Real Life(46)

“I wish those two would get together already,” Emma says. “It’s giving me a headache.”

“No kidding. But I think it’s sweet.”

“To be led on that way?”

“No one is leading anyone here. They’re in the same place.”

“If you say so,” Emma says against Wallace’s back, her arms around him. He does not know if it’s a gesture that’s meant to comfort him or comfort her, if he’s meant to be pulling strength from her nearness or if she is trying to steady herself.

“Thom doesn’t hate us,” he says. “He can’t.”

“He does. I think he does. Every time we come out to one of these things, he’s sulky for weeks. He doesn’t talk to me. I know that when I go home, he’s going to freeze me out.”

“Why?”

“Because he thinks I’m always looking for a way out.”

“Are you?”

“Maybe,” she says, “but aren’t we all? All the time?”

“Maybe,” he says, and they share a laugh.

“I think that’s why everyone is so on edge with you. Because you said it. You actually said it. You want out. You broke this illusion we all have. That it’s always going to be like this, that what we have now is good.”

“But it is good.” Wallace takes her arms and pulls them tighter around him. She kisses his hair and then his ear. She has forgiven him. Wallace relaxes.

“I don’t know if it’s good. Sometimes, I think that this is all I’ve ever wanted. Good research. Steady. Learning all the time. Other days I’m just miserable and want to cry. We all are, I think. In our way. We’re all fucking miserable in this place. But then, to actually hear it. It’s like somebody said something rude during church.”

“Is this church?”

“Hush, you know what I mean. I felt like, Oh no, oh no. First, I wanted to hug you. Because I’ve had days like that. Then I wanted to strangle you so you’d hush and not make us all think about it.”

But the difference, Wallace wants to say, is that you have the option of not thinking about it. His misery is not novel, but it is distinct. They’ve all lost data, ruined experiments. There was the time in second year when Yngve’s crystals failed to come out of solution and he was left with a flurried mess, all because he’d miscalculated the concentration of potassium in his buffer. Or the time Miller killed off a venerable line of bacterial cells in his lab that had been handed down from postdoc to postdoc for some twenty years because he’d taken the entire container from the -80°C freezer rather than a small aliquot and blown it all in a failed inoculation. Another time, Emma forgot to upload her latest data to the server and her laptop crashed, and there was no way to recover her qPCR runs, and she had to repeat the experiment, which took weeks. Or the time Cole dumped acid down the drain and chased it with bleach, resulting in an evacuation of the fifth floor. There were days in all their lives when things went wrong and they were forced to ask themselves if they wanted to go on. Decisions were made every day about what sort of life they wanted, and they always answered the same: Only this, only this. But that was the misery of trying to become something, misery that you could put up with because it was native to the act of trying. But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.

Is this what Dana was trying to say to him earlier? That he’s not the only one who has a hard time? That he doesn’t have some sort of monopoly on misery? But it’s different, he wanted to say then and wants to say now. It’s different. Can’t you see that? It’s different.

He could say this. It seems possible. But he knows what will happen. Wallace rolls his shoulders. If he makes a point of this, Emma will shake her head. She will refuse it. She will say that he’s pitying himself, that he’s not special. That he is not alone in his feeling of inadequacy. And this is perhaps a little true. And it’s that small truth of it that makes it dangerous to him. They do not understand that for them it will get better, while for him the misery will only change shape. She will say, Get over yourself, Wally, and she will smile and put her arms around his shoulders, and she will love him and try her best to understand him, and he will accept this, and he will go quiet and she will sense that something has gone wrong, but he will not tell her. And it will be as if nothing has happened at all.

“All right,” Wallace says.

Miller comes back with a beer and a small dish of pretzels. Emma waves it off, and Wallace shakes his head.

“I better take the coffee out,” she says. “Help me.”

Wallace takes a tray with several mismatched mugs bearing the logos of football and basketball teams. There is also a beautiful cherry red mug that he purchased for one of the boys during a gift exchange. Wallace received a small inflatable duck for his trouble, which made him laugh at the time as he held it up to them. Already, that seems so long ago.

It is even cooler than earlier in the backyard, and the skyline above the fence is rimmed in dark blue. The lights of the capitol building are in the distance, white beams turned gauzy, like a dream. There’s a small table made up of wooden crates, and Wallace sets the cups here. Emma brings out the carafe of dark coffee and some cream and sugar. Wallace sits on the edge of the blanket. Miller takes the spot next to him, which annoys Emma, but she sits in front of Wallace, and he encircles her with his arms.