Real Life(35)

Wallace rolls over onto his stomach and puts his chin against his folded arms. Behind them are soccer fields and dormitories. The grass is very green and very straight, bordered by sharp yellow signs and fence posts. Farther back, hazy in his vision, is the gray solidity of the gymnasium, and figures flickering in and out of view, people drunk from the game or because it is Saturday, wandering far afield of the stadium. The sun is hot on his lower back, where his shirt has come up, and he can feel it stinging, digging in, a purplish bruise on his skin gathering. Cole is making some dull, digging sound of his own, into the earth, as if to hide.

“If Vincent leaves me . . . I don’t know what I’ll do,” he says. It’s the sort of the thing you can say only when you’re looking away from it, offhand, distracted, the way you might casually notice a piece of furniture. It’s the sort of thing you say with a laugh, a soft roll of the shoulders. That’s the only way to express the inconsolable grief of it, the fear that begins down in the tripe, in the guts, in the core of who you are and what you want and what you need—it’s the truth, and for a moment, Wallace almost turns to him to comfort him. But he does not. To do so would be to break the spell, to cause Cole to crumple in on himself. His voice is streaked with moisture, a windowpane in the rain.

“You aren’t there yet,” Wallace says. “You’d know if you were.”

“I just don’t know what I’d do, Wallace. I don’t know.”

“You do know—you’d try to hold on. But you aren’t there yet.”

“Trying. What good is trying?”

“You have to try. You always have to try.”

“What if we’re there, but I don’t know we’re there?”

“You’d know. You just would.”

“But how do you know I’d know?”

“Because I know you.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Oh, stop playing at somber,” Wallace says. Stop playing at morose, at mystery, as if you aren’t living every moment of your life on the surface or just below it. Cole is one of those fat fish that circle near the underside of a vast plain of ice in winter, showing their scales through the dull frost, the whites of their bellies. He is as native to solemnity as Wallace is to decisive action.

“I’m not playing. I’m serious. What if you didn’t know me at all? Then what would you say?”

“Who are you?” Wallace replies quickly, laughing, his stomach pressing flatter to the ground. His own weight is making it harder to talk so low to the earth. “I guess I’d ask, ‘Who are you?’”

“I have no idea, some days, who the fuck I am.”

Wallace breathes out through his nose. A goose’s wings flap on the water nearby, carrying it up and up. Wallace has not considered the possibility that Cole, the simplest of all his friends, the kindest and most gentle among them, might be unknowable to him. He has not considered the possibility that the ease of Cole’s nature might be distorting something else, flattening it; or that it might be the result of a carefully orchestrated game, an illusion. All the parties, the deferring in conversation, the thoughtful inquiries about well-being, the baked goods, the plainness of his clothes, the flexibility of his schedule, the placid nature of his demeanor—all of it suggesting a genuine concern for others and a lack of selfish regard. How can Cole, of all people, doubt himself, who he is, when the person he presents to the world is so carefully constructed? It’s only now, even, that Wallace is aware of a certain puckering at the seams, a hint of construction showing through. It’s only now that he realizes that all along, Cole has perhaps been smiling with teeth to hide a grimace.

“I know that feeling,” Wallace says. “I know that feeling pretty well.”

“So don’t say it, okay, that you know me, that you know how this will turn out, because you don’t and can’t.”

“Okay,” Wallace says. “That’s fair. Okay.”

“I’m just really scared. I’ve loved him for so long. We’ve been in this thing for so long. I don’t know if I can begin again.”

Of course Cole is afraid to lose Vincent. Of course this is the peak, the pinnacle of Cole’s desires, not only for this relationship, but for the very configuration of things: a career, a loving partner, friends, lovely little parties, tennis on the weekend. What Cole wants from life is, above all else, that matters be settled before they are even raised, that everything fall into place. He expects that they’ll simply finish graduate school and settle into the next phase of life just as they are now, only a little older, a little wealthier, a little better off. He has not planned for a loss, for any of the many ways that life can and will go wrong. Vincent is not just Vincent, but also a symbol, collecting with each passing day more and more significance. He is a ward, an inoculation against the uncertainty of the future.

“I hate that you feel this way. I hate that you’re dealing with so much.”

“No, you,” Cole says. “Your dad—fuck, I’m going on again, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry. Really.”

“It must be so much, to lose your dad, it must be awful.”

“It’s . . . mostly fine,” Wallace admits, getting too close to the bone. He doesn’t want to go back over the thing about how grief can feel diffuse and dense all at once, like a flock of birds in the sky. He doesn’t want to get into it. He can taste dirt on his lips and in his mouth, granular and salty.