Who Do You Love(113)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

Andy had come to Wallen Home Goods five years ago, not hoping for much but telling himself that he had to start somewhere. Years ago, the home-goods chain had announced a policy of hiring Olympic hopefuls, giving them flexible schedules so they could keep up with their training. Andy hadn’t known how they would feel about hiring a disgraced ex-Olympian, but he’d decided it wouldn’t be a bad place to try.

His interview had been scheduled for 8:00 in the morning. He’d been in the parking lot at 7:00 a.m., sweating behind the wheel of the sedan that he’d bought for its trunk space and the easy access it offered to the front seats. On weekends he went to Philadelphia and drove Mr. Sills wherever he wanted to go—to junk shops, to bookstores, to church, to visit family and friends. It was Mr. Sills who’d encouraged him to get a job—because, he said, Andy needed purpose, and structure to his days. Routine, respectability, the first step on the road back to not hating himself quite so much. Andy’s first thought had been coaching, but after he’d written to Roman Catholic and gotten a form-letter rejection, he’d decided that if his alma mater didn’t want him, no one would.

“You always were handy,” Mr. Sills had said. Andy had wondered if he could be a superintendent for an apartment complex or even work as a handyman, but then he’d thought of Wallen and imagined a big, anonymous store, different faces every day, not the same small handful of people in a neighborhood or apartment building, who’d have too many questions, and decided to try. They offered benefits, he vaguely remembered, and they had classes there, in plumbing and painting and basic repairs. Maybe someday he’d teach them.

He remembered how hot it had been that morning, the air almost liquid, a heavy soup you had to push through to get anywhere. As he sat behind the wheel, his muscles clenched in a familiar knot, as if he was waiting for a starter’s gun that would never go off. His right leg jiggled and jumped; his toes flexed and curled; his fingers were rattling on the dashboard. In spite of the air-conditioning and the liberal application of deodorant, he’d already sweated through his undershirt.

That was just one of the post-scandal adjustments—the new clothes he’d had to buy. Khakis and jeans, shoes that weren’t sneakers, shirts that had long sleeves and weren’t made of wickable, odor-fighting fabric. On Interview Day, he’d worn Dockers, a white button-down, and the only tie that he’d kept, a heavy red-and-gold silk one from Hermès that Maisie had bought him for a birthday. With the fifteen pounds he’d put on since he had made what would be his final magazine appearance—Newsweek, six weeks after the revelations, had put the runners on the cover, beneath the single word DISGRACE—he no longer had an athlete’s leanness. He looked like every other clock-bound couch rider, like a guy who put in maybe three halfhearted days a week at the gym, and who’d get winded after a single turn around a track.

How do you act when you’ve lost everything? he’d wondered, walking through the parking lot to the front door. He’d kept his medal, but all of the prizes were gone: the endorsement deals, the pricey restaurants, the fine wines and fancy friends, actors and politicians who liked to collect athletes the same way they collected vintage cars and Impressionist paintings. And Maisie, of course. Maisie used to laugh and roll her eyes at the phrase trophy girlfriend. So I’m just another one of your things, she would tease, usually while she was naked, lying on the bed, long, smooth legs stretched out on the duvet cover, hips angled just so. She would act offended, but Andy thought that she enjoyed being the female equivalent of a gold medal.

He wondered what Maisie would make of his Brooklyn apartment, which could fit, in its entirety, into their Manhattan living room; what she’d say about his new clothes, not to mention his new body. He wondered, too, about Rachel—if she’d gotten married, if she was still doing social work, if she’d ever had kids. He’d wanted to see if she would call or write in the wake of the scandal—maybe to sympathize, maybe to gloat—but she hadn’t, and he’d never tried to find her, never hunted her down on Facebook or punched her name into Google. He imagined her husband, probably a guy with the right kind of background, upper-middle-class and Jewish, someone who’d make her parents happy. He thought that she would have had children and be good with them, her social-worker training combined with her good instincts and big heart. A happy, normal life. That’s what she deserved, and he hoped it was what she’d gotten.

He’d walked into the manager’s office holding his résumé, sad thing that it was, trying not to sweat on the paper. In a perverse way, he was proud of it. The résumé was a triumph of creativity, the first fiction he’d ever written. Describing his years as a paperboy, Andy had promoted himself to an “employee of the distribution department of a major news organization.” He had written that he’d been “self-employed as an independent contractor working around the world” for the last ten years, without saying that he’d been a runner, and if the manager asked him about the years between losing that job and applying for this one, Andy would simply say that he’d been a freelance consultant and then shut his mouth and hope that the follow-up question wasn’t “Consulting about what?” He’d also have to hope that the manager wouldn’t instantly know who he was.