Serenata considered. “No.”
“You feel above people capable of collective experience.”
“Yes, I suppose I do. Church services, football games, and even rock concerts leave me cold. Maybe that seems a pity, but I’d also remain unmoved by swastika-waving rallies for National Socialism.”
“As far as I know, you aren’t a member of anything. Not a professional organization, not a political party; I can’t even remember your joining a private library. So at least you’re consistent, though the purity of your lack of communal ties is a little chilling. But I want to get back to this ownership business.”
“All right,” she said tolerantly.
“Think about it: all the sports people play, and have done for generations. You’re so proud of doing ‘push-ups,’ but long ago someone else coined the term. The record books are strewn with achievements beyond your ken: the first woman to swim the English Channel. The bicycle you rode to Café Fiorello, and have insisted on riding to restaurants ever since: you didn’t invent the bicycle—”
“Ownership is a sensation. I can feel I own something without being given formal title to it.”
“But ‘owning’ physical fitness isn’t just irrational. It’s mentally ill. Furthermore, for you and me right now, your lunatic patrolling of this territory is highly problematic.”
“Oh, don’t use that word. According to Tommy, problematic is now a label for the trespasses of white people who are unfathomably evil.”
“Meaning, white people, period. The unfathomably evil part goes without saying.”
For a moment, they were on the same side.
“You understand much better than you’re pretending,” she said. “Obviously, plenty of people before me have run around, and jumped up and down, and biked places—though nowhere near the number who’ve discovered the bicycle now, nowhere near. Obviously, there’s such a thing as the professional athlete, too—which isn’t what we’re talking about. Suddenly you turn on the TV, and all the characters are in the gym. For the last several years, the one topic guaranteed to shoot to the top of the Most Popular list on the New York Times website is anything whatsoever to do with exercise. About the only articles capable of nudging a recommendation of interval training out of first place are the ones touting the health-giving properties of red wine. Meanwhile, magazines are crammed with profiles of icons who run fifty miles a day. Or seventy-five, or a hundred. Marathons—sweetie, marathons are old hat. You’re supposed to run a plain old marathon before breakfast.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“I’m not trying to be helpful. I’m trying to explain how I feel. And I’m observing that your turning to exercise for absolution, or a purpose in life, has been imposed on you from the outside. It’s a contagion, like herpes. You’ve always been more suggestible than I am.”
“If according to you the whole country is suddenly consumed with fitness, how come Americans keep getting fatter?”
“Because this tsunami of a social tide isn’t a matter of results. It has to do with what people aspire to. Nobody cares anymore about getting to Italy before they die, or reading Moby-Dick. Goodness, I don’t even think they all want to write a novel themselves anymore. It’s all about seizing on some extreme athletic event, after which presumably they’ll sit on the right hand of God the Father.”
“I think the rising popularity of endurance sports bothers you because you’re being beaten at your own game. A lot more ordinary amateurs are pushing their limits beyond what you ever have, isn’t that right?”
“Do I feel like my comparatively minor league gyrations are being shown up? Yeah. I probably do.”
“In which case, if I complete that marathon in April, a distance you’ve assumed for years that you could handle—and I tend to agree, though you’ve never tested yourself, so now we’ll never know—your own husband will show you up.”
“Is that your intention?”
“No it isn’t, and correcting that misimpression is one reason I wanted to have this conversation.”
“So far, it’s been closer to an interrogation.”
“I also think you resent the fact that fitness has become more exalted at the same time that you’re growing—somewhat prematurely at sixty—increasingly infirm.”
“Well, congratulations, Sherlock.”
“I meant that sympathetically.”
“It didn’t sound sympathetic. But if you are trying to beat me at my own game, even if you claim you’re not—triumphing over a cripple seems like cheating.”
“To the contrary, if you had the cartilage for it, I might have proposed that we run the race this spring together.”
“Liar,” she said. “You want credit for that cozy idea, but you can only suggest it because you know it’s impossible.”
“Who knows what’s going to be possible, after you finally bite the bullet and get knee replacements.”
“Do you realize what they do? I forced myself to look it up. They actually saw off the ends of your bones. In videos on YouTube, the doctors and nurses all put on, like, welding masks, to keep off all the blood spatter. One guy who refused general anesthesia described online how his whole body vibrated and he could hear the earsplitting rasp of the blade, as if he weren’t in a hospital but on a construction site. They remove the patella and replace your kneecap with a piece of plastic. They’ll throw my knees in the wastebasket. And pound metal knobs into my tibias and thighbones, bam, bam, bam, the way you sink a wedge in a log to split firewood.”
“Knee replacements have become much more commonplace—”
“Just because you do something often doesn’t preclude it being a big deal. These operations don’t always go according to plan, either, because no major surgery does. I could end up with chronic pain, chronic inflammation, or catastrophic infection.”
Remington sighed. “I’m so sorry you may have to go through this.”
“Yes. Yes, I know you are.” She took his hand. “But if it goes wrong, that operation could ruin my life.”
“Isn’t that an exaggeration?”
“No,” she said readily. “I would have to become someone else. We’d both suffer a bereavement. So if Churchwell is right, you have eighteen months at the outside of being assured the company of the woman you married.”
“You’d still be the woman I married with stumps at the end of your thighs.”
“Oh, how I wish that were true. Unfortunately, emotions like bitterness and acrimony spread like potato blight. Already when I read about those superheroes running ultramarathons all day long, I think: just you wait. You’ll end up on a gurney in the shadow of a surgical saw in no time, you fucking idiots. The vision fills me with glee.”
“You do have a spiteful side.”
“Side? I don’t think it’s just a side.” Behind closed doors, one of the joys of their marriage was mutual permission to be horrid.
They rose to collect the dishes, whose remaining tidbits had long before congealed. “You know, this recent fetishizing of fitness has a particular texture to it,” Serenata said. “You described athleticism as having become ‘exalted.’ That’s an apt word. But I’ve never seen exercise as exalted. It’s biological housework, like vacuuming the living room rug. These days, to wear yourself out is to attain a state of holiness. All these newbies seem to think that they’re making the leap from man to god. This . . . sanctimony, this . . . self-importance. It’s started to contaminate the flavor of my own workouts, like that metallic taste in my mouth when I was pregnant. So I worry that, well . . . I don’t want that anointed, pseudo-Nazi narcissism to infect you, too.”