Real Life(49)

Miller is rubbing his stomach in a gesture that feels familial to some long-vanished part of himself. Wallace watches the edge of a white curtain flutter. Yngve is outside and below them, laughing.

“I think Roman suspects something. He said something strange,” Wallace says.

“Let him.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“No. Not as much as I thought it would.”

“Oh.”

“Does it bother you?” Miller says, and there’s so much tentative anticipation in his voice that Wallace wants to cry. “You said those things before. That you’d rather be alone.”

“I think I would rather be alone,” Wallace says at the edge of a long thought, “but it doesn’t bother me to be with you.”

“Good,” Miller says, laughing because he can’t help himself. “Good.”

“You are funny-looking though, so there’s that.”

“That’s true. You once said I looked like a small child put in a big man’s body.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, when we first met at the bonfire. You said it right to my face.”

“No wonder you thought I hated you.”

“No wonder.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“I got that, later, but I got it.”

They turn to each other. It’s different from the time in Wallace’s apartment, from last night, when they turned to each other in desire, out of not knowing what else to do with themselves or their bodies, when the outcome seemed so uncertain. They turn to each other now of their own volition, and it’s so easy. Wallace puts his face against Miller’s chest, and Miller puts a hand on his thigh. They’re just lying there.

“But you would rather be alone,” Miller says. “You don’t want the hassle, I guess.”

“I would rather be alone. Or, I’d rather be the sort of person who’d rather be alone. It’s hard to want to be with other people because they just vanish on you, or they die.”

“I don’t think I’m dying anytime soon.”

“You could. It could happen anytime. I could die.”

“You are so morbid. You’re so, so morbid. I don’t think I knew that before.”

“My dad died fast.”

“I’m sorry, I know, I’m sorry.”

“People die before you know them. And then you get stuck wondering, what if, what if.”

“My mom . . . well, I told you already.”

“I’m sorry,” Wallace says, kissing Miller’s throat, where it is bristly and firm with cartilage and muscle.

“But I’m saying, I don’t plan on dying. I plan on sticking around.”

“That makes one of us,” Wallace says. “You heard that shit at dinner.”

“I hope you stay. But I hope you leave, if that’s what you want. You can’t stay for anyone but yourself.”

“It’s strange. They say, study science and you’ll always have a job. And it seems so easy. But they don’t tell you that there’s all this other stuff attached that will make you hate your life.”

“Do you hate it that much?”

“Yes, sometimes, you know—we all do, I guess, was what Emma was saying earlier.”

“Me too, yeah. But I love it more than I hate it.”

“But fuckers like Roman,” Wallace says, growling under his breath. “They make it unbearable.”

“I still can’t believe he said that to you.”

“No one said anything to him; no one did anything.”

“I wanted to, but then, I guess, I chickened out.”

Wallace pauses, stills in Miller’s arms. There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes.

Wallace presses his tongue flat.

“Good white people,” he says.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” The air is getting colder, darker. The sun is gone. Wind in the trees. They’re breaking wood outside, cracking it open. They’re building a fire. Its orange glow issues up in the night, and occasionally, there are embers that pass by the window like stars, or fireflies.

“Wallace?”

“Yes?”

“Will you tell me about yourself?”

“Why?”

“I just want to know. I want to know about you.”

“What’s there to know?”

“Please,” Miller says, pressing. “Please.”

Wallace considers this, the act of asking, the intent behind it. Such a strange request. How long has it been since someone attempted to know him? There is Brigit, of course, the person to whom he has said the most and also, perhaps, the least of it. And Emma, who has tried to know him in her way. But there are so few others, because the moment he arrived he decided to shed his other life like a skin. That is the really wonderful thing about living in a place to which you are not connected. It cannot lay a claim on who you were before you arrived there, and all anyone knows of you is what you tell them. It was possible to become a different version of himself in the Midwest, a version without a family and without a past, made up entirely as he saw fit.