Nothing. Except to work.
And now the work has been turned on him. His work is an insult to them. She hates him because he works, but he works only so that people might not hate him and might not rescind his place in the world. He works only so that he might get by in life on whatever he can muster. None of it will save him, he sees now. None of it can save him.
Wallace reaches over and shuts off his flame, for a moment thinking that he’s pushed the dial too hard, that he’s broken it and the room will fill with gas. But the handle holds his weight. He then turns back to Dana, this panting, miserable girl. Her face is red. Her eyes gleam. He steps closer to her on the bench. The soles of her shoes press flat to the front of his thighs.
It isn’t hatred. He does not hate her. Because she matters so little to him. It would be like hating a child. It would make him like his parents, who had certainly, in some way, hated him. And he does not want to be like them. But he cannot bring himself to be good. To be generous.
“Fuck you, Dana,” he says finally, and it feels like a relief, so much so that he is briefly thankful to her for the gift of it. “Just, totally fuck you.” A rush of air buoys him. He collects his racquet bag from the low storage on the floor, and all the time she is staring at him as though she has been slapped.
He rises. Another look passes between them. She looks like she’s on the cusp of saying something, but he turns, leaves. Away through the blue shadow that has taken the lab now that the lights have turned off. His motion doesn’t trigger them, as though he is a natural part of this place or a ghost.
Dana shouts after him, that she’s not done, that he doesn’t get to end a conversation before she’s had her say. She is shouting after him because she doesn’t know what else to do with her fear and her anger, and soon her shouts turn to sobs. But Wallace is already crossing the hall.
The light in the hall is too bright, searing. His steps echo. He walks hard. He’s got a heavy step. His mother used to make fun of him for that. You’re so heavy footed; you never look down. He does look down now. Sees the thin shawl of his shadow on the tiles. Passes the kitchen, passes Miller’s lab door.
“Hey,” Miller calls after him, but he does not stop. He can hear Miller’s steps after him, which only spurs him on, past the posters of experiments, past the fliers advertising employment opportunities, past the familiar bulletin boards with their cartoons and silly sayings, past the row of lockers where, in the eighties, people used to store their belongings. He is walking so fast that his feet are slipping over each other. He’s back at the stairwell that overlooks the atrium by the time Miller catches him. “What’s going on?” Each word is deliberate, drawn out.
“Apparently, I’m a huge misogynist,” Wallace says.
“What? Come on. What was all that shouting about?” Miller’s eyes are kind and concerned. He takes Wallace’s arm in his hand, and it’s like before, in the kitchen. Wallace can feel himself vibrating, with anger, with fear—who can say?
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what? Tell the truth? It’s nothing.”
“It’s obviously not.”
“Well, it’s not your problem,” Wallace says, and he snatches away from Miller. “I’ll deal.”
Miller is both angry and annoyed. He reaches, Wallace avoids.
“Come on.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” Miller takes his hand and pulls on him. They go into the library on the third floor, into one of the little rooms with doors that lock. Miller makes Wallace sit on the table and he steps between his legs. He is not letting him get away. The room smells vaguely dusty and like dry-erase markers. The carpet is hideously purple. Miller smells like his shampoo and soap. His eye is still puffy from last night, with the peppers and the nachos at the pier.
“I’m mad,” Wallace says when it becomes clear that Miller isn’t going to say anything or initiate the conversation. He’s got his arms folded over his chest and there is a patient look on his face.
“Obviously.”
“She said women are the new niggers and faggots.”
“I’m not even sure what that means.”
“She hates me.”
“Seems likely.”
“You aren’t helping,” Wallace says.
“I’m sorry it’s so bad,” Miller says, and he kisses Wallace softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop being nice to me. You hated me too, just the other day, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t hate you. I didn’t understand you—I don’t understand you—but I never hated you,” Miller says. How strange, Wallace thinks. A strange thing to say. He can’t look at Miller. Feels weirdly exposed. The table is cheap and yellow, laminated plywood. He wants to get down. Miller won’t move. Wallace pulls at the hem of the gray sweatshirt.
“I hate you. I hate you a lot.”
“I know,” Miller says. “Do you feel better?”
“No,” he says at first, and then, shrugging, “Well, maybe some.”
“Good.” There is another kiss and then another, and then Wallace is sliding his fingers through Miller’s hair, and Miller is biting at the side of Wallace’s neck. The table creaks beneath him as he shifts to get closer and then to get away.
“Please do not give me a hickey. I am not prepared to explain to anyone.”
“Oh, shit, I forgot,” Miller says.
“Yeah, well. It’s been real.” Wallace pushes at his chest, and Miller, remembering where they are and who they are, steps back.
“I am sorry, Wallace. You shouldn’t have to put up with that.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “You know, everyone has shit to deal with.”
“They do—but, well, you’re one of my people and I’m sad you have to deal with it.”
“Thanks,” Wallace says, touched to be someone’s person, to be thought of so tenderly.
“I guess you’re playing tennis after all.”
“It’s a date.”
They don’t know what else to do with their bodies except the obvious thing, which is intractable at the moment. So Wallace kisses Miller’s cheek, which makes Miller blush.
“Off I go.”
“Okay.”
Wallace is going down the steps when he looks up and sees Miller watching him. He thinks again of a bird, the matter of scope, how everything below it, all the big and towering world, is both flattened and shrunken. How he must look to Miller from above, the distortion of distance and light falling down through the skylight at the top of the atrium, how he must appear half in shadow, half lit. Looking up, he sees Miller’s height diminished, an illusion of the angle. He lifts his hand, waves. Wallace waves back.
“Call me later,” Miller says.
“Okay.” The answer to the question from before, the one he asked himself by leaving Miller in the kitchen—if he could withstand the possibility that last night was all he needed—is no. He knows this for sure now as he goes farther and farther down the steps, can feel Miller getting farther and farther away, higher above him. There will come a moment when he passes directly beneath Miller’s sight line, when they will be the closest that they possibly can be, and to someone looking from even higher up, they will appear identical, one laid over the other.
But there is a difference between entering someone, being in someone, and being with that person. There is an impossibility to the idea of simultaneously existing within them and beside them, the fact that when you get close enough to someone, you cease to be discrete entities and instead become a single surface, glittering in the sun.
“I mean it,” Miller says, his voice wafting down. “You better call, or text.”
“I will, thanks, Dad,” he calls back, walking backward, laughing.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Wallace.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Their voices are twinned echoes that grow apart until there is only silence, or that clash into each other until their energy is spent and they are subsumed into the quiet. Either way, Wallace is gone, and Miller is gone, and the atrium is still and warm.
The agitating machines beat on, beat on, beat on.
3
Wallace is at first surprised to find the courts deserted, but then he remembers the game at the stadium, a structure barely discernible at this distance, a soft white hump like the back of a whale. Music, dull and empty, pulses into the air, and Wallace knows that soon the streets will fill with drunk people in red-and-white-striped clothes, lolling from one side to the other. They will spill in a red wave across the campus and into downtown, and their voices will crowd the air like shouts from some sinking ship. It’s the worst part of the weekend. How permeable everything and everyone becomes. It takes only one glance to provoke a person into conversation or worse.
Last weekend, Wallace had been standing in line at the corner store behind a group of tan boys who smelled like beer and sweat. The boys were all wearing sunglasses, and now and then one of them would run his hands around the insides of his shorts, and occasionally Wallace saw a flash of hip, the tawny fur of pubic hair, a tumescent shadow between the legs. One of them turned to him, pushed his sunglasses up just enough for Wallace to see his bloodshot eyes, and said, “Bro, what are you doing here? We told you to wait.” Wallace blinked at the boy, not knowing what to say or what to do, but the boy just stared at him in amused annoyance as though Wallace were the one who’d made the mistake. The boy’s friends hooked their arms around his neck and pulled him, and the boy shouted after Wallace, “No, no, we can’t leave him. He’s got the hookup. Don’t you have the hookup, bro?” And all the people in the store turned to look at Wallace, who had only wanted to buy some soap and deodorant, who could have picked a better time and better day, certainly, but had chosen that moment and so had been marked out in some way. It could be that way.
The heat has not broken. Wallace sits down on the bench. He takes his racquet out of the yellow sleeve. The courts are blue with crisp white lines, made from recycled rubber or cement or some similar substance. They are the slowest courts he has ever played except for the soggy green clay where he first learned the game on weekends with his friends in undergrad.
There is a row of trees populated by crows calling to one another. Wallace moves to the hot surface of the court and begins to stretch, first his legs and then his back, bending this way and that, trying to unclench, to release. He breathes deeply, trying to let go of Dana. He pictures her on a boat sailing farther and farther away. The court is burning the undersides of his thighs, but the pain feels good, soaking into him like water through a shirt. The knot in his spine is unfurling. His bones crack. He stretches as far forward as he can, and his stomach presses against the tops of his thighs. He doesn’t have the build of a tennis player. He is not lanky like Cole. He is chubby, at best, fat at worst. This is the most rigorous exercise he gets all week.
He often thinks of the boys he sees rowing on the lake, how perfectly efficient their motion is as they draw themselves over the placid silver surface of the water. He sees them often when he’s out there walking, can hear their calls in the trees; sometimes he stops and stands on the edge of a slippery rock, marveling at the speed, their shining arms, their muscles flexing in perfect unison.
Cole comes jogging along the fence. He’s breathing hard.
“Sorry sorry sorry,” he says. He bends over, clutching his side. “Whew, it’s a scorcher out here.”
“Yep, it’s something,” Wallace says. “It’s okay. I’m not doing anything else today anyway.” He lies back on the court and pulls one thigh up to his chest, holds it until there is a sweet ache in the muscle.
Cole tosses his bag on the bench and joins Wallace on the ground to stretch. There is something agitated about him as he stretches out his long pale legs, which are already turning red from the sun. His eyes avoid Wallace’s. The coarse concrete scratches the back of Wallace’s neck.
“You okay?”
“Fine. Yes. No. Yes.”
“Oh—well.”
“It’s nothing,” Cole says, sitting up. “I just . . . Fuck. I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Wallace says. He sits up too, slowly. Cole lies back down.
“Are you on that app?”
“Which app?”
“You know the one.” Cole flushes as he says this, looking away to the trees and to the long, winding sidewalk that slopes down to the lake.
“The gay one, you mean?”
“That’s it. Yeah.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess, sometimes.” Wallace deleted the app some weeks ago, but this feels like a minor point. Cole has always made sure to mention that he is not on the app and that he’s relieved to have found Vincent before the advent of such technology. Geolocation, finding the nearest queers for fucking or whatever. Wallace always has to keep himself from saying that Cole would have done well on the app. He is tall and good-looking in an average sort of way. He is funny and quippy, gentle. He is also white, which is never a disadvantage with gay men. But Wallace says none of these things because to say them would disrupt Cole’s view of the average gay man as shallow and kind of stupid—they are shallow and kind of stupid, but no more than any other group. Wallace only deleted the app because he had grown tired of watching himself be invisible to them, of the gathering silence in his in-box. He wasn’t looking anyway, but at the same time he wanted to be looked at the same as anyone else, to be seen.
“I saw Vincent on there last night.”
“Oh? What were you doing on there?”
“I suspected he was on there. So I made a fake profile.”
“Isn’t that . . . ?”
“I know, I know, but I had to see if he was there. And he was there. Can you believe that?”
“Is that something you two talked about?”
“No. Yes. I mean . . . We said we’d think about it, you know? Opening things up. I don’t know why I’m not enough.”
“Maybe you are,” Wallace says. “It’s not about things not being enough. Maybe he just . . . wants something different. I don’t know.”
“But why would he sneak around to do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what kills me, Wallace. That he snuck around.”
“Has he?”
“Not that I know of. Fuck. I don’t know. We’re supposed to be thinking about getting a dog, you know? We’re supposed to be thinking about getting married. Settling down. And now he wants to open everything up.”
Wallace lets out a slow breath. He claps his hand on the back of Cole’s shoulder.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s hit a little.”
* * *
• • •
WALLACE AND COLE have been playing tennis together since their first year of graduate school. They are an evenly matched pair: Wallace’s backhand is a decent, flowing one-hander and Cole’s forehand is smooth and easy. Wallace hits his forehand with a looping swing and Cole’s backhand is piecemeal, barely keeping itself together. When they play, it’s a matter of just a few points here or there, but Cole typically comes through with the win because his serve is more consistent and when he needs it he can lash an ace out wide, leaving Wallace scrambling, flailing. They have played each other a number of times—so many, in fact, that each knows what the other will do even before the ball has landed on their side of the court. For example, Wallace knows that if he kicks his second serve up to Cole’s forehand, baiting him, Cole will swing out and probably sail the shot long. Cole knows that this is the tactic, but he thinks that this time will be the time he slaps the winner up the line.
&nbs
p; They start at the net, just a few volleys to get their bodies used to tracking the ball in the sun. Back and forth they send the ball across the net, easy, controlled. Wallace prefers his forehand volley and so he’s deft at meeting the ball out front on that side. He can put it to either side of Cole’s body, warming up both wings. Cole is less adept at this part. He prefers the telescopic blasting from the back of the court. But this will let them talk a little more. Cole’s eyes are red-rimmed, and his voice is thick and foggy with moisture.
“I mean, would you open things up if you had a partner?”
“I don’t know, Cole. I think that sort of thing depends.”
“I don’t. I think some people want it and some people don’t, and you can get to wanting it if something goes wrong. What the fuck went wrong?”
“You said you had talked about it maybe.”
“We did.”
“Did he say why he wanted it?”
“He said he was tired of waiting around for me on weekends and at nights and on holidays, that all I could think about was bacteria and drug discovery and my next paper. He said he wanted something too—more intimacy. We are fucking intimate.”
“That’s a lot,” Wallace says. “I mean, it’s a lot to take in.”
“Yeah, so he says, ‘I’d like to open things up. I’d like to discuss it with you.’ You know what he’s like, with that neutral voice. That shrink voice he got from his mother.”
“I didn’t know his mother was a shrink.”
“She isn’t. She’s a high school counselor. His dad’s the shrink.”
“Oh,” Wallace says. The ball comes faster, so he takes a step back from the net. Cole is striking the ball beautifully today, hard and flat. Wallace is having a hard time keeping up. His racquet flutters a little in his hand. He slides his grip up, flexes his fingers.
“It’s true. Things haven’t been great, or perfect, for a while. But I didn’t know it was this bad.” Cole shakes his head in disgust, slaps the ball into the bottom of the net.
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