“Come on, Davey, get your coat,” Sam Grobart, David’s father, said. “It’s nearly seven and we want to see warm-ups, don’t we?”
David slowly got off the couch in his apartment. He’d been pretending to play a game on his Blackberry—in fact he was trying to reach Amanda, which he’d been doing all day, so often that he’d had to lie about it to his parents, who tended to keep an eye out for addictive or destructive behavior.
“Why are warm-ups enjoyable to watch?” Hilary Grobart asked. In addition to being a therapist, she wrote her own line of self-help books, called Always Ask First, and so she was always asking first. David and her father sighed. It was like living with a paranoid parrot.
“We don’t have to,” Sam said, raising his voice. “But we want to.”
“I see,” Hilary said. “Come on, Davey.”
The three of them stood up and David half-glared at his parents. They were immensely tall people, and handsome in a way, if they hadn’t been so shy and awkward-looking, with their glasses and thick tweedy coats and responsible brown shoes. Every wall of their living room was lined with books, and everyone read all of the books all the time, so books were always teetering on the edges of the shelves, and they fell fairly often, so bunches of them lay on the floor with their spines broken.
In the elevator, Sam said, “We know you’ve been down in the dumps, but these seats are certainly going to cheer you up. I got them from Frederick Flood and they’re right behind the bench.”
“That’s nice.”
“He’s a good man, but he ought to see his children more often.”
“Isn’t that confidential?” David asked.
“Because I’m his therapist?”
“Well, yeah.”
“It is confidential, isn’t it? Did you ask first?” Hilary Grobart said. David and his father sighed again.
Even though the Grobarts lived downtown in a big old apartment in the Rembrandt Building, on the corner of West Fourth and Jane, they walked briskly up to Madison Square Garden on Thirty-fourth Street. They walked everywhere briskly.
Along the way, David and his father talked about how incredibly lousy the Rangers were, and how it seemed as if they’d always be that way.
“But I don’t understand, why are they so bad?” Hilary asked.
“Because Eric Lindros knows the inside of an MRI machine better than he knows his own ice skates,” Sam Grobart said, and laughed at his own joke. His wife only shook her head and stared in complete confusion at some drunks who were fighting in front of the Wild Pony Bar on Twenty-eighth Street.
David thought of Amanda. They’d been dating for ten months straight, except for the summer, when she’d gone away to Turks and Caicos for diving school. She’d smoked so much pot down there that she’d e-mailed a warning to him that she might have irretrievably changed her personality and wasn’t suited for him anymore. She’d sworn, though, that she hadn’t fooled around with anyone, and that the only reason she hadn’t called was that they didn’t have phones. And then, when she’d gotten back in September, just a month ago, they’d had sex. It was the first time for both of them. Or so she’d said.
On that day, Labor Day, David had gone to Amanda’s house in Tribeca, a gigantic loft that had been done up to look like an Upper East Side town house. He’d brought flowers and condoms and a bag of M&M’s and shampoo. He’d read in a book that it’s a sensual act if you wash a girl’s hair. But when he got into Amanda’s room, which faced the only airshaft in the loft and was decorated with the mid-century modern furniture her parents had been throwing away in favor of a more traditional look and a lot of horse ribbons that she’d won during summers out at their place in Sagaponack, Amanda just wanted to do it. He never even got the Infusium 23 with end enhancers out of the bag. Thus began what seemed like endless Tuesday and Thursday afternoons of sex (the days of no basketball practice).
He’d arrive with flowers or candy or nothing, and they’d dive under the yellow handmade Deke Fraternity quilt Amanda had been given by a group of admirers during a trip to visit her cousin at Duke, take off all their clothes, and work each other into a frenzy. Then when it was eight, David would go home and do his homework and Amanda would go out and meet her parents for dinner at Da Silvano.
“Let’s call it love,” David had said, on their third afternoon together. “I know I feel it, I’m in love with you.”
Amanda had been lying on her side, faced away from him, flipping channels on the little flat-screen TV that was on her bedside table.
“Okay?” David asked. She turned over and glanced at him. She had the same placid look on her face that she had when waiters came to the table and announced the evening specials. Amanda’s family were forever going out to dinner. It was the only thing they all really liked to do.
“Sure,” she said. “I love you, too.”
And David’s world, which was already really good, got about a thousand times better.
“You want popcorn?” Sam asked, and prodded David in the ribs. David shook his head and let out a yelp. His dad’s fingers were like gun muzzles.
“Come on, come on,” Sam said as they got into the Garden. The Grobarts had used the Floods’ Rangers tickets a few times before, so they knew their way to the face-on-the-glass seats, just a bit up and to the left of the visitor’s bench. Tonight it was the Rangers against their archenemy, the Flyers.
They settled into their seats, with David on one side, then his dad, then his mom.
“Why is offsides called icing, and when does it occur?” David’s mother asked. Sam leaned in to explain it.
David immediately began to text-message Amanda on his Blackberry. He wrote in long bursts, soliloquies, sonnets, great chunks of prose. He told her he’d do anything if she would just call, or send him back a note, or meet him later, or just somehow let him know that she still loved him.