Real Life(32)

“Hey,” Wallace says. “Hey.”

“No, you’re right. I have to put on my big-boy pants, or something. God, it’s hot out here.”

“It is,” Wallace says. “We can go to the lake if you want.” Cole considers it, stares out at the empty courts. The roar from the stadium is audible. A car glides by. The crows are back at it in the trees overhead. The shade cast through the fence is coarse and riddled with tiny holes of light, like standing beneath mesh and staring up into the sky. A single bead of sweat glides down the curve of Cole’s ear. Wallace is tempted to catch it on his fingertip, to say, make a wish, but that doesn’t work for water. There are no wishes to be found in salt water, no magic there at all except, in some cases, the way it turns to stars when dispersed, as from the tip of a finger with a breath.

“Okay. I’d like that. Okay.” They rise from the bench with stiff muscles and aching joints. Their bodies have cooled and hardened. They’ve been running from side to side under the sun for a little over an hour, and having come so suddenly to a stop, they can feel their blood cooling in odd places. It gives the world a kind of tilting, buoying quality as they exit through the gate at the fence and walk along the cool grass. It tickles their ankles, and they walk close enough together that their elbows collide with a meaty thud. They pass beneath the shade of the trees, crow calls fading. Up ahead, the world narrows, darkens. The sidewalk fades into crushed blue gravel and then yellow dirt. The air is immediately cooler when they enter the shade at the corner of the boathouse.



* * *



? ? ?

THE LAKE IS A SHIMMERING immensity ahead of them, going all the way out to the peninsula and beyond, to the other shore.

They can make out the shape of a couple of far-off boats, blurry in the distance. Behind them, the boathouse has its doors rolled up; muscular men are drawing cloths and sponges over the rowboats, polishing hulls, scraping off lake gunk. Some rhythmic, driving song on the radio. The air fizzes with humidity this close to the water.

Cole and Wallace turn left, away from the direction where Wallace lives. Through the thatch of trees and shrubs, the lake is intermittently visible. Their shoes slide and scrape. Occasionally a bicyclist shoots by, a blur of white or red or blue. Cole, for a few paces at least, puts his head on Wallace’s shoulder. Wallace loops an arm around his back. Whatever words Wallace might have for Cole in this moment feel inadequate to the task of righting him, solving this problem for him. He’s said all he knows how to say. He feels shitty for having dug around in the wound, prodded his friend this far. Cole’s body is warm against him, slippery with sweat, but since the sweat is cooling, drying into a husk, he’s a bit easier to hold on to as they go along.

“I didn’t know it would be like this,” Cole says. “I had no idea it’d be this hard.”

“Like what?”

“When I first moved here. I was lonely all the time. Vincent was still at Ole Miss. I was stuck here all alone. I missed him so much I thought I’d die. I thought it’d be easier once we were in the same place. I thought it would fix things.”

“It didn’t?”

“No,” Cole says, and he reaches up to wipe at his nose with his wrist. “No, it didn’t. I mean, for a while it did. It was great being with him again, here. But I don’t know. It’s not the same.”

“You’re not the same,” Wallace says.

“What do you mean?”

“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.