Jake pulls the curtain back. “Leave me alone.”
“A kid’s at the bottom of the lake,” Thad says. “My brother’s at the hospital.”
“I’m stressed,” Jake says. “This happens when I’m stressed.”
Thad leaves the bathroom, slams the door.
Stressed. There’s an explanation for Jake’s behavior, but stressed isn’t it. Jake’s horny. Jake’s always horny.
Thad used to be. Before weed. Before the regimen of Xanax, Paxil, and Seroquel. His dick works, it’s just the want that’s waned. He should want Jake. Jake’s gorgeous. He’s successful. He’s good to Thad, or good enough. And good enough, given Thad’s track record with men, ought to be enough. But it isn’t.
If only Jake listened, asked about his day, showed him affection unattached to sex. That, to Thad, would look like love.
He moves to the kitchen table.
In a double-wide, even a converted one, rooms run together: kitchen, dining area, family room. Two table legs rise from carpet, two from linoleum the color of uncooked pasta. The floor’s old, the kind that sticks to your feet with every step. Thad’s feeling hungry, then ashamed for feeling hungry. How long, in the aftermath of tragedy, does one wait to eat?
Outside, his mother’s coming up the hill. The grass is high. If she’s not careful, she’ll take a horseshoe stake to the shin.
From the bathroom comes Jake’s whistling. This one’s a hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” in a minor key. A recovering Baptist, Jake knows every hymn, each word of every verse. For him, growing up meant church on Wednesday, Saturday, and twice on Sunday. For Thad, church was Sunday mornings once or twice a month, and only if his mother insisted. (She never managed to get his father through the door of any house of worship.) Thad gave his mother’s church a chance, but he knew early on who he was, and while her church wasn’t the kind to condemn him, neither was it a place where Thad might raise his head from prayer to find others like him seated in the pews. Couples, there, were straight. Singles were straight. The minister was a woman married to a man. None of this felt particularly welcoming. None of it felt his.
He hasn’t been to church since he was twelve. And, while he judges Jake’s occasional childishness, there are days Thad, too, feels like a child. It’s as though, having dropped out of college, he missed some class everyone else got to take. Here’s how to pay taxes. Here’s how to balance a checkbook. Here’s how to keep a job.
How have his parents done it, stayed employed for thirty years, stayed married thirty-seven? Their love is real. Their work is important. Google either name, a thousand hits come up.
How, then, did they raise such dumbfuck sons?
Thad’s mother reaches the porch, but she does not come in. She stands on the top step and watches the water through binoculars.
Thad will miss this house, house of summers, of card games and horseshoes, of fish fries and music and ice cream and love. But this isn’t the home Thad remembers. The walls are marked by holes and hooks where paintings used to hang. Boxes crowd the corners, stacked or open, half-packed. Bookshelves stand empty. His mother’s knickknacks and flea market ceramics have all been newspapered away. Framed family portraits, wrapped in brown paper, lean against the walls.
The room’s one concession to ornamentation is Jake’s painting—a gift last year upon his first visit to the lake. In the painting, a girl palms a pomegranate half. A cherub hovers over one shoulder. A compass at her feet points north. One of the girl’s breasts is out. All of these add up to something symbolic, though, gun to his head, Thad couldn’t say what. Part of him wonders whether Jake could say. Jake might be a genius, or he might be making shit up as he goes. Could be anyone who tries to analyze his work, the joke’s on them. Thad merely remembers being relieved his mother hadn’t protested the wayward boob.
His mother, as a rule, is thoughtful, unfailingly polite. He imagines her packing, fretting over whether to take the painting down or leave it for Jake’s benefit. Thad can’t say such worry is undue. Jake’s got an ego and the sensitivity to go with it. Then again, it’s possible he hasn’t even noticed that his painting is the only one still up. Jake sometimes has trouble getting past himself. By twenty-four, he’d had two solo exhibitions. At twenty-five, he was the subject of pieces in Artforum, New American Paintings, and the Times. Just last week, the New Yorker gave his third solo show three pages, dubbing him Brooklyn’s next big thing and praising his work’s “mordant irony” and “refreshing excess.” Jake pretended not to care, but Thad’s caught him reading the article half a dozen times. He’s had only one bad review. An Art in America piece celebrated a group show before singling out Jake’s work as “clumsy, desperate, and eager to please,” a line that sent Thad’s boyfriend to bed for three full days.
The whistling tapers off, replaced by a bassline. Jake has switched on the Sharper Image plastic-capped bath radio he gave Thad’s parents for Christmas and which nobody but Jake has likely ever used.
Thad moves to the hallway. He presses an ear to the bathroom door, and that’s when he hears it. Over the rush of water, the buzz of the bathroom fan, the hum of Bell Biv DeVoe singing “Poison,” Thad can just make out the gentle slap of his boyfriend jerking off.
Thad’s mother crosses the porch. Thad steps into the bathroom and shuts the door. Immediately he’s underwater, the room more steam than air.
How did his brother do it? Push himself past so much silt and dark?
“You have to stop,” Thad says. “Or be quiet about it.”
The slapping grows frenzied.
“Jake,” he says. He doesn’t want to pull the curtain aside.
The sound slackens. Jake’s done. The radio cuts off. The water stops. The curtain draws back, and Jake’s head appears, eyes blue, teeth so white you’d think he modeled for some product four out of five dentists recommend.
Those eyes, though. He loves this boy. Jake’s sledgehammered Thad’s heart a hundred times, but it’s Thad who’s let him. You can only blame the hammer so long before you have to blame yourself for not stepping aside.
Jake wipes the water from his face.
The plans for tomorrow are set, and Thad should call them off. Say he did, would Jake go to Asheville without him, or would he stay? Either way, a boy is at the bottom of the lake. There are more pressing concerns than tomorrow’s lunch with Jake’s art school ex.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Thad says.
“Don’t shame me,” Jake says.
“I’m not shaming you. I just think it’s disrespectful.”
“Disrespectful? What I do with my dick—”
“Do you even care?”
Standing in this room is like being in a mouth. Everything is wet—the mirror, faucet, knobs all slick and glistening. Jake stands dripping, and Thad offers him a towel, which he takes.
“Do I care that a boy is dead?” Jake says. “Of course. I’m not a monster.”
Thad lowers the toilet lid and sits. In the shower, Jake towels off his hair, which is short and dark. There’s little in the world that Thad likes more than running his hands through that hair—clean and soft—before Jake slathers product into it. He likes Jake’s hair the way it is. Jake prefers the electrocuted hedgehog look.