Real Life(30)

“Hi,” Wallace said.

“Hey,” they all said in turn. Then Vincent stepped up to him, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Vincent, Cole’s boyfriend.” And Cole looked away in shame.

Their relationship has always seemed so steady to Wallace. They are so steadfastly even-tempered—except, perhaps, for last night, when Vincent seemed, yes, a little on edge. Had he been cruising even then? Had he been on the lookout for something passing in the night? There is a cruising ground near the lake, a sloped hill covered in downy trees. At night, all you have to do is let yourself be sucked into the darkness of the unlit running path. You walk and walk on soft soil until you bump up against something hard and firm, another man out there looking for something in the dark.

A shot skids off the sideline, and Wallace scoops it up off the bounce, sends it cross-court to Cole’s forehand. Cole should send it back cross-court but closer to the middle, but he won’t. Wallace can see it now in the way he’s winding up, drawing his racquet back and a little down. He’s going to shoot it straight up the line for a winner. Sure enough, Cole swings out, hits the ball squarely in front, and sends it hurtling low over the net and into the doubles alley.

If there is anything he does not enjoy about Cole, it’s the erratic nature of his tennis, how even during warm-up, kind as he is in daily life, he’s only thinking about himself. The goal of warm-up is just that, to get the body going, to get the shots ready for the set or match. It’s not about practicing winners. It’s not about showing off. Wallace would be content to hit the same forehand one thousand times in a warm-up. It’s boring, but he likes it, the consistency. He hates to miss.

“You think you might want to play a set?” Cole asks over the net.

“Sure. We can.”

“Great. First serve in?”

“Sounds perfect.”

He bunts the ball back over to Cole, and he lines up at the baseline to receive. Cole is bouncing the ball, eyeing the box. His toss rises slowly from his hand, and he reaches up for a serve. It misses horrifically, into the fence, which rattles. He tries again. Another misfire, this time flat into the court in front of him. Wallace clucks the roof of his mouth, but he knows that once Cole’s serve gets going, this same randomness will make it difficult to read and return.

Cole wipes sweat from his brow in frustration, rolls his shoulders two hard times. Then he tosses the ball up, and this time he strikes it perfectly. The ball shoots down into the corner of the service box, no spin or anything, just low and darting. Wallace chips it back with his forehand and the floating slice drifts toward Cole, who puts it away for a winner.

On the next serve, Wallace connects with a beautiful return, sending the ball up the line and away from Cole. The geometry of tennis is simple in many ways. You want to hit to where your opponent isn’t, but in order to make a space where they are not, you sometimes have to hit to where they are. You are trying to outmaneuver them. But because he and Cole know each other’s game so well, the maneuvering is always in minor gains, little turns in momentum. A winner here, an error there, an ace, a return winner. Cole manages to hold serve after digging himself out of two break points. They change ends.

Wallace takes two balls to the line. His arm is getting there. There is a small pain in his shoulder, the pain of remembering, recollecting, redefining form. His serve is mostly conservative. He spins it in rather than going for broke. He is a master of angles, slicing it wide or bending it into the body. For his first serve, he catches Cole going the other way and clips the outside of the line. The next serve is a double fault. And then a kicker that draws an error. He holds to fifteen. They each hold serve after that, the set score going higher and higher, matching hold for hold. There is the usual tension at a deuce point where Cole is playing wall-to-wall defense, scrambling, digging balls out of the corner, rushing the net, ready to put away anything that even remotely looks short, and by some bit of magic, Wallace manages to loop a winner by him cross-court, a dipping, vicious angle.

After, they sit on the bench side by side, sweating profusely. Wallace sucks lukewarm water from his bottle, and Cole chews on a banana.

“Are you coming to the dinner thing tonight?” Cole asks.

“What dinner thing?”

“Oh. We didn’t tell you? That’s probably because you left last night. We’re having a dinner thing at the boys’ house.”

“Dinner thing” usually means a party at which everyone stands around eating a variety of baked vegetables doused in dark sauces. “Dinner thing” also means standing in the corner looking out the window at the nearby street.

“Maybe not,” he says.

“Please come. Especially after this shit with Vincent, I need someone to be on my side.”

“Who isn’t on your side?”

“No. I just . . . Nobody else knows except Roman, and I think he’s the one who got Vincent thinking about opening things up in the first place.”

Roman is the attractive French student who is a year ahead of them, who is also gay and also in an open relationship, with an equally attractive German named Klaus. Roman has always been closer to Cole and Vincent than he has ever been to Wallace, for reasons that are abundantly clear to Wallace but that Cole pretends not to understand.

“So you want a gay civil war at the dinner thing. Okay.”

“No, not a gay civil war. No wars.”