Who Do You Love (25 page)

“So of course I was so nervous that I forgot to pack a brush. I asked one of the hairdressers if she had one that I could borrow, so she gives me a key to her suite, and I get there, and I scream, because it looks like a mass murder, with, like, twelve scalps laid out on the bed . . .” Eventually she'd learned that the hairdressers had packed multiple sets of extensions for each girl. “
SI
did focus groups. Men are big on hair,” she said. “They also like it when the girls touch each other. That's a direct quote from some guy's survey. ‘I like it when they're touching each other.' ”

Andy had listened, enchanted: by her beauty, by her stories, by the way people looked at them, how every man in the place seemed to regard him with respect bordering on awe. Across the table, smiling from behind long, lowered eyelashes, Maisie seemed both exotic and familiar, both like him and unlike anyone he'd ever met.

He'd thought that he'd been happy, enjoying the routines of coupled life: simple meals at the little table in the kitchen, the way Rachel's stuff had blended with his—her framed art posters on the wall, her lotion in the bathroom, her books scattered everywhere, the way the apartment would smell like her shampoo for hours after she got out of the shower, the sound of her voice rising and falling as she talked her clients through their crisis of the day. But here in this restaurant, on a cool, clear spring night, with a lovely woman across the table and the city glittering outside, he decided that maybe things with Rachel had gotten a little bit stale. He was only twenty-seven. Was he really ready to settle down? Besides, Rachel took him for granted, hanging around in sweatpants, spending entire evenings with a mud mask on her face. A few nights before she'd left for Los Angeles, he'd been doing his laundry and she'd been reading on the couch. He'd gone to kiss her and had noticed that, in addition to the garlic and the spices from the vegetarian chili she'd made, there was another smell in the room. With a pair of clean track pants in his hand, he'd said, “Jesus, was that you?”

“A thousand pardons,” she'd said. Then she'd started giggling . . . and, eventually, he started laughing, too. But was that what their life was going to be like? Was that what he had to look forward to? Mud masks and unannounced farting?

Maisie reached across the table and took his hand, tracing the lines with the tip of a fingernail. “Your love line. It's very strong.” When she looked up, into his eyes, he felt his heart skip. Andy shifted in his seat. He and Rachel hadn't had sex before he left, which was their routine. “My stomach's kind of funny,” she'd said, slipping out of bed to get the Pepto-Bismol right after he'd reached for her, and between that and the farting he'd left her alone. “Your life line,” said Maisie. He could feel her breath on the palms of his hands. “I see lots of success. Blue ribbons. Gold medals.” Andy smiled. Rachel was hundreds of miles away. She'd never find out. And wasn't he entitled? He'd slept with only seven women in his entire life. He was a world-class runner, an Olympic contender, possessor of one of the longest winning streaks in all of American collegiate track history. He should have been getting, as Mitch liked to say, more ass than a toilet seat at a girls' school, and he could still tally his conquests on two hands, with fingers left over. If his teammates ever learned he'd had this chance and failed to close the deal, they'd laugh him right off the track. It was like you'd had TV dinners for a year and someone offered you filet mignon; like you'd been riding a bike—a nice one, but a bike, still—and someone handed you the keys to a sports car, something low-slung and beautiful with a motor that purred when you touched your foot to the pedal.

Andy signaled for the check. Maisie smiled in approval as he pulled out his credit card—between his generous stipend and the bonuses the sneaker company paid him for his wins, he had money to spend. Maisie didn't even try to reach for her wallet, the way Rachel always did. They strolled back to the hotel in an expectant silence. In the lobby, she looked into his eyes.

“Do you think I could come up for a glass of water?”

A voice spoke up in his head. Not Rachel's voice, not his mother's, not a voice belonging to any one of the coaches he'd had through the years, but Mr. Sills's voice, asking him, very seriously,
Is this the kind of man you want to be?

Feeling like the biggest jackass in the world, Andy took her hand and folded it in his. “You're so beautiful,” he said, “and I'm probably going to regret this for the rest of my life. But I'm not exactly single.”

Maisie gave a pout that caused Andy to think that whatever she did when she'd finished modeling, it probably wouldn't be acting. “Shit,” she said. Andy tried not to flinch. He didn't like cursing, never had; it reminded him of Lori, when she'd been drinking. “Why are all the good ones either taken or gay?”

“Come on,” he'd said, giving her a tripod-style hug, careful to keep anything below their shoulders from touching. “You could have any guy in the world.”

“But what if you're the guy I want?”

Andy didn't answer. He just wanted to get up to his room, splash some cold water on his face, and call Rachel. But Rachel didn't answer. The cold water didn't work, so Andy took a cold shower and masturbated briskly, like it was the sexual equivalent of clearing his throat. Still, it took him two hours to fall asleep, and when the alarm shrilled, he woke up with a groan, still feeling tired, thinking that if he blew the race Rachel would be to blame.

That afternoon, crouched and waiting for the pistol, exhaustion dragged at him, and he felt frustrated and angry. Poised at the starting line, his body curled and ready to spring, all he wanted to do was go back to the hotel and sleep. Instead of being nervous, the way he usually was, so tense that sometimes he'd throw up right before a race began, he felt tired and calm almost to the point of boredom . . . and then, when he started to run, a weird thing happened. He felt almost airy, like his body was made of something less dense and more durable than flesh and blood. Leaning into the turns, arms swinging smoothly, he knew he was setting up for a PR, maybe even a course record . . . and then what? Would Maisie be waiting at the finish line? Would Rachel call his cell phone, wanting to congratulate him?

Be your body,
he thought. It wasn't one of his official
mantras
—
light and lean,
he'd taught himself to chant, or
no pain—
but, as he finished his first lap, that was what he told himself. He knew what this victory would mean—that Athens was a certainty, that he'd have his shot at the gold. With every step, he put more and more distance between himself and the guy behind him, breathing easily, moving effortlessly, thinking that he could run a marathon if he had to, that he could run forever.

He broke the tape, and then his coach was hugging him, shouting an unbelievable number in his ear. Andy looked up at the Jumbotron to confirm it, and there were TV cameras swinging toward his face, and there was Maisie, Maisie looking lovelier than he remembered, and he reached for her without thinking and pulled her into his arms.

Of course the pictures had ended up on the
Runner's World
website. Of course Rachel saw them. When he picked up his phone he saw that she'd called six times, and when he got back to the hotel to call her back she hadn't wasted a second before she'd started in on him.

“Rachel, it's nothing. It's just some girl. I met her in the gym, she's a runner, too, and she asked if she could come to the race, and I had no idea any of that was going to happen.” This was technically mostly true, even if it left out several salient facts, including their dinner together the night before.

“So, what, someone shoved her into your arms and made you hug her?”

Once he'd started running he'd never been interested in ball sports, but he knew what they told the guys on the football team—the best defense is a good offense. “If you're so worried, then why didn't you come out here with me?”

She made a disgusted noise. “So I could sit in a hotel room all day, then watch you run for eight minutes, then spend all night at a party listening to people talk about how their eight minutes of running went?”

Andy was hurt. “I haven't run a three thousand in over eight minutes since my junior year at Oregon.”

“Who cares?” Rachel shrieked. “And stop changing the subject! I don't care how fast you can run the three thousand. I care about you hugging random women!”

“Nothing happened,” he said, already starting to regret that it was true.

“Do you even know her name?” Rachel demanded.

“Maisie,” he'd said. “Maisie Guthrie.” And then some impulse he didn't understand made him blurt, “She's a model.”

“Oh, a model,” she said. “Well, I guess you've hit the big time now.”

Andy, who'd expected to at least get some congratulations on his personal record, was getting angry. “Would you let it go? She's someone I met, and she came there to watch me, to cheer for me, which was nice, so I hugged her. End of story.”

There was a seething, crackling pause. “Are you saying,” Rachel began, “that if I came to cheer for you, you wouldn't have felt the need to embrace models at the finish line?”

“Maybe!” Andy yelled. “I don't know! It's not like I've had a lot of experience with you coming to cheer for me!”

Instead of yelling back, Rachel spoke even more softly. “You want me to be the bad guy, don't you?” she asked. “You want me to be the bitch who won't go to your races so you'll have an excuse to be with Cindy Crawford. Only guess what?” Her voice was a poisonous whisper. “I'm not your mother. I actually do go to your races.”

“You come and you sit there with a book. You barely look up. You barely look at me.”

Another icy pause ensued. Finally Rachel said, speaking softly, “I am not your cheering squad.”

“I know that,” he muttered.

“I'm my own person.”

If you keep eating the way you do, you'll be your own two people,
Andy thought, but all he said was, “I know.”

“I think that maybe moving in with you was a mistake.”

He felt her words like a hard shove in the chest . . . but, if he was honest, there was also the tiniest undercurrent of relief. “It wasn't a mistake. I want you with me.”

“But we're not on equal footing, are we? You're working. Quote-unquote. You're making money. I'm not doing anything.”

“But once you get your degree, you'll get a job.” Rachel had been taking classes toward a social work degree at Portland State and had just started working at FAS's new West Coast office. “I hate not having my own money,” she'd say when he'd buy them dinner or she'd use his credit card to shop for clothes. She did have money—her parents had paid for college, and she'd saved every birthday check and bat mitzvah gift—but it wasn't money she'd earned, and she felt that acutely.

“I think I need to go back to New York. Amy said she's got a job for me. There's work there I should be doing.”

“Rachel.” This was all happening too fast, like he'd pulled a loose shingle off a roof and now the whole house was falling down. “I don't want you to leave. I'm sorry I got mad.”

“I'm sorry, too,” she said, in a small voice that hurt him more than her yelling had. “I shouldn't be surprised. You always wanted the new thing, right? No secondhand coats for you. I'll bet Miss Maisie doesn't have any nasty scars on her chest, right?”

“Rachel.” He could hear her crying, and he didn't know how to comfort her, didn't know what to say.

“And she's probably not spoiled. Pulled herself up by her pretty little bootstraps, I bet. Not like snobby Rachel and her snobby sorority friends, right, Andy? Be honest. I was never good enough for you, and no matter what I did, I was never going to be.”

She hung up the phone, and wouldn't answer it for the next two hours, at which point his teammates came by, rowdy and shouting and wanting to know why he wasn't at the bar. He went down, thinking that he'd have a few beers and try Rachel again. But there was Maisie, in a short dress that left her long legs bare. This time Andy didn't hesitate. He gulped a Scotch, grabbed Maisie around the waist, pulled her into a hug, and whispered, “Want to see my room?”

They'd started kissing in the elevator. Then they'd raced down the hall, hand in hand, with Andy fumbling for the key card and Maisie whispering, “Hurry, hurry.” Once they were in the room, he pushed her back against the wall and kissed her hard, almost angrily, until she wriggled away. “Let me use the little girls' room,” she said. Andy lay on the bed, still dressed, waiting, until she came out in nothing but a bathrobe, standing in front of him barefoot. “Hi there,” she whispered, letting the robe slip off her shoulders, and stood there naked except for panties that were just a scrap of black lace.

“Like what you see?” she whispered. And oh, God, she was unbelievable. Like something out of a movie or a magazine. Her breasts were small and perfectly shaped, topped by taut nipples big as blackberries. He yanked her toward him, and bent and sucked.

Unreal,
he thought, as his hands skimmed the curve of her hips, then cupped her ass. It was like she was a different species from Rachel, her waist so slim, her bottom so perfectly firm and round. Her pubic hair had been trimmed into a triangle that looked like an arrow directing him down. She was wet when he touched her, and she came almost as soon as he'd pushed himself inside, throwing her head back and sighing. “Handsome,” she whispered. “Oh, you handsome man.”

The next morning, he'd woken up to the sound of running water. He'd rolled onto his side in the fragrant, rumpled sheets, deciding how he should feel, if he was supposed to hate himself or feel like he'd gotten away with something, and who at the bar had seen them leave, and whether everyone knew. The water turned off, and the door opened, sending a puff of steam and the smell of soap into the room. When Maisie, wrapped in a towel, walked toward him, Andy braced for a scene, thinking that she would want promises, assurances that what they'd done had meant something, and that they'd see each other again. Instead, she'd kissed him lightly on his forehead. “Early call time,” she'd whispered. “Here's my number.” She put a scrap of paper on the nightstand, twisted her wet hair into a bun, pulled her dress on over her head, slipped on her shoes, and sashayed out the door. There had been no talk of fate or destiny or how they were meant to be together. She just gave him a smile, a last look at her perfect body, the beautiful angles of her cheeks and chin, and then she was gone.