William had no idea what Arash meant by this, but he watched carefully for the next twenty minutes. He tried to pull apart the different parts of Paterson’s movements: the angle of his body when he ran, the rotation of his knees when he pivoted, the abandon with which he leapt toward the basket. On the fourth viewing he noticed Paterson’s torso twist while he shot, which caused him to be off-balance when he landed. He tried to explain this to Arash, who nodded.
“That’s right. I think he might need to work on strengthening his ankles—there’s possible ligament weakness there. Your experience made me rethink my work, you know. I want to find out about the players’ prior injuries. If I have that information, I can help build them out. I’m concerned they’ll lie to me if I just ask them about the injuries straight up, though.” He made a face.
“They won’t want you to think there’s anything wrong with them. They don’t want to be viewed as damaged and get less playing time.”
“Exactly,” Arash said. “Goddamn knuckleheads.”
William nodded and put a hand on his weak knee. “This semester—for the next month, anyway—I’m not teaching,” he said. “I have some free time. Would you mind if I watched you work sometimes? Shadowed you?”
Arash turned in his seat to look at William. It occurred to William that he knew very little about this man. He’d been a physio at Northwestern for more than a decade, but did he have a wife? Kids? Did he live on campus? Where was he from? Studying history was about scope, about understanding the terrain that surrounded the critical event. Nothing and no one existed in a vacuum. Charlie in his armchair in his house had been only one slice of his terrain. The wake had revealed the woman at the bus stop, the friends he shared drinks with, fellow poetry-lovers, nice men at his miserable job. Bitter relatives, stunned daughters.
“Aren’t you in graduate school full-time?”
“I can get everything done,” William said.
Arash looked back at the court.
“I won’t get in your way.” William cringed because his voice sounded desperate, but also because he realized he was desperate. Something opened inside him in this gym, as he watched the players. He wanted to be here more. He needed to be here, to have any chance of feeling okay.
“That would be fine,” Arash said. “I could use your help.”
* * *
—
WILLIAM REGRETTED GIVING JULIA his book the moment he handed it to her. If Charlie hadn’t died, he never would have caved to her repeated requests, but he couldn’t bear to make her more unhappy than she already was. Also, William felt like he owed her something in return for her reluctant agreement to stay in their current apartment through the end of the school year. He said, “It’s not in a readable state yet. You’re not going to know what to make of it. This is a draft, a messy draft.”
“I understand that. I’m so glad you’re letting me look at it. Thank you.”
The next morning William saw her reading the pages at their yellow kitchen table, but then he never saw her reading again. A few days later he saw the manuscript on the couch, wrapped in the paper bag, and he flinched to see it out in the open. He felt like he’d handed his wife the muddled insides of his head, or perhaps his soul. He’d been writing the book for almost five years, but he’d done so in fits and starts. He didn’t actually think of it as a book—that’s just what Julia called it. For William, it was something he worked on because there was a silence inside him that sometimes frightened him. Basketball was noisy—the game took place at tempo, with ten men jumping, shooting, guarding, cutting at every moment—and writing about it masked William’s internal quiet. He could listen to the thumping of the basketball, in the gym or on the page, and imagine that it was his own heartbeat.
He used to return to his dorm room after a hard practice and re-create a famous game on the page. When he wrote about the signature moves of great players—Oscar Robertson’s head fake, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s glorious skyhook—he felt the ripples of those moves in his own body. Those ripples were the only times the stillness deep inside him broke, and he’d experience some relief. But because of the way William wrote, the narrative in the book was convoluted and followed only the fitful path of his enthusiasms. He knew it would make no sense to his wife, and having the pages out of his hands made him feel like he’d lost part of himself. Days went by without Julia mentioning the book, and she seemed to go to great effort not to meet his eyes. The fog that had arrived with William’s injury returned to his peripheral vision, like cloud cover circling a mountain. The book was terrible; he was terrible.
Finally, one night at bedtime, Julia handed him the stack of pages and said, “It’s good!”
He closed his eyes so he couldn’t see her bright, forced smile. “You don’t have to say that. It’s not true. It’s just for me. I’m sorry it won’t get me a job after graduate school.”
“You won’t need a book for that,” she said. “We’ll get you a job.”
Fog nipped at the edges of him, and he felt bad for his wife. She had to pretend she thought he was better than he was. She had to pretend she wasn’t worried she’d hitched herself to a bad horse. This wasn’t the first time William had seen this kind of strained smile on Julia’s face, and he hated that he’d put her in this position. A dark mist saturated him.
She said, “The footnotes were very interesting. Very unusual.”
“I need a glass of water,” he said, and climbed out of bed. He walked fast into the living room and then reared back, his heart racing, at the sight of Sylvie on the couch. He’d forgotten she was here; he’d forgotten everything.
“I’m sorry,” she said. He’d frightened her too.
“It was my fault,” he said. “Rushing into the room.”
“Are you all right?” she asked.
There was something in Sylvie’s voice, some knowing, that made William pause. He pictured his wife and Julia sleeping side by side on the couch. The two sisters were careful and kind with each other; he’d always admired that about them. One of the things he loved most about Julia was how she treated her family. The sisters were so close that, in reality, his wife never operated alone; the four Padavano girls shared their lives, celebrating and utilizing one another’s strengths, covering for one another’s weaknesses. Julia was the organizer and leader, Sylvie the reader and measured voice, Emeline the nurturer, and Cecelia the artist.
William’s wife wasn’t much of a reader anymore. Of course—he realized—Julia would have asked Sylvie to read his book. Not as an act of betrayal but as a way to bring her best self to the task. Julia’s love and ambition plus Sylvie’s critical-reading skills.
William stood still at the edge of the living room in the dim light while this knowledge unfolded inside him. He could feel Julia, anxious, behind him. William had always known that he’d married not just his wife but her family too. At the start of their relationship, Julia had brought her three sisters to his college basketball game to make it clear that she came as part of a unit, and he’d accepted that. Julia had legally changed her last name to his, but for all intents and purposes, he’d joined the Padavanos. The deepest union in this apartment was between the two sisters who fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Sylvie was sitting upright on the couch now, as if she were a visitor and not a woman wearing a nightgown with her hair down. She gave William the same worried look his wife was directing at his back.
William walked away from both women, into the kitchen. He needed to be alone. He needed to wrestle his breath under control. He leaned against the refrigerator and rested his hands against his thighs. He panted as if he were running the court, an hour into a game that his team was losing by a landslide. No matter how many minutes remained on the clock, there was no chance of victory.
* * *