Doubles (6 page)

After he left I looked down at Anne. The slackness in her face had rendered her a distant relative of herself. Her lips had thinned and tightened around her teeth. Her hair was clumped in grease. Sudden complex topography appeared where bone met bone. Sometimes I was convinced that she could wake up if she wanted. I looked around the room, as if someone might have secretly entered. It was still dark and silent and empty. I poked Anne in the cheek. My finger pressed against the edge of a molar.

“Hey,” I whispered and tapped her on the forehead.

I turned to the door, making sure no one was looking through the small square of wire-hatched glass. It was blank, a glowing box of fluorescence. I turned back to Anne, pinched her left eyelid, and pulled it open. The pale blue eyeball beneath stared ahead at nothing. So many times in the past it had gazed at me through viewfinders, sent me into spasms of nerves and thrill and love. It was her most vital organ. If anything was going to spring to life first, this would be it. It was one of the only parts of her body I had never touched. I placed my index finger on it and pressed. The cool surface gave just lightly under pressure. I stopped in terror and took my finger away. My wife’s blue eye looked back at nothing, motionless and cold and still under my hovering fingertip.

THE DASHBOARD HELD
our knees close to our chests. The dog moved from my lap to a narrow space behind the seats. The highways held so many shared memories. We used to drive this route endlessly, up and back through satellites and challengers. In college too, this was our interstate, an artery through the ACC. Up I-85 to I-95, into Virginia, over bilane stretches, north and southbound separated by a dark stretch of woods. We reached the northernmost Bojangles in America. I couldn’t remember who had ascertained this fact. It might not have even been true, but it was inarguable in our personal geography. We purchased a box of fried chicken with Combover’s Visa.

Manny moved into the left lane and passed a cop.

“They respect you if you do that,” he said, tossing a chicken wing into the widening space between the two cars. An Ennio Morricone score blared out of the tiny speakers.

“What’s up with the whole cowboy thing?” I said.

“How’d you know about my cowboy thing?”

“You’re wearing cowboy boots. There are horns on the front of the car. You’re listening to Ennio Morricone.”

“Slow!”

It was always something. Westerns were his new thing. The great American form. The strength of violence on screen. The epic storylines. “We should have never done away with the duel,” he proclaimed. “Conflict resolution!”

My mind kept drifting back to tennis. In southern Virginia we passed a black man standing alone on a hill at the edge of the interstate, at the far end of a motel parking lot. He was wearing yellow rubber gloves that reached to his elbows, and a rolled white towel was wrapped around his neck. He was just standing there, watching traffic. I thought,
That man would never play tennis. He probably thinks tennis is stupid.
It seemed the ultimate reproach to my previous life. I felt that whatever a black man with large yellow gloves at the edge of an interstate felt was unequivocally true. An endorsement of my retirement. But later Manny switched to talk radio, where a woman carried on about championship rose gardening. She said, “For gardeners, some of them, this is just competitive. For them, it’s just like tennis.” At the word, I started, as if she had mentioned a relative.
Tennis?
I thought.
That’s mine!
I took offense. For me, I thought, tennis was not just competitive. For me, tennis was rose gardening.

North of DC, I filled the Fiat at a truck stop while Manny jogged in place beside the pump. The heels of his cowboy boots clopped in time on the oily asphalt.

“Legs like these,” he said, “are just waiting to clot.”

I swiped Combover’s card.

Inside, Manny filled his arms with VHS Westerns from a discount bin. “Put these on Combover,” he said, letting them tumble onto the counter. “It’s business. These and pump 2. Got pornos? You want any pornos, Slow? Hey? Slow?”

When the Manhattan skyline rose through the New Jersey refinery towers, Manny perked up like he’d never seen it before. He pointed at the jagged, gray mass in the distance and said, “Slow!”

Even the dog turned.

 

Manny parked his Fiat on the west side on the lower level of a pier beside the
Intrepid
, the ancient old warship clanging under the footsteps of children high above.

“Two hundred dollars a month,” he said, pulling into the space. “I need to get another Vanagon and live right
here
.”

He held his hand out towards a Hudson filled with evening sunlight, and I thought he might be onto something. The smell of the water seemed exotic and familiar. The sun was unfiltered by the dense growth of my neighborhood. Here there was less humidity. If any mosquitoes were in the air, there was such a glut of humanity to choose from that they barely noticed my pale flesh. We walked north up Eleventh Avenue, through a throng of foreign tourists waiting to catch the next Circle Line.

We turned right on Fifty-second Street, an undistinguished block of five-story walk-ups all seemingly tilting to one side, antennaed water towers peeking from between ancient, crumbling cornices.

A young woman with fair skin sat on a stoop with a metal mixing bowl propped between her knees. She wore a low-cut shirt that revealed her small, freckled cleavage. Oversize red sunglasses rose as we approached. Manny’s upper lip curled into a sneer. He said, “M’lady.”

The woman smiled and said, “Hello.”

“Yeah,” Manny said, nodding.

“Who is your walking companion?”

She spoke in exact, clipped syllables, each with its own perfect place, delineated by abruptly cut consonants, soft, accent-free vowels. She sounded like a telephone recording come to life.

“It’s my player. My Slow. My best friend.”

“Paige,” she said.

I held up my hand.

“You shy?” she said.

“He’s a wild man,” Manny said, slapping me on my back.

“Are you related?”

“Brothers-in-arms.”

“I’m not shy,” I said.

“You live in the state of North Carolina as well?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Where are you from?”

“New Orleans.”

“Does everybody there talk like that?”

She laughed. “I’m trained in speech,” she said, then waved her hand back and forth as if her answer was only so-so.

“Like ads?” I said. “You look familiar.”

“People say I look like the screen actress Scarlett Johansson.”

“He’s heard all about you,” Manny said. “What you peeling?”

“Quail eggs.”

She held out a miniature egg, and Manny wrapped his giant lips around it. She held one to me. I softly pinched it between my fingers. It reminded me of Anne’s eyeball. It was so delicate, this boiled nascent bird. I didn’t want to chew it. But I put it in my mouth out of courtesy and held it there, rolling it across my tongue. As I did, my eyes met Paige’s. She just kept looking at me. I swallowed it whole. When I finished, Paige smiled softly like we shared a secret.

In my memory, rooms opened upon rooms in Manny’s apartment. There were corners where anything could be found. The walls read the subtle braille of decades of layered paint. Manny had built a trick bar, which swung open to reveal his freakishly long clothes hanging within a hidden chamber. There was even a backyard. I had spent months of my life there, months of my youth. Weeks without tournaments where I would wake late and not move, dreaming about the city outside. Once, walking home to the apartment one afternoon, coming from an Adidas storage space in Midtown, where’d I’d selected boxes of free clothing, I just started to laugh. I had stepped into a dream only to find that its ghostly, ridiculous landscape was real.

All of those times, Katie had been in the apartment, her elegance combining with Manny’s slop to create a chamber of worn Oriental
carpets, dusty photo albums of trips to North Africa, Greece. Pottery. Framed paintings. Large, beautiful books.

When I entered the apartment this time, the space had shrunk.

“Shit hole sweet shit hole,” Manny said.

The living room held a small table, a blue love seat, and two plastic chairs. The walls were bare. The top of a miniature TV was piled with more VHS Westerns. In the corner was a Ouija board, which Manny folded into a box.

“Ain’t she a peach?” he said, putting the Ouija board away. “You open to the spirit world?”

I had forgotten that the backyard was accessible only from the window. I looked out and saw it had been paved. The guest room was filled almost from wall to wall with a single mattress on the floor.

“Where’s Katie living?”

“Who wants to die rich?” Manny said. “Know what I’m saying?”

I did not know.

“But where is she? Where’s she staying?”

“Slow, you always did worry about her. But I’ll get her back. Don’t you worry.” He peered into the guest room and sighed. “This is all yours, until my next client.”

“Client?”

“Client, renter.”

“Subletter?”

“Yeah. I find them on Craigslist. Just had some Columbia guy in here for two weeks, computer programming.”

“For how much?”

“Nothing. Six hundred a week.”

“How much you pay?”

“Eight hundred a month. Rent control.” He watched me do the math. “I’m keeping it real.”

“These guys know?”

“Slow, some of these guys, they’re getting paid like a couple grand a week.”

“Where’s the Columbia guy?”

“He . . .” Manny shook his head. “He was great. Loved that guy,
loved
him. It was just, he just had this one problem. I mean, you tell me, Slow. Tell me. What’s the one thing every apartment in New York has?”

“Roaches?”

“No. Ah, Slow, that’s a good one, though. I mean this guy was from Kansas originally. They got, what, tornadoes like daily out there? Well, this motherfucker. I come home one day and he is standing on a chair.
Seriously
.”

“For what? Mice?”

“Well he says they were rats, but come on. I mean even if they are, I want them here. I mean, if you’re a rat, you got as much right to live in this city as I do.”

“So he left?”

“No, he asked me to do something about them. Said he found one in his bed.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Manny said. He fished a frozen sausage out of the freezer. “He finally just lost it.”

“So what’d you do?”

He held the sausage under hot water from the tap.

“Are you serious? About rats?” he said, shaking off the sausage. Then he yelled, “Rats! You hear me? I know you belong. We’re all fucking rats!”

He set his food on the miniature table in the living room, then pressed play on a video camera wired to the television. He always had that camera with him, shooting workouts and matches, analyzing groundstrokes. He settled back into the love seat. I stood in the doorway and watched, expecting tennis. Instead, a grainy black-and-white
video began to play of a naked man leaning over a naked woman, kissing her stomach. A huge grin spread across Manny’s face.

“The hell is this?” I said.

“Ain’t no shame in this.”

I leaned in. “Who is that?”

He smiled wider.

On screen, Manny now stood up and said, “You want red or white?”

The woman said, “I don’t care.”

He laughed on screen. He laughed in the room. I squinted, the woman just thighs and stomach. Then she sat up. It was Katie. She looked anatomical. A body captured. Manny climbed on top of her. I watched between fingers. I thought of my own life in contrast and felt like I was a hundred years old. On screen Manny moaned like a bad actor. Katie moaned back. He turned up the volume and whispered, “Listen. Listen. I write good material.”

Video Manny said, “You like that?” and Video Katie said, “Yeah.” He said, “You like it when I do monkey-style?” She said, “Oh yeah.”

“The hell are you saying?” I said.

“I don’t know.” He turned it up. “I write good material.”

“She know you were taping?”

“No. Shhhh.”

Video Katie said, “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.” Her legs kicked the air, then her feet settled on either side of Manny’s face.

He looked at me and nodded. “But she knew.”

Video Katie said, “What did you do to them?”

“I did this,” Video Manny said.

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘You like it monkey-style?’”

“Say it.”

“You like it monkey-style?”

“Yeah.”

He barked like an ape. “Oh oh ah ah ah! You like that. You like the monkey-style?”

“Yeah!”

I said, “Why do you keep saying that?”

“I just made it up! Watch. She wants me to choke her.”

She reached up and began to choke him.

“She’s choking
you
,” I said.

“I should have gone into porn, Slow.”

“I don’t think it’s that hard to get into.”

“No, it is,” he laughed, breathlessly. “There was this one post on Craigslist . . .”

But he trailed off to watch himself flip Katie over. She finally said, “Now choke me.”

“There it is,” he said, pointing at the screen and nodding.

Manny fast-forwarded until the woman who had just fed me a quail egg was standing before us, naked on the television, flossing her teeth. The view was partially blocked by cloth, clearly a camouflage, of which Paige was oblivious. She was thin in places that I thought she would be full, round in others, a revelation from what I had encountered on the street.

“
Konichiwa
, bitches,” Manny said. I turned to him in shock. He held his cell phone onto the side of his face as the video played on. He raised his eyebrows and pointed at the phone, as if it were of great secret importance. I knew who it was. “Kaz, no. Listen,” he said. “Listen. You need to meet me at the
secret place
. OK. You don’t? OK. I’ll tell you where it is.”