Jump

by Mike Lupica

  Hannah said, “This Perez guy said he was going to write you up and didn’t, so why do you trust him?”

  Jimmy was pacing, drinking a Diet Coke out of a can. Now he stopped.

  “You don’t read the papers, do you?” he said. Knowing she really didn’t. She might read Newsday when she was riding the exercise bike at the Vertical Club to see what Liz Smith had to say. She liked reading the reviews in the Times. But Hannah wasn’t someone who read all the papers; she just wasn’t that interested in everything.

  “If you mean Marty Perez, no, I don’t read him.”

  “What I mean is, you obviously didn’t read enough when the William Kennedy Smith trial was going on, or the Mike Tyson trial,” Jimmy said. “The fighter who got convicted of rape.”

  Hannah said, “I know who Mike Tyson is.”

  “Did you read about the woman in Florida who accused the three ballplayers of raping her that time?”

  “Brian—Detective Hyland—reminded me of that one today. Apparently, she waited almost as long as I did to come forward and file an official complaint.”

  “I don’t blame that on you. I blame that on the world-famous therapist, Beth.”

  “Can we bumper-sticker this, Jim?” It was an expression she’d heard one of the other trainers use at the Vertical, meaning get to the point. On her best day, Jimmy could wear her out sometimes talking. It never worked out that he was the audience for her, even when it was supposed to.

  “You’ve got to get your side out before they get their side out, that’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “You’re up against Ellis Adair, remember.”

  Jimmy made it sound as if she was going up against Jesus Christ. Any kind of celebrity had always gotten her brother worked up.

  Jimmy said, “People love this guy so much you’d think he was white.”

  Hannah let that one go.

  “You know what I mean,” Jimmy said. “He’s a god around here, for chrissakes. People in New York treat him like he’s Peter Pan in his two-hundred-dollar basketball shoes.” Jimmy made some kind of motion like he had a basketball in his hand, tried to make his deep voice sound black and said, “Looks at me, Ah’s can fly.” Hannah’d never thought too much about it, maybe Jimmy wasn’t kidding around, maybe he really was a racist. He was standing at the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. He finished the Diet Coke and slammed it down for emphasis. Even before he had thought about acting, when he was still going to make everybody forget McEnroe, when he was a junior tennis player out at Port Washington Tennis Academy, he had always been dramatic.

  “I’m telling you, Sis, we’ve got to hit him before he hits us.”

  Now it was “we” all of a sudden.

  “Brian said that Adair and Collins probably wouldn’t talk, even to him.”

  “They’ll get their story out anyway, that’s the point. They’ll say you’re a groupie. Or some kind of bimbette. They won’t say it themselves, oh no. But somebody will, so then it’ll be out there. Or someone will say you’re in it for the money, that this is some kind of setup. Everybody’s sure as hell going to want to know why it took you a year to come forward. You can count on that.” He went into a slouch, like he was some kind of New York tough guy, with an accent. “What, the rape slipped her mind?”

  Hannah bit.

  “That’s not the way it is,” she said, not wanting to have this conversation anymore.

  Jimmy said, “The way it is, the fact of things, that hardly ever matters in cases like this. It’s the way it’s covered. Geez, don’t you get it? It’s all in the presentation.”

  “Presentation,” Hannah said.

  Jimmy said, “Exactly! We need to set the tone. Let them start denying their shit before we have to start denying our shit. Like I said, hit them good before they hit us.”

  “They already hit us, believe me,” Hannah said.

  He came around the counter, over to where she was sitting. He knelt down in front of the couch, put his big hands on her shoulders, put his forehead gently on hers, then pulled back and smiled. As usual, Hannah felt like she was looking into a mirror. Jimmy was fourteen months older, but people had been mistaking them for twins for as long as Hannah could remember. Jimmy was hetero—pathologically heterosexual, that’s the way he described himself—but gays were hitting on him all the time. It didn’t surprise Hannah. She’d always thought he was the prettier one.

  “I’m on your side, Sis.”

  She said, “I know that.”

  “If you don’t want me to call the paper, I don’t call the paper. But that means it’s out of our control, somebody else gets to call the play.”

  She didn’t say anything, just closed her eyes.

  Jimmy said, “The bastards raped you. Let them start denying it.”

  That’s when Hannah finally said, “Go ahead and make the call.” She didn’t go to the Vertical. She decided against going to an AA meeting. She had started to go less and less. They had seemed like off-off-off Broadway plays to her at first, like something you’d see at some little place down in the Village, one of those coffee-shop productions she’d had parts in once, when she was going to be the next Meryl. But now AA was beginning to bore her. Lately she couldn’t even get into talking herself, when somebody finally got around to calling on her. And more and more, she was tired of listening to the other drunks and all their pain. Over the past year she had lost a lot of interest in other people’s pain.

  Hannah went into Jimmy’s guest room, closed her eyes, and slept for fourteen hours, slept until she was on the front page of the Daily News.

  She had stayed inside Jimmy’s apartment all day yesterday. Jimmy had asked her what she wanted to do after they’d both read the paper, and Hannah said, “Hide under the bed.” He told her to be his guest, just don’t answer the phone. He’d gone out for some auditions, come back with Chinese food; they’d watched all the local news channels try to catch up with Marty Perez’s story. Hannah went to bed at eight-thirty and slept like a dead person again.

  Now it was the second day. “Hannah Carey held hostage, day two,” Jimmy’d said before going out for more auditions and a callback on a part in a CBS movie they were going to shoot in New York. He left Hannah in the living room, reading Perez’s follow-up story.

  It was pretty much a rehash of what he had written yesterday, with a statement from the Knicks thrown in, the statement saying they were looking into the matter. There were some quotes from Jimmy that Perez seemed to have saved up, Jimmy still being identified as “the brother of the alleged victim.” Hannah read it all the way through, then read the stories in the other papers, trying to take a step back today, imagining the whole thing was about somebody else. After all the times when it had just been inside her head, or inside Beth’s little office down in the Village, now it was in front of her, on the page. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the page, that’s what Jimmy Carey always said. So there she was finally, out there for everybody to see.

  See and not see, Hannah thought.

  There was no name to go with the story.

  There was no face.

  This part even Hannah knew from all the other cases. This was the big joke, that this all was a way of protecting the victim’s privacy. Oh sure, Hannah thought. The truth was, they didn’t protect your privacy at all; Hannah had figured that one out already. Privacy didn’t enter into it. They just kept your name out of the paper and off television most of the time, unless they really wanted to screw around with you. They put your age in there, and your height, how much you weighed—which was high, by the way; she hadn’t been as high as one-forty in years. They put in there what street you lived on and your occupation. What color your hair was.

  Lift weights? They put that in, too.

  Just no name. And no face.

  Every reporter in town probably had her name already. But the papers didn’t tell the reader and acted like they were being more noble than the Queen of England.

 
Hannah thought it was a bunch of shit. It was like saying there was this city, millions of people, just across from New Jersey, lots of tall buildings.

  You just couldn’t tell people it was New York.

  “She is thirty-one years old,” Perez wrote today. “She had all these dreams about being a great actress. But she has not dreamed much lately, certainly not since that night last October, in a quiet little Connecticut town where a lot changed and her nightmare began.”

  Jesus H. Christ.

  Perez didn’t put in there that she’d been waiting tables lately. Maybe it was hard for him to get worked up about waitresses.

  “She is nearly six feet tall. She tries to work out every day. Her brother is a struggling actor, maybe you’d even recognize the face, if not the name. But this is real life now, for brother and sister. They want justice for what happened to the sister last October in Fulton, Connecticut.”

  Hannah put the paper down again. She had been putting it down all day, sometimes covering it up on the coffee table with some of Jimmy’s trade papers, but then picking it up again, starting to read in different places. And every time she would start to get worked up, she would think to herself, What did you expect?

  She went over to Jimmy’s phone, the one shaped like a Giants helmet he’d gotten for subscribing to some magazine, and punched out the phone number at her apartment.

  Jimmy told her not to be surprised when the whole world had the number. Hannah had said to him, “But it’s unlisted.” Jimmy just gave her one of those looks, like she was still twelve years old, like he was the smart one, and told her they could get Madonna’s number if they needed it.

  It was always “they” with Jimmy. Or “them.” Him against them, them being agents, or directors, or casting directors, or other actors.

  Hannah had stayed away from the phone yesterday, but now she was curious, punching out her code, listening to the tape rewinding, stopping finally, the first loud beep.

  “Miss Carey.” Male voice. “I’m from Fox News at 10 …”

  Beep.

  “Hannah, my name is Carly Wilson from the television show Inside Edition …”

  Beep.

  “Page Six of the New York Post calling for Hannah Carey, it’s nine o’clock in the morning, what day is this?…”

  She picked up a pen and Jimmy’s message pad off the counter and kept track, making four lines, then drawing a line through them, until she was up to sixteen calls and the tape on her machine finally ran out, for the first time in history. The National Enquirer. Beep. Liz Smith’s assistant. Beep. Geraldo Rivera’s show. Beep. Thirteen from the press in all, two from friends, one from Bobby, her trainer at the Vertical Club, telling her to get her fine ass over there, he’d beat up anyone who came near her.

  She went into the guest room and put on black tights and a black T-shirt and an old U.S. Open tennis sweatshirt and her high-top Reebok cross-trainers and the black Guys and Dolls cap Jimmy had bought her when they went to see the revival. Then she threw a change of clothes into a gym bag. Get over there and sweat, she told herself, and don’t think too hard on where all this was going.

  If the messages were like this, what was the rest of it going to be like?

  She went downstairs, past the door to the acupuncturist’s office, which always had somebody waiting outside, and then out of the great old brownstone and into the sun on West Seventy-first, between Amsterdam and Broadway. Her brother had had one real part, one piece of steady work, playing a doctor for two years on One Life to Live before finally being killed in a tragic car accident. It was long enough to buy the apartment. Jimmy still bitched that if the character had lived another year he could’ve bought a bigger apartment, but Hannah didn’t see why he would’ve needed anything bigger than what he had, which was two bedrooms, a huge living room with a fireplace, and a lot of sun.

  Hannah had been living up on West End Avenue the last two years, a cute studio with a partial view of the Hudson. She stood in front of Jimmy’s brownstone, wondering if she should go up there, just out of curiosity, to see if “they” really were staking her out already. The hell with it, she decided. If they were staking her out, let them wait until hell freezes over. She could beat the after-work crowd if she went over to the Vertical right now. She could do some bike and some Stairmaster if her legs could take it, then go through her upper-body Nautilus program, sweat, and get out of there.

  She couldn’t hide under the bed forever.

  She walked over to Broadway and up to Seventy-second, hailed a cab. The Vertical Club was on Sixty-first between First and Second. If you ran laps upstairs, you could look out a window and the Queensboro Bridge was right there in front of you. She started working out at the Vertical when it was still trendy, before there were about a hundred clubs just like it. She was walking around with her portfolio during the day, getting nowhere, waitressing nights at Jim McMullen’s. She had a tiny apartment on East Fifty-fifth, this one without a view of anything except Fifty-fifth, and even when she moved to the West Side, she decided to keep her membership. Most of her friends on the West Side had joined the Equinox Club, that was the hot new place, up on Amsterdam, with the sculpture of the girl rock-climbing in the big front window. But Hannah was comfortable at the Vertical.

  She had always been shitty with change.

  Hannah was crossing the street that cuts Sixty-first in half, feeding up into the bridge, when she heard the first shout.

  “There she is!”

  Hannah looked up and saw them coming for her.

  Somebody else said, “It’s her!”

  The light had changed behind her, and there was already some early rush-hour traffic, so there was a steady stream of cars feeding up into the bridge, on their way home to Queens. Hannah couldn’t retreat. She just stood there, seeing the television cameras mostly, the guys pointing them at her like they were guns.

  “Hannah!”

  “Hannah Carey?”

  “Can we get a comment?”

  She made herself move, not knowing what she could do, just knowing she had to do something. She couldn’t make it inside the Vertical without going right through them, so she crossed the street, nearly getting hit by some blue van, the van having a horn that sounded more like a siren, looking behind her to see some of them cutting in front of cars, so there were more horns now, as she got back to the north side of Sixty-first, and started running now, toward Second.

  Over the horns, some shrill woman’s voice: “Hannah, wait!”

  Then it was just the horns behind her, traffic stopped completely going to the bridge and some kind of black town car limo, nearly coming up onto the sidewalk after her, blowing its horn at her as a guy stuck his head out the back window of the town car and said, “You probably ought to get in. The bad guys are gaining on you.”

  The car stayed on her pace as she ran at a pretty good clip toward Second. Hannah started to tell the guy to get the hell away from her, but there was something about him, casually opening the back door as the crowd closed on her, offering her a way out.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  He smiled at her, holding the door open, still casual, like he did this all the time, played the cavalry. “My name’s DiMaggio,” he said, “I’m the good guys.”

  6

  DiMaggio sat across the street from the Vertical Club and waited. He knew how to do it. DiMaggio learned young, all the times he waited for his father, Tony DiMaggio, to come back from the road with Ralph Flanagan’s band, bringing him tacky gifts from places like Miami Beach. DiMaggio always wondered what his old man was thinking. Did he think he had a son who wanted to lead the league in plastic pink flamingos? To be able to put his collection up against anybody’s in Commack, Long Island? Tony DiMaggio, with his pompadour hair and gangster suits, would spend a couple of days at home, sleeping all day, saying he couldn’t get out of the habit. Then he would take off again, on his way to Baltimore and Washington and Atlanta. Then DiMaggio would wait some more, watch
ing his mother hit the Four Roses, until there was the big tour through the southwest, after which Tony DiMaggio never came back.

  DiMaggio didn’t even have a sample of his father’s handwriting, just the fucking flamingos.

  Then there was all the waiting as a ballplayer, too, in the game or on the bench or in the clubhouse. Mostly on the bench, even in all those bust-out rookie-league towns in the South, the redneck fools yelling out jokes about his last name, asking where his Uncle Joe was. “Uncle Joe DiMaggio, get it?” they’d yell. As if he didn’t. They were the kinds of places writers romanticized into the Vatican. It always gave DiMaggio a real thrill, reading about baseball. Every ballpark was a cathedral, and everything associated with the game was a sacrament. Even the waiting.

  The Greeks didn’t have as much bullshit mythology as baseball did.

  DiMaggio had just the one summer with the Yankees. It wasn’t even a summer, that was bullshit, he sounded like some asshole spin doctor touching up his career. DiMaggio got twelve weeks, four starts when Thurman Munson got hurt, a total of fifty innings, batting average of .202, only getting up there above .200 because of two hits off Rick Wise the last day of the regular season. DiMaggio didn’t remember much about the baseball, remembering much more clearly the phone call telling him he’d been released. He remembered more about living in New York the first time, in this apartment he found, cheap enough, on Ninety-fourth, east of Fifth. A stewardess he’d dated had it. Then she quit it all of a sudden to get married, to some rich guy she met on the red-eye from Los Angeles. DiMaggio grabbed it. The stewardess knew DiMaggio played the piano and told him some old piano player lived next door. DiMaggio did a little investigating and found out it was Vladimir Horowitz. DiMaggio smiled now, his head resting against the window on the right side of the backseat, the other window down, so he could watch the entrance to the Vertical. Some old piano player, he thought. Playing for the Yankees, all those stars, and he’d watch the street in the afternoons until it was time to go to the ballpark, waiting for a look at Horowitz. Mostly he’d just listen in the afternoons, when the old man would open the windows and play, laying the music over all the New York noise, the cabs, the whole shout of the place.