In 1993 or 1994, one or the other, I was walking down an aisle in a diner-style place in Burlington, Vermont, called Pepper's Memphis Barbeque, and that was when I saw Nancy crying. That was when it started. I still live in Burlington but Pepper's is long gone now. Long gone. The volume outlets and the big theme complexes came in one by one and gradually put most of the local concerns in the shade. How could a mom-and-pop rib joint compete against restaurants as limitless as an amusement park?
But like I say, I was walking to my seat at Pepper's, and I was just thirty-two years old in that year, when the city was still ringed with low hills and free-range cows. Vee was thirty, at home thinking up better, slipperier reasons for us to have children. Such as, They're the purest expression of hope and they take care of you when you're old and maybe can't even drive anymore. Such as her most biblical and least prophetic and most oddly moving: Vermont is the last,good place to multiply, Paul. In those days, she schemed for both of us. I had yet to be unfaithful, and she had yet to place my infidelity in the satin-lined jewelry box of her memory, for safekeeping.
I looked up that night and saw this picture on the giant overhead television. With all the chrome in the diner, you got the real sense that it was beaming at you, especially at night. All the coat racks and railings and stools had these little blue and red lightsmears on them, rolling like paint balls. And there was, this night, a picture of a figure skater just absolutely sobbing. She was gorgeous, even with her face wrenched, tears actually streaming in visible streams. Black leotard, ebony hair pulled tight back to her head. Cheekbones that could slice an apple. Suggestive even then of Walt Disney's Snow White, but brought up out of the cryogenic sleep of animation, turned real young woman, buffed out, toned, muscled, ripe and sweet as a mango, sitting and sobbing. In a leotard.
I remember registering the beauty-getting hit with it hard enough to stop the walk to my table so that I just stood behind guys at the counter eating-and still I remember thinking that the woman's nostrils were just slightly larger, and several more degrees to the vertical, than they should have been. It was all pretty much immediate, these impressions. The nostrils just, just, just barely marred everything. You could just about see up inside her face.
She was sobbing because she was at the Olympic Trials for the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway-the trials were here in the United States somewhere though. I don't remember where. Possibly L.A. Wherever, she had been struck on the knee by some guy with a long hard object like a pipe or a foot-and-a-half long blackjack, the kind of thing that would be made by security companies in northern Virginia specifically to smash knees. Broadcasters would later be calling it the same thing, but I can't remember what term they shook hands on. Let's say club. Her left knee was the target, I remember that perfectly. The guy with the club walked up and just hammered her once on that knee and sprinted. When I saw it, about eight or ten minutes later, it was swollen and shot through already with blue dead blood. And the left knee of course was her push-off knee, the one that broke gravity for her.
I saw this knee in very bright light against a tile floor and wall there wherever she was. I was, in effect, four feet from the knee, looking down. She was looking up at me and crying and saying, why me, over and over again. Why me? Later on it came to seem as though she had sobbed it out a million times. This was Nancy. Every once in a while the camera would shift emphasis, and you'd get a good look at the right knee, the unviolated one. An attractive, coltish, fast-looking knee.
I dwell on the knee, I know, but what I'm trying to do is give you a sense of where we were with media at that point. It was the frontier then, people. The public consciousness flashed on weird things. There were no formulae in place. No real system had been implemented. A kid down a well, or some young knee, beached whalesall of a sudden there would be diagrams and translations of the knee or the mammal into other languages and forms. You'd get a schematic of the joint or the well, and if people perked up, if sets went on worldwide, then you got more. It was all about number of sets. It was more organic. It was like a weather front then, very slowly thrashing around and settling according to its own rumbling, blaspheming physics over the landscape.
Sometimes there was just a sprinkling of something, but if the conditions held somehow, the sets and late-breaking facts and possible storylines, all of a sudden you had a full-on squall. Before you knew it you were in it. You were drenched and soaked through with it, eyes, ears, mouth, lungs. But it was also weather you'd asked for, somehow. You got pounded with what you wanted. You got left homeless, it rained so much and so hard and so long with what you'd signaled you wanted.
It was my first look at Nancy. I thought she was quite attractive. None of the first newscasts really showed Tonya. Tonya was not yet an option. Say it's mud season. Vee is the sort of woman who, if she has asked me not to track mud into the house because of a new mint-green oriental rug and I forget, say, will take the muddy Timberland boots, knot the laces together and wrench them tight, walk out into the front yard and launch the boots up onto the peak of our bungalow roof. She is a small woman but has a good arm and a temper like fire in the hole. I am the sort of man who will then leave the boots up there through summer and the next winter, and when the wind finally brings them down into the driveway the following spring, will drive over them and come to find comfort in the small jolt to the truck's carriage. I have the ability to decide to die before changing my mind on random matters.
We're both the kind of people, then, who will eventually laugh hysterically and simultaneously, two and a half years later, coming home from the Cineplex, when the headlights pick out the flattened brown fragments of our idiocy squatting in the drive.
When finally some itinerant black dog carries them away altogether, we go on as before. We have better things to do than wonder about where they went. At the breakfast table one morning-seven days before Nancy's knee pushed its way into the world's eye-Vee cleared her throat and hitched her chair closer to the table. She said, "Paul, I don't want to get into it again, because we both have to go to work, but I've decided I'm going to have a baby. I will give birth next year."
I didn't say anything. She was prophesying. I just listened.
"I really thought about how I feel and I decided that I can give you until the end of the month to decide if you want to be the father. And after that, if you decide you don't want to be the father, I can wait two months for you to decide whether you want to stay married to me and help me raise it." She looked right at me the whole time she said it. It was fundamentally different than boots on roofs. This introduced the idea of no roof at all, no us waiting one another out.
She was sawing into a half of grapefruit, sectioning it. Her preparations for this antidiscussion were implicit in that geometry. It was like an interactive computer game she'd written. If I said one thing, she'd argue around one side of the grapefruit, section after section. The story ended with a child. If I said another, she'd go the other way around, sawing her way through the pink pulp and flesh. The story ended with a child.
Vee was wearing a blue silk kimono her sister had given her for Christmas two years before, and her black hair was brushed and hanging onto the silk at the swell of her breasts, and it was implicit that that was an option too, both of us calling in sick, making love, making a child, whispering soft, binding words to one another. She licked her knife, spread some sugar onto the fruit. "I mean, it's not an ultimatum, Paul. I know it has to sound like that but it isn't at all. It's just what I'm gonna do, for me."
I had a bite of a bagel. The bagel was blameless. I would put that grapefruit down the Insinkerator when all was said and done, shove it into the toothless black mouth of the drain and flip the switch on it.
I said, "Fine. I'll let you know in a month."
Vee paused for a second, and then pushed another piece of the tart fruit into her mouth. "Well, it's November, so. It's just thirty days." She had evidently been working the calendar, figuring trimesters.
"Let's not get into it," I said flatly to her. "I thought that was the rule. We have to go to work. How are we supposed to go through the day?"
"I'm not getting into it," she shot back. "November's thirty days long. I didn't make it up. It's a fact."
"Yeah, well, facts are getting into it. People have different facts."
Continued from page 1.
She closed the kimono more tightly around her throat. So that was no longer an option. "Are you going to eat that grapefruit?" she asked finally.
"No. Never. Not a chance in hell."
"Fine." She reached over and took my half, sugared it, and began spooning its sections up into her mouth. It was the same methodical geometry, even with my half. The story still ended with her having a child.
With her mouth jammed full, she said, "I should start eating more anyway."
It wasn't all cause-and-effect, or logic-driven. I'd never say that. Stuff happened, at that point, unexpected stuff. Sets went on. More stuff came and the story built on a foundation of sex or violence or depravity and towered up over everything and came to matter to people, people here and in Norway and Belarus. And what you had going in your own life sometimes started twining around it like a vine. Pretty soon you couldn't separate them and you couldn't uproot them. Organic says it best. Look at it this way: Orson Welles had people swan-diving out of skyscrapers using just radio. Just radio waves. Just the ear.
It turned out, of course-after Tonya made it onto the Olympic team-that the assailant who'd taken Nancy out of the running had been working in concert with Tonya's own hulking bodyguard. It had been a hit, then, something calculated and for-profit, not some inscrutable crazy. And believe me, sets went on, the billion flowers bloomed. And from them a heavy perfume of vilification went up over the continental United States: Tonya was the dragon girl who had organized it all, who had deployed a small squad of thuggish trailer-park types, as a way of getting a shot at the gold she clearly coveted.
Sure, she was an acknowledged powerhouse on the ice. She was the only woman ever to add a triple axel to her routine-the gift of her thick torso and legs like sycamores-but she had neither the grace nor the technique nor the money nor the discipline to make it onto the U.S. figure skating team with Nancy standing in her way. She was an asthmatic and claimed she needed drugs to even the score. She was an asthmatic and she smoked. A lot. Her mascara looked like it had been applied with a Water Pik.
Around that time I remember a young woman walking into the law office where she and I were both then non-equity partners and, as she took her coat and gloves off, remarking to everyone, unable to contain it anymore, "Isn't Tonya just the skankiest tramp you ever saw in your life?" No one needed a last name; no one needed to have the word skanky defined for them.
At sometime after four o'clock that night, that morning, I dreamt that a man in black clothing had snuck into our bedroom and thrust his head up into my face and then suddenly struck my leg with a long, black-handled piece of metal. He pounded the pad of my thigh, and I tried to move but felt only the warped paralysis of sleep. I tried to scream for reporters, but nothing answered my desire to scream. And then I woke up suddenly to find Vee striking my leg with her small fist.
When she saw my eyes fly open, she pulled her hand back. She was sitting in a naked huddle, outside the covers. She was sobbing, her face was wet, and it glowed green with the half-light of the digital clock on the bedside.
Her eyes were wide, puffy-lidded and tortured. "How can you just sleep?" she hissed at me. "And just-wait around, and let the whole entire day go by and not say anything! All through dinner, the whole meal!"
"About what? What are you talking about? Why are you even up and-"
"You're just going to let the whole month go by and not say one word about the baby, this baby that's coming one way or the other. Aren't you? Aren't you?" She seemed genuinely horrified.
I was fully awake and sitting up by then, comforter pulled around me like bulletproofing. In the dark, the bedroom felt like it was the size of a small closet. "You gave me a month, right Vee? So it's been, like, a week. Come on."
Vee leaned down and hissed at me again. "Nine days, Paul. It's been nine days and you haven't said anything. My God, Paul, what do you think I'm made of? How much do you think you can torture me with silence and-and pretending like it doesn't matter to you that this might wreck everything?"
"Vee, what is the matter with you? You gave me thirty days to think about it and get back to you-"
"Get back to me," she repeated, struggling with emotion. "What am I, a client? A business contact or something? Somebody who's trying to lowball you on a damage negotiation? Jesus, Paul, that's sick. Oh my God."
"Vee, you're not thinking about it from my point of view. You set it all up. You said thirty days. I said fine. I've been thinking about what to do about all of this. And then I wake up and you're punching me. What's normal about that?"
*You know what's normal?" Vee asked, much more quietly, almost inaudibly. She pushed her hair back out of her face. All her anger and energy seemed to have dissipated. "Forget everything else. Forget there's even two sides to the issue. Normal is getting married, committing for life, buying a house, making love, having a child, raising the child, protecting it, and loving each other. And it keeps you from being a lonely, isolated person. And, I mean, everybody does it. Everybody in every country in the world just rolls with it and does it, and has a big family Christmas-or holidays or whatever the hell they have-and kids around the dinner table. And they do it because it's the only way that makes sense. And when we used to talk about it, you used to say you could see yourself with four kids, one of each sex and one to spare of each sex, like a little economy pack. You did, that time in Montpelier with your family."
She started to cry, and I could tell she was cold outside the covers, but watching her body shake I couldn't bring myself to reach for her. It was the grapefruit design all over again. It all smacked of scripting. Her body wanted a child. It was questing blindly for that, using big bad rhythms to try to make it so, and I couldn't bring myself to bring it nearer to me.
"You changed your mind about it, you did," she was saying through her tears, kneading the comforter, almost mumbling. "You did. You changed. I can't believe I was the one to marry someone who says children make him claustrophobic. I can't believe it was me."
"Vee," I said, hands at my side.
She snapped her head up and looked at me as she cried, dim green tears wetting her freckled chest. The damp breasts were an indictment, hanging there. "Why me?"
She asked. The question didn't seem directed to me, necessarily, but to anyone, to the world. "Why me?"
But no one-not the FBI, not the American Figure Skating Association or the Olympic Committee itself-could make the hulking bodyguard or Tonya's leather-jacketed boyfriend admit that she'd known anything about it. Oh, the authorities tried. They threatened the two with hard time, twenty-five years of it, in the deepest Federal hole available. And we tried to help. The whole country leaned on those two, and screw due process. They couldn't move without understanding just how completely we despised them. If they cracked open a fortune cookie, it carried a story about just precisely how much we despised them. We sent messages that producers should go ahead and schedule hour-long programs investigating their families and questioning their sexuality.
But for Central Casting thugs, they had heart. They didn't drop word one on Tonya. And in lieu of that word, the Committee had to let her skate at Lillehammer, either that or face a multi-million-dollar lawsuit by Tonya herself, who by now had some very classy legal help.
And then a couple of things happened. For one, Nancy went ballistic when she heard that Tonya was also going to be in Lillehammer. Nancy was not too attractive when she had her Irish up; it brought a previously unheard nasality to her voice, an odd new whine, and her anger only exacerbated the nostril situation. For another, we started to get some real, deep biography on Tonya. She had never had the skatingfriendly environment, parents in mini-vans carting her to practice and forgoing vacations to hire top-flight coaches. As we had suspected, she'd lied and cheated to get the odd hour here and there at the local hockey rink; we saw the lightless trailer she'd grown up in, and the stepfather who may or may not have had a sick thing for the spangled costumes, the little white skates.
And then there was this live footage of Tonya, who had been holed up inside a friend's apartment ringed with media, sprinting in bare feet to keep her pickup truck from being towed. It had been parked in a No Parking zone, of course. I remember a friend calling me from California and saying that he thought she had heart, whereas Nancy was a spoiled cream puff. He told me in so many words that he had actually had a successful sexual fantasy concerning the bare feet.
Continued from page 2.
I remember I had no trouble believing him. You could feel the world slowing, reversing, balancing on the verge of embracing Tonya.
Those thirty odd days were not all splattered with battery acid. Vee surprised me one afternoon, maybe Day Sixteen, by coming to pick me up at my office for lunch. I was up to my elbows in a sexual harassment case. Our client's supervisor had been sending her videotapes of himself working out on various exercise machines, and I'd spent the morning going through them, looking for particularly salacious freezeframes. I showed Vee the last of these, an over-the-shoulder, come-hither look from the Stairmaster.
"Don't you go changing, big guy," Vee said to the graying man on the screen. When we got out onto the street, she pulled a rose from her overcoat pocket, stem broken off to just a one-thorn nubbin. She removed the last thorn, and then put it in my overcoat pocket. She took my arm. It was the sort of bright, expectant November day that smells of snow but never pays off. People run around town laughing, looking up and dodging through their errands, waiting to be smote. Winter enforces a certain clarity, on those days.
While we were waiting for our sandwiches, Vee suddenly got up and came around and sat on my side of the booth. She had on an oversized white wool sweater, and inside it she looked raven-haired and red-cheeked and young. She shimmied her butt for more room, drumming me further toward the wall.
"Hey," I said, laughing.
"I'm eating over here," she announced.
"I guess so," I said.
"I'm feeling sentimental today. You know, like I do sometimes."
"Me too," I said. And it was true. The harassment case in general and the Stairmaster shot in particular had been turning my stomach. Seeing her reminded me how very glad I was that no one was pressuring her to view them as they exercised, and how glad I was that I wasn't someone who needed to be viewed.
The waiter came back and looked at us. Vee had her arm around my shoulders, and I had my hand across her lap, holding her knee. We looked up at him. "Is someone else going to be joining you?" he asked.
Vee tossed her hair out of her face and fixed him with a cold stare. "Look, just don't bring it up, OK, because"-and at that point we both started giggling, almost too loudly for her to finish-"because we're just trying to have a nice afternoon here, OK, no questions asked."
She turned to me and she had this spritish grin, and she mashed her lipsticked mouth against mine. It was a long kiss, considering, long enough for the young waiter to mumble "whatever" and to back away from our table. It was one of our three best lunches ever.
But by two days later, an ice storm had cleared the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain, and Vee and I were back at it, at it like wolverines. Burlington became a purgatory of ice-webbed trees that collapsed into power lines.
It was in that weather that Vee boarded a TurboProp for her sister's house in North Carolina, leaving a memo message on the answering machine that said, in part, "I'll be back when time's up. I guess I've started feeling loyal to the baby I'll have next year." There was the sound of her clearing her throat. "I feel like someday I'll have to explain why I was sleeping with the Devil's advocate."
The lawyers for the graying twitch on the Stairmaster faxed over an offer several days later, out of the blue. I'd had a courier bring over some color copies of the stills I'd isolated, just to make clear where our focus would be. The twitch's lawyers were not idiots, and they settled immediately for some big dollars. My firm threw a little party that night at a Greek restaurant downtown. But all the congratulations just churned up my desire for something else, something undefined and composed of ghost elements. I knew clearly only that I didn't want to go home to the empty house and the boxed-in feeling I had there. I couldn't face the memo light still blinking on the answering machine.
Frannie O's was a bar out near the airport, the sort that gives the sure-fire impressionalthough no one wears cowboy boots or hats or listens to country music-of a country roadhouse. It was a big place that smelled of beer and resignation and hard luck. Planes droned overhead. I had been there once, on a twelve-bar stint for a friend's stag party. It seemed like the place to go, who can say why. Men there yelled unself-consciously at the television, and women brought their own pool cues and picked lint off the felt with silk-wrapped nails.
Nancy and Tonya were on the television, as they had been at the restaurant party beforehand. Each was now under the gun, timewise: Nancy's knee had to shrink to a medically acceptable size before she would be allowed to skate in Lillehammer, and Tonya was trying to stave off charges of conspiracy that would lead to her being dropped from the U.S. team.
I watched as a doctor, using a model powered by a hydraulic pump, demonstrated how protective fluid had flooded Nancy's knee at the precise moment of impact. Guys at the bar were cracking jokes about Nancy, the pump, and the fluid.
There were four televisions in the place, one hung in each corner, and I turned to glance at the set behind me. Sitting beneath it was a woman with her blond hair pulled back tight, accentuating the smooth, bland expanse of her face. She had on a burgundy Danskin, and her arms and shoulders bulged up beneath it. Her mascara looked like it had been applied with a Water Pik. It was Tonya.
The bartender saw me staring. "Looks a hell of a lot like her, don't she?" he murmured. At that point, he didn't even need the first name; a pronoun served. Tonya was the universal proper noun. Unless otherwise indicated, she was she.
She also saw me looking and looked away, lit a cigarette. I felt the churning again, the shapeless desire. It felt like as soon as I took a breath, someone pumped the air out of my lungs.
I looked back at the scale model on the television screen. But now it showed an attorney, discussing conspiracy law.
"What's she drinking?" I asked the bartender, impulsively.
"Kamikaze," he said, "poured out over ice." He looked over at her again, up to the television, down at my credit card. "How about I mix you up a pitcher?"
When she'd topped her drink off with the cold new pitcher of Kamikazes, she took a sip, then motioned for me to have a seat. I saw guys at the bar glancing over at us. Close up, her makeup seemed heavier, crumbly, which you expected, but her actual skin tone was softer and finer, which you didn't.
"Aren't you going to ask me whether I did it?" she asked suddenly. She smiled when she said it, and you could almost see the little trailer park girl in her face, the girl who'd just wanted to skate because it was fun to skate. "Everybody else has. Go ahead."
"Did what?"
"Had her whacked in the knee. Aren't you curious?"
"Maybe." "Well maybe I did then. Maybe sometimes you gotta jump on an opportunity. How many people win a gold medal? Even get the chance?"
"I don't know," I said. I shifted in my seat; I realized I'd sat down in front of her the way I usually sat in front of the television, hunched forward a little, squinting.
"What's your name?"
"Don't you know?" she asked, again giving the little girl smile, but now shot through with sponsorships and domineering coaches and boyfriends looking for a ride to the world of private parties. "Bet you know if you think real hard. Smart guy like you."
"I don't think so," I said, smiling, shaking my head. "I'd like to know it, though." Come on, I said with my face, I'm interested in the real you, not her.
"Tonya," she said after a long pause. You're not interested in me, her face said back to me. "It's weird. Since it happened, nothing's the same. I don't buy my own drinks anymore. There's a big fuss in stores. A bus goes by and people riding on it point at me and wave, blow me kisses, give me the finger." She looked at me, looked me up and down. "Guys in suits come over to say hello. Guys with nice dimples. Pretty green ties."
"Yeah, I can see how it might be kind of fun. But don't you get tired of people confusing you with her?"
"Her?" she repeated, giving me a mock-quizzical look. She took a long pull at her drink. Then she topped off her glass and reached for mine. "Who's her?"
Her trailer was stuck down in a ravine off the small dirt road that leads to Jericho from Route I5 . It was backed up against a stand of birch and maple, looked like it had been thrown there by the hand of a giant child. There was a tracing of snow here and there. A rickety, undersized swingset stood off to one side of the drive.
I got out of my car, and she got out of her pickup and threw her cigarette uncertainly toward the ground. "This isn't my house," she said to me in a loud voice, walking toward a set of makeshift wooden steps that led to the front door. "I'm just hiding out here from all the media people."
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