Fortunate Lives (6 page)

The basketball team was almost languorous in their warm-up drills, waiting for the coaches to organize them. A dark-haired
boy passed the ball off to his teammate and moved over to the bleachers where the cheerleaders sat. He approached a small
girl, sitting about four seats up, who wouldn’t glance his way. Finally he fell forward slightly from the hip, resting his
forearms widely on either side of her, and she made a great point of straightening up to peer over his shoulder, refusing
to look at him.

The boy bent farther over the girl, and she finally looked right back at him and smiled, raising her hand to brush his hair
back from where it had fallen over his forehead. The two of them said something to each other before the boy stood back and
moved away. Watching them, Martin was suddenly surprised by a memory of uncomplicated adolescent lust, and his attention was
caught with an odd alertness, as though he remembered this very building, the high struts of the roof, the echoing thunk of
the ball, the diminished, hollow murmuring of a few people in an empty gym.

Most of the girls sat scattered over a small section of the far bleachers while two of them demonstrated a series of leaps
and turns again and again. Now and then one of the seated girls would rise and step down the bleachers to join them until
she, too, mastered the sequence. They were not shouting their cheers; they were concentrating on the choreography and only
talking quietly among themselves.

When Owen Croft came out of the dressing room behind the two coaches, the atmosphere became subdued. Martin had not realized
until that moment that he had been expecting to see Owen, but now he watched him carefully. Owen didn’t see him at all. In
fact, Owen kept his head down, his eyes averted, and he didn’t turn to
talk to anyone; he simply moved into a loosely organized rotation beneath the basket, turned, put the ball up, and moved off.

Both the women sitting above Martin, and the larger group of people farther down the stands, were quiet while Owen pivoted,
ran, shot, moved. A kind of sympathetic solemnity was heavy in the atmosphere as Owen continued to radiate his own isolation
within that group of lanky boys. And Martin felt it, too—an aching suspense, a communal need for resolution, absolution.

There was a dramatic hesitancy in the movements of the cheerleaders whenever they passed by Owen if he was sitting on the
bleachers watching a play. They would offer a solemn tilt of their heads, or touch his arm, or briefly brush his shoulder
without engaging his eye. In his presence that afternoon, they perceived themselves as fragile and tentative. When one or
another of them spoke some word to him, he didn’t answer or turn his head; he remained overwhelmed and unreachable, and therefore
he was suddenly the heroic center of all the sweet radiation of their grave concern.

The pale light that fell from the high windows of the building illuminated the shifting bodies without variation or shadow.
Every aspect of the scene had an equal vibrancy of color, like the landscape of a dream. Slowly the players moved into separate
teams. Five boys loped into the near court, but the only one Martin knew was Winston Grimes, the starting center.

The drills became smoother, the pace quicker and purposeful. In the far court Owen came in under the basket for a lay-up,
and then the team moved into another pattern, an elaborate series of passes, while the defensive players flung themselves
violently in the paths of their opponents, lunging and waving their arms while the offensive players pivoted and searched
for an opening. The two practice teams were serious now, and the increased adrenaline was
tangible under the lofty roof. The calling back and forth of the players echoed harshly, and the damp air was filled with
a pervasive, tangy scent like wet hay.

Martin sat perfectly still, but he was infected with that same surge of adrenaline. His whole body was tense, his senses heightened.
A remembered knowledge of communal masculinity under the attention of pretty girls along the sidelines swept over him, and
he knew again, just for a moment, that simultaneous male arrogance that had rendered him and his teammates haughty and indifferent—even
contemptuous—of those very girls whose presence spurred them on.

All at once Martin had become lost to his thirty-eight-year-old self and was affected with an absolute loss of self-consciousness
or restraint. Without a pause, without any consideration, he was up and off the bleachers, trotting diagonally across the
court. He too, just like those lovely young women and the leanly muscled boys, was drawn toward Owen Croft. Jogging slowly
across the floor, his treaded boots thumping against the parquet, he didn’t notice the surprised faces of the players under
the basket as he approached.

Owen was under the basket holding the ball in midair, cocked over his head. Martin took two long strides and launched himself
forward, landing his head solidly under Owen’s breastbone—a football tackle—and clasping him around the waist. Owen was slammed
backward, his long legs bent under him, his head bouncing up after thudding against the floor. There, lying on the floor of
the gymnasium, clasping Owen Croft tightly, and short of breath, Martin was finally trapped in a long moment of realization.
He came back to himself the instant Owen’s head had hit the floor, and it was as if those following seconds became elastic,
stretching out too far for him ever to escape them. Finally he pushed himself up and away from Owen, getting
to his feet and brushing himself off without looking up at all the faces turned toward him.

And Owen was pushing himself to his feet, too, where he stood for a moment before turning and moving slowly off toward the
dressing room. One of the coaches left midcourt to follow him, but no one else moved. Once the onlookers had recognized Martin,
they were horrified. Several people in the stands had risen to their feet, but most had stayed exactly where they were, stunned.
The teenagers were awed by these consequences more profoundly than they had understood the fact of Toby’s death, and the adults
were filled with dismay and pity and relief.

One of the coaches caught Martin roughly by the elbow as he turned to leave, but Martin swung around so furiously, in a slight,
aggressive crouch, that the coach drew back. The two men spoke briefly, and Martin moved away, stopping to collect Duchess
at the far end of the room. The spectators relaxed a little and sat back down or rearranged themselves in the bleachers. No
one had been seriously hurt. In fact, there was an unspoken feeling that something had been brought to a conclusion.

Martin paused once more on the ridge of Bell’s Hill, before following Duchess down the steep incline that would lead him into
the parking lot of the Freund Museum. Only now, six years later, did it occur to him exactly what had propelled him across
that basketball court. It was simply that he had not been able to bear the innocent self-centeredness of Owen’s own suffering.

He clipped Duchess back onto her leash. His thoughts turned to the soft day ahead. He had awakened this morning already making
a mental list of chores to be done. When he had been on the roof some weeks earlier to unclog a gutter, he had noticed that
several slates needed replacing. Water had seeped beneath them
and then had frozen and dislodged them sometime over the winter, and he had made a quick inspection of his household to discover
any other ravages of the past unusually brutal February.

But surely at seventeen Martin had not really believed in weather, had not really known about gravity, had given no thought
to the seasons as they happened around him. When he was the age Owen had been when Toby was killed, Martin had taken the natural
world for granted. Living on the earth had not impressed him with the slightest degree of humility.

No doubt he had understood that dramatic weather has dramatic consequences, but he had not known that just a little bit of
weather can weigh down the soul—the prevailing wind that moves west to east, the cold that sweeps in from the north, the stifling
heat that might settle over the village of West Bradford in long days of damp haze. Not until he had become a householder
and begun his yearly battle with the storm windows, the peeling paint on the west wall, the sump pump in the spring, the winter-killed
evergreen branches to be trimmed back, had he sometimes succumbed to the melancholy that accompanies the recognition of inevitability.

In the saturated air that long-ago afternoon in the gymnasium, it had maddened Martin that Owen’s very sadness had been perceived
by those around him as a virtue. But what could someone Owen’s age have known about anything, and what difference would it
have made how Owen felt?

As he made his way home, Martin battled a feeling of chagrin. In that gymnasium so long ago he had behaved like a person who
had not understood the absurdity of indignation. That one moment of futile aggression had been induced by his realization
that Owen’s agony was inevitably self-centered and peripheral to the real tragedy of the loss of Toby. But of course, so had
been his own grief. As inevitable
as it is, there is no
use
in grief, that’s what he had not understood. It only battens down one’s sensibilities a little more, further delineates that
little core of “self,” and makes it even more necessary to repress one’s own knowledge in order to get on with the days.

E
ARLY ON THE MORNING
of the Howellses’ annual Fourth of July party, David came down so early to work in the garden that ground fog still pooled
and swirled at the foot of the yard. Even parts of his own small garden were obscured from him. He had not slept at all after
taking Christie home from a late party. Near dawn he had pulled on jeans and an old blue shirt, and carried his shoes through
the barely lightening rooms and crept out the back door before sitting down on the steps to put on his old L. L. Bean bluchers.

He and Christie had gone to a party on Squire’s Hill where there was a fluctuating group of twenty to thirty. They had sat
around with Ethan and Sam, who was with Meg Cramer most of the night. By the time David got Christie away, Meg had wandered
off, and Sam was stretched out on the low stone wall next to the Park Service built-in barbecue pit. Ethan was mixing drinks
of vodka and cranberry juice for everyone, but David had brought a six-pack and sipped a beer.

Sitting there on the grass, watching the four of them get drunk, David had suddenly been as bored as he had ever remembered
being in his life. The sensation had frightened him because it was a feeling he had fought this whole last year of high school.
He had turned all at once, just at the moment Sam was taking a last drag on a cigarette, holding it between his thumb and
index finger, in a manner that for the first time filled David with scorn because it seemed so affected. He had been overwhelmed
by the idea that all he had thought about Sam, who had been his best friend since third grade—all he had thought about him
or any way in which he had ever valued him—was false. Simultaneously, however, he had been filled with a longing for Sam’s
easy friendship.

Sometime after midnight he and Christie had broken away from the group; but when they approached her house, the patio lights
were on, and they could see Mrs. Douglas sitting out in a lawn chair by the pool, her cigarette making a bright arc every
few moments, up and back. Through the filmy curtains the shadow of Christie’s father could be seen moving through the house,
past the lighted windows.

“Oh, God, David. Don’t take me home.”

“Are they waiting up for you?”

“No. They went out before I left. They probably just got home. I just don’t want to have to talk to them right now.” So he
had pulled the car over to the curb two houses down the street. He had been unaccountably impatient. He didn’t even want to
touch Christie, but he had reached over and put his hand on her neck under her soft hair in a pretense of comfort. She sat
still for a moment, her head bowed under his hand, and then with a sudden spasm of rage she had straightened, rigid against
the door, and thrown his hand off.

“I really wish you just wouldn’t touch me when you’re in a mood like this!”

He hadn’t said anything, but he put his hand on the steering wheel and leaned his head against the headrest.

“You’re getting ready, aren’t you, not to care at all about anybody? Won’t that make your life easy? Won’t you be
free
? You can just go away with your great, fucking
brilliance
, and your…
superiority
, and when you think about me you can just say, ‘Oh, well, Christie was so intense. Christie had so many
problems
! Christie’s so young!’” Her face was splotchy and glaring, and he looked away from her, out the window.

She rose to her knees and swung her hand at him ineffectually, just grazing the side of his head. “Don’t you dare look away
from me! Don’t you dare… don’t you dare! Even Ethan and Sam! You’re not even honest with Ethan and Sam anymore. You’re like,
‘Oh, it’s so awful for me to have to be around all the barbarians!’” She made her voice light and feminine, implying an unsavory
kind of fastidiousness.