Hello Beautiful

William tried to absorb Arash’s words; he knew immediately that he would replay this conversation later, when he was alone. These felt like the words, and sentences, he had been waiting for. William committed what felt like tiny failures and disappointments during every hour of his current life; he wished that he was still a basketball player with positional intelligence, who was part of a team. A memory flashed into his mind: He was standing on the park court as a ten-year-old, watching the boys who had just welcomed him into their game run away to get home in time for dinner. Come back, the young William thought.

Arash clapped him on the shoulder. “Got to get to an appointment. Maybe I’ll see you here again?”

“I’m here most days,” William said, and was confused by the feeling in his chest — was it longing? — as the man walked away.

—

William and Julia spent several weeks that December repeating the same argument every time Sylvie was out.

“We should move into the other apartment before I get huge,” Julia said. She and William now qualified for a two-bedroom apartment in married housing, because they were expecting a child. “I want to get organized,” she said. “We’re going to have to put together a crib and a changing table, at least. You’ll go back to teaching next month, so we should use this window to move, while you have a little free time.” She paused. “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

William tried to make his face neutral. “Like what?”

“Like what I’m saying is shocking. You realize we’re having a baby in April, right?”

“Of course. I’m just saying that we’re comfortable in this apartment. You’ve always said that you loved this place. Let’s stay here until the end of the school year. We can move in the summer.”

Julia looked at him with wide eyes, annoyed. “It’s too small, with Sylvie staying with us. If we move now, she could sleep in the baby’s room. I don’t understand why you’re arguing with me.”

William didn’t know what to say, how to explain that he simply wanted to push off moving for as long as possible. Nothing inside him would make sense to his wife. He thought dumbly: If we don’t move, then the baby won’t be born, because he or she won’t have a bedroom. The larger apartment was in a nearby campus building, so it wouldn’t be a big change, but now, with Charlie’s death and Julia growing and Sylvie on his couch, everything felt uncertain to William. He needed to wake up in his bed in his current bedroom, and eat two pieces of toast with strawberry jam, and then walk to the library. He needed to sit in his favorite study carrel and spread his books out in the precise way he liked. He needed to take a break from studying to eat lunch in the gym — sometimes with Arash — and remember what it used to feel like to run the court in front of him with a basketball in his hands. At the end of each day, after he attended classes, William returned home to the woman he’d fallen in love with only a few years earlier. The beats of this exact routine gave William an infrastructure, and the idea of any alteration made him stare blankly at his wife, even though he knew she was being reasonable and he was not.

—

Several days a week, Arash brought his soup and small brown roll — his lunch never varied — and sat beside William in the bleachers. Arash talked to William like he was a colleague, which was a kindness William appreciated.

“I have concerns about Paterson,” Arash said, nodding toward the sophomore shooting guard who was bouncing up and down on the court, waiting for his turn to shoot.

“He has a nice stroke,” William said. “Don’t you think?”

“Good technique in his shot, yes. But pay attention to how he lands.”

William watched the lanky kid dribble around three cones and then shoot. “I don’t see a problem.”

“Try to slow your vision down while you watch. Watch him in slow motion for his next three turns.”

William had no idea what Arash meant by this, but he watched carefully for the next twenty minutes. He tried to pull apart the different parts of Paterson’s movements: the angle of his body when he ran, the rotation of his knees when he pivoted, the abandon with which he leapt toward the basket. On the fourth viewing he noticed Paterson’s torso twist while he shot, which caused him to be off-balance when he landed. He tried to explain this to Arash, who nodded.

“That’s right. I think he might need to work on strengthening his ankles — there’s possible ligament weakness there. Your experience made me rethink my work, you know. I want to find out about the players’ prior injuries. If I have that information, I can help build them out. I’m concerned they’ll lie to me if I just ask them about the injuries straight up, though.” He made a face.

“They won’t want you to think there’s anything wrong with them. They don’t want to be viewed as damaged and get less playing time.”

“Exactly,” Arash said. “Goddamn knuckleheads.”