While I poke the ruined meat with the barbecue fork, an uncommonly handsome blond woman in a ponytail and a cherry-red tracksuit comes out of the building’s back door. She hurls a bashed pizza box, like a Frisbee, into the dumpster. Excess energy floats toward me, connecting us. She can’t stand still. She tightens a shoelace. We’re a community of toned, conditioned athletes. Use it or lose it. Hands pressed down on somebody’s Firebird, she does warm-up routines. I’ve seen her run in the Lull water Estate close by, but I’ve never felt connected enough to her to nod. I heave the meat from the rack to a platter. The woman’s still hanging around in that hyper, fidgety way of hers. She’s waiting. She’s waiting for someone. When a man in a matching tracksuit jogs out the back door, I get depressed. She used to run alone.
Blanquita doesn’t say anything about the state of our dinner. It’s already stuffed away conveniently in the past. She’s got the TV going again. The latest news, hot from Mexico City. “They had this news analyst chap on a minute ago,” she says. “They were talking about Vitaly Yurchenko.”
I put the butterfly lamb in the kitchen sink. “Why don’t you watch about Vitaly Yurchenko on an American station?” I ask. Usually, that steams her. Mexican is American! she’ll squeal. But instead she says, “He could have had it all if he’d stayed. What’s so great about Moscow?”
“Sometimes you blow it for love. It can happen.”
She runs to me, lavender arms going like wings. Her face — the skin so tight-pored that in the dark I feel I’m stroking petals — glows with new hope. “What are you saying, Griff? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I know what I would say if I weren’t the solid corporate guy in maroon tie and dark suit. I buy and sell with other people’s money and skim enough to just get by. It’s worked so far.
“Griff?”
Sailor?
“Let’s go for a run, Blanquita.”
The woman of many men’s dreams doesn’t wrench herself free from my kissing hold. I don’t deserve her.
“Just a short run. To clear our heads. Please?”
Before I met her I used to pump iron. I was pumping so hard I could feel a vein nearly pop in the back of my head. I was a candidate for a stroke. Self-love may be too much like self-hate, who knows? Blanquita got me running. We started out real easy, staying inside the Lullwater Estate like that woman in the red tracksuit. We ran the Peachtree I OK. We could run a marathon if we wanted to. Our weightless feet beat perfect time through city streets and wooded ravines. The daily run is the second best thing we do together, I like to think.
“All right,” she says. She gives me one of her demure, convent smiles. “But what’ll we do with dinner?”
I point at the shrivelled, carbonized thing in the stainless steel sink. “We could mail it to Africa.”
“Biafra?” she asks.
“Baby, Baby … Ethiopia, Mozambique. Biafra was gone a long time ago,” I tell her. She’s very selective with her news. Emilou was a news hound, and I took to watching CNN for a solid winter.
Blanquita pins my condo key to her elasticized waistband and goes out the front door ahead of me. The lawyer from 1403 is waiting by the elevator. I am far enough behind Blanquita to catch the quickie gleam in his eyes before he resumes his cool Duke demeanor and holds the elevator for us. In your face, Blue Devil.
That night Blanquita whips up some green nutritive complexion cream in the Cuisinart. She slaps the green sludge on her face with a rubber spatula. Her face is unequivocally mournful. The sludge in the Cuisinart fills the condo with smells I remember from nature trails of my childhood. Woodsy growths. Mosses. Ferns. I tracked game as a kid; I fished creeks. Atlanta wasn’t always this archipelago of developments.
“Better make tonight memorable,” she advises. The mask is starting to stiffen, especially around the lips. She has full, pouty, brownish lips. “It’s our last night.”
How many times has she said that? I’ve never said it, never had to. The women of my life always got the idea in plenty of time, they made it a mutual-consent, too-bad and so-long kind of thing. Wendi was really looking for a stepfather to her kids. Emilou was looking for full-time business advice to manage her settlement.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The lips make a whistling noise from inside the mask’s cutout. “Anyway,” she says, “it wasn’t all cherry bombs and rockets for me either. Just sparklers.”
Sex, intimacy, love. I can’t keep any of it straight anymore.
“You’re not going to the Chiefs cabin in the north woods, period. He’s Jack the Ripper.”
“You think I can’t handle the situation, right? You think I’m just a dumb, naive foreigner you have to protect, right?”
“Yeah.”
Then she leaps on me, green face, glamor-length nails, Dior robe and all. I don’t know about Baby, but for me those rockets explode.
All day Sunday it rains. The raindrops are of the big, splashy variety, complete with whiffs of wild winds and churned seas. Our winter is starting. I don’t do much; I stay in, play Bach on the earphones and vacuum the broadloom. Marcos seems here to stay because I can’t bring myself to call the ASPCA.
When the hour for the daily run rolls around, I start out as usual in the doctors’ wing of the VA Hospital parking lot, pick my way around Mazdas, Audis, Volvos — they don’t have too many station wagons in this neighborhood — keep pace with fit groups in running shoes for as long as it feels good, then shoot ahead, past the serious runners who don’t look back when they hear you coming, past the dogs with Frisbees in their jaws, past the pros who scorn designer tracksuits and the Emory runners with fraternity gizmos on their shirts, pick up more speed until the Reeboks sheathe feet as light as cotton. Then it’s time to race. Really race. After Emilou and just before Baby I did wind sprints for a spring at the Atlanta Track Club, ran the three-minute half, ran four of them. I can let it out.
Today in the rain and the changing weather, colder tomorrow, I run longer, pushing harder, than any afternoon in my life. Running is here to stay, even if Baby is gone.
Today I run until a vein in the back of my head feels ready to pop. The stopgap remedy is Fiorinal, and so I pop one while I slump in the shower. It feels so good, the exhaustion, the pile of heavy, cold, sweaty clothes, the whole paraphernalia of deliberate self-depletion. At the track club they had a sign from William Butler Yeats: Torture Body to Pleasure Soul. I believe it.
What to do now? The rain is over, the Falcons are dying on the tube, the sun is staging a comeback. Already, my arms and legs are lightening, I’m resurging, I’m pink and healthy as a baby.
The nearby mall is so upscale that even the Vendoland janitor is dressed in a bright red blazer. The mall’s got the requisite atriums, tinted skylights, fountains, and indoor neo-sidewalk cafés. It’s a world-within-the-world; perfect peace and humidity, totally phony, and I love it. The Fiorinal’s done its job. My head is vacant and painless.
It must still be raining on the Chiefs woodsy acres.
I walk into an art framer’s. It’s the only empty store and the woman behind the counter, a Buckhead version of Liv Ullmann, with a wide sympathetic face, doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t look like a serious shopper. I give her my toothiest.
“Just looking,” I apologize.
“Why?”
“That’s a very reasonable question,” I say. She is neatly and expensively dressed; at least, everything looks color coordinated and natural fiberish. She seems many cuts above mall sales assistant.
Besides, Blanquita thinks she’s too good for me.
“Don’t tell me you have something to frame,” she says, laughing. “And I know you wouldn’t buy the junk on these walls.” She’s really a great saleslady. She’s narrowed my choices in about ten seconds. She’s flattered my tastes. Her eyes are the same greenish blue as her paisley sweater vest.