Real Life(34)

“I thought about it,” Cole says. “In first year. I thought about it. You probably know that.”

“Let it alone,” Wallace says, more words from his grandmother.

“If I had known—”

“It would have been a mistake, anyway.”

“I still think about it, you know. I do. I want you to know that.”

Heat at the back of Wallace’s throat. The world is blurry. His eyes sting. He takes his hand from Cole’s stomach and lies down too. The grass is itchy on the back of his neck; dirt is in his hair. Cole’s body smells like the ocean, or how Wallace imagines the ocean must smell.

“That’s just your loneliness talking,” Wallace says.

“No. Maybe.”

“I thought about it, too, for a long time. And then I stopped.”

“Why?”

The clouds over them are white and thick. A cool wind comes out of the west, draws a hand across the grass and makes it whisper. The herons are moving through the stalks slowly, turning them over for more bugs, or a fish caught sleeping.

“You get tired of listening to yourself whine about the same old things.”

Cole does not laugh, though Wallace does after he says this.

“And then your boyfriend shows up. What do you do then?”

“I guess that’s true,” Cole says.

“I know you’re just saying that part about thinking about it to make me feel better, maybe. You think I need to hear it, but I don’t.”

“That’s not it.”

“I think it is, Cole. You’re too nice sometimes.” The water rustles against the shore, but because they’re lying down, they can’t see the lake entirely. The geese are immobile, sitting near the edge of the water. “You get to feeling sorry for people, and then you say things like that.”

“I don’t know,” Cole says. “Maybe you’re right about that too.”

“Do you really want me to come to the dinner thing tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Wallace says. “I’ll be there.”

There is an audible sigh of relief from Cole, air going out, but Wallace feels as if that same air is pressing closer than ever on him. At the dinner party, he’ll see their friends. He’ll see Miller. There is also the matter of the strange woman, the rock climber, whom he imagines as a tall, leanly muscled woman, very tan, with blond hair and expensive teeth. He imagines her voice fluty, with just enough crass humor running through her to make her interesting.

But he knows that Cole needs him there. He isn’t going to see Miller. He isn’t going to make a fool of himself. He’s going for his friend. He’s going to help Cole get through this. Yet—Miller looms, or rather, the prospect of seeing him again, and he is thrilled by it.

“We spent the whole time talking about me,” Cole is saying. “I didn’t even think to ask how you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your dad. You thinking about leaving. How is everything—are you okay?”

Wallace is momentarily confused and then it comes back to him—that Emma told everyone about his dad dying after he and Miller went off to the bathroom. He is again in the situation of having to articulate the curious shape of his grief, which does not bear the typical dimensions of such a loss. He doesn’t feel flattened by it. Instead, there’s a small channel in him going from his head to his feet, a channel through which a cold substance is churning at all times, cooling him from within, like a second circulatory system. There is something to it, isn’t there? Something beyond his grasp.

“I’m okay,” he says instead. Cole rolls over and looks at him.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he says. “I was just at the end of a very long rope yesterday, that’s all.”

“Is it the she-demon?”

“No. One of my lab mates ruined some experiments, and I just couldn’t deal with it.” There’s a smile on Wallace’s face, one that bears no heat. He’s watching the clouds again.

“I hope you don’t leave,” Cole says. “I hope you stay. I need you.”

“I don’t think I’ll leave,” Wallace says. “I don’t have any skills to live in the world.”

“Me either.”

“But sometimes I’d like to live in it—in the world, I mean. I’d like to be out there with a real job, a real life.”

“Vincent has a real job and look what it’s done to him.”

“Is that fair?” Wallace asks. “Do you think his job is the reason he downloaded a gay sex app? Or do you think it’s something more elemental?”

“I think my boyfriend is trying to cheat on me, is what I think. And I think I want my friend to stay and not throw his life away.”

“Persuasive.”

“I think so,” Cole says, half-joking, half-sincere. Wallace would like to be able to gaze out at the clouds and parse their slow language for signs and omens, but that would require a belief in a higher power, a higher order of things. There are shadows on the dark water, and in the distance, a hush upon the trees on the peninsula, a cessation of movement, the breeze gone now. What is the thing that Cole is really trying to persuade him of—going to the party or staying? And hasn’t he already made up his mind about staying? And going to the party?