She moved through the living room as quickly as she could, her eyes fixed on the carpet. She smelled the funk of beer and liquor and In-N-Out burgers. Ten steps to the stairs. Nine, eight—“Yo, sis!” Thomas’s voice, booming, slurred. She didn’t stop. Her foot on the first step, she risked a glance out of the corner of her eye: three of them on the couch, Thomas in the middle. On the coffee table, a half-empty handle of Jack Daniel’s presiding over a congregation of Tecate cans. “Come hang with us for a while, little sis,” Thomas said, smirking. Maria shook her head and kept walking—slowly, she told herself, don’t rush—up the stairs. “What the fuck’s her problem,” said one of the friends, laughing, and then she was inside her bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
She lay down on her bed and put on her headphones. She turned up the volume and closed her eyes, and then she was floating inside the music, free of Thomas, free of the Dreesons, free of San Gabriel. Some time passed—four songs, maybe five—then, in the silence between tracks, she heard the knocking. She took off her headphones. “What?”
“Yoo-hoo.” Thomas. “Can we come in?”
“Fuck off.”
Laughter from outside the door. “Yeah,” Thomas said, “not gonna do that.”
The knob rattled—there was no lock; why was there no lock?—and then they were inside her room, Thomas and his two idiot friends, all stinking drunk. Thomas swayed slightly as he pointed at her. “You,” he said, pausing as though about to deliver the capstone to a historic speech, “are a girl who needs to learn how to have fun.”
“Get out of my room,” Maria said.
“But it’s not your room,” Thomas said. “Remember? None of this”—he swept his arm in a wide arc—“is yours. You’re a freeloader, Maria. A leech.”
His two friends laughed. They were a blur to Maria, pasty-white faces floating above baggy athletic clothes. They crowded her room, shrinking the space around her.
“Yo, Tom,” one of the faces said, “what’s a leech do?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “Why don’t we ask Maria?”
Maria got up from the bed. “I’m leaving.” They blocked her way to the door. She shoved one of the friends, and Thomas grabbed her arm and threw her back onto the bed. “Show some respect,” he said.
She sat on the bed and stared at him. A dangerous charge pulsed through the room. In retrospect, she recognized this moment as the junction between Thomas choosing to be one kind of person or another—and between him choosing one kind of life or another for her.
“I think,” he said slowly, “Maria needs to learn how to show a little gratitude.”
The two friends moved to either side of the bed. Thomas stood at the foot, staring down on her with a blank, glassy look. For a second, nobody moved, and then Maria sprung up and at Thomas, catching him in the side of the head with her open palm. With a surprised grunt, he flung her back down onto the bed. She twisted as she fell, smashing her mouth into the headboard. She felt one of her teeth flare with pain—this was the origin of her gray and crooked incisor—and tasted the blood filling her mouth. “Hold her,” Thomas said, and the two friends obeyed, pinning her shoulders to the mattress. Thomas pulled away her jeans and underwear, and then he stopped, his hands gripping her thighs. “Ah, shit,” he said, and for a moment she thought he might have realized what he was doing, might have realized the damage he was about to cause. Then he told his friends to leave the room. They let go of her shoulders, but still she couldn’t move, paralyzed by both fear and the staggering incomprehensibility of the scene, and then the door closed and Thomas’s hand gripped her neck while the other yanked at his belt, and suddenly he was on top of her, pushing himself inside, and she went dead, limp as though her bones had dissolved into her blood. She stared into his face as he strained above her; she wanted him to acknowledge her. He didn’t look her in the eyes once, not until after he was finished. When he finally did, he appeared startled, as though he’d woken in an unfamiliar place and didn’t know how he’d gotten there. He buttoned up his jeans. “At least I wasn’t your first,” he said. “I would’ve felt pretty bad about that.”
• • •
Maria stopped here, abruptly, as though she’d reached the last page of an incomplete script, its final scenes gone missing.
“Maria,” Simon said. She ran the tip of her tongue back and forth against her damaged tooth. He tried to hold her gaze. He wanted her to know that he was trying to understand how shattering it must have been for her, to communicate how desperately he wished it had never happened, and he knew he’d fail with words alone. She turned away and stared stubbornly down the river. “Jesus. I’m so, so sorry.”
She snorted, as though trying to undercut the horror of what she’d told him. “Don’t say that until I tell you what happened to him.”
“You didn’t say anything to his parents?”
“I didn’t think they’d believe me. He’s their son. They’d known me for, what, a year? And I tell them some crazy fucking story about a rape? No.”
“But . . .” Simon remained stubbornly fixated on the aftermath’s details and logistics, as though he knew there was nothing he could say or ask that could touch the burning-hot, terrible core of the story, of the act itself. “What about the social worker? Or the police?”
“You’re looking at things from the outside, logically, like it was a problem I could solve if I just did things the right way. It didn’t feel like that from the inside. I couldn’t think like that, not then.” She pulled up her hood again, retreating. “I remember the main thing was this absolute terror that I would get pregnant. When that didn’t happen, I felt better. At least temporarily.”
“You never told anybody?”
“Not for years and years. I was so angry sometimes, I could barely see. But I was too young and fucked up then, and I turned a lot of that rage onto myself. And shame too. I couldn’t believe I’d let this happen to me—that was how I thought about the thing. I didn’t let anything happen, obviously. But it took some time before I could see that.” She stood up abruptly. “So that, Simon, was my lowest moment. Now you know.” She turned away from the river. “I’m cold. Let’s get back.”
“What happened to him? Thomas.”
She shook her head. “That’s a story for another night. Please, can we go now?”
• • •
BACK inside the apartment, Simon saw that it was later than he’d thought, nearly midnight. He brought pillows and a blanket out from his bedroom and started arranging them on the couch.
“I’ll sleep out here,” he said. “You take the bed.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s fine. I don’t mind.”
“Simon.”
Her voice was sharp, and he looked up to see her standing rigid in the doorway to his bedroom, two high spots of color rising on her cheeks.
“What?” he said.
“I don’t want your sympathy. That’s not what this is about.”
“Decency isn’t the same thing as sympathy.”
She stared at him for a breath, then relaxed and nodded. “All right.” She lingered in the doorway. “I’ll see you in the morning, then.”
He nodded, unfolded the blanket. “Okay. Good night.”
“Good night.” She paused for a moment, as though about to say something more, then slipped into the bedroom and shut the door.
Simon lay down on the couch. There had been something awkward about this exchange that made him suddenly and acutely aware that he was sharing an apartment with Maria and should, perhaps, feel self-conscious or strange about this, especially after she’d made herself vulnerable to him by telling her story. But he searched inside himself and found that he didn’t. What he felt about her—a complex cocktail of protectiveness, respect, and fascination—was unrelated to anything erotic. He recognized that she was, objectivel
y, attractive, and he even had to admit that he was attracted to her, but only in the literal sense of the word: he was drawn to her, he wanted to be near her. This attraction was not sexual. It was grounded, instead, in an impulse to protect her, to save her, an impulse undiminished despite the unwanted realization that soon enough she wasn’t going to need his help anymore.
He was thankful for this absence of desire, because for him sex had recently become—there was no other way to say it—a fucking disaster. He thought of the last girl he’d slept with, an old hook-up from college he’d run into at an East Village bar a few weeks after he’d started working for DaSilva. He’d been drinking alone, and the girl, Sylvia, had spotted him at his back-corner table, zoning out over his third whiskey. She sat down opposite him, red cheeked, bubbling with drunken good cheer. When she asked what he was doing with himself, he told her he was in medical school, and it didn’t even feel like a lie. Two whiskeys later, her friends left—they’d been drinking over at the bar, eyeing Simon with, he’d thought, rather ill-concealed suspicion—but Sylvia had waved them off and stayed, and he’d suddenly realized that she was flirting with him with real intention and not out of boredom or nostalgia. He straightened up in his chair and tried to rise to the occasion, and he must have done well enough—they’d had their genuinely lovely moments back in college, after all—because he ended up back at her apartment on Ludlow Street, a damp brick-walled three bedroom, with two roommates, two cats, and no real kitchen. Her bedroom was in keeping with those of most other twentysomething girls he’d encountered: a high, small, wobbly bed overrun with an armada of pillows; clothes and shoes erupting out of every enclosed space; no curtains on the windows and nothing to block out the cacophony of the street two stories below.
Once they’d managed to struggle out of their clothes, Sylvia produced a condom from a drawer in the nightstand, pausing for a moment before tearing the packaging open, searching Simon’s face for any sign that he wanted to stop things here. He gave none, and so she shook the condom once, briskly, before unrolling it onto his cock. She pushed him up against the mound of pillows before she climbed on top and almost dismissively inserted him into her. They fucked without speaking, their bodies settling into a pattern they’d established at college years before, muscle memory persevering over drunkenness. He felt slightly incidental to the whole thing, which didn’t bother him too much. Quickly and without warning, she clenched as one unified muscle, and then the tension released and her body went slack, her head slumping forward, her hair falling into his face.
After a moment, she looked down at him, two high spots of color rising on her cheeks. “Come on,” she said, more playful than angry. “Are you even here?”
He pushed her off him, dutifully, flipping her over onto her stomach. She rose onto her knees and elbows, and he took what she offered, driving himself into her. Her face was pressed into a pillow, and all he could see of her head was the tangle of her blond hair spread across the white pillowcase. The knobs of her vertebrae pushed against her skin as she arched her hips up, and he thought, unwillingly, of the plastic model of a spine that had hung from a hook in a classroom at medical school, of the concave bowl of the sacrum, the coccyx’s truncated tail. He looked down at her body stretched out in front of him, fused with his own, and it was as though he could see through the skin and fat and muscle down to the basic structures of tendon and bone, as though he were seeking, with his thrusting, to touch these structures.
She cried out, her voice muffled by the pillow, and he pressed her down flat against the mattress. An image came to him, of her back with its skin slit open and peeled and pinned like his cadaver’s in the anatomy lab, the muscles striated, the fascia yellow and clotted. He tried to fight the image off by closing his eyes. But then he saw, in the black behind his lids, the rib cage of the girl they’d dismantled, the ribs curving away from the sternum like a pair of wings, smaller and more delicate than he’d ever imagined. He opened his eyes and saw that Sylvia had twisted her head to see him—she was smiling, she was fine—and he came then, out of nowhere, while looking at her face, a hard, mean orgasm.
He rolled himself off her and lay panting on his back. The exact moment of disentanglement was for him unbearably sad. The sensation of immense loss lasted only a few seconds, but it was real; he’d felt it every time he’d had sex, with Sylvia or anybody else. It was instinctual, a product of the reptile brain: the withdrawal of warmth. His penis lay toppled on its side, the condom crumpled around the tip. He stood up and walked to her tiny bathroom. He closed the door behind him, threw the condom into the trash and washed himself off. In the mirror above the sink, his pale face was splotchy, his colorless hair mashed to his skull; he appeared stunned, as though he’d been assaulted. The usual sadness of decoupling was shadowed for him now by shame. He’d been able to keep images of the girl from the lab out of his mind for over a month, and he was ashamed that they’d come rushing back to him here, now, during sex. He was embarrassed by himself and his undisciplined mind. He hadn’t slept with anybody since that night. He was too afraid of losing control over his thoughts, too afraid of what bizarre and rotten spectacles his mind would conjure up, its compartments cracking open, the barriers between things that he worked so hard to maintain melting away as quickly as sugar held to a flame.
THE next morning the sky was the color of lead, the river black and glossy as crude oil. Simon got up from the couch and opened the Times website on his laptop, and there was the article, posted as the sports section’s lead story: “Ex-NFL Player’s Suicide Linked to Concussions.” Don MacLeod was paraphrased as saying that Leonard Pellegrini had been “frequently in attendance” at his support group for former players suffering “cognitive and emotional difficulties.” The article noted that Pellegrini had also suffered from acute liver disease “exacerbated” by alcohol and prescription drug abuse, and that a liver transplant at Cabrera Medical Center on Roosevelt Island, less than a month before, had brought “new hope” to his wife, Cheryl Pellegrini. Cheryl was quoted as saying—somewhat stiffly, Simon thought—that “we believed if we were able to solve Lenny’s liver disease, which had grown debilitating and life threatening, it would have a positive, healing effect on the way he experienced life.” The article concluded by saying that Cheryl had decided to donate Lenny’s brain to a group of medical researchers in Boston, the same group that had examined DeMarcus Rogers’s battered tissue. Accompanying the article was a photograph of Lenny from his playing days, standing on the sidelines with his hands on his hips. He looked young, strong, ready to do damage. The picture was from only ten years ago.
Looking at the photo, Simon remembered what Crewes had explained to him about offensive linemen’s freakish skill set: they had to be extremely large, six foot five or six and over three hundred pounds, but also capable of rapid bursts of movement in any direction (including backward), their footwork agile, practically balletic, their hands a karate blur as they warded off pass rushers. They were the grunts of the team, the trench diggers, complimented as a unit and singled out mostly for their mistakes, for missing a block or committing a penalty. And they were also, Crewes told him, some of the players who suffered most after a retirement usually forced by injury. It’s a difficult thing to be in excellent physical shape and at the same time essentially obese; it requires masochistic amounts of training and conditioning offset with equally masochistic feats of food intake. Remove the training and what’s left is an obese person with the hips, knees, and back of a septuagenarian.
Simon knew from Lenny’s medical files that he’d had two replacements of his left knee and one of his right, plus a pair of surgeries to repair bulging disks in his back. One of these operations had occurred while he was still playing, another within three years of his retirement, its costs still covered by the league. The rest, though, he’d had to pay for himself, with no insurance company willing to assume the future costs of such a battered consumer. The painkillers could have be
en first prescribed for any of these surgeries, or perhaps before, to manage the lesser pain of a broken finger or bruised rib. And this was only the toll on his body. The damage to his mind had surely been subtler, more insidious. Most likely there hadn’t been one or two big hits Lenny could point to and say that’s where it all started; most likely it was the accumulation, over a decade and a half, of the routine catastrophes of each snap, stretching back to whenever teenaged Lenny had discovered the power and joy in being both the unstoppable force and the immovable object.
Maria emerged from the bedroom and joined Simon at the kitchen table. She’d piled her hair into a dark, unruly knot on the top of her head and wore a baggy wool sweater, moth holes dotting its hem. She looked as though she’d barely slept, and he feared that telling her story had weighed on her mind during the night, that she regretted opening herself up to him like that. But what could he say about it that would put her at ease, that wouldn’t come off as condescending or pitying?
He brought her a cup of coffee and pointed at the laptop. “The story’s out there now.”
She chewed her lip as she read the piece. “No Crewes.”
“No. Hopefully people will be more concerned with Lenny’s brain than his liver.” He paused. “Did that sound cruel?”
The Dismantling Page 21