
“I’m so sorry, Wallace. God. I wish I could change it. I wish,” she said.
The size and scope of her sadness alarmed him. It seemed impossible that this display of grief could be entirely sincere, that her body shook in his arms because of a loss she felt he must have felt. He wanted to cry for her sake if not for his own, but he couldn’t. People at nearby tables began to hoot and holler at them, clapping and blowing kisses.
Emma growled at them, but they could not hear it. Only Thom stood with his back straight, like he sensed something wrong. When Wallace looked back at him, Thom was scowling, glaring. Thom knew that Wallace was gay. He knew that there was nothing between him and Emma. So why was he staring so hard? It was like someone had told him a joke but he hadn’t gotten it. He could be stupidly unironic, to the point of self-parody. He had messy hair and wore hiking boots year-round, even though they lived in the flat part of the state and he was from the middle of Oklahoma. Thom was all affectation all the time. He was getting a doctorate in literary studies, and he was strapped to the drowning enterprise of academia. Still, Wallace liked Thom more than he disliked him. He gave Wallace reading recommendations. He talked to Wallace about books the way the others talked about college footba
ll and hockey. It was just that every so often, in moments like this, he could be found staring at Wallace and Emma as if he wanted to decapitate them both.
“Well, that’s enough of a show,” Wallace said.
“No, not yet.” Emma kissed him on the mouth. Her breath was warm but sweet, like she’d been sucking on candies. Her lips were soft and sticky. The kiss was brief, but the noise it drew from the nearby tables was deafening. Someone swung a flashlight beam at them, and there they were, kissing down by the water, like something out of a movie. Emma, naturally dramatic, flung her arm back and fell across his lap.
Wallace had never been kissed before, not by anyone, not really. He felt vaguely like something had been stolen from him. Emma laughed against his knees. Thom came down to the water’s edge with Scout’s leash fisted tightly in hand.
“What the fuck was that?” he asked Wallace, sharply, meanly. “Do you just go around kissing other people’s partners?”
“She kissed me,” Wallace said.
“I kissed him,” Emma said as if that explained it. Wallace sighed.
“Emma, we’ve talked about this.”
“He’s gay,” she said, sitting up now. “It doesn’t count. It’s like kissing another girl.”
“Well, I appreciate that,” Wallace said.
“See?”
“No, Em. It’s not okay. It doesn’t matter if he’s gay—no offense, Wallace—”
“I mean, I am gay.”
“You’re still kissing other people,” Thom went on. “That’s not okay.”
“Don’t be such a puritan,” Emma said. “What, are you a Baptist all of a sudden?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” Thom said.
“His dad died. I was being a good friend!” She had stood up now. The edge of her skirt—some floral thing, probably rummaged out of someone’s closet and sold for pennies—was damp. Wallace sucked in a breath. Thom looked at him.
Real Life Page 3
