The Blind Wrestler.

Brazaitis, Mark

Katherine's son was about to wrestle a blind boy, a senior at St. Lucy's High School whom the local paper had written up the day before in a front-page story. The blind boy had been wrestling since he was in junior high, but, as the story tried to conceal, he wasn't very good. This season, he had lost all six of his matches. Her son, she feared, would destroy him.

Katherine sat four rows up in the collapsible stands of Sherman High's gym, which smelled like twenty-five years of sweat and the coffee parents had sneaked in this Saturday morning. St. Lucy's fans, on the other side of the gym, numbered two dozen, and they cheered the blind boy with half-hearted enthusiasm. Doubtless they'd seen him lose too often to think he stood a chance.

The blind boy's eyes were shielded by wraparound sunglasses, secured beneath his headgear and so dark and narrow they looked like a blindfold. His uniform was black, a contrast to his milk-pale skin. His 160 pounds were distributed over a sapling frame. He was taller than her son by a couple of inches but looked far less sturdy.

Her son pressed his palms against the blind boy's, and the whistle blew. For a moment, there was a standoff, the wrestlers like thin towers leaning against each other. But presently her son wrapped his arms around the blind boy's waist and drove his left shoulder into his chest. The blind boy gasped--from the blow or surprise at the blow, Katherine wasn't sure. An instant later, her son pinned him. Light applause filled the gym.

After standing, the blind boy extended his hand, and her son clasped it and said something and the wrestlers left the floor, the blind boy's coach helping him to the bench. Katherine's husband, sitting beside her, shouted congratulations, but their son was too cool to acknowledge his words. She could hear his teammates teasing him about beating a blind boy. What was next, one of them said, an opponent with one arm? Katherine realized she hadn't clapped at all.

For dinner, she served steak, as she always did after her son's matches. Her husband and son talked about her son's college options. He had been offered a partial wrestling scholarship to Ohio Eastern, the campus of which began eight blocks from where they lived, but his dream was to wrestle at Ohio State, whose coach had invited him to walk on.

She'd always hoped he would attend one of the excellent small schools in the state. Kenyon. Oberlin. Ohio Wesleyan. She'd pictured him inviting her to sit in on a lecture or attend a play. But she had overestimated his interest in books, studying, knowledge. He cared about what most boys his age cared about: video games, sports, girls. His girlfriend was another complaint of hers. She'd been the girlfriend of his two best friends. "So now it's his turn?" she asked her husband one night when their son wasn't home. "Is this a game of hot potato?" The blind wrestler, she remembered from the newspaper article, had been accepted early at Princeton. He intended to major in classics. He'd been studying ancient Greek since the ninth grade.

The phone rang. She left the table to answer it. It was her stepdaughter, who lived outside of Chicago with her husband and their three children, all under the age of five. "How are you, Katherine?" her stepdaughter asked in the inflated tone of someone who couldn't care less.

"I'm wonderful, as always. How are you? How's Brent? How are the kids?" Sometimes Katherine made a game of these phone calls, seeing how long she could keep them going, how uncomfortable she could make her stepdaughter, who was fourteen when Katherine married Simon and viewed her as an especially annoying secretary when all she wanted was to see the boss. But after her opening volley of questions, Katherine realized she lacked the stamina for the game tonight. Even before her stepdaughter had finished answering, she shouted, "Simon! Telephone!"

After her husband brought the phone to his ear, he exploded in a hearty, "Hey there! Long time, no hear!" It had been, Katherine calculated, no more than a week since they'd spoken. She looked around for her son, but he had retreated to his room. The sounds of her husband's enthusiastic conversation were inescapable so long as Katherine remained in the house, so she stepped outside. She wasn't wearing a coat. Her cotton sweater was thin, its buttons dainty. Examining it under a streetlight, she was appalled to think it made her look grandmotherly.

She headed north, weaving her way down side streets and across pothole-pocked intersections. Although she'd lived in Sherman since she was eight, these streets, lined with century-old houses, were unfamiliar. Several of the streets were made of brick, and their unevenness made them seem like an undulating sea. At the end of a cul-de-sac was a stone house, evidently abandoned. Behind its black metal gate and fence, its lawn was overgrown and gnarly. The glass in one of the second floor windows was missing, giving the house the appearance of a face with a gouged eye.

Off to her left, she heard whistling. She turned and saw a white dog, a square-headed Labrador. Behind the dog was the blind wrestler, bundled in a trench coat, his wool hat pulled down to the tops of his dark glasses. The wrestler and his dog strode toward her before abruptly stopping. Had they sensed her presence? Before she could retreat, the wrestler turned to the gate and pulled it open. He followed his dog up the front walk. A few steps shy of the front porch, they turned left, following a path she couldn't see because of the overgrown grass, and slipped around the house. To pursue him, she knew, was wrong. But curiosity overruled her conscience. She slipped past the gate, detoured down the path, and looped around the house. Here, she discovered woods, where the wrestler and his dog had no doubt gone. She sighed, disappointed.

There was a back door to the house, with a pair of concrete steps leading to it, the sides crumbling like a sand castle. She doubted the door was unlocked, but when she tried it, it flew toward her. She stepped into a mudroom at the same time she heard a dog's furious bark.

Beyond the mudroom, on the floor of the adjacent kitchen, sat the wrestler and his Lab. Pot smoke floated toward her, familiar from long ago. She wondered if this was a high-school hangout, a den of mild iniquity. The dog hadn't stopped barking, and the wrestler said "Who are you?" several times.

"It's all right," Katherine said. "I'm not the police."

"What are you doing here?"

Good question, she thought. "I don't know." Although honest, her answer didn't sound reassuring. "I was hoping to get high." Her voice rose on the last word, a question more to herself than to him.

"How did you know I'd be coming here?" His voice had lost its nervous edge. His dog had quieted.

She thought about this. "I had a feeling," she said.

"I'm not a dealer," he said.

"I didn't say you were. And I didn't mean to scare you. Or your dog."

"It's okay," he said, although his tone indicated otherwise. She kneeled across from them on the linoleum floor. The light was murky; it was as if she was seeing him in a grainy photograph.

"You have a beautiful dog."

"That's what all the girls say."

Katherine was flattered to be included with the girls.

The wrestler dug in the inside pocket of his jacket. She could barely see what he removed. Presently, he held it out to her. She reached toward him, her hand accidentally wrapping around his wrist. "Hey, we're not signing a peace treaty," he said.

"I can't see," she said.

"Join the crowd."

Her hand moved up his and discovered the roach. "Got it!" she said, as if she'd caught a fish.

"Need a light?"

She slapped her pockets futilely. "Please," she said.

He reached into his coat pocket again, and soon a flame blazed in the space between them. She hadn't smoked pot since college. Roach in mouth, she dipped toward the flame. She nearly choked on her first puff.

"Get out much?" he asked her, chuckling. "Are you at Sherman High?"

She didn't know if he was serious. Couldn't he tell her age from her voice?

"Or do you go to Ohio Eastern?"

College? Could she pretend to be in college? "No," she said.

"I don't go to school."

"You work then?"

"Yeah"

The wrestler didn't pursue the subject. "Cool" was all he said. He tilted his head and released smoke.

"How did you find this place?" she asked.

"Buster"--he indicated the dog--"specializes in sniffing out crack houses, gambling dens, houses of ill repute."

"Oh," she said.

"I'm joking."

"Right" she said. "I knew that"

"My girlfriend found it. Whenever we needed a little space, for whatever"--he paused and she nodded, although remembering he couldn't see, she said, "Got it"--"well, whenever we needed space, we'd come here. It wasn't long before Buster knew the route by heart, so when Emily, my girlfriend, went off to Brown in the fall, I kept the tradition alive.

"Emily came back for Christmas," he added. "It was freezing, remember? But we still managed a few trips over here. I'll be moving to the East Coast in the fall, so we'll see more of each other."

She asked him what he would be doing on the East Coast, although she knew, and he told her about Princeton and studying classics. "Homer is my hero. What can I say? It'll be the blind studying the blind." Although he'd doubtless used this line before, she laughed appreciatively. He told her about the other school subjects he liked, and why he enrolled at St. Lucy's rather than Sherman High--because St. Lucy's had a superior chess club as well as the only teachers within fifty square miles trained in instructing the blind. He didn't mention wrestling.

"What about you?" he asked. "You have a boyfriend?"

She thought about this. "Kind of," she said.

"Uh-huh," the wrestler said. "Not going where you want it to go?"

"Maybe," she said.

"What does that mean?"

She didn't know. She told him so.

"Up in the air," he concluded. They talked more before he said, "I better head home."

"Do you need help?" she asked. "I mean. I'm happy to--"

"I'm good," he said. "Buster could find his way home with his eyes closed." He laughed and laughed again. "I don't know what's funny," he said, laughing.

She laughed at the way he was laughing, like he was being tickled. "Hell, you'd think we'd smoked weed," she said.

As he stood, he said, "I'll be here Thursday, same time. If you want to come by." A pause. "No pressure or anything."

"If I can" she said, "I will."

"Cool," he said. "What's your name, anyway?"

"Katie," she said, which is how she'd been known in college.

"I'm Ben." In the darkness, he held out his hand, and they shook. Then he and Buster slipped out of the house.

A few minutes passed. She didn't feel like leaving. She liked imagining she was in college again. She didn't want to think about going home to Simon. She thought about him anyway, remembering the day they'd met, at the Book and Brew, where she worked during her sophomore year at Ohio Eastern. He was twenty-one years older than she was, and sometimes she noticed. But he was unfailingly sweet and attentive, and he was smarter than anyone she'd ever dated. (Admittedly, she hadn't factored in the advantage his age gave him; nor had she considered that his competition numbered exactly two). She had been studying English because she thought she would be a good English teacher. But she might have changed her mind. When she became pregnant, he was eager to marry her. For him, marriage was no big deal. He'd been married before. For her, it was like falling backwards and hoping someone would catch her. She quit college. She'd held a few part-time jobs, years apart and unmemorable. Occasionally, she thought of going back to school.

As she'd told her friend Elsa last month when they'd met for coffee at the Book and Brew, "I didn't know what I was doing."

"Who does?" Elsa said.

On Thursday night, Ben was where she'd found him the first time, Buster by his side. "Katie?" he asked.

"Hey," she said.

She slid across from him, sat Indian style. There was a silence, and Katherine heard Buster breathing, quick intakes of cold air. The darkness was like a photograph shot in evening without a flash, although Ben's pale face, moon-round, was distinct. Dark glasses covered his eyes. The house smelled of mold and talcum powder or aspirin or flour.

"You want to light up?" he asked.

"If you do," she said.

He sighed. "Do you mind if I skip it tonight? I have a match tomorrow."

"A match?" she said. She felt bad about playing the innocent. Deceiving a blind boy.

"I wrestle," he said.

"Neat."

"It would be if I was any good."

"I bet you're good."

"Why would you bet I'm good?" His curiosity seemed sincere. When she didn't respond, he said, "Because in wrestling, blindness isn't the kind of handicap it would be in football or hockey?"

"I don't know," she admitted.

"You were being polite. The truth is, I suck."

She wondered what she was supposed to say. "I'm sorry," she tried.

"It doesn't matter." He paused. "I didn't start wrestling because I loved wrestling. I started wrestling so I would get into Princeton. You know, blind boy refuses to allow handicap to stymie his Olympic dream." He laughed. "I started wrestling in the eighth grade, and I've won a grand total of two matches. One of them--I kid you not--was against a deaf boy."

"That's a good story," she said.

"Don't get me wrong: I don't like to lose. But I never aspired to be great. I have other interests" There was a pause. "Would you like to light up?" he asked, reaching into his pocket.

"No" she said. "It's okay"

He put his hand on Buster's head and massaged the dog. "I won't wrestle in college. I'm not good enough. Not by a long shot. But I'll miss it."

"You will? Why?"

"What do people do when they see a blind person? They clear out of the way. They're afraid they'll trip me or I'll run into them. If they do come close to me, they're usually crouching, saying hello to Buster."

"He's cute."

"And I'm not?" He laughed and ran his hand down Buster's back. "In wrestling," he said, "no one clears out of the way. They're required to do the opposite. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so," she said.

"It's wanting to feel contact," he said, "to have a hold on someone."

She remembered how, until he was ten or so, her son saw her body as a chair, a pillow, a jungle gym. He hugged her without shame. He didn't turn from her kisses but puckered like a fish. He lounged on her lap as they watched movies. At night, she read to him in his single bed, both of them under the covers, their legs entwined. Gradually, he stopped wanting this closeness. It was like he was weaning himself a second time.

"It's about the weight of another person against you," Ben added. "Weird to think I'll miss that, right?"

"No," she said. "I understand."

Katherine had been standing in front of her bathroom mirror for fifteen minutes, brushing her hair, applying eyeliner and lipstick, and rouging her cheeks, before she realized her audience wouldn't--indeed, couldn't--notice.

"Have an affair," her friend Elsa had told her that afternoon at the Book and Brew. "You'd have zero problem finding a lover." But Katherine didn't think she could do this to her husband, who remained the kindest man she'd ever known.

"What are you going to do after college?" she asked Ben. "What does a person do with a degree in classics?"

They were sitting on the kitchen floor in the stone house. The night was especially dark. Only when he drew in on his roach could she see his expression. Buster's breathing was the most pronounced sound in the silences between their conversation.

"Become a Rhodes Scholar," he said. "Afterwards, go to grad school. Harvard or Yale."

"And afterwards?"

"Become a professor. Be the next great translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Narrate a PBS special on ancient Greece."

"You're not joking," she said. "What about your girlfriend? What about a family?"

"A wife before I'm thirty-five, a family before I'm forty," he said. "But I can't control so much what happens in my private life."

"But the rest of it is in your control?"

He thought about this. "My dad could lose his job and we could go broke and I could wind up at Ohio Eastern instead of Princeton. But I'd still be gunning for a Rhodes Scholarship."

"Sounds easy," she said.

"It's not easy," he protested. "But it's what I want to do, so I'll do it."

"You could be president if you wanted." She was only half teasing.

"Definitely," he said, "if I had a social bone in my body. But, no, when I want to smoke weed, I sneak off to an abandoned house. If I were social, I'd do it at parties like everyone else."

"Where do you get the pot?" she asked.

"My dad. He's a sixties radical who never became unradical. He just became rich." They drew in on their roaches. They blew smoke into the darkness. Buster shook his head, as if in disapproval.

"Why do you come here to smoke?" she asked him. "If it's okay with your dad, why not stay home?"

"It wouldn't be okay with my mom."

"Right," Katherine said. It wouldn't be okay with her either. As a mother. But as a--what was she when she was here?--it was fine.

"What about you?" he said. "How old are you, anyway?"

She didn't answer.

"I think I know."

"You do?" she asked, her heart trembling.

"I think you're twenty-one."

She wondered if he was flattering her. "Close."

"Twenty-two?"

"Close enough."

"Damn," he said. "Think about how cool I'd be if I could say I'd hooked up with a twenty-three-year-old." Before Katherine could say anything, he added, "Too bad I'm happily married. Emily can probably hear me right now and I can expect a month in solitary confinement." He laughed, drew in smoke, exhaled it.

"What's Emily like?"

"Smart and sighted. But I thought we were talking about you."

"I'm only a Sherman girl who never left."

"Haven't left yet," he said. "Besides, what's wrong with that?"

"It isn't exactly a Rhodes Scholarship."

"A Rhodes Scholarship probably isn't even a Rhodes Scholarship. You think it's one thing and then it turns into something else. You study at the world's greatest university and ten years later all you remember of the two years is the crush you had on the girl at the newspaper stand around the corner."

"It sounds like you know her."

"Who?"

"The girl at the newspaper stand."

"I do! The Arctic Emporium, downtown Sherman, the summer I was fourteen. I was at an arts camp, and every afternoon we'd go for ice cream. She served me for five straight days. Her voice. Like marshmallow supreme with chocolate sauce. I can still hear it."

A few weeks before their wedding, Katherine and her husband-to-be went to the Hope Theater to see a revival of Last Tango in Paris. She had assumed the movie was about tango dancing, although she couldn't picture Marlon Brando as much of a dancer. She knew him as the enormous actor from Superman. "It's a different kind of tango," said her husband, who had picked the film.

She didn't think much of his comment until the movie started. Every so often, she glanced suspiciously at Simon, who always met her gaze with a small grin, which was probably intended to reassure her but struck her as sinister. You don't know who the hell I am, his grin said.

She remembered the movie today because the actress who had played the girl had died. The Sherman Advocate and Post, perhaps short on local stories, had printed a long obituary of her. The obituary quoted her saying she felt "a little bit raped" by the movie. Despite her roles in other films, she was forever the Last Tango actress, the girl Brando had had his way with in a desolate apartment. The designation haunted her; it may have contributed to her being, on several occasions, institutionalized.

"She was only nineteen when she acted in Last Tango," Katherine told Simon. Simon's hair, which had gone gray in his fifties, was now a Santa Claus white. It stood out against the black of his television chair. "Imagine making a decision at nineteen and having it determine the rest of your life. It ruined her."

"Ruined?" he said, puzzled. "No one would have heard of her if it hadn't been for that movie. I've never heard of an actress wanting anonymity."

There was a silence. She said, "Why did you take me see to that film, anyway?"

Another silence. "Honestly ..."

When he didn't continue, she said, "Honestly what?"

"I think it was an obviously misguided attempt to encourage the sex back into our life."

"You took me to Last--." She stopped. "I was pregnant. And I was sick as hell during all but maybe three days of my pregnancy."

"Maybe I thought you were sick of me."

"Sick of you already? We'd known each other barely a year."

"The movie was supposed to be erotic." He sighed. "Those cravings seem a little juvenile now."

"What cravings?" she asked.

"For different kinds of sex. Anonymous sex. Anal sex. Sex in the lotus position." His smile was rueful. "What one craves now is closeness. Words in one's ear. A hand on one's heart." In a softer voice, he said, "Perhaps I'm speaking only about myself." His eyes flashed over her face. "Is everything all right, Katherine? You've been disappearing every few nights for these walks. I can't help wondering."

"What?" she asked. Did she think her husband hadn't noticed? Perhaps she'd thought he didn't care.

"Of course I'm thinking you've found some man, some younger man ..."

He was right, in a fashion. "No," she said. "They're only walks." She tried to laugh so as to dismiss his worry. "I like the time to myself."

"She was only nineteen," she told Ben as they sat in the kitchen of the abandoned house. "She said yes to a movie and it made her life miserable."

"She might have been miserable anyway," he said.

"How can you say that?"

"Think about how an actress would handle it today," he said. "For a savvy one, it would be only a stage in her career. Afterward, she would do Shakespeare in the Park or Chekhov on Broadway. She'd adopt a kid from Bangladesh or the Sudan. She'd cut a CD of children's songs. She'd pose pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair."

"But it wasn't only a stage in her career. It was Last Tango in Paris. It was stunning. It was controversial. Hell, it was pornographic-except she was the only person to expose herself. Even without the butter scene, which she said wasn't in the original script and was excruciating to film ... well, the movie was her career--no, it was her life."

She should have stayed in school after she got pregnant, she thought. But at the time, it wasn't what young women in small-town Ohio who were knocked up and too terrified of hell or their parents to have an abortion did. They disappeared into marriage or worse. "I guess I feel ..." She was surprised to find herself choked up. She drew in a breath. They hadn't been smoking. Ben would wrestle his last match the following afternoon. The following week, Emily was coming home for her spring break. "I guess I feel bad for her. She was only fifty-eight."

In the darkness, she gazed at Ben, Buster at his feet. She wondered how the world would hurt him. Or how else it would hurt him. He'd been born blind, he'd told her, the result of Leber's congenital amaurosis. He'd had the defining moment of his life at its inception.

"When we think about forces we can't control," Ben said, his voice soft, conciliatory, "we usually think about hurricanes or floods or even drunk drivers who fly across the median and slam head-on into a family of five's station wagon. But I hear what you're saying. When you're cast as the female lead in Last Tango in Paris, the current is powerful. It's hard to swim back to shore."

"You hope you don't go over a falls," she said.

When Katherine walked into her son's bedroom, he was sitting at his desk in front of his computer. His face wore an absorbed, mesmerized look. Katherine was young enough to understand why her son's generation loved computers--loved them as much as her husband's generation loved cars--but old enough not to have fallen completely under their spell. "Do you have a minute?" she asked him.

He looked up, looked back at his screen. Reluctantly, he looked up at her again. He gave her a slight smile. "What's up?" he said.

Instinctively, she began to make his bed, a quick straightening and rearranging. She fluffed his pillow.

"Thanks," he said, his eyes back on the screen.

She sat on his bed. "You'll have to do this for yourself in college," she said.

"I know."

"I can't come with you."

He looked up at her. He was better looking than Simon. He was taller, and his eyes were larger and more welcoming. Of course, she'd known only the forty-and-over Simon.

"Sure you can come with me, Mom," her son said. "You can have my bunk bed. I'll sleep on the floor." He gave her a teasing grin. Even as he did so, he managed to punch letters on his keyboard. Clack, click, clack.

"Actually, I was thinking you might be better off going to Ohio Eastern," she said. "The wrestling scholarship is a real honor. You could live here your freshman year. You could ease into college life."

His typing had ceased, but he wasn't looking at her. "At this point, I'm leaning toward Ohio State." His eyes danced around her face, settled south of her chin. "It isn't so far away."

"But the scholarship ..."

"If I manage to walk on at Ohio State, the coach'll give me a scholarship." He narrowed his eyes. "We can afford the tuition, right? It's not like dad is ... We're okay--financially, I mean--aren't we?"

"Of course, of course." She waved her hand.

"You always wanted me to go off to college somewhere else in the state, right?" Again, he wasn't looking at her. "Out of the house but not out of the state. Isn't that what you said? Besides," he said, "this way you and dad can get to know each other again. A second honeymoon. Whatever."

She was going to protest his implied assessment of her marriage, but his cell phone rang. He held up a finger as if she might dare speak over the cacophonous clash of the ringtone. "Brittney, what's up?" It was his girlfriend. Katherine felt the usual rush of mild disgust, although this time she recognized another emotion in the brew. Brittney wasn't the brightest girl, but she knew enough to protect herself, ensuring that her high-school lovers became nothing more.

She retreated from her son's room. Absorbed in his conversation, he didn't acknowledge her departure.

In the ten days she didn't see Ben because of Emily's visit, she thought often about what he might be doing. One evening, with her husband on the phone with his daughter, she walked over to the abandoned stone house. She was hoping to glimpse Emily, to see if she was as she'd imagined--a younger version of herself. But no one came to the house; no one emerged from it.

On Monday evening, with Emily back at Brown, Katherine left by the back door so as to preclude Simon, who was watching television, from asking her where she was going. When she reached the house, she saw a sign jammed into the front lawn: Remodeling by Frank & Frank. There was a stepladder on the porch. Otherwise, the house appeared untouched. She slipped around to the back door, which was locked. Was Ben inside? She tapped against the wood. She tapped louder. "Ben?" she whispered. "Ben?"

"Right here," he said, and she stifled a scream. He was behind her, Buster at his side.

"My God, you scared me." She told him about the sign on the lawn and the locked door.

"Well, crap," he said. "Do you know of any other abandoned houses in the neighborhood?"

Only my own, she thought to say.

"Let me try something," he said, and Buster led him up to the door. He removed a set of keys from his pocket and hunched over the lock. She heard the scrape of metal on metal.

"What are you doing?" she whispered. As she spoke, a wind kicked up, fierce and cool. The door whooshed open. "How'd you manage that?"

"Practice," he said as they stepped inside. When they'd found seats on the kitchen floor, he added, "When I was a kid, my parents gave me all sorts of stuff to take apart."

"You'd make a good thief."

He laughed at this. "I have higher criminal ambitions: international assassin."

"How was Emily's visit?" She'd wanted her voice to sound neutral, disinterested.

"Great," he said. "For the first forty-five seconds."

"What do you mean?"

"She broke up with me." His voice quivered. She couldn't see him; she wondered what his face showed.

"Why?"

"She said I have my life planned down to the minute. She said I lack spontaneity." He paused. "I told her every day of my life is full of spontaneity. I'm never 100 percent certain my next step won't be over an abyss." He sighed. "Then she admitted she was seeing someone else."

"Who?"

"Some sighted asshole, of course. If she had gone with a deaf dude, I would have said, 'Well, fair fight.'" His words were sarcastic, but his voice betrayed his pain.

"I'm sorry," she said, and she felt like comforting him, wrapping him in her arms.

He shrugged. "What can I do? I can't even stalk her." He tried to laugh.

They sat in silence before he said, "You still hanging around with that dude you mentioned?"

She hesitated. The age difference between her and Ben was the same as between her and Simon. If she had felt inclined, could she have pursued something with him without it seeming absurd and scandalous? "Yeah" she said.

"Too bad." There was more silence. "I didn't bring any weed tonight. My dad's having second thoughts about supplying me."

"Bastard," Katherine said.

Ben laughed. "You said it." He ran a hand down Buster's back. "But I shouldn't be too critical. He's taking me and my mom to Greece this summer. My graduation present and their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary gift. We'll be leaving the day after I graduate."

Their conversation was interrupted by sounds of voices outside. Ben stood up. "Are they coming in?" he asked. Presently, they heard the sound of a key in the back door lock. "Oh, shit," Ben said. "We need to hide."

"Where?" she asked.

"The basement." There was a snapping sound; whoever was outside had locked the unlocked door. Puzzled murmurs followed.

"This way," Katherine said. "Do you mind if I--." But he held up his arm, and she grabbed it. With her cell phone as a flashlight, she led him and Buster to the door at the front of the kitchen, then guided them down the wooden steps. "There's a wine cellar here," he whispered, and she found it in the corner, opened its door, and moved them all inside, shutting the door behind her.

Profoundly dark, the cellar was only a little larger than a phone booth or a Port-o-Potty. They sat side by side, their hips and legs touching. Buster sat in Ben's lap. He made no sound. They could hear footsteps upstairs and muffled voices, a man's and a woman's, discussing stripping floors and removing wallpaper and installing insulation. A minute passed in which she heard nothing. She was about to declare coast clear when the man's voice said, "I don't know what to suggest with regard to the basement. Do you want to have a look?"

Footsteps again, louder, approaching. "There's nothing special down here." It was the man speaking from immediately outside the door, his flashlight's beam slipping under it. "Except maybe the wine cellar." Katherine expected the door to open. She could use their surprise to her advantage, race past them up the stairs and out into the night. Ben would be able to identify her only as Katie. It could have been a scene in Last Tango.

"Would you like to look inside?"

Katherine heard the man grip the doorknob. From Buster came a soft growl.

"It isn't necessary," said the woman. "Besides, I think my stomach is telling me it's dinnertime."

There was more conversation, but it drifted from the wine cellar, then up the stairs. When they could no longer hear voices, Katherine and Ben broke into quiet, relieved laughter. Buster's tail thumped against Ben's chest.

"Close call," Ben whispered. "Thank God Buster growls like a stomach."

"I guess our safe house is no longer safe," Katherine said.

A long silence followed as their nerves calmed. Eventually, Ben said, "I have a request. Please feel free to say no."

"All right," Katherine said.

"May I touch your face?"

"Touch my--. Oh. To--"

"You know, for blind people, our hands are our eyes."

"Right. I think I knew that."

"Our elbows are our noses."

"They are?"

"Our little toes are our brains. But our mouths are in fact our mouths."

"You're funny."

"But I was serious."

"Oh. Well, sure." Katherine wondered if he would feel her years in her face. She wondered what he would say if he did.

Presently, she felt his fingers on both cheeks. They were surprisingly warm, and she told him so.

"I've had them on Buster's back. He's an electric blanket with paws." He moved his fingers to her chin, around her lips. He drew a long finger down her nose. His gestures felt careful, precise, and she couldn't remember ever being known like this. It felt like a languid, sweet prelude to deeper intimacies. She wondered if this is what he was hoping for. But his fingers remained on her face, tracing her eyebrows and her forehead (and perhaps their creases) and her temples and her hairline. Her body warmed and yearned, not for him but for the touches she'd never felt.

He removed his hands as water pooled in her eyes and slid down her cheeks. She wondered at her sentimentality or self-pity. "You're very beautiful," he said, his voice even-handed, almost detached. "I can tell."

"Thank you."

"I guess it must be late," he said, standing. She followed.

"I think so."

"There's no wine around here, is there?"

"I think we would have bumped into it by now."

"Well, we can drink a toast anyway." He reached for her hand, and when their hands were clasped and suspended at chest-level between them, he said, "Cheers." Their faces were so close they could have drunk from the same glass.

Was this it? she wondered. Was this their goodbye? "Let's wrestle for it," she said.

"For what?" he asked.

She didn't know. She knew she wanted to delay their parting. She wouldn't see him again, not in such an intimate place, not where she could be in her twenties again. She couldn't have said who made the first move, but a moment later, they were grappling, pulling, twisting, laughing. He was even thinner than he seemed but also stronger, and when she squeezed his shoulder, she did so roughly and felt his bone. He had his hands on her back and pulled her toward him, their chests colliding, their breath intersecting. Buster broke into worried barking.

Their closeness held, then Ben eased back. "It's okay, boy," he said, crouching to pet his dog. He looked up at her. "I guess the referee is saying the match is over."

They stepped out of the wine cellar and into the basement, her cell phone casting a weak yellow glow onto cobwebs in corners. Ben looked over at her. "If you want to learn to wrestle, I know someone." There was a personal trainer, Maggie Ray, who in addition to leading her clients in the usual weight-lifting and treadmill exercises at Women's Work(out) in the Sky Lake Mall, he said, gave one-on-one lessons in Greco-Roman wrestling. She was a former state high-school champion--boys' division, no less--in the 101-pound weight class. She'd given a pre-match pep talk to St. Lucy's wrestlers last season. "I was so inspired I lost my match in thirty-two seconds," he said, smiling.

"I haven't done anything athletic in decades," she said.

He didn't comment on her word choice, though the smile he gave her in the yellow light suggested he knew how old she was. "It isn't too late," he said.

Her son decided to go to Ohio State. Although Columbus was only a two-hour drive from Sherman, she knew he wouldn't come home often. She knew she shouldn't want him to.

On the day he announced his decision, she thought about heading off to college herself. Starting over. It wasn't impossible. There were women in her position who had. She spent a couple of hours on her computer, calling up the websites of universities across the country. Even some of the top schools had rolling admission. She could begin again somewhere--Amherst, Massachusetts; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Charlottesville, Virginia. When she thought of Simon, she felt miserable. He did nothing wrong. But neither did I.

Later the same day, she hopped in her car and drove mechanically out of town. Drives had lately replaced her walks to the abandoned house. Half an hour later, she found herself at the Sky Lake Mall. She stopped in at Banana Republic and bought clothes for her son that he wouldn't like or need. As she returned to her car, she saw a storefront she'd never noticed. It was Women's Work(out), and she remembered what Ben had said about it. She tossed her shopping bags into her trunk and headed to the door. A trial membership was free. She asked about Maggie Ray, the wrestler. The front-desk clerk, a blond man with the tattoo of an upside down anchor on his right forearm, said Maggie had an opening in her schedule at six-thirty the next morning.

On the day her son was to leave home, his room seemed like a tree whose leaves had fallen. He had removed posters from his wall. He had swept shelves clean of baseballs and CDs. Instead of a broken alarm clock and programs to Ohio Eastern sporting events on the table next to his bed, there was only a layer of dust. It was as if he didn't plan to come back.

She found her son and her husband standing by the front door. The car was loaded. Katherine wore the black, body-hugging outfit she used for her wrestling lessons. Her son was wearing shorts and a gray T-shirt, her husband a nondescript polo shirt and jeans. The laces on his left shoe were untied. His white hair was half-combed. For him, it seemed, it could have been any Saturday morning. "Ready?" he asked her.

She looked at her son. "I have one request before we go," she said.

"What, Mom?"

"A wrestling match. The two of us."

Her son looked around as if she might be speaking to someone else. "Are you serious?"

"No going off to college until we've wrestled."

He turned to his father. "Is she serious?"

"I'm serious," she said. "In the living room." She motioned.

"I don't know, Mom."

"Come on."

"This shouldn't take long." This was her husband. "I mean, Katherine, he's hoping to walk on at Ohio State and you--."

"I'm what?"

"Never mind."

They knew she worked out at six-thirty every weekday morning. She hadn't told them what she did in the workouts.

In the living room, she pushed aside a couple of chairs. There was a red rug over their hardwood floor. It wasn't the size of a wrestling mat, but it would do.

"Are we betting on this?" her son asked.

"Nope," she said. "We're only wrestling."

"Dad, I guess you'll be the ref," he said, and both men laughed.

"All right," Simon said. "When I say, 'Bell,' the match starts." He paused. "Bell."

She attacked his midriff, wrapping her arms around him. He stumbled backwards. She wondered if he was going to fall, but he righted himself. "Mom, come--." He grunted as she pulled him down to the carpet. He was on his side. "Jesus, Mom. All r--." He struggled, and even in his squirming, she felt how warm he was, how soft in places, as she remembered. He didn't seem to know where to grab her, where to put his force. Even as he tried to escape, he exhibited a familiar passivity, a customary surrender. Baby, she wanted to say. Sweet baby.

"Come on, you two," her husband said. "We need to hit the road."

She had her son locked in her arms, his back to her, the left side of his body against the floor. He had been her joy, her burden. He had been her excuse. When he was gone, she could no longer claim he was in the way of what she could be.

"Okay, Mom, you won."

"No, I haven't," she insisted, feeling his heart beat against her hand, smelling his hair. She thought, Let go. You need to let go. But she didn't--she couldn't--even when her husband grabbed her wrists and strained to pull her free.