Murray had felt his rage boil up. You don’t think I know that? he’d been about to say. You don’t think I’m trying to get to the bottom of this, locate the criminal? But he had not yielded to those words, only to the silence of Rick’s stern eyes. You have to hold yourself together now, Rick had said, and then, It couldn’t hurt to see someone, before the season gets more chaotic. Or maybe take some time off.
Time off. Murray had felt the words boil over, this singeing heat—he’d wanted to lean in and grab Rick by the collar, remind him there wasn’t anyone to fill his shoes, that he was saving the season, the program for that matter—if they wanted to seal recruits, if they wanted to continue his legacy. But Murray had bit his lip hard, had gripped his pen firmer, and watched Rick just pat him on the shoulder. Think about it, Rick had said, before closing Murray’s door.
“Coach?” A finger brushed his back. Liu was gripping a heavy tote bag. A large white sweater slipped from her shoulder.
“I come here to do the same thing.” She smiled dimly.
Murray had to work saliva into his mouth. And when he spoke, when he said, “Oh?” his voice wasn’t familiar. But he focused on her pale cheeks, and he thought of the ceramic Nancy had put into storage because of the lead content when she was pregnant. You’re crazy, he’d said.
“I have to study chemistry for school anyway. So I come up here to read.”
“Be careful,” he said.
She was silent, her face scrunched.
“You might break it. It’s expensive.”
“These books?” she said, laughing quietly. “I usually use them when I’m here. I am about to put them back.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s very good.”
“It’s not true, is it?” she said, her voice tinny and hollow like a can Murray and Patrick had once used to talk between rooms.
“What?” he said.
“That you want to get rid of Rodney?”
He was silent again. The pages of the book he was reading were sticky. “No,” he said finally, counting to ten, imagining his arms square below him, and then his chest falling to the floor as his abdomen squeezed him up.
“I didn’t think so,” she said, eyes hazy like formula. “I don’t believe what the others say anyway,” she said. Her hand reached for his, wrist thin as a candy cane.
“Is that right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I think you are doing the best you can.”
Her forgiveness?
He scooted his chair closer to the small desk he was using, pressed to the wall before a window that overlooked the street. He was high up, and he could see streetlamps—and students gathered along the quad and by the women’s fountain.
“I think the architect was like you,” he said. “She achieved this—built that fountain.”
Liu just looked at him.
“Maya Lin, just like you,” he went on. “But she was a mediocre student.” Murray had heard the tour guide say this about Maya Lin, when he and Nancy had taken their first walk around the campus, and they had paused at the fountain, the water steadily flowing over the edges of the rounded gray stone.
Rodney, he thought. Her poor grades—and then he wondered if it was Rodney there, Rodney in the stacks looking at him now?
Liu looked away, down toward her feet. She wore silken flats. They weren’t supportive; she needed to wear better shoes. He closed his book and asked her to leave.
“You aren’t right,” Liu said, but now she was crying. He wouldn’t stand one more girl crying. Didn’t they all see—everyone—that he had his job to execute, all the hours he put in? Who would do it, if he didn’t?
Liu had left him, and so he put the books back, and he folded the notes he’d taken—all on scratch paper—into his pocket.
He paused to take a sip of water at the fountain. It was 11:43, according to the clock above the checkout desk. But his second stopwatch read 5:39.785. Zeros, digits between numbers flooding his brain.
TWENTY
Nancy began running with Caroline in the mornings. They met at 6:30 a.m. for two loops around the bridle path in the park, where the ground was soft and smelled sweetly of manure that forced owners to yank the leashes of their dogs harder, collars jangling in the mottled darkness. It was when they neared the reservoir—or the slivers of path that offered a clear view of the water, when the sun began to rise three miles in, that Nancy could ease into a pace. It was here, even at the age of forty-nine, that she was surprised she could focus on something else besides the stiffness in her muscles and joints, the endless cold in her lungs. She could focus on the morning light, how it flickered over the silver slant of high-rises, casting their impressions, silent and still, over the water’s glass. Or the snow, when it snowed, like ribs, along the path. Or bare trees crisscrossed black like uneven spokes.
In time, over the course of seven months, she learned to abandon the pain of every step, to at least accept it as part of the process, as a discomfort that came and went. If she was patient, the pain always passed. And it was one of the few times in her life when there was no room for thought—the sensations of her body superseded it, and if focusing on those sensations was the only thing she could do, when she finished each run, her mind felt that much freer to think new thoughts, to feel hopeful, she supposed, about what the day might bring.
She grew strong enough to hold a conversation with Caroline, grew open to talking across subjects that had not come easily before. Yes, there was always the weather and upcoming weekend plans, but there were also the movies she’d seen at the Angelika, the plays at Barrow Street Theatre, the two-hour lunch break she’d taken one Wednesday to try Korean barbecue with Martin and Frida, the Sunday evenings she spent perusing contemporary books at the Strand. They could talk about running practice on Tuesday evenings at the East River Track. Nancy didn’t mind running in the slowest group, and she took frequent breaks between sets. And when it came time to race, she wore the singlet and shorts she got as a member. In these uniforms, she felt Murray’s presence deeply. His sweat, the faded blue each item took on from repeated washing, and sometimes, no, often, really, she felt him adjusting her form. She knew from the diagrams he drew, her shoulders needed to be square, though they’d never be square, and her knees at ninety degrees, though her hip flexors were too tight to fulfill such a range. But she also felt him when she wanted to quit but didn’t—when it was raining or snowing or below ten degrees the following year, when she had to double up on spandex and gloves to get out the door—she felt him every time she braved uncertainty or forced order onto the disorder of a given day. And she was thankful for that, to picture him zipping up his coat and tying his shoes under the worst possible conditions.
Nancy thought of him, too, as she began to discover new routes by running down the East Side, past South Street Seaport, to Battery Park. She ran through the gardens that hooked through the West Side and continued down a path along the Hudson, scintillating in the sun, all the way up past Chelsea Piers and the Frying Pan, and the Sea, Air & Space Museum, past the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge, up Riverside Park and Washington Heights—once all the way to the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, where her knees ached over cobblestones and the tamed grounds of its gardens, and she walked its magnificent halls, its chapels with illuminated manuscripts. Before her body chilled with sweat, she ventured to part of a great stone ledge and leaned over it, looking down at the water, this revised view of the small and distant river, still quiet and shimmering.
One Saturday the following October, she ran through Chinatown, where the smell of fish was strong, the piles of fruit wobbly and overflowing from barrels, the street signs foreign, the voices frenzied, but she ran through the maze, and she focused on remaining calm, being a force of calm, which carried her up the Manhattan Bridge, this eggshell-colored steel that took her to Brooklyn, to Jay Street, which was wide and flat, and she ran to the farmers market in Grand Army Plaza—gourds and pumpkins and apples robust with autumn, pies glint
ing under plastic wrap that she had to stop to appreciate, to admire the delicacy with which berries had been tucked below folds of sugared crust. She curved around past the Brooklyn Public Library and entered Prospect Park there, where there were fewer people than at the main entrances. Over many Saturdays of running the loop, she would learn its specific sequence of hills, which were at least shorter than the hill in Harlem, but they happened in close succession. She learned to distract herself with the fragrance of the surrounding woodlands, to imagine the proximity of the Botanical Garden, efforts of conservancy not unlike her own at the library.
Sometimes she stopped at a stand and bought yellow Gatorade, the electrolytes Murray insisted on, enough energy to exit the park and jog through Prospect Heights, then Brooklyn Heights, where she admired the brownstones, the shaded, tree-lined streets that connected to a promenade for a view of the river. If she was patient and followed the signs through the construction, the scaffolding, she found the staircase to the Brooklyn Bridge. She squeezed between tourists taking photographs of the stone towers and steel-wire suspension cables. At one point there was a girl, no older than twenty-five, balancing over a truss; Nancy felt rifts building between breaths, blood flooding her face, her quickening pulse—the desire to say life was precious—but this was someone else’s life and she had to let that be, to step outside the image, to let it recede. There was just the snake of the river again, Manhattan a stagger of rushed script across the way. It glimmered over the water, clouds sifting between the sharp, narrow bodies of the buildings, the sky soft and cyan blue against anthracite, at turns silver—she could see again the largeness and the smallness of the world, time endlessly stretching and contracting the spinning orb of its arms.
Some evenings, especially in the winter months, when daytime was short and she left her office for the darkness, she ran through the bar-lit Lower East Side to the Williamsburg Bridge, guided by her footsteps as they shuddered over cast-iron steps. Never so dark that she couldn’t detect a clamor of neon graffiti—or notice the shadow of a bicycle on the adjacent path. She could catch a twinge of conversation here or there, too, sometimes—she liked best to hear a listener’s pause after something was said. And she didn’t know how to express in words the simultaneity of traffic rumbling below and above her—the sudden, illumined windows of a subway car—the J/M/Z train she’d rode home once after a run through some Hasidic quarters. It was a symphony that elevated and exalted her, and if she wrote Murray a letter now, she would tell him all this—how the distance between them was ever shifting, modulated by a single step, a single breath—and in this movement, this sound, she also found silence, a reigning silence that obliterated barriers between one thing and the other. In silence, weren’t they two of the same? Weren’t they part of some continuance that found its origin in Jean?
The silence in her chiseled cheekbones, the sharpness of her eyes, the crow’s-feet that had formed from miles of squinting in the sun—they reminded her of him. She wished to tell Murray she felt him there, in her body—different from desire. It was the way of repeated distance, of starting in one place and arriving at another, and the time it took to get there, printed by the map of sinew and tendon, veins rivering with blood, muscle fibers that frayed and rebuilt themselves into fortresses overnight.
Nights, as she lay in bed, legs heavy with exhaustion, she pictured Murray’s view of the body as a clock. Minutes and seconds never pointed to a continuum; rather, they were fixed and measured. They were results. Running, for him, represented a mountain whose peak never ended at the top. She wondered as she ran if maybe each peak represented a new summit he hadn’t been able to help but climb. So Nancy ran on, crossing bridges that connected her to Queens and Roosevelt Island and Randall’s Island.
She took the train to Long Island and ran through Roslyn Heights and Sea Cliff—took it to Westchester and ran along the Old Aqueduct Trail—through Dobbs Ferry, Irvington, Tarrytown, and Sleepy Hollow. Several times she connected from the trail to the Rockefeller Preserve, where she crossed farm meadows and ran loops around the lake. She licked sweat from her lips, listened to the crunch of dirt, the throb of roots under her shoes . . . and living, she thought, was the way light, temperature, breeze changed, in seconds. It was the sound of her feet falling in echo, distant from any pack, three falls for every one breath. It was bound by the borders of a moment one had to learn to hold for hours: daylight relaxing into dusk, dusk into evening, black. An accumulation of moments in which she grew ever smaller, her body no more than time’s vessel, this tremor of universe, tiny and self-contained and spinning on.
Caroline was surprised by the depth, the constancy of Nancy’s new habit. But she congratulated Nancy and cheered for her at road races, made signs that she held up from the sidelines as Nancy ran by.
Caroline didn’t scold Nancy either, the first time Nancy had pushed herself to the point of injury. By fifty-two, Nancy’s injuries had become more frequent and took longer to heal—yet she ran through them. She ran through tendonitis and hip bursitis, through turned ankles and gluteal strains and tarsal tunnel. Ran through piriformis syndrome and IT band syndrome and compartment syndrome. Several of these conditions were self-diagnosed; in fact, most were, but the point was over time she had come to laugh at her neuroses.
Only once did hypochondria surface in its harshest reality, after nine years of steady running; it happened the February before Nancy turned fifty-eight, as she was exiting the park at East Sixtieth Street. It had been below freezing that night, and she’d felt a sharp stab in her groin. She’d had to stop, had waited for the pain to dull before she began again, in a hurry to the subway—the train would be warm—but the pain only pierced more sharply. She’d had to limp down the stairs, peg-legged as Murray after a marathon. She was sure she’d broken a bone, and two days later, when she went to Columbia Medical Center for the X-ray, she was right. Her skin felt cold and clammy in the dark room, sequestered by the machine’s secret intelligence; she closed her eyes as it thrummed photographs. Afterward, the technician asked if she’d fallen on ice, and she’d said no, she hadn’t, but she had to wait for an orthopedist, one Caroline insisted she see on the Upper West Side, to point to a hairline crack, its halo ghosting through the screen.
“Your pubic ramus,” the doctor said. Dr. Patterson. He was a slightly bulkier version of her old obstetrician, Dr. Weiss—and she was surprised the resemblance didn’t bother her, that his voice, his presence, felt oddly comforting, familiar.
“It must be painful,” Dr. Patterson said. “It’s rare.” Rare. She closed her eyes at the word. As rare as Murray in Paris, as getting pregnant unexpectedly at forty, as losing Jean at seven months instead of the average three months for SIDS—the narrowness of each percentage, like a hangnail she wanted to tear off with her teeth. As Dr. Patterson had Nancy lay on her belly, he traced his hand up her spine and noted the curve. “Very interesting,” he said before advising she choose a different activity, to consider swimming or cycling—or even better, yoga.
“I’m not stopping,” she said, picking at the hangnail. Wondering if it would bleed.
Dr. Patterson shook his head and scribbled a prescription for physical therapy. He tore the blue slip from his pad and recommended someone experienced in the Schroth Method.
The next day, Nancy ordered an instructional video, which she followed morning, noon, and night. Some evenings she did the stretches in combination with the stationary bike at the gym, or on weekends she began aqua jogging at the 14th Street Y. She remembered how religious Murray had been about the pool, after he’d had surgery to remove arthritis in his hips the year she left him. And then later, at night, before she fell asleep, skin saturated in chlorine, she thought of how if they’d stayed together, they would never have grown so similar as they were now, apart.
But Nancy made sure they were still different. She let herself rest. She treated herself to chiropractic adjustments, massage, and acupuncture. There was a “miracle worker”—Dr. V—
whom Caroline had recommended. Dr. V treated multiple patients at one time, his electro-stim machines chiming every ten minutes, the sound of him greeting patients, or commending them for doing something about their conditions: You’re going to feel grrreat, he’d say before he was finished. The walls were covered in Broadway posters, signed by all the dancers he’d cured. Dr. V played Enya while he poked needles at various angles along her rear, two along her earlobes, which made her sleepy and flushed her face with color, grateful for the gifts of Eastern medicine. Dr. V gave her a yellow exercise band and told her to tie one end to her ankle, the other to her bedpost, and he showed her how to keep her leg straight while she did ten repetitions. He lay on the floor and demonstrated. “Light, light,” he said. “Your hamstrings are short. You don’t want to pull anything.”
And she did that at home, this light stretching and strengthening. Which, at her age, was an accomplishment; Dr. V said it during her tenth session, when he moved to lavender oil and massage.
It took four months’ time, but Nancy ran again. She ran through the scar tissue, the fear of breaking other bones. She ran through the discomfort of unfit lungs. She ran the loops she knew best, the shortest loops she’d first run with Caroline, though they felt longer than her longest runs through the city. She ran past what had been before. No matter how slow her pace, she was passing the past the way a train passes a row of houses shouldered by hills, a church, or industrial complex, a cemetery half-covered in snow.
In fact, the next January, when she was running the hills in Harlem, she sensed the old constriction in her lungs, the way it could come on suddenly without warning. She had thought she’d have to stop, just a minute, maybe five, to breathe. But then she’d closed her eyes, and thought of Murray in East Rock, all those mornings he’d climbed to the top of its summit, in snow, in freezing rain. She’d pictured him, and then she’d felt it, her lungs expanding in the cold, oxygen filling her legs, soothing their burn, arms pushing harder, past numbness.
Late Air Page 24
