Doubles, p.12
Doubles, page 12
The train was filled with business commuters, all beyond awake, cell phones and the smell of their coffee making the prospect of sleep for me less and less likely. At a stop in New Jersey, a young Mexican woman sat beside me, stuffing a seemingly endless amount of plastic bags full of clothing and food under the seat in front of her. She was emaciated, her teeth were a mess, and her nose bent to the left, but she was young and wearing a dress and was sitting beside me. That’s all it took. Again I thought of Anne, Katie, and Paige.
From one of her plastic bags, the woman withdrew a dark oblong fruit that I couldn’t identify, which she then began to expertly disassemble with her fingers. She noticed me looking and held part of the fruit towards me. I must have looked more depraved than she did. I took the fruit, but the mechanics of peeling the waxy thing were beyond me.
A man in a blue vest and pillbox hat walked into the car from behind us and began asking loudly for tickets. I guess it was because of Homeland Security, but after every few tickets he demanded identification. I’d ridden Amtrak a lot, and they never checked ID before. Customarily I wouldn’t have cared, but today I had purchased my ticket on Combover’s Visa. It was his name on the ticket.
“Buena?” the woman said.
“Oh. Yeah,” I said and began to try to dig my finger into the peel. Juice ran down my forearm as my index finger slid into the pulp. I could feel the Mexican woman’s gaze on me as I struggled with the thing.
“Tickets,” the man said, close behind us.
I tried to peel the rest of the skin off, starting from the hole, and juice poured into my lap. The engineer appeared beside me.
“Tickets.”
I wiped my hands on my pants. I handed him my damp ticket as the woman began to rustle through one of her plastic bags. The engineer glanced at my ticket, then just held it while he waited for the woman. When she finally pulled a folded ticket from a bag, the man said, “ID,” and it was clear he would have asked no matter what she handed him. “ID,” he said louder. “Identification. You got a driver’s license?” He looked down at my ticket, then up at me. “Mr. Como, she got an ID?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think she speaks English. She’s very nice.”
“OK. ID, please. You too.”
I gave him my driver’s license.
“Mr. Smith, this isn’t your ticket.”
“That’s my boss,” I said. “I’m on a business trip, and he bought the ticket for me.”
“You can’t use someone else’s ticket, Mr. Smith.”
“OK. Then what do I do?”
“Come on,” the man said to the woman. “Vamos. Both of you.”
In the amount of time it took my neighbor to retrieve all of her plastic bags this guy could have ID’d every stockbroker in the car, but of course they would have all checked out. He had what he was looking for. As we rustled down the aisle, we were interesting enough to make a dozen sets of stockbroking eyeballs leave their BlackBerrys to stare.
Pill Box walked us to the last seating car, where we sat down again, and the woman went through her whole plastic bag routine a second time. She was looking from side to side like a cow in a pen.
“Look,” I said to her. “This will be OK.”
“Gracias,” she said, beaming with thanks. “Gracias.”
I nodded to her, knowingly. But I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know why I was promising this woman something I couldn’t possibly deliver. I held my cell phone up to Pill Box as he passed and said, “Just call my boss. Let’s just call him. He’ll confirm this.”
The man surprised me when he shrugged and said, “OK.”
I dialed Combover, and he answered like a wheezing mouse.
“It’s about time,” he said.
“I need some help.”
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I need you to tell this guy I’m on a business trip.”
“Why haven’t you been calling me back?”
“I’ve been emailing you. But listen, I need you to help me out.”
“With what?”
“Tell this guy it’s OK that your name’s on my ticket.”
“What ticket?”
“Amtrak.”
“Why’s my name on your ticket?”
“I bought it with your credit card.”
“I never said you could buy tickets.”
“How was I going to get home?”
“You said you had a ride.”
“Only up here.”
Pill Box reached for the phone. I let him take it. Before he could even pace to the end of the car and back, he closed it and shook his head, the plastic rim of his hat pointing from eastern refinery to western refinery.
This was no organized reception, no intricate capture. It was simply a catch and release. At the DC exit, they removed us from the train.
The station in DC was grand. Three-story marble arches vaulted over the low-budget travelers confined to the rails and the businessmen who passed by the throngs of nobodies, the mystery fruit-eating Mexican women and destitute retired doubles tennis players.
The Mexican woman walked away, and I waved, expecting her to turn around and remember that she needed my help, but she didn’t. It was like she had expected this very sequence of events to happen from the moment she’d boarded the train. From one side of a slotted Plexiglas window I said, “I need to buy a ticket with this Visa, but my name needs to be on it.”
The attendant swiped the card. She swiped again.
“You have another card?” she said.
I called Combover again. He answered immediately.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” he said. He sounded tired and resigned.
“What do you mean?”
“Vecsey wrote about you.”
“Where?”
“Tennis.”
“The new issue isn’t even out yet.”
“Online. You can’t spend our money on whatever it is you’re up to, Slow. I want to help you. I do. But I don’t have any money, man. I can’t believe you’ve put me in this position.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“You’re going to have to buy your own ticket home.”
“Look who wrote the article. Vecsey! Who did I say I was with?”
“I’m sorry.”
Anybody else would have just bought their tickets with their own money. But ATP health insurance was dependent upon how much you bought into it. Which meant for me, it was crap. My measly pittance from Combover had left me with less money than I had had when I was eighteen years old. After the last round of medical bills had been paid, I probably had $200 in my bank account. Maybe less.
I searched my phone for Adam Lawler’s phone number. He was one of those classmates from Durham Academy who had been in my life since nap time in kindergarten. Even our dreams had shared the same vicinity for years. Now apart, we stayed in touch like we were never far away. He lived in DC, was in training for the CIA. At least that’s what we all thought. He said it was high-security State Department work, but ever since he started, friend after friend had been called by government security agents, who met them in Starbucks, living rooms, empty conference rooms asking details about Adam’s past. No one had called me, but if they had I could have told them that he was a perfect candidate for the job, that since he was a young boy he had read weapons manuals, had painted his face black and hid in the bushes beside the golf course, and obsessed over Tom Clancy novels and spy movies. He endeavored to reinforce stereotype. He had attended West Point. He had red hair cut into a tight flattop. He loved Guinness. In fact, he loved everything that had alcohol in it. He answered his phone before the first ring had finished sounding.
“Adam Lawler!” he said.
“I need evacuation.”
“Slow?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I just got kicked off the Amtrak.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s awesome.”
He picked me up in a golden Ford Explorer with a disassembled Ping-Pong table in the back.
“You look terrible,” he said as I placed my bag on top of the Ping-Pong table. I explained what had happened with the ticket. I left out the phone call to Combover.
“I’m starving,” I said.
“You want a cigarette?”
“I mean for food.”
“You like empanadas?”
“I guess.”
“When I was in Rio last summer, all we ate was empanadas.”
“Rio?”
“It was a language study.”
He drove tight on the bumper of a taxi, leaving a yard of air between us.
“So there’s this empanada place in my neighborhood,” Adam said as the taxi came to a stop. We cut into a Texaco and drove through the lot at full speed, compressing and releasing the Ford’s shocks in an instant as we crossed the curb. The service bell rang behind us as we rumbled into the road. Adam didn’t ask about my trip.
The restaurant was a fluorescent glass storefront on the corner of a block where the steps of brownstones receded up a hill into darkness. The workers made me wonder what had happened to the Mexican woman with the bags. Adam told me about Rio while I ate a spinach empanada.
“I thought you already spoke Spanish,” I said.
“I do.”
“Then what were you studying?”
“Portuguese. They speak Portuguese there.” Chewing a mouthful of empanada, he looked at me like I was an idiot. In some of the places I played, I never even spoke to a local unless they were working at the hotel or driving us to a court. And even then, I didn’t pay attention. I was usually on my phone, reading a magazine, or zoning out to music. It is important when you travel as much as we did that you do not engage in every new destination, but rather keep your own world constant, insular, and distinct. Adam went on. “And we kept our eye on some of the favela violence a little, too. But that’s mostly narcotics.” He often told me things like this, things that spoke of a wide underworld, unknown and vast. “And there was this girl,” he said, “who looked like Molly Ringwald. Brazilian. Ever notice how Molly Ringwald’s mouth always hangs open?”
I had not. I devoured three spinach empanadas. Adam recommended the chicken. “Spinach is for vegetarians,” he said. I drank two Pacificos. I was thrilled to be out of New York, away from Kaz, removed from anyone who knew about what he had done with my wife.
Adam lived up a dark hill behind the restaurant in a basement apartment of one of the shadowed brownstones. The venetian blinds on the one window facing the street were closed with the authority of having been in that position for months. A three-foot television monopolized the living room, surrounded by mounds of DVDs. An L-shaped leather couch stretched across two walls, the coffee table covered in Wall Street Journals and gun manuals. Above the couch hung two framed prints of West Point. I helped him set up the Ping-Pong table in an extra bedroom furnished with nothing other than one desk lamp sitting on the carpet, its green lampshade tilted upward, revealing the hard, bright edge of a lit lightbulb.
Ping-Pong. Gin. Vodka. Coors Light. A walk for more empanadas. I could barely stay awake. I lost track of how many Ping-Pong games I won in a row. It felt wonderful to dominate. I hit Adam in the forehead with the ball twice. I beat him left-handed. We were pouring sweat. My body felt like it was shutting down. Before I fell asleep on the couch, Adam showed me pictures of the Brazilian. Her mouth was shut. As I drifted off, the monolithic muted television flashed CNN, seeping red in surges through my heavy, closed eyelids.
I awoke wet. I reached into my crotch. The liquid was not urine. The leather beneath me was slippery with it. For a moment I was sure someone had spilled a large amount of water on me, but then I realized how hot I was. It was sweat. In the bathroom I vomited until I was left with nothing, bending over the toilet with thin strings of saliva dangling from my chapped lips. I couldn’t believe I had done this to myself. I changed spots on the couch and wrapped the damp blanket around me. In the extreme air-conditioning, my flesh recoiled from the fabric. Back in the bathroom, I filled the toilet again, this time with frothing diarrhea. I shook, then pulled the trash can in front of me and heaved nothing into it.
I put on dirty dry clothes from my bag and lay on the couch, shaking. I longed to turn off the television but could not find the remote. I passed in and out of sleep. I vomited more. I bled from the application of so much toilet paper. I’d never had a hangover like this. Something was terribly wrong. For one fever-induced hour, I convinced myself that I had contracted malaria from years in my swamp of a neighborhood.
At dawn, Adam passed through in a freshly pressed suit, carrying a newspaper and coffee. Dim sunlight exploded into the room as he opened the door. He closed it behind him without even looking at me. I tried to focus. Pictures of fields of spinach flashed on the television, interspersed with CNN anchormen. I crawled to the television and turned it up at the source.
Wolf Blitzer said, “The hospitalization of dozens of people across the country has been attributed to the tainted spinach.”
I had been poisoned by empanadas. I shook in the bathroom again, showered in a state of rapidly fluctuating temperature. There was nothing that might help. I checked the kitchen. It was filled with beer cans and specialty pastas, olives, and a number of jars of artichoke hearts. I walked outside, down the hill, trying to gauge the amount of time before I would need a toilet. My head was splitting. I found a corner bodega and bought Ritz crackers and Bayer. The discovery made me briefly euphoric.
With daylight I settled into a rhythm of shaking, going to the toilet, and sleeping. I thumbed through the weapons manuals piled in a basket by the edge of the couch. I watched the only movie I could find that wasn’t a James Bond film. Spies Like Us. Adam’s apartment confirmed everything. He was a caricature of himself.
In a moment of desperation I called Combover. On his voice mail I said, “Steve, it’s Slow. I’m in DC. I got spinach poisoning. I gotta get home, man. This was a business trip. It really was.”
It was almost impossible to discuss my sickness with Adam when he returned. “That sucks” and “oh man” was all we could say. We were incapable of investigating empathy. We were schooled only in personal destruction. He said, “I told you you shouldn’t have gotten the spinach. Want to get a drink with me and some friends?”
“Seriously?”
“It’ll be good for you.”
I wanted a doctor. A trainer. I wanted Anne. She would have brought me tea and crackers and made me get into a hot bath or a cold bath. Whichever was appropriate. I didn’t know. I longed for her. I sipped water, which then trickled out of me in various ways. More dry dirty clothes and then The Color of Money.
CNN covered spinach like it was a terrorist attack. Two children died. I wondered if, when I died, they would mention me on CNN. Former tennis player Slow Smith dies due to poison spinach. I doubted it. Another night of diarrhea and shivers. My head hurt so bad that I cried. Again Adam exited healthy with confidence at dawn.
I awoke in the afternoon to knocking on the door and crawled to it with the blanket wrapped around me. I opened it, the sunlight an electrical shock to my brain. Fever had never induced hallucinations before, but for a moment I questioned whether or not what I was seeing was real. I was looking at Kaz. He was clean-shaven, and his hair had been cut into a bristly crop. His fingernails were perfect.
He said, “Combover called me.”
It must have only taken a couple phone calls for Kaz to figure out where I was. He knew who I knew in DC. He stepped inside and sat with his back to the window, a silhouette before the drawn blinds. He had gone heavy on the aftershave. The aroma made my stomach turn. I had eaten nothing but crackers in more than a day. I was drained in every possible way. I let the silence ripen.
“Let me take you home,” he said.
“You serious?”
“I want to apologize.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“What can I do?”
It was a question I couldn’t answer. What I wanted from him was all in the past. I wanted him to not sleep with my wife.
I sighed. “Tell me what happened.”
“Slow.”
“Tell me.”
He didn’t speak for a long time. I felt nauseated for a moment but breathed softly and shallowly until the vomit lowered itself back into the last safe area of my stomach.
“It happened in New York.”
“Last year?”
He nodded. “After charades.”
“Who started it?”
“I’m not going to go into detail, man.”
“You guys do it without a condom?”
He didn’t look up. I could feel the vomit beginning to rise.
“Now this one’s important,” I said. “You do it without a condom? Hey!” He looked up. It was the most energy I had expended in days.
“This isn’t smart, Slow.”
“She kissed you,” I said. “Then you kissed her. Then what, you started groping each other? She put her hands in your pants? She took her clothes off? One of you probably said, ‘What are we doing?’ Or ‘We can’t do this.’ But you did it. Am I right?” I shook my head. “You know what happens when people have sex? You know what the outcome can be? The miracle of life?” I was floating, high on spinach fever. “Yeah. That happened.”
“We didn’t . . .” Kaz said. “OK?” He held up one open hand. “What Anne and I did was wrong. We knew that. She knew that. But I know what’s been going on with you and Katie and Paige. So you’re doing this stuff with Katie and Paige—no, just listen. And in the end, we’re all good people. We are. We’re good and we’re bad. You too. Just wait! We all love each other too much. I’m serious, I think we all love each other so much that we’ve messed everything up. Because I love you, man. And I’m not going to lie to you. We didn’t use a condom. She didn’t want me to.”
