Real Life(67)

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THEY END UP taking a table far away from the band. This is by design. The music is always too loud and not very good, as if the volume is meant to compensate for the lack of actual music being played. Brigit is wearing soft clothes, her hair in a loose braid down her back. They’re sharing a bag of salty popcorn. Wallace is drinking water. She has a light ale in a plastic cup. They’ve got their feet up on a third chair, their arms twined loosely together.

“How’s your weekend been?” she asks.

“Fine, good, you know,” he says, thinking of how they saw each other yesterday and how even then he was not being entirely honest with her about his feelings. “It’s been okay.”

She watches him from the corner of her eye, but does not say anything. She rolls a piece of popcorn around between her fingers. The lake is growing darker as the sun sinks. The air is getting cool and still. The boats are coming in, though many remain out there in the growing darkness. The lights of the shore are blooming. Wallace holds his cup to his lips, biting its plastic rim.

“My dad died,” he says, and he feels Brigit gasp and flinch and turn to him. “Before you freak out, though, it was weeks ago, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“God, Wally, oh my god,” she says.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me. No. Are you okay? Oh my god.”

He is about to say that he is fine, that he is okay, but he doesn’t. Brigit is staring at him, expecting an answer, and he knows that he could give her one, the one that would make this easy, make it simple for them to move past this moment. But he does not want to do that. He doesn’t want to give her that answer. He wants to say something about the thing with his dad and Alabama and Miller and Dana and Simone. He wants to say that he’s just barely hanging on, that within he’s raw and sad and spinning down and down and down. But how does he begin to say that, to manifest it in this world, which resists all the hardness of life? It’s too real, what he wants to say. There are no parameters. When someone is shocked in this way, you don’t shock them more. You make them feel better.

“Yep,” he says, nodding, choking the word out. “Yep.”

“What does that even mean, Wally? ‘Yep’? What does that mean?”

“It just—it’s hard. It’s been hard,” he says, though he isn’t sure if the hardness pertains to his father, to the strangeness of that grief, or to everything else that has gone wrong—what has been hard? Specificity. Particularity. Ascertain. Navigate. What to say? How to speak. “But I’m alive.” There is a wet ache in his voice. “I’m alive.”

Brigit hugs him tightly. She presses her face against his sweaty hair and she just holds him tight to her. She too has reached the edge of her vocabulary for such things. She has no way to comfort him for the things that he has no way of expressing, and so they are coming as close as they can to getting at it. He can hear her heart beating hard. She smells sweet and a little like the popcorn they’ve been eating. Her body is soft and warm. There are seagulls over them, circling, riding the air currents, which makes Wallace uneasy.

“Anyway, now you know. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before.”

“My god, Wallace. When was the funeral?”

“Oh, weeks ago.”

“You didn’t go.”

“No, it was too far, wasn’t worth it.”

Brigit lets this remark go without further comment, for which Wallace is grateful. She starts to eat more popcorn. He drinks his water, which is growing lukewarm. The band is starting, something lonesome, off-key, and drowning in reverb.

Having told her about his dad, he doesn’t feel the need to tell her anything else. It feels sufficient, in a way, a part telling the whole.

They slide lower in their chairs, which squeak a little as their thighs slip over the metal. They laugh at the sound, comical in the moment. Their laughter swells beyond its context, till it’s disproportionate, till they’re not laughing but crying hot tears. Wallace lets loose the ugly hiccupping moan of a small child or someone who has forgotten himself. Up it comes, all the tears, the frustration, the difficulty. He’s convulsing, shivering, tears and snot and coughing, crying, putting his palms flat to his eyes, his shoulders bouncing, hot, so hot, and wet. And Brigit is weeping on his shoulder, a staccato sound like animals in the underbrush, that clattering, rickety cry.

That time in Alabama, after the man left his house, Wallace cried. His father stooped and grabbed him around the waist, and he asked him, What are you crying for, what are you crying for? The reason had seemed obvious to Wallace, but the more his father asked him, the more Wallace questioned why he was crying, until after a while he stopped. His father had done some magic trick, converted certainty to doubt with no more effort than it took to ask, What are you crying for? Why had he done that? Why?

But here, with Brigit, the reason sharpens, its clarity terrifying. He is crying because he cannot recognize himself, because the way forward is obscured for him, because there is nothing he can do or say that will bring him happiness. He is crying because he is lodged between this life and the next, and for the first time he does not know whether it is better to stay or go. Wallace cries and cries, until eventually he is hollow and empty and there’s nothing left to cry about, until he feels like he’s being rung like a bell.