Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  These days, the porch sags. The siding is gray and mildew-stained. The roof is missing shingles, and what shingles remain hang furred with moss. And is it Lisa’s imagination, or does the whole house kind of lean a little? The hammock in the yard has long since rotted away, and the lawn is a patchwork of grass and dead places, of anthills and weeds.

  Last month, during negotiations, Lisa and Richard made so many concessions to the inspector’s damage report that they stood to lose tens of thousands. “Hold off,” their Realtor cautioned. “Fix up the place. The market’s only getting better. In a year, you might make twenty thousand more.”

  But what’s the point? The concessions are a way to tank the asking price, nothing more. Even pristine, the house, sold, would greet a wrecking ball. The lake is changing, investors coming in. In the end, it’s not the house that she and Richard are selling. It’s the land.

  Unless Lisa calls off the sale. Closing is a week away. Barring a lawsuit, it’s not too late. Keep or sell, stay or go, Richard won’t fight her. Because they had a deal. And Richard broke the deal, forgot what marriage meant. The handshake—the house—it has to go. This isn’t punishment. It’s more that the equation must be balanced. To stay together, they must start over. To start over, they must sell the house. That much, to Lisa, seems clear. And just because Richard doesn’t know she knows, that’s no reason to go on as though nothing’s happened. Is it?

  She isn’t sure.

  She’s sure of this: The choice is hers. Richard already made his choice. Richard gave up his right to have a say.

  Up the hill. Up the porch steps. The staircase gasps underfoot. Beneath it, where her children used to play, ivy’s taken over, a hiding place for snakes. She skips the fifth step, run through with rot. The railing shakes. The wood is soft as cork, the kind left too long in the bottle that crumbles at the corkscrew’s kiss.

  On the top step, she turns and once more brings the binoculars to her face. She focuses, and the mother is there. Lisa should be with her on the boat. But, being on the boat, she would become the mother, and she has already been the mother. She will not touch the hem of that particular misery again.

  And why is this happening now, their last week at the lake? Why rob her of the beauty of this time with her family?

  But these thoughts are evil. For a moment, she can’t stand herself.

  The other mother is Wendy. In the water, she gave her name, and Lisa thought of Peter Pan, not the play or Disney movie, but the book, a favorite of Lisa’s mother, whom Lisa lost three summers ago. Cancer, parents—the indignities of growing distinguished.

  God, Wendy’s face when those inflatables bobbed into view.

  Who was watching the boy? Who was supposed to be watching him? Not Michael, who saw and dove and rose beneath a boat.

  Poor Michael. Poor Wendy. Wendy is ruined. Wendy will never forgive herself.

  And where do they go? Lisa wonders not for the first time, not for anything like the first time in her life. Where have they gone, Wendy’s son and Lisa’s firstborn, all the souls of children gone too soon?

  If heaven exists, it has received them. They’re children, after all. If not innocent, then innocent enough. Lisa imagines a Neverland for them, a place the ghosts of children go to wait, to fly, until their parents come for them.

  She hopes for this. She prays.

  Some days, all that keeps her going is this thought: If God is love, she’ll see her girl again.

  3.

  Jake showers, and Thad leans against the sink. Thad still can’t be sure how it happened—the boy, the boat, his brother’s head. He searches the bathroom mirror for answers, but all he finds is his pale, unshaven face. The mirror fogs, and he wipes the condensation away. His eyebrows need trimming.

  From the bay, they swam ashore and ran uphill. His mother made the call while Thad tried to convince his brother he needed an ambulance, Michael insisting he was fine, that he could drive, while Diane cried and pressed a blood-soaked washcloth to her husband’s head. When the ambulance arrived, Michael reluctantly got in, Diane with him, and Thad’s mother stationed herself at the edge of the lake. When at last Thad thought to check on his boyfriend, he found him in the bathroom.

  “Are you still there?” Jake says, steam from the shower filling the room.

  “I’m here,” Thad says.

  And who is this boy he’s been with the past two years? Jake is twenty-six, four years younger than Thad, though there are times the gap feels wider, days Jake acts sixteen. They’ve reached the point they should get serious, commit or go their separate ways. That Jake might not recognize this makes Thad sad.

  “Can I have some privacy?” Jake asks.

  Thad wants to believe he’s misheard. He pulls the shower curtain aside. Jake stands beneath the water. He’s small and lithe, with acne on his chest. There’s lather in his hands, and he’s erect.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Jake pulls the curtain back. “Leave me alone.”

  “A kid’s at the bottom of the lake,” Thad says. “My brother’s at the hospital.”

  “I’m stressed,” Jake says. “This happens when I’m stressed.”

  Thad leaves the bathroom, slams the door.

  Stressed. There’s an explanation for Jake’s behavior, but stressed isn’t it. Jake’s horny. Jake’s always horny.

  Thad used to be. Before weed. Before the regimen of Xanax, Paxil, and Seroquel. His dick works, it’s just the want that’s waned. He should want Jake. Jake’s gorgeous. He’s successful. He’s good to Thad, or good enough. And good enough, given Thad’s track record with men, ought to be enough. But it isn’t.

  If only Jake listened, asked about his day, showed him affection unattached to sex. That, to Thad, would look like love.

  He moves to the kitchen table.

  In a double-wide, even a converted one, rooms run together: kitchen, dining area, family room. Two table legs rise from carpet, two from linoleum the color of uncooked pasta. The floor’s old, the kind that sticks to your feet with every step. Thad’s feeling hungry, then ashamed for feeling hungry. How long, in the aftermath of tragedy, does one wait to eat?

  Outside, his mother’s coming up the hill. The grass is high. If she’s not careful, she’ll take a horseshoe stake to the shin.

  From the bathroom comes Jake’s whistling. This one’s a hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” in a minor key. A recovering Baptist, Jake knows every hymn, each word of every verse. For him, growing up meant church on Wednesday, Saturday, and twice on Sunday. For Thad, church was Sunday mornings once or twice a month, and only if his mother insisted. (She never managed to get his father through the door of any house of worship.) Thad gave his mother’s church a chance, but he knew early on who he was, and while her church wasn’t the kind to condemn him, neither was it a place where Thad might raise his head from prayer to find others like him seated in the pews. Couples, there, were straight. Singles were straight. The minister was a woman married to a man. None of this felt particularly welcoming. None of it felt his.

  He hasn’t been to church since he was twelve. And, while he judges Jake’s occasional childishness, there are days Thad, too, feels like a child. It’s as though, having dropped out of college, he missed some class everyone else got to take. Here’s how to pay taxes. Here’s how to balance a checkbook. Here’s how to keep a job.

  How have his parents done it, stayed employed for thirty years, stayed married thirty-seven? Their love is real. Their work is important. Google either name, a thousand hits come up.

  How, then, did they raise such dumbfuck sons?

  Thad’s mother reaches the porch, but she does not come in. She stands on the top step and watches the water through binoculars.

  Thad will miss this house, house of summers, of card games and horseshoes, of fish fries and music and ice cream and love. But this isn’t the home Thad remembers. The walls are marked by holes and hooks where paintings used to hang. Boxes crowd the c
orners, stacked or open, half-packed. Bookshelves stand empty. His mother’s knickknacks and flea market ceramics have all been newspapered away. Framed family portraits, wrapped in brown paper, lean against the walls.

  The room’s one concession to ornamentation is Jake’s painting—a gift last year upon his first visit to the lake. In the painting, a girl palms a pomegranate half. A cherub hovers over one shoulder. A compass at her feet points north. One of the girl’s breasts is out. All of these add up to something symbolic, though, gun to his head, Thad couldn’t say what. Part of him wonders whether Jake could say. Jake might be a genius, or he might be making shit up as he goes. Could be anyone who tries to analyze his work, the joke’s on them. Thad merely remembers being relieved his mother hadn’t protested the wayward boob.

  His mother, as a rule, is thoughtful, unfailingly polite. He imagines her packing, fretting over whether to take the painting down or leave it for Jake’s benefit. Thad can’t say such worry is undue. Jake’s got an ego and the sensitivity to go with it. Then again, it’s possible he hasn’t even noticed that his painting is the only one still up. Jake sometimes has trouble getting past himself. By twenty-four, he’d had two solo exhibitions. At twenty-five, he was the subject of pieces in Artforum, New American Paintings, and the Times. Just last week, the New Yorker gave his third solo show three pages, dubbing him Brooklyn’s next big thing and praising his work’s “mordant irony” and “refreshing excess.” Jake pretended not to care, but Thad’s caught him reading the article half a dozen times. He’s had only one bad review. An Art in America piece celebrated a group show before singling out Jake’s work as “clumsy, desperate, and eager to please,” a line that sent Thad’s boyfriend to bed for three full days.

  The whistling tapers off, replaced by a bassline. Jake has switched on the Sharper Image plastic-capped bath radio he gave Thad’s parents for Christmas and which nobody but Jake has likely ever used.

  Thad moves to the hallway. He presses an ear to the bathroom door, and that’s when he hears it. Over the rush of water, the buzz of the bathroom fan, the hum of Bell Biv DeVoe singing “Poison,” Thad can just make out the gentle slap of his boyfriend jerking off.

  Thad’s mother crosses the porch. Thad steps into the bathroom and shuts the door. Immediately he’s underwater, the room more steam than air.

  How did his brother do it? Push himself past so much silt and dark?

  “You have to stop,” Thad says. “Or be quiet about it.”

  The slapping grows frenzied.

  “Jake,” he says. He doesn’t want to pull the curtain aside.

  The sound slackens. Jake’s done. The radio cuts off. The water stops. The curtain draws back, and Jake’s head appears, eyes blue, teeth so white you’d think he modeled for some product four out of five dentists recommend.

  Those eyes, though. He loves this boy. Jake’s sledgehammered Thad’s heart a hundred times, but it’s Thad who’s let him. You can only blame the hammer so long before you have to blame yourself for not stepping aside.

  Jake wipes the water from his face.

  The plans for tomorrow are set, and Thad should call them off. Say he did, would Jake go to Asheville without him, or would he stay? Either way, a boy is at the bottom of the lake. There are more pressing concerns than tomorrow’s lunch with Jake’s art school ex.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” Thad says.

  “Don’t shame me,” Jake says.

  “I’m not shaming you. I just think it’s disrespectful.”

  “Disrespectful? What I do with my dick—”

  “Do you even care?”

  Standing in this room is like being in a mouth. Everything is wet—the mirror, faucet, knobs all slick and glistening. Jake stands dripping, and Thad offers him a towel, which he takes.

  “Do I care that a boy is dead?” Jake says. “Of course. I’m not a monster.”

  Thad lowers the toilet lid and sits. In the shower, Jake towels off his hair, which is short and dark. There’s little in the world that Thad likes more than running his hands through that hair—clean and soft—before Jake slathers product into it. He likes Jake’s hair the way it is. Jake prefers the electrocuted hedgehog look.

  “All I’m saying is there’s a time and there’s a place,” Thad says.

  Jake laughs. “You don’t believe that. You think you believe that because that’s what you’ve been taught to believe. No sex for you. Not at a time like this. You’re respectful.”

  “My mom is—”

  “Your mom?”

  Thad’s arm itches. He runs a finger along the raised scar, swollen in the steam. “I could hear you halfway across the house. You want her hearing that?”

  “Ah,” Jake says. “That’s different. That’s manners. Manners I can get behind.”

  Jake’s big on manners. In the city, he’s as well-known for his charm as he is for his art. Frank DiFazio—respected, feared, beloved owner of Chelsea’s Gallery East, the man who made Jake and named Jake (before Frank, Jake was Jacob)—has Jake trained. “I took the boy out of Memphis and the Memphis out of the boy,” Thad once overheard Frank tell a friend.

  “I’m sorry I was impolite,” Jake says. He’s drying off. He’s lean but not boyish, muscled but not buff. Thad had a body like that once, but he’s put on weight the past few years. Too much pot. Too many late-night snacks.

  Jake smiles. It’s tough staying mad at him.

  Thad stands, and Jake drops the towel. He reaches past the shower curtain and places one hand on Thad’s cheek.

  “I can make you feel better,” Jake says. His hand drops to Thad’s waistband. “Come on. I’ll keep it real respectful.” Then Jake’s hand is down his shorts.

  Thad pushes him, and Jake hits the wall, hard.

  “Jesus,” Jake says.

  Thad moves to the door. He needs to leave the room before he cries. He doesn’t want to meet Jake’s ex. He doesn’t want to lose Jake. He doesn’t want a child to be dead.

  “You think they’ll find him?” Thad asks, but Jake won’t look at him.

  When Jake turns, his back is latticework, squares where the shower tiles have left their mark.

  “I’m sorry,” Thad says.

  But he no longer has Jake’s attention. Jake’s stepped out of the shower, and his attention is on the small, black jar he’s just fished from his toiletry kit. He uncaps the jar, dips two fingers in, then gently works the product into his hair.

  4.

  Diane Maddox exhales. Diane Maddox who traded Tennessee for Texas. Diane Maddox whose parents are divorced. Diane Maddox who married Michael ten years ago and wouldn’t take her husband’s name. Diane Maddox who carries a child inside her. Diane Maddox who had an abortion in high school and who does not regret that choice, but who is not in favor of making that choice a second time. Diane Maddox who went to school to be a painter before settling for being a those-who-can’t-do art teacher. Diane Maddox who wonders whether thirty-three is too early for a midlife crisis, were women said to have those and if those meant more than a red motorcycle and the affair to go with it. Diane Maddox who has been reassessing her infinitesimal place in the cruel and sideways-pressing world. Diane Maddox who likes dangly earrings. Diane Maddox who has always longed to visit Reykjavík. Diane Maddox who grew up watching Mad About You and wanted to be Helen Hunt. Diane Maddox who, in eighth grade, cried—cried—through the Mad About You finale, cried over the fact that Paul and Jamie weren’t together anymore. They would give it another try, the way Diane’s parents gave it another try too many times to count, giving it another try code for the pain a daughter feels when some mornings Dad’s there, eating Cheerios, and some mornings Mom says, “I hope that fucker drives that thing off a fucking bridge.” Diane Maddox who is unhappy but for whom divorce does not feel like an option (whether to prove something to her parents or to Mad About You, she isn’t sure). Diane Maddox who wonders whether things would have gone better had she taken her husband’s name, though of course a name can�
��t save you. A name can’t save a marriage, can’t save a house from sale or a boy from the bottom of a lake.

  Diane in the ambulance. Diane not crying, keeping calm. Diane following the paramedic’s instructions as the ambulance navigates country roads and the paramedic measures Michael’s blood pressure. Diane Maddox-not-Starling—and it’s never too late to change a thing, except sometimes it is—pressing the damp cloth to the head of the man she loves. Or loved. Some days, let’s face it, she’s not sure. Blood pooling beneath the cloth, the forehead an awfully vascular area, the paramedic says, worse than it looks, which Diane takes to mean looks worse than it is, though she can’t be sure. There will be stitches, though she hopes against concussion, against brain injury, against anything permanent because, in all fairness, can the girl who said in sickness and in health still speak for Diane at thirty-three? Say Michael slips into a coma or spends his life in diapers, drinking through a straw? Does the Diane who said I do love this man enough to wipe his ass another fifty years? And how to love a man who’s made it clear, if not in words, then in scowls and sighs, in the way he picks strings from the frayed cuffs of his jeans, that he’d rather her not have their kid? Does she love Michael enough to stay? Does she love herself enough to leave? Diane doesn’t know, knows only that Michael’s blood is real and warm and won’t stop rising from his head.

  The ambulance brakes, the doors open, and Diane breathes.

  The hospital is not what she was expecting. Small and beige and boxy, the building looks less like a hospital than a bank someone dropped onto an acre in the woods. Gently, Diane is pushed aside by a nurse at the curb, Michael lowered into a wheelchair and asked to hold the cloth to his own head. Of all the fears Diane has ever known—fear of flying, of snakes, of seeing the stick’s minus sign become a plus—never has she known a fear like watching her husband’s face paint the water red. The paramedic pushes the wheelchair forward, the nurse holds the door open for Michael to be pushed through, and Diane follows, feeling useless.