tomorrow,” says Sebastian.
Johan is wearing shorts and I can see him flex his quadriceps in response to mention of the coming stage. He is an abbreviated, muscular man, a different creature from the rest of us. He has longer hair, tied back in a small ponytail, and a goatee beard.
“It’ll be your day,” says Sebastian to Johan. Sebastian is the son of a famous cycling champion. Where his father was well-proportioned, though, he is stringy and awkward. Where his father pedaled with a wonderfully smooth style, Sebastian stamps through his strokes. Where his father was handsome, he has a big caricature of a face, a large nose and heavy jaw. It is hard to carry the diluted genes of a champion, and he probably would have done better avoiding the bike overall, getting a real profession. Theories on the causes of these differences between him and his father have been discussed at length. “It’s the difference in nutrition in the modern age,” Fabrice has said in Sebastian’s absence. “It makes for larger people.”
“His mother must be Amazonian,” Johan has said.
“You know who else rides a bike?” Rafael likes to say. “The postman.”
I take a seat next to Sebastian.
“In twenty hours,” says Johan, breaking a silence, “I’ll be kissing a podium girl.”
“You know they only kiss the winners?” says Sebastian, and then laughs at his own joke.
“What would you know about that anyway?” says Johan. “The only time you’ve ever been on a podium is in your father’s arms.”
“He always used to take my sister, actually,” says Sebastian.
Johan ignores his friend. He sits up and looks at me. “Have you seen the podium girls on this tour?” he says.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “We haven’t had much cause to hang around the podium.”
“Too true,” says Sebastian.
Johan kisses his bunched fingers and lifts that same hand, opening it in appreciation. “Oh,” he says. “Those girls …”
“Really?” I say.
“The best beauty,” says Johan, “has a certain weirdness. Each of these girls is almost ugly. One has a pronounced underbite, another has a long forehead. These things allow you to convince yourself that others see them as unattractive. You feel you are the only one who truly appreciates them, really knows them. In this way, you can imagine such an intimacy without even having exchanged a word.”
As I have said, one must find interests to stuff around one’s days on tour. Johan is, above all, interested in chasing women. “There have been many eras,” he told me once, “in which the things we value—money, politics, war, even cycling—were nonexistent or irrelevant. In no era, though, has sex been unimportant.”
I told him that you could say the same thing about any other aspect of human survival: breathing or eating or shitting.
“I like those things too,” he said primly. “Just not as much.”
* *
I have books in my room awaiting me: a small library carried in my luggage between hotels each day. Many are recommended by Liz, who despite B, despite the busyness of her lab, reads voraciously. I do not want to read now, though, but to be with these other men, in their studied idleness, in this small room, the traffic outside, the little TV above the door whispering the news.
I was struck when I first met Liz by the way her flat was so full of paper. There were the scientific journals she read, and the textbooks, but also piles of novels and newspapers and magazines. They spilled over the small desk in her bedroom, utterly obscuring everything. The third time I visited, I felt that I had to tidy the desk. It was too much to look at. I made four piles: textbooks, scientific papers, popular periodicals, and fiction. “You read all this?” I said. I couldn’t imagine how she had the time, the inclination.
“I will,” said Liz. She felt compelled to keep on top of it. She would do her work, which would occupy many more hours than most people’s jobs, but she would also have an opinion on the books which had made the Booker short list, the artists who had been nominated for the Turner Prize, on contemporary political events and the quality of the coverage of them in the newspapers. She practiced the bassoon, an instrument she had learned to play to a nearly professional level in her teens. All this was certainly encouraged by Katherine, who had taken pains to send her daughter to a prestigious all-female school in the Cots-wolds (sometimes, I suspected, simply so she could have this to hold over Liz forevermore). There was also the shadow of the dead father, who in death had been mythologized as an incomparable polymath.
In the first weeks of knowing her, I became eager to be able to stay with her and her friends in conversation. I read more widely, picked up books and newspapers and worked through them wondering how I would discuss them with Liz. It was hard to learn the dynamics of her group, the popular books they didn’t like, the unpopular ones they did. When I got a handle on this, Liz met my competence with suspicion, however. “That’s what Peter would say,” she told me, when I described the drawbacks of a popular literary novel. She wanted something different from me. Sometimes one of her friends would say something high-flown and impenetrable and she’d laugh and look at me for a reaction, as if sure that it should naturally repulse me. I was awed by her friends though, by the breadth of what they knew, how they could talk.
“They are impressive, at first,” she said. “They want to give you that sense. They think they can do anything, but none of them do.”
“No?”
“Or they would be actually doing it,” she said. She nodded at me, as if to prove her point, as if I embodied this doing.
* *
When I return to the room I am sharing with Tsutomo, he is already in his bed, facing the wall, apparently asleep, his side moving with the rhythm of his breathing. The room is illuminated only by light coming from the half-open bathroom door.
I quietly try to prepare for the night, stumbling in the dimness. When I make it into bed, I take time to think. I do not intend to sleep for these moments but merely to feel my body, to have some sense of my aches and pains. I am not always hopeful, but in this time I try to be. There are other men recovering in other rooms all over the city, thinking as I now am that tomorrow will be a better day than the one just past. The reality for most of us is that this will not be the case, and yet we will be on the start line tomorrow, and so we must disregard this fact. I stare at the ceiling. I try to think of what has gone well since I finished the day’s stage, of the ways in which I feel prepared. I look up, visualizing these points of strength, trying to draw them into a constellation.
The new day is sheathed in cloud. The light outside is dim, but the air is warm. This muted weather suits the care with which we leave the hotel. We load our bags onto the bus slowly and silently.
The day’s stage will take us out of the mountains. It begins tending lightly downhill and then runs flat across the plains. None of the other team leaders will be able to make time against the fierce efficiency of the peloton in such circumstances, and so the game is to keep Fabrice within the mass of riders, trying to work against the contingencies—the
