Through the Children's Gate (33 page)

There is hardly a single weird store left on Broadway from Forty-second Street to Forty-sixth Street—hardly a single place in which a peculiar passion seems to have committed itself to a peculiar product. You have now, one more irony, to bend east, toward respectable Fifth Avenue, toward the diamond merchants and the Brazilian restaurants and the kosher cafeterias that still fill the side streets, to re-create something that feels a little like the old Times Square. (Wonderful Forty-fifth Street! with the Judaica candlesticks and the Japanese-film rental and the two-story shops selling cheap clothes and stereos, lit up bright.) Social historians like to talk about the Tragedy of the Commons, meaning the way that everybody loses when everybody overgrazes the village green, though it is in no individual's interest to stop. In New York, we suffer from a Tragedy of the Uncommons: Weird things make the city worth living in, but though each individual wants them, no one individual wants to pay to keep them going. Times Square, as so often in the past, is responding, in typically heightened form, to the general state of the city: The loss of retail variety troubles us everywhere, as a new trinity of monotony—Starbucks, Duane Reade, and the Washington Mutual Bank—appears to dominate every block. We just feel it more on Broadway.

Do we overdraw Times Square history, make it more epic than it
ought to be? Piccadilly and Soho, in London, and Place de Clichy, in Paris, are similar places, have known similar kinds of decline and similar kinds of pickup, but without gathering quite the same emotion. We make Times Square do more work than it ought to. Other great cities have public spaces and pleasure spaces, clearly marked, and with less confusion between them. When Diana died, it was Kensington Palace, not Piccadilly, that got the flowers, and in Paris it is the Champs-Élysées, not Place de Clichy, that gets the military parade on the fourteenth of July. Which returns us, with a certain sense of awe, to the spell still cast by the original sin of the 1811 grid plan. We make our accidental pleasure plazas do the work of the public squares we don't have. This is asking a lot of a sign, or even of a bunch of bright ones lighting up the night.

T
he Running Fathers are sorry that they ever started, but they cannot seem to stop. Two and three and sometimes four times a week they put on their Walkman loaded with the Stones or Sting—it is really a Discman now, but the old name seems to suit the thing better, implying forward motion and a wandering impulse rather than a disc merely revolving, too quickly, round and round—and they run around the reservoir in Central Park for as long as their feet and lungs allow.

They recognize one another's presence as they lap the cinder track, and nod as they pass, between breaths and gasps. They wear sober gray tracksuits and plain black pullovers, gray sneakers and wool hats. They run reasonably well, considering how long it has been and how cold the air can be. They understand that they are distinct from the True Runners, with their skintight Lycra pants, their stopwatches and high-stepped knees, and their studied, educated panting. But they are distinct, too, from the Good-Natured Joggers, who wear old sweaters and torn gray sweatpants, and who huff and puff cheerfully, remnants of another, macramé universe.

They are sorry that they ever started, for they never meant to be here. Once, not so long ago, they would mock the men who went running around the reservoir. Back when they began life in New York, the runners at the reservoir seemed like symbols of a life of narrow needs and self-absorption, as vacant and mechanical as the toy animals turning slowly around the Delacorte clock at the entrance to the zoo. “Young executive types,” they called them, the word “yuppie” having not yet even been invented.

“This is
a path
!” one of them recalls shouting to the runners as they went by, “not a track!” They thought they were defending the idea of the park as a refuge, a meditative place for retreat and retrenchment. Now the difference seems harder to define, the distinction between a track that leads you around and a path that leads you forward harder to believe in.

Why, then, are they running; why are they out here in the morning and at dusk? They could go to the gym, of course, and run there, or bike there, or step there, or do something there. But somehow the gym has lost its charm, its magic, its promise of renewal. For years to go to a gym was pure pleasure—a feeling of infinity, “The 59th Street Bridge Song” made flesh, twenty again—but it has changed, and, in its changing, a feeling of expulsion has attached to it.

Is there something about approaching death that makes them run? Not that death feels imminent or even nearby; it is simply real. The Running Fathers envy those who knew it all along, who were running from the first, who got existential despair early on, Larkin-like, and then had only to settle in to make things pleasant while they waited, like condemned men decorating a cell. You start to run, perhaps, when you discover that something is gaining on you, when you discover not just that death is real, but that it is banal, too, that the end of life is merely like—there should be a higher or tonier metaphor, but there isn't—a canceled television series. First surprise at the sudden ending (were the ratings really that low, the heart really that fragile?), then shock, then a wistful hanging on, and then vague memories, afternoon syndication, and then nothing, only nostalgia and perhaps a website.

Even to be remembered after you are gone is always to be remembered wrong. A biography is to a life exactly as the movie-feature remake of an old television series is to the television series: a sequence of agreeably open-ended adventures, suddenly terminated with a rush to tie up a few loose ends in a last episode, is turned into something suspiciously well shaped, with an arc and a story and a backstory and a clear hierarchy of “choices” and motives. Charlie's Angels are given parents and old lovers, childhood traumas and life choices; Mannix is made over into a man with a past and, more important, a destiny, just as the dead subject of a biography is made a character in a story, with
a character's neat consistency and regulated growth. The shape is imposed, and the essential appeal and pleasure of all lived experience, as it is the pleasure of all old television series—that it had no real plot, no pleasure outside the sequence of open-ended episodes with the same repeated characters, the same promise of more like it next week at the same time—is gone, vanished. And so they run, even though they are beginning to hear rumors that running does no good.

T
he Motionless Mothers are in tune with their time. They have stopped running; they have stopped going to step class; they have almost stopped moving. And yet they bloom. Every morning they do their twelve yoga poses, rooted to a mat, saluting the sun and downing the dog, hardly stirring, just rocking back and forth in the lotus position, and then once a week they go to a cool, pure room and for twenty minutes do their Super Slow. They sit in the silent, cold room of the SuperSlow trainer—you cannot call it a gym; it lacks music, and all conviviality has been banished—and, eyes shut, breathing in short decisive pants, ten seconds up and ten seconds down, they lift great weights with their legs and arms and backs and torsos, hundreds of pounds for twenty uninterrupted minutes. They close their eyes and pant as they do it, the way they learned to do in childbirth. They have found a way to beat the odds, the genes, time itself: to be absolutely still and lift great weights very slowly.

The Motionless Mothers can lift two and three hundred pounds and see the results in the shower and bedroom. They now have the bodies of Puerto Rican flyweight boxers, narrow waists and long taut biceps and elongated thigh muscles. They are wise. They have grasped intuitively that we live in a slower time, that this epoch is not a running epoch. The glittering and the gleaming, the brilliant of all kinds, have ceded their place to the self-knowing and short-winded, to the stubborn and simple and still. We have passed from the Age of the Gilded Hare into the Age of the Armored Tortoise. Slow and steady wins the race, because the hare is broke, or in prison, or hiding in fear in his hutch. Even the truly rabbity must pretend now to have been turtles all along.

Within the new dispensation, the Motionless Mothers flourish motionlessly. Their backs are straight, their breath strong, their muscles eerily long and taut. They are, every inch of them, body and soul, in every sense,
defined.
Their husbands, merely running, are as vaguely defined as an acronym left over from the Cold War—SEATO, or MIRV—whose history no one can quite remember. What
do
they mean, exactly?

T
here
is
something saintly about the SuperSlow trainer, the Running Fathers think when they go at last to see him—a gentle, powerful youth who hides his physique, delicately, within loose T-shirt and jeans, and who has a shy smile and a diffident manner. And yet the trainer has, as well, the shining patient persuasiveness of the convert, of the man who has seen and who knows. The old hollering, the old-style trainer's “You can do it,” or “Give me three more!,” are anathema to him. Instead, he stands beside the machine and whispers, instructs his student through the three or four repetitions that are all that is needed. He smiles gently, seeking nothing, never raising his voice. The weight goes up, comes back down to the pile, and then goes back up, ten counts up, ten counts down.

“Okay. When you're ready. Just
sneak
out of there—crawl out, inch by inch. Hold it—now, slooow negative, coming back. Feel for the tap, don't look for it, feel for it, and then just sneaky-slow back out of there …”

The strange thing is that the two-hundred-plus-pound weight, which feels immovable on first contact,
moves.
It nudges forward and then, through a swell of mixed pain and effort, really moves, and slips back down, and then moves again. Four times, no more; a minute and a half, no longer.

The theory is impeccable, or at least persuasive. Muscles learn only from failure, like French schoolchildren, and they can be made to fail only by repeated stress slowly applied. The stress, if it is applied longer, cannot then really be stress. The mark of real stress is that the body cannot bear it long or often. The man in the gym rushing through his sets, the push-up artist doing his thousand push-ups—
they are cruising in a comfort zone of their own creation, an imaginative illusion of their own conceit. They are making sweat, not muscle.

“I'm going to stop you at a minute or half or failure,” the trainer whispers, “whichever comes first. We're hoping for failure, of course.” His hushed voice is the voice of the old game-show announcers whispering the password into the microphone behind the isolation booth, so the contestants cannot hear it. “Just inch out of there, sneaky-slow starting out—don't explode, don't throw it, just ease out, and hold it, and then slooowly back. ”

There are six machines, no more, and the program really
is
over in twenty minutes, in a blaze of breath and pain. It takes place in the cold room, with windows overlooking the cold avenue. But the speed with which the workout ends is not presented as a gift on the other end of the pain—it is a limitation, a sign of the stupidity of the body. “If you destroy a muscle sufficiently, it has no choice except to make more muscle for the task. If you challenge it to its accustomed limits, which is what most people call exercise, it is just satisfied with itself.” The runner can see that muscle, complacent as a young painter of the 1980s, not really trying. “The beautiful thing is that if you stress it and then give it time to recover, when it recovers, it will recover stronger than before. If you did it more often, it would have less time to recover from the stress, so you'd be doing
less
strength building, not more.”

What about running? the Running Fathers ask anxiously, don't you need aerobics to improve your lungs, couldn't the two things be complementary? The trainer is patient, humorous, kind, but absolute; running is not inadequate exercise—it is just not really exercise at all. It is recreation.

“We-ell,” he explains, with the good-humored patience of the true convert, “why is it that they ask you your weight before you input your time on one of those stationary bikes? Okay: It's because they need to know how many calories you're going to burn
just by sitting there,
just naturally, without doing anything. Let's say that's you burn a hundred calories just while you're standing still or sleeping or thinking. Well, thirty minutes of running will burn about a hundred calories more—so if, let's say, you have an iced tea right after because of
the thirst you've created by the ‘exercise’”—he beams with amusement as his voice brackets the word—“then you're back more deeply in debt than you were before! You're actually
gaining
calories. The same thing is true about running outdoors. I don't think it can harm you too much, but most of what we see”—he sounds like a doctor giving bad news kindly—“I mean, if it feels good and adds something to your life, by all means, keep running! But all you're doing is stressing your heart rather than training your muscles. Not every runner dies of an early heart attack. But I'm afraid that it's no accident that some of them do, and none of them …” His voice trails off.

And the pain? “I have, well, I have this thing someone said to me once.” The young trainer blushes, frightened of seeming too aphoristic, wanting to share his wisdoms but not wanting to seem to show off. “It, well, it works for me in a strong way. It's just this—” He pauses and swallows and then recites earnestly: “ ‘Flee the pain and the pain will seek you; seek the pain and the pain will flee you.’ ”

And the weird thing is that it
does
work, sort of. It is not that the pain really runs away; it is that if, at the moment when your knees are screaming, you simply turn
into
the scream, turn toward the pain and concentrate on it, seize it with your mind so that it engulfs you, then the pain becomes somehow a subject rather than an object—a thing outside yourself, gaining on you, but never quite catching up.