“You should be in the far right lane,” Spencer instructed from the passenger seat. “The Taconic Parkway is coming up.”
Ian kept his eyes on the road, hands at ten and two. “We’re already on the Taconic, hon. That was the last turn we made.”
Spencer expanded and contracted the map image on his phone. “We are? How did I miss that?”
“It’s fine. I know where we are.”
Ian smiled at the mountains ahead. He’d forgotten to stay surly about the trip. It was all too pleasant, as they sailed along the highway at seventy, the hot, stinking pavement of the city behind them. He loved feeling the expanse of the universe open up to them, the rest of the world reintroducing its big self with outlet malls and factories, then fields and mountains. Town, and then country! They were, for a few weeks, anyway, among The Vacationers: the people who disappear to fashionable and remote places to recharge in the summer months. Good riddance to the steaming sidewalks and unlucky urbanites who’d be trapped there all summer. They were vacationers.
Spencer was still examining the map on his phone.
Ian eyed him. “You seem weird.”
“I’m fine. Excited, probably.”
He didn’t seem excited to Ian. He didn’t seem half as excited as he would normally be at this phase of the drive. But then, it hadn’t been a normal year for Spencer. And Ian knew that these summer visits with his parents were Spencer’s private reckoning of the year’s accomplishments. All the accounting was done in the Berkshires, the additions and subtractions of his worth, in the presence of his father who’d amassed too many accolades for it to be a fair competition. None of this was explicit, of course. They were too polite for that, too enamored with each other. But Ian knew that Spencer arrived at the lake house with whatever pride or shame that he believed he’d earned that year.
In the end, Spencer almost always arrived with a surplus of pride. It was a default mode for the Bright men, and Spencer had lived a mostly charmed adult life. This would be his first year without it. Spencer’s most recent book—his fourth—had been poorly received in the foreign affairs community. He’d been too easy on Israel, they said, too conventional in his diagnosis for the Middle East, and lacking in new ideas. The New York Times review had used the word “unhelpful.”
It was a good book, Ian thought. Not his best, but deserving of publication, to be sure. The world and his academic field were shifting, though, and Spencer would need to shift with them to maintain relevance. That’s what Ian would have told him if he wanted to be brutally honest, which he did not. He wanted instead to be a supportive partner to the person he loved more than life itself. He wanted to build this man back up to the charming and arrogant force that he was. So Ian happily proofread Spencer’s fourth book and told him that the critics were bitter fools. That part, at least, was true.
“I hope you’re not thinking about the book right now,” Ian said, testing the waters.
“I’ve already forgotten about it.”
“Good. You should. It’s a good book.”
Spencer smiled, wide and bright, and as beautiful at forty-one as ever. A lock of black-brown hair fell over one eyebrow, and Ian would have leaned over and licked it away with his tongue if it wasn’t likely to cause a ten-car pileup on the parkway. Instead, he reached his right hand out and held firmly to the inside of Spencer’s thigh.
Spencer let the hand linger there as organs stirred beneath denim, then threw it back and laughed. “You’re an animal in the country. Please get us there alive.”
Ian smiled. He knew how to do this, to make Spencer whole again. He didn’t need what Spencer needed, and that gave him a superpower. Ian was a tenured professor with two highly acclaimed books of poetry under his belt. He loved his work. He loved his home life with Spencer. They didn’t have much disposable income, but they had enough to live modestly on the island of Manhattan, which made them luckier than the vast majority of people on this earth. Ian never forgot that. He was content, so at times like these, it was easy to pour all this happiness into Spencer if need be. Even—especially—at the lake house.