6 August 1979
A Very Good Question, Actually
Nathan sat at the breakfast table with Eleanor and Carol. Nat, of course, was long gone, as always. The topic of conversation was the weather. The heat, which was already quite pronounced at only eight o’clock in the morning.
Nathan was explaining to Carol why, in the nearly fifty years he’d lived in this house, he’d never bothered to have air conditioning installed. After all, the number of days per year the house felt uncomfortably warm could usually be counted on one hand. And he could only remember a handful of times it had ever gotten as hot as this.
“Boy,” Carol said, gazing down into her cornflakes. “Who would have thought … when we moved in … that we’d still be here by August?”
Nathan saw a missed beat in Eleanor’s movements as she raised her cereal spoon to her lips. It looked something like a flaw in the playback of an old film.
“Oh, I’m not sure it’s so surprising,” she said.
It seemed like a moment of tension, but it passed on its own, and Nathan picked up his paper again. Began looking for a letter to the editor that a colleague had written, and had asked Nathan to read. It didn’t seem to be in that morning’s edition. But, while looking for it, Nathan immediately got caught up in one of the other letters.
“I know you must be sick to death of us by now,” Carol said, breaking the silence, and Nathan’s concentration. It was clear to Nathan that Carol had directed her comment toward Eleanor, and not him.
“Oh, now, honey, you know I don’t mind having you here.”
“No, I know you don’t,” she replied, quite sincerely. “I know you don’t get sick of me. Just Nat.”
Silence, which hung over the table. Nathan tried to get back to his reading, but couldn’t seem to absorb the words. He had to keep reading the same paragraph over again, a pattern he found annoying. At least, on the rare occasions it happened.
In time Carol got up, washed her bowl at the sink, and left the room to get ready for school.
Eleanor looked up at Nathan immediately. “I never said a word against Nat in front of Carol.”
“I doubt you needed to.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means your feelings come through loud and clear whether you express them in words or not.”
“Maybe Nat’s been complaining to her that I’m not patient enough with him.”
“Maybe. But whether he’s said anything or not, I’m sure she can’t help noticing.”
Eleanor stood, cleared the breakfast dishes into the sink, and began to run the sink full of hot, soapy water.
“You know his eight months are up,” she said.
“Are they? No, actually, I hadn’t realized that.”
“On November twenty-fifth you told him he could have as long as eight months. Less would have been better, of course. That took us to July twenty-fifth. Last month. This is August sixth. I’ve been wanting to bring it up, but it’s such a sore subject with us.”
“Oh, so that’s what you’ve been wanting to bring up. I sensed there was something. You’re awfully exacting. Did you write down the date?”
“I didn’t have to. It was important to me, so I remembered it. Don’t you think it’s time he got a job?”
“He’s actually gone from the house a lot more this way than he would be if he were working a forty-hour week.”
“Yes, but the forty-hour week would pay. And then they could get their own place.”
“Well, in any case,” Nathan said, giving up and setting down his paper with a sigh, “he’s not going to quit his training and get a job. Then the whole thing would have been for nothing. He’s going to wrap up his training and get a fight. A professional fight. And he’ll try to make some money that way.”
“Well, then why doesn’t he?” she said, her voice rising alarmingly. “He was so anxious to finish his training and go pro. What is he waiting for?”
Nathan thought the question over briefly before answering. “That’s actually a very valid question. I’ll have a talk with him and see what I can find out.”
? ? ?
After breakfast, Nathan knocked gently on Nat and Carol’s bedroom door. No answer. He called Carol’s name, then cautiously stuck his head in. But apparently Carol had already left for school.
He made his way to the living room, where he wrote a note for Nat on one of his name-embossed cards.
Nat,
Please come in and wake me tonight, even if it’s late, so we can talk.
Nathan
He left the note in the middle of Nat and Carol’s bed, not knowing whose pillow was whose.
? ? ?
“What? What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything, Nat. I just wanted to ask about the progress of your training. Is it taking longer than you expected?”
They sat at the dining room table, Nat slumped defensively in his chair. The only illumination was a spill of light from the kitchen. Nathan had carefully closed both bedroom doors. To avoid disturbing Carol and Eleanor, and for privacy. He wondered briefly if he would return to his own bedroom to find that Eleanor had opened the door again to listen.
It still felt warm in the house, though it was well after midnight. All the windows had been left open a crack, but the breeze they allowed in barely felt cool.
“No. It’s going great. I’m in great shape. I’m totally ready. I could get in the ring on a moment’s notice.”
“That’s good. I’m glad to hear that. Now, as far as time goes, we had estimated—”
“I know, Nathan. I know. You think I don’t know? I know my eight months is up. I knew on the day it was up. I knew every day before it was up that it was about to be up. You don’t have to tell me I’m out of time. I know.”
A long pause that felt oddly comfortable to Nathan. He had grown to enjoy conversations in the half-dark, though he was not sure why. Also, he was comfortable in knowing that he would probably not need to say much more. The lid had been pried off the jar, and Nat would now do most of the work on his own.
“You know what’s holding me back,” Nat said. “Don’t you?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Really? You can’t even imagine? You can’t even guess?”
“Fear?”
Nat snorted laughter. “Fear? Are you kidding me? I dream of getting in that ring for a real fight. I think about it every minute of every day. I’m not afraid of it. I want it more than anything.”
“OK. Tell me what’s holding you back.”
“Money.” Another wordless, half-dark space to breathe. “Look. I swear I didn’t know this when I said I needed eight months. I swear to you. I thought I could just train and then get a pro fight. But Little Manny wants me to fight amateur for a year. We’ve already been doing some sparring across town with some guys he knows, and I thought that would be enough, but he says it’s not. He says most guys he’d say three years, but because I work so hard … Anyway, so I need money to stay afloat while I’m doing the amateur thing. And then after that Little Manny could get me a fight any time. All I have to do is say the word. Only it’d probably be in New York or Atlantic City. How are we supposed to get there? Everything costs money. It takes money to launch a career in the ring. Damn it,” he said, and put his head in his hands briefly. It looked to Nathan as though he were trying to wring out his own head. “I’m just kicking myself because I knew this was coming. I feel like that idiot who’s painting his floor and ends up getting himself stuck in the corner. I guess I just kept thinking something would happen between then and now. Like some big miracle or something. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“We should calmly look at possible solutions,” Nathan said.
“You’re better at that calmly thing than I am.”
“Could you get a job for a few months and earn enough money?”
“Sure. Only after a few months off from my training I wouldn’t be in shape to fight any more.”
“Hmm. That’s true, I suppose. Could you get somebody to invest in you?”
“It would have to be somebody who really believes in me. And let’s face it. The only people who believe in me are you and Carol. But you don’t believe in loaning money, and she doesn’t have any. The only time you ever loaned me money was for bus fare when I got a job. A couple nights ago I was lying awake thinking about it. Thinking maybe this was the same sort of situation. But I know you can’t do that now. First of all, it’s a lot more than bus fare. Second of all, Eleanor would shoot you.”
“Let’s just keep this to you and me for the moment. Now, this is not to say that I intend to invest in you. But anytime anybody comes to me with a potential investment, I ask a lot of questions.”
“OK. Go ahead and ask.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
“I really have no idea.”
“That’s not the ideal investment pitch.”
“I didn’t know I’d be pitching tonight! I thought I’d just go home and go to sleep, like any other night.”
“That’s true. I’m sorry.”
“I could talk to Little Manny and we could try to figure it out. It’s hard, though. I mean, we don’t know exactly how many out-of-town fights we want to schedule right away. As many as we can afford. If we have more money we’ll get more good equipment, if not we’ll get by on what we got. I’m not sure there’s any magic number.”
“OK. We’ll put the number aside for now, too. How would you pay me back if you didn’t win?”
“I’m going to win.”
“Wrong answer. I’m not asking what you think will happen. I’m asking what kind of Plan B you’ve formulated, in case you’re wrong for any reason.”
“Oh. Plan B. I hate Plan B. Because it makes it sound like you don’t believe in your own Plan A. I put everything into Plan A. I think you get more of what you want that way.”
“But your potential investor might be more cautious.”
“Yeah, right. OK. You know, what difference does this make, anyway? You can’t loan me the money and you know you can’t. Eleanor would bust a gut.”
“So, what is your Plan B?”
In the pause, Nathan could hear the young man breathing. As if every breath were a sigh.
“If my career didn’t work out the way I planned for some reason, then I would get a job and pay my investor back a little bit at a time. I mean, if it was you. If it was a professional investor, I’d just say, ‘Oh, well, you know. You took your chances.’ But nobody’s gonna invest in me right now but you, because I’m unproven. If I could get in there and win, and look good, I might get offers.”
“OK. Let’s get some sleep and we’ll let these ideas mellow a bit. I’ll need some time to think.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right. Of course.”
“How would you feel about my talking to your trainer?”
“Little Manny? Sure. He could tell you a lot about what we need.”
“I meant more for an analysis of what I would be investing in. I was just thinking, if I invested in any other boxer, I’d want to know that he was good.”
“Fine with me.”
A silence. And — was it only Nathan’s imagination? —a spreading sense of peace. As if something heavy had been set down at last. As if the whole room breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nathan? Now that we’ve talked all this out … maybe I could take a couple days off? I really need a couple days off. I haven’t had a break in months.”
“Of course. If you need to take a break, you just take a break.”
“Now you tell me,” Nat said.
? ? ?