Real Life(31)

“I don’t know, Cole.” Sweat stings his eyes. He’s pleasantly sore and buzzed from the set. The score is tied. Maybe he finally has a chance to win a set off Cole.

“Okay, but please come. Besides, you can laugh at Yngve trying set up Miller with some girl from his rock-climbing group.”

Miller’s name sits like a stalled train in his mind.

“What?”

“I forget her name, but Yngve says she’s nice. So that should be good for a few laughs.”

Wallace blots sweat from his face with his towel, but holds it still for several long moments. He’s trying to catch his breath, but it’s almost impossible because the towel is not letting any airflow through.

“Oh,” he says, muffled. The hurt surprises him more than anything else.

“You look like someone shot your dog,” Cole says.

“I don’t have a dog,” Wallace says. He towels off his hands, and takes up his racquet. “Let’s go.”

Cole lets the banana peel drop into the trash can beside the bench and picks up his racquet too. The sunlight and the heat are fanning out over them, pressing into their bodies. Wallace can feel it on his skin, like fizzy water. He’s darkening, as in boyhood when he had worked alongside his grandparents in their garden, his skin going from brown to a clay red color. Soil and clay.

Wallace is standing at the baseline preparing to serve. Cole prepares to receive, deep knee bend, weight loaded. Wallace’s palm aches. The racquet feels stiff and awkward as he bounces the ball. The vibrations jar his wrist. Miller and the girl from the rock-climbing group sitting side by side at dinner. Laughing. Eating their baked vegetables. Talking about what, Wallace wonders. The things people talk about when the world thinks they belong together. Who knows what affinities unlock between such people? How easy it must be. He’s not shocked at not having been invited. He’s not particularly offended by it, even. But now he’s in the impossible situation of having to either justify his absence or explain his presence to Miller. He’s been bouncing the ball too long, can see that Cole is getting anxious over there. Serves him right.

Wallace slices a serve up the middle, sending it spinning away from Cole, who lunged the other way. Cole looks back behind himself, a little shocked at the speed of the ball, the severity of its spin. The next serve bounds into his body. Wallace grits his teeth as he stalks up to the line again. Another slice, this time into the forehand for a weak reply. Wallace is already leaping forward, taking it on the rise, hitting the ball with the full weight of his anger. He has nudged ahead in the set, but he doesn’t feel like he’s winning anything at the moment. He also doesn’t feel as if he’s expended the urge to do harm, to vent his frustration and fury.

“So what are you going to do about Vincent?” he asks as they’re changing ends. Cole chokes a little.

“Oh, I don’t know. I can’t bring it up, right? He’ll know that I was on there too, but I was only on there to find him. It just seems so stupid.”

“Yeah,” Wallace says. “But you can’t not say something. You have to acknowledge it.”

Cole is silent, taps his racquet against the net, making its shadow flutter on the court’s surface, like a net dragging the blue sea. Wallace presses: “Unless you don’t think it’s worth it.”

“No, I do. I just . . . I’m more hurt than anything, you know? I’m hurt he lied. I’m hurt he’s doing it behind my back.”

“Do you think you’d ever want to open it up?”

“I don’t know, Wallace,” he says tightly.

“I just mean, you know, if you’re not going to be working fewer hours or whatever anytime soon.”

Cole is really whacking at the net now, and it’s shuddering under the force of his blows. He’s got his face screwed up in frustration. Oh, Wallace thinks. Oh no. What has he done?

“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business,” he says. “I’m sorry for prying.”

“No, you raise a good point. I just don’t know what to do.”

“If he’s not cheating, if he’s just looking—”

“Looking is cheating, Wallace.” Cole’s voice is sharp, hot like pressing your hand to a knife that’s been left in the sun. The anger in his eyes is adamantine and gleaming. Wallace swallows thickly.

“Well, sounds like you have to talk to him, then.”

“I don’t know how,” Cole says, shoulders slumping. “I don’t know how to begin it. Fuck.”

They’re done with tennis. Cole drops on the bench and puts his face in his hands. He’s not crying, but he’s breathing hard. Wallace takes the edge of the bench and puts his hand on Cole’s shoulder. He’s drenched in sweat and hot. It’s like the time in first year in the van in the rain, and Wallace feels the edge of that distant ache surfacing in him.

“It’ll be okay.”

“I don’t know if it will.”

“It will be. It has to be,” Wallace says, catching a rising tide not of confidence, but of desperation to see his friend through this at whatever cost. “People do this. They fight. They hide things, they argue. It means you’re in something that’s worth giving a damn about.”

Cole’s eyes are wet when he looks up from the curve of his palms. There is moisture on his cheeks, sweat or tears, Wallace is not sure. His lips crack open a bit, and there’s a sad, soft sound coming out of him.