Course Correction (23 page)

My thoughts lapped up against my heart's wants. Strayer brushed her hair out of her eyes, and my hand wanted to follow hers, smooth the hair, and brush the down on her cheek. Try to focus again. My entire body on alert, heart beating, thoughts fluttering, blood rushing. Again. I imagined taking her hand in mine, feeling the taper of her fingers, the contrast of her calluses with the softness of her inside wrist.

Strayer captivated me. I could listen to her talk about almost anything. And I was on fire around her. It became progressively harder to restrain myself from touching her, to stop myself from inventing excuses to rub up against her warmth or accidentally stroke her skin. Her biceps looked juicy, a standing invitation to fondle and squeeze. Whenever she touched me—her hand on my foot when she turned to talk to me in the boat, her fingers grasping my shoulder to get my attention, the friendly hug she enveloped me in to say hello—I felt her energy zap through me. I had to steel myself to keep from grabbing her.

“Hey, I bought some gifts for everyone,” Strayer said on our last afternoon practice of the camp. We'd have one more the next morning. Then good-bye.

She held the bag out toward me. “I thought I'd hand them out at practice.”

I peered inside at an assortment of pastel-colored, handgun-sized water pistols made of cheap hard plastic with little rubber stoppers.

“Are you kidding? What makes you think Tom's going to go with this?”

“Really? I think he'll enjoy a break from our routine.” She grabbed the bag back, dug her hand inside, and pulled one out. “This one's for you. You can fill it up before we launch.”

Tom grinned when Strayer presented him with his very own water gun. He tucked it into his waistband. “No shooting the coach,” he instructed.

We launched with the standing shove Strayer had taught me earlier in the week, a move that requires more dexterity than I would dare attempt solo. With her instruction and encouragement, I'd taken the plunge. Standing with one foot on the boat's floorboard, right between the seat tracks, I placed my other foot on the dock, avoiding
the riggers. Holding the handles of both oars in one hand, and using my landlubber foot, I pushed the boat off from the dock in time with Strayer's foot shove. Now waterborne, we both slowly brought our free feet into the boat and sat down on our seats without jarring the boat or falling into the water.

“Hey, Gilder,” Tom called as he motored up in his launch.

I said, “Strayer, get your gun!” We grabbed our loaded water pistols and cocked them toward our coach, but he was too quick for us. His camera was loaded and he had already started clicking pictures, admonishing, “Don't shoot the coach.”

By then we had spent nine days together, attending double practices that, although technically demanding, were not physically challenging. We had had lots of time to break down the discrete parts of a rowing stroke and study their details. We'd had ample opportunity to tell our life stories and learn the ins and outs of each other's personalities. Our canvas had the broad strokes of our future outlined.

That moment in the boat, cocking our water pistols, silly grins on our faces, summed up how Strayer changed my experience of rowing. When I was in a boat with her, the pleasure trumped the pain.

I was an Olympian, well trained in the subjugation of desire. I knew how to ignore the plea to stop the pain. I didn't even wonder if I could ignore the parallel plea for pleasure. Suppression was a tool I reached for naturally in managing my life.

We said our good-byes at the end of the camp. Strayer had the US National Team camp to attend, the World Championships in Munich to compete in, and senior year in Princeton to finish. I had my full-time job and live-in boyfriend in Boston. It was a relief. Distance would protect me.

12

But it did not. The letters began flowing immediately, like the start of a race. A state change: from dead stop to all out in an instant. Sitting motionless, poised to explode, watch for the tremor of the red flag signaling the starter's intention to swish it down as he utters the commands: “Are you ready? Ready All? ROW!” or, in French, the language of FISA, the international rowing federation, “
Êtes vous prêts? PARTEZ!
”

Your oars are not to move until the last part of the command, on the “row” or the “
partez
.” Of course, you go on the “r” or the “p,” but it's better to go on the flag's motion. Light travels faster than sound. You will see the flag move before you hear the commands. Go with what you see. The best start is the jumped one that's not called back.

Strayer's first letter to me was actually a postcard. It started with “Dear Jerk-face” and ended with “love.” It got me going right away, smiling at the memory of the private jokes we had shared. That first note covered so much distance, inviting, inciting, and establishing our inevitable direction. So much for calming the waters. Her words churned me up, like those first strokes off the line: a couple of short, light ones to launch the boat out of its dead-in-the-water torpor. The oars dig into the swirling puddles left by the first stroke. The next few strokes grow progressively longer to propel the boat to maximum speed. Don't waste any time gearing up.

Not that this was a one-sided affair. There she was, nearly halfway
across the world, a perfect excuse for a measured response, one which I devised accordingly: a dozen long-stemmed dark red roses sent overseas as a good luck gesture. Exactly the bouquet anyone would send a new friend. Good luck, my ass.

A starting race cadence typically exceeds forty strokes per minute—a kind of controlled hell breaking loose—until about a minute into the race, when the coxswain calls a settle to lower the stroke rate (number of strokes rowed per minute) to somewhere in the mid-thirties. By then all major muscle groups are starting to burn, lungs are heaving, and the body's oxygen debt is building rapidly. The level of initial exertion will prove impossible to maintain somewhere between two and two-and-a-half minutes into the race, depending on the rower's fitness. Once that anaerobic threshold is reached, the battle for superiority among crews is joined by the internal battle to keep pulling.

By mid-November, Strayer and I were ramping up to maximum intensity. In three months, we wrote and mailed over forty letters to each other, whose closings started with “see ya,” progressed to “love,” and blew through “I love you dearly” to “All My Love.” We explored our feelings within the boundaries of stilted sentences and oblique references, acknowledged the indefinable yet precious quality of our friendship, and even admitted that our closest friends characterized our relationship as obsessive. Yet we would not go further. We couldn't confess our wild and mutual attraction on paper and couldn't admit the rawness of the desire that was clawing at both of us.

After such an intense beginning, there was no knowing where our relationship would settle. We saw each other in late October at the Head of the Charles regatta for the first time in nearly three months, but we were both busy with training and racing. Strayer rowed in the seven seat of Princeton's varsity eight in her last autumn as a college rower. As for me, my dedication to sculling paid its first significant dividend. During my first year of rowing in Cambridge, my memory had imprinted the contours of the Charles River in its stores as my muscle memory consolidated my hours of training into substantially improved sculling technique. In my first major single's race, starting eighteenth in the pack of forty elite women's scullers, all of whom proceeded to cross the starting line one by one and then raced to pass the competitors ahead of them, I rowed superbly. Maneuvering around
more than half a dozen scullers, cutting every corner expertly, exiting from under the Anderson Bridge and skimming my blades inches above the Belmont Hill dock as I hugged the shore at the start of the course's last big turn, I nearly pulled off an upset. Despite rowing through the choppy wakes caused by my seventeen preceding competitors and rowing a slightly longer course, the result of passing frequently, I finished second. Only Judy Geer, who'd rowed to fifth place in the US women's double with her younger sister, Carlie, at the World Championships two months earlier beat my time. I beat not only my former Yale team-mate, Anne Warner, but Anne Marden, another Ivy Leaguer, a recent Princeton graduate, who'd also just raced at the Worlds as the US single and finished eighth. In one showing, I catapulted myself into the ranks of US sculling contenders.

That was enough excitement for the moment, which was extremely gratifying, but the following weekend brought a completely different wave of challenge and opportunity. Strayer and I met in New Haven to row the double together, far from the hullabaloo of a crowded race-course. We rowed out of the Yale boathouse in Derby on borrowed equipment, courtesy of Chris Ernst, who was still coaching the novice women.

On that quiet river, as we worked on drills and did some longer pieces together, I came face-to-face with the facts of my physical longing. Every time I slid into the stern for the next catch, I was tempted to drop my blades and grab the woman who sat mere inches in front of me. Every time I released my blades from the water before starting my recovery, I had to quell my impulse to let them go completely and pull her into my lap instead.

We rowed up to the top of the navigable stretch of the Housatonic River, four-and-a-half miles from the boathouse, where the shores veered close together and the water grew shallow, with rocks poking up in the middle of the river. I concentrated on our motion, listening for the sounds of synchronicity, and ignored my inner voices pleading for a different kind of unity.

We stopped and sat quietly for a moment before turning the boat downriver. Strayer turned around and put her hand on my lower leg, just above the ankle. She was saying something, I heard her voice, but the feel of her hand on my skin disabled my hearing. I was melting,
turning to liquid inside, wishing I could return the touch, stroke her hand, or take it in mine, pull her toward me, something, anything. I closed my eyes for a long moment, drinking in the feel of longing as my wishing thrummed its message throughout my body.

“I love it when you touch me like that,” was all I could say as we sat there together in our private craft. And still, we did nothing but row back to the boathouse.

The next weekend ended the wondering and waiting. Under the guise of attending the Yale-Princeton football game with my father, I visited Strayer. I drove down from Boston on the Friday of November's first weekend, arriving on the Princeton campus late in the evening. I spent the night on the floor of Strayer's dorm room and the next day with my father and his classmates, drinking heavily and cheering Yale on as its football team played to a dispiriting loss. Then I kissed my father goodbye and turned all my attention to the real purpose of my visit.

Clarity came in darkness. In the hallowed deep-night silence meant for peaceful sleep, I ended up snuggled next to Strayer in her dorm bed, our bodies wedged against each other in the narrow space. I don't know if I left my spot in the sleeping bag on the cold concrete floor to seek out Strayer's irresistible warmth or if she fished for and found my hand and tugged me up. Certainly, no words passed between us. Speaking and writing had taken us as far as they could. Intellect had brought us to the brink of rationality and could go no further. Emotion was now our reason to row, to yearn, to dream, to push on despite the risk.

Strayer and I could not voice the truth that burned between us, but thankfully we shut up and allowed our lips to take over and speak for us. Her mouth opened ever so slightly. A pure invitation, devoid of aggression, wanting without insisting. I closed my eyes, and everything beyond her touch disappeared. Her tongue welcomed mine, no power struggle in the exploratory hello that ensued. The heat of her first liquid touch ignited me, setting my entire body on alert. Just a kiss, but I was already all in.

I didn't pull away, she didn't stop, as we descended together into our own world. I sank into our embrace, which now extended down the full length of our bodies. I stretched my legs alongside hers and
caressed her feet with mine, my hands stroking her round cheeks, my fingers twirling the wayward strands of hair that curled by her ears, as our kiss lingered. I had never felt desire incited by such a light touch as that of her fingers circling the base of my skull below my hairline.

We found ourselves in a hot and steamy affair that defied us to deny that we were madly in love with each other. We oozed all the hallmarks of passion—holding hands and looking starry-eyed, the rush of blood at the sound of each other's voice, the weakness in the knees when we regained each other's presence, the incessant urgency to stand together, row together, talk together, sleep together, be together however, whenever, wherever we could manipulate the circumstances to force that outcome.

But I knew better, that those things did not belong between us: two girls, upstanding citizens, models of potential and promise, on the straight track to success.

I had dated my coxswain boyfriend since halfway through college, over three years ago. We were close. I'd gotten pregnant and had an abortion with him. Well, not exactly with him: he was too embarrassed to confess the circumstances to his rowing coach and refused to ask for a lousy practice off to accompany me to the clinic. So I went without him. So maybe we weren't that close.

But we were living more or less amicably together. Our conversations about the future started to veer in the direction of “either break up or get married”: not the dialogue of compelling romance, but at least someone wanted me, and he was a nice guy. He offered a safe harbor, and, given my family history, I could justify the choice of security over romance. But Strayer jerked my world upside down.

And there was the problem, right there … the world. I dreaded what the world would see or say. Forget the world, what about me? What would I say? Sex with a girl? Me, gay? How had I arrived at this juncture? I had always liked guys and, now, out of the blue, this … mess. What was happening to me?