Real Life(65)

“I see,” he says again, blankly.

“I don’t want to ask you to leave the lab, Wallace. But I do really want to encourage you to think about what you want.”

“What I want?”

“Yes, Wallace. Think about this really hard. Is this what you want? To be a scientist? To spend your life in academia? I must be honest; I really, truly must be honest. I like you. I do. But when I look at you, I don’t think you want this. Not like Katie. Not like Brigit. Not like Dana. You don’t want it.”

“I do,” he says. “I do want it. I want to be here.”

“Do you want to be here or do you . . . do you just not want to be somewhere else?”

Wallace looks down at his hands, which are cupped in his lap. His lips and throat are dry. He thinks of that bird again, lying on its back, eaten by ants, eaten as it dies, as it lies dying. His shorts are blue cotton, faded from too many washes. He digs a finger into his knee. What does he want, after all?

“I don’t know,” he says.

“I thought not. Why don’t you take some time to think about it?”

“All right,” he says. “Okay.”

“Okay?” She puts a hand on his shoulder. He isn’t crying or anything like that, but he feels blasted a bit, shaken. The world is shifting again, as if realigning itself to some new axis. Her touch is firm and warm. She runs her hand down his arm and up again. It’s meant to be a comforting gesture, he supposes.

“Is that all?” he asks.

“That’s all,” she says, and she smiles again, showing her imperfect teeth, the discoloration that comes with age and coffee and life lived, if only briefly, outside this charmed circle.



* * *



? ? ?

AT THE LAKE’S EDGE, he can hear the train coming. Wallace always stops, wherever he is in the city, to listen to the sound of the train passing. It’s a lonesome cry, like the baying of dogs in the woods, a sound to which he is especially attuned. There was a time when, very young and very impressionable, he believed his grandfather’s stories about spectral dogs that would come and spirit him away if he dawdled when playing out in the trees. The sound of any dog howling or yipping in the distance would send a chill through him, and he’d run straight ahead, no matter if he were going away from or toward home, because he knew, sure enough, that he’d arrive on either side of the woods and be safe with his aunts on one end or his grandparents on the other. But on days when his courage did not fail him, he would stand perfectly still among the shifting pines, put his shoulders back, and howl into the clear blue sky. Something in him was wild and wanting to be free, to be loose, and he howled at the top of his lungs, his little voice flattening, then fraying at the edges, until there was no more air in his chest and he was hollow.

After a few moments, the train passes.

Wallace is on the lakeshore path again, though this time he’s turned right and walked past the boathouse, where the boys are out oiling their boats again. Their swim trunks hang low on their hips, and their skin is tan and clear and slick with sweat. Together they are the picture of health. Occasionally one of them snaps a towel, leaving a streak across another boy’s back. There are fat ducks sleeping at the ends of the docks. Wallace walks past a dorm. He sees people dancing on a balcony, enjoying the weekend. A big white flag with the university’s mascot is hanging down the front of their house, and men are throwing a Frisbee on the little lawn. Wallace watches one of the men, tall and pale, reach back and fling the yellow disc from a grotesque position. It flutters at first, then settles into a clean arc that takes it over the heads of people sitting on a floral upholstered couch on the lawn, until another man, squat and dark, leaps up and snatches it from the air. Watching them, Wallace feels a kind of peace.

The noise inside him quiets. He feels as though he can think clearly now. He’s standing in the yellow gravel of the trail with his back to the lake. There are bicyclists swooping by, dark with motion. The bramble is filled with staccato animal calls, and out on the water there are people sailing. His friends might be out there, he realizes. That was their plan for the day, after all, to spend the last bright hours of the weekend on the lake together.

He imagines Yngve and Miller piloting a small, compact boat out to the center, where they’ll drift for a while, letting the others take small sips of whiskey or beer, letting them get drowsy and hot and drunk. The peace Wallace feels deepens as he imagines this scene, circling its completeness, Emma in the back of the boat, legs crossed, hair wild with wind. Thom reading or trying to read, getting seasick, flimsy and delicate. And Miller, looking out over the water, always looking out into the distance. Yngve would be sitting with Lukas tucked up against him, the two of them conjoined. And a wind, smooth and clear, warm with summer heat pressing down on them, nudging their boat farther and farther out, perhaps to the distant shore, where they might get out and have dinner in the rich part of town. And then their coming home, stumbling upon the pier, bronzed and raw, chapped from the sun and the wind, the air cooling as it does this time of year. Where will they go then—somewhere on the square, maybe? Or to Yngve and Miller’s, to drink more and smoke? They will scarcely think of him, Wallace knows, except for Miller. They will not consider his absence conspicuous, but he only has himself to blame. He should have said something at brunch.

How easily he might be among them had he not severed the connection and said he was going home, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be, that he would be going to lab the moment he left them, walking all the way there, stopping only to collect his bag. How easy it would have been to be with his friends if he hadn’t taken pains to ensure that he couldn’t. This, too, he has predicted, though, hasn’t he? The moment he hugged Miller good-bye on the corner, he knew he would regret leaving; still, he thinks, better to be here now, regretting not being there, than to be there and regret not being here. Better to imagine his friends happy than to see their unhappiness up close. And unhappy they certainly would be—that has been the lesson this weekend, hasn’t it? The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappiness, is perhaps all that connects them. Only the prospect of greater unhappiness keeps them within the circumscribed world of graduate school.