MICK WAS JUST INSIDE the restaurant’s outer door. “Not now,” he said, pushing past me when I tried to embrace him, and then he gripped my elbow and steered me back outside. “Where’s your car?” I’d driven my Honda, and he walked me to it. “Can we just drive somewhere?” he said. “You’re not hungry, are you?”
“Six Lines Your Man Likes to Hear,” the women’s magazine in my office lobby promised, and number 3 was I’m hungry, hungry for you.
“Not hungry,” I said now. Then I did something that surprised me: I handed Mick the keys to my car.
He took them without comment, and I walked to the passenger’s side and got in. We sat in separate bucket seats, and I yearned for him to turn and hug me, but instead he put the key in the ignition and said, “Where’re we going?”
“It’s your town.”
“We’ll drive around.”
Mick headed right, away from the highway and into the town. Even in the darkness, it wasn’t a well-groomed city. There were frame houses crouched on hillsides, porches lit by hanging lightbulbs and cluttered with packing boxes. “How’re your practices?” I asked.
He told me at some length, citing jokes and lines—how Leon Chiswick draped towels over the balls each night to keep them warm, how Corey Morgan would work on his free throws only with cooperative balls. “Not that ball,” he’d say. “That ball has an attitude.” “We’re having a great time,” Mick said, smiling. He seemed pleased to have this topic for me, like a child holding up a drawing.
“Good for you,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“Not bad. Tired, but that’s the time of year.”
“How are things at home?”
“Not bad.”
“That wasn’t good that Thursday.” I swallowed, looked out the right window. “When I walked in and it wasn’t you.”
He said nothing, and I stole a look in his direction and found his profile set and frowning.
“It was worse than not good,” I said, “it was horrible, when I opened the door and . . .”
“You hung up on me,” Mick cut in. “Last week. You hung up.”
“Did I? I didn’t mean to.”
“How can you not mean to? We made the date and you cut right off. How do you think that makes me feel? And then all those e-mails you said you threw out.”
“I didn’t read them. I was mad.”
“So how could I apologize if you didn’t read your e-mails? What was I doing, sending my apologies to air?”
“You could have phoned me.”
“You’d see my number on your cell and not answer! And I wouldn’t know if you weren’t answering or if you were in the middle of some doctor stuff.”
“Let’s not fight. We hardly see each other, let’s not spend our time together fighting.”
“And if you’re not going to read them, couldn’t you at least e-mail me that you’re not reading them?”
“I was wrong, you’re right. I should have told you.”
Mick glanced at me bitterly and returned his gaze to the road. He said nothing, and I said nothing, and we drove. I have a hundred more reasons to be angry than you do, I thought. I clamped my lips between my teeth so I wouldn’t say something I was sorry about later.
Then I remembered Mick’s cancer and resting my head on his shoulder and all our Thursdays and I got myself calmed down.
“What do you dream of these days?” I said after a while. A risk, a question from the article in my lobby.
“What do you mean?”
“Fantasize about. What would be the best thing that could happen to you?”
Mick snorted, and I saw a smile play upon his lips. In my relief I started grinning. “I dream we play Monday Night and win. I dream you get an apartment here—I know just the complex, five minutes from the school—and every time I get there you’re at home.”
My grin faded. My patients, my house, Claudia’s wedding, my partners—my life was too complex: there was no escaping it. “That’s impossible.”
“Yeah, well.” Mick cleared his throat. “That’s the thing with dreams.”
“I dream you take a leave from coaching,” I said, “get your surgery if that’s what you need, get radiation, and then five years from now I dream of us living in San Antonio. I can see you right now, bending over trimming the hedges.”
He jammed on the brakes and I looked up, saw there was indeed a red light. “What more do you want of me? You want another pound of flesh? I’m working twenty hours a day, I can’t have sex, I don’t pee right, I’m tired, and you want to put me through more? What are you, a sadist?”
It must have been my mentioning radiation that had angered him. “Mickey,” I said, my voice as free of pleading as I could make it, “that’s not fair to me. I want you to live.”
“What am I doing now?” He lifted his hands off the steering wheel, waved them in the air. “Do these hands look alive?”
“You know what I mean.” Those graceful hands. I saw him leafing through pages of statistics, his palm flashing up with each page.
“I didn’t let Karn talk to you so she could insinuate her ideas into you.”
“Why did you let her talk to me, exactly? Why did you let her put herself in our space?”
Silence.
“Our space, Mickey. Our room. It’s ruined now, it’s gone.” When Mick finally spoke, his voice was mournful. “She found out, Genie. She found out and every day she’s screaming, talking about you like you’re, you’re . . . like you’re a whore, I guess. Like you’re a sex organ with legs. And I thought, I don’t know, I thought if I let her see you and talk to you, then maybe she’d remember how you were with Jessica, maybe she’d see you were a real person, she wouldn’t hate you as much. I couldn’t stand her hating you. Because I’m married to her, Genie. I’m married to her and I’ve got this thing now and . . . It’s just too much. I’ve got a team to run, I can’t come home to World War Three every evening.”
I said nothing. He was ranking us, I saw: basketball, Karn, me. Mick said, “Karn said she’d tried to get hold of you and you wouldn’t answer.”
Again, nothing.
“You could do better than me, Genie.”
I closed my eyes—on all that, I suppose. “She told me about your PSA, Mickey.”
“It’s not your business.” I opened my eyes and the light was green, and Mick eased the car forward. Then he shrugged his eyebrows, already relenting. “Oh, it’s your business. But it’s ninety percent my business, and that’s what I keep telling Karn.”
“That’s crazy, it’s ninety percent you. You don’t think your family gets a say in this? Your team? Me?”
I saw Mick’s jaw square. He took a hard right into a street with a lighted stone entryway on each side. Winding Trail Estates, an etched stone in each wall read. This was clearly a better part of town, a neighborhood of brick driveways and big homes set back from the street.
“In a way, I was glad to talk to her,” I said. “You didn’t tell me what was going on.”
“Great, now you can deal with her. I’m sick of dealing with her.”
“You married her.” I was talking at my window.
“We were different people.”
“You stayed with her.”
I heard a tapping; I turned to see Mick flicking his index finger repeatedly against the steering wheel. “We’ve been through a lot,” he said. “She’s not a bad woman. She doesn’t usually cut on people.”
“I’m the enemy, to her.”
He shook his head quickly. “You’re nobody’s enemy. I’m your enemy. This would be the perfect time for you to forget me. Just cut me off. I wouldn’t care. I mean, I would care but it’s something I’d accept. You could have a normal life. You could get married.”
“Who would I marry? In the last twelve years the only man I’ve ever thought of marrying is you.”
There was a silence, and my face felt swollen, almost sunburned. But I’d told him the truth.
“That’s not going to happen now,” he said, his voice so soft I had to strain to hear it. “You wouldn’t want me.”
“How do you know what I’d want? I’d want you anytime.” Mick’s face, in the dark and in profile, looked caved in, as if his teeth had been removed. “God, Genie,” he said. “I’ve got tough games tomorrow and Sunday. I can’t deal with this now.”
Around us, big lighted houses loomed like ships at sea. “Think what’s happening in your body!” I said. “Don’t you think that matters more than two lousy games? What you’re willing to deal with? Isn’t that being selfish, hoarding your cancer for yourself ?”
“Listen, Genie.” His tone lost its roughness. He pulled the car to the side of the road, put it in park. “My life is giving people advice, giving them direction. And I pretty much know what to say. Well, a lot of times I don’t know what to say, but when the moment comes, I say it. But this stuff, this sickness . . . I don’t have a clue.
“I have these expressions, you’ve heard them. Steady forward pressure. Think harder. Listen to the ball. And I try them on myself and they’re not right. They’re not enough. They don’t take into account the complications.” Mick gave me a bitter smile. “What good am I, hunh? God.” He pulled his left hand over his face and bunched up his mouth like a paper bag, glanced out into the empty street, eased the car forward on the road.
“That’s our house,” he said, nodding out my window, and I turned my head to look. Our. Karn and Mick’s house was a big rectangular two-story, a copy of a frame colonial, not at all modern like mine. The lanterns on either side of the garage were designed to look like candles. Karn must go for an antique look.
“Look, first I’ve got to finish out this year.” Mick turned left up a hill; the car kicked into a grind. “Even if it ends badly. Even if we don’t make the NCAA. It’s just this . . . thing. It’s my destiny to be here with this team and these players, for better or worse, and the cancer can’t stand in the way. Because if I let it, if I took time off to get surgery or therapy or travel to Johns Hopkins or something, well, then the cancer would be winning. And I can’t let it win.” We burst over the top of the hill, headed down. To our left a wicker reindeer lay on its side between two trash cans.
“But that’s crazy,” I said. “You’re letting it win by not fighting.”
“Am I? I think I’d be letting it win to have it rule my life.”
Part of me understood this, exactly—part of me even agreed—and yet at the same time I saw that Mick was avoiding the issue, that he was experiencing what even a nursing student would recognize as denial. It gave me a sinking feeling to see him so predictable, and this was associated with the realization that I was indeed shrinking, my torso edging down toward my pelvis. I sat up straighter—all those exercise videos had to be worth something—and made my voice teacherish and firm. “I can’t let you do that,” I said. “I can’t watch you kill yourself.”
“Good,” he snapped, a coldness in his voice I’d never heard before. “You don’t have to.” He shot me a glance, and even in the dark I could recognize, beneath its weary skepticism, a glint that could be anger and, yes, triumph. “After all, you don’t live here,” Mick said. “You don’t have that little apartment I could come home to”—making moot my tears, my imprecations, my threats to collude with Karn, abolishing, in one stroke, my entire armamentarium, leaving me to flail for another twenty minutes, until Mick pulled my car up beside his own and stuck out his hand. A handshake? The cruelty of that gesture stunned me, made me picture, for a second, a slap across his face, but then he grunted a joyless laugh and hugged me—that is, he put his arms around me, giving me what to an observer would appear to be a hug—and when I turned my face toward his he responded with a quick and sparkless, an obligatory, kiss. I prayed that there’d be booze on his breath, but of course there wasn’t. What had I done to him? Why did he hate me? “Goodbye,” he said, almost cheerfully, dropping his hands from my back and turning to unlatch his door. I tried to remember if ever before at our parting he had used only that particular word. I sat still for a moment, thinking he might circle around the car to open my door, but by the time I got my wits together he was out of my car and into his own, pulling away.
I ’M A COMPLICATION. I could understand it, really: the cutting of the lines, the smooth sail of the boat over black water. From the middle of the lake the shore looked glimmery and insubstantial. The water underneath was deep and real and cold. In the middle of the lake there was no noise. How could I deny Mick this peace?
I would work. I would work and work and work. I’d add late office hours on Thursdays. On my drive back from West Virginia I stopped at a Wal-Mart Supercenter just off the highway and bought 110 pounds of weights—almost my own weight—and a bench I could use for lifting.
“Now, you be careful,” the salesman said. “I don’t sell too many of these to women. Especially women your size.”
No one in the world seemed to see that I was hurting. “Dr. Toledo,” one of my elderly female patients said the next day, lifting her upturned hand from my waist to my head, “what’s your secret?” In the restroom I stared at my ravaged self in the mirror and couldn’t understand it. Terrifying to realize the pain a human face can hide. You walk through the world and think, What am I missing in other people? What are they missing in me?
At noon, Claudia phoned me about accompanying her to pick flowers for the wedding. “You go yourself and decide,” I said. “Take my credit card. I’ll never get out of the hospital tonight.”
“Do you have your dress yet?” she asked. I had told her Mick and I had had a “flare-up” (my word).
“I’ll shop for my dress Sunday. Don’t you worry. I’ll be fine.” Shopping Sunday would give me something to do during one of Mick’s games.
“Mick’s doing great,” Claudia said, surprising me. “I always look for his scores in the paper and he’s always won.”
“Good teams find a way to win,” I said, quoting Mick.
“The guy on TV said this was the best Turkman team he’d ever seen. Mick must be thrilled.” Claudia had never followed Mick’s team in the past. That she was doing so now touched me, made me feel, for a moment, that I hadn’t been an awful mother. Claudia’s voice dropped. “Anything new between you two?”
“High-level negotiations,” I said in a hearty way. “But he’s not thinking about me much these days. You know what they say: winning isn’t everything, it’s the . . .”
HE SHOWED ME his house, I thought as I lay in bed Wednesday night. Maybe he meant for me to go there.
It seemed crazy, counterintuitive, to think this after the angry way we’d parted, but still: Mick had, after twelve years of acting as if he didn’t have a house, pointed out to me where he lived. He’d asked me to come to his town; he’d acquiesced when I handed him my car keys, already thinking where he’d drive me; he had taken me down his own street. I tried to recall the timing of the house sighting during our drive. He’d mentioned the apartment he dreamed of my renting; he’d told me I should break up with him now; he drove up the hill past his house; he told me his PSA wasn’t my business, I told him he was wrong, and then there was the whole explosion. He showed me his house. When I’d already said no to the apartment.
The spring of my sophomore year of high school my parents took an anniversary trip away. My brothers stayed with friends, but I was farmed out to my mother’s sister—who didn’t have much use for our family, normally—and put up in a chilly bedroom over her garage. Several boys from my high school lived in my aunt’s part of town, and when my aunt took me with her to the grocery after school (she didn’t trust me home alone) the boys would leave their game of catch and hover by the curb as we passed. One evening I was in my garage bedroom studying when I heard, from somewhere toward the back yard, a peculiar snapping sound. I lifted my head, frowned, sniffed at the air. Another snap, then a whole symphony of snapping. Soon I would open the back window, whisper to the boys below, even attempt, half heartedly, to climb out on the downspouting, but it was at that moment that I understood, that I recognized the splatter of the pebbles and their import, that my heart became so large and light I felt as if my body nudged the ceiling. I was wanted, I was wanted. The boys were calling me.
