The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving Read Free Book Online

great freshman team we had—if only most of them had been able to wrestle. He was saying that Pitt would have walked away with the team title at that tournament—if only Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O’Korn and Carr had been there. I agreed with Lee. But I knew that if Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O’Korn and Carr had been there,
I
wouldn’t have been wrestling; there was no room for me in that lineup. Caswell would have agreed with me: in such a lineup, there would have been no room for Caswell either.
    And so I began to savor just being in the semifinals. It’s fatal when you do that; you have to think about winning—not that you feel good to just
be
there. It’s fatal to get distracted, too, and I was a little distracted; the thought that I would not come back to Pittsburgh had been in my mind before the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates, of course—only now I
knew
it. I was also worried about my parents. Where were they?
    I called their friends in Massachusetts, where they’d spent the previous night; to my surprise, my mother answered the phone. The sleet that was falling at West Point was snow in New England. My mom and dad had to wait out the storm. Whether I won or lost in the semifinals, I would be wrestling the next day—either in the finals or in the consolation matches that could lead to a third or a fourth-place finish. My parents would see me wrestle at West Point tomorrow, either way. It was a long trip for them, from New Hampshire; they’d never missed a match of mine at Exeter, and I began to feel a little pressure—to win for
them.
That’s fatal, too—the wrong kind of pressure is fatal. You have to want to win for
you.
    I
wasn’t
distracted by the discovery that Max, our taxi driver, was nowhere to be seen; he might not have been as interested in watching us wrestle as he’d claimed. It was later that evening when I learned that some of my fellow wrestlers had been robbed; they’d left their wallets or their wristwatches in the locker room, either forgetting or neglecting to put that kind of stuff in the team’s “valuables box.” I immediately suspected Max. In retrospect, I thought he had the perfect combination of instant charm and compulsive deceit that I associate with thieves; yet his terror of the night, and of the multitude of trees, could never have been feigned—not unless I have underestimated his thespian skills.

The Semifinals
    As for the semifinals, I was what Coach Seabrooke always said I was—I was “halfway decent”—but the other guy was good. He was a kid from Cornell, and the favorite to win the weight class; he was the number-one seed. In the absence of a coach who knew me—Mr. Carr, given the greater abilities of his own son, generously overestimated my potential—I wrestled the kind of careful match that Ted Seabrooke would have recognized as the only kind of match I could win against a better wrestler. I even got the first takedown. But the Cornell kid escaped immediately—I couldn’t manage to hold him long enough to gain any riding-time advantage—and he scored a slick takedown at the edge of the mat, just as time was running out in the first period; I had no time to get an escape of my own. I was trailing 3-2 going into the second period, and the choice of position (a flip of the coin) was mine; I chose down. I finally escaped for a point, but the Cornell kid had ridden me for over a minute. It was 3-3 on the scoreboard but I knew he had a riding-time point, which made it 4-3 in his favor starting the third—unless I could keep him on the bottom long enough to erase his riding-time advantage. He got away from me in less than 15 seconds, which made it 4-3 on the scoreboard—in reality, 5-3 (with riding time). I knew that the two-point difference was a
possible
gap for me to close in the final period.
    Then I got lucky: my butterfly bandage