Grief Street

is also in theater—in a way.
    A young blond lady with a bare midriff, wearing aqua blue tights and matching sports halter and pedaling away to nowhere on a StairMaster machine, has suddenly caught Quent’s principal attention. I am meanwhile left lying in a growing pool of my own sweat on an adjacent rubbery black mat, hands locked behind my neck, knees bent, belly crunching up and down. I am feeling skin folds, and I am feeling old. Forty-four, forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight...
    “Yeah, you saw me?” Quent says.
    “Well, for just a second.” Blue Tights flashed her capped teeth. “I mean, like it went so fast.”
    “Keep going,” Quent said, turning to me. Then back to Blue Tights. “Was I convincing?”
    “Like what do you mean?”
    “Did you sense the angst?”
    “Jeez, like it was only dandruff shampoo.”
    “But, I was playing a guy in real misery.”
    “Yeah... I guess so.” Blue Tights stopped pedaling. She picked up a terry cloth towel and daubed sweat beads from her face. “Like I never knew there was so much to it.”
    “Sure. It’s a commercial. But it’s acting. Anyway, that’s the way I look at it.”
    “Like, you’re a true artist?”
    “You like artists?”
    “Artists are cool.”
    “I have to look over my new eight-by-tens after this. You want to help?”
    “Cool.”
    Postgym arrangements settled, Quent returned to business. He had me get up off the mat, wipe up my sweat with a towel, and follow him to a contraption whereby I cinched myself into a leather belt attached to a weighted pulley and squatted up and down until the point of fainting. After that, it was back to the mat.
    I strapped two-pound weights around my ankles and knelt on all fours. One leg I tucked into my chest and thrust straight back, then repeated for three sets of ten reps; after this, I had to pump the leg straight up over my hips for another thirty reps; then a final thirty reps of crisscrossing the leg over the opposite buttock, then arcing it ungainfully out to the side as far as possible. I thought I was dead. Quent thought otherwise and had me perform the same torture with the other leg.
    A flurry of push-ups was next. In another life, army basic training at Fort Dix, I was pretty good at push-ups—the real kind, military style, with legs and elbows locked and haunches raised and the whole body pumping up and down like a diving board. Quent was marginally kinder than the drill sergeant. He put me in modified position, knees on the mat so that only my upper body was lowered and lifted. And thus I learned how time is the thief of virility. After twenty modified push-ups, I again thought I was dead. Quent commanded five more.
    “Stick with me, Hockaday, I’ll make you clean and lean.” He laughed darkly and motioned for me to get up from the mat. I was directed to sop up more puddles of sweat as fast as I could, then hustle along behind him while my heart rate was still up in order to get maximum aerobic value from the next method of killing me. No problem about keeping the heart pounding. Gasping and wheezing like the trucks I hear in the streets outside my window, I plopped down on a stationary bicycle with a lot of dials and graphs on a glowing dashboard where there should have been handlebars. Quent grinned—luridly—as he set the dials. Then asked, “You love your wife, Ruby, right, Hockaday?”
    I would have said yes, but the only sound from me then was a grunt.
    “After two or three more of these pleasurable sessions, Ruby’s going to love you back like never before. Start pedaling, try to keep this digital readout here at eighty revolutions or higher.”
    “Let me ask you...” I had to pause. “Where do you know Ruby?”
    “Oh, from back when she was in the advertising business. She handled casting calls from her agency before she went and bought the theater.”
    “I see.”
    “Yeah, she’s all right,” Quent said. “She put me in my first commercial, actually. For a brand of scented shaving cream. Then later, I had some work at her theater, the Downtown Playhouse.”
    “I don’t get it about the scented shaving cream. You shave, then you put on lotion. The lotion’s got an aroma. Who needs scent in the shaving cream?”
    “Americans like smelling good. What can I tell you?” Quent stepped close to my bike and read the dials. “You slipped down to seventy-two. Keep it at eighty or over.”
    “What did you do at Ruby’s theater?”
    “I played the