But we weren’t bad ourselves. And we had a not-quite-secret weapon: the fifty-year-old. The fifty-year-old gym rats who frequent the Ys of the world are the only ones who get to have names on the pickup court, but their names are all the same: Old Man. Old Man is always on the court for one reason, and I don’t mean to relive his glory days. He doesn’t rebound, he doesn’t defend, he doesn’t pass. Bank on this: Old Man can fucking shoot the rock. Without hesitation, our Old Man demanded the ball, then he stepped beyond the three-point line and more quickly than I might have expected he got off what was essentially an old-school set shot. Nothing but net, swish.
Game fucking on, and bring it, Old Man and Shirts. My adrenaline freely flowed. It was exhilarating to be sweating and running and crashing against other players and nobody was being a pussy calling ticky-tack fouls and I was glad to be doing anything other than thinking about books so don’t bring this subject up for a few minutes, we were balling. Playing hoops and publishing books may have things in common, but like I say, not now, give a girl a break.
Back and forth, in and out, side to side, went the contest, and it was close. The game provided the most purely physical enjoyment I had had in a long time—and there’s another thing not to remind me of, the other kind of physical enjoyment I had not had for a while. The girl I was guarding had scored a few baskets on me, but I had more rebounds than she did, so she and I were basically even, canceling each other out. I respected her game. Shirts needed to spring open Old Man a few more times, and we would high-five each other after victory and take on the guys, all of them metrosexually unshaven, waiting we-got-next.
At a crucial instant, score tied 18–18, I set a pick and the opposing player stuck his hand out to ward me off. He grabbed my breast in the process. This happens, my boobs are not destined to appear in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, and it’s fucking basketball, which is a high-contact sport. But maybe he wasn’t used to playing against girls, because he blubbered a dim-witted apology. I lost all respect for him.
What fuck the fuck. It’s basketball, it’s not like you groped me, and I’ll survive, and you watch your nuts, buddy. We played on. And taking advantage of his distraction, I pivoted into the lane and got a pass close to the basket, the perfect lead for me, two feet away from the hoop, which is where I made my living in college, and I went up, as I had done a hundred thousand times in my life, expecting to make an uncontested two.
My opponent had other ideas. She met me at the top of what I once liked to think of as my leap, which shocked me, and she blocked the shot. She didn’t swat the ball out of bounds, she sort of tipped it, volleyball style, gently, and the ball came back down to the floor and then bounced back into my hands after I landed. Given a second chance with the ball, I went up again with renewed commitment.
She fucking blocked it again. Again, softly tipping it, and I grabbed the ball on the bounce and went up, this time pissed off.
Same result.
Three shots in a row from under the basket, three blocks. I don’t think I had been blocked a total of three times during all of high school and college combined, and here it happened in one series at the Y.
I went up again. With the predictable consequence. Just so you know, the fourth time is also not a fucking charm. And she was toying with me, too, not swatting the ball out of bounds, but at the same time not taunting me. She was determined to block my shot again, and she knew that she could. Everybody had stopped playing and watched, and stood around, mesmerized by the girlo-a-girlo game-inside-the-game. Fact is, I had never witnessed serial rejection like that with the exception of my romantic life. My teammates must have realized the mood on the court had turned too strange to continue and we needed a break and somebody called time out and everybody went to their water bottles.
“Hate to break it, but you’re not going to score the ball on me on the inside, girlfriend,” she said to me, as if this were merely a statement of fact, and not an in-your-face insult.
“See, that’s an expression that irritates the fuck out of me.
Score the ball? The hair-gelled and the Michael-Jordan-bald announcers on TV say this all game long. What else would you use to score if not the basketball?”
She took this as an opportunity to look up and make an observation to the gym rafters. “Spence girls are nerds.” But her apparent denunciation of me and my alma mater was uttered with a jokiness and with a sweetness that rivaled her jump shot. Trash talk is au courant in the pros and often in college, but at the Y? Frowned upon. Bad form. If you want to hear real smack, though, come to an editorial meeting. Brutal. But I’m trying not to think about the business for a minute.
Somebody please explain to me why I got up on my high horse and defended the good name of my K-12 alma mater where I had spent ten years getting through twelve grades until I received my diploma. Because the truth is Spence was a good school, and it was good for me, not that I knew as much when I attended. How many important experiences feel like that and are understood in retrospect and don’t remind me.
“How would you know we’re all nerds?” Or that I went to Spence in the first place? And another, bigger question to take up with somebody other than her: Do we ever graduate for real from high school? “Sibella’s no fucking nerd.”
Two problems with that last assertion of mine. One, I was a fucking nerd, and two, Sibella spoke of herself in the third person. This tit-a-tit was not going to end well.
“Packer Collegiate, that’s how. I watched you play when you were an eighth-grader and I had graduated, and you were talented, but with predictable non-moves in the lane, which is still true. To this day, you never learned to use your left hand, or do a basic head fake, and you still have your white-girl Spence hops.”
“We beat Packer like a drum.”
“That’s because, like I say, I graduated.” She laughed.
You know what? I believed her.
“I like playing against you,” she said. “You’re a challenge.”
She was being kind, but not patronizing. Packer punkette that she may have been, she was no punkette. And does everybody on the East Coast at some point end up in California for at least a while, as if the whole country is a box of puzzle pieces that you shake to the left to make everything inevitably slide westward?
The game finished soon after, and they won, and she and I hugged. A guy hug, more pat on the back than chest bump, and I went downstairs and took a longer than necessary shower while I imagined she played the next game and the next one after that and her team ran all the other teams out of the gym. I wouldn’t bet against her and you shouldn’t, either.
She had said she recognized me. I had never seen her before in my life. At the same time, she reminded me of someone, or so I thought as I scoured the Sibella memory banks. And then it hit me. She reminded me not of someone but of something. She was no candidate for soul mate or even a date for coffee, don’t get me wrong, but she reminded me what I used to have: friends. Where did they all go? Didn’t I use to have them? Where oh where did I ever put them? I use to know where friendship happened. In my life.
I was having a bad night and I was feeling sorry for myself and for Myron and for Hard Rain, and I was standing under the shower head for too long and wasting water, which is not an environmentally responsible thing to do, but I couldn’t budge. Sure, my job was eating up my days and nights and weekends. Moving to California didn’t help in that department. But those factors didn’t explain everything. My relationship with YGB I saw for what it had been, an empty fling, with a few pleasant high points, but essentially a nonevent. Of course, he never called me to break it off and say it was him not me, which I myself knew better than to ever believe. He didn’t even bother to break up with me by text.
That hurt, I have to say. A guy who breaks up with you by telling his boss he quits—he was never going to be a keeper for anybody. And then the guy hooks up with a pretty g
um-smacker.
In any case, I could use a friend. Not a virtual one, either. I was feeling sorrier for myself by the minute. All on account of some game? Man, if this kept up I was going to have to get a dog.
Whippets are beautiful dogs.
Stop, Sibella. You are going off the shallow end.
I mean it, whippets are very sweet, elegant, athletic. So we’d have nothing in common.
I would learn how to drive. Everybody in California knew how—or thought they did. Then again, their freeways are free-for-alls. Oh, and I would need to steal a car. And in San Francisco a place to park, which would cost more than the car itself. Objects in the rearview mirror, as all the cars inform you, are closer than they appear. Ain’t that the truth? Life in the fast lane? Never happened, never gonna happen.
Life in the remainder bin for me, more like it.
If I were you, I’d skip to the next chapter, it’s getting pretty maudlin.
As nobody ever once said with reference to me and my game: You cannot stop her, you can only hope to contain her.
Gratuitous advice from somebody who ought to know better: Don’t play a pickup game when you are in a vulnerable mood and you didn’t know you were in that mood, but whatever you do, don’t get smoked by a Packer Collegiate girl.
Here I was twenty-six years old, being schooled at the Y during a casual pickup game that was not really casual, and schooled as much as I ever deserved to be. I may have discovered that I was washed up on the basketball court, and it didn’t feel half as bad as I might have expected—which, paradoxically, made me feel worse, and I know that makes no sense. Here’s something that might pass for making sense: It was time for Sibella to grow up. Fucking Caitlin could be right. There were more serious games left to play. If I hung up my sneaks I would miss the gym and the competition, but isn’t life all about letting go? Life may be nothing but a series of losses.
I warned you to skip ahead.
Once when I was in college my dad came to a big game, and after we won he took me out to dinner, shrinkish dad and his Unshrinkable Sibella daughter savoring quality time. He asked if I had learned anything during the game. He was keen on questions like that. Despite his quirks, I love my pops. It had been a hard-fought game against a better team and we went into overtime, but we clawed out a victory, and I was spent and looking forward to getting some sleep that night for a change. I took his question seriously and then I told him I did feel satisfied. But I did not learn a single thing, I had to be honest. Saying as much, I sounded dumb, as if I should have learned a little bit, but he didn’t think so.
“Isn’t it funny,” he said, “how we only learn when we lose?”
You can see coming what I had to say, but this time I meant it.
“Say more, Dad.”
The Incredible Lightness
of Being Sibella
Months later occurred two major book developments I am professionally as well as unprofessionally obligated to report, one involving the Hard Rain publication of Ashlay Commingle’s book and the other involving the un-Hard Rain publication of Junior’s. The two books will in peculiar ways converge, as you’ll see, on the sales charts as well as in my mind. Due to our house’s supposedly temporary financial difficulties, Ashlay’s book was excruciatingly delayed, such that it practically coincided with Junior’s. His had been snapped up and rushed into print at a dizzying, land-speed-record-setting pace.
On other fronts, Myron had completed the cardiological testing, thanks for asking, including the echocardiogram. That is an advanced medical procedure that generates a fascinating and critical quantitative measuring stick called the ejection fraction (the percentage of blood leaving the heart after contraction). I confess I would have to take a hard look at any manuscript on the slush pile titled The Ejection Fraction, which sounds like it could be anything from a thriller to a AI love triangle to a book of poetry, which maybe we should just publish for once. Myron passed the tests with flying colors, but he had been summarily placed on notice: take better care of yourself. As a result, he was going on regular walks and watching his diet.
The Dream Calculus was released by YGB and Kelly’s publishing house. Inevitable or what? A long while had passed since my Never Going to Happen on My Watch in My House email and YGB’s Xile on Lame Street, and the breakup didn’t sting in the same way anymore, but if you believe that you should gin up a self-help book proposal and then immediately run it through the paper shredder and get a new life, which is some self-help advice I should instantly snag for myself.
Back to Junior. He always had this disconcerting effect on me. And you can tell I am stalling. This next part related to Junior’s book upset me in about six different ways.
His book was YGB’s much-publicized first acquisition, a six-figure deal with options for the next two novels and a commitment to publish his future books of poetry. One can imagine how much he relished taking a book Myron and I had passed on. His new house was going all-in on him. Kelly was assigned to be his editor, and those two worked closely together, the thought of which warmed my heart like a lava spill on the brothel-packed ancient town of Pompeii.
The critical response was unanimous and it was, fuck the fuck, adulatory. The work boomed and made a Krakatoa noise echoing across the whole book world. Calculus was greeted with a front-page rave in the Book Review. It shot up the bestseller charts. All the trades had given it starred reviews, and the bookstores had no trouble hand-selling the hand-fuck out of it. Life must have been sweet in Park Slope for him and his Smart Car-size wife. He was the newest darling of the literary set, and his picture appeared alongside her while attending the big book release champagne-and-caviar parties in New York, LA, and London. People were already speculating how the big prize nominations were all but inevitable. And a big box office movie star spectacularly optioned it, too.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright in the forests of the night.
I was downcast, and I apologized again to Myron for taking a pass.
“You can’t look back, Sibella. Every publishing house has regrets. Do you realize how many editors and publishers passed on classics? Catcher in the Rye. One Hundred Years of Solitude. On the Road. Lolita. The Name of the Rose. And the list goes on and on and on. The important thing is we go on, and we do better next time.”
“I fucked up.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I fucked up.”
“You can’t because you never fucking did fuck up like that.”
“Give yourself a break, Sibella. If it’s anybody’s fault it was mine, giving you the final call on the book. I might have been sensitive to the fact that you and I were both reeling from the Fontana mess and the Calypso near-catastrophe, and neither of us were on our game.”
“It was a better book than I acknowledged. You want me to step down as editor in chief, I’ll do it. Somebody ought to fall on her sword around here.”
“I didn’t know you owned a sword, but as the employee manual stipulates, keep yours out of the office, Sibella. You hungry? I could use a little lunch at Avenue. I hear the kale burger is scrumptious.”
I wasn’t hungry, and the veggie burger enticed me not, but I also didn’t feel like sitting at my desk pummeling myself. I was also unaware there was an employee manual, which I bet the editor in chief was supposed to be aware of.
“I’m going to get that fucking Chicken Diavolo,” I said as we walked out, contemplating culinary revenge.
✴✴✴
The next part of this story shows that, while my judgment on Junior’s book may have been foolish, in the end it turned out to have been the best ill-advised decision I had ever made. Yes, indeed, it was celebrated, and its charms and wonders I may have been too blinded by personal resentments to be able to depreciate. But powerful as Junior’s book was, it wasn’t Junior’s book.
His college roommate went public with the proof. I recalled his ro
ommie, Brewster. I always wondered how Junior and Brewster got along so well living together in the dorm, since they were temperamentally opposites. Brewster had, shall we say, a strangeness about him, and a very low affect. Asperger’s, I would have guessed, or as they say these days on the spectrum, and when I discussed my observations with my dad, he had a hunch I was probably right. Naturally, Brewster’s monomaniacally Ahabish, relentless commitment to his work was impressive. He always seemed to be on his computer, reading day and night, or writing day and night, and it seemed that he hardly ever slept. I know this because Junior and I would say goodnight and go to my room for euphemistic privacy (having a single, a benefit bestowed upon the captain of the basketball team). Brewster never made eye contact with me, and I question if he ever registered my name.
“He’s an odd duck,” Junior would say, “but he’s harmless. Half the time he’s working on something, the other half he is doing the whole thing all over again. And have you ever seen a boy’s dorm room with no dust bunnies? Brewster has two vacuum cleaners.” I had never been in another boy’s dorm room and therefore I couldn’t comment on any bunnies, but I took his point. “He is smart,” summa cum loutish Junior said more than once. “He puts me to shame.”
Full disclosure, which won’t reflect well on me: Remember the time I took Ritalin before a game with disastrous consequences? Well, where did I get the kill pill? Junior stole a few from Brewster’s stash. Junior denied taking any Ritalin himself, saying he preferred the black beauty Adderall, but looking back, I doubt that.
Sorry, Brewster. Please forgive me.
What I didn’t know was that Brewster was obsessively keeping a meticulous diary, and that Junior one day when his roommate was out for a long stretch to attend classes he read it. At some point, too, he must have photocopied extensive sections. What possessed him to do that? I don’t know, but Junior was one of those writers from early on who was perennially on the prowl for material and experience he could exploit for his own calculusating purposes. And if you assume that I assume I probably qualified as nothing but more material for him, you are probably my editor about to delete that whole whiny train of thought.
Sibella & Sibella Page 21
