At the same moment Robbie said, “Not really,” Maize yelled, “Yeah, baby!”
“Okay. Here goes.” Daniel was just a few feet away from them now. He took a deep breath, pinched his nose, and did multiple somersaults in the water, using his free arm to propel the rotations, flashing them again and again while Maize whooped in delight and Robbie sat there waiting for it to end. After five spins Daniel stood before them gulping air, his body bisected at the waist by the water, listing woozily with a wild look in his eye. Rivulets streamed down his abs and disappeared into the water. Maize clapped loudly in appreciation.
Daniel had never looked more beautiful to Robbie than in that moment, with his hair and everything below it glistening and his broad shoulders strong as a god’s wings. But all Robbie could think to say was “That’s enough.”
“No it’s not,” Daniel said. “I have one more trick.” And with that he lay on his back in the water, thrusting so that everything below his waist showed flagrantly, bobbing on the surface like a water snake for what seemed like forever.
Then with one sharp scissors kick he sprayed cold water onto Robbie and Maize and laughed, swimming away again.
It took a second before they knew what hit them. Maize sputtered as though the water had entered her mouth. Robbie smelled the chlorine and wiped his stinging eyes with his forearm. Daniel paddled away from them toward the diving board and hoisted himself onto it, jumping up and down before he cannonballed naked into the pool with a big splash.
From the periphery of his vision Robbie noticed another movement. He glanced up and saw his mother standing in her bedroom window upstairs, immobile and transfixed with a grimace, before she caught Robbie watching her and disappeared behind her sheer curtains like a phantom.
* * *
“Why the heck does your mother have a clay tennis court in Connecticut?” Daniel said as he and Robbie swept it a few hours later, in the setting sun. The red dust coated his sneakers and Robbie’s like powdery dried blood. “Were you parents pretending to be French or Spanish or something? Don’t you find this a pain? Hard courts make more sense in this part of the world.”
Robbie didn’t know which question to answer first. He was distracted by how opinionated Daniel was for someone who didn’t even play tennis. He had a doctor’s spillover decisiveness to nearly everything he said now, Robbie had begun to notice, as if he were constantly in the emergency ward. But when Robbie had asked Daniel why he’d flashed and spritzed them earlier he’d merely shrugged and said, “I dunno. I just felt like it. Lighten up, Robbie.”
“The clay court was here when my parents bought the house. They were stuck with what they had,” Robbie said now. “And for the record, we are European on my father’s side.”
“Well, if you want to go back three or four generations,” Daniel said.
“Italian Jews, to be specific,” Robbie said. “My father lives in Rome right now.”
“I know that already, Robbie,” Daniel said.
Robbie pushed the roller brush over the sidelines. He said, “Have you ever even played on a clay court? It’s great. Slower than hard courts, so it gives your points a chance to develop.”
Robbie knew what he was talking about. The bounces on clay were higher so you could have long, elegant rallies even if you weren’t very good and slide into your shots without stumbling, the way someone contemplative slid into a thought rather than pouncing on it.
“No, I’ve never played on clay. But I saw my parents do it once when we were on vacation in Portugal,” Daniel said. He moved over the court with the wide brush yoked to his shoulders like an ox.
“Then please shut up about what you don’t know,” Robbie said.
That hadn’t come out the way Robbie had intended. As he retreated to the nearby shed with a shovel, to get a scoop of fresh clay for the hollows near the baseline, his ears stung with his own words. But maybe he needed to be blunter with Daniel. He was getting fatigued from tiptoeing around, worrying about Daniel’s reactions to everything, and subtlety didn’t seem to work on him very well. He wanted to get off this court and take a nap.
Robbie spread the clay and smoothed it. He rather wished Maize had been blunter with him, too—shouted something like “Are you crazy, throwing two people like your mother and Daniel together for a whole week? What are you thinking?” He also wished he himself had been more forceful everywhere rather than playing the milquetoast. He should have confronted Jocelyn for stringing him along in the Arts section—demanded she tell him when his position there would become paying. Instead he’d let her get away with several flirtatious dodges, the last of which he’d not only saved on his voice mail for weeks but transcribed on a notepad like a court reporter: Hi Robbie, it’s Jocelyn. Ah, Robbie, I have a meeting at eight thirty tomorrow morning with the publisher—this is meeting nine thousand about expanding the staff—Jesus Christ! These people are driving me crazy—without spending any money—you know, the old story—and I presume that I’m going to be free to take you out for a nice lunch to gab about it but I don’t know how long this is gonna go and I want to get an answer tomorrow—but who knows?—so I would suggest that you not count on going to the restaurant just in case I get bollixed up—I don’t think I will; I think it’ll be fine and it will be something for me to look forward to, but nevertheless, we’ll see …
But he hadn’t challenged Jocelyn or anyone else in months and months. He was becoming a slacker who didn’t even challenge himself anymore. He was surrounded by new books he didn’t read—he merely read book reviews—and when he tried rereading his favorites he found their magic had diminished, temporarily he hoped, as if written in a dead lost language he no longer knew well enough to translate.
“Want to play a set when we’re done here?” he said to Daniel now. He hardly felt like playing tennis, but he thought he should make a peace offering. He might even throw the match to Daniel to make him feel better.
“Nope,” Daniel said.
“Come on. You’ll probably kick my butt. I’m so rusty and out of shape,” Robbie said.
Daniel smiled for a moment, shyly, as if imagining the pleasure of beating Robbie on his home court, and Robbie suddenly had the impulse to drag him into the storage shed and sodomize him amid the dirt and grit.
“Or I could get Maize out here and we could play a round robin with her,” Robbie said.
Daniel’s smile retracted and he said, “No.”
Although Robbie sensed he’d misspoken, he assumed the only antidote was to keep talking. “Maize can hardly get her racquet on the ball, of course.”
Daniel said, “No, Robbie.” He shook his head and said, “No. It’s getting late. No.”
* * *
Back at the house, Robbie’s mother clucked and said, “Cripes, I thought I had enough,” and she announced that she had to drive into town to buy more packing tape.
Maize went to the guest room and leafed through her journal while she waited for Robbie’s mother to return. She wasn’t up for writing a new entry but she allowed herself to think about her one night out with Eli as she shifted and fidgeted in an easy chair, unable to find a comfortable position.
After she’d finished sending out André’s board package that night, Eli had led her to a succession of strange places—first to a gallery showing photos of luridly mutilated dolls waving their mangled limbs in resort locations like Malibu and the French Riviera and Dubai (the artist, Eli had informed her, was a neighbor of his in Fort Greene), and then to a divey club near Tompkins Square where a quartet played an indistinct music wavering between jazz and classical and heavy metal (Maize guessed you’d call it fusion), and finally to a restaurant with a sign that read QUEER TAPAS BAR a few blocks from her apartment, which she’d never noticed before and which was, judging from its empty tables, either failing or had a late-night clientele. Between locales Eli did most of the talking and Maize nodded or spoke in monosyllables.
“Elias—qué pasa, bizcocho caliente?” a cute Latino waiter yelled t
he second they’d entered the restaurant, clamping his hand on Eli’s bare bicep and asking what a “big strapping boy” like him needed to keep up his studly energies. The waiter smirked at Maize more sharply with each new round of cocktails—once he even curled his lip—as though she were a fly that had landed on the food and couldn’t be readily shooed away or swatted.
Eli had eaten ravenously that night—he did have a lot of body to nourish, Maize supposed—but she’d ordered only drinks, which she’d downed too fast. Although her stomach was growling, she declined Eli’s repeated offers to share his tapas, since eating finger food in front of someone she hardly knew felt too personal.
From the moment she’d realized she’d trapped herself into going out with Eli, she’d resolved to keep everything pleasant yet distant. Something about Eli compelled and scared her equally, so if he questioned her about herself she’d answer succinctly and change the subject to the office instead—André’s deals and his clients, and how bad the computers were and stingy the company was with supplies—even if she bored both of them brainless.
When he asked her what her parents were like she said, “Oh, the usual” and expounded on what an interesting character she found André—how mean and manipulative he could be, and what a demanding perfectionist he was, but how she tried not to hold it against him because she sensed a boiling current of self-loathing under his frosty veneer although she didn’t know exactly where it came from.
Eli beamed at her as she spoke. What a blazing smile he had! Then he put on a hillbilly twang and said, “As my Appalachian grandmaw used to say to me, ‘Darlin’, with some folk, self-hatred’s just good sense.’ ” And when Maize laughed he started telling her about himself unbidden. He informed her that he was from a holler in Kentucky where his parents were tobacco farmers. Every morning he’d walked a long red dirt road to his school—an institution so backward that when he asked a high school guidance counselor about taking the SAT, she said it didn’t exist. The only reason he’d made it north six years ago was a scholarship to Juilliard, and that happened only because, at five, when he’d entered his kindergarten classroom and saw an upright piano, he went straight to it and tapped out an entire country music song he’d heard on his father’s radio, dumbfounding everybody. Within six months he was sight-reading Chopin. The other boys used to call him “twinklefingers” and beat him up, hoping to hurt his hands, until he got too tall to pick on anymore, and more recently his ex-girlfriend had kicked him out of their apartment because he wanted to practice too much on his keyboard and she complained that he was more interested in his instrument than in her. That was when he’d taken his extra job at the real estate office, out of necessity. For the rest of his money he drove a cab on the graveyard shift.
“Interesting,” Maize said, though she knew she was too distracted or tipsy to sound sincere. When Eli had mentioned his dangerously incompetent guidance counselor she’d immediately thought of Hal Jamesley and his incompetence—which was more charming than dangerous—and she wondered where Hal was right then as she sat there in a bar, the same as she’d wondered about him in other bars or bedrooms with other men she hardly knew, when she wasn’t contemplating how she’d describe her dates to Robbie later that evening or the following morning.
“Interesting,” she said to Eli again, and the hollowness of her voice echoed. “I mean, that all sounds hard.”
“I’m not complaining,” Eli said. “There are worse fates. I’m in New York City. I could be in the holler, strumming on my ol’ banjo.”
He smiled again—bashfully to himself this time—and he ordered another course of tapas from the cute snotty waiter. He raised his plate to her and said, “Sure you don’t want some of this? It’s fantastic,” but she shook her head no and gulped more vodka. When he said, “What about your background?” the room throbbed and she drained the last of her drink before speaking. She felt unutterably banal after his Lincolnesque tale of rural hardship and prodigy.
“My life story. It’s unbelievably scintillating, I can assure you,” she said. She launched into roughly the same digest of her personal history that she’d given many other men—the basics of birth and puberty and schooling—yet midway though her recitation she made the mistake of staring into Eli’s eyes as she talked, noticing there were pretty gold flecks in the gray (he had oversized eyes like a goldfish’s), and then she made the error of looking at his long forearms and fingers and his narrow torso and his clean jawline as she continued, and soon enough she’d careened way off track. She heard herself making jokes and using fancy turns of phrase—turning herself into a skit as Eli laughed and nodded—elaborating on her mother and father and stepfather and her high school friend Lyla, and describing the geeks and preppies and artistes and society kids she’d met at college, and her crazy upstairs neighbor who took hallucinogens and wandered their tenement hallways naked, searching for his little dog, and the Indian baker down the block who slipped more muffins into her bag than she’d paid for, and the Serbian superintendent who didn’t speak English and had to be told what needed fixing entirely through pantomime (“Woe betide those of us who suck at charades,” she said), and the sexy old lady who slinked down her block in micro-minis and fuck-me pumps every day and looked so great that both she and Robbie wished they were older heterosexual men instead of recent college graduates.
Robbie, she thought. She’d completely forgotten to tell Robbie she wouldn’t be coming home after work, and she’d turned off her cell phone, so he was probably wondering if she’d been killed on her way back to their cubbyhole of an apartment.
Clearly the alcohol had gotten to her, or something about Eli’s mesmerized attention, or some combination of both. She’d hardly ever spoken this freely with anybody except Robbie, whom she’d hardly mentioned in her monologue except to say that he was a wonderfully tidy roommate and that she’d known him “for eons.”
“So that’s me—fascinating, right?” she said as the waiter reapproached their table and laid his hand on Eli’s shoulder, whispering something in Eli’s ear and shooting daggers at her again.
“Yes,” Eli said, but she didn’t know if he was answering her or their server. Then her mind went blank and she couldn’t think of another sentence to say except, “Please bring us the bill.”
She staggered once when she got up from the table. She willed herself to keep a steady gait as Eli escorted her to her apartment, saying what a great time he’d had and that he hoped they’d go out again soon. By the time they got to her building she was worn out from the effort of walking straight to prove she wasn’t a lightweight. The drug dealer on her stoop eyed her suspiciously—like he didn’t recognize her—as if she and Eli were a pair of narcs come to make a bust.
“Well well,” Eli said, and then he stopped speaking, too. A clammy silence rose up between them as he loomed over her. He was standing a little too close, kicking the curb lightly with his boot like a restless little kid on summer vacation, waiting for something to happen. He said, “You look happy, Maize.”
“I do?” She smiled as if cued to show it. “Thank you for the invitation. Thanks.”
“Sure thing,” he said. When he said nothing further she said, “Okay then,” and realized she couldn’t finish, and heat came to her face. She looked down at his boot hitting the curb.
When she peered up at him again a grave expression had overtaken him—a serious look he hadn’t shown her before—which she recognized as something like grief, or passion, or grief at the sudden appearance of passion that might not be returned, and she was as perplexed as if looking in a small mirror he was holding up to her face and tilting at an angle she wouldn’t have tilted it herself. She was sure that if she didn’t get away fast something humiliating would happen.
“I better go now,” she said.
He said, “Right.” He leaned his head toward her, and then his shoulders, and then his torso, and to stop him more than anything she picked a spot on his left cheek and pecked him and said, “
Bye! See you at the ranch!” as she clambered past the dealer up the steps to her apartment, where she double-locked the door behind her.
To her relief he wasn’t at work the following day, or the next, and the day after that André ordered her to leave and never come back again.
Her stomach had growled that night when she reunited with Robbie and they’d pored over paint samples that looked like miniature color field paintings. Her stomach growled now as Robbie’s mother returned through the front door with the packing tape and called upstairs to let Maize know she was back and ready to resume whatever they’d been doing.
* * *
The next morning Maize had trouble dragging herself out of bed. She had promised to spend a day with her mother across town while she was up here and the time had come. She had no choice in the matter. It was her penance for the implied disloyalty of lodging at Robbie’s mother’s house for the week. Not that penance was justified, since her mother didn’t have room for her. Practically from the moment Maize went away to college, her mother had downsized from the modest three-bedroom house where Maize had grown up to a condo at the edge of the village, in a gated community called Sylvan Estates. Although her mother repeatedly claimed, “Of course you’re always welcome in my home, Maizie—you’re my daughter,” Maize felt otherwise.
Her mother’s condo was clean and bright enough but it wasn’t accommodating. Whenever Maize endured a stay on holidays or summer vacations, her bed was a pullout sofa in the living room with the double-height ceiling, which Maize would stare up at for hours because the sofa mattress was like a medieval rack. Her bathroom was a windowless powder room with no bath (she had to shower in her mother’s bathroom, among her mother’s little tubes and wands and pots of makeup), her furniture and old belongings were in storage units three towns away, and all her mother’s new furniture was expensive and rigidly elegant, as if she were assuring herself and others that she’d moved here out of choice rather than financial necessity.
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