Who Do You Love (30 page)

Maybe I couldn't have been his girlfriend, but I could have been a friend. Someone who'd known him a long time, who knew who he was and how he'd gotten that way.

The day that the
SI
story had come out, I'd been unpacking boxes at the brownstone that Jay and I had closed on the week before. Nana was in the kitchen, hand-washing the dishes that I'd already run through the machine, and my mom was upstairs, having a breakdown on the phone with the owner of the boutique that had sold me my gown, who was now saying that the alterations might not be finished in time for the blessed event. In the midst of all that, I got a call from the fact-checker for the
Times,
who needed to confirm details of our wedding announcement—where we'd gone to school, whether I was “a daughter” or “the daughter” of Bernard and Helen Blum of Clearview, Florida.

With the phone tucked under my chin, telling the guy that indeed, I had graduated cum laude from Beaumont, I had run down to the mailbox to see if any last-minute RSVPs had arrived, wondering what my mother would do if we needed to change the seating arrangement again. The mailman had left us three bills and Jay's copy of
Sports Illustrated,
with Andy Landis on the cover. It wasn't an action shot or a picture from the Olympics, but a portrait, a tight shot of just his face, his expressive brown eyes and thick, dark brows, the full lips that I'd kissed a thousand times, his teeth just peeking out in a hint of a smile. He looked tentative and guarded and tender underneath, the way he'd look when we'd been talking in bed and he'd finally loosened up enough to use his hands or smile when he got to the funny parts. I wondered who'd taken the picture, and what the photographer had said to Andy to get him to look like that.

“Ma'am?” The fact-checker wanted to know how I spelled my middle name. “Sorry,” I said, and spelled out Nicole, and gave him Amy's phone number so he could confirm her role in our how-we'd-met tale. I still needed to check in with the florist and ask if the caterer had vegan meals for my soon-to-be sister-in-law, Robin, and pick up my birth control pills from the pharmacy, but I decided that all of it could wait. I carried the magazine to the park at the end of our block, sat down on a bench in the sun, and started reading.

Running Down a Dream,
read the headline, and the first page of the story was a photograph of Andy winning his Olympic race, eyes shut, fists lifted, mouth open, in the instant he crossed the finish line.
How Andy Landis Outraced a Rough Start to Win Olympic Gold.
The piece had gone over everything I'd known about Andy—his life with Lori, the fights he'd gotten into, and how his mother had told him to channel his rage into running. I read about his paper route, his friend, Mr. Sills, his high school career, and the records he'd set. I skimmed, holding my breath, until I got to the new stuff.

Andrew Landis Senior was an athlete, too. A standout basketball player, good-looking, graceful, and fast, with a killer three-point shot, Landis Senior wasn't quite talented enough to attract the attention of college scouts, or strong enough to resist the lure of the streets. Arrested for the first time at seventeen for selling marijuana on a corner of his Philadelphia neighborhood, Landis got in trouble for everything from petty theft and larceny to bar brawls and grand theft auto. When a judge let him choose between jail and the army, Landis enlisted and was posted to Germany. When he came home on a furlough, trouble found him again. Landis was arrested as an accessory to murder after a friend, DeVaughn Sills, shot a twenty-
one-year
-old former high school classmate and alleged rival drug dealer to death. Landis Senior, who'd been driving the car, was caught trying to dispose of the gun.

DeVaughn Sills. Was that Mr. Sills's son?
Had to be,
I thought. How had Andy felt about that? I read the rest of it, wincing, sometimes gasping in sympathy. The reporter had found
Andy's
father living in an SRO in Philadelphia.
Landis Senior had watched his son's success from afar, seeing him win his gold medal on a twelve-inch screen in his room. He had papered his walls with pictures and clippings o
f
his son, but hadn't tried to get in touch. “I don't want Andy to think I'm after his money, or that I deserve any credit for his success,”
he'd said.
And i
f
he could send a message to his Olympic-­winning son?
the story continued
. Landis Senior doesn't even have to think about it. “I know I wasn't his father, but I'd tell him I was proud.”

Reached by telephone at the Manhattan apartment that he shares with his girlfriend, model Maisie Guthrie, Landis Junior had no comment,
I'd read.

Andy. Oh, Andy. I'd rocked back and forth on the bench with my arms wrapped around my shoulders, aching for him. Aching even as I read the rest of the piece, about the endorsement deals, the friendships with the Hollywood stars and the NBA players, and the description of “the ethereally beautiful Guthrie, who has walked the runway for Victoria's Secret and posed in some barely there bikinis for this publication.”

How had the ethereally lovely Guthrie handled the revelations? Had Andy gone to Philadelphia to find his father? My phone started buzzing in my lap. “Honey?” said my mother, on the verge of tears again, as always. “They're saying your dress will be there first thing tomorrow, but isn't that when you're getting your nails done?”

Oh, right,
I'd thought, getting to my feet.
I'm getting married on Saturday. There is that.
Send him love, I told myself, which was what my yoga instructor always said she did when someone barged in front of her on the stairs to the subway or grabbed the last quart of orange juice at the market. Send him love. He had Maisie, but I had Jay. The universe balanced. Let it be enough.

“It sounds like everything worked out,” Bethie said.

“I love living in New York. And Jay is great.” I hoped she didn't hear what I was hearing, which was the sound of a woman who'd spent too much on an item of clothing that didn't quite fit and was trying to tell herself that it looked fine. Jay was great. He was calm, he was kind, he was patient, solicitous, devoted . . . and if he was a little dictatorial, the tiniest bit patronizing about the stay-at-home thing, wasn't that understandable? Didn't it mean he would be a wonderful dad; didn't it show that he cared?

“Jay is great,” I said again, just as he came into view, carrying two cups of punch.

“I thought you ladies might like some refreshments,” he said, and when he smiled, I decided that I couldn't have gotten a better husband, that I couldn't love him more.

“Jay, this is Beth—Elizabeth. Elizabeth Botts . . . Did you change your name?”

“Please. Wouldn't you?” Bethie asked. I heard the faintest hint of the kind of sharp-edged nastiness she'd once used to deliver all of her remarks.
There you are, Bethie,
I thought. “It's Chamberlain now. Elizabeth Chamberlain.”

“Elizabeth,” said Jay, and held out his hand, before turning to me. “How are you feeling?”

“Just fine.”

“Not too warm? And you're staying hydrated?”

I rolled my eyes. “Jay thinks I should have checked into the hospital as soon as the test came back positive.”

Bethie pulled out a business card from her beaded clutch.
Elizabeth Chamberlain, Rabbinical Student.
“Let me know when you have the baby. I want to send you something.”

“Oh, you don't have to.”

“I want to,” she said, as I took her card, and let Jay take my hand and told myself again how lucky I was, how I'd landed in the middle of a life I didn't deserve.

Andy

2009

L
ori opened the front door of her dream house, a medium-sized and recently renovated cottage in Bryn Mawr that Andy had bought for her with his first big endorsement-deal check. “The Dream House for Mom,” his friend Laurent Dillard, who'd been a first-round draft pick for the 'Sixers, had said. “Gotta get that Dream House for Mom.”

Standing in the entryway, her bare feet on the terra-cotta tiles, she looked at him. “Andy,” she said. “Welcome home.”

“It's the place they have to take you in, right?”

Lori tried to smile, but he could see concern etched into the lines around her eyes and mouth.

“I'm sorry,” he told her. “I'm sorry for everything.”

“Oh, honey,” she said . . . and for the first time since the Olympics, his mother pulled him into her arms and held him tight.

•••

He remembered the night back in 2006 that Mitch had shown up at the door of the two-bedroom apartment he'd bought with Maisie, in a new high-rise in Carnegie Hill. Sometimes, riding up in the elevator, he imagined, or thought he could, the white guys in suits staring at him, and he told himself it was because they recognized him from Athens. Not because he was the only nonwhite guy in the building who wasn't delivering someone's dinner.

He and Mitch were both spending half the year training at a newly constructed facility in Westchester, with a bunch of new guys, most of them a year or two out of college, fast and strong and getting almost magically faster and stronger. Andy had watched in frustration and fear as his times failed to improve, telling himself that he'd work harder, work smarter, train more efficiently, suffer more than he ever had . . . but even when he did all of those things, he wasn't able to make any meaningful improvements. In fact, his times had started slipping. The young pups were not only coming up behind him; they'd run right past.

“You know what they're doing, right?” Mitch asked. He was dressed in street clothes, jeans and a dark-blue pullover,
with a backpack over one shoulder, a weariness around his eyes, and an angry scowl on his face. Short and wiry, Mitch was looking almost gaunt these days—he'd been doing some kind of low-carb thing, Andy knew, hoping that if he cut three or four pounds he'd see his times improve.

“Being younger than we are,” Andy said morosely. He'd already made up his mind that the Penn Relays in May would be his test. If things didn't improve by then—if he got trounced as thoroughly as the times he'd been putting up suggested that he would—then he'd have no hope of making the 2008 Olympic team, and he'd need to think about retiring. He'd be thirty-two by then, old for a runner, and there was no shame in quitting while you were ahead, and a gold medal certainly meant that he'd be going out on top, but he'd hoped for one more season, one more whack at the piñata . . . because he loved it and also because whenever he tried to think of what would come next his mind felt like a big, empty whiteboard that some zealous kid had wiped perfectly clean.
What would he do when that voice spoke up, the one that said he was undeserving of
everything
he had, if he couldn't run it into submission on his way toward even more prizes, more affirmations that yes, he'd proven his worth, he'd earned his right to be?

He and Rachel had sometimes talked about a post-racing life—maybe he could be a coach or a teacher; maybe he could help boys who needed someone in their lives, the same way Mr. Sills had helped him. “Picture a little love nest,” Rachel would sing, and Andy could see it—a cozy house, a yard that he'd mow, a swimming pool with a hot tub where he could soak. Maisie talked endlessly about her post-modeling plans, but they never discussed his future—because, he knew, it scared her, too. There was also an element of superstition involved. To talk about what came next was to signal to God or the universe or whatever forces were out there that you knew that what you had wouldn't last . . . which might, of course, invite those forces to sweep down and take it away.

“We're just getting older,” Andy said. “All that training can't make us twenty-seven again.”

“It's not that. How about Matt Parker?”

Andy sighed. Parker was a year older than he was. He ran the mile, and unlike Andy, his times had gotten faster in the past year, improving at an almost unheard-of rate.

Mitch reached into his backpack and pulled out a stainless-steel tube, the kind they sold toothpaste and hand cream in . . . except this tube had no label, no writing. It was perfectly blank.

“What is it?” Andy asked.

“What do you think it is?”

They stared at each other in silence. Mitch looked exasperated. Andy had no idea what was showing up on his face. He felt shocked, and then he felt stupid for being shocked. He'd always known about doping. There'd always been talk about this team or that guy, and, even among his own teammates, conversations that ended abruptly when he walked into the showers or the trainers' room. He'd heard talk about certain trainers, whispers about doctors who'd hook you up with anything you needed. Andy had never listened, because he had never needed anything. But now . . .

“Everyone's doing it,” said Mitch. Andy recognized the speech for what it was: the same talk boys in junior high gave to get each other to sneak beers or try cigarettes.

“The French, the Finns, the Kenyans. Not to mention our own so-called teammates. If we don't keep up we're going to be standing at the starting line looking like our legs are tied together.”

So there it was. Right out in the open. In his apartment. In his friend's hand.

“Where'd you get this?”
Andy's
voice sounded hoarse. “Who's handing it out?”

“John Mahoney, for one. Les Carter.” Andy got to his feet and started pacing. John Mahoney was the team manager, a man he'd known since college. Les was one of the trainers, always with a smile and a guy-walks-into-a-bar joke, who'd sit with you while you were in the ice baths or the whirlpool and ask about your girlfriend or wife or kids. “Other guys, but John's the one you want to talk to about the rest of it.”

“There's more?” Of course there was more, Mitch told him. Creams and pills and shots, transfusions of your own stored blood.
Everyone's doing it,
he said again, and then went home, leaving the tube behind him.

Andy had carried it to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He understood that if he went along with this, if he chose to do what Mitch and, ostensibly, most of the other runners were doing, his life would be divided by a bright line—before and after. The races he'd won, the times he'd put up honestly, and what he'd do with this stuff in his system. It was cheating . . . but was it really something he could refuse and still hope to compete? And was it really unfair if he did it to even the playing field, so that he wasn't starting his races half a lap behind everyone else?

He'd pulled his pants down to his ankles and stood in his briefs, feeling undignified and welcoming the feeling. There was nothing dignified, nothing honorable or admirable about this. Uncapping the bottle, he squirted some of the clear ointment into his hands and rubbed it first on his left quad, then on his right, as if it were the arnica gel some of the trainers used. His thighs ached. Everything ached. It used to be that he was in pain only while he was running, and then immediately after, when the acid would flood his muscles, making everything burn. Now there was something hurting almost all the time. He was stiff when he got out of bed, he walked to the bathroom as if his bones were made of glass, and it took a solid ten minutes of stretching and foam rolling before things loosened up. With all the pounding he'd given his limbs and his joints, it shouldn't have come as a surprise.

Once this new phase of his career had begun, he had hoped that the injections and the creams and the spun blood would help him feel better, stronger; and for a while he imagined that they did. He'd tied his personal best at the Penn Relays, then run a 5K in Central Park just for fun and creamed it, beating the second-place finisher by almost a minute. At the Middle Distance Classic in Pasadena, he'd come within four-tenths of a second of the winner, and then, back in Oregon, at the Nike Prefontaine Classic, he'd honored his hero by winning not only the 5000 but the 10,000, prompting ESPN to do a feature on him and other mid-career runners getting a surprising second wind.

He could see his body changing, his thighs getting bigger, his shoulders broader. He could hear his voice deepening and could feel the acne on his back. “You're fine,” Maisie would tell him, going through his closet and pulling out his suit jackets to have them altered. “You just look like you've been lifting.” Maisie knew what he was doing. Some of the stuff had to be kept on hand and refrigerated. In their place in New York, where, often, the only things in her refrigerator were Champagne and fancy mustard, they stored it in the crisper drawer, and Maisie started calling it the lettuce, as in “Are we out of lettuce yet?” A few times, she'd even rendezvoused with whichever intern or trainee John Mahoney was using as a delivery boy, and she'd booked his appointments with the doctor in Miami who wrote his prescriptions and Mitch's. They'd fly down together, play some golf, then drive their rented car to an office in a grimy strip mall and sit in the scuffed plastic chairs in the waiting room before the receptionist called their names—first names only, Andy noticed. There was a mirror on the back door of the doctor's exam rooms. Andy wondered about that. Did the doctor want his patients to see themselves, to see what they were doing to their bodies? Were he and Mitch meant to look with approval and gratitude? By then, Andy had gotten good at avoiding his own face in the mirror. He was used to scrutinizing his body, always looking out for any injury, any change. Since the night that Mitch had come over, though, he found that he couldn't look at his own reflection, couldn't stand to meet his own eyes.

The Adidas Grand Prix was in New York that June, and Andy was scheduled to compete in both the 5000 and the 10,000. The day before the heats, he'd run an easy three miles in Central Park, then came back to the apartment and saw reporters and a news van with a satellite dish blooming on its roof. He knew, even before he got close enough to hear them shouting his name, what had happened and why they were there. It was like the nuns had told him, “Be sure your sin will find you out.”

He kept his head down as he made his way through the throng, ignoring the questions—“How long have you been doping?” “Have you been subpoenaed?” “Will they make you give your medal back?” He heard cameras clicking and saw, across the street, a perfectly groomed woman in a yellow dress and high heels standing in front of a camera with a microphone raised to her lips. He was almost to the front door when he saw Bob Rieper from
Sports Illustrated,
the Grim Rieper, who'd written that profile of him, who'd found out about his father.

“Hey, man,” said Bob. He put his hand on
Andy's
shoulder, and with that touch, those two words, Andy knew that his life as a runner was done, that his second life had started, whether he was ready or not.

Up in the apartment, he found his cell phone and called John Mahoney, who answered on the first ring.

“Andy,” he said, in his familiar rasp. “Did you hear?”

“I haven't heard anything, but there's a bunch of reporters outside of my building.” Instead of being panicked, he felt a weird, shocked kind of calm. His pulse felt almost sluggish, and his heartbeat seemed to slow.

“Don't say a word,” Mahoney instructed. “If they call, just hang up, and if they catch you, say ‘No comment.' ”

“No comment,” Andy practiced, pacing the living room, then walking back to the bedroom to see if Maisie was there. He heard the shower running, and saw the TV tuned to ESPN, which seemed to be showing a loop—runners on a track, followed by a banner reading
DOPING SCANDAL
and a serious-looking white guy with an incongruously orange face saying something that Andy couldn't hear because Maisie had turned the volume down. Her suitcase was already open on the bed. He wondered what she'd say, what excuses she'd make, what last-minute photo shoot or family crisis she'd invent to get herself out of here, away from him.

He barely had to wait to find out. Maisie came out of the bathroom with one towel wrapped around her, another around her hair, and looked at him like he was a burglar who'd made it past the doorman and up to the thirty-third floor.

“Hey,” Andy began.

Her expression was a mixture of sorrow and embarrassment. Underneath that, like the primer she smoothed on beneath her makeup in the morning, Andy glimpsed a familiar cool calculation. This was what Maisie did when she met someone new—
a t
eammate's new wife, a photographer's new assistant—and was trying to decide who that person was, what he or she represented, and how he or she could be of any use to Maisie or Andy, individually or together. She'd turned them into a pair of beautiful people, featured in all the magazines, invited to all the parties. Now, Andy saw, she was figuring out how to turn herself into someone new, a woman betrayed by a boyfriend who was a criminal and a cheat.

“Mitch called for you. And Alex.” Alex was Alejandro Pérez-Peña,
Andy's
new coach.

“What'd they say?”

“Call Alex back. There's going to be a conference call at three. They hired a crisis management firm. And lawyers.”

“Lawyers?” Andy felt his legs, those world-beating, record-setting, medal-winning legs, start trembling underneath him. Could he go to jail for this? Was that even possible? Was it fair? Who had he hurt, except himself?

The fans,
his mind whispered. All those people who believed in you, who thought you were winning fair and square. Not to mention the companies who'd paid for him to speak, the manufacturers who'd paid for him to endorse their goods, the publisher with whom he'd just signed a contract to write his story. “
Andy Landis,
” his publicist, chic in a fitted suit with gold buttons, had announced, at a luncheon with his new publicity and marketing team. “
An American Story.
”