by Emily Nemens
Stephen stands. “Corey!” he calls. The boy looks up and makes a quick diagonal toward them. Trey rises as well, brushing off his rear.
Stephen puts out his hand. “Stephen Smith. Partial owner of the Lions.”
Corey takes his hat off, shakes Stephen’s hand. Nice grip, but the older man is startled by how young he looks. Smooth cheeks; hairless, glistening arms. Breathless. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”
* * *
The team has a doubleheader across Saturday afternoon and evening. Corey plays in the first, sharing the outfield with Trey and Goodyear. The rookie bounces on his toes between pitches, streaking the outfield whenever a pop fly carries past the infield dirt. He is a dancer, Stephen thinks, and such a contrast to Trey, who remains planted to his piece of sod, calculating trajectories and speeds, until the last possible moment—only once his analysis is complete does he approach the ball, traveling with such efficiency he’s like some antiballistic defensive shield calibrated to the center-field grass. In the toss between innings Corey throws a few lazy balls to the bullpen, then, at the catcher’s urging, tries a long ball to home plate. His throw to home is respectable, one bounce, and ends up in the box, but nothing like the rockets Trey and Goodyear can launch.
Across the game the young right fielder takes a couple of big swings, but ultimately goes one for three with a walk and a dribbly single he earns not by hitting but by hauling ass. That run to first, and one magnificent sprint in right, all the way to the right-field foul post and scaling halfway up the wall to make a catch on what was ultimately a foul ball, are the only opportunities Stephen has to enjoy his impressive speed.
Some of the front office guys are going out to eat, but Stephen, feeling slightly fatigued by the heat—it cracked ninety today—decides to go home. He picks up tacos from his favorite hole in the wall and drives the rest of the way with the smell of cumin filling his car. Once there, he opens a favorite vintage of California sauvignon blanc and calls the house, knowing Mona will already be at the event, clutching desperately on the arm of her handsome trainer or their daughter’s basketball coach or some other boring and attractive man. Stephen leaves her an apology on voice mail and finds a movie on Netflix.
* * *
Most players take the spring’s rare free day to sleep in or call their mothers, to get a massage or sit in a sauna or do something equally relaxing. But when Stephen asked at the practice field on Friday morning, Trey and Corey said they’d be happy to give Stephen their day off for a round of golf.
Monday morning Stephen packs his Callaway irons, slips a bottle of Scotch in the bag’s side pouch, and goes to the diner downtown, where he flirts with the waitress and orders pancakes. He sends some e-mails over breakfast, texts Mona the morning I love you (while she still won’t answer his calls, she is replying to texts; the dinner had gone well, no thanks to him), and calls his assistant to make sure no fires started over the weekend. He tells her he’ll be out of pocket until the afternoon.
The dry-cleaning chain he married into would have been comfortably profitable if he’d just kept its business steady, but when he took it over from Mona’s father he transformed it into Southern California’s first organic dry cleaner. Now they just about print money. That he’d climbed from a steamer paying his way through UCLA to the owner of a hundred-shop franchise was no small feat, and occasionally he lets himself feel a touch proud. At these moments he is aware of the jump start of his father-in-law’s gift, but also slightly dismissive of it. Look at what he has done.
The outfielders arrive together, in Trey’s Audi, which is the same make and model as Stephen’s, the next model year. As they approach, Stephen flips through the similarities between the outfielders like so many pressed coats on the dry cleaner’s rack. They are dressed the same—unpleated khakis and dark polo shirts. Trey’s got fifteen pounds of muscle on the kid, maybe another ten of middle-age settling, but their gait—they’re walking the same. When they spot Stephen standing next to the golf cart, they even wave the same way, pivoting from the elbow.
Stephen is startled by this twinning. This young man before him is not the boy he saw in postgame interviews after UNC won its division, not the brash player grinning for the cameras from under a Lions cap on draft day. Now he looks just like Trey. Trey, who looks just like Stephen. Some of that may be coincidence, but some is concerted effort. Stephen should know: he’d had to remake himself for Mona’s family, a new wardrobe and posture and way of speaking. Then, he’d had to steer Trey through the same. It took two seasons to lose his coarseness, to eliminate the kind of crass and crude manners that would get him nowhere fast. And he was so skittish, so startled, when he first arrived in Los Angeles. Trey could hardly say one syllable without stuttering it into four, and he looked at the world like everything—not just the rattlesnakes and desert spiders, but also the third baseman and the laundered uniforms deposited in his locker each morning and the signing bonus—might bite him in the ass. On Stephen’s part it took patience, perseverance—Christ, it took shopping trips to Neiman to get him in some decent off-field attire, banishing those ratty Michigan T-shirts—to cure him of all that.
But the boy—they’d only met that once, out on field six. Could Corey react, absorb, and adapt to meeting Stephen Smith so quickly? Is he that fast of a study, a savant at manners? Young baseball players are rarely smart at anything but baseball; Stephen’s first impression of Corey was the same. But perhaps Trey is some sort of conduit, sharing earlier lessons, passing them along to the boy as they sit on the bench, as they get dressed in the clubhouse (Stephen, again, imagines the young man’s physique, his bare shoulders and waist), in the toss between innings. That seems plausible, but why would Trey lie about having gotten to know the boy?
The men stride toward the cart. Stephen has always seen himself in Trey, and appreciated the tribute, but if the mimicker is mimicked, the mirror mirrored—where does that leave Stephen, the original image? His head swims; his knees feel suddenly weak.
“You all right, boss?” Trey asks, looking concerned.
“Huh, what?”
“Your eyebrow was doing that thing.” He signals the furrow between Stephen’s brows.
“Right.” Stephen massages the skin of his temples apart with his fingers.
After a moment more of pleasantries, back slaps, and allusions to the amber-colored fun they’ll have on the links, they turn to the golf cart. There are three iced coffees in the drinks tray, two sets of clubs—Stephen’s, plus one borrowed set he selected for Corey, based on the boy’s height and weight—in the rear. “We can share one cart, yes?” The men nod, and Trey adds his bag to the pile. “Great,” Stephen says. “I’ll drive.”
* * *
Stephen thinks someone who could connect with a curving, ninety-mile-an-hour pitch would understand the mechanics of swinging a golf club. Sure, Corey grew up in a tough part of Chicago, a place where golf occasionally popped up on ABC’s Saturday sports programming and nowhere else. But shouldn’t a guy who hit twenty-five homers his last college season get the physics of sending a ball in a long-hang arc? The boy miffs and miffs again, not even striking the dimpled surface. Stephen tries to describe the step-by-step. Corey listens attentively, nods as eagerly as a junior engineer his first day at the power plant. No luck. Trey explains the geometry of it, velocity and trajectory. Corey pretends he knows what a double-pendulum swing is, but Stephen can see the utter confusion behind his calm.
The trio proceeds, but hole after hole he blunders—balls into the woods, into the pond, even ricocheting one off the top of a passing golf cart. He’d have done better had he thrown it. Corey loses so many that they send him back to the clubhouse to get a basket of dinged driving-range balls and allot him three shots off each tee before Trey and Stephen begin play in earnest. Their earnestness: a gentlemen’s wager of $500 on the round, a sum that, when agreed upon, made a little slip of exclamation sneak out of Corey’s mouth. Stephen remembers something similar in Trey’s fir
st season, how he could not believe it when Stephen opened, and drank dry, a $400 bottle of wine. Stephen had had the same reaction any number of times, including his first visit to his in-law’s, the dripping opulence of their cut-glass chandeliers and brocade drapes.
The men are neck and neck until Stephen goofs the fourteenth hole, sending an easy ball into the water. When Trey sees his victory is all but assured, he loosens up. At the next hole a miracle: Corey’s first swing carries all the way down the fairway. Trey slaps his ass as if it’d been a game-ending RBI, which makes a resonate fwack sound, and all three men pause before continuing their hoorahs.
It’s two-thirty when they’re back to the clubhouse, the Scotch nearly empty, all three of them flush with sun and alcohol. The dining room carries the quiet clatter of recovering from a rush; the last lunch plates are being cleared. A waitress sits at a banquette, prepping silverware for dinner.
While lunch service is technically over, the hostess has the good sense to put them at a big table by the bay window, looking out toward the McDowell Range. The trio agrees to drink red and orders accordingly—a steak salad for Stephen, chicken Caesar for Trey, and a thirty-dollar burger, Wagyu beef and blue cheese, for Corey. Corey, with sidelong glances, copies the older outfielder as best he can: the way he holds his wineglass, the napkin on the lap.
But the boy, who just twenty minutes before had been jovial, seems startled into quiet now. Is it the fine china? Stephen wonders. The pressed tablecloths? The players steal glances at each other, looks like Ping-Pong balls, fast and light and already moving again by the time Stephen notices.
Wanting to put Corey at ease, Stephen encourages him to ask about anything. Anything. Eyebrows up for emphasis. Corey’s first question—about the pretty women (he uses a coarser term) who loiter around the players’ parking lot—makes Stephen’s face hot. “I haven’t noticed them,” Stephen says, even though, of course, he has. Maybe not at Salt River, but they’re the same at every park. The women act as a distraction to the players; has any man ever said, I met my wife in a parking lot? No. He’ll have to ask at the stadium—maybe that golf-cart-driving groundskeeper—to keep an eye out for them, shoo them off as tactfully as possible.
The boy looks disappointed, as is Stephen, but he tries to hide the emotion from his face. He doesn’t mind direct questions, but the boy should know better, should learn how to conduct himself around elders and administration. There will be plenty of stuffier stuffed shirts in his future, plenty of guys—white guys, Stephen clarifies in his mind—who will give Corey one half of one chance to make the right impression. No one says sluts at a golf club.
Corey tries again: “Did you hear about what happened to Goody?”
“The divorce?” Stephen nods. Mona had read about it in some gossip column; he could tell she relished in sharing the bad news. “Yes, it’s unfortunate. Love’s hard.”
The boy shakes his head. “Naw, man. I’m talking about the police incident.” Trey coughs into his fist, and Stephen’s throat constricts. No, he definitely has not heard their $150 million investment had a run-in with the law. And why hadn’t he been informed? By Dorsey or Woody or Goodyear himself? And why not by Trey? He tries to keep his face calm and make eye contact with Trey, a Did you know about this? glance, but the center fielder is watching out the window, where a hawk makes loops in the sky.
“How’d it—what the—” Stephen stutters, stops. Begins again. “When?”
“Last week, I guess. It’s cool,” Corey shrugs. “Misdemeanor. Trespassing or some shit. I mean, he’s a white guy. A famous one. He’ll be fine.”
Trey snorts.
“Trey?” Stephen is feeling light-headed. Over margaritas the two men discussed Jason’s recent divorce, how the usually stoic athlete has seemed shaky this spring, slumping at the plate. But Trey said he was pushing himself harder than ever, spending even more time alone at the training complex. Trey also said he was keeping an eye on Jason, not that the two were particularly close (and both have reputations of standing at a remove), but because the two do share an outfield. But obviously—getting arrested for trespassing! nearly burning down Frank Lloyd Wright’s house!—Trey had not been watching his teammate closely enough.
“I thought you knew,” Trey says.
The boy fidgets, realizing at least some dimension of his mistake.
Stephen waits for his voice to steady before beginning again, speaking to Corey. “I’ll make sure to follow up with Jason. Thank you for telling me.”
Corey is visibly relieved when his burger arrives. He slips into the posture of a slouching teenager, the boy he was until just recently, and leans forward, one arm on the table, almost protective of his food.
“Whoa, Corey. No one’s going to take your burger,” Stephen says with a laugh. Corey swallows deeply before he looks up, and Stephen smiles, full of teeth. Cheshire.
Stephen tries to restart the conversation. “Where are you living this spring, Corey?” It’s an innocuous question—he recalls that sections of the low-rise condos on the municipal golf course are rented to young players each spring, one building for the infield, another for pitchers, a third for the outfield prospects. But the boy stammers, hems. Haws.
After some leaning, Corey admits he spent the first week of camp in a bug-infested motel on the south side of town. Spent, past tense.
“What happened to the condos on the city course?” Stephen asks, trying to swallow his new doubt. Where is he staying now?
“They didn’t happen this year,” Corey explains. At least not any he was invited to join. The team’d gotten a block of rooms at the Best Western, one guy was staying at the casino, and a couple of the relief pitchers rented a loft in downtown Phoenix. Corey curls his nose at the thought. “Why would I want to live in a dirty-ass old warehouse?”
It is finally revealed: he is staying in Trey’s casita. Stephen’s ears prick—was the boy already staying with Trey when the men had their margaritas? Why would Trey withhold such a thing? Stephen can read nothing on the other man’s face except for the flush of alcohol, how his eyes are slightly glassy. No, there’s something else in them: he can also see some smugness. Maybe it’s the five crisp hundred-dollar bills buoying him, or some satisfaction of keeping Goodyear a secret all week. Or could it be this boy, their new friendship? Stephen is surprised by the anger that rumbles in his stomach.
Stephen’s swirling thoughts are interrupted by Trey. “Hey, boss.” Stephen’s hand goes to his forehead, the crease there, but Trey shakes his head and pushes his empty wineglass toward Stephen’s plate. “Nah, not that. Hook me up with more wine?”
* * *
Mona Smith is coming for a long weekend, without Alexis—she’s got a school slumber party at a museum or the zoo or somewhere else Stephen thinks sounds unhygienic—and his wife insists they have people over Thursday. He points out that Thursday’s the first cut meeting of spring; she says it’s all the more reason to host. She likes the Lions’ management’s wives, she says, misses them, wants to see them. The men can have their meeting, and the women will catch up. She promises to stay out of their hair. Stephen points out that only a few of the wives are in town, and that she’d see plenty of them if she ever came to a regular-season game. I come to plenty, Stevie, she says, same as always, though last season Stephen could count her attendance on one hand. This time he does not push the matter, as he is still far from her good graces. Besides, at this point in the spring there aren’t any surprises. They’re just letting a few nonroster invites go home early, guys who had good numbers in the development league but who, once they started playing with the big leaguers, clearly didn’t have the stuff. The weekly meetings will continue—and become increasing difficult—until the end of spring.
The group assembles on the Smiths’ patio at seven-thirty; the coaches, management, and owners agree on their list of dismissals and warnings in all of fifteen minutes. Then, more people fill into the patio: Ronnie Duncan, the real estate developer who helped
them with the stadium, a few neighbors Stephen’s not seen since last fall. He likes this house, this neighborhood—it’s full of suntanned cardiologists and chummy estate lawyers, men who have made millions off the snowbirds of Scottsdale.
There are a smattering of athletes in attendance, too. Conventional wisdom is that it’s bad form for management to socialize with the athletes. It’s like a teacher fraternizing with her students or a homeowner hanging out with the help. Trey, of course, is an exception; everyone’s come to expect him at Stephen’s side. The new right fielder, Corey Matthews, is there, too, awkward and quiet and looking like Trey’s mini-me in the corner. José Oliveira, a left-handed ace who’s aging himself out of the league, and his much-younger wife, Hillary, were invited because Mona likes Hillary more often than not, and she says she feels some kinship, both of them white women married to brown men. She knows what it’s like, Mona says whenever the Oliveiras come up. What what’s like? Stephen asks. The Dominican Republic is nothing like Watts. That always stops Mona in her tracks.
Jason Goodyear is there, too. Divorce is nothing new—major league ballplayers are notoriously fast to marry and quick to split, so much so that the team counsel has a standard prenup on file—and when Dorsey questioned Jason at the start of camp, the left fielder had told the team’s manager that he was handling it fine, that the club didn’t have anything to worry about. Get it out of your system this spring, the man had told Jason. April 1, I need you good. Then Dorsey left Jason to sulk, as was his right, and told Trey to keep an eye on him. At least, that’s the story he conveyed to Stephen, who called in a rage after his golf outing. It made him sick, he bellowed. He was feeling livid and maybe slightly drunk. What if he’d burned the place down? And why hadn’t anybody told him? Nobody asked, was Dorsey’s too-sharp reply, like Stephen was the idiot for missing the news. Don’t let your eyes off him, Stephen had shouted before hanging up.