Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “I do want to.”

  “You want to what?”

  “Kiss you,” Miller said.

  “Oh.”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “No. It’s not. But you know, you just said you didn’t.”

  “I do. I want to. I shouldn’t. But I do.”

  “Okay,” Wallace said.

  Miller squinted at him. The apartment was dimly lit by the kitchen light and whatever light came in through the broad living room window that overlooked an alley.

  “That easy, huh?”

  “What can I say, I’m easy.”

  “You’re so bad at jokes,” Miller said, rising from the stool and coming toward him. He blotted out the kitchen light, and so Wallace was completely in his shadow. He could feel the warmth of Miller’s breath on his cheeks. Miller reached up with the tips of his fingers and pressed them to Wallace’s lips, used his thumb to make space between them. Miller was looking down at him intently, not nervous or shy. He had done this before, that much was evident, been in such a position of power, control. Even so, there remained a bit of restraint, an awkwardness. There was a hitching quality to the way he drew his thumb back across Wallace’s lips. Wallace closed his mouth around Miller’s thumb and sucked the salt from its rim slowly, tenderly. “Why are you like this?” Miller asked.

  Wallace did not answer. He pulled on Miller’s shirt and sat more upright so that their bodies touched. Miller standing between his legs, bending just a little, and then, their lips coming into contact, the passing friction of it, the heat, the flicker of dampness. Wallace had been kissed only twice now, but he couldn’t understand why it had taken so long to get to this point of intimacy, which felt so good that he was afraid of losing it.

  Miller kissed him again, and Wallace involuntarily made small mewling sounds, which only encouraged Miller to kiss him more. Wallace felt as if he were being searched for something, as if each kiss, pressed to a different part of his mouth and jaw and cheek, was meant to yield some sort of answer to a question that wasn’t being asked. Miller’s hands were on his hips and then on his sides, going higher and higher until they arrived at his jaw, where they stopped. The sailing had roughened them, made their texture exciting on Wallace’s skin. His kisses tasted like beer and ice, cold and sharp. He bit Wallace’s lip.

  “I’m enjoying this,” Miller said. “More than I thought I would.”

  “That’s nice,” Wallace said. It seemed to be the wrong thing to say because Miller frowned and then went to pull away from him. But Wallace wrapped his legs tightly around Miller’s waist, stilling him. “Hey, where are you off to?”

  “You didn’t seem that into it,” he said. “I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “I’m into it plenty,” Wallace said, and he guided Miller’s hand between his legs, where he was hard. Miller gasped a little, jolted in surprise as if remembering that Wallace was a man like him, but he was not chastened by this. He wrapped his hand around Wallace tightly, maybe a little too tight, and pressed his lips to Wallace’s neck.

  “I don’t—I don’t know how to,” Miller said.

  “It’s okay,” Wallace said. “It’s not too hard.”

  Miller laughed. “I’m not a virgin. I just . . . This is . . . Well, you know.” He made a vague motion with his hands.

  * * *

  • • •

  WALLACE’S BEDROOM WAS STILL DARK, except for the open window, which was blue-black from the streetlight below.

  Wallace shut the blinds and the room was darker, shades of gray layered over each other, but this was his room. He knew its dimensions perfectly, and he knew that Miller was standing at the edge of the bed. He came up to him from behind, catching Miller unawares, and pushed him. Miller’s body resisted at first, just a little catch, and then he landed on the mattress with a bemused sigh. Wallace climbed onto the bed next to him, and they lay that way for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, the edges of their bodies just barely touching.

  Wallace couldn’t remember the last time he had lain with someone this way, in that nearly innocent configuration that comes before sex when both parties pretend to want everything other than that, letting their bodies wind up to the point of unbearable tension. He reached for Miller first, his hand against Miller’s chest to feel the rhythm of his heart, its fast, hard beat.

  They kissed again, the slow, downward sweep into desire. And then they came out of their clothes, shedding them like skins, so that when they touched again, they were bare and quivering like small, naked beings new to the world.

  “Get under the sheets,” he told Miller, who obliged him. When they touched, it was so impossibly tender and fearful that Wallace could have wept for the boy he’d been at seven or eight, when he was touched for the first time, neither tenderly nor fearing that the touch might do him harm. Wallace was determined to give Miller what nobody had thought to give him, determined that at the end of this, whatever it was, Miller wouldn’t learn to fear his body or what it could contain. Miller’s fingers dug into his hair as his head bobbed between Miller’s thighs. He took Miller deeper into his throat, and there was the final, strangled gasp.

  They fell asleep sore, covered in minor scratches and bruises. They fell asleep tangled together. They fell asleep, but Wallace did not dream. He skimmed beneath the surface of waking, gliding along a vast silver sea of light, viewing it from below, the world passing him by, passing over him.

  Miller’s body was so warm and heavy against him. Hard in odd places that felt unfamiliar to him. While Miller slept, Wallace traced his fingers along the bones of his hips, through the sparse pubic hair above his cock. Sailing had indeed changed Miller’s body, not that Wallace had been familiar with it before. But there was something about its underlying firmness and the residual softness of his stomach and thighs. It was a body in transition. Miller’s chest hair was soft and curly. Asleep, he looked sweet, gentle, like a little boy in a grown man’s body. There was vulnerability in the way he had his hand draped over his face, a peace and depth to his sleep that suggested to Wallace a level of comfort, of innocence.

  How long had it been since Wallace had slept well and easily? How long had it been since he had felt beyond the world’s grasp? Miller made a small sound in his sleep and rolled over, seeking out Wallace’s warmth. Wallace lay back down next to him and let himself be enfolded. The hum of the fan fell in and out of his perception. Would their other friends wonder where Miller had gone when they arrived home and found him not there? He shared a place with Yngve. It would be unusual if he stayed out. It wasn’t his habit. Even if he and Wallace were friends, it would be unusual, but well, there was tomorrow to worry about that.

  Wallace got out of bed and went into the kitchen, where he poured himself a tall glass of very cold water. He drank it slowly, letting it numb his tongue and throat, until swallowing was hard and his thirst felt both sated and unquenchable. His stomach expanded. He almost gagged, but he kept drinking. Down and down and down, swelling, welling with water. He refilled the glass, right up to the brim. He drank it. His lips were red. He kept drinking. He drank four glasses back-to-back, and he went into the bathroom and threw up. Up came the water, the semen, the kernels of popcorn, the sour cider, the soup from lunch, all of it churning and orange in the bowl. His throat was raw and burning with acid. He trembled as he braced himself against the toilet bowl. The stench drew more vomit from him, a heaving, clenching retch.

  He felt empty when it was done. He blotted the vomit from his mouth, brushed his teeth, and went back into the living room. He sat at the edge of the couch and folded his legs under himself. Outside, the moon was a perfect white circle. The world was still and quiet. He could see into the building across the alley, into the lives of the people who lived there. One of their lights was on, and there was a man ironing
at his kitchen table.

  The sounds from the other apartments in the building gave a texture to the silence of Wallace’s apartment. He heard someone singing off-key to a song that was popular that summer. And then, farther off, a ringing sound, not like a phone, but like water hitting a pipe.

  Wallace was nervous about his friends finding out about Miller, not because he was ashamed of it, but because he was afraid Miller would be and wouldn’t want to do it again.

  One blow job in the dark. That was it.

  “Where are you?” came a voice from the other room.

  “I’m out here,” he said, his throat still hot.

  Miller came dragging out of the bedroom with Wallace’s comforter wrapped around him. He sat next to Wallace. He smelled sour from sweat, but still very good, pleasant.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “You couldn’t sleep?”

  “No,” Wallace said, smiling a little. “But that’s nothing new.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why can’t you sleep?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been hard since my dad died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Miller said. He nodded as he said this, and then he kissed Wallace’s bare shoulder.

  “Thank you,” Wallace said.

  “Were you two close?”

  “No, not really—that’s the crazy thing, isn’t it? We didn’t even really know each other.”

  “My mom died two years ago,” Miller said. “She had breast cancer for a long time, and then it was in her liver and then it was all over her body. She died at home.”

  Wallace put his head on Miller’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What I know is that it doesn’t matter if you didn’t know them or they didn’t know you. My mom was a real bitch. She was mean and hateful and a liar and spent my whole life tearing me down. But when she died, I really . . . I don’t know, your parents aren’t people until they’re suffering. They aren’t people until they’re gone.”

  “Yeah,” Wallace said. “That’s it. Or some of it, anyway.”

  “My mom died, and I thought, Oh shit, oh shit. Because I had spent so long hating her, resenting her, and then she was suddenly facing this thing she couldn’t beat, and I just, I really felt for her.”

  “Did you say good-bye or anything?”

  “I was there every day,” Miller said. “We played cards and argued over television and she made fun of the music I liked and I cooked for her and she told me she loved me.” Miller’s eyes had begun to darken, cloud with tears, but none fell. “And then she was gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wallace said, stupidly, lacking anything more significant to say.

  “I can’t tell you what to do about your dad. I can’t tell you what to feel, Wallace. But I’m here if you need me. I’m your friend if you need me. Okay?” He took Wallace’s hand and Wallace let him. They kissed again, tenderly, faintly, briefly. It seemed silly to them, and they laughed. But then Miller lay on top of him and drew the blanket over their bodies, and Wallace, for the first time in a long time, let someone inside him. It hurt at first, like it always did, but that pain and the joy of his body remembering its keenest pleasure was enough to get him hard again, and through it. Miller was easy on him, but he knew what he wanted, and he pursued it relentlessly. They were both breathing hard by the time it was over.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY WIPED THEMSELVES clean in the bathroom light. Wallace felt like a beaten egg, frothy and messy. There was a throbbing heat inside him, like a private little sun glowing. Miller looked at him with clear, sober eyes.

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “I am very confused by all of this. I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “That’s fair,” Wallace said, choking back hurt. “It’s fine.”

  “No, let me finish. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s all probably wrong. But I liked this. It was good. Don’t beat yourself up.”

  “I’ll try not to take it personally.”

  “Wallace.”

  “Okay—thank you for your candor.”

  “Forget it, forget it.”

  “No, let me try again.”

  But Miller was already leaving the bathroom and going into the kitchen. Wallace followed him.

  “Hey, where are you going, come back, I’m sorry.”

  “Can I have some water?”

  “Sure,” Wallace said, but his cheeks and neck were hot because he remembered from before, the drinking and throwing up. He poured Miller a glass, the same one he had been using. He watched Miller drink, the flex of his throat, the swallowing action. He thought of his own mouth on the glass, the transference of his taste to Miller’s lips. Did he taste him there?

  “Stop watching me; I’m getting self-conscious,” Miller mumbled around the glass.

  “I’m sorry,” Wallace said, and made a show of looking away, back into the building across the alley, to where the man was still ironing at the sink. Had he seen them fucking on the couch?

  “More please,” Miller said. Wallace lifted the carafe and poured the last of the cold, clear water into the glass. Miller watched him as he poured, and he watched Miller watch him. The water level rose and rose until it was almost overflowing, spilling down their fingers. But it didn’t. Wallace stopped just short of that point, the point at which the water wavered on the very cusp of the container that meant to hold it, the point at which things swell to an unbearable height before giving way, the point at which something must either recede or break and extend.

  “There,” Wallace said. “Enjoy.”

  “Thank you,” Miller said, and he drank it all in one big gulp with his eyes closed, as if in ecstasy.

  2

  The other labs on the third floor of the biosciences building are empty, as if after the rapture. Strangely, it’s also not dissimilar from catching a glimpse of someone undressing when they think they are alone, the twin thrill and shame of the voyeur. The air carries the salty scent of yeast media. Wallace’s mouth waters. Below him, the atrium is filled with gauzy light. Dry yellow vines wrap around the railings, the floor glossy with wear. If he jumps, he thinks, he will plummet, a slow sweep through empty space, a horrible way to die. He feels, momentarily, the heat of the impact, the ghostly wet of his skull collapsing. The illusion of weightlessness gives way. The elevator slides shut with a rebounding clang.

  It’s a little after ten a.m. on a Saturday.

  At the end of the hall, light spills out of Simone’s lab. Katie stands at the table centrifuge. It is an enormous gray machine, emitting a high whine that rises in pitch until it bleeds into the mechanical noise of the lab: rattling cages and clinking glass beakers strapped to agitators, mewling coils behind the incubators, the dull roar of the air conditioner overhead. Standing there is like being in the peristaltic system of some large animal, amid the sounds of a body adjusting itself. Katie does not look at him. She’s blond with quite small features, as if someone had wiped away her original face and painted in its place a delicate, miniature facsimile. She balances a green ice bucket on her hip and she’s slapping a pair of pale blue nitrile gloves across her thigh. Impatience. Boredom.

  Wallace walks quickly by her, as if he might slip her notice, but she says, “Let’s get this shit done.”

  “Let’s get it done,” he says gingerly. He’s been caught, he knows. From up the lab—for it is really three rooms linked end to end, two benches per bay and five bays per room—a chorus of Let’s get it done comes back at them. The others sweep in and out of his line of sight as he makes his way to his bench. They are all here in this bright cluster in the middle of a cool dim building, for a moment its vibrating core. A minor comfort.

  In the lab, there are only women: Kat
ie, Brigit, Fay, Soo-Yin, and Dana.

  Katie is almost feral with a desperation to graduate; she emits a kind of raw and blistering energy. They all look away from her. She is their senior, just ahead of Brigit and Fay. Brigit is a natural, curious and dynamic, but with a preternatural memory that feeds on whole bibliographies of developmental biologists. Fay is awkward and nocturnal, short and so pale that when she pipets, you can almost see the shadow of blood sweeping up her forearms to her muscles. Her experiments are precisely designed if inconclusive, with minuscule error bars, something Wallace admires to the point of envy. Once, in lab meeting, Simone commented that Fay was trying to deduce some subtlety too fine to matter. Soo-Yin lives in the small lab among the chemical reagents and the tissue culture closet. There she plates thousands of tiny cultures, clumps of grayish cells that grow and divide, or else die, in pools of brilliant red media. Wallace once found her there, like stumbling upon a spirit in a myth. She had been dabbing tears from her eyes with her bare forearm, dabbing and pipetting simultaneously in one unbroken motion. She had a heavy scent to her, like salt water. The youngest is Dana, taken in the year after Wallace. Their adviser has not taken another student in some time. Every couple of months, the group hears whispers of rumor: retirement, migration to the Ivy League, leaving for an adviser position in government, consulting work. Rumors as insubstantial as they are numerous and temporary.

  For the most part, the lab is quiet. Clipped questions dart through its cool, bright air: Do you have any 6.8 Buffer? Did you make new TBE? Where is the DAPI? Why are we out of scalpels? Who forgot to order dNTPs?

  Two floors up, in Cole’s lab, Wallace has heard they play Frisbee together on weekends and sometimes visit each other outside the lab. Most of Cole’s lab came to his barbecue with Vincent, and when he asked Cole about it, Cole gave him a look of profound confusion: Of course I invited them! They’re my lab! When Katie showed up with Caroline, then just a few weeks postgraduation, Wallace went to stand in a corner with them. He was drawn to them out of a kind of loyalty, although the room was full of people he knew better and liked more. Caroline and Katie talked, but only to each other, not to him. Caroline let out a sigh and said, “Here we are again.” And Katie nursed her wine, looking through the glass out onto the patio, where the grilling was happening, watching a fifth-year swim lazy strokes in the pool. They languished there for hours, no more than a handful of words passing among them, but instead of making an excuse and heading off to find a friend, Wallace stood there with them the entire night—even after Caroline, having drunk perhaps too many beers, started scowling openly. Even after Katie rudely told Vincent that the meat looked undercooked and she wouldn’t be having any. He stood next to them because he had felt no impulse to leave.