Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  By high school, he’d had many crushes, though none he’d acted on until a youth group camping trip and the tent he shared with Sam McIntosh. All they’d done was kiss, but the next day, Sam went to their youth leader, Mr. Doug. The boys were the same age, same standing in the church, but no matter. Sam repented first. Jake had “made him do it.” Sam was forgiven, rebaptized, cleansed. Jake was all but excommunicated. No more youth group. No Wednesday nights or mission trips. He could accompany his parents to church on Sundays, nothing more. His mother cried. His father beat him, then didn’t speak to him for weeks.

  Months later, when Jake turned eighteen, he was sent to the three-day Arizona camp staffed by old queens pretending that they weren’t. He heard testimony after testimony: God could intercede. God could make you straight. The scales could fall from your eyes, and just like that, you’d be really into boobs.

  Jake tried. He took part in every ceremony, answered every question, sang every sparkly, halo-making song. He wanted to be a good Christian. He wanted to make his father proud. He wanted to love and to be loved by God.

  Jake opens his eyes. Onscreen, DannyK’s still going at it. The chat thread scrolls by, stuffed with images and GIFs. Beeps and dings like crazy. Someone types: Go, dawg, go!

  Jake’s lost his erection. He slaps the laptop closed. From the kitchen, he hears Thad’s mother on the phone.

  The bedroom door opens, and Thad pokes his head in. “They’re on their way home,” he says. “Michael’s fine. Just stitches.”

  “Good,” Jake says. He’s never cared much for Thad’s brother because Thad’s brother’s never cared much for him, but he wouldn’t want to see the guy hurt.

  “You might want to dress for dinner,” Thad says.

  Their eyes lock. Jake won’t apologize for his sex drive. Still, he feels bad. Thad’s good at guilt. Jake’s good at feeling guilty.

  Thad’s stomach brushes the doorknob. That shirt. The hemline used to reach his crotch. Now it rides his waist. With Thad, everything’s skinny but his gut. Muffin top. It’s noticeable enough that, more than once, walking through Brooklyn, Jake’s caught eyes on them, expressions that seem to ask why he’s with Thad.

  Thad backs out of the room and shuts the door.

  A thunderclap. Jake doesn’t look outside. He doesn’t want to see the police boats, the lake. He checks his phone. A text. Marco.

  Tomorrow’s a mistake. He shouldn’t go, and knowing he shouldn’t go, he will.

  Blame curiosity. Blame fate. Blame Facebook. When Marco IMed him and said he lived in Asheville, and when, a week later, Thad’s mom called, insisting they visit the lake before month’s end, the timing seemed too providential to ignore. Asheville awaits, an hour away. Only a matter of getting Thad on board.

  Every open relationship has boundaries, and theirs are these: Always together. Only if both are comfortable. Never if it’s an ex.

  A kind of mantra: Always. Only. If.

  For two years the rules have served them well. Thad wasn’t crazy about the open part at first, but Jake won’t have it any other way. He won’t have strictures imposed on him, not by church or any man. Better to be a fuckboy than an altar boy. Better to suffer one bad night than regret the torment of what if.

  Marco’s different, though. Not only is he an ex, he’s Jake’s first time, first love. With Marco, just lunch can’t possibly mean just lunch, can it?

  Tomorrow? Marco’s texted. We still on?

  We’re on, Jake texts. He hasn’t mentioned Thad. He texts a string of x’s and o’s, goofy enough for built-in deniability should Thad raid his phone, but bold enough to mean something to Marco if there’s something there to mean.

  Jake stands and slides the laptop into his bag. He slips on boxer briefs and pants.

  Outside, the wind makes maracas of the trees. Beyond the trees, the lake is wavy, and the boats have left the bay.

  He drops to the floor and searches for Thad’s pen, which he finds under the desk. The pen isn’t a nice one. It’s a Bic—white-barreled, black-tipped, the kind that comes cellophaned in packs of ten. Thad will write with anything, a quality Jake finds endearing. And annoying. He caps the pen and returns it to the desk.

  A little time until dinner. Really, he should do something productive. He went to the trouble of getting his oils through security, brought the material safety data sheets, though in the end he hadn’t needed them. The woman at security hardly noticed the tubes. “Paints,” he said, and she let him continue to his plane. Turps and mineral spirits wouldn’t have made it through, but he can siphon gas from the lawn mower if he needs a thinner. He has a pair of canvases and pushpins for the pushpin/trash bag trick to get the canvases home wet. He has brushes and a palette. He has his collapsible travel easel. Minus palette knives, he has everything he needs.

  He also has a secret.

  Jake Russell, the toast of Bushwick, Frank DiFazio’s youngest client, the man Artforum called a New Symbolist for the Twenty-First Century and an American Munch, hasn’t finished a painting in six months.

  7.

  Dusk, or not quite dusk. That cadaverous hour approaching dinner—doom.

  Lisa sits at the kitchen table. She is hungry, and the smell of chicken and rosemary and onions makes her hungrier. Before her, a cantaloupe half rests on a plate in a pool of its own brine, its middle molten, like a geode neatly cracked. She has only to dig the seed tangle from the melon’s center, but the spoon in her hand feels small, the task too much.

  Richard should be back by now.

  The windows are dirty, and she rises to wipe them. She unlatches a window, opens it. The lake’s gone gray. The boats are gone.

  Wind hits the window screen and dislodges a beetle—emerald husk, legs like twigs. The screen is red with rust. She can’t remember the last time the windows were cleaned. She can’t remember the last time she or Richard dusted or mopped the kitchen floor. Neglect might mean they don’t deserve the house. No matter. Soon, they’ll have no house to come to and not clean.

  On the sill, the insect reclines abdomen-up, an accusation. Thunder rattles the window in its frame, and at least this gives her something useful to do.

  She gathers the household rain buckets and sets them in place, handles tipped like smiles on their sides. One bucket catches drips from the roof’s peak, the other from a large, tarantula-shaped water stain.

  All rot, the inspector said, descending the ladder from the roof. Lisa worried the sale might not go through, but the buyers didn’t flinch. Which is when she knew they weren’t here for the house. In a week, her life’s best decades will be bulldozed into dust.

  Never again will Lisa see Thad’s little butt cheeks gallop haphazard through the house (there’d been a toddler streaker phase). Or watch Michael heft a catfish, tail flapping, up the hill. Or study a kingfisher, its punk-rock crest and heavy bill, from her back porch.

  Nor will they navigate the mountains, years from now, and find the driveway, ring the bell. “We used to live here,” they won’t say, hoping for a tour of the updated kitchen or rescreened porch. Because there will be no kitchen, no porch. Or, there will be, just not theirs. Their house will be gone, something preposterous and glamorous in its place.

  Why, then, these buckets? Why not let the water stain the floor?

  Because the house is hers. It’s hers a few days more, and Lisa cares for what is hers.

  She has only to cancel the closing, has only to say no. But that is the one thing she cannot do. A sacrifice is required. Except, a sacrifice to whom? For whom? In the name of… what?

  But these are the wrong questions. One might as well ask who owns our grief, who strips the incandescence from the matchbook of our days?

  The first time Lisa made love was to a boy named Nick. The year was 1978. She was a college junior, twenty years old, and they did it in her ’71 Chevy Vega. Two years later, she met Richard. Soon after, she married him, at which point she insisted they sell the car. Richard pushed back. The car was fine. I
f she hated the Vega, she could drive his Dart. But she wouldn’t have it. She refused to watch Richard drive the car or ride in it. Sex meant too much to her. Sex branded everything it touched. So the car was sold. And if this house wasn’t where Richard had trespassed, it’s where she’d waited, last summer, while he did. It’s the house to which he returned from his convention, bow tie askew, and she knew another woman’s hands had touched his neck. His laundry, when Lisa did it, smelled like her.

  No, the house must go, the crooked page made straight, spine of their days reset.

  There will be a winnowing, followed by a relocation: new state, new house, new birds, new friends, new lives. It isn’t the only way forward, except, having made up her mind, it is.

  She adjusts the rain buckets. It’s a job she’s done a hundred times, but there’s a comfort in rituals like these, security in the knowledge that, if nothing else, what rain comes will be caught.

  8.

  Thad drags a croquet mallet across the yard, over anthills, unmown grass. A red ball lounges tumorous beside a wicket, and he bends to excavate it from a dandelion patch.

  The day before, his father pulled the set from the garage, unboxed the mallets and affixed wickets to the lawn, though no one got around to playing. Not that they’ve ever played properly. Their family version of croquet involves balls whacked at random and however many points per wicket they’ve agreed to for that game. Official rules grace the back of the box, but Thad’s never read them. Arguing the finer points of croquet sounds to him like some fucked-up Tom and Daisy shit. His parents may own a lake house, but that house is still a trailer, a double-wide in disguise, purchased before word on Christopher, North Carolina, got out and the Home Depot guy bought up half the lake.

  That Thad’s father would break out croquet, of all things, is confirmation of a growing fear: his parents intend to resurrect the whole world in a week, everything they love about this place. Every boat ride and fishing trip. Every picnic. Every entertainment—horseshoes, lawn darts, cards. A forced march down memory lane.

  Jake loves the lake house games, loves competition. Whatever spring winds the clockwork of Thad’s father winds Thad’s boyfriend, as well. For Jake, life is art and sex and games. That, or art and sex are games. The way Jake does them, all three feel competitive.

  A rumble drifts polyphonic over the lawn. The croquet balls glow in the gloaming. Thad pulls his Moleskine from his pocket, but he has no pen. He could go inside, but he doesn’t want to deal with Jake.

  Glow in the gloaming. And he calls himself a poet. Bullshit.

  He unfastens the wickets and returns them to their bag. He’s found one mallet, and one’s in the box. Two to go. He wanders the yard, praying against snakes, until he finds the third mallet in the grass. It’s beat-up, the knocker gouged.

  When Dad wasn’t looking, Thad’s brother used to hammer slugs. The Slug Hunter 3000, Michael called his favorite croquet mallet. He’d raise the mallet, give a Mortal Kombat cry of “Finish him!” and bring the hammer down. What remained was magic, a glistening, mercury-leavened pool. Once, Michael malleted a snail, which, he reasoned, was just a slug with a hat. But the accompanying crunch was too much. Michael threw up. Thad cried. They never killed a slug or snail again.

  The storm is close, Thad’s shadow lengthening across the lawn. Cloud bottoms brighten overhead. He finds the last mallet and returns it to the garage just as the rain arrives.

  The garage, detached, was never a place for cars. Now it bulges with everything that once filled the house. Boxes tower and jostle, the uniform tan of U-Haul cardboard. Not one is labeled, which is just like his parents. The absentminded professors. But it’s not moving boxes Thad’s after. The boxes he wants are long and white.

  In middle and high school, he collected comic books. College, too, before he dropped out. The collection was X-Men, mostly, though he abandoned his beloved mutants once Matt Fraction’s run ended and the X-Men stopped making any sense. He still picks up an issue here and there. In the latest, Gambit and Rogue, the will-they-or-won’t-they Ross and Rachel of the superhero team, finally tied the knot, a development that would have thrilled him twenty years ago. These days, he’d trade the couple for a few gay X-Men in any story central to the plot.

  Most of his comics made it from Ithaca to Jake’s place, but, because Thad spent summers at the lake, the rest are here. He’s no completionist, but with every series interrupted by gaps in any given year, it would be nice to reunite the books. He could take some time, reread the best runs. Maybe eBay them. He isn’t sure what they’re worth. A few thousand dollars, probably. Enough to get him through a couple of months in the event that—

  But Thad doesn’t want to dwell on in the event that.

  He moves piles and reassembles stacks, but the long, white boxes are not here. Unless they’ve been boxed inside other boxes, they’re gone. Which can’t be. Surely his parents haven’t thrown out their son’s comic books. Surely he’s not that dated cautionary tale.

  He does find the old family telescope, secure in its dusty, patent leather case. He lifts it and the handle comes off. The case clatters to the floor. He drops the handle, leans the case like a rifle on one shoulder, lowers the garage door, and runs through the rain into the house.

  His mother is in the kitchen. A large roast chicken has been pulled from the oven, and the air is fragrant, the house warm.

  “I found the telescope,” he says. He’s back in boy mode. Despite himself, he wants her to be proud of him.

  “Okay, but don’t rearrange the garage. The movers charge more if the boxes aren’t consolidated.”

  He sets the telescope on the table, then moves to the kitchen counter where his mother whisks melted butter in a bowl. The counter’s horseshoe-shaped, and he stands across from her.

  “Did you put the croquet set away?” she asks.

  “I did.”

  Two more days and they’ll all adopt their family roles: his father withdrawn, his mother smothering, Michael moody, Thad jockeying for everybody’s love.

  “Mallets in the box,” she asks, “hoops in the bag?”

  “Wickets.”

  “In England, where the sport began, they’re hoops.”

  Thad smiles. “Pretty liberal interpretation of the word sport.”

  His mother butters the chicken with a basting brush. The skin is gold, not yet her trademark golden-brown.

  “I haven’t seen Jake all afternoon,” she says.

  “He’s painting,” Thad lies. “Hard at work on the next show.”

  “That’s wonderful,” his mother says, but she’s not really listening. She slips her hands into yellow oven mitts, opens the oven door, and slides the chicken in.

  The house is quiet. The thunder’s given up. Now it’s just rain on the roof and buckets catching drips.

  “Mom,” he says, but the timing’s wrong. His mother’s eyes are shut, arms folded over her chest. This day’s too big, and he’d sound monstrous raising the question of missing comic books.

  Let them eat first. Let them play a game. Maybe this week can still work out all right.

  Thad thinks this, then thinks of the other family, the boy. Immediately he feels selfish, then weak for feeling selfish, then self-conscious for feeling weak. “Analysis paralysis,” Steve would say, a term Thad’s pretty sure his therapist shoplifted from AA.

  Tomorrow, Thad will wake and go to the window. If the boats are back, they haven’t found the boy.

  His mother weeps. He shuts his eyes.

  There’s only one thing to do in the face of all this grief. Thad is going to get stoned out of his fucking mind.

  9.

  Richard shuffles, and Diane cuts the deck.

  The Spades they play is modified for six. They work in teams of three, rotating who plays. Richard keeps track of rotation and score.

  They’re at the kitchen table. Lisa’s made tea, which only she drinks, and filled a bowl with pretzels, which no one eats. No one ever eats the p
retzels, but they’re nice to look at, a little hillock of clipped trefoil knots. Outside, the rain is steady.

  Richard deals. He, Michael, and Jake make up one team, Lisa, Diane, and Thad the other. This is how it’s been since Jake entered the picture. Richard plays best with Jake. Jake gets the game. He follows Richard’s lead. And, most important, he plays to win. Ambition matters. Sure, it’s only family fun, but it’s no fun if it’s all in fun. Richard would rather play and lose than no one ever win.

  Jake’s a good kid, charming, successful. A little full of himself, but who wouldn’t be with money and prestige like that at twenty-six? Richard watches him across the table and wishes, forgive him, that his boys were more like Jake. Wishes he’d been more like Jake, everything he wanted at so young an age. Richard was late to marry, late to have kids, late to his career. Perhaps it’s not too late for his sons. Michael’s smart. He’s sensible enough. And Thad’s okay when he’s not off his meds. There was that nasty business in the winter of ’05 and a second attempt a decade ago. But Thad says that’s over now, and Richard wants to believe it’s true.

  Lisa stirs her tea.

  When it comes to cards, he and his wife make terrible partners. Thirty-seven years of marriage should translate to mind reading and knowing winks, but Richard has no patience for Lisa’s underbidding or her forgetting, each hand, what’s been played. There are only fifty-two cards, he wants to say. Keep up! He loves his wife. He’d step in front of a bus for her. But he hates how she plays Spades.

  She pulls the tea bag from her mug, lets it hang over the tea, dripping, then drops the pouch onto the tabletop. Where she sits, a constellation marks the place tea bags have steamed the finish from the wood. Richard can see her heart’s not in the game. His either. He’s just better at pretending. Fake contentedness until you feel it, that kind of thing.

  Dinner was a quiet affair, the chicken tough, the veggies rubbery, which is not the norm. Still, everyone ate. Everyone said how good the chicken was, everyone lying, everyone knowing everyone was lying and saying nothing, because that’s what families do. Lisa said little, Jake and Thad appeared to ignore each other, and Michael, high on painkillers, raised a hand every few minutes to probe the sizable bandage on his head, Diane scolding, pushing the fingers away.