The Dismantling (25 page)

“What happened to him? Thomas.”

She shook her head. “That's a story for another night. Please, can we go now?”

 • • • 

B
ACK
inside the apartment, Simon saw that it was later than he'd thought, nearly midnight. He brought pillows and a blanket out from his bedroom and started arranging them on the couch.

“I'll sleep out here,” he said. “You take the bed.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“It's fine. I don't mind.”

“Simon.”

Her voice was sharp, and he looked up to see her standing rigid in the doorway to his bedroom, two high spots of color rising on her cheeks.

“What?” he said.

“I don't want your sympathy. That's not what this is about.”

“Decency isn't the same thing as sympathy.”

She stared at him for a breath, then relaxed and nodded. “All right.” She lingered in the doorway. “I'll see you in the morning, then.”

He nodded, unfolded the blanket. “Okay. Good night.”

“Good night.” She paused for a moment, as though about to say something more, then slipped into the bedroom and shut the door.

Simon lay down on the couch. There had been something awkward about this exchange that made him suddenly and acutely aware that he was sharing an apartment with Maria and should, perhaps, feel self-conscious or strange about this, especially after she'd made herself vulnerable to him by telling her story. But he searched inside himself and found that he didn't. What he felt about her—a complex cocktail of protectiveness, respect, and fascination—was unrelated to anything erotic. He recognized that she was, objectively, attractive, and he even had to admit that he was attracted to her, but only in the literal sense of the word: he was drawn to her, he wanted to be near her. This attraction was not sexual. It was grounded, instead, in an impulse to protect her, to save her, an impulse undiminished despite the unwanted realization that soon enough she wasn't going to need his help anymore.

He was thankful for this absence of desire, because for him sex had recently become—there was no other way to say it—a fucking disaster. He thought of the last girl he'd slept with, an old hook-up from college he'd run into at an East Village bar a few weeks after he'd started working for DaSilva. He'd been drinking alone, and the girl, Sylvia, had spotted him at his back-corner table, zoning out over his third whiskey. She sat down opposite him, red cheeked, bubbling with drunken good cheer. When she asked what he was doing with himself, he told her he was in medical school, and it didn't even feel like a lie. Two whiskeys later, her friends left—they'd been drinking over at the bar, eyeing Simon with, he'd thought, rather ill-concealed suspicion—but Sylvia had waved them off and stayed, and he'd suddenly realized that she was flirting with him with real intention and not out of boredom or nostalgia. He straightened up in his chair and tried to rise to the occasion, and he must have done well enough—they'd had their genuinely lovely moments back in college, after all—because he ended up back at her apartment on Ludlow Street, a damp brick-walled three bedroom, with two roommates, two cats, and no real kitchen. Her bedroom was in keeping with those of most other twentysomething girls he'd encountered: a high, small, wobbly bed overrun with an armada of pillows; clothes and shoes erupting out of every enclosed space; no curtains on the windows and nothing to block out the cacophony of the street two stories below.

Once they'd managed to struggle out of their clothes, Sylvia produced a condom from a drawer in the nightstand, pausing for a moment before tearing the packaging open, searching Simon's face for any sign that he wanted to stop things here. He gave none, and so she shook the condom once, briskly, before unrolling it onto his cock. She pushed him up against the mound of pillows before she climbed on top and almost dismissively inserted him into her. They fucked without speaking, their bodies settling into a pattern they'd established at college years before, muscle memory persevering over drunkenness. He felt slightly incidental to the whole thing, which didn't bother him too much. Quickly and without warning, she clenched as one unified muscle, and then the tension released and her body went slack, her head slumping forward, her hair falling into his face.

After a moment, she looked down at him, two high spots of color rising on her cheeks. “Come on,” she said, more playful than angry. “Are you even here?”

He pushed her off him, dutifully, flipping her over onto her stomach. She rose onto her knees and elbows, and he took what she offered, driving himself into her. Her face was pressed into a pillow, and all he could see of her head was the tangle of her blond hair spread across the white pillowcase. The knobs of her vertebrae pushed against her skin as she arched her hips up, and he thought, unwillingly, of the plastic model of a spine that had hung from a hook in a classroom at medical school, of the concave bowl of the sacrum, the coccyx's truncated tail. He looked down at her body stretched out in front of him, fused with his own, and it was as though he could see through the skin and fat and muscle down to the basic structures of tendon and bone, as though he were seeking, with his thrusting, to touch these structures.

She cried out, her voice muffled by the pillow, and he pressed her down flat against the mattress. An image came to him, of her back with its skin slit open and peeled and pinned like his cadaver's in the anatomy lab, the muscles striated, the fascia yellow and clotted. He tried to fight the image off by closing his eyes. But then he saw, in the black behind his lids, the rib cage of the girl they'd dismantled, the ribs curving away from the sternum like a pair of wings, smaller and more delicate than he'd ever imagined. He opened his eyes and saw that Sylvia had twisted her head to see him—she was smiling, she was fine—and he came then, out of nowhere, while looking at her face, a hard, mean orgasm.

He rolled himself off her and lay panting on his back. The exact moment of disentanglement was for him unbearably sad. The sensation of immense loss lasted only a few seconds, but it was real; he'd felt it every time he'd had sex, with Sylvia or anybody else. It was instinctual, a product of the reptile brain: the withdrawal of warmth. His penis lay toppled on its side, the condom crumpled around the tip. He stood up and walked to her tiny bathroom. He closed the door behind him, threw the condom into the trash and washed himself off. In the mirror above the sink, his pale face was splotchy, his colorless hair mashed to his skull; he appeared stunned, as though he'd been assaulted. The usual sadness of decoupling was shadowed for him now by shame. He'd been able to keep images of the girl from the lab out of his mind for over a month, and he was ashamed that they'd come rushing back to him here, now, during sex. He was embarrassed by himself and his undisciplined mind. He hadn't slept with anybody since that night. He was too afraid of losing control over his thoughts, too afraid of what bizarre and rotten spectacles his mind would conjure up, its compartments cracking open, the barriers between things that he worked so hard to maintain melting away as quickly as sugar held to a flame.

T
HE
next morning the sky was the color of lead, the river black and glossy as crude oil. Simon got up from the couch and opened the
Times
website on his laptop, and there was the article, posted as the sports section's lead story: “Ex-NFL Player's Suicide Linked to Concussions.” Don MacLeod was paraphrased as saying that Leonard Pellegrini had been “frequently in attendance” at his support group for former players suffering “cognitive and emotional difficulties.” The article noted that Pellegrini had also suffered from acute liver disease “exacerbated” by alcohol and prescription drug abuse, and that a liver transplant at Cabrera Medical Center on Roosevelt Island, less than a month before, had brought “new hope” to his wife, Cheryl Pellegrini. Cheryl was quoted as saying—somewhat stiffly, Simon thought—that “we believed if we were able to solve Lenny's liver disease, which had grown debilitating and life threatening, it would have a positive, healing effect on the way he experienced life.” The article concluded by saying that Cheryl had decided to donate Lenny's brain to a group of medical researchers in Boston, the same group that had examined DeMarcus Rogers's battered tissue. Accompanying the article was a photograph of Lenny from his playing days, standing on the sidelines with his hands on his hips. He looked young, strong, ready to do damage. The picture was from only ten years ago.

Looking at the photo, Simon remembered what Crewes had explained to him about offensive linemen's freakish skill set: they had to be extremely large, six foot five or six and over three hundred pounds, but also capable of rapid bursts of movement in any direction (including backward), their footwork agile, practically balletic, their hands a karate blur as they warded off pass rushers. They were the grunts of the team, the trench diggers, complimented as a unit and singled out mostly for their mistakes, for missing a block or committing a penalty. And they were also, Crewes told him, some of the players who suffered most after a retirement usually forced by injury. It's a difficult thing to be in excellent physical shape and at the same time essentially obese; it requires masochistic amounts of training and conditioning offset with equally masochistic feats of food intake. Remove the training and what's left is an obese person with the hips, knees, and back of a septuagenarian.

Simon knew from Lenny's medical files that he'd had two replacements of his left knee and one of his right, plus a pair of surgeries to repair bulging disks in his back. One of these operations had occurred while he was still playing, another within three years of his retirement, its costs still covered by the league. The rest, though, he'd had to pay for himself, with no insurance company willing to assume the future costs of such a battered consumer. The painkillers could have been first prescribed for any of these surgeries, or perhaps before, to manage the lesser pain of a broken finger or bruised rib. And this was only the toll on his body. The damage to his mind had surely been subtler, more insidious. Most likely there hadn't been one or two big hits Lenny could point to and say that's where it all started; most likely it was the accumulation, over a decade and a half, of the routine catastrophes of each snap, stretching back to whenever teenaged Lenny had discovered the power and joy in being both the unstoppable force and the immovable object.

Maria emerged from the bedroom and joined Simon at the kitchen table. She'd piled her hair into a dark, unruly knot on the top of her head and wore a baggy wool sweater, moth holes dotting its hem. She looked as though she'd barely slept, and he feared that telling her story had weighed on her mind during the night, that she regretted opening herself up to him like that. But what could he say about it that would put her at ease, that wouldn't come off as condescending or pitying?

He brought her a cup of coffee and pointed at the laptop. “The story's out there now.”

She chewed her lip as she read the piece. “No Crewes.”

“No. Hopefully people will be more concerned with Lenny's brain than his liver.” He paused. “Did that sound cruel?”

“Not to me. But I'm biased.”

He went into the bedroom and pulled on a sweater and his winter jacket. He'd decided he couldn't wait any longer: he needed to speak to Cheryl Pellegrini. Calling seemed insufficient, a cop-out. He wanted to look her in the face and apologize for lying to her; he wanted to tell her what he'd really seen when he'd faced Lenny across her dinner table. He felt he owed her that much.

Simon didn't tell Maria where he was going. He knew she would think visiting Cheryl was a terrible idea, far too rash, and he didn't want to risk being talked out of it. Instead, he said he was going to the office to pick up some files DaSilva had left for him.

She just nodded and turned back to the laptop. “You know where to find me.”

 • • • 

H
e ate breakfast in a diner near Penn Station, watching commuters pour out of the subway entrance on the corner. He thought about Maria's story and tried to imagine the rage and confusion she must have felt after what Thomas had done to her. He felt sick about what had happened, but he didn't know how to express himself to her in a way that she wouldn't find cheap or irrelevant. The rape had set her on a course that led her here, to Health Solutions, but he still couldn't understand exactly how it had happened; there was a five-year link missing between then and now. He thought of the collection of photographs on her laptop. How did they fit into this? He knew better than to press her though; the best he could do was listen if she chose to tell him anything more.

He finished his coffee, walked to Madison Square Garden, and headed underground. He boarded an LIRR train, and about twenty-five minutes out of the station, as the train pulled away from Jamaica, he realized he was an idiot: Would Cheryl really be sleeping in the bedroom in which her husband had committed suicide only a few days before? She'd have to be staying somewhere else, with the friend Crewes had mentioned, or maybe with her mother, on the North Fork. He tried to remember whether Crewes had said anything about where this friend's house was, but all he could recall was that it was supposedly nearby, a few blocks away from the Pellegrinis'. He could call Howard and ask, but he knew Crewes wouldn't tell him; he'd think Simon's visit was a terrible idea as well.

Simon had the Pellegrinis' home number, and he tried it now. It rang five times, then came a click and Cheryl's voice saying: “Hi. You've reached the Pellegrini household. If you'd like to leave a message for Cheryl, Lenny . . . ,” and here a muffled mumbling, then a boy's voice announcing “Greg!” followed by a little girl saying, “Daniela,” drawing it out into four distinct syllables—Dan-i-
ell
-a—and then Cheryl once more, saying, “please leave us your name and number after the beep.”

Simon hung up. He pictured Cheryl on the phone, Gregory and Daniela clustered around her, the children pulling at their mother's elbow, anxious for their turn at the receiver. He imagined Cheryl's determination—cobbling together just enough fragile, self-deluding optimism—to record something suitably cheerful for this new beginning to their life as a family, and it broke his heart.

He got off the train and into a taxi waiting at the stand. He gave the driver an address a few numbers removed from the Pellegrinis. The cab crossed over Sunrise Highway, then continued past the high school football field, the grass chewed up, midfield a patch of bare dirt. This was probably where Lenny had played his high school ball, probably where somebody first told him he might make a living out of displacing other large men from their assigned spot of turf. A few minutes later, the cab pulled up outside a white Cape Cod.

“Here?” the driver said.

“Here is good.”

Simon got out and stood on the sidewalk, trying to get his bearings. He walked first one way, saw the numbers moving in the wrong direction, then turned around. He again passed the Cape Cod, then a dilapidated house with a sagging porch and rusted wind chime, then a green-painted clapboard home with a For Sale sign driven into its front yard. The plots were close together, only a scraggly line of bushes or a few bare-limbed trees separating one from the next. He quickly found the Pellegrinis' place, with its peeling yellowish paint, its tire-track-rutted lawn. He stood looking up at it, hands in his coat pockets. The block, not surprisingly for eleven thirty on a Monday morning, was deserted. Nobody on the sidewalks; no cars passing on the street. The house's windows were dark, and its driveway empty. He looked around. Nobody seemed to be watching, so he walked across the spongy lawn to the porch, climbed the stairs, and paused in front of the door. He listened, heard nothing but the sound of distant traffic. He opened the screen door and tried the knob. It was locked, of course. He stepped back onto the sidewalk and looked up at the second-floor room that Lenny had retreated to during Simon's last visit, the room he had to assume was the master bedroom. The shades were drawn, just as they were behind all the windows of the ground floor.

What was he supposed to do now? It was unlikely that Cheryl would have decamped all the way to the North Fork, over an hour drive away. There were surely arrangements to be made for the funeral, or wake, or whatever they were going to have, and it would be disruptive for the children. There was a good chance that wherever she'd first thought to go was where she'd stayed, and so he set off on foot to find this friend's house that Crewes had described. He hoped to be able to recognize it by the presence of her car outside, the maroon Honda. He lit a cigarette and came to a commercial street dotted with a Dunkin' Donuts, a Subway, a few local businesses. He turned left, randomly, onto this street and then made a few more equally arbitrary turns. The houses ran out onto a weedy field, and he stopped and realized he was completely lost. He turned back into the residential neighborhood, and then, halfway down the block, he saw it, the maroon car. It was parked on the sloped driveway of a tidy two-story clapboard house painted pale blue with white trim, blocking in a Ford station wagon. The Honda was the same model, he was sure of that, and as he drew closer he saw the bumper stickers he remembered: a yellow Support Our Troops ribbon and one in which the word “coexist” was spelled out with an Islamic crescent, a peace sign, a Star of David, a yin-yang symbol, and a Christian cross. It was her car, no question.

He watched the house and saw a light in one of the ground-floor rooms, another upstairs; the shadow of movement crossed a downstairs window. The presence of the Ford suggested that somebody else was home, but he'd have to live with that. The longer he stood on the sidewalk, watching the house, the more he felt his resolve slipping away, so he tossed his cigarette aside, walked up the cement path to the porch, and rang the doorbell. A few moments later, the door was opened the slightest bit, a single eye and sliver of cheek filling the crack.

“Can I help you?” A woman's voice, Long Island accent, not particularly friendly.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “Is Cheryl Pellegrini staying here?” He winced internally as the words left his mouth. Why did he use her last name? It made him sound like some kind of official or, worse, reporter.

“No.” She started to close the door.

“Wait. Please.” He put his hand inside the frame. “I need to speak with her. Please.”

The door opened slightly wider. The woman eyed his hand; he removed it. She was about Cheryl's age, in her late thirties or early forties, short and trim, a flat, wide nose dominating her oval face. “I said she wasn't here.”

“But that's her car outside,” Simon said.

The woman glanced over Simon's shoulder, then brought her eyes back to his face, her expression curdling. “You're going to have to leave. I'm sorry.”

“Can you please just tell her I'm here? If she doesn't want to talk to me, I'll leave. Okay?”

He saw a flicker of motion in the hallway, the woman turning her head slightly. Then the little girl, Daniela, rounded a corner and, as though drawn by a magnet, latched onto the woman's hip. “Dani,” she said, “go back inside, okay?”

The girl looked at Simon standing on the doorstep. “Hey,” she said shyly, half-hiding behind the woman's leg. “You were at my house.”

“That's right,” he said. “I met you and Gregory.”

The woman gave Simon a sharp look, then turned to Daniela. “Sweetie, go back upstairs. I'll be up in a minute.” The little girl shrugged, then wandered away, humming some half-familiar melody under her breath. The woman turned back to Simon. “What's your name?”

“Simon Worth.”

“All right. I'll tell her. But I swear to God if you upset her, I will kick you off my property and call the police if you ever come back.”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

“Just wait here,” she said, and closed the door in his face.