“Still nothing, no contract,” Duke croaked.
How could there be, I thought, given the way we’d—I’d—ambiguously amplified the spilling of his blood in the last picture?
“I don’t think there’s going to be one, man. That’s what Freddie’s telling me.” His voice had lost all its usual poise; the would-be cult icon had been laid low by his own antics. Now he was nonplussed and raw. “But you know the white boy I stepped on, Wickes?” This was his first mention of the cause of his trouble: the act he’d committed. “Do you know the kinds of things he says out there on the field? Do you know the texts I’ve gotten from other players about it? Black ones, all of them black? They say I’m a hero. One of them called me a martyr. And your picture, this one with the pool of blood hanging over my face...”
I braced for what he’d say. He hadn’t wanted to see my work ahead of time, which was perhaps a sign of his derangement. He wanted to confront himself in the street.
“It really is... it’s... majestic. It is. And did that make things worse? Is that why they’re calling me those things in the news? But I can’t take any of it back. There are things that are bigger than any game. And aren’t I getting seen now, coming out into the light, even if nobody understands what the hell it is that’s in front of them?”
“Maybe a team will still call, though,” I offered. “People go down all the time, blow out a knee, you know that. Principles don’t count for much then.”
“But I can’t be waiting fucking praying, begging forgiveness just for evening things up with those guys.”
I wondered how Duke explained the other transgression to himself, though, the jaw-breaking block he used to lay out Keller, his fellow African-American, when it seemed his anger should have been directed at the Bears’ quarterback, Skovsky. Shouldn’t Duke have ruined his jaw, not Keller’s?
“Freddie’s saying he might have found something else for me, though. That we should put football on the shelf for now, until, like you’re saying, someone tears an Achilles or something.”
“What else is there?”
“You’re not going to believe it.”
“Probably not.”
“He’s a big thinker, Freddie.” Duke’s confidence was returning, his voice was soaring, but there was something frantic in it now, unsettled. “And I want to keep this goddamned apartment. See, I couldn’t give it up. I couldn’t. My mom even visited.”
“I just assumed you were still around in New York, with Bryan.”
“I’ve got a lot more time for my Chicago boys now, you could say that. Remember Anthony? Eric? Got some of them crashing with me up here, too. They won’t let me give the place up.”
They were dependents, it seemed, children Duke felt a certain responsibility toward. I had to admire his sentiment, even if it was lunatic.
“It’s good for all of us,” he said, “getting back down to things. But that isn’t what I wanted to say. I’m talking about Freddie, my personal genius. The phone hardly rang—we got a couple calls from the commissioner, from the head office, but those were calls we didn’t want. But then Freddie, God bless him, he reminded me of something: there’s more than football in me. Way more. And he didn’t mean there’s more to life than sports or some horseshit.”
Hadn’t Duke himself just asserted this same idea, though?
“Remember I told you I used to play a lot of things in college? I was good at a lot of things.”
“So what? You’re going to pull a Bo Jackson?” Of course he was, I thought. It felt as though nothing were any longer unimaginable to me. Should I be grateful to Duke, to Theria, whichever it was, maybe both, for this new sensibility?
“I wish. I can’t hit a fastball for shit. Hardest thing in sports, right? But one thing I can do, maybe this won’t surprise you after what happened on the field. I can throw a punch.”
“So MMA? That’s—”
“I’d never do that.”
“Good to know.”
“But boxing—”
“Kimbo fucking Slice?” What had happened to me, to Duke, to all of us, to bring such convolutions into our lives? I was gloriously reeling.
“I’m good at it, though. He was just a fat fuck who should have never stepped into a ring. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Fighting in boat yards on YouTube is one thing, but I saw Kimbo getting his ass handed to him by third-rate pros several—”
“No, no, you’re not listening. I’m technically sound—not some simple Mr. T-looking nigger with a glandular problem.”
“Sound for college athletics, though.”
“I’d hardly got started and I was nationally ranked. So fuck you—fuck that—straight sound is what I am. And damn good on the street, too. That’s still something. I knocked bitches out on the Lower East Side, just like Slice. And he collected some pretty heavy checks in the ring, getting knocked out. You know that, right? That’s what gets slept on.”
“Kimbo was a stuntman. And didn’t he die of a coronary at like forty-five, anyway?”
“That had nothing to do with fighting. That was cheeseburgers and shit. But you know what? Except for the dying, I wouldn’t mind being Slice. A Super-Slice. I could try that on for a minute, yeah.”
“Oh?”
“Like I said, I’ve got skills, not just heavy hands. And I’ve been trained by a bona fide New York legend. Ever heard of Anton’s? The gym? Of course you haven’t. Kimbo was a meathead, and I’m a poet. You should ask Bryan. I almost brought out my skills that night on a nigger of his that was giving you trouble, but you were too fucked up to notice.”
“What does the street matter in the ring? Or fighting with all the padding around your head in the amateurs? And anyway what does Freddie think you’re going to get paid, boxing in some Mickey Mouse club as a circus act? Look, I know you want to keep that apartment, but until he can sign you for football, maybe you’ve got to let it go. Or just ask Garrett to float you.”
“I knew he was your sugar daddy. But you don’t get boxing, that’s all this means, man.” He was calm. Maybe he knew something.
“And just what kind of agent—”
“For half a second, you could shut the fuck up. You really could. You can do it. I am getting—with your help—known, right? Like in college, but nationwide now. Boxing is not a regular sport. Maybe it’s not even a sport. Fights don’t get made because you’re so damn good, or ranked so high. It’s about how many people you can get to watch you, how many pay-per-view buys. You understanding me? We’re talking spectacle, with a little bit of sports sprinkled on top. Real Situationist shit here, okay? I know more than you think. How do you think a guy like Don King could have run the thing for so long back in the day? And with my time as an amateur, Freddie, he knows the kind of guys—I love him for this—he knows the kind of guys who could maybe set something up. So it does matter. And your pictures matter. Every one you put up, it matters more and more. You’re making this all viable, you get that? So excuse me for reaching here. I could just be some contender’s tune-up—that’s fine. You can still make a quarter mil that way, maybe more.”
“How is this not just reality TV, Duke?”
“Or just reality, fuck the television.”
“You really have the perfect agent.”
“Well, he’s looking for a payday. Just like me. You. Whoever. The white bitch actor you fucking, too. We all the same here.”
“You haven’t thought this through, Duke.”
And that’s when the line went dead—probably a nicer sound than anything he was going to say next.
Wow was the first word I got from Garrett—the only time he used the word, I believe—when I told him how things stood with Duke. Wow was how I felt all the time now, really, though the overlap between the amazing and the despicable was great. Flustered, naturally, Garrett and I met soon after in midtown, at a coffee shop in the dungeons of Rockefeller Center. He’d just had Antral business down on 43rd Street, a cold and sunny plaza-bench meeting in Bryant Park with several leading petroleum suppliers from South America. He’d walked them back to their hotel near the Rock, he said, sorting out the supply details along the way. He put all this to me plainly, to show me, I think, that he wasn’t interested in making any secret of his other business. The more he appeared to hide, he knew, the more I would try to dig things up. Better to present dirty hands so that I didn’t go looking for more. In truth, I hadn’t been looking all that hard since finding out about JG Chemical. I don’t know why exactly. It didn’t capture my imagination, I suppose, not with everything else that was afoot.
I was meeting Garrett because of Duke, of course, but not only because of him. There was also the matter of Daniil Trifonov, playing Scriabin and Prokofiev sonatas at Carnegie Hall in the evening. Garrett was lending me his usual seat in the first tier and I needed the ticket, an old-fashioned paper one. It was a night that would deliberately have nothing to do with anything. So much was going on now, so much was uncertain, I was badly in need of an uninflected stretch, even just a few hours.
The perks of the job were piling up, though. That much I had to admit. The way he ran things, Garett always had enough to be sorry about, and his apologies, however insincere, were always worthwhile. And so the gap between desire and reality had been steadily collapsing for me, with everything seeming to occur with less resistance, so that there was a new ease to my passage through the city and the world. Indeed, as John put it, after I’d wished him well with his mother, I was conducting myself with the glide of the rich man I was always meant to be. I’d certainly gone far past a standing Uber—though even on that score, how long had it been since I’d gone down into the tunnels like a rat? How quickly I came to scorn the trains, and underground Helena, too, pretty much as soon as it became possible to conceive of a life that didn’t require them.
I was also buying up endless stocks of luxury art materials: the kind that lesser artists obsessed over, not unlike those writers who buy two-hundred-dollar calfskin notebooks of the purest rag only to fill them with flea-bitten prose. But things were different now. I was buying everything, without any preciousness, with any discrimination, really, because it cost me nothing. I hoarded away most of it in my apartment, for leaner times, when I was no longer with Garrett. (I was already imagining the day he’d spring it on me, my termination, as he had with Jeff, if I didn’t quit first. That’s just who he was.)
There were also plane flights on offer, going anywhere I wanted to, if I thought it might inspire me: up to Albany or New Hampshire to follow Daphne into the countryside, say, or else to the Bay, where I’d not been since my father recovered from what was described as a minor vascular event, two years ago. Or even all the way to Jakarta, Garrett promised, the last known location of Claire, who’d traveled there on a three-month residency, I didn’t know with whom.
Rest and recreation were provided for as well, to keep me fresh and prepared to deal with headcases like Duke and Daphne. Concert tickets like tonight; Knicks tickets, choice ones, thousands of dollars’ worth, though I wasn’t the sort of fan interested in seeing a sub .500 team flail just for the sake of saying I’d spent the night at the Garden. It was only a matter of time, I could already tell, before Garrett offered me boxing tickets, to prepare me for Duke, just in case the receiver turned his ludicrous notions into reality. Probably after Garrett finished his coffee, he’d open up his jacket and pull out two tickets to a title fight in Vegas. He had access to so many things he didn’t himself partake of, which might have been the signal measure of his power: to sit before a feast and toss everything to the dogs.
Naturally I would take those boxing tickets; I didn’t mind being a dog. In fact, if I had true love for any sport—and maybe I didn’t—it was actually boxing. That’s what Duke didn’t understand about me. I’d followed it in some way my entire life. Even the undistinguished fighters interested me, since almost any fight contained the possibility of the highest drama: someone might die, or at least end up on artificial respiration. Bringing those same stakes, that same feeling, into a football game, was grounds for suspension or worse. But in boxing, no-one would show up if you didn’t leave room for death. It’s why amateur boxing, like flag football, was more or less unwatchable.
Most grand of all the perks, the most intimate, too, was Garrett’s standing offer to scale up my living and studio conditions. He’d said from the beginning it was about guaranteeing the best work from me, but there was clearly a paternal element to it, which I didn’t yet know how to feel about. He was mentioning the offer more and more lately; for all I knew, he might have been trying to make me more dependent on his largesse, like a true procurer, so that my abandoning his campaign would lose all feasibility for me. Still, looking around my apartment, listening to Tanya crying upstairs three times a week, I had to consider it. Sometimes motives don’t matter.
My benefactor had been ramping up the spoils in precise proportion, it seemed, to the growing thorniness of the campaign itself, systematically offsetting the distress it was causing me, especially now with my fears over Theria’s side-effects, so that my life remained, on balance, no more vexing than before. It was just that the precise place of distress in my life, the corners it forced itself into, was shifting.
I’d thought Garrett had meant to meet me at the bakery on 49th Street. It was quite nice, an airy enough place. In fact he had a hankering for the restaurant underground, within the Rock’s bowels, flanked by all those national brands in identical storefronts, laid out in such a manner that, unless you were down there daily amid the perpetual whirl of people, it was almost impossible to orient yourself. I had nearly acquired this quasi-skill, which was closer to an adaptation to adverse conditions, when I’d worked in the neighborhood at the offices of the Carrington. I’d decided not to pursue mastery.
In fairness, the Rock was one of the few economically sturdy community centers. But the price had been high: it was utterly faceless, an illimitable chain of chains appropriate only to the sorts of beings who were absent from their own lives. Fortunately, that’s just the sort you got there, either those peculiar midtown workers who managed to be intelligent and well-dressed while also void, or the tourists who crawled around the place thinking, I suppose, it had some meaning to New Yorkers, though I’d never known anyone who didn’t work within a thousand feet of the place ever consider going there unless someone else dragged them, as Garrett had dragged me.
At least it was quieter now, later in the day; navigating its frenetic crowds was less treacherous. Yet it remained crushingly dark, so that it took me a while to find Garrett sitting alone at a corner table, looking upbeat, somehow, while things were going so poorly. Perhaps this was the only way through it. Or maybe the South Americans had good news for him, for Antral, the indomitable portion of his business.
Garrett took his coffee black, he told me while I got myself an espresso, the first of four. He was certainly no utopian when it came to health, though. I never saw him order anything organic or gluten-free, and when his coffee arrived, I was surprised to see the drink remain liquid under the conditions he created in his cup, shoveling in sugar—the classic, highly-processed sort, sparkling white—with a teaspoon. No stirring, either; he said it affected the texture. Periodically, throughout our conversation, which spanned his business meeting in the park, Trifonov (he’d heard great things, but hadn’t heard him), and the sad and silly news regarding Duke, he tossed in little half-spoons of sugar and silently mouthed the word wow. Nothing could stagger him; he might have been more unflappable than Hasan. Was he almost pleased, I wondered, that Duke’s life had been further bent out of shape by events, and his own misjudgments?
Garrett set down the spoon and smiled broadly when I finished telling him about Duke’s scheme. “Think Freddie can pull it off?” The admiring look he gave me then felt as though it might really have been intended for Duke’s agent, but I was the only one there. “Boxing is a free-for-all, in some ways. I don’t follow it closely, but Tony does. It’s been hurting for attention for years. So... you just never know what can take off, or how. Aren’t you and I trying something pretty strange, too? Someone could find it bizarre. Some do, I’m sure of that. But that doesn’t stop us. So let Freddie have a crack at it. Why not? I don’t think he’s doing much else with Duke these days.”
How many cups of coffee had he already had, for him to speak this excitably—and this emptily? I know that he never finished the one in front of him then; he didn’t even drink enough of it to expose the white mountain below the surface. As we parted, though, he planted the spoon in it like a flag, so that it stood straight up, as if to prove a point.
As I walked up Sixth Avenue, ticket in hand, I realized I forgot to ask Garrett about my deepest worry—the new Theria, and when it would come. Evidently other concerns were dominating my mind. In fact, I couldn’t help thinking, with half-an-hour still to go until the concert, how immensely bothered Garrett had been by Duke’s disappearance just days ago; he’d become not just angry but desperate, something I’d never seen in him before. Yet now that Duke had surfaced, the player’s travails, which were no less real and deep and urgent than they’d been when he was missing, didn’t seem nearly as vexing to Garrett as they ought to. Could it be he’d come to believe that somehow everything had to work out for Duke, that he was never in danger? Was Garrett so confident in his own campaign, his influence, that he thought he could resuscitate this black man’s fortunes whenever he chose—and even through my work? It was the kind of arrogance, a gentle and benevolent one, you couldn’t put past Garrett. There was an alternative, and it was differently troubling. Could he have been at peace with Duke’s perturbing trajectory, so that the only outcome he couldn’t accept, at least not until Duke had dropped off this world, probably in some ghastly way, was losing sight of him?
There could be no question of simple callousness or perversity, though. Garrett had shown too much regard and tact toward too many people to consider that idea, starting with Paul, who with his constant carping put himself in a position to be undressed almost every day. Yet most times Garrett would just laugh it off like a country gentleman. And then there was me. He tiptoed around anything having to do with the subject of the pieces that had first drawn him to me: Claire, someone whom he’d even met and might conceivably have something to say about. If I knew anything about him, he would have hungered for so many more details about her. He was a man of science, always searching for data, even if he did it in unorthodox ways. From some of the things Karen had let drop over the last couple of months, I knew he’d pursued with her some of his questions about Claire, presumably not to understand my ex better, but to understand me, how I might be expected to react to the vicissitudes of Duke and Daphne’s lives—and, I assume, his own maneuvers.
I thought as well of the way Garrett pretended, each time he came to the Bronx, not to notice the increasing shabbiness of my apartment, when a man of such discipline and order had to have found my quarters obscene, especially now, given how claustrophobic they’d grown, stuffed as they were with all the materials I’d bought at his expense, most of which had little to do with his project—although I was at pains to demonstrate otherwise. He chose not to trouble me over it. The nausea he must have felt only induced him to remind me how I might set myself up in a larger place, presumably with housekeeping, too, if I’d just give the word.
You know, he’d say as we shook hands on the crumbling curb outside my townhouse, I think we should move you soon, to the island, how’s that suit you? I’ll keep you away from the tech campus and the bureaucrats, he’d add, as if I must have feared that more than anything. And maybe I did. Maybe Garrett thought that no bad end could really come to me either, so long as I was in his employ, which is to say, under his wing, and it might have been in this spirit that he’d offered to house me.
Trifonov was baleful and listless that night, lacking his usual abandon, and Scriabin demanded heat if nothing else. Was the pianist simply growing older? Was I not much of a listener, now that Garrett had poisoned me with his concoction? It’d been years since I’d seen the Russian; the first time it had been Liszt, and it was marvelous—so good, in fact, painting had seemed pointless to me for days afterward. Today the effect was reversed, so that after arriving home, I turned immediately to what was on my drawing board: Daphne holding the film script in her apartment. It was a point-of-view piece, and the viewer occupied my position on that afternoon at her father’s home, sitting on her bed. Another work-in-progress sat on the desk. This was proving the hardest: Estelle in the clearing, with Vincent nearly lost in the distance, but framed by her hand whipping up dismissively at her shoulder, creating a porthole, like a Georgia O’Keefe pelvis, through which the disconsolate man could be seen. Vincent might as well have been me. Estelle had been taught a certain playbook. It would be difficult for her to become more congenial; men would bring out the worst in her to the end of her days, that’s what this casual swing of the hand told you. Of course, that was no less true of Daphne. Maybe it was more true.