Lionel had been out of the hospital for only a few days when the potluck invitation came.
The host lived in the first-floor apartment of a Near East Side duplex separated by a tiny cul-de-sac from the wide-bottomed cottages that fronted Lake Monona.
Noise of an undifferentiated party variety drifted out into the deep blue cold, meeting Lionel under the sunroom window where he had stopped to peer inside. He felt powerfully anonymous out there in the dark, looking in on all of them. That he did not recognize anyone apart from the host felt at once a comfort and a warning.
A rectangle of pale light unfurled down the stairs as the host pressed the door open on screeching hinges.
“Shit, it’s cold out here. You walk all this way?”
Lionel climbed the stairs and tried to arrange his stiff face into a friendly expression, the effort of which made his scalp tingle. He had walked only part of the way, about ten minutes in all. The bus had dropped him on the other side of Orton Park. When the host realized that Lionel wasn’t going to answer, he said, “Well, you’re right on time.”
“I didn’t have a chance to go to the store—I just got back,” Lionel said. The several pairs of shoes in the front hall indicated to him that this was not the small gathering he had thought it would be. It also indicated that he was not right on time, but he knew that already.
“Long trip?” The host wrapped his arm around Lionel’s lower back and pulled at him until they were very close, at the threshold of the apartment, but not yet inside. “Good?”
“Couple weeks,” Lionel said. “Sorry for not being in touch more.”
“It’s a busy time,” the host said in a way that wasn’t entirely not passive aggressive. Lionel turned his head a little out of reflexive guilt, and the host’s dry lips grazed the corner of his mouth.
“Thank you,” Lionel said.
“It’s good to see you. Let’s talk tonight. Catch up. It’s been forever.”
“Yeah, let’s.”
A few of the guests sat around on mismatched chairs and on the floor, holding plates of damp vegetables and grains. The improvised nature of the gathering diluted the strangeness he felt standing there alone, because although he was clearly a latecomer, the rest of them didn’t seem to belong to one another in the way that friends sometimes could. There was no operating logic to their association that he could see. They were all awkward, anxious strangers in the host’s living room. He waved to them, and they waved back. Their having seen him and his having seen them moved him.
Lionel felt alive, in the world.
The larger, noisier contingent of guests assembled their food in the kitchen. Lionel waited his turn, watching as they pirouetted and collided. They touched the smalls of each other’s backs and shoulders. Men and women. They hugged and kissed and pressed against each other. Looped arms and hooked thumbs into each other’s pockets. They poured wine and spooned things onto each other’s plates. The loud whack of plastic trays and the tinkle of ice, the hiss of seltzer. As they finished and squeezed by Lionel, he saw that they were about his age, twenty-four, or a little older. They smelled like tobacco and bright, vegetal things—orchids, hydrangeas. They said hey and hi and excuse me, and he stepped back to let them pass.
When the kitchen was empty and everyone had settled down to eat, Lionel made his own plate of baked asparagus, brown rice, kale salad. He leaned against the flaking yellow counter and pushed the food around until it had all been drawn across and through itself. The kitchen was humid, redolent of people and their colognes, shampoos, lotions. But the open window let in a shaft of cold, clear air. The wind whistled as it caught stray openings in the screen.
“Lionel!” the host called from the other room. “Lionel, what are you doing in there? Come on!”
He felt silly being summoned. When he was in the doorway, the host clapped loudly in a way that made the overhead lights flicker brighter in Lionel’s vision. His teeth hurt.
“There he is, there he is!”
The others did not clap, which made the host’s gesture seem both pitiful and cruel. Lionel could see the full array of people who had come to the potluck. The chubby man on the floor between two chairs kept insisting that he was fine. A blond woman sat with both feet on her chair and a plate balanced on her knees. The host shared the chaise with a couple who looked like siblings, in matching black corduroy pants and gray socks. The woman had a messy topknot, and the man wore his scraggly hair down to his shoulders under a felt baseball cap. An androgynous person, tall, striking, with a platinum buzzcut and septum piercing gestured at a black woman in overalls with pierced cheeks. Some skinny gay men in Breton sweaters, one black-white, the other white-black, were flirting with an equally skinny black man wearing sunglasses. A woman in chinos sat scowling at the space between her knees. Their faces were a wall of pleasant, bland expressions, but then they sank back into their own conversations. The chatter rose above the low music.
Near the defunct fireplace, over which someone had mounted a set of steer horns, Lionel squeezed into an opening on the floor next to a man in a burgundy turtleneck. The man was densely, unnecessarily muscular and looked like someone who enjoyed being looked at and could hold eye contact.
The conversation was difficult to catch. Everyone was talking in extended references to other moments, other events, other parties, and each reference, instead of drawing two things into relation, was instead the whole of the idiom, the entirety of the gesture. Which was fine, okay, he had gone to college with men who talked only in references to Will Ferrell movies and Adam McKay jokes. But he had not gone to these other parties. He had no way of getting inside the reference, the system. He laughed hollowly when other people did, though on a delay, but soon he grew tired of the feeling of falseness vibrating in his sinuses. The man next to him kept looking his way, and one or two times their eyes caught, and Lionel wondered at the feeling of recognition he experienced. The two of them were, by some strange bit of luck, on the outside of the conversation, though Lionel suspected that for the man this was intentional. He envied that. The way some people could choose to be in a moment with others or not. It was a choice he didn’t have access to, personally. He always felt that he was arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on. He had no sense of timing. But the man’s eyes kept catching him, and Lionel started to feel that the two of them, on the outside, had come to rest in their own moment. Their own tempo.
“I’m Charles,” the man said eventually.
“Lionel.”
“I heard. You’re famous now.”
“Well, he’s like that. He thinks everything is okay as long as he can laugh about it,” Lionel said. Charles raised his eyebrows.
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” Lionel started to say, but then stopped because he didn’t want to be considered a gossip, and Charles had leaned toward him slightly like gossiping was exactly what he had in mind. “He’s funny that way.”
“You a vegetarian?” Charles asked. The randomness of the remark, coming as it did from out of the ether, wrongfooted Lionel.
“How did you know? Something on my face?”
“Your plate,” Charles said. “You’re living that grain life.”
Lionel, as though he hadn’t made up the plate with his own hands, looked down and saw the food assembled there. The rice and kale mixed up. The stalks of asparagus. Oxidizing avocado chunks going soft.
“Guilty.”
Lionel looked at Charles’s plate. He had two fish portions, the kind with the head still on and the skin all crispy and brown. They looked like brim or something. Lionel had stopped eating meat the year before, when he was in the hospital. There was something so awful about it. Meat was so proximal to death, and he’d spent too much time looking at videos of the commercial food industry while he was in the private care facility. The kind shot on shaky camera phones and involving a lot of panting and rustling clothes, up-close shots of the cows pressing their snouts to mud-streaked bars or lying pathetically on their sides, suffering, with oozing sores and distended abdomens. He wasn’t radically vegetarian. He possessed no militant energy whatsoever. But still he felt insecure about it, because the origin of his desire to forgo meat wasn’t environmental or even about the animals, really. It was selfish. Because the thought of consuming dead things, when he had been so close to dying, when he had wanted to die, was too much. Lionel waited for Charles to say something dismissive about vegetarians, for that moment when people projected onto him whatever lingering guilt they felt about the consumption of meat.
He missed hamburgers terribly sometimes.
“How do you know our mutual friend?” Charles asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you at one of his dumb parties before.” Lionel was prepared for the abruptness of the transition this time.
“We were in the same department,” he said. He had known the host for several years, first when they were undergrad interns in the computer science department—Lionel from Michigan, the host from Arizona. Then both of them had been accepted into the same applied mathematics program at Wisconsin, and they’d been students together there for a few years, though Lionel was more pure math, while the host was working on applications to shielding and space exploration. They met for coffee and lunch after and before seminars and bonded over the fact that they hadn’t been math prodigies as kids. They slept together that first, itchy summer, fresh from undergrad and waiting for their lives to change. The host was now on track to graduate early—his project had attracted interest from the Department of Defense, which wanted to turn it into a weapon to be deployed in foreign wars.
“Oh, you’re a weird genius too, huh? That must be nice.” Charles whistled in fake appreciation.
“Definitely not a genius,” Lionel said. The word made him a little queasy. “I’m not in school right now, anyway. I’m on leave.”
Charles spun his fork around with a flick of his fingers. The metal flashed as it moved across his wrist and came to rest right side up. He did it again, just like that, a neat little trick.
“Then what do you do?”
“I proctor exams,” Lionel said.
“You what now?”
“I give exams for professors. I do entrance exams, too.” Lionel’s appetite shrank to a tiny white heat in the pit of his stomach. He was ashamed of proctoring only when he had to tell other people about it, and only when those people knew that he had once been a graduate student with good brain chemistry. He didn’t think proctoring was bad, but he could see how other people saw him the moment they heard it and how they appraised his life as it was by the metric of what it had once been.
“You’re pulling my leg. From math genius to proctor? Is that even a real thing?”
“It is,” Lionel said. “It’s what I do.”
“How’d that happen?”
“I just sort of fell into it,” Lionel said.
“Steep fall.”
“Not as steep as you’d imagine.”
Charles narrowed his eyes but smiled. Lionel felt a crackle of static between them.
“Is that your heart’s desire? To proctor?”
“Is your heart’s desire to interrogate strangers at a dinner party like a Chekhov character?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Charles said dryly, and Lionel snorted. The solidity of the sound startled him. Charles went back to spinning his fork.
Lionel resisted the urge to respond, grateful for the opportunity to drop down and out of the conversation. It was clear to him now, in a way that it hadn’t been before, that he and every other graduate student depended on the currency of their university affiliations to get by in conversations. As though academia were a satellite constantly pinging, letting him know who and where he was. It wasn’t until he had come out of that life that he realized he had no real way of relating to people without it. People looked at him differently when he didn’t mention that he’d once been a student or that he had a university affiliation. They looked through him, but the worst part of it was that he sometimes looked through himself in the same way.
“You like it?” Charles asked.
“It gives me time to think,” Lionel said. “It’s funny. I used to think so fast. Like, sometimes, I felt like I was having six different conversations in my head, all at once. But now it takes me a year just to get to the end of one thought.”
“If I were that in my head, I’d kill myself,” Charles said. “Sounds awful. Jesus.”
The acuity of the words stung Lionel right between the eyes. The air in the room was dense. His tongue felt heavy and numb. Something lodged at the base of his throat when he tried to respond. He coughed experimentally to see if he could clear it, but the hard knot of whatever it was remained stubbornly fixed. His neck bulged under his fingers. His skin was flushed and warm to the touch. He thought briefly that he was having an allergic reaction, that weird sense of driving panic and dry throat. His heart hammered along, and his eyes watered. Even the wool of his sweater itched and burned against his arms. He made another attempt at coughing loose whatever was in his throat. He beat on his chest to break up the tension, but there was no give.
“People do kill themselves,” Lionel wheezed. “They do.”
“Easy, buddy,” Charles said nervously. He slapped Lionel between the shoulders. The jolt of it made Lionel’s plate slide from his lap to the floor with a loud thunk. The wilted kale, coated in dressing, and the greasy avocado made a sad little pile.
The conversation, that wall of party noise, dropped away, and it was just the curious silence of the voyeur and the watched. Their attention felt like metal prods inserted into his joints.
“I need,” Lionel rasped, but then he stood up on his gummy legs. He went around the back of the chaise, and the host reached for him. The others called out:
Is he all right?
If I had to sit next to Charlie—
Charles, what did you do?
First door on the right!
Last fall, Lionel tried to kill himself.
His attempt had not been subtle, so his father had flown in from his suburb of Houston and his mother had driven from her suburb of Detroit. They converged on him in Madison, furious and terrified as they reprimanded him for yet again being so careless with himself.
He was held in UW Hospital for a few days. Held, because he could not leave of his own volition. What Lionel remembered with great clarity was the pain in his lower back: a hot ache just over his sacrum that throbbed all night. The doctor frowned at his EKG. The nurses spent a lot of time monitoring his respiration rate and his blood pressure. They told him to calm down and to think positive thoughts. They asked him about what he did, what he studied, said that he was young, that he was healthy, that he was okay, safe. He didn’t have to be so afraid. But his pulse stayed high, and eventually they had to give him a sedative, and he dropped into a blank void of sleep.
When his parents showed up, he was bloodshot and cold. His father guffawed and said, You look homeless. The doctor flinched at that, but Lionel knew he was only trying to make a joke. To be easy. His father was an engineer who worked in oil. He had worked on a new method to extract oil from shale. Before Houston his father had been in North Dakota, and before North Dakota he had been in Wyoming, and before Wyoming he had been married.
Lionel’s mother cried when she saw him and asked why he had done it, but the doctor said, We don’t ask that here. That is private. His mother looked at the doctor and said, Nothing about my child is private from me, and Lionel had wanted to say that his mother had taken the locks off his door when he was little and never put them back.
His parents left that first time, going back to his place to get his toiletries and a change of clothes. The doctor said Lionel didn’t have to go with them when they returned for him if he did not want to. He could stay. Lionel asked the doctor about the pain in his lower back, and the doctor offered to give him Valium, but said it was habit-forming. It’s not that bad, Lionel said then. The pain was all right. He could live with it.
A couple of weeks later, he checked into a private care facility outside Detroit. The facility had large, rolling lawns. There were cedar and pine trees, trails to walk. They called it hiking, though it was really just walking to the top of a modestly steep hill and looking down at the facility. From that height, one could see black fencing around the perimeter of the allotment. The building itself was the typical modernist arrangement of interlocking rectangles, edged here and there with a touch of wood paneling. It was the type of modernity that was hostile to history, to time, seemingly without precedent but utterly referential, almost dully so. The kind of building one saw so often that it had become a kind of visual cliché for money, for comfort, for aesthetic consideration.
Lionel had nightmares in which he fell through a slot of air, and he’d wake into another dream about being trapped under a thick sheet of ice. He’d cut his way down through sequential layers of dreams, waking into steadily more dire situations until at last he woke from a too-high bonfire or from wolves chasing him or from feeling lost in the woods at the base of an erupting volcano. The tachycardia left him winded just getting out of bed. He spent his time reading or lying under the gravity blanket his mother had brought him. When he’d been there a few weeks, he got permission to open his window. An aide unlocked it and explained that there was no screen and that he should look out for mosquitoes in the spring. The delicate security bars were impossible to remove. Unless you’re really persistent, the aide said with a wink. Even these had been designed. Their appearance. Their material. The interlocking mechanism that prevented their removal. All of it made to look not threatening. An affirming cage, Lionel thought. They wanted the people at the facility to feel affirmed by their captivity.
He was there for six months, and then they cut him loose. His mother wanted him to stay with her, but Lionel wanted to go back to his life and his research. He wanted to be himself again.
In Madison, Lionel was okay through the spring and the summer. He had a doctor, a routine. His leave of absence was ending, and he’d go back to the program in the new year.
He was not yet himself, but he was getting there.
Then, a couple weeks ago, he had been startled on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon by a crystalline image of himself stepping out in front of a car and getting obliterated. The next day, he checked himself back into UW Hospital to be monitored. When the sense of danger passed, when he no longer thought he’d hurt himself, he went home. And there was the invitation from the host. Like a call from the world he’d left behind.
People did try to kill themselves—some of them succeeded and some of them did not.
In the host’s bathroom, Lionel tried to be easy. His pulse thumped in his thighs, and he thought the force of it would make him slip from his perch on the edge of the toilet. The motion of it made him dizzy. He hated that he had let Charles’s remark, casual and dismissive as it was, jam him up. He’d let it rule him, but worse still, he’d let on how much it bothered him. Lionel stood, bent over the sink, and splashed cold water onto his face. The faucet handles screamed when he twisted them, and the head gave a jittery, anxious stream. He drank from his cupped palms, trying to get his pulse down. He found the water a little soapy, and the dizziness remained, that teetering, swaying sensation, as if his legs might go out from under him.
There was a hard knock on the door.
“Two minutes,” Lionel said. He ran the faucet again to give the person on the other side the idea that he was washing his hands. His mother would have told him to comb his hair and said that he had the bad habit of letting white people see him nappy and disheveled. He always wanted to tell her when she got on him about it that white people were just people, but he knew that it was a naive and stupid thing to say, because white people were white people. Back in the care facility, his mother had told him that his aunts and uncles down home, which was what she called her own hometown in eastern Georgia, thought his current state was because he’d been ripping and running with all them white kids at school and math camp. His aunts and uncles saw his desire to kill himself as an extension of all those things they didn’t like or understand—how he talked, how he saw things—and they blamed his father and his father’s ways for that.
It was dumb.
It was pointless.
It was nobody’s fault.
Things happened.
When he cracked the door open, he didn’t immediately see anyone. It was only after emerging fully into the narrow hallway, lined with photos of the host and his family, that Lionel saw Charles leaning against a shut door with his eyes closed.
“You good?” Charles asked.
“Looks like I should be asking you that.”
“I didn’t want to come to this thing.”
“Then why did you?” Lionel rested his back against the wall. Directly across from him was a photo of the host as a child, head thrown back in ecstasy. He looked happy. Pleased. A woman in white shorts stood next to a tall bush with a muted expression.
“Sophie,” Charles said. “Sophie wanted to come.”
“Which one is she?”
“The blond one.”
Lionel turned his head enough to look through the kitchen doorway and out into the living room.
“The flexible one?”
Charles nodded. He pushed off the door and leaned against the wall. The kitchen light fell through the doorway into the hall where they stood, separating them.
“It’s nice you do things for each other,” Lionel said.
“I really put my foot in my mouth.”
“I’m in one piece. You may continue with your conscience intact.”
“Really, man, if I fucked up, you can tell me.”
“In my experience, nobody wants to hear that they fucked up.”
“We should probably go back.”
“We?” Lionel shook his head. “You can do whatever you want. I think I’ll hang out here for a while.”
Charles sighed then. There, resting his cheek against the wall, he looked a little helpless. Lionel mirrored him, turning, resting his cheek against the cool plaster.
“You mind if I hang?”
“Suit yourself. Not my house,” Lionel said, but then he saw it. Relief. Charles was shy too.
“Okay, tough guy.”
Lionel felt their breathing sync. The eye contact had reached the point of being ridiculous, but it wasn’t uncomfortable or uneasy. Lionel wasn’t even sure if they were seeing each other anymore. His own eyes had gone slightly crossed, and Charles broke up into blurry segments. But they were in another moment apart. They had returned to their own tempo, just the two of them. Lionel felt free of other people’s expectations for how he should act and be. He felt free of his expectations for himself.
It was like kindness, as simple as that.
They went back to the party. Charles stopped behind Sophie. She rubbed his arms. The host reached again for Lionel’s hand and pulled at him.
“You okay?” the host asked. Lionel sat on the arm of the chaise. The host’s hands were greasy from dinner, and he’d stretched his feet across the laps of the couple. They were leaning forward now, each of them having a different conversation with the androgynous person, talking over each other in a hash of references to Dostoyevsky and Planned Parenthood:
“People only think they like Tolstoy better, but he’s basically J. K. Rowling. Dostoyevsky is the real genius.”
“Like, we’re this fucking close to being totally defunded. Skip a latte and make a damn donation, right?”
“Okay, but, like, I’ve tried. Where should I start?”
“Sure, but one person can’t do anything against the vast political machine of American empire.”
“Honestly, I think telling someone where to start with an author is kind of a slippery slope to fascism.”
“That’s what they want you to think. Like, imagine if MLK had just stayed home because it was hard.”
“I personally think Crime and Punishment is better, but hey, what do I know anyway?”
“I’m fine,” Lionel said. “Just getting over a bug.”
“You’re not contagious, are you?” someone asked. Lionel looked up and saw that it was the chubby man from before, sitting on the floor next to Sophie’s chair. “It’s flu season.”
“I don’t think it’s contagious,” Lionel said.
“Good, because I don’t have a great immune system, and, like, it’s socially irresponsible to come out if you’re not feeling well.”
“Oh, ‘social responsibility,’ here we go,” the host said, rubbing his greasy fingers across Lionel’s back.
“It’s not funny. I mean, not everyone has a robust immune system and—”
“Maybe if you ate more vegetables and hit the gym,” the host said with a sneer. Lionel felt conflicted. The man was annoying, but the host was being unnecessarily mean, and Lionel sensed it was because the man was fat and because the host did not find him attractive.
“Plant-based diets aren’t actually shown to have a significant protective effect against infections from viral vectors.”
“Oh, right, yeah, totally,” the host said, beaming, looking around the room for validation, and since it was his potluck and his apartment, people did go along with him, smiling thinly and humming in assent. The man on the floor turned red, but then shrugged.
“Speaking of vegetables, I should probably clean up my mess,” Lionel said.
“No, stay,” the host whined.
Lionel crouched near the fireplace, but his plate and the food had already been cleared away. What remained was a shiny streak on the scuffed wood flooring. Across the room, Charles had put his arms around Sophie. The two of them were looking at Lionel. Charles had leaned down to say something into her ear, and Lionel watched her eyes narrow fractionally. But then Sophie turned her head and whispered something back to Charles, and the two of them seemed to be chuckling. Lionel wished that the food was still on the floor. Then at least he’d have something to do with himself. Instead, he stood up and made his way to the kitchen. Maybe he could make himself useful, get started on the dishes.
Charles followed him, and then it was the two of them at the host’s sink. More of the small fried fish lay on a plate nearby. Charles picked one up and chewed on its crispy fins.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Lionel said. “I could have cleaned it up.”
“Figured it was half my mess, too.”
“Sophie seems nice.” Lionel ran water into a plastic cup. The sink was too full for him to want to actually help out. He’d lost his nerve or his charitable impulse or both.
“She’s something else,” Charles said.
Lionel was about to ask why Charles had followed him into the kitchen and why he was standing so close, when the host rounded the corner. He was a little surprised to see the two of them there, it was obvious, but he recovered like a cat shifting its weight mid-fall, and he reached around Charles to pull the fridge open.
“You boys want some wine?”
“None for me,” Charles said, drawing his fingers cross his neck in prohibition.
“I’ll have some,” Lionel said. The host pulled a bottle of rosé from the fridge, then reached down by Lionel, right in front of his crotch, and pulled a drawer open. He extracted a pair of kitchen shears and winked at Lionel before he pushed the drawer shut, his thumb tracing the outline of Lionel’s dick.
Lionel jumped at the contact though it was brief. It felt somehow like a threat. Or a promise.
The host snipped the cage over the cork and pulled it free with a pop that made Lionel’s mouth water. He could almost taste the wine in the sound. Charles stood back chewing his fish and watching as the host made a big production of pouring Lionel a glass and handing it to him.
“Cheers,” the host said.
“Cheers.”
“Are you going to congratulate me?”
“Sure. Congratulations. On what?”
“I’m defending right before break,” he said. “I’m a free man.”
“That would explain the potluck,” Lionel said.
The host nodded as he poured his wine into a mason jar. They toasted.
“Congratulations. You deserve it.” The host smiled. His teeth were very white and straight in a way that suggested that they had also been very expensive. The wine was good, though there was something metallic to it. Then again, Lionel didn’t know what constituted good wine. His face felt hot, though the wine was cold and crisp. He was a little embarrassed for the host, at how deep his need was and how clearly he displayed it. Lionel felt that in that position, he wouldn’t have been so needy. If he were that lucky, if he were that fortunate, he would have played it cool. He would have worn his success easy. But when you won, you got to decide how you celebrated. And everyone else had to accept it, otherwise they were sore losers.
His doctors had tried to help him get out of the habit of basing his self-image on things like success and what other people thought of him. They had tried to help him develop a robust sense of self-value. But in the host’s kitchen, he felt that old ego peek its head above the water and glare in judgment.
“You hitting the job market?” Charles asked. His voice cleaved through the kitchen, and Lionel regained some sense of equilibrium.
“Yeah,” the host said, “I got a couple interviews.”
“Anywhere good?” Charles raised his eyebrows like he knew what good was, but Lionel suspected that he did not. No one did. Partly because there was no good for mathematicians. You got a job in a university or you were a consultant. If you were lucky. If you weren’t, you adjuncted at three separate community colleges and worked in the small, dark hours of the morning and the evening on whatever small corner of the universe you had carved out for yourself in your graduate studies, but with far fewer resources and far less time. And then, year over year, the light of your future dimmed and died like a far-flung star. In the end, you told people that you had once studied with a Nobel laureate. And that you had once given a paper at the same conference as Terry Tao. And that you had once been nominated for the Fields Medal. All of this while the people you went to graduate school with raced out ahead of you and solved the universe’s deep mysteries. Your peers superseded you until you could hardly remember what they were like when the two of you had stood in their kitchen one snowy fall night drinking rosé and toasting their graduation.
Lionel knew and the host knew, and maybe, it was possible, Charles knew, too, that this was just polite dinner chatter. But it made Lionel feel worse. He sipped the wine, wishing in a cold, cruel part of himself that the host would fail his defense. But then Lionel ran over that thought with a bright white streak and erased it.
The host’s lips parted and those great, expensive teeth of his flashed in the kitchen light. In the living room, the party went on. Voices rose and fell. And someone called for the wine.
“Yeah,” the host said slowly. He put his hand at the small of Lionel’s back, leaned over, and kissed him. His lips were animal warm. Startlingly so. He seemed feverish. The host withdrew and winked at Charles. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you all about it.” Then he lifted the bottle over his head and posed at the doorway.
There was a loud, shrill cheer. Charles turned to Lionel.
“You okay?”
Lionel set his glass on the counter. The host went out to adoring noise, and Lionel eased himself down to the floor. He braced his back against the cupboard. Charles took a seat opposite him, but sinking to the floor, he winced and hissed in pain.
“I know what that’s like,” he said.
“What?”
“I know a couple assholes in my program, too.”
Lionel nodded, then shook his head. “No, he’s not an asshole. He’s talented.”
“You can be both.”
“If you’re talented, don’t you deserve to be an asshole?”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Charles said. “But people seem to think it is.”
“Maybe I’d be an asshole too if I hadn’t gone on leave. If I were graduating early.” But then Lionel didn’t like how bitter he sounded, in part because it felt like giving the host credit or power over him. “Anyway, it’s fine.”
The wind through the screen chilled his neck. Charles rested the back of his head against the drawer.
“It’s okay to be mad,” Charles said.
“Mad about what?”
“Your life.” Charles stretched his knee out gingerly and then rubbed it flat with his palm.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“Overworked. It’s nothing.”
It was easy to see how Charles might have overextended himself. He had the kind of body you could only get at great personal risk. He was good-looking, in a way that seemed incongruous with ordinary life. Like the kind of attractiveness only people on TV or with large social media followings could have. But he looked pained, too. All that body had cost him something.
Lionel could understand that. The cost of the life you wanted. The way it could bound back on you. Extract its due.
The kitchen tile crackled, and they both looked toward the door. It was Sophie. She looked down at them. Her eyes moved quickly from Lionel to Charles, to his knee.
“Do we need to go?” she asked.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We can stay.”
“It might be better if we iced it at home.”
Charles inhaled and then said, sharply, “I’m not a pussy.”
“Oh, brother,” Sophie said. She pulled the freezer door open and stuck her head inside like she’d done it a thousand times before. She took out a blue ice pack, offered it to Charles.
“What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed again, this time lighting upon Lionel. She dropped the ice pack in the middle of the floor, and it spun around on its back like a helpless turtle. They all watched it come to a stop.
“Maybe your new buddy can help you,” she said.
“Easy, Sophie.”
“You’re so selfish.”
“You’re the one who wanted to be here. I’m here.”
She said nothing after that, just watched Charles another moment or two. Then she went back into the living room, and Lionel felt he could exhale. All through that exchange, he had been holding his breath. And he’d seen them bare their teeth at each other. Was that what it meant to be with someone? Was that what it meant to care?
Charles stood stiffly. Lionel could hear his knee popping.
“What did I say about assholes?” Charles said, and then he left the kitchen, too, shaking his head as he went.
Lionel drank the rest of his rosé in peace. He brushed the ice pack with his foot, and sent it spinning around again. When it came to a rest, he spun it in the opposite direction.
Everyone went out into the backyard, even though it had started to snow; there was nothing to see but the glare of the lampposts through the trees and the bright blue light from the neighbors’ shed.
They passed around a joint someone had brought.
“Analog vaping,” the host said. “Love it.”
Lionel reached out through the porch railings and combed through the fat flakes of snow that drifted downward through the night. Their delicacy as they melted made him want to cry.
The host smelled like wine and pot, sweet and a little musky. He squatted next to Lionel, and they bumped shoulders.
“Do you want to stay over tonight?” the host asked. “To properly celebrate.” Lionel knew he meant Do you want to have sex? He asked it loud enough for others to hear, but quiet enough to suggest that there was some seriousness to the query. Lionel looked out at the other people’s faces and wondered what they would do if he said yes.
“Hmm,” he said instead. There, with their faces pressed close and the smell of smoke in his hair, Lionel felt that if things had been slightly different he might easily have said yes and let himself be pulled under. If only for the possibility that the host’s good luck and good life might rub off on him.
Charles sat on a stool and Sophie leaned down against his back. She had her arms around his neck, but she was watching Lionel. She was not quite smiling at him. No, not that. But there was warmth beneath her expression. In the porch light, she glowed. Charles stroked her arm with his finger. They could go on forever that way, Lionel thought. They knew what to do to each other. How to be together. That business in the kitchen had been an aberration, or maybe just the prelude to this tenderness.
Sophie kissed the top of Charles’s head and pulled away from him. She sat next to Lionel in her thick gray tights and corduroy skirt. She had a purple jacket over her shoulders and a green hat that someone had knit for her. As everyone had been getting ready to go outside, she had passed the hat around, clearly proud of it, like a family heirloom.
“Rough going at dinner. I see you and Charlie made up, though.”
She propped her chin on her hand. Charlie.
“Yeah,” Lionel said. “We’re old buddies now.”
Sophie’s face shifted subtly under the porch light, like a figure from myth or a trailer for an ominous horror movie. Charles leaned forward on the stool and braced his arms on the banister. In the yard, the others had begun to spin in slow circles with their heads back and their arms out in Christ pose.
“He’s good at enjoying himself,” Sophie said.
“I’m afraid I’m out of my depth. Or maybe I’m too drunk to have this conversation.”
“I just mean—he isn’t always considerate of other people.” She was amused as she said it, and Lionel relaxed. They squeezed together against the side of the house. Lionel felt he could breathe again. Sophie offered him her cup, and when Lionel hesitated, she clarified, “Water.”
“In that case,” Lionel said. The lukewarm water tasted vaguely like beer—someone had done a pretty halfhearted job of rinsing the cup out before refilling it or had simply refilled it without rinsing it at all. But he was aware, the moment he took the first sip, that he was powerfully, endlessly thirsty. He couldn’t stop drinking. The water passed through his mouth and down the back of his throat, where it dissolved into nothing. He kept drinking to satisfy his dry tongue, and before he knew it, he had drunk all of Sophie’s water. She looked at him in a way that was either impressed or annoyed. “Sorry.”
“The hour of thirst is upon us.”
Lionel offered to replenish the cup, but she shrugged and said it was fine. She’d brought a lightweight blanket out on the porch and draped it over their legs.
“I’m sorry if I was being bitchy before,” she said. “In the kitchen.”
“You weren’t.”
“I was, but thank you. I just hate when people lie about how they feel.”
“You must be bitchy all the time, then.”
“I consider myself an honest person.”
“It must be nice to have a robust sense of yourself.”
Lionel could feel through the house siding the pressure of Sophie’s head turning toward him. He could tell, too, from the subtle realigning of her shoulder against his arm.
“Now, that was a bitchy thing to say.”
“It’s been a long few weeks,” he said.
A kind of heat passed between them. Some kind of animal recognition. Sophie’s eyes were blue. She had bleached hair, but it was luminous and healthy-looking. Her mouth was full and soft, and she had a small scar on her chin. It was an unfamiliar sensation—or, no, it was familiar, but not one he was accustomed to feeling toward women. It was not desire as he understood or remembered it, exactly, not a desire to have sex with Sophie or to see her naked, but he wanted to reach out and touch her and be touched by her. He wanted to feel her against him. She had a perfectly tranquil expression, and he felt he might tell her anything about himself if only she might ask. Under them, the porch boards were cold and drafty. Sophie shivered and looked toward Charles, severing the moment.
“Charlie said you proctor exams.”
“Yeah—for the university. It’s only a few days a week, though.”
“That’s cool,” Sophie said, and Lionel rolled his eyes. It was the kind of thing you said when you were pretending not to find someone boring. They’d retreated to the inane chatter of dinner parties at last, the shuffling of banal bits of information like so much unwanted food on a plate.
“What do you do?”
“Oh, I dance. Since I was five. It’s like the one thing I’m good at. Absolutely no money in it, but hey.”
“That’s a real thing. Dance. Like, an actual real thing in the world. That’s art.”
“Sure, yeah, thanks,” she said. “Actually, Charlie’s a dancer, too.”
“Is he?” Lionel asked. Suddenly, the body made sense.
“We’re in the grad program.”
“How long have you been together?”
“Maybe eight months, something like that? I’m bad at this.” She crinkled her eyes and shook her head a little. Charles was looking at them over his shoulder. Sophie waved at him, but Charles shook his head and turned back to look out at the yard.
“That’s a long time,” Lionel said. Eight months was forever. A whole life could change in eight months. Or end entirely.
“Is it?” Sophie asked. “It doesn’t seem that way. But I guess time flies.”
“Yeah. Unless you want it to.”
Sophie looked at him sideways. “What are you trying to say?”
“Nothing. Well, nothing about you two, anyway,” Lionel said.
Sophie watched for a beat longer, and she seemed to make up her mind about something. She said, “He was right. You are hard to talk to.”
Lionel felt a frisson then, pleasure and discomfort rubbing up against each other. He hadn’t registered it before, when she’d said that thing about proctoring, but he realized now that they had been talking about him. Lionel ran through what Sophie had said and done since coming to sit next to him, trying to find the subtext. But he found nothing. Just the jangle of her voice, and the warmth of her body next to his under the blanket. Her hand was on his wrist, and then it slid down until her palm cupped his. Her hands were cold, lightly callused, but strong. She flexed her fingers through his and looked at him directly. Lionel wanted to pull his hand away, but he did not.
“People are hard,” he said.
“Spoken like a true introvert.”
“If I were a real introvert, I would have stayed home. Which would have been the wiser choice.”
“I think you really believe that,” she said in open awe. “You must really be afraid of yourself.”
Lionel shivered. He did pull his hand away from Sophie. But it was just as well, because Charles had jerked the blanket from their legs and whirled it around his shoulders like a shawl.
“Some of us are freezing our nuts off out here,” Charles said to them.
“I tried to get you to sit with us,” Sophie said.
“I didn’t want to,” Charles pouted.
Sophie made a condescending sound in the back of her throat, moaning in exaggerated sympathy. Charles stuck his bottom lip out.
“Sure you didn’t,” Sophie said, no longer mocking him. Charles stopped pouting, too, and there was a taut silence between them.
“I’d leave it alone if I were you,” he said.
“Get real.”
“Sophie,” Charles barked. His eyes flashed, and his shoulders opened slightly.
Out in the yard, the people had begun to leap and clap and shout. The host stood up, leaned out over the banister, and hollered. The snow was falling fully then. And everyone was howling. Charles put his head back and belted out a forceful, vibrating call. Lionel watched the muscles in his neck bulge. His skin reddened. He was the last to stop. Lionel felt soaked through with his sound.
He could still hear it when they all went back inside, out of the cold.
Lionel said good-bye to everyone in the front hall. The host embraced him for a long time, slid his hands up Lionel’s shirt, and said, “I want you to stay.”
“Next time,” Lionel whispered back. He gave Sophie a short squeeze. They exchanged numbers and promised to text or call for lunch in the next few days. Charles gripped his hand very hard and pulled him in close.
“See you around, Lionel,” he said.
“Good-bye, Charlie,” Lionel whispered into Charles’s ear, surprising them both.
Pleasantly buzzed, Lionel decided to walk home. The last bus was long gone, anyway, and the distance wasn’t terrible. He’d had only a couple of puffs on the joint and the one glass of wine. He floated on a warm cloud.
Lionel lived on Hancock, so he cut a path through Orton Park. The playground looked a little sad and eerie. The swings moved in the wind. The gazebo had white-blue lights going, but snow had piled up to the benches.
The neighborhoods and their mismatched houses. Queen Anne and modernist and Dutch colonial, all mixed together, side by side. During his first year in graduate school he had taken a walk with a friend through one of the East Side neighborhoods, and the friend, from Denmark, kept saying, You have turrets on one end and Frank Lloyd Wright on the other. It makes no sense. No flow. At night, the houses made a kind of sense. As if they were embedded in a shared context.
Lionel almost missed the chatter of the party, missed talking to Sophie and Charles. Charlie. It hadn’t felt comfortable, exactly. But he’d felt good talking to them. Sparring a little. It was easier to forget what lay in wait for him at his apartment: The dishes in the sink. The laundry he’d left. The dust covering all his possessions. Not for long—just a week and a half—but still. When he’d come home from the hospital, his apartment was stale and unfamiliar. Like it belonged to someone else. It had been the water sitting in the sink, he knew. The crusty dishes and soggy pasta. He’d done the dishes before the potluck, at least.
His phone vibrated, and he checked the screen. He did not recognize the number.
where r u?
Lionel looked up the long gray street. The little houses finally giving way to stone-and-brick apartment buildings. Near the capitol but not on the square. The snow had dampened the cuffs of his jeans and soaked through his socks. The drifts were high and thick. He checked the cross streets and saw that he was almost home. He had been walking for fifteen minutes without realizing how much time had passed. He texted his location to the number he did not recognize, feeling a kind of drugged, silly courage.
His phone pulsed again:
on my way
This was different. This was not a question but an answer. Something was on its way toward him, and he did not know what or who it was. He had texted his location as a joke, almost, but here was its echo, bounding back at him, and he felt a prick of something, a little bee-sting sensation at the base of his skull.
Then another text:
c u soon
Lionel went on walking, texting briefly:
who are you?
Another pulse, another text from the ether:
;)
Lionel looked behind himself along the street from which he’d come. He felt a pale version of fear. As if his whole body were numb, but trying to wake up, registering sensation only through a dense haze.
He kept walking. He would get home and forget about the potluck and Charles and Sophie. He would fold his laundry. He would get under his blankets and sleep. He would be okay. He would be fine, fine, fine.
Another text:
where are you? i don’t see you
Lionel did not answer. He kept going. But then came a voice calling down the street after him. He did not turn, just crossed the street. The voice grew louder and closer. He began to sweat. Heat covered his back and his stomach. Keep going, he said to himself. Keep going.
Lionel slid a little down the inclining sidewalk. The ice was scratchy beneath the snow, but then his soles found traction and he righted himself. The voice was closer then, but Lionel could see his building nearby, right there on the corner. He had a first-floor apartment. The light from the center hall of the building projected out onto the snow, a dull, yellow pool. He patted his pockets for his keys.
“Lionel!” he heard, the voice no longer indistinct but clear and ringing through the night: his name. Lionel looked up, and there was Charles, at the boundary between the light and the shadow. He breathed hard and bent over, clutching his side. His hair was damp, and beads of sweat had frozen to the ends of his curls, glinting. It was strange to see him here. Lionel found his keys in his pocket.
“Why are you here? How are you here?”
“You ran! Who runs?” Charles looked up at him, his panting coming to an end.
“I guess I did,” Lionel said. “I wasn’t trying to. I mean, I didn’t know I was running from you.”
“I texted you!” Charles said. He was upright then. His hands rested on his hips. But his weight distribution had him favoring one leg over the other. Lionel remembered his knee and felt bad.
“Ah. That was you.”
“Yes, idiot,” Charles said.
“Where’s your car?”
“Up the street.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Lionel said. His thighs burned and his lower back hurt. He had been running. Jostling himself through the thick snowdrifts. He felt very tired. And he wanted to be warm. “Do you want to come inside, then?”
“Sure,” Charles said.
Lionel nodded but did not move right away to open the door for them. He looked down into his palm at his keys, which the hospital staff had returned to him a few days before, along with the rest of his possessions. They were light, cold against his palm. The apartment building loomed behind them. All he had to do was turn and put the key into the lock, but he couldn’t. His joints wouldn’t move. His muscles wouldn’t budge. It felt too much after too long a night.
“Can you?” Lionel asked. “Would you?”
“You’re such a little weirdo,” Charles said. But he took the keys from Lionel’s hand. He tried the first one, but when it wouldn’t undo the lock of the main door, he turned back to look at Lionel. He tried another, still no luck. “You want to help out here?”
“It’s the one with the red tape,” Lionel said. A car passed on the street, kicking up gray slush into the air. Some of it landed near the rim of light at the edge of the yard.
Charles unlocked the door and the warmth of the lower hall wafted out to them. It smelled like boiled cabbage and floor wax.
Lionel stepped into the warm lobby and pointed down the long hall with its red tiles and row of dented gray mailboxes.
“The blue key,” Lionel said.
Charles looked down at the keys, noticing that they were all different colors. Lionel had retaped them just the morning before, as a way of remembering which did what.
“Handy,” Charles said. “Good system.”
“It helps,” Lionel said, but he could only lean against the wall by the mailboxes.
In Lionel’s apartment, they took off their coats and boots. Lionel turned on the light, and the intensity of its sudden brightness made them both flinch.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Charles sat at the tiny kitchen table, his mere presence making everything in the apartment seem small and ineffectual, like a child’s toy house. Lionel felt shy about it now, letting someone see where and how he lived.
“Do you want some coffee? I only have cheap beans—they’re a little old.”
“Sure thing.”
Lionel ran some water into the kettle and dumped the grounds into the French press. Charles’s chair scraped back, and the boards strained beneath his weight as he walked through the apartment. His step had an uneven hitch.
“This where you live?”
“No, we just broke into a stranger’s apartment,” Lionel said.
Charles stood near his bookcase, dragging a finger along the spines of his books. His humming filled the apartment. He turned to Lionel.
“Are you nervous?”
“A little.”
“Why? Because of me?” Charles came nearer to him.
“No, me. You, too, I guess.”
“What about me makes you nervous?” Charles pressed him against the counter. Lionel felt himself receding.
“You have a girlfriend,” Lionel said.
“I do.”
“Okay.” The electric kettle turned itself off. “I should pour this.” Charles stepped back to let him pour the water into the French press. Lionel poured slowly, watching the level of the water rise higher and higher. It brought him pleasure to do such things, to pay attention to ordinary tasks. They watched it steep in silence. Charles made a big show of it, letting on how intently focused he was on the surface of the coffee, and the occasional off-gassing. Lionel depressed the plunger.
“Cream?” Lionel asked.
“No.”
“That way is too bitter for me.”
“Sophie too.” Charles took a long drink from his coffee, which must have been too hot.
“I like Sophie,” Lionel said. “She’s really . . . nice.”
Charles smiled. Lionel felt embarrassed, thinking of how they’d been a little mean to each other, and how that had bonded them in some way. He thought, too, with rising color in his face, of that moment when it had felt like he and Sophie might have kissed on the porch, when it would have been the most natural thing. He liked Sophie. He liked the idea of being her friend. But Charles was looking at him, and Lionel could feel that possibility closing off. Charles set the cup on the table.
“Where do you sleep?”
“I’ll show you,” Lionel said.
In the morning, Lionel left Charles in bed.
He rinsed out their cups from last night. Then the French press, which he took apart and cleaned piece by piece and put in the rack to dry. He pushed up the window and propped it open with an old ruler. The cold would help air out the apartment, that stale smell from having left it shut up for almost two weeks.
Lionel could still feel Charles’s hands all over him, the sureness of his grip and the grinding pressure of their bodies coming together. He went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, to brush the taste of Charles out of his mouth. By the time he got to the front of the apartment, Charles had rolled over onto his back and was lying there naked, on full display. His body was magnificent. Edges and lines and clear definition. A thatch of pubic hair. His cock was uncut and of medium length, but very thick. Everything about him was proportional.
Lionel made more coffee, waiting for Charles to get up, wondering where he’d go after he left, wondering what had brought him here. But as he stood waiting for the coffee to bloom, staring down into its brown mass, the ruler snapped in half. He had used it for years with no problem. He’d had it since he was a kid, when he’d gotten it as a gift from his math camp counselor. All the lines were worn off. Now it had snapped, and for a moment the window hung suspended, as if its mechanism had magically repaired itself or gravity had ceased to function. Then it fell, slamming shut with such force that the glass broke. In cartoonish escalation, the shards fell down into the sink, shattering further. He felt something old and powdery land on his lip, but it was only a bit of dust, a flake of paint perhaps, from the windowsill.
“What are you doing over there?” Charles had come into the kitchen. Lionel turned to him.
“It’s a mess,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Lionel said, but his heart was beating fast, and his hands shook. He could hardly hold himself still.
“Oh, shit.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sure.”
“No, don’t! There’s glass,” Lionel said. Charles had made to cross the room. He was still naked, barefoot. At Lionel’s warning, he drew up short. Then he put on his boots, still naked, collected a dustpan and broom, and swept a few glass fragments from the floor. Then he leaned down to inspect what was in the sink, and whistled.
“You better get a new one,” he said.
With the glass gone, cold air was swirling into the apartment. Lionel saw the air raise goose bumps down Charles’s back and thighs, little ridges of flesh.
“Thanks,” he said. “Do you think you got it all?”
“You might run a vacuum over it if you’ve got one, but I think you’ll live.” Charles leaned down to kiss Lionel then, gripped the backs of his thighs and lifted him easily.
“Your knee,” Lionel said.
“You’re not a physio.”
Lionel wrapped his legs around Charles and let himself be carried back to bed. Charles stomped in the boots.
“Stay,” Lionel said later, when Charles was getting dressed.
“Can’t,” Charles said. “I have to go.”
“Stay.”
“I’ll be back,” Charles said. He kissed Lionel’s forehead and then his mouth and he was gone out the door. Lionel drew his blanket around himself and lay down.
“I have to go anyway,” Lionel said, and the only answer was the quiet of his apartment, the soft rattle of snow striking the kitchen sink.