Inside, the waiting room is empty, the floor a checkerboard. The woman at the front desk is rude. The hallways are hot. The X-ray room is cold.
Then Michael’s on a table, and she’s at his side. The Betadine goes on, and Michael winces, his forehead orange. The needles go in, and she has to look away. She holds his hand. The next time she looks, eight Frankensteinian stitches hold his head together. They fill the gap between eyebrow and hairline, as though Michael’s left eyebrow has an eyebrow of its own.
Then the X-rays are in and all is well—Good enough for this country doctor, anyway—though Michael gives Diane a look that says, When we get home, I’m getting a second opinion. Not that they can afford a second opinion, what with a mortgage they can hardly handle on a house that’s worth half what they paid in 2007, four maxed-out credit cards, plus Diane’s student loans, which, no matter how hard she ignores them, aren’t exactly going anywhere. Still, she’s glad to see Michael talking, smiling. Mostly, though, she’s happy she won’t have to change his diapers till death do them part.
That said, there is a diaper she wouldn’t mind changing in fewer than seven months.
This love for a thing unborn, a thing that isn’t even yet a thing—how to explain this love to her husband? She promised him she’d never want a child, and she’d meant it at the time. The mistake wasn’t getting pregnant. The mistake was making a promise that was never hers to keep.
The doctor scrubs his hands. A nurse will be with them shortly to discuss care and cleaning, he says, then dries his hands and leaves.
Michael’s still on the table, lying down. His eyes are on her middle, as though he can see beyond her waist into her womb.
We’re keeping it, she wants to say, but doesn’t, not yet.
She’s not religious, but she is superstitious. It seems bad luck to fight about the pregnancy today, as though doing so might invite the spirit of the dead boy into her, might curse her with a baby born blue-lipped, without breath.
If fates are steered by thoughts, by words, the least Diane can do, on this day, is keep quiet. So she lets her husband hold her hand. She smiles. And there are many, many, many, many, many, many things she does not say.
5.
Three times Richard Starling has given the officer his statement. Three times he’s explained he didn’t know what happened until what happened was over, Michael in the water, head cracked open, the girl on the boat wailing in a way Richard hopes never to hear again.
The officer’s face is downy, lips pursed in a spittle-glistening pout. He turns to the others. They are the Mallory family. The father is Glenn, the mother Wendy, the daughter Trish. Richard misses the boy’s name and can’t bring himself to ask.
Glenn gives his version of the story, then Wendy. Trish won’t stop crying. Again, the officer asks for the daughter’s statement. Glenn stands. Richard stands.
Richard’s not a violent man. He was a hippie. He was at Woodstock. He turned twenty-one in 1969. A December birthday doomed him, but flat feet saved his life. Instead of Vietnam, he got to finish school. He’s never thrown a punch, but, before Cornell, he taught high school in Atlanta for fifteen years, so he’s broken up his share of fights. He knows when a fist and a face are a parabola away.
The officer’s young, the kind who drinks hard on days off and makes his wife iron his uniform each night. He has yet to know loss, can’t register the grief beside him on this boat.
Richard’s hand finds Glenn’s shoulder.
“Why don’t you let me take them home?” Richard says.
The officer frowns. They’re on Glenn’s boat, bobbing. Richard holds a seatback to stay upright. He looks to shore, but Lisa’s left.
Police boats circle. Divers dive.
The day Richard discovered his daughter dead in her bassinet, he believed she might yet be revived. Even in the face of facts, he assumed, for hours, some new cure would be found. That was years ago, and not a day goes by he doesn’t miss his daughter.
These parents, though, Glenn and Wendy. Has it hit? Or do they hold out hope their son will surface still, will wave and swim ashore?
“Sir,” the officer says, “I’m going to need you to sit down. Both of you.” He won’t look Glenn in the eye. That’s a start, a sign—if this young man isn’t ashamed of the tone of his voice, at the very least he knows he ought to be. Glenn doesn’t sit, and neither does Richard.
“Sir!” the officer says, but another police boat has pulled up.
The man at the wheel is older, and the eyes beneath his visored cap are pinched in kindness. “Brockmeier,” he says, “a word.”
“Corporal—” the young officer says, but the expression on his superior’s face cuts him off. He climbs from gunwale to gunwale and hands the visored officer the clipboard onto which he’s recorded the day’s statements. From behind the wheel, the older officer touches the brim of his cap. He looks each family member in the eye, saying, “Ma’am. Ma’am. Sir.” When he gets to Richard, he says, “Sir, I think we’ve got it from here. If you’d kindly remove your boat from the premises, I’ll see the family makes it home.”
“We’re not leaving,” Glenn says. But his wife’s hands are on him, face pressed to his shirtfront. “Okay. Get us out of here.”
The young officer extends a hand that no one takes, and into the police boat they go, first Trish, then Wendy. Glenn turns to Richard, and it’s only then he sees his hand is still on the man’s shoulder. He lets go, and the other father leaves his side.
Richard watches the police boat depart, then climbs aboard The Sea Cow. He crosses the bay and navigates into the boathouse. He cranks the lift, and the boat rises from the water. The boathouse, like the house above, is crumbling. Wasp nests paper the eaves, insects funneling in and out like copper drones. Richard’s fishing poles lean in one corner. They’re in rough shape. They need new line, new reels. He’s not sure they’re worth bringing to Florida. He’s never fished the ocean. He might need all new gear.
An ache in his stomach, thinking this.
Florida’s all right. He likes Florida fine. There will be birds for Lisa and libraries for him. He likes those Florida potboilers—Miami mysteries, murders on the beach—likes solving the crime in the first fifty pages, flipping to the end, and being right. Plus there are colleges down there, plenty of them. If he gets bored, he can always teach again.
But Florida’s not Lake Christopher. Florida was never in the cards. The plan was here, always. He doesn’t want to leave the lake, but given what he’s done, who is he to say no?
Why did he do it? Why, last summer, did he join Katrina at MCA in Montreal, not expecting anything to happen, but not putting up a single boundary to keep said anything from happening, save the thin wall between their adjoining hotel rooms? Hadn’t he gone so far as to leave the door on his side open, just to see?
What are you doing? he asked himself all week, as though watching, from a distance, another man do things he’d never do.
He never should have joined her at the club. He offered her a drink, but Katrina only wanted to dance. She danced. Richard watched. When she returned to the bar, she was sweaty, smiling. “These Canadians are nice boys,” she said. “Too nice.” It was forty years since he’d been with anyone but Lisa, but Richard knew, right then, what would happen next. Katrina didn’t have to wink. She didn’t have to run her hand down his arm.
Katrina was brilliant, a fellow full professor—Stanford, physics. Her interest in Richard was in Lie theory and exceptional groups, and in their application to mathematical physics. She needed more math, and he was the reason, she said, she’d picked Cornell for her sabbatical. Early in the new century, Richard had joined another mathematician and a physicist in debunking Lisi’s E8 theory. This made him briefly famous (by mathematician standards) and won him some grant money, job offers leveraged into course releases, and the contract for a book he wrote and which sold well (again, by mathematician standards). Though in the end, who knows? History might be on Lisi
’s side. A grand unified theory could prove true. Perhaps there will even be a convincing theory of everything, though Richard doubts he’ll live to see the day.
In his time at Cornell, he had many genius colleagues, but never one so young as Katrina. She was in her thirties and already a full professor. She’d skipped grades in elementary school, she told him, finished college in three years, and defended her doctoral dissertation at twenty-four. This was more or less unheard of, and Richard found himself worshipping her for it.
“Relax,” she said. “It’s sex. It’s not a trap.”
They traded the club for Katrina’s hotel bed. Richard had trouble getting it up, then he didn’t. He lay back, she rode him, and all he could think was how, once, he’d been young too.
He didn’t love Katrina, and she made it clear that she did not love him. He loved Lisa—loves his wife. But one life will never be enough. If he could, he’d do it all again a hundred different ways. He’s sure he could live a hundred lifetimes and never grow bored.
In the boathouse, a wasp dive-bombs, and he returns the lifejackets to their hooks. He pulls the cooler with the day’s uneaten sandwiches from the boat. The cooler’s heavy. It will hurt his back to drag it up the hill.
At the door to the boathouse, he looks back, and it occurs to him this might have been his last day on the water. Given what’s happened, his family may not want to fish or swim. They may not want to stay the week.
He starts up the hill. The grass needs mowing. Above, the sky is dark, rain on the way. He sets the cooler down and stops to catch his breath. He used to race his boys up this hill. He’s always been an older father, forty by the time Thad was born, but he used to be in better shape.
In the grass, there’s a horseshoe. He bends to pick it up, then straightens, thinking of his back.
His affair with Katrina lasted three months. They were careful. They always used condoms, a new sensation that took some getting used to, and not once did Katrina call him at his home. In the end, it was Richard who called it off, more from guilt than fear of being caught. Katrina hugged him, straightened his bow tie, and said she understood. She accepted no blame for his infidelity, nor did he blame her. If a marriage was worth protecting, it was the duty of the married one to keep the vows.
That fall, then spring, they worked side by side as though nothing happened. On Friday afternoons, Katrina’s new boyfriend picked her up at the lab. He seemed nice, was handsome and much closer to her age. They were happy together, and Richard wished them well. He should have been relieved. Why, then, did he feel hurt?
What does he want?
He wants his body back, for one. He wants the stamina and muscle tone of someone half his age. He wants to be adored, not as a mathematician, but as a man.
He wants Lisa not to leave him. He fears she suspects, though how could she know?
On his cell phone, Katrina used to come up as K. What he wouldn’t give, some days, to see that letter blink green on the black screen of his phone. But they haven’t talked since spring semester’s end. She was not at his retirement party in May, a modest reception in Malott Hall. Chances are, they won’t speak again unless Katrina needs a reference for a grant or residency, a letter Richard will gladly write.
A screen door bangs, and Lisa meets him in the yard. She helps him lug the cooler up the hill, and they rest on the bottom porch step.
“Did they find him?” she asks, and Richard shakes his head. She’s been crying, face puffy, red. “Diane called. Michael got stitches, but he’ll be fine. They just need a ride home.”
“I’ll go,” he says.
The helicopter, departing, passes overhead. In the bay, divers climb onto their boats.
“Are they giving up already?” Lisa asks.
He doesn’t know. He guesses it’s the weather, takes her hand.
“Those poor people,” she says. “That poor boy.”
“Are you going to be okay?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “Absolutely not.”
They stand, and together they carry the cooler up the steps and across the porch, then Richard follows Lisa into the house.
6.
In dreams, Jake is running. His father has him in his sights.
In dreams, the Remington never wavers, and the buckshot, when it comes, arrives like lightning down his back.
In dreams, he’s in Phoenix at the Road to Manhood camp. He prays and prays and prays, and still he’s gay. Men scream at him. A counselor presses his erection to Jake’s back.
In dreams, his father calls him faggot, pussy, queer.
In dreams, his father says, You’re not my son.
From dreams, Jake wakes, and Thad is watching him from across the room.
“How long was I out?”
“Not long,” Thad says. “My dad went to get Michael and Diane. Mom’s making dinner. You can sleep more if you want.”
Jake sits up. The towel slips from his waist, and he’s naked on the bed. Thad’s seated at the desk his parents purchased for this room when Thad insisted he was a poet and needed a place at the lake to work. It’s the kind with hinges that opens to make a surface for your work.
“What’s that kind of desk called?”
“Secretary,” Thad says. He turns back to his work, writing in one of the little notebooks he carries with him everywhere he goes, a choice Jake finds insufferable. Jake doesn’t keep a sketchpad on him, never has. Maybe Thad’s poems are competent. Jake can’t be sure. With paintings, he can eye a piece and tell you in two seconds if it’s any good, what the artist was after, and how long it took—or should have taken—to paint. Whether he likes the painting is beside the point. What matters is conviction, is evidence of care and craft. Thad has conviction. Jake’s not so sure about the rest. The world of Thad’s poems is mostly a blur, like a moon glimpsed through a backward-facing telescope. Then again, Jake’s never really gotten poetry.
He stands. He moves to the desk and takes Thad’s shoulders in his hands. He kneads, and Thad puts down his pen. He lets the notebook flap closed.
“Please don’t,” Thad says. “I want to get this down.”
“Get it down,” Jake says. “No one’s stopping you.”
He massages. Thad’s shirt is blue and scratchy, the collared kind, Lacoste alligator openmouthed at nipple-height. Thad needs new shirts. The past year, his clothes have gotten tight, which Thad blamed on the dry cleaner before admitting he was the proud owner of what their friend Wes called a muffin top. “Welcome to thirty,” Wes said, and Thad gave Jake a look that said no way were they going to bed with Wes again.
Jake runs his palms down Thad’s back, lifts the hem, then slides his hands inside Thad’s shirt.
Thad stiffens. “I said don’t. I said please.”
Jake withdraws his hands. “I was being nice.”
“You weren’t.” Thad flicks his pen, which rolls off the desk onto the floor.
Jake leaves Thad’s side. He retrieves his laptop from his backpack and opens it on the bed. He gets comfortable, pillow under his head, then navigates to Chat-N-Bate, clicks Male on Male, then, changing his mind, clicks Male Solo.
Onscreen, a man sits on a bed. The bed is long and narrow, and there are posters on the wall: Metallica, Korn, Tool. A lava lamp shares a table with a stack of books. It’s a thirty-year-old’s idea of what a dorm room looks like, and this man is thirty if he’s a day. But Jake gets it. The college look is in, and being in is what gets you tips. Jake’s never tipped, but he likes to watch.
The man onscreen wears no shirt. His jeans are around his ankles. He’s shaven, long, uncut. He’s tugging at himself, looking into the camera like he can see Jake through the lens. He can’t, of course, but that’s the illusion: to make the other person feel seen.
The guy’s screen name is DannyK. Beside the livestream, a message board scrolls viewer comments. There’s a beep when someone posts and a ding when someone tips. Supposedly, hot twinks get rich off this, though Jake’s never seen
anyone clear more than fifty an hour. A hell of a way to grind out a living. He can’t fathom jerking off that much. Three, four times a day he’ll do, but every hour, eight hours a day? You’d get sore. Or bored. Maybe not bored. Jake can’t imagine getting bored of sex.
The kid tugs and tugs until Jake finds himself hard. He looks up. Thad’s watching.
“Seriously?” Thad says. He stands. He slips his notebook into his pocket and leaves the room.
Jake shuts his eyes. The laptop’s warm on his stomach, cool where the machine’s fan blows air across his skin.
He was sixteen when his father caught him masturbating. Masturbation alone, given their faith—Southern Baptist—and their church—the Church of the Glorious Redeemer, West Memphis campus—was bad enough. But Jake wasn’t just caught masturbating, he was caught masturbating to porn. And he wasn’t just caught masturbating to porn, he was caught masturbating to gay porn, a sin-packed trifecta that pretty much guaranteed him an eternity of pitchforks and fire.
His father didn’t beat him, not that time. Instead, he opened Jake’s Bible. The Bible had been a birthday present, Jake’s name embossed in gold leaf on one leather cover corner. Bible between them on the bed, his father led him through a dozen passages. He skipped Song of Songs, opting for passages condemning sexual sin. His father was versed in apologetics, and they got into the Greek, the multiple interpretations of arsenokoites. They talked David and Bathsheba. The Onan story got a lot of play.
His father admitted that boys Jake’s age had urges. Still, he must never act on them. No alternative was offered, merely the acknowledgment that, from time to time, Jake might mess up, at which point his only hope was to beg forgiveness and pray that God would make his boners go away. His father also assured him that he wasn’t gay, merely confused.
Jake wasn’t confused. In middle school, a friend had shared his stepfather’s videos. The women in the movies did nothing for him. Instead, he found himself watching the men, then watching his friend. “Don’t watch me,” the friend said. “Watch them.”
Lake Life Page 3