After lunch at the gym, William returned to the library to read about the Panic of 1893. William’s graduate adviser was a bright-eyed professor who always wore a bow tie and had a hard time sitting still, presumably because everything excited him so much. During their initial meeting, in the first month of the program, the professor had asked William what he really, really loved about the period of American history he’d chosen as his focus. With this question, William had felt everything at motion inside him—his blood, his lungs, his heart—slow almost to a stop. He was mortified; it had never occurred to him that he was supposed to bring love to this endeavor. Finally, he managed to say something about the great changes the country had gone through between 1890 and 1969—the Gilded Age, two world wars, the civil-rights movement—but it was too late. There was confusion in the professor’s eyes, and he seemed to be thinking: How strange, I don’t feel any historical passion coming from this young man at all.
Most days, William stayed at the gym later than he intended to after finishing his lunch. He needed to review chapters for his evening classes, but he delayed returning to the library. It was on one of those afternoons that Arash saw him while crossing the court and came to sit beside him.
“How’s the knee?” he asked.
“Fine.” This was William’s standard response when asked about his knee. He thought it was the correct answer, since the knee functioned and allowed him to walk from place to place. It always ached—the pain was worst at night—but it seemed unmanly to admit that. And who cared? He no longer needed a pain-free knee. Professors could sit, after all. His body was now more or less irrelevant.
Arash studied him. “I heard you’re in grad school here. Congratulations.”
William was surprised. “How did you hear that?”
Arash smiled. “We track you boys. I track my injuries, so you’re on my list. But we like to keep tabs on all our players. We’re not heartless, you know. We can’t send a nice note in celebration of some achievement if we’re not keeping tabs.”
William considered this. He hadn’t been prepared for kindness, and it made him think of Charlie. His father-in-law’s funeral was the first William had ever attended. He’d listened at the wake to the stories of how generous Charlie had been to people in Pilsen and at work. After a trio of drunk men tried to explain how Charlie had helped them appease an angry landlord, William had the urge to stand up and tell the room that his father-in-law had been an excellent driver and that he had hidden his competence, or perhaps it had been ignored by Rose and their daughters. How much else did Charlie feel like he had to hide from us? he wanted to ask. Instead, he watched Rose harden, hour by hour, and watched panic and grief etch his wife’s beautiful face.
After the casket was lowered into the ground, Julia had brought William to visit Cecelia and her baby girl. The infant was placed in William’s arms with no warning. He’d never held a baby before, but his wife and Izzy’s mother turned away from William casually, as if they trusted him to somehow know what to do. The baby stared up at him and her face quivered; she was considering tears. She was unbelievably tiny and wrapped up in blankets so he couldn’t see her limbs. She seemed very warm. Did she have a fever? Were the blankets necessary? William sat down in a chair, so that the baby would have less far to fall if he dropped her, and then slid down to sit on the floor. Julia and Cecelia laughed at him, but with affection in their eyes, and then the two women sat on the floor with him, as if to say that what he’d done was perfectly fine.
“Nice finish!” Arash said, his eyes on the court. “That freshman there, the power forward? He’s been an excellent replacement for Kent. Good first step.”
“Who’s replaced me?”
Arash scanned the floor. “There’s a new guy who rebounds well. He’s all elbows, though; he’s not an IQ guy like you.” Arash nodded, as if agreeing with his own assessment. “Have you read The Breaks of the Game?”
“The what?”
“It’s a book about smart players like you, how they play and think the game. Run through film in their mind, understand how to use space. The greats are always playing chess out there. You should read it.”
William tried to absorb Arash’s words; he knew immediately that he would replay this conversation later, when he was alone. These felt like the words, and sentences, he had been waiting for. William committed what felt like tiny failures and disappointments during every hour of his current life; he wished that he was still a basketball player with positional intelligence, who was part of a team. A memory flashed into his mind: He was standing on the park court as a ten-year-old, watching the boys who had just welcomed him into their game run away to get home in time for dinner. Come back, the young William thought.
Arash clapped him on the shoulder. “Got to get to an appointment. Maybe I’ll see you here again?”
“I’m here most days,” William said, and was confused by the feeling in his chest—was it longing?—as the man walked away.
* * *
—
WILLIAM AND JULIA SPENT several weeks that December repeating the same argument every time Sylvie was out.
“We should move into the other apartment before I get huge,” Julia said. She and William now qualified for a two-bedroom apartment in married housing, because they were expecting a child. “I want to get organized,” she said. “We’re going to have to put together a crib and a changing table, at least. You’ll go back to teaching next month, so we should use this window to move, while you have a little free time.” She paused. “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
William tried to make his face neutral. “Like what?”
“Like what I’m saying is shocking. You realize we’re having a baby in April, right?”
“Of course. I’m just saying that we’re comfortable in this apartment. You’ve always said that you loved this place. Let’s stay here until the end of the school year. We can move in the summer.”
Julia looked at him with wide eyes, annoyed. “It’s too small, with Sylvie staying with us. If we move now, she could sleep in the baby’s room. I don’t understand why you’re arguing with me.”
William didn’t know what to say, how to explain that he simply wanted to push off moving for as long as possible. Nothing inside him would make sense to his wife. He thought dumbly: If we don’t move, then the baby won’t be born, because he or she won’t have a bedroom. The larger apartment was in a nearby campus building, so it wouldn’t be a big change, but now, with Charlie’s death and Julia growing and Sylvie on his couch, everything felt uncertain to William. He needed to wake up in his bed in his current bedroom, and eat two pieces of toast with strawberry jam, and then walk to the library. He needed to sit in his favorite study carrel and spread his books out in the precise way he liked. He needed to take a break from studying to eat lunch in the gym—sometimes with Arash—and remember what it used to feel like to run the court in front of him with a basketball in his hands. At the end of each day, after he attended classes, William returned home to the woman he’d fallen in love with only a few years earlier. The beats of this exact routine gave William an infrastructure, and the idea of any alteration made him stare blankly at his wife, even though he knew she was being reasonable and he was not.
* * *
—
SEVERAL DAYS A WEEK, Arash brought his soup and small brown roll—his lunch never varied—and sat beside William in the bleachers. Arash talked to William like he was a colleague, which was a kindness William appreciated.
“I have concerns about Paterson,” Arash said, nodding toward the sophomore shooting guard who was bouncing up and down on the court, waiting for his turn to shoot.
“He has a nice stroke,” William said. “Don’t you think?”
“Good technique in his shot, yes. But pay attention to how he lands.”
William watched the lanky kid dribble around three cones and then shoot. “I don’t see a problem.”
“Try to slow your vision down while you watch. Watch him in slow motion for his next three turns.”