Real Life(44)

The dinner is ruined, that much is obvious, but Wallace is still eating because he is hungry. He eats the soup, even though there is too much tomato. He chews through the eggplant parm, the salads, the mashed potatoes, the pilaf, the pasta with olives, and the homemade ravioli. It feels as if some great pit in him has opened that can be filled only with food. He eats and eats, more and more servings, kale and hummus and pita chips and salty crackers. There is a variety of desserts: his fruit salad, some pecan pie, pumpkin pie, a cherry tart, lemon squares, snickerdoodles, a host of cookies. He eats them bit by bit, inch by inch, sliding them into his mouth. He is the only one eating because everyone else is speaking quietly, in twos and threes, trying to unravel what has happened.

Wallace does not look up. There was a time in second year, soon after Dana had convinced Simone that he had mixed up the purification reagents, when Wallace ate his lunch alone in the third-floor library. He would use the rickety microwave in the kitchen and then take his steaming cup of ramen down the halls, trying to keep the lid pressed tight against the sloshing hot water, and then take up residence in one of the study rooms so he could be alone with his shame. He ate while watching videos on his phone, the bright afternoon light cutting across the narrow window and lying like a golden slat on the table. He ate alone every day for a month, until one day Henrik came to find him. Wallace looked up, and there he was peering through the window in the door, watching him. Wallace jumped, knocked his cup on the floor, and Henrik’s expression darkened. He got down on his knees and started to scoop the ruined noodles into the cup, and Henrik pressed the door open and said, What are you doing in here? We have a kitchen for this. He folded his arms across his chest, hands damp on his shirt, and he wouldn’t move until Wallace collected his cup and his fork and began to walk back to the kitchen to dispose of his lunch. He didn’t eat lunch at lab for a long time after that, and every day, around three in the afternoon, Henrik would take his own lunch, and he’d stop just as he left their bay and look back at Wallace. There was regret in his eyes, Wallace thinks now. Regret and something else. He wishes he had asked Henrik about that. He wishes he had asked Henrik to eat lunch with him. He wonders now if Henrik had come not to scold him, but to make some offer—of friendship, maybe—but being shy, not knowing what to do with himself, had fumbled. Or maybe it hadn’t been anything.

The others have gotten up from the table. They’ve gone back through the archway into the kitchen. He hears them, distantly, faintly. The murmur of plans. No one speaks to him. Why would they now? He’s ruined their dinner thing.

The carrots are tearing his gums. He can taste a little of his own blood. His jaws feel loose, like putty.

“What are you doing?” Miller asks, and Wallace does look up, sees Miller’s face. He looks a little startled. Wallace presses his fingers to his lips, feels the warm, sticky weight of blood, not a lot, just a little. He’s nicked his lips with his teeth.

“Oh,” he says.

“You look terrible,” Miller says. He pulls out the chair next to Wallace and has a seat.

“I feel terrible.” Wallace glances through the archway out the back door. He sees the edge of someone’s shirt. They’re sitting under the tree out back. “I made a mess of tonight.”

“You had some help.”

“I knew better than to say that.”

“Probably so.”

Wallace groans and puts his head on the table, but instead of crying the way he wants to, he just laughs. It’s not funny. It’s not remotely funny. What has transpired tonight? Vincent’s infidelity, nebulous though it may remain, loosely confirmed at the very least. Nathan and Enid relegated to minor figures in their relationships with Lukas and Yngve, a tragedy not entirely surprising but pitiable. Roman is a racist at best. Who knows what’s going on with Emma and Thom? Zoe seems nice, but in the way that white people are nice right before they perform some new role in the secret machinery that ruins black people’s lives. It seems to Wallace that there is nothing to do but laugh.

He laughs and laughs. His eyes fill with warm tears. They dampen the white tablecloth. Miller’s hand is warm on the nape of Wallace’s neck, a tender gesture. Wallace’s laughter cinches like a wrung towel, and when it opens again, it is a wail.

“God,” he says. “I fucking hate it here.”

“I know.”

“I fucking hate it everywhere.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know where to go or what to do,” he says, and because the words are so true, strike such a fundamental chord with who he is, he vibrates at high frequency, shivers like a tuning fork.

“It’s not so bad,” Miller says.

“It is.”

“It’ll work out.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Don’t tell me what I know,” Miller says, cracking a smile. It is a deflection, and a bad one at that, which annoys Wallace. A deflection out of kindness. A kindness that seeks to encompass all futures, that asserts its constancy regardless of what might come. Miller, stroking the back of Wallace’s neck and looking down at him like an amused nursery school teacher, is saying something, promising something, and all Wallace has to do is find it in himself to accept it.

“You guys never take this stuff seriously,” Wallace says, and starts to push Miller’s hand away from him, but he stops when Miller says quietly, “I’m sorry.