We Begin Our Ascent

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She nodded. “Of course.”

“It was the cobblestones,” I said. “They’re lethal in the wet.”

“Technically,” said Thomas, “those are sett stones. They’re worked stones. Granite. A nice job, I must say.” Liz frowned at her stepfather. She studied the bike as I leaned on it; it was undamaged but for some of the handlebar tape, which was torn and uncurling, hanging like ringlets from the bars. She shook her head. She knew that it was just a small race, an insignificant thing, and yet I saw that she had been seduced, as I had, by the thought that it was a chance to show her mother the seriousness of what I did.

It was a consolation, actually, to realize that Liz had felt the stakes too. I thought of something she had said about my career before: “It must be nice to be able to succeed so clearly,” she said. “To have such definite parameters. Clear successes. No one is cheering me in my lab.” That night, however, demonstrated the drawbacks of performing one’s profession so publicly: the way in which expertise and preparation could be occluded by bad luck, the way that an expected success can buckle under the weight one has put upon it.

* *

Less than a kilometer after we begin, a handful of riders from opposing teams sprint away from the front. The peloton does not react to this but instead grinds along. Most of us are still finding what the day will be, trying to conserve and gauge our energies. We compete on each of the twenty-one days of the race, but there are unwritten rules, expectations and traditions which reach back to the men with their steel bikes, bad teeth, and muddy visages, to the stutter and shimmy of old newsreel footage. Not every minute of every day is heedless competition. There are truces and lulls, and moments of peace. Some of Liz’s friends were disappointed to hear this, I remember, as if I were telling them that my sport was nothing more than professional wrestling. That is not the case though. The conventions observed among us riders do not contain the competition but channel it. They are flexible rules, liable to be shifted by resentments, disagreements, and alterations in fortune. We are governed by the will of the peloton, the mood of the mass, which is as changeable as that of any small village. On mornings such as this, on flat stages, we usually agree to make some progress before competition breaks out fully. We are content to sit together, to allow a few young men, back markers, to spend some time leading, in view of the cameras, taking the first applause of the fans. That is, as long as the men are sufficiently far down in the overall classification to pose no threat to any of the leaders, and providing that they have done nothing to offend the mass. The publicly outspoken, the gratingly showy will be chased down with pleasure. Local boys may be allowed down the road to enjoy the adoration of their home fans, until their lead gets too great and they will be brought back, swallowed up.

Today the seven men out ahead are adjudged unthreatening and inoffensive enough to be left to ride ahead. The peloton churns along steadily.

Tsutomo and I collect team lunch bags from helpers at the side of the road. We ride between our teammates, distributing them. Because he is the team leader, Fabrice is supplied, as is his wont, with a peeled boiled egg each lunchtime. He eats it like an indulged child. Though we’re moving at forty kilometers per hour, he sits up on his bike and rides one-handed. He seeks to eat off the white first, until he has only the dusty yellow ball of yoke left. Then he squeezes this with his greasy fingers, exposed by his fingerless gloves. The yoke breaks up and, depending on the duration of the egg’s boiling, either oozes or crumbles. The state of the yoke of each egg seems, to Fabrice, to constitute an important omen.

* *

Sometimes, I suppose, I have had too much faith in the arcana of my sport to engage and elevate me. The days before Liz had been smaller days, I now know. I had been racing, and thinking only about that. I was getting better, but I was also feeling the limits of what I did. I had assumed, when I became a professional, that things would be more intense, somehow, more vivid and real. The reality, though, was that my life had become smaller. I prohibited myself from many things, set myself in a limited pattern of thinking. It is perhaps obvious in hindsight, but obsession does not give you more, but less. I had the routines and the inflexibility of someone already old.

Liz accompanied me to a race in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. It took some time to arrange: the time off for Liz, the travel, the permission from Rafael. When we arrived, I recced the course, then rested and made sure I was hydrated and properly fed. It was a minor race, a preparation for the real season. Rafael would not have contemplated allowing Liz to stay in my room otherwise. The four of us racing—myself, Sebastian, Tsutomo, and Fabrice—sought to maintain our good habits. We sat in the hotel café for most of the day preceding the race. We talked, when we did at all, about racing. Liz was there for much of the time. She was exasperated but also slightly in awe at how limited a day we could live, as if she were finding out that there were men who could subsist on only air. She wanted to stroll along the seafront promenade, but I couldn’t bear to. I told her I didn’t want to walk anywhere the day before a race.

After lunch she disappeared and then reappeared in the hotel café, wheeling an empty wheelchair. “You don’t want to walk,” she said. Fabrice and Tsutomo laughed at me, shook their heads. Liz kept looking at me, daring me. I climbed into the chair. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said to my companions. Normally, I would have been mortified to be wheeled around, but that day I chose not to be. Liz cackled delightedly. “I told you we could do it,” she said.

It was spring. The air was warm but there was a breeze coming off the sea. There were sailing boats out on the water, tacking against the wind. Other tourists were stopping to take photos of the view, but we glided past them. I was silent for much of the time. I just listened to Liz speak. She had been reading her guidebook. She leaned down behind me to tell me the history of the docks, to point out the town hall, an old palace on a hill. I smelled her perfume and felt her breath on the back of my neck.

Rafael was in the lobby when Liz wheeled me back into the hotel. His presence struck me with a sense of foreboding. He looked at me steadily, as if deciding upon a response. As I waited for this, Liz walked around the chair and toward him. “You must be Rafael,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Something about her approach—not the words but her firm assurance that he would greet her reasonably—seemed to weight the scales in our favor.

Rafael smiled at Liz. He was shorter than her, even in his special shoes. He looked up at her, put out a hand. “I have heard a great deal about you too,” he lied. I rose from the wheelchair, treating others in the lobby to an apparent miracle, and walked over to stand behind Liz.

She gestured at the chair. “We were trying to have a good afternoon without exerting him too much.”

Rafael laughed. “Wonderful,” he said. I felt for a moment the boyish silliness of my fear of him. It was an eerie moment. He touched my elbow. “Why have you been keeping this wonderful woman from us for so long?” he said.

That night Liz and I had sex, utterly silently, the slow creak of the mattress merging with the whispering of a window pulled back and forth on its hinges by the night wind, my teammates asleep in adjacent rooms. There is a prohibition on sex before racing. Rafael believes that intercourse diminishes the body in critical respects, despite Johan’s marshaling of scientific articles that apparently refute this claim. The thought that what we did was prohibited intensified it.

The race went well. I spent time out ahead on a break. I was in the leading pack when we went up the small winding ascent on which Liz was waiting. I came home in eighteenth place.

* *

We are close to halfway through the stage when the pace begins to ramp up. The cadence of the group rises. The feeling, emergent among us, is that competition may be put off no longer. We breathe. We sweat. Heat rises from us as from stock animals penned tightly.

We hear the time advantage of the leaders come down in increments as we exert ourselves.

I am taking my turn at the head of the peloton when we catch the men. We’re on one half of a closed-off highway, which curves through the landscape. We come over a very gentle rise and I see the breakers strung into a short line, turning their heads as we approach. Warnings over radios and the passing of the motorcycle outriders who precede the peloton have already informed them that they are being caught, and there is something in their resignation that almost makes me sorry for the ruthlessness of the group I tow behind me. The peloton, really, is the thing: the center of the bell curve. We riders are defined by our presence within it or apart from it. The very best, the likes of Fabrice, desire to leave the peloton behind. Their dreams are rendered in opposition to the machine. The rest of us worry each morning that this might be the day that we can’t keep pace. Our nightmares see us left in the wake, among the team cars, the journalists, the riders fixing punctures. If ever there was one, I am a peloton man. I am happiest within the mass. I do not flatter myself that I can kick away and do without it. It has been enough for me to get here, to find a small place in such a famous event. Only, occasionally, as when we pass these eager, exhausted young men, can I see it any differently: as an aggressor rather than as an ally.

We come up to the riders. The seams of their kits are bordered with fine lines of salt from their perspiration. They ride at the side of the road, heads down. Warnings are called out as the peloton contracts to pass them. Then, they are gone, back into the mass.

* *

I have been only once to Liz’s lab, back when she was working on her PhD. It’s a cool, quiet place. She and her colleagues hunch over the benches, performing tasks on a microscopic scale. They work with the embryos of zebra fish. The fish are quick to hatch, and they are transparent. With the right magnification one can see right into them. On my visit, Liz took a little petri dish and shook it. In the center was a cluster of what seemed like bubbles but were not. They were embryos, about thirty hours old. When I looked through the microscope, I could see them: their miniature, newly formed spines, curved in a C around globular, translucent yolks. At the top of the spine were the first hints of organs blooming, a skull being formed, and beneath this was a tiny heart, filaments of red where blood was beginning to enter and leave it, the slightest twitching as it beat.

In the lab, Liz and her colleagues perform what they call lost-function experiments. They work on cells in the fish’s spines, on interneurons. They render different genes mute and seek to measure the effect of this on cell development. “It’s as if you have a car,” Liz explained to me. “And you’re taking out different parts to see what happens. Can it still drive? Is it faster, even? Is it better at going around corners?” The cells are modified to contain a fluorescent protein from deep-sea creatures, so that when viewed under a microscope, their growth is writ in neon. Liz sedates the fish, puts them on microscope slides. The transparency of the fish means one can look into them to register the way their glowing axons are beginning to thatch around their spines.

As a teenager, I was drawn to riding because of the certainty it offered, the way a clear objective made stark the choices of when to train and when to eat and when to sleep. Liz’s work is based in routine too, and yet the aims are different. I realized, on that visit, she was creating a system in the hope that expectations would be confounded, with the wish that something unbidden, inexplicable might arise. When I visited, she was coming to the end of her thesis research. She’d been studying a particular gene: the one she would continue to study in her postdoctoral work. She had hopes, supported by data, that this gene was operative in cell repair. “And so?” I wanted to know.

“It could teach us things.”

“Yes?”

“How bodies repair themselves, perhaps.”

“Which would be useful for humans too?”

“Maybe. Possibly the things you are thinking: disease prevention, cancer cures, that kind of stuff.”

“You think this is likely?”

“The chance is what wins us funding,” she said. “But we must still be lucky, of course.”

“You don’t like to trumpet your work?”

“The world doesn’t lack for ambitious promises,” she said.

“Right,” I said. I thought of my own career: the managing of my aims, the focus on single steps, individual acts.

“I’m putting my energy into the actual project,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “The doing.”

She smiled. “The activity itself,” she said.

* *

With the breakers caught, the racing begins in earnest. Teams coalesce into groups within the peloton, sprinters and team leaders are shepherded to the front. Everyone who surges out ahead of the group is chased down now. The pace lurches to absorb attacks. It is hard, even in the middle of the peloton, to keep pace. I ride in front of Tsutomo, who is in front of Fabrice. We are at the mercy of the most ambitious, the most nervous. “Keep your underwear on,” says Rafael over the radio. “Keep in there. Stay calm.” Out of the corner of my eye I see the flash of our team colors. Sebastian squeezes his way between other riders, Johan on his wheel.

We come into the town in which we will finish,hammering along. The peloton is beginning to shed riders off the back. It is a looser thing. There is traffic furniture to negotiate. The group stretches, and we slice around a roundabout. We rattle down these small roads like pebbles down a drainpipe. Our freewheels fizz as we cease peddling for a moment. On the outside, a couple of riders hop onto a curb, and down again. The noise of the crowd is intense. It is nearly impossible to communicate among the mass. The road kinks slightly up ahead. The riders in front of me judder together but stay upright. I glance my brake to avoid colliding with the wheel of the rider in front. A Slovak rider, a time trial specialist, goes off the front with five kilometers to go. He stands and sprints and then, when he has opened up some gap, he tucks himself into his bike and pounds the pedals. The two teams holding the pace at the head of the peloton seem to be modulating the speed of this pursuit. It is very likely that we will get him easily, and his leading in the meantime discourages others from attacking. I see Sebastian ahead of me, though he is slowing, being passed by others. Johan is somewhere in the melee at the front. My own thighs burn. Fabrice is huddled down behind me. Exhausted riders are dropping from the group ever more frequently, and so we are at risk of colliding with those slowing. We travel at motorcycle speeds without the hydraulic brakes or leathers. I come up by Sebastian, nearly glancing his shoulder. My legs are agony. I feel my calves on the verge of cramp. I check right, move to the side, try to get out of the main flow. We hit a corner and I concentrate only on keeping my line. Tsutomo leads Fabrice now. They are both in front of me. The cramp in my calves arrives, fully, but I cannot stop in the middle of this group. The Slovak is hovering forty yards ahead of the rest of us; I see him over the heads of others at the top of a slight incline. People are still accelerating past me. I feel like I am being left behind a breaking wave. I pedal. I hold my pace until it is truly safe to slow, to make my way to the line in my own time. The head of the peloton has no doubt surged around the Slovak. The helicopter moves in a steady line up ahead, following the sprint finish. The noise of the crowd on the final straight is deafening. I let myself freewheel down this last stretch. I turn my attention to preserving energy.

I find Fabrice at the finish line. He’s okay. He finished with the main group, lost no time. “It’s a meringue of a stage,” he says. “You’d never think so much energy would go into something so boring.” He is happy. He wheels over to a barrier and signs autographs. He gives a brief and playful interview to a young reporter from a local radio station.

Johan and Sebastian are already near the bus when we arrive.

“It didn’t work out for you?” I say to Johan. He scowls but doesn’t answer.

“He had a good day,” says Sebastian. “He came eleventh.”

“Please don’t brag about me coming eleventh,” says Johan. “I have some dignity.”

“Amongst this caliber of racer,” says Sebastian, “that is not a small accomplishment.”

Johan sighs and stalks off to 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 (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)

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 had made the logical, forward-looking choices, encouraged by the man in his polyester suit. We were some way out of the city, and so we came to the understanding that we should be entitled to another bedroom, to a lawn. The garden was for the cat, ostensibly, but who would spend so much for just a cat?

Liz did not allow herself to settle too readily into this new life. She did not take her mother’s prompts to decorate or get to know the mostly older neighbors. She was keen to hold off the routines and compromises of our new suburban existence, I sensed, and I was glad to see this but also worried by the sense that her wariness strayed into a wider feeling of dissatisfaction. The more she progressed with her job, the more it seemed a source of distress. Her colleagues marveled at her fluency, but in her actual accomplishment of the position she had built so long toward, she was truly faced for the first time with the scant effect of the work she had chosen, the world’s apparent indifference to all her expertise.

It was not logical to think that the slow, steady science she was doing should have won her wide recognition, and yet we are not always logical in our hopes. I thought of all my slow progress in my career and the sense I used to have that others did not recognize the difficulty of all I did, that people around me did not take time to understand the milestones I was passing. I made a point to highlight her successes, to talk of what went well with her work. She was grateful but dissatisfied with the praise. I was partial, after all. It was not my role to offer the affirmation she sought.

For a while she exercised rigorously. She would borrow my turbo trainer after work, attach her own bike to it, and sit in the bike room, spinning, rubbing sweat from her forehead with a hand towel. She would go to the gym on her way into the lab. She jogged on the weekends when I went out to ride.

Liz had been a swimmer when she was at school. I could imagine it: the bleached-out hair, the loose walk, the smell of chlorine on her skin.

Her exertions seemed a way to channel frustration, to displace energy, and yet I also felt that there was some part of her that wanted to show that she could have, had she wanted, been doing what I did. I believed it. I did not deny that my work was more straightforward, that she would, had she really wanted to, have easily succeeded in my realm. My work was not the work of a lifetime though. There was that. It advanced more predictably, but then would be done so much faster.