Page 22 of Playworld

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“When don’t you like it?”

I shrugged again. “When I can’t keep up. When I don’t want to. When it gets in the way of everything else, like wrestling.”

“And then what do you think?”

“I think,” I said, “that it’s never going to change.”

“Yes,” Naomi said, and sat up. “Exactly.It’snevergoing to change, Griffin. So the question you have to ask yourself is: Can you live with that?”

It was one of those moments when I was struck mute. She cleared my hair from my eyes and smiled. Then she caught sight of her watch.

“Oy,” she said. “Look at me, late for the kids.” She turned to exit the back seat and then paused. She leaned in and bit my lip, gently. “It means a lot to me, just FYI, you being such an open book. Most men I’ve known, they’re the exact opposite.”

—

At the end of October, with the fall athletic season having just come to a close, it was time for Boyd’s sports award assembly. And since Kepplemen was also the varsity cross-country coach, it meant that he had to give a speech summing up the team’s results in front of the entire school, after which he read the names of everyone who’d lettered. He sat onstage, his usually mussed salt-and-pepper hair slick and combed, all dressed up in a suit and tie, except for his wrestling shoes—a signal to those of us on the team that therealseason, the one thatreallymattered, was about to start.

At its conclusion, we were each grabbing our book bags from where we’d slung them beneath the front hall pews. We were off to class even though the bell had not yet rung, and during this dispersal, Kepplemen intercepted me in the front hall and said, “I have something for you.”

He was already walking ahead of me, toward the school’s exit, and nodded for me to follow. I tugged at my bag’s strap, readjusting it, andthen slung it beneath the pew and hurried after him. He was out the front doors now, hanging a right. At the corner, he turned right again, south on Central Park West, briefly disappearing from my sight, turning east a block later, on Ninety-Fifth Street. I knew we were going to his apartment.

Several other wrestlers had been there. It was Cliffnotes who’d described it best: it was like being in a hamper, perhaps because there were clothes strewn everywhere: an odor of still-damp socks and, perhaps because of all the cross-country practices in Central Park, the loam of mud and tang of long-dried dog shit adhered to spikes. The building had several units dedicated to faculty, and Kepplemen’s apartment was on the eighth floor. It was a one-bedroom with a small kitchen and dining alcove, whose outstanding feature was its north-facing view of the low-slung skyline, which I gazed on when we arrived, above which a very light cloud fled, and below, the Boyd Astroturf, on whose gleaming green the lower school kids now played: the boys in their navy-blue uniform shirts and corduroy pants; the girls in their blue-and-green cardigans and skirts, shouting their high calls. I watched their games from the pair of open windows: Nerf football, wiffle ball, tag. Eight stories below and the children sounded so far away and proximate, remote and magically near, I imagined if I’d whispered,Nice catch,the boy who’d just made it might shield his eyes and look up toward where I stood.

Kepplemen nudged my arm with something blunt. It was a rolled-up magazine, which I took and uncoiled:Wrestling USA.I perused its cover: an action photo of one wrestler executing a perfect hip toss. He had hold of his opponent’s head and arm; the latter’s feet were pointed toward the ceiling while the former was also airborne with the throw’s force. Before I could express my appreciation, Kepplemen, already unknotting his tie, said, “A subscription’s been mailed to you.” And when I looked up from the cover again, Kepplemen handed me another package. It was still in its mailing envelope. I tossed the magazine onto his large bed. It was the only thing kempt in the room. Even its blanket had hospital corners. He said, “Open it,” and his expression was strange. It was not exactly expectant; there was an aspect to it of apology, as if the gift’s contents contained incriminating information he’d been ordered to reveal. I tore open thepackage, wanting to get this over with. I was already late for class. Kepplemen removed his blazer and tossed it onto the nearby chairback. It missed and fell into a heap on the floor. I was through the clear plastic now; Kepplemen removed his tie. I pulled a pair of neoprene kneepads from the wrapping; Kepplemen had by now pulled his shirttails from his pants. They were in Boyd’s colors, gold at the knees and blue at the thigh; he was toeing off his shoes. “A starter needs proper equipment,” he said. When I thanked him, he said, “Try them on.” He’d removed his trousers but not his briefs. He was changing into his athletic clothes, I hoped. When I told him I would, he shrugged. “Try them now,” he said, unbuttoning his collar, “in case I have to send them back.”

I did not tell Naomi about this. Nor did I tell anyone how after I’d removed my pants and slid on the kneepads, how after executing, at Kepplemen’s urging, a couple of practice shots to test their fit, after a tap of his knuckle to my chin and a playful slap and then some hand fighting, I found myself holding Kepplemen in a headlock on his bed, staring at the magazine’s cover as he groaned beneath me. I torqued his neck, pressing his arm over his nose so that he labored to breathe. His ankle had hooked mine. His body spooned my hip and thigh, affixed. There followed a feeling of tremendous suction, of all space between us removed. I noticed that both wrestlers in the photo wore red shoes, that these matched their singlets’ color, the Illinois wrestler had anIon his chest, the other anOU.At which point Kepplemen jerked once, twice, violently, against my length, groaning, and then he went rigid. During these several hundred heartbeats we lay tensed, and the only sound, before he went limp, were his teeth chattering.

Later, as I hurried out, Kepplemen said he would see me soon. He was pulling on his sweatpants behind me. I did not turn to face him. The morning’s light from his windows made the hallway seem dimmer when his door closed. At the elevator bank and then on the short walk around the block, I flipped through the magazine. I did not take my eyes off it until I arrived back at school, where I threw it into the garbage before entering Miss Sullens’s class.

“You’re late,” she said.

That afternoon, instead of heading straight home, I tarried. I got off the bus at Eighty-Sixth Street to kill time at West Side Comics. I walkedtwo blocks downtown to Tom’s Pizzeria and bought a slice. I got change and then playedAsteroidsfor a solid hour. I caught the bus again but got off at the stop before mine, walking west on Sixty-Seventh Street, circumventing Juilliard. I spotted Naomi’s car up the block, after I’d safely crossed Amsterdam Avenue. I could neither bear the expectation on Naomi’s face when I took my seat nor her expression of joy. When I returned to the apartment and no one was home, I climbed into my top bunk and reveled in the silence, pretending, with some guilt, that everyone in my family had died and I, unbeknownst to anyone, not even the doorman, lived here all alone, and it made me feel strangely at peace.

But later that week, my discomfort inexplicably banished, I was thrilled to spot her car. I hopped in the passenger seat, and she hugged me, hard. “Where have you got off to?” she asked. “I was getting so worried I almost called your mother.” We raced to the Dead Street, as if we were late for an appointment. She cut the engine and held up her finger; she reached in back and produced a gift-wrapped box, which she placed on my lap. “Open it,” Naomi said.

I lifted the top and peeled aside the tissue paper. It was three neckties in patterns that were Willy Wonka colorful—of lighthouses, of tiny fish, of hundreds of littleH’s.

“Those are Hermès,” she said. “It’s a French brand. Do you like them?” When I said yes, she asked if I would put one on. “Do you know how to tie a Windsor knot?” she asked. When I said I didn’t she put one around her neck and told me to copy her. “I used to tie my father’s,” she said, and pulled down the visor to regard herself, chin up, in its tiny mirror. I did the same. “Sometimes I tie Sam’s,” she said, as if to assure me she loved him. When we were finished, we sat in the back seat together, each with a tie around our neck. “I like the idea of you wearing something I gave you.” When I told her I did too, she said, “But maybe keep those at school.”

Which I did. In my locker. Next to the kneepads.

—

I didn’t see Naomi the next evening. It was the wrap party forThe Nuclear Family’s fourth season, and I had asked my lab partner, Deb Peryton, to go with me.

The party was held at an event space next to the Rockefeller Rink.The oval, recently iced, and shining whitely through the windows, wasn’t open to skaters yet. The gilded statue of Prometheus presided over this. There was a buffet, and, after dinner, a projection screen was set up, and they rolled Tom’s outtake reel and set of pranks, which Deb thought were hilarious, and I thanked God they didn’t include my duping of Andy, since his wife was not only in attendance but sat at the table with us. As a congratulatory gift for a fourth season, I was given a brass Tiffany table clock, as bright as the statue outside, whose face cover swiveled into a stand and was engraved with the NBC peacock. Deb and I didn’t have much to say to each other. It was strange how much easier it was talking to Naomi than to her. Was I unlearning how to talk to girls my own age? I was relieved when Kevin Savage, who was the show’s heartthrob and could tell my date was going poorly, asked her to disco dance. Dad had given me money for cab fare home, and because Deb lived on the Upper East Side, I told the driver—also according to Dad’s advice—to drop her off first.

“I really liked the DJ,” Deb said when we arrived at her building. “And the outtakes of you were funny.” Before she got out, she added, “Thanks for taking me. I’ve never gone out on a school night before.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “this is where I get out.”

Then she leaned forward and kissed me. It was a long kiss, a surprisingly sweet kiss, far less probing, less hungry, than Naomi’s. With the utmost delicacy, she touched her tongue to mine. Her lips tasted like the strawberry lip balm she’d applied when we first got in the cab.

“See you in lab tomorrow,” she said, and then exited.