by Ron Carlson
Then the strangest thing happened. When she was finished with my handkerchief, she asked me if we could pray. Well, that took me by surprise. I was just clasping my belt, but I clasped my hands humble as a schoolboy while she prayed aloud primarily to be delivered from evil, which was something I too hoped to be delivered from, but I sensed the prayer wasn’t wholly for me as she sprinkled it liberally with her boyfriend’s name: Tod. She went on there in the front seat for twenty minutes. I mean if prayers work, then this one was adequate. That little “Tod” every minute or so kept me alert right to the amen. We mounted the roadway and drove on in the dark. It had all changed. Now it seemed real late and it seemed a lot like driving my sister home from her date with Tod. Later I started seeing her on television, where she was a reporter for Channel 3, and it was real strange. Her hair was different, of course, blond, a professional requirement, and her name was different, Krink, for some reason, and I could barely remember if I had once had a scrape with this woman (including a couple of four-day nail scratches), if she was a part of my history at all. I mean, watching the news some nights it seemed impossible that I had ever prayed with Lisa Krink.
One of the primary cowardly acts of the late twentieth century is standing beneath the bleachers finishing a new beer before buying another and joining your date. I stood there in the archway, smacking my shoes in a little puddle of water on the cement floor, and tossed back the last of my beer. How lost can you be? The water was from an evaporative cooler mounted up in the locker-room window. It had been dripping steadily onto the floor for a decade. Amazing. I could fix that float seal in ten minutes. I’d done it at our house when Lily and I first moved in. And yet, I stood out of sight wondering how I was going to fix anything else. I bought another beer and went out to join Lynn. Just because you’re born into the open world doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to hide sometimes.
Lynn looked at me with frank relief. I could read it. She thought I had left. I probably should have, but you can’t leave a woman alone on this side of town, regardless of how bad the baseball gets.
The quality of Double A baseball is always strained. I could try to explain all the reasons, but there are too many to mention. It is not just a factor of skill or experience, because some of the most dextrous nineteen-year-olds in the universe took the field at the top of every inning along with two or three seasoned vets, guys about to be thirty who had seen action a year or two in the majors. No, it wasn’t ability. The problem came most aptly under the title “attitude,” and that attitude is best defined as “not giving a shit.” It’s exacerbated by the fact that not one game in a dozen got a headline and three paragraphs in the Register and none of the games were televised. And who—given the times—is going to leave his feet to stop a hot grounder down the line if his efforts are not going to be on TV?
Night fell softly over the lighted ballpark, unlike the dozens of flies that pelted into the outfield. The game bore on and on, both squads using every pitcher in the inventory, and Midgely and the other coach getting as much exercise as anyone by lifting their right and then their left arms to indicate which hurler should file forward next. The pitchers themselves marched quietly from the bull pen to the mound and then twenty pitches later to the dugout and then (we supposed) to the showers. By the time the game ended, after eleven (final score 21 to 16), there were at least four relievers who had showered, shaved, and dressed and were already home in bed.
In an economy measure, the ballpark lights were switched off the minute the last out, a force at second, was completed, and as the afterimage of the field burned out on our eyeballs, we could hear the players swearing as they bumbled around trying to pick their ways into the dugout. Lynn and I fell together and she took my arm so I could lead us stumbling out of the darkened stadium. It was kind of nice right there, a woman on my arm for a purpose, the whole world dark, and through it all the organ music, Steiner Brightenbeeker’s mournful version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Outside, under the streetlights, the three dozen other souls who had stuck it out all nine innings dispersed, and Lynn and I crossed the street to her car. I looked back at the park. Above the parapet I could see Steiner’s cigarette glowing up there in space. I pointed him out to Lynn and started to tell her that I had learned a lot from him, but it didn’t come out right. He had always been adamant about his art. He was the one who told me to do something on purpose for art; to go without for it. To skip a date and write a story. That if I did, by two a.m. I’d have fifteen pages and be flying. I couldn’t exactly explain it to her, so I just mentioned that he had done the music for the one play I’d ever written a thousand years ago and let it go at that.
At the car we could still hear the song. Steiner would play another hour for his fierce little coterie. The Phantom of the Ballpark.
Lynn and I went to her apartment in Sugarhouse for a nightcap. Now that’s a word. Like cocktail, which I rarely use, it implies certain protocol. It sounds at first like you are supposed to drink it and get tired, take a few sips and yawn politely and then go to your room. A nightcap. I asked for a beer.
Her apartment was furnished somewhat like the interior of a refrigerator in white plastic and stainless steel, but the sofa was a relatively comfortable amorphous thing that seemed to say, “I’m not really furniture. I’m just waiting here for the future.”
The only thing I knew for sure about a nightcap was that there was a moment when the woman said, “Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable?” I was flipping quickly through the possible replies to such a question when Lynn came back with a pilsner glass full of Beck’s for me and a small snifter of brandy for herself. She did not ask if she could slip into something more comfortable; instead she just sat by me in the couch or sofa, that thing, and put her knee up on the seat and her right hand on my shoulder. For a moment then, it was nifty as a picture. I thought: Hey, no problem, a nightcap. This is easy.
“How’s your nightcap?” I asked Lynn. We hadn’t really talked much in the car or parking it in the basement or riding the elevator to her floor or waiting for her to find her keys and I didn’t know how we were doing anymore. Isn’t that funny? You see a friend playing the organ in the dark, and you fall asleep at the wheel. I sipped the beer and I had no idea of what to say or do next.
“I love baseball,” she breathed at me. She smelled nice, something of brandy and a new little scent, something with a European city in the name of it, and her hand on my shoulder felt good, and I realized, as anyone realizes when he hears a woman tell him a lie when she knows it is a lie and that he is going to know it is a lie and that the rules have been changed or removed and that frankly, he should now do anything he wants to, it’s going to be all right. He’s not going to get slapped or told, “You fool, what are you doing!” It’s a realization that sets the adrenaline on you, your heart, your knees, and I sat there unable to move for a moment as the blood beat my corpuscles open.
When I did move, it was to reach for her, slowly, because that’s the best moment, the reach, and I pulled her over toward me to kiss her, but she came with the gesture a little too fully and rolled over on top of me, setting her brandy skillfully on the floor as her mouth closed on mine.
It had been a while for this cowboy, but even so, she didn’t quite feel right in my arms. Her body was not the body that I was used to, that I associated with such pleasures, and her movements too had an alien rhythm which I didn’t at first fully appreciate. I was still being dizzied by these special effects when she started in earnest. It wasn’t a moment until we were in a genuine thumping sofa rodeo, she on top of me, riding for the prize. My head had been crooked into the corner, stuffed into a spine-threatening pressure seal, and Lynn was bent (right word here) on tamping me further into the furniture. She did pause in her frenzy at one point, arch up, and pull her skirt free, bunching it at her waist. It was so frankly a practical matter, and her rosy face shone with such businesslike determination, that it gave me a new feeling: fear. Sup
ine on that couch device, I suddenly felt like I was at the dentist. How do these things turn on us? How does something we seem to want, something we lean toward, instantly grow fangs and offer to bite our heads off?
I remember Midgely at the plate during a college game, going after what he thought was the fattest fastball he’d ever seen. It was a slow screwball, and when it broke midway through his swing and took him in the throat, he looked betrayed. He was out for a week. He couldn’t talk above a whisper until after graduation. And right now I was midswing with Lynn, and I could tell something ugly was going to happen.
Meanwhile, with one halfhearted hand on her ass and the other massaging the sidewall of her breast, I was also thinking: You don’t want to be rude. You don’t want to stand, if you could, and heave her off and run for the door. With her panties tangled to her knees like that she’d likely take a tumble and put the corner of something into her brain. There you are visiting her in the hospital, coma day 183, the room stuffed with bushels of the flowers you’ve brought over the last six months, and you’re saying to her sister Phyllis, the most ardent wrongful-death attorney in the history of the world, “Nightcap. We’d had a nightcap.”
No, you can’t leave. It’s a night-cap, and you’ve got to do your part. You may know you’re in trouble, but you’ve got to stay.
A moment later, Lynn peaked. Her writhing quadrupled suddenly and she went into an extended knee-squeeze seizure, a move I think I had first witnessed on Big Time Wrestling, and then she softened with a sigh, and said to me in her new voice, breathy and smiling, a whisper really, “What do you want?”
It’s a great question, right? Even when it is misintended as it was here. It was meant here as the perfect overture to sexual compliance, but my answers marched right on by that and lined up. What do I want? I want my life back. I want to see a chiropractor. I want baseball to be what it used to be.
But I said, “How about another beer? I should be going soon, but I could use another beer.”
When she left the room, shaking her skirt down and then stepping insouciantly out of her underpants, I had a chance to gather my assertiveness. I would tell her I was sorry, but not to call me again. I would tell her I wasn’t ready for this mentally or physically. I would tell her simply, Don’t be mad, but we’re not right for each other in any way.
When Lynn reappeared with my beer, I sucked it down quietly and kissing her, took my ambivalent leave. The most assertive thing I said was that I would walk home, that I needed the air. Oh, it was sad out there in the air, walking along the dark streets. Why is it so hard to do things on purpose? I felt I had some principles, why wouldn’t they apply? Why couldn’t I use one like the right instrument and fix something? Don’t answer.
I walked the two miles back to the corner where I used to live, the lost Ghost Mansion. It was as dark as a dark house in a horror film. Was the woman I loved asleep in there? I turned and started down the hill toward my apartment. Oh, I was separated all right, and none of the pieces were big enough to be good for anything. I said Lily’s name and made one quiet resolution: no more nightcaps. At all.
DR. SLIME
THIS IS ABOUT the night Betsy told me she was leaving, the night that marked the end of a pretty screwy time all around. Everyone I knew was trying to be an artist, or really was an artist on some scale, and this was in Utah, so you can imagine the scale. Betsy had been almost making a living for several years as a singer, local work for advertising agencies and TV and radio, and my brother Mitchell, who loved her and with whom she lived, was an actor and model for television ads and local theater and whatever movie work came to town. I mean these were people who had consciously said, “I’m going to be an artist no matter what,” and that seemed kind of crazy and therefore lovable because it is more interesting than anything nine to five, and I found myself taking care of them from time to time over a three-year period, sponsoring meals and paying their rent two or three times a year, and hanging out with them generally, because I am a regular person, which put me in awe of their refusal to cope with daily duties, and I’ll just say it here, rather than let it sneak in later and have you think I’m a vile snake: I came to develop, after the first few months of catching midnight suppers after Mitch’s shows and lunches downtown with Betsy after her auditions or after she’d recorded some commercial or other, a condition that anyone in my regular shoes would have developed, I mean not a strange or evil condition, but a profound condition nevertheless, and the condition that I bore night and day was that I was deeply and irrevocably in love with Betsy, my brother’s lover, though as you will see it netted me nothing more than a sour and broken heart, broken as regular hearts can be broken, which I probably deserved, no, certainly deserved, and a condition regardless of its magnitude that allowed me to do the noble, the right thing, as you will also see, since I think I acted with grace or at least minor dexterity under such pressure.
I am not an artist. I am a baker for a major supermarket chain and it is work I enjoy more than I should perhaps, but I am dependent on my effort yielding tangible results, and at the end of my shift I go home tired and smelling good. On the day I’m talking about here I came home to my apartment about six a.m. having baked three flights of AUNT DOROTHY’S turnovers all night—apple, peach, and raisin—I am AUNT DOROTHY—and found an envelope under the door containing fifteen twenties, the three hundred dollars that Mitch owed me. The note read “THERE IS MORE WHERE THIS CAME FROM. M.” Every time he paid me back, this same note was enclosed. It meant that he had found work. His last gig for a smoked-meat ad paid him eight hundred dollars a day for four days, the only work he had in seven months. Mitch was feast or famine.
I put the money in the utility drawer in the kitchen; I would be lending it to him again. I didn’t know what it was this time, but Betsy had called a couple of times this week worried, asking about him, what he was doing. He had a big bruise on his neck, and a slug of capsules, unidentifiable multicolored capsules, had begun appearing in the apartment.
“He’s an actor,” I told her. This is what I used to tell our parents when they would worry. It was a line, I had learned, that was the good news and the bad news at once.
“Yeah, well, I want to know what part beats him up and has him carting drugs.”
I wanted to say: So do I, that no-good, erratic beast. Why don’t you just drop him and fall into this baker’s bed, where you’ll be coated in frosting and treated like a goddess. I’ll put you on a cake; I’ll strew your path with powdered sugar and tender feathers of my piecrusts, for which I am known throughout the Intermountain West.
I said: “Don’t worry, Betsy, I’ll help you find out.”
IT WAS THAT night that she came over to my place on her scooter about seven o’clock and told me she knew something and asked me would I help her, which meant Just Shut Up and Get on the Back. She wore an arresting costume, a red silk shirt printed with little guitars and a pair of bright blue trousers that bloomed at the knees and then fixed tight at the ankle cuff. I scanned her and said, “What decade are we preparing for?”
“Forties,” she said, locking up. “Or nineties. You ready? Have you eaten?” I had only been on that red scooter two or three times and found it a terrible and exquisite form of transportation, and the one legitimate opportunity this baker had for putting his hands on the woman who quickened his yeasty heart, in other words, Betsy, my brother’s lover, his paramour, his girlfriend, his, his, his.
We took the machine south on State Street. It was exhilarating to be in the rushing air, but the lane changes and a few of the stops made me feel even more tentative than I already did. I held Betsy’s waist gingerly, so that at the light on Ninth, he turned and said, “Doug, this is a scooter, hold on for god’s sakes. We’re friends. Don’t start acting like a god damned man.” And she clamped my hands onto her sides firmly, my fingers on the top of her hipbones.
That was good, because it made me feel comfortable resting my chin on her shoulder too, as half a jo
ke, and I could feel her smiling as we passed under the streetlights. But the joke was on me, nuzzling a woman of the future, who was I kidding? She smelled fresh, only a little like bread, and though I didn’t know it, this was the very apex of my romantic career.
We passed through the rough darkness on Thirty-third South and could see the huge trucks working under lights removing the toxic waste dump where Vitro Processors had been, and then on the rough neon edge of West Valley City, Betsy pulled into Apollo Burger Number Two, a good Greek place. When we stopped I felt the air come up around my face in a little heat. I quickly sidestepped into the bathroom to adjust myself in my underwear; at some point in the close float out here, holding Betsy, my body had begun acting like a god damned man.
We ate pastrami burgers and drank cold milk sitting at a sticky picnic table in front of the establishment. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and Betsy assured me we had plenty of time. She knew where we were going because she had asked the driver of the van who had pulled up at their apartment two hours ago. He had come in looking for Mitchell and had told her: Granger High School, eight o’clock. She knew something else, but wasn’t telling me.
“He’s got to stop taking these stupid nickel-and-dime jobs,” she said, as she made a tight ball of her burger wrapper.
“All work has its own dignity,” I said—it was one of Mitch’s lines.
“Bullshit, it’s exploitation. I’m through with it.”
“You’re not going to sing anymore?”