The Front Runner

start," said Billy, "and dig it all up and have vegetables. How about that? Fresh lettuce and stuff."
    For now, he just spaded up a small area, working industriously with his shirt off. He put in some tomato plants that he had bought on sale at the Sayville supermarket, and staked them with some old bamboo poles that he found in the garage.
    He was like a fragrance in my life, if you can say that stainless steel smells like hyacinths. I had craved
    nothing more than a lover, but I also got a friend. He was casual and practical, yet unfailingly gentle and considerate. He carried out my training program meticulously now, not because he had any more common sense (he didn't) but simply because he loved me.
    When I came down with a bad flu early in June, there wasn't anything that he didn't do to take care of me. He fed me aspirin, made me herb tea, bicycled to the drugstore to get my antibiotics. I was terrified he'd get my flu, but he was fit and taking Vitamin C, so he stayed immune.
    Slowly I learned how fully I could trust him. Sexual he was—he could seduce me with one steady look from his clear eyes. But he was chaste. Never once did I see his eye rove to rate another man's body. Devoted as I was to him, I was sometimes guilty of this—it was mostly habit, I'd been doing it so long. He always noticed it and scolded me possessively, but he always forgave me.
    His love burned with a steady, white heat, slowly melting the last hoarfrost of years off my bones. I sheltered him, raging against the world, yet he was always the stronger one, still and steely when I was ready to crack. His faults—his cold-bloodedness, his pitilessness—were now turned only against those who threatened us. From the day of our marriage, we had no more quarrels.
    This peace, this daily sharing, this accumulative tenderness, was all that any human being asks from life. Yet this was precisely what a number of people wanted to take away from us. We built each day consciously, and in implacable self-defense.
    When the press reported our marriage, we started hearing from long-absent relatives.
    I got a call from my uncle in Philadelphia, who told me that my mother had had a nervous breakdown as a result of the publicity. She was in a hospital. "Isn't it enough that you've brought such shame on the family?" he shouted in my ear. "Do you have to kill your mother too?"
    "I'm not trying to kill her," I said. "She's killing herself."
    "You must be a communist," said my uncle. "You're trying to destroy the American family."
    And then he had the nerve to tell me that, if my mother didn't now have Medicare, they would have insisted I help with the hospital expenses.
    But the most painful encounter was with Billy's mother.
    Both John and I had wondered if she would show up someday. Children who become famous have a way of luring missing parents out of hiding. About a week after the wedding, Billy received an innocent-sounding letter from Leida. She said she was living in San Diego now, and had been thinking of him all these years. Could she possibly see Billy?
    Billy was mildly disturbed, but he said, "I guess I ought to see her."
    One rainy afternoon in the third week of June, Leida came up to Prescott. She sat nervously in our living room, looking at the training schedule posted by the kitchen, and at our two pairs of muddy running shoes by the front door. Through the side window, she could see our shorts, jock straps and T-shirts hanging soaked on the clothesline where Billy had forgotten them.
    Leida was a slender agitated woman not much older than I. She sat clutching her handbag, with spots of feverish color in her pale cheeks. She was dressed as if she was going to church: pink linen suit, a white straw hat and white gloves. She had Billy's blue-gray eyes and cheekbones, and his curly, light brown hair. But on her the cheekbones looked strained, and the eyes hid things.
    Billy greeted her politely and cooly. He shook hands with her. "Hi, Leida," he said.
    She looked us up and down. I think she was irritated that we hadn't dressed up more to receive her. We had just come back from the Prescotts'. We both had on old T-shirts, shorts and rubber sandals.
    We had some strained chitchat. How was her trip? And so on.
    Finally Leida said, "All these years I have felt very guilty. I had you when I was very young, just 18. I. . ." Her eyes were wide, almost terrified. ". . . wasn't ready for a baby. I had a terrible postpartum depression. Then I left your