I Thought You Were Dead (11 page)

“Sounds like fun, but I'll pass,” Stella said. “I'd only slow you down.”

“I doubt that very much,” Paul said. He looked out the window. The snow in the streets had melted to slush. He could think of plenty of reasons to wait until conditions improved. Then he pictured his father again, trapped in his hospital bed.

He changed to go running. He'd decided things were going to be different hundreds of times before, but this time he really meant it. He laid the sweatshirt and his new sweatpants on the bed, as well as a baby-seal-orange stocking cap (for safety), but before he dressed, he regarded himself naked in the mirror, to get a good mental “before” picture.

He looked doughy. Unimposing. A pushover. He'd smoked until he was thirty — that hadn't helped anything. He was five foot eleven, with decent posture, standing up, but with a tendency to slouch when he was sitting down, particularly in movie theaters, where he was usually quite uncomfortable, mostly owing to his not having an ass. He wished he could say he'd worked it off, better yet that he'd laughed it off, or lost it in Vegas, but the sad fact was that he'd been born without one, part of his heritage. For centuries, his Viking ancestors had rowed boats across the wine-dark seas of the North Atlantic seated on hard wooden planks — no doubt it was a question of erosion more than of genetics or evolution.

In compensation for his hereditary asslessness, he had decent-looking legs, though a bit bowed. His feet were well shaped but his little toes turned in and tended to grow calluses and to blister if his socks were too thin. Structurally, his left leg was sound but his right knee was shot, the anterior cruciate ligament snapped and the lateral meniscus cartilage all but gone after a softball accident years earlier. His orthopedic surgeon told him afterward that he was no longer allowed to participate in any sports because of the further damage he might do and the risk of developing arthritis later in life. Paul looked at his legs. Arthritis wasn't as bad as a stroke, and that was what he was worried about.

He was going jogging.

Nothing was going to stop him.

“From this day forward,” he silently resolved, “every other beer will be a light beer. And every two out of three if I'm also eating Klondike bars.”

He had good shoulders, broad and square, and nice hands, or so he'd been told. His chest was smooth and hairless. The hair on his head was sandy brown and thinning, but only noticeably so if he stood directly beneath an overhead light, a reason to avoid motel bathrooms. He examined his face. He hated the way he looked in photographs but liked the way he looked in mirrors, except when the mirror was lying flat on a tabletop and he could only glimpse himself by bending over, and then gravity pulled at the loose skin on his face and neck and made him look jowly and ancient. A friend had warned him, “Once you turn forty and you're in bed with a younger woman, never be on top unless the room is pitch black, because she could open her eyes and suddenly think she's in bed with Jimmy Carter.”

He had “quiet good looks,” in Tamsen's words. He did not have bags under his eyes or wrinkles or frown lines, and his lips were not as thin as those of most Scandinavian men, not the down-turned narrow slits evident on his ancestors' faces in
old family photographs, immigrants in their New Land finery, men and women who never smiled, because their lives were hard and their memories pained them, and because the shutter speeds were so slow back then that you had to assume a pose and freeze for at least five seconds. No Norwegian man had ever been able to hold a smile for more than three.

“Make an appointment with a dentist,” he told himself.

“Find a dentist.”

“Or get a job with dental coverage. And a physical. Yeah, right.”

“Stop being so passive.”

His new jogging shoes were lighter than air and soft underfoot. He felt as if he was walking on somebody's sofa. He'd loved sports as a kid, fantasizing, as boys did, that one day he might turn pro. Horsing around and wrestling and playing kickball and catch with Carl made him aggressive and competitive. Before he broke his arm in a preseason football game in ninth grade, he'd been a four-season jock: baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and track in the spring. After the accident, he'd sat out games and practices for over a month, during which time he discovered all kinds of things: girls, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, girls. After that, he never really gave a damn anymore about sports, satisfied to ride the pine and muse without ever coming close to matching Carl's athletic accomplishments or his own prior expectations.

“I was an athlete once. I can be one again.”

Seeing his father lying in the hospital had given him a sense of mortality that he hadn't had before. He'd waited long enough. It was time to get healthy.

He tightened his laces, stood up, took a deep breath, and touched his toes, making a loud grunting sound. “Stretching is overrated,” he said to himself. His belly bulged slightly over the
drawstring of his sweatpants. He wore an oversize sweatshirt more because he needed something bulky to cover his gut. He took one last look in the mirror and thought, “It's a miracle that Tamsen is attracted to me. If the psychic hadn't told her I was the one for her, where would I be?”

The fact that she'd chosen him was impossibly flattering and good for his ego. She told him he didn't look anything like Jimmy Carter, but then, what else was she going to say?

“Maybe some day I'll run in a marathon with Carl. I'll get in great shape and kick his ass,” he thought.

“First things first. Just start running.”

“Maybe I will run with you. I've changed my mind,” Stella said. “How far are we going?” Even as out of shape as he was, he knew Stella was too old to keep up with him, try as she might.

“Uh … I'm going to need you to stay here and guard the house while I'm gone,” he told her.

“Fabulous,” she muttered, turning and circling once before lying on her bed. “We wouldn't want anyone breaking in and stealing the boxer shorts you left under the bed, would we?”

H
E STEPPED OUTSIDE
. The air was cold and dry, the sky a cloudless blue, the sun bright. He briefly considered waiting to begin his new regimen until some day when it was warmer, but he recognized the lame excuse for what it was. There was no way to start but to simply start, one foot in front of the other. He began walking to the corner and told himself as soon as he reached the fire hydrant, he would pick up the pace.

At the hydrant, he ran, turning right on Parsons and right again on Bridge, past the post office, where the employees were ominously cheerful and pleasant. He ran past Historic Northampton, a very old house across the street from the post office that was no doubt filled with very old things. Nobody he
knew had ever been there, and nobody he knew knew anybody who'd ever been there, or anybody who had any plans or intentions to go there, though the building was open to the public six days a week, preserving history by more or less keeping it to themselves. At first he was surprised at how easy it was to run after years of inactivity and sloth. Then he was surprised at how briefly that feeling lasted and how tired he soon became.

He headed downtown, Northampton a picturesque arcade of boutiques and businesses and a destination for travelers from Montreal to New York City, who came for the shops and the restaurants. He ran past Stanley Prochaska's jewelry store, one of the oldest shops in town, and past the bridal shop, perhaps the only one in the country that featured matching bridal gowns for “hers and hers” commitment ceremonies, Northampton being famous as a major haven for lesbians. He ran past the leather goods shop, and the sporting goods shop, past couples clutching paper bags, men shopping with their women. He briefly recalled shopping with his ex-wife, holding her bag and saying things like, “Do we really need a new blender?” or “Doesn't the old toaster oven still work?” He ran past Thornes Marketplace, once a traditional department store that now housed a variety of independent shops and was kind of the crown jewel of the Northampton shopping scene. He ran past the building where he rented an office for himself, where he kept his work mess separate from his home mess, writing and staring out the window, sometimes with binoculars, just keeping an eye on things.

Paul ran, unzipping his Windbreaker at the neck, though the temperature was only in the forties. His legs were starting to ache, and his lungs hurt, but he kept going, past a store called Faces, which sold cheap furniture and lamps and posters and things to go in dormitory rooms. He ran past Betsy's Threads, a high-end clothing shop where Betsy had to keep track of all the
social circles in town and remember which dresses she had sold to which women to make sure nobody showed up at the same party wearing the same thing. He ran past Intimate You, a sexy lingerie shop where the owner, a woman named Charlotte, knew everyone in town and, more importantly, knew who was wearing what beneath their clothes. She also had a good idea of who was having affairs and with whom, information garnered when men bought lacy bras or thong panties for their girlfriends, after which the mistresses brought them back to exchange them for the more appropriate sizes or styles.

He ran past Jake's No Frills Dining, where he'd gone for bacon and eggs and toast and coffee (but no frills) every morning for the past fifteen years. While Paul sipped coffee, read the
Globe,
and did the crossword puzzle, Stella would lie quietly in the café doorway, bothering no one, at least until the day the city said they were going to fine dog owners twenty-five dollars for tying their pets up downtown (there was a fine for not tying them up too), regardless of whether the offending pooch was snoozing peacefully in the sun or gnawing the toes off babies in their strollers. Paul couldn't begin to count the number of people in a typical day who smiled when they saw Stella lying contentedly in the doorway, but of course, nobody's going to call the dog officer and say, “I'd like to report a dog — it's not doing anything, but it made me really happy just to look at it …”

He ran down Main Street, where he often saw petitioners getting signatures to put candidates on ballots, and girls' soccer teams collecting donations, and New Age people offering incense or poetry, and disturbed zanies muttering things like “You don't leave witnesses, you
never
leave witnesses …” to themselves. Main Street was generally alive, seven days a week and year-round, with trust-fund mendicants, panhandlers and mooches, crow babies and white Rasta kids in Jamaican black,
yellow, green, and red knit caps, Goth waifs and death punks who asked for spare change to make “phone calls,” and, one time, a kid squatting on the sidewalk with a sign that read,
PARENTS SLAIN BY NINJAS — NEED MONEY FOR KUNG FU LESSONS
! He ran past a used-book store, and another used-book store, and a new-book store, and a store that had once sold crystals but went out of business when the crystals apparently told the owners they didn't want to be sold. He ran past importers carrying third-world knickknacks, and he ran past one of the dozen ice cream parlors in town, dairy being the last vice the local Birken-stockers allowed themselves. If a power failure were ever to shut down the ice cream parlor freezers, the streets of Northampton would be awash with slow-rolling waves of malted vanilla and lowfat frozen yogurt.

He kept running. He passed the Sunflower Laundromat, where everyone posted notes and notices on the community bulletin board. He ran past the Healing Cooperative next to the Laundromat, a kind of New Age clinic for psychic fairs and body workers and homeopathic remedies and treatments, with a pamphlet rack by the door, offering flyers for all the various local shamans and magical practitioners and caregivers. There he had to stop, wishing briefly that he'd brought along enough money to check himself into the Healing Cooperative for a full-body “gentle loving” massage.

He sat on the steps, panting, and felt light headed. He didn't expect to get in shape right away, but evidently he had further to go than he thought. He'd just begun to catch his breath when first his right calf muscle began to cramp up, then his left. He stood and walked it off, and after about ten minutes, he felt better.

And a minute later, he also felt proud of himself. By his own estimation, he'd come about a mile and a half. Most of the fitness gurus said that when you're starting out, it's important to go easy on yourself.

When he got home, he unlaced his shoes. Stella asked him how his run had gone.

“Terrific,” he said. He filled the tub with water as hot as he could stand it. His feet hurt. His knees throbbed. He put his robe on again, went to the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, opened it, and then went to recover in the tub. After a moment, Stella came into the bathroom and stared at him.

“Is that part of your training too?” she asked him, staring at the beer.

“No,” he told her, taking a sip. “This is my reward for exercising.”

“What does it feel like?” she asked.

“What does what feel like?”

“Drinking. I'm just curious.”

“It feels good. It relaxes you.”

“What do you need to relax from? You don't do anything.”

“From stress.”

“What's stress?”

“What's stress?” Paul said. “Hmm. Well. You know when you see another dog coming toward you on the sidewalk, and he looks big and mean with his fur up on the back of his neck, so you get the fur up on the back of your neck too?”

“Horripilation.”

“That's stress.”

“Oh.” She watched him as he swallowed. “So is there a big dog somewhere nearby or something?”

“No,” Paul said. “That was just an example for you. Human beings have a lot of other things that stress us out.”

“Like what things? You're lying in a tub of hot, soapy water, doing nothing as far as I can tell.”