“Just that we’re never the same. We’re always changing.”
“Maybe so,” Cole says.
The trees drop back and there, out to the right, is marshy yellow grass and dark water. There is also a narrow channel that runs out to the lake, but this is a small swamp. Herons move among the grasses, and large gray geese sun themselves on the bank. Ancient black wood juts out of the water like a jagged tooth, or a claw from some large underwater animal. Gray gulls circle overhead, and Cole tilts back to stare at them, shielding his eyes.
“If it’s hard, you know, maybe that means something too.”
“We’ve just put so much time in this thing. We’ve put so much love and blood into it. And Roman comes along and fucks it all to hell.”
“How did he get involved, anyway?”
“You know how it goes. Vincent wanted him and Klaus over for dinner. We get to talking about relationships, monogamy, being queer, which is fucking ridiculous. We’re gay, not queer.”
That Cole is going on again about how normal he and Vincent are—how regular-gay they are—is not entirely shocking. This is a common topic for him. Cole resents Roman, Wallace knows, because Roman is not only French and good-looking, but he also possesses the sort of deceptive charisma that can make even an open relationship appeal to Mississippi boys raised on Communion and the Holy Ghost. And haven’t they scraped this far from Sodom and Gomorrah in the public’s opinion by virtue of their normalcy, their adherence to traditional values? Cole doesn’t see how turning back the clock, how embracing hedonism is going to get them anywhere.
It’s all the same to Wallace. People do what they want even when they shouldn’t, even when they know better. The compulsion to take and take and take is a natural one, the urge to expand; desire will out, he thinks.
Cole does not notice Wallace’s silence. The water’s surface ripples with the passage of birds swooping low, snatching up insects. He picks up a rock and flings it out over the yellow grass. A dozen or so birds erupt into the air, their wings gray and brown, their bodies darting like arrowheads. Cole lets out a groan of frustration.
“And then, we’re having coffee after dinner,” Cole continues, “and Roman turns to Vincent and says, ‘You know, nothing is better than fucking someone while my boyfriend watches.’” Cole’s French accent is terrible, offensive and hilarious. Wallace tries not to laugh. It’s bubbling up out of him. “Can you believe that? Can you believe that fucking homo said that to my boyfriend? In front of my face. He said that.”
“I wonder if that’s true,” Wallace says. “I wonder if he really feels that way.”
“I’m not letting someone fuck my boyfriend in front of me. I’m not letting anyone fuck my boyfriend at all. Except me.”
Wallace bites the tip of his tongue, which is already so raw today. He swallows down what he wants to say: that a person doesn’t belong to you just because you’re in a relationship, just because you love them. That people are people and they belong only to themselves, or so they should. Miller can do whatever he wants with whomever he wants, is the thought that flashes through Wallace. He has a jealous heart. Love is a selfish thing.
“What does Vincent think?”
“Well, after that fucker left, we talked about it. We’re doing dishes, and he turns to me and says, ‘Babe, what did you think about what Roman said?’ I lost it, Wallace. I fucking lost it.”
“But what does Vincent want?”
“So, I say, ‘I’m not a fan.’ Vincent has this look on his face. Just . . . You should have seen it, Wallace. He looked like he’d missed his bus or his train or whatever. He looked like he was standing on the wrong side of the lake trying to see if the boat was coming back for him.” The look on Cole’s face is sad but angry. He’s remembering it, slipping back to that night in their apartment. “And I just knew that he was going to do something like this. Get on that app, look for something.”
“But what did he say?”
Cole licks the salt from above his lip. He looks back out over the water, to the grass drifting, sighing in the wind.
“He said, ‘But don’t you want to know?’”
“Know what?”
“That’s it,” Cole says, laughing. “That’s it. That’s what he said. ‘But don’t you want to know?’ What the fuck are we missing out on by being together, Wallace? Can you tell me that? What are we missing out on?”
Wallace crouches low and sits on the grass next to the trail. His body is humming. Cole sits down next to him, but then he lies back and puts his arm over his face. The world in all its vastness is still and quiet. Even the birds sit suspended on their perches. A cricket crawls to the end of a yellow piece of grass and beats out several long cries. Then it’s swallowed by a heron. Wallace watches that bird’s enormous eyes as it bends its long neck down to see the bug on the grass. To the bug, the eye must seem so large, impossibly large. And the eye must see the bug as so infinitesimal as to be inconsequential and yet still be able to discern all its architecture. The heron claps its beak over the grass, taking the cricket into its body.
Cole sighs. “I just want things to be like they were. Like when we were at Ole Miss, making plans. This was never in the plan. We only ever wanted each other.”
“Plans change. That doesn’t mean they’re bad or broken. It just means . . . you want something else.”
“But I don’t want something else. I don’t want anyone else. I want Vincent.” Cole sounds petulant. Wallace is twisting green grass, making a tiny hole in the ground. Cole’s voice is riddled with cracks. The air is cooler by the water, but the heat of the day hasn’t broken open yet, is still present, gauzy on their skin.
“I know, Cole. But you haven’t lost him. You’re still together. You can still make it work.”
“But what if he doesn’t want me back? What if he’s found something else?”
“Don’t borrow trouble,” Wallace says, struck by these words because they do not belong to him but to his grandmother. He can hear her at the kitchen table, stirring the batter for corn bread, singing to herself. He feels momentarily ill, dizzy with memory.
“I can’t help but to, it seems. All I have is trouble.”
“That’s not true,” Wallace says as he sprinkles the blades of grass on Cole’s stomach. “You have a boyfriend. That’s more than some of us have.”
“My boyfriend is looking for a boyfriend.”
“You don’t know that. You haven’t asked him.”
“What are you on there for, on the app, I mean?”
“To pass the time, mostly. Curiosity, maybe?”
“Do you ever hook up with people from there?” Cole slides his arm down to look at Wallace, and Wallace shakes his head. That’s the truth of it. He’s never been with anyone from the app.
“Nobody’s barking up this tree,” he says.
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, be sure to send me their address, then.”
“I mean it. You’re good-looking. You’re smart. You’re kind.”
“I’m fat,” Wallace says. “I’m average, at best, on a good day.”
“You aren’t fat.”
“No, you aren’t fat.” Wallace drums his hand on the flat of Cole’s stomach, which is softer than he thought it would be. He leaves his hand there, startled. Cole does not push it away.
“I thought about it,” Cole says. “In first year. I thought about it. You probably know that.”
“Let it alone,” Wallace says, more words from his grandmother.
“If I had known—”
“It would have been a mistake, anyway.”
“I still think about it, you know. I do. I want you to know that.”
Heat at the back of Wallace’s throat. The world is blurry. His eyes sting. He takes his hand from Cole’s stomach and lies down too. The grass is itchy on the back of his
neck; dirt is in his hair. Cole’s body smells like the ocean, or how Wallace imagines the ocean must smell.
“That’s just your loneliness talking,” Wallace says.
“No. Maybe.”
“I thought about it, too, for a long time. And then I stopped.”
“Why?”
The clouds over them are white and thick. A cool wind comes out of the west, draws a hand across the grass and makes it whisper. The herons are moving through the stalks slowly, turning them over for more bugs, or a fish caught sleeping.
“You get tired of listening to yourself whine about the same old things.”
Cole does not laugh, though Wallace does after he says this.
“And then your boyfriend shows up. What do you do then?”
“I guess that’s true,” Cole says.
“I know you’re just saying that part about thinking about it to make me feel better, maybe. You think I need to hear it, but I don’t.”
“That’s not it.”
“I think it is, Cole. You’re too nice sometimes.” The water rustles against the shore, but because they’re lying down, they can’t see the lake entirely. The geese are immobile, sitting near the edge of the water. “You get to feeling sorry for people, and then you say things like that.”
“I don’t know,” Cole says. “Maybe you’re right about that too.”
“Do you really want me to come to the dinner thing tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Wallace says. “I’ll be there.”
There is an audible sigh of relief from Cole, air going out, but Wallace feels as if that same air is pressing closer than ever on him. At the dinner party, he’ll see their friends. He’ll see Miller. There is also the matter of the strange woman, the rock climber, whom he imagines as a tall, leanly muscled woman, very tan, with blond hair and expensive teeth. He imagines her voice fluty, with just enough crass humor running through her to make her interesting.
But he knows that Cole needs him there. He isn’t going to see Miller. He isn’t going to make a fool of himself. He’s going for his friend. He’s going to help Cole get through this. Yet—Miller looms, or rather, the prospect of seeing him again, and he is thrilled by it.
“We spent the whole time talking about me,” Cole is saying. “I didn’t even think to ask how you’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your dad. You thinking about leaving. How is everything—are you okay?”
Wallace is momentarily confused and then it comes back to him—that Emma told everyone about his dad dying after he and Miller went off to the bathroom. He is again in the situation of having to articulate the curious shape of his grief, which does not bear the typical dimensions of such a loss. He doesn’t feel flattened by it. Instead, there’s a small channel in him going from his head to his feet, a channel through which a cold substance is churning at all times, cooling him from within, like a second circulatory system. There is something to it, isn’t there? Something beyond his grasp.
“I’m okay,” he says instead. Cole rolls over and looks at him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he says. “I was just at the end of a very long rope yesterday, that’s all.”
“Is it the she-demon?”
“No. One of my lab mates ruined some experiments, and I just couldn’t deal with it.” There’s a smile on Wallace’s face, one that bears no heat. He’s watching the clouds again.
“I hope you don’t leave,” Cole says. “I hope you stay. I need you.”
“I don’t think I’ll leave,” Wallace says. “I don’t have any skills to live in the world.”
“Me either.”
“But sometimes I’d like to live in it—in the world, I mean. I’d like to be out there with a real job, a real life.”
“Vincent has a real job and look what it’s done to him.”
“Is that fair?” Wallace asks. “Do you think his job is the reason he downloaded a gay sex app? Or do you think it’s something more elemental?”
“I think my boyfriend is trying to cheat on me, is what I think. And I think I want my friend to stay and not throw his life away.”
“Persuasive.”
“I think so,” Cole says, half-joking, half-sincere. Wallace would like to be able to gaze out at the clouds and parse their slow language for signs and omens, but that would require a belief in a higher power, a higher order of things. There are shadows on the dark water, and in the distance, a hush upon the trees on the peninsula, a cessation of movement, the breeze gone now. What is the thing that Cole is really trying to persuade him of—going to the party or staying? And hasn’t he already made up his mind about staying? And going to the party?
Wallace rolls over onto his stomach and puts his chin against his folded arms. Behind them are soccer fields and dormitories. The grass is very green and very straight, bordered by sharp yellow signs and fence posts. Farther back, hazy in his vision, is the gray solidity of the gymnasium, and figures flickering in and out of view, people drunk from the game or because it is Saturday, wandering far afield of the stadium. The sun is hot on his lower back, where his shirt has come up, and he can feel it stinging, digging in, a purplish bruise on his skin gathering. Cole is making some dull, digging sound of his own, into the earth, as if to hide.
“If Vincent leaves me . . . I don’t know what I’ll do,” he says. It’s the sort of the thing you can say only when you’re looking away from it, offhand, distracted, the way you might casually notice a piece of furniture. It’s the sort of thing you say with a laugh, a soft roll of the shoulders. That’s the only way to express the inconsolable grief of it, the fear that begins down in the tripe, in the guts, in the core of who you are and what you want and what you need—it’s the truth, and for a moment, Wallace almost turns to him to comfort him. But he does not. To do so would be to break the spell, to cause Cole to crumple in on himself. His voice is streaked with moisture, a windowpane in the rain.
“You aren’t there yet,” Wallace says. “You’d know if you were.”
“I just don’t know what I’d do, Wallace. I don’t know.”
“You do know—you’d try to hold on. But you aren’t there yet.”
“Trying. What good is trying?”
“You have to try. You always have to try.”
“What if we’re there, but I don’t know we’re there?”
“You’d know. You just would.”
“But how do you know I’d know?”
“Because I know you.”
“What if you don’t?”
“Oh, stop playing at somber,” Wallace says. Stop playing at morose, at mystery, as if you aren’t living every moment of your life on the surface or just below it. Cole is one of those fat fish that circle near the underside of a vast plain of ice in winter, showing their scales through the dull frost, the whites of their bellies. He is as native to solemnity as Wallace is to decisive action.
“I’m not playing. I’m serious. What if you didn’t know me at all? Then what would you say?”
“Who are you?” Wallace replies quickly, laughing, his stomach pressing flatter to the ground. His own weight is making it harder to talk so low to the earth. “I guess I’d ask, ‘Who are you?’”
“I have no idea, some days, who the fuck I am.”
Wallace breathes out through his nose. A goose’s wings flap on the water nearby, carrying it up and up. Wallace has not considered the possibility that Cole, the simplest of all his friends, the kindest and most gentle among them, might be unknowable to him. He has not considered the possibility that the ease of Cole’s nature might be distorting something else, flattening it; or that it might be the result of a carefully orchestrated game, an illusion. All the parties, the deferring in conversation, the thoughtful inquiries about well-being, the baked goods, t
he plainness of his clothes, the flexibility of his schedule, the placid nature of his demeanor—all of it suggesting a genuine concern for others and a lack of selfish regard. How can Cole, of all people, doubt himself, who he is, when the person he presents to the world is so carefully constructed? It’s only now, even, that Wallace is aware of a certain puckering at the seams, a hint of construction showing through. It’s only now that he realizes that all along, Cole has perhaps been smiling with teeth to hide a grimace.
“I know that feeling,” Wallace says. “I know that feeling pretty well.”
“So don’t say it, okay, that you know me, that you know how this will turn out, because you don’t and can’t.”
“Okay,” Wallace says. “That’s fair. Okay.”
“I’m just really scared. I’ve loved him for so long. We’ve been in this thing for so long. I don’t know if I can begin again.”
Of course Cole is afraid to lose Vincent. Of course this is the peak, the pinnacle of Cole’s desires, not only for this relationship, but for the very configuration of things: a career, a loving partner, friends, lovely little parties, tennis on the weekend. What Cole wants from life is, above all else, that matters be settled before they are even raised, that everything fall into place. He expects that they’ll simply finish graduate school and settle into the next phase of life just as they are now, only a little older, a little wealthier, a little better off. He has not planned for a loss, for any of the many ways that life can and will go wrong. Vincent is not just Vincent, but also a symbol, collecting with each passing day more and more significance. He is a ward, an inoculation against the uncertainty of the future.
“I hate that you feel this way. I hate that you’re dealing with so much.”
“No, you,” Cole says. “Your dad—fuck, I’m going on again, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry. Really.”
“It must be so much, to lose your dad, it must be awful.”
“It’s . . . mostly fine,” Wallace admits, getting too close to the bone. He doesn’t want to go back over the thing about how grief can feel diffuse and dense all at once, like a flock of birds in the sky. He doesn’t want to get into it. He can taste dirt on his lips and in his mouth, granular and salty.
Real Life Page 11
