Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  “Did you hit your head?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to go back to the hospital?”

  “Never.”

  The bandage she applied to his forehead in the CVS parking lot is still in place. Through the little plastic viewfinder, the stitches advertise themselves as dry.

  “It’s looking better,” she says.

  The wound does not look better. It looks like torn flesh shoelaced shut. The scar will be ugly.

  “I’m sorry about your coccyx,” she says, but her husband doesn’t laugh. He’s talking to his father.

  “I can’t believe you actually went down,” Michael says.

  He doesn’t know. How, when he fell, his father was behind him, reaching for his son. How his father chased him, reaching, the whole way.

  They walk the river’s shallows and swim its depths. They let the current carry them a mile to where the water yawns into another pool. Fewer people know this spot than know the falls, making this a sanctuary for locals. More beer coolers, fewer clothes. A dozen people splash and swim. On the riverbank, a boy of one or two makes naked circles chasing a lizard with a stick.

  From the water, a carved stairway of rock ascends to a fist of stone a story high. Men and women dive from the boulder. They belly flop, can opener, and all the other tricks. In every way, the jump is safer than the falls. The water’s deep, and there’s room enough for just one jumper at a time. It isn’t far to fall, though from the top, the edge feels awfully high. Her first trip here, Diane leapt. She hasn’t found the courage to leap again.

  “Michael,” she says, but already he’s at the stairs, in line behind a boy in yellow boxers, a smiley face plastered on the back.

  Onshore, a man in cutoff jeans, Michelob in hand, squats on a slab of river rock. Crushed cans litter the ground at his feet. He’s the father of the naked lizard chaser, Diane is guessing, as well as the yellow-boxered boy.

  Richard moves to her side. He’s so tall, the water hits his waist while she’s chest-deep. Her father-in-law is pale, but fit, well-groomed, no earholes clogged with hair. She’d be pleased if Michael looked like Richard at his age, assuming she and Michael are together forty years from now, which, given the circumstances, might be assuming too much.

  “Is he okay?” Richard asks.

  A girl jumps, followed by her father. Michael’s almost reached the top of the stone staircase.

  He’s not, Diane wants to say. He hasn’t been himself for years. But all she says is, “I’m not sure.”

  On the bank, the lizard’s gotten away, and the boy’s on hands and knees, turning over stones.

  “You two don’t have to stay,” Richard says. “I know Lisa wants you here, but that’s not as important as you kids taking care of yourselves.”

  “No,” Diane says. “I want to stay.”

  She didn’t last night. Today she does. She wants to see Christopher, North Carolina, one last time—the river, the falls, the lake, the land, the town. She wants to paint a sunset on the dock. She’s no Jake. Still, she loves making art. And she’d like to make peace with Michael. If that’s meant to happen anywhere, it’s here.

  A cry. The lizard lost, the child screams and runs to his father. The man takes a long pull from his Michelob, lays a hand on the child’s head, and at his touch, the screaming stops. The boy drops, cross-legged, onto the rock beside his father, then pulls at himself, inspecting his foreskin with a level of intensity typically reserved for police procedurals on TV.

  “You think one day you two might want one of those?” Richard asks.

  It’s a question women her age are used to being asked. Why no kids? Will you have kids? When will you have kids? Friends and colleagues, strangers, Diane’s mom. Diane’s never understood it, this need to know who’s breeding, and, if not, why? Coming from Richard, though, the question’s a surprise. Of all the people in her life, Richard is the most private. His standards of decorum belong to another generation, and if they seem at times old-fashioned, at times fussy, Diane finds them admirable too. He’s not a man who asks a woman whether she wants kids, and momentarily she wonders whether Michael’s told.

  Her hand, underwater, finds her waist. At ten weeks, what’s inside her is an inch long. She looked it up. There are toes and fingers, fingernails and hair.

  “We’ll see,” she says.

  The boy in yellow boxers jumps, splashes down, and comes up spitting water. The man on the riverbank whistles, and the toddler halts his self-examination to watch his brother swim to shore.

  “Terrible about yesterday,” Richard says.

  He looks away, and a revelation settles on Diane’s shoulders like snow. This quiet, private man needs someone to talk to. Well, who says she can’t be that person? She can talk to him. But she doesn’t want to talk about the boy.

  “I know Michael’s mad about the house, but I understand your position,” she says, unsure what makes her say it. She feels like a traitor, not taking her husband’s side. Plus, she doesn’t understand the reason for the sale. She has a habit of saying what she thinks others want to hear. She knows this about herself, and it worries her. Is she desperate to be loved, or just like everybody else?

  “Thank you,” Richard says, “but I’m not sure Michael will forgive me.”

  “It was a surprise, that’s all. Michael will adjust.”

  Michael won’t adjust. Her husband can hold a grudge better than anyone she knows.

  Onshore, the father stands. He finishes his beer in one gulp and pulls something from his pocket. The something turns out to be a plastic shopping bag that he shakes open and fills with the beer cans at his feet.

  Diane’s not used to long conversations with her father-in-law. What do mathematical physicists talk about?

  “That multiverse stuff you study,” she says. “You once said every combination of things that could happen is happening all at once.”

  “That’s just a theory,” Richard says. “I’m skeptical.”

  True or not, it’s an idea Diane likes and thinks about a lot. On bad days she consoles herself that, somewhere, she is happy. Somewhere, there’s no debt and Michael’s always kind. Somewhere, they have a baby, and she never doubts her husband’s love.

  Overhead, Michael has summited the rock. He stands on one foot, crane kick–style, arms up. He’s looking for a laugh, and she gives it to him.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Richard says. “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m all right,” she says. “I just got cold.”

  She’s more than cold. She’s sad. Also hopeful, excited, enraptured, scared. She’s going to be a mother. With or without Michael, she’ll bring new life into the world.

  “Cannonball!” her husband cries.

  A windmill of limbs, and Michael’s in the air.

  Diane cradles the promise of her abdomen.

  Chin to knees and knees to chest, Michael grasps his ankles. For a second he seems to levitate. Then, like the iron projectile for which the dive is named, her husband falls.

  14.

  Antoine’s is one of a dozen buildings squeezed onto a busy, parking-metered Asheville block. The storefronts rise from the sidewalk, competitive in their pastels. A cigar store. A delicatessen. Restaurants with sidewalk chalkboards advertising lunch specials and signature drinks. Of all the restaurants, Antoine’s is the scrappiest. Its peach topcoat flakes, teal swatches peeking out from underneath.

  Thad pictures a younger crowd, arms graffitied, earlobes gauged, but, inside, the clientele is suit and tie. This is not a place for tattoos. This is a place for working lunches and company credit cards.

  Jake wears the black crushed velvet blazer he wears to gallery openings and dinners with buyers. The coat is loud. It’s garish, the kind of coat a gay boy dreams of, the dream outgrown following his first trip to John Varvatos, or slipping on his first Brooks Brothers suit. Somehow, Jake never outgrew the dream.

  Thad brought no clothes for the occasion, and, an hou
r earlier, outside Asheville, Jake steered their rental into a JCPenney parking lot. “We need to look nice,” Jake said—we is the word he uses when he means Thad.

  Inside the department store, Jake pulled khaki pants and a gray blazer off the rack. Thad tried them on. The blazer was wooly and thick. The pants had pleats.

  “I look like a pallbearer,” Thad said.

  “You look fine,” Jake said, then went back to studying his phone. All morning there’d been dings and beeps, texts about when and where to meet.

  At the register, the clerk presented scissors, and Jake cut the tags off Thad. Thad’s sneakers didn’t match, but there was no time. Jake cared about appearances, but he cared more about punctuality.

  Now Jake strides through the restaurant, shoes polished, cuff links flashing, hair gelled, and Thad can’t say whether Jake meant to dress him up or make him look so lackluster, so drab by comparison, that Marco’s eyes would never stray from Jake.

  A hostess leads them to a door that opens to a courtyard. Outside, the day is hot, and there are no umbrellas, only an ivy-laced trellis overhead. A couple sits at one table, the girl tall and pale and thin, the man Latino, red shirt, dark hair. The man stands. “Jacob!” he says. The girl does not stand, but she’s so tall, her posture so fine, that it’s as if she stands already.

  Like Thad, Jake seems surprised to see the girl. There’s a hitch in his step, then Jake’s in Marco’s arms. With Jake, long hugs mean nothing, but this is not a long hug, which means everything: restraint in the brevity, premeditation in the pulling away. Marco’s hand finds Jake’s lapel, and his thumb runs its length.

  “This old thing,” Marco says.

  “Frank makes me wear it,” Jake says.

  In reality, Frank’s tried to talk Jake out of the velvet coat for years. But the lie is clever, a dodge and name-drop in one. Jake has confirmed his place in the art world along with his obligatory contempt for it. Near as Thad can tell, this is the goal of all of Jake’s painter friends, to make it big enough to be able to disparage everything they used to want.

  “How is old Frank?” Marco asks.

  “Frank’s fine,” Jake says. “This is Thad.”

  Marco takes his hand, and Thad understands the appeal of this man. His touch is soft. His jaw is strong. His hair’s slicked back, shirt open at the collar, chest waxed. His sleeves strain to hold the muscles in. He’s a specimen every bit as impressive as Thad had been prepared to expect, except in one crucial way. The man who stands before him is a J.Crew model—clean-cut, corporate, safe. Whatever element of danger, of excitement, made Marco an art school idol, that element’s long gone. Though for Jake, perhaps he’ll always be young Marco the way that Jake will always be the shy boy in the black blazer for Thad.

  Thad met Jake on an April evening two years ago. The night was cold, rain imminent. Thad trudged through Chelsea. He was low on money, exhausted, out of weed. His destination was a poetry open mic where he might find a joint or someone to spend the night with, preferably both. He had a month left on his lease, then it was back to Ithaca. Better to admit defeat and return home than starve. Then, through a wide gallery window, Thad saw him, a boy of twenty-four afloat in a sea of suits. The boy wore a velvet coat, a rose pinned to the lapel. His hair was wild. His eyes were wide. Where the boy moved, the crowd parted, and Thad realized that these people, all of them, were here for him. Who was this boy, and why was he beloved? Then it was raining, and Thad stepped inside to find out.

  Marco shakes Thad’s hand for too long.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Marco says, and Thad nods. He doesn’t like this guy.

  The girl at the table does not get up. Her dress is short and black. Her legs are crossed.

  “My girlfriend,” Marco says, “Amelia,” and suddenly Thad likes Marco very much.

  Jake looks to Amelia, then Marco. Thad sees he’s shocked, but Jake remains composed.

  They sit. The table holds four place settings and a pitcher of what must be margaritas. The pitcher glistens, a lemon halved and floating in the drink, and Amelia pours them each a glass. Thad’s drink reaches the rim, and a rivulet escapes and streaks the side.

  “Sorry,” Amelia says, and there’s something flirtatious in the way she reaches over him to dab his glass with her napkin, in the way her eyes settle on him.

  In high school, Thad was with two girls. He left one girl crying, one bemused. “I think I love you,” the first girl said. The second said, “I think you might be gay.”

  Amelia looks young enough to be one of those girls, too young to be dating Marco. She lifts her glass to her mouth and sips.

  Across from him, Jake talks and talks. Thad sits between Marco and Amelia so that Jake shouldn’t be able to turn his head without Thad interrupting his field of vision, but Jake finds a way, the table lengthening to a galaxy’s inky gulf. In the car, they agreed that if Thad grew uncomfortable, they’d leave, but how to communicate this when he can’t even enter his boyfriend’s line of sight?

  Finally, it’s Marco who cuts Jake off. “Thad, what do you do?”

  There’s honeysuckle in the air, and Thad feels a sneeze coming. North Carolina always makes him sneeze.

  “Oh, Thad doesn’t paint,” Jake says.

  “It’s okay,” Amelia says, a hand on Thad’s shoulder. “I don’t paint either.”

  A parade of bracelets encircles her arm. A character marks her wrist, another language’s word for love or peace, or feces, because tattoo artists have a sense of humor, too. Thad’s glad that, at her age, there was nothing he believed in badly enough to have it engraved on his skin. Perhaps in time he’ll find something, someone, he loves enough to earn his flesh. Some days, he thinks that someone might be Jake. But not today.

  He sneezes.

  “Bless you,” Amelia says.

  “Thank you,” he says. He drinks, and the margarita is potent, a lime squeezed between his teeth. Amelia’s hand leaves his shoulder.

  “C’mon, mystery man,” Marco says. “What do you do?”

  Marco turns from Jake. His torso swivels, legs apart, the kind of body language that assures you of a person’s full attention. Having that attention entirely, nothing feigned, Thad feels the ache of just how long it’s been since he felt seen.

  “Thad’s writing a book,” Jake says, and Thad has Jake’s eyes now. The eyes are big. They beg Thad not to let him down.

  “A book,” Marco says. “Fantastic! What about?”

  “Oh,” Jake says, “he won’t talk about it. It’s a process thing. A little pretentious, I know, but—”

  “Birds,” Thad says, thinking of his mother’s book. He tried to read it once, but the book’s no introduction to birding. It’s a text for ornithologists, one concerning the subtleties of bird taxonomy—class, order, family—that kind of thing, including an entire chapter on a bird called a wallcreeper and the degree to which it does or does not belong in the nuthatch family. Thad made it three pages before giving up, though as a boy, he often turned to the middle, a color insert on pages glossier than the rest. He liked the bird illustrations, their bright beaks and twiggy legs. He liked the diagrams, how a tail feather or wing was marked with a Roman numeral tied to a sidebar by a dotted line. Some nights, he lay in bed and imagined himself small, a cowboy, lasso in hand. He saddled birds and rode them, dotted lines for reins: Thaddeus, King of the Birds.

  “It’s a book of poems about birds,” he says. It isn’t such a bad idea, really.

  “No way,” Amelia says. “Marco totally paints birds.”

  Everyone turns to Marco for confirmation. Marco shrugs. He brings two fingers to his face and scratches his chin. “It’s true,” he says.

  “Oh my God,” Amelia says. “Marco, you should do the cover!”

  “You should!” Thad says. He’s watching Jake. “I would love for you to do the cover.”

  Jake doesn’t glare, but his tongue bobs in the pocket of his cheek. He smiles weakly.

  “I appreciate that,”
Marco says, “but I’m sure your publisher would want to consider my work first.”

  “No, no, no,” Thad says. “It’s yours. Jake says you’re great, and I trust Jake. In fact, the publisher’s a friend of Jake’s. He’ll put you two in touch.”

  If Jake were a cartoon, his face would be freshly frying-panned.

  “Well,” Marco says, “I guess lunch is on me.” He leans forward, elbows on the table. His eyes are bright, teeth big as Chiclets. Where Marco’s muscled, Thad is mostly fat. Where Thad’s chest dimples at the center, Marco’s pecs bulge.

  “This book of yours,” Marco says. “Does it have a name?”

  “Birds of a Feather,” Thad says. It’s the worst title he can think of. Still, Marco and Amelia smile. Then Amelia’s hand is on his shoulder, accompanied by a flourish of bracelet clicks. He doesn’t mind the touch, but he’s uncomfortable not knowing what it means.

  A server arrives, and at Marco’s insistence, everyone but Amelia orders swordfish.

  “I have a thing,” she says, ordering chicken.

  “She won’t eat anything that swims,” Marco says.

  A pair of men in suits take a table nearby. They hang their coats on their chairs and loosen their ties. They sit and light cigarettes.

  Soon, the server reappears with four Caesar salads.

  Amelia pushes a forkful of lettuce into her mouth, and Thad wonders whether she knows about Caesars—the dressing, all those anchovies. He wants to warn her but doesn’t want to make a scene. He eats his salad. He drinks his drink. The closer he gets to the bottom of the glass, the stronger the margarita gets. When he sets his glass down, Amelia is quick to refill it.

  “So, what do you do?” he asks.

  Amelia holds up a finger. She chews. She wears no makeup, no lipstick in danger of smearing when she touches her napkin to her mouth. She folds the napkin and returns it to her lap. Her table manners are impeccable.

  “I’m in school,” she says. “Western Carolina, but I might transfer to NC State, depending on what major I pick.”

  “Thad studied English,” Jake says. “At Cornell.” He doesn’t mention that Thad dropped out after sophomore year.