Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  Cole blinks like he’s looked into the sun for too long. Mostly fine. This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things. There is a pause. And a silence.

  “But it was your dad,” Cole presses. “You don’t have to say that. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

  “I’m not. I’m not ashamed. That’s how I feel.”

  “I feel like you’re not being honest. Like you’re not really accessing things here.”

  Wallace sits up from the ground, more dirt in his mouth. He picks loose grass from his hair. “I’m feeling very accessed right now.”

  “I’m here for you. Let me be here for you.”

  “Cole.”

  “Stop pushing me away.”

  Wallace clenches his jaw tight, presses his lips together. He counts back from ten. The air in his nose is hot. Cole is sitting there with his pale limbs wrapped around himself, looking on with those watery eyes of his. He looks sad. Bereft. Alone. This is Wallace’s penance for pushing Cole on the tennis court, fair play, wound for wound.

  “Okay,” he says, and, summoning up a tremulous voice, he adds: “I’m just really numb to it, you know, just really unable to process it.”

  “I hear that,” Cole says, nodding. “I hear that, Wallace.”

  “And, uhm, I just, yeah, I’m going through it, working the steps of grief, you know?”

  “That’s so important.” Cole touches his arm. “I’m so glad you aren’t just internalizing things.”

  “Thanks,” Wallace says, letting the edge of an emotion he doesn’t feel rise in his voice. “It’s been really helpful to have people in my life who really get me.”

  “We all love you, Wallace,” Cole says, smiling. He pulls Wallace in for a hug. “We all want you to be happy.”

  Wallace rolls his eyes when Cole hugs him, but he is careful to look cheered if somewhat mournful when he pulls back. They get up from the lakeshore just as the game at the stadium is ending. There is a huge cry from beyond, as all the herons and the geese alight from the water and take to the air.

  Gray water falls from their wings, and for a moment it’s like rain.

  4

  For what feels like the first time in days, Wallace is alone—though not entirely, as his apartment still smells like Miller. It seems unfair that Miller has overwritten the smell of his apartment in only a few hours; it seems out of proportion. The scent is not overpowering; in truth it’s barely there, discernible just in passing, as though radiating from the pulse points of the apartment, from the obscure corners: tangy citrus and open lake. Wallace briefly contemplates washing the gray duvet, the slate-colored sheets, getting Miller out of his bedclothes entirely. His room smells like their bodies, like their sex, like their sleep, and it is almost enough to make Wallace want to climb back into the bed and draw the blanket over himself and never leave. And it is that desire to climb back into the bed that makes him want to wash the sheets, to reset things, get even again. He rose from the bed this morning, leaving Miller sleeping there looking sweet, looking defenseless. Wallace left him there. It is a decision he regrets now, a little bitterness to chew on for the rest of the night. He pauses in the doorway of his bedroom. He can smell beer, too, leached into the air from Miller’s skin and breath. That wet, sour smell with which he is intimately acquainted, though he himself does not drink.

  He thinks with some resentment of the surprise people show when he tells them this fact about himself, that he does not drink. The scramble that follows, the backward shuffle into a half-hearted apology for offering him wine or beer or gin—as happened last winter when Henrik offered him gin at Simone’s holiday party and Wallace told him, shyly, No, none for me, but Henrik said, You passed your prelims, you’re an adult now, and Wallace said, finally, I don’t drink. Henrik’s gray eyes, the gentle tremor in his lower lip as if bunted with a newspaper, made Wallace feel guilty—so guilty he almost took the glass—but Henrik squared his shoulders and took it away. If Wallace had known then that that would be the last thing Henrik said to him, the last thing Henrik offered him, he would have taken the drink and downed it. He has no real sense for alcohol, how it ought to taste. It all tastes the same to him, though some of it burns when it goes down.

  His parents used to drink. All the time. His mother, a broad, massive woman with kind eyes and a mean streak, used to drink weak beer because she was a diabetic. That’s what she said, It’s because of my sugar pressure. And she’d drink beer after beer in her chair, reclining and looking out the window, its parted curtain—scanning the world, for what, Wallace did not know. They lived on a dirt road then, in a trailer, surrounded by relatives whose houses had been built out of cheap material and set up on bricks. There had been nothing in the world for her to see, in their obscure, dark corner surrounded by relatives and pine trees, nothing to watch except the churn of wind and the passing of clouds. But she sat in her chair and watched, every day, and that was how he found her, as he arrived home from college for the summer, sweating it out in his old bedroom, passing the time as they all did, waiting for the heat of the day to break, crawling into whatever cool corner one could find.

  He found her in her chair, her eyes open, her body gone stiff, gone tight. The doctor said she’d had a stroke. Something out of the blue. His mother had worked in a hotel on a golf course for ten years. But then, a while back, she had developed a tremor and for long periods of time thereafter she was locked up and couldn’t move. That’s what Wallace thought was happening to her. On the day he found her, her cup was still full of melting ice—the blue kind she liked from the hotel; she had a friend who brought her a new bag every couple of weeks—which was how Wallace knew she hadn’t been gone long. But that was years ago now, the summer before he left for the Midwest, for graduate school and a new life. What had she been looking for, all those days she’d spent in the chair, is a question he thinks of often. But for some questions there are no answers. When asked, Why don’t you drink? Wallace almost tells this story. But he does not. He says something else, something like, Oh, you know. One of those nonsense phrases meant to buffer the silence native to any exchange between people.

  It is of his mother that he thinks today when he smells the beer in the air. Like a haunting. He has not thought of her in a long time. When he does, it’s always the good things he remembers: how she would let him stay home from school if his stomach hurt, and how she’d spend the day with him, make him soup and let him watch cartoons; how he looked up and caught her watching him, not with pride exactly, but with fondness, with love. The rare moments when she was not shouting at him from the other room to come and tie her shoes for her, or when she wasn’t telling him that he was stupid, when she wasn’t bellowing in a register and at a volume that made her words indistinct and indecipherable to him, when she wasn’t striking him across the mouth, or forcing him to wash under his arms and between his legs in front of her, in front of company, when she wasn’t subjecting him to the innumerable dark hairs of her anger and her fear and her mistrust—then she could be, in those small moments, good to him. It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life. But he thinks of her. She falls out of the scent of beer, and he shuts his bedroom door because he cannot bear it.

  There is not much time before the dinner thing anyway.

  Wallace surveys the contents of the freezer. Some chicken breast, ground beef, fish, a variety of frozen vegetables, a pizza, some ice trays. The cold feels good on his face, which is still a little flushed from tennis and from the walk along the lake back to the apartment. His friends, and their friends, seldom eat
meat. There are typically many different vegetable dishes at their dinners, many different casseroles of beans and pasta and cheeses and long green stalks and quinoa and peas and nuts and jams and berries and grains. Once, early in his time here, he made a dish of Swedish meatballs, like his aunts had made for gatherings. Dark meat and onion and pepper and garlic and rich sauce made from scratch, cinnamon and cumin and vinegar and hickory and brown sugar, all in a Nordic-themed serving dish he’d purchased at a thrift store. He stood on the front porch just out of the rain, balancing the warm dish on his arms, trying to smile through his nerves. In those days, Yngve and Cole and Lukas lived together in a house just outside downtown, in one of the few residential neighborhoods that remained, the way they do in some college towns, where the barrier between the city and what used to be the town out of which the city emerged turns hazy and porous, and it is possible, if you stand on one street and look down it, to see the progression of time. The shutters, the porches, the white columns, broad windows, porch swings, lemonade on the banisters or tea slowly steeping on wicker tables, homes that in another time contained families, but that now contain the mismatched furniture and chipped dishes that have come to signify their lives, they who have freshly emerged from undergrad or grad school, their adulthood as wet as new moths’ wings. When the door swung open, it was not one of his friends, but a girl Yngve was sort of interested in seeing at the time, tall and brunette, from Arizona or some other dry place beneath notice. She took one look at the meatballs and wrinkled her nose. Then asked him if he was lost, or needed something.

  Yngve explained it all later, with an arm wrapped around Wallace’s neck, laughing in his ear. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “But, you know, she’s, like, vegan, so . . .” Wallace tried not to look disappointed when he collected his dish of uneaten meatballs at the end of the night, tried not to think of the money he’d spent and the time in his kitchen, wiping sweat, toweling brown stains off his hands, trying to get it exactly right, trying to make the sauce perfect for them—and the little dish, he’d been so proud of the little dish, red with white reindeer leaping. Not Swedish or anything, but close, on a theme, he had hoped.

  Since that time, Wallace has been careful to avoid bringing meat to these things. He typically brings crackers or another form of fiber because his friends are all full of shit and need cleaning out from time to time, all that cellulose from their vegetables. That is, on the few occasions when he has actually been invited to dinner with his friends. It seems to him now that they do not invite him along as much because he is in the habit of telling them no, or staying for only a little while, until the meal has just ended and they’re all feeling good and talking quietly about the things they did the last time they were all together, things that do not include Wallace because he was not there or left early. It’s in those moments that he experiences most acutely the feeling of his own estrangement from these people he calls his friends. Their shining eyes and wet mouths and their greasy fingers working at each other’s knees, a pantomime of intimacy, a cult of happiness, a cult of friendship.

  He can make a fruit salad or something. Lots of melon this time of year, and grapes are in season, particularly the green ones of which he’s fond, their tart juice and squishy bodies. He’ll make a fruit salad, like when they were all children, full of peaches and cantaloupe and honeydew and apple; no oranges, though, too full of seeds. A salad is easy to make.

  * * *

  • • •

  AFTER COLE MOVED OUT to live with Vincent, Miller moved in with Yngve and Lukas, taking his place. Their house is warm and comfortably furnished. After that first year, they bought real furniture for real adults at a real store, which is to say, they bought it at IKEA and put it together one humid and shirtless afternoon. Wallace was there to offer moral support and bottles of water, watching the sweat sluice down their spines and their stomachs, collecting at the tops of their shorts, staining them. Then everyone went out back to sit in the kiddie pool, the water already lukewarm from the sun, but cool enough, and besides, it was the novelty of the act that they enjoyed so much, and that was worth something.

  It’s a short walk to their place from Wallace’s apartment, and the bowl isn’t hot this time, but slightly chilled. The early evening is pale. It’s just past six thirty. He’s on time. He can see them through the window as he comes around the corner, all of them lit up by the yellow kitchen lights, smiling and laughing. White string lights have been woven down the banister. He steadies himself. This will be fine. This is going to be fine.

  Everyone here is his friend.

  He nudges the door open with his toe, and sticks his head around the corner.

  “Hello, hello,” he calls, stepping inside.

  “Wallace!” comes a chorus of voices from the kitchen. He toes off his shoes and leaves them at the door and makes his way through the current of warm air into the kitchen, where seven or eight people are already gathered. Cole and Vincent are washing root vegetables in the deep gray basin of the sink, bumping up against each other affectionately. Roman is sitting on the kitchen floor playing with a small rabbit. Emma comes toward Wallace with a glass of wine and wraps her arm around his neck. Lukas and Yngve chop celery and carrots at the kitchen island.

  “Oh, are you making bunny stew?” Wallace asks as he sets his bowl on a nearby counter.

  “Don’t joke about Lila,” Lukas says, pointing the knife at Wallace. There’s something joking in his voice, but only barely.

  “I love bunny stew,” Yngve says. “Love, love, love.”

  Lukas gives him a look of utter betrayal and mild disgust. Wallace laughs. On the other side of the kitchen, near Cole and Vincent, there is a woman chipping ice. She is tall and solidly built, with broad shoulders and a slender neck. She’s wearing a shirt with an open back, and Wallace can see freckles, rust-brown, speckling her shoulder blades. She seems immensely healthy. Her laugh is low and raspy, and she turns to Cole to say something; in profile, she is quite pretty. Her eyes are dark blue.

  Emma whispers in his ear, her voice sticky and wet with wine: “That’s Zoe. Yngve is trying to set Miller up.”

  “Oh, I think Cole mentioned something about that at tennis,” Wallace says, and he tries to smile, but his cheeks are already sore and the night hasn’t even begun yet.

  “I think she’s a rock climber or something like that?” Emma takes another long pull from her wine. Her eyes are red. She’s been crying.

  “Where’s Thom?” Wallace asks, and it’s like Emma collapses into a single, dark line. She closes in on him.

  “Let’s go see how those potatoes are coming, shall we?” She takes Wallace’s arm by the elbow and they move through the kitchen, its bumpy tiles crackling underfoot. Roman looks up at him and gives a faint, swiftly dying smile that is neither cold nor warm.

  “Roman,” Wallace says.

  “Wallace.”

  Cole turns to Wallace and hugs him tight, but he’s careful not to get the cloudy water on Wallace’s shirt. Cole’s cologne smells vaguely like ground cardamom.

  “You made it,” he says.

  “I did. I made it.”

  “I’m so glad,” he says, propping his damp wrists on Wallace’s shoulders.

  “Wallace,” Vincent says, and he reaches over to hug Wallace awkwardly around Cole. He squeezes Wallace’s arm. “Good to see you.”

  Zoe is now at Wallace’s left. They’re clustered together, squeezed between Emma, who is opening another bottle of wine, and Cole and Vincent at the sink. Zoe’s got the ice pick and the small mallet in hand. Her fingers look very sure of themselves. Up close, he can see that she has a wide mouth full of very expensive teeth, as he anticipated. Her eyes are set high on her head. She smiles at him.

  “Zoe,” she says by way of introduction. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Same,” he says with more warmth than he feels. “So, what do you do in town?”
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  It is the question they always ask people who are not in their program. What makes a person come to this place? Why this city on three lakes?

  “Law school,” she says.

  “I see. And rock climbing, from what I hear?” Wallace says.

  Zoe lines up the pick on a chunk of ice and with one smart movement cracks it open. “Definitely. My dad is a climbing instructor in Denver. So it runs in the family, I guess.”

  “Is that where you’re from?” Wallace asks.

  “No, originally, I’m from Billings. But my family moved a lot. I grew up all over, really, but Billings is home. I did my undergrad in Boston though.”

  “Harvard?”

  Zoe’s cheeks redden. She carves another section of ice. Wallace watches the gray blade of the pick descend into the heart of the ice.

  “Oh. Yeah,” she says, offhand.

  Wallace nods.

  “You?” Zoe asks.

  “Auburn,” he says.

  “Where is that?” she asks, laughing.

  “Alabama,” he says.

  “Oh—Crimson Tide.”

  “No,” Wallace says. “The other one. Tigers.”

  “Ah,” she says, nodding. Her hands are swift as she cracks the ice open into halves, then quarters. She breaks it down into cubes and ovals and crescents. It could be a party trick. Perhaps it is a party trick.

  “Can I help with anything?” Wallace asks, turning to Cole and Vincent.

  “No, no. Everything is all set,” they all say in various ways at various times, a chorus of voices falling on him like drops of rain. The kitchen is warm and foggy, filled with the gurgle and sizzle of food cooking. “Go have a seat or something.”

  “Okay,” he says. “All right. Where’s Miller?” Zoe’s shoulders open just slightly.