Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
E lijah. Thursday
I stopped what I was doing at my desk and picked up my office phone. Barbara announced, “Elijah? Leo is here. He wants a word with you.”
“Leo?” My partner was unexpected today. Still, I shared the business with him and had no good reason for not wanting to see him. “Sure, send him in.”
Immediately my office door opened, and Leo stepped inside and shut it behind him. “Elijah,” he greeted me.
“Hey, Leo,” I replied. “What’s up?”
“Just, um, a little personal concern, you might call it.”
I wrinkled my brow, not knowing how to take that. “Concern? What are you concerned about?”
“To be honest, you,” said Leo.
“ Me? ”
“Yes, you. Elijah, you kind of haven’t been yourself the last week. You haven't been by the house at all. You usually at least call and talk to Sarah, but we haven’t heard from you.”
“We are running a business, Leo,” I said. “I have busy times, just like you. It’s not that strange.”
“That’s what I thought at first. But then Sarah mentioned you’d dropped by, but wouldn’t say anything about it. She usually has something to say about what you two talk about, but she clammed up about this last visit. When my wife won’t talk, and you come over to the house and I don’t get to see you, it makes me wonder.”
“It was just something personal,” I told him. “Just between brother and sister, that’s all.”
“Well,” said Leo, “when my wife won’t even discuss the fact that her little brother came over to the house, it makes me think there’s something going on. So, is there? Is something going on?”
This was really not a conversation that I wanted to be having with my brother-in-law or my business partner. But, it wasn’t as if I could just throw him out of my office. Leo was family and part-owner of my business. Our lives and livelihood were intertwined.
So, I answered in generalities. “Look, it’s just something from my past that I thought was over and done with, that I’m going to have to get some final closure about, that’s all.”
He scrunched up his brow, which was not a good look on him with his dark, heavy eyebrows and straight, thick, dark hair. The gesture made him resemble a movie villain. “Your past?” he reacted. “ Your past?”
“Yes, my past,” I sighed. And with that, we were crossing all the way over into that territory that I didn’t want to discuss.
Leo said, as if I needed to hear it, “You know, your past is not something any of us want coming back.”
“I’m aware of that,” I replied, already tired of this conversation when it had barely gotten started. Leo knew all about my past. My sister, being married to him, had naturally told him chapter and verse about exactly what it was that he was marrying into.
“I mean, your past means that guy, ” said Leo, again stating things that I seriously did not mean to be reminded about. He had only heard about those things. I was the one who had lived them. “And, nobody wants anything to do with that guy. My sister wants no part of that guy. You should want no part of that guy.”
“Believe me,” I said, “I don’t want any part of that guy. I didn’t ask for him. He just got in touch with me unasked-for.”
“Well,” said Leo insistently, “can you make sure he knows nobody wants anything to do with him? Because I don’t like seeing Sarah upset.”
“I don’t like seeing her upset, either. But, she’s my sister, and there are some things I want to talk to her about. I asked her to keep it to herself because…” I had to be careful about the way I put it, “I knew you wouldn’t be too thrilled about it, either.”
“You’re right, I’m not thrilled,” he said. “But you know, Sarah is proud of you and happy for you, for the way you’ve been handling your life lately. And, I’d like her to be able to keep feeling good about things.”
“So would I,” I told him.
We had a good visit after that. Leo really was a good man. My sister really had married a better man than I was once used to associating with. There were better people in my life now. One of them, I’d be seeing later in the day.
_______________
The fact that it was my “leg day” at the gym seemed a bit symbolic. There was nothing I would have liked better than to kick my present problem right out of my life. As it was, there was nothing for me to do but work out.
When I arrived, Ben was busy with another client who looked as if he needed all the help he could get. I could tell this new guy was new to working out. Not to be judgemental, but he wasn’t showing any muscle definition yet, and Ben was instructing him on working one of the pull-down machines for his arms and shoulders.
Ben noticed me walking in — he never missed a thing that happened in his gym — and looked up while having the new guy start a set of reps. I mouthed, Just needed to get in a little extra workout, so as not to disturb the guy on the machine. He read my lips and nodded a greeting, and I ducked into the locker room with my gym bag.
Emerging in my standard workout gear, I went right for the leg machine and pumped my legs up and down on it as feverishly as I would pump my buttocks up and down on top of a woman, which I hadn’t done in a while, come to think of it. The complication of Kane returning to my life had made me forget everything else except for work, including how long it had been since my last “workout” with a member of the opposite sex. That was Kathleen, and the reason we broke up was that she couldn’t deal with my past — the past to which Kane belonged, which I’d done everything to separate myself from.
It seemed as if the root of all my problems was Kane. If not for him, I might still have Kathleen in my life. If not for him, I wouldn’t be spending so much of my waking life looking over my shoulder to make sure the stupidity and bad judgement of my past wasn’t sneaking up on me again. If not for him, I wouldn’t be making myself crazy or working my muscles until they were burning with fatigue and I was in danger of pulling them and leaving myself unable to walk.
The sounds I was making as I lifted and lowered my legs in one hard, furious rep after another actually reminded me of the kinds of sounds I might have made in bed with Kathleen. The difference was that with her it was fun, and the noises I was making right now, with beads of sweat flying from my face, were more like noises of punishment.
Perhaps I was trying to punish myself in a way. Perhaps I was inflicting this pain on myself not to stay in shape, but as a punishment for things I’d done and couldn’t change, for the idiot that I’d been when I was younger, and the kind of company I used to keep.
At some point, after I didn’t know how many reps, I reached that point Ben had coached me about so many times: the point of failure, where the muscles in my legs burned so badly that I just couldn’t go on. I stopped and sat hunched over on the bench of the leg machine, panting hard, wiping my forehead, my T-shirt wet with perspiration. I thought the failure from the fatigue that I’d given my muscles was a fitting thing, the symbol of the failure that I had once been in life, putting too much stock in a friendship with a lowlife.
By that time, Ben had walked his newbie client through a workout on some other upper-body machines and the newbie decided to hit the showers. That left Ben to cast a watchful eye out over the gym for other members who might need some help. That definitely meant me — but not for a workout.
I hauled myself up from where I was sitting, with my thigh muscles and calves complaining bitterly at me, and half-walked and half-staggered over to where Ben stood. The eyes of my trainer and friend quietly said, What did I tell you? as he watched me approaching.
“Don’t tell me,” said Ben. “It’s about your ‘old friend’ who’s coming back to town, right?”
Puffing, nodding my head, I replied, “Yeah. Him. I only wish there were some way he could fall into the Erie Canal and never get back out before he gets here. Damn it all.”
“He really was bad news,” Ben said.
“I’m not saying I’m blameless for how my life used to be,” I admitted, soberly. “Nobody told me to be friends with a loser, and nobody told me to let him screw me up so badly. I could have woken up to the kind of guy he was the first time he got me into trouble.
“But, guys like Kane Marcus have a way about them. They have no business being as slick and charismatic as they are. It’s only when you’re ready to put them behind you that you really see them for what they are. They have to take you right up to where you’re either going to go over the edge with them, or pull yourself back in the nick of time, and that’s when you finally recognize them for their real selves — and how they were making you just like them.”
“But, you did pull yourself back,” he reminded me. “You didn’t go over the edge with him, right?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “But, Kane is going to come back here, and he’s still going to be the way he always was, and he’s going to expect me to be the way I was with him, and I’m going to have to make him see somehow that it’s not happening.”
Ben gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “You’ve got this. You’ve got this. Listen, anyone who can pull himself out of the gutter where this guy was dragging you and make the kind of life you’ve made for yourself? This guy isn’t getting anything over on you. Elijah, man, you’re too good for him and too smart for him.”
“I know what you’re saying, and I appreciate it,” I told him. “What I need most now is to protect myself from the kind of thing that Kane can do to my life. Because he probably knows how I’ve got myself set up now, and he’s sure to work every angle and pull any kind of leverage he thinks he can get away with. And, I’m the lever he’ll want to pull. I need to protect myself from that.”
Nodding in understanding, Ben said, “You can do it. Any help I can give you, I’ve got you. You know that, right? I’ve got you.”
He offered me his fist to bump. “I know, man. Seriously, I know that,” I said. As I glanced across the gym where guys were repping away on this machine and that, my eyes fell on a particular place that looked very inviting just now. “You know what? Those punching bags are about as wide as Kane’s body, and I can just picture his face on them. Know what I’m saying?”
He chuckled and gave me a little squeeze on my shoulder. “I know just what you’re saying, buddy. You go to it. Give ‘em hell, and think about what kind of hell you’ll give Kane if he tries anything shady with you. Give the old bags a punch or two for me while you’re at it.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, swapping a smile with him. And with my legs complaining just a little less, I made my way over to where the punching bags awaited my pleasure.
There was a rack of gloves near the bags, and I picked a pair in my size and slipped them on. I went up to the nearest bag, imagined that the hanging sack of leather was Kane’s midsection, and I mentally put his face and head at the top of it. I gritted my teeth at it and rumbled, “Why the hell do you have to come back now? ”
And with the first of many hard swings, I went for his stomach and let my stand-in for Kane Marcus have it.