He remembered how slowly she’d worked a dab of butter around the brown centers, how she’d used her fork to cut off the white rims. She’d made the tiniest nibbles between sips of water. He’d gone on about what she’d done well that race: how she’d attacked the hills early and used the downgrades perfectly—saving just enough for the deceivingly long last half mile. Despite the slight incline, she’d sprinted to catch up with Delaware’s number one, but she’d finished just a hair behind—though she blazed by that girl at Nationals a few weeks later, just like he’d known she would.
Then he recalled something she’d said, curtly, almost disrespectfully. She’d said, I get it. She’d had her tunic on, her bare shoulders showing, and she’d looked away from him. She’d absently picked at some skin, too, where a wound looked to be, but when he asked how it happened, she told him about the cigarette burn from when she was small, with Doug in Atlantic City. The burn wasn’t new, she’d said. It was just that she’d gotten sunburned during practice, and it was peeling.
Practices were never that sunny in November, so that couldn’t be true. Murray also didn’t understand why a father would take a young child to such a place, when there were plenty of better, safer beaches and boardwalks around New Jersey. And now Doug wanted to blame him? One of those tyrants who controlled his wife too. Wasn’t that how it worked: the most distrustful were also the must untrustworthy? Out of shame. Guilt.
Anna trusted him, didn’t she? Or maybe she only pretended to—and that was how she’d orchestrated the team visit? Lisa mentioning when the team could come again, not just when he could come again. No one was asking his permission or his opinion about anything. He thought of what his father used to say. Life isn’t fair. I’m your superior. You listen when I tell you to do something. He and Patrick never argued; they knew this about life, that it was unfair, and that you learned to live with the unfairness. You learned not to ask too many questions, learned that it was never your place, as the child, to rebel.
Later that afternoon he drove to the track. The girls were doing triangles today: one lap, two laps, one. Three repetitions, between a five-and-a-half- and six-minute pace.
Anna had officially sprained her ankle. She had shown him Dr. Owens’s note, and no signs of a stress fracture had shown up on the scans. She would be working with a trainer twice a day to improve her core strength. She had a shot at the race next weekend. But she wasn’t answering his messages. Not just phone calls, text messages too.
He’d gotten here at least twenty minutes early because he couldn’t stand his office any longer, the chance of running into Rick and other coaches. It was damp in his car. Slightly chilled.
He stared at the empty track through the gate. There was mostly pavement around it, and tunnels for the football stadium, but if he looked past that, he could see part of the intramural fields, where the girls sometimes trained. Only if he wanted a more controlled circumference than the course. What if he’d taken Becky here, if he’d kept her on the fields?
No. Foul play could happen on any field. Any turf. He of all people knew that. Besides, there were plenty of other sports that practiced off campus. Like the equestrian team. They went a full hour away, to Rivendell Farm in Durham. What if a rider was thrown off? Or kicked? The coach wasn’t blamed.
Murray had grown up near stables himself and used to know the old riding coach, Mitchell Emory, pretty well. He’d told Mitchell stories about the Erdenheim Steeplechase his father had taken him and Patrick to once—the year before his father died.
His father used to work with this man, Jake Klimer, who left mining to care for horses at a farm just outside of Philadelphia. Jake had offered up a tour of the property one Saturday on his ATV. There were three hundred acres of open land, and Jake told them about the town steeplechase the farm was hosting the next day, where the best horses raced two miles of fence line. He’d managed to get them rooms for the night, and Murray’s father had let him and Patrick each put down two dollars on their favorite horses. Murray had chosen this bay-colored mare, named Quinn, for her sloping shoulders and long croup. He’d gotten a good look, too, through his father’s binoculars, and he could still feel its small black dial, coarse against his fingers, as he watched Quinn leap through the thick meadowland: the smell of the grass in his nose, the beating of hard hooves in his ears.
Quinn hadn’t won, though. A Selle Français with white markings had, but Murray had followed Quinn’s stats for months in an equestrian magazine the library kept. She’d once placed third in open fences at a national competition in Devon.
It was 3:28:14 p.m. Just two minutes before he’d consider everyone late, because fifteen minutes early was on time, and today practice started at 3:45. He rounded them up, had them hurry through form drills. As he was breaking down the workout, the gate creaked. Anna entered, wearing her foot brace.
Silently she walked over and reached for his clipboard. She set her watch. The girls were leaning in. He wanted the first lap hard.
He hit go, and Anna began to speak. Softly she said she’d been in touch with Becky’s parents. That she’d updated the team because she knew he hadn’t yet.
“You called a meeting?” He clicked stop on his watch before it was time. But Anna’s was still going. She would get the split.
“I’m not allowed?”
Tanya was coming around first. “Relax your arms!” he shouted through cupped hands.
She’d broken eighteen minutes in Franklin Park, only once. Her performance was sporadic at best, with no prospect of placing at the championship meet in October. He still had three weeks, and Anna would start running as soon as next week.
Anna fluidly took down splits. She was good at multitasking. A quality he’d always loved about Nancy, too, the way she’d handled even the driest paperwork with passion, resolve.
Anna had spent last summer in New York City through a publishing internship with Psychology Today. He’d overheard her tell Becky about it in the pool one morning. How she’d done little more than fetch coffee and type meeting minutes. He’d never seen her so worked up, breathless, really. But he thought how she had her whole life ahead of her—she might get a doctorate one day, like Nancy had.
A strong crosswind troubled the backstretch. Tanya struggled. Emily used her draft.
When they were coming up, Anna cheered without looking at him. “That’s it, Tanya!” she said, her hair tossed in the wind. She tucked stray strands behind her ears.
“I got everything,” she said, just after practice had ended. He’d already sent the girls on their cooldown, and he was about to ask her how she was feeling, if she’d gotten his messages.
“I have to work out on the bike in the field house,” she said. “I’ll get stretched after.”
Above, the sky was turning navy. Harder winds beat a flag above the bleachers. “Keep the resistance at 15,” he said. “You should be dripping sweat ten minutes in. Every five minutes, count your RPM. Twenty strokes in ten seconds.”
“I know,” she said, adjusting the Velcro over her brace.
“Be careful,” he said.
“It’s itching, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Don’t forget to engage your hamstrings,” he called to her back, wind shuddering through her jacket. “You have to pull back hard,” he said, his clipboard cold in his hands.
Murray remembered the county court. He’d been there last night after practice ended, had made it just in time to dispute his traffic violation. He’d had to wait, the way those horrible courthouses made you wait ad infinitum, no clue when you’d be called to plead your case with the traffic-ticket attorney. Murray had thought about how he’d hated attorneys, waiting there, and then he’d heard a child laugh behind him. He’d turned and found her sitting between her parents, swinging her legs with little white sneakers. She had looked more like her father than her mother, and he thought they should have just gotten a babysitter. A courthouse was no place for a child. He’d wanted to cover his ears so he
didn’t have to hear her breathing behind him.
On his way out of the gym, Murray tried to think of something else, about how his car tires needed to be replaced and when he could go to fix them. How much the tires would cost. All the research he still had to do, but he could not set his mind on tires. He could only think of 2002, the year he and Nancy had had their own formal hearing, and he had signed away his assets because none of them were worth keeping. He saw Nancy in their living room, wearing the same silk bathrobe in Paris green, her hair still wet from a shower, pointing her finger at him—accusing him of an affair with Sarah, after she’d been the one—she had accused him as if to justify her sleeping with Richard, and then had demanded more from him, and he’d conceded. As if it would have made forgetting her easier, all the ways she’d wronged him; the faster he’d agreed, the sooner he’d been able to get back to his life, his work, the things that had allowed them to survive that first year.
After everything they’d been through, he thought, finalizing the settlement had only taken a few months, through a small law office downtown, one with skylights and an unused fireplace.
They’d sat at opposite ends of a long mahogany table, phone and intercom at the center, bottled waters next to them, collated copies of the agreement with little red and yellow tags that said sign here.
When Nancy was pregnant, she’d wanted to assess pastors and options for a baptism ceremony. She’d grown up Protestant, and he had agreed to go with her to a Lutheran service in Milford. But then his Sunday long run had gotten in the way, or had it been something else? He remembered how she’d said they had time. Once when she’d been in a particularly good mood, she’d wanted to talk about the kind of values and traditions they planned to instill. She’d kept stacks of books on the kitchen table, on her desk, in their bedroom—books about pregnancy and child development—titles that reached as far as adolescence, but he’d never asked her about them. He’d agreed with her about waiting to decide, because, he’d said, wouldn’t experience teach everything they needed to know? Sweat hung slick on Murray’s neck and under his nose, though it was not hot today. It couldn’t have been much more than sixty degrees.
In his car, it was cooler, but still he was sweating: the way one felt in public restrooms, riddled by food poisoning or the flu. He turned on the car and pressed buttons and positioned the vents for a blast of cold air. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he turned to where Nancy might have been sitting. Then to the back of his sedan, where there used to be a car seat.
He closed his eyes again.
Nancy used to hum when there wasn’t any radio music. She used to sing off-key without a thought. She would hum, and her pencil would move around little lists, the dozens of lists they kept, together and separately, to track their lives.
He started the engine, shedding the thought of Nancy in a black wool hat with matching black mittens in the winter, when they might be driving someplace with snow on the streets.
Or in the summer, if the windows were down, her hair tossing lightly, and how sometimes she’d place her hand over his on the gearshift. He turned the radio off abruptly. Why had he kept this old car?
SIXTEEN
Two hours after Nancy had left Richard for good, exactly one month before her forty-ninth birthday in March, she found herself waiting with two suitcases full of all her belongings in a hotel across from Washington Square Park. She was hungry, but more than that she needed a shower, a long, hot one that turned her skin red and offset the cold.
On her lap was Virginia Woolf’s complete short fiction. She had been savoring the pages for weeks, but now her eyes couldn’t focus; she felt them wandering over the red-and-gold diamond patterns of the carpet, tracing different shoes: a man’s polished loafers, then the white sneakers of the woman beside him; it was unclear whether they were together or strangers. She refocused her eyes on a paragraph about burnished steel.
“Weber.” When Nancy heard her name, her maiden name, she was relieved: this hope that a city’s rhythms could erase, redeem, the past.
A bellboy helped her to her floor with her two large suitcases. She tipped him ten dollars and slowly oriented herself around the room, the heavy curtains she drew back for a view of the park, the television she turned on and surfed until she found a live recording of the Philharmonic performing Verdi’s Requiem, and she unpacked her books because they would make her feel at home here, at least temporarily, and she hung up her blouses and set the baby book on her desk, also a reading light and eye mask next to the Bible in the top drawer of the nightstand. Then she turned on the shower, and while she waited for the bathroom to fog up with steam, she sorted through a little basket of soap and shampoo, two Q-tips, a miniature sewing pack, and a shower cap, which she slipped around her hair. She wished to dye it red, for the gesture to mark a new chapter in her life, but she was already splurging with the hotel, and on Monday she’d scheduled her move to a small apartment on Grove Street in New Haven, just a quarter mile from the cemetery. It would comfort her to be closer to Jean’s grave, but she also feared the frequency of she and Murray crossing paths.
She considered it a miracle they’d only intersected once since she’d left him, on the sidewalk outside of the gym one Sunday. She had not told him she was on her way to the cemetery, a weekly habit she’d assumed he knew about, but he had not said anything while they waited for the light; he had merely stood still. She had been the first to speak, to wish him well before they both crossed the street and walked in different directions.
When they were dating, Murray used to remind her of characters in her favorite novels. She’d never told him this, but he often brought her back to Giovanni’s Room. Of course this book had consumed her days in Paris, carrying with it the city’s ambient gray, its smells and cadences, and so she guessed she’d been apt to make such comparisons. That moment when David and Giovanni walk along the wide sidewalk of Boulevard du Montparnasse, holding a kilo of cherries between them, laughing and spitting pits at one another like children, she always thought of Murray. How he had made her feel like a child discovering the city as if for the first time.
Nancy’s parents used to scold her for comparing her life to books. Remind her that characters could never be as complicated as real people, and though this was true—a woman was as infinite as every moment passing through her, and a book was limited by language, a writer’s choice over which words to leave in, which to leave out—the feelings Baldwin described had been as true as any she’d ever felt for Murray. Not just in terms of her love but her regret, in leaving him because it was easier than accepting the truth that it was too hard to rely on your partner when certain holes had dug themselves too deep inside you: impossible to see past the desert, past the mountains, to find the ocean.
Not once had Murray accompanied her to Jean’s grave, not once after the burial. Nancy had had the hardest time on Jean’s birthday, while Murray seemed the most withdrawn on the anniversary of her death—but just one year later, the year they’d stopped sleeping in the same bed, he’d failed to mention what day it was. Nancy could still see the moment like yesterday, the way she’d been sitting at the kitchen table after a sleepless night of pacing along the strip of floor between the oven and refrigerator, when Murray had entered, not once looking up from his same bowl of bran cereal and his legal pad, not once pausing to look at her or the May sky through the window, spring, the season she’d come to loathe for its fecundity, its new life smells—but he had merely dropped his bowl in the sink and told her to have a good day; he had kissed her cheek while reaching for his car keys, never wasting a move.
Nancy stepped out of the shower and cleaned her ears with the Q-tips. She dressed in clothes she found at the top of the first suitcase she opened. Then she took the subway to the Flatiron District and began walking up Fifth Avenue. The streets were gray and packed with tourists in expensive coats cradling cups of coffee. She was comforted by a couple speaking French—even if she couldn’t enter it dir
ectly, they made her feel part of a conversation. She found herself walking close behind them. But along Madison, when she passed Cellini and Rolex and Davidoff of Geneva, she felt foolish. She should walk farther west if she wanted to shop, but then there was the proximity to Times Square, its clogged streets and lights that flashed grotesque in her mind, especially around Christmas. It was months after that—February—but still she wound back toward Park, where the streets were wider and there were boxes of planted trees, frail from the cold city sun. Nancy remembered that one of her college roommates, Caroline, lived nearby. The last she’d heard from Caroline was years ago, when Nancy and Murray were still barely married. Caroline had sent a Christmas card, and somehow Nancy had burned the exact address into her memory, like so many details she would’ve liked to have forgotten. Caroline had had a child, a little boy named James, after his father—who went by Jim.
Nancy longed to call her parents, to curl up in the warm spaces of the house. She had called them with the news of the funeral. Her father had said he was there if she needed anything, but they had not made it. Her mother had not had the courage, even at a time so dire, to fly, to be there for her daughter, her grandchild.
It was unlikely Caroline still had the same address, but when she saw the listing for Caroline’s last name, her married name, on the dial box outside her apartment building, just as another tenant was walking out, she was surprised to feel her hand catch the door so she could head into the lobby and then up the elevator. Outside Caroline’s door, 12R, her hands trembled.
How stupid this was. She could still change her mind, she thought, pressing her back to the wall. Then a door across the hall opened, and another tenant walked out—no, the tenant’s dog walker, with a gorgeous blue-eyed husky. The walker wore a tattered coat, hair in dreadlocks, and as he hit the elevator button, Nancy felt his half gaze, his judgment. But the elevator came and the door opened, and the walker and the dog went in, and Nancy could breathe again. Though the underpinnings of her terror had grown more acute: of what Caroline might know, what rumors might have circled despite how quiet the funeral had been, how out of touch Nancy felt with all of her friends and family in Michigan.
Late Air Page 18
