The Front Runner

and shook apple-blossom petals down all over the guests. Delphine dabbed his eyes with a lace hanky and said, "God bless you both, cheris." Everybody started getting up, all smiles.
    Betsy rushed up and hugged us both, red-eyed. "You're both beautiful. There's no bride to kiss, so I'm gonna kiss the two grooms."
    Billy grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder. Betsy shrieked. "Harlan," he said, his eyes sparkling wickedly, "am I allowed to have a girlfriend?"
    "Sure," I said. "Have ten girlfriends."
    Billy paraded around the lawn with Betsy laughing and screaming on his shoulder. Nearly everybody there knew about Betsy, and the laughter was uproarious. Aldo didn't know, and his eyes bulged out again— he couldn't figure out what was going on.
    Then everybody, still with petals in their hair, had wine and champagne and cheese and other delicate snacks that Marian had put on a buffet table by the flower bed. Jacques played his recorder some more. Billy and I both tasted from a glass of champagne. "I guess Buddha will forgive me this once," said Billy.
    We all talked and laughed and were merry all afternoon.
    "You've really done it now," said Aldo before he left.
    "We know," I said.
    "Do me a favor," he said. "Don't announce it on the society page of the Times."
    "We haven't announced it to anybody," I said, "except the people here. But I guess the Times will find out fast enough."
    That night Billy moved out of his room in the faculty dorm and into my house.
    The team had done a job on my car and on Billy's bicycle. They decorated them with crepe streamers, tied on a lot of tin cans and old shoes, and a sign saying JUST MARRIED. This was their idea of a joke.
    John Sive looked happier than he had in a long time. "I really have good feelings about this," he said. "I think it's going to last."
    "It has to," I said. "If it doesn't, it's the end of us."
    FOURTEEN
    THE alarm would go off at 5:30 A.M.
    As I sat up sleepily to turn it off, Billy would stir in bed beside me. Every morning he was there, and the morning after, and the next. He would stretch and yawn, his feet disturbing the Irish setter, who slept at the foot of the bed.
    "Rise and shine, meathead," I would say. "Hut, hut, hut."
    The setter would jump down on the floor and shake himself.
    Billy groaned. "I hate getting up at this hour." But he got up and went in the bathroom to take a leak. "You wanna know what my dream is for after the Olympics? My really big fantasy?"
    "What?" I said, making the bed.
    "Sleeping until nine every morning for a month."
    Our routine, during those pre-Trials weeks, was simple and nearly always the same.
    In the living room, we would do calisthenics and yoga to get our blood moving. This careful stretching and warming up was one of the things that was keeping Billy injury-free. Then we would pull on our shoes and shorts.
    Just as the sun was reddening above the trees, we would set off on our workout. Billy would run whatever distance at whatever pace I had scheduled for the day. I would run my usual eight or nine miles at a 6:30- or 7-minute pace. Since Billy burned through his workout at nearly race pace, I couldn't stay up with him, so I let him drop me and watched him disappear among the trees ahead. I was always thankful for those sheltered private trails—if Billy were training
    out on the roads, some hostile person might try to run him down.
    Our different paces worked out fine. By the time I got back, he had finished and was showered and shaved and out of the bathroom.
    We fixed breakfast and ate it sitting at the pine table in the kitchen, with the sun coming through the windows. I ate my bacon and eggs, and Billy ate his fruit and sour milk. If it was his morning to make breakfast, he fried my bacon for me. Love is when you fry the other person's bacon even if you're a vegetarian.
    The feminists would have been touched to see how we dealt with housekeeping. Neither of us was going to be the woman, but neither of us liked living in a pigpen either. So we divided the chores fifty-fifty down the middle. One day I cooked and made the bed, and the next day he did. Once a week we managed to get a mop and dustcloth around the house. We paid Marian's housekeeper to do our laundry and ironing.
    Every other week it was Billy who rode his bicycle into Sayville, the village near the campus, to buy groceries. He was adjusting to living on a smaller bank account than his father's, and was very clever at helping me work out our