Knee replacements had become ordinary—even if a certain ordinary orthopedist had breezily informed a certain ordinary patient that the generation behind her was sure to get injections of stem cells to regenerate connective tissues instead. Thus right around the corner, though not in time for her to benefit, sheering off the ends of the leg bones with a hacksaw and pounding big foreign chunks of metal into their amputated stumps with a polo mallet—that is, attacking the dysfunctions of the human body as a crude carpentry project, as one might repair a garden shed or porch railing—would be regarded the height of barbarism. Thanks, doc. That makes me feel so much better.
Thus there was no call for alarm or complaint. Scads of other people had submitted to this same brutal surgery, gone through the same excruciating recovery (or failure to recover), and rolled the same medical dice that, should they come up snake eyes, would preclude not only completing one hour and fifty-eight minutes of high-intensity interval training, but also walking to the mailbox. For that matter, the yawn-inducing nonchalance now expected of candidates for joint replacement surely pertained to the likes of aging and death: They happened to everybody, so what was the big deal?
The big deal was that personally Serenata Terpsichore had never before inhabited a body tenderly preserved for decades—curated for decades, since the fashionable verb was now applied to everything from thrift stores to salad—that, despite best efforts, was falling apart. However predictable the monotonous cycle of renewal and decay in the big picture, on a granular level the tragic structure of the human life was forever startling. As she’d understood from childhood that the body wasn’t built to last, she should hardly have been surprised when her own body didn’t last, either. Nevertheless, she was surprised. Even the surprise was surprising.
To her further chagrin, the steady corruptions of the flesh were especially astonishing for her type. Much as she’d questioned Bambi’s claim that the more extreme the demands placed on a body, the more it thrives—and much as she’d paid lip service to the sensible notion that biological moving parts wear out—she herself had bought wholesale into her generation’s popular myth that the body solely flourishes with use. Throughout her life, she had exercised, hard, for a duration, virtually every day. According to legend, she had therefore earned reprieve from the tawdry ailments of sedentary mortals—many of whom were in fact physically better prepared to go the distance into old age than Serenata was now. The cult of MettleMan got up her nose to the degree it did because as a larger umbrella faith it was her church, too. The spouses simply differed on fine points of catechism, like a Methodist and a Pentecostal.
Whether the self was apiece with the body or rode around in a body like a passenger in an open-topped jalopy was one of those irresolvable questions, but it did seem to Serenata that you couldn’t have it both ways. You couldn’t walk around in a beautiful body and feel, yourself, beautiful when you were seventeen in hot pants, and then conveniently draw a sharp distinction between the it of you and the you of you when your vacuum cleaner was snarled by fistfuls of fallen-out hair from postmenopausal alopecia. You couldn’t identify with the body’s powers without also identifying with its deficiencies and even ugliness when those powers failed.
She was under no illusion about other people; that is, lazily, she saw man and manifestation as roughly one and the same, which meant that others also conflated Serenata the remote, obstinate, spitefully private character with a five-seven brunette whose nose was a touch Roman and on the sharp side. After all, it took mental effort to separate body and soul; it took affection, and attention, and the long view. Even with Remington, she had to concentrate in order to see him as an enduring presence—who hadn’t changed much and who if anything, the last two years notwithstanding, had improved—rather than as, increasingly, an older man, if not an old man, who by dint of equal parts sweat and lunacy had grown emaciated, with mean little muscles that wouldn’t last a month when his own arthritis struck. But with herself, of course, and this was surely universal, body and self were distinct; they would have to be, in order to be in relationship.
Plenty of people hated their bodies, and sadly, this antagonism could grow into the central battle of their lives, like bad marriages in a country that forbade divorce. In this respect, Serenata had been fortunate. Until recently, she and the body had for the most part been a team. The relationship was congenial, though there was an eternal tussle over which party was really in control. By conceit, the self was boss, and this was a myth; only at the body’s behest was Serenata here at all. Still, she felt responsible for an organism that was at once robust and fragile. Despite its high mileage, it was readily undone by a moment of clumsiness on the stairs or a bad oyster. The dumb ward had to be serviced, fueled but not too much, rested, and, in the absence of the miraculous Morphatron, manually put through its paces; sometimes these animal-husbandry routines wore thin. But overwhelmingly the relationship on the overlord’s side had been one of tenderness.
Somehow, the sorrow of watching a sturdy, long-serving charge falter and degrade was not the same sorrow of knowing that she herself, too, would soon perish. Though it would seem so, the claim that she dwelt in a well-crafted creature was not a boast. This body had come to her. The creature was not of her making. She had been entrusted with it. If she had broadly done right by it, you would not call that a boast, either. Yes, there was a small pride involved, in having made the body do things it didn’t want to that were for its own good, in having fed it something a little better than a steady diet of Velveeta nachos, but this was the pride of a caretaker, not so different from the satisfaction that a faithful janitor takes in the shine of swabbed floors.
Some parts of the body stirred her tenderness more than others. Small bits, in fact, came in for the same hostility that she sensed Valeria, for example, felt toward her whole package. Serenata hated her cuticles. She did not understand the purpose of a transitional scum that did nothing but split, dry, and tear. Left to their own devices, these epidermal predators would clearly have spread to the very tips of her nails, smothering the keratin the way malign algae blooms suffocated whole Great Lakes. In her disgust, she had been wont to strip the things in ragged shreds from fingers and toes, whereupon the bloody remains would stain the pillowcase and ruin her socks. The wounds hurt and took weeks to heal, but she thought of the amateur surgery as reprisal. While she might have felt sheepish about the miniature “self-harm,” she felt nothing of the kind. The cuticles had been disciplined into submission, and the conquest was gratifying.
Her legs were another matter. The primary drivers of Remington’s motion of the body through space, they were the strongest aspect of the organism, and qualified as shapely in the terms that her culture prescribed. Proportionately, they were long. The thighs at tension were solid. In profile, the tibias swooped gently from the knees like ski slopes. The calf muscles cut shadowed commas when she wore heels. The ankles were suitably slender. Wolf whistles when she wore short skirts had never offended her. The stems on which she perched were the lines where self and flesh converged. If in any sense soul was synonymous with body, Serenata was at one with her legs. And now she was offering them up in a grotesque act of human sacrifice.
Naturally her accelerating dysfunctions didn’t stop at the knees. A recurrent pang in her right wrist put her on notice that her push-ups were numbered. Or an ankle would freakishly sprain from stepping off a low curb at the wrong angle. Muscle spasms in her back were frequent, arbitrary, paralyzing, and occasioned by nothing she did or refrained from doing. For the last six months, her spine went pong every time she rose during her usual five hundred sit-ups—a creepy out-of-kilter slippage that doubtless portended traction. The creaks, the pops, the straining of guy ropes, the groaning of her hull together fostered the suspense of Titanic right before the ship sinks.
Worse, abruptly, it was as Tommy March foretold: the right knee had pretty much stopped working altogether. While still characterizing its implosion as an arthritic “flare-up,” Dr. Churchwell conceded that at a certain point a flare-up failed to subside and installed unremitting torment as the new normal. Athletically, she was grounded.
Regarding double replacements as tantamount to putting his patients through a six-car pileup, this orthopedist recommended getting the second knee done in three to six months’ time—which presented the happy prospect of barely recuperating from one ordeal only to go through the whole horror show all over again. With the right knee in such critical condition, the surgeon fit her into his schedule at Columbia Memorial at the end of May, claiming to have moved heaven and earth on her account. Yet from Serenata’s perspective, that meant six long weeks of melting like a bar of soap in a flooded dish.
Meanwhile, Remington had hit the home stretch of training for his full Mettle. He now hewed to a regime of running, cycling, and swimming, all three sports, every other day, with strength training at BruteBody on the odd ones. Rarely laying eyes on each other during daylight hours, she and her husband shared a postal address. In every other respect, their parallel universes barely intersected. Until this cliff-edge ejection from the world of expending energy, she hadn’t realized how heavily their marriage of late had depended on the slender Venn diagram of overlapping habits. The excess of the convert might have dwarfed her daily ministrations upstairs into the merely gestural, but heretofore continuing to clear what she’d once considered a fairly high athletic bar had kept her seething sense of inferiority in check. But now the bar was on the floor. She had joined the loamy, misshapen tubers on the living-room sofa.
This impression of total physiological collapse was ridiculous. Even a waterlogged bar of soap didn’t dissolve into a gelatinous puddle overnight, and a relatively slim female figure nicely toned for its age would progress toward liquefaction still more gradually. Yet her emotional disintegration was instantaneous.
Disrobing at bedtime, she kept her back to her husband, stripping off her jeans in haste and pulling her shirt overhead in a single desperate motion that snagged the care label on her hair clip. Though she’d formerly have draped the shirt on a hanger for wear a second day, now she didn’t even tug it right-side-out before flinging it atop her jeans on the rug, the better to wrench off her running bra and dive into the bedding. Though late spring was warm enough that she’d have commonly sprawled the mattress uncovered, legs extended, arms outstretched, basking in the breeze of the fan on low, now she kept the sheet tucked to her chin. Previously, it wasn’t that she’d been conceited about her figure, or put it on parade, but she’d never felt impelled to cover it up. Now she hid from both her husband and herself, averting her gaze from the full-length mirror if she needed to scuttle from the room, limping, to pee. She hadn’t realized how comfortable she’d been with her naked body until she was ashamed of it.
By contrast, if also with a limp that he tried to disguise, Remington strolled naked from bedroom to bath with unself-conscious ease. Indeed, before sliding into bed he could happily roam the house bare-assed for an hour or more. He’d already acquired a dark tan, which stopped so starkly a few inches above the knee that he appeared still to be wearing cycling shorts. The endearing swell at his midsection having long ago melted, he sported not an ounce of fat, so that when he walked, sinews rippled in his legs and buttocks in a continuous light show, like the old pixilated billboards in Times Square. Yet he’d just turned sixty-six. Though she’d never tell him so, he looked every year and then some. His figure had grown cadaverous. Creased the more from all that sun, his face looked hunted, wide-eyed, almost crazed.
Often wondering if she’d any real appetite for the rest of her life (and did that mean, in the absence of natural causes, she was threatening suicide?), Serenata was acutely aware that all her melodrama was uncalled for, even if the rending of garments took place mostly in her mind. Equating the end of squats with the end of the world was humiliating; hovering overhead, a more adult intelligence looked down on herself in every sense. Through no fault of her own—or she didn’t think it was her fault—her functionality had been compromised. Yet no levelheadedness she summoned could change the fact that imposed idleness had thrown her into a tailspin. What had been offended was deeper than vanity. As mechanically as she portrayed her daily fidelities to Remington, exercise, of all things, had grown nonsensically bound up with who she was, and without it she felt reduced and not a little lost. After the surgery, which would turn her into an invalid proper, the disassociation would only get worse.
She criticized Remington for his disordered priorities, but she was just as neurotic as he was. As May advanced, the signs became unmistakable: excessive sleep; trouble completing even minor voice-over jobs of a few lines; tendency to sit for bizarrely long periods doing nothing; avoidance of mundane chores like laundry, now insurmountable; reluctance to see Tommy or Griff—reluctance, really, to leave the house at all. Clearly, she had sunk into a profound depression. All because she couldn’t commence the five hundred burpees that most sane people would do almost anything to avoid.
Deacon couldn’t have picked a worse time to visit, which must have pleased him.
When he phoned, their son claimed to be between digs and in need of a bed to bridge the gap, though he was typically vague about the date his apocryphal new apartment would become available. When she asked about his things, he said he “didn’t have much stuff.” Perhaps it was materialistic to regard someone with negligible possessions as untrustworthy, but if you couldn’t take care of a few dishes and a desk lamp by twenty-nine, what else could you not take care of?
With grave misgivings, she and Remington agreed to take him in for a very short while. Despite Valeria’s suspicions about the nature of her brother’s livelihood, they hadn’t any proof, and he was still their son.
Deacon’s evasiveness about when he’d show up had apparently been code for “tomorrow.” That night, Remington had barely worked up his resentful declaration that the boy was not going to interfere with his training regime by five minutes or five feet, with an air of just getting started. Yet the very next afternoon, Deacon was at the door. Or through the door, since during the young man’s last extended period of freeloading their first summer in Hudson they’d provided him a key, which he hadn’t returned.
“You could have knocked,” Serenata said, tailing lines of green beans for what would not, it seemed, be a candlelit tête-à-tête with her husband. Chopping anything in a chair at the dining table still felt awkward. Her knife skills were tailored to standing up.
“Family,” Deacon said with a shrug. Kinship was a concept of which he availed himself when it suited him. “You never knocked when barging into my room.”
“I did at first. But that only gave you fair warning to hide all the swag you’d stolen.”
“Nice to see you, too.” He unshouldered a bag that would have fit in a budget airline’s overhead bin. As ever, the young man was a measure underweight, so the oversize rayon T-shirt and smartly cut slacks draped his frame with the chic flutter of garments on a manikin. He’d doubtless worn the same outfit for days. Preferring the subtle spectrum of laurel, teal, artichoke, and sage in which the affluent now painted their houses, he always bought expensive clothes, but he was lazy.
“That’s all you own in the world?”
“Easy come, easy go.” The expression might have been coined specifically for Deacon Alabaster. He picked up jobs readily enough but just as readily quit. With slim low-slung hips and a gaze both challenging and opaque, he had the effortless good looks and distant bearing that made him a magnet for the pretty but insecure girls he went through like Kleenex. She’d not have been surprised if he’d also sired more than one easy come child along the way, whom he’d have unthinkingly left behind in the careless spirit of genetic littering.
“So where’s Dad?”
“Where do you think? Trooping the trails with his floozy.”
“What? Like, jogging?” Since they only heard from Deacon when he wanted something, he wasn’t up to speed. One of them must have mentioned the enterprise, since tri was all Remington talked about, but if so their son hadn’t listened. He’d never seemed interested in either parent, especially not in his father. Deacon had the style of Remington as a young man, but none of the substance. As a consequence, Deacon had only to walk into the room for his father to feel mocked.
“He’s entering a triathlon in two weeks.”
“Why?”
The simple question left Serenata stymied. “I’ve asked him before. His answer has never been satisfactory. He seems to think his motivation is self-evident.”
“Yeah, those masochists are all over Windham.” Never having suffered from the ambition that might have driven him to the city, throughout his twenties Deacon had drifted from one struggling upper New York State town to another—Dormansville, Medusa, Preston-Potter Hollow—where the rents were low and life was neither hard nor pleasant. He seemed to relish the arbitrariness of living just anywhere.
Fetching a beer, Deacon elucidated. “Always in the way, traipsing in the road, since there’s no sidewalks. Fists clenched, faces purple and blotchy, like spoiled eggplants. Any day now they’ll be dead, and what did the motherfuckers do when they had the chance but make themselves as miserable as possible.”
Their son was chronically contemptuous. Yet he’d accomplished little enough—nothing, in most people’s terms, aside from hand-to-mouth survival—so it was a puzzle where this superiority was sourced. It was, his mother had concluded, the scorn of the nonparticipant. He hadn’t sullied himself with wanting something and trying to get it, which protected him from any sense of failure or disappointment. Remaining apart from the silly toiling, the overcoming of petty obstacles, the fruitless striving, and the sad little comings-up-short that punctuated the pointless churn of all the other suckers in his surround gave him an above-it-all quality that his peers found mesmeric.
“Also, I should warn you that tomorrow I’m getting my right knee replaced.”
“Why would you bother to do that?”
“Thanks for your concern,” Serenata said. “I’m in pain, and I can barely walk.”
“Then don’t walk.”
“Doc, it hurts when I do this?”
Deacon looked blank.
“It’s an old Henny Youngman joke. The doc says, ‘Then don’t do that.’”
“Pretty lame.”
“I am lame. That’s the point.”
It passed for enjoying each other’s company. Why, so far she was enjoying her son’s company. In some curious fashion she couldn’t put her finger on, at this precise moment of dread and desolation, Mr. Who Gives a Shit was the ideal houseguest.
“So both your parents are, as they say, stressed,” she continued. “I should put you on notice before he gets here, too, that your father doesn’t have a sense of humor about this triathlon business. I don’t recommend even gentle ribbing. He’s very nervous about his ability to complete the course. As he should be. A two-and-a-half-mile swim; well over a hundred miles on a bike; a marathon; and a final chin-up, just in case you improbably get through the rest of that crap without keeling over. I don’t think I’d have been able to do it, even in my heyday.” She paused; she may never before have said that aloud. “And if anything does go wrong in Lake Placid, don’t ever say anything. Just promise me. Say absolutely nothing.”
“You mean, ‘Hey, Dad, I heard you entered this dopy race and fell flat on your face!’ Like that?”
She laughed. “Like that. He’s got way too much riding on this thing. If the gamble doesn’t pay off, he’ll be busted.”
Rolling a cigarette, Deacon eyed her theatrically, swaying back and forth to examine her face. “You think it’s retarded.”
Another short laugh escaped, despite herself. Mother and son had always enjoyed a collusion, which she tried to resist. He had no moral compass. Yet she appreciated his anarchic streak. (Well—it was more than a streak.) He treated other people atrociously, but he went his own way. He wasn’t a joiner. “You can’t smoke that in here. And what I happen to think of your father’s endeavor doesn’t matter.”
Again, the keen appraisal, his head askance. It was fortunate that Deacon was so indolent. When he troubled himself, he was too canny. “I bet it does matter. I bet what you think of all his huffing and puffing is all that matters.”
A touch flustered, she nodded at the unlit rollup. “While we’re on house rules, I have to ask you something.”
“House rules? Honest, Mom, I don’t remember your being such a downer.”
“I want you to tell me how you make a living.”
It was always difficult to ask Deacon direct questions. He had a sidling nature; he was good at dodging bullets. To pin him straight on was to invite him to lie. Deacon lied breezily enough, but she found being lied to sufficiently disagreeable that to avoid the falsified answers she usually avoided the questions, too.
“I’m an entrepreneur,” he said with a smile.
“Who sells or makes what?”
“People need things, I get them.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever. Depends on the market.”
“Your sister thinks you’re dealing drugs.”
“Valeria thinks a lot of things. She thinks Jesus cares personally about her and her drooling, farting, Wal-Marty family. She thinks she’s a ‘survivor’ of child abuse. Valeria’s the last person I’d go to for intel about anything.”
“So you’re not dealing drugs? I don’t mind weed. I mean opioids, or heroin.”
“I’m sort of curious why you care. Theoretically. Like, I do know plenty of addicts. Supply and demand: they’re going to get their fix from somewhere. Plenty of scaggy losers right here in Hudson. Does it make you feel all pure, just so long as they don’t get their buzz from me?”
“If we catch you dealing from this house, you’re out on your ear.”
He chuckled. “Look. If I was into contraband, I wouldn’t be lugging around a suitcase of twist-tied baggies. I’d be higher up the food chain than that.”
“Because you’re such a self-starter. Such a go-getter.”
“No, because I aim to get by, and not put myself in the way of any grief. Turns out that doesn’t require much. You don’t call attention to yourself. You only take advantage of opportunities that land in your lap. You keep your head just high enough above a sea of shit so you can breathe, like dog-paddling in the toilet.”
She wasn’t going to get past Deacon’s stonewalling. At least, as she’d promised Remington, she had delivered their ultimatum. “Also,” she added. “No drug taking on the premises, either.”
“Do I have to clean my room and set the table?”
“Come to think of it, that would be nice.” She wasn’t sure about her sudden impulse. Honesty was an experiment. “Deacon, I’m very frightened of this surgery. The physical therapy afterward is horrendous. Surgeons talk an optimistic game, but the people I’ve met who’ve had it done are still limping a year later. They can hardly do any exercise, and they gain weight.”
“So? Haven’t you done enough? Christ, all through my childhood, for hours on end—pounding around Albany, or retiring to your secret torture chamber with its special instruments for waterboarding yourself or something. Put your feet up!” Deacon propped his own heels on a chair. “I’d think you’d be relieved to have an excuse to throw it all over.”
“I am, a little,” she admitted. He could be her confessor. “The day is so much longer. And there’s not this punishment sitting at the end of it. Maybe in declining to sample the pleasures of lethargy, I’ve been missing out. You don’t do anything, do you? I mean, exercise.”
“Get out of bed. Slog to the john. Roll a ciggie to recuperate from my terrible exertions. Speaking of which?” He dangled his handiwork.
“Oh, go ahead. Get a saucer. I don’t really care.” She wasn’t sure what impishness had gotten into her, but Deacon was a bad influence, and she was in the mood for a bad influence. She felt feckless, and fuck-it, and flippant.
“Honest.” Deacon lit up with a savor that made her envious. “Why not give up? You’re in your sixties, right? That whole physical plant of yours is going to hell in a handbasket—or a casket—whatever you do. Stop trying to compete with twenty-year-old nymphets who can beat you hands down just by walking down the street in a potato sack. Relax, and throw yourself into the arms of the inevitable. Got to be some advantage to becoming a doddering old bag.”
“Thanks.”
“Look, you’ve rated, right? My friends always thought you were smokin’. So hang it up while you’re ahead! You’re still not a bad-looking broad for a grandmother of . . . Sorry, I’ve lost count. Is it four or five kids now? In any case, add another notch to your belt. Valeria says she’s preggers again.”
“Good God, tell me you’re pulling my leg.”
“When I tell jokes, I don’t use the same punch line over and over.”
“Would you fetch the chenin blanc in the fridge? You’re driving me to drink.”
Deacon glugged half the bottle into a balloon glass. “Now seriously,” he said, bringing himself another beer. “I don’t understand women like you. I see it all the time, too, these rung-out dishrags gasping on treadmills. They’re ruining a perfectly decent afternoon, they still look like shit, and they also look pathetic. They’re kidding themselves in this totally public and embarrassing way, when plenty of these bitches are rich as fuck, and could be whooping it up and ordering the prime rib. Mom, you’ve done your bit. You were hot stuff for what, forty-five years? So stop starving yourself. Stop counting alcoholic units. Let go. And fuck the knee replacements. Get a walker that has wheels and a little basket for your shopping. Or don’t go anywhere. Catch up on The Simpsons.”
“You are a serpent,” she said with a toast. “But this woman—with whom your father now spends most of his time—do you have any idea what his trainer looks like?”
A key rattled in the side door. Given the clamor of voices, to her incredulity on this of all evenings, her husband had invited the tri club. It being still nominally his house, Remington was first in the door, at which point he froze. “Put that out right now.”
Deacon would have stirred a milder reaction by meeting his father with a shotgun. “I’m fine, thanks so much for asking.” He took another deep drag before reluctantly crushing his rollup in a dish. “And how are you, sir?”
Remington turned to his wife. “Since when? What’s wrong with you?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“And please put your feet on the floor,” Remington told their son. “We’re going to need all these chairs.”
“Gosh.” Again, Deacon complied in slow motion. “Another lovey-dovey family reunion.”
“We may not be gushy, but we can at least keep it civil.” With effort, Remington stuck out his hand, which Deacon shook with a limp clasp. “Welcome home.”
The club filtered in. They’d done another swim/bike/run day, which the members with jobs could only manage on weekends. As the full Mettle approached, the group had grown jittery and prone to conflict. Cherry DeVries was sometimes weepy. Hank Timmerman had more than once absconded. Chet Mason gave long, uninvited lowdowns on gear, when they’d already bought their gear. Ethan Crick had lost what little sense of humor he’d ever had about his reputation as a hypochondriac. Even Remington had shed his easy self-deprecation, and this evening reacted testily to Chet’s grousing that the rest of the club had to wait repeatedly, hours even, for him to finish each leg of the course—“Well, I got there in the end, didn’t I?”—whereas in times past he’d have made a joke at his own expense. Having completed Mettles before, only Bambi and Sloan retained their insouciance, though they were watchful of their brood. Earlier in the year, the group had returned tired and cocky; now they returned tired and cross.
Remington introduced the club members to Deacon, whose placid expression conveyed that he was not trying to remember their names. With one exception: “Bambi? Seriously? I guess you can call me Thumper then.”
“All right, Thumper.” Unlacing a running shoe on the chair Deacon’s feet had vacated, Bambi put on a pedestal for display what Remington called her artwork.
“You’re one of those lumpy chicks,” Deacon said.
“You could say that.” Unlacing the other shoe, Bambi shot him a once-over glance. “But you’re not one of those lumpy dicks.”
“Nah,” Deacon said with a smile. “I’m just a dick.”
The teasing spirit in which the club had once vied over who was faster had given way to a more acrimonious rivalry with higher stakes. “I only struggled on that hill because the derailleur was jumping gears, so sit on this,” Chet told Hank blackly with a raised middle finger. As Bambi ramped up to exceed her own personal best in Lake Placid, it seemed that she no longer looped back to check on stragglers, but churned neck and neck with Sloan, who eventually pulled well ahead in all three sports. For Bambi, their competition was now tainted with a drop of acid. She played her sex to her advantage off-road. But at the end of the day, Bambi didn’t really like being a girl.
This evening, it was the presence of Deacon Alabaster that really rattled them. The stranger in their midst evinced not the slightest interest in their times. When they cited extraordinary distances with the feigned casualness of name-dropping at parties, he didn’t bat an eye. On reflection, when Serenata spelled out the exploits that his dad would tackle in two weeks, Deacon had acted perfectly unfazed. She might as well have said his father was entering a limerick-writing contest. The club was smugly inured to the raging, transparently insecure “why aren’t you working in a homeless shelter?” type. But the company of the dismissive and blithely unimpressed was kryptonite.
Worse, here was a guy who hadn’t done a calf raise, a deltoid dip, or a bicep curl in his life—a guy whose idea of exercise was carrying a six-pack and bag of corn chips from the 7-Eleven to his car. Yet owing to the aesthetic multiplier effect of two attractive parents, he was handsome—meaning, rivetingly handsome, who-the-fuck-is-that? handsome. In times past, his mother had found this disjunction perplexing or even a touch maddening. Right now, she thought it was great.
Worse still for this crowd, Deacon was hip, a mysterious attribute that her son had embodied since he was eleven or twelve, when he was as popular in the schoolyard as his sister was ignored. During his juvenile delinquent days (assuming they were over) his smooth, aloof, unruffled affect had been infuriating. What exactly hipness comprised was difficult to identify. Suffice it to say that if you needed the texture explained to you then you didn’t have it. If you didn’t have it, you couldn’t go get it, either. Cool was not available for purchase, and it could not be learned.
Thus Deacon drove the tri club to distraction. They were all self-actualizers, and here was this slick customer who epitomized the one characteristic that they could not earn. The only one of their number who evidenced an iota of hipness was Deacon’s father—though Remington’s was an old-fashioned William Powell version, well spoken and well mannered. Sloan passed for hip in Hudson, but he needed the props of those classic cars. Even Bambi was too needy to be hip—and she’d never win the esteem she craved from Deacon, whose unadulterated indifference to everything she valued was not, to all appearances, a pose. Moreover, Bambi reviled defeat, and no gambit better assured victory in any game than refusing to play it in the first place.
For his parents, Deacon’s visits were mostly expensive headaches; by custom, they paid him to leave. But tonight he lent his mother’s skeptics’ corner a welcome clout. To capitalize on this rare plurality of apostates, she texted Tommy to join them. That first summer, Tommy had mooned day after day at their son as he dozed in the backyard hammock. After learning that Deacon was here, she showed up in five minutes flat. Together, the three of them occupied one end of the table, the rowdies at the back of the class.
“Hey, Bambi.” Serenata raised the hardback that Remington was halfway through. “Have you read the new bio of this renowned ultrarunner? Though he’s dead, you know.”
“Donald Ritchie? Yeah, somebody at BruteBody mentioned he left the building last year.”
“I thought it was interesting that he kicked it at only seventy-three.”
“Why interesting?” Bambi said warily. “That’s old enough.”
“Not these days. And he was in pretty bad shape. Diabetes. Lung problems. Actually, he had to stop running altogether at sixty-six. Remington’s age.” Serenata had only scanned the end of the book: the good part.
“So? Is this another Jim Fixx sneer? Ha-ha, the author of The Complete Book of Running keeled over while jogging at fifty-two? So getting off your ass can’t possibly be good for you. Running kills.”
“To establish any correlation between endurance sports and premature morbidity,” Remington instructed his cynical spouse, “one somewhat early death is about as statistically significant as, ‘There was this guy I knew.’” He turned to his trainer. “It’s like my wife here claiming that ‘all the people she’s met’ who’ve had knee replacements can barely walk and get fat. She’d tell you herself that she’s an antisocial misanthrope. So how many strangers are we talking? Two maybe. Three max. I don’t call that scientific.”
“Lots of distance runners die early,” Serenata said. “Heart attacks, mostly.”
“Not at a higher incidence than the general population,” Remington said. “Besides, who says the purpose of elite athletics is to increase longevity? Even if a less taxing existence did mean living longer—to do what? Really, what good is living to a hundred and ten? I’m not that keen getting past seventy.”
“That’s in four years,” she said softly.
“I can add,” he snapped.
Were she to be generous, Serenata could attribute her husband’s irritability to the likelihood that, if she was distraught about the next day’s operation, he was also anxious on her account. But she wasn’t feeling generous.
“Hey, check this out.” Tommy had grabbed the biography and was reading the summary on the back. “This Scotch guy ran a hundred miles at a time, in under twelve hours! That’s like . . .”
“A steady eight-minute mile,” Bambi said. “Mediocre for a marathon, but not bad for four of the fuckers back-to-back.”
“That’s nothing,” Remington said. “Ritchie ran the entire length of Great Britain—eight hundred and forty miles—in eleven days.”
“What was the problem?” Deacon said. “There was a rail strike?”
“You have no respect,” his father said.
Deacon licked the paper of another rollup. “Got that right.”
“During that long UK run,” Serenata read over Tommy’s arm, “he developed ‘a feverish cold’ and then faced ‘vicious head winds and sleet.’ The cold turned into bronchitis . . . He had ‘stomach pains, intestinal blood loss, a sore mouth, regular nose bleeds, chest pains, and torrential rains.’ Some people really know how to vacation.”
“You can’t tell me that you don’t admire that,” Remington charged her.
“So”—Deacon raised the knife with which his mother had tailed the beans—“if I flay myself alive, I’ll finally earn Daddy’s approval.”
“And why would that be admirable?” his father said.
“Suffering for suffering’s sake—what’s the difference?” Deacon said.
“Donald Ritchie set records!” Historically, only restraint borne of his own beatings in childhood had kept Remington from coming to blows with the boy.
“But records for what?” Deacon’s tone remained detached, his slouch languid, but he wasn’t backing down. Twiddling the unlit rollup in one hand, he was still holding the knife in the other. “I could set a record for how long I took to bleed to death.”
Serenata rose as briskly as her knee allowed. “Deacon simply raised the legitimate question of what running the length of any large island in bad weather and poor health actually accomplishes.” She held out her hand for the knife. “Discussion closed.”
Her phone rang: Valeria. She took the call to the back porch. “Mama, I made sure to put it in my diary that you’re getting that operation tomorrow.”
“That’s very nice of you to remember.”
“I asked around at the church, and everybody says it’s terrible! Like, you’re in awful pain for months and months, or even years! Online it says that up to one in five patients will be in pain kind of like, all the time, for the rest of their lives!”
“Thanks, Valeria. That’s very helpful.”
“Well, I think it is helpful! An older gentleman in our congregation said the one thing he wishes somebody had told him ahead of time is what a torment it was going to be. He said it actually tested his faith. He didn’t know why Jesus would put him through such a thing. He still uses a cane, and he got his knee ten years ago.”
“Well, then. It’s kind of you to prepare me.”
“And that’s not all,” Valeria went on.
“Oh, great,” her mother said.
“All that running in place and jumping around you do—that’s well and truly over. I guess you can do an itty-bitty bit of biking. And go on short walks. That’s about it.”
“Actually, with the newer joints, you can play tennis, golf, and even ski.”
“That’s what doctors say up front to get the money, Mama. Then there’s all these exceptions—like, just about everybody—along with the blood clots and faulty hardware they also don’t tell you about. Did you know if you get a ‘deep infection’ they’ll yank the whole thing out again, and they may even cut off your leg?”
“I’m touched that you’ve been googling so vigorously on my account.”
“I’ll be praying for you, Mama.”
“That’s sure to make all the difference, isn’t it? And Deacon tells me you’re due congratulations again.”
“That’s right,” Valeria said, her voice tightening. “Due right around Christmas, like Jesus himself. We’re real happy about it.” But for once she didn’t sound happy. Why, for a moment it seemed she might cry.
“And how’s Nancee doing?”
“I think she’s in the pink. But those pesky therapists have her on what they call an ‘exercise diet.’ It’s the silliest thing! I’m supposed to keep an eye on her, and if she heads upstairs, I have to follow her and make sure she only goes up once.”
After Serenata wrapped up her reassuring family call, Ethan said when she came back inside, “Hey, Sera! Rem just told us your surgery’s tomorrow. We all wanted to wish you good luck.”
“Yeah,” Chet said. “But I heard if you’re in half-okay shape to start with, you get through it a ton easier.” It was the closest anyone in the club had come to acknowledging that Remington’s wife was not, altogether, a slug.
“I was gonna say break a leg,” Bambi said. “But I guess they’re doing that for you, huh?” Cherry chimed in with the compulsive false confidence of the well-meaning. “You’ll be right as rain before you know it!” After Sloan and Hank also expressed greeting-card-grade support, the group moved on to other subjects with palpable relief. The simple scaled-up meal Serenata had halfheartedly entertained suddenly seemed insuperable, and she put the beans in the fridge. Girding for mutilation, she had nothing to spare for these people.
Fielding one more phone call briefly cheered her up. It was Griff, whose very awkwardness about what to say was strangely moving. He promised that when she was up and about he’d teach her to play cribbage. She said it’s a deal. Getting him off the phone was excruciating—neither was a master of social graces—since when you’d already said goodbye and then remained on the phone (he’d add “I’ll be thinking of you, sugar!” and she’d rejoin, “Thanks, I’m so glad you called!”), you’d already used up your arsenal of conclusion. At her wit’s end, she finally cried, “Well, bye, Griff!” and hit the red button as fast as humanly possible.
“Have you gotten back to training, honey?” Cherry was asking Tommy. “Because you look so much better!”
Tommy glowered. “I still look like a jellyfish. I’ve done a little running, but it’s slow and doesn’t feel good. The weird thing is, the dinky distances are harder. They don’t wow anybody, including me. I’m supposed to ‘take it easy,’ but I hate taking it easy. So half the time I really do take it easy, and watch TV instead. Turns out the sky doesn’t fall. While she’s been laid up, too, Serenata and I have been reading her commercial scripts aloud. I’m getting better at sight-reading. I used to need to rehearse, but with VO, especially in the gaming scene, you got to be able to read cold.”
Cherry’s attention wandered as soon as Tommy stopped talking about running. “I’m ashamed to say this, sweetie, but a couple of times now, Sarge has—he’s hit me. He’s never done that before. Last time, he knocked me down. I’ve even wondered if he’s hoping he’ll hurt me bad enough that I can’t compete in Lake Placid.”
“God, that sucks, Cherry,” Tommy said. “But is it really worth it?”
“Of course it’s ‘worth it.’ What do you mean?”
“Well, Sarge is obviously being a jerk, and I guess you could always walk out. Maybe you should. But if you don’t want to do that . . . Is a Mettle worth risking your marriage? I mean, you’ve got those three kids.”
Cherry drew herself up. “I know you’re disappointed, Tommy, but I didn’t think you’d gotten bitter. I can’t believe you’re trying to talk me out of my MettleMan.”
“I was only thinking, you know, in the long run . . .” Tommy said, beating a feeble retreat. “Like, afterward, what have you got, if you don’t have your family?”
“I have my finisher coffee mug, my finisher T-shirt, and my finisher self-respect.” She huffed back to the A-students.
Meanwhile, Hank had discovered the remains of the chenin blanc. Bambi put a hand over his glass. “I thought we all agreed: no booze from now till it’s over.”
“Whatever happened to ‘work hard, play hard’?” Hank said.
“In the home stretch,” she said, “it’s all ‘work hard.’ Now you get high on tri.”
Serenata uncorked a cabernet. Deacon switched to whiskey, and Tommy joined him. Drawn to open bottles, Hank shuffled closer to the punks at the table’s far end.
“I’m thinking about hitting the ultras next year,” Sloan said. “I’m up for Lake Placid, but doing one Mettle and then putting your feet up starts to feel too easy.”
“You mean, the two or three Mettles in a row, or the five?” Chet asked.
“The question,” Sloan posed philosophically, “is whether to do a double or triple first, or go straight to the quintuple. You want to really challenge yourself, right?”
“I can’t hardly imagine getting through one whole triathlon,” Cherry said. “I’m flabbergasted anybody can get up the next morning and do a full Mettle all over again.”
“Hell, Cherry,” Chet said, “I’m not sure what the record is now, but last I checked there’s been at least one guy who’s done thirty—thirty Mettles in thirty days.”
“Seems like an awful lot of bother and expense,” Deacon said. “With one bullet, you can accomplish the same thing in three seconds for fifty cents.”
The go-getters ignored him. “We should aim for thirty-one, then!” Hank declared, flushed from the cabernet he’d chugged from a camouflaging coffee mug.
“Sloan, isn’t talking up the ‘ultras’ demoralizing for your friends?” Serenata asked. “It makes doing only one MettleMan seem like no big deal.” It didn’t occur to anyone that waxing eloquent about outermost feats of strength and stamina in front of a woman on the eve of incapacitating surgery might also be in poor taste.
“Always good to keep your eye on the next mountain,” Sloan said. “Otherwise, you’ve got this flatness problem. You get a huge rush after you cross the finish line, and even the next day—after sleeping fifteen hours—you’re still fired up. But then it’s like, what’s next? You need a longer-term game plan. Without a new goal, you can get kind of low, you know? Like, everything is over, and the best part of your life is behind you.”
“Unbelievable,” Deacon said, pouring another shot. “This shit for you guys is the ‘best part of your life.’ I gotta feel sorry for you fuckers.”
“And what passes for the best part of your life, Thumper?” Bambi asked.
“Banging a sweet kid just past the age of consent, and topping up her tight little box in the morning. Grabbing a pastrami on rye with extra mustard. Boosting my mood with a cost-effective shortcut that doesn’t involve gasping around a reservoir fifty times. Hitting the road to Hudson, and basking in a mother’s love.” Throwing a credibly appreciative glance at Serenata, Deacon just pulled the remark back from sarcasm.
“Sounds great to me!” Tommy clinked her shot glass against Deacon’s and downed it. “But I want some melted Swiss on that pastrami.”
“To each his own, losers,” Bambi said.
“I’m starting to think you’re right,” Chet told Sloan. “The ultras have to be where the money’s at. Like, your routine Mettle is already seeming almost sad, right? To pull in the big-league sponsors, I bet you’ve got to do at least the quintuple. And in good time, too. Not cranking that final chin-up just before the stroke of midnight—”
“Chet, could you put a lid on the big talk?” Ethan interrupted. Seated equidistant between the troublemakers and the teacher’s pets, the ophthalmologist had barely said a word all evening. “You haven’t finished one MettleMan yet.”
“I know,” Chet said. “But Sloan’s right. You gotta keep expecting more of yourself. Like he said, find the next mountain—”
Deacon started crooning “Climb Every Mountain” from The Sound of Music.
“I don’t need another mountain,” Ethan said, once Deacon had forded every stream but before he could follow any rainbows. “Christ, we’re not even through with this Lake Placid nightmare, and you’re already talking about doing three in a row after that, or five, or thirty. Why not sixty, or a hundred? Why not swim, and run, and bike all day, every day, until . . . until what? As for the obvious end point, I hate to say it, but Deacon’s right.”
“Fuck me,” Deacon said. “I’ve never heard that in this house before.”
“I got into tri to begin with to get into better shape,” Ethan said. “To feel better, and to feel better about myself. But I’m not feeling better. I get sick, I’m supposed to keep training through it, so I just get sicker. Basically, all the time, I feel sort of terrible. It’s always something: a strain, a sprain, an inflamed tendon—”
“Wait till your sixties,” Serenata said. “It’s like that without getting out of bed.”
“Well, yeah—half the time, I do, I feel old. Creaky. Achy. Sore. Technically, I guess I’m stronger, but most of the time I feel wiped out. You guys are always ragging on me for being a pussy, but I have a full-time practice. To keep to Bambi’s training schedule, I’ve had to get up at five, and lately four-thirty, or even four. So I’m chronically under-slept. And I’m starting to wonder if this Mettle thing is safe. The distances are unreasonable—”
“They’re supposed to be unreasonable,” Bambi said.
“Yes, Ethan,” Remington said. “The whole idea is intentionally a little crazy.”
“There’s crazy as in wild and crazy, and then there’s crazy as in dangerously fucked-up,” Ethan said, backing his chair out and standing up. “Because I admit it, I’m losing the plot. I thought I did, but lately I don’t understand why we’re doing this anymore. Chet’s right on one point: we’re none of us setting any records. And Deacon’s right, too: even if we were, so what? This thing has ended up taking up a lot of time, and a huge amount of psychic energy, and meanwhile, with all these injuries, I’m actually in worse health. And now I listen to you guys get jacked about the idea of going up yet another level even if we do get through a full Mettle. So I just realized tonight—this stuff is too out for me. I like the idea of that pastrami and Swiss. I like the idea of going for a five-mile run, at a moderate pace, to work up an appetite for dinner. I like the idea of taking a shower, and talking to my wife about something else. In sum, guys: I quit.”
No one said anything as Ethan gathered his things and left.
“Wow,” Cherry said.
“Wow,” Tommy said.
“Face it, he never had the stuff for tri,” Bambi said. “With all those doubts, he had DNF written all over him. Let this be a lesson to all of you. It’s like I’ve warned you before: the one thing you never allow yourself to question is why you’re doing this in the first place. It’s total death. You disappear up your own ass in two minutes. You open the floodgates to the laziness of the body, and you drown in the body’s complaints. It’s like listening to that little dude with horns and a fork on your shoulder. So we’re better off without that softie. All along, he’s just been a drag on our resolve. Ethan Crick is weak.”
Curiously, however, the morale of the remaining stalwarts seemed unaccountably shaken, and they all drifted home.
“They’ll never be the same again,” Serenata said while still abed early the next morning. She’d been wide-eyed for hours. “They won’t look the same, they won’t feel the same—even if the operations go technically well. I’ll always set off metal detectors. I’ll have become part machine. I’m en route to becoming inanimate.”
“You’ll still be a ways from Robocop,” Remington said. “Besides, you don’t want your knees to be the same. They hurt like hell.”
“On the other side of these two carve-ups, they’ll hurt far worse.”
“Why are you so apocalyptic? The whole point is to improve your mobility. Which is why lots of people approach joint replacement with optimism and good cheer.”
“So I have an attitude problem.” She got up and jerked on a robe, but there was no purpose to heading downstairs; she wasn’t allowed to eat or drink as of the previous midnight. Not even being able to make coffee deprived the morning of structure. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the paper. There was nothing to do but wait.
“You’ve actually said this means your life is over,” he said, “and you might rather be dead. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“The way I did when you told your club that you don’t want to live past seventy.”
He raised a hand in concession. “Fair enough. Let’s make that seventy-two.”
“Ever since your marathon jag, you’ve focused entirely on physical competence. So for you to act mystified why I might regard becoming a hopeless cripple as something of the end of the party is hypocritical beyond belief.”
“Might your attitude problem negatively affect your surgery’s outcome?”
“That’s New Age hooey.” She tied the belt of her robe into a furious knot. “Do you think you can talk me into ‘optimism and good cheer’? Why does the fact that this surgery cuts me to the quick, and undermines who I am to myself, and threatens me with having to become someone I don’t want to be—why is that such an affront to you? Why do I have to feel the way you tell me to? Because all I’m hearing here is that this isn’t happening to you.”
“We’re in different places right now.”
“You knew this surgery was on my docket. You chose to put yourself in a different place. You’ve removed yourself from me, and run off to Tri World, like Peter Pan to the Island of Lost Boys. I think you were afraid of really staying with me through this. As if I might suck you into my creepy old-age problems. Just like last night—you dragged that whole club back here with you, so you wouldn’t have to be alone with your wife, who’d be crawling the walls. If you picture our marriage as a room, you’ve marched to a far corner. You’ve left me all by myself. This tri thing, I thought at first it was your angry overreaction to Lucinda Okonkwo, but now I cotton: it’s marital desertion, pure and simple. Except you don’t need to find your own apartment.”
“I appreciate that you’re anxious, but you’re being irrational—”
“Deacon saw it in a heartbeat. This perverse pursuit of yours is all about me. About becoming me, or replacing me, or besting me—”
“It’s only ‘about you’ insofar as I’d have thought, at the outset, that I’d earn your regard!”
“I already held you in high regard!”
“But I need to hold myself in high regard. And at my age, I have only so much time left. If I’m going to do triathlon, it’s now or never.”
“So what’s wrong with never?”
To her astonishment, he had literally walked to a far corner of the bedroom, where he stood naked, hands on hips. “I’ve sometimes fantasized about what it would be like to have a wife through my own valley of the shadow of death who would make me fear no evil, because thou art with me. Who wished me the best and would be waiting on the finish line with a kiss and champagne.”
“True, I was thinking more like cava.”
“The close proximity of your knee replacement and my MettleMan isn’t ideal.”
“Huh. Yuh think?”
“But the date for Lake Placid has been set for over a year.”
“So this near-synchronicity is my fault.”
“No one’s fault. It’s merely unfortunate.”
“For whom?”
“For us both. I won’t be as helpful during your recovery as I’d have liked to be.”
“I think that pretty much makes it unfortunate for me. As for the coincidence, it isn’t one, is it? It was foreseeable, more or less. You practically planned it.”
“I did no such thing. And the last thing I planned is Deacon’s showing up now of all times, too. I’m sorry. It’s an extra logistical burden, and he’s no ocean of sympathy.”
“I’ve found him a surprising comfort. And if I have trouble with pain management, at least I know where to get opioids.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Not long ago, you would have thought so. You’ve fallen fatally under the spell of the over-earnest . . . What are you doing?”
“Getting into my cycling clothes, obviously.”
“I thought you were going to take me to the hospital.”
“I’m planning on it. But I’m meeting Bambi in half an hour. We’re working on my gearing technique, going for lower resistance and a higher RPM. Since you don’t have to go to Columbia Memorial until noon, I can fit in a thirty miler.”
They had always been a talky couple, but the danger of all those words was talking around feelings, or over feelings, or about feelings by way of avoiding actually feeling feelings, and the real moments between them took place in the interstices between the words. This interstice was more than a crack; it was widening to a maw.
“Look,” he said, noticing the absence of a sprightly reply. “We’re hardly in the Garden of Gethsemane, are we?”