“You do realize that organized endurance sport is an industry,” Serenata idly observed while making dinner later that summer.
“Soft drinks are an industry,” Remington said. “We still buy Poland Spring soda water.”
“Your spiritual aspirations are being taken advantage of.”
“Poland Spring takes advantage of our thirst. Why shouldn’t MettleMan capitalize on my other thirsts? Someone might as well.”
“Because the money they make off your psychic dehydration is money we can’t easily spare.”
“Our children are grave disappointments, which relieves us of any obligation to provide them an inheritance. We’re old. There is no future. That makes me feel free.”
“It makes you feel panicked. Besides. We could live thirty more years.”
“Look at my father,” he said. “I don’t want to.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “It’s very, very easy to say.”
“Am I to infer that you intend this undertaking to be a form of suicide?” she asked lightly. “Because I’d count that as abandonment.”
The better to one-up a competing franchise, MettleMan boosted the distances of its epic triathlon an increment over previously established standards: not a 2.4- but a 2.6-mile swim; not a 112- but a 116-mile cycle; not a 26.2- but a 26.4-mile run—one feat after the other, with nothing but a frantic change into suitable clothing between events. (Even the original distances seemed perversely specific. What was wrong with swimming two miles or cycling one hundred?) Making the ordeal closer to a quadrathlon, the cherry on this sundae of insanity was a single chin-up on the finish line—a modest enough exploit you would think, yet a final exertion rumored as the great bridge too far for any number of contestants, especially women, who would sometimes collapse under the bar in tears now that no MC would call out on the loudspeakers, “You are . . . MettleMan!”, and they’d not get their fluorescent-orange trophy mug.
Serenata had never been wowed by marathoners, even if confidence that she could have conquered that distance in her heyday was undermined by never having conquered it in practice. For years, a two-mile swim had been routine. Ditto cycling a century, which she’d exceeded countless times in her twenties, when to visit a friend in Woodstock she’d saddle up and hit the George Washington Bridge pedestrian walkway, if only to save money on bus fare.
Yet after a two-mile swim, she always lay flat on the deck for twenty minutes, perfectly inert, every muscle spent. Even after a plain old ten-mile run, she’d often faded off with Remington that evening, eyelids heavy over the main course. As for cycling over a hundred miles, it had always filled her with an hysterical obsession with dinner. Once when she’d clocked the requisite distance after a late start toward Amherst, only to find herself in a rare commercial desert in Connecticut—no restaurants, fast-food outlets, or mini-marts—she’d sullenly set up camp in a roadside wood, gnawing the stale half onion roll and the remains of her peanut butter from lunch with a fury that would have driven a sizable generator.
One by one, then, each feat seemed achievable. All three without pause seemed both flagrantly impossible and mentally ill. Tommy was right: people who exercised less than you were pathetic; people who exercised more than you were nuts. Doubtful that even at her strongest she’d have been up to a MettleMan, she couldn’t trust her contempt for it. In the face of her husband’s deranged aspiration, she was horrified, intimidated, and completely outclassed. Ergo, she had to keep her mouth shut.
According to Bambi—and Remington’s whole catechism was now according to Bambi—one trained for a “full Mettle” a minimum of nine months. The client for whom the trainer successfully trawled in Saratoga Springs in April would never have gotten up to speed in time for the annual northeastern MettleMan in Lake Placid two months later. So Remington had set his sights on June of the following year.
That was a long time to keep your mouth shut.
Little matter, since the clamor that descended on their household when Remington returned from training with the rest of his tri club—that’s right, there was such a thing as a tri club, and enough fitness fanatics even in tiny Hudson, New York, to fill out the membership—she rarely got a word in edgewise.
Remington was the more gregarious spouse, long accustomed to the society of the workplace, without which he felt cut off. Joining the Hudson Tri Club restored that sense of shared mission. As the oldest by twenty-five years, he gave the younger athletes hope for their futures while never threatening to overtake them on a bike. Paying his dues with casual self-deprecation, he took gladly to his role as token geezer, and in short order became something of a mascot. Like the rest of the club, he joined BruteBody, to which Remington often repaired for hours, presumably clanking through strength-building sets, but also shooting the breeze and chugging energy drinks with his newfound soul mates.
Serenata did not, strictly speaking, hate them, or she didn’t hate them all. But she did hate them as an aggregate, and as an invading army. They’d taken to calling her “Sera,” which however you spelled it sounded like “Sarah,” and that was not her name. Even the cheerful, improbably overweight Cherry DeVries, who really was a housewife, treated her like The Wife. Whenever the crew descended, histrionically tired, Serenata was expected to hang jackets, fetch drinks, and knock up impromptu suppers. True, she might have retreated upstairs. But Remington was living more and more of his life away from her. Mutely distributing rounds of G&Ts like some barmaid was worth the abasement to spy.
For who led this ragtag band of second-string superheroes? Who set the distance and sport for the day and charted the course? Who was their inspiration, their savior, and their taskmaster, both feared and revered, if not idolized?
“Are you sure she knows what she’s doing?” Serenata finally asked her husband, when his pounding onward on that sore hamstring had not—surprise—allowed it to heal.
“Obviously. Look at her.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed you doing that rather a lot. Just checking her qualifications?”
“You and I are physically faithful, but we’re allowed to window-shop. And these days, it’s a relief to find one woman who enjoys being looked at—”
“And how,” Serenata muttered.
“The ‘male gaze’ is supposedly an insult. But Bambi would only be insulted if men looked away. Her body’s her calling card. It’s also her creation, her artwork.”
“I don’t see art. I see maniacal self-involvement. I see spending hours and hours in the gym, every day, and rarely doing much else.”
“That’s her job.”
“It’s a dopy job.”
“Nothing stops you from joining BruteBody and developing your forearm flexors, if hers make you that jealous.”
“I have a real career. I’ve put some effort into not falling completely apart, but it’s a sideline. I try to maintain a sense of proportion.”
Or so she claimed. Yet Serenata had grown convinced that this cultivation of the body to the exclusion of all else had somehow sprouted from her own original sin. Was she not always asserting, however tongue-in-cheek, that the rest of the world was “copying her”? So her ten-mile teeming along the river had tracked the seeds of fitness fundamentalism into the house. She couldn’t discourage her husband without sounding like a hypocrite. She’d created a monster.
“My trainer believes in me.”
“You buy her belief in you. Stop paying that $1,200 monthly retainer, and just see how long her faith in your prowess lasts.”
Although Serenata was pretty good at divining what made people tick, Bambi Buffer’s motives remained elusive. Obviously the woman wanted the money. Few amateurs in this mildly depressed small town would be able to afford a retainer that size. Why, their household couldn’t afford it, either. But even a well-paid trainer wasn’t obliged to drop by a client’s house five times a week, to prop her feet on an opposite chair and smooth a palm along the hard hillocks of her quadriceps, or to reward his occasional quip with a deep-throated laugh incommensurate with the modest joke. In her doting there seemed, if not an element of the maternal, at least one of possession. Remington had become her creature.
Crushingly, too: ever since the spontaneous lesson on marathon day, Serenata had been teaching Tommy March to swim at the Y. Like most adults who never mastered this crucial survival skill as kids, Tommy had freaked out the moment she couldn’t touch the bottom of the pool. Easing the girl past that primitive terror had been psychologically interesting, since giving into panic invited exactly what you were afraid of, and the experience of near drowning reinforced the fear. The key turned out to be the soothing lower tones of Serenata’s voice, which could induce a state close to hypnosis. Thus by July, the stalky girl had blossomed into an aquatic natural. Her instructor’s reward? In August, Tommy joined the tri club.
Remington’s long absences allowed Serenata plenty of solitude for catching up on voice-over work. But it was one thing to be left alone, another to feel left out. Rather than get lost in a script, she’d check the computer clock too often. Unsettled, she’d stop the recording to drift downstairs and fail to remember what she’d come down for.
When it was time to exercise, the ritual dread had grown more intense. It was bad enough that running no longer got her out of the house. It was bad enough that biking was blighted by bevies of zealous “fellow” cyclists. It was bad enough, too, that the pool at the Y was forever churning with members of the tri club, whose self-importance could put her off her laps the way a waft from a restaurant toilet could put you off your meal. But now the home calisthenics she’d substituted for all that motion of the body through space would not only be tedious; they also felt measly. Compared to the tri club’s, her workouts were a joke. This dwarfing was so disagreeable that she was sometimes tempted to skip exercise altogether. But she refused to let these maniacs control her.
Thus on a bright late Saturday afternoon in early September, Serenata duly undertook her high-intensity interval training, trying to put out of mind that at the same time Remington’s tri club was feverishly cycling seventy miles cross-country. She took care to stay on the cushioning double layer of fluffy bath mats, to raise her knees all the way to her waist, to maintain a ramped-up pace whose rhythm clashed with the recurring intro soundtrack of back-to-back Big Bang Theory, to quell her irritation when the bath mats constantly separated, and to determinedly ignore the building inflammation in her right knee. With fifteen repetitions of a thousand steps, and one hundred cool-down paces between each set, her high-knees running in place lasted one hour and fifty-eight minutes—and still felt paltry.
When she had four sets to go, voices sounded at the side door. As the rabble downstairs grew louder, she upped the tempo, rushing to join the party. Funny how a crowd you wanted no part of could still make you feel excluded.
Entering the roomy, rustic kitchen at last, Serenata found the tri club all in Lycra—which did Cherry DeVries no favors. She wasn’t obese, but looser fitting sportswear would have been kinder, and she’d bought aspirational shorts a size too small. By contrast, Tommy’s secondhand gear was overlarge and fatigued, and she kept pulling her waistband up and tugging gathered fabric down her thighs. Universally unbecoming, cycling shorts having ever come into fashion was inscrutable.
Mind, the style was almost universally unbecoming. On Bambi Buffer, the sleek shorts in sunny yellow conformed to her sharp hip bones, across which a yardstick could have balanced without touching flesh in between. They showed off her ass as hard and high. Each buttock shadowed when she took a step and the glutes contracted. A sleeveless V-neck, her tight powder-blue vest zipped up the front, pressing breasts the better part pectoral muscle into a semblance of cleavage. She’d burnished a smashing summer tan. Sun had lightened her tawny hair, its close boyish cut recently trimmed.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it is to no longer be the only woman in this club,” Cherry confided to Tommy. “That ride has set my you-know-where just raging. Yeast infection. The guys wouldn’t understand.”
“Hey, whadda ya mean, you’ve been the ‘only woman’?” Bambi said, pulling a bottle of red wine from the rack. Another sat empty on the counter.
“You don’t count, Bam-Bam. Whatever you are, plain old ‘woman’ ain’t it.” Lanky, about forty, and the club’s sole MettleMan veteran other than their Dear Leader, Sloan Wallace had two identical double-M tattoos on his right bicep: four peaks of adjacent orange, like a child’s drawing of a mountain range. If you didn’t recognize the signage, you weren’t an initiate but a slob.
“Think about getting a wider seat, Cherry,” Bambi said, popping the cork.
“Or let me take a look at the height and tilt.” Chet Mason was the club’s technocrat. “The bones of your ass should hit the back of the seat. You may be sitting too far forward on the tongue—”
“Whoa, baby!” cried Hank Timmerman, the sleazebag. “Sounds like some happy ride!”
Remington pecked his wife’s cheek distractedly. “Hey, we have any snacks? Everybody’s starving.”
These convocations now frequent, Serenata had begrudgingly laid in crackling bags of solidified palm oil. The crunchy crap would be just the beginning.
Bambi nodded at Serenata’s ratty cotton shorts. “Had your own little home workout?” She was prone to address The Wife at a perpendicular, throwing the odd lazy looping side-glance, as if underhanding a softball.
“Yeah, you know, one of those Jane Fonda videos,” Serenata said. “I know she’s pushing eighty, but I still can’t keep up with her. And I find getting sweaty kind of icky.”
“Sweat’s the Chanel of tri, honey,” Bambi said coolly, taking an inattentive gulp from a juice glass. She’d managed to locate their last bottle of pricey Napa syrah.
“Bam-Bam gets extra Kettle chips,” Sloan said, “after all that doubling back to check on Rem. Rest of us did seventy; add the babysitting, I bet Bam put in one-forty.”
“You do realize I’m riding the brake,” Remington said genially. “Just so Bambi gets a proper workout.”
“You really shouldn’t feed the beast,” Sloan said. “Bam’s being a glutton for punishment is still greed of a kind.”
“You should consider replacing that clunker, Rem,” Chet recommended. “Titanium tri bikes are so fucking frictionless that the biggest problem is falling asleep.”
In contrast to Serenata’s battered warhorse, circa 1991, Remington’s $1,300 “clunker” was only five months old.
“Rem says you’ve biked a bit yourself?” Bambi asked as their hostess fetched Sloan another beer.
“Here and there.” Vulgar submission of an athletic CV was out of the question.
“At your age, Sera, you might consider an e-bike,” Bambi suggested. “I recommend plug-in models to older clients all the time. Keeps them on the road, even with, you know—bum joints.”
“Yes, I’ve considered one of those,” Serenata said brightly. “But it seems more cost efficient to go straight to the mobility scooter.”
She retreated to the women by the stove.
“You don’t have to make supper for this crowd every time,” Cherry said. “We could always order takeout.”
“Oh, pasta’s no big deal,” Serenata said, pulling out their largest pot. Having tried the takeout option, she knew the drill: getting everyone’s orders straight was exhausting, and she and Remington would get stuck with the bill.
“What do you want me to chop?” Tommy offered, jumping up.
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Some,” she allowed, then lowered her voice. “Fucking Sloan is always showing off in the lead, and I just . . . Twenty-five m-p-h, steady? And twenty uphill? I can’t keep it up. Then I fall back, and feel like a girl.”
“Don’t tell anyone, but you are a girl,” Serenata whispered. “If you’re going to participate in a mixed athletic club, cut yourself some slack.”
“But aren’t you tired?” Tommy solicited as Serenata filled the pot with water. “I heard you upstairs when we got here. HIT is a killer.”
“Yes, but unlike some people I think that’s my business. Here. Parsley.”
As the three women did what women almost always ended up doing, the men defaulted to a stock sport: razzing their absent member Ethan Crick for having begged off the afternoon’s cycle training at the last minute.
“So what was Crick’s excuse this time?” Hank said.
“Stubbed his toe,” Sloan supposed. “Swelled up something awful, and wouldn’t fit in his bike shoe.”
“He’s been shaving his legs to decrease his wind resistance,” Remington said, “and now he has ingrown hairs.”
“He did fwee cwunches wivout AC,” Hank lisped, “and cowapsed fwum heat stwoke.”
“Oh, it was a ton more creative than that. You know Ethan,” Bambi said. “Something about how this particular back muscle knots, so that whenever he turns his head a paralyzing pain shoots up his neck. That bozo never just has a headache.”
“But I know what he means,” Serenata said, stemming cherry tomatoes. “From hunching for hours over the handlebars, a shoulder muscle cramps and pinches a nerve. The pain goes straight up the back of your neck, and it feels like a bee sting.”
“Funny,” Bambi said reluctantly. “That’s what Ethan said. ‘Like a bee sting.’”
Serenata should have stayed out of it, but this hacking on Ethan Crick had become an ugly club dependency, because it made them feel hardier by comparison. She was relieved that Remington had escaped being the club’s punching bag. Nevertheless, this mild-mannered ophthalmologist was the only member of the tri club who resisted Bambi’s defiant approach to injury. He’d no desire to wreck his body in the process of perfecting it. Yet Ethan’s proclivity for moderation might indeed have ill-suited him to MettleMan, whose website claimed that moderation was for chumps.
“Weekend after weekend,” Sloan said, “Crick is getting just the practice he needs. He’s a DNF in training.”
“What’s a DNF?” Serenata asked.
They recited in unison with melodramatic horror, “Did Not Finish.”
“I’ve heard more than one MettleMan DNF has actually offed himself,” Sloan said. “Talk about double loser.”
Bambi clapped Remington’s shoulder. “Mind you, now! Not one of my clients has ever DNF’ed. You finish, or I don’t let you start. Sloan’s right. I seen folks’ spirits crushed for life—for life—by staggering to that chin-up bar after midnight.”
“That’s when the race always cuts off?” Serenata asked.
“Like Cinderella,” Bambi said. “Bong-bong-bong, riches to rags.”
“I think quitters should be branded,” Chet said. “Sizzle it right on the ass with a hot iron: ‘D-N-F.’ Which also stands for ‘Disgraced Numb-nuts Fuck-up.’”
In his mid-twenties and perpetually gung-ho, with puppy-dog eyes and floppy brown hair, Chet was a local kid who’d gone to some community college, studying one of those broad, bland subjects like media studies that left you in much the same place as before you enrolled. He was now a barista at a Hudson internet café, and still living at home. A gym junkie, he’d developed a bunchy, constricted physique that wasn’t altogether fetching. Lately he’d latched on to the idea of becoming a triathlon pro. He certainly seemed to have the chops. Still, with these events now attracting participants in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, no big commercial sports company was likely to shell out gear, expenses, and a stipend for a male triathlete who was barely five-foot-eight.
Sloan Wallace was the one who looked the part. Leggy, lean, and languorous, he must have been at least six-three. But Serenata couldn’t imagine Sloan going up against an intimidating elite for Nike sponsorship. He was a small-pond competitor, who after ditching the scramble of Wall Street had moved up to Hudson to start a second life renovating classic cars. He appeared to be good at it and eked out a living preying on the adolescent ambitions of retirees with capital. In a one-horse town like this, he attracted the awe of younger provincials, who all thought re-chroming the grille of a 1957 Pontiac Bonneville was the coolest job ever. Sloan had cachet in these parts, and his suave, syrupy bearing made him a magnet for women. Naturally he was divorced—he was the sort of man always looking to trade up—and in the world of endurance sport, his brazen braggadocio was an asset.
“So are your kids really into your tri thing?” Tommy asked Cherry over broccoli. “Or are they all like, ‘Where’s my dinner?’”
“Oh, the kids are super supportive,” Cherry said. “When I come back from training, they bring me pillows and herbal tea.”
“What about your husband?”
Cherry paused the paring knife over a floret. “I guess Sarge is another story.”
“Why’s he down on the idea?”
“He thinks it’s ridiculous, to be honest. Not triathlons, but the idea of my doing one. He thinks I’m only trying to lose weight. He thinks I don’t have a chance in heck of finishing, so I’m only setting myself up for a fall. Then I’ll comfort eat and only get fatter.”
“Are you trying to lose weight?”
“Well, sure. But that’s not the only reason I’m doing this. We got married pretty young—even if we didn’t think we were young, you know how that is, or you will in a few years. I tended a grocery store till after high school, but I’ve never had a real job, because I got pregnant right away—which is fine, of course, I love Deedee to bits. But I want something, you know, to be proud of. I’m proud of all three of my children, but they’re not my personal accomplishments. They’re people, and they’re their own accomplishments. Sarge has the antiques shop, and though it’s been through some tough times, he can still say he’s made a go of a business. I want to be able to say I’ve done something, too.”
“Are you hoping to, like—show Sarge?” Tommy asked. “That he’s underestimated you?”
“Better believe it! Though I’m worried that if I ever do become a triathlete, well—that it’ll just make him mad.”
“Is he mad already?”
“Yeah. He’s pretty mad. He thinks I’m out-guying him—if that’s a word.”
“If it isn’t, it should be,” Remington chimed in, while searching out another bottle of red. “The women are manning up, and the boys all want to wear dresses.”
“They can have ’em!” Cherry said. “I’d rather have breathable spandex.”
Serenata had once supposed that during training surely Cherry DeVries kept Remington company at the back. He said no—Cherry maintained a position solidly in the middle of the pack. The assumption that a heavy woman would lag exhibited a certain prejudice, but mass had to have been a disadvantage—exaggerating her drag in water, increasing the pull of gravity on a bike, and forcing her to propel more weight on a run. If she kept up with Tommy, Cherry was the more impressive athlete.
Serenata threw herself into parboiling the broccoli and dissolving anchovies in hot olive oil, all the while telling herself that no one had forced her to make this meal, and nothing was more unbearable than people who freely elected to do something and then turned around and resented the imposition. But after the interval training, the right knee was yowling. The worst possible activity for these joints wasn’t walking or running but standing—also known as cooking. Fetching snacks, refilling drinks, and initiating supper for eight, she’d been on her feet for three hours. Slicing olives, she rested all her weight on the left leg. Unused, the right knee stiffened, and crossing the room to salt the pasta water she had to haul the bum leg straight. As Bambi stretched out at the dining table and crossed her legs prettily at her slender ankles—she’d had the presence to bring flattering ballet flats to change into—Serenata noted that her own knees had puffed up again. The swelling had spread to her lower thighs, creating an unpleasantly tubular effect. Since childhood, her legs had been her finest feature. In the end, she lurched to a drawer for a longer apron, not to protect her shabby sports clothes from anchovy grease but to conceal her finest feature from the tri club’s critical gaze, including the appraising eye of her husband.
“You’re limping,” Tommy whispered.
“In that I’m the one doing the limping,” Serenata snapped, “why do you think I need to be informed of that?”
Tommy looked as if she might cry. She was only twenty years old. Surrounded by prospective antagonists, you didn’t take out your frustrations on your only ally.
Serenata quickly laid a hand on Tommy’s arm. “I’m sorry. Thank you for noticing. You’re the only one who does.”
“Have you scheduled the surgery yet?” Tommy asked sternly.
“No.” Serenata turned back to the olives. She should never have bought the kind with pits.
“Why not?”
“I’m managing.”
“You’re not managing. They’re only getting worse. You keep exercising on them every day, and then afterward you can hardly walk.”
“I don’t want to get knee replacements. People say online you’d better get both done at once, because when you find out how awful it is, you’ll never do the other one.”
“It’s not like you can wait till you’re in the mood. You’ll never be in the mood. At some point you won’t be able to exercise at all, and then you’ll be sorry.”
“I’m already sorry. I’ve seen pictures of the scars. They’re hideous.”
“Scars? Who cares. You’re getting old. You’re being a little princess.”
“I won’t be lectured by a whippersnapper.”
“The whippersnapper’s riding you ’cause nobody else is, far as I can see. Why doesn’t Remington notice you limping? Why doesn’t Remington mash a phone in your hand and make you fix a date?”
“Because Remington doesn’t care about anything to do with me anymore.” The words were out before Serenata could stop them. She’d barely rescued herself from announcing more starkly still, Because Remington doesn’t care about me anymore.
“But he’s your husband.” Tommy sounded bewildered.
Serenata smiled tightly. “We are specializing in statements of the obvious tonight. I just meant, he’s not thinking about my problems right now. If you’re ever in a long-term marriage, you’ll find out: spouses drift. It doesn’t mean they’re cheating or anything. Their attention wanders. And then it comes back.”
Tommy looked skeptical. Serenata didn’t find this version of events persuasive herself. Rattled, she dumped three pounds of rotelli in the pot, though the water hadn’t quite come to a rolling boil—much like the unease in her marriage.
This time when they settled down to dinner, Serenata placed her wineglass firmly next to Remington’s usual chair at the end of the long, planked table. That didn’t prevent you-know-who from taking the chair at his other elbow, but at least she’d not be exiled at the opposite end with Hank, who’d been hitting the G&Ts and was getting wasted.
“Check out the commuters chugging around town,” Bambi said after the pasta had been demolished, touching Remington’s slender wrist. “They most always go choom-choom-choom—pressing heavy on the downstroke, then letting up on the upstroke. But what you want is a smooth, steady application of force. Remember to pull up on the cleat. You don’t want variable surges of power.”
It was a wonder that the average schoolchild mastered riding a bike at six, given that operating the mechanism was so terribly complicated.
Serenata had remained quiet throughout the meal, while Chet got excited about brands of wet suits, Cherry confided her embarrassing incontinence on long runs, and Bambi chided Hank to stop teeming ahead and then blowing out too early. Passivity was as enervating as the conversation, so at last Serenata put a hand in.
“I wonder,” she said carefully, “if a lot of older people are able to take part in endurance sports because they weren’t especially active when they were young.”
Bambi looked up sharply. “How do you figure that? Sitting on your butt being the best preparation for getting off it.”
“I talked to some elderly marathoners in Saratoga Springs,” Serenata said. “Every single one discovered exercise in their fifties or even sixties, like Remington.”
“That’s not surprising,” Bambi said. “It’s an era thing. This is a movement, sweeping across the country, and pretty soon we’re gonna see a whole super race—”
“Social trends are part of it. But maybe what makes it possible to demand so much from an aging body is that you haven’t already worn it out.”
“Exercise don’t wear you out, honey. It builds you up.”
“Only up to a point,” Serenata said. “The body is a mechanism, with moving parts that degrade from use. Some of those parts break down, like the parts of a car if you drive it too far.”
“The body’s an organism, not a machine,” Bambi said. “It thrives from being stressed. The more you ask, the more you get. Maybe you never asked enough.”
“Oh, Serenata’s asked plenty,” Remington intervened. His defense was touching, but Bambi ignored it.
“There are limits,” Serenata said.
“That has to be the most suck-dick motto I ever heard. How about, Fuck limits. Limits are all in your head. See, this is what I was warning you about, Rem.”
“Negative thinking,” Remington said.
“All this, oh, he’s gonna wear out like a car. It’s fear-based. But I guess that’s the kind of mind-set you get when you make a living from talk.”
“That’s me,” Serenata said. “Blah-blah-blah.”
“My wife is an accomplished voice-over artist.” Remington pressed his trainer’s arm with a forefinger. “I told you to watch that.”
“Bambi’s right about limits, though,” Cherry said. “At first, I didn’t think I could run to the end of the block. But I’ve been plumb dumbfounded what it turns out I can do! You have to keep telling yourself not to be a little baby.”
“But sometimes that ‘little baby,’” Serenata said, “might be aware that you’re damaging yourself, that you’re overdoing it.”
Tommy grinned. “Bambi doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as overdoing it.”
“But the vogue for extreme sports is pretty recent,” Serenata said. “Is there any research on what happens to people who keep at it year after year? For decades?”
“Planning to find out!” Chet said down the table. “By Rem’s age, I’ll be tri-ing to the moon!”
“Either that or you’ll be wheeled around on a gurney with a tube down your throat,” Serenata said sweetly. “That’s the question.”
“I learned a hip word from Rem the other day,” Bambi said. “You know your hub’s pretty smart?”
“After thirty-three years, I might have noticed that.”
“Catastrophizing,” Bambi pronounced with relish. “That’s what you’re doing, and it’s corrupting my client. Catastrophize, and you can wreck all my hard work.”
“I thought it was Remington’s hard work.”
“Joint effort, hon. This crew builds muscle as a team. And know what the most important muscle is? Not the glutes, not the quads, but the mind. Familiar with that expression ‘muscle-head’? Supposed to be an insult. It ain’t. Your mind is a muscle, and your hub’s brain, with a little help from his friends, is getting big and hard.”
“With a certain ass in the saddle out front,” Hank said, “it’s not only his brain getting big and hard.”
“When I was in high school,” Serenata said, turning a blind eye to the juvenile trash talk, “the jocks were considered the morons. Now that the educated class has discovered athletics, suddenly sport requires vast cognitive powers.”
“You can overthink tri, no question,” Bambi said. “But smarts is still an advantage. Rem here has met his distance, every single time. He’s a little slower than the rest of us—”
“You’re overgenerous,” Remington said. “I’m a lot slower.”
“But this guy, he’s never once set out to finish a certain number of miles and stopped short. You are aware of that?”
“Sure,” Serenata said casually. In truth, she was not aware of this.
Bambi clapped Remington’s shoulder again; it was a habit. “You got the determination. I can coach technique, I can design you a sked, but the ferocity got to be there from the start.”
“Some forms of determination are dangerous,” Serenata said.
With a guffaw, Bambi poured herself another glass of red, then topped up Remington’s to the rim. Should Serenata want a refresher, too, she’d have to open another bottle. “You are a trip and a half, sunshine. I got half a mind to print that on our club T-shirts: some forms of determination are dangerous.”
Serenata clarified, “I’m not happy about that hamstring.”
“You and Crick,” Bambi said. “Worrywarts in a pod.”
At the other end of the table, Chet was talking up his future as a tri pro to Sloan. “Once you start pulling in the sponsors, they give you all this free stuff! Running shoes, bike shorts, swimming goggles, you name it! And especially if you land a title or two, some of these deals include a serious whack of cash. So I’ve got my eye on one of your muscle cars. Kind of appropriate, right? Like that 1964 GTO.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Sloan said tolerantly; no way did that man believe Chet would ever make pro. “But mechanically, that GTO is shit. You’d be way better off with the ’67.”
“Chet,” Serenata said, “do you have any backup ambition? A plan B? Because even if you do go pro, it must be hard to maintain peak performance at such a grueling sport for more than a few years.”
Bambi slammed the table hard enough that at the DOT she’d have been fired. “Sweetie pie, you generate more clouds of doom than a fog machine in the movies. It must be so dismal in your head, I don’t know how you get out of bed.”
“Plan Bs are for suckers,” Chet said. “A backup would be planning for failure.”
“Yeah, you’re not supposed to let those thoughts into your mind,” Tommy agreed. “Like that MettleMan bumper sticker I put on my bedstead: doubt not.”
“Has a biblical ring to it,” Serenata said. “Like Moses.”
“If that’s your idea of ridicule,” Bambi said, “you’re gonna have to make more of an effort. Tri is a belief system, all right. But the belief is in yourself.”
“But if all you believe in is yourself,” Serenata said, “isn’t that on the slight side? It sounds awfully like egotism. If nothing else, it sounds lonely.”
“Look around you,” Bambi said. “We’re among plenty of friends. You’re the one sounds lonely.”
Serenata pulled up short. She did feel lonely.
“Tri’s been my salvation, man.” Hank had passed through the raucous phase of inebriation, and had progressed to the maudlin one. Cherry having extricated herself from his arm around her by at least pretending to need the bathroom, he’d now draped himself over Chet.
If Cherry was unfeasibly heavy for endurance sport, Hank was unfeasibly gaunt. His jagged black locks always looked unwashed. His stick-thin limbs were covered in straggles of disagreeable dark hair. He was still pale in early September. His expressions ranged from leering to desperate. Perhaps twenty-eight, he’d been imprisoned for possession at least once.
“When I was inside, the only thing kept me sane was the weights room,” Hank went on. “I promised myself this time when I got out I’d keep it up, right? I wouldn’t make bad decisions. I’d realize I had an illness, right? And the illness is inside me, but I’m not actually the illness, right? So first thing on release I joined BruteBody on one of them one-month free trials. They kept telling me in the joint that I had to believe it was possible to change, or I could be a danger to myself. Sure enough, it wasn’t much more than a week of going to the gym every day when I start to spot the warning signs. Racing thoughts. Intrusive thoughts. Basically, I just couldn’t stop thinking about scag. I knew I was right on the edge of scoring. And that’s when Bambi rescued me, man. Instead of copping a bag, I find myself out on this run with her, man. And I look back now and think it’s funny, since I bet it wasn’t longer than five miles or even less, but it seemed like forever, man. Like it just about killed me. But now I can go twelve, even fifteen, no problem, right? I got something to live for. I’m not addicted to scag, I’m addicted to going out there and fucking killing myself, man, on the road and in the pool. It’s a totally different high, a clean high. So I got to thank you guys, right? I’m gonna tri, tri, tri, tri, over and over again, man.”
Serenata had heard this testimonial before. The tuneful tri, tri, tri, tri recalled Nancee’s “joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart!” on the trip to Saratoga Springs.
Tommy joined Cherry in volunteering to help clean up.
“For ten bucks an hour?” Serenata’s wisecrack came out doleful.
“Nah,” Tommy said. “For you? Seven-fifty.”
The removal of dishes cleared space for Bambi and Remington to arm wrestle. Even after all that red wine, Bambi would have little trouble winning the day, though she kept her opponent’s arm straight up for long enough to ensure that the older man saved face. Besides, the pressure he applied brought out the dazzling definition of her bicep.
Serenata watched unresponsively with her chair pulled back from the table, though she felt a great deal farther away than that. On the occasions she and Remington had asked people to dinner in times past, the biggest problem had been entering into a rapid, playful back-and-forth that excluded their guests, because the couple never managed to invite anyone they wanted to talk to more than to each other. Equally alienating for visitors who just wanted to move on to the cheese course, they would wrestle for too long over a point neither would concede, just as these two were going at it now—albeit with a literalism that Remington of old would have considered crass.
The rest of the club was cheering and hooting, and the other three men lined up to be next. When Bambi lowered Remington’s arm, she didn’t bang it, but arced it gracefully to the wood with a hint of sorrow. You’d think that a husband would be glad of being well matched, for rhetorically their marriage was a draw. But maybe he was one of those curious men who found it more erotic to be beaten.
Hank was up next, and didn’t have a prayer. “I let you win,” he said, slackening in the hot seat. “More—sivulrish.”
“I’d be more chivalrous,” Bambi said, “not to mention more professional, if I kept you from taking on any athletic challenge when you’re slammed.”
“One to talk,” Hank said darkly.
“My veins run with red wine,” she said. “And I can hold my liquor.”
Although appearing to find it harder than he expected, after a brief grapple Chet flattened his coach’s arm. Bambi’s eyes flashed before she covered the fury with bluster: “Well, if you couldn’t drop a girl after all those curls, I’d say you need a new personal trainer!” She curved even defeat into her own success. She really didn’t like losing.
When Sloan took his turn, the antagonists were a matched set. They both had the naturally well-formed limbs of born athletes, and the elongated figures of avatars in video games. Meeting each other’s gaze, each seemed to apply gradually more force, but nothing moved; the sides of their palms grew whiter. Only after a full minute did it become apparent that Sloan was merely holding her there.
“So how long do you want to do this?” His voice was relaxed.
“You’re a condescending son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“I’m a man,” he said.
“Same thing.”
Wham. Bambi’s forearm hit the table.
“Pretty impressive force, considering,” Sloan allowed.
Bambi massaged her wrestling hand. “Yeah, right. That felt a little like arm wrestling with, like, the wall.”
Sloan laughed. “From you, I guess being compared to a mindless slab of Sheetrock is a compliment.”
Bambi raised a forefinger. “Planks! More of a gender-level playing field.”
Then they were off to the living room, audience trailing. Serenata watched limply from the doorway. Side by side, the two paragons extended over the Oriental carpet, propped on their toes and elbows, forearms forward and flat on the floor. Chet started his stopwatch. Obviously this parlor game was tacky. So their hostess wasn’t about to mention that she could maintain that plank herself for a solid five minutes. Besides, among the super race, a mere five minutes was sure to draw derision.
A contest over who could hold a stationary pose the longer was dull. Restless, Chet and Hank began to perform feats of strength with the furniture. Serenata tried to catch Remington’s eye to get him to discourage them, but her husband was lifting an armchair overhead. Finally, Sloan sank to the carpet and rolled onto his back.
“Nine minutes, twenty-four seconds!” Chet declared.
“Uncle, bitch,” Sloan said. “Happy now?”
But Bambi maintained the position. “Tell me when it’s ten!” Her voice was strangled. Only once Chet announced the ten-minute mark did she also collapse, flopping onto her back and gasping.
“Should have known better, Wallace.” Still catching her breath, Bambi rose to a stand. “Sheetrock abs.”
“How long did it take you to work up to ten minutes?” Remington asked.
“Oh, these puppies are a life’s work, pal,” Bambi said. “You know how pregnant women always have folks wanting to touch their stomach? Well, that’s what happens to me in gyms, only without the kid.”
“Seriously?” Remington said. “And you let them?”
“Sometimes,” Bambi said coyly. Lifting the baby-blue vest, she tensed her abdominal muscles. “Have a feel.”
Tentatively, Remington laid a hand on his trainer’s midsection.
“Stop.”
They all turned to the doorway. Remington took his hand back.
“I think that’s quite enough,” Serenata said soberly, and turned to the kitchen to help the two other women finish cleaning up. The humorless admonishment put the kibosh on the evening’s antics, and within a few minutes their guests had left. She was sorry to see Tommy go. Being left alone with her husband was less of a relief than usual.
Serenata sat on the edge of the bed, facing away. Spouses don’t feel close all the time. She and Remington plunged separately into other aspects of their lives, and then reported back. The very obliviousness of these periods of engrossment in other matters, their very ability to put their spouse’s entire existence out of mind for hours or even days, sprang from a sensation of safety—a happy complacency. This felt different.
Remington was toweling his hair after his midnight shower. He allowed his terrycloth robe to drape open. He’d become more at ease with nakedness in the last year. Serenata had grown less so. Having undressed, she was aware that the knots of the chenille bedspread would be dimpling her ass, just as the sock-lines scored her ankles and marred what remained of the tibias’ once-beguiling slope. The peach-tinted polish on her toenails had partially chipped off, perhaps a point of inattentive grooming that was an early sign of letting herself go. Where the polish was missing, the ugly vertical striations of aging keratin showed through. Crushed in bedraggled running shoes for decades, the toes had contorted, mashing together and overlapping, as if made of wet clay and someone had stepped on them. From a seated vantage point, that inside bulge of a right knee bone was at its most apparent. The distortion was subtle enough—schoolboys weren’t likely to point and laugh on the street—but call it what it was: a deformity. Her breasts had long ago dropped; when she experimented with clenching her pectorals, they effectively mounded a second set of mini-mammaries above the first, as if she were a freak, or had tumors. Because her shoulders were drooping as badly as her breasts—precisely this evening, a lifetime commitment to good posture seemed to have run its course—a slight sag of flesh creped over her abdomen, destroying any impression that their muscles were made of Sheetrock. She watched what she ate, but she’d had babies, for which women were reliably punished twice.
Commonly, they had no problem with silence. It only meant they had nothing to say. This silence called for filling, for if it went on much longer something would get worse, or perhaps something awful would happen. Perhaps something awful would happen anyway.
“You didn’t seem to have a very good time tonight,” he said.
“I wonder why that would be.”
“They’re not bad people.”
“I never said they were bad people.”
“You can be very judgmental.”
“I exercise judgment. Unlike some people.”
“We were horsing around. It was harmless.”
“It was embarrassing.”
“You’re the only one who was embarrassed.”
Serenata forced herself to sit more upright. “My dear, I’m sorry to say this, but your obsession with endurance sport has made your conversation a little trying. You used to talk about politics, or urban planning, or even about the television programs we watched as kids—and I’m highly entertained remembering those insufferable child actors in Flipper. I’ve enjoyed analyzing why we both watched so many programs we hated, and why children so often despise other children on TV. But now it’s all techniques for getting your wet suit off fast enough during ‘T1.’ If I didn’t have a good time tonight, that was mostly because I was bored.”
“The subject of physical fitness has never bored you when it was your fitness.”
“You’re quite wrong. It bores me to death. Which is why I rarely talk about it, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“You talk about it more than you realize.”
“Well, then, I’m sorry for boring you, too. You know, you say I didn’t have a good time tonight like an accusation. As if I refused to have a good time.”
“You didn’t exactly dive into the spirit of the occasion.”
“What spirit would that be?”
“Letting our hair down after a hard ride. Good-natured rivalry. Comparing notes on a challenging long-term project.”
“It’s not my project.”
“You put yourself outside the project and pronounce upon it.”
“You hardly spoke to me all night.”
“We had guests.”
“Yes. And I made a considerable effort to engage with your trainer.”
“Everything you said was critical.”
“What about what she said?”
“You put her on the defensive.”
“Do you find it interesting that the whole club is white?”
“Not really. Hudson is a majority white town.”
“It’s barely over half white, actually,” she said. “A quarter black, coming up on ten percent Latino. I looked it up.”
“It wouldn’t be surprising to form a small all-white club, even if the town were majority nonwhite.” His delivery steady and uninflected, Remington had returned to the punishing neutrality he preferred when subjects of this sensitivity arose. “It might be politically awkward, but most people are more comfortable around people like themselves. They self-sort, often unconsciously. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians do the same thing. It isn’t precisely racism. More a natural desire to recognize one another, and to be able to relax. Those perfectly ‘diverse’ cliques of friends, like a Coca-Cola ad teaching the world to sing—they’re a television fiction.”
“But I’ve glanced at your triathlon videos. The people drawn to this pastime are overwhelmingly white. I think that means something.”
“Are you insinuating that endurance sport is only for the well-off?”
“Not at all. Ethan may make a passable living as an ophthalmologist, but he wouldn’t get wealthy off a town this size. Sloan had money once, but restoring cars is time intensive, and I bet he barely breaks even. The others are struggling, even Bambi if it weren’t for you, and Hank bounces between drug addict and career criminal.”
“So what are you getting at?”
Serenata hadn’t formulated what she was getting at before she went down this road. As her destination came into focus, she wanted to turn around. “There’s a . . . regression, a . . . narrowing, a . . . retreat. A withdrawal. A lowering of horizons. A gross reduction of expectations. A new materialism, which doesn’t even extend to patio furniture. The material is the body. It’s a shrinking down to the very least you can be without being dead. A battening down of the hatches, a crawling into a hole.”
“It doesn’t feel like any of that. Getting physically stronger translates directly into strength of other kinds.”
“It’s a particular brand of flourishing, at the sacrifice of other flourishings. For all that mental resilience your trainer touts, it’s anti-intellectual. Which is weird, for you. Have you noticed you’ve stopped reading? Sports magazines, training manuals, yes. But I can’t remember the last time you tackled one of those state-of-the-nation tomes you used to furiously underline in red felt-tip.”
“Apparently you’re spending your time keeping track of how I spend mine, and I don’t see how that’s any better.”
“Also—have you noticed that we hardly ever have sex anymore?”
“I’m sixty-five. And after training, I’m often tired. Are you proposing we do something about it—like, tonight?”
Serenata’s laugh was involuntary. Getting from where they were now to sexual intercourse would have entailed running an emotional marathon before lights-out. “I was wondering whether you miss it.”
“Of course. But my powers—we may have to accept that they’re on the wane.”
“At present, you’re focused exclusively on your physical powers, which I’m led to believe are only on the increase.”
“Listen.” He walked around the corner of the bed and touched her shoulder. “I’m not having an affair with my personal trainer.”
A year ago, she’d never have imagined this B-movie cliché arising in their bedroom. “Since I didn’t think you were, I’m a little perplexed why you feel the need to clarify that.”
“You focus on Bambi Buffer to give your jealousy a face. But the jealousy is bigger than one woman. You’re jealous of the whole package—the club, the training schedule, my gains, my goals, the project. On that score, I can’t help you.”
“This ‘project’ is unworthy of you, and I can’t pretend to think something nicer.”
“Why do you always have to diminish it?”
“I don’t need to diminish it. It’s already small.”
“The experience of pushing past a mental barrier, and still completing another ten laps when you’re at the end of your rope—it isn’t small.”
“The achievement is small. Ordinary and not an achievement at all.”
“Most things are ordinary and not major achievements. I’ve been fired. I’m retired. Just how do you want me to be spending my time instead?”
“I don’t even know,” she said honestly. “Just not like this.”
“Your taking against this from the start has been a terrible mistake.”
“That’s the question, then. Who’s making the mistake.”
“You’re trying to come between me and the fulfillment of my potential—”
“Please. The language of vainglorious positivism is worse than intersectionality and micro-aggressions.”
“If anything, our household has suffered from an excess of irony. It’s a common disease of the over-educated. All that superior drollery is a cover for effeteness and passivity. It’s a fear of putting ourselves on the line.”
“You’ve put yourself on the line plenty. That’s why you were fired.”
“Ask any other American who’s in the wrong in this situation, and they’d say you.”
“I’m aware of that. But we’re not asking them. I’m asking you. Which would win out if you had to choose? Triathlon”—none of them said a triathlon, or the triathlon, just triathlon, which made it sound more majestic, like an awesome force of nature that simply is, gravity or magnetism, not a series of separate sporting events but something big and indivisible, just as faithful adherents to other religions didn’t reference a God or the God, but simply God—“or your marriage?”
“That’s a false choice and beneath you. It seems to me that not putting our marriage on the table is one of the rules. An unwritten rule, which makes it only more sacrosanct. Besides which, it’s been thirty-three years, and we’re old.”
“Old enough to stay together out of laziness. From lack of imagination.”
“Are you threatening me?”
He was shouting. That made her quiet. “I’m trying to talk to you.”
“Because if anyone should threaten anyone here, shouldn’t it be the other way around? Aren’t you the one who, implicitly or explicitly, has been pissing on my entire purpose for the last year? Aren’t I the one who should be reaching my limit?”
“There’s no such thing as a limit, according to your guru.”
“I’d prefer not to think of our marriage as an endurance sport.”
“Maybe you should,” she said. “Maybe then you’d take an interest in it.”