seven

ACK CALLED ME EARLY this morning and said to turn on CNN. I asked him what for and he said, "It's your Englishman."

I thanked him and hung up, and after some tense moments of searching for the remote I was looking at a low-quality video of a helicopter surveying rough water somewhere in the South Pacific, with the caption at the bottom of the screen reading, Around-the-World Balloonist Feared Downed. The voice of the reporter spoke about Sir Harold Clarkson-Ickes's control team having made last contact with him some twelve hours before, but said that yet another intense weather system had developed directly in his path and engulfed him. It was hoped that Sir Harold would have emerged from the storm a couple of hours earlier, perhaps blown significantly off course but with his pod intact and communications still functioning. At the moment, though, they had no word and were considering him to be downed some 500 kilometers east of New Zealand. A desperate search-and-rescue mission was in progress, but as yet there had not been any sign of the floatable high-tech carriage or the silvery-skinned balloon.

I watched for another hour or so through a couple news cycles but the story wasn't changing and I decided to take a drive in the Impala. In fact I started to head out to MacArthur so I could get up in the nice weather and feel as though I was doing something for Sir Harold instead of just sitting there like snuff-show sleaze waiting for the gruesome signs of his death. But after I got to the field and took the tonneau cover off Donnie, and removed the cowl plug and pitot tube and wheel chocks, and climbed inside to check the electronics and test the play of the ailerons and rudder, I suddenly felt completely ridiculous, like I was some dopey kid pretending to be a salty air ace, dreamily preparing to set out and look for the poor bedraggled explorer himself (which I'm not sure I would do had Sir Harold splashed down right smack in the middle of the Sound, out of dread of actually spotting the deflated balloon floating forlornly in the water like a tossed condom, but also because I can't bear too much traffic anywhere, and especially up there), all of which seemed too utterly safe and symbolic even for yours truly. And I realized perhaps, perhaps, while taking off my headset, that the crucial difference between me and Sir Harold was not only a few extra zeroes in the bank account or that he possessed a genuine thrill-seeking Type-T personality (whereas mine, as Rita once snidely suggested, was really more Type-D — i.e., Down-filled-Seeking), but rather that one of us would always be peeking about while venturing forth, checking and rechecking for the field, no matter how fair the air. So for the first time ever I buttoned Donnie back up without flying her, and went about idly cruising around the county under the dusky-throated power of 327 cubic inches of prime American displacement, the sound of which can almost make you think you might actually be accomplishing something, if unfortunately these days in a selfish world-ruinous sort of way.

At one point I passed near enough to Ivy Acres to consider (and feel the obligation of) stopping in to check on Pop, but I knew he'd be in the same unsettled mood he's been in since what happened to Bea, and I decided to keep on rolling. Bea, I should report, has made it, but not in a good way. In fact I can say without hesitancy that it couldn't be worse. After I and the staff and then the actual licensed medical personnel took our turns not getting out what was lodged in Bea's throat, she was rushed to the hospital, where the ER doctors finally removed the foreign object from her airway (a diamond-shaped patch of renegade turkey sternum that had somehow slipped through the boneless-breast-roll machines) and got her heart pumping again. Soon thereafter they put her on a ventilator and apparently it was touch and go that night. But she is now, a week later, finally breathing on her own, though it seems that she is no longer saying or thinking or feeling very much, or at least showing any signs of doing so, now or in the near future.

The near future being all Bea — and a lot of the rest of us—

has left.

What's a bit shocking is how thoroughly fine Pop seems to be with the whole thing, or how far he's already moved past it. I drove him over to the hospital and we had a decent enough visit with Bea but the next day before I was to pick him up again he called to tell me he didn't want to go. I said no problem, that I could take him whenever.

"Don't bother yourself," he said, his voice uncharacteristically hoarse, like a smoker's. "I don't want to see her anymore."

"You don't mean that," I said.

"Yeah, I do."

"You're just exhausted by all this. Sounds like you're coming down with something."

"Probably. I don't feel good."

"I'll come over and have someone take a look at you."

"Forget it."

"Let's talk tomorrow," I said. "You'll feel different I bet."

"I don't want to see her anymore, Jerome. I'm not kidding you. It's over between us."

I didn't quite know what to say to that last bit, which made it sound as though he and poor Bea had a falling out, a lovers'

quarrel, rather than the atmosphere-obliterating airburst that it was, and is.

"Okay. Maybe in a few days."

"No way. She's not for me."

"She's not herself right now, Pop. You know?"

"Not herself? Did you take a good look at her, Jerome, with her arms and legs as stiff as pipes? Who else do you think she might be? Esther fucking Williams?"

"I'm sure she'll get physical therapy soon. Maybe when she gets out of the hospital and they bring her back here, to the Transitions ward."

"Hey, buddy boy, I know the whole story. The nurses' aides will have to cut her toenails and fingernails and sponge-bathe her, too, but probably won't do a good job of it, so she'll start to smell bad and they'll resent having to deal with her even more than they do now So they'll treat her worse and worse until the last dignified remnants of the old Bea get so fed up that she won't open her mouth to eat or drink."

"You have to stop thinking like this, Pop."

"I'm not thinking!" he says, loudly enough that his voice distorts through the handset. "I don't have to think. I've got eyes.

And I've seen enough of what happens to the dried-out hides around here to know none of it is pretty. So don't expect me to put on a brave face and make the best of it, because that's all horseshit. I'm not a pretender, Jerome, I think you know that.

I've never run my life that way and I'm not going to do it now.

So listen to me. Bea is gone, gone forever. You can do me a big favor and not mention her anymore. Because if she ever does come back here from the hospital I'm not going to talk to her or visit her or go hold her hand or do anything else like that. She's kaput, okay? Dead and buried. I'm done with it, I'm finished."

"So what are you going to do now?"

"Whatdya mean, what am I going to do? I'm busy as hell. I'm gonna sit here and grow my nose hair. I'm gonna grind down my corns. If I'm lucky I won't slip in the tub and break my ass.

What's this I hear about Theresa maybe being pregnant?"

"Who told you that?"

"Jack. He visits me every week, you know."

"I didn't know that."

"He's no emotional deadbeat."

"She told him?"

"He thought she looked like she was showing at the party.

And now they're getting hitched sooner, right?"

"I guess."

"So what else is there?"

"Not much," I said, though at that moment I surprised myself by nearly asking for his advice, which wouldn't be advice so much as an opinion on what he would do and the blanket idiocy of any other course, probably to the tune of me putting my foot down and telling her that if she didn't jettison the baby and start treatments asap, she and Paul would have to pack up and leave and expect no support from me because I wasn't the kind of guy who would stand by tapping out the inexorable count-down of life while his daughter was ensuring her own doom, or something like that.

So I said, "It's early. She's not due for a while."

"Well, I decided if it's a boy I'd like him to be named Henry.

Or Hank. Tell her that. I don't care if he's got hardly any Battle in him. Jesus. How did our family get so damn Oriental? I guess you started it. Even Jack's kids — you'd think with that Nazi wife of his they wouldn't look like such little coolies."

As usual I didn't say anything to this, because there's no point, no point at all, though in truth I've thought the same basic thing countless times, if in somewhat more palatable terms, merely to muse upon the fact and not at all to judge, though whether that makes it generally acceptable or not I'll never be sure.

"I'll swing by later."

"Don't do anything on my account."

"Come on, Pop. Cut me a break, okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever."

"Tell me you're going to be okay."

"Tell yourself," he growled, and he clicked off before I could say anything else — our customary truncation, which is necessarily fine with me.

But I am bothered, and worried. I'd like to think that part of Pop's swift turn of sentiment is just a self-defense stratagem, or that it's because he doesn't have a long history with Bea, but to be honest I know of course Pop is right, that he has already dug right down to the core of the matter, as he does, alarmingly, most all of the time, for Bea as is — her limbs wooden and immobile, her pupils coal blue and unfixed, completely speechless and soundless save for the feeble high-pitched wheeze she'll make when the nurse shifts her in the bed — is really nothing but precisely unequivocally herself, the same "ain't nobody else" that Pop and I and you and yours will turn into (if even by a senseless accident) and instantly, wholly, embody.

Naturally, by any standard, Bea deserves better from him (and certainly from her daughter and grandchildren, who just departed on a monthlong Maui vacation, according to the Ivy Acres scuttlebutt), not to mention the fact that none of us really knows the full extent of her sentience, what she might be taking in. But at the same time I can't blame Pop for moving on, if that's what he's really doing. What concerns me is that as dis-traught as he was when it happened he's definitely being a bit too dispassionate now. Right now, whether it was for Bea's sake or not, he would normally be railing against our society's urgent program to isolate its old folks in air-conditioned corporate con-centration camps, to expunge all signs of disease and disability from public view, to sanitize not only death but the conspiracy to deny its existence, all his archly negative highfalutin notions that remind me where in fact Theresa comes from. Instead, he is sitting alone in his room with a dismal thump to his shoulders, his toenails hoof-like with neglect, not even bothering to watch the logorrheaists on the Fox News Channel.

In fact, I'd trade this lingering quietude for an angry jag or two of paranoid bombast, just to know he's still there. I'm worried about him as I've never worried about him. Not to mention that he's sounding slightly short of air, emphysemey, which is not like Pop at all, who has always been the free-breathing type, having spent most of his life outdoors in the superfertile waft of suburban gravel and loam. This last little detail had a sneaky effect on me, and when a little while later I called him and he answered again in the same existence-weary tone, I actually hung up on him. I couldn't quite bear to hear it, though I wanted to confirm, too, that he wasn't just doing it for me, the broken-down geezer act.

I almost called him again, given my habit/condition of disbelieving the Real. The fact is, I don't think I've ever seen him seriously sick or injured. Maybe once or twice, when I was a kid, he had a bad enough headache after work that my mother had to prepare a bowl of ice-cold compresses to place over his eyes as he lay down on the living room sofa, and another time at an extended-family picnic when his cousin Gus accused Pop of screwing his second wife (smoldering Aunt Frannie, of the perky sky-searching tits) and attacked him with a bat during the traditional softball game, knocking him out cold for ten scary minutes. Other than that, Pop has been as physically solid as the masonry work he and his brothers used to do at the big North Shore mansions, artisan-perfect brick walls and slate patios and Carrara marble pillars and stairs that will probably last five hundred years as long as there's no asteroid strike or polar ice cap melt or some other civilization-ending event. So perhaps it's also my disbelief. in the Real that leads me to think and hope — and ultimately, truly, believe — that all this cruddy rime will soon slough off and that Bea will rise up from her broccoli dreams to once again give Pop tender dentureless head in the moonlit corners of the dayroom after everyone's been medicated for another passage through this world's turn. And that he himself will remain exactly as is, in his costume armor of crazy old titan, while the universe trembles through and beyond him in its darkly incessant expansion. And yet, voila, non mirabile dictu (as Paul or Theresa will sometimes sigh, I think unironically), the Real insists, it heeds no time or other cosmic dimensionalities, brooks 110 terrestrial dissent, it ignores even the poignant majesty of our noblest human wishes, which are like ground mists to the hot morning sun, lingering as long as they can before being almost instantly transmogrified, dis-patched, forgotten.

Ask Sir Harold how quickly things can fall apart.

Which is why, with no one to call, Theresa and Paul gone out on an errand somewhere, and Jack on the road to present another bid, and feeling distinctly outside of things, I have given in to what is my most accessible trouble and driven over to Muttontown, where I am now, parked outside of Richie Coniglio's brick Georgian-revival mansion. The house is from the 1920s or so, the last time in our history when they really did build it right, with its glossy black shutters and white window trim and tendrils of ivy curling up over the patinaed copper gutters, the muted, multihued slate roof a stolid, stately cap over it all, bespeaking (or bellowing, more like) a hushed rampart of the Establishment. The rest of the neighborhood is of similar scale and order, the houses and properties prixnped and manicured enough but not so much as to seem nouveau, and some aspects of me must look the part, as the private security guard drove past and slowed and then gave me a toadying salute. The gleaming car, no doubt, helped do the trick — it's just the kind of nostalgic set of wheels the salt-and-pepper neighborhood fellows (or a visiting friend) would tool around in on a fine summer Sunday.

I've guessed right, because Rita's yellow Mustang is parked in back by the five-bay carriage house (going back two cars deep), along with another dusty not-so-late-model coupe, which is probably the housekeeper's car, and one of Richie's Ferraris, the other six or seven new and vintage no doubt tucked neatly inside. Richie is somewhat famous in the area as an avid collector (being featured in full-color spreads in local periodicals like Island Lifestyle and Nassau Monthly), and even races'a couple of specially tuned models at rich-guy rallies in California and Italy. Out front, on the semicircular drive, are two BMW sedans and a Range Rover, and it's not hard to figure that the Rabbit is entertaining guests, which in another circumstance and time might have dissuaded me from inviting myself in, but today feels like no big thing at all.

At the door, a portly older black woman dressed not in a uniform but in a dark, severe housedress that might as well be one asks if she can help me.

"I'm a colleague of Rita's," I say, hoping that she'll assume I'm some kind of doctor or hospital administrator. "She asked me to drop by."

The woman nods, tight-lipped, impressive with her high-domestic manner, an utterly neutral bearing that still leaves everything about you in doubt. Her accent is faintly Caribbean.

"Just a moment, sir. Your name, please?"

"Jerome Battle," I say, suddenly liking the way that sounds.

"You will wait in the foyer, please."

"No problem."

She regards me for an extra beat, as if she's telling me with her eyes that every wall hanging and knickknack in the room is now accounted for and catalogued, as are my height and hair and eye color. I fix/flash the ol' sparkle eyes, but no dice. The lady has a robot heart. She pads down the long hall in black orthopedic shoes and slides open a pair of pocket doors, glances at me once more, then disappears, closing the doors behind her.

I'm listening for voices, but I can't hear a thing, not a single thing, as if all the rooms are hermetically sealed off from one another. This is not quite the case in my drafty ranch house, where (when I wasn't living alone) you could hear every footfall on the creaky floorboards, every middle-of-the-night toilet flush and throat-clearing. Luxury means privacy, to people like Richie, even inside your own home. To a somewhat lesser degree it's the same deal at Jack's house, though there the new construction is in fact shamefully light-duty, so that you'd hear everything, too, if the place weren't so huge and many-winged.

Here in the Rabbit's lair, after I glimpse into the parlor on one side of the foyer, and the library on the other, it's instantly obvious that we're talking all custom material, even beyond the ultra-high-end stuff Jack wants to peddle, the kind of prime antique furnishing and ornamentation that you would never be able to put together if you weren't bred in the life, or didn't handsomely pay someone who purported that he or she did, which was clearly Richie's route. I know where he grew up, the Coniglios living in the same nice but not great Atomic Age Italian neighborhood of Queens as we did, in a brick shoebox house on a IA-acre lot, where the single garage door below the living room was barely wide enough to squeeze a fat-ass Buick inside.

Mr. Coniglio, like a lot of the dads, was some kind of mechanic or driver or municipal employee, a policeman or fireman or garbage man, a something-man with his name stitched on his workshirt or number stamped on a badge, a guy who didn't mind hitting you fungoes in the street after his shift in his tank undershirt, and afterward maybe letting the bunch of you split one of his fresh cold beers. Where he grew up, the smells drift-ing out from the houses weren't of sandalwood and myrrh, you were careful not to scuff the then-new Formica and Con-goleum, and high art was a deep-shag wall rug of sailboats or wild horses your mother and aunts had hand-knotted, or else posters of hilly seaside villages in Italy and Sicily, every one of them brittle in the corners and fading too fast. And yet knowing all of the above makes me feel a little more generously inclined toward Richie than I otherwise would, given his station and current intimacy with Rita (which is another detail that speaks well for him, not caring that she's a brown person), because no matter what, you have to hand it to a guy who never peeked or looked down on his way up to the top, who never paused or wondered or else settled too readily into any of life's intermit-tent drafts of friction-free gliding.

After what seems like barely a ten-count (as if she sprinted here on hearing my name), Rita appears in the doorway of the library, where I'm poking through dusty, moldering leather-bound volumes of late-nineteenth-century English maritime law, just the sort of deductible decorative element white-shoe attorneys love to impress visitors (and interlopers) with, having bought out some law library annex. Rita, on the other hand, looks absolutely fresh, phhhd, right out of the can, as she's dressed in tennis whites, a tiny little skirt and sleeveless top, porn-porn peds, and brand-new Reeboks, and my first thought-picture is how the skirt must flip up to reveal the frilly white underbrief against her smooth mocha thighs, and suddenly I'm more than a bit piqued.

"You don't play tennis," I say, sounding maybe too much like Pop, that aggrieved, aggressive combo of knowing nothing and knowing-it-all.

"What are you doing here, Jerry?" she says, not moving any closer. "I swear, you're losing it. You have to leave, right now Please leave now, Jerry."

"But you don't play tennis."

"Will you stop that? Anyway, I've started. I'm taking lessons."

"From Richie?"

"No. The pro at his club. Though Richard is a pretty good teacher. Listen, why do you care?"

"You never told me you were interested in tennis."

"I didn't know I was. I didn't know about a lot of things I might have enjoyed."

"You say that like it was my fault."

Rita shakes her head, her pinned-up hair making her look like a schoolgirl. I swear I would have fallen in love with her, at any age. Think of Jeanne Moreau, who looked good at every age, but with a darker complexion, a sweeter manner. She says,

"Let's leave it alone. And anyway, that's not the issue. The issue is, What are you doing here? I asked you not to come around here, remember?"

"I wanted to talk."

"You could have called me at home. He's having guests today."

"Champagne brunch and tennis."

"That's right."

"You know I'm thrilled that you're not saying e, we.

"This is Richard's house, not mine."

"And when you're married?"

"That's none of your business."

"He has you signing a prenuptial, right?"

"I'm not talking to you."

"I knew it. He's got it all spelled out, I bet. If you divorce or he dies, you don't get the house, or the cars, or the bearer bonds, or the Aspen ski lodge, or the bungalow in Boca. You just get whatever clothes or furs or jewelry he bought you, plus some parting gift, a check to cover six months' expenses."

"That would be a lot more than I got from you."

"Hey, you never asked. And I would have given you anything you wanted. Anything. I would have given you my house. My plane."

"What would I do with your plane, Jerry?"

"I'm just saying. Come on, Rita. Come back home with me.

I'll build you a tennis court in the backyard. There's plenty of room, where the pool was. I'll make it whatever surface you like, concrete, clay. I'll even do grass. It's a bitch to maintain but I can get the special mowers.."

"Will you please stop, Jerry? I just want you to leave, before Richard comes in and you embarrass me. I'm asking you nicely now but I swear if you don't listen to me I'll never talk to you again. Never, never, I swear. Are you hearing me?"

I am hearing her, hearing her good 'n' plenty, as my mother liked to be silly and sometimes say, but that doesn't seem to matter because I'm not moving in the direction she wants—

namely, out the door — and instead I'm still just standing here in this mahogany-paneled purgatory and jabbering what is clear pure reason to me but obviously sheer bankrupt babble to this woman I have loved perhaps wisely but not too well (or maybe not even that). Rita is glaring at me and crossing her arms in the way she does and I've long known, which might appear like plain pissed-offness but is really, if you could touch her, a steady boa-like self-constriction, the kind of anal-retentive stress response that you'd think would never afflict a beautiful fiery Latina; but in fact Rita is neither too fiery nor too much of a Latina, and never was, which is in no small measure why she and yours truly could have any history at all. The last gasp end of said history, I can finally see, has long commenced.

And that is when I tell her, out of body, and amazed with every word, "Theresa's in trouble."

"What trouble?" she says, stepping toward me now. "What are you talking about?"

"She and Paul have seen a doctor."

"They're pregnant? Something's wrong?"

"Yeah."

"What's wrong? Is something wrong with their baby?"

"It's complicated."

"If you're pulling something here, Jerry…."

But right then who pops in but Solicitor Coniglio, in his own shock-white tennis togs, looking tan and trim and not even that gray up top, an upmarket Jack La Lanne.

"I had a suspicion it was you, Jerry," Richie says, shaking my hand, all bluster and smile, like he's the fucking chair of the membership committee. "Have you eaten lunch yet?"

"Nope."

"Come outside, then, Alva's got her special buffet going.

She's an amazing cook, you know. Rita can vouch for her. Her curried lobster salad is stupendous."

glance at Rita; she's been thrown enough off balance, I can see, not to call me out on the kilim. And now I'm sorry that I brought up Theresa at all, because Rita has always loved both the kids, though naturally in different ways, tending to mother Jack and be girlfriendy with Theresa, which was just right for who they were.

But then she says weakly, "He was just going."

"Oh come on, Jerry, that's silly," he says to me, like I'm the one protesting. "You're already here. Besides, my doubles partner just pulled up lame, with a tight hammy. We'll all have a quick bite, and then you can fill in."

He says to Rita, "You know, Jerry used to play a lot."

"Not really," I say. This is mostly true, save for the summer before senior year in high school, when I decided to try something different from the Catskills camp and took care of a three-court tennis club up on the coast of Maine. I played with anyone needing a partner, and I found the game came naturally to me. By the end of the summer I was giving this small college-team player a run for his money, and when the school year started I lettered on the tennis team, at #2 singles, somehow making all-league honorable mention.

Rita's eyes plead no contest, and I plead the Fifth, so Richie ushers us through the kitchen and dining room to the back patio, where his colleagues are sitting around a large wrought-iron table with their drinks, a huge market umbrella shading them from the hot sun. The women are out on the court, playing Canadian doubles. I'm introduced by name only, and everyone tells me theirs, though I forget them instantly, as I'm sure they do mine. The men are attorneys in the firm, one of them younger than Richie and me by at least ten years, the other two quite a bit younger still, this clearly being the senior-partner-hosting-the-underlings sort of gathering, probably so that he can remind them again why they're billing 3000 hours this year and next year and every year after that.

But it's not an altogether typical crew (though probably I'm dead wrong), as the two young lawyers are minorities, black and Asian (their wives or girlfriends are both white, I should note), only the older one being more or less what you'd think, this vaguely Teddy Kennedy — looking fellow with a florid, Irishy face and a gut and obviously pushing fifty and a first by-pass. He's the one who's strained a muscle, no doubt trying to hold up his end competing with Richie against the young-uns, who I'm certain feature assured, classy games groomed at Hotchkiss-Choate-Trinity-Williams. They're of completely different races, of course, but they look to me like they're very much the same, oddly identical in their cool, semi-affable carriage, that self-satisfied apprentice master of the universe demeanor with which they encounter everyone but red-phone Richie, who rates the alpha-wolf treatment of flattened ears and tucked tail and gleeful yelps of respect and gratitude, and not so metaphorically speaking. The Asian associate is a bit more brownnosing than the black one, in that he laughs too heartily at Richie's jokes and observations and talks just like him, too, in tenor and rhythm. The black kid is somewhat careful, superpolite, his tentativeness masking what is probably a world-shaking ambition. Lame Teddy K. over there comports himself with plenty of self-possession, but probably exactly as much as Richie will allow. You can't blame any of them, certainly, because it is, if you'll excuse me, pretty fucking incredible around here, even in my long experience working for the Island gentry. Richie's property stretches magnificently beyond us in this run of lawned space long enough that I could probably land Donnie on it in a pinch, the Har-Tru tennis court tastefully sited to one side and screened by a low boxwood hedge

"fence," so as not to spoil any vista, trees and shrubs and paths like something you'd find in the Tuileries, the stonework weathered to just that seemly state of honorable decline. And then there is icy Alva's kitchen handiwork, an all-white tulip centerpiece accenting a buffet spread that would put any cruise ship's to shame, not just with its curried lobster and other pricey salads but also littlenecks on the half shell and gargantuan deep-fried prawns and fan-sliced tropical fruits and breads and a colorfully arrayed homemade dessert cart that includes my personal favorite, fresh coconut cream pie.

Richie flashes a china plate and asks what I'd like, apparently ready to serve, which I can't help but notice instantly warms his guests toward my surprise presence. It seems, though, to have an opposite effect on Rita, who suddenly excuses herself and heads inside. Richie, meanwhile, piles on the grub, and as I eat (Why not? It's here, and I like the idea of making my own mi-nuscule ding in the ocean liner of his bank account) Richie, most surprising to me, tells his guests the story of how I once saved him from a certain beating by a greaser known as The Stank (from Stankiewicz). He's doing this to show his softer side, I have to guess, though the tale is conveniently set more than forty years in the past and thus is effectively about somebody else.

The Stank was a hulking kid, in that he'd been left back two or three times early on and by eighth grade was pretty much a man-child, with muscled forearms and full mustache and the armor-piercing b.o. of a plumbing contractor. They didn't know it then, but he had one of those rogue bacterial problems that no amount of washing can cure, which it was rumored he did at least two or three times a day, slipping off to the locker room to shower between classes. He wasn't so much mean or a bully as he was volatile — say, grabbing an earth science teacher's throat if he thought a question was meant to embarrass, which may or may not have happened but became part of school lore. I never had any problem with him, even though I was one of the bigger kids in the school, which can often mean in the eyes of the school that we'd have to square off, almost by default, like they do with top prizefighters.

Richie, as he tells it now, made some wiseass comment about the barnyard odor of the lunch selections; The Stank stood a couple kids ahead on the cafeteria line, and being extra-sensitive about his aroma, glared with rage.

"I saw The Stank's face," Richie says, "and to be perfectly honest I hadn't meant to insult him. I wasn't a complete fucking idiot."

His guests chuckle uneasily, throttling back in case this is just underling bait.

"But you guys know how I like to work."

"Balls on the block," the Asian associate croons, tipping his glass toward Richie. "Ass in the fire."

"You got it, Kim-ster," Richie replies, animated. "But I couldn't help myself, something came over me, and I kept talking shit, louder and louder. The Stank is about to explode, but he gets his food and walks off, and I think I'm home free. But when the bell rings he's waiting for me and drags me outside.

I'm saying the Lord's Prayer, because I'm about eighty-five pounds, and The Stank's easily one seventy-five. He's got me literally pinned up against the school building, in a choke hold, my feet kicking. I was just about to black out when Jerry here happens by."

"You kicked The Stank's butt, Mr. Battle?" the other associate asks. I think his name is Kenton.

"No way," I try to reply, through a mouthful of smoked-trout frittata.

"My old friend Jerry here talked some sense to him. I don't remember now. What did you say, Jerry?"

"I think I told him he should probably reconsider, because he really might kill you, and then where would he be? He'd spend the rest of his life at Sing Sing, where they'd let him shower just once a week."

"In fact the same insult," Richie points out.

"I guess he let you go soon after that."

"I guess he did," Richie says, gazing off into his pastures.

"After that, Jerry was my hero. I think I bought you sodas for a week."

"I would say about that."

There's a bit of a lull then, just the soft pocks of the women's ground strokes, and it's clear that the story didn't quite entertain in the way Richie perhaps thought it might, though I can't see how it would, at least from the perspective of impressing his colleagues. But then among a certain class of people, tales of woe and near-ruin have a sneaky kind of honor, these badges of pathos that lend some necessary muck to otherwise wholly splendid, smashing lives. Although Richie and I both left out a few details of the conclusion of that incident — namely, that The Stank (who was not as dumb as people thought) insisted on exacting his own price for Richie's wising-off, such that Richie had to do all his homework for the rest of the year, and also submit to one small physical punishment, both of which, I guess, I brokered. And if you look real close at Richie now you can spot it, how he has the scantest hitch to his gait, this infinitesimal hop to the left foot, where all 175 pounds of The Stank jumped up and landed with his steel shank shitkicker boot, breaking the bones of Richie's foot into an extra dozen little pieces.

"Rat and I'll stomp your fucking head," The Stank said, and Richie, to his credit, just nodded through clenched teeth. I helped him to the nurse's office, where he told her a big rock had fallen on him. She was incredulous, but didn't care enough to pursue it.

The women come back from the tennis court, saying it's getting too hot and humid to play, which it is. We meet and greet.

They're all elite professional types, two lawyers and a portfolio manager, as well as very attractive, though not in the way I prefer, meaning they're a bit too thin and sharply featured, like you might jab yourself if you hugged and kissed them with any real verve. Daisy was slim, but she had a round moon face and was unusually supple of body, and Rita, of course, is a lovely plen-teous armful, legful, everything else, which I'm sure makes a man like me not really yearn to conquer or destroy or run my part of the world, but rather just dwell and loll and hope to float a little, relinquish the burdens.

And I'm wondering how long she'll remain inside, when Richie suggests the men play doubles; but the younger guys balk, saying they're too full with brunch, obviously just wanting to drink more beer, the older fellow still leaning on the table, trying to stretch out his leg, and Richie takes a racquet and hands it to me, practically supplanting my luncheon fork, and tells me I'm up.

"No way. I haven't played in more than twenty years," I tell him, not an untruth, the last time being at a divorced/widowed singles holiday mixer at an indoor tennis bubble, and only because I was bored to death.

"We'll just hit."

"I'm not dressed. Look at my shoes." I show him (and everybody else) my knockoff Top-Siders from Target. I'm wearing long shorts and an old polo shirt with a Battle Brothers logo on the breast, the head of a rake.

"What's your sneaker size?"

"Twelves. There's no way I'd fit into one of yours, what, you're an eight, nine?"

"We've got lots of extra pairs around here. Alva, if you can take a look, please."

"Yes, sir."

"Forget it. Anyway, I just ate."

"So did I."

"I haven't finished."

"Listen, Jerry," Richie says, irked, in his sharp conference table alto, "when are you going to figure out that there's no free lunch around here?"

Suddenly everyone's calling on me to play, except of course for Alva, who has just disappeared inside the house on her errand.

"Okay," I say, looking back to the house for Rita, my only ally, though thinking that perhaps she's been instructed to stay inside by Richie, so that she won't be a good health professional and dissuade this fifty-nine-year-old idiot from killing himself on the court.

We start hitting, or at least Richie does, as I blast his first three balls to me over the fence; after the third, Richie tells me to cut the bullshit. But I'm not playing games; it's my first time with these new titanium racquets, my last weapon being a lac-quered wood model (Jack Kramer Flight) strung with natural gut that you could nicely spin the ball with but had to whip to get any decent pace. This feather-light shiny thing feels like a Ping-Pong paddle in my hand, its head seeming twice as big as it should be — yet another game-improvement technology that makes anyone instantly competent in a sport he should probably never pursue but will anyway, leading to a lifetime of further time/financial investment. But after a couple more moonshots and a few overspins that dive and hit the court on my side of the net, I start to get the old stroke back, my arm feeling like the twenty-year scaffolding around it has been dis-mantled, and soon enough I'm solidly striking my ground strokes, at least those I don't have to range too far for, as my foot-work is shot and probably gone forever. And Ah yes, comes the revelation, I have legs, I have knees. Richie, on the other hand, appears to be playing a narrower court than mine. He's always hitting from the correct body position, knees flexed, shoulder to the target, weight moving forward, and though he doesn't hit for power he consistently places his balls deep, right inside the baseline, and periodically shaves a nasty cut backhand that skids low on the Har-Tru, making me bend that much more than I really can. He's good, for sure, obviously not self-taught, nothing natural about it, but thanks to hundreds of hours with his pro and a home ball machine and traveling tourneys with his club, he's got game.

"Not too shabby, Jerry," Richie calls out. "Not too shabby at all."

I can't really answer because it's taking all my energy to keep the rally going, and although I'm enjoying the action and its rhythms, the breezeless air suddenly seems unbearably humid, like I'm playing inside a dryer vent, and I just stop, letting his approach skip past me unharmed.

"What's the matter?" Richie says, poised at the net.

"I think I'm done."

"Not possible, Jerry," he says, chopping at the top of the white tape with his racquet. He's excited, though hardly breathing. "You gotta keep going. You're just getting into a groove. I think we're nicely matched. I usually play against guys who hit it pretty flat, but you have a lot of topspin on your shots, even your backhand."

"I'm done, Richie. Plus my feet are killing me."

I slip my sockless foot out of the deck shoe, half afraid to look. But it's not horrible, gone the color of watermelon, just that shade (white) skin turns just before the blisters puff out.

"Come on, it's nothing," he tells me, like his play date is being cut short. "Anyway, look, here comes Alva. Rita, too."

I turn around, and indeed the two of them are approaching the court, Alva holding an orange shoebox, Rita sporting an expression of extreme confusion and alarm, as if the sight of me holding a racquet near Richie were tantamount to wielding a machete, as in what is that lunatic Jerry doing now?

Alva flips the box top and hands me a pair of brand-new Nikes. "Twelve on the dot, Mr. Jerry," she says, it seems to me a bit gleefully. "I already laced them up for you. With fresh socks inside."

I say to Richie, "Where did you get these?"

"I told you," Richie says, coming on to my side of the court,

"we keep tennis shoes around, for guests. You can keep them."

"He doesn't need them," Rita breaks in. "Jerry, I'll talk to you later, all right?"

"Hey, now, Rita," Richie says. "He's a big boy."

"JerryI" she says, her voice firm and sharp enough that I reflexively begin handing the sneakers back to Alva.

Richie pushes the pair into my chest and says to Rita, "Hey, sweetheart, be a nice girl and sit down, okay?"

"Jerry was just going…"

"We're having fun here, Ri-ta," he says, more pronouncing her name than speaking it. "We'd like to focus on the business at hand. Please sit down and watch, or else join my friends and have something more to eat. Can I ask you to do that? Is that too much for me to ask? Because if it is, I'm confused. Maybe I'm dumb. But hey, if you insist, I'll do what you want."

Rita doesn't answer, because it's really not too much to ask but of course it is, especially when you ask that way, and I understand now why I never really liked Richie Coniglio too much, why I never really regretted standing by while the The Stank made a tortilla out of his foot, and why, too, maybe the worst kind of bullies are the ones who exert brain power rather than muscle power (as they can badly mistreat anyone they like, women and children, too, and still remain upstanding, for they leave no marks). Guys like Richie get pretty much 98 percent of whatever they want, that's their core talent, what they actually do for a living, the only thing slipping their grasp being that tiny sliver of unalloyed good feeling from friends and acolytes and lovers and other parties who should be celebrating but definitely are not. And maybe in a somewhat related manner, the people near and dear to me have perhaps decided that I'm not altogether different, that if I'm no rainmaker extraordinaire like Richie I'm a fellow who has enjoyed a bit too much calm flying for my (or anybody's) own good, and thus should suffer regular baleful storms of ill will to dash so unbuffeted a route.

There's sense in this, for sure, but I'd say, too, that there's no other mode in this life of ours as sanctified as the one in which you glide to the finish, supine, reclined, as sleepy-eyed as a satyr.

"Let's play, Richie," I say, without pleasure or merriment.

"One set."

"You got it. But what's the stake?"

"Whatever you like."

"Oh God," Rita says, starting back for the house.

"How about our wheels?" Richie says, straightening the strings of his racquet head. "What are you driving these days?"

"Impala convertible, '67."

"Yeah, I'll put up my '92 Testarossa. It's the one there by the garage. Four hundred original miles. It's worth at least eighty."

"Fine with me."

"Sure, but you'll have to do better. The Chevy's worth what, twenty at most? Don't you own a little plane?"

"You don't fly, Richie."

"You watch. I'll learn."

Rita has stopped, her posture and expression disbelieving that this has pretty much come to a pissing contest (though that would be a lot quicker and easier). She's waiting for my answer.

"Okay," I say, the sound of it harmless, not quite believing that this is for real, which is no doubt how chronic gamblers blithely invite utter ruin. Rita turns and immediately heads for the house. I tell everybody to wait a second, and follow her, at a respectful, cool distance, but once inside she goes right into a powder room next to the kitchen.

"Come on, now," I say through the walnut door. "We're just playing a game."

"You two are jerks."

"I still think he's worse than me."

"Just leave me alone, Jerry. Leave me alone."

I keep talking, but she doesn't answer, and soon just keeps flushing the can to drown out my words.

On the way back out I notice on the kitchen desk a laptop computer that's on, and hooked to the Web (the bastard has this same incredible fast line in his house that Jack does back at the shop), so I quickly tap in Sir Harold's address, and there it is, right on the big full-color flat screen, a grainy shot of Sir Harold's deflated silver balloon afloat in the water, signage of the party definitely being over, a skinny brown fisherman corralling it with a long-staffed hook. Another shot is of the damaged pod, its hatch missing, one side of it crushed in like a half-eaten whorl. The text is brief, and is addressed to Our Friends and Supporters: The Magellan Ill pod has been located, Sir Harold Clarkson-Ickes has not yet been found. Our search will continue.

One of the women knocks at the French doors and waves at me to come out. I click off the site and follow her to Richie's Centre Court, where the others are buzzing with talk of the wager.

But as I tie on my new sneakers I picture Sir Harold stiff-limbed and suspended in the dark water of the ocean, his hair streaming out in wildness, his gray-tipped beard fixed forever with its tragic explorer's-length growth, the shoes and socks knocked off his now bare feet, and his eyes, his eyes, gazing out at the terrible immensity of the deep. He surely loved to be alone, but not down there, submerged, caught in the wrong element. I feel suddenly sick to my stomach, and I step over behind the beautifully clipped boxwood and retch all of Alva's fine cold lobster curry. The shrub is tinseled in reds and greens.

My eyes tear with the gagging, of course, but for a few seconds I really let go; I can't remember the last time I bawled like this (not even after Daisy), and it's only when I feel a hand on my shoulder do I suck it up.

"Maybe you ought to take a pass, Mr. Battle." It's Kenton, offering a napkin. "You look real sick."

"Oh, he'll be all right," Richie calls over. "Just game-day nerves. Come on, Jerry, let's get this show on the road."

Richie, being the lawyer, goes over the whole deal: one six-game set, 12-point tie breaker at 6—all, honor system for calls, and (this clause for me) any play-ending injury or other inability to continue resulting in the forfeiture of the match and the keys to his car and my plane, which we've placed in a wineglass on the courtside table, where everyone but Rita is sitting.

Not surprisingly, I start out slow, serving first and promptly losing the game love, dumping three of the points on double faults. Richie easily wins his serve, and in the next game I do better, though still lose, chunking one game-winning volley into the net, and then completely whiffing an easy overhead on an out, for an instant 3–0. No one is saying anything at the side change, least of all Richie, who simply micro-adjusts his wrist-bands and smiles the tidy smile of a man who knows the future.

The fourth game looks bad for me, as Richie is working his big-kicking serves into my body, which I can't do much with save return harmlessly to him at the net, starting a predictable chain reaction of his crisp deep volley and my lame lob and his controlled smash and my desperate, futile get. But after those I sneak a couple skidding line jobs, and at 30—all he double-faults, I don't know how or why, but this squarely irritates him, I can see, because his whole game is not to commit any unforced errors, and on his ensuing serve (a bit flatter and wider) I go for broke and bust a forehand winner down the line. Game, Mr. Battle. I even pump a fist in the air, not just for me but also for Sir Harold, and while I'm mentally feting myself (because it sure feels to me as if I've already won), Richie breaks my serve again in a love game to go up 4–1; and as we change sides it dawns on me with a big fat duh that he's maybe eight lousy points away from taking my Donnie. But rather than inspire me, the circumstance paralyzes, I'm choked with dread, the picture of Richie soaring on high at the controls surveying the contour and line of his own earthly garden and then the rest of us gravity-stricken bipeds literally taking my breath away, and I have to clutch the net post to keep from falling down.

"Somebody give Mr. Battle there a drink," Richie says, already waiting at his baseline. "Nobody's going to croak here today."

Kenton comes and gives me a bottle of spring water, and says, with a hand on my shoulder, "You okay?"

I nod, finishing the bottle in one quick pull. He gives me another, this time advising me to drink it slow. When I look into his eyes I can see how he's seeing me, as a bedraggled pathetic heap, a veritable old man, which maybe I am but I'm not (but maybe I am?), and though Donnie is in jeopardy and I'm losing my ability to perspire, it's this that really shakes me, halts my breath.

Richie says, "What the fuck, Kenton, you nursing him now?"

"Jes bein a good water boy, boss," he says in a thick pick-aninny accent, which gives them all a good laugh, including Richie.

"Well let's move it along, son."

Kenton yessuhs, and I mutter "Thanks, buddy" to him, and as he hands me my racquet in exchange for the empty bottle he says in a voice so low I can hardly hear him, "Play low to the forehand."

I don't acknowledge him, of course, because I can hardly manage anything more than the basics, but when play resumes I think about what he said and begin doing it, hitting short cut shots to Richie's forehand whenever he's well back, which normally wouldn't be recommended against a solid net player like Richie but is strangely effective, as he seems to have some trouble handling a shortish ball on that side, resulting in flabby groundstrokes that are long and out, or, if in, I can hit back hard. Maybe Kenton has played enough with Richie to have learned this tendency, but after yet another short ball that Richie has to scuttle forward for I realize perhaps the reason why: it's his left foot that leads that particular shot, his left foot broken in youth by The Stank. Maybe it plain hurts when he lunges on it, or maybe it's a phantom hurt (which can be just as disturbing, if not more), but the fact of the matter is, it's working for me, not just for cheap and easy points but also because he's at last clearly tiring, no longer trying to run down every ball. So I keep cutting and then pouncing, and somehow winning, and although I'm feeling a little wooden in the legs I'm really zipping my strokes with this newfangled racquet, hitting the ball with a ferocious pace Richie is obviously unaccustomed to, and not at all liking. With my mounting success his colleagues and their s.o.'s have begun to cheer each of his points, even Kenton barking for Richie with feeling (we can all act in a pinch), but it's no matter; eventually the score is 6–5, Richie still in the lead, but I've got him at triple break point and I step forward practically to the service line and Richie implodes, jerking both serves into the bottom half of the net.

"Fuck!" he shouts, tossing down and kicking his racquet, and then turns to his hushed gallery. "You can clap for him, for chrissake. He's goddamn playing well enough."

So they do, and with what I detect is an extra measure of appreciation for my helping to make this something other than your standard boss's brunch, not to mention the fact that they would always gladly pay good money to see Richie suffer a substantial hit to his ego, if not bottom line. But none of it matters, because in my game focus I just now notice that Rita has been watching at courtside, maybe for a whole game or two, her face still sour for this endless intrusion, for my once again (I can anticipate her now) thrusting myself in the center ring of everyone else's business and pleasure.

"Why don't you two call it quits now," Rita says. "You're tied and we've had our fun."

"The fun's not over," Richie says, testing his racquet strings against his heels. I'm sitting on the ground, trying to stretch my legs, which are feeling suddenly hollowed out but calcified, these toppled, petrified trunks. "Come on, Jerry, get up, let's do it."

"Why do you want to do this?" Rita says, to us both. Maybe only I can tell, for she's not yelling or gesticulating and her expression hasn't changed, but she's really very angry now, practically livid. I know because her chin is noticeably quivering, something that happens to most other people when they're on the brink of crying. But she's far from that.

"Don't you see how disgusting this is? You really have to take away each other's toys, don't you? It's vulgar, Richard. And Jerry, let's be honest, you can't afford to lose your plane."

"Hey now…"

"I'm not talking about just money. What would you do without it? What, Jerry? Come on, tell me. What are you going to do?"

It's an excellent question, exactly the kind of query I get all the time from my loved ones, thoroughly rhetorical but also half holding out for some shard of the substantive from yours truly, some blood-tinged nugget of circumspection and probity.

But maybe just not right now, as I'm wondering myself how I'm going to unsticky this wicket I'm on, despite the 6—all tally I've worked, for my legs (are they mine?) feel absolutely inanimate, dumb, these knobby flesh logs that might as well be deli-catessen fodder, glass-encased in the chill.

"I can't get up," I say to Rita. "I can't move."

"Cut the horseshit, Jerry," Richie says. "You've had enough rest. Come on. Your serve starts the tiebreak. Then we serve in twos. First one to seven."

"I really can't, Rita," I say. "I'm not kidding."

Rita quickly approaches, kneels down beside me.

"Are you serious?"

"Everything just froze up."

"Both legs?"

"Yeah. But in different parts."

Rita turns to Richie, who's now coming to inspect. She tells him, "Okay, that's it, Richard. He's all cramped up. He's probably totally dehydrated. Game's over."

"Hey, if that's what he wants."

"That's what's going to happen," Rita says, firm and nurselike.

"I guess I'll start taking flying lessons," Richie says.

"You can't do that," she says. "You can't take his plane because of this."

"I'd rather not, but I will. You were inside when we agreed to the rules."

Rita looks at me as though I've descended to yet another circle of stupid-hell, and I can only, lowly, nod.

She says to him, "Richard. Don't be a jerk. Just call it a tie and Jerry can go home and everybody will be happy."

"Listen, Rita, you're completely missing your own point about toys. That's exactly right. There's no purer pleasure. So would you butt out right now, okay? Jerry and I made an honest wager with clear guidelines, and Jerry himself will tell you that if I were in his shoes, or in my own, to be exact, he would be doing the same thing. Ain't it so, Jerry?"

Of course I don't want to, but I have to nod, because he's absolutely right, even Rita knows it, I'd be righteously slipping that fat Ferrari fob on my mini — Swiss Army knife keychain before even helping his skinny ass up off the deck.

"I can't stand this," Rita says, using my thighs as a support to stand. It hurts, but sort of helps, too. The cool touch of her hands. She doesn't say anything, but just picks up her straw handbag (the one I brought back for her from the Canary Islands, with a heart cross-sewn into the weave) and just walks away, traversing the lawn straight to the carriage house, where she rumbles her banana mobile to life. For the whole time we watch her, neither Richie nor I saying a word, though I wonder if what he wants to say to her is just what I want to say, which isn't at all original, or earthshaking, or even romantic; it's the most basic request, what a guy like me who always has plenty to say but never quite when it counts, wants to say most often: Don't go. And as I mouth it, she whirs her car backward on the driveway and into the street, and then, with a bad transmission jerk, rattles off.

Richie says, "Okay, Jerry, now that that's done, what the fuck are you going to do?"

I can't answer, angry as I am with his that.

"Come on, Battle, get up now Or quit."

And I will tell you that Jerry Battle gets up on his feet then.

And I make my legs work. And I make Richie pay for what we both should have done.

At least in that, I am magnificent.

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