Be the One

by April Smith

  Teasing him with little kisses, “Sure, and nobody ever paid anybody off, or ever did anything underhanded or illegal, to get the entertainment center built?”

  Joe is smiling at her fondly. “No.”

  “No?”

  “We settle it like Greeks.”

  He cocks his head in a secret way that makes her feel it with a jolt down below.

  “There’s a famous story. Two Greeks were having an argument over who owned some olive trees. You know how they resolved it? They burned the olive trees down.”

  “That’s inspiring.”

  He draws her closer.

  “What you need to do is fall back and trust someone’s going to be there for you.”

  “I don’t know who that person would be.”

  He kisses her throat. There are hazards. The edge of the reflecting pool. The sand. Chaise lounges under the stars, folded towels on each, the scent of orange blossom from the trees in containers. The living room—sofas, rug, why not the polished stone hearth?—and, of course, the staircase, which quickly becomes littered with their clothes.

  On the second floor, a mezzanine overlooking the first, a half dozen oil paintings seem to float in silver bodies of light. The paintings are grotesque. Abstract lines and tortured human figures disappear into eerie mists but certain loud exaggerated features remain—ears, mouths, muscle, sores—that seem to shout for attention, refuse to melt, like gold teeth in a crematorium.

  “What is this?” Cassidy breathes.

  “An Irish painter named Francis Bacon. I began collecting him when I was in college.”

  “You knew his paintings would be valuable.”

  Joe says simply, “He moves me.”

  Cassidy shudders. “People with their souls hanging out.”

  “Well put.”

  “For a jock.”

  “Our insecurity is showing.”

  Cassidy moves away and stands, barefoot and in underwear, before a scene of crucifixion in which the martyr’s skin is peeling away to show gristle and white rib.

  “I remember this,” she says softly.

  “You’ve seen it before?”

  “No, but I feel like I have, it’s what you were talking about when we were driving in the Dominican. There was a horrible dead cow on the truck ahead of us.”

  Joe is hooking a finger in the champagne-colored lace of her panties.

  “What was I talking about?”

  “This painting. Whether it was when we were with Alberto or not, I can’t remember, but we were looking at this cow carcass tied up on this truck and you said something about how it was crucified and it was so beautiful.”

  Joe caresses her neck. “Could I have been more pretentious?”

  She keeps on staring as he tugs her backward by the G-string into the master bedroom where the walls and built-ins are finished in honey-colored sycamore, a warm contrast to the cold stainless steel below.

  “I like this a whole lot better than downstairs.”

  “They each have their moments in time,” Joe allows, pressing a remote that brings Stan Getz into the room.

  The bed faces the ocean at the same height as the tops of the Manila palms. Opening the doors to the terrace just a slice brings the steady blow of the sea. Joe sits on the edge of the white linens wearing nothing but the pink polo shirt, a frank raw erection looking straight at her from between his legs.

  “Wow,” he says. “You have really good posture.”

  Cassidy flops from the waist, giggling.

  “Let me see that, turn sideways.”

  She complies.

  “So is this what the babes in the gym look like?”

  “No.”

  She raises a leg to his shoulder and pushes him down with the sole of her bare foot.

  “They’re toned. I’m in shape. They fantasize. I’m it.”

  She climbs on top. Wrestles off his shirt. Luxuriates in his well-developed barrel chest.

  “You know what we should do?”

  He is naked above her, supported on his hands. Her pelvis is arching up, hot, too hot, willing to say yes to anything.

  “—We should get married,” says Joe.

  “We should?”

  “Yes, and for a wedding present, I’ll buy you a baseball team.”

  She laughs exorbitantly, to the point of hysteria, like a crazy person.

  “Who says I can’t? Who says you can’t? Be the first woman manager in the history of the game? You don’t think I mean it.”

  “You mean it now.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  His fingers are warm and their skins don’t pinch and pull.

  “Here,” she breathes.

  “Like this,” he whispers. “Wait—”

  Together they keep changing. Aware, then unaware. Lost, and then, like dripping pebbles, found.

  A handful of wet pebbles under a burning olive tree.

  MAY

  18

  The Dodgers win at Colorado, 6–4 with Raul Mondesi going two for four, a double, a homer and three RBIs. Cassidy listens to the play-by-play in the car, announcer Ross Porter’s voice pure and strong all the way from Denver. It is comforting, like hearing your dad talking in the den. Between the warm-up and the wrap-up Cassidy is able to cover three high school games and two hundred miles, seeing kids she has already seen once or twice before, a dedicated effort to track every last possibility before the big western regional meeting.

  This is it, fish or cut bait, when the West Coast scouts present their top prospects for the June draft. The pressure is severe, each man on the line to sell not only his prospects but his own expertise. If you stumble or hesitate, all that preparation flies out the window and you look—the worst thing possible for a baseball scout—indecisive.

  Besides, if Cassidy messed up in a room full of male competitors, all that would remain would be two gold earrings and a forty-nine-dollar Ironman watch. Maybe not the watch.

  The last bit of business of this long May afternoon is another visit with Brad Parker, the right-hander she had brought Travis down to see, whose family lives all the way out in Perris.

  An outpost of suburban blight on the lip of the desert, it takes Cassidy an hour and a half on baking freeways to get there. She has made the trip so often she is known by name in two different Denny’s and rejoices at the rows of battle-gray KC-10s lined up at March Air Force Base because the sight of them means she is almost at Cottonwood Gardens—a dusty-pink-walled tract—and can stretch that lumbar spine.

  “I brought you my mom’s recipe,” she announces, walking through the unlocked front door and into the kitchen as if she were a member of the family. “Cranberry-walnut-pumpkin loaf.”

  “Aren’t you a dear!”

  Brad’s mom, Pepper Parker, is setting out a welcoming snack, cheese nachos, cans of diet soda and carrot sticks. The nachos are topped with mild chili peppers, just like at the ballpark, and served in square paper containers with gingham checks she buys by the hundred.

  Overweight, with ash-colored hair all puffed and multiple pierces up the earlobes, wearing turquoise bicycle shorts and matching sleeveless blouse, Pepper, plus twenty pounds, is exactly who she was when she left Des Moines with baby Brad to follow her brawny high school impregnator to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base. From there it was a drive up the 215 to a starter home and a gig as an assistant manager in a twenty-four-hour copy shop that grew into an empire of three, plus the tree-trimming business.

  Pepper is a world-class baker of Christmas cookies, as Cassidy had discovered inside a heavy almond-scented tin last winter, who continues to be fascinated by Maggie Sanderson’s creative notion of using her own talent for baking to turn the family home into a B. Of course Maggie and her new husband, Stan, the retired marketing man from the Bay area, took it a couple of steps further by enshrining Smoke’s Pacific Coast League memorabilia in what used to be the dining room, renaming the house where Cassidy and Gregg grew up the Hollywood Stars Inn and Baseb
all Museum. Pepper still has the brochure Cassidy brought back from a visit in December stuck to the refrigerator with a koala bear magnet.

  “Thank your mom so much and tell her we’ll have to stop by. Next time we’re up in Oregon. We’ve got that camper out there,” Pepper says wistfully. “I imagine we’ll be getting it going around the same time we get that fish tank fired up.”

  An eight-foot-long, two-hundred-gallon empty casket of glass remains on the floor against the dining room wall.

  “Someday,” Cassidy sighs in agreement, as if it were her dream, as well, to replicate a living coral reef just minutes from Riverside.

  “Has Brad heard from any schools?”

  “We hope next month.”

  “Promise to call me when you get those envelopes?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “I want to get a jump on the competition.”

  Pepper looks toward the door. “Lang and Brad’ll be here any minute.” She checks her watch and makes a decision.

  She sits down across from Cassidy.

  “I want to share with you, in all honesty—and we both know there’s other interest—we’re sold on the Dodgers.”

  “My supervisor was real pleased when he saw Brad pitch.”

  Pepper’s darkened eyebrows arch hopefully. “Lang said he really had his stuff that day.”

  “When it comes to the draft, it’s going to be tough, but I’ll do my best. You know I believe in Brad.”

  “He adores you. Thinks you’re cool.”

  “Cool?” Cassidy laughs self-deprecatingly. “Anything that works.”

  “So …” Pepper taps the index card with the recipe against the oak table and stares at it for an anxious second or two, “if Lang seems to be giving you the runaround, it’s just his way—”

  “I know. Listen, I want him to always feel free to ask questions.”

  “What I’m telling you is … between us, and I probably shouldn’t say anything … when the time comes, we want to make a deal.”

  “I hear what you’re saying.”

  For the next twenty minutes, until the dad and prospect show, Cassidy sits with Pepper Parker and talks about brownies. Great brownies from the past, orgasmic brownies of the future we can only imagine. Dense or cakelike, does it really work if you use mayonnaise? Yes or no on the question of walnuts, chocolate chips, and various toppings of coconut, frosting or mini M&M’s—why do women crave chocolate?—and let’s sneak a Snickers from the freezer right now!

  It is the hardest and most crucial work she has done all day.

  On the morning of the western regional meeting Cassidy takes a long run on the beach, turning south at the Laguna lifeguard tower, the rented cottage quickly lost in the mishmash of pastel houses and red tile roofs that clings to every curve of the brooding coastal mountain range.

  She is going for broad external focus, calmly taking it all in, but it is hard to keep her eyes on the horizon. Several times she has caught herself with head down, spacing out on the toes of her running shoes rhythmically chugging the wet sand. She has had to make a conscious effort to loosen the jaw, relax the shoulders, keep the head up for max oxygen intake, and concentrate on rehearsing the promotional spiels Pedro had insisted she write out on behalf of her prospects, but it is difficult to concentrate on signability and bat speed when all she can think about is Joe.

  She had woken up dreaming they were making love. The bedroom, dormers bending close and rectangles of trapped sun, had felt like a slow oven on all night, her body the source of heat. Even the outside world seemed fat with desire, animated in tropical colors: the crowns of the palm trees lemon pinwheels of light, three black crows crying over and over the same primitive note.

  Release me.

  “When you are a physical person,” Marshall once said in a burst of postcoital eloquence, “you become addicted to the physical, driven by the physical, wanting to get back to the feeling of playing ball, searching for that level of intensity like Wow! and Holy shit! It can become almost sexual, sometimes you can’t tell the difference. It’s hard to separate, doesn’t matter, all you know is that you’re hungry for it.”

  For example, today is Wednesday, and according to their no-surrender training schedule, Cassidy and Marshall should be running together, six miles on the beach. But he is up in Vancouver training one of his bratty male movie stars on a film, which is a good thing. They might otherwise wind up in bed from 8:35 to 8:45 a.m.—not on the schedule and not where Cassidy wants to be with Marshall—but she might, in this current state of aroused aggression, be driven to it; an impulse buy, guilt-inducing as a walnut bear claw from Scandia bakery in town, and just as sticky.

  She turns around and heads back north. The tide is rising, forcing her to run on soft sand, harder on the hamstrings, so she angles down a ridge and sprints through the water. The pink cast came off last week; her left hand is beginning to throb inside its brace.

  Since the assault she has been shadowed by wild thoughts: that out in the open like this, someone is watching her through the scope of a high-powered automatic rifle. Unexpected objects make her jump, like the brown padded envelopes and FedEx boxes she finds on her doorstep from Nora—signed jerseys she’d bought at auction, paperbacks on how to coach your kids’ Little League team, a silver cable bracelet from Neiman Marcus, whole sports sections from the New York Times—with sad little Post-its that say, Let’s have lunch! and Thinking of you.

  Despite her paranoia, no more threats have been received by Alberto or Joe. Hopefully they have left the fuckers behind in Florida. Nobody from the organization has called to interrogate her as to why she didn’t tell Detective Allen about the Dominicans in the parking lot, or that Los Angeles developer Joe Galinis has been a target of the same extortion.

  Find the groove.

  When he becomes transfixed with that tragicomic stare of longing, Joe will go down on his knees and caress her ankles and say, “I adore you.”

  Should she marry the adoration? The privilege? Should she be a trophy? Be a star? Walk into the life she had lost when she lost the shot at the Olympics and a big endorsement deal: beautiful clothes, exclusive gyms, a gracious home with a dazzling pool, looking good, plastic surgery, always sitting in the skybox seats? Joe seems to want to give her everything—including her own baseball team (was he serious?). Still, she has a kind of power over him; something she has never felt with any other man.

  Find the groove.

  Out here in the open it is difficult to pretend that moment didn’t happen—when she had seen Joe naked and exposed, or nearly so, kicking a soccer ball in the waves with Sophie—and the feeling overwhelmed her, strong enough to override everything else.

  The bite of salt spray brings it back, watching Joe from the cliff outside the perimeter of the Gran Caribe as he lost himself in the game with Sophie, discovering his capacity for tenderness although he tried to keep it hidden in a cove.

  The clouds that had been skidding freely all morning had drawn together and changed character from impertinent white to iron gray, forming an ominous tower in the eastern sky. The fringed fronds of the king palms were stretched out like pennants on a good-sized wind. At poolside the band played to rows of empty lounge chairs. A half dozen young Italian men were clustered around, wet hair, wet legs, wet shorts, smoking cigarettes and drinking pinTa coladas by the pitcher. The barman stood idle. A towel boy was swinging his keys. The resort felt disconcertingly empty, Disneyland on a rainy day. Cassidy passed a table of Japanese who seemed to be the only other guests, puzzling out the Western dinner roll; one was sawing at it with knife and fork while the others watched. Two of the Italian boys were kissing with their tongues.

  The front desk manager advised Cassidy to look for Sr. Galinis in the casino, just beyond the restaurant.

  The casino was vast as a supermarket, cold as a morgue, filled with rows of glaring adult toys blinking and chirping to no one. Cars made of light-bulbs rotated above hundreds of digital slot machines; the
sugar towns still didn’t have electricity, but here in the citadel of sugar the lights were on and the air-conditioning howling twenty-four hours a day.

  “Who is there?”

  A man (not Joe) had risen quickly from a video game table upon which he and a woman companion were apparently doing work. There were coffee cups, printouts, a couple of piles of Dominican bills. In the underwater glow their faces looked green, but Cassidy recognized the imperious bearing. The man was the General, who had rented her the car.

  “¡Señorita!”

  The General clasped Cassidy’s hand in both of his.

  “What a pleasure! How are you? My nephew said everything went well?”

  “Very well. We had a little problem with the jeep—”

  “I am so sorry.”

  The young woman extended her hand.

  “Nora Galinis.”

  “You must be related to Joe.”

  “I’m his daughter.”

  Even in the strange neon light the resemblance was powerful. Dark hair. Aegean cheekbones. And the same defensive pride.

  “I was just looking for your dad.”

  “Were you?” The daughter held the other woman with the freckled nose and sun-bleached hair in silent commanding scrutiny for as long as it had taken to perform the necessary calculations.

  “He gave me a ride when the jeep broke down.”

  “I hope it was no inconvenience,” said the General. “Did you find your player?”

  “Signed him. Over and out.”

  “Congratulations. The lady is a baseball scout!” cried the General, dimples twinkling.

  “Do they have women baseball scouts?”

  “They do now.”

  Nora’s smile had become childlike. “I wish I could do something fun like that!”

  “You already have a big job,” crooned the General, patting her wrist. “She runs her daddy’s hotel.”

  Nora’s head dipped bashfully. Cassidy marveled at such machismo. First Rhonda in a swoon and now this Los Angeles mogul playing the ingenue.

  “I was wondering where your dad might be.”