The Hero's Body (18 page)

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 cash.”

“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.

“Fever,” from the collection
Cathedral
, was my father's story almost exactly: Carlyle is abandoned by his perfidious wife, Eileen, and must care for two small children without her; he struggles for competent babysitting, for an eclipsing of his sorrow, and along the way earns triumphs too tiny to make much difference. The Carverian
world is a spiritual tundra, an alcoholic wasteland in which the American Dream means disappointment and malaise: not because it has died, but because it never was born. Communion, if it comes at all, comes from minor human interaction. Forget about grace; grace means a feeble paycheck. If you're lucky, the electricity won't be turned off.

Carver was my first convincing intimation that something might be made from grief, that I myself might fashion artistic assertions from my own failings. There was some rescue in that: my sadness could be
useful
. Until this time, literature had been a font of pleasure and of wisdom: the satisfaction of beholding a well-carpentered sonnet, the beauty of a novel's sturdy plinths and joists. But why did reading “Ode to a Nightingale” at fifteen—
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain
—how did that relieve my own trendy death wishes? What spell was at work there? To be personally addressed by Keats in that way seemed a wizardry I'd never explain. Later I would understand. Reverse the ineffable and be found. The elemental vitality of the right words in the right order. Name the thing to gain dominion over it. The comfort, the good fortune of finding sentences and stanzas which equipped me with descriptions of my own half-explicable anguishes.

But how would
I
be capable of such wizardry, of reversing the ineffable, of naming? Until Carver, I'd been only a dabbler in written words: a sheaf of stray lines, impulsive poems, what might have made a song lyric for an especially inept rock vocalist—what Proust once dismissed as “merely phrase-making.” Instinctive volleys of self-expression. But there was no
assertion
, no armature, no order, no strivings into the accuracy and surprise of language. In Carver's expertly built stories, in their sneaky simplicity and demotic prose, I glimpsed possibilities of the architecture I might use. Faulkner, Bellow, Proust: they divested me of whatever motivation I might have had to conceive my own fiction. I could never do
that
, what
they did, how they did it. Bellow's
Augie March
seemed not of this world, seemed crafted of a linguistic magic and intelligence I'd need different DNA to perform.

But Carver's “Fever,” and “Vitamins,” and “A Small, Good Thing”: those I might attempt. And not just because they were about people I'd known my whole life (the handyman, the salesman, the janitor), or because their sadness let me feel less solitary (literature must be about more than the merely identifiable), but because their sentences and structures contained a crucial quality of the spoken, the conversational. Their narrative ease extended a hand in invitation, and that's part of why Carver was so beloved by so many, how he influenced so many, because his stories said,
I welcome you. Come in
.

And so, seated at a desk in the bedroom of that silent apartment, at a secondhand computer the size of the Liberty Bell, the winter in extended wrath, I began. The telling of stories. The circumstances of which were mine, yes, but, what?
Altered
somehow.
Imagined into order
. How should those circumstances proceed? Take an instance from a life—my own, say, or my father's—and give it shape, augment it into meaning. Let it find its form. Beginning, middle, end. Get characters talking. Have them want something—no,
need
something. The meaning, the structure of the meaning, would come from the characters' needs, from finding words that equaled their troubles. Because in life, I was certain, all the meaning had gone missing. Life had none of the symmetries, none of the parallel significances, of literature.

Is that where those periodic spasms of delight came from, spasms that for a few seconds at a time alleviated my despair? Not because I was expressing my bewilderment through characters who were me but different, my father but different—self-expression is simple: go punch a hole in the wall—but because I was attempting to fashion harmony from disorder, to go in search of what was within me? Attempting to manifest meaning in chaos? Because I was making,
because I was naming, and from that making and naming emanated a sense of control, the satisfaction of control? Yes, here was what people inevitably refer to as “a calling.” And the calling felt religious in its specifics, in its choosing of me and not a neighbor, not a friend. And the calling was relief, because I knew then, during those icy maelstroms, and then as the kicking cold relented into the kiss of spring, I knew what my life would be.

When the
time came to step onstage again in April, in Hackensack, New Jersey, I wasn't prepared. In several ways, my physique was improbably better than it had been at the first contest in August: fifteen pounds heavier, rounder and more symmetrical (I'd got the drug cocktail right). But all that unkind winter I'd despised each workout at inadequate gyms, suffered through each force-fed meal, and without the camaraderie of the Edge, I couldn't find importance in this any more. I'd skip workouts to begin another story or to reread Carver. During the days leading up to the show, I'd polluted my diet in a manner I could not clean: striations disappeared, one muscle bled into another. I drained a liter of water and fell asleep in my car in the parking lot before prejudging. Victor told me he couldn't discern a single abdominal muscle from his seat in the audience. It didn't matter. I took fourth place out of ten and walked offstage. Nowhere among the unreliable acoustics of memory can I locate the song I used, or much of anything else. Not my posing routine, not a single other competitor.

Friends planned to meet at a nearby diner to glut upon all they'd been forbidden for many weeks, but I drove back to my apartment and inhaled a pound of peanut M&Ms while revising yet another Carver-influenced story, another domestic drama, this one about an intruder who might or might not have broken into the home of a
struggling couple. The judges had handed me an embarrassing plastic trophy in Hackensack, and when I moved out of that apartment in May, I placed both of my bodybuilding trophies into the dumpster.
Placed
them, not
dropped
them, because although I didn't want to see them anymore, I also didn't want to see them broken.