Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

  Mark went home an hour ago. I won’t see him again until the rehearsal dinner at The Palm a week from Friday. There’s a tradition in his family for the groom to spend the final ten days of bachelorhood apart from the woman he will marry. His father says it goes back to the last century. I’m not sure I believe him, but both of Mark’s brothers did it, too. So an hour ago I kissed him good-bye in the doorway. I’ll see him at The Palm, and then at the altar.

  I walk with my glass to the stereo. I wait out the last peaceful notes of the song and turn it off, then stand for a moment in the quiet apartment. I pick up a wedding invitation from the credenza. The card is thick and heavy, the color of cream. I run my fingers over the raised black lettering. Joe and Dorothy Lessing request your presence at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in New York City at six o’clock on the evening of Saturday, April 27, for the union of their daughter, Mimi, with Mark Alan Guidry. I lay the card back on the credenza. The union.

  I walk into the bedroom and slide open the mirrored closet door. We made love this morning, Mark and I. He kept me with him every second, his eyes open and on mine. “Forever,” he said at the end. I take a white Deer Bay sweater from the shelf and put it on, the soft cotton luxurious against my arms. Beneath it I wear a lavender boat-neck top and matching capri pants. I slip my bare feet into white mesh shoes. I walk back into the living room, look around at the still apartment, and turn off the light. I step into the hallway and close the door behind me, then walk down the five flights of apartment stairs and out the front door into the spring night.

  The streets are crowded, alive. I step past a humming line of people outside of Tremblay’s, drinking wine on the sidewalk as they wait for tables. I reach Second Avenue just as a young man is stepping out of a taxi on the corner. I wave to him, and he holds the door for me. “Thank you,” I say, and slide inside. He closes the door for me.

  “Sixty-fourth and First,” I tell the driver. I sit back, lulled by the motion, by the spring breeze through the window. A recorded voice welcomes me to New York and tells me to buckle up for safety. “Right here is fine,” I say minutes later, and the driver pulls to the corner. The voice reminds me not to forget anything. I pay the driver and step out into the night. I walk one long block east, away from the lights, the noise, and then cross the street to the stairs of the skyway. I climb them and stand at the top.

  I can see the river now, fifty yards away. I can see half a mile up and down the walkway. I see runners with flashing night patches, people walking their dogs, couples arm in arm. And I see Jake Teller alone at the railing, standing where we met seven days ago, looking out at the black water.

  I start toward him across the skyway.

  In my bed as a girl, during storms, I would say the names of Connecticut towns. Through each terrifying burst of thunder, I would recite them as fast as I could. Darien, Storrs, Old Saybrook, New Canaan. As long as I didn’t run out of towns, the thunder couldn’t hurt me. I reach the curving ramp that leads down to the river walkway.

  Last Friday in Elise’s apartment, I opened the front door and closed it again, so that Jake Teller would think I had walked out. I closed it and sat on my knees in the foyer, whispering the names of Connecticut towns. I whispered them until the end, until she was finally quiet. And then I let myself out.

  I reach the river walkway. He is a good person, I know it. I can’t explain why, but I know it. He turns from the railing and sees me. He wears slacks and a short-sleeve blue shirt. His eyes take me in, and then he looks away. I walk to the railing and stand a few feet from him.

  “Finish all your accounts?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  It’s too hard to look at each other, so we look out at the water. To the south, just before the river curves from sight, I can see the lights of a single boat moving toward us. At least a minute passes in silence.

  “Your parents were killed when you were sixteen,” I say.

  Jake looks at me, hard, then back out at the water.

  “Who told you?”

  “I read your file, at work.”

  “My file,” he says quietly. “They don’t just leave those lying around.”

  “Mr. Stein once told me where they keep them.”

  “He trusted you.”

  I watch the water.

  “How did it happen?” I ask. “Your parents.”

  He is quiet a long time.

  “They went off a mountain road in the rain.”

  “You weren’t in the car.”

  “No.”

  “How did you find out?”

  Jake rubs the black railing. The boat grows bigger as it glides toward us up the river.

  “Tell me something that isn’t in your file, Mimi.”

  Even at night, outside, his blue eyes are charged, bottomless.

  “Mark’s been the only one, ever,” I say. I grip the railing. The wind, stronger now, stirs the waves.

  “I got home late at night,” he says. “A family friend was in the living room.”

  “Where had you been?”

  “On the team bus, coming back from a basketball tournament.”

  An old couple, elegantly dressed, pauses close to us on an evening walk. The woman tends to the man’s scarf as he catches his breath. “Okay,” he says. She smiles and takes his arm again, and they continue up the walkway.

  “Tell me something else,” Jake says.

  “The other night, at home, I put ice to my wrist.”

  “You couldn’t take it.”

  “Just seconds.”

  On the river, the boat is closer now. It is a twenty-foot cabin cruiser. Serenity is written across its bow.

  “Your grandfather raised you,” I say. “He died a year ago.”

  “He had a heart attack.”

  “The girl you followed to the theater. That was a year ago.”

  His eyes flash.

  “Why did you ask me here, Mimi?”

  “I want to understand. You take everything from them. Why?”

  He looks at me, and for just a second his eyes are naked, desperate. He looks away.

  “When you watch,” he says. “What excites you the most?”

  I close my eyes.

  “The girl in the theater, Jake. It was after your grandfather died, wasn’t it?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I see Nina Torring again, as Jake takes her leg to the post. Elise, as the first drop hits her.

  “Their struggle,” I whisper.

  “What else?”

  I feel the flush in my face. All through me. I look at him again.

  “The way you take away every defense — one by one. The first girl, Jake. The one in the theater.”

  “It was a week after he died.”

  The boat is even with us now, moving quietly. A man stands alone at the helm, his hands resting casually on the bottom of the wheel. At peace. Gliding past Manhattan in the dark.

  “One more, Mimi,” Jake says. “Friday night.”

  I close my eyes tightly.

  “The Century Motel on Tenth Avenue. Ten o’clock.”

  I can feel my engagement ring against the railing.

  “Who is she?” I ask.

  Jake doesn’t say anything. Serenity is past us now, heading toward open water, her rippling wake disappearing as she moves away. All along I’ve told myself I could walk away. It was never true.

  “We could set rules,” I say.

  “No rules.”

  “Limits.”

  “No.”

  I look straight down into the black water. And now up into Jake Teller’s blue eyes.

  “Room twenty,” he says. “The last one. It won’t be locked.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I wasn’t on the team bus the night my parents were killed.

  It was the night our small American high school played for the championship of the Far East Basketball Tournament. We’d never reached the title game before, and though we’d torn through the Kanto Plain League that s
eason and had four starters who would go on to play small-college ball, no one imagined as the tournament began that we’d be any match for the best military high schools in Asia. They had one resource we didn’t — black players — and it usually made all the difference.

  Sixteen teams would be whittled down to one over four nights of games at Yokota Air Force Base, a two-hour bus ride from our school. For the opening round, we drew a break — Hong Kong International. They were a private school, like us, and we took them apart. The next night it got tougher — a base team from Seoul. They were heavy favorites, but we came out firing; before they knew what hit them, we were up by fifteen. We hung on to win by three, and just like that, we were through to the Final Four.

  In homeroom the next morning, the principal’s voice came over the intercom. “In honor of our Mustangs,” he announced, pausing for effect, “there will be no tests tomorrow.” You could hear the cheers out by the highway. All day long Mustang fever built in the classrooms and hallways, and that night 250 of our 300 students piled into two yellow school buses and made the trek to Yokota to cheer us on.

  Coach knew we couldn’t handle the Guam Raiders in the paint, so his game plan was simple. “Get every loose ball,” he told us. “And fire away.” We did, answering their dunks with three-point shots, hustling, scratching, keeping it close. We trailed by four after one quarter, by three after two, by two after three, and by two, still, when I stepped to the free-throw line with three seconds left. I made them both, sending the game into overtime; and minutes later, when our senior captain, Bud Jenks, hit a floater in the lane to win it, our fans rocked the wooden bleachers of that old base gym as if they were the back-row faithful at Lambeau Field. We were in the finals, and the only thing standing between us and school history was the best high-school basketball team in the Far East — the Wagner Falcons.

  The Falcons were the pride of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. They’d won three straight Far East tournaments, and in the opening minute of the first game of this one, with fourteen teams watching from the stands, their point guard drove baseline and dunked, serving notice to all that they played a different brand of ball than the rest of us. They won their first tournament game by thirty-five points, their second by thirty, and their semifinal game by twenty-two. Still, as our team rode the bus back to Tokyo Thursday night, fresh off our last-second win, there wasn’t a guy among us who didn’t think we could take them.

  Coach started his pep talk twenty hours early. Some coaches, he said, would look at a team like Wagner and see reasons to lose. But looking around this bus, he saw reasons to win. Twelve of them. Twelve kids who knew the value of sweat, who knew what it could earn you if you gave enough of it. Twelve kids who weren’t afraid, who were glad for the chance to play the best team out there because the trophy would mean that much more when we beat them. Twelve kids who weren’t alone but were a part of something larger — a special community, and here Coach pointed out the back window at the two yellow buses just behind us. It was midnight on a school night, and they carried 80 percent of our student body.

  He was quiet for a moment, and then he looked around at all of us again. He saw twelve pretty good basketball players on this bus, he said, and one damn good basketball team, and if for thirty-two more minutes this damn good basketball team would do the things that had gotten us here — box out, take charges, set screens, rotate on defense — if for thirty-two more minutes we would stick together and play without fear, then, well, he didn’t care who took the court against us — he liked our chances. Coach finished his talk just as the bus pulled into the school parking lot, and as I walked to my bike in the dark and then rode the ten minutes home through the cold March night, I had all the reasons I needed to beat Wagner. Eight hours later I would be given one more.

  On game days, each player would find a gold crepe-paper M taped to his locker, with a message of luck from one of the cheerleaders. You can do it! it might read, or Win tonight, Jake! The morning of the championship game, I eased the front wheel of my bike into the bike rack and walked to my locker, blowing on my hands in the morning cold. I turned the dial on the combination lock and glanced at my gold M.

  Jake — Win tonight and I’ll kiss you! — Naomi

  I stopped turning the dial.

  Six years before, on my first day at the American School, Naomi Kenn had seen me sitting alone at recess and had held out a piece of soft red candy wrapped in transparent paper. She laughed as I tried to unwrap it. “You can eat it,” she said. “It’s rice paper.” I put it into my mouth, and to my wonder the paper melted onto my tongue.

  She was the daughter of an American missionary and his Japanese wife. A nice, quiet girl who lived, as I did, out near the school. In junior high, on the weekends, I would shoot baskets for hours on the outdoor court, and Naomi would come by after church, in shorts and a T-shirt, and hit tennis balls against the practice wall nearby. At four o’clock or so, we’d walk to the yakitori truck that was forever parked across the street from the school, and we’d watch the old man cook skewered chicken on his grill, the dripping tare sauce sending the flames right up to his dancing fingers as he turned the sticks.

  Missionary families were allowed a summer in the States every five years. Two weeks after ninth grade ended, Naomi Kenn left for California. Three months later, on the first day of tenth grade, I stared across the school lobby at a lithe Amerasian beauty with big almond eyes, skin of light caramel, and a tight, packed body that retained, despite its new enticements, its essential innocence and grace. Naomi Kenn. The sweet mix of her genes had exploded into bloom that summer, and they’d transformed the thin, pretty missionary’s daughter into, in the words of the guys in gym class that first day, “one tight little package.”

  That fall she was the only sophomore to make the cheerleading squad, and I was the only sophomore to make the varsity hoop team. I averaged fourteen points a game, a school sophomore record, but neither my rainbow threes nor my slashes to the basket triggered the same buzz in the stands, or even on the team bench, as Naomi Kenn did each time she bounded onto the court during a timeout. She was the middle cheerleader of seven, the centerpiece, and she executed the faux hip-hop moves with a joy and innocence ten times as alluring as the studied cool of the older girls. Even the coaches would break the huddle a second early to catch the finish of their signature routine, which ended with Jessie Case and Teri Evans, seniors both, launching Naomi skyward, where sweet gravity lifted her skirt up and out, exposing the tight black vee of her cheerleading panties as she reached out for her small white shoes, then went limp and plummeted back into the linked arms of her spotters, only to spring out of them into a cartwheel, and then another, and a third, her taut thighs flashing, and then a graceful turn and back the other way, her final cartwheel taking her back to the pyramid that Jessie and Teri had retreated into, where she closed the routine, for good and all, with a deep, thrilling split.

  Jake — Win tonight and I’ll kiss you! — Naomi

  I opened my locker and taped the gold M to the inside. I’d never kissed a girl before, and the thought that Naomi might be my first, and that night, took my mind off the Wagner Falcons for the first time since the buzzer had sounded on our semifinal win. I stared into my locker, then smiled and shook my head. She meant it innocently, of course. As she meant everything. If we were to pull off the upset and I held her to it, she would smile and brush her cheek against mine. Still, I felt a burn at the base of my spine as I walked through the halls to homeroom, nodding at the fists of support from other students and trying to visualize, again, the precise spots on the court where I could get off my jumper.

  The mood on the ride out to the base was taut and determined. Coach took a scuffed leather basketball from the team bag, and as he turned it in his hands, he told us that his father had once told him that a man, if he’s lucky, gets five special days in his life. This was one of his five, Coach said, and he thanked us for it, and then handed the ball to Bud Jenks a
nd walked to his seat at the front of the bus. Bud held the ball a little while, and then he asked each of us to take it and to think about what we, personally, were going to do to win this game, and he started the ball around the team. Everyone had their time with it, and when the last guy handed it back to Bud, he walked to the front of the bus and gave it back to Coach.

  Man for man, we didn’t belong on the same court with the Falcons. But as a team, that one night in March of 1990, we were their equal. We played a tight zone and collapsed on everything inside, daring their guards to beat us over the top. They would have, they were that good, but at the other end of the court the hot shooting that had carried us through the tournament held true. We knew they were quicker and stronger than we were, so we set screen after screen, and knocked down jumper after jumper, and when they adjusted in the second half, fighting over them, we went back door, sending the screener to the basket for a layup.

  The crowd spurred us on. Not just our own legions, a raucous sea of black and gold, but the base crowd, too, which rooted politely for us at the start, to keep from sitting through a blowout, but grew louder and more committed the longer we hung in. And we hung in and hung in and hung in, and when our point guard drew a charge from theirs with the score tied and sixteen seconds to play, suddenly it was our game to win.

  Coach’s call was to take the clock down to eight seconds and then to run Bud through a double screen that would free him for a shot from the corner. They were ready for it. Bud’s defender fought over the first screen and under the second, the one I set, and he was right on him as Bud caught the pass and squared to the basket. As Bud left his feet, my man ran at him, too, so I leaked out to the wing, just in case. Sure enough, Bud — double-teamed in the air — dropped the ball off to me as the clock hit four, and I set my feet as the clock hit three, then left them, and it was as if I was back on the outdoor court at school, just me and the rim, shooting one of ten thousand shots, and I let it fly as the clock hit two, and I held my follow-through, and held it, and held it, and I was still holding it as the ball split the net, and the buzzer sounded, and a swarm of black and gold swallowed me up.