Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  6

  When Wallace wakes alone in Miller’s bed a little before midnight, all he can say is, “Fair enough.”

  Miller’s room is dark except for the indistinct blue haze coming from a tangled cluster of string lights on the floor. There’s a dense clump of hurt below his belly, pressing against his back. His bladder. The sleep has been partial and rough. His face is swollen from pressing into the pillow. He can smell Miller’s sweat. The room is cool from the fan in the window. The voices on the lawn are gone. There are no voices in the hall. A fine crack rings the upper edge of the wall, near the close, white, angled ceiling. There is a skylight there, a trapezoid of deeper black, a few caught leaves flattened to its corners. These old houses—the words spring to mind like a bit of old music, a line dredged up from the holiday party at Simone’s house the previous year, Henrik’s last year.

  He and Henrik had been sent down into the basement to retrieve chairs. Simone stood at the top of the stairs, watching the two of them move into and out of the pool of light at the base, stacking the chairs. Henrik had been drinking gin already, and his lips were red. His eyes were a little pink. Wallace could smell the piney scent on him. At one point they both stepped out of the light into the shadow at the same moment and reached for the same chair, and their hands brushed low over its base. Henrik grunted, and Wallace drew back stiffly. Henrik lifted the chair in one smooth move and he motioned with his chin to the far wall, deeper into the shadow under the stairs, where there was a faint, barely discernible crack running through the concrete. These old houses, he said. They’ve got shitty foundations. Which at the time had not made sense to Wallace, because how did a thing with a shitty foundation get to be old? He thought about it as they climbed the stairs together over and over, carrying two chairs at a time, and each time the stairs creaked or threatened to give way under their weight; he thought about it until it became a kind of song. These old houses. Henrik’s last party. Henrik’s last year. These old houses.

  Wallace gets up to piss. He draws Miller’s flannel around his shoulders. They get cold, these old houses, Wallace thinks. On the landing, he presses close to the railing and waits. The front hall is dark. The kitchen is dark. But the silence is not perfect. He can make out the soft scratch of the edge of whispers. Not the words, but the impression of sound pressing against the air. He is not alone. It makes sense, after all, that Miller would still be in the house. And Yngve. People live here. Their lives go on. He has not been left entirely alone. The incompleteness of his abandonment makes him want to laugh a little, but he also feels the curious, inverted sweep of vertigo. The shame of having given away too much of himself, and to Miller of all people. The reflexive desire to seek cover, to hide, flashes through him. There was a time—running up to Friday, even—when giving so much of himself away would have been a fatal mistake. He would have had to live the rest of his time in graduate school fearing reprisal, fearing having it sprung on him at odd turns, strange moments, always having to peer around the corner just to make sure. There was a time when Wallace would have trusted this suspicious streak in his nature, would have trusted it to keep him safe, but he had done a stupid thing, has done a stupid thing, in telling Miller all of this about himself, and so all he has is hope, and he has never been a person who can depend on hope.

  The bathroom is clean, full of wicker and white, like a bathroom in some beach town. He pisses with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, smelling like Miller, and he watches the water in the bowl turn yellow. The stink of urine, too much coffee, the smell of ammonia. He rinses his hands, pulls the blanket back around him, and then he descends the stairs.

  In the air: musk and burning pine. Thin blue vapor. At the edge of the doorway, he sees them sitting on the kitchen floor. The piercing red glow of an electronic cigarette. The back door cracked. Miller’s and Yngve’s long legs stretched out past each other. Miller with his back against the low cabinets. Yngve with his back against the wall. They pass the vape pen back and forth, each taking his time, the one not smoking looking out the door into the night, where the blankets are still strewn across the grass, getting damp. Yngve and Miller, they look like brothers this way, except that Yngve’s face is angular, sharp, and his body’s got a boxy quality, like he was cut from a piece of thick leather. Miller is softer, that stupid curl in his hair, the baby fat of his cheeks and his jaw. They’re talking about the boats, but what about them Wallace cannot tell, either because he lacks the knowledge or because they are quiet, or maybe it’s both. But he’s desperate to know, gripping the edge of the door so tight his nails ache. He needs to know what they are talking about because he is afraid—the rising chill at the nape of his neck, the heat of blood in his nose—that they are talking about him. His senses sharpen. The smell of grease from dinner. The tinny drip of water into the basin sink. The hiss of the resin as it burns, as the plant matter in the vape pen congeals. He can smell the heat. He can taste it on the tip of his tongue. And he watches the slow, dark motion of their mouths, their eyes turning toward each other, glinting, and Wallace takes that fatal step forward, the floor underneath him groans, and there, just before Yngve turns to him, Wallace watches a ripple of muscle up his neck, a sign that surely his head will turn, and on Miller’s face, a momentary beat at the hollow of his throat. In that moment, Wallace sees it all, the whole world, deepened and shaded, can feel them, can hear them, knows even before they do what action, what motion will come next, and he steadies himself. Prepares himself for it.

  “Wallace,” Yngve says brightly. “Come smoke with us.”

  “He doesn’t smoke,” Miller says with some stiffness, not quite formal, not distant, but tight. Wallace crosses the kitchen, collects a glass from the cupboard.

  “I’ll sit with you,” he says. He fills the glass near-full, and this reminds him of the previous night, when he filled the glass and made Miller drink from it. His face grows hot at the memory. The inappropriateness of it. The subtle way they have been drawn into re-creating it, except that when he looks to Miller he sees no recognition on his face. The moment passes, which is at once a relief and a disappointment. Wallace sits next to Yngve. Yngve draws the blanket around himself; their elbows and shoulders touch. He is cool from sitting near the open door. Miller sucks off the end of the gray vape. His eyes close. Yngve snaps quick and hard.

  “Come on, come on,” he says, motioning back toward himself. Wallace can smell the vapor on him and the beer. Something else too, darker liquor, maybe. Yngve is sour from sweat. Miller is wearing a yellow sweater with exposed stitching. Wallace watches the blunted ends of Miller’s fingers, their thick knuckles. Yngve crosses his legs. A white sickle-shaped scar across his knee, faint railroad track scar. Wallace reaches down, presses his thumb to it, can feel the tension in Miller’s gaze as surely as if it were a thread caught to his hand. Yngve gives a little involuntary shiver under Wallace’s thumb. Miller gives the vape back to Yngve. The coarse blond hair of Yngve’s leg. He traces the scar; Yngve shivers again.

  “How did this happen?” Wallace asks.

  “I’ve had that for years,” Yngve says. “I got it right before I came to grad school. It was from soccer, all those years. Junky joints.” A silver shred of vapor from the corner of his mouth. He rests the back of his head against the wall. “They went in and cleaned it out for me.”

  Wallace is still stroking the scar when he looks up, spots Miller staring at him. Wallace takes his hand away. Yngve passes the vape to Miller.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” Yngve says. “It doesn’t. Before, that’s when it hurt like hell. But now, nothing.” Yngve presses his palm flat to his knee, and Wallace watches as he gives it a squeeze as if to emphasize his point. Wallace drinks.

  “Some night tonight,” Miller says.

  “Some night,” Yngve says. It’s Wallace’s turn to shiver.

  “Is that what you were talking about before? When I came in?”
r />   “No,” Yngve says quickly, but then he laughs. “Yeah, I guess we were.”

  “I didn’t know all that about Cole and Vincent,” Miller says.

  “Me either, but maybe we should have guessed.”

  “I mean, they fight, but not like this,” Miller says, frowning. “But I guess you can’t know what other people are doing. Or feeling.”

  Yngve nudges Wallace’s side, and Wallace cannot tell if it is because Yngve is saying that Wallace is the one who started it all or if he is saying that he suspects something is going on between the two of them, Wallace and Miller. Either implication leaves Wallace feeling cold and afraid. So he shrugs, and Yngve laughs again. It’s not a mocking sort of laughter, glinting and ferocious. Nor is it entirely insinuating, winking. After a few moments, Wallace realizes that Yngve is just laughing at Miller.

  Yngve says, “Listen to him over here. Real wise guy.”

  “Shut it,” Miller snaps back, but there’s a crooked grin on his face.

  “Do you think they’ll split up?” Wallace asks, out of guilt more than anything. “Do you really think they’ll break up over it?”

  “No, it was dumb,” Miller says. “I’m sure they’ll be fine. They went home together.”

  “They did? When?” Wallace asks. “God. Fuck. I wish I’d gotten to say something before they left.”

  “You said enough,” Yngve says, still smiling. He puts his arm around Wallace’s neck and pulls him close. “Little Wally got himself into enough for one night, I think.”

  Miller hums in assent, and Wallace feels a quick pulse of hurt. But they are right, he knows. Nothing he could have said would have made them feel better. And yet he went off with Miller instead of cleaning up after himself. He let himself be drawn away and comforted. But was it comfort? Talking to Miller, feeling a little worse with every word he said? That’s the strange thing about it, he thinks. That he started that story in order to feel better or to feel clearer, started it because it seemed a thing within his grasp and Miller had asked him to and it felt good to give Miller something he wanted. But Wallace does not feel better for having told Miller all that. He does not feel happier or comforted. Perhaps it was right after all, he thinks. A kind of justice.

  “When did they leave? When did everyone go?”

  “A little while ago. You were asleep.”

  “You two did vanish, that’s true,” Yngve says.

  “I got sick,” Wallace says.

  Yngve does not look at Wallace. He looks at Miller.

  “Is that so?”

  “And I owed him for last night. Helping me.”

  “You two are so chummy these days,” Yngve says.

  “I hate him,” Wallace says. Yngve pinches the side of Wallace’s neck.

  “Don’t lie. You don’t have to lie. We’re friends. We’re all friends here.”

  “Is Lukas here?”

  “Yes, upstairs,” Yngve says, but then, catching himself, he says, “Oh, no. He’s with Nate.” There is something in his voice, not sadness because it would be too easy to call it sadness, or regret. There is something about the way he says it, the way he turns back, as if he convinced himself that Lukas is upstairs asleep, safe and sound, as if by some trivial bit of magic he made himself believe that. Some act of sleight of hand, and now, facing the truth, the voice turns soft, tinged at its edges, like turning your palms up, caught. Yngve’s eyes are red-rimmed, glossy, blue-gray like river stones.

  No wonder the house is so quiet.

  Wallace offers some water to Yngve, who smiles and takes the glass. A look of annoyance flashes across Miller’s face, but then it’s gone, as if he’s thinking how trivial, how childish, let him drink. Yngve drinks as if he’s under a clock.

  “Well,” he says. “I’m going up to bed.”

  “Okay,” Miller says. “Sleep tight.”

  Yngve says something in Swedish, kisses Wallace’s cheek, and then is gone. They listen to Yngve going up the stairs, his weight coming in even intervals, plodding up and up, growing fainter and fainter until it is indistinguishable from the mass of the house itself. Miller nods to the space beside him, and Wallace slides over to sit next to him. Miller takes some of the blanket, the way Yngve did.

  Wallace puts his leg across Miller’s, and Miller puts a hand on Wallace’s knee.

  “You left me,” Wallace says.

  “I left a note.”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” Miller says, laughing.

  “I didn’t look, anyway.”

  “Did you sleep well?” Miller asks. “Are you feeling better?”

  “I did. I am,” Wallace says, though he’s getting nervous again. “I thought I had scared you off.”

  “No,” Miller says. “You couldn’t scare me off.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true. It’s okay if you’re freaked out or whatever. It’s a lot, I know.”

  “I’m not,” Miller says. He’s fumbling with the edge of the blanket, not looking at Wallace. His neck is red, his cheeks are red. The boyishness, the part of him that’s always hesitating, faltering, is so evident now. Wallace kisses his shoulder.

  “Okay,” Wallace says. “That’s good. I’m glad. It’s just that you didn’t say anything after.” He’s putting himself out there, laying his uneasiness at Miller’s feet to acknowledge or ignore. He could take Miller at his word, believe him, that the silence is nothing at all. He won’t push. He will let it go. He will be easy. He will be calm.

  Miller does not respond. He’s back to looking outside into the dark. It’s hard to see anything out there, only the faint outlines of shapes and figures. He is flexing his hand again, the knuckles thick and hard. The tension runs up his arm to his shoulder, where Wallace can feel it throbbing. It isn’t an angry silence. It isn’t like that at all. But there is something in it, a gathering of something hard and unyielding, a knotting sensation.

  Has he done this? Has Wallace caused this? He should have been firm in his resistance to remain silent on the matter of his past and his history. He should have kept his mouth closed.