The Sea of Light (19 page)

Then the tears—so many, I didn’t know there’d be so many. They flow in nauseous waves with each sob, shake her whole body, go on and on for many minutes, until her hands drop to the coffee-stained tabletop and her eyes, dripping, haunted, meet mine.

“I can’t, Chick. God, I can’t! I can’t see you any more.”

“Why, sweetie? Why not?”

“You knew me with Kay. You knew us together. And when I see you, God! it reminds me of everything. I can’t take it—you don’t know. I miss her so much, Chick. In some ways, you’re just like her. And I can’t see you—because it reminds me, and I just can’t stand my feelings right now, they make me want to rip off my skin.”

That’s when I do the last unguarded thing of the weekend: I grab her reluctant hands, stare sternly up into a naked face that I would like to soothe, shelter, heal, and smack—a face that makes me angry. Because it’s so obstinately willing, even in this extremity of grief, to shut me out completely now, call a halt to sixteen years of friendship.

“Listen, Bren. You can live however you want. You can go home, you can crawl straight back into the closet you’ve built, you can lock it from the inside and throw away the key. But don’t expect that that’s going to make all the pain disappear. Just because you stay isolated—just because no one around you knows you loved another woman—doesn’t mean that any of it, that any of the truth, is going to disappear. And don’t think you can shut
me
out! I think I’m the best damned friend you’ve got, and that’s true whether or not we ever make love, you know? I knew you with Kay—well, so what? I also knew you
before.
I’ve seen you being terrific and I’ve seen you make an ass of yourself. And I never stopped being your friend, and you’d better not forget that!”

Something streaks by the window then. A starling, dark dash across the sun-bright autumn day.

Sunday. It is Sunday.

This shuts me up. Deadliest of days for the lonely, the sick. Dead end of the week, when you imagine everyone else and their lovers huddling in front of fireplaces far, far from your own cold cellar of misery, holding hands, touching intimately, passionately, reading newspapers and literary supplements and sports sections, reaching for glasses of warm beverage and taking walks along quiet tree-lined avenues, going to brunch, making love.

Sunday, when your own isolation drips down in front of you like the dying tip of an icicle. Take a jog, a dip in some pool, a long solitary trudge through drifting leaves; nothing cuts the thick dull edge of it. If you aren’t sheltered by mate or family, aren’t happy inside your own life, it’s a day of unavoidable despair. She faces all that now—and she knows it, for sure—another day of mourning alone. I squeeze her hands harshly. Kay was never mine to lose. But there are some things I’ve known firsthand in my life, and—without regret for it, or even sentimentality—loneliness is one of them.

“You need some time alone, well, that’s fine. Just don’t tell me to stay permanently out of your life. I sure don’t want you permanently out of mine.” It comes to me, like a sigh: fifteen years ago, our kiss. In a hallway, on stairs between landings, at a party. It jumped naturally out of nothing but the two of us and was sudden, wonderful. Then over in surprise and fear. Last night bathes me with a kind of nostalgia—the graceful part, anyway—until I remember the rest of it. “Personally, Bren, I don’t think your closet ever
was
big enough for two. I don’t even think it’s big enough for
you
any more. And I’m willing to bet that it’s not nearly big enough to mourn in.”

She cries again, more softly now.

I resolve to say good-bye for a while, if that’s what she wants and needs. Tell myself that in a little while Bren will go, I’ll stay, and Kay’s dog will stay with me. Boz won’t mind when I give him the party line about how crazy it is for people to be ashamed of loving who they love.

Then I wonder if Kay somehow engineered this—this temporary bestowal of the dog on me. A last request? Postmortem control? She might have.

But I’m here to hold her lover while she cries, and, for a while, Kay lets me.

Holding Bren, I remember, and think I understand, what she tried to describe last night. The weird thing she saw, those last few days in the hospital. After something Kay told her. They had held each other, tried to touch however they could. A hot, bright thing, like fever, only it wasn’t that. From Kay, but not really. And not from Bren either. But from everything. No. It was in everything. Everything around them. Always had been there, she thought—only, that day, she had seen it for the first and only time. Like taking the lampshade from the bulb.

She pushes me down with arms, weight, tears, so we’re lying on my floor with the dog skittering around us, and I hold her against me and stroke her hair. Until I cry, too.

Is there something of Kay in me now? Crying because I will miss her? Holding on to say good-bye?

Loving the fact that I love her?

Big West

(
BREN
)

First Friday in October, and after morning workout Bob Lewison passes by with a casual
Hey Bren, gearing up for Big West yet?
reminding me of many things I’d rather not think about. Weekend conferences coming up. Right as the kids are hitting the water. Although, thankfully, our trainer, who doubles as my assistant, can run the workouts I’ve prepared while I’m away. Also, I don’t have to present any papers this time around—just moderate a panel—the prospect holds an ugly, banal immensity for me. It means reading. Thinking. Tying seemingly unrelated things together, in public, in front of an audience, in a neat verbal way that must seem relaxed, casually knowledgeable, off the cuff. In addition to which, this unsought invitation to be panel moderator has upset the apple cart around here, in more ways than one. Grinning, looking hassled and older than he did in August, Bob stops to lean across the threshold.

“Pete’s nose still out of joint?”

“Probably,” I sigh. “What about yours?”

“No complaints. But sit with me on the plane down there, huh? I’ll be editing up to the last minute.”

He hurries away looking insane. I resign myself to mopping up another of his stitched-together presentations—which are never as lame or preverbal as McMullen’s, but are nevertheless marked by impatience and a frustrating lack of clarity. Somewhat manic, Kay would say. Sophomoric attempts to philosophize.

I would have wanted to tell her, then, that there was nothing wrong with attempting to make the sport you loved a metaphor for the rest of your life; that whether the metaphor held up to the test of time, and truth, and life itself, was probably less important than the fact that some struggling human being somewhere found such comparison useful. But she would most likely have responded that I was just too prosaic. And, in a way, she’d have been absolutely right.

“Ho! There’s our lady superstar. Coach of the Year, Bren—you’re bucking for it, aren’t you? Makes us look good. So stay the course.”

Pete tosses a memo in the form of an airplane through my office door. It settles on some pencils and I unfold it: a warning against wasting department-issued stationery.

“Pete—” I begin, but he’s already down the hall. Too embarrassed, too pissed off really, to face me yet. My chairing of this panel—at a professionally weighty conference for which he has not even been asked to submit a paper or presentation proposal—has been a blow to his ego, intended or not, a definitely perceived slight. He may now see me as some kind of open danger. Rival. It’s probably for this reason that the level of competitive stress has risen significantly on the men’s team; he must have them win, to prove his own worth. For this reason, too, he has ripped Mike Canelli off the redshirt list too early.

I consider chasing him down the hall to make an appointment for inevitable confrontation. But the phone light blinks and buzzes. I sit on the edge of the desk, pick up, hear the very young, girlish secretarial voice:

“Someone named Phil Delgado for you, on line one.”

Ah, of course. Delgado, I’ve been expecting you. Though I did not know which one it would be—you, or the mother, or maybe even a sibling, an uncle, a grandparent.

I move slowly, slight smile on my face, as if through an often-rehearsed dream. A major pain-in-the-ass element of coaching—the athlete’s family.

So it begins, I think; with the father. You must always expect it, but at the same time you never really know who will make first contact, or what they’ll all have up their collective sleeve in the end.

I press the blinking button. Brenna Allen speaking, I say. Careful to sound calm and friendly. Then I listen to the pause, and the smooth, husky, vaguely accented rush of baritone words that follows as he introduces himself, says how glad, how very glad he is, to finally get the chance to speak with me. Genial voice. Inviting. Warm, practical, carefully measured words that you immediately yearn to trust.

Used to being a player, I think. Sophisticated. Convincing. Aims for class, competent operations, for respect. Generates money. Proud of his success. Good businessman.

“So. How is our girl doing?”

Conversational. Very good disguise. Unless you listened for it specifically, you would not catch the nervous undertone.

“I think she’s doing very well, Phil. Physically, as I know you know, it has been and will continue to be a long hard road for her—”

“Well of course! Of course.”

“—But, from my paint of view, she’s doing even better than expected. And I can’t say enough about the quality she brings to the program—I’m not just talking about athletic ability, now, I’m talking about character as well.”

“Mmmm. She’s feeling okay? Emotionally, I mean.”

Warning sirens go off in my head, just as I knew they would sooner or later. I remember to stay somewhat amused. To choose good, calm, neutral words carefully.

“Well, Phil, I can tell you that she’s doing well in school. She appears to have made some friends and to be in good health. Never misses practice.”

“Good. Good.” There is a pause, during which I sense the impending pop of exposure, or explosion. I get ready. Usually, it begins with the third question. He breathes deeply and I hear it over the line: painful, sighing. “Listen, there’s something else I need to speak to you about. It’s about this matter of—well, she mentioned something to me during a recent phone call about a diet she’d gone on—”

“Yes.”

“Do you know about this?”

“As a matter of fact, Phil, I do.” I grin, try to sound entirely casual, hope that he will somehow sense it over the phone, and that it will disguise the fishing expedition I must now begin myself. “Do you speak with her often?”

“Um—well, yes. No. What I mean is that I call her a few times each week, but she usually isn’t there, or doesn’t answer. I guess we actually speak once every week or two. But I try to keep in touch.”

“That’s nice. That’s nice that you do. Your family must be very close.”

“I don’t know, Coach Allen—”

“Bren. You can call me Bren.”

“—Okay, Bren. How do you tell if your family is close? All I know these days is that I worry about my child. Because she’s had problems with—around these things, you know, in the past.”

“What things? Keeping in touch with you? Being close?”

“No! No. I mean with
dieting.
Starving herself.”

“Well, I think you can stop worrying about that. This particular diet is something she decided on, in consultation with a professional nutritionist who works with us here. It’s been specifically, individually, scientifically designed for Babe. Basically, it involves a reduction of sugar and low-quality fat intake, and eating enough calories of high-quality proteins and complex carbohydrates, and taking vitamin and mineral supplements every day, to ensure that she’ll stay nutritionally sound during training and competing—”

“But she’s not losing too
much
weight, is she? I mean, I just hope that she’s not starving herself.”

“Well, obviously I don’t sit down with her at every meal to see what her eating habits are. But, from what I do see of her, she looks extremely hearty and strong. This diet—let’s not call it a
diet,
okay? let’s just call it a nutritional regimen—is designed for optimal physical health and strength more than for any particular kind of weight loss. As far as Babe is concerned, though, there’s been some fat loss, some muscle gain. All the good things that come with training.”

“Ah. Just so it’s not too—too extreme.”

“I want you to know, Phil, that extremity is not the name of the game around here.”

For a while, he does not speak. Then, “Oh,” he says wryly, “well, that sounds refreshing.”

Both of us laugh.

I begin to like, but not to trust.

“Tell me, Bren. Do you think she’ll make a complete recovery? I mean, come back all the way?”

“Hard to tell. Probably not.”

“I mean, emotionally.”

Emotionally. Second time he has said that word.

All this talk of feelings, of psychological well-being. And from a successful father, too; interesting. Usually, in my experience, it is the mother who worries about inner life. Either way, though, there is often this split: one parent puts his or her ego and energy into caring about athletic success; the other, into caring about the mind and heart and soul. If both care only about the athletic success, you may have on your hands a powerful and insensitive athlete whose life will one day smack her full in the face with surprises—all the demands of love and grief, for which she will not have the heart; or for which she must, on the spot, immediately begin to develop one. If both parents emphasize the nonphysical, though, you may have an underachiever on your hands, a self-castigator, who falls short of genuine potential; one who will experience a sense of physical regret and competitive frustration for the rest of her life.