Real Life(41)

“Have you been to Yosemite?” Wallace hears from up the table. It’s Zoe, talking to Miller.

“No,” he says.

“I do this thing with some friends almost every year—we try to go to as many national parks as we can in a summer. I love Yosemite the most, though. My parents took me and my brother there every year.”

“I did Glacier a few weeks back,” Yngve says. “With Enid.”

“How was it?” Zoe asks with a laugh.

“Gorgeous, of course,” Enid says. Enid and Zoe are not dissimilar looking, Wallace notes. Except Enid is very pale. Her hair is a dyed gray-lilac color. She has a nose piercing, and her shoulder is covered in angular dark tattoos, deep black zigzags. Not tribal, but a geometry of the self, Wallace thinks. “I kind of broke my foot, though, so it was short.”

“I stayed for three days after that, though,” Yngve says. Enid’s lips tighten as she nods, like the gesture is costing her something. “I mean. I don’t get a lot of time off, and it was kind of a big trip for me.”

“Glacier’s a great park,” Zoe says. “I did that one too. Not this year. Last.”

“I’ve never been to a national park,” Miller says.

“Me either,” Wallace says. They turn to him, as if suddenly aware that he has been listening to their conversation this whole time. He goes back to his plate. Tries to tuck himself smaller, but it is too late for that. He has squandered his opening gambit. Miller laughs.

“It can seem scary, or too big a thing,” Zoe says. “I mean, national park doesn’t really make it sound like a welcoming place. But . . . I don’t know, there’s just something about being in a place like that, where it’s just you and nature and the cell phone service is shitty. It’s like starting over.”

“That’s why I went climbing after my grandpa died,” Yngve says. “It’s you and the rock. It’s you and the sky. It’s you, and all that matters is, Can I move five inches upward without dying? It’s amazing.”

“I think it’s like—you know how when you look back at something and you realize how stupid it was to be upset that Tiffany Blanchard didn’t invite you to her slumber party? And how stupid it was that Greg Newsome didn’t ask you to homecoming? Like, when you’re climbing or hiking or just out there in the hills, when you see, like, the products of geological time—it’s like that. It’s like—” Zoe fumbles, makes slow circles with her knife, trying to find the word.

“Perspective,” Emma says.

“Yes, exactly. Perspective. Thank you,” Zoe says, laughing. “It’s like, what am I getting upset about? Because of torts?”

“Don’t lawyers decide if people live or die?” Miller asks, and Zoe winces.

“You know what I mean,” she says. “Right?” She’s looking at them, at each of them, in turn. Her eyes wander over their faces, and Wallace feels himself retract from her gaze. It is painful to watch the embarrassment come over her. She clears her throat.

“Totally,” Vincent says, a beat too late. “It’s like we were talking about yesterday—there’s more to life than a program.”

“Don’t start,” Cole says.

“Like, you, Wallace,” Vincent says, sitting forward. The table shifts. Their glasses shake. Wallace’s water ripples.

“How do you mean?” he asks, his voice drawing across the question as though to reveal a suddenly vanished rabbit.

Vincent barely pauses, says, “How you want to leave, I mean. How you want to quit. Your dad dying. Perspective, right?”

Wallace feels their gazes strike the surface of his body like pellets.

“Oh, it hardly seems the same,” he says.

“Seems like it to me,” Vincent replies, and then elaborates. “Wallace was saying yesterday, last night, that he hates grad school. Just hates it. Is totally miserable—poor guy—and anyway, he’s like, My dad died, and I hate it here. Why would he stay? You know. Like, his dad just died. That must change things, certainly.”

“Must it?” Wallace asks, and to his horror, he realizes that he isn’t asking just himself. He has asked the table. His voice is a hoarse whisper. “Must it change things? What must it change?”

“Well. Everything,” Vincent says with a wry laugh. “I mean, if my dad died, I’d be devastated.”

Wallace nods. There is a hollow hissing sound from somewhere overhead. Now that they are all quiet, he can hear it perfectly. What is that, he wonders. That sound like something escaping, a leak.

“Everything must change,” he says after a while, smiling, laughing—always smiling, the smiling fool, the happy clam. His eyes crinkle. The room relaxes. Roman narrows his eyes.

“Is that true? That you are thinking of going?”

Wallace thinks of three French verbs in quick succession: partir, sortir, quitter. He learned French in high school, where he took four years of the language. And then in college, where he studied another three years. In college, he was also friends with the North African tennis players, but he was always shy to use his French outside the classroom. Except in moments of peculiar bravery, he asked them questions about themselves, about their homes, their families, about their lives. And there was a boy, Peter, with whom he almost slept several times. Peter used to say good-bye to him with quitter: Je quitte. It is of this word that Wallace now thinks. It hangs on the edge of his tongue, but he holds it back. It is a private word. It belongs to Peter.