“Right, I’ve bled and treadmilled and wired up for you, and got the all clear,” Remington announced just inside the door. The checkup had not been his idea, and he was humoring her. “Doctor Eden located a minor cardiac irregularity, but he assured me it’s common, and nothing to worry about.”
“What irregularity?” He’d not have wanted to mention any negative findings at all, but luckily for Serenata her husband was a stickler for the truth.
“I don’t remember what it’s called.” He had chosen not to remember, to prevent her from googling for alarmism. “The point is, I’m fine. Eden sees no reason I can’t run a marathon, so long as I up the distance gradually and stick to the program.”
“What program?”
“I’m following an online schedule.” His tone was officious.
“You couldn’t figure out how to run a little bit farther every week by yourself?” she said to his back as he returned to the car.
“It’s not that simple,” he said, lugging two sagging bags from the backseat. “You have to set goals, do longer runs, and shorter ones in between. Vary the pace. There’s a science to it. You’ve never run a marathon yourself—”
“So now we’re pulling rank.”
“I don’t understand this disdain you have for any undertaking that involves anyone else.” He clanked the bags beside the dining table. “Why does my consulting the considerable literature on this subject seem to you a sign of weakness? Your declared hostility to the rest of the human race is what’s weak. It puts you at an evolutionary disadvantage. Humble yourself, and you can learn from other people’s mistakes.”
“What’s all this?”
“Free weights. I need to work on my core.”
Serenata battled a wave of mental nausea. “What’s wrong with the word torso? And I have free weights. You could have borrowed mine.”
“Your attitude from the get-go has hardly been share and share alike. It’s better for me to have my own equipment. I thought I’d use one of those empty bedrooms for my home gym.”
“You mean you’ll commandeer a bedroom,” she said.
“Haven’t you commandeered one for your own gyrations?”
“You also have your study. Though I’m not sure what it’s for.”
“You can’t possibly be goading me for being unemployed. Tell me that’s not what you meant.”
“No. Or maybe, but that was unkind. I disliked that word gyrations. I was getting a dig in back. Sorry.”
“A bigger dig. I retract ‘gyrations.’ Workouts. I’ll call them whatever you like.”
“Oh, go ahead then, take one of the extra bedrooms. This is a large house, and we’re hardly the European powers carving up the Middle East after World War One.”
She took Remington’s face in her hands and kissed his forehead, to bless their restored truce. It was past six thirty p.m., and in Serenataland, dinner had to be earned.
She slipped upstairs and changed into grubby shorts and a tattered T, anxious whether that “cardiac irregularity” was truly nothing to fret about; doctor-patient confidentiality precluded getting the real lowdown. Although she trusted that her husband wouldn’t lie about that “all clear,” he was so invested in running this Saratoga Springs event that he could have trivialized an anomaly that was cause for concern.
Of more immediate concern was the snippy tenor of their interchanges since October, which displayed little of the dry, Thin Man repartee polished early in their marriage. The past two-plus months had been punctuated by the cheap potshots of empty nesters who without the children underfoot had nothing in common, although years ago their own return to just the two of them had come as a relief. It rankled that she got no credit for restraint. As of earlier this December, after all the training, scores of hours online, and nearly two thousand bucks in gear (she’d kept track), he’d worked up to a respectable five-mile run. But his pace, if anything, had grown even slower! Having completed that landmark distance last Saturday in well over an hour, he had to be clocking a thirteen-minute mile. He didn’t faintly appreciate the self-control required to keep from making fun of him.
As ever, this segment of the day inspired nothing like eagerness, and if it weren’t getting so late she’d have found herself seized with a sudden determination to fold the laundry. She was always amused by sluggards who explained, you see, they “just didn’t enjoy exercise.” Granted, some sports were diverting enough to distract from the effort they demanded, but straight-up exercise was odious, and a sane person approached it with dread. This evening was scheduled for a raft of “gyrations” focused solely on her legs, which her orthopedist had stressed could not be too strong, a declaration that this patient took as a dare. Of her variety pack of masochisms, the legs routine was streets ahead of the rest in sheer tedium.
She kept the radiator valve closed, so it was freezing in here—leaving exertion as the only route to warming up. As for the TV, it was large, loud, smart, and replete with hundreds of cable channels, as well as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. As emergency backup, the hard drive was bursting with recorded films and box sets. With no television, she’d have skipped this whole ninety-minute folderol of holds and lunges and raises and pulls, and shot herself in the head.
Yet the range of optimal on-screen fare was narrow. It shouldn’t be too serious, because she couldn’t spare the energy to be moved. It shouldn’t be too funny, because she couldn’t spare the energy to laugh. Subtitles were out. Documentaries were okay, so long as they weren’t too arty. What you wanted was good crap. Unfortunately, she’d finished the last season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which had hit the sweet spot.
Opting lazily for network news, she looped a nylon strap around an ankle and closed the door on its anchor. Tugging through the four stations of the hip-tightening raises—stretching the black rubber TheraBand by pulling the straightened leg (theoretically straightened; suffering “loss of extension,” the right one was permanently crooked) forward, to the right, backward, and from the left, twenty times each direction—she considered what proportion of her life so far had been devoted to this sort of monotony. Ninety minutes of a sixteen-hour waking day was . . . It was impossible to make mathematical calculations while tracking repetitions (one, two, three, four . . . ). Suffice it to say that the percentage was high: a source of pride, or horror? Drawing a last breath, would she echo Jackie Kennedy’s apocryphal deathbed keen, “Why on earth did I do all those sit-ups?” Serenata had already spent a massive whack of her discretionary time on this earth deliberately boring herself to death. (Left leg, second set.) One, two, three, four . . . She’d also spent a staggering amount of her short finite life counting. Like a kindergartner.
In the pharmaceutical ads on-screen, square-faced older men with full heads of salt-and-pepper hair joined comely wives in bright leggings and matching jackets, a colorist’s gray streak at the women’s hairline a sole gesture toward the geriatric. Despite the debilitations of whatever ailment the actors were aping, in every single advertisement the sufferers were running along a riverside, cycling country roads, or hiking woodsy trails. They were always laughing, which made you wonder what about this ceaseless bustle was so hilarious.
Oldsters in drug commercials used to stare sweetly out the window at the setting sun while pinching china teacups. Something had happened, and Serenata had made a study of it. The transformation had been gradual at first, insidious even, and then, in its perfect universality, abrupt.
The change had been most striking in relation to women, who throughout her girlhood might have yearned to be slender, but regarded discernable muscles on the female form as unsightly, unseemly, and butch. Her own enthusiasm for well-defined biceps was peculiar if not suspect for the time, and in short sleeves she’d more than once been catcalled as a “dyke.”
Fast-forward to the present. Models marketing even classically feminine products like fragrances wore running bras. Silhouettes in magazines were still photoshopped to a narrowness that wouldn’t allow for kidneys, but the ripples like windblown sand across bare midriffs were new. On the sides of buses, women’s blown-up shoulders were cut, their thighs chiseled. On billboards, even lovelies languishing in nightwear slipped calves from the slits of their negligees that were full and taut. With so much money on the line, advertising held a well-researched mirror to the modern ideal, and in the commercial representation of today’s daily life, beguiling young ladies were consistently pictured kayaking, mountain climbing, swimming laps, taking spinning classes, overdoing it on rowing machines, and pummeling punching bags. Keen awareness that Serenata of all people should have found her sex’s contemporary aspiration to strength culturally auspicious and altogether marvelous made the frenzied female hard bodies bannered across the marketing landscape only the more grating.
Placing her right foot on the seat of a wooden chair, she pushed the left foot off the floor, stood on the right foot, and brought the left knee chest-high. A hundred on the right, a hundred on the left, exhaling on every rise. The hard part was keeping your balance.
Mind, she regarded this ninety-minute tune-up as no nobler than a tune-up for a car. Conscientious motorists maintained their automobiles, but didn’t expect a medal for changing the oil. She, too, was trying to be the responsible custodian of a mechanism. This was a devotion, but not in a sacred sense. She was devoted to the upkeep of the vehicle out of sheer self-interest: it got her from place to place.
Pulling the Velcro taut on the two ten-pound ankle weights, Serenata was reminded by a sharp twinge that were she ever to have considered a daily athletic ordeal as exhibiting moral properties—as raising her high on a ladder of enlightenment or hoisting her to a superior position in the social hierarchy—these ritual efforts at redemption had backfired. She was being punished. Dr. Churchwell’s diagnosis had been insultingly prosaic, grandmotherly, and out-to-pasture: osteoarthritis, in both knees, in all three sectors bone-on-bone. Absent a familial history of the disease, he’d pronounced dismissively that the condition had clearly resulted from “overuse.” The expectation that, if not virtue, then at least good practice would necessarily be rewarded was naive, but that didn’t alter the ferocity of the feeling—that it wasn’t fair.
At dinner, Remington had an agenda.
“It hasn’t escaped me,” he began, “that you experience my discovery of endurance sport as something being taken away from you. So I would like us to examine what I can only call your sense of ownership of physical fitness.”
“I suppose I do own it,” she said coolly.
“You invented it?”
“I invented it for myself.”
“So the Greeks who ran the original twenty-six point two miles from the town of Marathon to Athens—they sent a time traveler to steal the idea from you.”
“That would be unlikely. Since, as you observed so pointedly earlier this evening, I’ve never run a marathon, have I? Though I have run sixteen, seventeen miles in one go—that time I got lost in Australia, and had to keep going until I located civilization again—so I could probably have managed another ten, if I were determined to.”
“You’ve always said that if you ever ran a marathon you’d do it by yourself.”
“That’s right.”
“Except that now you never will.”
“Well, this isn’t exactly Make Serenata Feel Better Day, is it?”
“The only way you’d ever have gotten around to running twenty-six point two miles on any given day is by participating in a group event, the way everyone else does it.”
“I find large numbers of people doing the same thing in one place a little repulsive.”
“No, you find it a lot repulsive. But for normal people, the company of many others engaged in a common pursuit is uplifting.”
“I’m incapable of losing myself in a crowd. I have no desire to melt into some giant pulsating amoeba.”
“Does it ever occur to you that maybe you’re missing out on something?”
Serenata considered. “No.”
“You feel above people capable of collective experience.”
“Yes, I suppose I do. Church services, football games, and even rock concerts leave me cold. Maybe that seems a pity, but I’d also remain unmoved by swastika-waving rallies for National Socialism.”
“As far as I know, you aren’t a member of anything. Not a professional organization, not a political party; I can’t even remember your joining a private library. So at least you’re consistent, though the purity of your lack of communal ties is a little chilling. But I want to get back to this ownership business.”
“All right,” she said tolerantly.
“Think about it: all the sports people play, and have done for generations. You’re so proud of doing ‘push-ups,’ but long ago someone else coined the term. The record books are strewn with achievements beyond your ken: the first woman to swim the English Channel. The bicycle you rode to Café Fiorello, and have insisted on riding to restaurants ever since: you didn’t invent the bicycle—”
“Ownership is a sensation. I can feel I own something without being given formal title to it.”
“But ‘owning’ physical fitness isn’t just irrational. It’s mentally ill. Furthermore, for you and me right now, your lunatic patrolling of this territory is highly problematic.”
“Oh, don’t use that word. According to Tommy, problematic is now a label for the trespasses of white people who are unfathomably evil.”
“Meaning, white people, period. The unfathomably evil part goes without saying.”
For a moment, they were on the same side.
“You understand much better than you’re pretending,” she said. “Obviously, plenty of people before me have run around, and jumped up and down, and biked places—though nowhere near the number who’ve discovered the bicycle now, nowhere near. Obviously, there’s such a thing as the professional athlete, too—which isn’t what we’re talking about. Suddenly you turn on the TV, and all the characters are in the gym. For the last several years, the one topic guaranteed to shoot to the top of the Most Popular list on the New York Times website is anything whatsoever to do with exercise. About the only articles capable of nudging a recommendation of interval training out of first place are the ones touting the health-giving properties of red wine. Meanwhile, magazines are crammed with profiles of icons who run fifty miles a day. Or seventy-five, or a hundred. Marathons—sweetie, marathons are old hat. You’re supposed to run a plain old marathon before breakfast.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“I’m not trying to be helpful. I’m trying to explain how I feel. And I’m observing that your turning to exercise for absolution, or a purpose in life, has been imposed on you from the outside. It’s a contagion, like herpes. You’ve always been more suggestible than I am.”
“If according to you the whole country is suddenly consumed with fitness, how come Americans keep getting fatter?”
“Because this tsunami of a social tide isn’t a matter of results. It has to do with what people aspire to. Nobody cares anymore about getting to Italy before they die, or reading Moby-Dick. Goodness, I don’t even think they all want to write a novel themselves anymore. It’s all about seizing on some extreme athletic event, after which presumably they’ll sit on the right hand of God the Father.”
“I think the rising popularity of endurance sports bothers you because you’re being beaten at your own game. A lot more ordinary amateurs are pushing their limits beyond what you ever have, isn’t that right?”
“Do I feel like my comparatively minor league gyrations are being shown up? Yeah. I probably do.”
“In which case, if I complete that marathon in April, a distance you’ve assumed for years that you could handle—and I tend to agree, though you’ve never tested yourself, so now we’ll never know—your own husband will show you up.”
“Is that your intention?”
“No it isn’t, and correcting that misimpression is one reason I wanted to have this conversation.”
“So far, it’s been closer to an interrogation.”
“I also think you resent the fact that fitness has become more exalted at the same time that you’re growing—somewhat prematurely at sixty—increasingly infirm.”
“Well, congratulations, Sherlock.”
“I meant that sympathetically.”
“It didn’t sound sympathetic. But if you are trying to beat me at my own game, even if you claim you’re not—triumphing over a cripple seems like cheating.”
“To the contrary, if you had the cartilage for it, I might have proposed that we run the race this spring together.”
“Liar,” she said. “You want credit for that cozy idea, but you can only suggest it because you know it’s impossible.”
“Who knows what’s going to be possible, after you finally bite the bullet and get knee replacements.”
“Do you realize what they do? I forced myself to look it up. They actually saw off the ends of your bones. In videos on YouTube, the doctors and nurses all put on, like, welding masks, to keep off all the blood spatter. One guy who refused general anesthesia described online how his whole body vibrated and he could hear the earsplitting rasp of the blade, as if he weren’t in a hospital but on a construction site. They remove the patella and replace your kneecap with a piece of plastic. They’ll throw my knees in the wastebasket. And pound metal knobs into my tibias and thighbones, bam, bam, bam, the way you sink a wedge in a log to split firewood.”
“Knee replacements have become much more commonplace—”
“Just because you do something often doesn’t preclude it being a big deal. These operations don’t always go according to plan, either, because no major surgery does. I could end up with chronic pain, chronic inflammation, or catastrophic infection.”
Remington sighed. “I’m so sorry you may have to go through this.”
“Yes. Yes, I know you are.” She took his hand. “But if it goes wrong, that operation could ruin my life.”
“Isn’t that an exaggeration?”
“No,” she said readily. “I would have to become someone else. We’d both suffer a bereavement. So if Churchwell is right, you have eighteen months at the outside of being assured the company of the woman you married.”
“You’d still be the woman I married with stumps at the end of your thighs.”
“Oh, how I wish that were true. Unfortunately, emotions like bitterness and acrimony spread like potato blight. Already when I read about those superheroes running ultramarathons all day long, I think: just you wait. You’ll end up on a gurney in the shadow of a surgical saw in no time, you fucking idiots. The vision fills me with glee.”
“You do have a spiteful side.”
“Side? I don’t think it’s just a side.” Behind closed doors, one of the joys of their marriage was mutual permission to be horrid.
They rose to collect the dishes, whose remaining tidbits had long before congealed. “You know, this recent fetishizing of fitness has a particular texture to it,” Serenata said. “You described athleticism as having become ‘exalted.’ That’s an apt word. But I’ve never seen exercise as exalted. It’s biological housework, like vacuuming the living room rug. These days, to wear yourself out is to attain a state of holiness. All these newbies seem to think that they’re making the leap from man to god. This . . . sanctimony, this . . . self-importance. It’s started to contaminate the flavor of my own workouts, like that metallic taste in my mouth when I was pregnant. So I worry that, well . . . I don’t want that anointed, pseudo-Nazi narcissism to infect you, too.”
“You’re afraid I’m going to become an asshole,” Remington surmised. “But, my darling wife, and I say this as affectionately as one can: you’re the asshole.”
“Well! I’m not sure one can say that affectionately, darling husband.”
“Regular, vigorous exercise helps to maintain a healthy weight. It can put type two diabetes into remission, reduces the likelihood of cancer, and may even help diseases like Parkinson’s. It improves your sleep. It promotes longevity and mental acuity, and it’s often more effective than medication for treating depression—”
“So you’re one of the readers driving all those articles to the Number One slot.”
“Not to mention,” he continued, “that you might find a husband’s better toned body more attractive. But your reaction to your compatriots becoming more active is despair. You want to hog all the benefits of your lifelong habits to yourself. When you do something, it’s a wise, considered discipline, and when everyone else does the same thing, it’s a disgusting fad. So: you’re the asshole.”
Serenata laughed. “Fine, I’m an asshole. Except it doesn’t matter how I feel. I can sit there stewing in silent rage that all these other cyclists are suddenly glomming around me at intersections. Not a single one of them will forgo the healthful benefits of cycling and throw the contraption back in the cellar—all because they picked up strange, terrifying waves of hostility emanating from a crazed-looking older woman gripping her handlebars with white knuckles. Emotions, like opinions, are entertainment. If I celebrated this athletic revolution instead, would a single extra American pick up a barbell? No. And I’m not the rah-rah type. So it amuses me to be resentful instead.”
“But it does matter,” Remington said with sudden seriousness, placing a dishwatery hand on her cheek, “how you feel about me.”
In January, Serenata acted on the theory that it was especially after the holidays when old people got lonely. Relatives could be tempted to use having been doting at Christmas as an excuse to skate for a while.
Surveying the streets on the short walk over, she speculated what it was about Hudson that conveyed the impression that the town wasn’t exactly flourishing. All the chain-link fences weren’t rusted, but some of them were. On a given block, only one building might be boarded, but that created an economic and aesthetic ambiance in considerable contrast to a block on which none of the buildings was boarded. Several businesses along Warren Street were perky and new—often given to wince-inducing wordplay, like Flower Kraut, or Mane Street Hair Styles—but their aura of optimism seemed of the delusional sort. Most instilled a powerful inkling that they weren’t going to make it. Church windows were masked with protective sheets of plexiglass, making the stained glass look black, as well as a little hostile, as if ill-behaved local youth with poor prospects might throw rocks. More than one church having been deconsecrated and repurposed planted the suspicion that the congregations of those that remained were on the elderly side and dwindling.
The small town of six thousand people or so was holding up better than most in the region. If you kept abreast of which perky cafés were still open, you could sit down to a decent cappuccino. There were properly up-market restaurants for a passable meal. The train station was on the Hudson Line, which ran directly to the city on a picturesque journey along the river; thus the town benefitted from a range of weekenders and wealthy New Yorkers with summer houses and their visitors, who might linger for a drink or a poke around the antique stores before escaping to scenic verandas in the Berkshires. Nevertheless, as a place to remain rather than pass through, Hudson had a beleaguered feel, as did anywhere whose underlying economy was too dependent on a hospital.
Remington had grown up here. The tendency with small hometowns was to either revile them and flee, or romanticize them—having fled. Her husband had made the mistake of doing both. Confiningly provincial only became charmingly provincial from a distance. Even in his teens, he’d leaped at any excuse to streak south to civilization. When they’d needed to leave Albany if only for its associations, Hudson had beckoned as a safe, comfortingly familiar bolt-hole for the licking of wounds. Perhaps it was predictable in retrospect that Remington was already going stir-crazy. Having sampled the gamut of her country’s geography, Serenata never much cared where she was; she was her own location. But anyone ending up precisely where he started couldn’t help but fear that in the interim he had gone nowhere. She wished her husband were able to infer that the same experience of stasis and even of doom was bound to issue from running a marathon, once his heart rate settled and his exorbitant sneakers had lost their noxious smell. Lo, there you were, where you’d begun, and nothing had changed.
“Please don’t get up!” Serenata shouted through the front door. “You know I’ve got a key. I only ring the bell to give you fair warning.”
The remonstration was wasted. Griff Alabaster had still not relinquished the protocols of hospitality—not that he’d ever been that polite, but he didn’t want to be treated like an invalid. By the time she entered from the foyer, he’d struggled to a stand, and was negotiating the obstacle course of his cluttered living room. Refusing the indignity of a walker, her father-in-law planted his cane before him and pulled. Wavering with the instability of the high seas, he traversed the floorboards as if poling a boat.
“Just you today, sugar?”
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re stuck with just me,” she said with a smile, removing the shepherd’s pie from her tote. She wondered if he didn’t prefer it when she visited alone. He’d long been sweet on her, embarrassingly so. His wife, Margaret, had been industrious but unassuming. She’d only been to secretarial school (she’d picked up her younger son’s distinguished-sounding Christian name from the typewriter company); before the industry in Hudson collapsed, she abetted the family’s meager income by cleaning fish. When the dowdy, compulsively self-deprecating woman was still alive, her trim, arty daughter-in-law had made Margaret jealous.
“I swear, I saw that boy more often when you folks lived in Albany,” Griff said, “’stead of six blocks east.”
“Well, you know how seriously he’s preparing for that marathon in April!” she said, trying to convey chirpy enthusiasm as she carried the casserole to the kitchen. She’d paid Tommy to clean the place a couple of days before, and the counters were filthy again.
This whole house wasn’t exactly messy, but it never changed, except in that steady, inexorable way that you didn’t notice when witnessing the decay day by day. The faded floral curtains were often drawn during the daytime to skip the bother of opening and closing them again. Cheap reproductions of Old Masters in homemade wooden frames had light-bleached, until the oils looked like watercolors. It would never have occurred to Griff to buy new throw pillows, much less new furniture, but all the paddings had flattened and exuded cough-inducing dust if you plumped them up. The heavy leather coat he’d worn to work in cold weather was still on its hook in the catchall utility room off the kitchen, but the garment had stiffened into a kind of mounted hunting trophy. The living room walls were darkened by years of an open fire; the kitchen was mottled with stains in corners that Tommy found hard to reach. Though the trinkets littering every available surface weren’t likely to Griff’s taste—china figurines of milkmaids—they’d been chosen by his late wife, and perhaps more importantly had always occupied a precise location, where they would therefore remain for eternity. Griff gave Tommy no end of grief if while dusting she returned the empty milk-glass candy dish two inches from its appointed perch.
Serenata’s father-in-law couldn’t bear the notion of a home as opposed to his own, but maintaining the viability of his independence was in Remington’s and her interest as well. A nursing facility would necessitate selling this house, whose proceeds would evaporate from monthly fees. Her own parents had died in debt, like good Americans. Griff’s expiring in situ was their only chance at a modest inheritance—which, what with Remington’s punitively reduced pension, the unreliability of her freelance work, a real estate downturn that had shrunk the equity in the Albany house, and a steady drain from two grown children who never seemed to quite get their adult acts together, they might need.
“In my day,” her father-in-law called, “you got paid to tucker yourself out!”
“Exhaustion has become an industry,” she said, back from the kitchen. “Just think! These days, you could allow people to carry all that lumber you lugged around, and hoist your steel beams for you, and you could charge them for the privilege. Just don’t call it a ‘building site,’ but a ‘sports center.’ Oh, and we’d have to come up with a snappy name—so instead of Pilates, or CrossFit, you could call your regimen . . . Erection.”
Griff emitted a wheezy laugh as he sank into his saggy brown recliner. “You have a mind like a cesspit, kiddo.”
“I think Erection is inspired. You could trademark the term—just change the C to a K—and start a franchise. Your membership, being gluttons for exercise, could dig foundations, and frame buildings, and hand-plow access roads with miserable little shovels—all the while paying a stiff monthly fee. You’d make a fortune. The income from selling off the actual structures they built would be incidental chump change.”
“Folks used to look down on a body for working with his hands,” Griff said as she settled in the wing chair once reserved for his wife. “Earning your crust by breaking your back not only landed you in an early grave, but got no respect. Including from my sons, I’m sorry to say.”
“You’re hardly landing in an early grave, Griff, at eighty-eight. Still, I don’t think manual labor gets any more respect now than it ever did. Maybe that’s why ‘Erektion’ would never work: lately you only get credit for running yourself ragged to the point of collapse if by doing so you accomplish absolutely nothing.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I am one to talk. And I have the knees to prove it.”
“Never forget your nipping upstairs to put on them skimpy red shorts, first time you crossed this threshold,” he reminisced (again). “Rushed out the door without a word, leaving poor Remy to explain—with the chicken steaming on the table. Margaret was livid.” His wife hadn’t been the only one who was livid—Griff had lit into quite a tirade when the new girlfriend returned from her ten-mile run—but over the years the anecdote had softened.
Much like Griff himself. His forearms broad and scarred, Remington’s father had been a burly man prone to rages. A drinker (who still put away more stout than his doctors advised), he’d doled out a fair share of corporal punishment as a father, and by the time they met, the man still wielded a brutal frankness like the retired tool belt with which he’d beaten his sons. She’d found him intimidating. The ease with which they could speak now was hard won.
But then, his figure had grown far less imposing. After forty-some years of physical toil, ill health had forced him to retire; his joints were gravel, and he was suffering from chronic back pain. In the last decade, Griff had shrunk like a parade float with a slow leak—an impression only heightened by his insistence on wearing his old forest-green Hudson Valley Construction work clothes, which dwarfed him now. His default expression of belligerence had over the years been replaced by one of wariness—the same emotion, inverted. It was not in his interest to alienate his caretakers, and to a degree his more amiable latter-day bearing was calculated.
She missed being afraid of him. Griffith Alabaster had been a formidable man, and though he’d never gone to college—the minimal importance of which was only apparent to those who had—he was smart. Even now, he had his lapses, but was nowhere near senile.
“What bee’s got under Remy’s bonnet? Years of urban planning and mass transit and traffic flow, and suddenly all I hear about is jogging. That silly business at the DOT must have something to do with it.”
“Oh, it’s in the mix. He needs distraction. As hobbies go, running is probably better than taxidermy, or becoming a drunk. Though come to think of it, taxidermy might interest me more. Foxes poised with bared teeth in the basement? I’d be enchanted.”
“Only thing worse than working,” Griff declared, “is not working.”
“But he’s not going to get another job at sixty-four. And Remington could be looking at another thirty years. I hate to think of those three decades as time to kill.”
“Tell me about it,” Griff said.
“He’s taken an indignant line. But on some level, he’s ashamed. No one wants to leave a job of such long standing with his tail between his legs. I’m sure he feels self-conscious about how it turned out, and worries he’s let me down. Let you down, too.”
“Truth be told, I was relieved to learn that boy has a temper to lose.”
“He didn’t used to be like this, you know. So imperturbable, so steady-state.”
Indeed, Remington’s most taxing professional achievement was learning to keep his mouth shut. But self-control was one of those virulent capacities that, ironically, was hard to control. The last few years in Albany, he’d grown laconic even at home, as if to speak his mind would encourage bad habits. When he did talk, he cloaked all his remarks in a disguising mildness, so that listening from the next room you could never tell if he was noting the loss of a sock in the last load of laundry or saying goodbye before blowing his brains out.
“He acted like a man for five seconds, and paid the price,” Griff said. “I turn on the TV lately, and there’s all these men got their willies chopped off, ’cause they feel like girls. I don’t doubt it. They act like girls. Real men’ve got rare as hen’s teeth.”
“Mm,” Serenata said noncommittally. “Possibly some men don’t always feel up to being the responsible one, the expert, the authority. The one who has to be strong and confident. Always the protector, never the protected. That’s a tall order. Women nowadays get to choose. We squeal and make the men kill the water bug in the kitchen, and then when anyone questions our courage in the face of threat, we can get on our high horse and act insulted. Pretty good deal, when you think about it. We can be world-beaters, and run whole companies, and then claim to be traumatized by a hand on our knee when helplessness is politically useful. Men aren’t really given that option. And they’re continually set up to look like disappointments. Because masculinity as an ideal is pretty ridiculous. Then if they do improbably succeed in being fierce, and fearless, and emotionally impassive no matter what horrors befall them—pillars of might and right and agency, slaying the dragons every which way, well—that’s only to be expected, isn’t it? Lose-lose. Maybe it’s no wonder that so many of them want to wear a dress.”
“Remy wants to wear a dress?”
“Not last I checked my closet.”
“But he finds being a man a terrible cross to bear.”
“No, I think he’s worn the weight of his sex quite lightly. But he does find the current climate of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, unfair. Go soft, and you’re a sissy. Keep holding up the side for the team, and you’re not only a bully, but a relic.”
“I put in a long day’s work supporting my family, and I didn’t see that as a choice. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, either.”
“Neither does Remington. Underneath all that calm and placidity, he’s homicidal. And he’d like to kill someone in particular.”
“But he ain’t murdering anybody. He’s jogging for twenty miles. What’s that prove?”
“Twenty-six point two miles,” she corrected. “Oh, and you must have noticed that he’s dropped a couple of pounds.”
“Big whoop.” Griff had dropped fifty by accident. “I’d think better of his figure if he slimmed down by bringing me in some firewood. Down to sticks last week, till Tommy stopped by.”
“She must’ve leaped at the job.”
“How’d you know?”
“More steps,” Serenata said enigmatically. “But now that you mention it . . .”
She brought in two wheelbarrow loads from the back, mindful to remember kindling as well. Stacking the logs by the fireplace, she asked diffidently, “Should you still be having open fires? With flying sparks . . . What if you fall asleep?”
“I built more fires than you fixed hot dinners. Only decent thing about winter. I pull that mesh curtain round. I’m old, not a dummy.”
“Would you like me to build you one? It’s getting dark.”
“Wish you wouldn’t. Have my own way of laying the logs, and you’d pile ’em different—”
“And you’d bite my head off.”
“I don’t got that much to do. Nice point in the day, laying the night’s fire. Guess I enjoy it.”
She focused on her hands as she spanked off the grime. “You know, given that Remington was never very athletic . . . Might you ever consider venturing some appreciative comment, like, I don’t know, ‘You’ve really surprised me, my boy!’ or ‘Good show, kid!’ or even—”
“No, and I don’t plan to.” He’d cut her off with a forcefulness that took her aback. “You’re a mother, so you should know this yourself. It’s a right pain in the rear to have children always expecting you to pat them on the head for whatever they’ve a notion you ought to admire. You always got to bear in mind if you say the wrong thing—and ask Remy, I guess I said the wrong thing plenty—they’ll end up bawling in the corner and you’ll be sorry. So when they’re small, you indulge them. You magnet their crummy drawings to the fridge. But once they’re grown, they can’t expect to be treated like adults, and at the same time expect the empty compliments you chucked them when they were kids. Remy got to live with my real opinions, and suck it up. I was right impressed when that boy drew a line in the sand at the DOT. That respect’s freely given. But at my age, I should be past the point where just ’cause I’m his father I got to play pretend in case I hurt his feelings. No grown man over sixty should still be holding out for his daddy’s damned approval. Tell me, lamb chop, that you don’t also find this whole marathon malarkey tiresome as all get-out.”
She took a breath, and chose her words with care. “If it’s important to my husband, then I wish him the best. But as an answer to what to do with the next tranche of his life, I do find endurance sport a little . . . thin.” She was about to add more, and pulled up short.
“It’s vain,” Griff announced.
“The race at least gives him a goal.” This qualified as a brave stab at sticking up for her husband, surely. “I’ll speak for myself, but one’s sixties do seem difficult. I guess all ages are difficult. And maybe being your age is even harder. But for Remington and me, there’s just not that much to look forward to.”
“Anticipation’s overrated. For years I was looking forward to the days I’d get to sleep in. I been at liberty to sleep till noon since 1994, and still get up at five.”
“But our generation is likely to live into our nineties, if not past a hundred. Facing all those decades of decline—well, the future seems sort of horrible. Some days I walk around in a state of apprehension, start to finish—wondering what disease is lurking around the corner, and fretting about what I’m supposed to be doing with the tiny amount of time left before it hits. Remington might be going through a variation on the same thing.”
“He reckons he can stop the clock.”
“If not turn it backward. But leaving him to his delusions doesn’t cost us much.”
“A lie always costs something.”
“Well, we’ve only got three more months to go.” Serenata rose and fetched her coat. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She rustled through her bag. “I brought you a set of CDs. Though you’ll need to upgrade your technology soon, because this format is being phased out. It’s my most recent audiobook. A thriller, but you never seem too picky.”
“Can’t follow what’s happening most of the time, but you know I’ll finish it.” Griff had never been much of a reader, but most of his friends were dead. He enjoyed listening to her recordings for company, and to bask in the sound of her voice.
“People make a to-do about how unnatural it is to lose a child,” she reflected as he insisted on seeing her to the door. “But it must feel almost as unnatural to watch your own kids get old.”
“Oh, to me, you and Remy still look like new lovebirds, fresh as peaches.”
She raised a forefinger. “You watch that! A lie always costs something.”
On the stoop, she leaned down a bit so that he could kiss her goodbye on the cheek. “Um—one last thing,” she added. “In April, Valeria and her family are piling into their van, and then we’ll drive up and watch the marathon in Saratoga Springs together. If you’d like to come, too . . .”
“Why in God’s name would I want to travel all the way upstate to watch a bunch of fools jog past with numbers on their shirts and clutching little bottles of water?”
“Because one of the fools is your son. I’m sure your coming to applaud him at the finish line would mean a lot to him.” There. She’d done her duty.