We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo

cool down on the stationary trainer.

      I cool down myself. I climb onto the bus. I retrieve my tracksuit, my phone, my wallet, my wedding ring.

      * *

      Liz and I married within nine months of meeting. The days of that first autumn together were swift, clipped days. Liz was busy in the lab, finishing a PhD, and I was training steadily. My landlord was putting the house I rented on the market. Liz’s housemate was moving out. It made sense to live together suddenly, and that fact seemed to open other possibilities. We were living strange, unbalanced lives, our eyes on the horizon. It was a comfort for each of us to be with someone else who thought about the future, who weighed days ahead over wearying present routines. The similarity of our positions, of our needs, felt so uncommon.

      I didn’t know the register to propose in, how serious it should be. I felt that I was speaking a language that I only knew so well, in which I could communicate blunderingly or not at all. We were not those people, I hoped, who believed a wedding to be the climax or culmination of a life. We had objectives beyond the ordinary. I did not want to get down on one knee in a tastefully lit restaurant, to have others applaud as if we had actually achieved something, to have a bottle of champagne arrive in a polished stainless steel bucket. Still, I did not want to do it comfortably. It seemed important that the gesture should make me a little uneasy, and that I should endure that discontent. Doing it in privacy would have been a cop-out. I wanted to show the extent to which being with Liz had allowed me to step outside myself.

      I asked her on the riverbank in the end. We had eaten an excellent dinner. It was a Tuesday night. We walked toward the river, close to the theater we had been to on that first meeting with Liz’s mother. I stopped her at the edge of the river, near a closed gateway that led to a floating ferry landing. The dark water lapped ahead of us. The fittings clanked with the shifting of the jetty. I did not get down on one knee, which I regret now. It would have been a small thing. I took out the ring it in its box and placed it on the wall we leaned against. “Will you marry me?” I asked.

      “Okay,” she said, so lightly that I was disconcerted. Yet that was her, I thought: someone always ready for whatever came next. She sometimes seemed to know what I would say before I did. She was prepared for the world, forever set to meet what it would cast toward her. She smiled. She fingered the ring, put it on, took it off and played with it, put it on again.

       Chapter 4

      I wake to birdcalls, to sunlight seeping through the patterned curtains. It is still early, and the alarm has not gone. I lie back. Tsutomo is still asleep. I clear my throat as quietly as I can. I feel my soft palate as I do so, alert to a catch, to a tenderness that might presage a cold. There is not a morning of the past ten years that I have not woken and worried about my state of health. My airways feel clear though. I concentrate on my breathing, on the inhale and exhale, on the slight strain of an intercostal muscle that this reflection makes clear.

      I cannot sleep. I know my alarm will go soon, that the day will commence. I lie and let my mind run.

      The hotel room is neat, plain. It lightens in imperceptible increments. It is an antiseptic life, this. In a couple of hours, I will pack my small bag, vacate the room without more of a trace of my occupancy than the rucking up of the sheets. It is so different from home, with B, so many things spread across floors and tabletops. I think of Liz getting up far away, making her own way into the day.

      At the breakfast table, I sit next to Fabrice. He asks whether I dreamed. I think back and find nothing behind the sensation of having woken, my slow thinking as I waited for the alarm.

      * *

      Once she had agreed to marry, Liz went into it with a velocity. Neither of us had the patience or the time for worrying about outfits and dances and table decorations, but we had a large meal, a party afterward. My mother came. She had recently retired from her job as a hospital receptionist, and she had just seen a retirement counselor who had told her that her life from that point on was her own. She was on her way to Spain to buy a house, an act of uncharacteristic resolve that I sensed was a gesture toward a new imagining of herself. My mother is a quiet woman, capable but diffident. She cannot place herself at the center of an anecdote but loses her way in detail and texture that she does not have the confidence to discount. She sat with Katherine and Thomas, and I was gratified and a little surprised by the patience with which Katherine listened to her stories.

      Liz and I moved to the northern periphery of the city. I came south to this new house, Liz north. Liz had finished her PhD and begun her postdoc work in the same lab straightaway. There we were, suddenly with all of this: a summer ahead of us; a largely empty house; neighbors; a street of London plane trees; a route for me, up along the river, out into the countryside above the M25.

      We saw Liz’s friends when we could. We would meet them for dinner. Liz would come straight from the laboratory, and I would take the train into the center of the city. The friends were interested in our new lives, in our marriage, though, as a rule, not quite curious enough to make the journey to see us at home. We would barely have been in the house to greet them anyway. Both of us were busy then. I was riding better than I ever had, increasingly finding myself selected by Rafael for the bigger races. I wondered whether my new life, my new perspective, was helping. It was probably just conditioning, I told myself reluctantly: adaptation, development, the body as machine. The friends asked about my racing still, but it was hard to explain my advances. They expected, I think, when Liz mentioned my recent successes, that I should be winning races, appearing on television. They did not really understand the difficulty of making it into the ranks of truly world-class riders. They saw I was zealous, but not that this zeal could be surpassed by others, for whom racing meant even more. Liz could identify with this. She had similar problems communicating her own work with her friends. She had moved up in the hierarchy of the lab, and now the success of certain protocols, of essential parts of the study, rested with her. “If it goes well, it’s like cooking,” she said. “If it goes wrong, it’s like a murder investigation.” It was going well. She had good hands, an observant eye. Her results were regarded as reliable. It was patient work, systematic and unglamorous. I felt heartened to hear that she saw elements of her own work in mine, pleased by the sense that it drew us together. We were partners in our sense of isolation, in our preoccupations incomprehensible to so many. We both had our routines, our slogs, in service of single moments, possibilities. It felt noble, all this putting off.

      * *

      On the journey to the start, Rafael rattles around the coach like a wasp trapped in a Coke can. Today is another flat stage, another day to simply make it through. Tomorrow is a day of low rolling hills. We are in what Rafael has dubbed the “maintenance” portion of the Tour: days during which no great gains are to be made and losses are to be precluded. He is agitated. The bus sighs to a halt. Rafael stands at the front and speaks before we disembark. “I am not getting the best feeling seeing you all today,” he says. “You seem tired. You seem without interest.” I can hear the public address system, the patter of words, the high-frequency creak of speakers. “Let me say, nobody outside this bus cares about you. Nobody out there requires that you race. You do this because you want to.” Rafael sighs loudly and theatrically. “You care. I care. Otherwise everything is fucked.”

      Later I join Fabrice on the warm-up bikes. “A cyclist is riding in a race,” he says, not looking up from his steady pedaling. “Halfway through, the race referee pulls up beside him. The race referee tells the cyclist that the car of his directeur sportif crashed into a tree half an hour before, killing everyone inside.” He looks at me now, though he doesn’t change his cadence. “ ‘Oh good,’ says the cyclist. ‘I thought my radio earpiece was broken.’ ”

      “A good one,” I say.

      * *

      That new house was a surprise in all that it seemed to ask of us. Liz and I had chosen it, of course. We had driven around the locality in the estate agent’s branded car. It was what we could afford. It had good transport connections. I could travel easily to airports to fly abroad.

      We