Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Daniel said.

  “Wasn’t talking to you. Wiley? You done?”

  “Fuck no,” Wiley said.

  They met in the middle of the ring again. Tunney rang the bell. Daniel took a step back, and then lunged forward. Wiley didn’t move with anything resembling the same eagerness. Daniel began practicing combinations, passing on the easy punches for more challenging ones, trying to hold himself in check. Time stretched in the ring, minutes passing so slowly Daniel felt he could hold the seconds in his hand, palpate them for a while, and then send them on their way. It was probably no more than a minute, ninety seconds at the most, before Wiley lifted his gloves in front of his face. Daniel stepped back, again searching for Wiley’s eyes but finding only the Everlast label on the front of the headgear on Wiley’s bent head. Daniel felt the hunger rising again. It would be so easy now. With a single blow he could send the man to the mat. The headgear provided some protection against soft tissue damage, but it would be like cellophane against Daniel’s fist. He could see and hear it so clearly: the thunk of glove against skull, the jerk of the man’s head on his spine, the spray of sweat and spit, the shiver under his feet as the man’s body smashed to the canvas. Once again everything around him faded—the sounds of the few people crowded around the ring, the smells of sweat and leather, the mats and the ropes—it was all gone. All that was left were his fist and the pain it would cause. He hauled back his fist and narrowed his eyes, ready to propel it through his opponent. Ready to see Wiley crumple and fall. Ready to see Wiley’s head bounce on the mat. Ready to hurt him as much as he possibly could. Ready to cause pain, because that was the surest way to forget about feeling it.

  Just as he sent his fist sailing through the air he heard from behind an all-too-familiar voice.

  “Daniel! What are you doing?”

  He turned in the direction of the voice, and thus he did not see his glove graze Wiley’s cheek, did not see Wiley spin and bounce against the ropes, did not see Wiley stagger upright, shake his head, and lunge toward him.

  The only time Iris ever saw Daniel box she had come prepared to be outraged, prepared even to walk out in disgust. In fact she was there in the stands of the smelly gym in Rahway, New Jersey, only to refute Daniel’s argument that there was a beauty in boxing, that it served to civilize rather than enhance or exploit man’s essentially violent nature. But as she watched the first bouts on the card, she found herself fascinated by the sound of the fighters’ leather gloves pounding against muscle, by the play of force across the muscles of their backs as they flung their fists, by the sprays of sweat lit up by the bright spotlights.

  She tried to resist these feelings, to dismiss them as internalized vestiges of oppression. It was a simple physical reflex, she told herself, one that could and ought to be conquered. But watching Daniel walk up the aisle to the ring for his bout she felt awash in a strange sense of pride. The pride of ownership. That body—those long legs striated with muscle, the bulging band of deltoids connecting his shoulders and neck, the ropy veins crossing the muscles, the flat hard belly disappearing beneath the wide elastic of his shorts—was hers. All that strength and grace had been bestowed upon her, laid at her feet. He belonged to her.

  As he climbed into the ring, Daniel caught her eye, and a flush crept across her face, down her belly, and settled like an itch between her legs. He winked at her and she jumped as though he’d touched her. When he turned to duck under the ropes, she shifted in her seat, clenching her thighs together.

  When the bell rang Iris leaned forward in her seat, gripping her knees so tightly that her fingers turned white. There was something about Daniel’s expression, something she had not noticed in the faces of the fighters in the prior bouts because she had been so much more interested in their bodies. Daniel and his opponent looked hungry as they leaped toward each other. They sized each other up the way you would gaze at a hamburger immediately before sinking your teeth into it. It seemed so obvious, but it had not occurred to her until that moment that to be a boxer a man must enjoy hitting people. He must in some way enjoy the sensation of causing pain. Iris knew that this introduction of violence into her life should repel her. And it did. It horrified her, she told herself. Yet she felt faint, and not with repulsion, at the thought of being fucked by the man who was so competently demolishing his opponent.

  By the third round there was not a person in the gym who would not have agreed that Daniel was winning the match. The other boxer had a few pounds on him, but Daniel was outfighting him. He moved faster, his jabs and hooks had more power behind them. He followed up every well-placed punch. And then, as Daniel was watching the guy’s right hand, looking for the opening he knew was about to come, he was suddenly on the ground. Later he told Iris that he never saw the blow, didn’t even feel himself fall. One minute he was about to strike, the next he was listening to the count. Iris watched Daniel struggle to his knees, his heavy head like a sunflower drooping on the stem of his neck. He reached for the ropes, but couldn’t haul himself up. He was momentarily saved from the humiliation of failure by the shrill peal of the bell.

  She was on her feet as Daniel dragged himself back to his corner, and by the time he had collapsed onto the stool his coach had slung into the ring, she was reaching for him through the ropes. His eyes were closed, and the coach twisted a paper cylinder under his nose, releasing an acrid, chemical smell. He barely flinched. The ref called the fight.

  That night, Iris sat in bed next to Daniel, doing her best to follow the orders given by the physician who had diagnosed his concussion. She was to wake him up every hour to ask him a few questions and make sure he was still responsive. At the beginning her task was made easier by the fact that Daniel kept waking to heave the contents of his empty stomach into the bowl she held for him. But after a while his nausea abated. Through the long hours of the night, she sat curled on the bed, her hands in fists, her fingernails digging into her palms to make sure that she would not fall asleep herself. Every hour on the hour precisely, she would hold his face in her hands, talk to him, beg him to stay awake just for a moment, kiss him urgently when his eyes drifted closed. He was conscious, even tried to talk to her, but he was exhausted from the fight and from the pain in his head, and he wanted to sleep. The harder it got to wake him up, the more frantic she became. She soaked a washcloth in cold water and put it on his face, and then cried when he batted it away and grumbled.

  “Please, please,” she said as he became more and more difficult to rouse. “Please don’t die. Don’t die.” She was terrified of losing him, and worse, she felt a sick sense of shame. She knew that her excitement in the fight had nothing to do with his injury, but still could not help but imagine that her pleasure had goaded him on. There was that look they’d shared before he entered the ring, the look that had so effectively communicated the thrill she was feeling. Had that moment of eye contact made him take risks he would not have were she not in the audience? She held his face in her hands, trying to rouse him without jostling his delicate, damaged head, feeling as though it were his life she was holding in the palms of her hands, that if she failed to keep him awake, she would lose him forever.

  “Don’t die,” she chanted like a mantra, soaking and soaking again the washcloth, pressing it to his temples.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Daniel mumbled. “It’s just a concussion. I’m not going to die.”

  Only at dawn did she finally give in and let him sleep. She woke him up a few hours later with a cup of tea and two slices of toast.

  “I didn’t think your stomach would be able to handle more than this,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said, relieving her of the cup and plate.

  Iris sat down on the bed. The mattress shifted slightly under her weight.

  “Daniel,” she said, taking his hand. “I love you.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as though this were not the first time either of them had said those words.

  “I love you, too.
”

  “But I won’t be with you if you keep boxing. I won’t go through that again.”

  Daniel argued with her, but at this point he knew that his career was all but over anyway. And he loved this stern and passionate girl, this generous girl who had murmured to him all night long, who had sung to him and kissed him and whose fear of losing him had been so obvious that it was only for her sake that he bothered to follow the doctor’s unnecessarily cautious orders at all.

  It was Iris who came up with the idea that he attend law school. She persuaded him that the courtroom, like the ring, was a place of controlled violence, and that he would be perfectly suited to its rigors. Iris had filled out his applications and financial aid forms—she said her typing was better than his. If she could have taken the law boards for him she probably would have done that, too. But in the end she was wrong; not about boxing, perhaps, but about his suitability for a career in the law. As a lawyer Daniel had none of the competitor’s instinct that had come so naturally to him in the ring. He once told Iris that the kind of pain his colleagues enjoyed causing was complicated and insidious, and far more agonizing than anything he had experienced or inflicted as a boxer. He could not take pleasure in that kind of fight. Back when Daniel was practicing law—before he failed to make partner and instead took a position as a clinical instructor in a third-rate law school—Iris would try to encourage him with boxing metaphors. “Just keep hitting him,” she’d say about a recalcitrant opposing counsel. “File motion after motion. Eventually you’ll wear him down, and then, when he’s not paying attention, land your knockout blow.” But on the rare occasions when Daniel did manage to channel his fighting nature, it would be at the worst possible moment, in a way that disgusted rather than intimidated his colleagues.

  Now, more than thirty years later, Iris stood in the dingy boxing gym in Newmarket, her face pale, shouting at him to stop.

  “Iris,” Daniel said, dropping his fists. Because he was staring at his wife, he did not notice Wiley pinwheeling forward. With a grunt Wiley landed a wild haymaker in Daniel’s kidney, directly on his off button. The air shot out of Daniel’s lungs in a single blast, and he gagged. Before he could even take the breath he needed to remain upright, Wiley came in with a ferocious jab, the edge of his glove somehow penetrating the inch of padding on Daniel’s headgear and opening up a cut under his eyebrow. A rope of thick, sticky blood flowed from the cut, a blackish-red stream across his field of vision. He shook his head and blood flew across his cheek and head gear. He grunted and bent over, and Wiley threw his fist forward again, weakly but low, and square on Daniel’s groin.

  Jason leaped into the ring, grabbed Wiley, and said, “Shit, dude. Wicked low.”

  “No kidding,” Daniel managed to say.

  “I think we’re done,” Tunney said.

  Wiley lifted his gloves over his head, grinning like a fool.

  “You fucking punched me in the balls, you little prick,” Daniel said.

  “Hey, whatever, Grandpa. Who’s bleeding all over the ring?”

  “Wiley, you were born a horse’s ass and you’ll die a horse’s ass,” Tunney said. He rolled closer to the ring. “You need a hand?” he asked Daniel, motioning to Jason to help him up.

  “No,” Daniel said, unfolding himself with care, like a man opening a broken umbrella. “I’m fine.”

  “You did all right,” Tunney said. “Are we going to see you tomorrow?”

  “No doubt,” Daniel said.

  “Over my dead body,” Iris said. When Daniel stooped through the ropes, she stripped off her sweatshirt and pressed it against his forehead, staunching the flow of blood from his split eyebrow. He allowed her to lead him to a chair, let her unbuckle his headgear, even obediently spat out the mouth guard into her waiting palm.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, wiping the saliva from his lips with the back of his hand.

  “What do you think I’m doing here? I’ve been driving around Newmarket all morning looking for your car. What did you think? That I was just going to ignore the fact that you’ve been disappearing every day? And anyway, what I’m doing here is not the question. The question is what the hell you’re doing here.” Her tone was belied only partly by the gentleness of her touch as she pressed her favorite gray hoodie, now ruined, against his cut, holding his head against her soft belly.

  “I can’t fucking believe you followed me,” he said, pulling away.

  Tunney rolled up in his wheelchair, a jar of Vaseline in his hand. Daniel bent down obediently and the old trainer fingered up a thick wad and smeared it over the cut. The bleeding stopped.

  “I didn’t follow you,” Iris said. “I was looking for you. There’s a difference.”

  “Like hell there is,” Daniel said, tossing her the sweatshirt.

  That night, as Iris lay stewing in her anger in bed, Daniel stood in front of the mirror, studying the damage. His eye was already swollen shut, and blood crusted the row of inexpert stitches across his eyebrow. Jimmy Tunney might have once been able to close his boxers’ wounds with serviceable sutures, but while his kit remained stocked and ready, his hands no longer held the dexterity for the delicate work of stitching a man’s face. Had Iris not been so aggressive in her demand that he go to the hospital, Daniel probably wouldn’t have let the old man near the cut with his needle. As it was he had regretted his decision the moment Tunney pierced his eyebrow, but by then he’d taken a stand and had a point to prove.

  Daniel laid the palm of his hand against the sore spot under his rib. He took a breath and winced at the bloom of fire. Delicately he probed an oozing scrape on his shoulder. He moved his sore neck from side to side until he heard the satisfying pop of his vertebrae cracking. It was all going to hurt worse tomorrow, he thought. In the mirror his skewbald face smiled back at him.

  II

  Jane was a neophyte insomniac—all her life until now her capacity for sleep had saved her sanity. At ten o’clock she would drop insensible into her bed, and once asleep she would not wake, not even when her drunken husband lurched into the bedroom, banging into the furniture and muttering incomprehensible curses. When the kids were little babies she had warmed their middle-of-the-night bottles without ever really coming to. But after the accident she lost her capacity for sleep and had not to this day regained it. She spent every night wandering the house, rarely managing to fall asleep before dawn. She groped through her days in an exhausted fog.

  She drove on autopilot, thanking God that every twist, bend, and pothole was as familiar to her as the faces of her children. Jane knew that on Tuesdays and Fridays, Mehitable Hewins, who lived in the double-wide on the intersection of Route 179 and the Bangor Road, hung out her laundry. She knew that every weekday morning at 8:40 A.M. the day-camp bus picked up the kids from Fletcher’s Landing in front of the post office. She knew which barns concealed police cars waiting for out-of-state speeders. The trip to Wal-Mart always took her three-quarters of an hour, give or take a minute or two, depending on how she caught the single stoplight in Red Hook and the three in Newmarket. Today, when she pulled into the vast parking lot, she realized that she had not the slightest recollection of the drive.

  She parked the car and laid her head on the steering wheel, closing her eyes for what she intended to be a rejuvenating moment. Ninety minutes later, she was awakened by a rapping on the window.

  Flustered and embarrassed at having been discovered sacked out in her car like some kind of homeless woman, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and wiped at the saliva that had dripped from the corner of her mouth. Sheriff Paige stood there, his arms laden with two big shopping bags and a new red plastic cooler. He was out of uniform, and looked worried.

  “You all right, Ms. Tetherly?” the sheriff asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You’ve been here over an hour.”

  “You’ve been watching me sleep for an hour?”

  “No, ma’am. I saw you when I pulled in. And as you were st
ill here when I came out, I decided it might be a good idea to make sure you were okay.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just tired.” She collected her purse and opened the door, bumping it into his thighs.

  “Oops,” he said, backing away.

  “Sorry.”

  As she closed the door, he said, “You might want to get those keys.”

  Jane looked into the car. Hanging from the ignition was her key chain, loaded with her house keys, the keys of the Unitarian church, the keys of every family for whom she worked, and of course her car keys.

  “Rough night?” Sheriff Paige asked, as she yanked the door open.

  “They’re all rough,” she said before she could stop herself.

  “Insomnia?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “I don’t sleep well myself.”

  In the uncomfortable silence that followed her failure to reply, she remembered the last time she had seen him, at the funeral. His forgiving smile when she had tried to make a stumbling apology for her disgraceful behavior at the scene of the accident had shamed her all over again. Now, nearly two years later, she blushed at the memory of those appalling days.

  “You might think about taking something for it,” Sheriff Paige said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They’ve got good sleeping pills nowadays. Won’t make you groggy like the old ones did.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yuh.” He patted his pockets until he came up with a pen and a scrap of paper. He scribbled the name of the drug and of his doctor. “You tell him I sent you,” he said. “Tell him what all you been through. He’s a good man. He’ll take care of you.”

  Jane made an appointment that very day. Paige’s doctor blamed her sleeplessness on the change of life; insomnia was a frequent symptom, he told her. Jane did not bother to point out to him that she had gone through menopause years ago, early, like all the women in her family, with a minimum of fuss. Neither did she tell him about John. Her private grief was none of his business. She didn’t need a doctor to tell her why she hadn’t been able to sleep in two years.