Ride Around Shining (10 page)

Well, I would serve, I would serve.

I reached down and gripped her ankle, and put my mouth to her calf. I took off my belt so she could hear it whipping in the air.

Then from somewhere the cat jumped on the bed. The fat bulk of him must have had to go all out to reach such heights. Disregarding the petty human activities before him, he stalked around Antonia. Glaring at me, he slumped down along her hip. I showed him the switch and he looked ready to bat at it, and I reached to throw him down. But then Antonia laughed. All the tension of her surrender was released in a loud snort. The cat was backing its rump up into her side.

The whole feeling of the moment was changed somehow. Suddenly I couldn't imagine moving the cat to get at her. The presence of this dumpy living thing, pathetically wholesome, the hairs of its belly disarrayed, asserted something that had been lying in my mind since the afternoon, since my first day maybe. I looked at her a long time. She was so little and lithe, I imagined undoing the bonds so she could pounce at me, the bachelor's sheets cheaply harsh next to her skin, and the rich fabric that would be by then hanging off her, torn.

I tried to imagine the vivid color of them as they sat on the floor, discarded in the wan morning light. I could see it, and I knew somehow it would be a disappointment. I'd get up and try to make her breakfast and remember I had no food, and feel that there was nowhere to go from there, that whatever else had pulled me to that job was beyond me now, and would go unexplored. And all for the pleasure of ripping a pair of underwear off the boss's wife, off a girl on whom I had hung a few of my more inexhaustible aspirations. It had seemed the rarest aim, the most illicit goal, but now it felt small to me. It had just been all I could think of to want.

I breathed softly, looking down at her, and I felt flush with sensitivity, delicate, mysterious to myself once more, and I knew that to force the rent underwear down her calves would only fill me with dread. To climb at last upon the bed would be to say, it's all been for this, I can make nothing greater.

It's not that I would have minded so badly. Of course I'd have had her, if there were no consequences. But what most obsessed me was elsewhere. I sensed again some other energy, that had called me to take this job, and that now made this great victory of sex and class—that she should say my name and not his while something within her was rending and I was pressing her face into a pillow—into a small man's triumph. I stood on the cusp; I felt it beneath my feet; I rocked forward and then settled back on my heels again, relieved. Her torn underwear and her cries would be some exquisite, stolen pleasure only in relation to whatever blank, middle-middle life had come before. As though I had ever had anything, really, to rise up from. What did I live by, to claim victory from that? What rich heart would feed on that and be full? No. There was more. There was Calyph.

“Just a second,” I said, and I went out into the hall, to the kitchen. From among my work things I took up the Realtor's flyer, the one I'd planted and then taken back again after he'd been hurt. The little thing had seemed so dangerous once, and it was time to be rid of it. I picked it up and unfolded it with wide, disbelieving eyes. A picture of Joseph Jones stared back at me; his dapper staff stood handsomely arrayed. It was a leaflet for Lost Boys. I'd grabbed the wrong thing. I stood there a long time, thinking what it meant.

When I came back, she looked asleep. Softly I unbound her; her limbs sank down inert. The blindfold had slipped down, but still her eyes were closed. I smoothed the spread as I moved my hands away, and then her eyes were open and she was looking at me curiously, and I felt all through my limbs the pleasure of declining, the depthlessness of my own heart, and then a prickle of excitement, for whatever was in store for him and me, and then I turned away before I could get sorry, and walked from room to room, to turn out all the yearning lights and find somewhere to sleep.

In the fall after the estrangement
, I had him all to myself, crippled and more and more in need of me. The team had a lot invested in him, of course—there was always someone lurking, watching over his regimen. He had his mother and brother for the cooking and the housework. In interviews he'd give them credit for the emotional side of his recovery, for keeping him upbeat and on the right path. But really I think I did as much as anyone. What was he going to say? This white dude I hired to drive my car is really giving me a lot of support? They always credit their mothers, you can look anywhere.

Still, I was there. I was the one heating up the soup with the sandwiches his brother made three or four at a time and left to chill. I had so much business with crutches and pill bottles I was halfway an orderly. I even made his bed for him some days. The corners were so tight he couldn't tell it wasn't his mother. Late some nights, when he got tired of rolling toward another championship with his alma mater on the Xbox, we'd play Chinese poker, or just sit up talking. Sometimes he'd press me for details about my past, and it was almost embarrassing to see him devour tales of my grandmother, the famous Milwaukee socialite, and our family home on the bluffs over Lake Michigan. But he was a surprising listener for someone who'd been treated like junior royalty half his life, and it was hard to deflect his interest. He'd nod sagely at the description of the wrought-iron phaeton on our driveway gate, and these impossible details seemed to give him satisfaction, as though seeing our fall materialized reassured him of his own ascent.

It was hard to take more than a little pleasure from it, though. They were difficult times for him, and there was a grim feeling to everything. The days were full of gray light and rooms with drawn curtains. Still, I was happy. I'd worked my way into the center of things. I was dug in, I could watch and watch—and I was needed.

As for Antonia, I can't say I thought about her much. It was strange; she was gone so suddenly. I remember seeing her again for the first time a few days after I tied her to the bed, fleeting in the front doorway while I sat in the car, a fragment of a private smile hanging off her. Afterward she was always pushing her husband around in a wheelchair. But that phase didn't last, either—Calyph soon got well enough to find her out.

He found the flyer for her house on Alberta, which I could never manage to recover, in early August. He called the number and they told him everything. Then he just sent her away, and all for cheating on him with a little real estate. I thought for sure I'd be preoccupied a little, that she'd come to me in a daydream now and then. I guess when she didn't it seemed only respectful. He didn't desire her, so I didn't. She wasn't even illicit anymore, merely passé. I knew they weren't done with one another, not really, but he wanted to live in this illusion of complete erasure of her, and I complied. Through simple will he made a new, diminished world and walled her out of it, and then we lived there together, he and I, with his wounds.

In the middle of October
, we went for a week to the Pharaoh's estate. Savier “Pharaoh” Ramses was the last of the Jail Blazers, the gifted but misbehaving old guard who had taken the team to the Western Conference finals in '99 and 2000 but bottomed out the franchise by the mid-aughts. Pharaoh had been a high draft pick during the team's decline, but he was one of those talents who never became more than a sideshow collection of impressively mismatched skills. He was six-nine with guard speed and a great handle, but had no half-court game: he was too weak for the post and he couldn't shoot. He was technically still with the team, but he'd not been on the active roster at all the previous season. The official reason was a slow-healing knee injury, but the rumor was that he and his bloated salary were getting pushed out. All summer I'd seen his classic Pontiac convertible with its “PH4R40” license plate haunting the players' garage. Ras, his Antiguan driver, liked to dispense paternal advice to me about car wax, and Pharaoh became a sort of mentor to Calyph, gifting him with the nickname Yoshi, or Young Sheed. The team probably would've given Calyph a bonus just for staying away from Ramses, but with their matching knee injuries and defiant on-court attitudes, there was no keeping them apart.

I arrived at the Pharaoh's as a guest, but soon found myself placed among the staff. I guess it was clear right away I wasn't going to be any good at smoking spliffs and sitting by the pool. “Come,” said Ras, as I stood awkwardly in the doorway of my narrow room that first afternoon. “You'll see more of de place if you work a little. We'll only give you chitty-chitty stuff to do.”

The gaming tent stood in the middle of the hanging gardens, which ran almost to the cliff in the southwest corner of the estate. The Pharaoh had built on a desolate stretch of coast about two hours from Portland, and at high tide I could hear the sea in all its violence. My week there was one of the most singular of my life, but few moments there thrilled me with as much consummate oddness as following Ras down a narrow stone path beneath dangling creepers, carrying gourmet BLTs on a blinding silver tray to men who sat in the hiss and boom of the seething Pacific, playing video games.

“Don't shoot that,” came Calyph's voice. “That's not your range, boy.”

“I hit that all day.”

“Not on here you don't. They got you so you can barely make a damn layup.”

“Naw,” Belmont said, jockeying his controller around in unconscious compensation. “I show you.” He wore a bright white T-shirt and a modest gold chain, and looked hardly more than a boy.

They crowded the wide set, and the low stools they sat on leaned dangerously as they traded fast breaks. Calyph's crutches sat against a nearby chair. Pharaoh lay behind them in a squat black chaise longue, watching indifferently. Only when we came beneath the tent did he grasp his cane to rise.

“Brick again,” Calyph chided. “Better put Deron back in.”

“Man, you musta put it to Superstar.”

“I didn't put nothing to nothing, and you're oh for six from deep. You're playing this game like you twelve.”

“I'm tellin' you, they got me rated
right
. Ninety-five speed.”

“Yeah? Pause it, let's see. Let's see what rating they got for you from three.”

“I'm like eighty,” Belmont boasted. “Seventy-five, minimum.”

“Let's see. Oh. Oh, sixty? Yeah. So sorry.”

“What are you?”

“Doesn't matter,” Calyph said quickly. “I never play as me. What am I, a damn egoist?”

“Food, gentlemen,” Pharaoh called. “Pause that for now.”

They rose quickly, and when Calyph hopped over to collect his crutches, he still managed a suggestion of grace. His leg was heavily braced, but the thing didn't look too medical—I'd helped him pick the color, a rich navy.

Pharaoh had three guests from the league that week, though none would be seen in any of the home openers that were by then less than two weeks away. Pharaoh and Calyph were injured, Belmont was suspended, and Goat, who was late, was just a failure.

Among the visiting servants, I was Calyph's only representative, while Belmont had a three-man entourage. In eighth grade, Rodrique Belmont had been a six-foot point guard from the Bronx with the best crossover since Washington did the Delaware, and now he was just a five-ten backup in Utah, a child prodigy seen through to a limited man. Hype died slow, and the league's contracts were guaranteed, so Belmont arrived with the trappings of the star he was once thought sure to become. Goat came alone, and I think he was already in debt.

As the men came near, I eyed the bacon and the wedges of avocado on the sandwiches hungrily, and watched Ras pour a clear, sparkling drink from a glass pitcher. Pharaoh, being a man of purity, forbade the presence of alcohol until sundown.

“To living in the league,” he said, toasting in his rasping voice. “And to the player's freedom from enslavement—from the owner, from the coach, and from the dollar.”

Calyph and Belmont glanced at each other a moment before lifting their glasses silently in the air, as if wary of the import of this stern rhetoric upon their weekend. Ras nudged me. A woman was coming down the path.

“Careful,” he muttered. “You look at her, she talks to you.”

As she was still much too far away to talk to me, this was a simple ploy. She was a short, white redhead, dressed in a gray tee cut ragged at the neck and sweatpants. She walked with her shoulders back, and I could see the sheen of sweat on her collarbones across the distance. Her body was just unfair, unfair to her I mean. I don't think she could play badminton, eat a strawberry, or even so much as read an advertisement for milk in a magazine without seeming to engage in a luscious and obscene activity. “She a hothouse flower in the champagne room,” Calyph said later, and whatever that means, I can't say it better. As she grew near, a communal embarrassment seemed to come over everyone but the Pharaoh. She was the first woman we'd seen there who was not a servant, and Belmont hissed between his teeth as if in displeasure. I could see there was something strange with her hands.

As she came under the tent, Pharaoh put his hand on her shoulder just formally enough that I didn't draw any conclusions, and presented her as Odette. Her hair was up and her hands were wrapped in tape, like a fighter's. She wiped her arm across her brow and shook hands with poise, holding her left back gingerly.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Pharaoh asked.

“It's broken,” she said, lisping. She held her small, battered hand up for us to see, but Pharaoh did not take her seriously, and everyone else seemed to think better of leaning in to look. After a moment she began to unwrap the tape proudly.

“Who were you fighting?” Calyph asked, looking away like he was amused.

“I was sparring with Wedge,” she replied. “Do you know him?”