Flat Water Tuesday (12 page)

“Where are you calling from?”

“My office. Oh, I’m
sorry
. I’m in the city. In a law firm.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Not really, Rob.” There was a pause. “But an interesting sounding woman answered the phone. Are you married?”

I glanced over at Carolyn, who was at her post in front of the computer, her back to me. “No. You?”

“
There’s
something we can talk about when I see you.”

“Fair enough.”

Her voice took on that firm tone again. “I’ll see you at the school. Read your e-mail, I just sent it off to you.”

We said our good-byes and she clicked off. I lay the phone down, went to the bedroom and pulled on my pants and shirt. I walked into the kitchen and poured myself some coffee that the machine had brewed automatically an hour ago. I thought about John Perry. It was Thursday. Carolyn stood up from the workstation, finally, walked to the couch where I had slept. She picked up the handset and looked at me expectantly.

“That was a woman I went to high school with.”

“In Niccalsetti?”

“No. Fenton School, in Connecticut. Where I rowed. A guy I knew from the crew died and they’re having a service on Saturday.”

“Was he a friend?”

“He was, in a way.” I took the phone from her, set it back in the charger, gently wriggled it until it fit. “He killed himself. Jumped off the GW.”

Carolyn’s eyes widened.

“I hadn’t spoken to him in years. He wrote us all notes but I didn’t get mine until I came back from the shoot. His life had gone a little crazy.”

“That’s awful, Rob.”

“I haven’t seen him since before college.”

“That school has had its share of tragedy.” Carolyn had gone to a girl’s day school in New York before she went to NYU. The idea of boarding school seemed arcane to her. It seemed arcane to me, actually. Carolyn regarded me for a second more and then examined the counters. “I guess I could finish the opening parts of the edit myself, if you help again today.”

I went back into the bedroom, the floor cold on my bare feet. I sat on the bed and flipped open my notebook. Carolyn sat at the table, watching me. I downloaded my e-mail account and it took a while. I hadn’t even looked at the computer in weeks and the usual spam came through and then the messages from the filmers in Africa and three e-mails from Kevin, my editor at
National Geographic
, all of them with headings like,
Where are you?
and
Earth to Rob …
Ruth’s e-mail came in last, with the text of the article copied in the body of the message.

MAN JUMPS TO DEATH FROM GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE

A thirty-three-year-old man abandoned his car on the George Washington Bridge on Friday and jumped to his death from the south sidewalk. Port Authority police sources said a workman painting the New Jersey tower last saw Jonathan Perry, of Greenwich, Connecticut, at approximately 11:00
A.M.
on Friday. “He had one leg hooked over the guardrail … appearing to go over,” said Port Authority Police Deputy Dan DiMarchi. A Coast Guard crew pulled Perry’s body from the Hudson River on Saturday. “There was no note,” said Lieutenant J. D. Forbess. Perry had apparently been taking antidepressants, police said.

I read the article twice and then shut the computer. Ruth hadn’t added anything at the bottom of the message. I went back into the kitchen and poured myself half a mug of coffee and sipped it, the taste milky and sweet and a little stale. I drank it standing over the sink and washed the cup very carefully and set it in the rack, watched the water drip from it onto the rubber beneath.

Behind me, Carolyn said, “Are you okay? It’s awful news and I kind of think it might be good if you went up to the service. We have to start thinking about what happens now. With us. I’m sorry about last night, Rob, but I don’t regret it. It doesn’t change anything, though. It’d still be best if we stick to our plan of your moving out.”

I turned and we faced each other in the kitchen like boxers too tired for the last round. “Not
our
plan.
Your
plan. What if I said I didn’t want to go?”

“You’re going to go anyway, Rob. To South Africa. To Europe. To Brazil. To fucking Zambia.” She said the last place with a bite. “You don’t really live here. This is pretend. This is … convenient.”

I went over to the window and squinted down into the city light. It was a gorgeous day. Down below the cars nosed their way around each other, and the galleries were putting up their sidewalk boards. There was a new exhibition on two buildings over entitled
Eggshell Mantra: A Pop Art Collection
. I scooped up the keys from the granite island between us—her keys, with the frayed, beaded fertility doll fob—and went to the door.

“Where are you going?” she demanded.

“Out. I don’t know, Car. Out.”

I slipped into the cool stairwell and took the elevator to the bottom floor, stepped onto the street and walked for a long time.

*   *   *

The primitive ritual of human sacrifice, otherwise known as formal ergometer testing, began with twelve rowers jacketed against the fall cold, running down the morning-gray highway like motley cattle, stamping and chuffing and spitting. I ran in the middle of the throng listening to the grunts and hawks of the contenders for the God Four pushing themselves through the crew’s first dawn run. We had left the dark school buildings behind us and had stampeded down Route 7, past the sports fields and the hulked building of the hockey rink. The average Fenton rower was too big, too malformed and heavy in the shoulders, to run with any grace. We were meant to move boats. Our road running was a study in careful inertia, of piloting rangy muscles, oversized feet and bodies meant for leverage and not velocity.

Connor led, cap pulled low, ignoring us. Ruth ran behind him for a while, then dropped back to move among and around as we lumbered along; an agile sheepdog keeping the herd in line. She constantly checked her tiny digital watch as she ran, an irritating reflex that betrayed her obsession with time and pace. “Faster, guys. Coach will be waiting.”

The football jocks lagging at the back trotted a bit faster in response as she pushed us on up the road, barely out of breath, in her sunglasses, blue sweatsuit and knit gloves. As she ran guys would flip her off, but she was ready for it. “DeKress, you’re slower than my mom.”

DeKress grinned. “That’s not what I hear, Ruthie.”

“Wadsworth, can’t you even keep up with a girl? Perry, John Perry, you need to move those arms.”

She glanced back at me, red-faced, her breath making quick puffs of vapor in the dawn. “Carrey, I could take you over two miles. Ten dollars says I could.”

“Not a chance,” I replied, trying not to let her hear how winded I was.

We circled back, still following Connor, moving now in a brutal solemnity, each runner’s eyes cast down to the road or into the back of the rower ahead of him. All the bantering and wisecracking ended as we focused instead on breathing. We stopped near the river and walked off the warm pain, our breaths fogging up the cold air. A dust of frost had settled in the trees that were brightening and reddening. Mist rose from their depths into the new, deep blue morning sky, the light outlining the mountains.

If any of us saw beauty there, none commented on it as we walked and stretched and mumbled to one another on our way to the brooding boathouse and its basement where the appraisals would begin. Channing had been waiting but looked at our steaming throng as if surprised to see us. He was dressed for labor in worn khaki pants, a checkered shirt, heavy sweater, scuffed brown waterproof boots. He was carrying his leather briefcase and a clipboard and was wearing a faded baseball cap that at one point had the national team rings emblazoned across the front. He was completely impervious to the cold. The casual air he adopted before ergometer tests was a deliberate tactic meant to allay our fears.

I walked into the wood-and-oil darkness, set my heels with each step hard enough to shake the wood boards. Connor switched on the lights and they flickered to cold fluorescence above us. The boats, stacked upside down on their wooden trestles, shone blue in the hollow light. Connor glanced at them as he headed for the basement stairs. “The weapons of war,” he murmured.

“Time, now,” Channing said as we passed. He glanced at me once, briefly and without recognition.

Connor reached the bottom of the basement stairs and took a long, satisfied breath. In the gloom there were eight ergometers lined up in two symmetrical rows of four. Like huge, patient insects, they had lain in wait for us in the darkness. The stink of sweat and oil and steel hanging above them was mixed with the odor of human bodies in distress; human effluent. Eight machines, each one connected to a tiny computer, the ergs stood as reminders that our speed and beauty on the water were functions of brute force and endurance.

By the time we entered the room we had gone silent, more silent than any of us were in class or in chapel. The hollow dripping from the showers echoed. We collapsed against the walls, sat with our feet splayed out in front of us in the dust while Channing, Connor and Ruth went through the motions of zeroing computers and checking seats. Channing worked wordlessly down here. When he was finished he stood toward the back of the room, his hands behind his back, relinquishing control to Connor and Ruth.

Each erg was a steel monorail with a sliding seat on two squat legs. Two boards and two sets of straps for the rower’s feet were bolted to the front. A bracket extended straight from this same end of the monorail and it held a heavy fan protected by a black cage. A black bicycle chain snaked out from the innards of the monorail, into the cage, over the gears of the fan and back out of the cage to a mock oar handle that the rower pulled while sliding on his seat, just like in a boat. Screwed onto the cage was the small square computer that calculated the energy you used to spin the fan and the distance you had traveled. You rowed on this thing. It tallied the strokes you poured into it, kept a tab on your slow but sure capitulation. An erg test measured how long it took to row two thousand five hundred meters. A good score was around eight minutes.

We began to prepare for the ordeal, throwing off sweatshirts and baseball hats and nylon pants and spitting into the sinks, gulping from water bottles, trying not to look at each other, or the machines. Or at Ruth, who moved around our farting, hawking bodies with some nimbleness. Ruth was partly one of us, partly not, because she held the clipboard. How many girls could deal with being in a room where guys were stretching and burping, scratching their balls, cracking their joints and generally getting ready to experience pain? She did it with a clinical detachment: checked us off her list, assigned us our test slots, all the while moving indifferently between that mass of human meat.

Phil Leonsis stripped off his shirt and stood towering in front of her, all muscle and hair and bravado. “What do you think?”

Ruth looked him up and down. “About what?”

“You and me, Ruth. In the shower room. I need to warm up. Let’s go. Five minutes.”

She looked at him sharply and then the look changed to something between aversion and pity. It was the same expression a nurse gives a patient on a gurney before surgery. “You’re asking for five minutes with me before an erg test, Leonsis? You’d be ruined.”

He laughed. “Not if you blow me, babe.”

“Shut up, Leonsis.” Perry glowered at him from across the room. “Stop messing around, dude.”

Ruth smiled sweetly up at Leonsis and turned away, two red spots high on her cheeks. She called Connor to one of the end ergometers. “Connor wanted to go first this morning. The rest of you can warm up on the other machines. All times from now until final selections are made will be recorded. You can come back and retest but this is the fastest way to cut you guys. The top four rowers will form a training group. The rest of you will train with John Hinkle.” Hinkle, the second boat coxswain, looked up at the mention of his name. He sat in a bright yellow climbing jacket in the corner looking ill. Ruth looked us over. “Stretch your backs, your legs, your arms. I repeat: we take down
all
times today, no matter how pathetic.”

So Connor had the responsibility of setting our benchmark time and he had to do it right there in front of us. Some of the rowers stood and began their own preparations. Five left to stretch and stamp in the next room to avoid seeing what they themselves would soon endure. But most of us stayed to watch. The exertion required for an erg test was almost unreal. Anything could go wrong. You could cramp, pull a muscle, throw up, perform poorly because you were coming down with a cold and didn’t know it yet or because your body was tired from training too much or too little; myriad reasons could contribute to an embarrassing score.

Connor stripped off his sweatshirt and sweatpants. Beneath these he was wearing his worn racing trunks and a white undershirt. He had wrapped a piece of toweling around his head and adjusted it carefully, a crude sweatband that looked like a bandage. He coughed, settled onto his machine, strapped his feet into the foot stretchers. He crouched, extended his arms and grabbed the handle that rested against the fan’s cage. He pushed down on his legs and leaned back, pulled the handle toward him. The fan in the cage began to whir and then growl as Connor snapped his arms to his chest. The bicycle chain snaked out from its coiled home. It ticked back into the machine as he came back up the slide. The fan spun and slowed as Connor crouched and caught it with a stronger push from his legs. The computer lit up and the numbers began to churn on the screen.

I hugged my knees.

Let him be weak
, I thought.
Let him not be equal to his bullshit.

Connor balled his body, reached and pulled. The machine snarled, whirred and ticked back. He brought up the pace, and the machine began to hiss, its numbers reacting to every second stroke. His rasping breaths came quicker, the hissing turned into whines and then screeches. A blue vein stood out on his forehead, rose and pulsed into the sweat towel binding his hair. One minute went down. Connor exhaled and gulped the air as the machine rasped.