Flat Water Tuesday

by Ron Irwin

  By the time I was approaching Bleecker and Mulberry and moving away from NYU, I was among the kind of people I had grown up with. I liked that I identified not with the other camera-wielding types that infested this part of the city, but with the working guys, some of whom I, in my never ending naïveté about Manhattan, believed might be connected.

  The men who worked for my father thought my going off to Fenton to try and attract a big university was a scam, of course. They understood the idea of kids getting basketball and football scholarships because those were real sports that people played on TV. But a scholarship for rowing? Even the guys who drove along the expressway beside the river and saw the eights from the Black Rock Rowing Club didn’t think it was really difficult. It was distant, it happened on the water, it wasn’t spectator friendly, it looked too graceful. Rowing wasn’t a real sport to them.

  Football. Now that was a real sport, a sport they could understand. My brother Tom had done them proud, even though he’d never see the inside of a university. Tom had captained the Niccalsetti Senior School to victory against every other school in the county. When he came to work the guys treated him like an all-conquering hero, a Roman legionnaire back from the front. My sport—rowing alone for medals—they did not understand; it was merely tolerated because I was the boss’s son. Year after year, through fall, through winter training, through spring, the guys on my father’s payroll rarely asked me what I was doing.

  So when they found out a school in New England—a prep school—wanted me, they were suspicious. Prep schools were already suspect enough, storage places for rich kids. When I told them Fenton wanted me for crew, that I was idiot enough to do an extra year of high school, the questions finally came. “They have school teams for rowing, you mean?” I said yes and they’d think about that. “And all the big colleges have rowing teams?” Lots of them did, sure, I told them, they called them crews. But the colleges my father’s guys knew about were the Big Ten colleges that formed the bulwark of the football pool, and schools like Georgetown and Notre Dame, which they saw on TV during basketball season. Did those schools also have crews? “Yeah,” I’d say, “but they don’t give you scholarships to row on those teams. Just the Ivy League schools. And then only sometimes.” Ivy League? “You know, Yale, Harvard, Princeton.” And the guys would shrug and say those were cool, too.

  At first I didn’t want to go when Fenton contacted me through one of the sculling coaches at the rowing club and asked me to repeat my senior year there. The offer came just when I was trying to figure out how I’d pay to go to the State University of New York at Niccalsetti, which was pretty cheap, but still going to be a push for my parents. I was looking at working my way through college and then the letter from Fenton arrived at the Black Rock Rowing Club after I won the Canadian Henley Sculls. One year at Fenton and I could get a break on tuition at a rowing school. My father pushed me to do it. “You liked Niccalsetti Senior School and you have lots of friends there and girls and all that, but what did they do for Tom? These rich-kid schools can get you into places. It’s nine months. Then you can come back here and spend the rest of your life with your buddies if you’re that dumb. But take the opportunity.”

  Shouldering my way into the coffee place on Lafayette, Fenton seemed like another universe. A dream. I wondered what my younger self—fanatic that I was—would think as I ordered extra-large cappuccinos, bagels, fresh bread for toast, green lemonade and the rest of the supplies I’d need to buy myself another morning with Car. What would that kid make of me walking back to Broome and finding my awkward way up to the loft where Carolyn would pointedly ignore me as I threw my keys and cell phone down in the kitchen and placed the food on plates?

  How would that Fenton student of a decade and a half ago like to see his older self set these things down like graven offerings beside this woman in calculated silence? Would he watch in bewilderment as Carolyn flipped off the lid to her coffee, took a sip and then noticed the vegan cookies I knew she could not resist? Rob Carrey of fifteen years past would wonder what I was doing as I crept up behind her—while she tried to ignore me lugubriously, gazing at the computer screen while crunching the cookie—and sank my teeth into her shoulder hard enough to make her yelp and laugh, truce flooding into the room for an exquisite moment.

  10.

  The first really cold snap that blew through Fenton that year caught us all by surprise. I woke up and saw the clouds of condensation on my window and felt the icy floor after I rolled out of bed. Walking down the boardwalk to the dining hall I faced the rest of the students in the morning silence, most of us unable to even contemplate winter term yet. Chris Wadsworth and John Perry were drinking coffee while looking over the river that was now a sad, dark gutter of water dividing the frosted grass. Wadsworth caught my eye and said, “Coach is going to want road training now. Connor will, too.”

  Behind his glasses, Wadsworth had pale blue eyes that made him seem lupine and pitiless. He was dressed for class already, wearing a long camel coat, leather gloves and a neon blue skiing hat. In less than ten years he would be a lawyer in New York. He was one of those guys who was ruddy and healthy year round, and who also always seemed a little stoned somehow. It was a look many aspired to at Fenton. He played squash—very well—a sport that would be useful to him for the rest of his life, unlike crew. You met lots of kids just like Wadsworth at Fenton, guys who were already thinking a decade ahead, almost living it. He rowed in the bow of the God Four. Was known for pulling all-nighters studying con-law cases in the attic of North Dorm. He squinted at me. “Do you think we’re going to get a chance to row before spring break, Carrey?”

  Perry looked at me evenly. “Carrey has other aspirations.”

  Wadsworth grinned. “So I hear.”

  They had been friends since freshman year and the easy back and forth of their joking had the touch of a well-rehearsed performance about it; a finely choreographed two-man act. Perry was dressed for the final assault on Everest wrapped in a Gore-Tex climbing vest and Nepal knit cap. The tassels hung down ludicrously next to his ears. He examined the river and the haze of cold rising from it that would dissipate later in the morning in the weakening fall sun. Perry was a valuable and well-liked football player and had been on the varsity team since his freshman year. His folks lived in Darien, Connecticut, where his father owned a trucking company. His last name was on the same trucks I used to see delivering frozen food to the supermarket on my street at home.

  “I think Carrey’s after Ruth Anderson,” Wadsworth continued to goad good-naturedly. “Queen Ruth. Now that’s aspiration in its purest form.”

  Perry grinned shyly at the water. The hardest part of adjusting to this life was dealing with the constant insults, the bantering. Guys said things to your face here you’d kill them for at home. It was all we had in a world where you didn’t ever express affection or friendship, where to be overly committed to anything was considered in poor taste. This was as friendly as these guys could be.

  It was impossible that Wadsworth knew what I thought about Ruth. It wasn’t like anything was happening between us. I sat behind her in my chemistry class and had only really had one real conversation with her. But the fact that these guys knew about this meant that she had told somebody about it.

  And that was very cool.

  Wadsworth glanced nonchalantly over the railing. “Carrey’s getting laid. Time somebody did.”

  Perry looked at me, startled. “Are you, Carrey?” There was sincere surprise in his voice. And envy.

  “Jumbo, do you really think I’d tell you?”

  Perry winced. “My name’s John. I hate being called Jumbo.”

  “Jumbo, everyone calls you Jumbo.”

  Wadsworth laughed. “It’s like, on his birth certificate. ‘Jumbo. Fifty pound baby boy. Mother deceased.’”

  “It is not.” Jumbo looked nervously down the boardwalk. “What chick wants to go out with a guy named Jumbo? You guys need to stop calling me that name. I�
�m a senior now. I have rights.”

  “There are worse nicknames, Jumbo.”

  “There are not! Being called Jumbo sucks!”

  “There’s that sophomore everyone calls Pumpkin Head.”

  “You mean Georgie Panousis? Okay, yeah. But that’s because he had to endure a pumpkin drop. Not because his head is pumpkin shaped.”

  “A pumpkin drop?”

  “Last year he wouldn’t get this crazy senior, Bruce Harmon, a pizza during study hall, so Bruce and some of his friends dropped rotten pumpkins on him while he was, like, sleeping. Pumpkin drops used to be a tradition around here.”

  “Nice. If anyone tried to do that to me I’d break his arm.”

  “They only did it to freshmen. Seniors were exempt and everything. And you’re a rower.”

  Wadsworth smirked. “Georgie’s might have been the last official pumpkin drop ever. Pumpkin drops are extinct now. The headmaster told us the next time we held a pumpkin drop there would be an expulsion. Georgie’s dad threatened to sue the school, the dick claimed Georgie got a concussion from it or something. The headmaster has no sack. An eighty-year-old tradition. Gone. It’s a crying shame.”

  “Are you a virgin, Wadsworth?” I asked, trying to catch him off-guard.

  “No, Carrrey, I am not a virgin. I mean, technically, no way.”

  “The rumor is, you’re a virgin, Wads. And you have it all over you. Chicks can smell it. Ask anyone.”

  Wadsworth set his jaw. “FYI dickhead, next weekend I’m taking a college visit to Yale. I’m staying with Jill St. Pierre.”

  Perry laughed. “Carrey doesn’t know who she is, dude.” A blast of wind came whipping down the boardwalk and blew Perry’s cap tassels in his face. “Jill graduated last year. She and Wads used to go out but Wads never scored. So, anyway, word is Yale has suddenly thawed her out. She’s apparently transformed into the Whore of New Haven. Maybe he’ll finally get some serious action.”

  Wadsworth shrugged. “Nicely put. Nice. I appreciate that, Jumbo. Jill will, too. Very nice.”

  “Dude, everyone knows this.”

  I looked at Wadsworth with pity. “That’s kind of sad, Wadsworth. I mean, it’s really sad.”

  Perry rubbed his stomach and changed the subject. “I’ve been running, Carrey, can you tell? And practicing on the fucking erg. It’s hard to get my head into rowing this early in the year. We have months till the racing season starts. Ruth sent me a note and told me I had to lose, like, ten pounds. And whenever I see her she gives me this look. Like she knows I’m slacking.”

  “Perry is scared of her,” Wadsworth said.

  “You are, too, man. She’s like, the Devil.”

  Wadsworth looked at me. “She is. We are mean to her because we fear her.”

  “Dude, I’m not mean to her,” Perry protested.

  Wadsworth giggled maliciously. “That’s because Perry secretly wants her. He asked her out once. To this dance at Hotchkiss. And she said it ‘wouldn’t be appropriate.’ Talk about getting über-negged. Poor bastard.”

  “Dude, shut up, dude. It wasn’t a dance. It was a social.” Perry punched Wads in the arm and Wads had to take a step back to absorb the impact. He rubbed his arm and shoved Perry back. Or tried to.

  “Don’t tell Connor that Ruth shot Perry down. I know you guys hang out. Connor would never let Perry forget it. Seriously. We’re taking you into our confidence.”

  “I don’t hang out with Connor, Wads. I don’t even like him.”

  “Nobody likes Connor. We tolerate him. Like taxes and death and all.”

  “We gotta go, Carrey,” Perry cut in. “Tell Captain Connor we don’t want to run today. Tell him to take a break for once in his life.”

  Wadsworth grinned. “Fat chance of that. Connor’s a psycho. Carrey, you, too, are a psycho.”

  Perry pushed him down the boardwalk. “Give our regards to Ruth.”

  Wadsworth put a gloved finger in the air and made his final pronouncement. “Now, speaking of virgins…”

  I watched them go, Wadsworth tall and lanky, Perry shuffling beside him in his untied, clownishly oversized Bean boots. From behind they looked like two busted-out boxers on the bum. The future leaders of America.

  * * *

  Wadsworth was right. Soon after our exchange on the boardwalk, Connor and Channing wanted roadwork. By late afternoon a few days later, the sun was weak and pale beside the mountain, darkness falling ever earlier. We jogged stiffly down the road against the wind. Channing drove behind us, his war-torn Chevy burping exhaust from its busted manifold. The gas fumes were eye watering even at twenty yards in the brisk cold. Connor ran behind the herd, next to Perry, who was wearing a filthy brace over the yard of cloth covering his right knee. Ruth ignored us, staying just out of Connor’s range of vision, pacing the crowd in her heavy sweat clothes, her mirrored sunglasses making her look like a bug.

  Perry was puffing hard, hawking, plodding forward with his head down. His face was red right to the tip of his nose, as if he was cooking from his own internal combustion. Basted in his own sweat, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand as he ran, then smeared snot on his chest like streaks of mucosal war paint. Connor kept hounding him. “Run. Go, load.”

  Perry wheezed, spat, pushed his knees up and bunched his massive shoulders around his head. “It’s all muscle, Connor. Pure muscle.”

  “Dead weight. All dead weight for this team to haul over the finish. Run.”

  Perry coughed and tried to pour on some speed to get away from him, loping now toward the rest of us. Connor just lengthened his stride a fraction, not even breathing hard, and was all over him again. I could hear Perry’s meaty footfalls and smell him: a musty, elephant pong. “I’m benching three hundred even, dude. Free weights. Three hundred even.” Perry gasped this out to the general crowd, but mostly to irk Connor. Connor shoved him and he almost lost his footing. It always irritated Connor when Perry brought up weightlifting. Connor maxed out at two hundred ten on a good day—on a day when that’s all he was focused on. He hated the free weights bench in the boathouse and always put his book bag and sweatshirt on it when he trained down there, as if that ominous equipment was only good for hanging clothes. “You’re not lifting the boat,” Connor spat out. “You’re rowing it. Run it off, fat boy.”

  Perry had a Buddha’s patience, his meaty bull shoulders dropped and rounded against the cold and strained against the wet cloth of his sweatshirt. I couldn’t even hear Connor’s footsteps as they bickered. “Where did they find you, Jumbo?” he asked, running easily and lightly, not the slightest bit winded. “Seriously. I really want to know. The admissions committee must have interviewed you and somebody actually had to say, ‘Okay, John Perry’s a good candidate for this school. He’s the right stuff.’ I mean, Carrey I can just about understand. We have to help underprivileged people in this world, but there’s no excuse for you, Jumbo. None.”

  Perry took it and took it. I wondered what would happen if he just turned around and swung at him. It was all he had to do. Connor wouldn’t last a second in a fight with Perry. One smack from that moist, fat fist and Connor would wake up in summer vacation needing therapy to relearn his name. Maybe Perry thought taking shit from Connor was good for him. Like it was character building or something. Back home, where kids routinely fought out of sheer boredom, Connor wouldn’t exist. Somebody would have killed him.

  I upped my pace and broke away from the group, started lengthening my stride when I saw the boathouse. I wanted to leave all of them behind me for just a minute, hit the road in front of the boathouse at full speed. But Connor shadowed me, staying just out of my peripheral vision. I could hear his footsteps striking the ground with mine and I pushed it a little harder. I couldn’t lose him. By the time I saw the boathouse peeping over the fields, I put my head down and charged it, figured I had two hundred yards to shake him, but he stayed right behind me, and then he was next to me. I laid it on and he kept it up. “Nice pace, Carrey. Very nice.
”

  I ignored him, kept the speed up until we had twenty yards and then I tried to lose him again. I took a breath and dug in, sprinted as hard as I could, thinking I’d beat him to the driveway by a stride, but he was already pouring on the juice and just managed to cross next to me. It took all my self-control to resist the urge to hit him down to the water. I turned away from him and walked it off.

  He hadn’t beaten me, but there was no way I could have pulled away from him. I turned and looked up at him and he was doubled over, wheezing, gasping, then stood up when the rest of the team stampeded onto the boathouse drive. He quickly turned and looked at me, grinning, his breath short clouds of vapor. “Sweet one, Roberto.”

  I jogged by him toward the boathouse.

  Ruth caught up with me. “Good run, Carrey.”

  “He still almost beat me.”

  “You don’t have to compete with him for everything, Carrey. He’s not the enemy.” Sweat glistened in her hair. Her sunglasses had slid down her nose.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Just be cool, all right? Can you do that for me? Play nicely with the other boys.” She grinned wickedly. Punched my arm. “Don’t make me mad at you, Carrey. Or make me do something I’ll regret.”

  Ruth herded us back into the unheated boathouse for another hour of training. Channing had posted the workout up on the bulletin board on an index card written in his jagged script: Work on the ergometer, a weight circuit, bench pulls circuit. He didn’t come into the boathouse with us, simply drove off and left us to our own devices.