Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  “Uh. That’s a good question, actually,” Yngve says, frowning. “He was supposed to be setting up the music, but then he sort of vanished.”

  “I’ll check out back,” Wallace says, and he steps over Roman’s long legs to reach the sliding door. Roman is still cuddling the fat brown rabbit, Lila the bunny, a mascot of sorts. He would stop to pet her, but Roman has her in a protective grasp, and Wallace knows that there are limits to his frosty friendliness.

  In the backyard there is grass, so it is much cooler than the front, which faces the street and the asphalt of the city. Wallace has always loved this part of the house, where Lukas keeps a tiny garden bounded by red bricks. There is also one of those upright storage units that look like the entrance to a small home. And a large oak tree near the back fence, and a fire pit, where on autumn nights they burn dry wood and drink beer and laugh as their clothes fill with the smell of smoke.

  He finds Miller sitting in a chair near the edge of the yard, one of those aluminum folding chairs with tacky plastic for the seat. Overhead, the sky is lavender. Miller’s drinking from a long dark bottle, staring into his phone. Texting, probably. He does not see Wallace as he approaches. Wallace stands at the edge of Miller’s toes, waiting for him to notice, for the weight of his presence to shift something in the air. He holds his breath. Miller is wearing a crisp blue oxford with the sleeves rolled back, and dark blue shorts. He has always been self-conscious about his knees and the skinniness of his legs. But sailing has changed that, made him hardier, fuller, like a drawing taking shape over thin streaked lines. His hair is glossy and light.

  “I can see you there,” he says.

  “Hello.”

  “I didn’t know if you would come,” Miller says shyly. He’s nervous, probably about the girl; at first this makes Wallace want to smile at him, and then it just annoys him.

  “Cole asked me to,” he says.

  “Is this weird? It’s probably weird.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s weird at all.”

  “You don’t? I do,” Miller says, shaking his head. “I think it’s terrible. I didn’t ask Yngve to—”

  “Oh, who cares, how boring.”

  “Hey, come on, don’t be that way, please. I’m trying to be good.”

  “You aren’t doing anything wrong. No one is. It’s all good.”

  “I really hate this. I didn’t even know there would be a dinner thing until I got home earlier. They sprung it on me.”

  “Cole told me,” Wallace says. “After tennis. Or during. He said they decided after we left the table last night.”

  “Oh yeah?” Miller slides his leg against the inside of Wallace’s legs, their bare skin skimming, touching. The warmth of it excites Wallace, brings him back to the surface of last night, when they left the table together, or separately, but wound up together. It’s on Miller’s mind, too, the way he’s looking up with dusk filling his eyes, remembering. The tip of Miller’s tongue emerges from the pink of his mouth and presses against the edge of his lips.

  “Not like that,” Wallace says, short of breath. “I meant— You know what I meant.”

  “I know,” Miller says. He sits forward in the chair, brings his hand to the outside of Wallace’s thigh, just over his knee. His fingers, the roughness of them, are familiar, from this morning, from last night. He jolts, almost falls down. Miller traces a thumb up the front of his knee, and he’s smiling. The wind makes a soft sound in the trees, like a hushed cry. “How are you feeling?” Miller asks. “That girl in your lab, I mean. How are you?”

  “Better,” Wallace says. He puts his fingers in Miller’s hair, which is greasy with product, but he persists, passing them back and back through its curls. “I came here thinking I’d be sulky and mad all night.”

  “Mad? Why mad? At me?”

  “No, I don’t know, maybe, yes. Mad at you. And myself, mostly. Yngve.”

  “But you aren’t mad? That’s good, right?”

  “I don’t know if it’s good,” Wallace says. “I don’t know if it’s good at all.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Because, I think, if I’m not mad, maybe that means I feel like I’ve won something. Like I’ve gotten something I wanted. But I shouldn’t want it at all. You know?”

  “I don’t,” Miller says. He puts the beer on the grass beside him and holds on to Wallace’s legs with both hands. “Tell me,” he says.

  Wallace pulls his hands through Miller’s hair down to his forehead and he presses his thumb hard there so that Miller’s brows, furrowed in concentration, flatten and smooth.

  “I feel relieved because I didn’t want to think about you wanting someone else. But I also don’t want to feel relieved. I don’t want to care if you do or don’t.”

  “But what if I want you to care?” Miller says.

  “Straight boys,” Wallace says, laughing, “always want what they want until they don’t.”

  “That’s not fair. We’re friends.”

  “Which is why this is such a terrible idea,” Wallace says.

  “I don’t think so.”

  There is a voice in the gathering darkness calling for them. Miller’s fingers flex around him and then release him.

  “I’m not done talking to you about this,” Miller says.

  “What’s to talk about?” Wallace asks. They turn to the voice calling their names. It’s Yngve. He’s got his hand cupped over his eyes.

  “We’ll eat without you,” he says. “Hurry up. And where is our music, Miller?”

  Miller pushes up from the chair, and the two of them go along the grass together, not looking at each other. Wallace then feels Miller’s knuckles graze the outside of his knuckles, and for a moment the two of them are connected. The contact is over almost as it begins, and the suddenness of the dissolution heightens Wallace’s sense of it: For the span of those several seconds, he felt as though molten glass were being drawn through him like liquid into a capillary. They climb the back stairs, and they are once more among their friends.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE TABLE IS PERHAPS the one article of genuine adult furniture in the whole house. Lukas brought it down with him from his grandparents’ home in northern Wisconsin. Typically the table is pressed to the far wall, where it holds the articles of their lives: dishes, laundry, newspapers, books, articles, notebooks, tools, cables, and whatever else could be discarded and forgotten. But today they’ve drawn the table away from the wall into the large open room off the kitchen. Lukas draped a linen tablecloth over it, disguising its bruises, its nicks, specks of robin’s-egg blue from the painting of chairs. All this cartography hidden now.

  Wallace sits in the middle, between Emma and Cole, across the table from Roman and Klaus. Yngve and his girlfriend, Enid, are at one end of the table with Miller and Zoe; down the other are Lukas and his boyfriend, Nathan. The table is a little cramped. Emma has parked her elbow in Wallace’s side; he keeps stepping on the edge of Cole’s foot. Vincent’s tacked on to the end next to Cole.

  “I’m first off the island, I guess,” Vincent says, and there’s a small murmur of laughter.

  They pass the food in diagonals. Wallace takes some of the baked chicken (meat at the dinner thing, a mild thrill), some asparagus, brussels sprouts, a kind of strange mealy paste with no aroma that he presumes are the mashed potatoes. Someone passes him the wine, and he says, “No, none for me, thank you.”

  Roman holds the bottle, presses it forward. “No, don’t be rude, now.”

  “Wallace doesn’t drink,” Emma says.

  “Did you drive here? Is that it? We can surely find you a ride home.”

  “No,” Wallace says. “I just don’t drink.”

  Roman is very handsome—so blond that Wallace thinks he cannot be naturally so. But his eyelashes are blond, his eyebrows are blond,
and his beard is mostly a white-yellow, except in places where it’s gone dark red. He has dark green eyes, and a very architectural chin. To Wallace he looks not French but Icelandic. But he is French, from a small town in Normandy. His English is faultless, though accented. Klaus is stubby and dark-featured, like a minor folkloric figure. There is something perpetually strained about him, as though he is concentrating every moment of every day to make himself taller. Roman studies the early development of the heart in mice, the point at which the clump of white tissue no more animal-like than the white meat of an egg begins to jerk and to beat. He holds the hearts of tiny animals on his fingernail.

  The look he gives Wallace is difficult to parse, though Wallace decides it means annoyed.

  Down the table and back up the table goes the wine bottle, go the dishes of food. Wallace pulls the leg of the chicken out of its joint, sees the white head of the cartilage pop out. The meat itself is tender and dark. Though, at the joint, the chicken is red and a little bloody. It’s undercooked, but he cuts it up anyway, all the chicken and its crispy yellow crust dissected upon his plate. Under the skin lurk pulpy, bulbous strings of fat. The corn is good. Sweet, a little oily.

  “Have you been to Yosemite?” Wallace hears from up the table. It’s Zoe, talking to Miller.

  “No,” he says.

  “I do this thing with some friends almost every year—we try to go to as many national parks as we can in a summer. I love Yosemite the most, though. My parents took me and my brother there every year.”

  “I did Glacier a few weeks back,” Yngve says. “With Enid.”

  “How was it?” Zoe asks with a laugh.

  “Gorgeous, of course,” Enid says. Enid and Zoe are not dissimilar looking, Wallace notes. Except Enid is very pale. Her hair is a dyed gray-lilac color. She has a nose piercing, and her shoulder is covered in angular dark tattoos, deep black zigzags. Not tribal, but a geometry of the self, Wallace thinks. “I kind of broke my foot, though, so it was short.”

  “I stayed for three days after that, though,” Yngve says. Enid’s lips tighten as she nods, like the gesture is costing her something. “I mean. I don’t get a lot of time off, and it was kind of a big trip for me.”

  “Glacier’s a great park,” Zoe says. “I did that one too. Not this year. Last.”

  “I’ve never been to a national park,” Miller says.

  “Me either,” Wallace says. They turn to him, as if suddenly aware that he has been listening to their conversation this whole time. He goes back to his plate. Tries to tuck himself smaller, but it is too late for that. He has squandered his opening gambit. Miller laughs.

  “It can seem scary, or too big a thing,” Zoe says. “I mean, national park doesn’t really make it sound like a welcoming place. But . . . I don’t know, there’s just something about being in a place like that, where it’s just you and nature and the cell phone service is shitty. It’s like starting over.”

  “That’s why I went climbing after my grandpa died,” Yngve says. “It’s you and the rock. It’s you and the sky. It’s you, and all that matters is, Can I move five inches upward without dying? It’s amazing.”

  “I think it’s like—you know how when you look back at something and you realize how stupid it was to be upset that Tiffany Blanchard didn’t invite you to her slumber party? And how stupid it was that Greg Newsome didn’t ask you to homecoming? Like, when you’re climbing or hiking or just out there in the hills, when you see, like, the products of geological time—it’s like that. It’s like—” Zoe fumbles, makes slow circles with her knife, trying to find the word.

  “Perspective,” Emma says.

  “Yes, exactly. Perspective. Thank you,” Zoe says, laughing. “It’s like, what am I getting upset about? Because of torts?”

  “Don’t lawyers decide if people live or die?” Miller asks, and Zoe winces.

  “You know what I mean,” she says. “Right?” She’s looking at them, at each of them, in turn. Her eyes wander over their faces, and Wallace feels himself retract from her gaze. It is painful to watch the embarrassment come over her. She clears her throat.

  “Totally,” Vincent says, a beat too late. “It’s like we were talking about yesterday—there’s more to life than a program.”

  “Don’t start,” Cole says.

  “Like, you, Wallace,” Vincent says, sitting forward. The table shifts. Their glasses shake. Wallace’s water ripples.

  “How do you mean?” he asks, his voice drawing across the question as though to reveal a suddenly vanished rabbit.

  Vincent barely pauses, says, “How you want to leave, I mean. How you want to quit. Your dad dying. Perspective, right?”

  Wallace feels their gazes strike the surface of his body like pellets.

  “Oh, it hardly seems the same,” he says.

  “Seems like it to me,” Vincent replies, and then elaborates. “Wallace was saying yesterday, last night, that he hates grad school. Just hates it. Is totally miserable—poor guy—and anyway, he’s like, My dad died, and I hate it here. Why would he stay? You know. Like, his dad just died. That must change things, certainly.”

  “Must it?” Wallace asks, and to his horror, he realizes that he isn’t asking just himself. He has asked the table. His voice is a hoarse whisper. “Must it change things? What must it change?”

  “Well. Everything,” Vincent says with a wry laugh. “I mean, if my dad died, I’d be devastated.”

  Wallace nods. There is a hollow hissing sound from somewhere overhead. Now that they are all quiet, he can hear it perfectly. What is that, he wonders. That sound like something escaping, a leak.

  “Everything must change,” he says after a while, smiling, laughing—always smiling, the smiling fool, the happy clam. His eyes crinkle. The room relaxes. Roman narrows his eyes.

  “Is that true? That you are thinking of going?”

  Wallace thinks of three French verbs in quick succession: partir, sortir, quitter. He learned French in high school, where he took four years of the language. And then in college, where he studied another three years. In college, he was also friends with the North African tennis players, but he was always shy to use his French outside the classroom. Except in moments of peculiar bravery, he asked them questions about themselves, about their homes, their families, about their lives. And there was a boy, Peter, with whom he almost slept several times. Peter used to say good-bye to him with quitter: Je quitte. It is of this word that Wallace now thinks. It hangs on the edge of his tongue, but he holds it back. It is a private word. It belongs to Peter.

  Wallace hums. “I mean, I wouldn’t say that I want to leave, but I’ve thought about it, sure.”

  “Why would you do that? I mean, the prospects for . . . black people, you know?”

  “What are the prospects for black people?” Wallace asks, though he knows he will be considered the aggressor for this question. Already, they’re taking stock of the tension in his forearms, in his hands, in the way his eyes are narrowing. Tension gathers at the corners of his mouth.

  “Well,” Roman says, shrugging, “with a doctorate, you have better prospects, a better job, better outlook. Without it . . . the stats are what they are.”

  “Fascinating,” Wallace says.

  “Besides, they spent so much money on your training. It seems ungrateful to leave.”

  “So I should stay out of gratitude?”

  “I mean, if you don’t feel you can keep up, then for sure, you should go. But they brought you in knowing what your deficiencies were and—”

  “My deficiencies?”

  “Yes. Your deficiencies. I won’t say what they are. You already know. You come from a challenging background. It is unfortunate, but it is how it is.”

  Wallace can only taste ashes in his mouth. He dissects a piece of a casserole and chews it thoughtfully. His deficiencies are indeed what they
are. There are the gaps in his knowledge about developmental biology, which he has closed steadily over the past few years, through study and coursework. There was also, in those early years, a lack of technical expertise, which he has acquired through practice. But the deficiency to which Roman is alluding is not one of those, not one of the many ways in which people come into graduate school unprepared for its demands, wrong-footed this way and that by its odd rituals and rigors. What Roman is referring to is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of some requisite sameness. This deficiency cannot be overcome. The fact is, no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns or how many skills he masters, he will always be provisional in the eyes of these people, no matter how they might be fond of him or gentle with him.

  “Did I hurt your feelings?” Roman asks. “I just want to be clear. I think you should stay. You owe the department that much, don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t have anything to say to that, Roman,” Wallace says, smiling. To keep his hands from shaking, he clenches his fists until his knuckles turn to white ridges of pressure.

  “Well, think about it,” he says.

  “I will, thanks.”

  Emma puts her head on Wallace’s shoulder, but she won’t say anything either, can’t bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it. That’s the frustrating part. Wallace is the only one for whom this is a humiliation. He breathes out through the agony of it, through the pressure in his chest. Roman is whispering to Klaus, and they’re laughing about something.

  “Can we get that wine back down here?” Lukas asks in a tone that is both polite and pointed. Nathan is on his phone, reading the scores of the badminton competition in Singapore.

  “You’ll have to come get it,” Yngve says, holding the bottle up and swirling it.

  “Just give it to him,” Enid says. “Jesus.”

  Lukas is already standing, coming around Wallace’s side of the table and approaching Yngve. He reaches for the bottle, but Yngve has bolted to his feet.