Arash clapped him on the shoulder. “Got to get to an appointment. Maybe I’ll see you here again?”
“I’m here most days,” William said, and was confused by the feeling in his chest — was it longing? — as the man walked away.
—
William and Julia spent several weeks that December repeating the same argument every time Sylvie was out.
“We should move into the other apartment before I get huge,” Julia said. She and William now qualified for a two-bedroom apartment in married housing, because they were expecting a child. “I want to get organized,” she said. “We’re going to have to put together a crib and a changing table, at least. You’ll go back to teaching next month, so we should use this window to move, while you have a little free time.” She paused. “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
William tried to make his face neutral. “Like what?”
“Like what I’m saying is shocking. You realize we’re having a baby in April, right?”
“Of course. I’m just saying that we’re comfortable in this apartment. You’ve always said that you loved this place. Let’s stay here until the end of the school year. We can move in the summer.”
Julia looked at him with wide eyes, annoyed. “It’s too small, with Sylvie staying with us. If we move now, she could sleep in the baby’s room. I don’t understand why you’re arguing with me.”
William didn’t know what to say, how to explain that he simply wanted to push off moving for as long as possible. Nothing inside him would make sense to his wife. He thought dumbly: If we don’t move, then the baby won’t be born, because he or she won’t have a bedroom. The larger apartment was in a nearby campus building, so it wouldn’t be a big change, but now, with Charlie’s death and Julia growing and Sylvie on his couch, everything felt uncertain to William. He needed to wake up in his bed in his current bedroom, and eat two pieces of toast with strawberry jam, and then walk to the library. He needed to sit in his favorite study carrel and spread his books out in the precise way he liked. He needed to take a break from studying to eat lunch in the gym — sometimes with Arash — and remember what it used to feel like to run the court in front of him with a basketball in his hands. At the end of each day, after he attended classes, William returned home to the woman he’d fallen in love with only a few years earlier. The beats of this exact routine gave William an infrastructure, and the idea of any alteration made him stare blankly at his wife, even though he knew she was being reasonable and he was not.
—
Several days a week, Arash brought his soup and small brown roll — his lunch never varied — and sat beside William in the bleachers. Arash talked to William like he was a colleague, which was a kindness William appreciated.
“I have concerns about Paterson,” Arash said, nodding toward the sophomore shooting guard who was bouncing up and down on the court, waiting for his turn to shoot.
“He has a nice stroke,” William said. “Don’t you think?”
“Good technique in his shot, yes. But pay attention to how he lands.”
William watched the lanky kid dribble around three cones and then shoot. “I don’t see a problem.”
“Try to slow your vision down while you watch. Watch him in slow motion for his next three turns.”
William had no idea what Arash meant by this, but he watched carefully for the next twenty minutes. He tried to pull apart the different parts of Paterson’s movements: the angle of his body when he ran, the rotation of his knees when he pivoted, the abandon with which he leapt toward the basket. On the fourth viewing he noticed Paterson’s torso twist while he shot, which caused him to be off-balance when he landed. He tried to explain this to Arash, who nodded.
“That’s right. I think he might need to work on strengthening his ankles — there’s possible ligament weakness there. Your experience made me rethink my work, you know. I want to find out about the players’ prior injuries. If I have that information, I can help build them out. I’m concerned they’ll lie to me if I just ask them about the injuries straight up, though.” He made a face.
“They won’t want you to think there’s anything wrong with them. They don’t want to be viewed as damaged and get less playing time.”
“Exactly,” Arash said. “Goddamn knuckleheads.”
William nodded and put a hand on his weak knee. “This semester — for the next month, anyway — I’m not teaching,” he said. “I have some free time. Would you mind if I watched you work sometimes? Shadowed you?”
Arash turned in his seat to look at William. It occurred to William that he knew very little about this man. He’d been a physio at Northwestern for more than a decade, but did he have a wife? Kids? Did he live on campus? Where was he from? Studying history was about scope, about understanding the terrain that surrounded the critical event. Nothing and no one existed in a vacuum. Charlie in his armchair in his house had been only one slice of his terrain. The wake had revealed the woman at the bus stop, the friends he shared drinks with, fellow poetry-lovers, nice men at his miserable job. Bitter relatives, stunned daughters.
“Aren’t you in graduate school full-time?”
“I can get everything done,” William said.
Arash looked back at the court.
“I won’t get in your way.” William cringed because his voice sounded desperate, but also because he realized he was desperate. Something opened inside him in this gym, as he watched the players. He wanted to be here more. He needed to be here, to have any chance of feeling okay.
“That would be fine,” Arash said. “I could use your help.”
—
William regretted giving Julia his book the moment he handed it to her. If Charlie hadn’t died, he never would have caved to her repeated requests, but he couldn’t bear to make her more unhappy than she already was. Also, William felt like he owed her something in return for her reluctant agreement to stay in their current apartment through the end of the school year. He said, “It’s not in a readable state yet. You’re not going to know what to make of it. This is a draft, a messy draft.”
“I understand that. I’m so glad you’re letting me look at it. Thank you.”
The next morning William saw her reading the pages at their yellow kitchen table, but then he never saw her reading again. A few days later he saw the manuscript on the couch, wrapped in the paper bag, and he flinched to see it out in the open. He felt like he’d handed his wife the muddled insides of his head, or perhaps his soul. He’d been writing the book for almost five years, but he’d done so in fits and starts. He didn’t actually think of it as a book — that’s just what Julia called it. For William, it was something he worked on because there was a silence inside him that sometimes frightened him. Basketball was noisy — the game took place at tempo, with ten men jumping, shooting, guarding, cutting at every moment — and writing about it masked William’s internal quiet. He could listen to the thumping of the basketball, in the gym or on the page, and imagine that it was his own heartbeat.
He used to return to his dorm room after a hard practice and re-create a famous game on the page. When he wrote about the signature moves of great players — Oscar Robertson’s head fake, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s glorious skyhook — he felt the ripples of those moves in his own body. Those ripples were the only times the stillness deep inside him broke, and he’d experience some relief. But because of the way William wrote, the narrative in the book was convoluted and followed only the fitful path of his enthusiasms. He knew it would make no sense to his wife, and having the pages out of his hands made him feel like he’d lost part of himself. Days went by without Julia mentioning the book, and she seemed to go to great effort not to meet his eyes. The fog that had arrived with William’s injury returned to his peripheral vision, like cloud cover circling a mountain. The book was terrible; he was terrible.