Later, he felt bad about the whole thing. Worse than bad. He didn’t know how it happened exactly, but there was some resentment there, he guessed, and it just snuck up on him — plus he was drunk, if that was any excuse. Which it wasn’t. Anyway, he hadn’t meant to get physical, and by the time she’d stopped fighting him and he got her shorts down he hadn’t even really wanted to go through with it. This wasn’t making love, this wasn’t what he wanted. She just lay there beneath him like she was dead, like some sort of zombie, and it made him sick, so sick he couldn’t even begin to apologize or excuse himself. He felt her eyes on him as he was zipping up, hard eyes, accusatory eyes, eyes like claws, and he had to stagger into the bathroom and cover himself with the noise of both taps and the toilet to keep from breaking down. He’d gone too far. He knew it. He was ashamed of himself, deeply ashamed, and there really wasn’t anything left to say. He just slumped his shoulders and slouched out the door.
And now here he was, contrite and hungover, mooning around on Ledbetter Beach in the cool hush of 7:00 A.M., waiting with all the rest of the guppies for the race to start. Paula wouldn’t even look at him. Her mouth was set, clamped shut, a tiny little line of nothing beneath her nose, and her eyes looked no farther than her equipment — her spidery ultra-lightweight bike with the triathlon bars and her little skullcap of a helmet and water bottles and whatnot. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit, and she’d already had her number—23—painted on her upper arms and the long burnished muscles of her thighs. He shook out a cigarette and stared off past her, wondering what they used for the numbers: Magic Marker? Greasepaint? Something that wouldn’t come off in the surf, anyway — or with all the sweat. He remembered the way she looked in Houston, pounding through the muggy haze in a sheen of sweat, her face sunk in a mask of suffering, her legs and buttocks taut, her breasts flattened to her chest in the grip of the clinging top. He thought about that, watching her from behind the police line as she bent to fool with her bike, not an ounce of fat on her, nothing, not even a stray hair, and he got hard just looking at her.
But that was short-lived, because he felt bad about last night and knew he’d have to really put himself through the wringer to make it up to her. Plus, just watching the rest of the four hundred and six fleshless masochists parade by with their Gore-Tex T-shirts and Lycra shorts and all the rest of their paraphernalia was enough to make him go cold all over. His stomach felt like a fried egg left out on the counter too long, and his hands shook when he lit the cigarette. He should be in bed, that’s where he should be — enough of this seven o’clock in the morning. They were crazy, these people, purely crazy, getting up at dawn to put themselves through something like this — one mile in the water, thirty-four on the bike, and a ten-mile run to wrap it up, and this was a walk compared to the Ironman. They were all bone and long, lean muscle, like whippet dogs or something, the women indistinguishable from the men, stringy and titless. Except for Paula. She was all right in that department, and that was genetic — she referred to her breasts as her fat reserves. He was wondering if they shrank at all during the race, what with all that stress and water loss, when a woman with big hair and too much makeup asked him for a light.
She was milling around with maybe a couple hundred other spectators — or sadists, he guessed you’d have to call them — waiting to watch the crazies do their thing. “Thanks,” she breathed, after he’d leaned in close to touch the tip of his smoke to hers. Her eyes were big wet pools, and she was no freak, no bone woman. Her lips were wet too, or maybe it was his imagination. “So,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, a real smoker’s rasp, “here for the big event?”
He just nodded.
There was a pause. They sucked at their cigarettes. A pair of gulls flailed sharply at the air behind them and then settled down to poke through the sand for anything that looked edible. “My name’s Sandra,” she offered, but he wasn’t listening, not really, because it was then that it came to him, his inspiration, his moment of grace and redemption: suddenly he knew how he was going to make it up to Paula. He cut his eyes away from the woman and through the crowd to where Paula bent over her equipment, the take-no-prisoners look ironed into her face. And what does she want more than anything? he asked himself, his excitement so intense he almost spoke the words aloud. What would make her happy, glad to see him, ready to party, celebrate, dance till dawn and let bygones be bygones?
To win. That was all. To beat Zinny Bauer. And in that moment, even as Paula caught his eye and glowered at him, he had a vision of Zinny Bauer, the Amazing Bone Woman, coming into the final stretch with her legs and arms pumping, in command, no problem, and the bright green cup of Gatorade held out for her by the smiling volunteer in the official volunteer’s cap and T-shirt — yes — and Zinny Bauer refreshing herself, drinking it down in mid-stride, running on and on until she hit the wall he was already constructing.
Paula pulled the red bathing cap down over her ears, adjusted her swim goggles, and strode across the beach, her heartbeat as slow and steady as a lizard’s. She was focussed, as clearheaded and certain as she’d ever been in her life. Nothing mattered now except leaving all the hotshots and loudmouths and macho types behind in the dust — and Zinny Bauer too. There were a couple of pros competing in the men’s division and she had no illusions about beating them, but she was going to teach the rest of them a hard lesson, a lesson about toughness and endurance and will. If anything, what had happened with Jason last night was something she could use, the kind of thing that made her angry, that made her wonder what she’d seen in him in the first place. He didn’t care about her. He didn’t care about anybody. That was what she was thinking when the gun went off and she hit the water with the great thundering herd of them, the image of his bleary apologetic face burning into her brain — date rape, that’s what they called it — and she came out of the surf just behind Zinny Bauer, Jill Eisen, and Tommy Roe, one of the men’s pros.
All right. Okay. She was on her bike now, through the gate in a flash and driving down the flat wide concourse of Cabrillo Boulevard in perfect rhythm, effortless, as if the blood were flowing through her legs and into the bike itself. Before she’d gone half a mile she knew she was going to catch Zinny Bauer and pass her to ride with the men’s leaders and get off first on the run. It was preordained, she could feel it, feel it pounding in her temples and in the perfect engine of her heart. The anger had settled in her legs now, a bitter, hot-burning fuel. She fed on the air, tucked herself into the handlebars, and flew. If all this time she’d raced for herself, for something uncontainable inside her, now she was racing for Jason, to show him up, to show him what she was, what she really was. There was no excuse for him. None. And she was going to win this event, she was going to beat Zinny Bauer and all those hundreds of soft, winded, undertrained, crowing, chest-thumping jocks too, and she was going to accept her trophy and stride right by him as if he didn’t exist, because she wasn’t soft, she wasn’t, and he was going to find that out once and for all.
By the time he got back to the beach Jason thought he’d run some sort of race himself. He was breathing hard — got to quit smoking — and his tequila headache was heating up to the point where he was seriously considering ducking into Clubber’s and slamming a shot or two, though it was only half past nine and all the tourists would be there buttering their French toast and would you pass the syrup please and thank you very much. He’d had to go all the way out to Drake’s place and shake him awake to get the Tuinal — one of Drake’s mother’s six thousand and one prescriptions to fight off the withering aches of her seventy-odd years. Tuinal, Nembutal, Dalmane, Darvocet: Jason didn’t care, just so long as there was enough of it. He didn’t do barbiturates anymore — probably hadn’t swallowed a Tooey in ten years — but he remembered the sweet numb glow they gave him and the way they made his legs feel like tree trunks planted deep in the ground.