The Motion of the Body Through Space Read online

  Dedication

  To Jeff—whose luxurious lassitude has spared me the plot of this novel. Added together and divided by two, we make a perfectly balanced person.

  Epigraph

  “The glory of suffering might be humankind’s biggest, ever-recyclable con trick.”

  —melanie reid, The World I Fell Out Of

  “Clearly his personal god or chi was not made for great things. A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi. The saying of the elders was not true—that if a man said yea his chi also affirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own affirmation.”

  —chinua achebe, Things Fall Apart

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Lionel Shriver

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  “I’ve decided to run a marathon.”

  In a second-rate sitcom, she’d have spewed coffee across her breakfast. Yet Serenata was an understated person, and between sips. “What?” Her tone was a little arch, but polite.

  “You heard me.” Back to the stove, Remington studied her with a discomfiting level gaze. “I have my eye on the race in Saratoga Springs in April.”

  She had the sense, rare in her marriage, that she should watch what she said. “This is serious. You’re not pulling my leg.”

  “Do I often make statements of intent, and then pull the rug out: just foolin’? I’m not sure how to take your disbelief as anything but an insult.”

  “My ‘disbelief’ might have something to do with the fact that I’ve never seen you run from here to the living room.”

  “Why would I run to the living room?”

  The literalism had precedent. They called each other out in this nitpicking manner as a matter of course. It was a game. “For the last thirty-two years, you’ve not once trotted out for a run around the block. And now you tell me with a straight face that you want to run a marathon. You must have assumed I’d be a bit surprised.”

  “Go ahead, then. Be surprised.”

  “It doesn’t bother you . . .” Serenata continued to feel careful. She didn’t care for the carefulness, not one bit. “. . . That your ambition is hopelessly trite?”

  “Not in the least,” he said affably. “That’s the sort of thing that bothers you. Besides, if I decline to run a marathon because so many other people also want to run one, my actions would still be dictated by the multitude.”

  “What is this, some ‘bucket list’ notion? You’ve been listening to your old Beatles records and suddenly realized that when I’m sixty-four refers to you? Bucket list,” she repeated, backing off. “Where did I get that?”

  Indeed, incessant citation of the now commonplace idiom was exactly the sort of lemming-like behavior that drove her wild. (That allusion did a grave injustice to lemmings. In the documentary that propagated the mass-suicide myth, the filmmakers had flung the poor creatures over the cliff. Thus the popular but fallacious metaphor for mass conformity was itself an example of mass conformity.) Okay, there was nothing wrong with adopting a new expression. What galled was the way everyone suddenly started referring to their “bucket list” in a breezy, familiar spirit that conveyed they had always said it.

  Serenata began to push up from her chair, having lost interest in the news from Albany on her tablet. It had only been four months since they’d moved to Hudson, and she wondered how much longer she’d keep up the pretense of a connection with their old hometown by reading the Times Union online.

  She herself was only sixty, though hers was the first generation to append “only” to such a sobering milestone. Having remained in the same position for half an hour, her knees had stiffened, and extending the right one was tricky. Once it had seized, you had to straighten it very slowly. She never knew, either, when one of the knees would do something creepy and unexpected—suddenly go pong, seeming to slip slightly out of joint and then pop back in again. This was what old people thought about, and talked about. She wished she could issue a retroactive apology to her late grandparents, whose medical kvetching she’d found so trying as a child. Underestimating the pitiless self-involvement of their nearest and dearest, old folks detailed their ailments because they assumed that anyone who cared about them would necessarily care about their pain. But no one had cared about her grandparents’ pain, and now no one would care about the pain of the granddaughter who’d once been so unfeeling. Rough justice.

  The segue to a stand was a success. My, what miserable achievements might pass for triumph in a few years’ time. Remembering the word blender. Taking a sip of water without breaking the glass. “Have you considered the timing of this announcement?” She plugged in the tablet—busywork; the battery was still at 64 percent.

  “What about it?”

  “It coincides with a certain incapacity. I only stopped running myself in July.”

  “I knew you’d take this personally. That’s why I dreaded telling you. Would you really want me to deny myself something just because it makes you feel wistful?”

  “Wistful. You think it makes me feel wistful.”

  “Resentful,” Remington revised. “But if I bind myself to a chair for eternity, that won’t help your knees in the slightest.”

  “Yes, that’s all very rational.”

  “You say that as if it’s a criticism.”

  “So in your view, it’s ‘irrational’ to take your wife’s feelings into consideration.”

  “When making a sacrifice won’t make her feel any better—yes.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this for a while?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “In your mind, does this uncharacteristic blossoming of an interest in fitness have anything to do with what happened at the DOT?”

  “Only in the sense that what happened at the DOT has provided me a great deal of unanticipated leisure time.” Even this brush against the subject made Remington twitchy. He chewed at his cheek in that way he had, and his tone went icy and sour, with a few drops of bitterness, like a cocktail.

  Serenata disdained women who broadcast their emotions by banging about the kitchen, though it took a ridiculous degree of concentration to keep from unloading the dishwasher. “If you’re looking to fill your dance card, don’t forget the main reason we moved here. It’s already been too long since you last visited your father, and his house is a riot of repair jobs.”

  “I’m not spending the rest of my life under my father’s sink. Is this your version of talking me out of a marathon? You can do better.”

  “No, I want you to do whatever you want. Obviously.”

  “Not so obviously.”

  The dishwasher had proved irresistible. Serenata hated herself.

  “You ran for such a long time—”

  “Forty-seven years.” Her tone was clipped. “Running, and a great deal else.”

  “So—maybe you could give me some pointers.” Remington’s suggestion was halting. He did not want any pointers.

  “Remember to tie your shoes. There’s no more to it.”

  “Look . . . I’m sorry you’ve had to give up something you loved.”

  Serenata straightened, and put down a bowl. “I did not love running. Here’s a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they’re l
ying. The only good part is having run. In the moment, it’s dull, and hard as in effortful but not as in difficult to master. It’s repetitive. It doesn’t open the floodgates of revelation, as I’m sure you’ve been led to expect. I’m probably grateful for an excuse to quit. Maybe that’s what I can’t forgive myself. Though at least I’ve finally escaped the great mass of morons chugging alongside who all think they’re so fucking special.”

  “Morons like me.”

  “Morons like you.”

  “You can’t hold me in contempt for doing what you did for, I quote, forty-seven years.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she said with a tight smile before pivoting toward the staircase. “Watch me.”

  Remington Alabaster was a narrow, vertical man who seemed to have maintained his figure without a struggle. His limbs were born shapely. With slender ankles, firm calves, neat knees, and thighs that didn’t jiggle, given a quick shave those legs would have looked smashing on a woman. He had beautiful feet—also narrow, with high arches and elongated toes. Whenever Serenata massaged the insteps, they were dry. His hairless pectorals were delectably subtle, and should they ever bulge grossly from a sustained obsession with bench-pressing, she’d count the transformation a loss. True, in the last couple of years he’d developed a slight swell above the belt, whose mention she avoided. That was the unspoken contract, standard between couples, she would wager: unless he brought it up, such vacillations in his bodily person were his business. Which was why, though tempted, she hadn’t asked him squarely this morning whether freaking out about what had to be a weight gain of less than five pounds was what this marathon lark was all about.

  The harmless bulge aside, Remington was aging well. His facial features had always been expressive. The mask of impassivity he’d worn the last few years of his employment was protective, a contrivance for which a certain Lucinda Okonkwo was wholly to blame. Once he hit his sixties, the coloration of those features ashed over somewhat; it was this homogenizing of hue that made Caucasian faces look vaguer, flatter, and somehow less extant as their age advanced, like curtains whose once bold print had bleached in the sun. Yet in her mind’s eye, Serenata routinely interposed the more decisive lines of his younger visage over the hoarier, more tentative present, sharpening the eyes and flushing the cheeks as if applying mental makeup.

  She could see him. She could see him at a range of ages with a single glance, and could even, if unwillingly, glimpse in that still vital face the frail elder he’d grow into. Perceiving this man in full, what he was, had been, and would be, was her job. It was an important job, more so as he aged, because to others he would soon be just some old geezer. He was not just some old geezer. At twenty-seven, she’d fallen in love with a handsome civil engineer, and he was still here. It was the subject of some puzzlement: other people were themselves getting older by the day, themselves watching these mysterious transformations not all of which were their fault, and knew themselves to have once been younger. Yet the young and old alike perceived others in their surround as stationary constants, like parking signs. If you were fifty, then fifty was all you were, all you ever had been, and all you ever would be. Perhaps the exercise of informed imagination was simply too exhausting.

  It was also her job to look upon her husband with kindness. To both see and not see. To screw up her eyes and blur the eruptions of uninvited skin conditions into a smooth surface—an Alabaster surface. To issue a blanket pardon for every blobbing mole, every deepening crag of erosion. To be the sole person in the entire world who did not regard the slight thickening under his jaw as a character flaw. The sole person who did not construe from the sparseness of the hair at his temples that he didn’t matter. In trade, Remington would forgive the crenulations atop her elbows and the sharp line beside her nose when she slept too hard on her right side—a harsh indentation that could last until mid-afternoon and would soon be scored there all the time. Were he to have registered, as he could not help but have done, that his wife’s physical form was no longer identical to the one he wed, Remington alone would not regard this as a sign that she had done something wrong, perhaps even morally wrong, and he would not hold her accountable for being a disappointment. That was also part of the contract. It was a good deal.

  Yet Remington had no need to draw drastically on the bottomless reserves of his wife’s forgiveness for not having been dipped in preservative plastic when they met, like an ID card. He looked pretty damned good for sixty-four. How he’d remained so slim, vigorous, and nicely proportioned without any appreciable exercise was anyone’s guess. Oh, he walked places, and didn’t complain about taking the stairs if an elevator was out of order. But he’d never even experimented with one of those “seven minutes to a better body” routines, much less joined a gym. During lunch, he ate lunch.

  More exercise would improve his circulation, build vascular resilience, and forestall cognitive decline. She should welcome the turned leaf. She should ply him with protein bars and proudly track his increasing mileage on a pad in the foyer.

  The whole supportiveness shtick might actually have been doable had he introduced his resolution with suitable chagrin: “I realize I’ll never manage to cover nearly the distances you have. Still, I wonder if maybe it would be good for my heart to go out for a modest, you know, two-mile jog, say, two or three times a week.” But no. He had to run a marathon. For the rest of the day, then, Serenata indulged the pretense of intense professionalism the better to avoid her husband. She only went back downstairs to make tea once she heard him go out. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t “rational,” but this specific subset of human experience belonged to her, and his timing was cruel.

  Presumably, she herself began by copying someone else—though that’s not how it felt at the time. Both her sedentary parents were on the heavy side, and, in the way of these things, they grew heavier. Their idea of exertion was pushing a manual lawn mower, to be replaced by a power mower as soon as possible. That wasn’t to criticize. Americans in the 1960s of her childhood were big on “labor-saving devices.” A sign of modernity, the reduction of personal energy output was highly prized.

  A marketing analyst for Johnson & Johnson, her father had been relocated every two years or so. Born in Santa Ana, California, Serenata never knew the town before the family shifted to Jacksonville, Florida—and then they were off to West Chester, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; Roanoke, Virginia; Monument, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio, and finally to the company headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As a consequence, she had no regional affiliations, and was one of those rare creatures whose sole geographical identifier was the big, baggy country itself. She was “an American,” with no qualifier or hyphenation—since calling herself a “Greek-American,” having grown up supping nary a bowl of avgolemono soup, would have struck her as desperate.

  Being yanked from one school to the next as a girl had made her leery of forming attachments. She’d only inculcated the concept of friendship in adulthood, and then with difficulty—tending to mislay companions out of sheer absentmindedness, like gloves dropped in the street. For Serenata, friendship was a discipline. She was too content by herself, and had sometimes wondered if not getting lonely was a shortcoming.

  Her mother had responded to ceaseless transplantation by fastening onto multiple church and volunteer groups the moment the family arrived in a new town, like an octopus on speed. The constant convenings of these memberships left an only child to her own devices, an arrangement that suited Serenata altogether. Once old enough to fix her own Fluffernutter sandwiches, she occupied her unsupervised after-school hours building strength and stamina.

  She would lie palms down on the lawn and count the number of seconds—one one-thousand, two one-thousand—she could keep her straightened legs raised a foot above the ground (discouragingly few, but only to begin with). She was gripping a low-hanging tree branch and struggling to get her chin above the wood well before she learned that the exercise was called a pull-up. She invented her own calisthe
nics. To complete what she dubbed a “broken leg,” you hopped on one foot the circumference of the yard with the opposite leg thrust forward in a goose step, then repeated the circuit hopping backward. “Rolly-pollies” entailed lying on the grass, gripping your knees to the chest, and rocking on your back one-two-three! to throw your legs straight behind your head; later she added a shoulder stand at the end. As an adult, she would recall with wan incredulity that when she strung her creations together to stage her own backyard Olympics, it never occurred to her to invite the neighborhood children to join in.

  Many of her contortions were silly, but repeated enough times they still wore her out. Pleasantly so, though even these fanciful routines—of which she kept an exacting secret record in crimped printing in a bound blank book stashed under her mattress—were not exactly fun. It was interesting to discover that it was possible to not especially want to do them and to do them anyway.

  During the “physical education” of her school days, the meager athletic demands placed on girls were one of the few constants across Jacksonville, West Chester, Omaha, Roanoke, Monument, Cincinnati, and New Brunswick. The half-hour recess in primary school usually sponsored kickball—and if you managed to get up before your teammates lost the inning, you might run an entire ten yards to first base. Dodgeball was even more absurd: jumping one foot this way, one foot that. In middle schools’ formal gym classes, twenty of the forty-five minutes were consumed with changing in and out of gym clothes. The instructor would direct the girls in unison to do ten jumping jacks, do five squat thrusts, and run in place for thirty seconds. Given this limp gesturing toward strength training, it hadn’t really been fair to subject these same girls to a formal fitness assessment in eighth grade—during which, after Serenata sailed past the one hundred mark in the sit-ups test, the gym teacher intervened and insisted in a shrill panic that she stop. For the following decades, of course, she’d be doing sit-ups in sets of five hundred. They weren’t really efficient, abdominally, but she had a soft spot for the classics.