Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  And how to explain his feelings for Thad? Jake never asked to love one man, but he does. He does, and what now? What can he do?

  Like me. Fuck me. Love me.

  Maybe Marco’s the same way. Maybe Thad. Everyone on planet Earth, bursting, desperate to be adored. Maybe Jake’s not special, and maybe it’s this that scares him most of all.

  There are no good words, no way to transmit this, but that’s no matter, because Marco is standing, pulling him from the couch and toward the bedroom down the hall.

  They sit at the end of Marco’s bed. Pillows cover the headboard, more pillows than any two people could ever need. The bed is covered by a quilt, and Jake knows this quilt. Once, drunk, he and Marco argued over whether the quilt’s color was seafoam or green, the kind of argument art school students have when all they have to show for all the work they’ve done, so far in life, are their opinions and inflexibility.

  Jake runs a hand over the quilt. The stitching swirls and loops, rising through the cloth like Morse code.

  “My grandmother made it,” Marco says.

  “From Puerto Rico,” Jake says. “I remember.” I still love you, he might as well have said.

  A wet, slapping sound works its way into the room from down the hall, and Marco stands and shuts the door. He moves to the bathroom, and when he returns, his shirt is off. His stomach ripples, abdominal muscles pronounced as tire tracks in mud. In one hand, he holds the blue North Carolina mug. The other hand, palm up, holds a blue pill.

  Jake takes the mug, the pill. He swallows, drinks.

  He grips the quilt and watches his crotch.

  Marco laughs and joins him on the bed. “This isn’t ‘The Incredible Hulk.’ It takes some time.”

  “Is this even safe? Mixing Viagra with cocaine?” Jake listens for sex sounds, but the closed door does its job.

  “My last boyfriend did it all the time,” Marco says.

  Boyfriend. Jake doesn’t know how to ask tactfully, so he just asks. “Amelia. What’s the story there?”

  Marco shrugs. “She gives good head.”

  Jake must look bewildered, because suddenly Marco’s gripping his shoulder, shaking him too hard.

  “I’m kidding,” Marco says. “Jesus. I don’t know. We clicked. You’re telling me you’ve never clicked with someone who isn’t your type?”

  “Sure,” Jake says, “but they were guys.”

  “I still like guys, but I like her too. She’s sexy, and she loves talking art.”

  Jake wants to say that the only people talking art in New York aren’t people you want to talk art with. Talkers are buyers, blowhards, students, wannabes. When Jake sees his painter friends, the last thing they talk is art.

  “Amelia reminds me of you, actually,” Marco says. “Not you, but you. You before success went to your head.” He runs two fingers down Jake’s arm. “I loved you, you know.”

  Jake wants to feel something, but the words sound calculated, rehearsed, and he can’t say whether they’re meant as a kindness or a cruelty.

  “So, you and Amelia, you’re what?”

  “It is what it is,” Marco says. “We don’t like putting labels on it.”

  Which makes Jake laugh. How many times has he heard this line from married men trying to get him into bed?

  “We have fun,” Marco says. “That’s all.”

  And is that all Jake is to Marco, fun?

  “Did you really love me?” Jake asks. It’s easier than asking: Do you love me now?

  Marco lets go of a sigh he may well have been holding in for years.

  “Who knows, Jacob?” he says, and that extra syllable is a hatchet in Jake’s heart.

  The quilt bunches in his hands. More than sex, right now Jake wants to be alone. The cocaine, while it’s quickened his heartrate, has slowed his thinking. Or else it’s the blue pill rerouting blood from his brain. He needs to think, but his mind isn’t working right.

  “I wasn’t jealous,” Marco says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Marco rises. He wanders the room. “When Frank took you on, when all those paintings sold, you said I was jealous. But I wasn’t jealous. I was happy for you. That isn’t why I left.”

  Jake wants to know. He doesn’t want to know. “Why did you leave?”

  “Because, Jacob, you were fucking everyone. Every time was the last time. Every time you said you wouldn’t do it again.”

  “There weren’t that many,” Jake says.

  “Spencer,” Marco says. “Roger.”

  “I never had sex with Roger,” Jake says. He’s sure he didn’t. He’s almost sure.

  “Clifton. Alan. Ned. Demetrius.”

  “Okay.”

  “That guy at Heather’s opening,” Marco says. “He had a septum ring. A septum ring.”

  “I loved you,” Jake says.

  Marco returns to the foot of the bed. He kneels.

  “I believe you believe that,” Marco says. “But here’s the thing. You don’t know what love is. There’s something wrong with you. Something’s broken. You don’t love anyone. Because you can’t.”

  Marco pulls off Jake’s pants, pulls down his underwear, and Jake, in spite of himself, sees that the blue pill’s worked.

  There’s so much he wants to say, but Marco shushes him.

  “No more talking,” Marco says. “Let me do the thing you came here for me to do.”

  17.

  In the kitchen, carrots, chopped for soup, clutter a cutting board. On the stove, a pot of water sits, unboiled. On the counter, a pyramid of bouillon cubes, a wooden spoon, an onion snug in its golden skin. Diane unstacks the cubes, stacks them again.

  She knows better than to knock. What’s happening in the bathroom is not her business. But even from the kitchen she can hear her mother-in-law crying. Diane goes to the door. She knocks.

  Either Lisa can’t hear over the running water, or Diane is being ignored. She knocks again.

  She gets it. She’s a private person too. But even a private person shouldn’t be left alone, crying, for an hour in the tub. Lisa needs to know she’s not alone, and if Richard won’t be a husband today, Diane will do her best to be a daughter.

  She tries the door, and it’s unlocked.

  “Lisa,” she calls, “I’m coming in.”

  Inside, the bathroom is condensation and fog. The sink’s brass knobs are dewed. Even the toilet tank is slick with sweat. Four bulbs are meant to light the mirror above the sink, but two are burnt out, giving the room the feel of dusk, the calm after a day’s rain. Somewhere behind a perspiring shower curtain, Lisa bathes.

  Diane’s skin pinks. Her sleeves, in the humidity, grip her arms. The water shuts off.

  “Hello?” Lisa says.

  “It’s me,” Diane says. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just having a day at the spa. Steam’s good for the pores.”

  Diane nods, but the shower curtain isn’t giving her much to work with. She pulls a towel from the bar, drapes it over the damp toilet lid, and sits. Beside her, a gap between the curtain and the wall reveals Lisa’s feet and, above them, the polished silver of the bathtub faucet. The silver is at odds with the sink’s brass, something Diane loves about this place, the house a mishmash, each broken part swapped out, over time, so that nothing matches because nothing needs to match. This is not a place for suppering with colleagues or entertaining guests. This is a summer home, a place for family. The bathroom fixtures clash, but there’s a harmony in the discord.

  Lisa’s toes retreat into the water. The faucet drips.

  Diane wants very much to say something, anything, but she has the strong impression that it’s not her turn to talk.

  “That boy,” Lisa says. “That family.”

  Her foot leaves the water, and the toes, prehensile, grip the knob marked H. The foot retreats as the water rushes, steam spilling past the curtain into the room. There must be something in the tub, salts or bubble bath, because there is an aroma of fresh-cut flo
wers, eucalyptus, mint. The toes return, and the water is cut off.

  They’re quiet after that, the only sounds the faucet’s drip and Lisa’s ragged, tear-filled breathing.

  “Can I get you anything?” Diane asks. “Is there—”

  “I lost one too,” Lisa says. The curtain ripples, its far end pushed aside so that Diane can take in Lisa’s face, the puffy eyes and tear-tracked cheeks. “We had a daughter. Her name was June. She lived a month. This summer, she’d be thirty-five.”

  Diane wants to go to her, to hug her, but the nakedness, the tub, makes it impossible.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “Michael never told me.”

  “Michael doesn’t know.”

  Surely Diane’s heard wrong. This secret, it’s not the kind you keep thirty-five years, then tell your daughter-in-law from the tub.

  “We never told the boys,” Lisa says. Her hands cup water, which she splashes on her face. “You’re wondering why we didn’t tell them. You’re wondering why I’m telling you.”

  Diane is dizzy. She’s sweating, the room too hot, the air too thick to breathe.

  “Richard wanted to tell the boys,” Lisa says, “but we couldn’t agree on an age. You can’t tell a toddler he had a sister that he’ll never see. You can’t tell a child that children die. You can, of course, but it’s a risk, developmentally, emotionally. The age of seven, then. That was our agreement, based on what we read. Except, when Michael turned seven, Thad was four, and we didn’t trust Michael not to tell. When Thad was seven, Michael was ten, and we worried we’d waited too long. The more we worried, the longer we waited, until telling the boys felt like something we’d be doing for ourselves more than for them. If there were any risk they’d find out some other way, we’d have said something. But June was born in Georgia, and Georgia’s where she died. In New York, no one knew. Which is how we wanted it when we left those lives behind.”

  Diane’s nose runs in the steam, but she’s afraid to lift a finger, afraid to break the spell. She’s never doubted Lisa loves her, in the obligatory way that mothers love the wives and husbands of their sons, but she and Lisa have never been particularly close. This disclosure, though, it feels like love.

  “There’s no name for it, you know,” Lisa says. “We have words for all the rest: orphan, widow, widower. But no name for the parent of a child who goes first.”

  Diane pulls toilet paper from the roll. She dries her eyes, her nose. She’s always been a person you can’t cry in front of without her joining in.

  “Should we have told the boys?” Lisa says. “I don’t know. Should we tell them now? Who can say? Which is more selfish, telling them when it will only make them sad, or holding back the truth because you can’t bear reliving it again?”

  “There’s no good choice,” Diane says.

  “Precisely. No good choice. No right way. People say, Work the steps, grieve in this order for this much time, but no one gets to say. No one gets to tell you how to grieve.”

  Lisa ladles more water onto her face. The steam has thinned.

  “I don’t want my sons feeling sorry for me. I don’t want them to look and see Mom who lost a child. I want them to look and see Mom. In Georgia, for a year, everywhere I went, people asked what happened, asked if I was okay. The grieving mother, that was me. Do you know what that’s like, being defined by one thing?”

  “No,” Diane says, though she does.

  At restaurants or walking the neighborhood, Diane sees students, students and the parents of students, or those who were her students once upon a time. To them, she is not Diane. She is Mrs. Maddox, elementary school art teacher. To them, she is pinch pots and papier-mâché and finger paints. She is bathroom passes and tardy slips. Even among her colleagues, she is the art teacher, which makes her lunch monitor, bus duty coordinator, the one whose room unruly children are sent to for time-out. Each person, every aspect of her job, is a reminder that she lives in Texas, not New York, that she is defined by the dream she gave up long ago.

  “Sympathy is exhausting,” Lisa says. “I know that sounds terrible, but there are days you’d rather pretend you’re fine, rather everyone pretend around you too. It’s not fair to ask that of others, I know. And who knows if it’s healthy? Who knows what healthy even is. I watch these shows, in waiting rooms, in airports—daytime TV—and these people, they feel compelled to say what they feel, everything they feel. To strangers. On national television. You can’t convince me that’s healthy.”

  A curl of hair, steam-spun, falls over Lisa’s eyes, and she pushes the hair from her face.

  “Sometimes I imagine June isn’t my daughter, more an old friend I haven’t seen in a while. Last I heard, she was in Madagascar studying lemurs. She likes mangoes and dry-roasted cashews, and her favorite color’s something odd—chartreuse. I should call her, I’ll think. Then my heart breaks because, for a minute there, I let myself forget. And that forgetting is a failure. To lose a child is to spend the rest of your life failing the child you’ve already lost.”

  More toilet paper. More tears. Through the hand towel, Diane feels the seat of her pants wet from the toilet’s damp. She watches Lisa. Lisa watches her. And it’s as though a tether, noosed at either end, binds both their hearts. From the tether, the ghosts of children dangle alongside children not yet born, bodies hauling themselves hand over hand.

  “That boy’s mother,” Lisa says. “She’ll never forgive herself. She’ll never understand it’s not her fault.”

  Diane’s feet leave the floor. Her knees find her chin, then she’s balled up tight on the toilet lid.

  The list of things she’ll do for Michael is long. But there’s something she can’t do. Yes, they had an understanding when they married. Yes, she promised. But she’s a human being, and human beings are allowed to change their minds.

  No one is taking this child from her. No one.

  And though this room, and the hurt in it, belongs to Lisa, Diane can’t keep quiet anymore. She has to speak.

  “I’m pregnant,” she says, and Lisa beams.

  A new kind of crying fills the room.

  “There’s more,” Diane says.

  The rest will be hard for Lisa to hear. Her son’s feelings. Michael’s suggestion that they call the baby off. Still, Diane confesses everything.

  And watches Lisa’s face fall.

  18.

  Fuck Jake.

  They’re done. As far as Thad’s concerned, they’re finished.

  “Sweetie,” Jake says.

  Thad didn’t speak on the car ride back from Asheville, and he doesn’t speak now.

  “If anyone should be mad, it’s me,” Jake says. “You’re the one who fucked them both.”

  Thad regrets his revenge, petty and mean. To be inside a woman. Consensual, yes, but he used Amelia, used her body to get back at Jake.

  He regrets the look on Jake’s face entering the room. Regrets how they locked eyes, Thad behind Amelia on the couch, then pulling out, tearing off the condom, and grabbing himself, four quick bursts from his fist, and Jake the first to look away. Regrets how Marco joined him on the couch, how Thad let himself be fondled, kissed. How Thad kissed back.

  Which, for Jake, must have been worse than watching him with Amelia. The feelings Jake no doubt still has for Marco. Surely, this was the worst thing Thad could do. And he did it. And, all the while, no one beckoned Jake to join.

  We’re through, Thad wants to say, but dinner is soon and everyone is home. He’d rather sulk than start a shouting match.

  “Just talk to me,” Jake says. “Please.” He’s begging, which is not a thing Jake does.

  The bedroom walls press in, claustrophobic in their 1970’s faux wood paneling.

  “I can’t believe you made me wear this,” Thad says, pulling off the JCPenney shirt. He heads to the bathroom to change pants. He doesn’t want Jake seeing him right now.

  Changed, he finds Jake in bed pretending to sleep. Jake’s laptop lies beside him on Thad’s p
illow. The laptop is shut. Thad sits on the bed and rests the computer, still warm, on his lap. He pulls Jake’s pillow from beneath his head and throws it to the floor.

  “I was sleeping,” Jake says.

  “If I open this laptop, am I going to find porn?”

  Jake has no reply, and Thad opens the laptop. Jake sits up, and the bedsheet falls to his waist. He’s shirtless.

  “What’s your password?” Thad says.

  Jake smooths the sheet across his lap.

  “I will smash this laptop to pieces, I swear to God.”

  “Your birthday,” Jake says, which gives Thad pause. If he weren’t so mad, the moment would be sweet.

  He types the date. The screen goes black, then bright, then there is a naked man. The picture is blurry, a selfie snapped on someone’s phone. Thad drags the cursor to Search History, and it’s what he expected. Hundreds of sites. Thousands. Nothing illegal or underage, from what he can tell in the minutes he spends scrolling. Still: So. Much. Porn.

  “You have a problem,” Thad says.

  Jake stands. He fishes his shirt from beneath the covers and pulls it on. “I’m a healthy American male.”

  “This isn’t healthy.”

  “I’m twenty-six years old,” Jake says. “It’s normal.”

  “This isn’t normal. It’s too much. You know these are time-stamped, right? That you can see how long you spent on every site?”

  Jake cracks the blinds with two fingers and watches the yard.

  “Jake, this is hours every day. This doesn’t even look like fun. This looks like a compulsion.”

  Thad scrolls, tabulating time stamps. These aren’t just furtive searches when Thad’s left the building or gone to bed. They’re off and on all day, most days, especially midday when Jake’s in his studio. Which is when Thad realizes the reason he hasn’t seen a canvas leave that room in months.