Will Lyman — Portfolio

Jon knew the Ryan’s like his own blood, at least that’s what he told me when we were climbing in his car to go to their dinner party. Trying to learn Jon’s world and my place within it was a puzzling pursuit, as he was a subject that skirted easy castings. As we drove through the hills––the sky all lazy pink outside my window––I came to understand that our night at the Ryans was key to the whole thing. “The Ryans are my oldest friends,” he explained, “they’re my heart.” 

The car hummed as if shut off, then was silent. We sat close in the front seat. We both knew the name of the feeling. Impotence, anger, resentment. We hadn’t had sex in months, as the lust of newness dissipated and our relationship went into its current flat, dormant state.

I was rudderless, and my writing reflected it. In those months I was leading a workshop in town, the same one I had once been a student of. The day prior, a girl who almost never spoke and whose stories were exclusively about the functions of her body––her hair growth patterns and the geography of her nipples––explained that today’s world was more hostile a landscape for women than any time before, and that her work was a remedy to these societal evils. 

In workshop, I increasingly found myself confronted with redundancy. Everything had been said before, thought before. After I understood this, all contemporary stories shrugged off their disguises and revealed themselves to be attempts at differentiation—at complicating or challenging an existing canon. I find that, even in reading, I no longer get a thrill from fictional beheadings or mutilation nightmares or anything. I was senseless, bored, undone. 

“I don’t know if you’ll get along with any of them,” Jon’s words shook me out of my thoughts. We were walking over to the Ryan’s. “They’re fun. They’re different,” he said of his friends, who I’d never met before. 

The twins were a particular fascination of mine for their shiny, new-age life. Lots of people intrigued me in those early days, where everything new in the city was charged with a mystical, distant allure. The Ryans weren’t twins, but boyfriends who shared the same name, and coincidentally, almost every other identifying feature. They lived together in Calabasas with a dachshund named Judy. Jon told me Ryan H’s mom “had money.”

When I saw them for the first time they were standing on either end of the grill. They were both tall, lanky blondes, Barbie dolls with high cheekbones and those bony knees that were either at full extension or a sharp ninety degree angle. Every time I looked at their legs, even when sitting, I was reminded of their height. They were smooth and chipper, with the fresh moisturized faces of two marathon runners whose sole pastime was sweating and rehydrating on an endless cycle. Jon hugged them both, and I noticed how short and bumpy he looked in comparison. 

Even though my time in LA was still fresh, I felt I’d seen every face before. A new person, although they might surprise me at first, would ring familiar. After an instant, it would occur to me who this figure reminded me of: a friend back home, or my brother’s math teacher. All voices had a similar tune, and if you looked close enough, everyone had the same features.

For this reason, the Ryans gave me significant pause, as if they were proof of my apathetic view. They were sharp-boned, nearly identical, and spoke in the same cadence. The first time I met them, they came across the same few words as if by surprise. Each sentence was grafted into another and so on. they shared an exact vocabulary, as close as two people can be. And I found it a miracle that they encountered the other in the wide, sprawling world, with all its missed opportunities and thwarted connections. Though, this was my first thought. I know now that the world is much tighter, much more inevitable, than it initially seemed when I was twenty two. I tried to picture the Ryans fucking, but it disturbed me too much to go through with it. 

“Pinot for the girls and Coors for Betsy,” Jon chuckled as he set the drinks in a big blue cooler. “She just broke up with her girlfriend,” he explained. Then I made a noise, something like a consolation or a sign of pity, and he said “Not like that. She was a hag.” I hadn’t known him to be so quick to render judgements, so I shut up. Already, the food had been cooked and arranged on trays. Jon stood more erect than usual, his hands neatly on his hips.

Ryan H. introduced himself and Ryan R. I saw a little tuft of fur moving around the yard, and I asked if it was Judy the dog.. 

“Garland, of course.” R. clarified.

It seemed as if it mattered a great deal to him that everyone be present and overserved. He did a lot of hand waving, of redirection to the pour-pitcher of sangria and to each guests’ place card at the table. I thought it was nice to see my name in writing next to a seat that waited for me.

Jon was across the yard talking to an even shorter guy wearing a cowhide vest. This was JR, who Ryan H informed me was back in town after a years-long hiatus. I introduced myself. I gave a firm handshake. I was, by all means, proud of my showing. Then, at a lapse in conversation, JR mentioned that he was late to the Ryans because he had been cruising in the park. “Behind that wall, you know?” He asked Jon, who answered: “Yeah, that one.” 

Then Jon joked that we were early for the opposite reason, which made me red in the face. When I didn’t laugh, JR took note and told me to “ease up.” He prodded my side, explaining that “Jon was the same way when we were together.” This was the first I was learning of any relationship between them. “He was… sharp. You probably know,” JR gestured to me, “you spend so much time out there that you don’t know where your edges are.” He waved vaguely to the right, as if the rest of the country was an abstract space just adjacent to him. 

In lieu of having my own conversations to turn to, I stood off to the side of him and JR while they discussed marketing. The stretch of the grass and the firepit in the distance had an illusory quality to it, like I wasn’t really there. 

Jon: “I think I’ll be safe because of the accounts I’m on.” 

JR: “Best thing about my job is I can’t get laid off.”

As far as I could tell, JR didn’t really have a job. His life consisted of a series of side hustles that both impressed me and made me want to mock him. When we spoke later he listed them: landscaping, reselling vintage porn, and negotiating influencer brand deals. He treated sex like a subversive act on par with rebellion itself. It was in every other sentence he spoke: who he fucked, who he wanted to, how his body felt after two glasses of wine.

“This is she,” Jon called from across the deck. Betsy, emerging from the kitchen, looked as if she would smell like mildewed cigarettes and kitty litter. In other words, she achieved the look she was going for: a roomy flannel, boot cut denim, a tossed, careless hair. She was rail thin and hard to look at. Yet, I hugged Betsy and didn’t revolt. She smelled like linen—a scent I always likened to cleanness, to nothingness itself. And, coming away from her embrace, I noticed that she was actually quite pretty when looked at directly.

Then she spoke. With each syllable, she swayed a little. “Betsy.” We shook hands, which was strange after she’d made a point of hugging me. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.” 

“I wasn’t.”

“Okay.” In her hand she held a dry glass of orange wedges from the fridge. A fog of condensation was forming as she stood in the sun. She spoke again: “Who are you? What’s your story?”

And embarrassingly I had little to say. I listed some demographic information, but Betsy seemed utterly unimpressed. I couldn’t come up with an easy way to sell myself, and I was confronted with my own plainness as we sat for dinner.

At the table, a worry ran through me that I would be the subject of attention. A new presence at the table was sure to bring questions, and with it, scrutinizing talk of local color and hometown origins. I’d lived there for two months, enough to be aware of how much I still had to learn. 

Jon hooked my leg under his then kissed me. I thought for a moment that he would try to jerk me off under the table again, as he did when we were at dinner with his mother the third week we were dating.

Yet when conversation began, as it did ceremoniously by the clinking of Ryan R’s fork against his wine glass, none of it was about me. They carried on talking as if I were a pet or a temporary installation. First it was trains, then cocaine quality, then zoning laws.  “The ferns? Yeah. I don’t like them either.”

They talked like old friends, like family. Across from me, Betsy pulled the cooled orange wedges from her glass and pressed them on her neck.

After an hour, I was able to tell the difference between the twins. Ryan R. was a lean little man. He grew up playing soccer before transitioning into distance running, which he viewed as a fall from grace. He complained at length about losing definition in his thighs after quitting soccer. At the table, he threw out lines meant to encourage group consensus: How do we feel about X? Do we think we should start with Y? Knowing this simple biographical fact about him made every action he took appear as a desperate call to be a part of something. He wanted a team. 

And while Ryan R. was a pack animal, Ryan H. had a sense of himself that was complete, autonomous. He moved around the table with authority, without checking if what he was doing was alright. When they talked about running, a pursuit which H. began independently before roping R. into the equation, I understood their pastime as a motivated push toward something, a headstrong vehicle accumulating momentum. Last year, they ran the Boston half-marathon. This fall, they would run the Santa Rosa 26.2. “Maybe one day we’ll run an Ultra,” he explained when I asked if he’d had an ultimate, final goal.

At Dartmouth, Jon had gotten lost in a field near campus and spent the night in jail, H. reported. Jon wandered from a tailgate to pee the night before a term presentation in Classics. I wondered if this was indicative of a larger streak of behavior, but my worry was met with the roaring, expectant laughter of the table as H. began recounting the story. “He got processed, like, in a gray crew neck.” The force of H’s slaps as he laughed—on Jon’s bicep, his back—struck me with their deft impact. “And we get to whatever station they brought him to and stand outside a double-locked wooden door til this guy comes out.” 

“Okay,” Jon said, trying to halt the story from continuing. H. pushed away his hand as it raised, then kept talking. 

“He sees us, still drunk, and thinks we’re the furies.”  

“We were reading Euripides,” Jon whispered to me for context. Although I knew already that the furies were from Aeschylus and that correcting him in front of his friends would do no good.

“Whole time I’ve known this guy, I’ve never seen him more scared,” H. continued.

“The three of you, standing there, looked like punishment itself,” Jon laughed, red in the face. He looked at me, but didn’t linger. 

When the bottle was finished, JR talked about moving to San Francisco. From the faces of his friends I got something like a warning, as if this were a fantasy he wouldn’t abandon. He spoke about the city exclusively through objects and proper nouns: the Castro, leather cock rings, and a boy he called Lemon that gave the best head he’d ever gotten. 

Ryan R. cut him off with a story about their new house: how they’d driven together in a Zipcar down the street and knew that it was where they’d live for the rest of their lives. His story was nice, if a little forced, and he often stalled with intermissions of “um,” while trying to find his point. Across the table, JR had already started eating. “And it was a struggle trying to mortgage it.” Then he kept talking and I got lost watching JR’s mouth get loaded with string beans.

“I don’t know why you’re saying it like that,” was where I clued back in. Ryan H. interrupted his twin with a sour tone. “Like we got the house, everything turned out okay.”

“I know.”

“Then don’t say it like that.”

Jon nudged my leg under the table. When he caught my eye, he shrugged his eyebrows. 

“Not trying to embarrass you.”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

Then a silence fell between the Ryans. A pregnant pause hung over the table, broken only by the clinking of JR’s fork. 

“But here we are,” R. finished, holding out his glass. Then Jon joined, then R. and me and everyone else. I watched our glasses bounce off each other in cheers, remarking how quickly they’d moved forward.

Betsy stood and started scraping plates together. I balled up napkins and put them in the trash. As we all shuffled, Jon came up behind me and set his hands on my waist. I turned and he cupped my cheeks and kissed me.

“We can wait,” I said.

He kissed the back of my neck, then down my shoulder.  

“Do we have to?” he mumbled into my lips, mashed against his. Up close, all I could see were his eyes so close to mine. In my periphery, I saw Betsy watching us, then I pulled away and started clearing the table.

Ryan R. caught me on the deck. I had begun carrying the dishes to the kitchen and was halfway up the stairs by the time I noticed he was calling my name. At first I even believed he wanted to help me with the plates, so I set the stack on the stair below me for him to pick up. But as he approached, sighing, arms at his sides, I realized he wanted to talk to me. I set down the rest of the plates, which stood next to the first pile like a magnetic pole. 

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” R. began. I tried to tell him that it was alright, that I had hardly noticed their little squabble, but he wouldn’t listen. And it would be a lie to say their words didn’t conjure something within me: like a groggy mix of excitement and curiosity. Their fight resembles one a child might have with their own reflection. It was not rich with the meaning I wanted it to be, but perhaps Ryan R.’s candor offered something of a window through which I could prod their incongruities. 

“He’s always dissecting me,” R. sighed, “like correcting me and picking out what I’m doing wrong.” His words tumbled from him, like air rushing out of a balloon. 

“Why do you think that is?” I asked, resting my hand on R.’s arm to show my concern, my care.

“I mean, he’s not perceptive like I am. Right?”

He looked to me, and I understood that what he really wanted was for me to agree with him.

“I see that,” I said. “Is it always like this?”

“I don’t know. Kinda,” R. said.

“How do you feel about it? I asked, and at that moment I realized I’d inquired too aggressively. R. picked up the first stack of dishes to halt his moment of vulnerability. 

“So, where are you from?” Betsy asked a while later, leaning over the wooden arm of her chair. We were sitting by the firepit. Her face was lit by the flashing of the flames. The sky above us was deepening navy blue. “Jumped outta Michigan and into Jon’s bed?” 

“I’m not from Michigan.”

“Fresno? Utah?” She guessed. Then spouted a few more promiseless origin points, then I guess she got bored and stopped mid-sentence, staring into the fire. But she was right about the core of it, that I’d been alone most of my life.

Across from me, the Ryans nestled into each other’s necks. They shared a chair. Jon was a few chairs away from me. We hadn’t been near each other in quite some time. It wasn’t a climactic point of departure, but rather my gradual recognition that Jon preferred to be with JR. And, perhaps, my presence had been the catalyst to their renewed interest in each other. All I knew was that when I stopped making an effort to be near him, he was gone. He was far, far, on the other side of the fire pit with the Ryans. 

The other boys had four sticks they’d found in the woods, upon which they speared marshmallows and stuck them into the flames. Ryan R had offered me his, but nobody had extended one to Betsy. 

“Are you vegan?” I asked, wanting to start a conversation.

“No,” she answered, “And I really want a s’more.”

She sat alone in her chair, digging into the notches in the wooden arm with her fingernail.

“Can I ask?” I began, “Why are you here?”

“Well.” She nodded to the rest of the group, who were blithely unaware. “All these fairies. You see ‘em. They need a man.” She wrapped a hand around my shoulder, as if preaching a private, chest-held philosophy. “I’m their man. I’m their rock.”

I asked her why.

“Someone needs to be on the outside. I’m kind of the most important one.”

I laughed, but she didn’t. I heard a puff of air leave Jon’s lungs as he blew out the flame on his marshmallow behind me.

She turned towards me with a renewed fervor. “If I weren’t here, they would go at each other.” 

“The snake would eat its own tail,” I offered. She nodded, then looked over to Jon and JR, who spoke quietly to each other. 

“You know what I think?” Betsy said. I leaned toward her, bringing our faces close together. “I think you need a rock. You need a purpose.” She sat back in her chair. “We all have one.” And I wondered what this would look like for me. Though what I remember, rather than any particular realization, was the fire popping in my periphery. A little spark flew out and died. The sound was relief.

Time passed, which I had ceased to pay attention to. JR rose unexpectedly and walked to the house, swatting bugs off of his arms. Jon joined him. Then the Ryans. Betsy and I were last to rise. She doused the fire with what remained of her Coors. The moon above us was high, stark against the black of the sky.

At the deck, I glanced inside the window. Betsy stopped behind me and watched along. Inside, the Ryans were alone. R. pulled H. in close and they kissed. I allowed my mind to wander. I imagined, for a moment, that there was anger brewing between the Ryans. That they might conclude their kiss with a punch, a beating, a reveal of the violence that I wanted to be simmering between them. I pictured R. bashing H.’s face in with his fists. The vision was quick and brutal and I really wanted it to keep going. 

But it wasn’t real. R. kissed his twin and led him into the living room where JR and Jon waited on the couch. I looked in through the window as they rejoined the warm circle of light, filled with hands reaching to each other with cups and high fives and pinky promises. They were playing some sort of game. JR had a deck of cards. Jon sat center, the Ryans on either side. Their bodies were young and enviable and they clung to each other. 

Seeing the harmony of their world, the glow of the windows, I knew that I would never be the writer I wanted to be. I understood that this was who I am: standing outside it all, wanting to watch them tear eachother apart.

Next to me, Betsy shifted. Then, without a word, she stepped toward the doorway inside. I didn’t follow her, nor look in her direction, for fear that she would extend an invitation to join and that I would accept it.