Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  “We promised each other we wouldn’t… we didn’t want—” Michael waves a hand, and his travel mug tumbles to the ground. He uncrosses his legs and retrieves the mug. He sips. He’s slouching now, feet in the grass.

  Richard sits up straighter. “I know it feels like the end, but it doesn’t have to be.”

  “I love Diane, but— I really shouldn’t talk about this.”

  “It’s okay,” Richard says. He is ashamed, but he can say it. They are men of the same mistake. Michael will understand. “I had an affair too.”

  Michael’s head turns in his direction, but slow. It’s as though the head has been severed and centered on a lazy Susan, the tray turned a quarter-revolution at a speed designed to maximize the agony of the father coming face-to-face with the disapproving son.

  Richard has miscalculated, grossly.

  “Too?” Michael says. “You cheated on Mom?”

  “There was a woman—”

  “Oh my God.”

  “—another professor.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “And you thought I—”

  “Michael,” Richard says, “please lower your voice.”

  Michael puts down the mug and grips his knees. His head drops. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear it, and I definitely don’t want to know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Richard says. “I thought—”

  “You thought I’d fuck around on my wife? I wouldn’t do that, Dad. I’m not that man.” Michael’s head lifts to search his father’s face. “How are you that man?”

  His boy thinks he’s better than him. His boy with a mug full of moonshine and a mountain of debt thinks he’s better than the father who made one mistake.

  Michael runs a hand over the stone wall. A rock is loose, and he pushes on it.

  “Does Mom know?”

  “Some days, I think she knows, though I’m not sure how she could.”

  Richard searches the windows of the house above, but no sign of Lisa. He should have gone to her. He should be up there with his wife.

  “I wish you hadn’t told me,” Michael says. He has the stone in both hands now. He pushes on it, hard, and Richard remembers the weeks he spent assembling this wall. But what does it matter, really? The wall may well be razed next week.

  “First Thad,” Michael says. “Now you.”

  “Thad?” Richard says.

  “Thad and Jake are open.”

  “Open?”

  “Open. As in fucking other dudes.”

  “Oh,” Richard says. “Thad told you that?”

  He’s not naive. Over a generation separates him from his sons, and younger people do things differently. He’d just always pegged Thad as the old-fashioned type.

  Michael lets go of the stone. The mortar has chipped and crumbled, and he brushes dust and pebbles to the ground.

  “Did Thad tell you this in confidence?”

  Michael nods, and Richard shakes his head.

  “You shouldn’t have told me,” Richard says.

  “You shouldn’t have told me you had an affair.”

  “That’s different,” Richard says, careful not to raise his voice. “That was my secret to tell. You owe it to your brother to respect his privacy.”

  “And you owe it to Mom not to fuck other women.”

  Woman, Richard wants to say, but what’s the use? Michael is determined to attack anything he says.

  A rattle turns both of their heads. In the bay, the men on the boat work the giant chain. The hook breaks the surface and comes up clean.

  “Be a better brother,” Richard says. “Also, Diane loves you. My advice? Whatever’s gotten into you, don’t mess that up. You don’t have much, but you have her.”

  Richard dismounts the wall. He presents the last horseshoe to Michael. No more words, just this. The horseshoe waits in his hand. One more word, then: “Throw.”

  Then the horseshoe’s out of his hand, and Michael’s moving fast. He doesn’t take his time, doesn’t line up the shot at the pinecones. But the throw, when it happens, is even better than the first. The first was the basketball equivalent of a granny shot, up and down and around the stake by the dumbest of luck. This pitch, though, is vigorous, a fiery fuck you.

  The horseshoe, that age-old symbol—U up for luck—cups sunlight in its rusty hoof. It spins. It sails like it will detonate the stake.

  Three points on the line, and both men wait. They wait without breath or blink of eye, wait to see whether what remains will be negated or upheld.

  16.

  In Bushwick, Marco’s apartment would rent for three thousand a month. But this is Asheville. Jake’s guessing Marco pays fifteen hundred, tops. The apartment is white in a way that feels sterile: white carpet, white ceiling, white walls. Not cream. Not eggshell. White. Jake hasn’t seen an apartment with this much carpet in a while and tries to imagine Marco vacuuming. Marco mentions three bedrooms, but, down the hallway, the first two doors are shut, and he doesn’t offer to open them. The third door opens to a tidy bedroom. The room is huge—walk-in closet, king-sized bed.

  “Can I get anyone anything?” Marco says. He’s undone another button, waxed chest aglow. He’s in even better shape than when they were together.

  “I’d drink coffee,” Jake says. He checks his pants. No water stain, but he’s feeling self-conscious. In the bathroom at Antoine’s, he stood beneath the hand dryer until it burned.

  They return to the main room and a pair of couches, plump and white, a glass-top coffee table squeezed between. Jake removes his coat and drapes it on the back of one couch, then sits. Thad joins him, Amelia sits opposite, and Marco moves to the kitchen. Jake can’t help looking at Thad beside him, then Marco in the kitchen. Thad’s not chiseled like Marco, but he’s cute, still boyish, baby-faced. Jake cares about him. He does.

  Thad smiles, making small talk with Amelia. Whatever had him so worked up at lunch seems to have left his system. Jake takes his hand, and Thad lets him take it.

  In the kitchen, Marco makes a show of making coffee, opening and closing numerous silver-handled cabinet doors and filling the counter with coffee bags, a grinder, a French press.

  From her couch, Amelia smiles, long legs buckled beneath her. Jake doesn’t know what to make of her. No way is Marco straight. He’d be surprised were Marco bi. Not his Marco. Not the Marco he knew in art school.

  Amelia asks what brings them to town, and Thad tells her about Lake Christopher, his parents’ place, the visit before the closing on the house. She runs a hand through her hair and tilts her head, eyes so suggestive Jake nearly laughs out loud. Good luck with that.

  “The house is a trailer,” Jake says. Thad releases his hand, and Jake can’t say why he said it. What compels him to act this way? What makes him mean?

  “My parents live in a trailer,” Amelia says. “Lots of people do.”

  Thad sinks into the couch cushions and studies the ceiling. Jake looks up, but there’s nothing there, just the crumbly popcorn finish used by contractors too lazy to hang drywall without leaving seams.

  “That must be tough,” Amelia says to Thad. “Losing the family home.”

  There’s a lull in the conversation before Amelia unfolds her legs and stands.

  “Honey,” she calls to the kitchen, “can we do some coke?”

  “I don’t know,” Marco says. “How do our guests feel about that?”

  “Your guests are quite taken by the idea,” Thad says.

  Jake’s pretty sure Thad’s never done coke, and right then he knows he’s in trouble. Thad hasn’t calmed down. He’s been waiting to strike. He doesn’t want cocaine. He just wants to fuck with Jake.

  “Jake?” Marco says. “You cool with that?”

  “Absolutely,” he says. He’s thinking of PSAs, high school assemblies, videos of eggs sizzling in a pan. Just say no! How much harder to say no in real life, though.

  In the kitchen, a kettle whistles.

&
nbsp; Amelia leaves the room, then returns with a Boggle box. She lifts the lid and dumps the contents onto the coffee table. There’s a plastic segmented tray, an hourglass, a couple dozen dice with letters where the numbers ought to be. If they played, Thad would destroy them all. Words are kind of his thing. But they aren’t here to play.

  Amelia pries the plastic cap from one end of the hourglass and pours half of what’s inside onto the table. With the box top, she shuffles the pile into anthills, the anthills into lines, then runs a finger along the lid and licks her finger clean.

  Jake’s been to parties in every corner of every borough, watched artists snort or smoke or gobble or shoot up just about every drug there is, and never, never, has he seen someone go to all this trouble for some coke. Seriously, who takes the time to fill a Boggle hourglass? Why not keep their drugs in baggies the way respectable recreational users do?

  “Closest to A goes first,” Amelia says.

  Thad plucks a die from the tabletop and rolls a Q.

  And, at last, here’s Marco. He carries a silver serving dish with four teacups, a creamer, and a sugar bowl. The teacups are dainty, brittle-looking. At the tray’s center sits the French press. The plunger is gold, and, where a bulb should be, a skull bares its teeth at them, gemstones for eyes.

  Amelia clears a place on the table, and Marco lowers the tray.

  “Thad rolled a Q,” she says.

  Marco laughs. He sits. He rolls.

  Jake hates this. The only time he did cocaine, his heart beat so fast he thought he’d die, and he’s in no mood to try again. He looks to Thad to bail him out, but Thad’s studying the ceiling once more.

  Jake excuses himself to the bathroom, ducks around the corner, and hurries down the hall. But it’s not a bathroom he’s after. He needs a place to hide, just for a minute, just to calm down before he hits the point that he can’t breathe. Also, he’s feeling nosy.

  Given a thousand guesses, Jake couldn’t have predicted what’s behind door number one. Painters don’t hang their own paintings, let alone set up mini-galleries for themselves, but that’s what the door opens to: a Marco shrine. Filling the walls are all the paintings Marco did in art school that never sold. Jake knows these paintings. The bullfight series. The acrylics of gutted goats. The self-portrait in iodine and blood. The work is brutal, better than Jake remembered, but none of it is new.

  Jake’s favorite is the hardest to look at, the way his favorites often are. It’s from a series Marco began after touring a slaughterhouse. The painting is a collage of dripping snouts, pig ears tattooed or tagged, hooves bound by wire, streaked with blood. Authenticity is hard to fake, and Marco’s old work makes Jake want to see the new. Perhaps there is life after Asheville. Maybe someone in New York would still take Marco on.

  Jake backs out of the room and shuts the door. With no one coming down the hall, he opens the next door and slips inside. This room has a window, good natural light, and he sees that it’s a studio. Canvases crowd the floor, each draped by a pillowcase or else turned toward a wall. Two easels face away from him. He wants to see a canvas, get a look at these birds Marco’s been working on, but he hears a voice and leaves the room.

  He follows the hallway to the bedroom, then steps into the master bath and locks the door. The bathroom is luxurious: double sinks, ten-foot ceiling, a glassed-in shower and a whirlpool tub.

  He sits on the edge of the tub, and it’s back, the feeling that he can’t catch his breath.

  What if Marco’s a better painter than him?

  What if Marco moves back to New York and people like him more, and Jake’s sales slip?

  What if Thad leaves him? Already, on one of those white couches, he’s planning his escape. Soon, Jake will be alone. Then broke. Then homeless. The rats will gnaw his fingers in the night.

  He’s going to throw up. No, he’s going to die. He’s going to die on the floor of his ex-boyfriend’s bathroom while his boyfriend and ex-boyfriend do cocaine. Should make for a nice write-up in the Times.

  At one sink, he splashes water on his face. On the counter, a blue mug features an outline in the shape of North Carolina. A pair of toothbrushes occupy the mug. One toothbrush is new, bristles compact and uniform. The other’s bristles are like the hair of someone waking up. Jake can’t even guess which toothbrush is Marco’s. He’s not sure he knows this man anymore.

  The water helps. He breathes. There’s a hand towel, and he dries his face. There’s a medicine cabinet, and he opens it. He looks for lube, prescription meds—anything Marco might consider private—but he finds only toothpaste, combs and creams, the usual. He finds floss and threads a sliver of swordfish from his teeth.

  He returns to the main room, where the French press has been plunged. Marco and Amelia sip from their teacups. Jake sits and reaches for a cup. On a normal day, he’d take cream and sugar with his coffee, but this is not a normal day. He’s not sure his shaky hands would survive the delicate ballet of sugar and spoon, so he brings the teacup to his lips with two hands and sips the coffee black.

  “Last line is yours,” Marco says.

  Cocaine adorns the tabletop, white and caterpillar-thick. Polite as he can, Jake shakes his head.

  “Oh, c’mon,” Thad says. He moves close, and their thighs touch. On the couch across from them, Amelia is practically in Marco’s lap. Her nose is dusted white.

  A green Starbucks straw lies beside the Boggle box, and the hourglass has tipped over. Jake takes the straw between two fingers, bows his head, and brings the straw to his nose, but something’s changed—a current in the air—and Thad’s face is at his ear.

  “I forgive you,” Thad whispers. “All we have to do is leave right now.”

  Half of Jake wants to turn and embrace the man he loves, to leave this place and go about their lives. The other half, the half that hates ultimatums, hates shame—the half whispering in his other ear that pride is superior to love—steadies his hand, pinches one nostril to the straw, and inhales.

  At first he feels nothing. Then the nothing’s followed by a buzz, electricity coming on inside his head. Sparks, lightning. His brain’s a Tesla coil, current racing down his throat, electrifying his spine. His eyes are bulbs, his lips fluorescent lights.

  He looks for Thad, but Thad is gone. On the other couch, Amelia and Marco kiss, which is hard to watch. The sight of Marco with a woman is unsettling.

  Then Thad’s back. The JCPenney pants Jake bought him this morning are off. His boxers are bright red. He unbuttons his shirt and lets it fall to the floor.

  “This is good?” Marco says. “We’re all good with this?”

  “I’m good,” Thad says.

  “I’m great,” Amelia says.

  This isn’t right. This isn’t what Jake wants.

  Words—someone’s saying his name. Then Marco’s on the couch with him.

  “Let’s do a bump, all right?” Marco says.

  Marco shakes the hourglass, and more cocaine comes out. He doesn’t bother with dice or straws or careful lines. A spoon protrudes from the tea tray’s silver sugar bowl, and Marco removes it. He untucks his shirt from the waistband of his pants, polishes the spoon with one shirttail, does a bump, and passes the spoon to Jake.

  Across the table, Amelia and Thad now share a couch. Amelia’s dress has dropped to her waist, and her bra, if she was wearing one, is nowhere to be seen.

  Her breasts aren’t large so much as long, and Thad lifts them and lets go. They smack her ribs, which looks like it hurts, but Amelia only laughs.

  Unlike Jake, Thad was with girls in high school, so this isn’t a first, but this isn’t like Thad. This is an act designed to torture Jake.

  He doesn’t want more coke—already his heart is hammering away—and he scoops just enough to powder the surface of the spoon. He sniffs. He coughs.

  “It’s the postnasal drip,” Marco says. “Bothers some people more than others.”

  Then Marco’s hands are on him, kneading his shoulders, running the
length of his spine. The hands feel good. They feel… familiar. And when did Jake’s shirt come off? He doesn’t want to watch Thad and Amelia, but he doesn’t want to leave the couch, doesn’t want these hands to stop.

  “Like this,” Amelia is saying. Her breasts are in her hands, then, startlingly, one is in her mouth, a thing Jake didn’t know women could do. Amelia sucks at her nipple for a minute, then lowers the breast, glistening, to her chest. She holds the other breast, and Thad guides his mouth to it. He catches Jake’s eyes. There’s a moment’s hesitation, then the nipple’s in Thad’s mouth.

  Fuck it. Jake taps the hourglass onto the spoon, a mighty bump, and snorts the coke up. And it is good. The cocaine is good. He feels good. His heart is a metronome on high.

  “Slow down there,” Marco says. “That shit’s the shit.” His hands move to Jake’s stomach, his belt.

  Jake considers his boyfriend, but Thad’s mouth is full, his eyes closed on the couch.

  Jake’s belt comes undone, and he lets his eyes shut too. He’s readied himself for weeks, imagining the many ways this day might go. Not one scenario included Amelia or cocaine, but that’s okay. That’s fine. He won’t let those stop him. His pants are down. He’s ready.

  Except, his body won’t respond. Marco’s hands are on him, and he’s limp, which is not a thing that happens, not to Jake.

  “It can be this way with cocaine,” Marco says. “Easy to get horny, hard to get hard. I’ve got Viagra if you need some.”

  Fuck that. Jake’s twenty-six years old. He’s good in bed. He doesn’t need a pill to get him hard.

  A rhythm tap-dances itself into his head, and he traces the tempo to a white clock on the wall. On the other couch, Amelia tugs at Thad’s boxers. Jake unholsters himself from Marco’s grip and zips his pants back up.

  “What’s wrong?” Marco says, voice buttery with a concern Jake wants to believe is real.

  So many things to say, they tangle, Pentecostal, on his tongue.

  How to explain the need to be admired, praised, and the wanting not to need such things so much? How to explain the desire to be seen not as he is but as he wants to be seen?

  How to explain the desperation, paranoia, shame? Such shame! The horniness and the shame for the horniness he feels. The jerk-off sessions several times a day. The three-ways. The four-ways. The times with Thad, and the times Thad doesn’t know about. Men come to him, beautiful men with designer jeans and rock star hair, painters and men who want to be painters and men who will never be painters but just don’t know that yet.