Real Life(38)

He can make a fruit salad or something. Lots of melon this time of year, and grapes are in season, particularly the green ones of which he’s fond, their tart juice and squishy bodies. He’ll make a fruit salad, like when they were all children, full of peaches and cantaloupe and honeydew and apple; no oranges, though, too full of seeds. A salad is easy to make.



* * *



? ? ?

AFTER COLE MOVED OUT to live with Vincent, Miller moved in with Yngve and Lukas, taking his place. Their house is warm and comfortably furnished. After that first year, they bought real furniture for real adults at a real store, which is to say, they bought it at IKEA and put it together one humid and shirtless afternoon. Wallace was there to offer moral support and bottles of water, watching the sweat sluice down their spines and their stomachs, collecting at the tops of their shorts, staining them. Then everyone went out back to sit in the kiddie pool, the water already lukewarm from the sun, but cool enough, and besides, it was the novelty of the act that they enjoyed so much, and that was worth something.

It’s a short walk to their place from Wallace’s apartment, and the bowl isn’t hot this time, but slightly chilled. The early evening is pale. It’s just past six thirty. He’s on time. He can see them through the window as he comes around the corner, all of them lit up by the yellow kitchen lights, smiling and laughing. White string lights have been woven down the banister. He steadies himself. This will be fine. This is going to be fine.

Everyone here is his friend.

He nudges the door open with his toe, and sticks his head around the corner.

“Hello, hello,” he calls, stepping inside.

“Wallace!” comes a chorus of voices from the kitchen. He toes off his shoes and leaves them at the door and makes his way through the current of warm air into the kitchen, where seven or eight people are already gathered. Cole and Vincent are washing root vegetables in the deep gray basin of the sink, bumping up against each other affectionately. Roman is sitting on the kitchen floor playing with a small rabbit. Emma comes toward Wallace with a glass of wine and wraps her arm around his neck. Lukas and Yngve chop celery and carrots at the kitchen island.

“Oh, are you making bunny stew?” Wallace asks as he sets his bowl on a nearby counter.

“Don’t joke about Lila,” Lukas says, pointing the knife at Wallace. There’s something joking in his voice, but only barely.

“I love bunny stew,” Yngve says. “Love, love, love.”

Lukas gives him a look of utter betrayal and mild disgust. Wallace laughs. On the other side of the kitchen, near Cole and Vincent, there is a woman chipping ice. She is tall and solidly built, with broad shoulders and a slender neck. She’s wearing a shirt with an open back, and Wallace can see freckles, rust-brown, speckling her shoulder blades. She seems immensely healthy. Her laugh is low and raspy, and she turns to Cole to say something; in profile, she is quite pretty. Her eyes are dark blue.

Emma whispers in his ear, her voice sticky and wet with wine: “That’s Zoe. Yngve is trying to set Miller up.”

“Oh, I think Cole mentioned something about that at tennis,” Wallace says, and he tries to smile, but his cheeks are already sore and the night hasn’t even begun yet.

“I think she’s a rock climber or something like that?” Emma takes another long pull from her wine. Her eyes are red. She’s been crying.

“Where’s Thom?” Wallace asks, and it’s like Emma collapses into a single, dark line. She closes in on him.

“Let’s go see how those potatoes are coming, shall we?” She takes Wallace’s arm by the elbow and they move through the kitchen, its bumpy tiles crackling underfoot. Roman looks up at him and gives a faint, swiftly dying smile that is neither cold nor warm.

“Roman,” Wallace says.

“Wallace.”

Cole turns to Wallace and hugs him tight, but he’s careful not to get the cloudy water on Wallace’s shirt. Cole’s cologne smells vaguely like ground cardamom.

“You made it,” he says.

“I did. I made it.”

“I’m so glad,” he says, propping his damp wrists on Wallace’s shoulders.

“Wallace,” Vincent says, and he reaches over to hug Wallace awkwardly around Cole. He squeezes Wallace’s arm. “Good to see you.”

Zoe is now at Wallace’s left. They’re clustered together, squeezed between Emma, who is opening another bottle of wine, and Cole and Vincent at the sink. Zoe’s got the ice pick and the small mallet in hand. Her fingers look very sure of themselves. Up close, he can see that she has a wide mouth full of very expensive teeth, as he anticipated. Her eyes are set high on her head. She smiles at him.

“Zoe,” she says by way of introduction. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Same,” he says with more warmth than he feels. “So, what do you do in town?”

It is the question they always ask people who are not in their program. What makes a person come to this place? Why this city on three lakes?

“Law school,” she says.

“I see. And rock climbing, from what I hear?” Wallace says.

Zoe lines up the pick on a chunk of ice and with one smart movement cracks it open. “Definitely. My dad is a climbing instructor in Denver. So it runs in the family, I guess.”