From that moment I began to go up in her estimation. This was a girl, after all, who sometimes thought of becoming an actress. Thought about it, as one of the things she might possibly do, when she grew up. She dreamed about being ‘discovered.’ She wanted desperately to get out of Landshut. Writing and books belonged to the world she aspired to, where she would be recognized as interesting and original. But it might be enough to have an affair with an author; he could do the recognizing for her.
‘What do you write about? Do you write about me?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘When do you write, if you spend all day with me?’
‘I write a little every night before going to bed.’
‘What else do you write about?’
I hesitated a moment, then said: ‘Some of the players. Hadnot.’
But she wasn’t offended. ‘Why do you always call him Hadnot? It makes him sound strange. His name is Bo. And he isn’t very interesting. All he does is play basketball and think about basketball.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody better at what he does, than Hadnot.’
‘But if he is so good, why is he stuck here?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I want to think about.’
This sort of talk is just as embarrassing in its way as my failed kiss, but there is worse. Books are mostly about things happening to people, I said, but nothing ever seems to happen to me. So I want to write books about that.
‘That doesn’t sound very interesting,’ she said. ‘Anyway, lots of things happen to you. You came here, and you met me on a train, and it turns out I live around the corner. And you are falling in love with me, and I don’t let you kiss me. Isn’t that enough?’
‘It’s enough for me,’ I said, but she didn’t like that answer, either.
Also, sometimes, when Franziska was asleep, she did let me kiss her. We sat demurely and rather breathlessly side by side, on her sofa at home or the curbs of deserted streets, and every once in a while she pushed me away again with tears in her eyes.
‘It is very difficult for me,’ she repeated.
Then I usually made a show of leaving, quite casually, and explaining, in a normal tone of voice, that I didn’t mind and could completely understand her position but there wasn’t much point in my sticking around if that’s how it was, until she drew me by the hands back to her again.
‘You are unfair to me,’ she said. ‘It is much harder for me than for you. You will go away again.’
‘But you want me to go away,’ I said.
We both became addicted to the intensity of these relations. We stared at each other a lot, and I found it difficult to be around Franziska afterwards. I like to think that she shamed me into a sense of my childishness, but really, Anke used her to ease the pressure of those physical affections building up in each of us. She buried her face in her daughter’s belly until Franziska wriggled herself free again, and I had a sudden view of the three of us, in a photograph perhaps, dated by the passage of time: the woman with a wet face hiding it against the little girl; the man standing somewhat apart and trying to say something. And in that photograph we looked much older and more assured than I thought we were, and the whole thing seemed more serious.
Once I said to her, during one of my literary ‘confessions,’ that I wanted to write stories about people who don’t have any major flaws, who don’t do anything stupid or wrong, and don’t suffer from any unusual bad luck.
We had been kissing and Anke felt gentle and encouraging towards me. ‘I think they will be very happy stories.’
But I shook my head, and she pushed herself away.
‘What is going to happen to these people?’
‘The usual things.’
‘And what are those?’
‘The truth is, I don’t know yet.’
We still talked about Hadnot, though Anke knew I might write down later whatever struck me as interesting. To her credit, she didn’t seem to mind. She may have been vain, but at least she had the courage of her vanity. In fact, she became more open than before, because of our new relationship or because it seemed to her more important to be truthful. Of course, I don’t really know how truthful she was. I wanted to go to bed with her, but it was difficult to arrange. Once Franziska was asleep, I had practice. By the time I got home, by the time I had showered and forced down some food, it was almost midnight, and Anke was unwilling to let me in at that hour. It seemed too desperate, too secretive to her, too much like an affair.
She said to me once, ‘It may surprise you to know, but Bo wasn’t all that interested in sex.’ Maybe she thought I was jealous of him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not just after Franziska was born, but before as well. He was such a . . . strong American man, I expected . . . I don’t know what I expected. But it never mattered very much to him, all that. And having a baby didn’t help. For the first few months, of course, sex was the last thing on my mind. But after a while, I began to think about it again. I thought, I am twenty-three years old, and this is my life. I had worked very hard to lose the weight. I thought, pay attention. I said to him once, you are like a man on an airplane. All you do is eat, sleep, watch TV and go to the bathroom.’
‘And what did he say to that?’
She admitted, ‘Maybe I didn’t say it. Maybe I only thought it.’
The idea worked its way into the novel I was writing at the time. The hero was a great man whose greatness never found its true expression, and part of the problem was summed up by his sex drive. People turned out to be unfaithful to him, because they accepted the pleasures and relations he considered beneath him. I have no way of knowing whether Hadnot himself suffered, if suffer is the word, from a want of sexual appetite. Anke’s account of their break-up was the only one I had. Hadnot never mentioned her to me. Maybe he just lost his appetite for her; maybe he had a dozen affairs on the side.
A few months later something happened that suggested a different side to the story. The league we were playing in covered a lot of ground. Sometimes we had to travel six hours by bus to a game, which also meant, since the club was too cheap to pay for accommodation, another six-hour ride home afterwards. Most of the buses had TVs screwed into a corner of the roof up front, with a VCR installed, and the players took it in turns to bring videos along for the journey back.
Mid-December; snow piled up to the side of the highway, melting and yellow under the lamps. Under the moon, the wide forested distances of Bavaria. We had lost a tough game in Freiburg, which turned out to be Hadnot’s last game for us, but if he was on the way out, he was the only one who knew it. I can’t remember the name of the movie, some kind of romantic thriller. The roar of the coach was too loud for most of us to hear the words, but we sat there, sleepless, uncomfortable, in the sadness that is sometimes deeper than the disappointment which occasions it, watching the images shift on the small screen.
There was a scene in the movie of a couple on a date: the man had cooked a nice meal for the woman at his place. Candles and folded napkins, etc. Dinner was followed by a little music and a little dancing around the coffee table with its magazines laid out. The music was the only part I could really hear. Eventually they went upstairs and got into bed together, though even that was drawn out and involved a number of artfully angled hesitations. Hadnot started talking as soon as they stood up from dinner, a kind of rumble like the play-by-play of a race announcer. I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, it sounded like so many numbers, and then I realized he was listing a series of odds. From the man’s point of view – he was calculating how likely he thought it was that he’d get laid.
This isn’t my kind of joke, and it’s certainly not the kind of joke I’m good at telling. Besides, you more or less had to watch the movie at the same time, and see the woman accept a cigarette, or blow out the candle, or say something, naked in bed, like ‘talk to me.’ But Hadnot had most of the guys in stitches by the end. Five to one, he said
, in his soft southern accent, both gentleman-like and rough. Three to one. Seven to two. On and on as the highway miles went by.
It struck me only afterwards how unhappy the whole thing seemed, and I gave the incident a sort of caption in my head, like a New Yorker cartoon: The Statistics of Love. On the other hand, it wasn’t the joke of a man who never thought about sex.
17
While all this went on we played basketball, twice a day and a game on the weekends. Sundays off, and Sundays seemed, for the contrast, to belong to a different world, in which other things mattered again. Unemployment, weather, foreign wars. There was a kiosk in town that sold the weekend Herald Tribune, and on Sundays I bought it and sat with a pot of tea over it, looking out the glass door to my balcony and on to the fields across the road.
We won our second game on the road against Augsburg. Hadnot, who had found his legs by this stage, scored sixteen points off ten shots. Milo played well too, under control, and managed to tease and harass their top scorer, a kid fresh from Michigan State, into throwing punches at him; he got sent off. But I was glad to see some of the punches land.
Afterwards, Milo was so happy that he smuggled a girl onto the team bus, who had to be kept hidden from Henkel. She claimed to be at vocational college, training to be a floor manager, but looked no older than seventeen. This seemed very funny for about twenty minutes, until it became clear to her that she would simply have a late ride home again, and Milo and she spent the rest of the journey negotiating how to get her back. In the end, he drove her; it was only an hour and a half. I felt for the moment a part of the whole stupid setup, laughing at Milo and trying at the same time to keep the girl hidden; maybe I felt this because we had won. I scored three points.
There were ten teams in our league, and everybody played each other twice. At the end of the season, the second place club traveled to the first place club for a playoff that determined promotion to the first division. That was the prize: one game, winner takes all. The first division meant more money, more travel, the European league. National television exposure. Magazine interviews. A different life.
It’s hard to describe what matters in sports without resorting to the banality of numbers – which is all that you’d see reported, the day after a game, in the Munich newspaper:
Samstag, 5 Oktober.
TG HITACHI Landshut – TV AXA DIREKT Langen: 83: 85 (49: 41).
A wet thundery night at home; the crowds stank of heat and dampness. Karl played especially poorly and for the first time vented his anger on court. Still, we were up at the break, thanks to the big men, Olaf and Plotzke, who played dirty under the boards and got their way. In the second half, Karl more or less refused to pass. Whenever he got the ball, he launched himself into a shot, until Henkel had to pull him and put me or Milo in. Hadnot played forty minutes. One of those games I’m not sure how we lost. We ran around until our legs gave way and after it was over somehow they had come out on top. Karl continued angry in the shower, and most of us left him alone. I washed back at the apartment, but Olaf stood up to him for once, and they ended up slapping each other and squirting shampoo. Olaf, who was fully dressed, got drenched.
‘Young man,’ he kept saying, ‘this is no laughing matter.’
But Karl had cheered up by that time. We lost the next game by twenty to Koblenz on the road.
Something was wrong, even I could see that. Henkel played around with the line-ups in practice, and for a few days I ran with the starting five. The trouble was, his two best scorers couldn’t play together: Karl disappeared whenever Hadnot was on court. That’s why he started firing up shots against Langen – a childish bid for attention. Henkel could only get forty good minutes out of the pair of them. I hadn’t panned out yet, and Milo was too much of a head-case to be trusted on offense. Which left Charlie taking jumpshots when the first option broke down.
On the long ride back from Koblenz, Henkel walked silently up the aisle distributing stat sheets to all the players. Not just for that game, but for the season. There was something awful about seeing your contributions to the cause so concisely summed up. Markovits: 2.3 ppg 35.1% FG etc. Karl led the team in total points, at just under eighteen a game, but Hadnot shot for a better percentage and scored more per minute. Hadnot was thirty years old, though, and the club was trying to market Karl as a rising star. Henkel wanted the international scouts to make their way to Landshut, but the scouts don’t come to watch a div 2 German club that loses three quarters of its games.
As it happens, Henkel was happy with what he called ‘my progress.’
‘You don’t play crazy anymore,’ he said.
What he meant was, I had learned my role. It was my job to swing the ball on offense, set hard screens on the block, and take the odd open shot. I played the second line on our press and closed off the corner at half-court. On defense, I pushed the wings baseline, blocked out on the perimeter, and made myself available for the outlet. Then I filled a lane behind Charlie. I did none of these things particularly well, but I did them. Henkel had decided what I was good for and how to put me to use.
Something was happening to me, and it occurred to me, a few months into the season, that all my curiosity and mild general friendliness was a defense against whatever it was. My relationship with Anke had pushed aside everyone else. Olaf and Milo cycled to bars together after practice and checked out girls. Charlie never invited me to lunch again. Darmstadt had his high school friends. Thomas Arnold and Karl began to hang out at his father’s big place in the hills. And Hadnot – what I was doing with Anke colored my feelings towards him, too. I was looking after his kid and making out with his wife. The taste of her in those first few weeks, still strange and thick on my tongue, stayed with me all day. Even with the salt of exertion in my mouth. You get used to it, as you get used to your own smell, but sometimes I caught a whiff of that, too.
Hadnot looked out for me more, after our country drive. On Mondays I brought in the weekend Tribune and gave it to him after practice: the back pages covered American sports. We sat on the slatted locker room benches and talked box scores.
‘I used to play against some of these stiffs,’ he said.
Often I left him, holding the wrinkled paper in his hands, damp from the shower steam, still reading out the stat lines.
In the morning, I continued to warm up with Karl, but Bo sometimes asked me to work out in the afternoons, and when I wasn’t seeing Anke, I spent an hour inside with her husband in a lightless mirrored room, pushing weights around.
These workouts were almost as intense as my dates with Anke. The sweat of his hands was on my hands; I could feel against my skin the heat of his skin. We both stank. More than these things, the companionableness of shared patience: we had a series of set tasks to get through, and it was dangerous to hurry them. Dumb bells, squats, lat pulls. Before and after, we helped each other stretch out. I pressed back against his lifted leg, while he lay flat; one leg and then the other.
He mentioned to me once that he figured on having another two or three good years. If he kept himself in shape, if he managed to get out of this Podunk league.
‘I don’t know what I’m sticking around for,’ he said. ‘My daughter can’t talk to me. My wife doesn’t want to.’
‘How long you been separated?’
‘Most of the off-season.’ He lay back on the bench press and shrugged his shoulders, adjusting his hands on the bar.
‘Can I ask you what went wrong?’
‘You can ask me,’ he said, and bent himself to the weight.
Afterwards, I went home with a racing heart to see Anke, but she was cool and sweet as ever, and we spent the rest of the afternoon twisting our fingers together under her coat, while Franziska climbed up and down the slide in the children’s playground. I didn’t tell her about these sessions, or him either about the days I spent with his wife. I used to be secretive as a child, without having much to keep secrets about. I was a good kid. It was a manner, more than anyth
ing else; it didn’t count for much. But these days I had good reason. So this is what I’m like, I thought.
Anke, whenever we went out, was conscious that Landshut is a small town. We kissed mostly in the kitchen, with Franziska in her cot two rooms away. Or sometimes, on warm days, under the trees on quiet back streets, with the girl asleep in her stroller. But when Franziska was awake, we couldn’t help being seen together, and Anke once admitted that the sight of me with her daughter aroused something in her blood, almost a sexual feeling. She felt other less happy and more complicated things at the same time; she didn’t mean to frighten me away.
‘I’m not frightened,’ I said.
Occasionally we treated Franziska to a salty packet of fries from the McDonald’s on the High Street. Anke disliked going, she had spent too much time there as a teenager, smoking outside on the benches. And some of the girls she used to go to school with, the ones she despised, still hung around outside, with their babies in buggies, eating chicken nuggets and smoking. But Franziska liked it, so we sometimes went. I liked it, too – the thought of revisiting, a few years too late, the scenes of her teenage rebellion . . .
‘It wasn’t rebellion,’ she said. ‘It was just boredom.’
But even her boredom appealed to me.
Once, coming out, I saw Milo making his way along the High Street, hunched two-handed over a Styrofoam box, bending from the heat of the sandwich. I almost called out to him; then thought, maybe it’s best he doesn’t see me here with them. Then thought: maybe he has seen me already.
Playing Days Page 13
