Real Life(27)

“Please do not give me a hickey. I am not prepared to explain to anyone.”

“Oh, shit, I forgot,” Miller says.

“Yeah, well. It’s been real.” Wallace pushes at his chest, and Miller, remembering where they are and who they are, steps back.

“I am sorry, Wallace. You shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “You know, everyone has shit to deal with.”

“They do—but, well, you’re one of my people and I’m sad you have to deal with it.”

“Thanks,” Wallace says, touched to be someone’s person, to be thought of so tenderly.

“I guess you’re playing tennis after all.”

“It’s a date.”

They don’t know what else to do with their bodies except the obvious thing, which is intractable at the moment. So Wallace kisses Miller’s cheek, which makes Miller blush.

“Off I go.”

“Okay.”

Wallace is going down the steps when he looks up and sees Miller watching him. He thinks again of a bird, the matter of scope, how everything below it, all the big and towering world, is both flattened and shrunken. How he must look to Miller from above, the distortion of distance and light falling down through the skylight at the top of the atrium, how he must appear half in shadow, half lit. Looking up, he sees Miller’s height diminished, an illusion of the angle. He lifts his hand, waves. Wallace waves back.

“Call me later,” Miller says.

“Okay.” The answer to the question from before, the one he asked himself by leaving Miller in the kitchen—if he could withstand the possibility that last night was all he needed—is no. He knows this for sure now as he goes farther and farther down the steps, can feel Miller getting farther and farther away, higher above him. There will come a moment when he passes directly beneath Miller’s sight line, when they will be the closest that they possibly can be, and to someone looking from even higher up, they will appear identical, one laid over the other.

But there is a difference between entering someone, being in someone, and being with that person. There is an impossibility to the idea of simultaneously existing within them and beside them, the fact that when you get close enough to someone, you cease to be discrete entities and instead become a single surface, glittering in the sun.

“I mean it,” Miller says, his voice wafting down. “You better call, or text.”

“I will, thanks, Dad,” he calls back, walking backward, laughing.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

“Wallace.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Their voices are twinned echoes that grow apart until there is only silence, or that clash into each other until their energy is spent and they are subsumed into the quiet. Either way, Wallace is gone, and Miller is gone, and the atrium is still and warm.

The agitating machines beat on, beat on, beat on.





3





Wallace is at first surprised to find the courts deserted, but then he remembers the game at the stadium, a structure barely discernible at this distance, a soft white hump like the back of a whale. Music, dull and empty, pulses into the air, and Wallace knows that soon the streets will fill with drunk people in red-and-white-striped clothes, lolling from one side to the other. They will spill in a red wave across the campus and into downtown, and their voices will crowd the air like shouts from some sinking ship. It’s the worst part of the weekend. How permeable everything and everyone becomes. It takes only one glance to provoke a person into conversation or worse.

Last weekend, Wallace had been standing in line at the corner store behind a group of tan boys who smelled like beer and sweat. The boys were all wearing sunglasses, and now and then one of them would run his hands around the insides of his shorts, and occasionally Wallace saw a flash of hip, the tawny fur of pubic hair, a tumescent shadow between the legs. One of them turned to him, pushed his sunglasses up just enough for Wallace to see his bloodshot eyes, and said, “Bro, what are you doing here? We told you to wait.” Wallace blinked at the boy, not knowing what to say or what to do, but the boy just stared at him in amused annoyance as though Wallace were the one who’d made the mistake. The boy’s friends hooked their arms around his neck and pulled him, and the boy shouted after Wallace, “No, no, we can’t leave him. He’s got the hookup. Don’t you have the hookup, bro?” And all the people in the store turned to look at Wallace, who had only wanted to buy some soap and deodorant, who could have picked a better time and better day, certainly, but had chosen that moment and so had been marked out in some way. It could be that way.

The heat has not broken. Wallace sits down on the bench. He takes his racquet out of the yellow sleeve. The courts are blue with crisp white lines, made from recycled rubber or cement or some similar substance. They are the slowest courts he has ever played except for the soggy green clay where he first learned the game on weekends with his friends in undergrad.

There is a row of trees populated by crows calling to one another. Wallace moves to the hot surface of the court and begins to stretch, first his legs and then his back, bending this way and that, trying to unclench, to release. He breathes deeply, trying to let go of Dana. He pictures her on a boat sailing farther and farther away. The court is burning the undersides of his thighs, but the pain feels good, soaking into him like water through a shirt. The knot in his spine is unfurling. His bones crack. He stretches as far forward as he can, and his stomach presses against the tops of his thighs. He doesn’t have the build of a tennis player. He is not lanky like Cole. He is chubby, at best, fat at worst. This is the most rigorous exercise he gets all week.