Liz’s restlessness in the period surprised me, though probably I should have recognized its source. While I drew solace from the suspension of these days, for her they underlined her idleness. The rest of the world was on holiday, watching TV, and drinking in the afternoons. Even the lab was empty but for a few of the technicians going in to feed the fish. Yet for her these late December days were indistinguishable from any others of the previous months. She was due to be returning to work after the new year, and she itched to do it. Her students had not been finding changes from the mutation the project was studying. “I know they’re missing something,” she said. “They’re unobservant.” One picks up a fluency in the lab, she told me. It was like unlocking a door, she said. Everyone’s front door has a knack to it—a twist, a little push against the bolt—and yet people don’t think for a minute about opening their own locks. “How do you describe it though, to someone who can’t do it?” she said. “How do you make them do it right?”
She went back to the lab on the first work day of the new year. I relished her precise prettiness in her work clothes. I was envious that it seemed directed to others and not me. She was meticulously prepared. It was as if she dared the world to suggest that motherhood had diminished her appetite for work.
* *
The other riders have finished breakfast when I reach the dining room. The waiters move around, clearing up dishes, carrying stacks of dirty plates into the kitchen. I am not hungry, but I load up my plate with what is left. The porridge is cool and set hard on top, the coffee tepid. Sebastian, the last rider still at the table, wipes his mouth with his napkin. I take a seat next to him. “I’m going,” he says. “No offense, of course.” He taps the giant red sports watch that, bug-like, grips to his wrist. I work to force my food down. He stands and lumbers out of the room. There is an hour before we will leave the hotel, but I feel caught behind, rushed. I look up to see a waiter watching me eat with an expression of distaste.
When I am nearly finished, my phone rings. I stand, walk out to the hotel car park to take it.
“I just talked to Rafael,” Liz says.
“What?”
“He called me.”
“He called you?”
“As I said. He made some insinuations.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“About his suggestion that I assist him.”
“Right.” I feel the breakfast in my stomach, the sour taste of coffee on my teeth.
“It’s pretty critical,” she says. “I think he really needs this. He’s prepared to make things very difficult if we don’t help him.”
“That’s my problem,” I say.
“Why do you say that?” she says. “You earn most of the money. I know about all of this. You store your products in our fridge.”
“What did he say?”
“Your job is on the line, I think.”
“He’s bluffing,” I say. I exhale. I cough drily. “This ruins your trip,” I say. “It turns it into something else.”
“Perhaps that’s not so terrible,” she says. “He tells me he will pay for the hotels.”
“I can’t just do everything he says.”
“That’s true,” she says. She is speaking calmly. “But this is not about what he wants. It’s about you.”
“We can’t do it,” I say.
“If your career is on the line?”
“Even then,” I say.
She laughs as if in disbelief. “All these years. This trying. You won’t let me give you a hand. This is just one little thing more.”
“With him there is always one little thing more.”
“Well,” she says. “You know how it is. It’s your choice.”
She waits. There is an answer she wants, and I know why she desires it. I think of her nights of coming home from bad days at the laboratory, of her talking under her breath, reliving problems that I could not conceive of let alone solve. The vows of marriage have felt to me to be limited things at times, my ability to ease her passage through the world constrained by what little I know of her work. I think of waking in the night to find that she has not been sleeping, looking at her lying there in the dim streetlight that cuts through the curtains, her turning to look at me sadly, and the sense in her doing this that I cannot set her mind at ease, that she does not expect me to.
I remember heading out training on a winter day after B had been born, before Liz returned to the lab. It was a long, cold ride, sleeting throughout. The weather was so bad that I found myself perversely ecstatic. Just being out on the bike was a triumph. I was glad to have endured the ride, felt that this endurance augured well for the season. When I opened the front door with my numb fingers, however, Liz was still in the same place on the sofa she had been sitting when I left. She watched me come in without expression and asked with no particular expectation in her voice how the ride had been. I found that I didn’t want to answer her truly and share the odd pleasure I had taken in the last three hours. I looked at my weary wife and at B rolling on his mat, and I felt with sadness that she could not take in the thoughts that had pleased me, could not imagine my petty priorities.
She exhales. I still do not speak. “Let me do this for you,” she says.
Why have I not considered that she might feel about my profession as I did her work? Why would I not have imagined there was a hunger to be let in?
“You’re sure?” I say.
“Of course.”
“Okay,” I say. “The vials. Just the vials.”
* *
Later, in the starting area, Fabrice seeks me out. I am sitting on a chair by the bus putting on my socks and shoes. “Late to breakfast,” he says. “Everything okay?”
“Rafael wanted to see me,” I say.
“I see,” he says. “The issue is all sorted out?” He gives no indication of whether he knows what Rafael has asked.
“Oh yes,” I say.
He takes a seat next to me. He buckles his own shoes a little tighter, releases the buckles, tightens them again. He has just today’s stage to make it through before the rest day, before he may recover a little, before he will have leisure to spend time with Rafael considering his gains, his route to victory. He sits up from fiddling with his shoes and looks at me. “A cyclist is visited by a genie on the day of the World Championships,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
He slaps his thighs. His legs are newly shaven. “The genie says, ‘I will give you a wish, with just one condition: that anything you ask for, your greatest rival will have double.’ ”
“Okay.”
“ ‘So if I ask to win the World Championships . . . ,’ the cyclist says. ‘Your rival will win it twice,’ says the genie.” Fabrice’s index finger rises. “The cyclist thinks. ‘Well, then I suppose that I would like you to push an uncooked baking potato into my rectum.’ ”
“That’s good,” I say.
“Yes,” says Fabrice. “I have told it a number of times. It is important to specify a baking potato. A spring potato . . .” He shrugs, stands, and clacks off in the direction of his bike.
* *
We have barely gone a kilometer from the start when a couple of young riders from the German team sprint off up a short climb. Others in the peloton are unwilling to let them go, and so we are all thrown into a chase from the start of the day, stiff and grumbling and not yet broken into any kind of rhythm. Today’s stage has a number of small inclines and descents that will hamper the efficiency of the peloton, so as a group we are eager to let no one get too far ahead. I ride next to Tsutomo, who shakes his head. “Assholes,” he says. He turns and catches my eye. “They were prepared.”
“Indeed,” I say.
“The blond one was chewing his handlebars at the start.”
* *
When I thought of drug taking before, I always considered it so simple. One would have a few injections, I thought, and become better at what one does. Rafael’s program, however, puts a lie to this. “Making yo
u shit bags better,” he says, “is like trying to fix a wristwatch with a rock.”
There are no rules, apparently. There is talk of “responders” to different substances. One man’s wing is another man’s millstone. “You are all unique,” says Rafael. “Not in the way that I care about your what-is-called ‘personalities’; in the way that the drugs always affect each of you differently.” Our needs vary too. Johan, for instance, does not have so many of the endurance treatments. He cares about sprinting, and thus power, and takes growth hormone. I do not see the specifics of his treatments, but I witness him bulging at the seams in the season. The hormone makes his jaw grow, and he complains of dental problems all summer.
I went to stay with Rafael for training in early winter. B was still young, but I was assured the trip was important. Rafael and the Butcher live close together. I rode in the days, and Rafael and the Butcher followed me in their cars. Sometimes Fabrice, who also lives in the region, came to join.
There was a computer attached to my bicycle, logging my power output, my speed, and my heart rate. Occasionally Rafael asked how I felt. More often though, he and the Butcher simply consulted the data. “The mind is one of the body’s least reliable parts,” Rafael said to me when I told him that I was feeling tired. “The data, on the second hand, is almost always correct.” He told me the data looked good. He urged me to push a little harder.
In these days, he tested my response to a few substances: for recovery, for muscle growth, for weight loss.
Riding with Fabrice on one of these days, I told him that I never knew my body had so many states. Fabrice nodded in response. “In their way,” he said, “the two of them are artists.”
Fabrice and I did two long rides sequentially, and before the second I was given an injection which made me ride like a man pursued. Fabrice and I rode next to each other up a switchbacking climb. I felt I had a spring in my riding that Fabrice did not. The hill sank beneath me with a thrilling inevitability. Fabrice shifted his limbs as though they were impossibly heavy. Each time I eased ahead it seemed less likely he would return to riding level with me.
At the top of the climb, the Butcher and Rafael were there to meet us, to debrief. Fabrice was unusually sullen. I was enthusiastic. “They can give me that stuff every day,” I said, when Fabrice and I were freewheeling slowly down the mountain.
“It becomes less effective,” he said. “It inhibits future growth.”
“Still.”
“Still it was you also.”
“Me?”
“You think a drop or two of this or that can do so much?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to think the capability is inside of you, do you not?”
We rode in silence for a time. We concentrated on taking the corners. The evening was setting in. Lights were on in the valley. “Just don’t take too much,” Fabrice said. “It burns you up.”
I came, despite myself, to appreciate the danger of it all. I am cautious by nature, but some of the things I have encountered have made me wonder at our desire. I have heard rumors of a bovine blood extract smuggled around the world. People have talked in the peloton of a weight-loss drug pulled even from a testing phase, yet available through certain doctors. I marvel sometimes. We are doing all this for a bicycle race? It is almost magnificent. Fabrice thinks this too, I guess. Even in his regret there was a quantity of pride. His warning was in some way a challenge.
* *
The rolling nature of the stage takes a toll on my legs. We catch the first breakers, and then another group goes on the next climb. They are just four riders, down in the overall ranking, no real threat to Fabrice and the other leaders. We will pull them in slowly, however. The peloton is a twitchy thing today. The group is forever changing speed as the incline of the road alters. I am eager not to let our team get dropped as we did the day previously, and so I stand, I hang off the handlebars. I concentrate on the motion of those at the front of the group.
Fabrice sits silent behind me. He pedals in easy circles. He breathes through his nose. I reprimand those ahead who let the pace slacken. Tsutomo takes his turn ahead of Fabrice. I push forward. I pedal at the front for a while and enjoy the sensation of cutting through the thick summer air, the sense of steering a great machine.
* *
As the spring began to approach, I started to have more commitments. There was a training camp; there were races to go to on the continent. B was so small, we didn’t want to entrust him to a nanny. Liz’s old friend Davina, who only worked part time, did a considerable amount of caring for B. For a couple of weeks, when I was away racing, she spent nearly as much time in our house as she did in her own. I do not think that Liz and I are selfish people, but we were good at blocking out a true sense of how much we were taking advantage of Davina’s generosity. Occasionally a word or expression of hers would cause me to consider the reality of what Liz and I were asking. I would recall how I had thought of certain parents before the arrival of our own child, of how much I had been irritated by those who took up pavements with pushchairs, or refused to take their wailing child out of a crowded restaurant. I would look at B, though, and feel that we were not doing that. She liked him, I felt. It was inconceivable that she could not.
Eventually, Davina’s patience just ran out. “I can’t do this much,” she said one evening when Liz had just got in from work, and when I had just flown back into the city from a race. We all knew this had been coming, I suppose. It was a relief, even. She was nice to do it then. I had ten days before I needed to travel again. We had time to come up with a new arrangement.
We interviewed for a nanny, found a skinny girl in her early twenties who was preparing to go to nursing college in the autumn. For some reason, she was learning Finnish. “I could speak Finnish to the baby,” she said.
“I think that might be confusing for him,” said Liz. “For you to be trying to teach him Finnish at this point.”
The girl was pleasant. She wore a baggy cable-knit cardigan. She had flushed cheeks, gave the impression of someone trying very hard. It was when she left and we started discussing her rate of pay that we had doubts. “It’s the transactional nature,” said Liz.
“We can pay her more,” I said.
“But the payment itself,” said Liz. “So soon. So young for him.” She pointed at B, who lay on his mat, who had been admirably quiet for the visit of the girl.
“But you need to be in the lab.”
She shrugged. “Sure.” She both wanted and didn’t want this context, this encouragement of her own ambitions. I don’t think she was yet inclined to concede that we had to choose between care for B and our work. “It’s a job for this girl,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The secret of adulthood,” Liz said. “Most people are bad at their jobs.”
“You sound like Rafael,” I said.
She laughed. “Does that make me wrong?” she said.
“Just scary,” I said. I laughed myself.
I understood her impulse, I thought. I felt that the issue of care for B should never be resolved too easily. I have plenty of devices to measure my training, to track my power and distance and speed and heart rate. And yet what reassures me I am doing enough is the sense of pushing into discomfort, going outside of what I know myself able to do. It is the same with B, I think: there is the need to do enough for him, yet beyond that is a feeling that his care should cost us effort, that we should give him more than we think we can.
There was, of course, a relatively simple option, though it was not one we were easily inclined to take. Katherine was still eager for more time with her grandchild. Parcels of presents and clothes arrived every couple of weeks.
Liz was not keen on this option, but the idea of paying someone displeased her even more. I thought that Katherine would do a good job, but I knew also that Liz would chafe against her mother’s regular presence. “She can wind me up,” said Liz, “but I’m better with her now. I won�
�t let her get to me.”
When we asked Katherine, it was as if she had known we would. She came down the day before I was due to leave for a training camp and tidied up the spare room. She brought with her a box of baby things that had once been Liz’s own. This exasperated Liz, who regarded them as old and dirty, but I was impressed by the care with which they had been packed away, by the fact that Katherine had stored them and retrieved them after all these years.
I didn’t see Katherine as much as Liz did, because she was covering for my absences. She would arrive early on days on which I was due to go away, so well put together already, made up and smelling of Yardley’s Lavender. She would even make me sandwiches for the flight.
At first Katherine followed the guidelines Liz had given her, but soon she was using her own initiative. Liz was staying later than she would have liked at the lab. She was struggling to improve the procedures. She came home to find that Katherine had made changes to feeding patterns, to clothes, to certain routines we had laid down. Liz complained about this on the phone, and I commiserated. However, in these first weeks of being cared for by his grandmother, B did become calmer. Perhaps this would have happened anyway. Perhaps his previous discomfort was just a phase. We did not begrudge Katherine this success anyway. We forgot all our former resistance. We were readier to renounce opinions than we previously would have been. We put less stock in coherence.
* *
I am in the middle of the pack when we reconnect with the second breakaway group of the day. However, as soon as we have done so, another handful of riders sprint off up the road. There is a quick panic around us as riders wonder whether any of the main competitors are trying to ride away. The men are just more back markers though. It is one of those days, of infernal attacks and countermoves. The idea that one rider, of all who attempt it, should get across the line first seems even stranger than usual.
I fall back from the peloton to the team car in order to collect water. Rafael buzzes down the passenger window. “How is Fabrice?” he says. The Butcher drives.
Rafael begins to hand me bottles but does so slowly. He offers the first one out the window and I grip it. He doesn’t let go, however, but holds on, dragging me with him and the car, saving me from having to pedal properly. Every now and then, for the sake of appearances, I take the bottle fully and put it into my rear pockets, then grasp another one passed out by Rafael.
We Begin Our Ascent Page 9