Eleven

“Where is he? It’s ten to twelve!”

Deacon picked toast crumbs from his plate with a forefinger and tsked. “I always remember Dr. DOT as on the dot.”

“He’s not answering his phone, and I refuse to leave another humiliating voice-mail. I cannot believe that this of all mornings he decided to spend with that woman.”

Deacon was clearly enjoying this visit’s reconfigured family architecture. However divided they’d been in his adolescence over how to contend with a hooligan, his parents’ differences back then were merely methodological. In the main, they’d presented a united front—worse, formed a glib, self-reinforcing if not self-congratulatory unit of two, who corroborated that they were right, about everything, by agreeing with each other. As Serenata had only recently appreciated, the couple’s show-off Noël-Coward banter had been infuriating. The children saw their parents as sealed in an unassailable bubble, though she thought of the problem otherwise: she and Remington were too happily married. They didn’t need other people enough—not friends, not relatives, and not, alas, their own kids. They’d been too satisfied with each other’s company, which read to outsiders as self-satisfaction, and their contentment came across as exclusionary. At last the bubble had burst. If she were honest with herself, she was more at ease with Deacon now, because she’d hitherto held back from her son out of loyalty to her husband. The boy made Remington so angry.

“That Bambi chick is a piece of work,” Deacon said. “You shouldn’t let her get to you. She’s yanking your chain on purpose.”

“I don’t mean to be insulting, but I still don’t understand what she sees in your father. I think I’ve put it together, and then I look at the two of them, so incongruous, and my theories fall apart.”

“You said she has a thing about winning,” he said. “People like that, doesn’t matter what the prize is. She’d compete to her last dying breath for a plastic whistle.”

“I know they rarely start surgeries on time, but they’re very strict about showing up at admissions by your appointment. If I’m late, I risk losing the slot.”

“Isn’t that what you’d secretly like anyway?”

“All my life I’ve prided myself on making myself do things I didn’t want to. But I did, sort of, want to do my push-ups. I don’t want to do this. It turns out I’m as terrible at making myself do what I really don’t want to do as anybody else. We have to go.”

Chivalrously, Deacon carried her overnight bag—a small gesture he’d never have made when the bubble was intact—and held open the door of his dented Mercedes.

“Not bothering to get back on time . . .” Ducking in, she supported her right leg by holding on to the door. “I don’t know, maybe it’s a good sign that he can still hurt my feelings.”

“Your honeybunch may not be able to make you feel all warm and gooey inside anymore,” Deacon said. “But the ability to fuck you up, well—it’s the last magic power to go.”

“I’m not sure how consoling that is. Still, thank you for being here.”

“De nada,” he said at the wheel, reversing.

“If this morning’s absenteeism is anything to go by, I’m going to need your help. Obviously, I won’t be able to bike. But according to the pre-op seminar they made me take—and it was full of fat people; I wasn’t flattered by the company—I also won’t be able to drive. You can’t move your leg fast enough to shift from the accelerator to the brake. As for incapacities, that’s only for starters.”

“You can still back out of this if you want to.”

“I’m loath to give your father’s trainer any credit, but last night she was right on one point: you can’t allow yourself to question the premise. Never ask why.”

“Seems like that’s the first thing you’d do.”

“I know it sounds counterintuitive. And it’s especially disconcerting for someone like your father, who’s so contemplative by nature. But once you make a commitment, it’s a big mistake to force yourself to keep remaking it. My knee is killing me. It’s going to keep killing me unless I let them saw me to pieces like a bookshelf.”

It was a short drive, during which she kept looking out for Remington—pedaling feverishly toward their house, admonishing himself for allowing his trainer to goad him into ten extra miles. When they turned into the Columbia Memorial parking lot, she pictured him skidding into their drive, throwing his precious tri bike carelessly on the lawn, and banging through the side door, praying that they hadn’t left without him. All through the admissions paperwork, too, she kept shooting glances at the entrance, through which at any moment her husband might burst at a run. When she returned the clipboard, the receptionist directed her to the surgical waiting room, where, she was advised, she’d be welcome to bring a friend or family member.

“I could be waiting a few minutes, or a few hours,” Serenata told her son. “You’ve done your bit. It’s okay if you want to go.”

In times past, Deacon would have left. He was anything but an altruist. “Nah,” he said. “I brought your portable Scrabble.”

She asked the receptionist to direct her husband to the waiting room should he deign to make an appearance, changed into a formless gown and sock slippers with nonskid feet, and stored her clothing and valuables in a locker. Every medical functionary she dealt with, even the one who provided a blanket for her assigned gurney, asked for name, birth date, and body part. She kept her monotonous responses pleasant; they were simply being careful. She and Deacon were given a flimsy privacy with a wraparound curtain. When Dr. Churchwell showed up with a Magic Marker and wrote TKR on the joint soon to be tossed into a medical waste bin, she was a little nonplussed that after all their dealings with one another he was still afraid he’d forget and take out her spleen instead.

The travel Scrabble set turned out to be a godsend. It gave her something to concentrate on. It reprieved them from making conversation. Most of all, it distracted her from supposing that while she’d accused Remington of “marital desertion,” she’d never really believed that he didn’t want to see her through this tribulation, never really believed that he spent more time with Bambi Buffer than with his own wife because he was infatuated with his trainer, and never really believed what she’d told her father-in-law: that her marriage was in any sense in peril, or diminished, or unhappy like everyone else’s. Maybe she told other people things as a substitute for telling herself. She’d made all these dire assertions, and then when nothing dire came of airing them, that seemed to prove they weren’t dire after all, or even true. As time ticked on, she played E-X-U-D-E with a triple-letter score on the X, not bad under the circumstances, until finally the anesthetist appeared, wanting to know if she ever took drugs.

“I think you’re asking the wrong party,” she said, with a dry glance at Deacon—not bad under the circumstances, either.

After the blood pressure, heart rate, and O₂ sat readings, she and Deacon managed three more turns. When they brought the syringe for setting the IV, she objected that she couldn’t go under now, because the game wasn’t over and she was winning. Neither the anesthetist nor his assistant smiled, for she could feel herself transitioning in their eyes from a who to a what. It wasn’t that they were callous, but that for their professional purposes the fact that someone lived in this artifact had become incidental, or downright inconvenient.

According to Deacon’s watch, it had been over two hours. Remington was still a no-show. The tiles restored to their bag, Serenata could no longer obsess over how to squeeze any appreciable points from a rack with six vowels, four of which were A’s. Instead she was pelted with all the thoughts she’d been batting away, and not only today but for months, perhaps the whole last year.

For the first time, she wondered who would get the house. For the first time, she weighed up whether either of them would want the place once it became a repository of such jarring late-life desolation, or whether limited resources alone would demand that they sell the property and split the proceeds. For the first time, she questioned whether she’d stay in Hudson, and worried about how devastated Griff would be if she left town. And for the first time, she recognized how much she lied to herself about cherishing solitude, which was only sumptuous when contrasting with something else; solitude without respite went by another name. It was an unwelcome reverie that might have seemed poor preparation for major surgery, but the surgery itself made the reflections apt. If you could offer up your own leg to be cut into pieces, any severance was possible.

As a nurse was about to slip a mask for gas over her face, Serenata started to cry. The wave caught her unawares, as if she were facing the shore and a swell had smacked her crown. It wasn’t altogether clear what overwhelmed her, Remington’s astonishing abandonment, or the fact that she didn’t want to do this and she wanted to go home. When the nurse asked, “Is there something wrong?” the question was, again, not cold exactly, but mechanical. They didn’t care what she felt, but only what the body felt.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a lull when she could get words out. “I don’t think I was this childish when I was a child.” Deacon held her hand, and while it might have been better had her husband held her hand, her son was acting more decent than at any time since she could remember, and she had a rare inkling on the waft into oblivion that maybe she hadn’t always been an atrocious mother.

 

Emerging from general anesthesia wasn’t so much an awakening as a resurrection. The distinction revealed just how rich and eventful the experience of sleeping was, and how aware one was, throughout a night’s slumber, of the passage of time. Sleep was in no way an absence, so it was foolish to imagine dying as in any sense like drifting off in bed. Coming to, Serenata could groggily infer that after holding Deacon’s hand something had happened. But the time was missing. It had been hacked from her life, sawed out.

When a nurse arrived to administer an anti-emetic, she wondered if sloshing to nonexistence and back again induced a spiritual seasickness. The nurse’s face was ravishing, shades of purple mixing with burnt sienna, and her expression radiated warmth and acumen; so deep was the brown of her eyes that the pupils seemed to drill to the back of her head. Serenata was overwhelmed that a total stranger would worry about whether her stomach was unsettled. She was filled with the same burgeoning gratitude when her vital signs were taken by a second nurse, whom she kept thanking, and reassuring that, yes, she felt comfortable, that’s good of you to ask. They all seemed to care so about how she was, though they’d no reason to, and it was all so touching and human and true.

The walls sectioned into soft, gradated grays, like a painting—a subtle painting, at which you could gaze for hours and always find something new. From a far window shafted a single luminous bar, its supersaturated yellow distinct to the midyear’s early evening sun; it was the light that photographers lived for, in which every subject appeared golden and chosen by God. As Serenata lay being, so recently returned from not-being, she was newly alert to the luxuriousness of breathing—how marvelous, that you could draw in the very atmosphere, extract from it what you needed, and give most of it gratefully back. How amazing it was to be present. She reproached herself—gently, tenderly—for ever questioning the toil and trouble of remaining in this astounding and unfathomable place, with its colors and shapes, its smells and tastes, for many more years. Simply bearing witness to the physical world was worth the price of admission.

She thought of Remington, claiming that he didn’t want to live beyond seventy or was it seventy-two, and of course that made her think of Remington more broadly. She had a trace memory of his disappointing her, but that was swallowed by a larger impression that she had disappointed him, too. She’d been unkind to him, repeatedly unkind, and she had withheld herself. He wanted something, it wasn’t entirely clear what, any more than it was clear to Remington either, and he was probably not going to get it, or at least not the way he was going about the quest. But she had to allow him to make his own mistakes and then come back to her, because if she did not he would not. He was doing something that was not a part of their lives together but it didn’t hurt her. He was doing something that lots of people were also doing, and just then it did seem curious that she’d ever had a problem with activities in which lots of people took part. Like all those other people on bicycles. She’d loved her long life on a bicycle, so there was no reason she shouldn’t want everyone else to enjoy the liberation, the rush of air, the giddy lean into a curve of a bicycle, too.

And that was when she realized she was on drugs.

Dr. Churchwell swung by, airy and brisk as usual. Around sixty-five, he kept his dyed-blond hair in a boyish tousle. It was immediately clear from his closer proximity to the door than to her bed, and from the bland, offhand quality of his pronouncement upon her surgery’s success, that by the time she formulated any questions that she badly needed answered, he’d be long gone. In truth, she’d never especially liked Dr. Churchwell, although he was reputedly the best knee surgeon at Columbia Memorial, a moderately sized institution in a small town, so she couldn’t be too choosy. Chronically supercilious, he’d spent a goodly portion of their appointments extolling his achievements as a squash champion. With the hucksterism of a television evangelist, he likewise bragged about the NFL players and Olympic team members on whom he’d operated who still sent thankful Christmas cards—and he left Serenata under no illusion that a sorry amateur’s piddling ten-mile runs would ever qualify her own cards for his living-room mantel.

Yet under the influence, Serenata could discern behind the arch expression and battered complexion the dashing med student so many mothers would have hoped their daughters would marry. The physician’s preening was cover for a garden-variety anxiety about getting old. The more closely he skirted the infirmity of his patients, the more fiercely he worked to maintain a distinction between them, and to carve out a place for himself as an exception—an exception to laws that doctors knew better than anyone allowed for no exceptions. Inexorably, in another five years or so, he’d have to retire, and no one would care about his squash trophies. He’d just be some old guy, like the rest of us, but with more money. As for the boasting, his work was respected but mechanical. He needed to christen certain patients as special to make himself seem special, and maybe it was a good sign that some of them were people to him and not just hunks of furniture. Besides, everyone treated surgeons with such exaggerated deference that in a way their clichéd narcissism was not their fault.

“The operation was perfectly routine,” he said, after she’d tried to solicit a little more detail.

“I’m sorry I bored you.”

“I do five of these in a day,” the surgeon said. “Though I must say, your patella and the articular surface of your lateral condyle looked like someone had taken a pile driver to them. You really should have had this done earlier—as I advised. You came to me at the very outside of the window I gave you. I’m skeptical we’ll achieve anything close to full extension when you recover.”

“In case something went wrong, I’ve wanted to take advantage of my real knees as long as I could.”

“Yes, yes, I hear that all the time. You’re all fraidy cats, terrified that you won’t be able to play a full round of croquet. Fair enough, but if this aversive delay of yours translates into a limp, you’ve only yourself to blame. Now, I’m keeping you on Oxycontin for another three days, but then we’re moving to NSAIDs. Just don’t slacken on the PT, or you don’t have a prayer of attaining that extension.”

She was a little injured that her orthopedist displayed so little understanding of his patient after seeing her for two years. “I’m not a slacker. I’m more the type to overdo it.”

“Well, don’t overdo it, either,” he said with annoyance. “You could damage the scar tissue and invite inflammation the size of last year’s wildfire in California. Worse, you might even loosen the cement, and we’d have to do the whole thing all over again. Now, that would be boring.” With no goodbye, he was gone.

“You have a visitor, Mrs. Terpsichore,” a nurse said a few minutes later, poking his head in the door. He’d mangled her surname, and Serenata didn’t care. Absent pharmaceutical intervention, she’d have been crushed that the visitor was not her husband. Instead, when Tommy filtered shyly to the side of the bed, she was enchanted.

“Hey,” Tommy said. “How are you feeling?”

“High as a kite,” Serenata said. “I suspect I feel dreadful and I have no idea.”

“It went okay?”

“Yes, though I’m afraid Dr. Churchwell found my case a little dreary.”

“With this medicine stuff?” Tommy said. “I don’t think you ever want to be interesting. Have you looked at it?”

“No.”

Together, they peered under the blanket. “Oh, wow.”

Covered in a thick white rectangle, the bulbous tubular object attached to Serenata’s torso did not appear to belong to her body. “It reminds me,” Serenata said, “of those big pork roasts in the supermarket, covered with a giant slab of scored fell, tied up with butcher’s twine, and bulging in cellophane on an oozy Styrofoam platter. Even the bandage—it’s like that little diaper they put under the meat, just upside down.”

“Baby, I’ve been there,” Tommy said. “You’re like, ‘I don’t recognize this humongo blob! How’d I get inside a Macy’s parade float?’”

“You were so upset. You kept saying, ‘I didn’t even get to eat any pizza!’”

“You were the only one who was nice to me.”

“I’m relieved to hear I’ve been nice to someone. I don’t think I’ve been very nice to Remington.” Her throat was dry. “For the life of me, I don’t remember why, either.”

“It’ll come back to you,” Tommy said. “You just have to get off the opioids.”

“In that case, I’m not sure I want to get off them.”

“Pretty standard reaction. Why do you think they’re so addictive?”

“I had no idea . . .” Serenata struggled to formulate what she was thinking. “I’m surprised what this feels like. I’m comforted to discover that these drugs make you so warmly disposed toward people. I mean, I’m glad it turns out that so many young people like you are mostly desperate to feel benevolent. Apparently this country is full of people who crave the experience of generosity and optimism. It’s strangely moving—that they’ll put themselves and their health at risk—they’ll go broke or even steal—just to keep thinking of other people as wonderful, and as on their side. That’s not a bad thing to find addictive. Maybe Deacon’s not as depraved as I’ve worried he is.”

Tommy laughed. “It’s almost creepy, but for a change of pace, I kind of like you this way. All philosophical and sappy. So I hate to break it to you: I think you only get that ‘Joy to the World’ buzz at the beginning. Later you keep taking the stuff just to keep from killing yourself.”

“I like my version of opioid addiction better.”

“Listen . . .” Tommy paused. “We talked about it. That is, Bambi—sorry—well, she called me. We decided it’d be better to tell you afterward. We didn’t think you should get all worked up right before surgery.”

“Tell me what?” Pain meds didn’t preclude a capacity for alarm.

Tommy raised her hands. “Now, don’t freak out! He didn’t die or anything. But Remington had a bike accident.”

“How bad was it, then?”

“Actually, for your purposes?” Tommy cocked her head. “Probably not quite bad enough.”

The assertion didn’t register. “Where is he?”

“Here. So he officially gets credit for coming to the hospital when you had your knee done. Except for the first four hours he was in the ER waiting room. He’s finally been able to see somebody, and I think they’re checking him for concussion. And they must be doing X-rays. He was hurting pretty bad while we hung out with him in the waiting room, and he was super shaken up. But I doubt they’re going to admit him overnight. He’s cut up, and bruised, and he has these long bloody scrapes on an arm and a leg from sliding along the ground. Still, Bambi doesn’t think he broke any bones.”

“Did she save his life again? That would make three times. My, a charm.” From behind the cotton candy of narcotic goodwill, a glint of sardonicism.

“Now, that’s the old Serenata! There wasn’t any mouth-to-mouth this time, though I guess she did call the ambulance.”

“Not that this matters, really, but . . . It’s what I’d worry about: Carlisle.”

“Who’s that?”

“I’m just asking, what happened to his bike? That Little Lord Fauntleroy may be pretty full of itself, but it’s Remington’s beloved.”

“Totaled. He bent the frame. Kiss of death.”

Serenata sighed. It wouldn’t do to find the death of this rival too satisfying. “What’s ten grand down the drain—so long as I keep taking these meds.”

“He does still have the old bike,” Tommy reminded her.

After a rap on the door, a female PT came in with a wheeled walker. “Gab fest’s over, girls! Time to get to work.”

Getting out of bed was slow, confusing, and awkward. Therapist at the ready, Serenata leaned heavily on the frame. The right knee wouldn’t bend, but she was cheered when the mandatory shuffle around the room didn’t hurt at all, and she wondered whether everyone made far too much of this wretched recovery business, until she clocked: the elephantine leg was still numb. Oh. Thereafter, Deacon stopped by, complaining that now both his parents were train wrecks, and they hadn’t warned him that a stint living at their house in Hudson would entail “turning into some full-time nursing-home orderly.” The objection couldn’t have been called good-humored.

At last, the door yawned open to reveal Himself. He was wearing a mismatched shorts and T-shirt combo that one of the women must have grabbed from home—clothes from a few years ago that drooped off him now. Presumably the Lycra cycling gear had been totaled, too. A square of gauze was affixed to his forehead; one cheek was grazed and pointillated with bloody pits. His limbs were covered in so many bandages that he looked like a cartoon.

“So,” she said, “we’re both back from the wars.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Remington said. “But I’m hugely sorry about this morning—”

“Don’t. I understand now. But it was important to me that you went with me. It’s important that it was still important.”

“That should go without saying.”

“Nothing goes without saying. Not right now.” She flipped the blanket back to expose the pork roast and nodded at the bandage on his thigh. “Look at you. You’re copying me.”

“Isn’t that what you think I’ve been doing this whole time? Copying you?”

“I’ve never been quite sure which proposition is more distressing, that your late-life athletic renaissance has everything to do with me, or nothing to do with me. Would you please sit down? Just looking at you standing there makes me tired.”

When he sat, he winced. “Tommy assured me the surgery went fine?”

“As far as I know. And you?” she asked. “Nothing broken?”

“Bruising, swelling, some laceration. Mild concussion—those helmets . . .”

“They’re TinkerToy,” Serenata said. “And no one tightens the straps enough, because if you do you get a headache. When a helmet is even halfway comfortable, it rides back on your forehead. Then, pitch over the handlebars, you might as well be wearing a Mets cap. With the explosion of cycling in this country, I don’t understand why bike helmets are still so hard to adjust, still look so geeky, and still don’t work.” Powered by the garrulousness taking over now that the general anesthesia had lifted, such convivial commiseration had been signally lacking in their dealings with one another from “I’ve decided to run a marathon” onward.

“I was told I was lucky,” Remington said.

“You sure don’t look lucky. What happened?”

“It was a new route, to mix things up. If she, you know—”

“If we couldn’t avoid her stupid name for over a year, we can’t avoid it now.”

“All right, Bambi would have warned me, but she hadn’t been on this stretch of B-road before, either. She was well behind me, because she wanted me to work on pacing myself, or she might have wiped out, too. We were headed down a hill, and the tarmac was that washed-out gray, with imbedded gravel. So it was impossible to tell that at the very bottom of the descent the surface suddenly turned to gravel-gravel. Loose gravel. In a car, the change of surface wouldn’t have mattered much. On a bike . . . No traction. I skidded, then got thrown clear of the bike, which hurtled into a tree.”

“People our age should never take down-hills at speed,” Serenata said. “People Tommy’s age shouldn’t, either, but only we ancients know the stakes.”

“If you considered the stakes, you’d never do anything.”

“Then maybe we should never do anything.”

Just then, something gave way in him. His head dropped; he slumped. Serenata had had bike accidents herself, and like any other trauma there was a delayed reaction. She edged carefully to the far side of the single mattress and folded back the bedding. He could just fit alongside her, nestling his temple into the hollow of her shoulder as she wrapped an arm around his back. He slipped a hand under her hospital gown and cupped a breast, always a neat fit in his palm.

 

If the end of the day had once been steeped in dread, now it was the whole day. When she returned home after two nights in Columbia Memorial, recovery became her full-time job, since any economically productive activity was inconceivable. Demotion from Oxycontin to Tylenol was like a CEO’s plummet to the mailroom. Every time the PT showed up for an hour of home therapy, every time she repeated the exercises with a gun to her head later in the day, and every time she lurched from a living-room recliner to the kitchen (only after contemplating for fifteen minutes whether a cup of tea was worth the trip), it was whoosh up the same giddy learning curve that she’d climbed on the West Side bikeway—the same fast-forward short course in pain, the same surprise!-this-is-what-agony-feels-like-and-this-is-why-no-one-likes-it. She soon grew to regard going upstairs as on the same scale of commitment as moving to Cleveland.

From the start, too, Serenata was obliged to relinquish her precious conceit about having a “high pain threshold,” because it turned out her threshold was as low as anyone’s, as low as low could be; it was on the floor. All that vaunted “discipline” of hers turned out to be of no use in executing exercises that before her bones were sawed off wouldn’t have counted as exercise at all. Besides, reasonably fit people experienced little appreciable pain when they worked out; it was out-of-shape people who really suffered. Thus the presumption that had helped propel her to schedule the surgery in the first place—that she was accustomed to “pushing herself,” so she’d “bounce back” in no time—was revealed over the course of three minutes on Day One to be a self-serving, bald-faced lie. As for her image of herself as stoic, that was out the window, too. Wrapping an elastic band around the ankle and forcing the right leg to bend from a 110-degree angle to a 109-degree one, she wept. In front of the therapist, in front of Remington, and the tears didn’t even fill her with shame, because shame, like the tears themselves, didn’t help.

The whole business was so humbling that she rapidly lost every last shred of self-respect. She was a tired, beaten-down, aging woman whose utility to humanity was zero, whose idea of bliss was sitting still, and whose few ruminations on her circumstances she had thought before: how lonely pain was, and how unreal to people who weren’t feeling it, too; how quickly people got bored with other people’s pain after an initial display of cheap pity; how the peculiar inability to quite remember the sensation must have served as a primitive survival mechanism, since if you could truly remember agony you’d never forgo the security of the lair even to forage for food. In their repetitiveness, the recurrent reflections were one more torture.

The fact that Remington was also beaten up was a complication. The long scrapes on his arms, in which imbedded chunks of gravel had left deep pits, needed the dressings changed regularly and had to be slicked painfully with antibiotic ointment. On the side of his body that had taken the hit, his shoulder was puffy and sore. Given its restricted range of motion, he might have damaged his rotary cuff. He had a sizable hematoma on his elbow, and the interior bleeding had spread in branching violet all the way down and around his forearm. He also had swelling, bruising, and pitting from the gravel along the one whole leg, and once the thigh scrape barely started to heal, the scab cracked and bled when he walked. The ankle having been yanked in a direction Nature never intended, his Achilles was pulled, paining him with every step. Hard falls occasioned not only a delayed emotional reaction, but also a delayed physical one. After a day or two, a bodywide ache set in, as if you were a house after an earthquake, and now your framing was askew, your two-by-fours were straining at their nails, and your windows and doors were out of plumb.

They found some camaraderie. Yet they inevitably suffered from a low-key competition over which spouse deserved more sympathy, even if the contest made no sense. Sympathy was not zero-sum. Deacon didn’t feel especially sorry for either parent, so the only sympathy to fight over was each other’s, and they could have agreed simply to swap. Besides, like a cut-rate cologne whose flowery scent instantly evaporated, sympathy didn’t do either of them any good.

One irksome problem was getting blood and various paler discharges on the sheets. Neither had the energy to scrub the percale every morning, and if Deacon was ill-tempered about runs to the supermarket, he wasn’t going to toil over a sink with his parents’ gory bedclothes as if trying to destroy evidence. So the stains would set. They went through fresh sheets nightly, until Serenata resolved that until they both stopped oozing they’d have to sleep on sheets they’d already ruined. The bed soon resembled a Red Cross cot during World War One.

Perhaps oddly, they didn’t discuss it. Remington’s mute, downcast lumber around the house read, yes, as an understandably sober demeanor after a close call with mortality, but also as the inevitable funk into which anyone would sink after training over a year for an event he could no longer enter. (Unfortunately, it was too late to get back his whacking MettleMan deposit.) He’d take a while to resign himself to the disappointment, so it seemed strategic to give the sensitive subject wide berth. Presumably he would address the letdown when he was good and ready. Maybe in time he’d take a positive view of the experience, even if it hadn’t culminated in the expected triumph. He must have gotten something out of all those training sessions in and of themselves. Underneath the bandages, he was in better shape. More adept than his wife at getting along with people from different walks of life, he’d flourished in the company of the tri club. In due course, he might look back on this period as introspectively informative and socially rich. If he had also escaped the potential ignominy of failing to complete the course, she was hardly going to mention that. Any intimation that withdrawal was reprieve would sound like an accusation of cowardice. He was pulling out because he’d had a terrible accident. In Tri World, that was a far more respectable excuse than Ethan Crick’s sudden attack of sanity.

With the benefit of hindsight, Serenata might even come to soften on his infuriating weakness for that trollop (the archaic pejorative was perfect). He was sixty-six. Younger attentions had been flattering. Once the wounds healed and he regained his energy, maybe they could go back to having sex again, and with a renewed enthusiasm to which residual fantasies about his erstwhile trainer might contribute—just so long as Remington didn’t propose a three-way with the detestable woman in real life.

Most of all for Serenata, now that a full Mettle was summarily off the table, the challenge was to disguise her relief.

 

“What are you doing?” It was the one-week anniversary of her surgery and Remington’s crash. She was at the dining table, doing extension and flexion exercises to the eye so farcical that they might have been mistaken for restless leg syndrome.

“What does it look like?” Remington tugged his laces. “I’m going for a run.”

Serenata’s heart fell. Apparently she’d been hoping he’d throw in the towel on exercise altogether. But keeping active would be good for him, and this sour reaction to Remington’s finally getting out of the house was mean-spirited. It was the knee replacement talking. Her own current version of a marathon was hunching down the four steps from the side door and hobbling to the end of the block with a walker. And even there, she had to ask Deacon to lift the walker to the drive; she couldn’t carry it and hold on to her cane and the rail as well. She’d have to be mindful of this if-I-can’t-then-you-can’t-either spitefulness. Recovery was awful enough without also becoming a shrew.

“Isn’t it a little soon?”

“It’s a little late. The Mettle is in six days.”

The screen door banged behind him. “Hey, champ!” a familiar female voice shouted from the end of the drive. “Ready to roll?”

 

Serenata continued to sit in the chair. Deacon came back from whatever mysterious activities occupied him for most of the day. With unusual alertness to mother-as-domestic-statuary, he asked, “What’s up? Your face—you look like someone just hacked the other leg in half.”

“Your father is still planning to do that triathlon.” Her voice was flat.

“No big surprise. You don’t want him to. QED.”

“Spouses in their sixties aren’t supposed to make decisions like teenagers.”

“Take it from me. Let it go. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Funny, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about.”

“If you’re right and he can’t do it, then he won’t do it,” Deacon said. “Simple.”

“Deacon, I hate to ask this, since you just got home. But would you mind going out again for a while? I have to talk to your father when he gets back, and in private.”

“Okay—but you know you’re not going to talk him out of it.”

“All right, I’ll take that as a dare.”

By the time Remington returned, she was ready for them.

“Well, that tumble you took has slowed you down a mite,” Bambi was saying behind him when the duo came back in. Though it was in the eighties, her pink running bra was pristine; she hadn’t broken a sweat. “Hey, Sera! Haven’t seen you since the big carve-up. How’s the prosthesis?”

“The prosthesis is thriving. It’s the rest of me it’s attached to that’s having a hard time.” Serenata tried to keep her tone matter-of-fact when she observed, “Sweetheart, you’re bleeding.”

Perspiration had loosened the tape on Remington’s bandages, which had blossomed in red speckle. The wounds were to be kept dry, so in lieu of a shower he was moistening a dish towel at the sink. “The abrasions crack,” he said, rubbing his face and neck. “That’s inevitable. Can you excuse me, ladies? I’m going upstairs to change.”

The two women were rarely alone with one another. It was awkward.

“Give it a year or two, and you’ll be tooling the aisles of Price Chopper without a cane,” Bambi said. “I could give you some exercises that would help.”

“Thanks,” Serenata said. “But I’m in the care of a PT, and more exercises are the last thing I need. Listen, do you mind my asking—is it your idea that Remington still enter the full Mettle, even after that bike accident? Have you in any way enticed him—I mean, challenged him, or flung down a gauntlet? Made him feel embarrassed about the idea of bowing out?”

“Honey, you just don’t get tri. For Rem to do it at all, it has to be his idea. Do tri to make somebody else happy, you won’t make it ten feet.”

Serenata regrouped. “I just wonder if, in your professional opinion, Remington is sufficiently recovered from his injuries to participate. He’d take your assessment seriously, much more than he would mine.”

Bambi shrugged. “He’s still in one piece. But whether he’s up for it is a judgment only Rem can make.”

Then what good are you. “Don’t you feel responsible? Not for the accident, of course, but for any further damage he might do to himself if he enters the race?”

“I never encourage my clients to hold me responsible, for their decisions or for their performance. That’s against everything I teach. ’Sides. It’s in the contract.”

“I wonder if you wouldn’t consider—appealing to him. Suggesting that, at the very least, maybe he should delay, and not enter until next year.”

“You been underfoot, so you must have some idea of how much time and sweat goes into training for a Mettle. And Rem’s been at it longer than most—not nine months, but fourteen. I can’t in good conscience push any client to throw that away, not unless it’s a dead cert they can’t finish. And that husband of yours has massive heart. That’s the secret sauce no trainer can give to a client, since it got to be there from the start. I guess you guys get on, since you two been married a good while. Still, I sometimes can’t help but wonder if you know your husband at all.”

“It’s not a surprise to me that he’s pigheaded.”

Bambi shook her head. “See, that language . . . How about steely, or brave? Far as his being kinda beat up right now, that just makes a Mettle more heroic.”

“Doesn’t heroism entail doing something perilous for the sake of someone else?”

The trainer frowned. “Nah,” she pronounced after her moment of deep thought. “Tri’s about being a hero to yourself, and for the sake of yourself.”

“Let me get this straight, then. You have no interest in pushing Remington to reconsider? You won’t press him to remember what he’d be asking his body to do when it’s just been hurtled at twenty miles an hour across two lanes of scree. You won’t console him that under the circumstances his withdrawal wouldn’t amount to weakness. I couldn’t interest you in persuading him that there’s actually a bravery—a heroism, to use your word—in accepting a short-term disappointment for long-term perseverance.”

“I’m a medium for my clients’ aspirations,” Bambi said. “Nobody hires me to tell ’em what they can’t do. There’s plenty other folks out there happy to piss on parades for free—not mentioning any names—so that’s not my job. And you know, I’m not married; maybe that means I shouldn’t do couples counseling. But I’ll give it a go anyway. If I did have a husband, I’d try and bring out the best in the guy. I’d have even higher expectations than he has of himself—”

“You’re right, you shouldn’t do couples counseling.” Serenata kept her voice down, lest it carry upstairs. “I’m sorry, but I’m putting you on notice. I believe that by remaining in thrall to that lobotomized rah-rah thinking of yours, you’re shirking your duty as a professional. Any idiot can take one look at Remington right now and tell that he belongs in bed. If you had a moral brain cell in your head, you’d order him to put his feet up and to forget doing a MettleMan, or training of any kind, until he’s recuperated. I don’t know if you belong to any professional body, or whether you have some kind of accreditation to maintain. But if so, and you don’t make a convincing effort to stop him, given the compromised condition he’s in, I’m reporting you. In writing, in detail, with pictures of his injuries attached. And I’ll have you disbarred, or whatever you’d call never again being able to parlay your hack trade in New York State. I’ll go on your website and leave a scathing one-star review. I’ll also go on every other pertinent website I can find—every sports magazine, every workout blog, every commercial gym within hundreds of miles, including BruteBody—and I’ll trash your reputation in the comments. To make sure you don’t endanger the well-being of anyone else, I might even overcome my loathing for social media.”

Bambi stood up. “I don’t take kindly to threats. And you’re hardly in the shape to make any. So how’s this for a threat: I can tell Rem what you just said. He won’t take kindly to that, either.”

“‘Take kindly’ to what?” came from the hallway.

“Blackmail,” Bambi said as Remington entered the kitchen. “Rem, I’ll see you at the pool tomorrow at three, after I’ve had a chance to find those waterproof dressings. Just now, thanks for the offer, but I think I’m gonna skip that iced tea.”

“What was that about?” Remington asked once she’d slammed the screen door.

“A difference of opinion.”

“Over?”

“Take a guess.”

Remington fixed himself a sandwich; he may have been hungry, or simply eager to busy himself. He couldn’t imagine he was getting out of this conversation.

“Your swelling is still not down,” she began as he separated slices of smoked turkey. “You can’t raise your arm above your shoulder. Just like your hamstring, your Achilles is strained or inflamed, and on the same leg. Your bruises do nothing but darken as the blood rises to the surface, which means the injuries are deep. Every time the scabs crack you open a new route to infection. Didn’t that run you just went on hurt?”

“That’s irrelevant.” He liked it. He liked that it hurt.

Hectoring would be deadly. Likewise ridicule, and trying to win. She’d gone at this all wrong from the beginning.

“Darling. My beloved.” Modulating the voice by occupation should be good for something. Better still, to speak tenderly was to feel tender. “Sit down?”

Reluctantly, he brought his plate over. He didn’t touch the sandwich.

“I can see why you can’t trust me,” she said. “I know I’ve seemed competitive. Defensive of what always used to be my territory. Resentful that you’ve exceeded my own feats of stamina. Angry about suddenly becoming such a shipwreck—though if I take some small comfort from your being in the same boat, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel close to you, is there?”

“Not unless the closeness is smothering.”

“And I’m sorry I called this enterprise of yours ‘dumb.’ It’s true I can’t help what I think. But the merits of a triathlon are beside the point now. Even according to Bambi, you almost drowned. You were a hair away from heatstroke—”

“Not this again.”

“I’m not bringing up your trio of near-death experiences as a bludgeon. But of the three, it’s Syracuse that bothers me the most. You can die from heatstroke. Your internal organs shut down. And you didn’t stop. You wanted me to be impressed that you still finished that race, and I was, but not the way you hoped. Your continuing to run when you were delirious means I can’t trust you. It’s official: you don’t know when to quit. Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“Of course not. Though there would be worse ways to make an exit.”

She leaned forward. “I am your wife. You made promises when you married me. I am supposed to be able to have and to hold you. I’m only sixty-two. I may not look the part right now, but it’s not impossible that I live to ninety. I know neither of us is especially thrilled by old age. Nobody is. But there’s only one thing worse than our getting decrepit together. You’ve been given fair warning—three times. Entering that race would be dubious enough if you were in peak condition, but look at you! Covered in bandages, and bruises, and contusions! I can tell by the way you move around the house that your whole body aches—every muscle, every joint, down to the bones. That was a horrible accident. I realize you weren’t to blame. Without any road signs about the change of surface, anyone could have wiped out in that gravel. But being oblivious to what that accident has done to you seems ungrateful for the miracle that you survived at all.”

“What would be ungrateful is not taking full advantage of coming out relatively unscathed. Using a few scrapes and bruises as an excuse to give up would be gutless, and would make me feel gutless. I can’t understand why you’d want to live with me in a state of emasculation.”

“I want to live with you, period, and in what state is secondary! So please. Please don’t do that triathlon. I’ll tell everyone that it was my fault you quit, that I forced you. I know you’re suspicious, and I’ve given you reason to be, but this time I’m not trying to stop you because I’m jealous, or because we’ve been in some stupid contest over this for months on end and I want to have my way, or even to get you away from Bambi Buffer. It’s because I love you, and this race is dangerous. Please, I’m begging you.” And now she did the worst possible thing that she could do at this time: she got down on her knees.

“Get up!” he cried, springing to a stand. “Get off that fucking knee!”

“I’m begging you.” If she was being manipulative, she couldn’t have come up with a better guarantee of generating real tears than her current posture. “Don’t do this MettleMan. I know it’s a sacrifice, but I don’t ask you for that much. So make the sacrifice for me. I despair of getting old anyway; I can’t bear the idea of doing it alone.”

Remington dragged her upright by the armpits and dumped her back into the chair. “You’re always separate, so unto yourself, so needless. You disdain the comforts of other people’s company. You’re contemptuous of their support. You scorn shared enthusiasms as mindless conformity. I suppose that means I’m special, that it matters to you that I’m here, an actual other person you can stand. All right. I’m glad of that. And it’s true. I agree. You don’t ask me for much. So it is wicked, wicked, that when you finally do, it’s for the only thing in the whole wide world that you know I can’t agree to.”