Real Life(57)

“I hope you don’t hate me,” Miller says. “Isn’t that stupid? To tell you what I am and then say, Please don’t hate me?”

“I don’t hate you,” Wallace says.

“Okay. I’m glad.”

Wallace turns to him, and they kiss again, more deeply this time. When Miller moves inside him, Wallace closes his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see Miller looking at him. He does not trust himself with this uncertain feeling gaining momentum. Miller asks him to roll onto his stomach, and Wallace does, and he’s relieved not to have to close his eyes so tight. Miller kisses his shoulders, his back. It’s tender. But it’s still fucking, and it still hurts, which, in this moment, is a blessing because it gives Wallace something to feel anchored in. When Miller finishes, he goes across the hall and comes back with a warm towel. Wallace cleans himself, but Miller looks away from him shyly, still unable to face the necessary discomfort of fucking a man. Wallace laughs, and Miller looks up sharply.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Wallace says, and gets back under the quilt. “I was just laughing.”

“At me?”

“No, at myself, I guess. It’s funny. I didn’t have sex for a long time, and now it’s just a thing.”

“Was it good?”

“Yes,” Wallace says. “It was fine.”

“Fine,” Miller says, narrowing his eyes. Wallace kisses him.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” he says. “Don’t think so much.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?” Wallace asks, and Miller looks down at him meaningfully. “Oh, it’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Wallace says, and it is fine because he doesn’t think he could get hard even if he wanted to. It isn’t anything to do with Miller or not wanting him, he realizes. But he feels disconnected now, suddenly, from the part of him that is necessary for fucking or coming. “I’m tired.”

“Me too,” Miller says.

They lie there for a long time, just breathing next to each other. It is like the night before, Wallace thinks. Except now they are in Miller’s bed instead of Wallace’s, except now they’re in this part of town rather than downtown, except for all the rest of it; it’s like the night before except somehow shifted, the world at angles to itself, an oblique reflection across some strange line of symmetry. Wallace feels a childish sense of glee at this revelation, a small bit of happiness at having discerned it. But there is no place to tell it, nowhere he can set it down and present it to Miller.

When Miller falls asleep, Wallace pulls his arms apart and slides from the bed. He puts on his clothes as quietly as he can. He moves about the dark room, collecting his shoes and his shirt and his sweater. It’s cold, and the world outside is gray with coming morning. When he is dressed, he slips into the dark hall and down the stairs. He leaves the bowl he brought. It’s not worth it. And he goes out onto the street, making sure the door is shut firmly behind him.

It’s getting to be four or five now. There are a couple of cars. The sky is lightening. Wallace stomps in his shoes and wraps his arms around himself. The street slopes upward. There are the familiar houses, their identical facades in minor variations, cream and hunter green and navy blue. Their doors shut firmly. Here and there a porch with wooden furniture on it, or a couch with ugly upholstery. Scraggly city grass. The odd tree. Cars parked neatly against the sides of houses. Up the street he goes, his steps echoing softly. The air is cool and damp. He’s sore and feels like he’s all scratched up inside. Ahead of him the top of the capitol is visible, beyond it the gray bulk of the lake. He’s almost home.

Did Miller really almost kill someone? Bring his cracking bones down on someone because he didn’t know what to do with himself? Anger could be like that, moving from person to person like an illness or a plague. The way Wallace himself was cruel at dinner, lobbing that grenade at Vincent because of what had been said to him. Or the way that telling Miller about Alabama prompted Miller to tell him about Indiana, the two of them passing cruelty back and forth like a joint. Perhaps friendship is really nothing but controlled cruelty. Maybe that’s all they’re doing, lacerating each other and expecting kindness back. Or maybe it’s just Wallace, lacking friends, lacking an understanding of how friendship works.

But he understands cruelty. He understands violence, even if friendship is beyond him. Just as he can feel the coming weather, he can discern from shifting tides the shape of violence on the horizon. It is his native element, his mother tongue—he knows how people can maim each other. He sensed it in the bed with Miller, drifting off to sleep—that if he stayed, something terrible would happen. Perhaps not in that moment, or even the next day. But soon enough something awful was coming their way. Why stay, then? Why, if he could feel it in the ache of his belly, in the pressure collecting behind his eyes?

Wallace reaches the top of the hill, where the street flattens out and becomes a side street adjoining the capitol. There are cafés and bakeries here, though they are not open. He walks briskly past a little patio, where people sleep in soggy blankets on painted benches. The scent of urine and old food rotting hangs in the air. How easily he might have become one of them; how simple it would have been for him to be homeless here, or down in Alabama. This too is a kind of life, a way in which things can go wrong for a person.