Winners (4 page)

“Why is that?”

“No idea.”

“Mmm, all that pumping and plunging. Plumbers, miners, oilmen. Basketball. Men are so excellent at shoving things in holes.”

“Isn’t that what holes are for?”

“Did you play today?”

“Yes.” She nods to tell him she’s just asking. He won’t say anything else unless she pries.

“Any women on the court?”

“No. Not lately.” There’s one woman who used to play with them, sometimes, the tiny sister of one of the guys. Good shooter. Lou tries to be interested in Shane’s rhapsodies on basketball but she’s truly fascinated by this woman who dares to come up and play with him and his large and sweaty friends. She pours herself another glass of wine.

“You know what I wish? I wish there was something you liked to do that only women did. And that they kicked your ass at it every single time.”

“That’s a sweet wish. What would this thing be?”

“Well that’s the problem. If there was something like that, men simply wouldn’t want to do it. They wouldn’t just not do it—they’d will themselves to stop even caring about it. And then, then they’d convince the whole world that it wasn’t even an interesting thing to do in the first place.”

“Wow. Men are smart.”

The waitress arrives with two delicate-looking salads, uncommon leaves arranged like flower petals on faded yellow plates. “I just want you to imagine,” Lou is saying, as the waitress grinds fresh pepper, waiting for a sign. “You wake up tomorrow and discover that you’re the only guy who plays basketball, and every woman is better than you. Bummed out when you’re on their team. Won’t pass you the ball. Wish you’d just go away.”

The waitress listens with interest, but he waits until she’s gone before he answers. “And that would make me some better kind of person.”

“Not you in particular. Men.” Lou picks through her salad as if looking for something valuable or gross. “The world would be a ten times better place. Every time you went up for a shot—blocked! Every time you got the ball—steal! Whatever. But you loved the game, right? so you kept playing with women even though they absolutely and always kicked your ass. That would be so good for you.”

“But not me in particular.” He pictures her at the gym astride a step master, angrily grunting, with Sam bench pressing twice her body weight nearby. All of us.

“Just for this male bluster and confidence in general.”

“You’re confident. You’re ambitious. You bluster.”

“It’s not the same thing.” She toys with a pale green sprig of arugula, finally hefting it to mouth and chewing comprehensively. “Women pay dearly for our sins. Look over there.”

He follows her glance to the table where a younger couple chats amiably, conducting conversation with waving forks. They’re twenty-three, twenty-four, they’re the age he was when he first met Lou. The girl has short blond hair, slightly spiked, very white smooth skin, dressed in a boyish vest. The boy is delicate, thin, with retro-chic glasses, short cropped hair, simple matte zipper jacket over a bright-colored T-shirt.

Lou leans in, drops her voice. “Take those two. She thinks it’s all possibility. They’re these equals, right, both gotten everything they want so far. Make good money, great money, work with friends, options, Foosball tables in the office, everyone goes bowling Thursday lunch.”

“Rope course retreats. Catamarans in the bay.”

“Right, the whole deal. Now, she’s at level one, but level one is high these days, you can see the top from there. They go public next week and wham! Or if she gets unhappy, if he gets fed up, fine—they’ll just go and start their own damn company. Make their own fortunes.” She snaps her fingers, pinches an invisible fly in midair. “The top is right there, and she’s going to make it, if she wants, she knows it. Because this is not the old world. This is the new world. Now, is it my duty to go over there and tell her she don’t know squat?”

“I’m going to go with ‘no’ on this one.”

“See they’re going to pay, because they all believe this shit.” The salads disappear. “The old boys’ club just got a whole lot younger, you know, they don’t pinch butts so much anymore, maybe they don’t do deals over moose hunts. But it’s still, really, the same old same old. There’s so much money to be made right now, but guess who’s making it? I spent about a million hours on this conference call this morning, a circus, and when we all get on the line of course it’s me and eleven dudes. Which means you either get completely ignored, you put up with the little jokes or you have to go hard-ass kung fu on the world. Either way, they’ve got you. You’re a quiet smart nice little cookie or a pushy big-mouth bitch.”

“That was your bad day? A conference call?”

“Oh no.” She shrugs. “I also had the pleasure of talking to the Wallet. Then Spermy called.”

“What did the Wallet say?” He wants to stay away from Spermy if he can.

“He’s still talking a ten million mezzanine with a fourteen-month ramp. I think it’s stupid, we’re ready to go bigger and sooner than that. But now he’s got Sloan, too. Jesus. And no joke, five minutes later, Spermy calls. Trying to tell me about his latest book, trouble in paradise with his whore.” Her father is a well-known academic in New England who left Lou’s mom for one of his students. Lou and her father were big pals until high school when she used to smell their perfume in the car, these girls her father was fucking. Girlfriends closer to Lou’s age than her father’s. “I got out of there. God knows who was gonna call next.”

He nods carefully, keeps his eyes on her. In the wake of these conversations with Spermy, Shane is always very careful not to get caught looking at other humans, some of whom may be female. She’s gotten much better—it’s almost disappointing—but his wife’s reserves of jealously still run deep.

From the netherworld beyond, dinner descends: seared sea bass with a dollop of risotto, a beautiful crepe with a scallop and tomato garnish hinting at its insides.

“You know what this whole day was about?” Lou says, barely looking at the food. “Men simply can’t treat women as equals. No matter how enlightened they think they are, no matter if they’re gay or straight or old or young, no matter where in the world they’re from. For now, at least, men simply don’t have it in them.”

They eat. She chews so slowly he thinks she’s going to spit something out.

“What do you think?”

“What do I think.”

“We’re just talking.”

“You can’t have it both ways. That moment in history stuff, oh these are special times, I have to give it everything I’ve got ’cause you know was my mother part of a revolution when she was twenty-something, was my grandmother? Opportunity of the millennium, all that. That’s what I think.”

“Yeah. Well. I’m in a shitty mood, I warned you. You should have left me on the couch and put police tape across the door.”

“Maybe I should have.”

“What can I say?” She prods the back of her hand with her fork. “I hate myself. I wish you’d hate me too.”

“Don’t worry, honey. I hate you sometimes.”

She smiles. “Aw, sweetie. I hate you sometimes too.”

He’s not even hungry but he eats anyway. He will destroy their meal alone if he has to and get them out of there.

“I’m turning into a grumpy old man,” she says. “We’re living in the most cheerful times imaginable and I still get like this. It’s fatigue. It’s too much work.”

“I know.”

“Can we pretend? Pretend we just got here. We just sat down.” She reaches across the table to halt his progress on the crepe.

“Okay.”

“Friday night.”

“We just got here.”

“Just sat down.” She smiles at him, finally, a real smile, and he takes another bite. “So how was your day?”

“Okay,” he says. “Dog tried to bite my dick off.”

I
N THE MORNING
he leaves Lou in bed, pulls on his white mesh shorts and dull gray tee, and drives across the city to collect Jimmy and find Sam.

Shane’s mother and malfunctioning youngest brother still live in the pale yellow house of Shane’s childhood, out in the Sunset on a quiet uneventful street. Growing up out there, there were a bunch of Irish, and also Chinese, Koreans, Russians. “The Irish and other enemies of the state,” his dad used to say. The Asians have increased their share, but physically the Sunset hasn’t changed wildly over the years. More Stop signs. No more intersection Sunset Roulette. But this part of the city is still crowded with houses he knows, inside and out. Childhood and cleaning chimneys and parties and friends made and lost over time. The street corners have retained old meanings, spots where they stalked the skirted girls from Sacred Heart or annihilated time on skateboards, scooters, bikes. Trees he puked on. A thousand wistful vulgar sites, thickening as he closes on home.

The sky is blinding blue and still. It’s going to be that one day, that one day a year. Drawn out by the warm morning, a few people are walking the streets already, and he examines them as he drives past. He recognizes no one. This is the new sensation of this city, more than anything, this mass extinction of familiar faces. There was a time not very long ago when he couldn’t step out of the house without finding a thick parade of living ghosts.

He finds his mother in the kitchen, kneading meatloaf into a bread tin. Always shorter, plumper than he expects. She extends hands coated with grounds of beef and ketchup and crumbs, pantomiming a hug. Her face has turned so soft and sagging that he wants to reach out and mold it back into place. Only her eyes haven’t changed: blue and bright and clear under the long blond lazy lashes.

“Getting it out of the way,” she says. She knows it’s ridiculous to be prepping for dinner at nine in the morning, but she’s not taking any guff about it.

“It’s gonna be hot today, Ma. You sure you wanna use the oven?”

She shrugs. “You coming?”

“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”

She shakes her head, betrayed, as if tomorrow is the worst idea in the world. “There’s some things from the bank, I put on the little table in the TV room.”

“Okay. I’ll have a look.”

The insect whine of the television, its sound turned down, hits him in the hallway as he passes the photographs of their McCarthy tribe. A few of Ma’s Breens thrown in, for good measure. Grandchildren, nephews, nieces. And then there they are: Shane, Brendan, Tommy, Jimmy. His father and mother are accounted for, but mostly this hall is ruled by four brothers. Shot after shot of costumed freckled boys documents the small and faddish passing of time. Four babies and toddlers, four lads in orange brown striped shirts, four school boys in white button-downs and thin ties, four ripped and sloppy teens. From him to Jimmy is a total distance of six years. They were packed in tight. He passes picture after picture of the four of them, a timeline tilting to adulthood, until one by one they begin to splinter off into wedding photos, first homes, children. Until at the end of the wall only Jimmy stands alone, squinting impish handsome by himself, looking mildly unhappy that they’ve left him there behind.

He finds the real live Jimmy still in bed, in the room Shane and Brendan used to share. Beside the bed Jimmy has pinned up his own favorite family photo with flat red thumbtacks. Ma and Dad are about Shane’s age, both looking young and strong and beautiful, and the boys all dressed up in their Christmas best and smiling big, flashing excellent teeth. Who took the picture? Jimmy is a plump and jolly three on daddy’s lap, cracking up at his own private toddler’s joke. His feet already look huge.

Outside a throaty classic car starts up, demanding loyalty and repair. Jimmy sighs in sleep. The car revs down low once and disappears. The young brothers on the wall listen carefully, holding their places, waiting for a sign. Dad squints out at Shane, about to break the silence.

He died on Shane’s twenty-fourth birthday, when Shane was still in college across the bay in Berkeley with the golden bears and boys and girls of California, starting his sixth and final year. Shane would end up graduating the following summer, despite abandoning school for the fall semester and dismal performances on most of his exams. Dad had fallen very sick, very quickly, with cancer of the colon that had been developing for a long time. The cancer was old to his body but new to Dad and family—it had only been discovered that summer, the day after the Fourth of July. Dad was a big, strong, energetic man and his weakness made him furious.

“I’ve got death up my ass,” he told Shane. “How the fuck you think I feel?”

He did have death up his ass and it made short work of him. The colon came out but by then the cancer had metastasized to his liver and his lungs. Ma called Shane on his birthday morning. It could have been a happy birthday call but she said the three words that told him he was no longer a son who had birthdays but something else.

“I’m coming,” he told her. “I’m leaving right now.” But she kept talking about his father, about a smile the night before and a fight with the nurse last week.

It was beautiful outside Shane’s window, a bright Berkeley day filled with gardeners’ promises. They’d had the first wet year in a long time, and the hills above the campus were exploding with thick, wild green. All the students and tourists and freaks crowded out on the warm busy streets, packing the parks and benches, riding bikes along the smooth, protected paths. Lou was out there somewhere. Shane was about to meet her for the first time, soon. They would meet and date and move in together and romp around San Francisco and get married on the bluff above the Cliff House looking out over the ocean. They would get their first apartment together, buy furniture and plants, throw a wild New Year’s party where Jimmy’s friend jumped off the fire escape but nobody got hurt. He pressed the phone against his ear, staring out the window, watching the neighbors’ cat making its way along the top of a wooden fence, the loose feline belly swinging as it went. Something was out there, something good, he would go and find it. His mother stopped talking and they stayed on the line in silence, the new widow and her oldest prince, called from his days of pleasure to take his rightful place on the sad, abandoned throne.

“I’m coming,” he said again. And went.

He moved home for a few months, and after that spent weekends and sometimes nights there during the week, and then after he graduated he just plain went home. He took over the business and paid the bills and drove across the bay to see Lou as often as he could. Money was a problem. After they buried his father and Shane sought out the balance books for business and family alike, he found nothing there. There were no books. No life insurance. No bank statements. The ones he finally wrestled from the bank told him very little except that there wasn’t any money. How could that be? How could there be nothing? For the next few years, he’d find himself up on a roof or sticking his head into a crusty fireplace and think: what did Daddy do with our money? There’d always been plenty of business, a good reputation, a quarter-page ad in the yellow pages. Shane kept expecting that somewhere he’d find a sign of secret waste. Their father had worked six days a week, and their mother’s house seemed to run on vapors, on true voodoo economics. She was one of the most frugal creatures on the planet, a heroic clipper of coupons, roller of pennies. She recycled, restored, made do. She did not spend. He doubted she had bought herself a new article of clothing in twenty years. But still there was no money.

Everywhere he looked in their family’s financial history, Shane had the feeling that something was missing, and he wanted a concrete suspect, a sin, a crime even, to explain the situation. Drinking, gambling, drugs, whores. Secrets. He demanded a reason that they were in debt, and he didn’t want the reason to be Jimmy, Tommy, Brendy, and him. Sneakers, underwear, tuition, meat. The endless mortgage on the house. He looked and looked but he could never find anything else.

Once he thought he might be on to something, the best of possible explanations. A guy called up a year after Dad died, and seemed shocked by the news. The guy called himself an old friend of the family. Shane ended up going over there to clean his chimney. The man was strange, quiet, nervous, a drunk probably in the bargain. He lived alone. Nothing in his house looked like it had changed since the late fifties. He didn’t say a word to Shane until the job was finished, when the guy repeated that he was an old friend of the family, he was short right now, could he settle up in a month or two. Even when Shane sent him the follow-up bill, he knew the old guy was never going to pay. Maybe, he thought, maybe it was charity, maybe there were a host of these gnomes throughout the city on the dole from his father, year after year. Maybe Dad even used to give them money, buddy loans never to be repaid. He clung to this idea, waiting for the other calls, the other mysterious old friends expecting services for free. He aired his theory to Lou, his brothers, his mother: Christian charity, that’s why. But gnome number one was the only one. The other calls never came, and he realized that even he didn’t believe it. The gnome didn’t call again.

The explanation that he has settled on, finally, is that there is no explanation. Or that maybe their father never understood how money worked, and maybe Shane doesn’t either.

In the bed, Jimmy’s body. A spare arm dangles over the edge, a hairy leg splays out on top of the covers. He is always relieved to find his brother in some absolutely normal state. A part of him always half expects to open the door and find gore or shame. Disaster.

“Get up.”

“What time is it.” The body doesn’t move but one eye opens. “Am I dead? Is this heaven?”

“The other place.”

“Again.”

“Your breath stinks.”

His brother farts and rolls away from him in a bundle of flesh and sheet. “Ah man. I had the most fucked-up dream.”

“Yeah, tell me in the van.”

“Okay. But really,” Jimmy says, not moving an inch. “Michael Jordan was the devil but nobody believed me.”

“Doubted even in your dreams.”

“Especially.”

“Get up.”

“Okay, okay.” He sits, kneading his head gently with both hands as if checking a tropical fruit for ripeness.

Paragon dominates a wide intersection at the downtown edge of Potrero Hill. Once this was the middle of nowhere, but things are hopping now. A new neighborhood has been decided. They slog through traffic behind new bulbous Bugs and hulking SUVs and sporty Outback wagons with bikes and surfboards lashed on top. They pass three extensive construction projects: one beginning, one middle, one end. An entire city block sits empty, gouged three stories into the ground, poised for something more massive than them all. The old warehouse buildings that started it have been cleaned and burnished to hold design firms, game coms, software companies. Mild bustle lines the street, young men and women looking purposeful with coffee. Bike racks. Juice bar. Deli, salads, wraps. Starbucks. The gym. It’s a big one, filling a healthy portion of the block. Shane hasn’t been over here in a long time, but he has a dim memory of a dim place in the emptiness: Mike’s Muscle, without even a sign outside. Now the whole front of the building has morphed into glass, flashing shiny steel girders within. Upstairs, a row of exercisers is bobbing on machines.

Jimmy catches his eye as they cruise for parking.

“What the hell is this?” Jimmy says.

“Yeah, yeah. I know.”

They loop around the block and stop behind another line of traffic. Up ahead of them, Shane can make out part of the problem: two delivery trucks backing into a loading dock. He recognizes the trucks, which are painted beige and green. They have a small, almost pseudo-European shape, these trucks that used to park their tilted way at his front door in his convalescent days, when Lou would order their groceries online.

“Holy shit!” Jimmy says, spotting the van. “So this is where they live.” Online groceries, Shane knows, stand for much that Jimmy believes is wrong in the world. He watches his brother roll down the window. Jimmy leans out and bellows cheerfully, “Hey…Webvan!” One of the drivers turns his head, finds Jimmy smiling at him out the window. The guy nods back, smiles. “Yeah, fuck you, Webvan!” Jimmy yells. “Damn you to hell!” Jimmy is almost completely out of the window now, shaking his fist in a lavish show of rage.

The guy stares, briefly stunned, then shrugs and ignores them as they pass. “He’s probably not allowed to give me the finger,” Jimmy says.

“But I am.” A part of Shane could drive around and shoot the shit with Jimmy all day long.

They park and enter the gym, where Lou has two guest passes waiting for them. She has offered a million times, but they both know they never really want to see the other at the gym. That way lies the end of love. It’s still brute and dirty maintenance, even if Paragon is six hundred times as nice as the place Shane goes. The floors are polished concrete, the stairs are shiny steel, the glass ubiquitous and spotless, the whole place shimmers like a space station. The woman at the desk smiles and hands them each two small white towels and calls for Carlos to show them around.

“We were referred by a guy,” Jimmy tells Carlos. “Guy we play ball with.”

“Basketball.”

“Yeah. Young guy named Sam.” Carlos shakes his head. “I’m sure you know him. Kind of light-skinned black guy, bushy hair, freckles, long arms. Wears shiny red sweats, stripes.”

If this perp talk surprises him, Carlos doesn’t let on. “There so many people come through here, man? I bet I’d recognize him, though. But when you join, we’ll be sure he gets a credit. We’re all about referrals. That’s how we stay we, you know?”

“Sure,” Jimmy says, winking at Shane with unusual restraint.

Carlos leads them upstairs to tour the thermoclimed incubation room for heated yoga; a dance studio where salsa hopscotch kickboxing is transformed into aerobics; a big room with eternal stair climbers, quadraceptors, bikes with Internet screens attached, treadmills with private televisions; an interior cellblock with closed doors and no windows for imaginary bike rides, where an unseen instructor is screaming at her stationary cycling cult. A thick-scented pollen of sweat wafts out under the door. Shane looks around carefully, not seeing Sam but feeling something familiar.