Real Life(36)

Cole blinks like he’s looked into the sun for too long. Mostly fine. This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things. There is a pause. And a silence.

“But it was your dad,” Cole presses. “You don’t have to say that. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“I’m not. I’m not ashamed. That’s how I feel.”

“I feel like you’re not being honest. Like you’re not really accessing things here.”

Wallace sits up from the ground, more dirt in his mouth. He picks loose grass from his hair. “I’m feeling very accessed right now.”

“I’m here for you. Let me be here for you.”

“Cole.”

“Stop pushing me away.”

Wallace clenches his jaw tight, presses his lips together. He counts back from ten. The air in his nose is hot. Cole is sitting there with his pale limbs wrapped around himself, looking on with those watery eyes of his. He looks sad. Bereft. Alone. This is Wallace’s penance for pushing Cole on the tennis court, fair play, wound for wound.

“Okay,” he says, and, summoning up a tremulous voice, he adds: “I’m just really numb to it, you know, just really unable to process it.”

“I hear that,” Cole says, nodding. “I hear that, Wallace.”

“And, uhm, I just, yeah, I’m going through it, working the steps of grief, you know?”

“That’s so important.” Cole touches his arm. “I’m so glad you aren’t just internalizing things.”

“Thanks,” Wallace says, letting the edge of an emotion he doesn’t feel rise in his voice. “It’s been really helpful to have people in my life who really get me.”

“We all love you, Wallace,” Cole says, smiling. He pulls Wallace in for a hug. “We all want you to be happy.”

Wallace rolls his eyes when Cole hugs him, but he is careful to look cheered if somewhat mournful when he pulls back. They get up from the lakeshore just as the game at the stadium is ending. There is a huge cry from beyond, as all the herons and the geese alight from the water and take to the air.

Gray water falls from their wings, and for a moment it’s like rain.





4





For what feels like the first time in days, Wallace is alone—though not entirely, as his apartment still smells like Miller. It seems unfair that Miller has overwritten the smell of his apartment in only a few hours; it seems out of proportion. The scent is not overpowering; in truth it’s barely there, discernible just in passing, as though radiating from the pulse points of the apartment, from the obscure corners: tangy citrus and open lake. Wallace briefly contemplates washing the gray duvet, the slate-colored sheets, getting Miller out of his bedclothes entirely. His room smells like their bodies, like their sex, like their sleep, and it is almost enough to make Wallace want to climb back into the bed and draw the blanket over himself and never leave. And it is that desire to climb back into the bed that makes him want to wash the sheets, to reset things, get even again. He rose from the bed this morning, leaving Miller sleeping there looking sweet, looking defenseless. Wallace left him there. It is a decision he regrets now, a little bitterness to chew on for the rest of the night. He pauses in the doorway of his bedroom. He can smell beer, too, leached into the air from Miller’s skin and breath. That wet, sour smell with which he is intimately acquainted, though he himself does not drink.

He thinks with some resentment of the surprise people show when he tells them this fact about himself, that he does not drink. The scramble that follows, the backward shuffle into a half-hearted apology for offering him wine or beer or gin—as happened last winter when Henrik offered him gin at Simone’s holiday party and Wallace told him, shyly, No, none for me, but Henrik said, You passed your prelims, you’re an adult now, and Wallace said, finally, I don’t drink. Henrik’s gray eyes, the gentle tremor in his lower lip as if bunted with a newspaper, made Wallace feel guilty—so guilty he almost took the glass—but Henrik squared his shoulders and took it away. If Wallace had known then that that would be the last thing Henrik said to him, the last thing Henrik offered him, he would have taken the drink and downed it. He has no real sense for alcohol, how it ought to taste. It all tastes the same to him, though some of it burns when it goes down.

His parents used to drink. All the time. His mother, a broad, massive woman with kind eyes and a mean streak, used to drink weak beer because she was a diabetic. That’s what she said, It’s because of my sugar pressure. And she’d drink beer after beer in her chair, reclining and looking out the window, its parted curtain—scanning the world, for what, Wallace did not know. They lived on a dirt road then, in a trailer, surrounded by relatives whose houses had been built out of cheap material and set up on bricks. There had been nothing in the world for her to see, in their obscure, dark corner surrounded by relatives and pine trees, nothing to watch except the churn of wind and the passing of clouds. But she sat in her chair and watched, every day, and that was how he found her, as he arrived home from college for the summer, sweating it out in his old bedroom, passing the time as they all did, waiting for the heat of the day to break, crawling into whatever cool corner one could find.