Flat Water Tuesday (13 page)

Two minutes. Anyone could slam down two good minutes. What’s two minutes?

His legs crushed the white boards of the foot stretchers; he spewed spit at the machine’s cage before gulping in more air. Connor was pulling hard and evenly and the numbers flickered, changed, and his times began to weaken, but only slightly. Three minutes, then four. One hundred and twenty strokes counted on the screen, one hundred and twenty crouches, pulls, hisses, whines and screeches. Then it was five minutes and now one hundred and sixty. The muscles lacing his forearms were straining, shifting over one another. One hundred and seventy crouches, one hundred and seventy releases. One hundred and ninety strokes now, the pace brought up, the stakes higher.

I sat in the dust of the boathouse, watching, my stomach filled with a black acid of fear. It was horrible to see how good he was. How easy it would be, I thought, to relent. To give up a few strokes. By now Connor’s body was revolting against the pain, his veins were filled with poison, his head was thrumming. What compelled him to seat himself to this feast of agony? Two hundred strokes passed, his blond hair was a wet blur. How many meters were rowed now?

Two thousand.

Five hundred to go.

Just under fifty more strokes.

Now two thousand one hundred and the screeches came faster. The blue vein wormed deeper into his skull, and the striations down his legs went pink, then red. Two thousand four hundred meters, and then four more shuddering screeches and quick rasps and two thousand five hundred meters rowed. There was a last snarl from the machine and Connor slumped over, eating the air, pushing the handle away, his eyes shut, their white lids covered with sweat. The otherworldly presence in the room was gone now. Left behind was Connor’s collapsed, spent body, merely human again.

He stood up, finally. The room had gone silent and Ruth, not looking at him, marked his time, the best time I had ever seen a rower pull. Wiping his eyes, he looked at me first. “Your turn, Roberto.”

9.

We realigned the ergs so that I rowed with Wadsworth, Leonsis, DeKress and Perry, all of us in a line with Ruth pacing beside us. On my right, DeKress did the entire test wearing a baseball hat backward. He and I settled into an easy pace, maybe twenty-eight strokes a minute, but halfway through I ticked out to thirty-two and he just looked over at me and blinked through his sweat. Leonsis, next to him, tried to power through the first hundred strokes and made it to seventy-five before taking it down to a slow twenty-five strokes a minute. His style went to hell, but he was powerful enough to pull through it anyway. At the end, wearing a Fenton squash shirt and shorts, Wadsworth rowed to stay near the top and simply outpaced DeKress. He didn’t look at us while he did it, just gazed at the computer over his horn-rimmed glasses, scored a decent time and stopped, packed up, left. I admired that. As for Perry on my left, he conducted a tug-of-war with his machine. His test began badly and only got worse.

My time was three seconds behind Connor’s. A world apart. But still second best in the club, enough so I was assured a place on the senior training squad. I was furious with myself though. I had known the time to beat, knew exactly what I needed to do, but started out too hard and couldn’t make it up at the end. The last thirty strokes saw me lose three seconds. I willed the numbers to flicker in my favor, but they wouldn’t. The basement air seemed to cling to my lungs and the wind from the other fans and sobbing breaths from the other rowers distracted me. As did Ruth’s closeness to me while I tried to pull through it. Even though she didn’t flaunt it, she was a fierce feminine presence in this morass of sweaty testosterone.

Toward the end she just said, calmly, “Your last twenty strokes are coming in two and you can beat Connor. You’re good for it, Carrey.” Her voice so close it seemed like it was in my head. I looked over at her and only saw her in profile, her dark eyes looking at my fading numbers. “Don’t look at me, Carrey, look at the computer. Seventeen strokes in. Don’t get distracted.” And I tried to jam it for the last ten, but the numbers would not obey. The pain became so unbearable I knew I had to settle or risk passing out. Losing consciousness chasing Connor’s score was not what I needed, but there was something else. A rage at seeing those numbers stand still while I poured everything I had into it. The feeling of hatred running up my spine and boiling beneath my brain blurred my vision. Connor had felt the same pain but had rowed through it, alone, knowing what he had to do to make himself more untouchable than he already was. I knew that if I stood up after that test I’d scream. I had no idea why. Maybe it was the way Connor lost interest in my test before I hit the last twenty strokes, turned away knowing I’d never make up the time. Ruth watched me finish impassively, took down my score and moved off. Before she did she gently touched me, part congratulation, part something else.

Three seconds.

Half a boat length.

Connor’s universe remained undisturbed.

*   *   *

Just about everyone witnessed John Perry collapse on his machine. He rowed next to me on one end of the row. We had tapped hands before the test, not a handshake, not a slap, just an assertion of a mutual presence. We had moved his ergometer away from the rest to accommodate him and he had rowed with an uneven fury, slobber hanging out his mouth while he worked. The ergometer test was about two hundred and fifty strokes and he survived only the first one hundred and twenty, and then his pace went slack. Ruth felt it before I did, and stood behind him, cursing at him, swearing at him, appealing to his pride and his strength, then mocking him, shouting at him to move the numbers up, to pull harder, to punish the machine. But still Perry faded. By the end of it, he was hunched over the oar handle, rowing in a weak frenzy, the handle barely clearing his knees, his tremendous body depleted of oxygen. Humiliation and pain rose off him in equal measure as he tried to row through it. Ten strokes, fifteen jagged strokes, then a series of whipping strokes over the knees. His breathing sounded like groaning.

Channing had taken a seat against the wall on a battered wooden bench that looked like it might have once served as a pew in some country chapel. He watched Perry as if he had finally found out what we as a group had been hiding from him. Connor stood silently next to him the entire time. Perry, eyes squeezed shut, threw himself into the machine.

Ruth’s voice cracked over all of us, “Now you come back on this and show these guys what you can do. You are dying on me Perry,
dying
, don’t you die.” But Perry did die, and Ruth’s voice rose to a screech and then sunk into awful silence. I had finished my piece two minutes ahead of him, sat gasping over the monorail. The rest of the oarsmen finished within forty seconds of me, but Perry chugged on, our eyes on him, some of us attempting pity. When he was done Perry collapsed, covered in sweat and snot and watery vomit, his face turned away from Channing and Connor. Ruth took down his score. An eternity later, Perry stood, red-faced and blotched, and reeled drunkenly to the door.

Connor turned to him and spoke, loud enough so we could all hear. “You didn’t finish. You stopped at two thousand meters.”

Perry nodded in response, unable to look up or talk.

“Mark that down, Ruth. Write ‘Did not finish.’ Put it in big letters by his name so we’ll remember.” He continued looking at Perry in disgust. “Get out. Hear me? Get out of here and come back when you are ready to train.”

Perry walked to his sweatshirt, unsteady and spitting, and pulled it on under Connor’s unrelenting gaze. By now no one in the boathouse was even pretending they weren’t watching him get cast out. As Perry left I felt a sickness inside me. A clammy feeling of guilt and apprehension. I heard Perry labor up the stairs, then listened to his heavy plodding steps across the floors above, the creak of the door. I looked once at Channing, who regarded us as if we had confirmed something elemental about human nature that he had almost forgotten.

*   *   *

Connor was not about to let Perry quit, though. He never invited Leonsis to train with the returning God Four and Leonsis never asked why, either, was simply told to keep working and come back for the group tests. It wasn’t because Connor liked Perry. It was because Leonsis would never take Connor’s shit. And Connor also knew that Perry’s sprint times were deadly. He was a brute at the start of a race, nobody in that room could match his first fifty strokes. His endurance could be built back up—he was playing football now, moving in short bursts. On a good day, Perry could kill Leonsis with his bare hands, and Connor wanted that kind of power in his boat.

But Perry might also have been salvaged because Ruth never forgave Leonsis for asking for a blow job in front of the JV returners. Even in jest he had overstepped the mark, and Ruth was not afraid to wield her power.

*   *   *

I walked all the way to Washington Square Park, snagged a lone bench and tried to cool off. By this time in my life I had learned not to do anything important when I was in a rage, certainly not to argue with Carolyn. I knew as well that I could not think about John, although I wanted to. I watched two people doing t’ai chi. NYU kids sitting under the trees and by the fountains, nodding into iPods over books. Some kids on the kind of modern swings undreamed of when I was a child in Niccalsetti.

I moved over to the game tables and sat down close to the fountain. It was warming up but the serious grifters were still sleeping. I practiced what I would say to Carolyn when I returned, how I could get us back to where we were eight hours ago. I had brought my cell phone, shoved it in my pocket when I left the loft. It was, hands down, an unfashionable phone. It was one of the flat metal ones that opened and were cool a decade ago, and I had never traded up because I always told myself that I would simply put the phone I used in South Africa to roam when I came back to the city. But I always wound up using this one, which was verging on being a collector’s item when I met Carolyn.

She kept it in the same basket that she kept her iPhone, my charger wrapped around it. It was a good sign.

I checked the message window, idly hoping she might have texted me, but of course she hadn’t. I flipped open the phone, thought, finally punched in “bagels/coffee (?)”

And then I waited obstinately for ten minutes, knowing (bitterly) that Carolyn would have picked up the text right away. She kept her iPhone next to her wherever she was in the loft, refused to leave the place without it, woke up to it, told the time with it. The wait was part of the message to me. The trick was not to get irritated, not to follow up with a “wtf??” despite knowing she could be back to me in thirty seconds if she wanted. There was no arguing with this procedure. If I called her, she’d put me to voice mail. If she was truly pissed off at me, of course, she would not reply. This was possible.

So I sat and watched an old woman in a cashmere suit playing chess against her granddaughter. The woman was sitting primly on one of the green benches in front of the permanent chessboards, and the granddaughter was standing on the other, moving pieces with care, laughing when the grandmother thought, moved, lost a piece and smiled. Each time one of them moved they would bow their heads over the board. Every move of the girl’s was a revelation for both of them. The old woman was once tall, now frail, still impeccable. The granddaughter was wearing loud pink overalls. Sneakers that lit up when she moved. Dressed, obviously, by a mother with different tastes.

As I watched I found myself tearing up, and I wiped my eyes quickly on my shoulder, looked furtively around me to make sure nobody saw. I set the phone on the bench next to me. Seven minutes had gone by since I texted Car. Rowing had left me with an excellent sense of time.

The granddaughter had put her grandmother in a tough position. I imagined filming it, a long shot from here, then close-ups of the game from the grandmother’s perspective, then the kid’s tiny hands on the chess pieces. I couldn’t see what color the granddaughter was playing, but I imagined she was playing black, had taken her grandmother’s bishops and rooks and knights while losing only a few polite pawns. The grandmother’s queen would be cornered in the back of the board by a relentless march of the childish army, the child’s defenses ever secure. I’d do a profile of the knowing look on the grandmother’s face as her queen was wiped off the board and the king was boxed in, then get a table-level shot of the king being ceremoniously knocked over to a scream and a hug from the victor.

My phone vibrated, buzzed, spun halfway round on the wooden bench and started to slide downward.

I goalied it. Flipped it open.

“whatev.”

I didn’t look back at the two chess players. I stood and walked toward Lafayette Street. I had a plan. A kid wearing a blue Columbia University rowing windshirt and sunglasses steered a silver mountain bike around me. He had on Nikes and black rowing trunks and a backpack. It could have been me a decade and a half ago. It could have been Connor.

I know that whenever I imagine Connor Payne I am unfair. I represent him badly. The fact is, whenever I thought of Fenton, I thought of him. Of the privilege of being friends with him. It gave you a kind of grace that I had never experienced back at home. There was simply no equivalent sport to crew in a regular high school. Not even the football players are part of the kind of aristocracy that the members of the top crews at the top rowing schools in America enjoy. Fenton students admired the rowing team, they admired Connor. And Connor was arrogant. He was the most arrogant person I ever met, and he encouraged us to be arrogant as well. The school, in his mind, had been divided between rowers and the plebes, most of whom he referred to as “tools” or “dorkage.”

In his mind, you had to succeed without any effort. Striving, working, was in bad taste. Connor told me this, the hardest working person I have ever known. Most of the teachers at Fenton were tools, in his mind, except for about five or six of them, the really hard-core teachers, most of whom failed him mercilessly. He failed with a grim sense of pride. Case in point: He refused to prepare for the SAT. He obstinately refused to take it seriously. The SAT was for kids he called “power tools.” Geeks and pure dorkage took the SAT review course the school held.