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  They come into a room at the back of the house, startlingly empty and bright, with two great windows and a paint-spattered cloth on the floor. Frazer’s pulse accelerates before he knows why. Everything else in the room has been pushed to one side, away from the drop cloth, neatly arranged though cramped up. The guide has been breathlessly narrating the objects they encounter: “Nineteenth-century Mexican beggar’s bowl. 925-sterling-silver filigree. Of course, a beggar in nineteenth-century Mexico couldn’t afford such a thing; the term beggar’s bowl is fanciful.” Frazer stares at the drop cloth, and the dots of paint on it. “What’s happening here?” he blurts out.

  Although he’s interrupted her, the guide is incandescent; she is delighted to have piqued his curiosity. “It must be clear to you, Mr. Jones, that the house is in need of attention. There’s so much to be done, and we are tackling things one at a time. I was just about to draw your attention to these beautiful windows; notice the light, so much brighter here than in the rest of the house. This room, seventeen feet square with nearly sixteen-foot ceilings, was the painting studio of Mrs. Brinson Henley; here she strived to capture the light of the great Hudson Valley. Notice that the panes are not leaded; they are all in one piece, very rare for that time, and very heavy. In the course of the decades these panes have warped away from their frames, and we have had tragic water damage as a result.” She stops for breath and looks at them solemnly. The retired couple seems stricken with horror. Frazer himself feels his lungs empty out. Slowly, calmly, he looks around the room. He fixes his gaze on each object, as if picking it up in his hands. A cushioned chair. A floor lamp. A huge, dark, oily cabinet. The beggar’s bowl. Nothing here that is hers.

  “But now,” the guide resumes, clasping her hands at her breast, “we have an Oriental girl who’s helping us with restoration.” Her voice grows confiding. “It’s just beautiful, watching her work.”

  IT HAD BEEN some years before, long enough ago for a full cycle of students to have matriculated and departed in the interval, that the Manhattan university near Frazer’s current apartment, upon receipt of an endowment of undisclosed millions from a once-athletic, now nostalgic alumnus, announced plans for a huge new gymnasium. The gymnasium would be the university’s first building project in a very long time, and great hopes and intents were attached to it. Its neo-Victorian style would serve as a reproach to the chill modernism then dominating architectural design. Its material, red sandstone, would echo the elegant yet whimsical Furness Palace of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It would employ stonecutters, an endangered breed of craftsman. It would have the upward thrust and rich ornamentation of a cathedral, dedicated as it would be to the tabernacle that is the human body; and its great window frames would contain, instead of inspirational religious images, inspirational secular phrases painted onto the panes. It would take up a full city block, in the midst of the adjacent black ghetto, much of which the university owned.

  To be fair, the university had not left the ghetto entirely out of its thinking. It had plans for relocating those families whose buildings would have to be razed. It had also declared that ghetto inhabitants would be allowed to benefit from the gym’s facilities; that the gym was being placed in that spot not merely for lack of an alternative but to serve as a “bridge” to what the university called “its community.” Informational meetings were held for community members; some time later, a scale model was unveiled. Despite its location in the lobby of the university’s white-marble library, situated squarely on its green, fortressed quad, a sprinkling of curious community members ventured over to look, with ideas of enrolling their children in “kinderswim” classes, or themselves for the use of the weight room, all of which possibilities had first been suggested by university spokesmen. At first glance the scale model was impressive, even exciting. It did look like a beautiful church. On closer perusal the more design-minded of the observers noticed that the accompanying blueprints described a side entrance as a “community access point.” This was just to “streamline traffic flow”; students also had an “access point”—a larger one, by chance at the front of the building. It additionally emerged that the university had decided, for reasons having to do with insurance, that community members would not be able to use the pool, or enroll their younger members in kinderswim class, after all, though they would probably be welcome to use the exercise machines for an annual membership fee, at particular hours.

  Even these disappointments might have been absorbed in due time if it hadn’t been for the aphorisms on the windows. Judging from the model, the aphorisms faced out, like ads, or parental exhortations. No one was sure what TALKERS ARE NO GREAT DOERS was supposed to be saying, but all agreed it seemed somehow insulting, as if the neighborhood people were morons, or crooks.

  There was, eventually, an act of vandalism. Somebody smashed the glass box enclosing the model, and then the model itself. It might have ended there, if the student community hadn’t by then become aware of the project. The student community at that time was becoming aware of a lot of things: the university’s role in the production of the weapons of mass destruction then raining down on certain parts of southeast Asia. The university’s friendly accommodation of recruiters from the Central Intelligence Agency. The university’s staggering whiteness. Because most of the students were themselves white, and from equally white places, they hadn’t noticed this aspect at first, but upon venturing further and further afield from classrooms and dorms, perhaps drawn forth by nothing more than the desire for a snack in the middle of the night, they had discovered that a vast black neighborhood encircled their school, and this had made it easier, somehow, to notice the disproportion of whites on the campus. Global forces, bad ones, seemed everywhere suddenly. And it was all very hard to understand, but the gymnasium—because it was a thing, because it was nearby, because it just seemed really stupid—was easy to understand. And so the gym became a catalyst for action, though soon, with the seizures of buildings and hapless staff members and the paintings of banners and the smashings of windows, and the multiplication of incendiary students and the absence from the fray of “community members”—in spite of the students’ claim and the university administrators’ fear that the community comprised a sort of secret weapon awaiting deployment—the battle was about any number of things having nothing to do with the gym.

  And it was at around this same time that Rob Frazer, on the other side of the country, was well into his first—hopefully not his last—bout of genuine celebrity. It was Frazer’s theory that the vast majority of people live a decade behind the times, happily, and that a tragic few live ahead of the times, miserably, and are misunderstood and punished. And then there are the people on the leading edge, riding it forward, like surfers, and this was what Frazer was, in his own estimation. Since the dawn of his maturity he’d been seeing his own particular obsessions bloom into cultural obsession all around him—no more in response to his presence than his presence was in response to these developments. It was just sync, a wave traveling forward that he was inside of. Frazer had arrived as an undergraduate at Berkeley on the football ticket, another side of beef with the jock’s guaranteed C-minus like a rubber floor that bounced him back no matter how much he fucked off. Doubleportion privileges the first time through the chow line and that was the end of respect as he knew it. He’d ditched football at the end of his first year—Berkeley, like many high-minded schools, wasn’t really permitted to base acceptance on football, and so they couldn’t throw him out when he refused to play the game. He moved into bona fide student life, never quite got a toehold, moved toward nonpompommed women, fought for years for his toehold, moved leftward through politics—but here he had his toehold, capped to his toe and awaiting the rest. When it came, it would hold on to him.

  Because Frazer had had an idea, and though the anticapitalists and the anti-imperialists and the antiracists and the antiexploitationists who should have been his natural allies thought him a boneheaded joke, an irrelevance, he knew
that his moment would come, and it did. The moment came, surprisingly soon, when people saw he’d been right about the exploitation of athletes in professional sports, and the way it rhymed in so many respects with racism, and the way the exceptional status of black athletes proved the rule of American fear and loathing of the rest of black people. He’d been right about all of this—not being a black man, not being a great or even a consistently good athlete, not being some politico-sociotheorist, just being a hyperactive middle-class white kid with the scary muscularity of a blue-collar thug and a brain that, though flawed, was a lot better at thinking than most people thought. Stubbornly, he’d gotten himself into the sociology department, stubbornly started a mimeographed, smeary newsletter, at first just his own trademarked ranting and raving. Then he’d written his first book, a compendium, typos corrected, of the newsletter. Gotten it published by a very small press, sold it out of the back of his car in the stadium parking lot. Been abused by a number of sports fans, and, unsurprisingly to him, intensely supported by more and more athletes. Swung his way into the socio doctoral program and started getting submissions to the newsletter, and inquiries from like-minded writers who thought he could help them—and it turned out he could. And then, all of a sudden and almost too fast, had come Mexico City’s raised fists and the threat of the boycott, his loud support, a pipe bomb through his window, a national news crew the same afternoon, and, crowningly, a denunciation from a Republican senator and former football star who called him, Frazer, a sour-grapes football failure turned Commie destroyer of the American way. Which meant, just like that, fame.

  After Berkeley he’d gotten hired at a small East Coast college as athletic director, over the unanimous objection of the corps of individual team coaches. He was fired before he’d worked a single day, with a full year’s salary as severance—a full year’s pay without work! Carol had wanted to move to Manhattan, and he’d been able to take her there, set up an office for himself, get the newsletter going again—now with the senator’s denunciation as part of the masthead—and start writing his next book. He found that he knew people—academic types drawn to his anti-intellectual ass-kicking hard-left persona, professional athletes he’d helped learn how to voice their critiques of the system while negotiating lucrative contracts, sportswriters who knew who he knew, and who amusingly abased themselves before him. The fracas over the gymnasium at the local university hadn’t initially grabbed his allegiance—by this time it had dragged through three semesters and two student strikes—but he’d eventually gone over to find out about it, and one thing had led to another, and in the end the university, in its abject confusion, had hired him, as athletic director and as sop to the student insurgency, in the hopes that his reputation as a left-leaning white with black friends would be helpful to them in the course of a now-labyrinthine negotiation schedule. Frazer had reveled for a few weeks in his power, given about a hundred interviews to local media, and then, as all was threatening to cool, hired a known black Muslim and world-ranked 800-meter runner as his co-director, and been fired again, this time for almost twice his previous severance, as he made them buy out his whole contract. He gave the runner a chunk of the money, gave more interviews, and continued to settle with Carol into their university-owned apartment, which they’d decided to keep, by whatever legal or illegal means necessary.

  It was a nice apartment, with high ceilings and creaking french doors and a claw-footed tub in the bathroom. Calling Carol that night from his Rhinebeck motel room, Frazer thought happily of its shambling extent. “Hi,” he said when she finally answered. “Did you pick up milk yet?”

  “Oh, my God.” He could hear Carol dragging the phone across the room and down the hall, pictured the cord slithering over the rug, catching on a chair leg and going taut until Carol yanked it impatiently. On cue, something crashed in the background. “Fuck!” Carol said. Frazer had bought Carol the fifty-foot phone cord just after they’d gotten married. He’d come home and found her lying on their bed, fully dressed, sobbing at the ceiling. It was like Carol to cry flat on her back, arms and legs splayed, eyes open and angry. She wasn’t the kind of woman to roll into a ball or hide under a blanket. “What is it, baby?” he’d asked her. She’d said, with difficulty, but vehemently, “What about my privacy? Goddammit! What if I want to be alone?”

  She’d gotten the phone down the hall to the bathroom. Carol had turned the bathroom into a sort of private office; it was full of water-warped feminist books and all manner of atmospheric scenting equipment. Frazer liked to go in there when she wasn’t home, finger her little incense bowls and read the labels on her candles. That sort of stuff generally got lost or broken in the rest of their apartment. He heard her push the bathroom door firmly shut. “Goddammit, Robbie! Where are you?”

  “I said, did you pick up milk yet?”

  “Oh, Rob. It’s pouring out.”

  “Will you go get milk, please?”

  There was a long pause, during which Frazer waited for Carol to accept that the rain wasn’t his fault, that the milk was in her interest, too, and that for all these reasons, she couldn’t yell at him. “Okay,” she said finally. “Fifteen minutes. But don’t blame me if—”

  “Later, Carol,” he said. She sighed and hung up.

  Frazer looked at his watch, bounced onto the bed, bounced back to his feet. Fifteen long minutes. As usual, given a very brief, exact amount of time to kill, he found idleness unbearable. He opened the door to his room and stood watching the fading light darken the fields on the far side of the road. Out here the air cooled so quickly at sundown; he felt it seeping through his shirt, raising the small hairs on his forearms. He smelled damp earth. The rhythmic creaking of crickets seemed to slowly fade in, although he knew it was only himself, tuning in to the sound. The air was passing into that stage of particulate darkness, as if made of fine charcoal dust. He saw a firefly drifting slowly across the parking lot, parallel to the ground, and stepped forward suddenly, confused, feeling through the outskirts of his skin the pristine sense memory of his own cupped hands, closing together, the whisper of the insect on his palm—

  When he remembered to look at his watch it had been twenty minutes. He went back into his room, which now seemed to blaze like a stage in the deepening dusk. Carol answered on the first ring and he heard the hiss of wet tires on wet pavement, all the boomerang howls of the traffic on Broadway. He’d left the door to his room standing open—this was how confident he’d come to feel in this place—and he stood for a moment ignoring Carol’s voice, listening just to the racket of the city in the background while keeping his gaze on the motionless night. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d so palpably appreciated the drama of the telephone.

  “There was a guy talking and talking. I practically had to glare him to death to get him to get off the phone. Do you think he’s still hanging around? He went into the deli and now I don’t remember seeing him leave.”

  “Calm down, baby.” Frazer inched over and pushed the door closed with his toe, feeling regret. The stale motel lamplight closed around him.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down.”

  Frazer laughed. One of his favorite things about Carol was her ceaseless narration of grievances; he never wondered what was on her mind. That kind of mysterious woman was for hopelessly loving, not living with.

  “So this situation isn’t quite as entertaining as it was two days ago. For one thing I’m going stir-crazy. I’m scared to leave her alone in the house. I’m all freaked out so I can barely concentrate. I can’t even imagine what she’s doing right now.”

  “She’s not doing anything. She’s doing whatever it was she was doing when you left.”

  “Oh, great! Jesus, Robbie. She might be running up and down Broadway completely naked this very minute. I keep looking around expecting to see her go by with her hair on fire or something. I’d lock her in but we don’t have the right kind of lock.”

  “The last thing she’d ever do is leave the house. Are y
ou kidding? She won’t even get up off the floor.”

  “Now she does. She’s obsessed with the streetside windows.”

  “Keep her the fuck away from the windows.”

  “No, the blinds are down, but she keeps creeping over to them and kind of perching there all stiff and wide-eyed like she’s some kind of woodland animal listening for something. I swear I’ve seen her nose twitching. You know how squirrels look when they’re really freaked out? She looks like that.”

  “More evidence there’s no chance she’ll run out of the house.”

  “You’re probably right but I wish she would.” Carol laughed a little.

  “Hang in there, baby.”

  “If she isn’t in squirrel posture she’s ranting at me about our shitty security. The super was out in the hallway mopping and she went off about how our place isn’t secure and we’re really fucking her, blah blah, she won’t be surprised if it’s all a fucking setup, blah blah. And the worst is she ruined my paper—after you left I went and got the Sunday paper to have something to do so I wouldn’t go nuts and then I went out again for about five minutes and when I came back she had totally ruined it.”

  “She’s just clipping the coverage about herself. She likes doing that.”

  “No! That’s not even what she was doing! She had the paper spread all over the floor and she was crawling around on it with a Magic Marker X-ing out people’s faces and going ‘Pig! Pig!’ She fucked up the whole thing.”

  “Jesus. Who’d she X out?”