“Can’t,” Nate says. “It’s a hundred percent participation.”
“I recently had a minor stroke and am supposed to avoid overexertion,” I say.
Nate looks at me, worried, suddenly fragile.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I just have to be a little careful.”
“You’re pretty much just managing your own weight,” he says. “Would that be okay? There’s a harness and a lock, so you can’t really fall.”
“I never was much of an athlete,” I say.
“Trust me, these guys aren’t either — they’re blowhards.”
It’s turning into a standoff — my dread of sports, of having to show off or, worse, failing to show off, in front of all these children and their parents, is making me cranky. “Dad would never do it either,” Nate says, annoyed.
“Why not?” I ask; I’m surprised.
“No real reason. Every year I signed up for it, it always happened that he didn’t have to do it — a call he had to take, a pulled this, sprained that.”
“I’ll do it,” I say, finding inspiration in the fact that George never would.
The climbing teacher fits each of us with a harness. We’re given a lesson on how the ropes work. He makes it sound simple, effortless — I’m sweating. The other men look no more or less capable; a last-minute addition is a chunky guy wearing dark sunglasses and dressed like he’s left the house in his black long underwear — or someone else’s long underwear, because it’s way too tight. He’s wearing nothing beneath it — his cock and balls are pancaked, all too explicitly. I can’t help but stare, and then wonder, is this kind of full-on peacock display standard around here?
By the time I get four feet off the ground, I’m praying that Nate, who’s holding my line, is stronger than he looks, and that when I plummet, he doesn’t go flying through the air like some seesaw gone wrong. I’m both defying gravity and entirely aware of gravity’s pull.
“Use your feet,” Nate says, coaching from below.
I feel around for the lumps of faux rock to use for leverage; they’re like doorstops. Pushing off, I rise a few feet and then grab at the holds just above my head.
“Push,” he says, “push yourself up, don’t pull. It’s easier.”
For sixty-five thousand dollars a year in tuition, according to the school’s Web site, I’m glad he’s learning something about physics.
I push up and belch; acrid coffee and cake fill my mouth. I swallow, get my footing, and push again. There are other men above and below me; the air is filled with a gamy scent of men under pressure. I go higher, determined, really fucking determined.
While I’m on the wall, the Headmaster comes around, working the crowd on the ground, shaking hands. I’m two stories up and hoping that Nate doesn’t get distracted by his “boss” in a skirt. I shift my weight and look down below; suddenly my testicles are trapped under the harness, which has slipped. It’s excruciating, and now I’m almost dancing, trying to address the situation.
“What are you doing?” Nate screams.
I hug the wall, use both hands, and adjust accordingly.
I notice some men have special climbing shoes on — I’ve got George’s fucking slip-ons. One falls off, bouncing against the wall, tumbling to the floor.
“I can throw it back up to you,” Nate says.
“Never mind,” I say, pushing higher, my sock foot slipping.
“Is this Dad’s shoe?” Nate shouts up to me.
“Yes,” I call down.
“Weird.”
I turn and focus on the wall. Fuck, yes, I tell myself as I fight my way to the top.
And guess what’s there? A goddamned GOLDEN EGG. I’m not joking: there’s a golden egg, a porcelain fucking piggy bank at the top. The problem is — how do you bring it down? How do you carry something fragile when you need both hands and feet? I stuff it down my pants. Hung like a horse, fucking the golden egg, I rappel down. Nate is at the bottom with tears in his eyes, and I’ve got no option other than to unzip my pants, extract the egg, and give it to him — a kind of offering. He’s hugging me and crying. I taste victory and sweat and think this is amazing. For one shining moment I am HIGH!
Twenty minutes later, my head is throbbing. I’m walking like a broken cowboy and I have a distinct absence of sensation in three fingers. When I sit on the toilet I can barely get up. I ask Nate if he’s got any Tylenol, and he says I should go see the school nurse.
“Forget it,” I grouch, and we head back into the main building for afternoon sherry and cheese cubes.
I drink too much — honestly, drinking any sherry constitutes drinking too much. The headache is getting worse.
“Have a Coke,” Nate suggests, and he’s right.
I have two Cokes and a half-pound of cheese, and show off my medal to anyone who will listen to the story of my stroke and miraculous recovery.
“What now?” I ask as the cocktail hour winds down.
“We go to dinner at the Ravaged Fowl,” Nate says, as though it’s obvious. “You made the reservation?”
I look blank.
“We always go there, but you have to have a reservation.” The way he says it, there is no way out, it’s definitive.
“Not a problem,” I say. “All taken care of.”
From the stall of the men’s bathroom I call the Ravaged Fowl; there’s a embarrassing echo.
“Sold out,” the woman says. “Fully booked. No tables until Monday.”
I don’t tell Nate — some things are best addressed in person — but as we’re heading there, my already fragile constitution is taking on a kind of anticipatory stress, wondering what is going to happen.
We arrive, I play dumb, I give the hostess our name. “Let me check,” the girl says. I get nervous. “We have a reservation. Every year we come here. How many years now?” I turn to Nate.
“Four,” the boy says, looking at his shoes.
“For the last four years we’ve been coming here, this same day every year. I always make the reservation.” I become indignant. The girl doesn’t care. She is busy answering the phone; I talk right over her: “I thought we could rely on you.” She holds her finger up, as if putting me on hold — my voice is getting louder. My mood turns.
“Your face looks like Dad’s,” Nate says.
“Always, or just right now?”
“Right now,” he says.
“I’m in a lousy mood.”
“Do you want to leave me here? You can go deal with your headache, I’ll join another table.”
“That’s not an option,” I say. “Can’t I be in a bad mood for a minute? It’s a lot for me.” I can’t begin to explain how or why, but the opulence, the success, the beauty of this bright and shining day is getting me down. It has all been so wonderful that it’s made me sick — I can’t tell Nate and his buddies that the threat, the creeping encroachment of their youthful, excellent promising future, is for me a giant fucking depressant.
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” he says, and I feel him retreat, vacate, leaving an empty shell.
The hostess hangs up the phone and walks away. I am tempted to chase after her — you can’t walk away from me, you can’t leave me standing there, having made a fool of myself in front of the kid.
My anger is intense. Without speaking, I am tearing her apart, surprised at the ugly clarity of my thoughts. She is singularly unattractive — grotesque. All too proud of what some would call a good figure, she’s wearing an emerald-green dress that’s too tight with a scoop neck and her boobies spilling out. She looks less like a hostess than a hooker, or a homely drag queen. Her lips are thick and wide, smeared with cheap frosted pink goo. Her pores are large and black, each like an individual cesspool, each blackhead a black hole. There’s a thing or two I have half a mind to say: Don’t tell me you can’t manage a reservation that I made months ago; what’s the point of my making a reservation if you can’t keep track of it? And then I remember that I never made a reservation, and I imagine turning over her little bowl of crème mints, tipping her toothpicks, telling her to shove her creamed spinach up her cunt, and then whisking the kid off to some lousy diner twenty-five miles from here.