Real Life(3)

“I’m hungry,” Miller said, sliding his arms open on the table. The suddenness of the gesture, his hands sweeping close to Wallace’s elbows, made Wallace flinch.

“You were right there when I ordered those pitchers, Miller,” Yngve said. “You could have said something then. You said you weren’t hungry.”

“I wasn’t hungry. Not for ice cream, anyway. I wanted real food. Especially if we’re drinking. And we’ve been in the sun all day.”

“Real food,” Yngve said, shaking his head. “Listen to that. What do you want, asparagus? Some sprouts? Real food. What even is that?”

“You know what I mean.”

Vincent and Cole coughed under their breath. The table tilted with the shifting weight of their bodies. Would it hold them? Would it last? Wallace pressed against the slats of the tabletop, watching as they slid on slim, dark nails.

“Do I?” Yngve crooned. Miller groaned and rolled his eyes. The flurry of easygoing taunts made Wallace feel a little sad, the kind of private sadness you could conceal from yourself until one day you surfaced and found it waiting.

“I just want some food, that’s all. You don’t have to be so obnoxious,” Miller said with a laugh, but there was hardness in his voice. Real food. Wallace had real food at home. He lived close by. It occurred to him that he could offer to take Miller home and feed him, like a stray animal. Hey, I’ve got some pork chop left over from last night. He could caramelize onions, reheat the chop, slice bread from the corner bakery, the hard, crusty kind, soak it in grease or batter to fry. Wallace saw it all in his mind’s eye: the meal made up of leftovers, converted into something hearty and fast and hot. It was one of those moments in which anything seemed possible. But then the moment passed, a shift in the shadow falling over the table.

“I can go to the stand. If you want. I can buy something,” Wallace said.

“No. It’s fine. I don’t need anything.”

“Are you sure?” Wallace asked.

Miller raised his eyebrows, skepticism that felt like a slap.

The two of them had never been the sort of friends who traded kind favors, but they saw each other constantly. At the ice machine; in the kitchen where they took down abandoned plates and bowls from the shelves to eat their sad, brief lunches; in the cold room where the sensitive reagents were kept; in the hideous purple bathrooms—they were thrown together like surly, unhappy cousins, and they needled each other in the amiable manner of enemies too lazy to make a true go at violence and harm. Last December, at the departmental party, Wallace had made some offhand comment about Miller’s outfit, called it something like the folk costume of the Greater Midwestern Trailer Park. People had laughed, including Miller, but for the next several months Miller brought it up whenever they were together: Oh, Wallace is here, I guess the fashionista will have some comment, then a flash of his eyes, a chilly, crooked smile.

In April, Miller paid him back. Wallace came into the department seminar late and had to stand near the back of the room. Miller was there too. They were teaching assistants for the class before the seminar, and it had run over, but Miller had left early while Wallace stayed behind to answer questions for the undergraduates. They stood against the wood panels, watching the slides crawl along. The visiting scholar was famous in the field of proteomics. Standing room only. It pleased a petty part of Wallace to see that Miller hadn’t gotten a seat either. But then Miller had bent down close to Wallace’s ear, his breath damp and warm, and he’d said, Didn’t they move your people up front? Wallace had felt a cool, reluctant thrill at Miller’s proximity, but in that moment it turned into something else. The right side of Wallace’s body went numb and hot. When Miller looked down at him, he must have seen it on Wallace’s face—that they were not this kind of friend either, that the list of things they could joke about did not include his race. After the lecture, among the jostling line for free coffee and stale cookies, Miller had tried to apologize, but Wallace had refused to hear it. For weeks thereafter, he had steered clear of Miller. And they fell into that chilly silence that comes between two people who ought to be close but who are not because of some early, critical miscalculation. Wallace had come to regret the impasse, because it precluded their discussing the things they shared: They’d both been the first people in their families to go to college; they had both been cowed upon arrival by the size of this particular Midwestern city; they were both unusual among their friends in that they were unaccustomed to the easiness of life. But here they were.

Miller’s surprised silence, the dark caution on his face, told Wallace everything he needed to know about his offer.

“Well, all right then,” Wallace said quietly. Miller put his head down on the table and groaned with exaggerated plaintiveness.

Cole, who was kinder than the rest of them and could therefore get away with such gestures, reached over and ruffled Miller’s hair. “Come on, let’s go,” he said, and Miller grunted, then swung his long legs out from under the table and stood up. Cole kissed Vincent’s cheek and shoulder, and another cold shard of envy darted through Wallace.

The table behind Yngve was filled by a league soccer team in cheap nylon shorts and white T-shirts on which they had drawn their numbers, loudly discussing what to Wallace sounded like women’s tennis. They were all fit and tan and covered in dirt and grass. One of them wore a rainbow headband, and he pointed aggressively at another man, shouting at him in Spanish or maybe Portuguese. Wallace tried to make out what they were talking about, but his seven years of French gave him no purchase on the flurry of diphthongs and fragmented consonants.