Flat Water Tuesday (16 page)

Connor laughed. “Screw you, Carrey. Jumbo’s fine. Look at him.”

I turned and stared at him. Jumbo was right next to me and Wadsworth was standing behind us. Connor looked at the three of us, standing his ground. Fearless.

“Where’s Jumbo’s ten bucks?”

“What?” Connor looked like he genuinely didn’t know what I was talking about.

“You bet him ten bucks he couldn’t lift that weight. Where’s your money? You owe him ten bucks.”

Perry said, “Rob, man, it’s cool—”

“It’s not cool. He owes you ten bucks.” I kept my eyes on Connor. If he was going to hit me, it would be right now. I damn near prayed for it.

Connor smirked. “Don’t you think I’m good for it, Roberto?”

“Pay him, then.”

Connor shrugged, walked nonchalantly to the back of the training room, fumbled through his backpack and extracted two fives from his prissy black leather wallet. He straightened, sauntered back across the room, ignoring everyone looking at us. He handed Perry the money and somehow managed to make it look condescending; like he was tipping a bell hop or something. Perry stuffed the bills in his sweatshirt. I punched Jumbo’s heavy arm. “C’mon, man. Let’s get you some air. You need to walk that off.” I turned to Connor. “You couldn’t even get that weight off the ground.”

“I don’t have to, Carrey. I have the best time on the erg of anyone in this room. Including you.”

“That’s all you have, asshole.”

Connor grinned, turned away.

Jumbo followed me upstairs and we walked through the boats to the sliding door Ruth had left hanging open. I looked around for her but she had disappeared into the last light of the day. Perry walked next to me and I could swear he was limping, just a little.

“I did it, Rob. Jesus. I’ve never done that much weight. That was badass, right?”

“It was total crap, Connor asking you to do that.”

“Naw, man. I called his bluff.”

He was walking heavily, smiling broadly, as if he’d just been given a bag of popcorn.

“Jumbo, you don’t need to take Connor’s bullshit. You could tell him to go to hell and what’s he going to do? Hit you? Not let you on the team?”

“You know it’s not that easy. And it’s cool I’m still training with you guys after quitting the erg test. I owe him for that. He could have blackballed me. Leonsis could have my place.”

“He’s not God, Jumbo.”

Perry stopped at Route 7, looked across the road. “Rob, I’ve been here for three years. I came here as a freshman, like Connor did. Like Wads and Ruth. Back then all the seniors hazed the crap out of us. Even Connor. I must have delivered a hundred pizzas into the senior garret. Connor was given a wilderness every night.”

“A wilderness?”

“He had to wait on all the kids at the rowing table. And do the whole cleanup. Without help. That’s called doing a wilderness. He was like the wilderness kid.”

“So? It didn’t make him humble.”

“But he still made the God Four. He still did it. He was the first freshman in years to make the God Four. Like, since World War One or something, when all the seniors went off to battle or caught polio or whatever. At the end of the year, somebody was waiting on
him
.”

Perry coughed, spat, jogged across the road and when he got to the other side he was almost winded. All I had to do to keep up with him was lengthen my stride. My
walking
stride.

“Last year they held the Warwick Race over at Warwick. Every year Connor’s parents come up for it. They come up in a real limo. This big silver Caddy with smoked glass windows. So, anyway, last year, they didn’t even get out. They just had their chauffeur park it near the finish line.”

Perry covered one of his huge nostrils with his thumb and blew. A stream of snot sprayed out onto the road. I tried not to puke.

“It was their message to us. They had watched two God Fours lose and they weren’t going to bother getting out of the car for the third race.”

“You want to know something, Jumbo? I didn’t know real people drove around in limos. I thought they were for, like, foreign dignitaries and kids on prom night and rock stars. A limo. And you feel sorry for him? Nice.”

“Dude, Connor is from New York. Do you think his dad, like, hails cabs and stuff? Or takes the subway?” Jumbo laughed. “Anyway, we almost beat Warwick. We had them by half a boat length into the last twenty strokes. And this guy who graduated last year, Paul Wendt, caught a crab. His oar jut sliced under the water and yanked him out of the foot stretchers. It smacked him in the jaw and he was just laid out. One more inch and he would have been tossed out of the boat.”

“Believe me, I’ve heard about it.”

“Do they call it ‘catching a crab’ where you come from?”

“Where I come from? Jumbo, Niccalsetti is just eight hours away. It’s not another country. We use the same language.”

“Niccalsetti is only eight hours away? Really?”

“It’s New York State. The state isn’t that big.”

“So, you get summer and all? I thought it always snowed there. Like, you know, Finland or Alaska or whatever. Seriously. No offense.”

“Finish the story, you ignoramus.”

“So we still pulled it together. Came back over the line a boat length and a half down. By the time we’d let it run and were spinning the boat to go back to the dock, the limo was gone. They just drove away, man.”

He started lumbering toward the school. “Wadsworth’s parents took us all out to lunch after, including Channing. Connor didn’t say anything the whole time. And he never spoke to Wendt again. We won every race after that, but we lost to Warwick, and that’s all that counts to Connor because that’s the only race that counts to any of them.”

“That doesn’t excuse the fact that he’s a prick.”

“I know, Rob, dude. But it kind of explains it.”

We walked on in silence until we got to the entrance of North Dorm. Perry lived in West Dorm, still had a hike ahead of him. Students were pushing by us on their way to dinner. I was starved. Perry looked at me earnestly. “Do you think Ruth is pissed off at me?”

“I think she’s pissed off at all of us.”

“She always is. It’s kind of cool.”

“Good luck, Perry.”

“Don’t need luck. I’m stone cold, bro.” He grinned, put his hands in the air in victory, punched the sky. “I got three hundred and twelve pounds up to my shoulders, man! Can’t beat it, even on a good day!” He strode away, all the freshmen giving him a wide berth. I watched him cut across the field toward the chapel, alone, still waving his arms and making a racket.

I cupped my hands over my mouth and shouted, “You lifted three hundred and
fifteen
pounds!” My voice echoed against the mountain.

That stopped him. He turned, shouted back, “Really?”

“Do the math!” I couldn’t help smiling. The dork.

He stood for a second, adding. Then he whooped. Performed a ludicrous jig.

At home we had a neighbor named Feldman, back before my father had restored the house my parents currently lived in, back when we were really poor. Feldman was a drunk boilermaker who had a big St. Bernard. The dog lived in the yard of the house we shared, had his own doghouse, and during the muddy season in Niccalsetti he was covered with muck and his bushy fur clung to his great shoulders and forepaws. Some nights the dog used to stand out at the end of its chain and bark at nothing at all, big ferocious barks that woke my brother and me, who slept in the back room over the yard. The dog was so strong that he sometimes managed to pull the doghouse sideways, so Feldman had to drive a steel pole into the ground and chain him to that instead.

Feldman came home from the bar one night and the dog started up, straining at the end of his chain, barking for all he was worth, until Feldman started kicking him. You could hear Feldman swearing and kicking the dog, dull thuds and chops, the dog barking back strong and loud through each kick. I got up and watched through our bedroom window, the dog taking each kick and barking, just barking, and the man wailing out there in the dark, his head jogging up and down. My brother woke my dad, who went downstairs and out the back door and pulled him away from the animal. Feldman was bellowing and sobbing and my father helped him up the stairs.

Looking at Perry hiking across the quad I could hear that dog barking at the night, asking the starless sky with great fury why such a good, strong animal could be chained and kicked in such a small place.

11.

When Carolyn walked down the street with me I sometimes felt an aura rising off her. She strode on supple legs through crowds, a leopard on the prowl, consumed people’s eyes, men’s eyes. It was strong erotic juju. Men did what Carolyn wanted. They gave her tables in restaurants and made room for her at the bar. Being with her gave you instant alpha male status. I’d look at her at a party, with a glass of wine in her hand or angling a glass of scotch to her lips and feel ill with desire. We had sex across the world. In France. In Spain. In Africa. Up until two years ago, sex between us was like breathing, and we became careless, as careless as you can be about something essential that you take for granted, like sunshine or air or sleep or blood or your heart pumping.

“I think I might be pregnant,” Carolyn whispered one Saturday morning while we were making love, just as I was coming. I reared back from her in shock but when I saw the anxious, needy look on her face I felt myself melt into her. She confirmed it with a home pregnancy test and we spent a long morning talking about it in our robes, sitting in the summer sun streaming through the warehouse windows, a stained paper wisp with its magic purple lines between us. This pregnancy was a sign we were meant to be, she felt. We were going to have the child. We were going to make it work. That was that. Somehow I’d have to change my life and she’d change hers.

Part of me was desperately adrift but another part was satisfied. Her pregnancy made me feel possessive of her, and protective. That talk, that agreement at the kitchen table (sealed with yet more sex in the adjoining bedroom after she had gone online, naked, at the computer, to make sure sex was kosher when you were about four weeks and a day pregnant, we were
that
ignorant) was the most important agreement I have ever made.

In the following months we did things newly pregnant couples do. We read the books. We shopped for pregnancy clothes for Carolyn, most of which she despised and returned. We looked at pastel-colored Lilliputian table and chair sets, sleigh-shaped cribs, changing tables with outboard rubber bins for used diapers. We started to adjust our lives. I had one big shoot to do, in Zambia, in a nature reserve called the Luangwa Valley. The money would allow me to take some time off when the baby was born and get us into a new apartment. That was the plan.

The two of us started thinking about changing our living arrangements. Should we still live in the city? The studio had been great, but it wasn’t a living space for a mature couple like the two of us, with a kid on the way. The studio was also drafty, she pointed out, and it was loud—everytime you walked across the bare wooden floor you’d wake a sleeping infant. Especially if you were wearing boots or heels, she added. The kitchen echoed, the cars down below on the street sent noise up through the push-open factory windows, which, she pointed out, were so filthy from decades of grime they’d never come clean. The pigeons in the morning would wake up the baby, too, not to mention the sweatshop downstairs. We could never have guests or do much work at home, because the only private space was the sleeping area and anyway a baby needed its own bathroom, next to the nursery, which was right now the spare room that was filled with film junk, boxes, and her clothes and shoes.

The baby was always referred to as “she.” I have no idea why. “If we were trying to work here, Rob, she’d hear every word,” Carolyn would say, in a voice I had never heard. “And we have to push the volume on the edit suite pretty high to hear the ambient, you know? She’ll hate that.”

I told her the Zambia shoot would be one of my last assignments outside the country. Part of the good vibe of her being pregnant was that both of us were terrified and we didn’t care. Anything was possible.

*   *   *

“Smooth out, Robby.” Connor’s voice sounded controlled and patient, the voice of someone out to test me. I had been avoiding him ever since the episode with Perry and was taken aback and immediately irritated to find him on the water. He sat hunched in his own flat, thin craft, watching me. We had been enjoying a few temperate days—a last respite before the really cold weather blew in—and I was sneaking in this dawn practice because I doubted I’d have a chance to scull again. Connor was the last person on earth I wanted to see right now. He was waiting for me where the river bowed after the bridge, had to have started out in the dark at least twenty minutes before me in order to catch me off guard like this.

I grit my teeth, the rubber ends of my oars slippery in my hands. Balancing, I crept forward, the fragile wooden scull precariously gliding across the water, my arms outstretched for another stroke. I dropped the oars in behind me and pressed with my feet and then my legs, fell back into the stroke and the boat surged, water running around the bow. Connor was just ahead of me now, eyeballing my bladework.

The muscles across my chest tightened as I tapped the oars out of the water, gently feathering them for my next stroke. I saw the stern of Connor’s shell as I passed. He was still crouched languidly in his seat. I caught another stroke, and the boat ran free, losing me in a familiar sensation, the feeling of speed and hypnotic rhythm. I fell backward for a second into that mysterious rush.

“Decent, decent.” Connor leaned forward and pulled his boat to me. “Not bad.”

I sincerely wished he would vaporize.

Connor rowed the
Morrison
, christened after a Fenton old boy who had been shot on Sword Beach. It was a Vespoli racing shell, blue and black, banged together from carbon fiber and aluminum, light as an arrow. Connor reached forward, dipped his oars into the water and snapped off a swift, level stroke. He fell back into the coda of each finish. He feathered his blades and torpedoed away from me. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”