Real Life(40)

“No, I don’t know, maybe, yes. Mad at you. And myself, mostly. Yngve.”

“But you aren’t mad? That’s good, right?”

“I don’t know if it’s good,” Wallace says. “I don’t know if it’s good at all.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because, I think, if I’m not mad, maybe that means I feel like I’ve won something. Like I’ve gotten something I wanted. But I shouldn’t want it at all. You know?”

“I don’t,” Miller says. He puts the beer on the grass beside him and holds on to Wallace’s legs with both hands. “Tell me,” he says.

Wallace pulls his hands through Miller’s hair down to his forehead and he presses his thumb hard there so that Miller’s brows, furrowed in concentration, flatten and smooth.

“I feel relieved because I didn’t want to think about you wanting someone else. But I also don’t want to feel relieved. I don’t want to care if you do or don’t.”

“But what if I want you to care?” Miller says.

“Straight boys,” Wallace says, laughing, “always want what they want until they don’t.”

“That’s not fair. We’re friends.”

“Which is why this is such a terrible idea,” Wallace says.

“I don’t think so.”

There is a voice in the gathering darkness calling for them. Miller’s fingers flex around him and then release him.

“I’m not done talking to you about this,” Miller says.

“What’s to talk about?” Wallace asks. They turn to the voice calling their names. It’s Yngve. He’s got his hand cupped over his eyes.

“We’ll eat without you,” he says. “Hurry up. And where is our music, Miller?”

Miller pushes up from the chair, and the two of them go along the grass together, not looking at each other. Wallace then feels Miller’s knuckles graze the outside of his knuckles, and for a moment the two of them are connected. The contact is over almost as it begins, and the suddenness of the dissolution heightens Wallace’s sense of it: For the span of those several seconds, he felt as though molten glass were being drawn through him like liquid into a capillary. They climb the back stairs, and they are once more among their friends.



* * *



? ? ?

THE TABLE IS PERHAPS the one article of genuine adult furniture in the whole house. Lukas brought it down with him from his grandparents’ home in northern Wisconsin. Typically the table is pressed to the far wall, where it holds the articles of their lives: dishes, laundry, newspapers, books, articles, notebooks, tools, cables, and whatever else could be discarded and forgotten. But today they’ve drawn the table away from the wall into the large open room off the kitchen. Lukas draped a linen tablecloth over it, disguising its bruises, its nicks, specks of robin’s-egg blue from the painting of chairs. All this cartography hidden now.

Wallace sits in the middle, between Emma and Cole, across the table from Roman and Klaus. Yngve and his girlfriend, Enid, are at one end of the table with Miller and Zoe; down the other are Lukas and his boyfriend, Nathan. The table is a little cramped. Emma has parked her elbow in Wallace’s side; he keeps stepping on the edge of Cole’s foot. Vincent’s tacked on to the end next to Cole.

“I’m first off the island, I guess,” Vincent says, and there’s a small murmur of laughter.

They pass the food in diagonals. Wallace takes some of the baked chicken (meat at the dinner thing, a mild thrill), some asparagus, brussels sprouts, a kind of strange mealy paste with no aroma that he presumes are the mashed potatoes. Someone passes him the wine, and he says, “No, none for me, thank you.”

Roman holds the bottle, presses it forward. “No, don’t be rude, now.”

“Wallace doesn’t drink,” Emma says.

“Did you drive here? Is that it? We can surely find you a ride home.”

“No,” Wallace says. “I just don’t drink.”

Roman is very handsome—so blond that Wallace thinks he cannot be naturally so. But his eyelashes are blond, his eyebrows are blond, and his beard is mostly a white-yellow, except in places where it’s gone dark red. He has dark green eyes, and a very architectural chin. To Wallace he looks not French but Icelandic. But he is French, from a small town in Normandy. His English is faultless, though accented. Klaus is stubby and dark-featured, like a minor folkloric figure. There is something perpetually strained about him, as though he is concentrating every moment of every day to make himself taller. Roman studies the early development of the heart in mice, the point at which the clump of white tissue no more animal-like than the white meat of an egg begins to jerk and to beat. He holds the hearts of tiny animals on his fingernail.

The look he gives Wallace is difficult to parse, though Wallace decides it means annoyed.

Down the table and back up the table goes the wine bottle, go the dishes of food. Wallace pulls the leg of the chicken out of its joint, sees the white head of the cartilage pop out. The meat itself is tender and dark. Though, at the joint, the chicken is red and a little bloody. It’s undercooked, but he cuts it up anyway, all the chicken and its crispy yellow crust dissected upon his plate. Under the skin lurk pulpy, bulbous strings of fat. The corn is good. Sweet, a little oily.