Late Air
Page 26
There he was. James coming up the steps with his satchel. He wore cropped pants in this heat. Flip-flops for all this walking. She reminded herself that her job was to act as friend, mentor. Her job was not to scold him, the admonishing finger, the packed lunches, the sunscreen—things that had never been required of her.
“Hi!” she said, surprised by her nervous lilt.
“Hi,” James said. His voice was deeper than expected, his eyes a soft green she’d never noticed before. He carried a pocket-sized paper journal, its cover fire red.
“What’s first?” she asked. “What would you like to see?” She began to unravel her map, tracing her finger along the numbers, the many rooms she’d never been to. “Egyptian art? European painting?”
“Whatever,” he said, refusing to look at her.
She scrunched her eyes, unsure of whether to take the lead or let James decide.
“Move!” A woman pushed past. “You’re blocking the door.” The woman was carrying shopping bags and a backpack, which security stopped her to inspect.
Nancy shrugged; she knew it was important to set a precedent of calm, so she led the way through security. James wandered in after her, looking up at the banners, the high ceiling. Nancy donated twenty dollars for their tickets. Then she thought maybe she should donate more—she worked in art, at a museum, for God’s sake, she should give more—so she pulled out another twenty.
James looked annoyed. He did not seem pleased, in general, about the way she did things. The trick was confidence. She told him there was a painting he might like in Modern and Contemporary Art. She showed him on the map, drawing down the Great Hall and left after the two-dimensional staircase, which they could see from where they stood. He walked ahead of her, toward Medieval Art, but it was easy to get lost in here.
“James,” she said. “It’s this way. We have to turn now.” She had her hand on the map, but that was ridiculous. Of course it would be too hard for him to see. She hurried to catch up. “This way,” she said.
Reluctantly he turned to follow her, and they crossed through European Sculpture, where she was tempted to point out French medals from the 1600s and artifacts from the Renaissance. Or to take a slight detour to stand before Canova’s stunning Perseus with the Head of Medusa, acquired, she believed, through the Fletcher Fund. But James was moving too fast. He reminded her so much of Murray, the way he skimmed through rooms, never pausing to read a caption. She’d made him stop, listen to what she’d had to say about a particular artist or moment in time.
“Lucky you have a sketch pad,” she said. But he pretended not to hear her—or maybe he really didn’t hear her through all of the clicking heels, the incessant chatter—the vastness of the space. So she waited until they were in Modern and Contemporary Art, where it was slightly quieter, to tell him about Agnes Martin—the artist whose painting they were about to see.
“She was born in Canada,” Nancy said. “Have you been there?”
But James wanted nothing to do with a history lesson. He was edging his way into the main exhibition gallery, when she wanted to bypass that. “James,” she said. “This way.” Her voice had begun to aggravate her, its sheer repetitiousness. “Gallery 908,” she said. She wouldn’t bore him with the accession number she’d memorized, or the details of the loan through SFMOMA, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky—she had copied the details in her own journal last night, after several hours of extensive research—in case James did look up to her or was considering a similar path—but she could see Caroline’s skewed expectations. Her projection onto him.
James had followed her. She felt him behind her when she paused. Here was the one.
“There you are,” she said, smiling. “I wanted to show you this one.” But still he didn’t seem to hear her, so she spoke louder. “James,” she said.
He turned and looked at her as he might have his mother. Irritated. She focused on the dimensions of the painting, six feet long by six feet wide, and the material, oil on linen.
“Look closely,” she said. “At those lines.” And then after a few moments: “See how close together they are.”
Still he said nothing.
“She did each one of these tiny horizontal lines with her steady hand, one after the other—see how the vertical lines form a grid?”
“I get it,” he said. “I see it.” James pushed his bangs back again, but this time he held his hand there, over his forehead.
Nancy moved away from the canvas, because if she walked farther away from the gridlines, the painting was like a wave, these undulating saturations of blue, but if she moved close again, all she saw was the detail, the patience, the precision.
“What does it make you think of?” she asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The sky.” He rolled his eyes at her.
“Okay,” she said. “I think that’s fair. But what else in the lines, the color?”
“Fabric,” he said. “It looks like a clean piece of fabric.” He sighed.
“And—”
“That’s it,” he said, turning to walk toward the elevator. Light poured through a slant of windows along the curved ceiling.
“James,” she said, reaching for his arm.
He jerked away.
“I’m just—I—” Nancy’s pulse was dizzying, like a sprint to a bus she couldn’t miss, not without great expense. “I just want to hear your thoughts. I’m really interested to hear what you think.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?” he said. “Thinking and thought?”
“James,” she said. Just saying it, the single syllable sound, the J, she didn’t know how many times she’d have to repeat it.
“What?” he said.
She shifted her attention. She thought of something else. “That very shade of blue,” she said. “It was a color the artist chose . . . and don’t you think? Have you ever thought that painting, or drawing, or any kind of art, is about a series of choices?”
“No,” James said. “I don’t. Because isn’t that obvious?” He sighed. He opened his notebook and wrote something down.
“I don’t know,” Nancy went on, her head light, heart accelerating further—for reasons she could and couldn’t place. “I think about this a lot. That every single moment an artist has is a choice about how she wants to look at her subject, and in an instant that decision can change, that choice can change, so in some ways we could consider the final piece an accident.”
“What?” he said. He had started walking again, and she alongside him, forgetting all of the paintings they were missing, but he was talking. “You really believe painting hundreds of lines together was an accident?”
“It might have been planned, you’re right—at least to a degree, but I don’t think her painting is about perfection. I think it’s about patience.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“We don’t know what she was feeling when she chose this blue oil or this quality of linen.”
James stopped. “I still think it’s pretty simple,” he said. “She likes solid colors.”
“I think you’re onto something,” Nancy said. “Solid colors. Why does she like them? Maybe she’s searching for something.”
“Patience,” James said, his tone mocking. But then, after a few seconds of silence, he said, “Didn’t you say it was about that?”
“I did!” Nancy laughed. “You’re right. But that’s just my interpretation. And when I look at it, I feel something more too.” The light from the windows had formed shafts over the floor, dust spectral in the light. “I think it’s about healing.”
“Falling Blue,” James said. “That’s the title.” Which he wrote down, his eyes hiding like she didn’t see him do it. “What is she falling from?” he asked. “Grace?” He laughed, as though it could be a joke.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s simpler, like you said before. Because it’s just the light falling, different patterns of light depending on the angle—or maybe it’s like rain.”
Afterward, they went for soft pretzels from a stand just outside. James squeezed mustard over his, while Nancy picked off a few kernels of salt. He had not shown her his notebook when she asked to see his sketches, nor had he answered her questions about the classes he was taking, his roommate at Choate. He merely let her walk with him down the East Side. She took the subway at Grand Central, cutting through the main concourse, where the clock glowed the time. 4:32. She gazed up at the ceiling, admiring its constellated stars, and she thought of how easy it was to dream a dream for a child that did not have a chance to be broken, how much harder to watch a child slowly break it. She wished to tell Caroline there was a kind of beauty in this destruction—through it, James would create himself over time.
It was the same with Murray: shards she’d had to learn to leave as shards, some which pearled in the sand, others jagged and sharp under her feet. Eventually they led her back to the ocean, the dream of it always as vast, as silent.
TWENTY-THREE
Saturday
7:06:38 a.m.
The Lehigh Invitational was in Bethlehem, not too far from where Murray had grown up. Every year he took his top three girls. Ross did the same for the men’s team, and the whole ride up in Ross’s Jeep, he attempted small talk with Murray, imagining what the predicted cold would do to his number one, also nursing an injury, a minor hamstring strain. But Murray, too concerned about the competition, only half paid attention. He’d read up on Penn State’s number one and two girls, and a few other top names at Gettysburg and Villanova, since both were having remarkable seasons. If all went well, Anna would be up there with the best of them, running sub-5:20 miles. On Wednesday, her second workout back, she’d clocked in three repeats at close to five flat. Granted, the intramural fields lacked ample hills to simulate a real race, but it showed she had the foot speed and might have a real breakthrough this morning.
Lehigh’s course wove through dry cornfields, the kind he’d grown up running around too—stretches of countryside always in his periphery. Racing spikes, he imagined them snapping husks and crunching earth.
“Let’s go,” Anna told the team a few minutes after Murray and Ross finished setting up the tent. After Thursday’s practice on the track (200-meter striders), he’d tried to tell her about his second visit with Becky, but she’d insisted on catching the shuttle for the team dinner.
He was looking around for Kate Reinhart from Gettysburg, the girl Anna needed to follow if she had any chance at setting a new record. But Murray only had a vague idea of what she looked like from another meet last year.
Now he was too afraid to search Becky’s name, for the sheer number of articles destined to populate. More every week. Rumors that he worked his girls like horses, that he starved them, but they had him confused with Jana, the Princeton coach. The calls and messages from journalists that kept piling up. No one could see all the calls that had accumulated through his lifetime, every moment he’d endured between his father’s death, and his mother’s too—his wife leaving him after he’d done everything that had needed to be done so they could get on with their lives—Murray had kept himself and Nancy afloat those two years before they’d separated, and still people would call him and leave him messages wanting answers to their questions, as though he were a machine, a robot operating on command.
If Nancy were there, she’d say, How is it you can’t think to say one thing in the paper about what’s happened to your team? You really think you can just pretend?
It had been March, around her forty-second birthday, when he’d tried to surprise her with flowers. You think this will take my mind off things? She had stuffed the flowers in the trash. He had thought her cruel—how blind she’d been to his every gesture, his every attempt to save their marriage—how could he have said it out loud, like she wanted, to everyone? Let the words in every day, while still giving his girls the focus they needed, the resolve to compete like it was the last time they would.
The first time he’d raced the mile, when his father was still alive, he’d run hard enough for the world to turn hazy—all oxygen had gone to supplying muscles, not enough to the brain, causing him to finish in a delirium, dizzy and heaving by his knees. He had heard his coach’s cheering as an echo, the whistles of the crowd, reverberations that had led him into the pain, to choose it, and surpass it, eventually; if he pushed hard enough, the pain would always leave him.
“Stay loose,” he told Anna. He reminded her of where he would be, pushing pen hard into pad. Numbers. But she wasn’t looking at him. And then she walked away to join Tanya and Ginny by the tent. He watched their three foreheads press together, arms looped, hugging.
“Let’s get to mile one early this time.” Ross, the men’s coach, had tapped his shoulder, and then as they headed to his Jeep, he spun on about how his number one, Ryan Thompson, wasn’t running well, and no one could figure it out. Ross thought something was off at home, or even more likely—girl troubles, because Ryan was a junior and had been singularly focused on school and running until last summer, when he was studying abroad in Spain and probably met someone.
“Murray?”
“What?”
“I called you a bunch of times by the tent.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
“I know it’s been a lot,” he said, his face scrunched. “The stress.”
“I’m fine,” he said, but he was looking at his forearm, thinking about the time Nancy had gotten some soap under her wedding ring. The skin became irritated, and at night she used to scratch—until she got eczema and had to apply dime-sized amounts of cortisone daily. She’d taken a break from wearing it for months, or maybe that had always been an excuse?
Ross had said something else in the car, about “being there” if Murray needed anything, and Murray had said something else, but he couldn’t remember what.
“Ahead of the curve.” Ross smiled. They were standing at mile one with the other coaches. One had four different stopwatches looped around his clipboard.
“Three minutes.” Ross looked at Murray. Ross had started coaching men’s after Murray had already been coaching his girls for ten years; he’d once asked Murray if he had any children, and when Murray had told him, Ross had asked more questions. What do you mean? he’d said—not understanding the conditions of Murray’s loss, the vague description he’d provided. Minimum facts, he thought—it had never been anyone’s business—as Ross’s number one runner approached, part of a tight pack.
Murray watched Ross click his watch after his first runner, Wes Michaels, clocked his first mile at 4:25—there were at least nine men in the pack, and Ross told Wes to hold on. Murray had recorded the split, but the next twenty seconds felt much longer; he watched fractions dissolve.
One minute and seven seconds later, Murray spotted the lead woman, on pace for 5:05. He waited another fifteen seconds, but still no sign of Anna. Had she fallen again? Was it her ankle? Ross didn’t have time to stay with him, so Murray gripped his watch alone.
At 5:25.49, his heart rate was elevated, and at 5:32.17, it beat at triple speed. His lips cold with sweat. At 5:48.53, he wasn’t sure of the order of numbers, of what came first, a five or a three? There would be no heeding his clock’s cross into six minutes—or seven—or eight—or nine—until ten: the rolling green of that misted hill on the golf course that morning, the quiet, the sight of Becky lying there, at 10:23.57. He felt his pulse like a frog’s tongue inside his neck, flicking dim, but fast. Two fingers by her pulse. He closed his eyes, shaking off more cold sweat. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He flinched. And then he heard: “Coach.”
“You have to go back. Right away!” The voice was loud, nearly shouting, as someone, a woman, got him in her car. If she was another coach, where was the logo on h
er jacket? She spoke rapidly, and he wanted to ask her to slow down, but his lips wouldn’t move. They were gelled and cold. Something serious had happened—he knew this much, and she drove them a half a mile and then parked in the grass, in the open space between the tents and the course.
Then he saw them all there. Rodney in front, in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, Anna right next to her, after that was Liu, Tanya, Victoria, and Emily. How had they traveled here?
All their hands were locked together, in a barricade. Their mouths hung open, and they were chanting, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Something about Becky, but as he hobbled closer, he still couldn’t hear words—like those dolls his mother had kept along the windowsill during Christmas: a silent chorus of dolls.
He felt the other teams, other coaches watching. Felt the land, smell of the earth, at his feet. The air was growing colder, mountains turning redder, when he was a child and would look up and think: No other place but here, hills and mines. All of it, closing him in.
Silence roared through his ears like an ocean as he approached. He was close enough to see Anna’s eyes, rage, greener. Nancy’s shards piercing, suddenly he felt his head light, hovering above him; a planet against its universe, black centrifugal forces. He did not feel himself fall, only the unbearable weight of his limbs, like watching oneself bleed.