Upstairs, Arthur showers and puts on his pajamas, then sits in darkness on the edge of their bed. He feels a slight movement under the covers and turns to see that Miriam is laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
It takes her a moment to speak. “Your face,” she manages. “When you looked at that picture. You should have seen yourself.” She rises on the pillows and touches his arm to reassure him. “I’m sorry, Art. It was just so funny.”
Arthur climbs under the covers beside her. “She is pretty,” Arthur says. “You know, I think she reminded me of you.”
“No, she didn’t,” Miriam says. She turns and puts her arms around him. “You’re very sweet, but you don’t have to say that.”
“Nothing sweet about it,” Arthur says. He kisses her, and feels sleep coming. “It’s true.”
Arthur and Miriam, out of town: they awaken late, eat a breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls in the hotel lobby, then set out on foot to the campus to find O’Neil. It is nearly eleven; the day is bright and icy cold. Overnight, a mass of clear arctic air has moved in, and the effect is vaguely kaleidoscopic, all the colors and shapes of the town and campus at once less than real and somehow more. Above the college’s stone entranceway a banner says, Welcome Parents, and beneath the bare trees and blue, blue sky, the wide lawn of the college’s main quadrangle floats like a plate of ice.
They arrive at O’Neil’s dormitory, hoping to surprise him with a bag of muffins filched from the hotel breakfast buffet, but no one answers the door when they knock. A moment of confusion: Didn’t they arrange to meet him here? Then, as they’re leaving, they run into his roommate, Stephen, on his way back from the shower. They have known him for years; O’Neil and Stephen went to high school together, and though the college did not let them share a room freshman year, now they are together again. Stephen, who is tall and fair with a long nose and a hairline that’s already receding, is wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe and carrying a plastic basket of toiletries under his arm. Behind one ear is a dab of shaving cream. He seems startled to see them, but after an awkward moment he hugs Miriam and shakes Arthur’s hand.
“He left, like, an hour ago,” Stephen explains. The door across from Stephen and O’Neil’s room opens, washing the hallway with the smell of cigarettes and the sound of Steely Dan. Miriam recognizes the record-it is one that O’Neil played all through high school. A young woman Miriam doesn’t know steps from the room in a silk dressing gown, says hello to Stephen, and heads down the hall to the showers, humming the song as she goes. Miriam tries not to look but does; her hair is a thick, glistening black, like a curtain of velvet, and the way she walks, her bare feet silently striking the hallway’s green carpet, suggests that, beneath the gown, she isn’t wearing anything at all. The smoke from her cigarette follows her like a laugh.
“I wasn’t even awake yet, really, but I heard the door,” Stephen says, yawning. Miriam wonders if Stephen is lying, to cover for O’Neil-did he even spend the night there?-but decides not to say anything about this. “You can probably catch him over by the grandstands. I think he thought you were meeting him there.”
They leave the muffins with Stephen, who is biting into one even as he’s saying good-bye, and head back out into the bright day. By the grandstands, a five-minute walk away, they find O’Neil in his sweats, milling around with the other members of the cross-country team. A few students and parents are already sitting in the aluminum bleachers, chatting and hugging themselves in the cold. O’Neil explains the course: five miles down trails through the woods that abut the playing fields, then up the hill into the middle of town, and back to the starting line. He hasn’t shaved, and his hair, despite its length, seems disheveled, as if he had only awakened moments ago. On the other side of the field a fancy motorcoach is parked, and Miriam can see the other team stretching out in their shimmering violet sweatsuits. The race is thirty minutes away.
“God, why did you let me eat all that?” O’Neil is on the grass, sitting Indian style, though the bottoms of his running shoes are somehow together. He bends forward at the waist, his forehead dropping to his knees in a single liquid motion. “Never mind. My fault, right? The chocolate pie was definitely a mistake, though. I was up moaning half the night.”
“Is Sandra going to be here?” Arthur asks.
“You know, I thought she would be, by now.” He rises nimbly and does half a dozen quick hops on his toes. Miriam can practically feel the energy coiled in him, a spring about to release, chocolate pie or no. O’Neil scans the scene, looking for Sandra, and shrugs when he fails to find her. “I’m sure she’ll show up. I told her you were coming, and if that doesn’t get her here, nothing will.”
“I’m beginning to think you invented her,” Miriam says.
“Trust me, Mom.” O’Neil smiles confidently. “I couldn’t have made her up if I tried.” Still standing, he spreads his legs wide, pivots on the balls of his feet, and drops one knee to the grass. “God, I feel just awful. At least it’s cold,” he says. “I’m better when it’s cold.”
O’Neil introduces them to some of his teammates and then to his coach-a surprisingly young man, not much older than the runners themselves, with a woolly beard and long black hair-and then shoos them to the grandstands, to wait for the race to begin. By the starting line O’Neil and his teammates have stripped to their shorts and tank tops and gathered in a tight circle around their coach, their bodies making constant small movements even as they listen to what he’s telling them. They break apart then, each finding someplace nearby to go. Some jog in place, or stretch; others merely stand quietly, waiting.
“What are they doing?” Arthur asks.
Miriam watches. O’Neil is one of the quiet ones. Apart from the others, he has selected a spot fifty feet from the starting line, near a line of parked cars. His hands dangle limply at his sides, and his head is slightly bowed; even at this distance, she can see him breathe, and knows by the rhythm of his rising chest that his eyes, turned down, are closed.
“He’s being alone with it,” she says.
A hush has fallen over the crowd; everyone, parents and friends, has been led into this moment of silence, like a prayer before mass. The runners gather at the starting line.
“This is it,” Arthur says.
Miriam looks to O’Neil, who has taken a spot in the middle of the line, between two runners from the opposing team. She knows at once that he will do well, better than he has ever dared imagine, that this day will be his. Her confidence is absolute; she knows this fact as certainly as she knows his name. She says it then-“O’Neil”-and as she does, the runners crouch, the gun appears from nowhere, and with a single report, they’re off.
She rises to her feet. “Go!” she cries, and the two teams burst away. “Go! Go! Go!”
Arthur in the bleachers, thinking of Dora Auclaire: his son is running-the two teams are gone; in seconds they have flown over the field and disappeared into the woods-and yet his mind has drifted away from all of this, crossing two state lines and traveling half the width of New York State to alight in his office, where the letter waits in his desk. Unsent but sealed, it is, like his wave on the street a week ago, one more thing half finished. When he mails it, he knows, these many months of secrecy will all be over, and he can rejoin his life. And yet he has not done this. He was already so late another delay would hardly have mattered; he could have dropped it off at the clinic (no: he would have seen her, stopped to talk) or paused at the post office on his way home to feed the cat and pick up their bags. He could have, but didn’t, and so here he is, thinking of her.