Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

“You know,” Wallace says, though he has no idea where he’s going with this, only that the look on Cole’s face makes his stomach hurt, “I think that it’s probably a good sign that he expressed, um, a want? A need? It’s probably good that he said something?”

  “But the minute I said no, he turned around and hopped on a dating app? What’s the point of communicating if you don’t listen?”

  “Yes, you are right, yes. But perhaps he did it because he didn’t feel heard?”

  Cole looks up from the net, and his eyes are cold. His mouth is a grim line.

  “So it’s my fault?”

  “No, Cole, that’s not what I mean.”

  “Because that would be a fucked-up thing to say, Wallace.”

  Wallace tries to find some inner bead of calm, some granule of peace. He sighs. Sweat burns the edge of his vision.

  “Cole, all I’m saying is that Vincent is a person too. And you aren’t the only one in your relationship with feelings.”

  “I’m not ready to be on his side!”

  “I am not asking you to be on his side, or to forgive him or whatever. I am only saying that maybe you’re still okay. Maybe all this means that you’re okay.” Wallace tries to smile through the tension in his jaw and his neck. If he can, then perhaps it is true that they are okay, that they will be okay. If he can smile, then he might believe it and then Cole might believe it. That’s all he wants, after all. That’s all that matters here, he realizes. Cole’s feelings.

  “I don’t know.”

  They go to the baseline, and Cole decides to drop in by sending the ball hard to the service line. It bounces up nice and high, and Wallace is able to send it back with good depth and spin. There’s a pleasant shape to the ball, an arc that puts it right in front of Cole’s service line. It’s easy to rally this way, putting just enough force into the shot to send it over the net, but not enough heat to do real harm. The best players in the world could do this for hours with no mistakes. Cole often sends a ball into the net or off to the side, and Wallace has to move quickly to save it, catching it in the air and sending it back nice and easy.

  He is surprised that there is so much trouble in Vincent and Cole’s relationship. They have been together going on seven years now. When Wallace first met Cole, they had sat next to each other on a log at an introductory bonfire. The heat was on their thighs and their faces, and Cole was telling him how much he loved tennis. There was no mention of a boyfriend or even that Cole was gay, but there had been something in the way their eyes met, the way Cole reached over and put a hand on Wallace’s knee, the insistence of those fingers kneading the surface of his skin, that had caused Wallace to hope.

  That whole first year was an elaborate flirtation. He and Cole went everywhere together. To dinner, to lunch, to play tennis. They spoke quietly in Cole’s van after they had been rained out, cold and soaked. There was a moment, the world a gray streak, when they looked at each other and found a possibility of something. Cole leaned toward him, across the center console, smelling like sweat and rain, his full lower lip plush and red, and Wallace tilted toward him out of instinct, two bodies in motion. But something stopped them. Some force rendered them still right before contact, and Wallace got out into the rain. He didn’t hear if Cole called after him, and maybe that was for the best.

  Some months later, at the end of that first summer, at the start of second year, he was walking home from grocery shopping, his hands full of food, thinking of calling Cole and patching things up, when he saw a group of his friends walking in the opposite direction. He waved with his hands full, and they waved and came up to him. Cole and Emma and Yngve, and Vincent, who at the time was unknown to him.

  “Hi,” Wallace said.

  “Hey,” they all said in turn. Then Vincent stepped up to him, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Vincent, Cole’s boyfriend.” And Cole looked away in shame.

  Their relationship has always seemed so steady to Wallace. They are so steadfastly even-tempered—except, perhaps, for last night, when Vincent seemed, yes, a little on edge. Had he been cruising even then? Had he been on the lookout for something passing in the night? There is a cruising ground near the lake, a sloped hill covered in downy trees. At night, all you have to do is let yourself be sucked into the darkness of the unlit running path. You walk and walk on soft soil until you bump up against something hard and firm, another man out there looking for something in the dark.

  A shot skids off the sideline, and Wallace scoops it up off the bounce, sends it cross-court to Cole’s forehand. Cole should send it back cross-court but closer to the middle, but he won’t. Wallace can see it now in the way he’s winding up, drawing his racquet back and a little down. He’s going to shoot it straight up the line for a winner. Sure enough, Cole swings out, hits the ball squarely in front, and sends it hurtling low over the net and into the doubles alley.

  If there is anything he does not enjoy about Cole, it’s the erratic nature of his tennis, how even during warm-up, kind as he is in daily life, he’s only thinking about himself. The goal of warm-up is just that, to get the body going, to get the shots ready for the set or match. It’s not about practicing winners. It’s not about showing off. Wallace would be content to hit the same forehand one thousand times in a warm-up. It’s boring, but he likes it, the consistency. He hates to miss.

  “You think you might want to play a set?” Cole asks over the net.

  “Sure. We can.”

  “Great. First serve in?”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  He bunts the ball back over to Cole, and he lines up at the baseline to receive. Cole is bouncing the ball, eyeing the box. His toss rises slowly from his hand, and he reaches up for a serve. It misses horrifically, into the fence, which rattles. He tries again. Another misfire, this time flat into the court in front of him. Wallace clucks the roof of his mouth, but he knows that once Cole’s serve gets going, this same randomness will make it difficult to read and return.

  Cole wipes sweat from his brow in frustration, rolls his shoulders two hard times. Then he tosses the ball up, and this time he strikes it perfectly. The ball shoots down into the corner of the service box, no spin or anything, just low and darting. Wallace chips it back with his forehand and the floating slice drifts toward Cole, who puts it away for a winner.

  On the next serve, Wallace connects with a beautiful return, sending the ball up the line and away from Cole. The geometry of tennis is simple in many ways. You want to hit to where your opponent isn’t, but in order to make a space where they are not, you sometimes have to hit to where they are. You are trying to outmaneuver them. But because he and Cole know each other’s game so well, the maneuvering is always in minor gains, little turns in momentum. A winner here, an error there, an ace, a return winner. Cole manages to hold serve after digging himself out of two break points. They change ends.

  Wallace takes two balls to the line. His arm is getting there. There is a small pain in his shoulder, the pain of remembering, recollecting, redefining form. His serve is mostly conservative. He spins it in rather than going for broke. He is a master of angles, slicing it wide or bending it into the body. For his first serve, he catches Cole going the other way and clips the outside of the line. The next serve is a double fault. And then a kicker that draws an error. He holds to fifteen. They each hold serve after that, the set score going higher and higher, matching hold for hold. There is the usual tension at a deuce point where Cole is playing wall-to-wall defense, scrambling, digging balls out of the corner, rushing the net, ready to put away anything that even remotely looks short, and by some bit of magic, Wallace manages to loop a winner by him cross-court, a dipping, vicious angle.

  After, they sit on the bench side by side, sweating profusely. Wallace sucks lukewarm water from his bottle, and Cole chews on a banana.

  “Are you coming to the dinner thing tonight?” Cole asks.


  “What dinner thing?”

  “Oh. We didn’t tell you? That’s probably because you left last night. We’re having a dinner thing at the boys’ house.”

  “Dinner thing” usually means a party at which everyone stands around eating a variety of baked vegetables doused in dark sauces. “Dinner thing” also means standing in the corner looking out the window at the nearby street.

  “Maybe not,” he says.

  “Please come. Especially after this shit with Vincent, I need someone to be on my side.”

  “Who isn’t on your side?”

  “No. I just . . . Nobody else knows except Roman, and I think he’s the one who got Vincent thinking about opening things up in the first place.”

  Roman is the attractive French student who is a year ahead of them, who is also gay and also in an open relationship, with an equally attractive German named Klaus. Roman has always been closer to Cole and Vincent than he has ever been to Wallace, for reasons that are abundantly clear to Wallace but that Cole pretends not to understand.

  “So you want a gay civil war at the dinner thing. Okay.”

  “No, not a gay civil war. No wars.”

  “I don’t know, Cole.” Sweat stings his eyes. He’s pleasantly sore and buzzed from the set. The score is tied. Maybe he finally has a chance to win a set off Cole.

  “Okay, but please come. Besides, you can laugh at Yngve trying set up Miller with some girl from his rock-climbing group.”

  Miller’s name sits like a stalled train in his mind.

  “What?”

  “I forget her name, but Yngve says she’s nice. So that should be good for a few laughs.”

  Wallace blots sweat from his face with his towel, but holds it still for several long moments. He’s trying to catch his breath, but it’s almost impossible because the towel is not letting any airflow through.

  “Oh,” he says, muffled. The hurt surprises him more than anything else.

  “You look like someone shot your dog,” Cole says.

  “I don’t have a dog,” Wallace says. He towels off his hands, and takes up his racquet. “Let’s go.”

  Cole lets the banana peel drop into the trash can beside the bench and picks up his racquet too. The sunlight and the heat are fanning out over them, pressing into their bodies. Wallace can feel it on his skin, like fizzy water. He’s darkening, as in boyhood when he had worked alongside his grandparents in their garden, his skin going from brown to a clay red color. Soil and clay.

  Wallace is standing at the baseline preparing to serve. Cole prepares to receive, deep knee bend, weight loaded. Wallace’s palm aches. The racquet feels stiff and awkward as he bounces the ball. The vibrations jar his wrist. Miller and the girl from the rock-climbing group sitting side by side at dinner. Laughing. Eating their baked vegetables. Talking about what, Wallace wonders. The things people talk about when the world thinks they belong together. Who knows what affinities unlock between such people? How easy it must be. He’s not shocked at not having been invited. He’s not particularly offended by it, even. But now he’s in the impossible situation of having to either justify his absence or explain his presence to Miller. He’s been bouncing the ball too long, can see that Cole is getting anxious over there. Serves him right.

  Wallace slices a serve up the middle, sending it spinning away from Cole, who lunged the other way. Cole looks back behind himself, a little shocked at the speed of the ball, the severity of its spin. The next serve bounds into his body. Wallace grits his teeth as he stalks up to the line again. Another slice, this time into the forehand for a weak reply. Wallace is already leaping forward, taking it on the rise, hitting the ball with the full weight of his anger. He has nudged ahead in the set, but he doesn’t feel like he’s winning anything at the moment. He also doesn’t feel as if he’s expended the urge to do harm, to vent his frustration and fury.

  “So what are you going to do about Vincent?” he asks as they’re changing ends. Cole chokes a little.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I can’t bring it up, right? He’ll know that I was on there too, but I was only on there to find him. It just seems so stupid.”

  “Yeah,” Wallace says. “But you can’t not say something. You have to acknowledge it.”

  Cole is silent, taps his racquet against the net, making its shadow flutter on the court’s surface, like a net dragging the blue sea. Wallace presses: “Unless you don’t think it’s worth it.”

  “No, I do. I just . . . I’m more hurt than anything, you know? I’m hurt he lied. I’m hurt he’s doing it behind my back.”

  “Do you think you’d ever want to open it up?”

  “I don’t know, Wallace,” he says tightly.

  “I just mean, you know, if you’re not going to be working fewer hours or whatever anytime soon.”

  Cole is really whacking at the net now, and it’s shuddering under the force of his blows. He’s got his face screwed up in frustration. Oh, Wallace thinks. Oh no. What has he done?

  “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business,” he says. “I’m sorry for prying.”

  “No, you raise a good point. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “If he’s not cheating, if he’s just looking—”

  “Looking is cheating, Wallace.” Cole’s voice is sharp, hot like pressing your hand to a knife that’s been left in the sun. The anger in his eyes is adamantine and gleaming. Wallace swallows thickly.

  “Well, sounds like you have to talk to him, then.”

  “I don’t know how,” Cole says, shoulders slumping. “I don’t know how to begin it. Fuck.”

  They’re done with tennis. Cole drops on the bench and puts his face in his hands. He’s not crying, but he’s breathing hard. Wallace takes the edge of the bench and puts his hand on Cole’s shoulder. He’s drenched in sweat and hot. It’s like the time in first year in the van in the rain, and Wallace feels the edge of that distant ache surfacing in him.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know if it will.”

  “It will be. It has to be,” Wallace says, catching a rising tide not of confidence, but of desperation to see his friend through this at whatever cost. “People do this. They fight. They hide things, they argue. It means you’re in something that’s worth giving a damn about.”

  Cole’s eyes are wet when he looks up from the curve of his palms. There is moisture on his cheeks, sweat or tears, Wallace is not sure. His lips crack open a bit, and there’s a sad, soft sound coming out of him.

  “Hey,” Wallace says. “Hey.”

  “No, you’re right. I have to put on my big-boy pants, or something. God, it’s hot out here.”

  “It is,” Wallace says. “We can go to the lake if you want.” Cole considers it, stares out at the empty courts. The roar from the stadium is audible. A car glides by. The crows are back at it in the trees overhead. The shade cast through the fence is coarse and riddled with tiny holes of light, like standing beneath mesh and staring up into the sky. A single bead of sweat glides down the curve of Cole’s ear. Wallace is tempted to catch it on his fingertip, to say, make a wish, but that doesn’t work for water. There are no wishes to be found in salt water, no magic there at all except, in some cases, the way it turns to stars when dispersed, as from the tip of a finger with a breath.

  “Okay. I’d like that. Okay.” They rise from the bench with stiff muscles and aching joints. Their bodies have cooled and hardened. They’ve been running from side to side under the sun for a little over an hour, and having come so suddenly to a stop, they can feel their blood cooling in odd places. It gives the world a kind of tilting, buoying quality as they exit through the gate at the fence and walk along the cool grass. It tickles their ankles, and they walk close enough together that their elbows collide with a meaty thud. They pass beneath the shade of the trees, crow calls fading. Up ahead, the world narrows, darken
s. The sidewalk fades into crushed blue gravel and then yellow dirt. The air is immediately cooler when they enter the shade at the corner of the boathouse.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE LAKE IS A SHIMMERING immensity ahead of them, going all the way out to the peninsula and beyond, to the other shore.

  They can make out the shape of a couple of far-off boats, blurry in the distance. Behind them, the boathouse has its doors rolled up; muscular men are drawing cloths and sponges over the rowboats, polishing hulls, scraping off lake gunk. Some rhythmic, driving song on the radio. The air fizzes with humidity this close to the water.

  Cole and Wallace turn left, away from the direction where Wallace lives. Through the thatch of trees and shrubs, the lake is intermittently visible. Their shoes slide and scrape. Occasionally a bicyclist shoots by, a blur of white or red or blue. Cole, for a few paces at least, puts his head on Wallace’s shoulder. Wallace loops an arm around his back. Whatever words Wallace might have for Cole in this moment feel inadequate to the task of righting him, solving this problem for him. He’s said all he knows how to say. He feels shitty for having dug around in the wound, prodded his friend this far. Cole’s body is warm against him, slippery with sweat, but since the sweat is cooling, drying into a husk, he’s a bit easier to hold on to as they go along.

  “I didn’t know it would be like this,” Cole says. “I had no idea it’d be this hard.”

  “Like what?”

  “When I first moved here. I was lonely all the time. Vincent was still at Ole Miss. I was stuck here all alone. I missed him so much I thought I’d die. I thought it’d be easier once we were in the same place. I thought it would fix things.”

  “It didn’t?”

  “No,” Cole says, and he reaches up to wipe at his nose with his wrist. “No, it didn’t. I mean, for a while it did. It was great being with him again, here. But I don’t know. It’s not the same.”

  “You’re not the same,” Wallace says.

  “What do you mean?”