My companion Marc is an athlete, and I knew it before he said
anything. There was a big "29" Sharpie-tattooed on the indentured
crescent that happens when a muscled person flexes his calf, right
there on the back of his left leg. It's a brand reserved only for
BMIs less than 25, a coterie of slim and sinewy overachievers who
insist on more than the bone-pound of running; more than the waterlog
of swimming; and more than enduring the triangle of pain known as a
cycle seat than cycling: triathletes.
This shouldn't have surprised me (the only time we'd met before, he
was on his bike, wearing a spandex onesie) - but I was startled.
He had run a triathlon in Staten Island on the
very day that we took the L train to Brooklyn and hefeweissened
ourselves into first-date conversational oblivion. Many people can do
both of these things but not in the same day. The 29 was to mark his
age group. He was already superhuman, and I was pretty much just who I
am: Lois lazy.
I, a non-athlete, never played a varsity sport or a junior varsity
sport; have gone to yoga class once a month for the past three years
and still raise my hand when the instructor asks if there are any
beginners; and was forced to wear a neon yellow armband at second
grade sleepaway camp that indicated to every last camper my
ineptitude at swimming. But the good thing about a first date in New
York is that there are no armbands; you can bluff your way around your
own deficiencies. You can steer the conversation towards the lush,
plush, and figurative island of your musical knowledge; your political
opinions; your childhood pets. I fudged out a whole afternoon this
way. He bought every minute of it.
I soon remembered one of the best aftereffects of a great first date:
the visions you have of being with the person in the long term. Part
of this invovles a few extended daydreams of self-improvement. As a
non-athlete, I always know that I'll be figured out by the athlete
sooner or later if I don't whip myself into shape. The first time he
lifts up my shirt, he'll know it hasn't done a sit up in years. So I
imagine myself being covertly personal trainered all into the night,
after the lights are off at Equinox. It's just me and some giant
fauve former muscleman with a boombox. I'm wearing a big
weightlifters belt and heaving giant dumbbells while Marc is on the
other side of town, in slow heartbeat sleep, thinking about running
across the Brooklyn Bridge with me next weekend. I imagine him never
finding out that before we met I was on a ninth grade soccer team
that never scored a goal or won a match; that I attempted the track
team and tripped over a hurdle in a meet and had those little rubber
grit-sands embedded in my leg for weeks; that I was once pelted with a
nerf football in a school assembly and sobbed my way, with an audience of
200, to the nurse's office.
Then I imagined taking Marc to a sports event. Although there's no proven correlation
between a good fan and a good athlete, men are really impressed by a woman
if she knows the name of the shortstop for the Staten Island Yankees. An added
plus to this is that the players on the team will, by virtue of their natural
abilities, overshadow your date's own athletic prowess. He'll be put
a little in his place, without you having to put him there.
Then I would show Marc my golf swing. It looks real. To make me feel better,
my dad always says that it actually could be, but who can afford an $80 round of golf in
a city where a good beer is $9, and a good concert $25, and a good
pair of shoes $300? And none of those other things make my back hurt,
and there are no old men or frumpy clothes or stuffy pro shops. To
add insult, many real athletes doubt the legitimacy of golf as a real
sport. Marc is one of them.
I actually put a few of these fantasies into play with swimming results.
Marc played along for a while with my aerobic and sports-related
decoys, but he figured me out on the day we were to run across
the Williamsburg bridge. It was February. My lungs needed
dewinterizing. By the time I got to the crest of the bridge, he had
gotten to the end and looped me. We settled for brunch at La Bonita.
And a sweaty public kiss. And a bus ride home.
I guess I just have that Schopenhauerean need, when selecting a mate,
to find someone who fills my own voids. He called it the will-to-life
(wille zum leben) syndrome: I, the last-picked hurdle-fallen knee
scab, choose you, the Division One All-American.
I have tried in various ways to make myself more athletic. I even a
took a job as a summer outdoor adventure leader, guiding teenagers
through backcountry forests in the North Cascades of Washington. They
figured me out too. I bought a bike for my birthday, and Marc agreed
to be its custodial manager for the winter. It was stolen over the
holidays. Neither of us made much of a fuss. He probably figured it
was providence.
Because we live in a city where you can be not a bone athletic and get
by and have a fine time, some of our hardest weekends are weekends away.
Recently we bunked in a hotel room in Chicago with no running water and a hairy bathtub and
a highly flammable duvet cover and no running water. It was
apparently in the beautiful residential neighborhood of Lincoln Park
but we got in late and couldn't see it. We made a pact to stay for
the first night and bail on the second night and get ourselves to a
high-end boutique hotel with complimentary lemon water in the
lobby as soon as we woke up. But I awoke groggy under the flammable duvet
alone: the runner in him had awoken at 0600 hours for a pacey sunup stride. He came back all
aglow and sweaty and endorphined, while little me was shivering in a
hot sweat in our desert room.
"I actually like this neighborhood," he said to me while I sipped from
a bottle of water and gurgled it around in my mouth with toothpaste
and spat it into the dirty sink. "I think we should stay." His
runners high had come to a direct head-on with our three-
star covenant from the night before. If athletes only got good
hardware and not all of those good feelings and afterglows, it might
have been easier to wake up alone.
We ended up switching hotels that day, and he later attributed his
hallucination to the morning jog. My untoned stomach is now an object of both of our affections - apart from bedding, it's the only soft thing in the apartment. And I often
imagine myself with a picnicbasket-full of chicken salad sandwiches at
the finish line, and he with 35, 41, 47, 54, all the way up to 100,
inked on the sweet spot of his calf.