John turned at the sound of his name, paused and smiled and leaned forward a bit trying to see better in the dim light. Alexa’s father walked up to him with both hands in his jacket pockets. He stood close and said, “Remember me?”
John leaned even closer. When he exhaled through his mouth, Alexa’s father could smell his breath, a mix of mint and beer. “Think hard,” Alexa’s father said. “Seven years ago.”
A few moments passed before John’s eyes widened. Alexa’s father drew his right hand from the pocket and pressed the tip of the black pistol to John’s chest and pulled the trigger. John went down on his knees and Alexa’s father aimed at the top of his head and pulled the trigger again. All the way back to his car and as he drove he could feel the vibration of those shots in his hand, and he could hear the two quick shots echoing in the silence throughout his car.
Not far from his hotel he found a side street with mostly abandoned buildings and few streetlights. Then he drove up and down that street until in the darkness he could make out an open sewer drain beneath the curb, and he pulled alongside that curb and put his hand out the window and with a flick of his wrist sent the gun down into the drain.
Alexa’s father returned to his hotel room and stayed there throughout the night, then was up early and attended all of the conference’s Sunday activities. Every time he looked toward the entrance he expected to see a couple of police officers standing there.
That night he called his wife and spoke to her softly and she asked how the conference had gone. He said, “Fine, but mostly boring,” and she said, “Didn’t you met any interesting people?” He said, “There is no such thing as an interesting dentist,” and she laughed but sounded tired. He told her that his flight would get in at 8:47 the next morning. After collecting his bags and returning the rental car, he should be home by 10:30. “Good,” she said. “It’s too quiet here.”
He arrived home at 20 minutes before 11:00 the next morning, still wearing the conference registration badge on a black cord around his neck. When he came into the kitchen after dropping his bags in the living room, his wife looked up from the table where she sat with both hands wrapped around a coffee mug and said, “You forgot to take off your name badge.”
He looked down and touched it and said, “I needed it for the free breakfast. Forgot all about it.”
She asked if he wanted a cup of coffee and he said, “No, thank you. I should call in and see if they need me in the office today.”
She said, “You just got home. Can’t you sit with me and rest a while?”
Only then did he realize how tired he was. He said, looking toward the kitchen window that overlooked the back yard, “I’m thinking that might be the last conference for me. Unless they hold it in a different city next time.”
“You’ve been going every year for the last how many? Ten?”
He nodded. “It’s always the same people though. The same food. Only the technology changes.”
“You need to stay abreast of it, don’t you? I’ve heard you say that yourself.”
He kept gazing at the kitchen window, seeing what wasn’t there. Then he shrugged. Looked down at his wife. “There are other conventions. I might go somewhere else for a change. If I do, would you go with me again?”
She looked down at the coffee in the bottom of her cup. Then back to him. “I might,” she said, “if it’s in another city. I won’t ever go back to that one again.”
He nodded. Pulled out a chair. Said, “Maybe I will stay home with you today.” He sat. Laid his hand atop hers. “A little rest won’t kill me.”
Snap
At first the rain sounded like a distant tapping, like heels running across metal roofs. Then it became a crowd racing toward me. Finally all the light outside the terrace doors went gray, swallowed in a thundering waterfall of dark rain. I thought, Now I can go to the bookstore and sit with a latte and a Granta and forget about his sad and angry face for a while.
But it was one of those summer showers that comes in an explosion and is over too soon. Within minutes the sun was blazing again and the sidewalks steaming. I knew Salandro would be waiting for me. If he had not given me the autographed baseball bat and ball two days earlier, I would not have felt obligated to visit him, but the ball was on the bookcase in my living room and the bat leaned against the wall.
Thirty minutes later I walked into Three Rivers Stadium through the press entrance and there was Salandro in a box above the home team bullpen, just sitting there looking tragic and ruined while he stared at the empty diamond. When he spotted me coming out of the tunnel he grinned with that childish light of hope in his eyes, a look that filled me with dread—a look that asked if today I would snap my fingers and somehow turn back the cursed clock.
He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, the blue rubber shower thongs and old blue gym shorts that were too tight, and a white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He sat with his broken left arm in its blue sling resting atop his huge belly, the cast covered with the signatures of all his fellow Pirates, his former teammates.
“Did you get much rain out here?” I asked. I sat one seat away from him.
He shrugged and said, “We’re on the road anyway,” as if he believed that he was still a part of the team, that his radius bone was going to heal counter to all the diagnoses. I felt a twinge of contempt for his refusal to face the truth but then I immediately felt bad for my contempt. Up until last week he had been my hero, this boy 19 years my junior, this rookie phenomenon. He had given me half a season of pleasure and now I was sitting there resenting him for ruining a few of my afternoons.
I asked, “Any luck with those endorsements?”
He did not smile or even shake his head. His body sagged and his big round shoulders drooped. There were not going to be any endorsements for this athlete, not ever. A week ago he could clock 96 miles per hour whenever he wanted to, and his slider would break hard to the outside two nanoseconds after the batter decided to swing at it, and he had smacked 20 homeruns before the first of July, but except when he was at bat or on the mound he was one of the least photogenic of athletes. He stood 6’4” and weighed 310 pounds and nearly all of that weight was in his buttocks, belly and chest. His limbs were long and gangly and his hands seemed too small for the rest of his body, but they were big enough to swallow a baseball. His teeth were uneven and one of his canines was a russet brown.
“What about that profile thing?” he asked. “Any word on that?”
“It’s working its way through the suits.”
“I’m really counting on that to get things started.”
“I should have an answer for you in a week at the latest.”
In fact I was the only suit at the station who had even considered giving our “Local Hero” spot to Salandro. To everybody else he was old news. But I had been in the station’s box at the game nine days earlier when Salandro made his wind-up and delivery and I had seen that moment when something snapped in his arm and the ball went wide and Salandro went down on his knees on the mound. The radius had snapped and so had his career. At the age of 22 he was out of the game forever. The press had loved him because he was until then a happy bull of a man, a grinning moonfaced boy from some dust smudge in Texas but with a fierce raw talent that kept all the sportswriters thumbing through thesauruses for the most grandiose of superlatives.
I had loved him because I have loved baseball ever since my second Christmas, when my father handed me an 18” Louisville Slugger with a red bow stuck to its sweet spot. For the next 16 years baseball was the one thing my father and I held in common. We watched the games on TV and when the Pirates were out of town we listened to them on the radio, and five or six times a year we went to the ballpark and felt like Roman senators in the general admission seats.
Then I went away to college and my father died. For the next 20 years I entertained myself with politics and theater and existentialism and work, and I scarcely even thought about baseball until late last spring. It was th
en I became aware of a buzzing in the air, a murmuring of Salandro’s name. I went to one game and heard the sweet fatal thud of his fastball smacking the catcher’s mitt, and maybe because I missed my father’s love or I missed my youth or I missed the ability to lose myself in a few voyeuristic hours of sport, suddenly I felt a longing for the sounds and smells of the stadium. In my father’s company at the ballfield I had felt a part of something, a true kinship with another human being. Also I loved the order and rhythm of the game, nine men struggling toward a common goal. In baseball there is a rule for every possibility. Everything about the game is prescribed but nothing is predictable. Baseball contains everything my life did not, a cadence, a symmetry, and for half a season I had viewed the unlikely Salandro as the maestro of that cadence.
What I really wanted, I suppose, was to believe, for a while, at least, that each one of us is not ineluctably alone.
This might seem a peculiar longing to be fulfilled by a mere game, but baseball is the most ritualized of American games, and in a country where few traditions endure, and to an individual whose nightly work is a moil of ephemera and egos... well, suffice it to say that something was missing in my life, and for a while baseball had filled that void.
I felt something break in me the day Salandro went down on his knees on the mound. I felt sucker punched, just as I had the day I lost my father. Once again my tether to the world, this time improbably mended by Salandro, had snapped. But I was grateful too for the salubrious days he had given me and I wanted to give him something in return. So I asked if he would let me bring a crew to tape a profile of him for the late night news. He agreed without hesitation but there was something desperate to his eagerness. Within minutes he started demanding payment for the interview. Before I could think of a tactful refusal he launched into a litany of complaint about his doctors and his agent and about the winters in Pittsburgh, and from there he branched out easily to blame most of western Pennsylvania and all of professional baseball for what had happened to him.
It wasn’t that I could not understand his bitterness and fear. Next year Salandro would have signed a long-term contract, but now he would be lucky to get a job coaching baseball for the city league. He had become a wholly different creature than the one I had seen command the mound and the batter’s box, just another lost soul who reminded me too much of myself.
On this day, my fourth visit, I sat with him for nearly an hour. An hour was all the whining I could stand. “I have to get back home,” I told him. “Some people are coming up from DC.”
He lifted his head. “They’re coming here?”
I hated the hopefulness in his voice. “Just a friend of mine from college,” I said. “My old roommate. I haven’t seen him in seven, eight years now. He’s bringing his fiancée, wants us to meet each other.”
Salandro blinked and looked insulted. “I suppose you won’t be coming tomorrow.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
* * *
My friend did not show up or even call so I went to work as usual that evening. There was the usual off-camera tumult, the bickering and chaos and last-minute frenzy in the editing room. Then came the relative calm of the news hour. Then a couple hours of meetings and planning for the next day. All I really wanted was to get away from everybody for a while.
I returned home a little after 1:00 a.m. After a quick shower I went upstairs to visit Isabella. She was sleeping when I knocked but she had been expecting me. She came to the door wearing a short white satin robe and matching teddy, and she held the door open with one hand while shielding her eyes from the hallway light.
She gave me her standard greeting. “Hello, baby. You been missin’ me?”
I slipped a hand under her robe while she reshot the deadbolt. “Every time I see you in white I think of Dianne Carroll in the TV show Julia.”
She smiled sleepily. “You want me to be your maid tonight?”
I liked that she did not bother to turn on any lights in the apartment, that we were left with only the clouded moon and the yellow lights outside the windows. She went into the bedroom and let the robe fall to the floor, then slipped off the teddy and stood there brown and sleek and impossible and waiting. When I did not join her right away she lay atop the white satin sheets and crossed her legs at the ankle.
I stood at the bedroom window and looked out. “It’s a pretty city at night, isn’t it?”
“Mmm,” she said. “The Renaissance City.”
“That’s a phrase I haven’t heard for a while.”
“I’m just an old-fashioned girl, I guess.” She stretched her leg out and rubbed a foot against my knee.
I reached for the radio alarm clock on the table. “Do you mind if I set the alarm for 7:00?”
“In the morning?” she said.
“I’m trying to change my routine. Keep a more regular life.”
“You need more sleep than that. We all do.”
“I’ll set the volume really low. You won’t even hear it.”
But later I awoke after a couple of hours and could not sleep. At half-past five I slipped out of bed, shut off the alarm, then dressed in the dark of the living room. I had my trousers on and was buttoning up my shirt when a peculiar thing happened: my mind went completely blank. Suddenly I had no comprehension of where I was or what I was doing there. It lasted for only a few seconds but immediately afterward a weakness came over me, a heaviness so that I had to put a hand out against the back of the sofa, a debilitating sense of futility. Strangely, the words that came into my head then were Camus’, the opening lines from The Stranger, a book I hadn’t read in at least a dozen years: Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
Finally I went downstairs to my own apartment and undressed and set the alarm for 7:00 and climbed into bed.
The door buzzer awoke me less than a half-hour later. I stumbled to the door and thumbed down the intercom button. “What?” was all I could manage.
“Open the fucking door, you low gray rat.”
I buzzed him in, then unlocked the door and stumbled back to the bedroom for a robe. Then back to the living room to turn on a floor lamp. I was standing there thinking I should make a pot of coffee when the door shot open. There stood Brady Thompson grinning and drunk and 20 pounds heavier than the last time I had seen him.
We shook hands and hugged and made the usual remarks about how good we looked and how long it had been. Under Brady’s right eye an old bruise had sallowed to yellow. He caught me squinting at it and said, “Racquetball. What’d ya got to drink?”
“There might be a couple of beers,” I said.
“I’ll take them both. In the bottle. I can’t stay.”
He followed me into the kitchen. “You can’t sit down and drink a beer?”
“I’ve got a woman in a taxi waiting.”
“Your fiancée? Jesus, bring her up. Let me put some coffee on—”
He took the beers from my hands and headed for the door. “She won’t come up. Says it’s not an appropriate time.”
“She’s maybe got a point there.”
“Drinks later,” he said, and turned at the door to face me. “That place in Shadyside we used to go to—is it still there?”
“Bwana Donna’s, still there. But it’s a kid’s place, you know. We were kids when we went there. There’s another place just a block down street….”
“Bwana Donna’s,” Brady said. “Four o’clock sharp. Be there or be square.”
“What are you, 19? One of the richest men in Maryland and you still talk like a freshman.”
He threw an arm around my neck and pulled me close and laid a hard kiss on my cheek. “Four o’clock,” he said after he pushed away.
“Come on, bring her up. I’ll make omelets. I want to meet her.”
He smiled crookedly. The bruise on his cheekbone made it seem more a wince than a smile.
“Which reminds me,” I said. “You were supposed to be here yesterday.”
&nb
sp; He shook a finger at me as if I had said something naughty. Then he turned without another word and went out and when I looked after him he was sprinting down the hallway.
* * *
A few minutes before 4:00 that afternoon I arrived at Bwana Donna’s and claimed a table behind the front window. A half-hour later Brady had still not shown. By then the room was packed three-deep at the bar with young office workers and college kids. The servers all wore safari shorts, vests and boots and the bartenders wore pith helmets. As a young man I had thought this place exotic and after enough beers I would talk about how I was going to climb Kilimanjaro or run with the bulls and about all kinds of things I would never do except in a beer fantasy. Now all the youthful servers and patrons and the polyester animal skins on the walls made me feel like an old man sitting on the edge of a poorly written skit in which there was no role for anyone over 30.
The clamor and smoke squeezed my skull with an oscillating grip. Five more minutes, I told myself. Five more and then the hell with it. Brady had never been this unreliable in the old days.
At 5:15 I finally pushed back my chair and stood. I took one more look around the room, just in case I had missed him somehow. When I turned to the front window again there was a woman on the sidewalk looking back at me. A tall woman, at least 5’9”, with thick chestnut hair that whispered at her shoulders. She was wearing a yellow summer dress and short white gloves. Her eyes, almond-shaped, gave her a slightly Asian look; they were as dark as oil but flecked with brightness. Her legs were poetry, a couplet of long graceful lines that rose from the concrete to the sublime. Her hips and breasts and shoulders, all the right curves and undulations.... I don’t know how else to describe them but to say that she wore her body like an ermine coat, something rare and expensive but she was used to it, comfortable in its luxury.
She held up one finger to indicate that I should wait there, don’t move. Then she came inside and it was amazing to watch how the crowd parted to let her pass, so that she did not have to twist and turn to get to my table but walked languidly all the way. She flowed like slow water.
Incident on Ten-Right Road Page 12