Athlete

Down by the old courts whenever a good wind picked up the leaves would scatter about like flurries, paperthin and colored melancholic pastels of golden browns and greens. There were cracks in the cement, bits of grass sprouting through, and the leaves would dance above them, never touching. Spraypainted graffiti marred the once stainless black tar; crude images had been poorly splashed against the backboards, ruining the stately pastoral image of trees in bloom rimming the lake beyond. The nets had been torn completely on one end, where the mesh lay in a dirtied heap by the sideline, and partially at the other end, so that what had once hung straight and true now dangled like any leaf dying in the postautumnal freeze. Staring at the hoop for too long Girard could hear in his ears the swoosh that his fading jumper had made so many times on that net, but it was wrong, lacking somehow – empty of meaning. No chill ran down his back, and when he shut his eyes he did not see the board the way it once was, the way it looked when you lied down on your back between games and saw it practically luminescent against a cloudless summer sky.

Sometimes he would hold his hands by his eyes to shield the sun and all he could see in his vision would be the basketball, the hoop, the blueness. As if nothing else existed. As if his universe contained exactly that: the things of his forming. The world that he knew, cut away from the one which he did not in a dreamlike specter of solitude.

***

When he was a boy the city kids would call him the White Horse. White because he was white and horse because he could play all day without tiring, like a horse. For pickup games Girard would take the NJ Transit over the bridge and into the city.

Any of the parks along Arch or Spring Garden would always be overcrowded if you went during the right time of day, if you knew the right kind of people. Summer afternoons on Spring Garden, crowds massing in old lots, sweatshirts tossed over the fences, water bottles lining the edge of the courts – these were his proving grounds. Only Girard never thought of them that way. He spent all of his twenty dollar a month allowance on bus tickets, just so that he could play with these boys.

Girard slowly earned the respect of the city kids. He made friends with the best player on Spring Garden, a boy named Payden. “My man the White Hizzorse, he would always say, and they would play and Girard would always win. But Payden kept coming back. Many didn’t. And he became better. And so did Girard.

“The hell don’t you play at school for?” Payden asked him once when they were walking down the street after a game of twenty-one.

“Just don’t,” Girard said.

“Can’t take practice?”

“That ain’t it,” he said, firing the ball off the brick siding of a convenience store.

“Yo he’s like Iverson, dog,” chimed in Payden’s brother Chris. “Practice, mayun, I’m talkin’ ‘bout practice…”

“Practice isn’t it,” Girard said again, and maybe he grinned, and that’s all he would say, “not a game, not a game” chorusing the streets long after.

What Girard had which most of the boys he played with did not was patience. Patience to stand and shoot three-pointers from the same spot until he drained a dozen in a row. Patience to run full loops of the court just to gain a half a foot with which to take a clear jumper. Patience to wait for an opponent to make a mistake on offense (he almost always did) instead of forcing one. Where the patience came from Girard did not exactly know, and only vaguely recognized its existence himself. He only knew that regardless of the speed of some of these incredibly coordinated boys, they lost interest quickly – he knew how to see each defender’s weakness and exploit it thoroughly. More often than not, that weakness was impatience. Girard lived for that instant when he could read defeat in the face of an opponent; the sagging of the eyes, the laziness of limbs following through on motions – and in a gesture of both triumph and gentle admonition drain a loping fadeaway.

***

Girard liked to come back here now, to these courts. He never played, never brought a basketball with him. Did he even have a ball anymore? He couldn’t remember. Maybe. Maybe, he did. There was that old red and yellow one Rick’d given him for Christmas one year (“Merry Christmas, dude.”) No, that had been run over walking home from school senior year.

He stood up, not bothering to brush himself off, patches of dirt and sediment clinging to his blue jeans, his flannel shirt, as he wandered down through the trees towards the lake. The leaves crunched beneath his feet into the tall and waving grasses. As he descended the light incline he could see over the lakeside bushes, the gusts of wind shaking the multicolored trees on the opposite bank free of their holdings. The water churned lightly in disturbance. He glanced down to the dock, distantly remembering the bass he’d caught just where an old woman was now standing. He couldn’t remember what it looked like – only its fine-slippery finish, smooth like a buttered cookie sheet, the way its belly felt when he ran his finger down it before releasing it back to the muddy shallows. What else had happened? he wondered. Where was I then? But he could not remember.

The old woman was hunched over her cane, distributing bits of bread to a flock of collected geese, honking their excitement from across the water as they rushed to the source. Somewhere in the back of his mind he balanced the visceral gratification of providing for another living thing against the all too natural consequences. That old woman would die – in a week, a month, even ten years from now – and the geese would have no recourse, no way to get the food to which they had become accustomed. Their bellies would violently protest as they moved to readjust to the constant hunger inherent in a wild life. Those that did not die would suffer immeasurably.
He angled himself away.

He wandered down toward the lake and towards the thicket of woods, not just away from the old woman but away from the courts and the Y and the apartment complex and all the buildings that he could see. There was a fresh woodchip path paralleling the lake that had not been there in his boyhood, or at least he could not place it, and he avoided it instinctively, walking through the itchy highgrass and the splotches of creek-mud that suctioned his shoes as he strode forward. The gnats buzzed the discolored shallows, lent their hymn to the remorseful lapping of a tired current against the murky shores. Girard’s sucking footsteps made no noise, left no print. The grasses folded back over the earth where an imprint should have been. The hymn beat on steady and slow, renewing itself with the tide. Whether it swallowed the sound of his motion, he did not know. He knew only what he could hear and what he could not hear. Thus spake the lakeside orchestra.

***

What was it, he sometimes idly wondered; was it the way the ball could arc so neatly, so mathematically sublime – drawing a semicircle straight out of the pages of a Geometry textbook - from his open palm, and across the sky, and through the net? Was it the sound – the noiseless noise that gave Nike a logo, that made children stand in the same spot beneath the backboard for hours, attempting to replicate what they saw on television, or in the park that one Thursday after school? Maybe it was a sense of power, of possibility – of knowing you can control and produce something of great beauty, if you only tried hard enough, if only you were willing to feel the pain that came with the pleasure of anything worthwhile.

Fun never did it for Girard; the word was lacking, too childish, shallow. Fun was going to the zoo to see the orangutans. Fun was lazing in the ocean on a hot midsummer’s day, drinking Coke, throwing Frisbee. Fun was wandering barefoot down the boardwalk, playing in the arcades, eating pizza and funnel cake, riding the Tilt-a-Whirl. Fun was hanging out with friends, watching a movie with family, meeting new people, drinking hot chocolate, wrestling with a dog, organizing baseball cards, entertaining simple new pastimes and possibilities about life…

***

Girard was seventeen and a senior in high school the first night he could feel it slipping and her name was Tracey Ellis. She was captain of the tennis team and she was a tall and angular blur of green eyes and white-toothed smiles. When she was excited (like anytime in History class, Girard had noted sophomore year), she would arch her chin up and pull her lips back and raise her eyebrows so that the muscles in her neck pressed against her golden skin. Ouch, he had thought then.

It was a cold October night and Girard had borrowed his parents’ car to take Tracey and his best friend Rick Mallory to the high school football game against Cecilbrook. The wind was gusting a harvest chill; the night smelled of burnt leaves and cooking hot chocolate. An aura of liquor loomed in the deeper patches of fans. Cecilbrook was winning very much.

At halftime he went with Tray to get hot cocoa and a hot dog from the concessions under the stadium. They walked side by side down the steps, overlooking the muddy field and the mist of rain floating in the shadow of the stadium lights. He held her hand, she told him she loved him. He leaned over and kissed her warmly on the lips. It was one of those nights, he thought, that can only be warm if you have the right kind of girl and you kiss her the right kind of way, and Girard had the girl and he knew exactly how to kiss her.

“My man the Whiiite Hiizzorse,” came a voice. “Check it.”

Girard spun. It was the boys from Spring Garden, Payden and Chris with a pair of their friends, decked out in Cecilbrook garb.

“You never told me your boys sucked so bad,” Payden said, cackling.

“You never told me you went to Cecilbrook High,” Girard returned lamely, grinning, handshaking and half-hugging all of them.

“We’re headin’ out to play on your court right now,” Chris said. “By the lake. You down, right?”

“Uhh,” Girard said. He awkwardly put his arm around Tracey’s waist. He knew it was a futile gesture: he did it anyway.

“Aww shit,” Payden cackled again, sizing Tracey up. “Your homegirl can come.”

“Yeah I can come,” Tracey said, beaming. “I’ve never seen you play.”

***

Over the heads of the trees, down a valley of bushes through which ran a trickling creek, over the flat surface of a baseball diamond marred by its fall incarnation of a soccer field, the stadium lights played dimly over the old court. The lake behind the forest was invisible, enshrouded in black by the trees in the night, ripples echoing faintly in their lapping on the far shores.

It was not pretty, the game they played that night. Rick was his team-mate, and Rick was not very good. Payden was not as good as he once had been. Something was gone from his boyishness, from his speed. Girard was quick and efficient, pointed with his shots and merciless with his hustle. His focus never left the thinly lit patch of cement at the feet of his opponents. His feet never stopped moving, crossing behind one another and pouncing agile at just the right moments with the trim buoyancy of a cat.

When it was over the others clapped him on the back, laughing amongst themselves about something unrelated, suffusing themselves effortlessly from the game as they wandered down the dark street in hooded sweatshirts, doing lazy crossovers. Rick, anxious not to miss the third quarter, ran ahead back to the stadium. Girard was left then standing, slightly meekish – sweat blanketing him thickly and mixing with the mist to give his skin a glowing sheen.

“What the hell was that?” Tracey asked from her perch on a courtside log.

Girard sat down crosslegged at center court, draping his longsleeve over the arch in his neck.

“What the hell was what?” he feigned good-naturedly, pretending to stretch. He knew he should have been upset with himself for giving in so easily, for allowing this clash of his two lives, for not doing something drastic like just holding back in the game a little, or just running away the instant he first saw them, back out of the gate to the stands and down through the parking lot back to his home. The second thought he’d briefly entertained – there was rarely a time where turning on his heel and sprinting as hard as he could in the opposite direction did not hold a tremendous appeal - the first, he had not.

But now he could hardly hold back a grin, a pleasant feeling of well being coming over him as he lay back on the cold, wet pavement. Otherwise innocuous happenstances gave him pleasure; he observed his surroundings from a new light, as though he were seeing them now through a lens that had been absent an hour before. How nicely the clouds lined up in the sky, he thought. How good this pair of jeans has been to me.

Bits of mud were seeping through the strands of his hair, sticking to his skull.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were Michael Goddamn Jordan?”

He glanced over to her, her profile sideways from his prone posture, flecks of gold spotting her hair against the faded light above the trees.

“I’d rather be Grant Goddamn Hill or Christian Goddamn Laettner,” he said. “But O.K.”

She was silent for a moment at this – she was not a Duke fan. From his position at center court he could see her lip furling in confusion at the brief derailment before she longreached it back on course.

“Why don’t you go out for the team?” she asked. He spoke the words with her under his breath, a subtlety she did not miss.

“Well?”

“Just don’t,” he said.

“I mean that was half of Cecilbrook’s varsity right there,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “If I’m remembering last year right. I mean you’d be good for the school. The school stunk last year.”

“I know,” he said.

“How are you just blowing this off, I mean how are you just sitting there like that, after all that just happened, you have to –”

But Girard stood up, moved swiftly over the blacktop with long strides, went to her on the log and wrapped his arms around her. He had an acute awareness of the moment, of the person he dealt with; knew that there would be a limited amount of times in her life that Tray would ever see that kind of basketball – knew too that there would a limited amount of times when he could silence an irate woman with nothing more than an embrace – and taking on half a high school varsity team all but on his own in a game of half-court was probably one of those times. Mixed in was no small amount of his desire to bask in the quiet of an hour of basketball with the girl, to know what it was to sit back and beat a complete peace, a complete stasis of mind and body; to float unhindered, unbothered, even if for only those few moments.

Long after the sweat had dried on his chest and sent shivers down his back with the gusting breeze, long after the crickets had quieted themselves in the nearby bush and the lights of the stadium distant had begun to dim and the cheers emanating from them ceased; long after that he felt, offering a gentle affirmation, her fingers on the back of his head, holding him in return.

***

Those walks home walks home from the city were always the best time of day. There was nothing like knowing that he had loosed that dancing nymph from his oversoul, that giddy restlessness which never ceased to make his calmer, deskbound hours a trial. When the sun was setting over the city the air would grow cooler, crisp, the clouds purpling in their molding with the night, the sweat crusting the dirt to the side of his face as it dried. Autumn would be best. Cries of children heading home punctuating the dusk. He would let his thoughts wander, then. He would inspect the happiness inside of him with a happy curiosity, like a nutty professor waking up in a laboratory of his own making. What if God had not made the Earth, but only found it? Like a stumbling supernatural deity wandering the great abyss. Hey, here’s a great blue and green ball, He must have said, and oh how fun it could be play with it. What delightful trickery must lie, He must have thought, in the mastery of its movements.

***

Girard was in fifth grade at the Catholic school the day he walked over to the rectory to see Sister Joanne. It was a cold winter afternoon just before Christmas, on one of those days of the year where there is almost no sunlight left once school is over. He even thought he could see the sun setting as he hurried from his last class, splashes of yellow tinging the cloudedges over the tops of the chapel and the big apartments rising through the trees beyond.

The lawn of the rectory was hard and cold, soil hardened by the freezing temperatures, the cement walkway smooth and graywhite leading up to the old wooden arches by the door. It was going to snow that night, Girard reflected. There could even be flurries on the ground by the time he came back outside again. Next time I see you, ground, he said, you will be covered in white. This made him happy, happy in the way that Fridays would make him happy when they came.

Father Farraday greeted him at the door, led him through the old foyer and into Sister Joanne’s office, which was so tidy to the extent that it suggested a desperation to be anything otherwise. There was that distinct old-person smell in the air – thinking back in later years, that would always be what Girard remembered the most. The smell not of death but of things that must be undertaken very slowly, very politely, very tidily.

Father Farraday left with a smile, shutting the door on the way out. Sister Joanne was kneeling behind her desk praying with her rosary beads, and turned to see him when he entered. She possessed a broad, open, oval face, a face that suggested illimitable kindliness. When he had first met Sister Joanne Girard had subconsciously assumed this feature to indicate some inner warmth of spirit, some profound and encompassing pleasantness, the type that a part of him automatically struggled to associate with all religious people. Now that he knew her, he knew this was not true. Now her face was just fat. What had seemed oval and pleasant before was now hanging jowl-flesh. Some people are born with a smile on their face not because they are smiling, but because their genetics have defined their facial muscular structure in such a way that forces the corners of their lips at an upward angle. Appearance had nothing to do with personality, Girard was discovering, contrary to a myth that seemed to permeate the air he breathed.

“So,” Sister Joanne said, seating him across the desk in a plush chair. “Did you wish to talk about your grades this quarter past?”

She looked at him in a way that made him feel guilty for something of which the details he did not know.

“No.”

“I see. Did you wish to speak to me about confirmation?”

“No, Sister. It’s about…is church supposed to be fun?” Girard sighed with relief as he said it, as if dropping a heavy load.

“Fun in what way?”

“Just fun.”

“Well, I suppose it depends what your understanding of what ‘fun’ is, Girard. In a classic sense, yes. The worship of our Creator fills us with His boundless love. Doesn’t that sound fun to you?”

Girard turned red. He did not know what to say, and felt profoundly uncomfortable. His heart was hammering against his ribcage.

“What I mean to ask,” he said, after an agonizing interim of silence, “Is that is it bad if I am not having fun in church?”

“Do not get me wrong,” Sister Joanne said. “There is a certain…fineness, to understanding the mysteries of the Holy Trinity. A certain…subtlety. When in proper contemplation of Gospel truths, you should be filled with a lightness of being. A massive weight is being released from your shoulders, you understand. You are being graced with the presence of God. Exactly what is happening is by its very definition indefinable. Do you see? You can only know it when you see it.”

“Have you seen it?” Girard asked.

“Yes, I have. I see God in everyday life. I see Him in the arrangement of spring flowers in bloom. I see Him when I close my eyes after I get up from praying the rosary and my joints ache. I see Him…Girard? Is that helpful to you? Girard? Girard, where you are going? Girard!”

But Girard was gone, out of the office, down the hall, and out into the grey night, tearing across the snowless lawn and into the lamplit streets, still-mittened hands pumping, the ball in his backpack flopping up and down, up and down, in tune to his bouncy stride.

And Sister Joanne, bearing a frowning smile of almost comical contradiction, shut her office door with not a small amount of muttered generalities regarding the younger generations, and such, and resumed attending to her beads.

***

He’d read a book about music once. One that he’d found in the library, about music and how it didn’t really belong to anyone, and how the whole world wasjust kind of an open orchestra, and it was just silly to think that people could actually buy and sell it. And there were these people – art professors, music teachers, homeless accordion players, etcetera– and what they all said was that it had always been there. The music. From the beginning. Like anything else. No one was creating anything. They’re all just listening really hard. They’re channeling something ancient. Something as old as mankind. Older, even. Older than the Earth. Something that has always been there. Something that was written in the way the universe was made. And what they did was just seek it out. They pictured music as being on this different frequency – surrounding the universe in its every movement. What the best musicians were able to do was relay that frequency. The best musicians were just able to see something which the rest of us could not. The lesser musicians were just replaying something that had already been found.

That was the whole thing of it, they said, was that it was never creation, music. It was discovery.
Kind of like what religious people might think of as God.


***
Once she had cornered him, after the season opener against Cecilbrook. The score had been ninety-four to twenty-seven, in favor of Cecilbrook. Payden Atkins was game M.V.P. with nineteen points, eleven assists, and eleven steals for the triple-double. She had watched from the first row of the stands. Girard was never, for his part, at any point inside of the gymnasium.

She walked to his home, he was reading Russian literature on the sofa with his parents. This was how he liked to think of it. She smiled at his mother who let her in and gave her tea in the dining room. She was wearing a blue tanktop; a sheen of sweat from the strangely hot December night made her shoulderblades glisten attractively. He led her away and into the kitchen, her all the while holding the teacup ceremoniously between parted lips, steam rising over the bridge of her nose, smoking over her pale forehead.

“What’s this Dostoevsky shit you’re reading?” she said, motioning to the book at his side, his index finger marking his place, the pages folded over between his thumb and pinkie.
“It’s called Brothers Karamazov,” he said.

“We were only supposed to read Crime and Punishment,” she said, accusatorily.

“I know what we were supposed to do,” he said, grabbing her roughly by the arm and pulling her farther into the kitchen.

He watched her with some satisfaction as the color went from her cheeks and she turned her eyes away. He never was severe with her – for better and for worse – and on the rare occasions that he was, she knew to pay attention. She recovered fairly quickly, though, pulling her arm back to her side.

“Guess where I just was?” she said, her eyes brimming with that assured glittering of the enlightened.

“The library?”

“Yes. I wear a tanktop to the library in December.” When Girard pictured her words – as his imagination had a restless, inexplicable habit of doing – they were icicles, sharp, crystalline, beautifully and wickedly harsh, with chipped edges dangling precariously in an Arctic mist.

“I was at the stupid basketball game,” she said. Ya wanna know who won?”

“Tray.”

“Cecilbrook did. Ya wanna know the stupid score?”

“Tray, c’mon now. Listen to me.”

“Ninety-four to twenty-seven.”

“Okay. No it wasn’t.”

“The goddamn hell it wasn’t. Ya wanna know who the stupid M.V.P. of the stupid game was?”

“Ogilby,” he said the name of his classmate looking away.

“No, it wasn’t that gangletron 2000 Ogilby. It was that kid Atkins. Payden goddamn Atkins. That’s who it was. He had a goddamn double-triple.”

“Triple-double, but…” he said, offhand.

“I don’t care what the hell the technical term is,” she said. “The score would’ve been closer if it was one on five. Jesus, Girard, for all I know you can beat all five of them.”

“I don’t know,” he said seriously. “They’ve got that real lanky bastard of a power forward. Some kind of 6’6 lanky bastard. They’re whole defensive shtick is to double him up on the best shooter.”

“They’d be fiving up on you, so I don’t even see how that comment is relevant. But that’s not the point. The point is – the point is, it’s embarrassing.”

“Since when do you care about school pride so much?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I care about you that much. I care about you just sitting here reading your book. I care about you waiting for me to be done with tennis practice every day for two hours by shooting hoops, and nothing ever coming of it.”

“What makes you think,” he said very quietly, “That nothing is coming of it?”

She looked at him dead on, the color going again from her face, the flame lingering in her eye.

“You could be great,” she said.

“Great! Hah!” he gave a horrible bellow of a laugh, the echo of a sentiment which it was plainly obvious he did not feel. “The pursuit of ‘great’ is what people have used for centuries to justify all kinds of horrible things.”

“Don’t start with that. Don’t start getting philosophical.”

“From starting wars to neglecting wives,” he continued.

“You’re not on a team,” she said firmly. “You’re not winning championships. You’re not getting your name in the paper. You’re not getting recruited by colleges. You’re not rising above your peers. You’re not working with your peers. You’re just sitting there…alone…” she paused, hesitant to let fall the words from her tongue. “Hiding. Afraid, almost. If I didn’t know you better that’s what I would say.”

They were silent for some time. From the living room their drifted the sounds of a family at home – sipping of tea, rustle of the pages in a book, the occasional sneeze, the constant of the television playing CNN. The noises morphed into a cacophony of quiet and peace, the calm forging a wicked contradiction between the rooms. And as the two teenagers stared at the kitchen tiling near the other’s feet, they listened with that detached disbelief of the person in despair, who cannot believe that the simplicities and banalities of everyday life were still continuing on as if the world of trouble and tumult had never happened.

“You see the thing is Blah I don’t see your point, you guys have been doing this since day one. What the Republican Party needs to do is denounce George Bush entirely.”

“Do you, uh, realize, Mrs. Blah-Blah, that George Bush has just won the general election for President of the United States…”

“He’s going to sink them, he’s going to bring them down, and the Democratic party is going to rule again…”

“There is a serious difference,” he finally said. Between dislike and fear. And real basketball is about none of the things you have mentioned. Not a single one.”

“Oh it’s not, is it?”

“No.”

“You’re wasting your gift.”

“Innate skill is not my gift. I am the way I am because I made myself that way. Me. Sure genetics played a part in the whole deal. In my limits. What I can…become. But random chance is hardly a gift. It’s not like I owe a favor, or a goddamn responsibility, to the way my cells happened to collate.”

“Well I –” lines creased her forehead as she stammered in frustration. “I think you do. You owe it to yourself. What Coach Quinn always says is ‘the saddest thing in life is wasted talent.’ And that’s true. It is.”

“Tray. Don’t quote Coach Quinn to me. You know goddamn well what I think of that quote. The whole idea is so absurd. I mean, waste on whose terms, exactly? What may be ‘wasteful’ to you and I – take recycling, for Chrissake – is absurd to others. I mean, do you think remote tribes in the middle of Africa are recycling? It’s not even on their goddamn radar. I mean you can’t define things like that. Not in this day and age.”

“Goldbond medicated powder is ideal for those suffering from acute ailments, particularly of the…”

She was looking away now, looking at the blank of the refrigerator behind him.

“Listen to me, Tray. Do you remember the story you told me about when you first started playing tennis?”

“Of course I do, and how is this relevant.”

“Tray. Please. Trust me,” he said, and pulled out a chair for her from behind the refrigerator, and sat her down, and sat across from her in the little alleyway between the pantry and the entrance to the bathroom. Their knees were touching.

“But I’ve told you all about that summer, you – ”

“I know. Remind me again.”

“I was down the shore at my uncle’s. It was during Wimbledon. We were watching it, he used to be semipro, and he taught me to backhand like Justine Henin.”

“No,” he said. “The first time.”

“That was it.”

“The first time you used a racket.”

“Well I bought the old wooden one at my best friend’s garage sale. And then I was alone, and I had just one of those high-bounce pink balls, the kind you said you used throw grounders to yourself as a kid. And I just started playing, like I was Justine Henin and the wall was Martina Hingis, or Venus Williams, or something, but really…”

“Really, it was just you against you.”

“Really it was just me against me.”

“And that was the moment.”

“Yes,” she said, somehow morphing from wistful to suspicious in a single syllable.

“In other words,” he said, “It was just tennis. Nothing else. Just tennis.”

“You’re being cryptic.”

“No cheerleading, no coaching techniques, no after-game barbeques with parents you don’t like, no schedules, orders, discipline – ”

“That doesn’t bother me like it bothers you – ”

“It shouldn’t be a matter of bother at all. I mean your whole life can be one grand attempt at appeasement and neutrality, if you let it.”

“Sometimes,” she said with a flourish, “You need to suck it up. Life’s not that easy. You gotta go through crap to get what you want.”

“There’s enough crap, though, without creating any, for chrissakes. I mean, answer me honest, how much of that joy that you felt the first time you picked up a racket is there when you do goddamn stretching drills, and skips, and all that clown shit, it’s not what sport is. Sport isn’t about drunken fans, and contracts, and scholarships, and memorabilia, and autographs, and trillion dollar stadiums, and used-car salesmen who rip off little kids’ dreams with cheap coaching videos…”

“It’s not all perfect,” she said tersely. “And it can’t all be fun. Not if you want to be a champion.”

“Yes it can,” he said. “Yes it is.”

He sighed. He did not look into her eyes, which were green and gloomy. Instead he eyed the portrait on the wall of the Giant in the Sky, as if he did not entirely trust its confident gait heading in the opposite direction.

“Listen. My point is that I didn’t fall in love with you because you’re captain of the tennis team, or because you almost won districts as a junior, or because you lead the goddamn stretch circle at 2:52…not anymore than I did because of your S.A.T. score, for that matter.”

He heaved a deep breath.

“You’re being cryptic,” she said, but her voice was breaking, her gaze had warmed as it fell over his words.

“I fell in love with you, because,” he began, failing at feigning a levity of tone, his words falling heavily on both of their ears.

She was looking into his eyes now.

“I know,” she whispered.

***

It came to his mind then, an assault of detail in a burst:

The stout, dark Township girl returning Tray’s serve to the far right quadrant; Tray, bounding over in two quick strides; planting her feet, her white shoes smacking the green court; arching her pale arm back, ponytail bouncing over her shoulders; neon orb spinning towards her through crisp air, cutting a line in the sky; the arm, swinging forward, racket held relaxed but firm in her palm, fingers pink from the cold – and then just one sound, that delicious punk of felt hitting the sweet spot between the racket strings, sending the ball sailing just over the rim of the net across the court, reversing the Township girl midstride; the ball landing at just the precise limit of the white line, midcourt, tailing away with a topspin that would be the envy of Justine Henin herself, canceling the stout girl’s desire to even reach her arm out in the midst of her dash back. And Tray – Tray, coming square after the shot, smiling just a little bit to herself, landing so exactly, so evenly, in an effortless completion of the movement – the shadow of which would be the best feet-first popup slide Ricky Henderson ever accomplished – like it was all one great fluidic act, rhythmic to not only her forehand return but the whole set, the whole match.

He saw it like a lightning flash, blinding him for an instant with its brilliance before crackling away. He saw the whole shot, then the upwards curve of her lips, then her shot again. Like someone were switching slides back and forth on the projector of his mind at an endlessly increasing rate. Until the end when all he could see was a blur of inapproachable perfection.

***

She’d left that night much later. He walked her home, under the stars, through the tree-lined streets. Kissed her goodnight by her window-sill. Held her foot in the palm of his hand to boost her inside. Watched her house from the curb on the other side of the road until the glow of her light was muffed out, restoring the block to blackness.

Coming back he walked very slowly. At one point he counted his steps, thinking it may come in handy later. To know. He lost track in the thousands. It was very hard to do all that math on such a night.

***

“It was the motion,” he had told her, walking back home after the match. “It was just so deliberate. It was just so perfect. And it was almost as if everything else was getting in the way. Like not just the crowd, or the fence, but the other girl. The whole court. The net. Your racket, even, and the ball. It was you that was perfect. You, and that motion.”


***

From his perch on the log at the top of the hill Girard had a bird’s eye of the park. The lake, from here, was a massive blue plateau, rippling in its coming and recession. Gusts of wind caught him forthwith, chilling him to his bony center. But it was a good chill, in the way than only an autumn chill by a forested lake can be a good chill. It was a chill that made him want to fold his arms against himself to keep warm, not angrily stalk into an artificially heated building to sulk against the sky. Yes, a storm was coming.

At some point he began to shake without realizing it. In the far distance through the now gray sky he saw the sun sloping slightly downwards in the beginnings of its setting, reddish-gold embers melting in a corner of the sky and letting trickling in bits of bloody sparkles the light that was the last hope for a spectacle of sunset. The tops of the trees along the opposite bank received this light well, their leaves brilliant shades of amber and eggyolk yellow in the midst of a different passing. Watching the sun try to display its setting, and leaves to fall, and the gray sky which belonged to winter take over, he felt an unfamiliar new comfort. Keeping his left arm folded across his chest, he unfurled his right, slipped it into the back pocket of his blue jeans, and pulled out a white envelope.

He let it sit in his lap, bristle in the wind. The front was blank and coffee-stained. The right corner was slightly torn; as if someone had thought about opening it and then abruptly changed their mind.

This was precisely what had happened.

His hands were stiffening from the cold as he held the single sheet open and flexed his fingers, feeling the blood flow return slowly, painfully, as it always had after so many childhood winters of exploring, playing, running to the brink of frostbite. Stopping not out of fear, but curiosity. For how long could you remain between two places? Looking at one, living in another. The disparity tearing physical body in two. A punishment for your failure in balance.

3/1/006 DEER, GIRARD. I HOPE IT IS O.K. TO WRITE LETTERS TO YOU. DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU CAME OVER ONE TIME AND TRAY HAD TO GO TO DROP HER BOOKS AT THE LIBRARY AND YOU STAYED AT THE HOUSE. WELL THAT TIME DO YOU REMEMBER WE PLAYED ONE ON ONE AND YOU ONLY USED ONE OF YOUR BIG ARMS AND YOU SAID NEXT TIME I WOULD BE OLD ENOUGH TO PLAY YOU WITH BOTH OF YOUR BIG ARMS. WELL I THINK I AM READY NOW. MAYBE NOT BUT I STILL WANT TO PLAY YOU WITH BOTH OF YOUR BIG ARMS. SINCERLY FRIEND, CHARLIE (TRAY’S BROTHER)

The letter was dated three springs ago, almost to the day. It had not been two weeks since he had found the envelope stuffed under his front door. That night he had confronted his landlady, a serene woman who drank too much coffee and saw too little sunlight.

“What is this?” he waved the envelope under her nose. “Who put this under my door?”

“You’re being cryptic,” she said, and slowly hobbled away. Her footsteps made no sound on the cobblestone.

***

Vaguely, now:

The tickets. Yes there had been tickets. Dropped off in an unmarked white envelope between a typed note on university heading, Enjoy, you and a friend. Yours, Coach C.

Courtside, the thick necks of the players just feet away. Sweat dripping down their thick necks. Trainers tossing towels, players tossing towels. The hardwood floor was shiny, colorful. Every movement reflected. Beautiful orange hoop. Yes, and glass boards. Strange, foreign things.
And two young men, yes, two men with Eric Snow jerseys where they were not supposed to be. Two men yelling, two men not listening. I’m sorry, but you’re in our seats, Girard had said. Or something like that. Most common of mistakes. Happen to anyone. That right? And then he’d said something more, and then they were standing, and beer had been tossed all over Tray, and Tray was screaming, and he was backing away, and the security guards were coming but they were on top of him, the both of them, and pummeling, and Tray screaming, and a man in yellow holding his hands saying sir, sir? Sir?

Bright lights, big court. His nose felt wobbly, like it was separate. Tray said something that sounded like blood tickets. What had he said back? Did he shrug? He shrugged, probably. Maybe a salty pretzel in his mouth. Tray’s hair golden, straight around her face. So beautiful, and he just shrugged. What’s wrong, what’s wrong, tell me, tell me, what is it? But he handed her his soda to share. He’d never really drank soda, before. Burning in his throat. Arena rumbling but in his ears silence. Complete. Crowd a fading echo. Reading Tray’s lips, the smack of red together. He kissed her, then, probably. Yes, he definitely had. Still, after, something about your nose and my fault and you were always right, and he watched Larry Brown patrol the sideline like a raving professor at a roomlength chalkboard. Iverson never stopped moving. Gameplay was a blur. Sweatbands, fancy mesh fabrics. Cornrows. Thick necks with big animallike beads of sweat running down them. Let’s stay, he had whispered to her, when the game was over.

He had blackrimmed glasses, the newspaperman. A greasy nose. Short greasy hair. Little greasy notebook fingers. Empty stands, no drowned roar in his ears. He’d met him in the bathroom at halftime, read his lips too: You’re Girard Spencer, aren’t you? Girard had his thumb and forefinger around the bridge of his nose. He yanked. He remembered that, the yank. Stars in his eyes. Sure, he’d said. We’re in Row One, Section blah blah…to that extent.

The newspaperman asked many questions. Girard remembered few of them. How is the season going? many of them began. …and will that affect your choice of university? He remembered repeating that, that phrase. Back to the newspaperman. As if to anticipate his response. To give him material. When we are state champions, this will not affect my choice of… Tray shaking her head, don’t tell him thats and why are you doing this’ permeating the nacho-beer stink to the air.

His greasy eyes on her now, asking her now, and do you play sports? And her saying, no.

***

Now he was not tormented always by the details. They came and they went, and Girard accepted them, like they were an inevitability, without sadness or comeuppance. He felt himself a third party to these memories, when they did come. Had that happened to him? Or had he just been watching? Maybe it was a movie. Yes, maybe a very bad movie that he should not have been watching. Movies were so bad these days. He really did not like so very many of them. No he did not at all.

This he saw with detachment. With carelessness. To call it apathy would suggest that he even noticed something to ignore in the first place.

Outside the arena was very quiet. In his boyhood he had always begged his father and his mother to stay late after the game so that they might see the players come out to their cars.
“They might not like people watching them very much,” his father would say, knowing that only in the iciest of hells would his mother consent to another two hours in a basketball arena on a weeknight.

That was how the night felt. Like one of anticipation, from childhood. Waiting to move, from the edge of one world to the next.

***

Only patches coming: the night icy, her shivering, her coldly shaking away his jacket. Him scrambling back to pick it up off the asphalt.
The two Eric Snows there, suddenly, from between the cars,
and Tray screaming,
and a gun was out,
and one was on him,
and he was on the ground.
Tray screaming. The night cold, cold. Face gone numb. Nose breaking again: with a single crack. Time passing. Tray facedown on the ground. Him scrambling up. The gun in his hand now. The report of the pistol echoing through the night: one, two, three, four…tell me that you…

***

There was a light drizzle coming down through the trees as he hiked along the edge of the lake towards the perimeter of the courts. There were a few boys playing there, the report of dribbling having carried through the woods for many hundreds of yards to his spot at the top of the hill. He stood there for a while, lurking, in a manner, he realized later, that would have been disconcerting to any adult watching. The rain began to come down harder – near the Y he saw the baseball players running for cover in the dugouts, he saw the old lady moving steadily towards a car with a swiftness that betrayed her cane. There were shouts over near the old sled hill, parents calling from the porches of their apartments to one another, rushing about to bring all their things in-doors. Girard waited for the boys to stop playing, but they did not seem to notice. These were children, eleven, twelve years old. They did not understand such things as rushing inside from a rainstorm yet. They did not know to care of such things yet. They knew only of their game.

The ball was knocked loose from the paws of one of the boys, and came tumbling over towards Girard’s spot near the corner of the court, where he was toeing a crack in the asphalt. One of them came dashing over, slipping on a corner of paint on the sideline that had not yet been washed away and crashing spectacularly into the asphalt, ball locked between his forearm and his ribcage like a running back. He bounced up immediately, grinning like a madman, a long, weeping scrape speckled with flecks of concrete running up the side of his leg. He looked to Girard, grinning still, sweat and rain pouring down his cheek. Oblivious to the blood.

“Hey man,” the boy said, flipping the ball deftly between his dirtied hands, “You wanna play?”

The boy bounce-passed the ball to Girard, the mud-spattered orb hitting him square in the chest against his new flannel shirt. In his hands it felt cold and warm at once, bristling with bits of dirt, raw from its usage, the grip on it fading. Girard bounced it once, twice. Felt the splat it made against the wet court, felt it come back quickly into his opened palm. He took a step back, then a step forward, over the crack. He looked at the boy. He cocked the ball back. He shot.







_______________________________________
Bibliography, or, where undoubtable inspiration arose from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/27/john-updike-rabbit-run-extract
http://www.dibache.com/text.asp?cat=51&id=173
http://us.macmillan.com/lifeatthesespeeds