Table for Two

by Nia Forrester

  We are quiet for a while, and then Dani speaks again.

  “And Faith? I mean, do you sometimes miss her?”

  This question is asked spontaneously as well. But with a little more reluctance, and almost … reverence. Dani knows the fundamentals of my relationship with Faith. The core truth about it—that it was based on a bed of lies—but she doesn’t ask a lot of questions, or any really, about what me and Faith were like in the day-to-day-ness of it.

  “I miss … knowing that she’s on this earth,” I say. “And sometimes …” I hesitate over this part, because I don’t want Dani to be hurt by it. “Sometimes I wish I could talk to her about our son. Tell her things he did, or said. Sometimes I do talk to her about those things. In my head, y’know?”

  “Yeah. I know. I’m like that with my Dad. Especially if I’ve done something that I think would make him proud, I talk to him in my head.”

  “So,” I say. “What’re you about to do now?”

  We say this when we’ve been talking on the phone for a while and want to signal that we’re about to hang up. Talking about Faith, thinking about the ESPYs looming around the corner … all of it makes me want to be alone with my thoughts.

  “I’m about to read,” Dani says. “Want to?”

  “Want to, what?”

  “Read with me. Or not, read with me. But have me read to you.”

  I laugh a little. “No thanks. You have fun with that.”

  “It’s ‘Of Mice and Men’. Remember that book from English class?”

  “I remember that it was depressing as hell,” I say. “And why would you be reading …”

  “It’s good to get back to basics sometimes. And anyway, it’s more than just depressing. It’s one of the great books about loneliness, and isolation, companionship, friendship.”

  I know all about loneliness and isolation. But because of Danielle, I am learning more about companionship, and about friendship.

  “There are some really good parts. I’m going to read it to you.”

  “No.”

  “Rand. It’ll level you out, I promise. You’ll relax, forget all your worries … Listening to someone read aloud has therapeutic benefits.”

  “What makes you think I need to be … leveled out?” It’s actually kind of freaky the way she can read me so easily, even over the phone. “Are you trying to ‘life coach’ me?” I ask.

  Dani laughs. “Only if you want me to.”

  “You know what I want,” I tell her, lowering my voice.

  “No, I don’t. What do you want?”

  “For you to be here, and not there.” When I’m tired, shit slips past the filter. This must be one of those times, because I am sounding straight up hokey right now.

  There is a long silence, and I wonder whether Dani is thinking the same thing.

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” she says finally, and I think her voice sounds a little choked, a little clogged like what I said touched her. “So, instead, let me read to you.”

  I don’t know where she gets these ideas. I don’t know how she’s able to persuade me to go along with them. But she almost always does.

  “Fine,” I tell her, trying to sound resigned. “Go ahead. Read to me.”

  And she does. And I listen.

  And after a while, damned if I don’t feel myself ‘level out’ as she calls it. It’s not the story that relaxes me, making my muscles soften, and my eyes grow heavy. And I don’t know how long it takes, but all I know is that just before I fall asleep, my last thought if that I like this, drifting off with the sound of Danielle’s voice in my head.

  “You been kinda scarce, Miss Erlinger.”

  “No, I haven’t. Have I?”

  “Been trying to catch up with you for a minute,” Corey says. He stretches his long legs out in front of him, clumsily maneuvering to avoid having his knees collide with the desk.

  Corey is the client who helped me get “to the next level” as they say. Before him, I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t just kidding myself with this whole life coaching thing. But since I was able to accomplish something with him, and saw actual, real-world improvements in his life, I gained confidence that maybe, I knew what I was doing after all.

  As a high school draftee into the NBA, his adjustment problems led his parents to contact me, and we have been working together ever since, Corey and I.

  But his schedule makes it challenging for us to talk on the phone, let alone meet in person and it isn’t unusual for him to reach out at the last minute to try to get on my calendar. Until recently, I was always able to accommodate him, but now that he’s saying it, I realize I have been less available for impromptu sessions. A life coach who doesn’t have a life of her own is much more accessible to her clients. But now that I have Rand and Little Rocket, there have been a few times when I missed the chance to check in with Corey.

  “Maybe we should set up recurring appointments?” I suggest to him now. “Pick some dates that we set in stone, and plan not to miss unless it’s unavoidable?”

  “That’d work.” Corey pulls out his phone. “I’ll check my dates right now.”

  As we’re both poring over our calendars, I sneak a look at Corey. He is just twenty now, and has been in the NBA for just over two years. His clothes look more expensive, and his shoes definitely do. In sportswear, he only wears Nike, because he has an endorsement deal, and when he wears their shoes, his are custom-made. He even smells more prosperous. But he is still just a kid, with a gangly awkwardness that I think it will take him a few more years to shed.

  When he showed up a little while ago, he hugged me with what felt like genuine affection, and I hugged him back, trying to reconcile the kid standing in front of me with the much more polished young man I sometimes see on-camera, rehashing some of his plays, and making forecasts about his next game. On-camera interviews used to be his major area of anxiety when he first came to me. He said that he was preoccupied, even while he played, with the likelihood that after the game, he would be mobbed by reporters, asking him questions about each move he made on-court.

  It got so bad, he was beginning to plan what he might say later, even while he planned a lay-up, or ran the ball down court. And predictably, that made him play much more poorly, missing shots that should have been simple, and not passing, or catching passes that should have been easy for him. Corey’s ‘problem’, I learned after many weeks of working with him, was the plain old fear of public speaking, and nothing more.

  Together we talked about it, orchestrated times when he could practice, and found out something important. If he took control of a situation in which he was expected to speak, he was much more comfortable. If he came to a post-game press conference with something he had prepared and wanted to say, or if he walked toward the reporters to initiate an on-camera interview before they surged toward him, he wasn’t anxious at all. We didn’t ever get to the bottom of why that made all the difference, but for Corey, it did.

  I wasn’t a psychologist, but he said the first time he remembered being scared of speaking in public was when a teacher called him up to the front of the room and he wasn’t prepared. His classmates had laughed at him, stuttering and stumbling through his answers to the teacher’s questions. All we had done together, Corey and I, was help him re-create that moment of having to speak to a crowd, but this time with him prepared, and in control.

  “I can do weekly,” he tells me now. “Like on Tuesdays …”

  “Corey, you don’t need to speak to me weekly,” I say. “Things are fine. You’re playing well, and I watch you on television all the time. You sound great, you look great …”

  “Yeah, but that’s only because I know I got you in my corner,” he says, looking up from his phone. “You’re my secret weapon, Miss Erlinger. I really would like it if we could keep talking on a regular.”

  “Corey …” I begin, about to tell him he is being sweet. But I don’t say that. Maybe he is being sweet, but he’s reminded me of some
thing that has been easy to forget lately, in the hustle and bustle of a different life than I used to have—I am good at what I do.

  I am good at what I do, and will be successful, if I just make time to do it.

  “I think I needed to see you today, Corey,” I say instead. “I think I needed to see you just as much as you think you needed to see me.”

  Now I am sure of the decision that had me a little wracked with guilt the night before. I can’t possibly go to LA with Rand for a week. I have a job to do, a business to build; and I can’t let my role as the woman on his arm at the ESPYs stand in the way of that.

  ~4~

  People, places, and things.

  The first time I ever heard that refrain, was from my boy, DaQuan. He was my teammate, and maybe the closest friend I had at the time. Quan was with me on that infamous night in Las Vegas when I wound up pulling out my dick and stopping traffic to relieve myself in the middle of Fremont.

  In the clip from TMZ, Quan was right there, laughing, egging me on at first, and then dragging me away when, in the distance, we hear the approaching wail of sirens.

  Two weeks after that, Quan was avoiding me like the plague, and when I stepped to him about it, he gave it to me straight.

  ‘My wife ain’t nothin’ like yours, Rocket,’ he said. ‘She saw that tape and dang near lost her mind. Says I need to stay away from people, places and things that lead to that kind of shit. Or she will leave me. And she don’ play.’

  At the time, I focused only on that first part: ‘my wife ain’t nothin’ like yours’.

  And I was pissed at Quan for calling out what was I desperately trying to distract myself from—the fact that my marriage wasn’t a conventional marriage. Some people—me included—might say it wasn’t a marriage at all. I didn’t focus on the fact that I, Quan’s best friend, had been labeled by his wife as one of the people in his life who would lead him into self-destructive behavior.

  Quan would use those words again over the year following. Whenever I would try to entice him to come to the club, to hook up with some highly-motivated groupies buzzing around us in a bar, or some other ill-advised mess, he would grin, shake his head and say, ‘Nah, man. People, places and things.’

  When my wife died, Quan was the only one of my teammates, only one of my so-called friends who kept calling, over and over, and over again. Even though I never took those calls. He hollered at least once a week, up to eighteen months after Faith died. I heard he moved back to Alabama and runs a football camp or something like that now.

  Anyway, I’m thinking about Quan now, as I mill around in the foyer that leads into the colossally huge house of one of the LA team’s marquee players, a wide receiver named Chris Spencer. Spencer is as cocky as they come. He greeted me at the front door as soon as I arrived, with a woman on either side of him, and dressed in a black velour robe, Fila sandals and a tight boxer-style swimsuit.

  “C’mon through, Rocket,” he said, a cigar between his teeth.

  I almost laughed, he’s such a cliché. Not even thirty yet, thinking he’s king of the world because he can induce pretty girls with barely a high school education who don’t bring much to the table as far as native intelligence, to come sit by his pool, drink his booze and blow his friends.

  I shouldn’t be so judgmental, because I used to be Chris Spencer. Hey, we all gotta travel our own journey, right? But this kid, if my read of his stats is right, will have a much shorter journey in the League than he realizes.

  So, I went through to the back, grabbed a glass that was handed to me by a passing server, and looked around. And it was basically what I expected. Lots of guys, but lots more women, playing the kinds of games in the pool that we used to play back in high school. Except with a lot of alcohol to loosen things up. I knew the scene so well, I may as well have choreographed it. After nodding my acknowledgment to a few folks, I turned and went back inside and to the foyer, where I am now.

  As usual, the women fell into three categories, the Young and Dumb ones who were so doggone happy to be at a pool party at the home of an NFL player, they were allowing liberties—ass-groping, nipple-tweaking—that never led anyplace good, while they squealed and ran around pretending it was all in good fun. Four out of five of those women will wind up naked under some dude who is too drunk to truly please them, or fending off the attentions of some second-string low-rate player who’s only here to get Chris Spencer’s leftovers.

  Then there were the Long Gamers. Those were the women who remained a little more aloof, choosing to sit in conversation with one particular dude rather than playing the entire field. Those chicks were older, definitely north of twenty-five, and coming up on the dreaded age of twenty-nine, around which time they either needed some baller to wife her, or knock her up; but preferably both. Otherwise, damn, she might have to find herself a better job than the one she has working in that high-end boutique on Rodeo Drive. Those women aren’t running around half-naked, but sitting on a lounger in a casually elegant cover-up, legs demurely crossed, sipping champagne.

  And finally, there were the Old Heads. Not old at all, they were my age-group, thirty to thirty-three, or so. Most of those women were standing here with me in the foyer, drinking something with very little alcohol, like a white wine spritzer or something like that. They had arrived—and intended to remain—fully-clothed in maxi- or sundresses, even though they knew it was a pool party.

  Not only were they not trying to compete with the Young and Dumb chicks with the tight, supple, barely-out-of-high-school bodies, but they had been there and done that. No longer too interested in scoring a baller, they were here for men like me—executives and sports personalities who had likely done all their share of running around and were looking for a quieter life, with a wife who “still looks damn good” and has learned to conduct herself with a little more poise than the chicks outside shrieking by the pool.

  Yeah, so I’m standing here, rum and Coke in hand, bored out of my mind and already wondering how soon I can leave because I know this scene way too well. But there’s another part of me that feels anxious, like a former crackhead wandering into the “bad” part of town where they know they can score a hit way too easily.

  I’m not looking to score anything, other than brownie points with my new ESPN bosses, two of whom are here, valiantly trying to network with players who only have pussy and drinking on the brain. But we’re all in town for the ESPYs, which is like the prom for the network. Lots of the suits who spend most of the year in Bristol or New York only ever get to meet the stars who are their bread-and-butter at this time of year. And so, some of them are starstruck and will be hanging around for a while.

  Reaching into the pocket of my lightweight blazer, I pull out my phone and look at the face.

  Nothing from Dani.

  “Shit,” I mutter.

  She has one last session before she can make it to the airport to join me out here, and I asked her to text me when she was done, so I’d know she would make the flight.

  I warned her she would be cutting it close, but she insisted she wouldn’t, because she would be “rigid” with her client about ending on time. Dani is never rigid about anything, so I knew that was BS. She is like putty in people’s hands. Her pain-in-the-ass so-called best friend who walks all over her and she lets it happen, Little Rocket who can get her to do his bidding with even the hint of a pout, and … yeah, me too. But for obvious reasons, I don’t mind as much when she spoils, or gives in to me.

  “Rocket Reese,” a voice says, as I look up. “I can’t believe it.”

  My eyes fall on a woman in a form-fitting but tasteful, pink summer dress that has a print with little white blossoms all over it. She is a dark-haired Latina, very pretty, with a long, asymmetrical bob that brushes one shoulder. She looks like a sexy Sunday School teacher, who has learned to harness the sexiness. But this is no Sunday School teacher.

  It’s Rayna.

  Shit.

  I should have known as soon
as I set foot in Chris Spencer’s house. People, places, and things.

  “You look good,” Rayna says. She touches my forearm with the tip of a finger, and then pulls away, like she isn’t sure I want to be touched.

  We’re sitting on the steps in Chris Spencer’s portico, a few yards away from where two teenagers in red vests are parking the cars for arriving guests, or retrieving them for people departing. Altogether, I think there are probably about seventy people inside. The music is loud, and so is the laughter, so Rayna and I came to sit out here to catch up.

  As soon as she touched me, it all came back, all the crazy shit we used to do.

  I once screwed her in a nightclub bathroom. It was one of those places where there were—unbelievably—no stalls. Just a single, well-decorated, larger than necessary bathroom with a single silent-flush commode, pewter fixtures, and enormous bowl-style sink big enough to bathe a toddler. I backed Rayna up inside, and ploughed into her as she leaned against the wall and propped one leg up on the toilet seat, while someone outside banged on the door and asked us to hurry up.

  Another time, we hooked up in the tunnel in Alameda Coliseum after dark, the night before I played a game there. I paid off a security guard, and he let us in because I had the stupid-ass idea that I wanted to fuck Rayna in the end-zone for good luck.

  And then there was the time I asked her to meet me in a hotel room in some swanky boutique-type place when I landed in LA for a game, and she did. But she brought along a friend …

  “You look good, too,” I tell her, finally.

  And it’s true. Now, just two plus years since I’ve seen her last, Rayna has turned into one of the Old Heads, dressed almost modestly, gunning for wifehood, and not just a good time with someone whose face is on a Jumbo Tron, and on television every Sunday in the fall. Her eyes are softer, and kinder, and less calculating than I remember them, and I have a feeling that like me, she’s been through some things.

  “Things are a little different for me now,” she says. “I’ve got a daughter. And so, you know, that slows things down a little … thank God.” She makes the sign of the cross.