Absent Friends

did this also with jury summations, with phone conversations: any situation could teach you something, lessons were everywhere if you looked for them. Most people didn't look. The reason behind that (because there was a reason behind everything)? Phil assumed it was this: most people didn't want to know they had choices. People loved the idea of doing what they had to do—God, his clients said that all the time. That was how they told him why they'd shot their sister's husband, why they'd snatched a woman's purse, why the whole damn crowd was cooking meth, wrapping it and dealing it from the nice frame house in Queens.

Had to.

No choice.

And by the time they came to Phil, the damn thing was, by that time, for a lot of them, it was finally true.

Toweling off, looking through the cards in his mind, Phil compared today's game to last week's, to the other games since September 11 and the games in August, in July, in days before.

Right after the attacks, in those first days, the Y was closed like so many places, and no one played games.

When the Y reopened early the next week, Phil and his teammates reassembled. They began again, as everyone tried to do.

Those first games were wild, lawless. People passed too hard or too far, fired up insane shots. No one set things up, no one was making plays. Then a strange thing: in the third game after, Terry the Ball-Hog (even Terry called himself that) made three great passes, two to Brian, who could really shoot, and the third to little Jane, who was cutting in for a layup. It was the right play, a play by the book, though Jane had no layup anyone had ever seen; and Terry, who never before in memory had given up a ball once he had his hands on it, passed for the third time that morning, and Jane took the shot. And missed it. But the next ball that came to her she sent to Brian, who swung it to Terry, and suddenly the passing game was under way, and they had never given it up.

Oh, they still ran the fast break when the chance came, they still posted up and cleared out for the big centers (on those mornings the big centers showed up), but this new thing, this was a team game. These last few weeks, Phil had seen this: the thrill of setting a teammate up in a smooth and beautiful play trumped the thrill of sinking a basket. Almost, it trumped winning.

No one spoke about it; it was possible, it occurred to Phil as he shaved, that he was the only one who thought about it.

What caused the change?

The same thing that made the players who came early to the first game after the attacks hold off starting for nearly half an hour, in case other people were coming but were late, delayed by the erratic subways or by having to show their ID to the National Guardsmen on the corner.

The same thing that made all fourteen players show up that day, something that almost never happened. (Even Arnie had come, though his brother was still missing, later declared dead with no body found; Phil went to the service.)

The fresh breeze of relief that had swept the gym every time a player pushed through the swinging doors that day had flashed Phil back to his childhood, to his Bronx neighborhood, to after-school detours to the newsstand for comic books and Cokes.

In the shadow of the El women with their wheeled wire carts stopped for gossip. Old men shuffled by, dangling loaves of bread and quarts of milk in plastic bags. Eleven-year-old Phil Constantine (Konnenstein in the old country, four generations back; Phil had cousins called Conner) was on a mission for the new Spider-Man, hoping maybe for the Fantastic Four, though that was probably not out until tomorrow. He headed up this way a couple of times a month: he'd worked out the Marvel schedule, and DC, too, he knew just when to expect his books.

He knew this, too: Sometimes when you got to the newsstand, the Irish kids from St. Margaret's would be hanging out on the corner. Sometimes if they were, all they did was look at you with stony eyes; but sometimes they wanted more. If they did, you had to fight them. Had to. Because if you didn't take it up there, in public, on the sidewalk, they'd wait for you on the ballfield at dusk, or on the corner where the construction site was: somewhere lonely, where no one would see and no adults were near to break it up.

Phil understood early that that was the point: on the sidewalk, where adults could see and stop you, no one won and no one lost. The St. Margaret's boys could throw down the challenge, could stand proud that they'd defended their territory, could claim they'd have murdered you, pulverized you, little kike bastard, if only old man Murray hadn't come out swinging his baseball bat, hadn't threatened to call the cops. They could do this safe in the knowledge that old man Murray would come out, or Mrs. Harper, or that old crock Lefkowitz with his bloodied butcher's apron. That someone would stop them before they had to find out how far they were really willing to go.

Phil understood that. And this: old man Murray's newsstand wasn't the only place to buy comic books. You could walk way up Broadway, twenty minutes out of the neighborhood, where the St. Margaret's boys didn't care if you went or not. You could jump on the El, ride downtown a few stops, pick up your books in the subway newsstand at 168th, and come back on the same token. You had choices. Going to Murray's, Phil was making his.

So when he had to, Phil fought those boys.

And as great as the relief was that enveloped him anytime he rounded the corner and saw the sidewalk empty, he never once considered not heading to old man Murray's newsstand the day the new Spider-Man came out.

Now, knotting his tie in the locker room mirror, he thought that same enveloping relief was where the team game came from at the Y a mile from Ground Zero, the first weeks after.

They were all relieved that this one morning ritual could continue. That among so many things so totally changed, this one hour was still what it had been. That it required no coping, no dealing-with, no brave adjustments or support groups or halting, painful phone calls.

The passing and the play-making were expressions of gratitude.

Gratitude for what?

They were grateful to one another, Phil thought, for being alive.

Two blocks east of the Y, Phil sat down at a diner counter to drink black coffee, wait for eggs and bacon, thumb through the morning papers. All five, every day: the dailies and the Wall Street Journal. Just to know.