Page 33 of Playworld
“This,” Kepplemen said. Then he gestured toward the entire gym. “Today. You really showed me something out there. You competed. You compete, and you learn where you are. Learn where you are,” he continued, “and you know where you have to go.” He was considering me, contemplating me, with an entirely different level of seriousness. And whereas he often used our losses as an opportunity for consolation, to touch us, now he neither palmed my neck nor pulled my forehead to his. “You won’t forget it.”
I took the back seat in Naomi’s car. She rode shotgun so that Dad could drive. Mom was in the Bentley with Sam, since she hadn’t had the chance at Elliott and Lynn’s anniversary to test it out. I sat low in my seat. The streetlights rose and fell in long arcs, shining along the highway and among the trees, as if keeping time with my heartbeat. The night was black and starless. The car was warm and the seat comfortable. I thought I might fall asleep. My father was talking; Naomi, pretending to listen, occasionally glanced at me between the seats. Unaware that she’d interrupted my father, she said to me, “I thought we’d order some Chinese.” It traversed the distance between us like a question and ignored my father’s monologue, which I appreciated.
“That would be okay,” I said, at once forlorn and dreamy and open to Naomi’s imploring expression. I marked the asphalt’s one-two rhythm thudding against the tires. I was thinking about my match. I was pressing my head into Goldburn’s ribs. I’d taken a moment to laugh and then drove him out of bounds. Seconds I couldn’t get back. My failure to recognize our position. Oh, that arena, where there was nowhere to hide, where all your weaknesses were exposed. I thought:Know where you are on the mat.
Acting never gifted me with such language.
The Shahs had a three-car garage. Sam’s Ferrari, I noted for Oren, was gunmetal gray. The wine Sam served my parents was red; its label’s letters were fashioned of a calligraphy ornate and ancient. My mother, who sat by the fireplace with Sam, said it was the best wine she’d ever had. Tonight, my parents seemed to be playing a game: they were swapping partners to get each other’s attention. Mom hung on Sam’s everyword, sitting in that coiled way of hers, legs crossed, elbow on her knee, her other elbow clasped in her hand, her chin at rest atop her palm. His enthusiasm was nearly uncontrollable as he leaned toward her; he took his eyes off her only to toss a log into the blaze. Naomi was seated between my father and me on the couch. He was making a Very Important Point, but Naomi remained inert and quiet, her hip pressed to mine, and if she was listening to anything it seemed it was the sound of our breathing.
Danny and Jackie made an appearance; Danny and Jackie presented themselves to my mother; Danny and Jackie disappeared. We were sitting in the Shahs’ living room. Ceiling-high windows faced onto their backyard, black but for the water feature outside, a koi pond that reflected the light from the interior. The white sofas were as plush as the leather in Naomi’s Mercedes. Before opening the next bottle of wine, Sam held it away from his body, with his arms fully extended, as if he were farsighted. He handed it to my father, who mimicked the gesture, and spoke the vintage in a French accent so heavy it verged on parody. The Chinese food cartons were arrayed atop the coffee table like tents in an army camp. The smell was heady. I was hungry but could not bring myself to eat; I had a plate in my lap and chopsticks I could not manage. My knee pressed lightly and secretly against Naomi’s. At one point, amid all the hubbub—the record Sam was playing and the music my father commented on and my mother’s crying laugh—during a second or two when I felt most decoupled and disengaged and seemed so disembodied it was as if I were watching myself slump quietly within this bustling scene, Naomi, sensing my need, leaned toward me and, as if we were alone in her car, touched her shoulder to mine and said, “You doing all right?” to which I replied, “Would it be okay if I took a shower?”
I hadn’t bathed, after all, hadn’t tended to the mat burn above my eyes and cheeks, hadn’t rinsed the soreness from my shoulders or the dullness across both my forearms that weakened my grip. To the adults Naomi announced, “Griffin says he wants to bathe,” and after this was barely acknowledged, she got up from the sofa and bid me follow her. The moment we were out of sight she directed me by touching the small of my back. I was certain she might put her arm around me. I followed her up a wide set of stairs. I paused midflight, out of wooziness. I held the banister until the dizziness stopped, and then she joined me and tookmy elbow with the lightest pressure, directing me to the top of the landing and down a long hallway whose light she didn’t bother to turn on. “You must be so beat up,” she said. “A shower will do you good.” We padded through the master bedroom; I could feel how plush the carpet was even through my wrestling shoes. Naomi did not bother to turn on the light here either. “Almost there,” she said. A huge bed faced another set of windows. She snapped on the light in the master bath, and I shut my eyes, wincing from the brightness. She leaned me against the wall as if to acknowledge I was unsteady. She rubbed my shoulders and said, “Don’t fall over.” And after sliding open the shower door, she seated herself on the tub’s edge, reaching behind her to turn on the faucets, mixing the hot and cold and letting the water run over her fingers, until she turned to me and smiled and said, “Just right.” She pulled the diverter. There was a pause in the pressure, the shower began to run, and then she got up and walked past me to the bathroom door, which she closed and locked.
The room was filling with steam. I was taken by the hiss, by the water’s great torrent, and stood facing Naomi, who leaned, now, against the sink, her palms pressed to the countertop, her elbows locked, and one leg extended so that she pressed her foot to the wall between the exit and me. I could appreciate what she was wearing now: the long skirt and high-heeled boots, which made her my height; a silk blouse with a metallic sheen to it. She removed her glasses; the lenses had begun to fog, as had the mirror, which she sat before and reflected her back, which soon reflected nothing. I knew what she was waiting for me to do.
I unzipped the top of my warm-ups and pulled my arms from its sleeves with some effort, with some pain. I bent to unlace my wrestling shoes, toeing off each at the heel. I removed my socks and stepped out of my pants, and then thumbed my singlet’s shoulder straps, pushing it down at the waist along with the elastic band of my jock. By now the room was so fogged that the sink’s mirror was completely clouded in mist, the opaque vapor floating between us and blotting the background. I stood before her, freed from my clothing’s compression that had somehow isolated each pain point’s radiation and, like unpinioned wings, spread across my entire back. Naomi pushed away from the countertop and reached out to embrace me. She ran her hands along my dewyshoulders, down my arms to my wrists, and up again to my scapulae, her fingernails tracing these contours to my lower back, and then she gently palmed my ass. She pressed her cheek to mine. Our skin was softened by the steam, the space between where we touched slick. She remained there and then said, “My boy, my sweet, sweet boy. It was hard to watch you out there tonight.” I pressed my forehead to her shoulder and leaned against her. She gently rocked us side to side. She pressed her mouth to my ear. “It’s terrible not to talk to you sometimes,” she whispered, her words blending with the shower’s hiss. “To be so close, to be right there.” Did she want a reply? I had none. Not that it would have mattered. Before I could answer, before I could summon a response, she let go, disappearing even before she disappeared from the room, a void left in her wake, the steam furled and serpentine and quickly filling the space, as if it had been conjured to finally give me some privacy.
Double Fantasy
Friday night was Taco Night at Tanner’s house.
Mr. Potts cooked the meal. An investment banker at Morgan Stanley, he arrived to the apartment in his suit and overcoat. We saw him appear at the front door, shopping bag in hand, from where we sat watching TV off the kitchen. He placed this on the countertop, disappeared down the hallway to his bedroom, and, absent the tie and jacket when he returned, donned an apron, took his place behind the range—from where he cooked, he had a perfect view of the screen—aimed the remote, and then changed the channel to the news, which I knew not to protest but which Tanner always forgot. “It’s my TV,” said Mr. Potts, “so I get to watch what I want.”
It was day 398 of the Iran hostage crisis.
At the kitchen counter, Mr. Potts began by preparing the stew beef, and while it browned, he chopped the onions, garlic, and peppers; as these sautéed, he opened a beer and took a sip, and he grated a block of cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese. He added canned tomatoes to the pan, poured the remainder of his beer into it, and, while all this simmered, he cooked each tortilla individually in vegetable oil, the hot liquid shining and then foaming at the circumference, out of which he tonged and then flipped them, arraying the finished stack on a bakingsheet where, after popping them into the oven, they took on their final clamshell form.
The Pottses’ Upper East Side apartment was as big as the one we’d lived in before moving back to Lincoln Towers, maybe even bigger, certainly longer, the lengthy hallway running down its center, branching off of which were, in order and to the left, if you walked it as Mr. Potts just had, Tanner’s elder sister Gwyneth’s room, followed by his younger sister Melissa’s room; to the left again, as you made your way back, was the Pottses’ master, Tanner’s bedroom, the dining room, and, once again, the sitting room off the kitchen—this where nearly the majority of our time was spent and a fact that I found ironic, given all the space it enjoyed. This hallway was the apartment’s spine and terminated in a living room, which I’d never once seen anyone sit in, though it was decorated with their most expensive furniture and was the only room with west- and south-facing windows—by far the brightest in the entire place.
By now the chili’s smells had lured Tanner’s sisters from their rooms. Gwyneth, who was a senior at Spence and the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, sat between Tanner and me on the couch, Melissa—an eighth grader—on the rug at our feet. Mrs. Potts had just arrived home, also in her overcoat and business suit (all three of the women were blond). She too reappeared, having lost her jacket, having unbuttoned her collar to reveal a string of pearls. Her contribution to the meal was to make the margaritas, and while she concentrated on squeezing the limes, I stole a glance at her. She was, my father liked to say, “a very handsome woman,” a phrase I tried to decode, something he remarked upon after the annual parents’ nights at Boyd. (A banker like her husband, she called on my father once a year, over the phone, to invest money with her, and he responded to her pitch with several “uh-huhs” as if he were in a rush to be somewhere else. “Sharon,” he said, and his eye twitched, “I’m working with someone else right now, but if I make a change, I’ll be in touch.”) Mrs. Potts, balancing her margarita, joined us on the couch, seating herself to my left, and now, with a Potts woman to either side of me and Melissa at my feet, I was in a sort of heaven.
To Tanner, Mrs. Potts said, “What happened to you?” and gently took his injured hand. He explained he had dislocated his middle finger in practice today; it was buddy-taped to his ring finger and the sizeof a hot dog. “I’m going to splint that,” she said, and, after asking Tanner to hold her margarita, excused herself, upon which Tanner took a sip and then offered me some. She had been a nurse before she became an investment banker. True, she couldn’t keep anything sports-related straight in her head: she called a home run a touchdown, a touchdown a goal. When we watched games and she joyfully screamed these aloud, her family heaped upon her endless derision, but I admired her for having multiple careers. If my mom became a nurse, I figured she and Dad might not fight about money so much.
Tanner took another sip of his mother’s margarita. “How psyched are you we don’t have a wrestling tournament this weekend?” He offered the glass to me again. “No making weight. No Kepplemen. We can just pig out and sleep in.”
“Cheers,” I said, and took my sip.
Soon we were called to the dinner table, which everyone helped set. The Pottses had a custom dining nook off their kitchen. It felt like eating in a restaurant, enclosed and intimate.
“…but preferences,” Mr. Potts was saying to me, “preferences are measurable, quantifiable, and therefore somewhat predictable, at least in terms of market behavior,” and I, who very much enjoyed listening to the ticker of Tanner’s dad’s talk, said that was true, that some people preferredTheBrady BunchtoThe Partridge Family,McDonald’s to Burger King, Marvel to DC Comics, the Osmonds to the Jackson Five. Then I asked for another taco. “Exactly, Griffin,” he said, and passed the platter, “you are absolutely right, and among other things, it is the job of investment bankers to identify the companies that have cornered the market on these preferences or that know the consumer’s preference before he or she even knows what that preference is.” Gwyneth said, “I thought the job of an investment banker was to determine a company’s value,” and Mr. Potts replied, “It is, but I’m trying to make a finer point to Griffin. Why is it,” he continued to me, “that we remember certain slogans?Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane.Or certain taglines.The American Express Card, don’t leave home without it.”
“Sometimes you feel like a nut,”I said, and asked him to pass the guacamole.
“Sometimes you don’t,”said Mr. Potts, and handed me the bowl. “Itsticks in themind. Stickiness is the advertiser’s modus operandi. His holy grail. What’s your dad’s line in that commercial?Treat your dog to Liv-a-Snaps.We don’t even have a dog, but I pass one on the street and I want to blurt it out to its owner.” To which Tanner said, “This is boring,” since he thought any grown-up talk I engaged in was bullshit ass-kissing. “Well then, you’re an idiot,” his father said, “and your friend here clearly has what we call ‘business acumen.’ ” Which, I realized, Oren also had, and also that Tanner wasn’t completely wrong. I was only half interested in the discussion. I felt I owed the man something for eating ten tacos, a fact that Mrs. Pottsclearlydid not approve of (“Clearly,” she said, echoing my father, “someone is growing”) but one that Melissa marveled at and Gwyneth welcomed, if only to prevent a scolding about her refusal to eat. “The onions give me bad breath,” she announced, then directed her gaze at her father, “and I plan on getting kissed tonight.” Gwyneth tried to shock her father whenever possible, but Mr. Potts, usually quick with a retort, merely sipped his drink in response.
With some scorn, Tanner asked Gwyneth, “Going toStudio tonight?” and she replied, “Going to Dorrian’s first.” (We had heard vaguely of both but were yet to visit either.) Melissa invariably launched into a long story that had no clear point—it was something we suffered, Melissa’s tortuously digressive stories, which usually began with “You’ll never believe what happened in math today” but somehow managed to wend through each and every one of her classes before arriving at her stated subject. During which Mrs. Potts often did strange things, like brush something invisible from her chest while balancing her margarita in her free hand or lifting her plate in the air to look beneath it. “Did you lose something?” Tanner asked her. In response to which, Mr. Potts said, “Don’t talk to your mother like that!” and then “For God’s sake, Sharon, listen to your daughter.” In response to which, Mrs. Potts said, “What did you say?” At which point Gwyneth, who had been examining a strand of her long blond hair as if she had a piece of gum stuck in it, caught my eye across the table and said,“Huis clos,”which was the title of a book I’d noticed sitting on her desk as I walked by her room, which I stared into any chance I got.
Gwyneth’s walls were painted an artic blue, and of all her room’s artifacts—a pennant from Yale, where her boyfriend was a freshman(she called him a “frosh”); her golfing trophies and regatta medals; her burbling aquarium, bejeweled with tropical fish—the one I admired most was her collage. Hers was enormous and themed; it used, like so many other girls’ collages I’d seen, magazine ads and images, but instead of a random mash-up or agglomeration of interests, Gwyneth selected and organized her snippets by color, these the various shaded blues of Tiffany boxes, of Jordache jeans and JAG clothing, theReagan for Presidentcampaign poster, theAmerican Gigoloposter (He leaves women feeling more alive than they’ve ever felt before,went Dad’s line in the promo), the Rive Gauche perfume glossy, the blue velvet background of the Crown Royal whiskey ad, and the cover of Billy Joel’sGlass Houses,all of which she cut into rectangular pixels to form a set of waves, from one of which, rising up, was the shark from the cover of Peter Benchley’sJaws,the Club Med Neptune trident, and the blue whale from the Museum of Natural History catalog—a work of art atop which she’d titled in bright, foamy white letters made of cotton balls:If Life Is a Sea of Love, Dive In!If I fashioned my own, what would I include in it? And what would its mantra be? I had ideas, but just the fact that it hadoccurredto Gwyneth to make such a thing was what I most envied. Or that I would never dream of such a clear announcement of self—thatwas what I lacked.
“What are you doing?” Tanner said. And I hurried from Gwyneth’s door to join him in his room.
After dinner, Tanner and I did the usual. To manage our food babies, we took off our shirts, put on the Stones’Emotional Rescue,and then had a push-up contest—first to a hundred wins—followed by multiple sets of curls in front of his mirror. Tanner had two beds in his room. We played wall ball using lacrosse sticks, and whoever failed to make the catch on the rebound had to accept a dead arm. Melissa appeared at our door and said she was headed downstairs to sleep at Buffy Biggs’s house, a classmate who lived on the second floor. Tanner said, “Who cares?” and she left. Mr. Potts, on the way to his bedroom, paused at our door, considered our toplessness, and said, “Kiss-kiss, ladies, nighty night,” because on Saturdays he and Mrs. Potts ran the Central Park loop first thing in the morning and made it a point to go to bed early. He pulled the door closed and then reopened it: “You’re making too much noise,”he said, so we dropped our sticks. As soon as the latch clicked Tanner shot a double-leg takedown on me and we wrestled for the next hour. When we rolled, Tanner would occasionally bury his mouth in my neck when he took my back and growl, “Try to get out of it, cocksucker, you know you fucking like it,” but it only made me madder and I’d Granby out of his hooks and stuff his face in his rug to let him know I was displeased. From the hallway, we heard Gwyneth say, “Bye,” and later, while we both lay on the floor, spent and sweaty and staring at the ceiling, we heard the buzzer ring and hurried to the kitchen to answer it.
It was Sean, the doorman. He was maybe in his thirties. He was a giant with a thick Irish brogue, and in something close to a panic he said, “Pick you boyos up in the service elevator, I need your help right feckin now.”
The door to the rear stairwell and service elevator was off the Pottses’ kitchen, and we waited until Sean rose into view. His doorman’s coat was laughably short at the sleeves. When he pulled open the accordion gate and waved us aboard, it wasn’t clear how we’d fit on the car. “Mr. McAllister’s in a mess on eleven, so no gawking.”
Through the McAllisters’ differently furnished kitchen with the same layout as the Pottses’, down their hallway with different paintings but the same hallway as upstairs, into the master bedroom with floral wallpaper and sconces but the same bedroom, there lay elderly Mrs. McAllister in her bed, in her nightgown, her white hair perfectly coiffed, her back perfectly straight against the headboard, watching us walk by as if we were pedestrians passing her on a street bench. Sean said, “Cavalry’s arrived, Mrs. McAllister, don’t you worry,” and led us into the master bathroom. Bald Mr. McAllister, in broadcloth pajamas, sat stuck between the toilet and the sink, having obviously slipped, a bright pool of piss spread in a circle beneath him. He appeared dejected, disoriented. “Well, lift him up for Chrissakes,” said Sean, filling the doorway, and then watched as Tanner and I lifted Mr. McAllister, his darkened pants making a sucking sound as we raised him up, the small room heady with the puddled stink. We walked him into his bedroom, his arms draped over our shoulders, his cuffs leaving a trail of drippings and wet footprints behind us that marked a path to the bed, whose covers Sean folded back as Tanner and I guided the old man into position (“It’s okay, Mr. McAllister, you gotthis, you’re all right,” Tanner said) and then sat him down. Following this, Tanner made a great show of tucking him in (“There you go, Mr. McAllister, nice and comfy”), and now that Mr. McAllister was safely in place but still soiled, he too sat ramrod straight next to his wife, neither of them speaking, the pair at once wide-eyed and frozen-faced, as if we were burglars plundering their home, their expressions neither embarrassed nor grateful but closer to stunned. “Okay, Mrs. McAllister,” said Sean to her, “we’ve got your fella back where he belongs, we’ll be going now.”