Every day his girlfriend set off for the university uncomplainingly, but Ezra wanted to be on campus no more than what was already required. Instead he got a job at a gym. He had to wear an orange polo shirt with the gym’s logo stitched over his left pectoral. Standing at a counter, he scanned members’ ID cards as they entered and then checked on the computer to make sure that their payments were up to date. This was how he first learned her name, Meg Sand. He was familiar with her name long before he noticed her looking at him from the lat machine. Or gazing, maybe. It was hard to tell the nature of the look from across the expanse of equipment, under the gym’s flattening fluorescent light. Either way she had her pale eyes fixed on him, and every once in a while, in the middle of a set, she gave him an effortful smile. The amount of weight she was lifting, he saw, was significant. An immense iron stack rose up slowly behind her like an omen.
“Thanks,” she said, as she turned in her towel.
“Why, hello,” he said jokingly, leaning forward on the counter.
Meg Sand wore a stretchy top that matched her reflective leggings, new sneakers, and a full face of makeup. The makeup wasn’t loud; she looked like a girl who had moved to the city from upstate and, upon the shock of arrival, severely trained herself in how to do things nicely. She clutched a rather elegant brown purse. Her voice was deeper than he’d expected and when she spoke to him she sounded unnatural, as if she were a grown-up trying to be pals with a kid. Did he also work out here? Or just work? She laughed lamely at herself. Yet Meg Sand was, according to the computer, practically the same age as him. Not even a full year older. It was her hair, he realized: she wore it short and gently teased, in a mature little pouf, a style chosen, he saw with a pang, to conceal the fact that it was thinning.
Quickly enough he developed the trick of not letting his eyes drift above her forehead. Sitting at the Polish restaurant around the corner from the gym, he would watch her tuck into a plate of cherry blintzes and finish off a big glass of ice water. She seemed to take undue pride in not being the type of gym-goer who only ate healthy. The booth’s seats were sticky and made funny sounds whenever he adjusted himself, which he did often, sucking listlessly at a fountain soda and describing what had happened that week in crit. She would listen with a stolid expression and barely move. To his surprise, she did not share an upsetting story straightaway, as white girls who liked him were in the habit of doing, a story told slowly, as if with reluctance, but always aired fully by the time they were making out. Bulimia and bad parents. Depression. Social pressures, double standards, a sister who had been hospitalized. All offered unconsciously, he guessed, in a nervous spirit of redress. Yet Meg Sand rarely said anything about herself. And girl, in her case, didn’t exactly fit.
Without making a big fuss, she’d pay the bill for both of them. Together they would walk to his subway station and after giving her a brisk hug he’d jog downstairs into the clatter and the heat, feeling light of heart. Nothing was going on. Nothing was going on! He sailed into the basement apartment, pulled off his orange polo shirt, and made love under the open window to his beautiful girlfriend. He planned, any day now, to propose to her. But not on his knees: they already spent enough time as it was practically underground. Instead he imagined, absurdly, a wide empty field, where he would toss the glittering ring in the air and she would catch it with her outstretched hands.
It was not only his heart that felt newly light. His legs on the long walk to the subway, his hand as it moved across a thick sheet of paper. His advisor’s caustic sense of humor, which had made him insecure at the start of the semester, was now a source of amusement and private laughter. The gym regulars no longer greeted him as “Man” or “Dude” but by his real name. Hey, Ezra, what’s up. Rearranging the free weights took almost no effort at all. He felt agile and clearheaded. His skin looked good. Out of the depths of her boxy brown purse, Meg Sand produced little tubes and flasks of extravagant ointments made by companies he’d never heard of before. She worked in a large department store on the housewares floor, but she claimed to have friends at all the cosmetic counters, and these were samples, she said. They were free.
From inside the humid broom closet they called their bathroom came his girlfriend’s gentle voice. “I have to say these look regular-sized to
