The guys who trained there were fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys preparing for the Golden Gloves. Some, however, came to strengthen their arms for fastball pitches in baseball. They practiced jabs and cross punches against the sandbags, exercising the thrust of their shoulders and the rotation of their bodies so that they could throw a ball at eighty miles per hour without tearing a muscle. Their exercise routines followed the rhythms of a match: three minutes of rigorous training and one of rest. When they saw me come in, some of them thought I was there to take notes for an article about gyms and they started telling me their stories, saying that they were friends with the author Joyce Carol Oates, who lived in New Jersey and had written a fine book about boxing, and they all called her Olive because of her resemblance to Popeye the Sailor’s girlfriend.
The coach was an old Cuban exile who claimed to have been a featherweight champion in some socialist boxing championships far away in Moscow. A very laid-back, mixed race man, he was a fan of Kid Gavilán and Sugar Ray Leonard. In a boxing match, he told me, style depends on eyesight and speed, in other words something he gives the “scientific” term of instant vision. If only I could gain that instant vision and be able to see Ida between the shadows. What was she doing when she wasn’t with me, what was she thinking about when I passed her in the hallways, when she spoke to me as if I were a stranger from some distant, indistinct country?
I taught my classes, ate at the restaurant in Prospect House, and sometimes spent a few hours reading in Small World, at a table by the window, thinking that I might see her passing along the street that led to the entrance of campus. And indeed, I saw her one afternoon through the front window of the bar; she crossed right in front of me and, barely even pausing, made a signal to me and said, silently mouthing the words behind the glass, that she’d stop by my office. She showed up there a while later and, in a low voice, proposed that we meet on Friday at 9:00 p.m. in the Hyatt Hotel—off the side of the highway to New York. We could find each other in the lobby and then spend the night together.
We drove there, each on our own, and met in the bar, where a black piano player was tentatively playing Ellington tunes. The hotel was enormous and empty; maybe it was used for conventions or by travelers who missed their flights at the nearby Newark airport, or it could have been a place meant for the clandestine meetings of furtive lovers from around the area.
I’d reserved a room under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Andrade and only had to slide a hundred-dollar bill across the front desk along with my driver’s license for the night attendant to jot me down in the guest book and give me two key cards for the door to the room. I told him I was waiting for my wife and went back to have a drink at the bar. She entered the lobby a short while later, dressed in her gray overcoat, and we went up to the room. It was desolate, with white furniture, designed for executives or prospective suicides, but as soon as the door closed it was as if a sequence of tiny actions had suspended time, and we instantly rekindled the same intimacy and intensity we’d experienced in her hideout in New York.
She enjoyed secrecy, enjoyed these clandestine rendezvous at roadside hotels. She left first, early in the morning, and I waited until I saw her cross the parking lot and get into her car. After a while I left the hotel and went back home, driving along the deserted roads as the sun rose over seeded fields and the first lights were flicking on in the tall colonial houses at the beginning of town.
We repeated this game two or three more times, as if she was faithfully obeying the points of agreement as she’d promised, the passionate clandestine nights, the wall of silence that shut us off from the world, the longed-for repetition of motions, words, precise requests, a strict and meticulously prepared list of obligations and terms that she submitted to with pleasure and delight. Maybe, perhaps, we could bring someone else along, a stranger I’d go looking for in the lobby bar or at a bus stop off a bend on the freeway, someone who would come up to the hotel and spend the night with us. There were a few clubs in New York where you could go, she said, to get together with strangers. Fantasies in the anonymous night: she yearned to be swept away, alone, astonished, alive.
And then, on the outside, everything would be impassive and distant yet again. In each nocturnal rendezvous everything was the same, but the language and private rituals changed. It wasn’t just with me, I realized later; secrecy dominated every aspect of her life, and everything had its inverse, its parallel reality, as if each experience must be abstracted to some omnipresent and threatening enemy force.
In a sense, despite everything, the arrangement worked for me: I could go on being the single man I wanted to be, with no commitments and with the anticipation of those luminous nights in the future. Sporadic meetings with a woman at a roadside hotel, each time recreating the intensity of the first. Nothing more was needed, and I didn’t want to go back to the stupid appeal of commonplace feelings. She was right; that immediate and intense intimacy could never last if we subjected it to the harsh light
