Kitabı oku: «The Motion of the Body Through Space», sayfa 2

TWO

Though the right knee rebuked her when it bore the load, Serenata refused to take the stairs one at a time, like a toddler. Hobbling down for tea the following afternoon, she found Remington in the living room. While she was still unaccustomed to his being home weekdays, it wasn’t fair to resent the presence of your husband when it was his house, too. Early retirement hadn’t been his idea, or, precisely, his fault.

Yet his getup was annoying by any measure: leggings, silky green shorts with undershorts of bright purple, and a shiny green shirt with purple netting for aeration—a set, its price tag dangling at the back of the neck. His wrist gleamed with a new sports watch. On a younger man the red bandanna around his forehead might have seemed rakish, but on Remington at sixty-four it looked like a costuming choice that cinemagoers were to read at a glance: this guy is a nut. In case the bandanna wasn’t enough, add the air-traffic-control orange shoes, with trim of more purple.

He only bent to clutch an ankle with both hands when she walked in. He’d been waiting for her.

So, fine, she watched. He held the ankle, raised his arms overhead, and dived for the opposite leg. As he teetered on one foot while tugging a knee to his chest, she left for her Earl Grey. On her return, he was bracing both hands against a wall and elongating a calf muscle. The whole ritual screamed of the internet.

“My dear,” she said. “There’s some evidence that stretching does a bit of good, but only after you’ve run. All it accomplishes beforehand is to put off the unpleasant.”

“You’re going to be a real bitch about this, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” she said lightly, and swept back upstairs. When the front door slammed, she ventured onto the second-story side porch to peer over the rail. After poking at the complicated watch for minutes, the intrepid began his inaugural run—trudging out the gate and down Union Street. She could have passed him at a stroll.

The impulse was wicked, but she checked the time. The door slammed again twelve minutes later. His shower would last longer. Is this how she’d get through this ordeal? With condescension? It was only October. It was going to be a long winter.

“How was your run?” she forced herself to inquire during a laconic dinner.

“Invigorating!” he declared. “I’m starting to see why you went at it, those forty-seven years.”

Uh-huh. Wait till it gets cold, and sleets, and blows a gale in your face. Wait till your intestines start to transit, with seven more miles to go, and you huddle in a cramped scuttle, praying you’ll make it before they explode all over your shiny green shorts. See how invigorated you get then. “And where did you get to?”

“I turned around at Highway Nine.”

Half a mile from their front door. Yet he was bursting with accomplishment. She looked at him with fascination. He was impossible to embarrass.

And why ever would she wish to embarrass him? Precisely what inflamed her about this stupid joiner impulse of his to run a marathon was the way such a mean-spirited desire had already arisen in her head, after her husband’s sole athletic achievement constituted running—if you could call it that—again, you see, this contaminating contempt—a single mile. She was not a combative harridan, nor had she been for their thirty-two years together. To the contrary, it was in the nature of wary isolates to give themselves completely and without stint once the formidable barriers they routinely erected before all and sundry had been breached. Most people regarded Serenata as standoffish, and she was fine with that; being seen as a woman who kept others at bay helped keep them at bay. But she was not aloof with Remington Alabaster, as of halfway through their first date. Largely keeping to yourself did not mean you lacked a normal human need for companionship. It did mean you tended to put eggs in one basket. Remington was her basket. She could not afford to resent the basket—to want to embarrass the basket, or to hope that when the basket set his sights on what had become a rather mundane status marker the basket would fail.

She owed him for the fact that what might otherwise have become an arid solitude was instead round, full, and rich. She’d relished being his sole confidante when the situation at the DOT went south; it was too dangerous for him to talk to anyone at work. She missed the camaraderie of shared indignation. Throughout the whole debacle, he’d have been unwavering in his confidence that she was staunchly in his corner. They’d had their differences, especially about the children, who had both, frankly, turned out a little strange. Nevertheless, the measure of a marriage was military: a good one was an alliance.

Furthermore, when they met she was floundering. She owed him for her career.

As a child, after a family vacation on Cape Hatteras, she’d declared her reigning ambition to become a lighthouse keeper—thrust on the prow of a spit, raised high with a view of an expanse that could make you feel either very small or very big, depending on your mood, with regal control of a great beacon. She would live in a small round room decorated with driftwood, heating up cans of soup on a hot plate, reading (well, she was only eight) Pippi Longstocking under a swinging bare bulb, and watching (ditto) reruns of I Dream of Jeannie on one of those miniature black-and-white televisions they had at the hotel on the Outer Banks. Later during the usual equine phase for girls, she imagined growing up to be a national park warden who toured vast public woodlands alone on horseback. Still later, inspired by a newspaper’s unusual job listing, she became enthralled by the idea of caretaking an estate on a tropical island owned by a very rich man, who’d only visit with an array of celebrity guests in his private jet once a year. The rest of the time she’d have a mansion to herself—with dinner seatings for a hundred, a chandeliered ballroom, a private menagerie, a golf course, and tennis courts, all without the bother of making a fortune and thus having to build a boring old business first. In the latter fantasy, it never occurred to her that infinite access to a golf course and tennis courts was of limited value with no one else to play with.

By her teens, the backyard frolicking of her childhood having given way to a covert if demanding fitness regime, Serenata entertained jobs that might put exertion to practical employ. She pictured herself as the only woman on a construction crew, pounding spikes, wielding big flats of Sheetrock, and manipulating heavy jackhammers—thus amazing her male coworkers, who would scoff at the upstart girlie at first, but would come to revere her and defend her honor in bars. Or she might become a great asset to a team of moving men (who would scoff, come to revere her, and defend her honor in bars …). She contemplated tree surgery. Alas, hard physical labor was apparently low-skilled and low-waged, and her middle-class parents dismissed all these backbreaking prospects as preposterous.

For years, the only child had amused her parents by performing original radio plays. She recorded all the parts on a portable cassette player, punctuating the dramas with sound effects—door slams, floor tromping, crumpling paper for fire. At once, her girlhood’s reigning ambition to pursue a solitary occupation seemed to display a gut self-knowledge. What fit the bill, then, was to become a writer.

Oh, her parents didn’t regard this aspiration as any more practical than becoming a construction worker. They expected she’d just get married. But at least a literary bent would argue for a college education, which would raise the quality and earning power of her suitors. So with their blessing she enrolled at Hunter, within shouting distance of New Brunswick, emerging like most liberal arts graduates as roundly unemployable.

Serenata’s twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. She couldn’t afford her own apartment, so (anathema) had to share digs with other girls whose twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. The menial jobs she procured hardly required a college degree. She tried to make time for “her work” without saying the pretentious expression aloud. Mortifyingly, every other peer she encountered in New York City also described themselves as writers, who were also making time for “their work.”

It was manning the phones at Lord & Taylor’s Customer Service that turned her tide. A young man called about needing to return a gift of a tasteless tie. He described the gaudy item in comical detail. He enticed her to explain what a customer should do both with and without a receipt, when surely he had the receipt or he didn’t. It dawned dimly on the store’s representative that he was keeping her on the line. Finally he implored her to repeat after him, “Please watch the closing doors.”

“What?”

“Just say it. As a favor. Please watch the closing doors.”

Well, it wasn’t as if he’d asked her to repeat “Please can I suck your dick.” She complied.

“Perfect,” he said.

“I’m not sure how one would say that badly.”

“Most people would say that badly,” he countered—and proceeded to explain that he was a civil servant with the city’s Department of Transportation. He’d been tasked with finding a new announcer for recorded public transit advisories, and begged her to try out for the job. She was leery, of course. As a precaution, she looked up the NYC Department of Transportation in the phone book, and the address he’d provided matched.

In the end, it was decided higher up that New Yorkers weren’t quite ready for female authority, and she didn’t get the job. As Remington shared with her later, one of the other men on the team had declared after replaying her audition tape that no male passenger listening to that sultry voice would ever hear the content of the announcements; he’d be fantasizing about fucking the loudspeaker.

Yet before the disappointing determination was made, she did agree to a dinner date—albeit only after Remington’s second invitation. She was obliged to turn down the spontaneous one on the heels of her audition because the bike trip between her East Village apartment and the DOT office downtown was officially too short to “count,” and it wouldn’t do to dine out when she hadn’t yet exercised. They agreed to meet at Café Fiorello on Broadway, a high-end Italian trattoria that longtime New York residents would generally consign to tourists. Despite the upscale venue, Serenata, as ever, insisted on cycling.

From a distance in the restaurant’s entryway, Remington had apparently watched her standard Cinderella transformation beside an alternate-side parking sign. She toed off a ratty sneaker, balanced on the other foot, and shimmied from one leg of her jeans—ensuring that the skirt fluttering over them continued to cover her person in a seemly fashion. It was still nippy in March, and ivory panty hose had doubled as insulation. From a pannier, she withdrew a pair of killer heels in red patent leather. Steadying herself on one high heel by holding the bike seat, she repeated the striptease with the opposite leg and stuffed her rolled jeans into the pannier. After giving the skirt a straightening tug, she applied a hasty touch-up of lipstick; the ride itself would provide the blush. She removed her helmet, shook out the thick black hair, and bound it with a homemade fabric binder not yet called a scrunchie. By then Remington had tucked back into the restaurant, enabling her to check her filthy jacket and the greasy saddlebags, their erstwhile hi-viz yellow now the queasy, sullen color of a spoiled olive.

Over a lobster pasta, her date responded to her hopes to become a writer with a neutrality that must have disguised an inner eye roll. After all, she was rolling her eyes at herself. “I’m afraid the aspiration has started to seem self-indulgent. And everyone I run into in this town wants to be a writer, too.”

“If it’s what you really want to do, it doesn’t matter that it’s a cliché.”

“But I wonder if it is what I want to do. I do thrive on isolation. But I don’t yearn to reveal myself. I want frantically to keep other people out of my business. I prefer to keep my secrets. Whenever I try my hand at fiction, I write about characters who have nothing to do with me.”

“Ha! Maybe you do have a future in literature.”

“No, there’s another problem. This isn’t going to sound good.”

“Now you’ve intrigued me.” He leaned back, leaving his fork in the fettuccini.

“You know how people on the news are always starving, or dying in an earthquake? I’m starting to realize that I don’t care about them.”

“Natural disasters are often far away. The victims seem abstract. Maybe it’s easier to feel for folks closer to home.”

“Suffering people don’t seem abstract. On television, they look real as sin. As for the people closer to home—I don’t care about them, either.”

Remington chuckled. “That’s either refreshing or appalling.”

“I’d opt for appalling.”

“If you don’t care about other people, what does that make me?”

“Possibly,” she said cautiously, “an exception. I make a few. But my default setting is obliviousness. That’s a lousy qualification for a writer, isn’t it? Besides. I’m not sure I’ve got the voice to stand out.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “you do have the voice. I’d gladly listen to you read the entire federal tax code.”

She enhanced the silky tone in her throat with a rough edge: “Really?” Remington admitted later that the adverb gave him an erection.

They moved on. Merely to be courteous, she asked why he’d ended up at the DOT. His response was unexpectedly impassioned.

“It may sound mechanical, but transport is massively emotional! There’s no other aspect of urban life that arouses such strong feelings. On some streets, if you take out a lane of traffic to build a bike lane, you’ll start a riot. Miscalibrate a pedestrian light to last a whole two minutes, and you can hear drivers pounding on the steering wheel with their windows shut. Buses that don’t come for an hour when it’s five below … Subways stuck indefinitely under the East River with no explanation on the loudspeaker … Terrifyingly designed freeway entrance ramps, where vision of oncoming traffic is occluded by a blind curve … Confusing signage that sends you plummeting south on the New Jersey Turnpike for twenty miles with no exit when you want to go north, and you were already running late … You may not give a hoot about other people, but transport?

Everybody cares about transport.”

“Maybe so. I think my bicycle is a horse. A beloved horse.”

He confessed to having watched her sidewalk burlesque. “So what if we went somewhere together?”

“I’d meet you there on my bike.”

“Even if I offered to pick you up?”

“I’d decline. Politely.”

“I question the ‘politely,’ when refusal would be obstinate and rude.”

“Insisting I alter a lifelong practice just to suit you or convention would also be rude.”

Like most rigid people, Serenata didn’t care whether inflexibility was an especially entrancing quality. You never coaxed the deeply obdurate into a more ingratiating give-and-take. You got with the program.

At the disarming civil engineer’s urging, Serenata did indeed audition for a voice-over job at an advertising firm, and was hired on the spot. Similar work came in with sufficient regularity that she was able to quit Lord & Taylor. She gained a reputation. In time, she would extend to audiobooks, and nowadays much of her work was infomercials and video games. If she cared little about other people, she did care about excellence, and was forever delighted to discover new timbres, or to extend her upper and lower registers to convey cranky children and grousing old men. It was one of the pleasures of human speech to be unconstrained by a limited number of notes in a scale, and she relished the infinite incremental tonalities in a glissando of disappointment.

Having moved so often as a kid had left her diction exotically nonspecific and usefully fluid. All variations in the pronunciation of aunt, syrup, or pecan were to her ear equally correct and equally arbitrary. She readily picked up accents because she wasn’t attached to her own—and even sly lingual detectives failed to pin the origins of her argot. As she explained to Remington, “I’m from nowhere. Sometimes people mis-hear my first name and write it ‘Sarah Nada’: Sarah Nothing.”

Yet their courtship was curiously chaste. Her guarded quality had tempted earlier suitors to try to overrun the ramparts—with fatal consequences. Perhaps Remington was thus cannily countering her withholding by withholding in return, but she began to worry that he kept his hands to himself because he just didn’t find her attractive. “I know you fell for my voice,” she noted at last. “But when the voice showed up in the flesh—were the three dimensions a turnoff?”

“You police your borders,” he said. “I’ve been waiting to be issued a visa.”

So she kissed him—taking his hand and placing it firmly on an inside thigh, with the formality of stamping his passport. These many years later, the question was: If she’d first been captivated by Remington Alabaster’s respect for her fierce sense of territory, why was he now invading it at the age of sixty-four?

“That’s it for the upstairs bathroom,” the young woman announced, tugging her rubber gloves from the wrist so that they came off disastrously inside out.

Serenata nodded at the gloves lying moist and smelly on the kitchen island. “You did it again.”

“Oh, bastard!”

“I’m not paying you by the hour to work those fingers one-by-one back through the other way.” Her tone, however, was teasing.

“Okay, off the clock.” With a glance at her wrist, Tomasina March—Tommy for short—began the arduous business of poking the inverted forefinger of the first glove and edging it down through the sticky yellow tube by the quarter inch.

Although her parents had hired a cleaner, before the move to Hudson Serenata had spurned domestic help. Oh, she didn’t suffer from liberal discomfort with servants. She simply didn’t want strangers—other people—in her house. Yet reaching sixty had put her over the hill in a panoramic sense. She had crested, and could see from here the decline that spread before her. She could choose to spend a measurable proportion of this surprisingly short and potentially precipitous decay scrubbing the soap buildup around the shower drain, or she could pay someone else to do it. No-brainer.

Besides, though she’d usually have been put off by the proximity of one more exercise fanatic, something about the nineteen-year-old next-door doing hundreds of squat thrusts in her busted-furniture-strewn backyard on the day they moved in had reminded Serenata of her own childhood’s “broken legs” and “rolly-pollies.” Glad for the pocket money (Serenata paid $10/hour—appallingly, in upstate New York a generous wage), Tommy was a stalky girl, long-limbed and awkward, thin but shapeless. Her honey hair was fine and lank. Her face was open and guileless. Its unwritten quality brought back in a rush how truly awful it was to have this whole stupid life looming before you, a life you never asked for in the first place, and to have not an inkling what to do with it. At Tommy’s age, most kids with half a wit would be visited by a sick feeling that by the time they finally cobbled together a plan it would prove too late, because there was something they should have done—at nineteen—to put the stratagem into action. It was a wonder that people grew nostalgic for youth. The wistfulness was pure amnesia.

“So where’s Remington?” Tommy asked.

“Out for a run, believe it or not. Which means we have a whole six more minutes to talk about him behind his back.”

“I didn’t know he was into running.”

“He wasn’t. Not until two weeks ago. Now he wants to run a marathon.”

“Well, good for him.”

“Is it good for him?”

“Sure.” Tommy was concentrating on the glove. She still hadn’t rescued its forefinger. “Everybody wants to run a marathon, so what could be wrong with it?”

“That fact that everybody wants to. I know he’s at loose ends, but I wish he’d latched on to something more original.”

“There’s not that much to do. Whatever you think of, somebody else’s done it already. Being original is a lost cause.”

“I’m being mean,” Serenata said, not referring to Remington—but of course, she was being mean about him, too. “Those gloves—I should just buy you a new pair. Though you’d make quicker work of them if you stopped pacing.”

Tommy continued to lunge back and forth across the kitchen while victoriously inverting the forefinger. “Can’t. Only at twelve thousand, and it’s already four o’clock.”

“Twelve thousand what?”

“Steps.” She gestured to the plastic band on her left hand. “I got a Fitbit. A knockoff, but same difference. Also, if I stop, this thing won’t count your first thirty steps for some dumb reason. In the instructions, it says, ‘in case you just shaking hands,’ as if anybody shakes hands thirty freaking times. Those instructions are all written by Chinese people who obviously don’t know anything about American customs. Not that I mean there’s anything wrong with Chinese people,” she added anxiously. “Is that what you’re supposed to call them? ‘Chinese people’? It sounds kind of insulting. Anyway, those lost thirty steps, over and over—they really add up.”

“And this matters why? That back-and-forth of yours is putting me into a trance.”

“Well, you post your steps. Every day. Online. Just about everybody clocks up, like, twenty K or more, and Marley Wilson, this total cunt from senior year, regularly posts thirty.”

“How many miles is that?”

“Just under fifteen,” Tommy said promptly.

“Unless she’s really hoofing it, walking that mileage could take five hours a day. Does she do anything else?”

“Whatever else she does isn’t the point.”

“Why do you care how many steps other people take?”

“You don’t get it. But you should. The main reason it bugs you that Remington’s started running is you stopped.”

“I didn’t say it bugged me.”

“Didn’t have to. He’s beating you. Even if he’s only gone six minutes, he’s beating you.”

“I still exercise by other means.”

“Not for long. You went on that whole rant last week about how impossible it is to do anything aerobic that doesn’t involve your knees. You can’t even swim, when they get too puffy.”

It was ridiculous to feel wounded when Tommy was only quoting Serenata back to herself.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Tommy added, waving a fully outside-out rubber glove in triumph, “most people who do marathons totally give up running pretty soon afterward. Like those World’s Biggest Losers who go right back to being fat. They check that box on the bucket list, and then move on.”

“Did you know the term ‘bucket list’ only goes back about ten years? I looked it up. A screenwriter wrote a list of things he wanted to do before he ‘kicked the bucket.’ So he called it ‘The Bucket List.’ Since at the very top was getting a screenplay produced, he wrote a movie with the same title. It must have done okay, because the term went viral.”

“Ten years ago, I was nine. Far as I’m concerned, we’ve said that forever.”

“That expression ‘going viral’ itself went viral only a few years earlier. I wonder if there’s a name for that—something that is what it describes.”

“You care more about the names of stuff than I do.”

“It’s called being educated. You should try it sometime.”

“Why? I told you, I want to be a voice-over artist, too. I can already read pretty good. Now I just have to get better at once more, with feeling, like you said.”

This peculiarly age-discrepant friendship had first taken off after the girl discovered that Serenata Terpsichore had recorded the audiobook of one of her favorite young adult novels. Tommy had never known anyone whose name had appeared on an Amazon download, so the credit made her next-door neighbor a superstar.

“I think what grates about these abruptly ubiquitous expressions—”

Tommy wasn’t going to ask.

“Meaning, suddenly everyone says it,” Serenata added. “It’s just, people throwing around fashionable lingo think they’re so hip and imaginative. But you can’t be hip and imaginative. You can be unhip and imaginative, or hip and conformist.”

“For a lady who doesn’t care about what other people think, and what other people do, you sure talk a lot about what other people think, and what other people do.”

“That’s because other people are constantly crowding me.”

“Do I crowd you?” Tommy asked shyly, actually coming to a stop.

Serenata pulled herself up—it was a Bad Knee Day—and put an arm around the girl. “Certainly not! It’s you and I against the world. Now that you’ve paused, the next thirty steps are a write-off. So let’s have tea.”

Tommy slid gratefully into a chair. “Did you know that within fifteen minutes of sitting down, your whole body, like, changes and everything? Your heart and stuff.”

“Yes, I’ve read that. But I can’t stand up twelve hours a day anymore. It hurts.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, before. About the running and stuff. ’Cause anyway, for an old person—you still look pretty hot.”

“Thanks—I think. Strawberry-mango okay?” Serenata lit the burner under the kettle. “But being halfway well put together won’t last. Exercise has been my secret. A secret that’s out, I gather.”

“Not that out. Most people look terrible. Like my mother.”

“You said she has diabetes.” With bad timing, Serenata put out a plate of almond cookies. “Cut her some slack.”

Tommy March was not unloved, but under-loved, which was worse—just as full-tilt fasting had a strengthening absolutism, whereas a never-ending diet made you peevish and weak. Her father had cut and run long ago, and her mother rarely left the house. Presumably they were on public assistance. So even in a town with depressed property values—this vast brown clapboard had been a steal at $235K, with two baths, three porches, and six bedrooms, two of which they still hadn’t put to any use—naturally Tommy’s mother was still renting. She’d never encouraged her daughter to go to college. Which was a shame, because the girl had plenty of drive, but her urge to self-improvement was unmoored. She pinballed from fad to fad with little awareness of the larger social forces that worked the flippers. When she declared herself a vegan (before realizing two weeks in that she couldn’t live without pizza), she imagined that the idea just came to her out of the blue.

Typically for the time, then, Tommy was skittish about sugar. As if stealing the confection behind her own back, her hand darted at a cookie like a lizard’s tongue and snatched the snack to her lap. “You’re still being, like, all grumpy-out-of-it-old-lady about social media, right?”

“I have better things to do. In the real world.”

“Social media is the real world. It’s way more real than this one. It’s only ’cause you shut yourself out of it that you don’t know that.”

“I prefer to use you as my spy. I used Remington the same way for years. He went out into the American workplace and reported back. As for what he found there … A layer of insulation seems prudent.”

“I just think you should know … Well, on these YA platforms …” Tommy had stopped looking Serenata in the eye. “It’s got kinda not so great, for white readers of audiobooks to use accents. Especially of POCs.”

“People of color!” Serenata said. “Bet you thought I didn’t know that. Remington always thought it was hilarious that at work if he’d ever said ‘colored people’ instead, he’d have been fired. But then, he was fired anyway. So much for hoop jumping, if you’re not in pro basketball.”

“Look, I don’t make the rules.”

“But you do make the rules. Remington says that it’s everyone slavishly obeying these capriciously concocted taboos that gives them teeth. He says rules that are roundly ignored are ‘just suggestions.’”

“You’re not listening! The point is, your name came up. And not in a nice way.”

“So what’s wrong with doing accents again? I’m not following this.”

“It’s—problematic.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means everything. It’s a great big giant word for absolutely everything that’s super bad. See, now they’re all saying that white readers pretending to talk like marginalized communities is ‘mimicry,’ and also it’s like, cultural appropriation.”

“It depresses the hell out of me that you can rattle off ‘marginalized communities’ and ‘cultural appropriation,’ whatever that is, when you don’t know the word ubiquitous.”

“I do now! It means everybody does it.”

“No. Omnipresent, everywhere. Now, why does my name come up?”

“Honest? Your accents, on the audiobooks. I think it’s because you’re so good at them. Like, you have a reputation. So when these guys reach for an example, it’s your name they think of.”

“Let me get this straight,” Serenata said. “I’m now supposed to deliver the dialogue of a coke dealer in Crown Heights as if he’s a professor of medieval literature at Oxford. ‘Yo, bro, dat bitch ain’t no better than a ho, true dat.’” She’d given the line an aristocratic English snootery, and Tommy laughed.

“Please let’s not tell Remington about this,” Serenata said. “Promise me. I’m deadly serious. He’d freak.”

“Shouldn’t tell Remington what?” Himself closed the side door behind him. It was November, and he’d made the usual mistake of bundling up to excess, when the biggest problem of running in cold weather was getting hot. Underneath all that winter sports gear he’d be drenched, and his face was red. The ruddy complexion was further enhanced by a glow of a more interior sort. Good grief, she prayed that she herself had never returned from some dumpy old run exuding this degree of self-congratulation.