Who Do You Love

by Jennifer Weiner

“What do you think it is?”

  They stared at each other in silence. Mitch looked exasperated. Andy had no idea what was showing up on his face. He felt shocked, and then he felt stupid for being shocked. He’d always known about doping. There’d always been talk about this team or that guy, and, even among his own teammates, conversations that ended abruptly when he walked into the showers or the trainers’ room. He’d heard talk about certain trainers, whispers about doctors who’d hook you up with anything you needed. Andy had never listened, because he had never needed anything. But now . . .

  “Everyone’s doing it,” said Mitch. Andy recognized the speech for what it was: the same talk boys in junior high gave to get each other to sneak beers or try cigarettes.

  “The French, the Finns, the Kenyans. Not to mention our own so-called teammates. If we don’t keep up we’re going to be standing at the starting line looking like our legs are tied together.”

  So there it was. Right out in the open. In his apartment. In his friend’s hand.

  “Where’d you get this?” Andy’s voice sounded hoarse. “Who’s handing it out?”

  “John Mahoney, for one. Les Carter.” Andy got to his feet and started pacing. John Mahoney was the team manager, a man he’d known since college. Les was one of the trainers, always with a smile and a guy-walks-into-a-bar joke, who’d sit with you while you were in the ice baths or the whirlpool and ask about your girlfriend or wife or kids. “Other guys, but John’s the one you want to talk to about the rest of it.”

  “There’s more?” Of course there was more, Mitch told him. Creams and pills and shots, transfusions of your own stored blood. Everyone’s doing it, he said again, and then went home, leaving the tube behind him.

  Andy had carried it to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He understood that if he went along with this, if he chose to do what Mitch and, ostensibly, most of the other runners were doing, his life would be divided by a bright line—before and after. The races he’d won, the times he’d put up honestly, and what he’d do with this stuff in his system. It was cheating . . . but was it really something he could refuse and still hope to compete? And was it really unfair if he did it to even the playing field, so that he wasn’t starting his races half a lap behind everyone else?

  He’d pulled his pants down to his ankles and stood in his briefs, feeling undignified and welcoming the feeling. There was nothing dignified, nothing honorable or admirable about this. Uncapping the bottle, he squirted some of the clear ointment into his hands and rubbed it first on his left quad, then on his right, as if it were the arnica gel some of the trainers used. His thighs ached. Everything ached. It used to be that he was in pain only while he was running, and then immediately after, when the acid would flood his muscles, making everything burn. Now there was something hurting almost all the time. He was stiff when he got out of bed, he walked to the bathroom as if his bones were made of glass, and it took a solid ten minutes of stretching and foam rolling before things loosened up. With all the pounding he’d given his limbs and his joints, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

  Once this new phase of his career had begun, he had hoped that the injections and the creams and the spun blood would help him feel better, stronger; and for a while he imagined that they did. He’d tied his personal best at the Penn Relays, then run a 5K in Central Park just for fun and creamed it, beating the second-place finisher by almost a minute. At the Middle Distance Classic in Pasadena, he’d come within four-tenths of a second of the winner, and then, back in Oregon, at the Nike Prefontaine Classic, he’d honored his hero by winning not only the 5000 but the 10,000, prompting ESPN to do a feature on him and other mid-career runners getting a surprising second wind.

  He could see his body changing, his thighs getting bigger, his shoulders broader. He could hear his voice deepening and could feel the acne on his back. “You’re fine,” Maisie would tell him, going through his closet and pulling out his suit jackets to have them altered. “You just look like you’ve been lifting.” Maisie knew what he was doing. Some of the stuff had to be kept on hand and refrigerated. In their place in New York, where, often, the only things in her refrigerator were Champagne and fancy mustard, they stored it in the crisper drawer, and Maisie started calling it the lettuce, as in “Are we out of lettuce yet?” A few times, she’d even rendezvoused with whichever intern or trainee John Mahoney was using as a delivery boy, and she’d booked his appointments with the doctor in Miami who wrote his prescriptions and Mitch’s. They’d fly down together, play some golf, then drive their rented car to an office in a grimy strip mall and sit in the scuffed plastic chairs in the waiting room before the receptionist called their names—first names only, Andy noticed. There was a mirror on the back door of the doctor’s exam rooms. Andy wondered about that. Did the doctor want his patients to see themselves, to see what they were doing to their bodies? Were he and Mitch meant to look with approval and gratitude? By then, Andy had gotten good at avoiding his own face in the mirror. He was used to scrutinizing his body, always looking out for any injury, any change. Since the night that Mitch had come over, though, he found that he couldn’t look at his own reflection, couldn’t stand to meet his own eyes.

  The Adidas Grand Prix was in New York that June, and Andy was scheduled to compete in both the 5000 and the 10,000. The day before the heats, he’d run an easy three miles in Central Park, then came back to the apartment and saw reporters and a news van with a satellite dish blooming on its roof. He knew, even before he got close enough to hear them shouting his name, what had happened and why they were there. It was like the nuns had told him, “Be sure your sin will find you out.”

  He kept his head down as he made his way through the throng, ignoring the questions—“How long have you been doping?” “Have you been subpoenaed?” “Will they make you give your medal back?” He heard cameras clicking and saw, across the street, a perfectly groomed woman in a yellow dress and high heels standing in front of a camera with a microphone raised to her lips. He was almost to the front door when he saw Bob Rieper from Sports Illustrated, the Grim Rieper, who’d written that profile of him, who’d found out about his father.

  “Hey, man,” said Bob. He put his hand on Andy’s shoulder, and with that touch, those two words, Andy knew that his life as a runner was done, that his second life had started, whether he was ready or not.

  Up in the apartment, he found his cell phone and called John Mahoney, who answered on the first ring.

  “Andy,” he said, in his familiar rasp. “Did you hear?”

  “I haven’t heard anything, but there’s a bunch of reporters outside of my building.” Instead of being panicked, he felt a weird, shocked kind of calm. His pulse felt almost sluggish, and his heartbeat seemed to slow.

  “Don’t say a word,” Mahoney instructed. “If they call, just hang up, and if they catch you, say ‘No comment.’ ”

  “No comment,” Andy practiced, pacing the living room, then walking back to the bedroom to see if Maisie was there. He heard the shower running, and saw the TV tuned to ESPN, which seemed to be showing a loop—runners on a track, followed by a banner reading DOPING SCANDAL and a serious-looking white guy with an incongruously orange face saying something that Andy couldn’t hear because Maisie had turned the volume down. Her suitcase was already open on the bed. He wondered what she’d say, what excuses she’d make, what last-minute photo shoot or family crisis she’d invent to get herself out of here, away from him.

  He barely had to wait to find out. Maisie came out of the bathroom with one towel wrapped around her, another around her hair, and looked at him like he was a burglar who’d made it past the doorman and up to the thirty-third floor.

  “Hey,” Andy began.

  Her expression was a mixture of sorrow and embarrassment. Underneath that, like the primer she smoothed on beneath her makeup in the morning, Andy glimpsed a familiar cool calculation. This w
as what Maisie did when she met someone new—a teammate’s new wife, a photographer’s new assistant—and was trying to decide who that person was, what he or she represented, and how he or she could be of any use to Maisie or Andy, individually or together. She’d turned them into a pair of beautiful people, featured in all the magazines, invited to all the parties. Now, Andy saw, she was figuring out how to turn herself into someone new, a woman betrayed by a boyfriend who was a criminal and a cheat.

  “Mitch called for you. And Alex.” Alex was Alejandro Pérez-Peña, Andy’s new coach.

  “What’d they say?”

  “Call Alex back. There’s going to be a conference call at three. They hired a crisis management firm. And lawyers.”

  “Lawyers?” Andy felt his legs, those world-beating, record-setting, medal-winning legs, start trembling underneath him. Could he go to jail for this? Was that even possible? Was it fair? Who had he hurt, except himself?

  The fans, his mind whispered. All those people who believed in you, who thought you were winning fair and square. Not to mention the companies who’d paid for him to speak, the manufacturers who’d paid for him to endorse their goods, the publisher with whom he’d just signed a contract to write his story. “Andy Landis,” his publicist, chic in a fitted suit with gold buttons, had announced, at a luncheon with his new publicity and marketing team. “An American Story.”

  Some story, he thought as Maisie looked at him, eyebrows arched in a parody of surprise. “Yes, you need lawyers. The stuff you were doing was against the law.” She gave a small, theatrical shudder. Her fake shudders, Andy observed from his bubble of detachment, had improved over the years. The acting lessons were paying off. “Some of it’s only been approved for use on animals.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Instead of answering, Maisie flipped open the laptop she’d left next to the bed. Nine Olympians Indicted in Drug Probe. Records, Medals in Jeopardy. No Response Yet from Team USA. And pictures. His pictures. The ones they’d run in Sports Illustrated, of him in Athens, edging out the runner from Morocco, his arms raised in triumph. Maisie scrolled down just far enough for Andy to read the quote and recognize his own words: “I’d never take shortcuts, or do anything illegal. Everything I got, I earned.”

  “Oh,” he said, and shut his eyes, feeling numb and hollow, the way he had when he’d been ten and the policeman caught him—like he’d lost everything, like he’d never feel good or proud or happy ever again.

  Maisie didn’t say anything . . . but then, what could she say that would help? He watched as she went to the closet, came back with an armful of clothing, and folded it into the suitcase.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Tenerife. Remember?”

  “That’s next week.”

  Without turning to face him, she said, “I’m going to go stay with Bethany for the night. We’ll leave together in the morning. I know you’ve got a lot to deal with, and I didn’t want to be in your way.”

  “I need you here,” he told her.

  “Oh, Andy,” she said with a sigh. He watched with a sense of déjà vu as she raised her perfect chin a fraction of an inch, like she was responding to a photographer’s command. Give me just a teeny bit of profile, babydoll . . . that’s it. Right there. Perfection. “You knew the risks. You knew this could happen.”

  “I didn’t have a choice!” he yelled.

  She just looked at him.

  “What?” he asked. “What choice did I have? What else can I do? I’m not good at anything else except this. If I wanted to compete, I had to take that stuff. I didn’t have a choice.”

  She didn’t answer. She zipped up the suitcase. Answer enough, Andy thought.

  “If someone told you that you needed breast implants to be a model, are you saying you wouldn’t get them?”

  “Implants aren’t illegal,” she said, and slung her purse over her shoulder. Andy stood, his arms dangling at his sides, legs weak and wobbling, watching the red soles of her shoes flashing as she wheeled her suitcase out the door.

  For a minute he stood there, feeling sick and shaky and terrified, hoping she’d come back, willing her to return, if only to tell him that she loved him. Knowing that she wouldn’t. Maisie looked out for Maisie. At night, sometimes, lying awake, he’d tried to imagine her staying with him if they lost everything; tried to picture the two of them scratching out a living in some anonymous town in Middle America. He couldn’t do it. Maisie was made for cities, for late nights, for glamorous clubs, for Champagne and sushi, not small towns, fish sticks, and generic ginger ale. Nor would she sacrifice a second of the time she had left to work as a model. He was convinced that was the reason she hadn’t agreed to get married or have a baby. She’d said all the right things about how happy they were and why rock the boat and that they had plenty of time. When he pushed her, she talked about not being able to take a year off from work and what would happen if she couldn’t get her body back. She’d told him the story of a stunning girl from Iceland who’d given birth to twins and found it impossible to shed the last ten pounds of baby weight. Poor Karine had gotten liposuction, and there were filters that could erase her stretch marks. Still, Maisie had told him, eyes wide and horrified, poor Karine had never . . . worked . . . again.

  “At least, not in Manhattan,” Maisie had said with a final shudder. “I heard she was doing, like, catalog work for Dillard’s.”

  “A fate worse than death,” Andy had deadpanned, and Maisie, not getting it, had nodded so vigorously that she’d almost lost a hair extension and had said, “I know! I know!” Then she’d kissed him, purring, “We can wait. For now, let’s just enjoy our freedom.” He’d agreed, all the while thinking that it wasn’t about work or freedom or stretch marks or how good things were between them, but about the way a baby would link them, inextricably and forever, uniting them in a bond that would be harder to break than even marriage.

  He knew she’d rather die than lose her spot on the ladder. If her boyfriend became a liability, she’d do exactly what she’d done—take ten minutes to cram some stuff in a suitcase, call her agent, and change her ticket and move on to the next thing.

  •••

  For the next few weeks, Andy stayed in the apartment, wondering if it was possible to die of shame. Whenever he thought about going outside, usually after he’d been pacing for a few hours and was desperate for fresh air and open space, he would hear the words Everything I’ve got, I earned and decide it wasn’t worth it. Valerie, his personal assistant of five years, gave her notice, saying that she’d loved working for him but she couldn’t handle the volume of calls and e-mails, not to mention the questions from her friends and family about whether she’d known what was going on. His calls to his agent went straight to voice mail; his publicist handed him off to a different firm, one that handled oil companies who’d dumped thousands of gallons into the ocean and right-wing senators who’d been paying off their same-sex, underage lovers.

  If he’d earned his previous life—the endorsement deals, the perks, the famous friends—then surely he’d earned this one, too. He’d earned the barista at Starbucks who’d refused to take his order, the waitress who’d turned on her heel when Andy and his old friend Miles Stratton sat down for lunch to discuss his finances in light of what Miles called “these new developments.” He’d earned the ten-year-old girl who’d mailed him a poster depicting his Olympic win with a note that read You used to be my hero but you aren’t anymore.

  Still in his bubble of numbed disbelief, Andy went to the hearings, the meetings, the conferences with the publicists and the ones with the lawyers. He sat at long tables in offices on high floors with stunning views of Central Park and tried to pay attention as attorneys for the USATF and the runners who were being called the Athens Nine tried to work out a deal. Eventually, they decided that if Andy and his teammates would testify about how they’d gotten
the drugs and who else they knew was using, they could keep the medals and the prizes they’d won up to 2006 . . . but none of them would be able to run competitively ever again.

  The sneaker company that had underwritten his running life since college sent a certified letter explaining that, given his current circumstances, they could no longer continue their association. They wished him well. So did the watch company he’d done ads for, and the sports drink he’d endorsed. He moved his stuff out of his place in Oregon, downsized from two bedrooms in Carnegie Hill to a studio in a not-great neighborhood in Brooklyn. Those moves, plus his savings, gave him a nest egg he could live off for a while. He would need to do something eventually, but for now, there was vodka and premium cable for binge-watching old shows. He’d learned to avoid live TV after flipping through the channels and seeing a late-night wit urging the public, “Give blood. Our Olympic runners might need extra.”

  He ate delivery pizza or Chinese food, bagels for breakfast, bags of pretzels in between, for once not caring about calories or carbs or sodium or nutrients or any of it. He’d wash it all down with PowerUp, the sports drink that he’d spike with vodka after the sun went down. He had cases and cases of the stuff—he’d been the face of PowerUp, and part of his deal included free drinks for life. Only now, he noted with sour amusement, they sent him boxes full of discontinued flavors, something called Red Rage that tasted like fermented cough syrup, and Blue Crush, which tasted like chalk.

  For the first time in a long time, Andy was faced with empty days to fill, hours and hours when he had nowhere to be and nothing to do. The Sports Illustrated with his face on the cover was in one of the boxes he’d brought over, along with his tax returns and copies of the contracts he’d signed. In the years since it had been published, he’d never been able to bring himself to read Bob Rieper’s profile. One day he found it, flipped it open to the page with his picture, and began scanning the text for his father’s name.

  At fifty-one, Andrew Landis Senior bears little resemblance to his son, or to the teenage basketball star that he was once. Tall and lanky in his youth, he is stooped now, heavier through the chest and belly, with rounded shoulders and a mostly bald head. His walk is a head-down, shoulders-hunched shuffle. The only trace of the son that Landis Senior and his wife, Lori, named after him are his feet, size fourteen, big as flippers in heavy brown work boots. “I was always fast,” Landis Senior says.