Page 34 of Playworld
After Sean dropped us off on our floor and thanked us and then ashamedly slammed the gate, Tanner and I stood in his kitchen, staring at nothing in the quiet apartment.
Tanner perked up. “A good deed like that calls for a drink,” he said, and from the cabinet he produced a bottle of rum and a pair of shot glasses, the pair of which he filled to the brim. “Through the lips and past the gums, watch out stomach, here it comes.”
We drank.
“Time for bed,” Tanner announced.
He killed the lights and was soon out cold. He slept on his stomach, hugging the pillow to his smushed face and occasionally mumbling puckered nonsense. As I lay awake, I could not shake the thought of Naomi and me, standing in her bathroom together. Of her nails slowly sliding down my back. From my briefs’ waistband, my cock emerged, hard as a policeman’s baton, and to banish the thought of her, I imagined Gwyneth and me, doing the Hustle at Studio 54, which I pictured as the dance floor inSaturday Night Fever.“You sorta look like John Travolta,” Gwyneth said, but in Naomi’s voice, since she often whispered this to me. Was there not some way to make the perfect girl? I wondered. She’d kiss like Deb Peryton, have Gwyneth’s face, but be easy to talk to, like Naomi. Did such a person already exist, and if we met, would I recognize her? If I recognized her, and we started dating, I was certain I’d be happy. Without meaning to, I next replayed the scene at the McAllisters’ apartment. Of the couple’s expectant muteness as they watched us march in and out of their bedroom. Were they lying there now, I wondered, just as we’d left them? Was there really no one else they could call for help? I had no answers to these questions and found myself weeping a bit, butmy erection had receded, thank God, and before I drifted off to sleep, I was strangely certain of this: for as long as I lived, I would neither forget those two poor people nor their sad tableau.
Morning, and I was up with the sun. I heard Mr. and Mrs. Potts pad down the hallway and out the door, off on their jog. Tanner’s clock radio read 6:57, and I forced myself back to sleep.
I woke again at 7:43, hoping I’d overslept, but it was useless. I had no excuse to miss my appointment. I got up and went to get some breakfast.
I found Gwyneth in the dining nook. She was wearing a black cocktail dress and her mascara was smeared—from sweat or tears, it wasn’t clear, though she seemed upbeat, in spite of the hour. She smelled of cigarette smoke and limes. She was reading the financial section of theNew York Times,the Saturday listings of all the stock prices, several of which she’d underlined with a pen, writing out their arcane abbreviations and symbols on a small notepad. On the table was also a plate with a half-eaten taco and a stubbed-out Marlboro Light, the pack with a Studio 54 matchbook atop it by her side as well. She had cracked the window in front of the sink; its breeze was cold. She blew her nose into a napkin that was lightly dotted with blood. “You’re up early,” she said, and returned to scanning the broadsheet.
I helped myself to a bowl of graham crackers and then poured whole milk over it—a Tanner Potts specialty. I ate, staring at Gwyneth intently. Her concentration was total; occasionally, she sniffled. After a few more minutes of reading, she took her plate to the window, raised farther the sash, and smoked one more cigarette. The view was an east-facing alley, a back-of-the-building, streetless one, and into this void she ashed. Afterward, she scraped her plate into the trash, then rinsed it under the faucet and placed it on the dish rack.
“Good night,” she said, and excused herself to her room.
The clock above the rear entrance read 8:26.
If I didn’t leave now, I’d be late.
At Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Third Street I looked downtown and then dejectedly headed north. I entered Central Park just above the Seventy-Ninth Street transverse, past the Met, the Temple of Dendur visible through its wall of glass and silent in the morning light. I merged onto the bridle path running alongside the reservoir. A beautiful womanon horseback cantered past me, prettier even than Gwyneth. It was gray and windy, the air damp and promising either rain or sun, it was not yet clear. Exiting the park, I rode uptown again, on Central Park West, to school.
When I entered the building, there was Coach Kepplemen, waiting for me on the pews.
He had been sitting as he had at the sports award assembly, his ankle, which he held in his hand, at rest atop his knee and his foot flapping. At the sight of me he smiled with unguarded fondness, an expression that, I realize now, signaled a surprised happiness, a relief or amazement that I had showed up—that any of us did—in the first place, which elicited, of all things, sympathy from me. Then he got up without further acknowledgment and walked the long hallway, ahead of me, as always, toward the wrestling gym, his preferred place for us to practice on Saturdays—though on these weekends he never turned on the room’s overhead lights, choosing also to roll on the practice mats, which lay against the same wall as the double doors, so that we were hidden from view. Even if you’d gotten on your toes to peek through one of the small porthole windows, you couldn’t have seen us. He was already dressed for our session, in wrestling shoes and a T-shirt, but also, I noticed, wearing shorts. Ihatedwhen Kepplemen wore shorts; he had neither a jockstrap nor underwear beneath these, ever. When we drilled, I could feel everything. And even though it was only the beginning of December, with three full months left in the season, I suffered the tiniest itch for wrestling to be over.
Later, at home, Dad still hadn’t put away the challah French toast and Canadian bacon. I wasn’t hungry but upon arrival ate a second breakfast, which Dad insisted on reheating, even the syrup. I had seconds ofthattoo. I didn’t understand why I did this to myself. It would make cutting weight this week hellish. The sweat from my workout was overlaid with the sweat from my ride home, and my wind-dried neck was salty with the perspiration and the smell of Kepplemen’s cologne. Dad and Mom were seated on the couch, dividing theNew York Timesbetween them, their faces hidden behind Arts & Leisure and theBook Review.I’d taken the seat facing the window and was staring at the sky…
Dad said, “Your mother asked you a question.”
I turned to him and then Mom, confused.
“I said,” Mom said, “what are you up to tonight?”
“There’s a party,” I told her. “But I’m eating at Cliff’s first.”
—
It was a rare treat to be invited to Cliff’s home for dinner, but especially tonight, which was the fifth evening of Hanukkah. The Bauers’ menorah sat atop a chest in their living/dining area, and it was Cliff’s night to light the candle and recite the blessings. We had stuffed breast of veal for dinner with ratatouille and latkes that Mr. Bauer had cooked. Mrs. Bauer did all the driving, the exact opposite from our family, but he didallthe cooking, usually even the desserts—though tonight, instead of his usual cheesecake, he’d brought home a mess of chocolate and cherry rugelach. I ate so many I was like a goldfish. I could barely concentrate on the dreidel and had to lie down on the couch. We soon moved to Scrabble, which was an exercise in humiliation at Cliff’s house. Shira, his sister, a senior and a dark-haired version of Gwyneth, was the only one of us who could keep up with Mrs. Bauer, an editor at theNew York Times,at least until the inevitable inflection point when Cliff’s mom considered the clotted board and her letters and in her gentle, singsong voice—it was the only time I ever caught her acting—said, “Oh, look what I have,” and with a single tile plopped onDouble Letter Scoreactivated so many branches of words it reminded me of lighting a Christmas tree.
The Bauers lived on Eighty-Seventh between Columbus and Central Park West, and though it lacked the grandeur our former apartment possessed, I recognized in Cliff’s home some of the same rot and charm: exposed steam pipes in the bathroom dusted with soot, and the parquet floors that popped when you walked across them. Like Tanner’s place, the kitchen and dining room windows faced west, onto one of the city’s streetless spaces, where all the block’s buildings stood bunched together and, in their varying heights, formed a set of rising and falling tar-topped roofs. These were populated with prickly television aerials and rotating air vents, with water towers and the steepled glass that crowned elevator shafts—it was easy to forget that a building is a machine. I often imagined that if I could find the right door or hop from the right window, I could walk the entirety of Manhattan by this staircase, or at least travel between my friends’ apartments unseen and, like some urban superhero,permanently live the fleeting feeling of freedom I now enjoyed, deep, as I was, into the weekend.
“We were in Bayonne,” Mr. Bauer was saying, now that the game had concluded, although we had still not put away the board, “in an internment camp the SS had set up there. I was ten, I think—”
“You were in Luxembourg for three years after fleeing Hamburg, so you were twelve,” said Mrs. Bauer.
“And I see an SS officer berating this decrepit old Orthodox Jew. He is accusing him of stealing food. We were all starving, so I say to him, ‘Leave the poor guy alone, can’t you see he has nothing?’ And the officer bends down to me and says, ‘And you are?’ I say my name, and he goes, ‘And what do you do, Alex Bauer?’ And I say, ‘I’m a Lebenskünstler.’ And he says, ‘What is a Lebenskünstler?’ And I say, ‘Maybe someday I will tell you.’ And he says, ‘Maybe you will, and maybe you won’t.’ And he kicks me in the head, here.”
Mr. Bauer lifted his eyelid to reveal the jagged scar.
“Flash-forward,” he continues, “it is March 1945, we are about to cross the Rhine…”
Cliff kneed me under the table to say,This is the best part.
“I’m on patrol with my friend Mark. We’re in the forest, just outside Cologne, and we realize we’ve wandered behind enemy lines. And as we’re trying to make it back to our side, who do we capture? The very same German officer from Bayonne. We tie him to a tree. I say to him, ‘You gave me this scar when I was a boy. You put your boot in my face, do you remember that?’ He says, ‘I do’—which I thought was brave. I say to him, ‘Did you ever learn what a Lebenskünstler is?’ He doesn’t remember that part. He says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘A Lebenskünstler,’ I explain, ‘is a life artist. You have to be a life artist to survive in this world.’ And he says, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And I say, ‘Because you arenota life artist.’ ”