The Hero's Body (11 page)

That went on for more mornings than my ego cared to count. Even when it was only the two of us there, her face stayed locked on a magazine, a notepad, a book. Until that morning when the book was Fitzgerald's
The Beautiful and Damned
. Our exchange sounded like this:

“They're pretty miserable, those two.”

“Who?” she said.

“Anthony and Gloria Patch,” I told her.

“You read this?”

“Yup.” Like every American high-schooler, I'd been given
Gatsby
in tenth grade, and when our class finished with it, I went in search of more Fitzgerald.
The Beautiful and Damned
seemed to me an unimprovable title.

“You read books?” she asked.

“Yup.”

“
These
kinds of books?” and she showed me the cover, showed me the kind she meant, the serious kind, the kind serious, unmuscled readers read.

“
Those
kind,” I said, and if I'd been more calculating, I'd have feigned a wounded bafflement.

Mornings at the counter were different after that: her gradual glowing, an uncoiling. Since college she'd been nursing a medium-grade Fitzgerald fetish, and so, trying to catch up, intimated by her knowledge and the many sentences she'd memorized, I abruptly had a whole drift of Scribners paperbacks on my bedside stand.

At some point phone numbers were exchanged, midnight talks shared, ostensibly about F. Scott but the subtext was all about our own antsy fluids. Val had not been returning my calls—she was just then in the process of banishing me to the marchlands of her heart,
enthralled by college life at Rutgers, one of sororities and frats, a drunken rollick that could not include me—and so I didn't for a minute consider this cheating.

Soon I was at Daisy's condo, an after-dark, unplanned stepping-out, in a town much swankier than Manville, BMWs and Benzes dreaming in driveways, lit shrubbery that looked imported from the Orient. She had a city of white boxes in her garage, boxes filled with baby oil, each with a picture of an overjoyed, over-soft infant on the side. A couple of times a week she'd empty several bottles into her bath water, marinate in it for an hour or more, and her skin, as I would experience that night, was like the satiny backside of the baby itself.

When you're the sprig I was then, and the woman grinding herself into your lap is not only a decade older than you but a decade ahead of you—degreed, salaried, mortgaged—what you first feel are inklings of the paradisal, an adrenalized confidence and joy, but then it's something else. Then it's much more substantive, a confirmation of your selfhood, a validating of your spirit; it's a welcome to the altar of your contentment.

It's not quite accurate to say that Daisy seduced me that night; what happened in her bedroom was closer to consumption. I remember a robust gibbous moon cutting through blinds, the mirror atop her bureau alive with it, illuminating the underthings, the T-shirts, shorts, and socks that had been tossed hastily onto her carpet, her bookshelf boasting two feet of Fitzgerald. And I remember the scent too, always the perfumed, lotioned, laundered scent of a woman's sheets.

Her grip on my deltoids and biceps wasn't merely bracing as she ground into me, nor was it merely a caress. Rather, it was part massage, part claw, talons attached to my arms as if she could keep them. She said my name and I did what you do: I said hers back. And that's when she demanded, “Call me Daisy.” And I called her that until the
moon showed me her bun of lemon hair shaking free and she began to tremble toward release. Soon she'd switch jobs, switch gyms, and I wouldn't see her again, although I'd remain intensely grateful for that single night she gave me, and for her leading me deeper into Fitzgerald than I might have otherwise gone.

Parma had
convinced my father that he needed what's routinely called personal time, that his life couldn't be a conveyor belt of kids, work, chores. I can hear her say it still: “How's he ever gonna
meet
someone if he never goes out?” I was ten years old when she bought him a membership at a Jack LaLanne gym two towns away. For roughly four decades, from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, LaLanne was the preferred fitness czar for everyday Americans; his television program,
The Jack LaLanne Show
, which ran from 1953 to 1985, had a lot to do with that. But his gyms were of the sort that I and my set would, eight years later, regularly tease for their unembarrassed lack of masculine asperity and grit, their neutering sounds of Duran Duran and Phil Collins.

But a lack of asperity and grit was exactly what my father needed then. He was only in his early thirties, although, said Parma, “he looks forty,” and so she paid for his gym membership with a mother's gung-ho hope that it would both dilute his unhappiness and introduce him to a female. “He needs a
woman
in that house. It's not
natural
for a man to cook and clean, and I can't help forever.” My family was big on declarations about what was and was not natural.

I'd recently overheard Parma and my father talking—adults often have an ignoramus's inability to detect the antennae of children, when and how often those children can hear them, and how incredibly much those children care to comprehend—and my father said he was worried about bringing a woman into our house, worried
about destabilizing us kids (my sister was eight, my brother six), worried about how threatened a new female might make us. If I felt guilty about this, I cannot now recall. It seems as if I should have felt at least a little guilty about the lonesome bachelorhood my psycho-emotional needs had helped to force upon our father.

Parma was capable of periodic gestures of hope, I know, but overall her disposition was unsinkably grim. That mood of hers, her dire sense of drama, set the tone in our family, and so there was habitual talk of how bad we three kids had it: “Those poor kids, without a mother, it's so hard.” That's the reason my father hadn't brought a woman home; he believed, with Parma, that we kids were contents under pressure, canisters of ineffable internal suffering.

My father worked out at Jack LaLanne on weeknights while my siblings and I were at my grandparents' eating supper and scratching through homework. Not long after his gym life began, there was indeed a swelling of chatter about a woman. This appeared supernatural, if for no other reason than Parma, consistently wrong about human living, was right about Jack LaLanne.

Whatever reservations my father had about bringing a woman into our house had been dashed, because this woman, Kim, was about to spend the night—on the sofa, but still, she was spending the night, because she lived an hour away. Our father and Kim had a date, my siblings and I had a babysitter, and because our father was sawing lumber until noon the following day, we were given warning and we were given injunction: “When you wake up, Kim will be here” and “Please, for the love of God, do not terrorize Kim.” Somehow the earnestness and gravity of that injunction did not reach me.

I went to sleep that night positively giddy with the prospect of a woman being in the house upon my waking. My father was gone by six, I rose at eight, ahead of my siblings, and the first thing I did, before I even shook myself fully awake, was dress in my ninja regalia, mask and all—this was the apex of my Sho Kosugi
period—including tabi boots and a utility belt into which I tucked my weapons, the nunchucks and shurikens I was too young and knuckleheaded to have, and yet I had them. I also owned a black grappling hook with a knotted rope I'd ordered from a catalog, and this was good news, because we had an open upstairs hallway, loftlike beneath a cathedral ceiling, a balcony that overlooked our living room. Lately I'd been practicing my crafty descent from the balcony onto the cushioned armchair below.

I'd later be told that what I did next was unequivocally wacky behavior, even for a ten-year-old—“borderline mental illness,” my father said. But here it is: in my ninja suit I crept across the carpet to the spindles of the balcony, and I saw, down there asnooze on our sofa, the woman called Kim. Her hair—what was that color called? sangria? currant?—was cropped close, spiky like a man's, and this sent tides of delight through me because all night I'd been expecting a commonplace do, an umber or mousy mane, permed just past her shoulders.

I secured the grappling hook's talon to the banister and rappelled, knot by knot, to the armchair, then ducked behind one of the two sofas, on my knees at the corner of it, spying on her erotic snores. Then, step by glacial, silent step, I approached those snores, my own breath clinched. I was close enough to smell her now, a fruity odor, part shampoo, part disinfectant. I'd punched nose-holes in my mask for ventilation, un-ninja of me, I know, but I couldn't breathe in the thing otherwise.

Her face was warmed by skylights: a creamy complexion, the dimmed galaxy of freckles across pronounced cheekbones, lips like azaleas. I was standing over her, bent at the waist, only two feet between us, my heart bobbing in my breast. And when her eyes flashed open—the sleeping mind sometimes knows when a delinquent is watching it—the sound she made was not so much a scream from the mouth as a moan from the throat, a clipped moan stuck
somewhere between surprise and injury. Of course I rushed away, retreated back up to my bedroom, bolted the door, left Kim there on the sofa wondering if she'd been poked or probed. Even a visual trespass can feel filthy. I have no memory now of what followed, of what we five did that day after my father returned from work, but I know that evening she left and never came back.

My decade-old self, the child as traitor: the unconscious saboteur of my father's romantic hopes. Such maliciousness, such bristling, can hide in the heart of a child. He gets even for perceived wrongs, for whatever marring he feels has been unjustly done to him, and he gets even against those who deserve it least. Of what was my father guilty? Of driving away my mother? What hazard did Kim present to me? The splitting of my father's affections? Of course my creepy ninja act was not to blame for her going away and never coming back, but neither was it darling boyishness: a ten-year-old is not a five-year-old. The latter can get away with all orders of mischief; the former is just two years shy of pubic hair.

During those childhood years, there would be only one more appearance by a woman in our house, a fellow divorcee with two children of her own, a Manville girl, someone who'd known my mother before she'd disappeared, someone who could have been Carly Simon's stunt double. Her relationship with my father, if you could call it that, was ill-fated from the word go. It couldn't have lasted a month. He kept up his membership at the Jack LaLanne gym for a while longer, but he never met another woman there. He'd be single for seven more years, his only female love from the woman who bore him.

VII

Victor and I,
along with some other pals from the Edge, had been traipsing around central Jersey some Saturdays to attend different amateur bodybuilding competitions. And at one of these shows, as we watched the teenage division, my pals became convinced that I could beat every guy up there, that I had the desirable aesthetics to excel on stage: “You could take those dudes, bro,” and “Dudes all got toothpick arms, bro,” and “Those dudes ain't stacked like you, bro” (most of our sentences contained a
dude
and a
bro
). And it was true, mostly; one kid carried about as much muscle as a high-school swimmer.

That Saturday morning, reclined in an auditorium somewhere in the intestines of our state, after what was really the most piddling instigation of friends, we decided: in two months, I'd represent the Edge in the teenage division at the Muscle Beach bodybuilding competition in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. This decision, it seems to me now, should have been paired with a feeling of momentousness. I'd never before done anything like it, was not a performer, naked or otherwise, at ease on stages. But I remember no momentousness. What I remember is the sense of inevitability, and a desperation not to disappoint the guys at the Edge who wanted me to do this.

At only 175 pounds, I was in no way large, nothing close to what you see in magazines. If you put normal clothes on me I looked
like any athletic kid, a lacrosse or football player perhaps. But my arms and shoulders were well built and round; those were always my kindest body parts. Unlike my lagging chest and calves that always needed extra doses of loving anguish, my arms and shoulders grew without too much coercion from me. And my waist was only twenty-eight inches, which allowed me that coveted V-shape. Bodybuilders can't be fireplugs.

Also, because I was naturally light and lean, with an over-rapid metabolism that made it an Augean effort for me to gain weight, I had the body-fat percentage of an Olympic runner, five to six percent, and for the bodybuilding stage, that's a blessing you cannot inject. What's more, in addition to having full muscle bellies, I had narrow joints, the joints of a fifth-grader. All of which meant that I appeared much more rotundly muscular, much more the bodybuilder, than I actually was. That appearance, or call it an illusion, is indispensible for the competitive bodybuilder. When he's onstage, nobody cares about how much he can bench press. It's not a strength contest; it's an art contest.