“Is that common?” Michael asks.
Thad caps the rubbing alcohol, pulls a bandage from the box, and peels the backing off.
“Well,” Thad says, “I can’t speak—”
“For the entire gay community. I get it. But what are the statistics?”
“Statistics?”
“Are most gay guys open, or what? I mean, in my world, that’s considered pretty far out.”
“Less far out than you’d think. Plenty of straight swingers too, I’d imagine. Now, hold still.”
The bandage approaching Michael’s face is huge. If Thad gets it right, it will fill a rectangle of skin between his eyebrow and his hairline without touching any hair. If he gets it wrong, the next change of dressing is going to suck.
“So, Jake goes to town on some other guy,” Michael says. “You’re cool with that?”
“I know Jake loves me.”
Something about this bothers Michael, not because he cares what Thad does, but because this doesn’t sound like Thad. It sounds like something Jake’s trained Thad to say.
The bandage goes on, and Michael feels his eyebrow catch.
“Shit,” Thad says.
“It’s fine. You’re telling me you don’t get jealous?”
“Of Jake? Of course not. I’m involved. At the very least, I’m in the room.”
Michael pulls in the fishing line and sets down the rod. He reaches for the glass, remembers it’s empty, then feels the bandage. It’s definitely affixed to his eyebrow.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I couldn’t do it.”
He imagines Diane, some dude above her, thrusting. Instantly he’s angry—real fury toward some guy he just made up.
“You never worry he’ll fall in love with someone else?” Michael asks.
“Do you worry Diane will fall in love with someone else?”
“No, but we’re not fucking other people.”
Thad shakes his head. “Trust me, our little rendezvous, love’s got nothing to do with it.”
Except that Thad can’t hide things from his brother, and the look on his face betrays him. There’s something there. Not fear, necessarily, but concern. Bewilderment, at least. It’s as though, with his line of questioning, Michael’s rearranged Thad’s mental furniture. Or else Jake rearranged the furniture long ago, and Thad’s just now noticing that something’s out of place.
Thad lights his joint. He takes a drag. He flicks what’s left into the water.
“Say, one day, Diane comes to you,” Thad says, “and she says, ‘Michael, I love you. I’m happy. But you know what would make me really happy? If sometimes we had sex with other people.’ What would you say?”
“ ‘Fuck no.’ ”
“Not even for her happiness?”
Michael stands. He’s cold. He wants his bed. “She might think she’d be happier, but who’s to say? Who says sex with other people wouldn’t raise all sorts of questions for her?”
“Say it did? Don’t questions deserve to be raised?”
“Sure,” Michael says. “Before the wedding day. Before you make a commitment.”
Thad gathers the towels, the bandages, the rubbing alcohol. “That’s fair. You two took vows. But people change. You’re no longer the people you were at twenty-three.”
“I don’t want to watch my wife with another dude.”
“Another woman, then. Isn’t that every straight man’s fantasy? What are the statistics on that?”
Michael watches the water. He can feel himself swaying.
He and Diane were eighteen when they met. She’s the only woman he’s been with. Some days, he’s proud of this. Other days, the thought embarrasses him. Either way, it’s rare he worries that he’s missing out. Diane is good in bed. Was good. They haven’t been together since before the fight, the morning, weeks ago, when Diane opened the bathroom door and Michael saw the white stick in her hand.
“You think happiness is getting what you want,” Michael says. “Whatever you want, as much as you want, whenever you want it.” His voice is trembling. “But what if that’s not happiness? What if true happiness is about saying fuck you to what you want, then sticking together, even when things get hard, even when you’re not the people you once were?”
He burps. Something’s churning in his gut. Drunk as he is, it’s not lost on him that he’s just articulated his wife’s argument for the baby that he doesn’t want.
How fiercely we defend those we love, even to the annihilation of ourselves.
Michael laughs. He laughs, and, laughing, throws up on Thad. Just drenches him. He’s like a fire hydrant, uncapped, his stomach emptied in a colorful and urgent gush. He drops to the dock, and his knees rattle the boards.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but when he turns, the world’s stopped spinning, and his brother’s halfway up the hill.
PART TWO SATURDAY
13.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen the falls,” Diane’s father-in-law calls from the backseat. “Years.”
Polite to a fault, Richard insisted Diane ride up front, though the car that he and Lisa share is a hybrid and tiny. His knees grind Diane’s seatback. No one’s comfortable.
Michael pulls away from the gas station, and they follow the country road west. His thumbs drum the steering wheel. A silver coffee tumbler rests between his legs.
This morning, when she offered to drive, Michael only frowned and gave her the look. Diane hates the look—the way Michael narrows his eyes to make her feel dumb. “You’re so lucky to have a husband who doesn’t raise his voice,” her friends say. How to explain, though, that a few fights would be better than all this not fighting, this slow dance toward separate lives lived side by side.
Michael turns the radio up, and Buddy Holly is between them, crooning about a roller coaster and undying love. Anyone would think her husband is relaxed, but Diane recognizes the telltale grind of his jaw. At night, he wears a mouth guard just to keep from chewing through his tongue in his sleep.
“It can’t be five more miles,” Richard says.
“I’m just saying what the guy at the gas station said,” Michael says.
They pass a farmhouse, an apple orchard, a wandering cow.
After sleeping badly, Diane woke to more boats in the bay. She scrambled eggs, made toast, but couldn’t eat. Lisa stayed in bed. Thad and Jake were off to see a friend. “We have to get out of here,” she said, and Michael suggested the falls. So they changed into swimsuits, Richard joined them, and at Diane’s insistence they stopped at CVS for waterproof bandages, at which point Michael and his father began arguing about their destination and how long it took to reach.
“Set the odometer,” Richard says. He’s watching trees go by.
What is he thinking about? Diane wonders. Her father-in-law meditates at wavelengths well beyond them all. The absentminded professor, Lisa calls him, but there’s something gorgeous in the way he’s always lost in thought. Diane doesn’t regret art school, only the quality of instruction she got in everything that wasn’t art. More math and, who knows, maybe she could balance a budget. More geography and maybe she could find Iceland on a map.
“The odometer, Son,” Richard says. “I want to know if it’s five miles or not.”
Michael does as he’s asked. Of course, it’s been a mile since the gas station. This will launch an argument when they arrive, so they’ll have to clock the mileage going back. But this is the way of families—the inconsequential elevated to the imperative. Bring three couples together for a week under one roof, and everything is code for something else.
Michael drinks from his mug and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes say, Can you believe my dad? Richard leans across the backseat. In the rearview, his eyes say, Don’t worry, I know you’re on my side.
She shuts her eyes. For the next one to four miles, she’ll pretend to be asleep.
These men with their loud emotions, their quiet power grabs. Some days, she imag
ines a life without men, just her and her daughter on a blanket in a field of poppies and cardinals and bright blue sky. Even the flowers, in this dream, have had their stamens plucked. Diane and her daughter. Then again, who says the child won’t be a boy?
The car slows, and she opens her eyes. Vehicles clog the roadside. No sign or gravel lot, just grass trammeled by a half century of tire tread on sunny days. Michael steers the car onto the shoulder, parks, then pulls the key from the ignition.
Outside the car, the day is hot, air heavy with last night’s rain, and she moves through soupy, sun-bleached sky. Beyond the tree line, a gentle echo, water cascading into other water.
Two shaggy-haired boys emerge from the woods. One boy raises a hand for the other to high-five. “Bust yo’ ass falls!” he says. The other slaps his hand so hard, the first boy staggers. Meanwhile, Michael and Richard lean against the car, arguing over mileage and who said what. From a distance, Michael’s forehead looks coraled—bulbous and purpled in some otherworldly, underwater way.
“Gentlemen,” she calls. She will not be their referee.
Michael steps away from the car, and his father follows. They wear towels around their necks, ceremonial as stoles. They fall into step—same height, same stride—Michael and the man he will be forty years from now.
Beyond the high-fiving boys and past the trees, a trail leads them through the woods. She remembers the way. After all, Michael’s not the only one who grew up here. While her parents may not have had the money for a summer home, they had friends who let them visit every year.
She was eighteen the summer she and Michael met, back when she wore a two-piece and Michael’s abs still showed. He was funny and smart, and she liked the way one front tooth overlapped the other just a bit. He was tall and gangly, big-eared, like a friendly rabbit, and his eyes were kind. Plus he was surprisingly big below the belt, which shouldn’t have been a big deal, though she couldn’t help feeling shyly proud of this.
The trail bends, and pine trees beckon, needles silvered by sunlight, trunks ambered with sap. The falls grow louder, the tumble of water over rocks and the splash of bodies, airborne, touching down. Voices rise, river to woods and woods to sky. Then they’re around the bend, the river a ribbon, the water wide. The footpath forks, a choice: Follow the river downstream, or take the trail to the top of the falls.
All is as she left it. She’s not sure why she worried things would change. A river needs no tending. A river need only not be polluted, dammed, or cut off at the source. This river has been here millennia and will be here millennia more.
Yips, a yodel, and a boy is riding down the falls. The falls don’t fall, exactly. They don’t crest a ledge and drop in a postcard-perfect way. Instead, the water rushes down an incline, ski slope–steep, three stories, maybe four. Children slalom the falls on stomachs and backs, laughing, screaming, singing songs. Along the riverbank, the path is gentle. The middle, though, is like a luge. More than once, Diane’s watched a girl slide down and rise without her top.
The falls are tricky too. The water zips and wishbones so that, no matter where you push off, there’s no guarantee you won’t be pinballed to the middle, which is why Diane’s never braved the falls herself.
The boy sliding now is tall, long hair. He slaloms, all ass and holler, down the incline and rodeos into the current below. He surfaces, shakes his mane, then leaves the river, charging up the trail, a whir of pink swim trunks and skinny, hairy legs.
He’s not from here. Men from here wear cutoffs or jean shorts, or drop their pants and swim in underwear. The bills of their caps are frayed, ornamented by a single fishing hook. Their tans are real, their Oakleys fake, and they drink beer from cans that aren’t in paper bags. Plus, around here, men don’t wear pink.
Vacationers are just as easy to spot. They aren’t rich, but they have money, enough to rent summer homes or stay at Blackstone Inn. Their board shorts are plaid or paisley or have Corona emblazoned on the front. They’re clean-cut, shaved faces, shaven chests. Their tans are fake. Their Oakleys are real.
Then again, distinctions are becoming hazier. Hipsters and trustafarians. All that denim. All those PBRs.
Meeting Michael, she took him for a local before learning his parents taught at Cornell. Michael didn’t talk like he had money, which is to say he didn’t speak the way Diane, at eighteen, assumed people with money spoke. He spoke like her. He loved her, and, in time, she loved him back.
In the water, a woman swims with a baby. She blows on the baby’s face, dips her underwater, then, quick, brings her back up. Each time, the baby comes up laughing. The woman brings the baby to her chest, and she clings there, water beading on her cheeks.
Diane turns, but Michael’s already up the trail. “Michael,” she calls.
I love you, she should say. I forgive you the grief you’ve caused me these six weeks. Now, come back, take my hand, and together let’s wade downstream. She should say this, and she won’t. She won’t because what she needs most is to hear these words from him.
Instead, she says, “Watch your head.”
At the top of the trail, Michael pulls off his shirt. He’s still in shape, minus the abs, chest defined, nipples pert as baby peas. She likes the parts of him that stick out, the oversized ears, the bob of Adam’s apple and curl of collarbone. Richard follows Michael up the trail, and Diane removes her shoes and steps into the pool below the falls.
The mother cups water onto her daughter’s head. She sings. The song’s not one Diane knows. There is a verse about a creek, red clay, a sun at the bottom of the sea. The baby coos, and the mother pulls her swimsuit top aside. Then the baby is nursing, and the mother shuts her eyes. Bliss.
Diane knows better than to touch a baby without asking, but the child summons her, seems to send out lassoes of beckoning light from the top of her suckling head. And suddenly Diane’s beside them, suddenly reaching, suddenly touching two fingers to the child’s tender scalp. Fingers to head and head to breast, a current runs up her arm and through her womb, the four of them briefly, magnificently, one.
“How far along are you?” the mother asks, opening her eyes.
Diane’s face must give her away, because the mother puts a hand on her arm and gives a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry. You’re not telling people yet.”
“No,” Diane says. “That’s all right. I just… how?”
Above, boys whoop and taunt the falls.
“You’re not showing,” the woman says. “A mother can just tell. Sometimes. I was wrong last week. That was an uncomfortable Piggly Wiggly checkout line.”
Diane laughs. She wants to hug this stranger. She wants to hold the nursing child. Together, she and this mother could raise their children, free from needy men and the trappings of romantic love. Some members of the animal kingdom must do this, dispense with the males once the deed is done.
Oh, but she’d miss Michael. She would. That charming overlap of teeth. His ability to home in on every ring of keys that she’s misplaced. How, when she cries, he holds her for as long as she needs without ever asking why.
The child has fallen asleep at the mother’s breast, milk running down one cheek. The mother wades to the far shore and lowers herself onto a quilt, the child in her arms. In time, she notices that her breast is exposed and pulls her swimsuit up. She gives Diane a wave, but the wave is not an invitation to join them, and Diane returns to the foot of the waterfall.
Others hike the trail, emerge from the trees, and stand onshore. Overhead, swimmers wait their turn at the top of the falls, Michael and Richard among them.
Earlier, Diane wondered whether they’d have the river to themselves, whether news of the drowning would make visitors wary or keep locals indoors. Except, that’s the thing about death—it reminds you you’re alive. The world spins, and those with lives continue risking them. Had the Starlings not been there, the drowning would feel no more substantial than the front page on which its story, this morning, was printed. What happened on
ly hurts because they saw. But such things happen every day.
Had she spoken to the boy? She hadn’t. Though she can picture his face, his buzz cut and blue eyes.
Diane lets herself slip beneath the surface where the falls give way to underwater roar. She examines her hand. How easily a ring in water might slip off. She spins her wedding band, but she does not tug. She rises, and her husband calls to her, something in his expression that reminds her of a child’s Look at me.
The week they met, she swam here. She watched Michael above, light caught in his hair, light burnishing his legs, light racing with him down the falls. How her stomach hurt that day, her heart gone papery with want. How young they’d been, backs pimpled, skin soft. She knew, watching him ride the falls, she’d sleep with him that night.
But that was fifteen years ago. At thirty-three, Michael has far less hair on his head for light to tangle in, and his legs’ golden hair has turned a wiry black. He crouches, apprehensive at the water’s edge, his godhood all used up.
Sit, she thinks. Sit before you slip and crack your head open again.
A pair of teenagers goes down the falls holding hands, a bikinied girl and bowl cut–headed boy. Halfway down they’re ripped apart, then rejoined at the bottom. In froth and foam, they rise laughing, holding hands again.
Above, Richard joins Michael. He sits, the current parting at his back.
Michael stands. And slips. The seat of his swim trunks hit, and the current carries him. It’s like a stickup, how his hands reach for the sky. Then he’s down the falls and under, Richard close behind. Michael comes up. Richard rises too, and Diane hurries to their sides.
“My ass hurts,” Michael says, rubbing the back of his trunks, his waist. “Like, really hurts.”
“You might have bruised your coccyx,” Richard says.
“You’re not that kind of doctor,” Michael says.
Diane slips a hand down Michael’s shorts, but all she feels is butt.
Lake Life Page 8