“I’m not saying we’re about to split up,” she blurted to her father-in-law in March, after yet another painful pause. When at a total loss for conversation, she ended up unburdening what she probably shouldn’t, because the only unexhausted material she could lay hands on was her inmost thoughts. “But we’ve always enjoyed each other’s company. And now I—don’t. Enjoy his company. Or not as much.”
“It’s this triathlaton business,” Griff said warily. At ninety, he’d not want to hear that his son was in danger of divorce. Leaving aside his practical and emotional dependence on Serenata, a divorce would mean change, and to Griff even a rearrangement of his late wife’s porcelain figurines was anathema.
“Even when he’s not training, he reads sports autobiographies, or listens to inspirational podcasts by ‘tri’ record-setters. I can’t tell you how sick I am of the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire. He used to read bios of Robert Moses, or the latest Thomas Friedman. I miss the blues, and films with tragic endings. But he won’t subject himself to anything sad or dark.”
“Remy’s always been single-minded. Time was, he was single-minded about you. From that first tryout for those subway announcements, I could tell he’d fixed on roping this lady in—the one with the sultry voice. He never confided in his parents much, so when he couldn’t stop mentioning you, I knew you were it.” Griff’s strategy was hardly subtle. Recollection of their courtship was meant to revive romantic coals.
“I’m sorry that he’s also been making so little time to come see you—”
Griff snorted. “Try no time. That boy hasn’t been by here in months.”
“He thinks you’re hostile to his endeavor. You contaminate his pure heart.”
“He’s making a damned fool of himself. Tell him to take up cribbage. He can have my board. It’s a respectable hobby for a man in his sixties.”
“I’m afraid we had a fight,” Serenata said, twisting her hands. “Or rather, I got so angry, we didn’t have a fight. I didn’t think we could afford one.”
“Not that woman, was it?”
“Not this time. But you’re right, that trainer he’s hired . . . She’s younger and physically perfect. She makes me feel haggard, flabby, and hideous.”
“Now, sugar, that’s one terrible waste. You’re the prettiest filly in Hudson.”
“I’m a mare, not a filly, and of an age no one rides anymore.” Serenata blushed; the off-color insinuation had been inadvertent.
“Remy showed up with that hussy sometime last fall—”
“You never told me you met Bambi Buffer!”
“Didn’t want to cause trouble. Wasn’t sure how aware you were that he was swelling around town with that gal.”
“I’m painfully aware. She drops by our house at all hours.”
“I wasn’t impressed,” Griff said. “Mannish.”
“To most people, she’s a feminine icon. Strong is in.”
“Flat-chested,” he said. “And bossy.”
“Don’t tell me,” Serenata said. “She went straight to the kitchen and helped herself to a six-pack of your best stout.”
“Worse. Barely in the door, the lady starts hectoring me about how ‘seniors’ shouldn’t give into being ‘sedentary.’ Messes with the furniture, to demonstrate how I’m to practice popping up and down in a chair—like I’m getting up and can’t remember what I wanted and sit down again. Practice for senility is what I call it. And then she helicoptors her arms in the air to get me to whirlybird along with her, and shows me how to stand on one leg for an eternity, like a goddamned stork. Impertinent. Didn’t put the chair back. No appreciation for how much effort it takes at ninety just to fix a sandwich. They weren’t here five minutes, and that pushy pain in the backside still wore me out.”
“She’s paid to be pushy.”
“I’d pay that tyrant just to stay out of my house.”
“Well, while you’re at it, pay her to stay out of mine.”
“This arrangement, with Remy. Which I can’t say I understand, and I’m not sure I want to. Ever ask yourself what she gets out of it?”
Citing a retainer the size of Griff’s monthly Social Security check seemed impolitic. “She collects people. She has an insatiable appetite for admiration, so she surrounds herself with acolytes who depend on her to shore up their own self-esteem. She convinces her disciples that they’re superior to all the peons who are fat and lazy and sleep late. It’s not that different from Scientology.”
But Griff wanted nitty-gritty. “Is my son carrying on with that woman? When those two showed up here, I didn’t care for it. Like they were a couple. If he’s cheating on you, say the word, and I’ll read him the riot act. I raised him better than that.”
“He’s going through a weird period, but he still has too much class to visit his father with a mistress in tow. Still, he is besotted with her. Not in love exactly, but bewitched. I’m the naysayer; she tells him what he wants to hear. You’ve heard of horse whisperers? Well, she’s a sports whisperer. Maybe she’s good at it. Remington has sure run, swum, and biked farther and faster than ever before with Bambi egging him on.”
“You say that like I’m supposed to care.”
“No, but Remington cares. Either he believes she can summon a whole new self out of him—a man who’s fierce and indestructible and glass-half-full—or she really can. I guess I’m afraid she can. I don’t want a brand-new husband who’s idiotically self-important. I liked Remington the way he was. Modest, for example.”
“Don’t know about that. Always thought of that kid as right full of himself. Couldn’t wait to get out of Hudson, and earned all those degrees.”
“He was a good student, and a confident professional. But he never used to be an inconsiderate cretin. Right, he won’t visit his father when it’s only a ten-minute walk, and he no longer prunes your hedges—but you think it’s only you? I have to do everything now. Shopping, picking up, cooking, finding an electrician to replace the broken shaving socket in the bathroom. Remembering our grandchildren’s birthdays, wrapping the presents, and posting them on time—not that I give a shit about birthdays, but we can’t provide Valeria any excuse to disappear off the face of the earth for another four years. I know Margaret would have done most of that in your day, but I work, too, and my carrying the whole household isn’t part of the contract. He’s the one who’s retired, for Pete’s sake, and he did more domestic heavy lifting with a full-time job.”
“You said you had a fight, or near to. You fell out over the housework?”
“It was even more hackneyed than that. We fell out over money. But money in three dimensions. Money that would have taken up space in the garage, except that it’s too damp in there, so he keeps his precious ward propped beside the dining table, like a newly adopted child we’re plying with chocolate pudding.”
“Lost me there, pumpkin.”
“Sorry, I’m being opaque. He bought a bicycle.”
“I thought he had a bicycle.”
“He did. But this one . . . is pricier.”
“When he was a boy, I got Remy a bike for forty bucks—and he hardly rode the thing. Eventually I got it: bicycles were for sissies. The tough kids all rode mopeds.”
“This titanium marvel was more than forty bucks,” she said, with dizzying understatement. “But for years Remington brought in the bigger income. Strictly speaking, it’s his money. So I’m not supposed to say anything. These days, I’m never supposed to say anything about anything. Like, I can’t say that trying to buy athletic excellence is pathetic.”
Regarding the probing of deep emotion, Griffith Alabaster had always been awkward at best. Yet he may finally have registered that you’d never address what really mattered in life if you were still giving the crux wide berth at ninety. “You do still—care for my son, don’t you, sugar?”
In return for her father-in-law’s courage, she answered as honestly as she could. “I love the man I married. But I’m not sure he is the man I married. Here’s the thing.” Elbows on her knees, she faced the old man—who’d not be here much longer, and she didn’t want to kick herself once it was too late for never having spoken to him plainly.
“My parents were Methodists,” she said, “but I think their faith was skin-deep. It was mostly social, and because we moved so often, churches were a useful shortcut, especially for my mother. But once I hit my teens, I told them that to me the whole Christ story seemed far-fetched. I didn’t want to keep claiming to believe something I didn’t. They acted disappointed, but didn’t force me to keep going. It wasn’t that I lost my faith; I never had it. I’m sorry, because I know Margaret was a devout Catholic, but I’ve always found religious belief not only foreign, but mindless and—well, a little repellent. The stories you’re meant to buy into are absurd. To me, religion is a form of mass hypnosis, or collective psychosis.”
“Something to be said for churches,” Griff said. “They get folks to gather round each other in times of need. I’m not sure you lapsed youngsters have come up with anything better.”
“No, we haven’t—which is sort of my point. See, Remington has always been a rationalist. We’ve enjoyed sparring over a host of issues, but neither of us has ever subscribed to a dogma. On the electoral rolls, Remington is registered as an independent. That’s always been important to me about your son: he’s a freethinker. His refusal to ape the version of virtue imposed by the political fashions of the time is one of the reasons he lost his job. If he’d abased himself, he might have kept it.”
“Remy’s got backbone.”
“He used to. But I’m not sure loyalty to somebody else’s principles qualifies as backbone. Because if you’d asked me years ago what was the one thing that might cripple my marriage, I’d have said the one thing that could never happen: religious conversion. That’s why Valeria’s having gone born-again has been so alienating. Technically, we’ve restored relations, but in truth I have no idea who she is anymore. All her Jesus guff has an element of spitefulness about it, and that much I understand. But willingly giving over to a crowd, and signing up wholesale to some kooky creed of other people’s contrivance—I don’t understand that at all.
“Griff, MettleMan isn’t just an exercise regime. MettleMan is a cult. That’s why I can’t give you a one-word answer to whether I still love your son.” She sat back in the chair. “The man I fell in love with has been kidnapped.”
“And what about Remy’s promises as a husband? You haven’t been ‘kidnapped.’ And you’re the best thing ever happened to that boy.”
She threw up her hands. “I am—irrelevant! For Remington, anything or anyone that doesn’t have to do with triathlon isn’t in the picture. Unless I’m stocking up for another binge with his tri club, I’m just a nuisance. After all, according to the Book of MettleMan, the height of spiritual achievement is perfect self-absorption.”
Serenata couldn’t sit still, and returned to pacing. “So in Syracuse next month? He and his club are doing a ‘half Mettle’—meaning not completely insane, but only sort-of-but-still-basically insane—and I’m expected to go and wave pom-poms. But I don’t want to! It’s not only that I hate all this tri shit, but I especially hate the idea of reinforcing my role in his life as the one on the sidelines! Besides which, because he is getting older, and he’s not a natural athlete, and his body isn’t used to this degree of strain, I’m really worried he’s going to hurt himself. But to Remington, that’s just me being ‘dark,’ and trying to stop him from achieving nirvana, so any concern I express he interprets as raging antagonism. On the other hand, it’s more than possible that I did this to myself, and I did this to our marriage, because I’m rigid, and insensitive, and territorial, and bitter about my knees, and maybe if I’d done nothing but hooray and Hail Mary and holler hallelujah from the start, we’d still be happy as clams.”
She’d been ranging the living room with her hands flailing. The outburst was intemperate. But she couldn’t confide to Tommy anymore, now that the girl had drunk the Kool-Aid, too; she’d left her few plausible friends back in Albany; least of all could she pour out her heart to Remington.
Her father-in-law frowned. “Not thinking of doing anything rash, are you?”
“Oh, I’m not the first person to be stymied by what’s worse: no marriage, or a bad one.” She bombed back to the wing chair. “So should I go to this ‘half Mettle,’ or not? Staying home seems traitorous, and I leave him at the mercy of Bambi.”
“You trust a man, or you don’t. If you don’t, following him around won’t do a lick of good. Once this ‘Mister Metal’ folderol is over—not the littler thing next month, but the big hoo-ha in June—you reckon Remy’ll have had enough?”
“I’d like to think so, but that’s what I assumed about the marathon last year. Boy, was I wrong. For all I know, he’s decided to enter triathlons for the rest of his life. He’s not making plans to do anything else.”
“Won’t that boy get tired?”
“The real danger is that I get tired first, Griff.”
“Please don’t leave me.” His voice was shaking.
“Never,” she said. Rising to take his face in her hands and kiss his forehead, she whispered in his ear, “But that’s what I could stand to hear from Remington.”
She put her mac and cheese in the oven, and set the timer so he wouldn’t forget. She fished the melting zucchini and crusting cauliflower from the fridge; she always threw a few into the weekly order from AmazonFresh, but Griff didn’t have much time for vegetables. Her Swiffer of the kitchen floor was hasty, since Tommy would be in on Friday. In the bathroom, she stacked some extra toilet paper within easy reach, and swabbed the area in front of the bowl, where old men tended to dribble. She laid out his pills, and freshened a glass of water with a slice of lemon.
“Thanks for letting me complain,” she said, gathering her things. “And don’t lose any sleep over this, because it’s out of both our hands. Remington will escape from the clutches of his sect. Or he won’t.”
When she got home, Remington was still at the gym. The redundant free weights and bells-and-whistles treadmill upstairs were gathering dust. He preferred to worship with his congregation.
She shot a glare at the tri bike propped against the wall. It was constructed of elliptical tubing at peculiar angles, and the handlebars were built so you laid your forearms flat and held on to upturned grips. For the inanimate, it had an aggressively snobbish ambiance. In contrast to the gaudy colors of Remington’s running gear, the contraption was ostentatiously sophisticated: a slick slate-gray with a sandy matte finish and slim, tasteful accents of branding in bloodred. A bicycle should appear storied, well traveled; this mechanism was immaculate. It didn’t look like something that you’d ride in a park, but more like an art object you’d display in a design museum, where you’d slap the hands of little boys who tried to touch it. Before this haughty intruder slid into their house, she’d never have believed that a bicycle could cost ten grand.
“Gosh, I take it all back,” she said aloud over her phone. “Maybe there is a God.” For the email that had just pinged in was an offer of work: an extensive recording session in lower Manhattan for a new video game, and the terms were generous. If Remington was going to drop ten big ones on a bike, she had to accept the job. Better yet, the dates would perfectly preclude tagging along to watch the half Mettle in Syracuse. Brilliant.
The phone stirred again: Valeria.
“Thanks a lot, Mama,” the young woman exploded once her mother had barely said hello. “You’ll be glad to hear that Nancee’s in the hospital.”
“What’s happened? And why on earth would I be glad?”
“She’s been admitted for exhaustion. And they seem to think she’s anorexic.”
“Well, you know, back in April I did try to call your attention—”
“She’s a picky eater, but she doesn’t starve herself,” Valeria snapped. “I’m her mother, and I should know.”
Valeria was in a vengeful mood, and contributing Tommy’s diagnosis that Nancee was an “exercise bulimic” might not be perceived as helpful. “Did something happen, or is she just run-down?”
“Better believe something happened. There’s a water tower near our house, and somehow those kids managed to pull down the ladder to the stairway on the outside. The silly girl started running up and down it. Thankfully Logan was keeping watch, not to mention Our Lord and Savior—”
Serenata gasped. “She didn’t fall, did she?”
“No, but she could have. Because at some point, she collapsed. Logan was a good boy, and called 911. And me, of course. I had to find someone from the church to watch the other kids, so by the time I got there the medics had already climbed up three flights to carry her down. She may have fainted from dehydration.”
“Has she done this sort of thing before?”
“Logan isn’t saying. Deacon did nothing but torture me—not that you ever noticed—but Logan is very loyal.”
“How is she doing now?”
“Nice of you to get around to asking,” Valeria said. “She’s on a drip to restore fluids, and they’re feeding her intravenously. She’s alert, and I’m afraid she’s not what you’d call an ideal patient. The nurses are convinced she’s freaking out because of the nutrition. I guess they’ve seen skinny girls ripping out the needles before. But that’s not it. I know my girl. She just doesn’t like lying in bed. She’s promised to keep the IV in, so long as they’ll let her march up and down the halls with the thing on wheels. But the doctor is insisting on complete rest, and it’s turned into something of a battle.”
“I’d hate to go up against Nancee over anything. She’s wiry but ferocious.”
“You can’t imagine how awful it is to see your own child in restraints, like a crazy person. But I got her to admit what she was up to. Apparently in running up and down all those stairs, she was trying to beat some sort of record. And guess whose?”
Serenata allowed the question to dangle.
“Did you or did you not,” Valeria went on, “tell my daughter that you run two hundred flights at a time?”
“I may have mentioned that I did that in my twenties—”
“What kind of grandmother are you? Throwing down a gauntlet like that to a little girl?”
“I wasn’t throwing down a gauntlet. I noticed she was running up and down the stairs here, and I was only trying to establish a sense of camaraderie.”
“You were indoctrinating my daughter into the same lunacy I grew up with!”
“Sweetie, you’re one to talk about indoctrination.”
“Children are very suggestible!” Valeria shouted. “You can’t go planting ideas in their heads without taking responsibility for the consequences!”
“I’d remind you that thanks to your impromptu pause for station identification, your father and I missed out on four highly formative years of your two oldest children. By the time you deigned to get in touch with your parents again, Nancee was already, as you put it yourself, an ‘Energizer Bunny.’ I didn’t invent this thrall to exertion, either. It’s in the ether. It’s on TV and in the movies and in advertising and all over the internet. For pity’s sake, look at what’s happened to your father! You flatter me, my dear, but Nancee didn’t get the idea of distinguishing herself through sheer fatigue from me.”
But Valeria had already hung up.
Nancee was just the beginning.
Something was off about Tommy from the moment she arrived. True, her eagerness to busy-bee about the house had lessened somewhat, now that she’d discarded her Fitbit knockoff. (Failing to track a single mile of cycling and insufficiently waterproof for the pool, the mechanism no longer performed its prime function of giving its user credit.) But it was still not her habit to begin a stint of cleaning with an immediate plop in a chair.
“Sure you’re up for this?” Serenata scrutinized her neighbor while preparing the girl tea. “You look beat. We could always reschedule.”
“I’m still trying to get out of paying for a full membership at BruteBody . . . So the other guys in the tri club trade off having me as a . . . as a . . . guest. I don’t like to ask too often. Have to take advantage . . . when I’m in.” Tommy slumped. It was not entirely clear how she would scrub the upstairs porcelain when she could barely talk.
“Meaning?” Serenata put out shortbread. Maybe the girl had low blood sugar.
“Yesterday. Stationary bike. Really . . . shoulder to the wheel. Sloan got me into the gym this time, and he never . . . never notices me at all.”
“Mm-hmm.” Serenata had harbored some suspicions along these lines. “Why do you care whether Sloan notices you?”
Tommy glared up through the wisps of her fine honey hair. “Duh. He’s, like, the hottest guy in the club—if not in Hudson . . .”
“Or in the world,” she finished for the girl with a smile. Goodness, having recently turned sixty-two had many a downside, but thank heavens she was no longer twenty.
“He’s like a . . . like a fucking god.”
“Take it from me, friend, you never want to have a relationship with a god. They always turn out to be mere mortals in Groucho glasses.”
“You’re old,” Tommy slurred. “You don’t remember anything.”
“There’s plenty from my early twenties I wish I didn’t remember. Sorry to be such a downer, but he’s twice your age. He’s a divorcé whose kids are almost as old as you are. But I know, I know: the heart wants what the heart wants.”
“Yesterday—I guess I was trying to impress him,” Tommy confessed. Her consonants had thickened. “Full hour, cranked . . . up. Sweat like a . . .” A metaphor seemed beyond her. “Got totally soaked. Wiped me . . . out.”
Delivering the tea, Serenata pushed the plate forward. “Energy.”
“No cookies,” Tommy said. “Feel fat. Pants . . . don’t fit.”
Serenata drew the hair from her neighbor’s face and tucked it behind an ear. “You don’t look fat. You look puffy. That’s different.” Tommy’s color was peculiar, too, but remark on its yellowish cast would only make the girl feel more self-conscious.
“Thighs are killing me. Tight. Might just . . . take the day off.”
Serenata peered. “Cleaning, or working out?”
“. . . Both.”
In the lead-up to this half-Mettle malarkey, Tommy’s proposing to take a day off from exercise was unheard of. Had Tommy been out in the woods? Serenata asked. Picked off any ticks? No. Had she eaten anything unusual? No. Had she eaten anything at all, since yesterday? No. “You’re not well. I think you should see a doctor.”
“Uh-uh. No big deal. Just need . . . rest.” In Tri World, “rest” was commonly consigned to the same trash heap as “limits” and “overdoing it.” Tommy struggled to a stand. Her thighs had bulged overnight from adolescent to menopausal.
Serenata let the girl go—she wasn’t Tommy’s mother—but the encounter was disturbing. Later that evening, she tried Tommy’s cell, but the call went to voice-mail, and a text went unanswered.
Sleep that night was not improved by Remington’s being up and down more than once, pacing and stretching at the bedpost, trying to get the clenched skein of fine muscles on the tops of his feet to relax. The seizures had grown chronic since he’d upped his laps in the pool. The spasms spread to the toes, which straightened and separated unnaturally with raised tendons. It was her helplessness in the face of his agony that kept her up. He was clearly trying to be quiet but couldn’t keep his breath from rasping. The moonlight through the curtains chiaroscuroed his face into a Kabuki mask of anguish: forehead curdled, eyes squeezed shut, as if not being able to see his feet would make them go away. She loved his feet—his long, dry, shapely feet—and hated to see them convert to instruments of torture. In this light, too, his ever-stringier frame looked less muscular than withered.
Over the tablet at breakfast, she recounted the news from India. “So a teenage girl was gang-raped, and her parents objected—as one might. The village elders levied a punishment on the men of a small monetary fine and one hundred sit-ups. The rapists were enraged, beat the shit out of the parents, doused the girl with kerosene, and burned her alive.”
“The lengths to which some people will go to get out of sit-ups,” Remington said.
“Gosh, I wonder what penalty that village levies for first-degree murder. Jumping jacks?”
“Only diagonal toe-touches,” Remington said. “You don’t want them to get too tuckered out for their next rampage.”
The interchange was of a sort that once routinely characterized their breakfast-table banter, and she was grateful for it—too grateful.
With still no word from Tommy, she nosed around the web in accelerating agitation, and finally walked around to the Marchs’ front door. She had to marshal courage to knock. The few pleasantries she’d lobbed in the mother’s direction had been received with suspicion. What did that hoity-toity older lady next-door get out of a relationship with a twenty-year-old kid aside from a clean sink?
“Yeah?” the mother said, opening the door partway. Heavy, bad complexion, prematurely haggard—no wonder her daughter was an exercise nut. “Tommy’s not feeling too good.”
“I know. That’s why I stopped by. I need to ask her a question.”
“All right. I can ask her for you.”
“Fine, then—ask her about her urine. What color is it?”
“Seems kind of personal, don’t it? Why’s that matter to you?”
“Please. This is important.”
With a glare, the neighbor turned without asking Serenata inside. At length, Tommy shuffled to the door, keeping upright by hanging on the jamb. So advanced had the puffiness grown that for the first time her resemblance to her mother was apparent.
“What’s this about wee? It’s the least of my problems. I’m turning into a whale, and everything hurts.”
“The color. In the toilet bowl, when you pee.”
Tommy frowned. “Well, come to think of it, sort of brown. But I thought it was rust in the pipes again.”
“Your session at BruteBody, with the stationary bike. Up to a point, you want muscle to break down, so it builds back stronger. But if you take it too far, the fibers get into your bloodstream, and your kidneys shut down. If I’m right, this is nothing to mess with, Tommy. It could kill you. I’m taking you to Columbia Memorial right now.”
Tommy didn’t have the energy to put up a fight. While Serenata offered to take her mother as well, the woman mumbled something about hospital bills, and begged off. But Tommy was covered by Medicaid. Her mother was a shut-in. Besides, to Mrs. March, Serenata’s having arrived at a diagnosis made Tommy’s ailment her fault.
“Aren’t you being alarmist?” Remington asked when she rushed in for the key fob. “That condition is very rare.”
“Not as rare as it used to be.”
“And convenient. For your side.”
“My side?”
“You heard me. And you’re kidnapping one of my club members.”
It was the same verb she’d used about him. “Not to sound grand, but I prefer to think I’m rescuing her.”
“This isn’t good timing, for the half Mettle. She should be hitting the road.”
“You haven’t seen her. She’s more like hitting the floor. And medical calamity is notoriously difficult to schedule at one’s athletic convenience.”
The wait at the ER was extensive, and neither the nurse at reception nor the doctor they saw at last had heard of the diagnosis, either.
“Oh, man, rhabdo!” Bambi exclaimed familiarly, after Serenata updated the club on Tommy’s condition around the dining table two days later.
“She’ll be hospitalized for about a week,” Serenata said. “I’m sure she’d appreciate you guys going by to say hello. Just don’t mention how bloated she looks. She feels unattractive enough already.”
“Bet she didn’t hydrate enough,” Bambi said confidently.
“Maybe,” Serenata said. “But she also pushed herself too far, and that’s why she went into full-blown kidney failure. Her creatinine count was off the charts. They’re pumping her with fluids and may do dialysis. There’s no way she can enter the half Mettle.”
“That’s according to you.”
“That’s according to Columbia Memorial. Recuperation from rhabdomyolysis can take weeks or even months. Frankly, though I haven’t pressed the matter with her yet, a full MettleMan is off the table, too.”
“Ever notice how happy you sound when delivering bad news?” Bambi said.
“Tommy’s my friend, and her circumstances certainly don’t make me happy.”
“But she’s right, my dear,” Remington said. “You do sound satisfied. You’ve won the girl back to your team.”
“In this club, the two ‘teams’ are the supermen and the slobs,” Serenata said. “That makes me the queen of the slobs. Is that what you think?”
“That’s your formulation, not mine,” Remington said.
“It’s just, this whole thing is a lot easier when your spouse believes in you,” Cherry said. “Take it from me. And that’s all Rem means, honey. We all know you’re not big on tri. But nobody here thinks you’re glad poor Tommy’s in the hospital.”
Meanwhile, Ethan Crick was diffidently sliding off a running shoe. He peeled off the sock, and then hobbled to their hostess to ask quietly for a Band-Aid. Ethan must have been set on living down his reputation as a whiner, since he was trying valiantly to be nonchalant about the massive blister on his big toe. It appeared to have ripped open and healed over more than once, only to be abraded again on the club’s fourteen-mile run that afternoon. The surface was gluey, and its edges were bleeding.
She led him to the bathroom and scrounged the medicine cabinet for a large enough bandage. With an air of benevolence and an innocent moon face, the ophthalmologist wasn’t at all pudgy, but his body had blunted contours that no amount of running or weight lifting would sharpen. He’d never attain the sleek build and rippling definition of a Sloan Wallace. She prayed he didn’t care. Fat chance.
“Let the sweat dry off, or this won’t stick,” she said. “And we have to trim the rumpled skin. It hardens when it’s dead, and then it tears.” Having located the nail scissors, she had him prop the foot on the tub, recoiling slightly from the smell. The wound was the gooey yellow of frothed egg yolks. Worse, the foot had taken his body’s blunted quality to an extreme. “This blister’s badly infected, Ethan. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Well, sure, some, I guess.”
“How in God’s name did you run fourteen miles on this? And why?”
They both knew why. “It was a little tricky.”
“I thought you were the sensible one.”
“Being sensible doesn’t get you much respect, in this crowd.”
“I’m applying some Bacitracin. But for your whole foot to swell up like this, the infection could be getting into your bloodstream.”
He shrugged. “I have a healthy immune system.”
“Please. You’re a doctor.”
“Eye doctor.”
“You need antibiotics. Did you know that Calvin Coolidge’s son died from an infected blister on his foot?”
“Here we go, more catastrophizing!” Proprietary about her seven dwarfs, Bambi had stuck her head in.
Nevertheless, Serenata wouldn’t let up until Ethan agreed to go directly to the walk-in clinic downtown; he just had time to make it before the doors closed.
“Did you check out how he played up that limp?” Chet said the moment Ethan left. “Like Quasimodo or something.”
“His foot is a mess.” Serenata wasn’t having a reprise of Crick bashing so that they could all feel invincible in comparison. “And sepsis is not a character failing.”
Hank Timmerman’s offer to refresh everyone’s unfinished drinks covered for getting another G&T for himself. He was always at a loss for words around Serenata, whose chronic aloofness made their un-relationship worse. Having gathered that she sometimes read books aloud for a living, he asked as she handed him the tonic, “So—have you ever read Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America? I thought it was really good.”
A perfectly passable effort at small talk, were it not for the fact that Hank had asked her this exact same question five times now. Heaven knew in what rehab joint a copy of those short stories was kicking around, but she was obliged to infer that Birds of America was the only book he’d ever read. The first time he’d asked about Lorrie Moore, she’d been touched by his effort to connect, and responded with enthusiasm. But binge drinking obliterated all memory of having already used this icebreaker more than once, and her replies had grown terse.
“Yesss,” she hissed icily.
He looked stung. Being a little nicer wouldn’t have cost her much, but Tommy’s situation was preying on her mind and made her cross. It was all so unnecessary.
“That kid’s gonna be crushed if she has to quit,” Chet said as Hank delivered more beers. “She’s into tri super heavy.”
“Well, maybe she could get into something else ‘super heavy,’ then,” Serenata said. “She’s only got a high school education, and aside from a vague aspiration to become a voice-over artist, she has no plan for her life. So maybe I am glad she’s in the hospital, Cherry. As long as she fully recovers, rhabdomyolysis could be a blessing in disguise. For Tommy, MettleMan is a distraction.”
“Distraction from what?” Bambi said. “Rising to a challenge is what we’re put on earth to do.”
“I read about an event somewhere in England,” Serenata said, “where dozens of people run around a four-hundred-meter track for twenty-four hours straight. The last winner ran a hundred and sixty miles. That’s six hundred and forty times around the track. The contestants start to hallucinate. They literally make themselves demented. One runner said the object of the exercise was ‘to feel dead.’ This kind of event is proliferating all over the Western world. We invented the computer and put a man on the moon. Now we’re running in manic circles, like tigers churning ourselves to butter. A once-great civilization, disappearing up its ass.”
“It’s hard to run an ellipse over six hundred times,” Bambi said. “You try it.”
“It’s hard to thread six hundred and forty tiny beads on a limp string.”
“Look, we all know about your knees, Sera,” Sloan said. “Isn’t this sour grapes?”
“I think you can survive one skeptic,” Serenata said. “The whole of American culture is cheering you guys on.”
“That’s not totally true,” Bambi said. “There’s an element—a pretty fucking big element—that hates our guts. They can be pretty vocal about it, too.”
“No joke,” Sloan said. “You should hear my ex. ‘Oh, you’re just into this big ego trip, and you only want to ogle yourself in the mirror.’ Before we split, every time I left to train, I’d get it in the neck about how I should be taking the kids to the park. But for Mettles, you have to throw your family under the bus. Otherwise they’ll drag you down with them, slumming around on Sunday mornings in bathrobes, with croissants, and travel supplements, and plastic toys.”
“I got into it pretty deep with a customer at the café last week,” Chet said. “I’d been talking about tri with a regular, and this guy at the next table gets all on his high horse about what a waste of time it is. Like, if we’re going to expend all that energy, we should really be working at a homeless shelter—”
“That old saw!” Bambi said. “The why-don’t-you-volunteer-for-a-food-bank thing—”
“Or dig wells for starving Africans,” Chet said.
“No, no, I always get told I should be visiting the elderly,” Cherry said. “Calling bingo in nursing homes.”
“But why is the logical alternative to strenuous exercise a posturing altruism?” Remington said. “Really, who stands at the door and decides, ‘Well, I could go for a run, or I could go teach immigrants English at my local community center’?”
“I don’t know, but I hear this stuff every time I grab a stool at a bar,” Bambi said. “What kills me? These same cunts whose dainty ethical sensibilities are so offended by your spending your life the way you fucking well want to—you can bet your last dollar they don’t volunteer at any damned homeless shelter.”
“And MettleMan events raise tons of money for charity!” Cherry said.
“Ever notice how all the guys who take a poke at tri are fat? I mean”—Hank shot a nervous glance at Cherry—“not hard fat, but, you know, blobby fat.”
“That’s what really bugged my ex,” Sloan said. “She started to look her age, and I didn’t.”
“The slugs just feel inferior—” Bambi said.
Hank punched the air. “’Cause they are inferior!”
“—And they’re jealous.”
As ever, Serenata had retreated behind the butcher-block slab of the kitchen island, like their bartender. This conversation was stock. Any questioning of their purpose read as your own personal inadequacy. Presumably the only way to acquire the standing to cast convincing doubt on the merits of MettleMan was to complete one first. So she could only prove to these people that she didn’t want to do what they were doing by doing what they were doing.
“I’ve never understood what it is about envy,” Remington speculated, “that makes people disguise it to themselves as a different emotion altogether—sometimes as plain dislike, but more often as moral disapproval.”
So, Serenata would have rejoined gamely, had it been just the two of them at dinner. I can never deny feeling envious, because the sensation would appear to me in another guise. It’s what you’ve always said about being called a racist, isn’t it? That your very refutation makes it true? And now the same goes for anyone who says a discouraging word about MettleMan: you’re just gutless, indolent, and weak. Voilà, your dubious enterprise is forever above reproach. But she and Remington were anything but alone.
“I don’t envy anybody.” Bambi looked straight at Serenata. “Not a fucking soul.”
She glared right back. “According to Remington, if you did, you’d disapprove of them instead. Maybe you secretly envy us benchwarmers, then—sleeping in, popping Pringles, and enjoying our lives while you suffer.” Her punctuating smile was mirthless.
“So, Rem,” Hank said, “seems like you recovered pretty good from last weekend. Any problems since? You must’ve took in a shitload of water.”
“Yeah, and dirty water,” Cherry said. “I meant to ask, did it make you sick?”
Remington’s rigid shake of the head was perhaps misinterpreted.
“The main thing is,” Chet said, “did you make sure to hit the pool this week? You know, jump back on the horse. You don’t want to get all phobic or anything.”
“What’s this about?” Serenata asked.
The club went quiet. Sloan mumbled to Remington, “You didn’t tell her?”
“Didn’t tell me what?”
“Comes with the territory,” Sloan said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Remington. What wasn’t a big deal?”
“He’s here, ain’t he?” Bambi said. “He ran fourteen miles today, and he’s fine.”
“Until a minute ago, I took it for granted that my husband was fine. So what happened that should make me grateful that he’s even ‘here’?”
“I didn’t want you to worry about it,” Remington said. “Because, obviously, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“You’re talking about last Saturday, aren’t you? When you got home weirdly late and you couldn’t get warm. It was seventy-four degrees in here, and you wanted me to build a fire. You were shaking. You barely ate a thing, and went straight to bed. Why?”
“We did a swim in open water, in the Hudson,” Remington said. “I told you that. I just didn’t mention that I—got into difficulties. I may have gotten a chill—”
“My bad,” Bambi said. “The water temperature was borderline, so it was a judgment call. Had it to do over again, I’d have gone with wet suits.”
“How long a swim was this?” Serenata asked.
“About a mile and a half, give or take,” Remington said.
“Have you ever swum that far before?”
“Yes, but in a pool. Open water’s a little different.”
“Quite,” she said. “Your ‘difficulties.’ Are you trying to tell me that last weekend you nearly drowned?”
“I’m not trying to tell you that. I am telling you that.”
“And why didn’t you drown?”
“I pulled him out, Sera, of course I did,” Bambi said. “I always loop back to check on stragglers, and I hit the pedal to the metal the moment I noticed Rem was in trouble. It’s part of my job. My lifeguard skills are top-notch. Got Rem onshore in no time. Called the rest of the club in, too. I don’t often cut a training session short, but I do make exceptions when necessary, since whatever you think I’m not totally out of my fucking mind.”
“And were you obliged to give mouth-to-mouth?”
“Well, yeah. But don’t worry, it was hardly what you’d call romantic.”
“I think it is what I’d call romantic. I guess I owe you thanks. For saving my husband’s life.”
“Well, no, like I said, I was just doing my job. All in a day’s work.”
“Except you also put him in the circumstances where he required saving.”
“I put myself in those circumstances,” Remington said. “If I overestimated my present abilities, that’s my fault.”
“According to your trainer, these ‘difficulties’—that is, I assume, coming within a whisker of floundering to the bottom of the river until you become another trashy castoff along with the spare tires and shopping carts . . . If she says the incident was so pro forma, ‘all in a day’s work,’ why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“You know exactly why I didn’t tell you about it.”
When she was about eight and still learning to swim, Serenata had paddled accidentally into the deep end of a public pool, tried to stand up, and panicked. A lifeguard noticed right away, so she couldn’t have been thrashing and taking in chlorinated water salted with gallons of primary-school pee for more than about thirty seconds before a young man threw an arm around her from behind and pulled her to the shallows. But it was a long thirty seconds—a small lifetime of blind animal terror, burned so vividly into her memory that these many years later she could replay those “difficulties” as if they’d occurred yesterday. She refused to believe that the experience of drowning was any less profound at the age of sixty-five than it was at eight. Particularly since by sixty-five you’re better equipped to understand just what you may be in the process of losing. Yet her husband came back and failed to mention having inhaled death itself, all because he didn’t want to give her ammunition in a difference of opinion over his participation in a sporting event. If the reason for his reticence was absurd, it was also sad. He had all these new friends, but when they went home, she wasn’t the only one who felt lonely.