Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [114]
The welterweight had a lean, muscled torso, his skin a burnished brown, and when Tony called “Time!,” the kid and I tapped gloves in the center of the ring, and I chomped down on my mouthpiece and wished for headgear.
But I never let him get close to me. I jabbed him in the face for most of the three rounds. A few times he weaved away and got off a hook or a right, but his feet weren’t set and his range was off so the punches only glanced my gloves. After three rounds, the kid ducked fast through the ropes and looked frustrated and I felt mildly proud of myself. Tony talked to him awhile in the light of his office. Two heavyweights stepped into the ring, and I ducked between the ropes and unlaced my gloves and started doing incline sit-ups, my feet hooked beneath an iron bar. After a while, Tony came over. “You’re good with that jab but you gotta throw more combinations. You don’t want to win on points, you want to fight.”
I nodded and thanked him. I knew he was right. I was too careful in the ring, and I wasn’t sure why, but his last word hung between my ears—fight. Is that what I was supposed to be doing? Because a boxing match just did not feel like a real fight to me; something was missing from it, the way maybe love is missing from an act that then becomes fucking. Something was missing, but I wouldn’t know what it was till later that winter close to dawn in a diner in Monument Square.
WE WERE all in a celebratory mood. Sam and Theresa were now officially engaged. They asked me to be best man, and the wedding was set for late August, just a few days before I’d be driving west to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and their Ph.D. program in Marxist social science. The letter had come in the mail just a few days before. That night Liz was happy too. She’d just written something she was proud of, and now she and Sam and Theresa and I were in her room, listening to music and telling stories and drinking beer and playing cards. After his shift, Vinny T. came up and joined us, too. Vinny T. was the head of security at Bradford College. He was a short, small-boned ex-Marine with olive skin and a mat of curly black hair, his cheeks and jaw forever darkened by whiskers he kept shaved as close to the skin as possible. Vinny always had a good joke and liked to go drinking after his shift. Partly because he’d been in the Marines, he and Pop hit it off and Vinny spent a lot of time at Pop’s campus house, the two of them drinking till very late. Soon he was sitting on the couch very close to one of Liz’s girlfriends who’d wandered in, his hand on her knee, his handsome Italian face just inches from hers as he told her a dirty joke and she laughed too hard and spilled her drink. There was the feeling that good things were happening, that life wasn’t so directionless anymore and that hard work and focus could bring about something like Sam and Theresa getting married. I still wasn’t sure why I was going back to school, but just knowing I was really going had lifted something off me.
Liz sat close to Theresa on the couch, the two of them laughing and looking like sisters with their brown hair and wool sweaters and tight jeans. Then it was after three in the morning and Liz’s friend had wandered off and there was a plan to go to Vinny’s house out on Lake Attitash. He was going to cook the five of us omelets. Sam and Theresa wanted to get home, though, and I hugged them at the back door of Academy Hall, quiet now, the red-carpeted floor soft and gritty under our feet. I watched the two of them walk out to the parking lot holding hands, the light from a security lamp shining dully on Sam’s black Duster as they pulled away.
Vinny had some last-minute paperwork to get done so Liz and I and sat on the couch in Vinny’s office. The only light came from a fluorescent desk lamp, and Vinny sat in it entering something into the shift log, his eyes squinting, the slight static of the dispatch radio in the air.