Real Life(47)

Yngve is stooped over the table, pouring coffee, when he spots Miller. He grins and straightens up to his full height.

“Okay, okay. So everyone is here now. Perfect.”

Lukas and Nathan are lying together now, their hands entwined. Vincent and Cole are over near the garden, whispering quietly. Everything is hushed and perfect.

“All right, Miller, come, come.” Yngve waves his hands several times, trying to get Miller to come to him, and Miller eventually relents. Wallace watches him go. Roman takes Miller’s spot. Klaus is chattering in German on the phone near the tree. Yngve steers Miller in the direction of Zoe, who is wearing a terrific cardigan, slouchy, dark, a hole in the shoulder, surely too big for her.

“Wallace,” Roman says, which draws Wallace’s gaze up as Roman sits in Miller’s spot. Wallace nods. Roman smells like gin. His eyes fall on Klaus, then back to Wallace. “I’m in big trouble there.” He says it with a smile, a wink.

“It’s like that, I hear,” Wallace says.

“Catching too,” Roman says, looking pointedly in the direction of Cole and Vincent.

“That time of the year,” Wallace says.

“You surprise me,” Roman says. Emma cranes her neck back to look at Roman.

“I surprise myself.”

“Hush,” Emma says. “Yngve is doing his best matchmaker.”

Wallace tries to listen. Zoe talks with her hands. Big, sweeping gestures. She is miming some sort of climbing technique. She has her hands out, gripping stone, scaling some forbidding craggy surface. Miller nods. Mimes back. Her hands ghost down to his hips, adjust him just so, maneuver his hands. She holds his wrist steady. Yngve laughs loud, claps Miller on the back.

“I didn’t know you were on the app, Wallace. I thought you’d be above that sort of thing. I’ve never seen you there.”

“I blocked you,” Wallace says without looking away from Miller and Zoe. They look like the sort of people he sees sometimes at the pier or in cafés, pushing strollers. The sort of couple the world lays itself open for. They do not seem unalike in sensibility. Miller has folded his arm across his chest. He props his chin up with his knuckles.

“That hurts,” Roman says.

“I doubt that.”

“It’s true. It doesn’t hurt much. But it does sting. We are friends, aren’t we?”

“Is that what you use the app for, Roman? Friendship?”

“Sometimes,” he says. “What do you use it for? Weight Watchers?”

Wallace turns to Roman, gives him the attention he is so desperate for.

“What do you want, Roman?”

“I have a theory,” he says. “I have a theory that you lied. That you’re not the one on the app.”

“Shut up,” Emma says to Roman. “It’s getting good now.”

Wallace follows her eyes back to Miller and Zoe, but the two of them are still just talking. Yngve’s hand is resting on Miller’s shoulder, and Yngve has turned around to stare at Lukas and Nathan, who are lying down. There’s nothing about the moment that corresponds to anything getting good, or being different from the moment it was before, and so Wallace is confused, annoyed. He pinches Emma’s hip. She lets out a sharp hiss of pain.

“Use your eyes, stupid. Look.”

Wallace does look.

“I think you’re covering for someone,” Roman says.

Wallace looks and looks, and there it is: Yngve’s face. It was hidden from Wallace at first, but when he shifts his weight, his annoyance is clear. He is staring in mild fury at Nathan and Lukas, his jaw working from side to side. His hand is gripping Miller so tight that Miller reaches for his wrist. “Hey, hey, Yngve, bud, hey, you gotta let me go,” Miller says. Yngve looks startled, finds his way back to himself.

“I think it’s Cole,” Roman says finally. “I think you’re covering for Cole.” He all but breathes it into Wallace’s ear, his breath wet and warm. Wallace turns to him, and there they are, face-to-face, nose-to-nose. He can see the array of whiskers in Roman’s beard, the subtle gradient of reds. The smooth surface of his cheeks. He is, up close, almost innocent. Roman’s nostrils flare just suddenly, and Wallace is transfixed by the play of light in his eyes. There’s mischief and something else. Wallace remembers, with a shiver, just moments before, the wet flick of Roman’s tongue against his ear.

“What game is this?” he asks Roman.

“No game,” he says. Then, to Emma, “How is Thom?” Emma flinches, takes a long drink from her coffee. She’s sobering up.

“He’s lovely. Writing that essay on Tolstoy, you know.” The tree’s limbs are moving again, wind in the leaves. Wallace looks up, the flash of a white stomach, a bird overhead, darting away, first low and then high, and over the fence.

“Tolstoy? I prefer Zola,” Roman says, smiling.

Emma nods tightly. She’s drinking from a Packers mug. Miller glances back. Their eyes meet, and Wallace looks away. Roman is watching him.

“Fascinating,” Roman says.

“Get your eyes checked,” Wallace says with far more cool than he deserves.

“The better to see you with,” Roman says, smiling broadly.

“Excuse me,” he says. “Emma, hey, I have to get up.”