By Gary Percesepe
I hate the word ex.
Is it a word? Or the remains of one.
There’s
the echo of
sex
and the
reminder
that
it’s over
I would like to tell you about Z, but everything is in dispute. We don’t really own our stories, we share them. At the divorce, my lawyer told me I was entitled to half of everything we’d acquired in the marriage, but I was never sure which half we each received. Whose stories are these?
*
I stepped to the free throw line today at the gym and hit ten shots in a row. I’ve been working out four or five days a week, the usual cardio stuff plus some light lifting, nothing fancy, but regular as I can make it. As a former basketball player, “working out” always means stopping by the gym—finding a decent basketball, one that feels right to the touch, with pebbled grain that suits my hands and is inflated correctly— and shooting around. This is something I always do by myself. Only in America, I suppose, could one have an entire regulation sized court or half court available to oneself. If I see another person shooting on one end of the court, I go to the other. If both baskets on that court are occupied, I walk a few steps to the other full court to see if there is a place for me. So, two full courts, four possibilities of solitary shooting.
But today, stepping back to launch a long jumper, working on hook shots in the lane, and practicing my fadeaway (the best shot I have), I realized that playing basketball alone always takes me back to my youth, when I lived in Lake Allendale with my parents, and would practice for hours on an asphalt court by the lake.
My father worked like hell to get his family out of the city. Having grown up in the Finger Lake region of New York, he thought a lake was essential for children. He got a VA loan and within weeks we were packing. The developers christened it Lake Allendale Home Owners Association (or LAHOA, as in “the boys of LAHOA”) sledge hammering a black and white sign into the grass above the playground. LAHOA consisted of several hundred houses built in concentric circles around a man-made lake, one of thousands of such housing developments that sprung up in America after the second world war. The basketball court was just down the street. I practiced my ball handling skills on the short walk to the court, alternating hands as I dribbled from my house on 122 Allen Street every morning and dribbled home at night; I dribbled behind my back, between my legs, with my eyes closed, sometimes running at full speed as if on a fast break, sometimes standing still in the road, imagining myself running out the clock as invisible fans cheered. I slept with my basketball, the way my idol Pete Maravich did. I practiced dribbling inches off the ground, and high in the air for show, dribbling until the ball became an extension of my hands, just like Pistol Pete at LSU.
LAHOA’s basketball court was tiny. It had one good basket, the one closest to the lake. Where the asphalt ended the grass began, sloping steeply down to the lake, so you had to be quick to retrieve an errant pass, or the random rebound that clanged off the rim. The basket on the other end of the court was homemade, probably some DIY homeowner who’d hung a cheap hoop on a shaky telephone pole, but the pole was important for other reasons: that was where you could find the switch to turn on the light that lit the court at night.
The basketball court had an eerie feel at night, especially in late fall and winter, when warmer air suspended over the cooler water produced lake fog that haloed the court. Mounted high on the telephone pole, the 150-watt flood light shed just enough light to reach the business end of the court. Standing in the center of the court in the dead of night in fall and winter I could barely make out the small playground next to the basketball court, which was equipped with swings, monkey bars, and seesaws for children who’d grown up long ago and abandoned them to rust. I felt like I was on a movie set of some cheesy Billy Graham film about the Rapture, where everyone’d been taken, and I was all alone. Standing at the free throw line in the dim light (or where I thought the free throw line would be if the court was marked, which it wasn’t) I’d shoot for hours. When I missed, I’d play the rebound, shedding an imaginary defender and hitting a layup or a runner from the “lane” or posting my defender up and double or triple faking till I could get off my fadeaway jumper. If I missed, I’d grab that rebound and dribble back to the top of the key (again, no painted lines except those in my imagination).
I liked to play at the top of the key with my back to the basket. Of course, I was imitating my heroes at the time, especially Earl Monroe, whose spin moves I practiced endlessly, sometimes wheeling left, then quick right, to “shake and bake” my guy, leaving him faked out his jockstrap. Talking trash to imaginary opponents, working off a teammate’s pick to shed a defender, all I needed to create was a half inch to get off my shot.
*
I was 21 when I married, and Z was 23. When couples marry young, they create a shared narrative that grows from the same root, so that it is nearly impossible to tell which part is you and which the other person. Divorce is a severing at the root, at the farthest distance from its branches, a painful bloody mess that leaves you half of what you were before and exiled from your own history.
If you asked me to tell you the story of Z and how we met, I’d probably say something like this: We fell into things at a college talent show. Watching Z onstage from the wings I saw her with Little Orphan Annie. Annie walked in first. She stepped up to the microphone. Behind her walked Z, a bit wobbly in high heels, dressed primly in a pencil skirt, her wavy yellow hair halfway down her back. Her piano accompaniment was good, but poor Annie never caught a rhythm in the hot lights. Her pancake makeup melted from flop sweat. Her curly red wig slid down her face and dropped to the floor. She reached to pick it up and got lost in the lyrics. The audience groaned, and a stagehand sniggered “tomorrow will never come.” An explosion of laughter. Her face flushed, Z stared down at the black and white keys and tried to shrink herself. Song over, she cut out ahead of Annie, but in her haste tripped over the mic cord. I caught her and the force of her momentum pulled us both down to my knees.
I suppose it’s also true that our thirty-seven year marriage (I was 20 when I first caught her) involved a lot of catching, and missing the catch. That first time I just got lucky.
*
Pickup games at LAHOA worked like this. We’d shoot around until enough guys showed up to play three on three or four on four. If only four players showed up, we went with that, two on two; if there were ten, our little court was a blur of shirts and skins and a general sense of bedlam and anticipation.
The shootaround had informal rules. If you made a shot, someone would kick the ball back out to you. You shot until you missed. Bobby Carbonara was the best shooter in LAHOA, a three-letter varsity man. Bobby would make his way counter clockwise around the court, sometimes pausing to adjust his glasses or wipe the sweat from his hands onto his shorts before catching the return pass and launching another perfect jumper. He was six two and loved to take shots from the raised corner of the court nearest the lake. When he got in a groove, he could be as deadly as Larry Bird. But most players would hit two or three shots in a row and then miss, and the shoot around continued until someone else got hot. Usually there was only one ball, but as enough players showed up and we were able to get a round robin going, there might be a barrage of three or four basketballs in the air at once, meaning you had rebounds coming at you from all directions. It was not uncommon for someone to get hit in the head by a rebound he never saw coming, watching the wrong ball.
It was during these shootarounds that I learned the art of the rebound. I would position myself four to eight feet from the hoop, never directly in front of the basket, always to the opposite side of the shooter, what’s known as the “weak side.” 80% of rebounds happen within eight feet of the rim. The vast majority of missed shots go to the opposite side of the rim from which they are shot: to the right if the shot is launched from the left side of the court, to the left side if launched from the right. During the shootaround I learned three things about rebounds: distance matters (the longer the shot, the longer the rebound); direction matters (always position yourself on the weak side); there will be randomness (occasionally the rebound will go to the strong side, or the ball will hit the back of the rim and go straight up into the air, or will hit the front of the rim and ricochet back to the shooter, or in rare cases, get wedged between the rim and the blackboard).
At five nine, I could dunk a tennis ball, but the art of rebounding lies not in the height of your jump (Bobby rarely jumped more than six or eight inches) but in the way you position yourself in relation to your defender. The best rebounders learn to “box out” their opponents, tracking the flight of the ball from the moment it leaves the shooter’s hand, then moving into an athletic position, spreading both arms and extending them backwards, shielding their opponent from getting position in front of them, anticipating where the defender tries to go and blocking them from getting there, while backing into them and pushing them away from the basket. If a frustrated opponent jumps over you while you are in the classic box out position, often they will commit a personal foul by making contact with you “coming over the top,” allowing your team to retain possession (there were no referees at LAHOA pickup games, we policed ourselves). As a point guard I was often one of the shortest players on the court, but learning how to box out made me a good rebounder.
Rebounds, I learned, have a reliable uncertainty.
*
Z was a music major, who had taken private piano lessons since childhood. Her father was tall, her mother petite; she’d inherited her father’s hands. Hers were soft and narrow, the palms creased with lines, but the fingers long and double jointed, easily spanning an octave. Like me, she was a nail biter since childhood. She’d signed up to be the pianist for a choral group that was going to Iowa over Spring break. A native New Yorker, I had no idea where Iowa was, but I wanted to be where she was, so I signed up for the ten-day tour. I preached three or four times and sang tenor with the chorale. We spent long hours riding in a college van, sharing meals, and staying overnight in the homes of mostly friendly church folk. There were thick slabs of Iowa bacon for breakfast, the smell of steaming coffee, large helpings of pancakes and home fries.
The food was passed around, family style, and the conversation sometimes turned to livestock. One morning our host was asked questions about registered Holsteins, auctions, acreage, and while everyone was talking, I leaned closer to get a whiff of Z’s hair, which was still wet from her shower. The farmer happened to glance over just as I did this, which jarred me, so I blurted out, “Hey, would it be OK if I milked a cow?” and she chortled. “This is my first real farm,” I explained. The farmer grinned and said, “Sure, son, we can arrange that.” Z came up beside me, snickering as we walked out to the barn. “This should be good,” she said.
Z cracked up when I placed a three-legged stool beside a large cow, and began searching for the on button. I later learned that dairy farmers have machines that milk the cows, so no one actually touches them. This poor cow’s head was turned around in puzzled annoyance as I pulled righteously on her udders. She thought about it a minute, then kicked me hard with her hind leg, knocking me off the stool. And just like that our narrative was established: a couple of misfits in the aisle of lost toys.
We walked the lonesome country roads in the long afternoons before our evening concerts. There were towering cloud formations some days, and other days the sky was mackerel. We walked past live oaks and the fecund smell of corn growing in endless fields. Soaring hawks with raspy voices sent the small birds into a panic. It was that phase where you wanted to know everything about the other person.
We came to an intersection. Four ways, each going to somewhere I had never been, never thought to be, and would likely never see again. I suggested we’d better be getting back. She agreed. We headed back.
“How about your parents?” I asked. “What do they do?”
“Oh, they’re dead,” she said. “I live with my grandfather.”
I stopped walking and took her by the elbow.
“Both of them? Oh man, I’m so sorry.”
“That’s OK. My mom died of cancer when I was little.”
“Damn, girl. That seriously sucks.”
“Yes, “she said. “It does.”
She was eight years old when her mom died. Her mother had worked at the Remington factory during the war. She was a smoker, and the gunpowder in the factory didn’t help either.
“And your dad, he’s gone too?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s been gone for years.” She stopped to pick a pebble from her sneaker.
“How’d he die?”
A mistake. She made a face, like she was choking on manure from the fields. We kept walking.
“Well, he’s not dead dead.”
Puzzled, I asked what she meant by dead dead.
She cut me a look. “He’s just dead to me,” she said.
In the evening the church folk would amble into the sanctuary. Z would enter last, nod to the audience, and play a prelude of her own composition. She sat erect, her hands in textbook position, but there was something lurking beneath the surface of the church music she played in major keys, a sense of the tragic. She pulled everything into a minor key and was at her best during morning rehearsals when she’d warm up by striking a root and doing a simple blues progression, flat 3rd, 4th, flat 5th, 5th and flat 7th of the major scale. Short-waisted, she had long narrow feet, a tiny waist, flaxen hair parted in the middle, straight on top, wavy underneath. Her long hair curtained her face, which was small, with a low forehead, prominent nose, and pale blue eyes. For performances she dressed in a long black skirt and matching silk shirt which gave her body a long uninterrupted line.
This was before the Rob Reiner movie, but she looked like the Princess Bride. She was precisely five foot five, weighed maybe 110. On the Spring break choir tour, she’d often worn a black print maxi skirt made of some kind of tragic polyester fabric that emitted sparks when she made the tiniest movement, even on the van, seated facing me, which, for some reason, cracked us up. Our chorale classmates had noticed: We were electric.
Back on campus, we parked in front of her residence hall one night. We sat in her car, a 1966 Corvair that had belonged to her aunt Dorothy. Her sneakers were threadbare and wet from a late evening thunderstorm, so I pulled them off. I cupped her feet with my hands, then rubbed her arches with my thumbs. “Stop,” she said, pulling her feet away. “We’ll get caught. We can’t afford to get kicked out.”
The college had weird rules about sex. The general idea was, don’t even think about it. No coed residence halls. Girls, when seated on beds together in the dorm, talking, were required to have both feet on the floor. There were CCTV cameras everywhere.
“Then let’s get married,” I blurted. “We’ll marry and they won’t be able to tell us what to do.”
In the long history of dumb ideas, this idea is among the dumbest.
Except it didn’t seem dumb to us.
More of Z’s story emerged. Horrible stories about her father’s drinking, his addictions, how he stole from his family, how his own family had disowned him, how if it wasn’t for her grandfather she’d have been orphaned, left to rot with some foster parents, or worse, some group home somewhere. It was her grandfather who got her started with all those piano lessons, to lesson her heartbreak. She’d wanted a pony as a girl, and saved her pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters, but her old man broke into the house one day and stole her pony money from the piggy bank and spent it on booze. It was evident that these stories had been told before, but not to me.
Also: she’d been engaged to be married to some asshole named Dennis who lived in Indianapolis.
“What happened?”
She took a breath. Her voice was suddenly tiny. I had to lean in. “His parents didn’t like me,” she said. “Especially his mother. They were upset because I came from a broken home. They didn’t want that for him. They wanted someone better.”
It was sunny day in April. We’d tramped all over Glen Helen in Yellow Springs, walking in the light rain. But the sun had come out and we were sitting on a bench in front of Founders Hall, watching people walk to and from the college post office, sorting their mail, greeting friends, making weekend plans.
“Like it was my fault. His family didn’t like that I wasn’t raised in a quote, Christian environment.” She made scare quotes in the air, clearly agitated. Her pale blue eyes were glistening. I felt something crack, inside me.
“All I wanted in life was to be part of a family,” Z said. “To feel like I belonged. I had the bridesmaids’ outfits picked out, the flowers, the caterer. The date was set, after graduation. It was supposed to be at his church. But he called it off.”
She gave me a steely look. “I can’t be abandoned again. That’s the one thing you have to promise me.”
I promised. And it’s never occurred to me until just this minute, typing these words, that I was married to Z for thirty-seven years and just figured out that she had met me on the rebound. It’s especially hard to digest since I was a basketball player and knew all about rebounds, how individual they were, how the ball could deflect off the rim in a thousand different directions— short off the rim or long off the glass, boxing your man out to get an advantage, leaning all your weight back into him and pushing him out of the lane with your lower body while you studied the flight of the ball and tried to gauge where it was headed and once you saw the ball flight move quickly to secure the ball, then dribbling up court to start the fast break. But it all started by grabbing that rebound.
*
The next afternoon I was in a borrowed tux singing French madrigals. I sung second tenor in an eight-member vocal ensemble and had a show coming up. Someone burst into our dress rehearsal screaming, “Take shelter fast, there’s a severe weather warning!”
It smelt like a burning electrical wire and dirt freshly turned in a field. The sky was green with tall clouds. There was no rain, but a strong wind was blowing counter clockwise, howling as the sky darkened. Looking closer, the darkness held shingles, bricks, pieces of trees, and buildings. I ran like hell to Founders Hall.
It was an F5 tornado.
She was there, crying. Speech came in fragments. She’d been asleep. Awakened by the roar. People were screaming, scattering. Two downspouts merged over the campus lake into one-mile-wide cyclone. A cow fell on its head from a tree with a sickening thud. I pulled Z down with me under the reception desk. She removed my black bow tie and held it in hands clammy with fear. We waited. Sirens sounded. A freight train rumbled through the building. Streaked lighting torched the tall arched windows bright as midday, followed by a thunderous boom that shattered the glass. The nation’s gaze was fixed on Xenia, Ohio, eight miles away, where 36 people were reported dead.
We fell into a restless sleep just before dawn, then walked to the cemetery on State Route 72 at first light. Sitting high on the granite shelf of some family mausoleum, we gazed out onto the dilapidated campus. It looked like a brutalist version of the Roman Forum. A single steel girder from Patterson Hall pointed into the air like the finger of God. Pictures of Xenia on the news showed the remains of pre-war buildings now rubble, shops we’d frequented, fire hydrants open and a stream flowing down Main Street as if to water more beautiful ruins. Z let her head drop until her long blonde hair curtained her face. It was something she did when she didn’t want to be seen. She looked a little like Cousin It from the Addams Family, without the creepiness. I took her hand and gently tilted her face up and back towards me, using my other hand to push her hair back until I could see her eyes.
As I looked deeply into her retina, I could see my image reflected; I was not only seeing Z, I was also seeing her see me. She saw me see her. Everyone needs to be seen, I thought. We were alive. We had survived a tornado. She had survived the death of her mother and abandonment by her father. I had survived the death of my brother when I was just four, separation from my family in the wake of traumatic loss, early childhood disorder. and general trauma. We mirrored each other.
*
As a kid I would walk to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to play sandlot baseball. Baseball is a temporal sport, but it is not governed by a clock. Time remains open. Theoretically, as long as a baseball game remains tied, it can go on and on and on, into an infinite universe. But basketball is spacial as well as mathematical; it is a fluid geometry and a physics of bodies in motion; the poetics of space.
Today as I shot my free throws at the LifeTime gym, I recalled my love for the game in middle school and high school. I retain images of the guys I played with on that little court in LOHOA, when boys hung out with other boys almost exclusively, and watched each other closely, taking one’s own measure. There were weekend round robin tournaments we organised by ourselves, without adult supervision or control. Guys like Kevin Payne, who I was always assigned to guard since he was about the same size (sadly, he died a few years ago); he had the strongest hands I’d ever seen; I was never able to wrestle a loose ball from his iron grip. John Allen and Bob Carbonara were regulars, and red-haired tempestuous Ricky Lough. Ricky had sly eyes and quick hands, a Golden Glove boxer and street brawler (where did he go?); Nick Perrelle would sometimes come around with his classy jump shot, and Curt Zingaro, one of the best athletes our school turned out. I got Johnny Moro to come over from his home in Waterbury Manor, to start playing with us. John’s dad coached basketball at Peekskill High, and he would later start on our varsity team in 9th grade, though his dad lured him back to play for Peekskill the rest of his career.
But I was also thinking that the basketball court was where I learned a lot about girls from listening to the older guys talk, especially Bobby, who started in one night talking about Cassandra, who was friends with my sister, after he’d had a few beers, talking about how he could palm her tits with his hand. Even then, I suppose, I was learning to self-differentiate my views on how gender gets performed (as we would say today) and realize that I was alienated from my peers, who, as near as I could tell, didn’t seem to like girls very much, or else were fronting or outright lying, or displaying their insecurities, which, let’s face it, I shared.
*
We’d both been virgins when we married, carefully monitored by the school, bombarded with sermons about the perils of pre-marital sex, to the point where we had internalized the message; you don’t need a cop on every corner if you can get people to police themselves. We took the bible literally, not seriously.
The thrill of long-awaited sex on our wedding night was enhanced by danger. During the ceremony at her Baptist church in Illinois, Z had almost caught fire as she lit the unity candle. Alarmed, I pulled her veil away from the flame as the congregation gasped. We served finger food and sandwiches at the reception, which was on a Sunday afternoon in June the day after my college graduation, thinking the less food the faster we could get out of there. As we dodged the rice and started to run across the busy street to our ’68 Malibu, soaped with “Just Married” on the back window, Z stepped off the curb without looking and was almost killed by a speeding car. We’d been married less than two hours and I’d almost lost her twice.
The first night we spent together as husband and wife lives in my memory in a protected place of youthful innocence and hope. I want to hold that young couple in my heart space where they have yet to say a cruel word to one another or tell hurtful lies or fail at love. I drove the Malibu marriage car, complete with trailing streamers and tin cans up the steep hill to the Edwardsville Holiday Inn. The next morning we’d fly to the Pocono Mountains for a four-night honeymoon. We’d stay at a romantic resort with a heart shaped bathtub and a fireplace in our room, sate ourselves with sex, then drive out to Denver the next week to begin graduate school, but on that first night we were strangely shy. Z changed into a lovely green Halston dress which I gently removed and hung in a closet. Her skin was tanned, her body firm as she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me. She removed my shirt and pants. Soon we were entirely naked for the first time in each other’s presence. She looked at me as if I knew what to do. What I knew had been learned from the movies, so I carried her to bed where we kissed with hungry mouths. The church had taught us that our sexual union was the supreme manifestation of love, a reflection of Christ’s love for the church, but this high-minded theology seemed as far to us as east from west as we explored our bodies with unholy greed and, in my case, undisguised lust.
I was shocked to find that my lust, once loosed, was like Colorado’s Big Thompson River that roared down the steep canyon the next summer, wiping out four hundred homes and killing scores of residents and tourist, whatever was in the path of the flood. The river moved boulders weighing nearly three hundred tons. I was married, but easily distracted. At shopping malls, at McDonalds, pumping gas at the Monaco station, shopping at King Soopers, at hair salons and at the Department of Motor Vehicles, in department stores shopping for Z’s clothes, and especially in church the women all seemed impossibly lovely and activated some strange electrical surge in me I had mistakenly thought would be reserved for my wife. In our courtship and on our honeymoon, it was as if we were operating on 220 volt current, but the marriage had been halved to 110, and when I saw a beautiful woman headed to the fitting room to try on a dress my eyes followed her with anything but Christ’s love. I got a job driving a school bus and the sight of a dozen scantily clad teenagers with coltish legs and small breasts and some of them just three years younger than me set my heart racing and the blood rushing down, down. The expression “thinking with your dick” is not too far off. I had to wrap a jacket around my waist to hide my excitement. I’d give myself a stern talking to. I’d hit myself. I’d pray to do better, and in this way, I remained “faithful” for six years (minus three weeks).
We’d been crazy in love as kids. But my attention wandered, my countenance fell, I averted my eyes, and my beautiful bride went unseen. I grew bored. Bored people become people who feel the need to see new things. Or new people. Stalled mid-motion in what we called our life I looked up and saw no sky; I found myself in a dark wood. As Dante puts it, ché la diritta via era smaritta— the way ahead was blotted out. I was lost. The period of my wandering had begun.
*
The checker girl stood beside her cash register in her tiny orange vest. She held her arms high above her head as she yawned and twisted her hair into a French braid. Her vest pulled up, baring her flat, tan belly. She held my gaze steadily, with a smile that said, “That’s right, pal, I’m right here and it’s hopeless now, isn’t it?” There were no customers in her line. I was standing nearby in the picnic aisle. Throwing some charcoal, lighter fluid and matches into my shopping cart, I went through her line, then went through again twenty minutes later with a small Weber grill. The Black girl who was bagging for her whispered into her ear, loud enough for me to hear, “Girl, this one look like he wanna eat you up.”
Her name was Cindi with an “i.” One night she gave me directions to her house. “You’ll see a Lutheran Church with a blue cross in neon lights up high. Look for the cross. They never turn it off. That’s your turn.” I thought the cross was a nice touch, the all-seeing universe deciding I needed my own private version of Gatsby’s Dr. Eckleburg. I was already nervous and feeling waves of guilt. I hit myself, a glancing blow to the chin, and turned left by the church.
One night we sat smoking on her stoop. Cindi was unusually quiet. I had just come from a university function that had required me to dress up. She tousled my hair, kissed me and then inspected my necktie. I shot my cuffs, and she fingered my gold watch, which had been my grandfather’s. She pulled at my cuff links, clasping and unclasping. I asked her if she had ever made love to a man in a suit. She shook her head no. “How do you tie a knot like this?” she asked. I undid the tie and put it around her slender neck, which was brown as a nut. As I demonstrated the four in hand knot, I chose that moment to tease her about the spelling of her name, the bad professor hitting the easy target, and she locked eyes with me, then shrugged, and said that was her mother’s doing. “My mom wanted me to have something in my life that wasn’t plain,” she said. “That’s what she came up with, I guess.”
I remember her saying this to me. The silence afterward. The way we held each other, then, her head nestled against my shoulder. My first affair had felt cheap and dirty and exhilarating. I knew it could only end badly. But they say every love affair has one moment that comes to represent all the others, one that will stay with you if you let it.
*
On the LOHOA basketball court at night I kept my head down and my mouth shut when the older guys talked about girls. I tried to learn, but then would spend a lifetime un-learning.
One night Vin Kelly was there with his girlfriend. He’d hooked a portable record player up, plugging the cord into the electrical box on the pole. Under the lone spotlight they slow danced to “A Groovy Kind of Love.” It was a short song, just 115 seconds, and Vinny asked if I would play it again for them. His girl gave me a shy smile that I saved for later when I was alone. I played “Groovy Kind of Love” for them a dozen or more times, until the lyrics and music were grooved in my teenage heart. Filled with longing, I went home once they had left the court. I cam back with my basketball and worked on my hook shot.
I think of that old spotlight hung on the pole by the lake in LAHOA, and the solitary practice every day of the year, how I’d play through the rain and shovel the court off when it snowed; I thought of how I would wait for the sound of John or Bobby or Kevin dribbling up Allen Street, ballers looking to play ball, and remembered the smell of the fish in the lake or bacon being fried in a nearby house and the hope that some more guys would dribble over, and a pickup game would rise.
*
I see now that Z mixed her origin stories with mine, but she also retained the earliest versions of her own, perhaps uncritically. The same could easily be said of me. Love had invented us, but it was our responsibility to sustain that love and to continue to allow the narrative to expand to accommodate each other.
We failed at this. I see now that I was afraid to recognize that the old narrative no longer fit my expansive self. I shrunk into falsity, into a small false self, narrated by my deepest fears. I came to understand the price of things. I understood that this is really what it means to be a man, to admit your faults, own up to them, and accept the consequences. The price was high.
Of all the feelings of failure that divorce imparted, this stings the most: I stopped seeing my wife. I stopped hearing her story and allowing it to move me. This too, was a choice.
Every story must end.
I suppose it’s true that no one brings you up like your first true love. She’d called me her knight and joked that I’d shown up in the nick of time. I’d met her not long after Dennis (or maybe Dennis’ mother?) called off their wedding at the last moment. Z hated the name Dennis! Who names a kid Dennis! I joked. Glibly, I thought I understood her sadness, her deep pain. But over time I saw that situations have possibilities attached to them, and we have only to be present to be involved. No matter what I chose to do in the situation, my name would be added to a succession of Dennis’ in her ongoing narrative of disappointment. Too much awareness too early in life can be a problem with no known solution and you have only yourself to answer to, even if it’s true that you are the cause of nothing.
Under the right conditions a tornado can form, a cow could land in a tree or a dormitory drop onto the street. Or lovers fall into each other’s arms, seemingly ordained. But even when life wants to seem pure and plain, it isn’t. I could do nothing to save my bride. It’s impossible to change another person, or even understand how they see things, completely, though it’s certainly possible to make things worse.
She’d rebounded into my arms, but that doesn’t mean our love wasn’t real, and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t count. We had played the game, as best we could, and we lost.
