by T. T. Monday
Connie smiles. “Exactly.”
“Exactly? You say the goal should be to play your best game. I say the goal is winning. How does Tiff Tate support your argument?”
“Because she makes your teammates feel good about what they’re doing.”
“You know what feels good? Winning.”
“I’m not going to give up on this one, John. Winning isn’t everything. If it were, then everyone would cheat.”
“For a while, they did.”
Her eyebrows drift up. Connie is not especially interested in baseball, but she likes the stories about men behaving badly. I gear up to tell the story of the steroid era, where everyone is juicing, the authorities turn a blind eye, and corruption lurks behind every corner. But it doesn’t feel right. Not today. Not with Erik Magnusson in the coroner’s refrigerator.
“Put it this way,” I say. “Wherever there is money to be made from games, you’ll have players cheating. It’s not just baseball. Think about insider trading.”
“The stock market is not a game.”
“If it’s not a game, explain to me how a company like Uber, a company with no profits and a workforce of independent contractors, can be worth more than the rest of the transportation industry combined?”
“You know that’s a complicated question.” This is a long-running debate between us. Connie did her graduate internship at the University of Colorado’s business library, so she knows a lot about this stuff. I know just enough to start arguments.
“The whole technology sector is bullshit!” I say. “Why is Tesla worth more than Ford?”
“Actually, it’s not.”
“Well, it’s close. Too close, if you ask me….” I pause. Out of the corner of my eye, I see something. Someone, rather. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”
I walk briskly to a table in the back of the restaurant, where a well-dressed Latino couple sit with their heads down, reading the menu. “Yonel?”
Ruiz’s head snaps up. His eyes are inky black, the pupils nearly indistinguishable from the irises. The tattoo on his neck, I see now, is a dragon.
“It’s Johnny Adcock, from the Bay Dogs.”
I expect him to react one of two ways: either he’ll smile and put out his hand like we’re old buddies—this is the way of the ballplayer fraternity, especially in front of nonplayers like his date—or he’ll pretend to be upset about the afternoon’s game, ribbing me for throwing him junk, something like that. All in good fun, of course, even though I’m sure the loss stings.
Instead, he does something I could not have anticipated. He shakes his head and says nervously, “No inglés…” He shakes my hand weakly, with a sweaty palm.
“Fine,” I say in Spanish. “I just wanted to introduce myself. Congratulations on an excellent season.” They are kind words, the type of encouragement I would have welcomed from a veteran when I was his age. But Ruiz does not thank me. In silence he flips his menu shut, looks at his watch, and then stares at the floor.
I turn to his date. “My name is Johnny. I’m a ballplayer, too.”
“Glad to meet you. I am Enriqueta.” She grips my hand in both of hers and squeezes.
“My sister,” Ruiz explains.
His sister? “We are happy to have Yonel in our league,” I say. “Your brother is a very talented player, as I’m sure you know.”
“It has always been a pleasure to meet my brother’s friends, especially the ballplayers….” She laughs flirtatiously, but with an edge, as though there is more she might say on that subject if she felt I could handle it. Her eyes, I notice, are like the pitcher Max Scherzer’s—heterochromatic, one brown and one blue. Heterochromatic eyes are usually the result of an injury in childhood or a virus that stopped the normal pigmentation in one iris but not the other. A lot of guys are envious of Scherzer’s fastball, but I’ve always wanted his eyes. I imagine that crazy-wolf stare would be frightening on the mound. Anything that unbalances the hitter, no matter how small, can be worth dozens of outs over the course of a season. Even the tiniest hint of panic can be the difference between a smash and a soft ground ball.
“Your Spanish is very good, Señor Johnny. Have you spent time in Latin America?”
“Does Los Angeles count?”
She laughs. “You’re funny. Join us for dinner?”
“Thanks for the invitation, but I can’t.”
“A drink?” Enriqueta reaches out and grasps my left biceps. “Surely you can stay for a drink.”
“My date is waiting. Otherwise, I would.” I turn to Ruiz. “Let’s talk at batting practice tomorrow.”
He shrugs.
As I turn to leave, Enriqueta stands up and blocks my path with her thigh. Her metallic minidress barely clears her crotch. “We should have dinner,” she says. “If not tonight, another time.”
“We’ll see. I’m only in town for the weekend.”
“You call me, we’ll work something out. Middle of the night, it doesn’t matter.” She shakes my hand one more time, and when I pull back I find that she has slipped me a scrap of paper with her phone number written in purple ink. I am amazed. Does she keep these tucked in her bra?
Back at the table, Connie has ordered two glasses of white wine. “Who was that?” she asks.
“One of the Rockies,” I say. “The new Cuban guy.”
“Oh, Yonel Ruiz!” Connie cranes her neck to see. Ruiz’s story has become so widely known that even a nonfan knows his name. Barely two months on the team, and already he’s Peyton Manning.
“Yeah, I faced him this afternoon, but we’ve never met. I wanted to introduce myself.”
“Did you get him out?”
“I did.”
“So you wanted to gloat.”
“Not at all. I didn’t mention the game.”
Connie eyes me suspiciously. “What did he say?”
“Nothing. He didn’t want to talk.”
“Well, he’s entitled to his privacy. After what he’s been through, on the motorboat and everything. The sharks. I can’t imagine what it was like.”
The waiter comes back and we order the bison. Connie starts to tell me about a crisis at work, something about an avaricious vendor of online journals. After a few minutes, I turn around to look in on Ruiz, but he’s disappeared. The sister, too. The utensils are untouched, the table holding nothing but two sweating glasses of ice water.
7
Connie’s apartment is in a former sewing-machine factory that a developer divided and converted to condos. A similar pad in San José would cost a million bucks, but this is not Silicon Valley, this is Denver, where a librarian can afford a decent life. The condo has all the touches you’d expect from a former industrial space: exposed brick, steel handrails, riveted beams. The concrete floors, however, are new. They contain radiant heating, which is an invention up there with toothbrushes, cars, and sliced bread. I have instructed my agent to look out for radiant-floor-heating companies in need of celebrity pitchmen. I don’t even want to be paid; I just think the world needs to know.
After the wine (we had Saint-Émilion with the bison), we are both a little tipsy. Connie goes to the stereo and puts on some music, a band with guitars and two girl singers, whose voices swirl in and out of loose harmony. I can’t remember the name of the band. I haven’t listened to music with any intention—that is, actually putting on music, and thinking about my selections—since I was a teenager. Early in my professional career, I used to listen to whatever was playing in the team bus, but now that everyone’s got headphones, I don’t even hear that. I feel like last winter Connie reintroduced me to an old friend. We cooked together, too: something else I used to do. Maybe it’s Connie who’s the old friend.
Her apartment is configured as a split-level loft, with the living and dining space below and the sleeping deck and toilet upstairs. I take Connie by the hand and pull her toward me. We kiss. Her mouth still tastes like the chocolate torte we had for dessert. She presses her body against mine, warm and so
ft.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispers in my ear.
Up we go. With a deft twist of the elbow, she unzips the back of her dress. Her shoulders slide out, and the garment collapses onto the floor. She’s wearing lace panties and a bra made of fabric so sheer I can count the bumps around her nipples. Hardly what you’d expect a librarian to be wearing under her clothes, but you know what they say about judging a book by its cover.
I shake off my jeans and stretch out on the futon bed. For a moment she hovers over me on hands and knees, the ends of her hair tickling my arms. I want to get inside her as soon as possible, but I still haven’t covered my agenda. I was going to do it in the restaurant, but then Ruiz got in the way. So I abstain a little more. “We need to talk,” I say, pulling away just enough to look her in the eye.
Connie’s lips are plump and shiny with saliva. “Later,” she says.
“I’d feel better if we talked first.”
She sits up. “I want to have this conversation, John. I do. But it feels…I don’t know, manipulative? Unfair, at least. It doesn’t feel right to be discussing commitment while we’re having sex.”
“We’re not having sex yet.”
She runs her fingers through her hair, shakes it back onto her shoulders, then unclips her bra and flops down onto the bed beside me. Lifting her pelvis, she slides out of her panties. Flight attendants have landing strips. Librarians, in my experience, prefer a three-volume set. “To be honest, right now I don’t want to talk. Right now I want to make love.”
Fair enough. She gets on hands and knees—her favorite—and puts that spectacular ass in the air. The girl singers tell us how lonely it can be in the great big metropolis. Connie and I do our part for togetherness. My grandfather once told me that you know a woman is the one when “as soon as you roll off her you can’t wait to roll back on.” I feel this way about Connie, but I remember feeling it for my ex-wife, too. (And plenty of women in between.) I suppose it’s a cliché to say that the best orgasm of a man’s life is the one he just had, but this one ranks in the top five for sure. My loins are still buzzing twenty minutes after Connie falls asleep.
That’s at 11:00 p.m. By 3:00 a.m., my mind is playing another movie. In my head I’m back at the restaurant, talking to Ruiz, and he keeps shaking his head. “No inglés…Mi hermana…” I believe the no inglés part. English is the language of the imperialist pigs, right? In Cuba, they probably teach Russian or Chinese as a second language. But mi hermana? That part I don’t buy. My suspicion could amount to naught, but Ruiz’s silence is unsettling. It would have been unsettling even if Erik Magnusson were still alive. I have tremendous respect for Yonel Ruiz. To a large degree, I agree with Connie that his ordeal grants him permission to act however he likes. But it wasn’t shell shock I saw tonight. It was something else; I’m not sure what.
Tu hermana? Ay, amigo, I don’t think so.
By four-thirty, I’ve given up on sleeping. Very quietly, I gather my clothes and tiptoe downstairs to put them on without waking Connie. I write a note and leave it on the kitchen table: Tonight we talk—promise!
In the elevator, I dig in my pocket and find the slip of paper tangled up with the receipt from dinner. It’s a New York City mobile number. I wonder how long Enriqueta is in town.
Middle of the night, she said, it doesn’t matter.
I take out my phone. Anything for a case.
8
She’s staying at the Ritz-Carlton downtown, midway between Connie’s place and the team hotel. At first I’m puzzled why she’s not staying with her brother, but then I remember my first big-league rental, a furnished month-to-month efficiency where I used an empty pizza box as a lap desk, not for convenience but because it was the cleanest surface in the apartment. Good times, but no place to put up your sister.
Under ordinary circumstances I’d walk, but, given the likelihood that I’m being watched, I call an Uber, apologizing to the app for trashing it at dinner. On my phone I watch the car approach, block by block, until finally it pulls around the corner. My fourteen-year-old daughter told me the other day about something called the Singularity, a hypothetical moment in which our real and virtual selves merge into a single consciousness online. I feel like I’m looking at it right now, but I could be missing something.
Enriqueta opens the door in a white silk chemise and matching thong. I never really doubted what she had in mind when she asked me to call, but this outfit pretty much settles the issue. Her thick, kinky hair is down, tumbling onto her shoulders and everywhere else. I realize that the tight little bun she sported at dinner was probably a victory, a feat of control. The hair has now returned to its natural state. Her breasts are also at liberty, swaying under the silk like chubby backup singers.
I slip into the dark room, and she leads me directly to bed. I’m not familiar with her perfume, a kind of woody frankincense that says as well as any words could that this is a woman—not a girl, but a woman, full stop. She falls out of the chemise, and I’m not sure what happens to the thong. Within a minute we’re both completely naked. The riot on her head turns out to be the only hair on her body; the rest of her is so smooth it’s almost slippery. Our limbs slide past one another as we wrestle—and it does feel like wrestling, each of us struggling for a stronger angle, a firmer grasp, a better exposure. She breathes in my ear and gently bites at the cartilage, whispering taunts in Spanish. Then one of her arms is around my back, pulling me down on top of her. The other hand is between her legs, then mine, darting back and forth, lining up the shot.
For the second time tonight I reach the cusp and pause. I raise myself up so I can see her face. “Tell me about your brother,” I say. “Was it hard for him, coming here?”
“Hard?”
“Does Yonel talk about the men who brought him over?” I try to make these lines sound unrehearsed. This is important, because, as enjoyable as this chore may be, information was my true goal in coming here (scout’s honor). I slide my hand between her legs. Her thighs clench and relax as my fingers slip inside. “I’ve heard they’re very expensive.”
“Yonel has plenty of money.”
This is either a lie or a misapprehension. According to Tiff, Ruiz is living on a pittance. Maybe Enriqueta doesn’t know the smugglers are taking his salary? Or maybe she does know, but to her Cuban sensibility Ruiz’s allowance feels like a fortune? I read that the per capita income in Cuba is less than five hundred dollars a year.
Then again, she’s staying at the Ritz-Carlton in a room that costs five hundred a night.
“I’ve heard stories. Cuban players being blackmailed by their smugglers.” I had to look up the word for “blackmail” on my phone on the way over here. I hope I’m saying it correctly.
“What could they do? Yonel is already here.”
“They could threaten his family….”
“Don’t you think I would know if my family was being threatened?” Enriqueta wriggles away from my hand. She rolls onto her side and throws a leg over my hip like she’s going to swing up into the saddle.
“I think you would,” I say.
“Shhh….”
“Can you put me in touch with Yonel?”
“You talk too much, Adcock.” She flips me onto my back and rises onto her knees. Then she walks up my body until she’s straddling my neck.
“I’m just—” One more nudge forward. Now she’s sitting on my face. For a moment I’m confused about how to proceed. I’ve never had an interrogation interrupted this way. I can think of only one thing to do. Closing my eyes, I press my tongue inside.
“Now I talk,” says the voice above me. “Yonel is with this woman Tiff Tate all the time. Do you know her?”
I am throwing myself into the task at hand, lips and tongue and everything, and Enriqueta’s bucking hips tell me the effort is appreciated. But now she stops and slides off. Apparently her question wasn’t idle chatter. She wants an answer.
“It’s not what you think,” I say. “Tif
f Tate is…” I don’t know the Spanish word for “stylist,” or even “consultant,” so I just say, “She’s the woman who picks his clothes.”
Enriqueta clicks her tongue in disapproval. “I told Yonel, don’t pay for sex. In America, you don’t have to pay. He doesn’t listen.”
I could explain the difference between a prostitute and a stylist, but, honestly, it’s a fine distinction, and I’m not sure my Spanish is up to the task. Also, my balls are starting to ache and it’s nearly six in the morning.
“Come down and ride my horse,” I say. Tonight is the first time in years I’ve spoken Spanish during sex, and I’m simultaneously impressed and repulsed by my ingenuity. Ask anyone, I sound nothing like this in English. “I need a cowgirl. Are you my cowgirl?”
“You want a cowgirl?” Enriqueta slips happily into the charade. “Okay, horsey, show me your tricks….” She rolls on a condom, and the next five minutes are a blur. We’re sitting up, and she’s straddling me. Her face is six inches from mine, and I’m staring into these crazy mismatched eyes, panting like an animal. We reach a kind of rhythm, and then our strokes gather speed until I’m no longer sure if I’m in or out. Except for the most basic biology, it couldn’t resemble any less the sensuous, loving sex I had with Connie a few hours before. Finally, we finish and fall back on the bed.
Is it the eyes? Does Max Scherzer’s wife feel like this every night?
While I catch my breath, Enriqueta props herself up on her elbows. A little moonlight comes through the chenille curtain, making the sweat on her forehead shine. She looks like she’s been in a fight, hair leaping off in all directions, lips abraded, makeup smeared. I wonder if our tango took a turn she wasn’t expecting. But she appears unhurt. No harm, no foul—right?
Enriqueta exhales emphatically. She wipes her upper lip with one manicured thumb. Then she says, matter-of-factly, “So—where can I find Tiff Tate?”
9
After a stop at the team hotel for a change of clothes, I walk to Coors Field. It’s 7:30 a.m., and I am the first player to arrive. I walk around the field for a while, gathering my thoughts. A lone groundskeeper mows the outfield on a John Deere tractor. The sun is rising over the grandstand, filling the prairie sky. It’s a great location, a lovely stadium. For a pitcher, it’s almost worth the pain. This time the pain is worse than ever, and it has nothing to do with getting knocked around on the field.