Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  “You’ll have to be faster,” Yngve says, and Lukas loads his weight and springs for the bottle. Lukas is much shorter than Yngve. He has a compact, muscular body and the features of a cartoon character—wide eyes, large face. Yngve steps back, Lukas steps forward. It’s a dance.

  Nathan pushes his glasses back up his nose. He watches the two of them at the head of the table, the swing and pivot of their bodies. The wine sloshes, glugs in the bottle. There is another bottle of wine on the table. Enid watches it very carefully. There’s tension in her neck. Zoe crosses her arms on the table to support herself. Her shoulders shake with laughter. Miller’s eyes fall to her back just as Zoe’s eyes come across her shoulder. Their gazes meet. And Wallace feels it happening, the tightening between people in common attraction.

  Yngve puts his arm around Lukas, gets him by the waist, and lifts him up. “Sorry, shorty. You must be this tall to drink wine.”

  “Yngve,” Lukas says, but he can’t help himself. He’s flush-faced.

  “What are we, children?” Enid asks. She lifts the bottle from the table and slams it down. It does not break. “Take this one.”

  Yngve lets Lukas down. Lukas takes the bottle from his hand. There’s no challenge in him anymore. He takes his seat, breathing hard. Nathan looks down with the same prim delicacy with which one might fold a napkin in one’s lap. Wallace smells the wine, its sweet, dark scent.

  Cole laughs nervously.

  They are always laughing. This is it, Wallace thinks. That’s how they get by. Silence and laughter, silence and laughter, switch and swing. The way one glides through this life without having to think about anything hard. He still feels the sting of embarrassment, but it has ebbed. Vincent’s gaze clips the outside of his own. Wallace eats his food.

  The tasteless, strained, diluted flavor of white people food, its curious texture, its ugliness. He eats his food. He grinds his teeth. His anger is cold. There’s a skin stretching across it.

  Roman and Vincent share a look. Cole watches them share a look. They are all looking at each other.

  Wallace thinks of Peter. Of his mother. Of his father. Of Henrik. Of Dana.

  “You guys played tennis today?” Vincent asks. The commonness of the question shears the skin off Wallace’s anger.

  “It was great,” Cole says.

  “We had a long talk. It was good to catch up.”

  “I bet, I bet,” Vincent says.

  “So when you were on the app last night, Vincent, were you just looking or did you really plan to fuck someone else?” Wallace asks, smiling, his teeth gleaming.

  There is a stuttering pause. Cole tenses. Roman’s eyes swing around to them. Vincent turns a sickly green color.

  “What?” he asks. “What did you say?”

  “I saw you on the app last night, and I was just wondering if . . . you know, you two were opening things up?” He looks between Cole and Vincent, as though he were asking about color swatches. He asks in a voice lighter than he feels, because in truth, at the moment, he wants to die. But it feels good, for once, to see someone else caught out.

  Cole reaches down and grips Wallace’s knee hard and tight, so tight it almost hurts, and that pain is nearly enough to get him through this moment. Wallace’s head is pounding.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “Is that true, Vincent?” Cole asks, taking up Wallace’s lie, because unlike for Wallace, this truth is one that means everything to him.

  “I don’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I . . .”

  “Wow,” Roman says, clapping softly. “Good for you two. It’s great.”

  “Really great,” Klaus says, nodding firmly. “It’s the best decision we ever made.”

  “You were on there?” Cole says, letting his anger and his hurt sweep through him. He turns in his chair. “We were only talking about it. But you did it behind my back? Why?”

  Wallace watches Vincent’s face very carefully. That pinched, needful look of his has turned sharper and more pronounced. He has crumbs of food stuck to the underside of his lower lip. His mouth is shiny with grease. His thick brow, which juts over his small eyes like a protective cliff, has grown darker. There are some people whose shock flays them open and leaves them exposed, but Vincent is not one of these people. He has collected into himself, grown small and hard, and Wallace feels in some way both proud of him and cheated of a more discernible reaction. Yes, Wallace thinks, that’s it, don’t let them see you sweat, Vincent; it should be that way. But he also feels, in the baser part of himself, a snarl of anger, deprived of his reward for having turned it all back on them. It’s an ugly, petty part of Wallace that delights and shivers and wishes only that Vincent were the more combustible sort.

  “Holy shit,” Lukas says. “Holy shit.”

  “Oh my god.” Yngve is up from the end of the table and coming toward them, but thinks better of it, reluctant to get caught up in someone else’s mess, and sits back down.

  “I was just looking, Cole. I didn’t mean to do anything. I was just looking.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say something before you did it?”

  “I don’t know. I was scared you’d say no. I was scared I’d want you to say yes? I don’t know. Fuck.” Vincent’s eyes are wet. He’s on the brink of crying. Wallace feels guilty now—real guilt, gravelly and hard. He swallows. His own eyes are stinging. Cole is crying softly already, beating his leg with his hand.

  “Why am I not enough?”

  “It’s not about you not being enough,” Roman says.

  Cole turns to him and says, “Shut up, Roman. I wasn’t talking to you.”

  There is a look of surprise on Roman’s face. He leans back in his chair. “You two are out here in public. I assumed you wanted input.”

  “Can we just have a fucking minute to be in our relationship without you wanting to stick your dick in it?”

  “Someone is finally growing some spine, great for you,” Roman says, clapping louder this time. “Someone is finally being a man. But a tip. If you don’t want someone else fucking your boyfriend, maybe you should.”

  “What is he talking about, Vincent?”

  “No, no, no,” Vincent says, putting his face in his hands. “No, no, no. This isn’t happening.”

  “Vincent, what is he talking about?”

  “Fuck,” Vincent says. “Fuck.”

  Klaus is dark red with anger, looking stormily at Roman, who has gone back to eating his dinner.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Miller says. Emma has gotten up to put her arms around Cole, who is staring at Vincent.

  “Baby, baby,” Emma says. “Baby, baby. Come on.” She’s rubbing Cole’s back, pressing him to get up from the table and come with her, somewhere, anywhere else.

  Wallace does not even try to look innocent of his role in the whole thing. Cole will likely never forgive him, but Wallace did in fact give him what he needed but could never ask for himself, and isn’t that why Cole asked him to come in the first place? Yes, he reacted out of pettiness, out of a desire to see someone brought low, but in the end, hadn’t something important been achieved? He looks to his left and sees Vincent sobbing into his hands, and Cole staring like an empty obelisk. Roman and Klaus speak to each other in angry French and German, words slashing at each other.

  The dinner is ruined, that much is obvious, but Wallace is still eating because he is hungry. He eats the soup, even though there is too much tomato. He chews through the eggplant parm, the salads, the mashed potatoes, the pilaf, the pasta with olives, and the homemade ravioli. It feels as if some great pit in him has opened that can be filled only with food. He eats and eats, more and more servings, kale and hummus and pita chips and salty crackers. There is a variety of desserts: his fruit salad, some pecan pie, pumpkin pie, a cherry tart, lemon squares, snickerdoodles, a host of cookies. He eats them bit by bit,
inch by inch, sliding them into his mouth. He is the only one eating because everyone else is speaking quietly, in twos and threes, trying to unravel what has happened.

  Wallace does not look up. There was a time in second year, soon after Dana had convinced Simone that he had mixed up the purification reagents, when Wallace ate his lunch alone in the third-floor library. He would use the rickety microwave in the kitchen and then take his steaming cup of ramen down the halls, trying to keep the lid pressed tight against the sloshing hot water, and then take up residence in one of the study rooms so he could be alone with his shame. He ate while watching videos on his phone, the bright afternoon light cutting across the narrow window and lying like a golden slat on the table. He ate alone every day for a month, until one day Henrik came to find him. Wallace looked up, and there he was peering through the window in the door, watching him. Wallace jumped, knocked his cup on the floor, and Henrik’s expression darkened. He got down on his knees and started to scoop the ruined noodles into the cup, and Henrik pressed the door open and said, What are you doing in here? We have a kitchen for this. He folded his arms across his chest, hands damp on his shirt, and he wouldn’t move until Wallace collected his cup and his fork and began to walk back to the kitchen to dispose of his lunch. He didn’t eat lunch at lab for a long time after that, and every day, around three in the afternoon, Henrik would take his own lunch, and he’d stop just as he left their bay and look back at Wallace. There was regret in his eyes, Wallace thinks now. Regret and something else. He wishes he had asked Henrik about that. He wishes he had asked Henrik to eat lunch with him. He wonders now if Henrik had come not to scold him, but to make some offer—of friendship, maybe—but being shy, not knowing what to do with himself, had fumbled. Or maybe it hadn’t been anything.

  The others have gotten up from the table. They’ve gone back through the archway into the kitchen. He hears them, distantly, faintly. The murmur of plans. No one speaks to him. Why would they now? He’s ruined their dinner thing.

  The carrots are tearing his gums. He can taste a little of his own blood. His jaws feel loose, like putty.

  “What are you doing?” Miller asks, and Wallace does look up, sees Miller’s face. He looks a little startled. Wallace presses his fingers to his lips, feels the warm, sticky weight of blood, not a lot, just a little. He’s nicked his lips with his teeth.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “You look terrible,” Miller says. He pulls out the chair next to Wallace and has a seat.

  “I feel terrible.” Wallace glances through the archway out the back door. He sees the edge of someone’s shirt. They’re sitting under the tree out back. “I made a mess of tonight.”

  “You had some help.”

  “I knew better than to say that.”

  “Probably so.”

  Wallace groans and puts his head on the table, but instead of crying the way he wants to, he just laughs. It’s not funny. It’s not remotely funny. What has transpired tonight? Vincent’s infidelity, nebulous though it may remain, loosely confirmed at the very least. Nathan and Enid relegated to minor figures in their relationships with Lukas and Yngve, a tragedy not entirely surprising but pitiable. Roman is a racist at best. Who knows what’s going on with Emma and Thom? Zoe seems nice, but in the way that white people are nice right before they perform some new role in the secret machinery that ruins black people’s lives. It seems to Wallace that there is nothing to do but laugh.

  He laughs and laughs. His eyes fill with warm tears. They dampen the white tablecloth. Miller’s hand is warm on the nape of Wallace’s neck, a tender gesture. Wallace’s laughter cinches like a wrung towel, and when it opens again, it is a wail.

  “God,” he says. “I fucking hate it here.”

  “I know.”

  “I fucking hate it everywhere.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know where to go or what to do,” he says, and because the words are so true, strike such a fundamental chord with who he is, he vibrates at high frequency, shivers like a tuning fork.

  “It’s not so bad,” Miller says.

  “It is.”

  “It’ll work out.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I know,” Miller says, cracking a smile. It is a deflection, and a bad one at that, which annoys Wallace. A deflection out of kindness. A kindness that seeks to encompass all futures, that asserts its constancy regardless of what might come. Miller, stroking the back of Wallace’s neck and looking down at him like an amused nursery school teacher, is saying something, promising something, and all Wallace has to do is find it in himself to accept it.

  “You guys never take this stuff seriously,” Wallace says, and starts to push Miller’s hand away from him, but he stops when Miller says quietly, “I’m sorry.

  “We should be better. I should be better. I’m sorry,” Miller says firmly. This is kindness too, Wallace thinks. Of a different sort. What he does not know—and maybe, just maybe, it’s not important—is whether this kindness is just an extension of their friendship or something else, or if that question itself, the uncertainty, is a rebuke, an insult, a miscalculation. What is the source of kindness? What causes people to be kind to each other? “Wallace?” Miller asks after a moment. “Okay? I’m sorry.”

  Wallace nods, his head still against the table. Miller’s thumb resumes its scratching glide across Wallace’s neck.

  Kindness is a debt, Wallace thinks. Kindness is something owed and something repaid. Kindness is an obligation.

  The kettle goes shrill on the stove. Someone is making coffee for the group outside. The windows are open, and the world smells like summer turning to fall. There is a certain crispness. Miller, in the darkening room, opens his mouth and then closes it. He puts his head on the table, too, and they’re sitting there like two ducks with their faces in the water. It’s harder for Miller, who has a long neck, but he’s making it work somehow. Wallace wants to laugh at him.

  The house exhales into the cool of the evening. Crickets in the garden, eating the leaves. Under the table, Wallace reaches for Miller’s hand and takes it.

  Voices from outside. Steps on the back stairs, coming up. Emma, slapping into the kitchen in sandals, smelling like dogwood and coconut.

  “I’m so tired,” she says. Her voice is warped. She’s a little drunk. “But coffee won’t make itself.” There is the sound of her clattering about, making busy with small tasks. Miller is smiling at him, blinking slowly. Wallace could sleep forever. “Are you coming outside?”

  Miller’s smile is slow in coming, but he lets Wallace’s hand go. Emma is in the kitchen, at the counter. The rich, dark scent of coffee joins them—she’s making pour-over, less acidic and smoother than brew. The water over the grounds in the filter is hissing softly, settling in, the faint trickle of the water like rain. Wallace sits up in his chair. Emma’s face goes dark.

  “I guess I’ll have another beer,” Miller says. He gets up from the table, and Emma takes his spot, folding her legs under herself.

  “Wallace, don’t get mad at me—” she says. It’s the slow windup. He stiffens. She’s chewing on an apple slice. “What was that at dinner? It wasn’t like you.”

  “What would be like me, Emma?” he asks low, quick. She looks a little startled by the question, by his tone, which is not neutral or kind. She resents his resentment.

  “You aren’t like this. This isn’t who you are.”

  “Nobody said a thing to him when he was suddenly a demographics expert, did they?”

  “That isn’t the same. You might have really hurt Cole,” she says.

  “Hurt Cole? Me? And not his philandering boyfriend?”

  “You don’t know what’s going on with them, Wallace. You don’t get to decide how someone else’s life is run, what is okay for them. That isn’t your call. You should have asked him in priv
ate.”

  “Oh,” Wallace says, nodding severely. He takes some of the apple slices for himself. He peels back their slick skins until their white flesh is bare, sees how they begin to oxidize, these naked, tender things. “Privacy. So now we understand the concept of privacy.”

  Emma’s eyes widen at this. She gets on her knees beside him and puts her finger into his chest.

  “You are so selfish,” she says. “I told our friends about your loss to help you. You told everyone about Cole and Vincent’s mess to hurt them. It’s different.”

  “It seems like that should not be your call, Emma,” Wallace says. The delicate skin of her throat pulses.

  “Oh, so you think I’m controlling too. Wonderful. Well, you and Thom can have a fucking pity party about it. See if I care.” She waves her hand at him, dismisses him. She’s in his face. Their argument is quiet, contained to the air between them. Wallace glances over her shoulder, through the veil of her hair, into the kitchen.

  “I never said that,” he says. “I just mean—no one ever sticks up for me.”

  “That doesn’t make it all right to go ruining people’s lives.”

  “Sure. I’ll just take it, right? I’ll just take my licks,” he says. Emma presses her palms to her face. She gives a full-body shudder. Wallace’s stomach hurts. “Anyway, where’s Thom?”

  “Don’t,” she says.

  “Where is he? What’s going on? We might as well have your mess too.”

  “Thom didn’t want to come,” she says. “Does that rhyme? Thom didn’t want to come because Thom wants to stay home and read because Thom hates my friends.” There’s a singsong quality to it, this story she’s telling him. She pushes back from the table, gets up. Wallace follows her.

  In the kitchen, the two of them look through the back door to the yard, where the others have stretched out on flannel blankets. Yngve has flicked the switch for the white string lights that hang from the tree—it’s all very soft and very white out there now, under the sky, which is angled and dark. They’re drinking beer from cans and bottles. More folk music, more guitar, something by Dylan, he thinks. Yngve is lying back, and Lukas has put his head on Yngve’s stomach. They look silly and in love, which is something Yngve would never admit, could never bring himself to admit. Enid and Nathan sit together, filled with a sadness that they cannot articulate without fracturing their relationships, because Yngve will always choose Lukas and Lukas will always choose Yngve; they don’t have to say it to know it’s true. It’s a trust that can exist only in silence, he realizes. They can’t speak because to speak would be to dissolve it.