The sparring partner was a young man named Terry McCorkandale. He was from Oklahoma, had a red crew cut, and looked like his mother had conceived him with her first cousin. He was a sparring partner of another pro, who was a sparring partner of a ranked contender.
This record gave Neal some comfort. True, the guy was a pro, but just barely, judging by his record. Besides which, Neal was feeling pretty good about his training. He was no boxer, he knew, but he could hold his own. He stepped into the ring, shook hands with McCorkandale, and flashed a quick smile at Levine and Graham. Then he assumed his defensive stance and shot out a crisp left jab.
He woke up hearing McCorkandale pleading defensively, “I just tapped him. Honest.”
“Glass jaw?” Mick asked Graham.
“Glass brain,” Graham answered.
“What day is it?” Mick asked Neal.
“January.”
“Close enough,” Levine said. “Let’s try it again.”
Neal was on his feet but not quite sure how he had gotten there. He knew he had been humiliated, but he didn’t mind that as much as he did the physical pain. McCorkandale was smiling at him apologetically.
Mick whispered in his ear, “Lucky punch, kid. Go get him.”
Neal had an album of the 1812 Overture at home, and the next three minutes were like living inside the drum section, The Tulsa Terror rattled on him like a snare drum, beat a few timpani shots, and thumped a couple of bass drumbeats before Neal could move his hands. He could not have been more helpless if he had been tied up in telephone wire. He was only grateful this guy wasn’t really trying.
“Interesting strategy,” Levine observed to Graham, “wearing the guy out like that.”
“That Neal’s a terror.”
Neal the Terror did what he could. He started to laugh. It was funny to him now that every time he attempted a punch or a parry, he got hit with three shots, so he covered up the best he could and got pounded on. And giggled.
“I gotta stop this,” Mick said.
“He’s not hurting him,” Ed said.
“This kid’s gotta fight tonight. He won’t be able to lift his arms.”
“So?” Levine asked Mick while Neal was in the shower.
“He’s hopeless,” Mick wheezed. “The worst I ever seen.”
“Yeah, okay. No more lessons.”
“Aw, thank God, Ed. I ain’t got the heart. What that kid does to the Sweet Science shouldn’t be done.”
“You want a milk shake?”
“I can eat solid food. I want a cheeseburger.”
Neal and Graham were at the Burger Joint, of course, after the big match. Neal’s jaw was a little puffy and he had a black eye.
“That was fun, Neal. I enjoyed that. Thanks for the afternoon.”
“That makes it all worth it, Graham.”
“You did pretty good. I think your ribs bruised his hand once.”
“I had him right where I wanted him. Another ten minutes, he would have dropped,” Neal checked his face in the mirror on the side wall. “Carol’s not going to like this.”
“Are you kidding? Women love that stuff. If you had a broken nose, she’d propose to you.”
“I need an iced coffee.”
“For your face?”
“It does kind of hurt.”
Neal took small bites of his burger. The iced coffee came and Neal alternately sipped at it and held it against his jaw. He felt really tired all of a sudden.
“Forget about it. Guy was a pro.”
Neal shook his head. “That’s not it. I don’t know what to tell Carol. Her parents.”
“She doesn’t know what you do?”
“Get real.”
“We’re not the what-do-you-call-it, the CIA, son. You can tell her.”
“If I tell what I do, I’d have to tell her how I got doing what I do.”
“So?”
“So she’ll split. And if she doesn’t, her parents will make her split.”
“You got quite a problem there, son-”
“Tell me about it.”
“With your head.”
Graham tossed a five on the table, chucked Neal under the chin, and left. Neal sat there for a while and then went home to get ready for his date.
So a couple of dates later, Neal told Carol all about himself. About never knowing who his father was, about his junkie mom and what she did for a living. About how she’d disappeared and he lived on his own. And he told her he did some work on the side for sort of a detective agency, but how that wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to be a professor.
And she hugged him and kissed him and he took her back to his place and they made love and it was all wonderful and they talked about going to college together and always being there for each other.
A week later, Carol’s dad took him aside when he went to pick her up. Mr. Metzger led him into the study. Carol had told them about Neal’s life and both he and Carol’s mother didn’t think that she was ready for quite such an exposure to the real world just yet. Certainly Neal could understand, and they could still be friends in school.
Neal and Carol snuck around for a while. She would tell her parents lies and get a friend to cover for her, and sometimes she would even spend the night at Neal’s. At first, it was exciting and romantic, but then it got to be just tiring and sad, and Neal figured that he did enough sneaking around in his life. He should be able to love in the open. So after a while, they became just friends, and then not even that.
One night over a late dinner, Neal told Graham the story and capped it off with his mature judgment.
“You can’t trust anyone, Dad.”
“That’s not true, son. You can trust me.”
12
Neal came back from Connecticut to an empty apartment. It didn’t surprise him, even though Diane had been sleeping there more nights than not lately.
They’d had one of those quick but wicked fights the morning he’d left to meet Graham at the train. She couldn’t understand that anything could be so urgent that he had to miss an exam, or that anything could be so confidential that he couldn’t tell her where he was going or what he was doing. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t understand it, either, but the rules told him to keep his mouth shut.
“Am I allowed to know how long you’ll be gone?” she’d asked.
“I’d tell you if I knew.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“How’s the studying going?”
“Great.”
He didn’t doubt it. He knew Diane was smarter than he was and worked harder to boot. She was the star of every class and seminar, and so insecure, she was the only one who didn’t see that.
They’d met in Boskin’s Eighteenth-Century Comparative Lit seminar just a few weeks after the Halperin job. He’d been reading and drinking, more drinking than reading, when they managed to contrive a conversation in the hall. He took her to coffee and she took him to bed, explaining somewhere in there that she had time for a relationship but not for a courtship. He found that the pageboy cut of her dark brown hair and the hats and vests and baggy clothes she wore disguised a quite feminine body. She made love like she studied, with a fierce concentration and attention to detail, and she slept right through the nightmares he was having in those days.
So now, he called her room at Barnard. She answered on the fourth ring.
“Yeah?”
“Hi.”
“You missed a hell of an exam.”
Might as well get this over with.
“I have to go away for a while.”
He could feel her anger over the phone.
“More secret guy-type stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“I sleep with you, you know?”
“I know.”
“So when do I get to know you? When do I see the other half? What’s so bad? What’s so special about your secrets?” she asked, then added with a small chuckle, “Hey, Neal, you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
His chest felt tight. It hurt. “If I show you that stuff, you’ll leave me.”