“I guess you’re right, that’s what I am,” I said.
“They still picking on you in school?” he said.
“No,” I said, then added, “I have a friend there.”
“Sorry I couldn’t help you more.” As he shook my hand goodbye, he said, “You’ve got nice soft hands. A real gentleman. Anyone can see that.”
On the way home, Mom said that Brad was disappointed to lose me.
“He probably didn’t want to lose a paying customer,” I said.
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said. “He really liked you. Didn’t you know?”
What she was saying didn’t seem possible. I hadn’t even made yellow belt. Still, now that I thought about it, Brad had been nice about my leaving. Maybe there was more to the guy than I’d given him credit for. Maybe I’d dropped out of karate too soon.
Oh, well. I was free now, and I wasn’t going back.
TWO
A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE THE basketball game, Ari goes for an extra run. He hates running, but he tells himself that if he runs for half an hour four times a week before trooping off to campus to teach Special Topics in Medieval History or Women of the Middle Ages: Feminism’s First Wave?, then he’s allowed the occasional doughnut for breakfast. As a result, he has knee trouble and a small potbelly.
What the hell is he going to do about M? He has to make some kind of decision, the right one, the ethical one. But how can he ruin the man he once believed he’d be spending the rest of his life with? E. M. Forster used to say if forced to choose between betraying my friend or my country, I hope I have the guts to betray my country. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the same kind of situation. So what is he going to do? For the time being, he keeps on running.
Ari’s neighborhood, called “the Park,” is a pleasant enough area northeast of DC that was once working class but is now the kind of place where residents recycle and buy raw water at Whole Foods. The sidewalks are marked with children’s chalk drawings of hearts, moons, and stars that wash out with the rain. Sometimes Ari stops to look at these drawings, scanning them for traces of talent, though he himself hasn’t picked up a paintbrush or drawing instrument in years.
These days, Ari takes pleasure in art by looking rather than producing, a shift of mind dating back to sophomore year of college, and a required survey class, Art of the Western World Part I: The Ancient World to the Late Middle Ages. While cramming for finals, he’d stare at textbook images of stained glass windows and manuscript illuminations, with their broad panes of flat colors. He wanted to know about the people who made these. What were their lives like?
He felt especially drawn to the concept of courtly love. In the early days of Ari’s relationship with M, M would quote bits he’d memorized from love poems by Audre Lorde or Thom Gunn while Ari read from Andreas Capellanus’s twelfth-century treatise The Book of the Art of Loving Nobly and the Reproving of Dishonourable Love:
He who is not jealous is not in love.
The lover regularly turns pale before his beloved. His heart pulses.
He rarely eats, sleeps little.
A love easily won is of little value; difficulty makes it valuable.
A true lover thinks of nothing but that which will please the beloved.
When attained, love disappears, like a piece of ice in the fist.
When made public, love fails to endure.
He’s taught these verses so often he knows them by heart. Sadly, they seem especially quaint and amusing in the age of social media, in particular the idea that “When made public, love fails to endure.”
Is that why any exchange of genuine emotion seems so rare now, so hard won? Because so much of our lives are lived in public?
Ari’s convinced that Orwell was right about Big Brother, but wrong about how such an arrangement would be achieved. No one forces us to live our lives under constant surveillance; we happily give away our privacy without coercion or reward. He used to warn M about this. “Every time you stream something, you’re giving up your information to Big Data, to be tracked.”
“Oh, Pooh-bear,”—that was one of M’s favorite ironic nicknames for Ari—“you’re as addicted to paranoia as I am to online amateur porn.”
His neighbor, a single mother with two teenage girls, is tying pink balloons to her porch. She’s hosting a Valentine’s Day party. Her windows are decorated with cardboard hearts printed with messages like “Be Mine,” “Real Love,” and the odd “Not Tonite.” She waves to Ari, asks when M is coming home. Ari’s been spreading the story that M has taken an artist’s fellowship at a colony in upstate in New York for the semester.
“Hard to say,” Ari pants, pretending he’s too out of breath from jogging to talk for long. “He’s having a great time up there. Later!”
It’s an especially chilly morning for February in suburban DC, and the weather makes Ari lonely. Had he accepted his parents’ invitation to visit them this weekend in Florida, he could be running in shorts and a T-shirt. Afterward he’d have to fight for bathroom time with his brother and his wife and their gaggle of chatty children. And at meals, he’d be the odd “plus one,” stuck in wherever there was an extra chair. Maybe his parents had only invited him in the faint hope that M might come too.
Also, if he were in Florida, he’d miss the basketball game.
Still puffing his way down the sidewalk, Ari decides to rouse himself from his usual amiably melancholy state of mind. Today isn’t a day for doldrums. Today he’s going to a basketball game, so rahrah. And today, at this basketball game, he’ll see Justin for the first time in twenty years. Rah-rah indeed.
He’d taken up running in college, when he needed to do something for exercise, and the business of trying to find a partner to play tennis was too tedious. He didn’t particularly like running, but it had its advantages. No racquet strings to snap on you without warning, no balls to chase, no club memberships or court time to pay for, no partners to let you down by failing to show up, just you against the pavement, running as fast and as hard as you could, as if your life depended on it.
One time, while in grad school at Columbia, he’d been running in Riverside Park, and it had seemed to him his life really had depended on it. He’d stopped to catch his breath, near Grant’s Tomb, and caught eyes with a man standing in the trees. A white man in a black denim jacket. Not moving, not even seeming to breathe, staring fiercely at Ari as if he wanted something.
Ari began running again and the man followed, staying in the cover of the trees, but following. So Ari ran faster, and the man ran faster too, weaving in and out of the trees, his sneakers crunching leaves.
What do you want? What the hell do you want from me?
His breath short, his throat closing up, his chest tight, his fingers clenched, Ari cut across an open lawn and under a bridge toward the river. The man still followed. All around them were parents pushing strollers, other joggers, bicyclists, but no one could help Ari, none of them could stop this man from taking what he wanted, if he were bold enough to reach out and take it.
Ari continued running, panicking, unsure of where to go, what to do. He turned haphazardly, zigzagging in different directions, tripped up by a divot in his path, his legs scarred by errant thorny branches, his lungs filling up with the humid air that came off the Hudson River, bearing a strangely cool, metallic scent.
And then he turned around and the man was gone.
He