Who Do You Love (31 page)

Some story, he thought as Maisie looked at him, eyebrows arched in a parody of surprise. “Yes, you need lawyers. The stuff you were doing was against the law.” She gave a small, theatrical shudder. Her fake shudders, Andy observed from his bubble of detachment, had improved over the years. The acting lessons were paying off. “Some of it's only been approved for use on animals.”

“How do you know all this?”

Instead of answering, Maisie flipped open the laptop she'd left next to the bed.
Nine Olympians Indicted in Drug Probe. Records, Medals in Jeopardy. No Response Yet from Team USA.
And pictures. His pictures. The ones they'd run in
Sports Illustrated,
of him in Athens, edging out the runner from Morocco, his arms raised in triumph. Maisie scrolled down just far enough for Andy to read the quote and recognize his own words:
“I'd never take shortcuts, or do anything illegal. Everything I got, I earned.”

“Oh,” he said, and shut his eyes, feeling numb and hollow, the way he had when he'd been ten and the policeman caught him—like he'd lost everything, like he'd never feel good or proud or happy ever again.

Maisie didn't say anything . . . but then, what could she say that would help? He watched as she went to the closet, came back with an armful of clothing, and folded it into the suitcase.

“Where are you going?”

“Tenerife. Remember?”

“That's next week.”

Without turning to face him, she said, “I'm going to go stay with Bethany for the night. We'll leave together in the morning. I know you've got a lot to deal with, and I didn't want to be in your way.”

“I need you here,” he told her.

“Oh, Andy,” she said with a sigh. He watched with a sense of déjà vu as she raised her perfect chin a fraction of an inch, like she was responding to a photographer's command.
Give me just a teeny bit of profile, babydoll .
.
.
that's it. Right there. Perfection.
“You knew the risks. You knew this could happen.”

“I didn't have a choice!” he yelled.

She just looked at him.

“What?” he asked. “What choice did I have? What else can I do? I'm not good at anything else except this. If I wanted to compete, I had to take that stuff. I didn't have a choice.”

She didn't answer. She zipped up the suitcase.
Answer enough,
Andy thought.

“If someone told you that you needed breast implants to be a model, are you saying you wouldn't get them?”

“Implants aren't illegal,” she said, and slung her purse over her shoulder. Andy stood, his arms dangling at his sides, legs weak and wobbling, watching the red soles of her shoes flashing as she wheeled her
suitcase
out the door.

For a minute he stood there, feeling sick and shaky and terrified, hoping she'd come back, willing her to return, if only to tell him that she loved him. Knowing that she wouldn't. Maisie looked out for Maisie. At night, sometimes, lying awake, he'd tried to imagine her staying with him if they lost everything; tried to picture the two of them scratching out a living in some anonymous town in Middle America. He couldn't do it. Maisie was made for cities, for late nights, for glamorous clubs, for Champagne and sushi, not small towns, fish sticks, and generic ginger ale. Nor would she sacrifice a second of the time she had left to work as a model. He was convinced that was the reason she hadn't agreed to get married or have a baby. She'd said all the right things about how happy they were and why rock the boat and that they had plenty of time. When he pushed her, she talked about not being able to take a year off from work and what would happen if she couldn't get her body back. She'd told him the story of a stunning girl from Iceland who'd given birth to twins and found it impossible to shed the last ten pounds of baby weight. Poor Karine had gotten liposuction, and there were filters that could erase her stretch marks. Still, Maisie had told him, eyes wide and horrified, poor Karine had never . . . worked . . . again.

“At least, not in Manhattan,” Maisie had said with a final shudder. “I heard she was doing, like, catalog work for Dillard's.”

“A fate worse than death,” Andy had deadpanned, and Maisie, not getting it, had nodded so vigorously that she'd almost lost a hair extension and had said, “I know! I know!” Then she'd kissed him, purring, “We can wait. For now, let's just enjoy our freedom.” He'd agreed, all the while thinking that it wasn't about work or freedom or stretch marks or how good things were between them, but about the way a baby would link them, inextricably and forever, uniting them in a bond that would be harder to break than even marriage.

He knew she'd rather die than lose her spot on the ladder. If her boyfriend became a liability, she'd do exactly what she'd done—take ten minutes to cram some stuff in a suitcase, call her agent, and change her ticket and move on to the next thing.

•••

For the next few weeks, Andy stayed in the apartment, wondering if it was possible to die of shame. Whenever he thought about going outside, usually after he'd been pacing for a few hours and was desperate for fresh air and open space, he would hear the words
Everything I've got, I earned
and decide it wasn't worth it. Valerie, his personal assistant of five years, gave her notice, saying that she'd loved working for him but she couldn't handle the volume of calls and e-mails, not to mention the questions from her friends and family about whether she'd known what was going on. His calls to his agent went straight to voice mail; his publicist handed him off to a different firm, one that handled oil companies who'd dumped thousands of gallons into the ocean and right-wing senators who'd been paying off their same-sex, underage lovers.

If he'd earned his previous life—the endorsement deals, the perks, the famous friends—then surely he'd earned this one, too. He'd earned the barista at Starbucks who'd refused to take his order, the waitress who'd turned on her heel when Andy and his old friend Miles Stratton sat down for lunch to discuss his finances in light of what Miles called “these new developments.” He'd earned the ten-year-old girl who'd mailed him a poster depicting his Olympic win with a note that read
You used to be my hero but you aren't anymore.

Still in his bubble of numbed disbelief, Andy went to the hearings, the meetings, the conferences with the publicists and the ones with the lawyers. He sat at long tables in offices on high floors with stunning views of Central Park and tried to pay attention as attorneys for the USATF and the runners who were being called the Athens Nine tried to work out a deal. Eventually, they decided that if Andy and his teammates would testify about how they'd gotten the drugs and who else they knew was using, they could keep the medals and the prizes they'd won up to 2006 . . . but none of them would be able to run competitively ever again.

The sneaker company that had underwritten his running life since college sent a certified letter explaining that, given his current circumstances, they could no longer continue their association. They wished him well. So did the watch company he'd done ads for, and the sports drink he'd endorsed. He moved his stuff out of his place in Oregon, downsized from two bedrooms in Carnegie Hill to a studio in a not-great neighborhood in Brooklyn. Those moves, plus his savings, gave him a nest egg he could live off for a while. He would need to do something eventually, but for now, there was vodka and premium cable for binge-watching old shows. He'd learned to avoid live TV after flipping through the channels and seeing a late-night wit urging the public, “Give blood. Our Olympic runners might need extra.”

He ate delivery pizza or Chinese food, bagels for breakfast, bags of pretzels in between, for once not caring about calories or carbs or sodium or nutrients or any of it. He'd wash it all down with PowerUp, the sports drink that he'd spike with vodka after the sun went down. He had cases and cases of the stuff—he'd been the face of PowerUp, and part of his deal included free drinks for life. Only now, he noted with sour amusement, they sent him boxes full of discontinued flavors, something called Red Rage that tasted like fermented cough syrup, and Blue Crush, which tasted like chalk.

For the first time in a long time, Andy was faced with empty days to fill, hours and hours when he had nowhere to be and nothing to do. The
Sports Illustrated
with his face on the cover was in one of the boxes he'd brought over, along with his tax returns and copies of the contracts he'd signed. In the years since it had been published, he'd never been able to bring himself to read Bob Rieper's profile. One day he found it, flipped it open to the page with his picture, and began scanning the text for his father's name.

At fifty-one, Andrew Landis Senior bears little resemblance to his son, or to the teenage basketball star that he was once. Tall and lanky in his youth, he is stooped now, heavier through the chest and belly, with rounded shoulders and a mostly bald head. His walk is a head-down, shoulders-hunched shuffle. The only trace of the son that Landis Senior and his wife, Lori, named after him are his feet, size fourteen, big as flippers in heavy brown work boots. “I was always fast,” Landis Senior says.

After getting out of prison he moved to an SRO hotel. His tiny, windowless room in a no-name neighborhood in Philadelphia has the feel of a cell, the single bed neatly made, books and magazines arranged in perfect stacks, posters and pictures taped to his cinder-block wall. The posters and pictures are all of his son; the magazines all feature stories about him. In a scrapbook, Landis has newspaper clippings charting Andy Landis's history as a runner, beginning in high school. Over the years, Landis Senior says, friends sent them to him in prison. He is proud of his son, but has, he says, no desire to get in touch. “It's too many men who come out of the woodwork when their children make something of themselves,” he said, mentioning Shaquille O'Neal's father, who'd abandoned his son as a six-month-old baby, who'd disappeared into addiction, then prison, only to finally come forward, brandishing a birth certificate, looking to be taken into O'Neal's fold after his son became a star.

“I don't want Andy to think I'm after his money, or that I deserve any credit for his success. Everything he did, that's all him.” And if he could send a message to his Olympic-winning son? Landis Senior doesn't even have to think about it. “I know I wasn't his father, but I'd tell him I was proud.”

Andy stared at the words. He wondered which friends had sent his father clippings about him, and then pictured Mr. Sills, carefully cutting out each story. Maybe writing a note. Had his old friend felt guilty, that it was his own son's fault, and maybe somehow his, too, that
Andy's
dad was in prison?

Inside the magazine's pages was an envelope from the Grim Rieper.
This is your father's address and phone number. He asked me to pass them along.
Andy studied the note for a minute, trying to imagine the reunion, the ex-con father meeting his infamous, tainted son. He looked at his phone, but instead of reaching for it he grabbed the vodka, adding another dollop to his Red Rage. That night, for the first time in his life, he drank until he passed out.

He might have stayed in that room forever, eating, drinking, sleeping, then waking to do it all again, except one day his cell phone had started ringing. He'd seen 215, the area code for Philadelphia, and, on a whim, he'd answered it.

“No comment,” he'd said instead of
hello.
The words sounded a little slushy. Oh, well.

Instead of a volley of questions, his opening sally earned him a wheezy laugh. “Andy Landis,” said a familiar voice that had gotten fainter over time. “Is that any way to say hello to your old friend?”

Andy, who'd been lounging on the couch with a go-cup full of Blue Crush and vodka balanced on his chest, sat up so fast that the drink spilled all over his shirt.

“Mr. Sills?”

Another wheezy laugh. “You can call me Clement now,
remember
? I make it a policy for all my friends who've won gold medals.”

The familiar searing, scalding shame rose through his body, making him flush and squirm with the desperate desire to outrun what could never be outrun. Disgrace was now his shadow, and he couldn't ever leave it behind.

“Your friend who cheated.”

Mr. Sills sighed. “Now, I'm not saying you didn't do wrong. But name me someone who goes through life without making mistakes. I know you,” he continued. “You're probably sitting in the dark, not talking to anyone, beating yourself up.” Looking around, Andy realized that he hadn't turned any lights on that night or, he suspected, most nights. “You've still got a long time to live, and there's plenty of good you could be doing. Lots of boys out there could use a helping hand. Maybe even a coach.”

“Who'd hire me?” Andy hated that he sounded whiny, in addition to drunk. “Nobody'd want a cheater coaching their kids.”

Mr. Sills was relentless. “Do you know that for sure? Have you asked anyone? I'd bet you a whole stack of
National Geographic
s that if you went back to Roman Catholic, went to the coach, said, ‘I'd like to help out,' he'd have you doing it in a minute.”

Andy, who wasn't so sure, said nothing.

“But that's not why I called,” his friend continued. “Truth is, I haven't been doing so well lately. I've got that emphysema, you know.”

Andy hadn't known.

“I'd sure like a visit,” Mr. Sills had said. “Maybe you could come down here, we'd have some breakfast, maybe visit a few junk shops.”
Junk shops,
Andy remembered, had been Mr. Sills's name for the antiques shops and the vintage and resale stores that they'd frequented. “I don't drive anymore . . .”