Ride Around Shining (5 page)

She gave a prefatory cough and handed up one of the Realtor's flyers from that afternoon. “That house you saw,” she said.

“Yes?”

“The papers are all signed.”

I didn't know whether I ought to act surprised. I thought maybe some rich old phrase was required of me.

“Many congratulations,” I said.

“Thanks. It's a long time coming.”

“When will you start there?”

“Oh, soon.”

“Having servants?”

“Servants,” she repeated lightly. “It's too small for that. Besides, I think Calyph will be staying up here most the time.”

There was a pause in which I pretended to examine the flyer. “Congratulations once again,” I said. My voice sounded dead somehow, like the car was filtering vital things out of the air.

I could hear her dress slide along her skin as she leaned forward, and then her voice was just behind my neck. “I hope you'll show me more of the city,” she said. “Now that you know how to get me there.” Her voice seemed poised exactly at the edge of open flirtation and simple appeal; like the flower, it was innocent and indecent all at once.

“Of course,” I said, and for a second I let my hand slip from the wheel, so I could take it again in a strong new grip. “I bet it was a long party. You ought to see how Mr. West is feeling.”

“He's probably not even here,” she said.

The dark house sat before us, inviting. I could walk through all the rooms without turning on any of the lights, and see their night stillness. “He said something the other day . . . ,” I began vaguely.

“What?” I turned off the car then, and her voice was sharp in the new silence. She sounded forced out of comfort.

“Maybe we could go inside,” I said.

“I don't think that's . . .” But she couldn't decide what it wasn't.

I heard her belt click and release.

“We're comfortable in here,” she said, reassuring herself. “Say what you have to.”

I felt my lips press together. Suddenly it was me the silence encroached on. I turned the key and the music came quietly back. “The house,” I said. “He doesn't even know you're looking.”

“No,” she said at last. “He'll know soon,” she amended feebly. “I just want to surprise him.”

“You better surprise him before he surprises you.”

She didn't say anything to this, and I didn't look at her, but somehow her confusion was apparent. There was some kind of awkward beat.

“I've been taking him around to see Realtors, for when the extension goes through,” I said. “It's been kind of a thing for him. You're not supposed to know.”

“Oh,” she said.

When she spoke again, her voice had changed once more. I couldn't tell if it was sheer caprice or if she was trying to buy me, but again her voice warmed, husky and irresponsible. “I suppose you could come inside a minute,” she said. “Have a coffee for the drive.”

I made an indifferent noise. “What kind you got?” I asked scornfully.

“Hot,” she said.

“I bet you make a thin cup,” I told her.

“Oh?”

“Your cream is skim,” I declared.

In the kitchen I watched the fuzz at the back of her neck glow under the lights of the exhaust hood. She was still wearing her flower, and I wondered if I held her head very still while I squeezed the stem, would any juice come out. She was working at some new apparatus that reimagined the future of coffee so you loaded the grounds one plastic bullet at a time. The sounds hissed and roared through the silent house.

My cup was made in thirty seconds, and then Antonia's phone rang and she turned away with her finger up and wandered off. From the dark of the dining room I heard her brightly laughing. I stood there a minute, feeling neglected, and then angry with myself that I should so easily miss her.

I took to the family room, and until my eyes adjusted to the moon-shaded black I moved among the ideas of their things. I gripped the edge of a couch, and though its grain felt as ordinary as anything from my own childhood, in the dark it could've been any couch in any room where I felt out of place and privileged to be. In the dark, things I might have scorned elsewhere as Mc-Mansion set pieces felt owned and earned. The fat candles I'd elsewhere thought tacky were cool and timeless to the touch, and felt like all the surfaces in all the rooms where I'd stood as a young man and sensed that here was a place that led to other places where life sloped alluringly out of my reach. In the dark I remembered the bright stone paths of the old summer places on Lake Geneva, down which the wet footprints disappeared, and every threadbare hall outside the apartment of an indifferent woman—every place that was that place that was as far as I would get. I was always finding those rooms, places where a middle-middle man would stall out until he had matured or risen or simply become better. And hadn't I? I was a man of action now, I assured myself. I shaped destinies.

I picked a curio off the mantel, the skyline of the Chapel Hill campus done out in copper and encased in glass, and turned it around in my hands, feeling again the mystery of why I'd come to work here. To be near to Antonia's life was to be surrounded by all the old, passed-down desires I'd taken up with young hands, ten years ago or more, in the initial creation of what I thought to be my eternal personality. She was a campus spire and a cool, judgmental charisma and my torn cover of
This Side of Paradise
. Now I was in the dark among her airs and her blue-blooded things, and as they grew gradually visible around me I knew I was helpless to judge them as harshly as they deserved—they'd become fundamental to my aspiration. She herself was a person and not a symbol, but the relics of her childhood, her Italian swimwear catalogs and her damp upper lip, those belonged to everyone who grew up in a nowhere junction town dreaming our erotic, limited, and endless American dreams.

In the half-light of the dining room, she stood silent with the phone at her ear, a fading amusement on her face. When she saw me, she dropped the phone an inch or two and looked at me with her expression suspended halfway into apology. She had seen what was on my face and it had made her wary.

I stood near and she did not step back and I took her upheld wrist and moved it away. I put my hand through her hair, around her ear where the flower was. Her eyes were very large, she was frightened, and I kissed her. Her mouth was so small a careless man could miss it. I tested the pull of her lips; they were not so loose as I had thought. She did not respond, nor pull away, and after what must have been at most five seconds I leaned back and took the flower slowly from her ear.

She hadn't put down the phone, and as she felt the flower go she resumed the conversation as though she'd been pulled away from it only a moment by some trifling necessity.

“You're kidding,” she said into the phone. “What?” She looked slightly shaken, but she smiled at me a little, chidingly. Then she turned away.

I was on my way out when I heard him dribbling. I knew he'd been around somewhere. It was a low, flat sound, and when the ball struck there was a finality to it, like each time was the last time it would ever land. I stopped in the hall and waited to hear the sound again.

When it came, I took my cup out across the patio and onto the narrow paved path toward the court. One half of the court was bright with floodlights, but the lit key stood empty. At first I thought he was chasing an errant ball into the murk, but I heard the ball go through the far net twice and he didn't appear. He was playing on the dark half.

I laid down the cup and crept around the spill of light to the near corner. I crouched a moment with my fingers resting in the mesh of the fence. He must have been so focused inward I needn't have bothered being afraid he'd see me. Even before I could see him, I knew he was trying to figure something out about himself, testing his first step—I could hear the asphalt grind as he pivoted and then tried to explode. He always took one dribble, and it was the loudest sound. He'd lay up and then catch the ball out of the net and walk back slowly and go again. The calm of this walk unsettled me—it was like he was taking his time to get feedback from all his sinews and nerves.

After a couple dozen drives, he stopped and I heard the ball slam down with what seemed a satisfied sound. I could see him dimly then, the ball under his foot, and he raised his arms and detached something from himself and it sailed toward me and fluttered to the ground. I caught the smell of sweat then, and it threw me. I'd never smelled his sweat before. It smelled the same as mine, and this offended me. Until they get televisions that smell, ballers are people who have pure water running off them as a byproduct of their elegance, and sweat is the thing the rest of us make as we feel ourselves fall short. Sweat was what came off our slick freckly skin and hung in our ugly socks as we breathed hard in endless games of three-on-three in decrepit gyms while our women looked sadly on as our layups rolled off. Calyph smelled harsh as a wet woman does, to shame the hopes of small men who wish for a perfect world where everything good is fragrant.

With his shirt off, he rippled and glistened in the moon, and I began to feel uneasy. He broke from the rigidity of his drills, and just shot around, and I saw the contour of him, and tried to make out his tattoos. Really it's white people who should be doomed to smudgy, half-invisible tattoos—it would suit us better. I told myself I'd sneak away once I made out the single word that was written on his back in script, between the shoulder blades, but he would not stay still. I watched and watched the ink on his body in the dark, and when I looked away at last I saw I'd pulled the flower all to pieces.

Driving out to Dunthorpe
in the early morning, with the roads still clear and dew on the medians, I liked to think of the players in their houses spread out over the city. Year by year it just gets easier to see all America spread naked under the sky. If you want to see what kind of car Michael Jordan's chauffeur is driving these days, you can just find the latest high-res satellite photograph of Highland Park and blow it up until you see the two Bentleys, black and white, sitting in his drive like pixilated Matchbox cars. I liked to think of someone finding the coordinates to Calyph's house on a message board somewhere, like you can with MJ. As I drove past the early dog walkers and spry old men dutifully following ancient health advice, I imagined all of Portland unfolding that same way on those mornings, when the mist cleared and all our lives stood open to a glimpse from the satellites and the street views. Somehow the city was more alive to me with the team spread across it, humming with the energy of their half-hidden lives, from the glittering mistresses' apartments in the Lloyd District to the sturdy exurban mansions of West Linn, built on rolling hills of grass seed. In satellite photographs, we were together.

At Calyph's, I sat at the kitchen island and looked down at the laptop I'd been instructed to bring as though it were a mixing board or a ten-key, some kind of byzantine machine.

“What am I doing here again?” I called out.

“You know about cars,” Calyph shouted back vaguely.

In front of me sat a fresh copy of
The Oregonian
and a stack of pricing guides tagged from the central library. I guess I was looking for a deal on a used car. I felt odd about being in their house again. There was no sign of Antonia, but after the previous night I preferred to be kept at a formal distance from their real lives for a little while.

“Look up Lost Boys Staffing while you at it,” Calyph said, leaning against the door frame. “Gonna fill things out here with a houseman in a bit, hook him up with this old ride. There's a brochure for 'em around here somewhere. Make y'self at home, too,” he said, tilting his head toward the living room, and went off down the stairs.

I got up and settled down again in a deep, stiff chair. I didn't see any brochures, but a pretty clunky-looking Web page told me Lost Boys was a charitable venture started by Joseph Jones, one of the league's more august veterans. He'd won a championship with the Pistons, but he was in his twilight now, known as much for being a respected locker-room figure and having the league's most dignified beard as for the workman's rebounding and post defense, which were all he had left to give to the hardwood. Off the court he always wore spectacles and cream-colored suits, a true Georgetown warrior-scholar. According to the site, after Jones won his ring he'd replaced his staff with new servants he'd found through a company that trained resettled refugees from Sudan and the Congo. He'd later invested in the company, becoming its emissary to the league and eventually its figurehead. The site went on vaguely about its nonprofit status before boasting that all the staff were trained to drive and, later, helped to purchase cars.

Jones's own staff was a handsome five-person affair. Each man looked like a consummate professional, dapper and severe in his cream-colored livery, and among this proud lineup I couldn't help note the presence of a chauffeur, distinguished by his driving cap. It seemed a praiseworthy venture but I wasn't about to be pushed out by some humanitarian cause.

Finishing with the site, I got up again to wander. A cloud shoal was rolling in, and a little mist was crawling across the lawn. Behind glass there was no way to tell it wasn't already fall. Out in Illinois, the bright, discouraging gate with “23” on it must still be baking beneath the sun and the satellites, but all across western Oregon the mists were gathering, limbering up for their six-month stay.

Turning from the window, the room seemed charged with the changing of seasons, and I wondered how Calyph and Antonia's life had flowed through it. They must not have always avoided the formal living room as a stiff and superfluous place—there must have been a time when, twenty-one and trying to own all these things for the first time, they'd put their feet up on all the ottomans and turned all the throw pillows around slowly in their hands and thought, what a lot of underfoot shit comes with an adult house, and how incredible that we'll come to find it all crucial.