Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [27]
And suddenly I want someone to come up to me and say, I loved your father. Tommy was the man.
Because then I could say, He should have won. Or, His fans meant everything to him. But when I play these conversations all the way out, they’re full of self-pity and I really have to get off the street and take care of my head.
Even if I could look away from the pictures of him fighting in every bar—in slo-mo, in flashplay, psychedelic patterns and Warhol color grids—the audio is cranked so loud I hear every last sound that comes out of his chest as if my head is leaning against it. I hear his effort to turn things around and win, at least to stay alive—I know he wanted that.
Then the way the crowd calls, —UBER, UBER!
And just before I duck into the subway, I see that Visigoth reach down and pick up my bracelet again.
CHAPTER
9
Mark’s family lives less than a block from the subway, on a high first floor, directly across from a lighting shop that’s always ablaze. His family saves a lot on electricity. They have no shades or curtains on their windows. It’s just light pouring in at all hours, the feeling of wattage—and I’ve never been happier to be anywhere.
I let myself in with the key above the door frame and go past his parents’ bedroom. Lloyd, his father, or maybe his mother, Julie, snores within. Julie’s a total Glad wife and the best stitcher in the city—a veritable surgeon. She met Allison when they were both freshly widowed from their first husbands and Mark and I were toddlers. Mark doesn’t remember his first father, but his second father, Lloyd, is one of those Glads who managed to run his contract out. He got through a whole year of competition with only a small dent in his forehead. Then Julie had a dream one night that he would lose his nose and both his ears if he signed up for a second year. Since Lloyd refused to wear a helmet with face gear, like Tommy, she found herself investigating face grafting online. Pretty soon she couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about loving one man with another man’s face. And the day she woke up from a dream about Lloyd having some dead man’s face, she convinced him to become a trainer.
Sometimes she teases him that he’s too quiet to be a good trainer, and that he really should be more upbeat. But that’s Lloyd. He’s Head of Instruction at the Boston Ludus Magnus Americus and he’ll see a pension one day and maybe keep more than a few guys from losing their extremities, because he really cares about his boys.
Mark opens the door before I knock, like he knows I’m there. We do that kind of thing. The second I see him I lay my head against his chest, my face pressed into his pajama buttons. Mark is a good six inches taller than I am and he has large, nicked-up hands and smells of cigarette smoke and gel pens. When he runs a hand down the back of my head I flinch. He turns me around the way his mother does if she’s looking for a confession about something. He’s the kind of guy who will confess to almost anything if it makes her happy. Of course, we’re all like that with Julie.
Mark makes me sit on his unmade bed now with its stale sheets, and he disappears into the hallway. A minute later he’s back with Julie. She’s wearing her monkey slippers and robe. On another occasion I might crack a primate joke, but I really have to lie down.
—Tell me what hurts, Julie says.
—My heart?
I can feel my chin quiver. She holds it for a moment, kisses my cheek, and says, —I know. All of us love . . . we all loved Tommy.
Then she starts in, asking me to follow her pen, shining a flashlight in my eyes, asking me to squeeze her fingers. She tells Mark to boil some water. While I lie down she quickly braids her hair so it will be out of the way. In Mark’s bathroom she scrubs up to her elbows, keeping an eye on me in the medicine cabinet mirror. Then Julie dries her hands and examines the back of my head, shifting the clumps of matted hair about as gently as she can though each movement makes it throb more.
When I loosen the blanket and let it fall to the bed, she stops and studies