All Adults Here(54)

The space had been upgraded slightly, but there was no removing the smell of mildew, which clearly lived behind every tile and beneath every floorboard. Faucets ran twenty-four hours a day, cold water to splash on yourself when the heat became unbearable. It was still mostly bare bones, despite the much-changed demographic of the East Village and despite the burly Russian man who had taken his money at the door. The shorts were the same, and though it didn’t seem possible—Nicky hadn’t been in at least six months, maybe a year—he recognized the faces and bodies of some of the men in the sauna room. He lay his towel flat and then stretched his body out on top of it. It was a co-ed day, no one’s favorite except the rich guys who came with their model girlfriends, couples for whom physical discomfort and awkwardness seemed part of the plan. It was too hot for human bodies, and so the sweat just came. The true-blue bathers covered their chests and legs with a layer of Vaseline, making it even harder for the sweat to push through. Nicky closed his eyes and breathed, every cell in his body telling him that this was a very bad idea. That was part of the pleasure of it, fighting against the urge to leave, but he’d spent the last twenty years meditating, and this was the same thing. Sit with the discomfort. Sit with yourself. Just sit.

When he was eighteen, Nicky’s body could do anything—he could run for miles without tiring, he could play a new sport adequately well having only just learned the rules. He wasn’t competitive but loved team sports—when he first saw Juliette dance, the night they met, at an engagement party for mutual friends who were now divorced, she and her friends danced with such total abandon, their arms and legs poking and sweeping and jutting and shaking all to make one another and themselves laugh, he understood. He had understood her, the way she moved through the world, body first.

They had come here together, from time to time, though Nicky came less often when the demographics of the place began to change faster. He liked the assortment of ages and bodies, the Hasids, the union guys who came after working all night, each of them trying to burn something out from under their skin. When he first came with Jerry, Nicky was sweating out grief—his father’s death had been sudden and his mother’s response was like closing a door to keep out the chill. It was done; it was over. There was no meaningful discussion. When their teachers had pushed for some sort of family counseling, Astrid had rolled her eyes but acquiesced, clearly just to check it off the list, and to satisfy the due diligence. Nicky remembered what the room had been like—a dark purple corduroy couch, a glass coffee table with a box of tissues sitting in the middle, some cracked-leather chairs on the opposite side. Porter and Nicky had sat together in one corner of the couch, with Astrid perched forward on the far end and Elliot across from them in a chair, bouncing his knees. Nicky and Porter had curled into each other’s bodies and sobbed. Only the therapist had thought to slide the box of tissues within their reach.

Acting had never been particularly interesting to Nicky, but it was something he could do. He could remember lines, and he could speak in public, in dark rooms, with a light pointed at his face. The eighth-grade performance of South Pacific had been spotty—Jamie Van Dusen, who played Nellie, had a thin, timid voice and gave a little half chuckle whenever she was about to break into song, as if in acknowledgment that she knew she wasn’t going to be terrific, but she was going to do her best. After the performance, Russell had rushed up to Nicky, leaving Astrid and Porter with the flowers, and embraced him. Nicky could feel his father’s warm breath in his ear, could still hear him say, “Son, that was wonderful,” as if the wondrousness wasn’t due to Rodgers or Hammerstein but as if he, Nicholas Strick, were solely responsible. Encouragement could do anything. Encouragement and a natural inclination. Russell could have encouraged Porter to be an actress every day of her life and she still would have turned beet red and tried to swallow her own tongue at the prospect. Nicky admitted that much, that there was something in him, some true match that his father had seen. After that, Nicky was in everything: My Fair Lady, RENT, Our Town, The Crucible. And when his high school drama teacher recommended Nicky audition for a film, Russell slapped his hands together. He knew Nicky would get the part—they were looking for a charmer, a flirt, someone who half the audience would pretend to kiss in their bedrooms at night and the other half would imitate in the halls at school. Russell would have loved the movie, though it was passable at best, and now seemed horribly dated. But Russell would have loved seeing his son’s face in People magazine. Imagine, Nicky Strick, in every dentist’s waiting room in the country! Russell would have tapped strangers on the shoulder. He would have beamed. Instead, he’d died in between filming and the release, suspended in the time when anything could happen, or nothing could happen. Russell would have been proud either way.

Someone touched Nicky on the foot, and he opened his eyes. It was a young man with a blond buzz cut.

“Massage?” he asked. Everyone who worked at the baths was related to everyone else—Jerry Pustilnik had told Nicky the whole saga once, how it had been owned by brothers who had had a falling-out, and how they now ran the space on different days, how if you bought a ticket from Dmitri, you could only use it on Dmitri days, that his brother, Ivan, would frown and turn you away. The rest of the staff were members of their family that remained agnostic, like so many children of divorce. This young man was someone’s nephew or cousin. Nicky had always wanted that kind of family, so big that you could never quite work out if you were someone’s second cousin or third cousin once removed, because it didn’t matter, you were family, and that was the only label that counted. But you needed so many people on board to make that happen, generations of joiners, and the Stricks were not that.