The same thing must have happened to plenty of others as well. There were only so many things to wear, to love, to do. And there were too many people. So sooner or later whatever you claimed for yourself would be adopted by several million of your closest friends. At which point you either abandoned your own enthusiasms or submitted numbly to the appearance of slavish conformity. For the most part, Serenata had opted for the latter. Still, the experience was repeatedly one of being occupied, as if a horde of strangers had camped out on her lawn.
Which, steadily yet at an accelerating pace for the last twenty years, was what had been happening to fitness in any form. She could almost hear them, rumbling the inside of her skull like an oncoming migration of wildebeest, the dust catching in her nostrils, the beat of their hooves pounding from the horizon. This time the multitudes could be spotted not merely aping her tastes in music or fiction in the quiet isolation of their homes, but in aggregate, pounding in droves over the hills and dales of public parks, splashing in phalanxes across all six lanes of her regular pool, clamoring with crazed, head-down pumping in swarms of cyclists, every one of them feverishly desperate to overtake the bike ahead, only to come to a stop at the next light—where the pack would twitch, poised to get a jump on the others like hyenas straining toward a fresh kill. This time the incursion into her territory wasn’t metaphorical but could be measured in square feet. Now her beloved husband had joined the mindless look-alikes of the swollen herd.
Two
Though the right knee rebuked her when it bore the load, Serenata refused to take the stairs one at a time, like a toddler. Hobbling down for tea the following afternoon, she found Remington in the living room. While she was still unaccustomed to his being home weekdays, it wasn’t fair to resent the presence of your husband when it was his house, too. Early retirement hadn’t been his idea, or, precisely, his fault.
Yet his getup was annoying by any measure: leggings, silky green shorts with undershorts of bright purple, and a shiny green shirt with purple netting for aeration—a set, its price tag dangling at the back of the neck. His wrist gleamed with a new sports watch. On a younger man the red bandanna around his forehead might have seemed rakish, but on Remington at sixty-four it looked like a costuming choice that cinemagoers were to read at a glance: this guy is a nut. In case the bandanna wasn’t enough, add the air-traffic-control orange shoes, with trim of more purple.
He only bent to clutch an ankle with both hands when she walked in. He’d been waiting for her.
So, fine, she watched. He held the ankle, raised his arms overhead, and dived for the opposite leg. As he teetered on one foot while tugging a knee to his chest, she left for her Earl Grey. On her return, he was bracing both hands against a wall and elongating a calf muscle. The whole ritual screamed of the internet.
“My dear,” she said. “There’s some evidence that stretching does a bit of good, but only after you’ve run. All it accomplishes beforehand is to put off the unpleasant.”
“You’re going to be a real bitch about this, aren’t you?”
“Probably,” she said lightly, and swept back upstairs. When the front door slammed, she ventured onto the second-story side porch to peer over the rail. After poking at the complicated watch for minutes, the intrepid began his inaugural run—trudging out the gate and down Union Street. She could have passed him at a stroll.
The impulse was wicked, but she checked the time. The door slammed again twelve minutes later. His shower would last longer. Is this how she’d get through this ordeal? With condescension? It was only October. It was going to be a long winter.
“How was your run?” she forced herself to inquire during a laconic dinner.
“Invigorating!” he declared. “I’m starting to see why you went at it, those forty-seven years.”
Uh-huh. Wait till it gets cold, and sleets, and blows a gale in your face. Wait till your intestines start to transit, with seven more miles to go, and you huddle in a cramped scuttle, praying you’ll make it before they explode all over your shiny green shorts. See how invigorated you get then. “And where did you get to?”
“I turned around at Highway Nine.”
Half a mile from their front door. Yet he was bursting with accomplishment. She looked at him with fascination. He was impossible to embarrass.
And why ever would she wish to embarrass him? Precisely what inflamed her about this stupid joiner impulse of his to run a marathon was the way such a mean-spirited desire had already arisen in her head, after her husband’s sole athletic achievement constituted running—if you could call it that—again, you see, this contaminating contempt—a single mile. She was not a combative harridan, nor had she been for their thirty-two years together. To the contrary, it was in the nature of wary isolates to give themselves completely and without stint once the formidable barriers they routinely erected before all and sundry had been breached. Most people regarded Serenata as standoffish, and she was fine with that; being seen as a woman who kept others at bay helped keep them at bay. But she was not aloof with Remington Alabaster, as of halfway through their first date. Largely keeping to yourself did not mean you lacked a normal human need for companionship. It did mean you tended to put eggs in one basket. Remington was her basket. She could not afford to resent the basket—to want to embarrass the basket, or to hope that when the basket set his sights on what had become a rather mundane status marker the basket would fail.
She owed him for the fact that what might otherwise have become an arid solitude was instead round, full, and rich. She’d relished being his sole confidante when the situation at the DOT went south; it was too dangerous for him to talk to anyone at work. She missed the camaraderie of shared indignation. Throughout the whole debacle, he’d have been unwavering in his confidence that she was staunchly in his corner. They’d had their differences, especially about the children, who had both, frankly, turned out a little strange. Nevertheless, the measure of a marriage was military: a good one was an alliance.
Furthermore, when they met she was floundering. She owed him for her career.
As a child, after a family vacation on Cape Hatteras, she’d declared her reigning ambition to become a lighthouse keeper—thrust on the prow of a spit, raised high with a view of an expanse that could make you feel either very small or very big, depending on your mood, with regal control of a great beacon. She would live in a small round room decorated with driftwood, heating up cans of soup on a hot plate, reading (well, she was only eight) Pippi Longstocking under a swinging bare bulb, and watching (ditto) reruns of I Dream of Jeannie on one of those miniature black-and-white televisions they had at the hotel on the Outer Banks. Later during the usual equine phase for girls, she imagined growing up to be a national park warden who toured vast public woodlands alone on horseback. Still later, inspired by a newspaper’s unusual job listing, she became enthralled by the idea of caretaking an estate on a tropical island owned by a very rich man, who’d only visit with an array of celebrity guests in his private jet once a year. The rest of the time she’d have a mansion to herself—with dinner seatings for a hundred, a chandeliered ballroom, a private menagerie, a golf course, and tennis courts, all without the bother of making a fortune and thus having to build a boring old business first. In the latter fantasy, it never occurred to her that infinite access to a golf course and tennis courts was of limited value with no one else to play with.