Ruth would have liked to say: “So what?” What’s good enough for Ruth is not, by extension, good enough for Ariana. To depend on your body’s excellence is to risk the pop of ruination, which you will register even before the pain sets in, and which will render the pain secondary to the grief. Ruth would do anything to spare her daughter that pop—or the analogous moment in a model’s career, which Ruth, for all her fretting, cannot begin to imagine.
On her eighteenth birthday Ariana signed with a DC-based agency and was assigned to Manny, a booker whose verbal tic is to say “beautiful” in place of “okay” or “sure.” Ruth had never seen her daughter prouder than when pulling up the agency’s home page and presenting the screen for Ruth’s approval. It took Ruth a harrowing few seconds to locate Ari’s headshot among the rows of air-brushed faces. Finally, her eyes alighted on Ariana’s hair. (Those curls, Ruth has never gotten over them.) Alarm bells clanged in her head. Too late.
As Angie slides Ruth’s glasses over the bridge of her nose, Ruth prepares to end the call. “I’m not going to crash your trip. I was just teasing.”
Truthfully, Ruth is desperate to watch Ariana work—both to ensure no one lays a finger on her, and because her curiosity knows no bounds. How does her daughter the model behave? How do photographers and assistants and advertisers behave toward her daughter the model? Still, every time Ariana denies her the opportunity to find out, Ruth is relieved. Since she was very small, Ari has lived a life of which Ruth has only a partial view. She has learned about her daughter from report cards and babysitters, by stealing glances at the texts proliferating on Ari’s screen. Now that her child is a legal adult, Ruth isn’t sure how much she wants to know.
She isn’t sure how much she deserves to know.
“So I was wondering . . .” Gloom has lowered Ariana’s voice. Ruth braces herself. She needs to turn her mind toward the game, to metaphorically bang her head against the stanchion. “Yes?”
“Are you, like, for sure not coming to my graduation?”
Ruth’s heart seems to clench.
When Ariana was eight, she went through a phase of expressing absolute bereavement every time her mother left town for a game. In her bare feet and nightgown, she would chase Ruth to the driveway and try to wrestle her suitcase from the cabdriver before he could load it into the trunk. Her sobs were frayed, feral, and they merged with high-pitched screams that sawed at the cords of Ruth’s motivation. If not for her own mother’s tender firmness as she appeared in the driveway—fully dressed, no matter the hour—and carried Ariana back inside, Ruth would have caved. She’d have canceled her contract and stayed home every time.
Instead, she climbed into the taxi feeling light-headed and dissociative. She would watch the clock on the dashboard and try to guess the minute at which Ariana had heaved her last sob. Surely, by the time the cab turned onto the parkway, Cheryl had distracted Ari with cartoons or frozen waffles. And surely, by the time Ruth pushed through the terminal’s revolving door, Ariana’s face bore the ghost of her anguish—dusty streaks beneath her eyes, a fading rash on her neck.
“It’s still too early to say, baby.”
“Okay. Except I realized I really want you there. Dad’s coming, and it’s going to be so depressing having dinner alone with him after.”
“Lester said he’s coming?”
“Yeah. No matter what.”
But Lester is contractually obligated to call a Game Seven if there is one—no matter what. That he’s gambled on the lie does not surprise Ruth, but now she needs to smack him.
“Since when is spending time with your father depressing?”
“Since his girlfriend dumped him and he says things like, ‘Better to be over the hill than under it, right, kiddo?’ while staring at the wall like a neutered dog.”
“Gwen dumped Lester?” Ruth glances at Angie, who has a hairpin between her teeth and does not react.
“Uh-huh. She told Dad she wants a second act.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“New man. Babies. The works.”
“Gwen wants babies? The woman’s in her forties.” A retired dancer, Gwen owns a barre studio in Adams Morgan, where she shoves and stretches sinewy women into a series of socket-defying poses. Her lean limbs and augmented lips make her look both younger and older than Ruth.
“I know, it’s gross. Dad gets all worked up about it and tells me details I do not need to know. That’s why I want you there.”
“Of course I want to be there, sweetie. But if there’s a Game Seven, I have to work it.”
“You don’t have to,” Ariana says. “People get sick. People have family emergencies.”
“People do.”
“But you don’t.”
Ruth is silent.
Ariana heaves a sigh. Then, as if her conscience has put a gun to her head: “Have fun tonight, Mom. Maybe next year you’ll be calling the game.”
Angie is coaxing Ruth’s hair into camera-friendly waves when Phillip shoulders through the dressing room door. Close behind him is play-by-play announcer Jay Thomas—known for lingering at the broadcast table after especially breathtaking fourth quarters, his eyes darting between spots on the floor as he mutters a recap of the final play, cramming for some self-administered quiz—followed by color analyst Lester Devon. Together they are the network’s highest-rated broadcasting duo. In ongoing celebration of this fact, they like to coordinate their outfits, opting for ties and pocket squares in theatrical patterns that tend to look better with Jay’s dark skin than with Lester’s pallor. Both men are bald, their heads already oiled or moisturized or powdered, whatever needs to happen there, freeing them up to crash Ruth’s hour with Angie.
“How did you find me?” she says.
Phillip is composing a text message. He raises his one-minute finger, a gesture in which his hand will one day freeze.
“We wandered blindly, calling out your name.” Lester sinks to a bench behind Ruth’s chair but still within her mirrored view.
“We asked Natalie,” Jay answers. Their stage manager’s knowledge of their whereabouts is so precise, Ruth sometimes wonders if Natalie has tapped their phones.
Phillip fires off a flurry of texts before lowering the screen a healthy six inches from his face. “Okay, RD. What we talked about, where you introduce the Emory-Darius drama and segue into some stats? I’m calling an audible. Turns out Taylor Swift is coming tonight. I want you to talk to her. She’s tall, right? Ask if she played in high school—did she go to high school? Ask if she’s ever written a song about Emory Turner. No, don’t do that. That’s sexist, isn’t it?”
Ruth makes eye contact with his reflection. Steam rises from the lock of hair clamped in Angie’s curling wand. “I’m not sure how tall she is.”
“Great. Lead with that.”
Ruth wonders if the Swift assignment is, indirectly, the result of last night’s call, which they are pretending did not happen. But no—in their afternoon meeting Phillip seemed pleased with Ruth’s pitches. If he thinks fans want a screenful of pop star in the minutes before Game One of the NBA finals, he’s probably right.
Ruth says, “People are riveted by this Emory-Darius story.”
“Lester will compare their stats in the opener. Lake’s efficiency, Turner’s defense, the ways their games have changed since the trade—don’t worry, we’re using all that. It’s good stuff.”
Ruth twists in her chair to look directly at Lester. Angie exhales through her nose. Squeezing his shoulders, Lester exonerates himself: this is out of his control; Phillip is running the show; et cetera.
Ruth’s idea was to start with some drama to hook even channel-surfing non-fans: two ex-teammates, formerly the league’s most lethal pick-and-roll partnership—whose families vacationed together! Whose daughters attended the same Montessori school in Seattle!—meet again as competitors in
the finals. From there, she was going to illustrate the matchup with numbers. And she spent time on those numbers, boiling each player’s game down to its most effective parts. Too much time, maybe, for a segment that will top out at thirty seconds.
Sensing her resistance, Phillip sighs. He slides his phone into his pocket, stopping short of withdrawing his hand. “Look, Ruth, you’re not an analyst tonight. You’re a reporter. Taylor Swift posted an Insta story wishing Emory good luck. She pretended she was his coach, like she taught him everything he knows. It was actually quite droll.”
Angie gives Ruth’s hair a final fluff and begins packing up her tools. Ruth rises from her chair, stomping the lost feeling back into her legs and ignoring her pregame butterflies, more frenzied than usual. “I have nothing against Taylor. I’m sure she’s fascinating in her own right. But listen, I sat down with Emory yesterday. The man said, and this is a direct quote, ‘Darius is my brother, but for the next four games he’s my enemy.’ ”
Phillip’s head droops to one side. “That’s good.”
“That is good,” Lester says. “Turner never gives me anything good. I ask him a question, and he fixes me with this look, this mean fucking look, like he’s picturing my head in a toilet.”
“Now I’m picturing your head in a toilet,” Jay says.
Out of habit, the men are sitting unconventionally close to each other, elbows accustomed to colliding in the booth. “How do I look?” Lester asks.
“Not bad,” Jay says.
Ruth pleads her case. “I’ll hook them with the drama. I’ll quote Turner. And then I’ll finish with the stats, like we talked about.”
Phillip’s salt-and-pepper hair gets saltier as he chews his lip and performs a mental calculation: Taylor Swift’s online antics versus Ruth’s desperation for airtime.
They are no longer pretending last night’s call didn’t happen.
“I won’t be verbose,” Ruth says. “I’ll make it punchy and to the point. I’ll smile.” She gives him a preview of the smile she means—a disarming display of whitened teeth, requiring careful contortion of each part of her face. A process through which Ariana has coached her.
Phillip’s pocket vibrates. His one-minute finger seems to rise again, then slices through the air to point at Ruth. “You got it,” he says. “Back to the original plan. But in the event that Seattle’s up by twenty, let’s fit Swift into a segment later on.”
“That’s fair,” Ruth says. But she’s not expecting a blowout. Ruth has been obsessed with Darius Lake all season. The trade—which, for a lesser player, might have meant the beginning of the end—unlocked something. The adjustments to his game were barely discernible; it’s possible he cleaned up his shot, tightened his right elbow, got more rotation on the ball. But mentally he’s transformed. Gone are the moments of hesitation, the long twos, the nail-biting on the bench. As a Wildcat, Darius stays ahead of the play: he gets a touch and makes a judgment in the same instant; blink, and he’s either shooting a three or at the rim. The Sonics may have stats and history on their side, but Ruth suspects that Emory, already unpredictable under pressure, will meet his match in his old friend.
Phillip and Angie try to exit the room at the same time. Angie steps back and Phillip passes her with long, self-important strides. Covertly, Ruth appraises her body in the full-length mirror—fine, she looks fine, unless her skirt is too tight across her ass? A week ago it wasn’t—before telling Lester and Jay, “I’ll see you guys out there.”
Hoping no one follows her, she turns down a wide hallway muraled with iconic Emory dunks, passing locker rooms whose precise layouts she could conjure in her sleep. Over the course of her career, Ruth has clocked hundreds of hours in the bowels of this building. Pioneer Center is the oldest structure in the NBA, slated for implosion this summer, the end of an era. Next season, the Supersonics will play in a glossy new arena overlooking the Puget Sound.
Everyone Ruth encounters on her way to the court smiles or gawks at her. In addition to smiling and gawking they say her name—either with proud familiarity or with slack-jawed reverence. “Ruth,” says a twenty-six-year-old shooting coach. “Ruuuuth,” bleats a bearded beat writer with a popular podcast on which Ruth keeps promising to appear. “Ruth!” chirps Alison Lee, a sideline reporter for Seattle’s regional network, known for abusing the talk-back button with unworthy huddle updates. Alison’s contract won’t be renewed—a bit of gossip Ruth wishes she didn’t know. She likes Alison.
Seattle’s mascot, a well-groomed, ever-pensive Sasquatch, clasps his hairy hands together and bows mutely at Ruth, implying but not speaking her name.
Then, coming up behind her in the tunnel: the smooth timbre familiar to anyone who has ever patronized a sports bar on a Wednesday night, now drained of the irony with which he protected himself in the dressing room.
“Ruthie. Wait for me.”
It’s possible to forget that she once kneeled at the altar with Lester Devon, before Catholicism completely lost its grip on her. That she took (and never returned) his name, made his bed, pressed his shirts. She gave birth with the man stationed at her right knee, his attention fixed on the gore between her legs, his spirited narration of the event a precursor to his second career. To forget all that, Ruth must either lock herself in the present moment, taking shelter in their roles for the night (Lester in the analyst’s chair, she on the sideline) or go all the way back to college (Lester the coach, she the starting point guard). But the pet name is too much. It pinches a nerve. She hears Ruthie and thinks: what’s he doing here?
They stand alone at the mouth of the tunnel. Already the roar is oceanic.
“You’ve heard the news?” he asks her.
Most conversations with Lester are about Lester; even so, Ruth hesitates.
“What news?”
He laces his fingers behind his neck. “Come on. I’m abdicating the throne!”
In his late fifties, Lester has reached peak handsomeness. Observing the brightness of his gray eyes, the rough-hewn jaw and easy smile, you might assume his bald dome is a choice. But Ruth knows that by thirty-seven Lester was hiding a geriatric halo of auburn fuzz beneath his baseball cap. By forty a barber was shaving him clean twice a month. If she’s honest, Ruth misses the caps. She misses nineties fashion in general—the dressy turtlenecks and billowing khakis. These things looked right to her.
She laughs at him. “Yes. Everyone knows that. You know I know. Why are you asking if I know?”
Lester is unabashed. “You haven’t said a word!”
Ruth sometimes worries that her ex-husband’s naked need for her attention is what has enabled her to remain unmarried since their divorce. When the boyfriends realize that Ruth Devon is 20 percent maternal anxiety, 80 percent basketball—which is to say, when the boyfriends leave—she only has to call up Lester to hear her name spoken with a combination of thirst and gratitude. That Lester never stopped wanting her was, until she met Joel, the North Star of her personal life. (Some years it was the entirety of her personal life.) Now his affection remains a comfort but also a burden. Several times per season he touches her face, and she pushes him away.
By failing to congratulate him on his retirement, Ruth didn’t mean to hurt Lester’s feelings. She meant to put some superstitious distance between herself and the subject. She wants Lester’s job, but not because it’s his. Ruth has wanted a spot in the booth since the days when Lester, a head NBA coach, considered the media a pain in his ass.
Ruth asks, “What was I supposed to say?”
“That you’re happy for me? Proud of an old friend? Hoping I’ll finally pass on my secrets of the trade?”
“As far as I’m concerned, your leaving is a loss. For the league and for the network. And for me.”
Either Lester knows she wants his job and is choosing to say nothing, a display of restraint for which there is no precedent, or he is oblivious—wh
ich would be typical.
“I suppose you’ve heard the other news,” Lester says.
“You and Gwen? Ariana just told me. I was sorry to hear it.”
“She wants children.” Lester turns up his palms. “As if I could jump in a time machine, go back to the eighties, and impregnate her.”
“Gwen was a child in the eighties. I’m sure that’s not at all what she wants.”
Lester blinks. “I’m the one in the time machine, remember? And I was in my twenties. Twenty-six is the perfect age to start a family. When I was twenty-six I could touch my toes. From a standing position, I could literally bend in half and touch my goddamn toes.”
“You’re nuts,” Ruth observes.
“I got a vasectomy after our divorce,” Lester says.
They are interrupted by Wildcats center Anthony Moore and his nine-year-old son. “Can Jakob get a pic with you two?” Anthony asks. “He’s a big, big fan. Loves you, Ruth.”
Ruth’s reaction to Lester’s comment is still active on her face. She’s aware of relaxing her features as she nods at Moore. She doesn’t know him well. He’s a veteran, just past his prime, who spent nine years in Atlanta before signing with Cincinnati. Born in the Dominican Republic, raised in Michigan, married to a beauty queen. He rarely hits a shot from the perimeter, but when he does he celebrates by miming steeping a tea bag and taking a sip, a gesture that never fails to crack Ruth up.
Lester is already grinning, bending his knees to crouch at kid height, but Jakob presses himself firmly against Ruth. One skinny arm snakes around her midsection, and for a moment Ruth feels she will die if she never has another baby and if the baby is not a boy. A boy, in her imagination, would be like Ruth: restless and competitive and always slightly out of breath. A boy would brag about her career to his friends—something Ariana never considered, preferring the cryptic deflection, “My mom’s on TV.”
Anthony Moore snaps the photo from his height of seven-two, an aerial shot that must include more of Lester’s scalp than his face. Satisfied, Moore passes the phone (pregame contraband) to his son. Jakob is slow to disentangle from Ruth. “You’re awesome,” he whispers as if it’s the salutation of a prayer.
The Second Season Page 4