We Begin Our Ascent Page 3

  It seemed so unlikely that I should find this woman, this feeling reflected back, in this airport, in all the drag of getting home. All meetings are chance, of course, but this one felt so especially.

  * *

  “You did well, from what I saw today,” she now says over the phone. B gives a sharp cry like something being dragged across a polished floor. I ask her how he slept, what he ate. Liz gives answers of such scientific detail as would satisfy Rafael. We are that kind of parents now, though I do not mind this in the least. The sound of a vacuum cleaner comes from Liz’s end of the call. Her mother is with her, giving a hand in caring for B. Liz will be going back to the lab in the early evening. We talk about her day at work, her return to it later. She sighs. “My students couldn’t find the end of their own noses if I drew them a map,” she says.

  * *

  My first sense of her was that she made things happen around her. To go around London with her was like going on a treasure hunt of her devising. She had a gangliness that read alternately of girlishness and durability. She took me to a sushi restaurant above a barber in the West End with her friends, and it was good, so improbably so that I felt her due credit for its existence. When she went to the bathroom, her friends and I blundered on, like people trying to persevere through a power outage. I wondered how she came to be with me. I looked at those around the table and thought that they must have despised me for my good luck. She and I were both only children, and both had a similar sturdiness, a self-sufficiency born of that fact. She had something beyond it, though. She could pull others into her plans, bear them along in a way I could not.

  We went to museums. Though I lived so close to the city, I had not done that much before meeting her. It is not that I had not thought museum going a good thing to do, but that I had not opened myself to it. The city offered so much that seemed a distraction, and so I was used to passing up experiences which would have been perfectly pleasant. Liz was different, in this respect. The thought that someone took interest in a subject she knew nothing about would unsettle her. She would return from parties and click through Wikipedia articles until late into the night, researching things she had talked to others about, learning more about the careers of those she had met. She had a deep desire to be rounded. She played a continual thought experiment: “Imagine you were sent back in time four hundred years,” she said. “How much of the modern world could you describe and explain?”

  In Tate Modern, we walked through the bright rooms. She watched me examine the paintings. I strained to identify them. I would look at a picture and try to guess the author of the work from the limited cast of names I knew. I would consult the label, then, to check my intuition. When I had failed too often at this strategy, I tried to guess only the nationality of the painter. “They’re not flash cards,” Liz said, when we sat in the café on the third floor, a light rain hitting the windows. “Take a moment with them. See what really works for you.”

  The implication that some of them might not “work” for me was surprising. Here were paintings worth many millions of pounds, and Liz was suggesting that it was possible, simply, to not like some of them. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if she had said that I could reach out and run my fingers across the pictures. Still, it was difficult to proceed with this knowledge, to stand and look, with Liz all the while seeking to gauge the authentic effect of the works upon me.

  In one of the upper rooms there was a brass sculpture: a figure striding forward, the specifics of its body lost in stylized whorls and dashes of teased bronze. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. I read the caption, about motion and futurism and the Nietzschean superman. “It’s you,” said Liz. “It’s a man totally dedicated to his motion through the air.”

  I shook my head. The likeness did not strike me as true. This figure was so substantial, so defiant in the way it bore itself forward. The superman was bold, fleshed out. My teammates and I, however, were skinny, unique not in capabilities we had gained but in those we had chosen to jettison. The figure seemed to confront the wind, while we, I said, sought only to slip past without its noticing.

  She was pleased with this. I felt her satisfaction in the way she turned away from the piece. We rode down through the building on the escalators. I suppose that I had cheated a little, achieved a victory on familiar ground, but I did not think of it that way then. It was exhilarating to meet her challenge.

  * *

  We end the call, and I leave the hotel room and walk down the corridor. Pictures of sailing boats alternate with sconces along the hallways. I round a corner to see Fabrice sitting on the carpet, his back against the wall. He fidgets, jogs his knees. He is thinking of the end of today’s stage, I am sure. He and I are the same age—nearly thirty—and yet I am younger to it all. He has been racing since he was thirteen. There is still some of that teenager in him—his bounce, his fidgeting, his Kafka ears. One gets the sense that the real world has had little chance to make its mark upon him. He has had some good results in his past: one-day victories, stage wins, and a top-ten finish in this race two years ago. He has struggled for consistency, though. His promise is thought yet unfulfilled. There have been fewer comparisons to past champions in the last year, more mentions of those who flared and were forgotten. This tour is a chance to reinvent his potential, to bounce his story back into its former groove. I lean against the wall, slide down until I am seated beside him.

  “Seeing the Butcher?” I say. He nods.

  The Butcher is what we call the chiropractor. If he were really a butcher, however, he might be compelled to clean his equipment. The massage table holds a history in its complicated odor of sweat. “What’s the difference between a chiropractor and an osteopath?” says Fabrice.

  “Is this a joke?” I say.

  “No no,” he says. “It’s a what you call it . . . an inquiry.”

  “I think that it’s something to do with the intensity.”

  “Right,” he says. “That sounds correct.”

  Fabrice goes before me, and when I see the Butcher, he is weary himself.

  “You guys wear me out,” he says. He is Norwegian. In mannerism and personality, he is more of a carpenter. He presses into my back. Parts of me crunch and readjust. He takes my neck and he cracks it left and then right. I don’t like people cracking my neck. My impulse is to resist it. However, I am extremely good, and I do not joke here, at submitting to things which I do not like.

  * *

  Outside the Butcher’s room, Rafael is waiting for me. “Solomon,” he says. He uses my full name always, he and my mother only. “How did the Butcher do?” He stands close, furrows his heavy brow. He sucks aniseed drops constantly, and his breath is thick with the smell.

  “Well enough,” I say.

  “Good,” he says.

  Rafael has been distant since the race finished. The result of each stage, for him, is always material from which something can be built. Sometimes he is triumphant, sometimes self-justifying, sometimes incensed. Never, though, is he resigned. Rafael’s success is based upon a fierce blindness to chance, an ignorance of the limits of his influence. He closes one eye and rubs at the lid. He looks tired, dangerously so.

  “There were issues today,” he says.

  I nod.

  “You.” He nods back. “You were not totally shit.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Other people were totally shit. Other people let you down.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yes. They let you down. Aren’t you angry?” He looks at me expectantly.

  “Raging,” I say, feeling a need to placate him.

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “Inside,” I say.

  He shuts his eyes now; he resets himself. “A flat day, a flat day, a hilly day, the rest day,” he says. “Then the last week, the mountain stages and a time trial.” He does not need to spell out the plan for coming stages. The days with gradients are days on which Fabrice will seek to make time, the flat days
are days to be endured. Each night Rafael pores over route maps, makes tallies of where gains may be made and losses limited. He inputs the data of the past day and works with it until he sees a path to the results he desires. I think of a shopkeeper recounting his takings again and again in the hope that his next calculation should make the cash and the receipts match.

  “We’ll do our best,” I say.

  He nods, cautiously satisfied, and moves away. I walk slowly down the nautical corridor. My muscles are loose, my vision clear. The light seems to flicker. The boats shift on lapping seas.

  * *

  Liz is close to her mother, Katherine. Katherine is clever, slightly spiky, grand in her manners. Liz’s father, a professor of political economy, died in a car accident when Liz was very young, and Katherine is remarried to a man called Thomas, who owns a building supply warehouse in East Anglia. The two of them traveled down to London on the train four months after I had first met Liz, and we greeted them at Kings Cross. Katherine was tall like her daughter, with a straight nose, dark hair subtly dyed and held implausibly in place. Thomas was a broad, neat man with a mustache that I sensed he had worn for years. “So this is him?” Katherine said, and looked at her daughter for a steady second. We went to a grubby Chinese restaurant, which surprised me then but would not now. Katherine’s terror is not dirtiness but mediocrity or inauthenticity, and the place was better on those terms than all the nearby Italian restaurants with columns around the doorways and tall pepper mills. She asked me questions about cycle racing that were pointed, as if the racing could not possibly be an end in itself but merely a way of attaining some other higher thing, which she expected me to articulate. “People like to watch this?” she said. “They understand it? They concern themselves with the details?”

  All I could say was that people did watch my sport. It was Liz who came to my defense. She talked about tactics and psychology and the vicarious desires of the fans. Katherine nodded like she appreciated her daughter’s effort.

  “She’s not keen on my career?” I asked Liz on the train home that night.

  Liz exhaled in a way that signaled disagreement. “She just wants to be told why it consumes you. She wants to be sold on it.”

  “Yes?”

  “A meaning,” she said. “A sense of the story you tell yourself.”

  * *

  After our team dinner, I am not in the mood to sit and read or watch TV, and it is not yet late enough to sleep. I risk Rafael’s wrath, then, by walking slowly around the hotel.

  In the lounge, I find some of our team sitting between the plastic plants. The lounge is unpleasant—badly decorated and with a view of the hotel car park—and thus a perfect place to congregate. No self-respecting holidaymakers would spend a minute of their vacation here, so it is ours. Johan lies on a pleather sofa. Sebastian sits upright in an armchair leafing through a magazine.

  Johan is our sprinter. His job is to compete for wins in flat stages, those in which riders finish en masse. He pulls from the wind shadow of the peloton and thrashes for the line at the last minute. He is trained to ride in others’ tailwinds until the final meters. While the rest of the team work for Fabrice, Johan competes to win individual stages in the sprints, seeking prizes, publicity, and acclaim for the team in this way.

  Sebastian is Johan’s minder. As we domestiques tend to Fabrice, he tends to Johan. He offers him shade from the elements and leads him into position for the finish. On days like the one just past, in which Johan has no chance of victory and must simply make it up and down the mountains within the elimination time, Sebastian paces Johan all day. I have seen neither of them much in the past twenty-four hours. While I was trying to help Fabrice, they were grinding along far behind.

  “How’s the boss man?” says Johan, meaning Fabrice. Some other teams concentrate fully on their sprinters, ignoring the overall race. Johan would, of course, rather be on such a team.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Didn’t quite get the finish he wanted?” says Johan, the pleasure with which he says this ill-disguised.

  “Uh-uh,” I say.

  “Flat tomorrow,” says Sebastian.

  Johan is wearing shorts and I can see him flex his quadriceps in response to mention of the coming stage. He is an abbreviated, muscular man, a different creature from the rest of us. He has longer hair, tied back in a small ponytail, and a goatee beard.

  “It’ll be your day,” says Sebastian to Johan. Sebastian is the son of a famous cycling champion. Where his father was well-proportioned, though, he is stringy and awkward. Where his father pedaled with a wonderfully smooth style, Sebastian stamps through his strokes. Where his father was handsome, he has a big caricature of a face, a large nose and heavy jaw. It is hard to carry the diluted genes of a champion, and he probably would have done better avoiding the bike overall, getting a real profession. Theories on the causes of these differences between him and his father have been discussed at length. “It’s the difference in nutrition in the modern age,” Fabrice has said in Sebastian’s absence. “It makes for larger people.”

  “His mother must be Amazonian,” Johan has said.

  “You know who else rides a bike?” Rafael likes to say. “The postman.”

  I take a seat next to Sebastian.

  “In twenty hours,” says Johan, breaking a silence, “I’ll be kissing a podium girl.”

  “You know they only kiss the winners?” says Sebastian, and then laughs at his own joke.

  “What would you know about that anyway?” says Johan. “The only time you’ve ever been on a podium is in your father’s arms.”

  “He always used to take my sister, actually,” says Sebastian.

  Johan ignores his friend. He sits up and looks at me. “Have you seen the podium girls on this tour?” he says.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “We haven’t had much cause to hang around the podium.”

  “Too true,” says Sebastian.

  Johan kisses his bunched fingers and lifts that same hand, opening it in appreciation. “Oh,” he says. “Those girls . . .”

  “Really?” I say.

  “The best beauty,” says Johan, “has a certain weirdness. Each of these girls is almost ugly. One has a pronounced underbite, another has a long forehead. These things allow you to convince yourself that others see them as unattractive. You feel you are the only one who truly appreciates them, really knows them. In this way, you can imagine such an intimacy without even having exchanged a word.”

  As I have said, one must find interests to stuff around one’s days on tour. Johan is, above all, interested in chasing women. “There have been many eras,” he told me once, “in which the things we value—money, politics, war, even cycling—were nonexistent or irrelevant. In no era, though, has sex been unimportant.”

  I told him that you could say the same thing about any other aspect of human survival: breathing or eating or shitting.

  “I like those things too,” he said primly. “Just not as much.”

  * *

  I have books in my room awaiting me: a small library carried in my luggage between hotels each day. Many are recommended by Liz, who despite B, despite the busyness of her lab, reads voraciously. I do not want to read now, though, but to be with these other men, in their studied idleness, in this small room, the traffic outside, the little TV above the door whispering the news.

  I was struck when I first met Liz by the way her flat was so full of paper. There were the scientific journals she read, and the textbooks, but also piles of novels and newspapers and magazines. They spilled over the small desk in her bedroom, utterly obscuring everything. The third time I visited, I felt that I had to tidy the desk. It was too much to look at. I made four piles: textbooks, scientific papers, popular periodicals, and fiction. “You read all this?” I said. I couldn’t imagine how she had the time, the inclination.

  “I will,” said Liz. She felt compelled to keep on top of it. She would do her work, which would occupy m
any more hours than most people’s jobs, but she would also have an opinion on the books which had made the Booker short list, the artists who had been nominated for the Turner Prize, on contemporary political events and the quality of the coverage of them in the newspapers. She practiced the bassoon, an instrument she had learned to play to a nearly professional level in her teens. All this was certainly encouraged by Katherine, who had taken pains to send her daughter to a prestigious all-female school in the Cotswolds (sometimes, I suspected, simply so she could have this to hold over Liz forevermore). There was also the shadow of the dead father, who in death had been mythologized as an incomparable polymath.

  In the first weeks of knowing her, I became eager to be able to stay with her and her friends in conversation. I read more widely, picked up books and newspapers and worked through them wondering how I would discuss them with Liz. It was hard to learn the dynamics of her group, the popular books they didn’t like, the unpopular ones they did. When I got a handle on this, Liz met my competence with suspicion, however. “That’s what Peter would say,” she told me, when I described the drawbacks of a popular literary novel. She wanted something different from me. Sometimes one of her friends would say something high-flown and impenetrable and she’d laugh and look at me for a reaction, as if sure that it should naturally repulse me. I was awed by her friends though, by the breadth of what they knew, how they could talk.

  “They are impressive, at first,” she said. “They want to give you that sense. They think they can do anything, but none of them do.”

  “No?”

  “Or they would be actually doing it,” she said. She nodded at me, as if to prove her point, as if I embodied this doing.

  * *

  When I return to the room I am sharing with Tsutomo, he is already in his bed, facing the wall, apparently asleep, his side moving with the rhythm of his breathing. The room is illuminated only by light coming from the half-open bathroom door.