The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  Then came the posedown, an unscripted minute of free-for-all posing to whatever guitars burst through the speakers, all eight guys elbowing for a spot at the lip of center stage, the sweat and oil stink of us, trying to smile, some of us virtually hugging, trying to get around one another. The music stopped at sixty seconds, but guys were still hitting shots for the judges, and everybody had to be ordered back into line. This posedown was for the audience; it didn’t matter for winning or losing because the judges had already finalized their decisions during the posing competition.

  Now we statues stood at the line, waiting to hear the top five numbers. When your number was yelled, you stepped forward. If your number wasn’t yelled, you didn’t place, and you remained lonesomely at the line. The top five would stand on the dais, but only the top three would be handed trophies—two-foot, two-tiered oak and silver-sprayed sculptures of a muscled demigod in mid-pose, forty pounds apiece, expertly crafted. My number was among the five. And so I’d be fifth place, I thought: fifth among eight. But when the announcer yelled the number for fifth place, it was not mine. Nor was fourth.

  At this point, something begins to happen to the enlivened competitor, the formerly insecure one who an hour earlier thought he’d take sixth place. He begins to think not about the possibility of third place or second place, but about the possibility of first place. It’s an optimistic delusion based upon the suddenly fortuitous, a reversal of fortune (peripeteia was its name on the Greek stage, although the reversals there were almost always in a direful direction). My brief rationale was this: I thought I’d be in sixth place, but now I’m in the top three, and if I can be third, then I can be first, because the distance between third and first is much narrower than the distance between sixth and first. Well, of course it is, but that didn’t mean that there was no distance between third and first, and to remind myself of this, to dispel the delusion, all I had to do was glance at the other two guys who remained in the lineup with me.

  Third place was announced and it wasn’t my number, and I began to suspect that major errors were being committed. I twisted the badge on my trunks to check it, to make sure I was seeing and hearing numbers correctly, because the kid to whom they’d just given third place outmuscled me by about twenty-five pounds. Only I and the obsidian beauty now, the toothpick and the sirloin, and when they gave me second place it felt like relief to me. Not relief that this madness was finally finished and I could down a canter of water and a chocolate bar, although that too, but relief that rightness had prevailed. The world now and then peddles justice.

  It didn’t feel anything like justice to the third placer. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but in photographs from that night, we three perched and posing on the dais with our trophies, I can see his indignant smirk, his awareness that he’d just been robbed of second place. And robbed he surely was, although why, I don’t know; perhaps because the judges didn’t like his attitude (he’d been pushy, arrogant during posing), perhaps because his skin was denser than mine, his routine less graceful.

  I walked behind the curtain with forty pounds of trophy, through the backstage flurry to dress myself, to receive high-fives from Victor, congrats and shoulder pats from giants all around. In the silent, fluorescent hallway that led to my seat in the auditorium, I bent into the water fountain to gulp for an uninterrupted two minutes. But what flooded me then was a mix of pride and bliss, a mix I’d never felt before, and one I’d have to wait sixteen years to feel again, when my first son was born.

  My father, Pop, and Tony were there in seats at the rear of the auditorium, and when I entered they rose to greet me, each grinning, nodding, and I hoisted the trophy to chest level as if to say, “Ta da.”

  “That’s one hell of a trophy,” Pop said. “I didn’t think you’d make better than fifth place.”

  “You did good,” my father said. “I had you at third place.”

  “I had you at second,” Tony said. “You were better than that third-place kid. He was big but he had no shape.”

  Before we took our seats, my father, with a calculated slyness, handed me a small paper bag, as if he didn’t want anyone else in the auditorium to see it: an assortment of Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He said, “I thought you might be craving one of those.”

  I said, “How’d you know?”

  He said, “I know things,” and together we finished off that bag of chocolate.

  XI

  It happened on a Saturday afternoon that autumn, October or November, all the oaks aflame. The road to the Physical Edge cut through farmland and plots of forest, and I remember clicking off the radio as if quiet would pronounce the color. I turned into the parking lot of the Edge and spotted a huddle near the glass doors, others leaned against cars, some sitting on curbs, heads framed in hands as if with something to ponder, or else grief-hit. On Saturdays, the only business open in this industrial complex was our gym, and so from a distance I knew these were my people and not others from adjacent buildings. There was Victor’s red Camaro, Sid’s black Ford pickup, Rude’s Harley, Pedro’s silver Corvette, Bob the Cop’s cruiser, and a dozen other vehicles I’d learned to associate with the faces of their drivers. A fire alarm, I thought. A mistaken fire alarm must have chased everyone out into the parking lot.

  When I approached the huddle at the doors, these were the sentences my friends spoke to me:

  “We’re shut down, dude.”

  “Out of commission, man.”

  “Shit out of luck, bro.”

  Chains snaked around both sets of door handles, the entrance and the exit. Taped to the inside of the glass was this notice on gym letterhead: THE PHYSICAL EDGE WILL NO LONGER BE OPEN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATRONAGE. Sixteen hours earlier, when we’d all been here training, we’d detected no portent of this. There’d been no whispers, nothing aslant. So, imagine: one morning you leave your house of several years to report for another normal day at work, and after that normal day, you return home in the evening to discover your locks have been swapped and a note that reads, This is no longer your home. I heard someone in the huddle say, “We’re gymless,” but what that really meant for me was We’re homeless.

  Because I was an employee, the others looked at me as if I might have some corrective wisdom, but I had nothing of the sort. I’d never met or spoken to the owners. Bob the Cop was making furious calls from his car phone, others complaining that they still had clothes in their lockers. I pressed my face against the glass, hands ovaled to my eyes, peering into the new dark of our beloved space, everything right there and familiar but abruptly severed from us. When I joined the huddle to see what we were going to do about this, I could tell how deflated they felt. These normally verbose, resourceful individuals had been jarred into a kind of paralysis. Men of immensity and machismo, women who’d always seemed to me unflappable, were drooped now, looking at their sneakers as if about to sob. Refugees now, orphaned by the owners of the Edge.

  The scene quickly turned into a makeshift funeral as more of our set arrived, and it wouldn’t have seemed out of place for someone to break into “We Shall Overcome,” except that it didn’t seem as if we would. Emboldened by my second-place finish in the bodybuilding competition two months earlier, I planned to compete in another, more prestigious show that April, but that didn’t seem doable now. This was the end of something. In the coming days we’d hear rumors of bankruptcy, but we wouldn’t learn for certain how we’d come to be orphaned. They owed me a paycheck I’d never see, although that didn’t even register on my scale of sorrow, because I knew what the closing of the Edge would do. It would scatter us all to other gyms in central Jersey. It meant our affection for one another would have no place to thrive.

  I remained there on the curb that day long after everyone else had gone, waiting for someone to arrive and rectify this misdeed, but no one came. And every day for a week I showed up there to see if anything had changed, in the hope of catching someone inside, someone who might tell me what had happen
ed, who might let me walk through a final time, touch the equipment, offer a proper farewell, kneel once more in our house of worship.

  Things continued to unravel after that. My father sold our home, took my siblings, and moved in with his new girlfriend, a woman he’d been dating for a year, the mother of one of my sister’s friends. There was no room for me in her condo; I wouldn’t have elected to go if there had been. I took an apartment in town, a place I could neither afford nor fill, a two-bedroom with pine floors, early-’80s appliances, a sliding glass door that looked upon real homes across an expanse of grass dotted with spruce. It was forever empty, echoic, and I bled my bank account to be there, borrowed money from my father and Pop, although “borrow” was a joke and everybody knew it.

  Dinnertime with my grandparents was a nightly inquisition: “When are you getting a job? Can’t lift weights for a living. You think about college? What about being a cop? That kid from your class, what’s-his-name, over on Bosel Avenue, he’s becoming a cop. Good benefits, cops. Or else you better start thinking about construction with your father and uncles. You’re not exactly cut out for that work, we know, but it’s a living, and better than nothing.” Before returning to the emphatic silence of my apartment, I’d drive slowly past my boyhood home, nearly stop in front of it, and look at the windows burning amber in the winter night, see if I could spot foreign shapes through the sheerness of drawn curtains, shapes living a family’s life in rooms that had made me.

  Victor and I drove overlong distances each afternoon to try out other gyms, but none ever welcomed us as the Edge had; none ever fit. We’d see Pedro at one gym, Sid at another, Rude at another, and we’d embrace and reminisce and try to revive our enthusiasm, but our workouts were shit, the weights not right, the music all wrong (REO Speedwagon, for Christ’s sake). The clientele at those gyms was mostly piddlers, and the managers scolded us for training as we did, for smashing the barbells back into the racks, for our spitting, cussing intensity, an intensity impossible to maintain in those climates. Our set from the Edge muttered to one another those absurd senior-class-yearbook vows of not losing touch, made wispy attempts to remain in contact, but that never works, the forcing of unions that had once developed organically and without effort. Take away the nucleus and the electrons spin off and away. There were phone calls, a stray Friday-night revel at a restaurant, a bachelor party with New York strippers, and then nothing.

  Val and I had been providing occasional CPR to a relationship that was desperate to die; but she stayed with me during the winter break from Rutgers, and for that month of pretending, the serpentine home of her body helped absorb the echoes of my empty rooms. Her voice, even when she lied, especially when she lied, had the throaty allure of a chanteuse. When she at last killed the relationship in January, those echoes returned, but louder. Always the dumpee and never the dumper, I was unstrung each time it happened. Textbook shrinks would later tell me that I was experiencing the original wound of my mother’s abandonment: as a child I didn’t have the equipment to process such abandonment, didn’t have the emotional utensils even to acknowledge it, and so as a teen I lived out the grief of that large wound through fleeing girlfriends. A better question might have been why girlfriends were always fleeing.

  And then came the ice storms, entire zip codes crippled beneath inches of frigid glass. The snow and ice lasted weeks, appeared never to tire of their own terrible beauty. For whole days at a time the ice entombed me within my first-floor apartment. The wind gusted ceaselessly through the night like angry souls unleashed, sealing the windows and doors, rounding the brick steps in a promise of deadly descent. I’d lie on the sofa at night in the dark—after Val left I could no longer sleep in the bedroom, could not scrub it free of her scent—and listen to the ice pelt the sliding glass door. Out back were domes of lacquered snow, sheds and patio grills thickly packaged in white, icicles like great fangs jabbing down from street lamps glowing dull lime.

  TV weathermen seemed pleased to be of such use; their increased airtime lent them a mien of scholarly importance. In the mornings I’d wield a blow dryer against an opaque window to melt a porthole for me to peer through, but there was nothing to see except the silent heft of winter, all that curvaceous cold. If I made it outside and down the steps, I could barely reach the sidewalk without injury, and couldn’t shovel: the metal one would bend, the plastic one break. On walkways beads of salt lay uselessly atop ice like seeds strewn for pigeons suddenly extinct. No one could drive anywhere, and that didn’t matter: cars sat in surrender to their interment.

  Good boots helped. Snowplows had carved slick conduits through the centers of most streets, and that’s how I hiked to the grocery store. Except the grocery store wasn’t open when I arrived. And so I hoofed and slid over drifts and waffled paths for another mile to a convenience store whose shelves looked ransacked by marauders. If I passed a fellow hiker, he watched me through goggles and a ski mask as if deciding whether or not to kill and cook me. An orange snowplow would scrape past trailing a mess of sand or salt, its single yellow light twirling in impotence. I felt further stranded when it didn’t stop to pick me up. Somehow I’d make it back to my apartment, and that night the icy gusts would come again, sealing me inside again.

  The monotony of doldrums, their stalling, sputtering of time. Hours would pass, but when I looked at the clock its arms hadn’t budged since the last time I checked. My appetite obliterated, a clenched stomach from the instant I woke until the gray bowl above began to darken. Fetal on the sofa with a pillow clutched to my gut. It took me an hour or more to talk myself into standing up. At dusk I forced down protein shakes because I couldn’t muster the will to chew a meal. Pacing from one room to another, then hallucinating Val on a kitchen stool, on the toilet, in the bathtub. One afternoon I discovered her unwashed panties wedged between the sofa cushions—pink cotton gossamer that once held worlds—and I slipped them over my head, reclined there to inhale her. Winter continued as if it enjoyed astonishment.

  When streets became passable I exhumed my car with a pickaxe and potfuls of boiling water. It took six hours, such were the crusted mounds that had shored against it, flotsam from snowplows. A route to a gym that usually took an hour took twice that, and I was worthless once I got there: my body weight down, strength gone, incentive sacked. Victor clapped me with back pats, offered buck-ups, but his voice came as if from underwater. Another tempest of ice and snow would make misery of roads and we’d go another week without training.

  Once, asleep on the sofa at noon, I woke to a doorbell. It seemed this tolling had come from the dreamland I’d been sucked down into, but then I heard it again: it was mine. I’d never heard my own doorbell before. My father stood on the top step, dressed like an Inuit: fur-lined hood, padded Carhartt overalls, chunky Sorel snow boots, his cheeks lashed red from wind, his lips chapped, veined with cracks of blood. He was holding something up in a dramatically displayed pincer grip.

  “You lose something?” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your wallet,” he said.

  “Where’d you get my wallet?”

  “Arty the electrician gave it to me.”

  “How did Arty the electrician get my wallet?” I said.

  “He found it in the WaWa parking lot, half-buried in a snow bank.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I haven’t been to WaWa in three days,” I said.

  “You lost your wallet three days ago and you didn’t notice?”

  “I’ve been . . .”

  “You’ve been what?” he said. “Were you sleeping?”

  “No, no. I was . . . looking in the want ads.”

  The previous tenant had tied a thermometer to the porch lamp. Its mercury, a bulb of blood starting at minus forty, could rise no higher than nineteen degrees. The cold came like pins through my T-shirt and sweatpants.

  “Did you have cash in your wallet?” my father asked. “Arty said he found it with no c
ash.”

  “Yes. Forty, I think. Or thirty maybe.” I looked into the lonely folds of the wallet. “But there’s money in here,” I said.

  “Naturally, Bill. I couldn’t give you back an empty wallet.”

  Naturally was one of my father’s pet terms. Should I get Pop a birthday present? Naturally. Was Yamaha better than Ducati? Naturally. He squinted over my shoulder into the curtained dark of the apartment as if looking for whatever had turned me this way.

  “Are you feeling all right?” he said. “You look like hell.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Come for dinner tonight. I’ve been asking for weeks.”

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll come tonight.”

  Back on the sofa, I crawled into a placenta of blankets, and when I emerged it was 8 P.M. and long past dinnertime.

  That winter I began walling myself in with books, stacking them around the sofa as if to repel the cold, abutments of new hardbacks and paperbacks, columns of slipcased fiction I found secondhand. If I came across an essay by Dorothy Parker or a story by Raymond Carver in an anthology, I was soon at the bookshop unloading all the Parker and Carver titles from its shelves. The hoards of books were manifestations of the selfhood I was reaching for, a sensibility externalized, a worldview I could see and hold. They were rather like muscles in that way, embodiments of the strengthened self I wanted, at a time when I seemed always just minutes from collapse.

  Raymond Carver’s fiction discovered me with the same restorative jolt as bodybuilding had three years earlier. He’d been dead for nearly a decade, but his stories were new to me, and just then offered a much-needed brotherhood of working-class melancholy. On the coffee table in front of the sofa I’d stacked a tower of his paperbacks, those unmistakable white Vintage Contemporaries, his name a thing of hope in a colored band at the head of the spine. Immediately upon waking, the light of morning like steel, spruce still oppressed by snow, in me a living void, I’d reach for Carver’s stories with the guarded faith of a pilgrim.