Lionel always felt a kind of secondhand embarrassment when he proctored exams. It was like visiting a friend’s house during a family function: everyone behaving in a formal, context-determined way that at once applied to you as a guest but also did not apply to you, because you were not family, so the level of artifice was clear, yet you weren’t supposed to comment on it.
The department head was teaching an advanced seminar on early modern French history. Lionel’s job was to write the prompt for the essay on the board, wait the two hours for the students to fill their blue books with everything they knew, and then deposit the blue books with the departmental secretary. It was as easy a chain of events as he could have asked for.
He was late getting to the room in the basement of the art library and found the fifteen white boys clustered in the hall, some standing and leaning against the wall, others on the floor, shuffling note cards, flicking them front to back. Their anxiety scuffed up the quiet. He let them into the room and wrote the prompt on the board:
French Absolutism
Then he wondered if he should have waited for them to seat themselves and put away their study materials. So he erased his writing, turned to them. He pulled up the PDF with the class roster and instructions and saw that he was supposed to have them sign in. But he had not gone to the departmental office to pick up the slip for them to sign.
“Does anyone have . . . ?” he motioned as if to write on air, and one of the students, tallish in some sort of gray sweatsuit, ripped a sheet of paper from his notebook and held it out between two fingers.
Lionel took the sheet and then, realizing he’d forgotten to bring a pen, looked up and scribbled in the air again. The same boy rolled his eyes and offered Lionel his pen. Lionel took it, wrote the name and number of the course across the top of the sheet, then drew a line down the center and wrote two column headings: name and student id #.
The boy wrote his name with a scratching swiftness and handed it over his shoulder. He wrestled himself out of his sweatshirt. His hair was oily and dirty blond, and he had greasy pit stains on the T-shirt he wore underneath. He had what looked to be four-day stubble. He stretched in his chair. The paper went back and up the next row, but then one of the boys said, “Uh, this isn’t like, secure.”
“What do you mean?” Lionel asked.
“Our ID numbers. Like, they’re right here. I could take a pic and use them.” The boy held the sheet up and gestured at it with his pen.
“Do you plan to take a picture and use them?”
“No, but I could. That’s the point. This isn’t secure. This is kind of a violation of privacy.”
“I see your point,” Lionel said. “But, honor system, right? Nobody steal anyone’s identity.”
There was a petty, pitying kind of amusement in the room at that joke. But the boy with the security issue wasn’t pleased. He squinted down at the sheet of paper and said, “Do you mind if I don’t? Like, I don’t feel comfortable.”
“Sure,” Lionel said. “Okay. Whatever you want.”
The boy signed his name and passed the sheet to the next boy, who looked at it for a moment while holding his ID card aloft in his right hand, as if making up his mind about whether or not to write down his number. Lionel felt like he had lost some control over the room, like he’d just failed a test of his own. But after a moment the boy did write down his name and number, and the paper went on, with people adding their details, until it was clear that the only person without an ID number was the boy who had complained. Lionel refrained from pointing out that this was as identifying as putting your information down in the first place, but people were allowed their convictions, and he could respect that.
When he had taken the sheet back, he wrote French Absolutism on the board again and said, “You have two hours. Good luck.”
They put their heads down over their blue books. There were five rows of five desks each, and the boys had spread out across the room in a weird sequence. One row was filled entirely, then the next left empty, and then a couple in the third and fourth rows, and the last row also filled. It was like a riddle or SAT question: 5, 0, 2, 3, 5. Out of habit, Lionel shifted the numbers around, first in increasing order, then decreasing order. He calculated the sum, the average, the sum of squares, the sum of cubes, the standard deviation. He leaned against the table at the front of the room, running the numbers through a string of permutations. It made him homesick for math—for the library where he’d worked through his first-year coursework in the graduate program, going through two or three legal pads of calculations a week, checking his work against WolframAlpha, graphing ridiculous functions and sending screenshots to the friend who had hosted the potluck last night. He missed the cramped TA office the math department had provided to him and the others who taught Calc I, and if they were unlucky, remedial algebra—those sullen, unhappy faces of the probationary students who didn’t know even the most basic of things. Lionel longed for that period of his life, when he made grilled cheeses and sat in the back patio of his building, trying to solve the problems that were sometimes pinned to the bulletin board in the department office. That smell like burning coffee when someone had left the machine on in the shared kitchen, the hum of the big printer and scanner. He missed the long talks with his advisor, Dr. Lauk, who had taken Lionel in after that summer program because Lionel was also interested in complex differential geometry, though Lionel didn’t like analysis and had struggled through his analytic geometry class. He even missed the mean, brutal hours of Dr. Nonan’s seminar on geometric isoforms and topology, the one class where he had gotten the minimum required B.
Lionel remembered staring at the grade with great incredulity. No one in grad school got Bs unless something had gone wildly wrong. He remembered being summoned when that fall semester’s grade posted, and hearing Dr. Lauk say, with kindness that verged on condescension, “He can be a challenging instructor. You’ll do better next time.” The implication being that Lionel must retake the course and get an A because the subject matter intersected so deeply with his advisor’s specialty. There were moments in the spring semester when Lionel wondered if it was for his own benefit that he was retaking the class or if it was because he was being moved around a chessboard he couldn’t see, his graduate education a pawn passed between two egos. But even that he missed—the messy, ridiculous departmental politics, the rituals, all of it.
But in his second year, Lionel had tried to kill himself. And now that was over.
The boys wrote furiously. Lionel checked the time on his phone, then checked Instagram and Reddit and Twitter. He read a long thread about Wisconsin electoral maps and how Madison had recently been redistricted. He thought of the conversation he had overheard last night about Planned Parenthood being defunded. It often happened that two things that seemed unrelated in Lionel’s life were actually connected in the larger context of the world, and a network revealed itself to him in random, strange ways. Usually mediated via the internet, via social media, via someone saying something to someone at a dinner party, not even directly to him or about him. He was aware that he lived, in that way, amid the great matrix of the world’s concerns.
He put his phone away, but then it pulsed and he took it out again.
lunch?
The text was from Sophie. The sudden shame made him dizzy. Because, of course, Charles had shown up at his apartment. Why else all those looks, that run-in outside the bathroom—what else had all that meant if not I see you. I want you. What else could all that have culminated in, if not Charles standing in the falling snow, taking the keys from Lionel’s hand, and letting them both inside? And Lionel had done it, knowing that the moment he followed Charles in, he was saying good-bye to Sophie and whatever friendship she might have had for him.
Lionel stared down at his phone.
u there?
Proctoring.
sounds terrible. lunch?
Maybe not a good idea.
why?
A pause. Then another vibration.
charlie? i know, it’s cool
Jesus Christ. He stared down at his phone and tried to figure out what that could mean: I know. What did she know? How did she know? What did she mean by It’s cool? How could this be possible, unless Charles had told her, or unless it had been as obvious to her as it had been to him last night. Charles materializing out of the snow, breathing hard at his doorstep. He could see it, Sophie watching the whole thing with a detached ease, a calm paid for by who knew how many other similar events. There, he thought, was a truly horrifying possibility: that he was nothing more than another bit of local weather for the two of them, and that what felt to Lionel like the edge of some great change, a sign of his reacclimation to people, to the world, to the easiness of friendship, was nothing but another thing to them, one more thing that happened and was now over.
She knew, Lionel thought with sinking fear. She knew. It’s cool. Lionel envied her but also felt humiliated—what to say? Best to say nothing.
it’ll be fun. i’ll buy
Coffee?
! ! !
even better! come to the café!
One of the students coughed, and Lionel looked up sharply. The boy with the security concerns was staring at him. No. The boy was staring beyond him at the board, at the question that was not a question. French Absolutism. Lionel felt sorry for him, because he looked like he was drowning and he knew it.
Poor kid. Lionel wanted to lean over and ruffle his hair, to say it would be okay, that no matter what he wrote in the blue book, it would be okay, that this was temporary and at the end of the two hours it would pass, would collapse down into the general topography of his life, and he’d forget this panicked, drowning feeling. The guy licked his lips and put his head down—back to work. Lionel glanced at the clock over the door.
There was time.
After the exam, Lionel took the fifteen blue books up the stairs to the history department’s office. He gave them to the departmental secretary, a broad, bland-faced woman with a skin tag like a perpetual crumb at the leftmost corner of her mouth. The secretary took the papers, shuffled them, and stared at Lionel reproachfully. He shrugged uneasily at her, signed the form saying that he’d done what he’d been asked, and left.
The look, he suspected, was because he’d had to cancel the last several proctoring appointments with the history department when he had been in the hospital. He could still hear her voice, scratchy on the phone, when he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it. “Your generation is killing this nation with your carelessness,” she’d said, and hung up on him before he could respond. He’d stood in the reception area of the psychiatric care facility, staring at his reflection in his phone screen, thinking, well, maybe that was true, maybe they were killing the country and killing the world, but they were also killing themselves, and what would it list on his death certificate as cause of death, if not carelessness, misadventure. It was a serious thing to kill a world. He’d stood there with the clipboard of paperwork in his hand, had only called her because the act of lifting the clipboard to sign his name had brought to mind the fact that at that moment he was supposed to be somewhere else, on campus, giving an exam instead of admitting himself. But she didn’t care about that, and he didn’t blame her. He’d caused a mess. She was entitled to her feelings.
Lionel knew the café where Sophie worked—he avoided it because it was popular with undergraduates. It was crowded, noisy, the last place you could get any work done or be alone with your thoughts. But when he arrived via the seldom-used entrance from the adjoining library, he was surprised to find it empty except for Sophie and another barista. Sophie sat at a table near the window, looking out. Lionel wondered if she was looking for him—the window faced onto the quad and the usual entrance—and the thought touched him. But when the door shut behind him, she looked up and frowned in mock surprise.
“You have your tricks,” she said.
“Some.”
At her table, he unwound his scarf and unzipped his jacket. She reached out and stuck her finger through a hole in the collar of his shirt. “What happened there?” she said. Lionel pulled his chin back and looked down as she traced the hole, then flattened the collar with a little pat. “There we go.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Do you want something? To eat, to drink?” She had gotten up, rested her knuckles against her hip. She was wearing black tights and a sweater the color of weak tea. Lionel found it a little hard to make eye contact with her. He pressed his hands to his cheeks.
“Oh, I’m fine. Well. Yes. A coffee,” Lionel said, and when she returned a few minutes later with the coffee in a small carafe, he asked, “How much do I owe you?” She slapped his arm. She had already touched him twice. It felt like he was racking up a debt he wouldn’t be able to repay. Yes, she’d said she knew about Charles, but about what did she know? Did she know the whole of it? About this morning, too? The more he let her touch him, be kind to him, the worse it would be when she found out everything. The harder it would be to salvage anything like friendship.
“I can afford a cup of coffee at least,” she said. Lionel could feel the small mound of his wallet in his pocket. “Next time’s on you.”
“Is it always so busy?” Lionel asked. Overhead, Christmas music was playing. It was only November.
“Very funny.” Sophie said. “It’s our slow season, I guess. The calm before the storm.”
“Finals.”
“Bingo. You must get busy, too, around then,” she said.
“I don’t really know. It’s my first finals season as a proctor,” Lionel said. The coffee burned his tongue.
“You proctored today, right? What kind of test? Can you say?” She leaned forward with her elbows on the table. Her eyes seemed lit with real curiosity.
“History,” Lionel said. She had a mole on her neck, black as a pupil. She had bright blue eyes. She had painted her fingernails pale matte pink. The tips of her fingers were cracking and white. She caught him looking at her hands.
“If I don’t paint them, I chew,” she said a little self-consciously. She pulled her hands away and put them behind her knees. She’d put her feet up on the chair again. “You were saying . . . the history test?”
“Oh, yeah. There was this one kid who was really up my ass about security. He acted like I was spying on his data or something. They all have to write their student ID numbers down to sign in. As protocol, I guess.”
Sophie nodded like it made all the sense in the world, and Lionel wasn’t sure if she was nodding because she thought the student had a point or if she agreed he’d made too much of it.
“But after that, it was fine. I just had to write the words ‘French Absolutism’ on the board and wait until they were done.”
“Wow. What if they have questions?”
“I think that’s why they don’t have the history TAs do it? Because they might give them information they’re not supposed to have? They pick a total idiot like me.”
She gave him a look. “Weren’t you, like, doing NASA research as a child or something? You’re not an idiot.”
“No, that’s not me. I’d make a terrible engineer,” Lionel said too seriously. “I did go to math camp, though. Guilty by association.”
“Math camp? That’s not just a movie trope?” Sophie made a show of leaning forward, putting her chin on her palms.
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I went for, like, twelve years. The last as a counselor.”
“Holy shit. What’s it like?”
Lionel swirled the coffee in the cup, aware of the gesture as he performed it, knowing that it had little utility, that it was something performed to make him look a certain way, pensive, thoughtful.
He’d gone to math camp in Tennessee, and they’d slept in cabins and showered in groups of three. They roasted hot dogs. They ran through the woods, getting welts on their legs, getting bitten by mosquitoes. They went home covered in new bumps and scrapes. One kid got his eye knocked out during a game of handball, which was why they no longer played after that year, fourth grade. But they also learned how to calculate their location based on the stars. They learned to calculate time from the angle of the sun. To calculate the distance between them and a summer storm by counting the seconds and the flash and the bang. They learned how to eye metric conversions. They did dumb little games and experiments like dropping bowling balls and baseballs and eggs from the roof. They swam and calculated distances from the opposite shore. They wrote letters home to their parents. They fished and threw back. They hiked and kept little journals of things they saw and would tell their friends back home. They hid under the covers and traded Pokémon cards and Game Boy cartridges. They practiced kissing when all the lights were out, and their bunks filled with their humid breath.
And at the end of summer, they went home and were alone. And sometimes things happened to them that they didn’t tell anyone about.
“So, yeah, it’s like camp,” he said. “You must have done dance stuff, growing up, right?”
“No,” Sophie said. “My grandma couldn’t really afford intensives, could barely afford class.” Her laughter was husky, and Lionel felt stupid for having said what he did.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m an asshole.”
“You’re probably just middle class, right?”
“Guilty again,” Lionel said. “My dad’s an engineer and my mom’s a nurse practitioner.”
“Leave It to Beaver over here.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Lionel said. But it was true. It was all true.
“Don’t be ashamed. It’s okay. Everyone’s so weird about money and stuff. Like there’s something so noble about being poor. But having cash growing up, you know? That’s good. It’s good your childhood didn’t suck.”
“Yeah. They were good people. They tried with me,” Lionel said.
“Then why all the shame?”
Lionel pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. The coffee had cooled. He drank to give himself something to do, and Sophie went on looking at him.
“I think I feel sorry for them,” he said. “Because they got me. Instead of a real kid.”
“What are you, Pinocchio or something?”
“I was such a weird kid. I mean—math camp? Kind of says it all.”
“You’re not as strange as you think you are, I bet,” she said.
“Well, for my sake, I hope that’s true. That would be a vast improvement in my circumstances.”
Sophie watched him then, and he wanted to retreat from her. To hide from her probing gaze. He made a silly face and asked, “Is there another hole in my shirt?”
“So you wrote ‘French Whatchamacallit’ on the board and just hung out for two hours?” Sophie tucked her chin between her knees. It was the same posture she had assumed at the potluck, and it brought to mind the cold of the time they spent on the porch after dinner, how close they had gotten, her hand in his palm, the gritty texture of the porch. He swallowed the coffee. Felt his nasal cavities fill with heat and a burning smell.
“Yeah—like I said, even an idiot like me couldn’t mess it up.” Sophie narrowed her eyes at him and reached for his mug of coffee, as if she’d read his mind, and he pushed it gently toward her until she drew it back to herself. She drank from it, and Lionel felt a thrill of pleasure in his stomach, the idea of her lips touching a place where his lips had been, and there was something like a presentiment or a premonition or some other ephemeral, fleeting thought, that Charles had been a similar kind of conduit. A thing that they had both touched and been touched by, and he got a little hard remembering it, Charles sliding into him that first time, the awful discomfort of it, the smell like sweat and breath and piss, but it wasn’t just remembering that Charles had fucked him, it was remembering it while sitting here with Sophie, and thinking that Sophie, too, had fucked Charles.
She drank from his mug, and he felt exposed.
“Tell me about last night,” she said calmly. “Was he good? Did you like it?”
“The potluck?”
“Charles,” she said, her lips tracing his name.
Lionel closed his eyes and saw Charles before him, how beautiful his body was, how solid, how real, how warm. He felt dizzy again, as if his center of gravity had shifted violently and suddenly upward. He gripped the underside of the table. Opened his eyes. Sophie was watching him, her lids low, lips parted just so.
“He came to my apartment. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, but apparently, he was calling my name and chasing me and I ran.”
“You ran?”
“And kind of slid? By the time he caught up with me, I couldn’t really use my keys. But he helped me.”
“You poor thing,” she said, and she meant it. She actually meant it. Lionel’s mouth was dry and he motioned for the cup back. She shook her head, refused him.
“But then he came in. I made coffee, we talked a bit.”
“What did you talk about?”
“That’s so funny,” Lionel said. “People say that, We talked. But I don’t remember a single thing we said to each other. He asked, Where do you sleep?”
“No.”
“He did.”
Sophie put her face behind her hand and shook her head. She groaned.
“It was nice, actually.”
“Are you with someone?”
“No,” Lionel said. “God no.”
“Why not?”
Lionel considered the question. Then he unbuttoned his left sleeve and rolled it up to his elbow. His forearm was covered in a network of scars, culminating in a series of deep gouges near his wrist. His forearms were paler than the rest of him, except for this cluster of keloids with their tannish, reddish undertones. And sometimes, in the winter months, they grew dry and rubbery.
Sophie took in the view and Lionel watched her for the usual choreography of sympathy and disgust. She reached out and brushed her fingers across his arm and made a low, appraising hum. He could barely feel her touch. With the keloids, it was either too much sensation or nothing at all. Sometimes they burned powerfully or throbbed so much he couldn’t sleep. His doctors had said that it was a real pain, but also not a real pain. They stopped short of saying it was psychosomatic. They didn’t like that term, because it implied an unreal element, no matter how careful they were about contextualizing their comments.
“What happened?” she asked. “If that’s not too personal?”
“I tried to kill myself. Which, I guess, is a little obvious. But I made a real hash of it. My roommate found me. Then I did some inpatient stuff. And some outpatient stuff. Not a lot of room for extracurriculars.”
“Sounds like a lot.”
“Yeah, last year, I was just . . . in this bad way. I felt really unsafe. I felt so sick, all the time. Like, really sick. Like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. And I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t think. That was hardest—the not thinking. My mind wasn’t even empty, just hazy. Like standing in a room you know perfectly well, but you can’t see anything because it’s full of this burning smoke. It was just. Impossible, and I was so scared—like this was going to be my life, I was never going to be okay again. I wanted some relief, I guess. I wanted to get out.”
“Did you always struggle with that stuff?”
“No,” Lionel said. “Well . . . yes? No and yes. I was always anxious. But the first two years of grad school were really hard, brutal. And I found it really hard to cope. It’s like when a plane descends, you know? Gradually, down through the clouds, and suddenly you can’t see anything? Except, with a plane, eventually you see the city. There was no city for me.”
“Oh, Lionel,” she said. She rested her palm in his palm again, and he squeezed. It was the first time he had told someone about it. The whole of it. His throat was hot from talking and from trying to make himself known to another person. He put his head down on the table but went on squeezing Sophie’s hand. She threaded her fingers through his.
“Anyway. I was okay until last week.”
“You went back?”
“I had this feeling—this totally random sensation. It was kind of a thought and kind of not a thought. A voice, maybe? Something.”
“What did it say?”
“You’ll think I’m nuts,” he said dryly. “If you don’t already.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to risk.”
“That’s true. It said—or showed me?—this image of myself, stepping out into traffic. I was on a sidewalk on my way home from the grocery store. And I was waiting for the light, and there were these cars coming on, and it just seemed possible to step out there and get swept away. It felt so real, for a minute I thought I had done it. But then I was just standing there on the sidewalk. And the cars were going by. And it was so cold. So I checked myself in.”
“I think I know what you mean,” she said.
People sometimes thought they knew what he meant, but what they usually meant was that sometimes, in their own lives, they had been disappointed. They had been a little unwell in totally manageable ways. What they meant was that they had suffered in the small ways that everyone suffered. But Sophie set the mug down and stroked his wrist as though she were stroking the head of a small animal.
“My parents died. And then my sister, a few years ago, died. Overdose. And sometimes, I think, Fuck. Enough. Or sometimes, it’s like, Why not make it a full set?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I used to purge. Everybody thinks it’s about being skinny and being light for ballet. They think it’s to look a certain way. But I think most of us purge because of the control. Like, there’s a moment when you go from feeling full and awful to feeling clean and clear and bright. There’s just a moment, right before you get it all out, before you’re burning up and convulsing, when you feel something go ping and you know it’ll be all right. That’s what it’s about. That little ping of clarity. Anyway, I used to purge. When I lived with my grandma. All the other girls in ballet did, too. It’s not special or anything, but I did. And then I got these awful ulcers. And I couldn’t dance because I had no energy and my vision started to get weird? I felt like my body was betraying me.”
Lionel sat up then. Sophie’s thumb traced his knuckles.
“Then my sister died, and I thought, I can keep doing this or I can try to fucking live. Really live. Dance is awful, don’t get me wrong—if your foot is too big or your shoulder doesn’t bend a certain way. There are fewer than zero jobs. And everyone is on coke or a serial rapist. But when I’m dancing, sometimes, I feel that little ping. I know where I am in the world. I can feel myself. And, like, yeah, my technique is not classical. Come on. I learned to dance in Arkansas. But as long as I can dance, I’ll be okay. I don’t need ABT. Or Royal Ballet or anything. I just want to dance for as long as I can.”
“It’s your something,” Lionel said.
“Everybody deserves a something, right?”
Lionel nodded, and Sophie blotted the corners of her eyes with a sleeve.
“Okay, so. Don’t think you can distract me with all this blubbering. Tell me more about you and Charlie last night.”
Lionel put his hands over his face. He could smell Sophie’s lotion. The coffee. His own breath.
“You’re relentless,” he said.
“I just like to know things. I hate secrets.”
Lionel felt exhausted by the prospect of telling her more of the seedy details from last night. But also by the prospect of convincing her that he’d already told her all there was to know. There was nothing interesting left except the petty details of how their bodies had been arranged and what it had felt like. But she seemed keen to know exactly that, and Lionel shook his head.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“I absolutely do,” was her reply, but then there was a solid bang at the window between their heads, and they looked out into the dim, late-afternoon sun. A snowball had exploded against the glass. Sophie leaned back and squinted. The world had attained a patina of blue light. The blue hour was upon them.
“It’s Charlie,” she said.
“Oh no.”
The door opened and admitted a wave of cold, dense air. Lionel did not turn but instead watched Sophie’s eyes course over his head toward the front of the café. “White Christmas” was playing, the version Lionel recognized from childhood, by the Drifters. Charles came strolling through the café, and Lionel could almost feel his body heat.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Sophie said. Charles braced himself on the table. He was soaked. The tips of his curls were beaded with something chalky: sweat or shampoo that he hadn’t washed out entirely, melting snow. Charles hung his head, his expression hidden from Lionel, which was just as well, because Lionel felt at that moment that he probably should leave. He pulled his scarf free from the back of the chair and turned to take up his coat.
“I’ll let you guys be,” he said.
“No way,” Sophie said. “You stay put.” He felt her foot then against his knee, keeping in place. She smiled at him, but it was not a joke. Then she turned to Charles and asked him if he wanted some water or a coffee. Charles said that he wanted an espresso, with a tonic back. She made an elaborate bow at him and got up. Charles took her chair, and when she was around the corner, when they could hear her tamping out the used coffee, Charles turned to Lionel.
“What’s all this?”
“She asked me here,” Lionel said. “I’m not trying anything.”
“That is so typical of her.” Charles shook his head, leaned back in the chair. “She’s playing a game. She thinks everything is fucking hilarious.”
“She said she knew already. About last night.”
“Yeah, I told her earlier—sorry if that was supposed to be a secret or something,” Charles said. Lionel watched his lips shape into an amused smirk, the little dimple in his right cheek appearing, then vanishing.
“She seemed fine with it.”
Charles turned and gripped the back of the chair, gave his body a hard wrench. Lionel’s breath caught at the mobility of his joints. How easy it was for him to attain such a ridiculous position. The espresso machine hissed.
“You all right?”
“I can go if you want.”
“No, don’t. She’d just make a whole case about it,” Charles said. “Better to let her have her way.”
Sophie returned with the espresso and the small glass boot filled with tonic water. Charles shifted over to the empty chair closer to the window, away from Lionel, and Sophie reclaimed her seat. The small espresso cup was a deep caramel color. The crema was beautiful, perfect, and Charles sipped it to test the heat. Sophie had her chin on her palm, appraising his reaction. They had a whole routine down. One that excluded Lionel, made him feel extraneous, with his collar with the hole in it and his scarf and his anxiety. He rolled his sleeves down and buttoned them, and in the process drew Sophie’s attention. Not in any obvious way, but he could feel the tension in her gaze shift slightly in his direction. Charles had seen him naked, of course, and had touched him. But that touching and that seeing had been focused in its particulars. They hadn’t talked about their bodies, only used them. It was different in the café.
He had that feeling again, the one like watching an intimate function at a friend’s house, the way two people who loved each other shared a context that had nothing to do with him. He was stupid for staying, for listening, when Charles and Sophie told him to stay put. He should have listened to himself. After all, his duty was to himself. Like that old line from his doctors: Your duty is to your health. You owe yourself that much.
“I think I should bounce, you guys,” he said. Charles did not look at him. Sophie frowned.
“Didn’t I say to stay right where you are?”
“It’s getting a little weird, Sophie, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to be funny, but sounding only desperate to himself.
“No,” she said.
Charles knocked back the entire boot of tonic.
“You don’t have to prove anything to her, Lionel. If you want to go, you can go.” Charles pointed to the door over Lionel’s shoulder.
Sophie turned her head then, and she put her arm around Charles’s neck in a gesture that was at once playful and threatening. She was smaller than he was, but her arms were taut and strong. She clenched and Charles reached down, lifted her up, and settled her on his lap with no more effort than moving a coat from a chair.
“Behave,” Charles said.
“You behave,” was Sophie’s reply, but Lionel did see her arm slacken. “Where did you go earlier?”
Charles sighed. “Rehearsal. For the spring shows.”
“Who’s choreographing?”
“Farnland,” Charles groaned, closing his eyes.
“I don’t know they let him choreograph still. After the incident.” She said the word with cartoonish exaggeration, turning to Lionel and giving him a very pointed look.
“It wasn’t an incident,” Charles said. “Come on. Don’t spread rumors.”
She looked at Lionel. “Farnland—allegedly—had an affair with one of the high school boys.”
“Sophie, be serious.”
The tension in the conversation cut against the casualness of their physical closeness. Sophie’s arm dangled around Charles’s shoulders. He had one arm wrapped around her waist, holding her steady, but with his free hand he swirled the espresso, breaking up the crema. Their limbs were loose and relaxed. But it was clear that this was a thing they disagreed about, and not for the first time, which made Lionel wonder why Sophie had brought it up in the first place. In front of him.
“I’m just reporting the facts.”
“You mean gossip,” Charles said.
“Why’d you go with him, anyway? You could have danced in the stupid classical piece with the rest of us. You don’t even like contemporary.”
“It’s neoclassical inspired, for one thing. Don’t be a bitch about it.”
“Ah, yes, his Balanchine homage,” Sophie said.
Charles closed his eyes again. “And for two, he asked me. Plus, he knows that guy in Seattle.”
“PNB? You were serious about PNB?”
“I need a job, Sophie.”
“Or it’s back to the paper mill,” she said, slapping his chest. Then, looking back at Lionel, she said, “Charlie comes from paper folk.”
“Why are you being such a bitch today?” Charles said.
Sophie got off his lap. The table rocked from her motion. “I’m not,” she said. “You’re the one who intruded on my coffee date with Lionel.”
“Oh, I’m intruding?” Charles made a big show of looking between Lionel and Sophie, and Lionel once again pulled his coat from the back of his chair.
“He’s fine, actually,” Lionel said.
Sophie ignored this. “Yes, you’re intruding,” she told Charlie. “We were having a very intimate conversation before you arrived and invited yourself.”
“About what?” Charles asked, looking directly at Lionel then. “What were you talking about?”
“Lionel’s proctoring. He did a history test today.”
“About what?”
“French something-something,” Sophie said.
“Absolutism,” Lionel said.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I just did the test,” Lionel said. “And then collected the blue books.”
“And that’s so important?”
“For some people, you know, tests are everything,” Lionel said. He stood up, looped his scarf around his neck. “I didn’t mean to make a mess here.”
“No, stay. I’m being a dick. I’m just burned out,” Charles said.
“Yeah, he’s being a dick,” Sophie added.
They were both looking at him then, each of them knowing something a little different about him. He should go. He should leave. But they were looking at him as if they wanted him to stay, really wanted him to sit with them, and it had been a long time since Lionel felt that anyone really wanted him around or needed him. Distantly, remotely, he felt a click, a little alleviation of pressure in his head. Something had been determined. Something was now opening. He sat again, and at that very moment, he felt one foot glide along the outside of his right leg. And he felt a reassuring pressure against his left ankle. They were both touching him. They were both moving against him.
“All right,” he said. “All right.”