The Motion of the Body Through Space Read online

  To correct any misimpressions: Serenata Terpsichore—which rhymed with hickory, though she grew inured to teachers stressing the first syllable and pronouncing the last as a tiresome task—had no designs on professional athletics. She didn’t want to earn a place on a national volleyball team. She didn’t want to become a ballerina. She didn’t aspire to take part in weight-lifting contests, or to attract an Adidas sponsorship. She’d never come near to breaking any records, and hadn’t tried. After all, the setting of records was all about placing your achievements in relation to the achievements of other people. She might have engaged in rigorous, self-contrived conniptions on a daily basis from childhood, but that had nothing to do with anyone else. Push-ups were private.

  She’d never identified in an elaborate way with a particular sport. She ran, she cycled, she swam; she was not a runner or a swimmer or a cyclist, designations that would have allowed these mere forms of locomotion to place a claim on her. She was not, as they say, a team player, either. Her ideal running route was deserted. She gloried in the serenity of an empty swimming pool. Throughout her fifty-two years of biking for primary transportation, a single other cyclist in sight despoiled her solitude and ruined her mood.

  Given that Serenata would have thrived on a desert island in the company of fish, it was disconcerting to have so frequently been co-opted by, as Remington had said, the multitude. Sooner or later, any quirk, any curious habit or obsession, was eventually colonized by a throng.

  Impulsively, when she was sixteen, she’d slipped into a shadowy establishment in downtown Cincinnati to have a tiny tattoo inscribed on the tender inside face of her right wrist. The design she requested was snatched, literally, from the air: a bumblebee in flight. With no other customers, the artisan took his time. He captured the diaphanous wings, the inquiring antennae, the delicate legs poised for landing. The image had nothing to do with her. Yet in crafting character from scratch, one reached for what lay to hand; we were all found artworks. Thus the arbitrary soon converted to the signal. The bumblebee became her emblem, doodled endlessly across the canvas covers of her three-ring binders.

  Tattoos in the 1970s were largely confined to longshoremen, sailors, prison inmates, and biker gangs. For wayward children of the middle class, what were not yet called “tats” were a defilement. That winter, she concealed the inking from her parents with long sleeves. That spring, she switched her watch to her right wrist, with the face flipped down. She lived in constant fear of exposure, though secrecy also freighted the image with mighty powers. In retrospect, it would have been nobler to have declared the “mutilation” voluntarily and taken the consequences, but that was an adult perspective. Young people, for whom time moved so sedulously that every moment could seem an eternity of reprieve, put a great deal of store in delay.

  Inevitably, one morning she overslept her alarm. Come to rouse the sleepyhead, her mother discovered the naked wrist thrown upright on a pillow. Once the teenager confessed that the image wasn’t felt-tip, her mother cried.

  The point: Serenata would have been the sole student in her high school to brave a tattoo. Nowadays? Over a third of the eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic sported at least one, and the total acreage of American skin aswirl with hobbits, barbed wire, or barcodes, eyes, tigers, or tribals, and scorpions, skulls, or superheroes, was the size of Pennsylvania. Serenata’s adventure into the underworld had inverted from intrepid to trite.

  In her twenties, frustrated that traditional ponytail ties snagged the strands of her thick black hair, Serenata set about stitching several tubes of colorful fabric, through which she threaded sturdy elastic. After tying the ends of the elastic together, she sewed the cloth tubes into gathered circles. The resultant binders kept the hair from her face without grabbing, while adding a flash of pizzazz to her crown. Some peers found the handicrafts kooky, but more than one coworker asked where to get one. Yet by the 1990s, most of her female compatriots owned a set of twenty-five in a rainbow of hues. She hacked her hair to just under her ears and tossed what were apparently called “scrunchies” in the wastebasket.

  It would have been circa 1980, too, that she made one of her effortful bids for friendship, inviting a handful of coworkers at Lord & Taylor’s customer service to dinner. For the previous couple of years she had dabbled in Japanese cuisine, an enthusiasm rescued from a dead-end date who’d taken her to a hole-in-the-wall counter that served his countrymen’s expats. She had loved the smoothness, the coolness, the subtly. Later back home, she experimented with vinegared rice, green powdered horseradish, and a sharp knife. Eager to share her discoveries, she laid out multiple platters for her guests, aiming for what a later era would call the wow factor.

  They were horrified. None of the girls could bear the prospect of raw fish.

  Yet nowadays it was not unusual to find three different sushi bars along a single block of a midsize town in Iowa. The dreariest undergrad had a preference for fresh or saltwater eel. It wasn’t as if Serenata could take the slightest credit for the centuries-old traditions of a storied island nation in the East. Nevertheless, what was once an idiosyncrasy had been crowd funded.

  The watch, which obscured her sin of self-defacement? It had made for an effective disguise because it had once been her father’s. Serenata had been wearing oversize men’s watches ever since. Lo, come the 2010s, every other woman in the country was wearing massive, masculine-style watches as well. Favorite books that made little or no splash on release—A Home at the End of the World or The City of Your Final Destination—invariably got turned into movies, and suddenly these private totems belonged to everybody. She’d no sooner revive the nearly lost art of quilting, stitching swatches of worn-out corduroys and old towels while watching Breaking Bad before anyone had ever heard of it, than quilting bees would sweep the country as a nationwide fad. If Serenata Terpsichore ever seized upon the music of an obscure band that only played pass-the-hat clubs and wedding gigs, that veritably guaranteed that these same nobodies would hit the top forty by the following year. If she happened to pick up the habit of wearing incredibly warm, soft sheepskin boots hitherto confined to the small Australian and California surfer sets, the better to weather an Albany winter, you could be damned sure that Oprah Winfrey would make the same discovery. Ugg.

  The same thing must have happened to plenty of others as well. There were only so many things to wear, to love, to do. And there were too many people. So sooner or later whatever you claimed for yourself would be adopted by several million of your closest friends. At which point you either abandoned your own enthusiasms or submitted numbly to the appearance of slavish conformity. For the most part, Serenata had opted for the latter. Still, the experience was repeatedly one of being occupied, as if a horde of strangers had camped out on her lawn.

  Which, steadily yet at an accelerating pace for the last twenty years, was what had been happening to fitness in any form. She could almost hear them, rumbling the inside of her skull like an oncoming migration of wildebeest, the dust catching in her nostrils, the beat of their hooves pounding from the horizon. This time the multitudes could be spotted not merely aping her tastes in music or fiction in the quiet isolation of their homes, but in aggregate, pounding in droves over the hills and dales of public parks, splashing in phalanxes across all six lanes of her regular pool, clamoring with crazed, head-down pumping in swarms of cyclists, every one of them feverishly desperate to overtake the bike ahead, only to come to a stop at the next light—where the pack would twitch, poised to get a jump on the others like hyenas straining toward a fresh kill. This time the incursion into her territory wasn’t metaphorical but could be measured in square feet. Now her beloved husband had joined the mindless look-alikes of the swollen herd.

  Two

  Though the right knee rebuked her when it bore the load, Serenata refused to take the stairs one at a time, like a toddler. Hobbling down for tea the following afternoon, she found Remington in the living room. While she was still unaccustomed to his being home weekdays, it wasn’t fair to resent the presence of your husband when it was his house, too. Early retirement hadn’t been his idea, or, precisely, his fault.

  Yet his getup was annoying by any measure: leggings, silky green shorts with undershorts of bright purple, and a shiny green shirt with purple netting for aeration—a set, its price tag dangling at the back of the neck. His wrist gleamed with a new sports watch. On a younger man the red bandanna around his forehead might have seemed rakish, but on Remington at sixty-four it looked like a costuming choice that cinemagoers were to read at a glance: this guy is a nut. In case the bandanna wasn’t enough, add the air-traffic-control orange shoes, with trim of more purple.

  He only bent to clutch an ankle with both hands when she walked in. He’d been waiting for her.

  So, fine, she watched. He held the ankle, raised his arms overhead, and dived for the opposite leg. As he teetered on one foot while tugging a knee to his chest, she left for her Earl Grey. On her return, he was bracing both hands against a wall and elongating a calf muscle. The whole ritual screamed of the internet.

  “My dear,” she said. “There’s some evidence that stretching does a bit of good, but only after you’ve run. All it accomplishes beforehand is to put off the unpleasant.”

  “You’re going to be a real bitch about this, aren’t you?”

  “Probably,” she said lightly, and swept back upstairs. When the front door slammed, she ventured onto the second-story side porch to peer over the rail. After poking at the complicated watch for minutes, the intrepid began his inaugural run—trudging out the gate and down Union Street. She could have passed him at a stroll.

  The impulse was wicked, but she checked the time. The door slammed again twelve minutes later. His shower would last longer. Is this how she’d get through this ordeal? With condescension? It was only October. It was going to be a long winter.

  “How was your run?” she forced herself to inquire during a laconic dinner.

  “Invigorating!” he declared. “I’m starting to see why you went at it, those forty-seven years.”

  Uh-huh. Wait till it gets cold, and sleets, and blows a gale in your face. Wait till your intestines start to transit, with seven more miles to go, and you huddle in a cramped scuttle, praying you’ll make it before they explode all over your shiny green shorts. See how invigorated you get then. “And where did you get to?”

  “I turned around at Highway Nine.”

  Half a mile from their front door. Yet he was bursting with accomplishment. She looked at him with fascination. He was impossible to embarrass.

  And why ever would she wish to embarrass him? Precisely what inflamed her about this stupid joiner impulse of his to run a marathon was the way such a mean-spirited desire had already arisen in her head, after her husband’s sole athletic achievement constituted running—if you could call it that—again, you see, this contaminating contempt—a single mile. She was not a combative harridan, nor had she been for their thirty-two years together. To the contrary, it was in the nature of wary isolates to give themselves completely and without stint once the formidable barriers they routinely erected before all and sundry had been breached. Most people regarded Serenata as standoffish, and she was fine with that; being seen as a woman who kept others at bay helped keep them at bay. But she was not aloof with Remington Alabaster, as of halfway through their first date. Largely keeping to yourself did not mean you lacked a normal human need for companionship. It did mean you tended to put eggs in one basket. Remington was her basket. She could not afford to resent the basket—to want to embarrass the basket, or to hope that when the basket set his sights on what had become a rather mundane status marker the basket would fail.

  She owed him for the fact that what might otherwise have become an arid solitude was instead round, full, and rich. She’d relished being his sole confidante when the situation at the DOT went south; it was too dangerous for him to talk to anyone at work. She missed the camaraderie of shared indignation. Throughout the whole debacle, he’d have been unwavering in his confidence that she was staunchly in his corner. They’d had their differences, especially about the children, who had both, frankly, turned out a little strange. Nevertheless, the measure of a marriage was military: a good one was an alliance.

  Furthermore, when they met she was floundering. She owed him for her career.

  As a child, after a family vacation on Cape Hatteras, she’d declared her reigning ambition to become a lighthouse keeper—thrust on the prow of a spit, raised high with a view of an expanse that could make you feel either very small or very big, depending on your mood, with regal control of a great beacon. She would live in a small round room decorated with driftwood, heating up cans of soup on a hot plate, reading (well, she was only eight) Pippi Longstocking under a swinging bare bulb, and watching (ditto) reruns of I Dream of Jeannie on one of those miniature black-and-white televisions they had at the hotel on the Outer Banks. Later during the usual equine phase for girls, she imagined growing up to be a national park warden who toured vast public woodlands alone on horseback. Still later, inspired by a newspaper’s unusual job listing, she became enthralled by the idea of caretaking an estate on a tropical island owned by a very rich man, who’d only visit with an array of celebrity guests in his private jet once a year. The rest of the time she’d have a mansion to herself—with dinner seatings for a hundred, a chandeliered ballroom, a private menagerie, a golf course, and tennis courts, all without the bother of making a fortune and thus having to build a boring old business first. In the latter fantasy, it never occurred to her that infinite access to a golf course and tennis courts was of limited value with no one else to play with.

  By her teens, the backyard frolicking of her childhood having given way to a covert if demanding fitness regime, Serenata entertained jobs that might put exertion to practical employ. She pictured herself as the only woman on a construction crew, pounding spikes, wielding big flats of Sheetrock, and manipulating heavy jackhammers—thus amazing her male coworkers, who would scoff at the upstart girlie at first, but would come to revere her and defend her honor in bars. Or she might become a great asset to a team of moving men (who would scoff, come to revere her, and defend her honor in bars . . . ). She contemplated tree surgery. Alas, hard physical labor was apparently low-skilled and low-waged, and her middle-class parents dismissed all these backbreaking prospects as preposterous.

  For years, the only child had amused her parents by performing original radio plays. She recorded all the parts on a portable cassette player, punctuating the dramas with sound effects—door slams, floor tromping, crumpling paper for fire. At once, her girlhood’s reigning ambition to pursue a solitary occupation seemed to display a gut self-knowledge. What fit the bill, then, was to become a writer.

  Oh, her parents didn’t regard this aspiration as any more practical than becoming a construction worker. They expected she’d just get married. But at least a literary bent would argue for a college education, which would raise the quality and earning power of her suitors. So with their blessing she enrolled at Hunter, within shouting distance of New Brunswick, emerging like most liberal arts graduates as roundly unemployable.

  Serenata’s twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. She couldn’t afford her own apartment, so (anathema) had to share digs with other girls whose twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. The menial jobs she procured hardly required a college degree. She tried to make time for “her work” without saying the pretentious expression aloud. Mortifyingly, every other peer she encountered in New York City also described themselves as writers, who were also making time for “their work.”

  It was manning the phones at Lord & Taylor’s Customer Service that turned her tide. A young man called about needing to return a gift of a tasteless tie. He described the gaudy item in comical detail. He enticed her to explain what a customer should do both with and without a receipt, when surely he had the receipt or he didn’t. It dawned dimly on the store’s representative that he was keeping her on the line. Finally he implored her to repeat after him, “Please watch the closing doors.”

  “What?”

  “Just say it. As a favor. Please watch the closing doors.”

  Well, it wasn’t as if he’d asked her to repeat “Please can I suck your dick.” She complied.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  “I’m not sure how one would say that badly.”

  “Most people would say that badly,” he countered—and proceeded to explain that he was a civil servant with the city’s Department of Transportation. He’d been tasked with finding a new announcer for recorded public transit advisories, and begged her to try out for the job. She was leery, of course. As a precaution, she looked up the NYC Department of Transportation in the phone book, and the address he’d provided matched.

  In the end, it was decided higher up that New Yorkers weren’t quite ready for female authority, and she didn’t get the job. As Remington shared with her later, one of the other men on the team had declared after replaying her audition tape that no male passenger listening to that sultry voice would ever hear the content of the announcements; he’d be fantasizing about fucking the loudspeaker.

  Yet before the disappointing determination was made, she did agree to a dinner date—albeit only after Remington’s second invitation. She was obliged to turn down the spontaneous one on the heels of her audition because the bike trip between her East Village apartment and the DOT office downtown was officially too short to “count,” and it wouldn’t do to dine out when she hadn’t yet exercised. They agreed to meet at Café Fiorello on Broadway, a high-end Italian trattoria that longtime New York residents would generally consign to tourists. Despite the upscale venue, Serenata, as ever, insisted on cycling.