having run. In the moment, it’s dull, and hard as in effortful but not as in difficult to master. It’s repetitive. It doesn’t open the floodgates of revelation, as I’m sure you’ve been led to expect. I’m probably grateful for an excuse to quit. Maybe that’s what I can’t forgive myself. Though at least I’ve finally escaped the great mass of morons chugging alongside who all think they’re so fucking special.”
“Morons like me.”
“Morons like you.”
“You can’t hold me in contempt for doing what you did for, I quote, forty-seven years.”
“Oh, yeah?” she said with a tight smile before pivoting toward the staircase. “Watch me.”
Remington Alabaster was a narrow, vertical man who seemed to have maintained his figure without a struggle. His limbs were born shapely. With slender ankles, firm calves, neat knees, and thighs that didn’t jiggle, given a quick shave those legs would have looked smashing on a woman. He had beautiful feet—also narrow, with high arches and elongated toes. Whenever Serenata massaged the insteps, they were dry. His hairless pectorals were delectably subtle, and should they ever bulge grossly from a sustained obsession with bench-pressing, she’d count the transformation a loss. True, in the last couple of years he’d developed a slight swell above the belt, whose mention she avoided. That was the unspoken contract, standard between couples, she would wager: unless he brought it up, such vacillations in his bodily person were his business. Which was why, though tempted, she hadn’t asked him squarely this morning whether freaking out about what had to be a weight gain of less than five pounds was what this marathon lark was all about.
The harmless bulge aside, Remington was aging well. His facial features had always been expressive. The mask of impassivity he’d worn the last few years of his employment was protective, a contrivance for which a certain Lucinda Okonkwo was wholly to blame. Once he hit his sixties, the coloration of those features ashed over somewhat; it was this homogenizing of hue that made Caucasian faces look vaguer, flatter, and somehow less extant as their age advanced, like curtains whose once bold print had bleached in the sun. Yet in her mind’s eye, Serenata routinely interposed the more decisive lines of his younger visage over the hoarier, more tentative present, sharpening the eyes and flushing the cheeks as if applying mental makeup.
She could see him. She could see him at a range of ages with a single glance, and could even, if unwillingly, glimpse in that still vital face the frail elder he’d grow into. Perceiving this man in full, what he was, had been, and would be, was her job. It was an important job, more so as he aged, because to others he would soon be just some old geezer. He was not just some old geezer. At twenty-seven, she’d fallen in love with a handsome civil engineer, and he was still here. It was the subject of some puzzlement: other people were themselves getting older by the day, themselves watching these mysterious transformations not all of which were their fault, and knew themselves to have once been younger. Yet the young and old alike perceived others in their surround as stationary constants, like parking signs. If you were fifty, then fifty was all you were, all you ever had been, and all you ever would be. Perhaps the exercise of informed imagination was simply too exhausting.
It was also her job to look upon her husband with kindness. To both see and not see. To screw up her eyes and blur the eruptions of uninvited skin conditions into a smooth surface—an Alabaster surface. To issue a blanket pardon for every blobbing mole, every deepening crag of erosion. To be the sole person in the entire world who did not regard the slight thickening under his jaw as a character flaw. The sole person who did not construe from the sparseness of the hair at his temples that he didn’t matter. In trade, Remington would forgive the crenulations atop her elbows and the sharp line beside her nose when she slept too hard on her right side—a harsh indentation that could last until mid-afternoon and would soon be scored there all the time. Were he to have registered, as he could not help but have done, that his wife’s physical form was no longer identical to the one he wed, Remington alone would not regard this as a sign that she had done something wrong, perhaps even morally wrong, and he would not hold her accountable for being a disappointment. That was also part of the contract. It was a good deal.
Yet Remington had no need to draw drastically on the bottomless reserves of his wife’s forgiveness for not having been dipped in preservative plastic when they met, like an ID card. He looked pretty damned good for sixty-four. How he’d remained so slim, vigorous, and nicely proportioned without any appreciable exercise was anyone’s guess. Oh, he walked places, and didn’t complain about taking the stairs if an elevator was out of order. But he’d never even experimented with one of those “seven minutes to a better body” routines, much less joined a gym. During lunch, he ate lunch.
More exercise would improve his circulation, build vascular resilience, and forestall cognitive decline. She should welcome the turned leaf. She should ply him with protein bars and proudly track his increasing mileage on a pad in the foyer.
The whole supportiveness shtick might actually have been doable had he introduced his resolution with suitable chagrin: “I realize I’ll never manage to cover nearly the distances you have. Still, I wonder if maybe it would be good for my heart to go out for a modest, you know, two-mile jog, say, two or three times a week.” But no. He had to run a marathon. For the rest of the day, then, Serenata indulged the pretense of intense professionalism the better to avoid her husband. She only went back downstairs to make tea once she heard him go out. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t “rational,” but this specific subset of human experience belonged to her, and his timing was cruel.
Presumably, she herself began by copying someone else—though that’s not how it felt at the time. Both her sedentary parents were on the heavy side, and, in the way of these things, they grew heavier. Their idea of exertion was pushing a manual lawn mower, to be replaced by a power mower as soon as possible. That wasn’t to criticize. Americans in the 1960s of her childhood were big on “labor-saving devices.” A sign of modernity, the reduction of personal energy output was highly prized.
A marketing analyst for Johnson & Johnson, her father had been relocated every two years or so. Born in Santa Ana, California, Serenata never knew the town before the family shifted to Jacksonville, Florida—and then they were off to West Chester, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; Roanoke, Virginia; Monument, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio, and finally to the company headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As a consequence, she had no regional affiliations, and was one of those rare creatures whose sole geographical identifier was the big, baggy country itself. She was “an American,” with no qualifier or hyphenation—since calling herself a “Greek-American,” having grown up supping nary a bowl of avgolemono soup, would have struck her as desperate.
Being yanked from one school to the next as a girl had made her leery of forming attachments. She’d only inculcated the concept of friendship in adulthood, and then with difficulty—tending to mislay companions out of sheer absentmindedness, like gloves dropped in the street. For Serenata, friendship was a discipline. She was too content by herself, and had sometimes wondered if not getting lonely was a shortcoming.
Her mother had responded to ceaseless transplantation by fastening onto multiple church and volunteer groups the moment the family arrived in a new town, like an octopus on speed. The constant convenings of these memberships left an only child to her own devices, an arrangement that suited Serenata altogether. Once old enough to fix her own Fluffernutter sandwiches, she occupied her unsupervised after-school hours building strength and stamina.
She would lie palms down on the lawn and count the number of seconds—one one-thousand, two one-thousand—she could keep her straightened legs raised a foot above the ground (discouragingly few, but only to begin with). She was gripping a low-hanging tree branch and struggling to get her chin above the wood well before she learned that the exercise was called a pull-up. She invented her own calisthenics. To
