Nothing will prevent this interview from becoming a meme, but if the man cracks even the suggestion of a smile, Ruth will be in on, no longer the butt of, the joke. She holds out.
He does not smile. He doesn’t even blink. Nine seconds have passed since she asked him a question.
“We’re on television,” Ruth reminds him. Her voice wavers.
“Ah,” he says, cheeks sagging. He crinkles his eyes with a gentleman’s neutered charm. Someday Ruth’s cheeks will sag. Her neck will fold like an accordion and her knuckles will swell—and by the time it happens, the camera will have long forgotten her. “Lucky us.”
The coach turns. His open suit jacket brushes against Ruth’s fist as he moves past her.
Ruth avoids her A2’s frown—which, coming from Simone, counts as sympathy—and scurries back to her home base. With trembling hands—shit—she hits the talk-back button on her mic and asks her producer, “Are we airing that?”
“Yup,” Phillip says in the distracted tone of someone trying to merge onto the interstate.
Of course he’s airing it. Why wouldn’t he? Coach interviews, as a genre, are strained and hollow, impervious to real insight or emotion. Tonight, Bell gave them anger, despair, impatience! He put Ruth in her place by suggesting she stand there and absorb it all. She obliged.
The game will resume in a matter of seconds. She needs it sooner—needs the Wildcats to come back from their twelve-point deficit, needs the Sonics to feel the pressure. Needs the snap of the net, the impact of a hard pick, point guards calling out plays. Needs the game to liquefy her. Because nothing short of good basketball will drown out the echo of her own voice (did it crack with shame? Fear?) as she begged Rick Bellantoni for mercy.
We’re on television.
CHAPTER SIX
When a game is in progress she has no personal life, per Ruth Devon policy. Last year an earthquake struck southern California and reverberated one-hundred and fifty miles east, rocking the Las Vegas arena where Ruth, Lester, and Jay were calling a summer league game as a trio. Ruth watched the screens on the broadcast table quiver, saw the scoreboard sway high above the court. Lester and Jay were riffing on a player from France, a point guard, tiny and lithe, with inexplicable prowess at the rim.
“Barthez with the hesitation, spin, and he finishes!” Jay marveled.
“He’s a whirling dervish,” Lester said.
“A French revolution is what he is,” Jay said.
“Oui, oui.”
Calmly, Ruth said, “We are feeling the effects of an earthquake.”
“Whoa. You’re right.” Lester gripped Ruth’s forearm.
“The ref has stopped the game. Players seem confused. Unclear whether fans will need to evacuate—I’m a little concerned about the movement of the scoreboard, not to mention the overall structure of the arena—but we will keep you updated as this event unfolds.”
Her daughter was safe on the East Coast. And maybe Ruth knew as much in the core of her consciousness, or maybe she forgot she was anyone’s mother. Possibly Ruth is addicted to the way her work effaces her. Losing herself in the simultaneous currents of the game and the telecast is easy from the vantage point of the booth, where she was that night. No cameras in her face. No awkward hustling from one huddle to another. Her headset snug like armor.
Tonight, Ruth’s policy is failing her. Or she is failing it. Joel finally tunes into the game after the third quarter, during Ruth’s uneventful interview with Sonics coach Andre Morris, as tight-lipped as Bell but politely so. You look beautiful, says Joel’s text message. Halfway through the fourth, Ruth is still thinking about it.
She could quit. She could accept she is not going to get Lester’s job. That the network executives will find a reason to keep her on the sideline, assuming the near-tears with which she gifted them tonight weren’t enough on their own. Because clearly, she can’t think on her feet. Or come up with a question worthy of Bell’s consideration—and anyway, wasn’t it unprofessional the way her lips parted and froze? The way her makeup looked, on-screen, like permanent humiliation?
She needs fresh air. A breeze to cool the sweat beading at her temples, the sharp, clarifying smell of the ocean. Something Ruth didn’t foresee when she was younger was how much of her life would be spent inside. And not the comforting interior of a home or an office or a coffee shop, but the vast, commercialized spaces of stadiums and airports. Where windows don’t open and you need a map to find an exit. As a kid in Hampton, Virginia she was always outdoors. If she wasn’t shooting hoops at the park, she was on the beach. Ruth has promised herself that if she ever loses her job, she will move somewhere warm and coastal.
Wouldn’t the West Coast be ideal? She could turn in her mic, her IFB, her notes. She could coach high school basketball and jog along the shoreline with Ariana and get a dog. A rowdy rescue of a dog, a female with soft ears and a propeller-tail, who needs to be walked first thing in the morning and schooled in obedience. Ruth would be good at training a dog. She would commit to that bitch. Ruth’s heart races as she flirts with the idea, the way a person might close their eyes on the highway to flirt with death. The number of men vying for Lester’s job is in the double digits. Ruth’s competition played professional basketball and coached professional basketball. The job is not hers, it never was, and she ought to pull herself from the running before she is rejected.
The game gets tight. The score is tied when Wildcats point guard Denzel Kerr, as cocky as he is Christian, sinks a three from the logo and the camera catches him mouthing motherfuckers toward the Sonics and thank you, Jesus toward the rafters. Sonics ball: Kasey Powell, the former Wildcat for whom Darius was traded, sees Emory slip a pick and dive toward the rim. Emory receives the lob and dunks in one motion, shaking the backboard and, through the crowd’s response, the whole arena. Overtime, Ruth thinks wishfully. She would take two overtimes, or three: that the game has to end at some point—that basketball is time-bound, zero-sum—is the problem.
After a stop, the Sonics have the ball with seventeen seconds left. Emory Turner is alone, dribbling down the clock at the top of the key. As the crowd’s roar rises to the decibel that lodges in your chest and splits open your ears, Powell sets a screen. And there’s the switch: Turner is staring down Darius Lake. Turner crosses over, steps back, crosses over again; these moves would usually leave his defender off balance and grasping as Emory shoots over him or blows by him. Tonight, Emory’s defender is the one person who can read his mind.
Ruth, who prefers to keep her eyes on live action, happens to glance at her monitor in time to catch a close shot of Lake’s face, his upper lip curling: Is he talking trash on the game’s final possession? What did he say? Ruth hits the talk-back button reflexively. “What did he say?” She might as well be screaming into the surf.
Too much time has passed. Emory’s only choice is to take a one-legged fadeaway from twenty feet with Darius draped all over him. It’s a prayer, a brick. The buzzer is the crowd’s heart flatlining.
Ruth will never quit this job. She would sooner be dragged from the court.
In Ruth’s ear, and on televisions across America, Jay Thomas concludes, “It could have been a game-winner, but Turner’s shot is no good—and Game One goes to the Wildcats.”
Ruth is rising, telling Phillip she wants Darius for the walkout (“No shit” is his staticky reply) when she and Lester lock eyes across the floor.
He is shoulder to shoulder with Jay in the booth, his features framed by his headset, his traffic-cone-orange tie muted by the bedlam of the court. Lester’s expression cracks open, as if locating Ruth amid the throngs of Times Square or an airport terminal. Ruth considers his vasectomy. The chilling implications of it. After their divorce, Lester cut his losses, closed up shop? She hadn’t known. And a surge of nausea—at the thought of the scalpel? Or else Lester’s loyalty—makes Ruth wish he had never told her.
An NBA game overwhelms the senses. It’s not the optics or the forced bodily contact but the acoustics, the deluge of sound, that can throw Ruth off balance if she’s not careful. She has watched walkout interviews after Wimbledon, one voice at a time echoing in a tennis club, hushed, church-like—the assignment would be as alien to Ruth as a gig on the moon. In her ear, Phillip is saying she has a full minute to talk to Darius. Julian gestures for her to move closer to the player. Behind Ruth, two assistant coaches are shouting civilities at each other. Intermittent and alarming are the shrieks of dispersing fans; constant is the rumble of those still seated; and threatening to drown it all out is the arena’s house music, blaring through the ceiling-mounted speakers, throbbing at the base of Ruth’s skull.
She leans into Darius. On more than one occasion Ruth has been asked to rank the smelliest players in the league. She won’t do it, but she will tell you who, after a forty-eight-minute game, smells inexplicably like soap and fresh apples.
That would be Darius Lake.
“You’re certainly known as a two-way player, but in the second half tonight you exceeded expectations on the defensive end. Can you tell us what was going through your mind as you guarded Emory Turner on that last play?”
She’s hollering. The background noise will be adjusted for the broadcast, and in the absence of interference Ruth will sound unhinged. Men will take to Reddit: Why is Ruth Devon’s voice so strained? Why is she always screaming at everyone like my lesbian gym teacher in 1993?
“Um.” Darius hunches toward her, smoothing his braids with a flattened palm. “I saw what he was up to, and I thought I’d shut it down.” He speaks without inflection, in a voice so deep and tranquilizing Ruth can imagine the expedience with which he lulled his newborn babies to sleep.
“This has to be an emotionally challenging series for you. You and Emory Turner were the faces of the franchise here in Seattle for the better part of a decade. Seattle’s offense set screen after screen, forcing you to defend your former teammate, and you didn’t lose your composure, not for a moment. But it’s only Game One. Where do you go from here?”
“I usually go back to the hotel after the game.”
Ruth smiles, waiting him out. Playing with fire on live television. Again.
“Unless it’s a home game,” he clarifies. “Then I go home.”
Ruth says, “Let me rephrase: How is your team feeling heading into Game Two?”
“We plan to win it.”
Ruth chuckles her segment-ending chuckle. “You steal two games on the road, I think you’ll make a lot of people back home very happy.” She’s about to thank him when he stoops toward the microphone.
“What about you? Would you be happy?”
Both reporting and basketball are games of split-second reactions. Ruth’s subject can thwart her plans as easily as a well-executed defense. Certain players love to tease her, throwing questions back in her face; from Emory Turner she would expect this. Prepare for it, even. Heading into the interview with Darius Lake, Ruth doubted she could keep him on air for a full minute. Since when is he playful? When has he ever been coy?
When a player offers the media something it hasn’t seen before, the most common mistake is to pretend nothing happened. To filter out responses that don’t conform to a preconceived impression. When, in these moments of uncertainty, the reporter pauses instead? She gets gold.
Ruth tilts her head and looks at Darius openly. “Where there’s basketball, I’m always happy,” she says.
He extends a palm, requesting hers. Ruth shifts the mic from her right hand to her left, allowing Darius Lake to dap her up on live television. In the production truck, her director will shout, “Stay with Ruth. Stay . . . stay . . .” Milking the moment. Savoring the debut of a more confident, candid Darius Lake—finally freed from his function as Emory’s foil. Ruth imagines, with a mixture of relief and apprehension, the clip obliterating tonight’s interview with Rick Bellantoni, burying the coach a thousand thumbnails deep.
“Thank you, Darius.”
“Thanks, Ruth.” He turns away from the camera, peeling off his jersey to give to his mom, who is making her way down the concrete steps.
Ruth exhales on “Jay,” tossing back to the booth, as she must.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In her hotel room Ruth scrubs her face clean. She knots her hair and slips into one of several university-branded hoodies she collected discretely on last year’s college tour with Ariana. (The idea was to present her daughter with the pertinent hoodie as soon as Ariana chose a school; alas, the hoodies were absorbed by Ruth’s collection of athleisure wear.) Comfortable, Ruth can no longer access the body-based anxiety that creeps up on her before each broadcast, Angie laboring over Ruth’s face like a conservator intent on restoring some neglected work of art.
When she was younger, Ruth was virtuously unvain. Her bowl cuts grew into incidental mullets. Her knees were scarred, if not actively bleeding. She wore prescription athletic goggles, purchased begrudgingly by Cheryl after Ruth smashed two pairs of glasses on the basketball court. Then came college, her crush on Coach Devon followed by a career on television. Ever since: a mental map, its topography detailed, of her physical imperfections. For a long time the combination of professional makeup artists and Ruth’s workout routine kept her conventionally beautiful. She has thick blond hair, bright eyes, and a round nose of the kind popularized by Y2K-era actresses whom magazines described as “girls next door.” Then Ruth got older and her metabolism slowed, softened her chin and dimpled her arms. Her hard work etched itself into the fragile skin around her eyes. There was a time in her late-thirties when she kept expecting to wake up with her beauty refreshed, as if emerging from an illness or a particularly brutal hangover. When it dawned on her that the wrinkles were permanent, she was more fascinated than bereft: so this is what I look like.
Her age answered questions. About money (fifty cents to Lester’s dollar—still plenty) and marriage (nope) and children (just the one). It took time, but eventually she settled into these answers the way you settle into a new house or haircut. It is mostly a relief to be forty-two. To the extent that her job pressures her to chase both the appearance and the mindset of a younger woman, it’s pressure she resents. To the extent that Joel has ripped open the seams of the answered questions, Ruth feels a slow-seeping panic. She half-wishes she could drop to one knee and ask Joel to be her boyfriend indefinitely. Never leaving, forever not her husband. That could be sweet, right?
Or devastating.
Lounging in bed, sipping conservatively but also directly from the bottle of whiskey Joel ordered to her room while she was gone, Ruth relives her night.
This is insane. Literally the most @dariuslake has ever said at once.
OMFG did @dariuslake just do a JOKE? On the TELEVISION?
Go home, Darius. You’re drunk.
@dariuslake out here trying so damn hard to be Emory, like that’ll get him the dub. Smdh.
Normalize @dariuslake making facial expressions.
@dariuslake flirting with @HeyRD. Big mood, bro.
Lol @dariuslake trying to get Ruth to admit she’s rooting for Seattle.
Ahhhh don’t think I’ve ever seen @HeyRD speechless. Well played, sir.
Surprised to learn Darius has a Twitter account, Ruth taps his avatar. In the last decade he has tweeted twice. Once to share a heavily hashtagged picture of himself playing mini golf, and again, several years later, to congratulate Serena Williams on her twenty-second grand slam.
She is still scrolling, lying flat on the bed in her bra and shapewear, when Twitter goes dark to accommodate an incoming call from Phillip.
“That interview,” he says without preamble. Ruth last saw Phillip in the parking lot outside the production truck. An intern was filming him with a phone, asking, “Who on your staff would you say is indispensable?” Phillip pulled R
uth into his arms. “This lady. Always this lady.”
Now Phillip says, “That was wild. What was that?”
“I guess he was feeling good.”
“That was the most he’s ever said at one time!”
All the same tweets have leapt to the top of Phillip’s feed. Ruth says, “Look, no one expected the Wildcats to make it this far. As a comeback story, it’s irresistible. He’s not immune to that.”
There’s a pause. It’s hard to imagine Phillip without an energy drink or iced coffee in hand. At one in the morning he must be swigging from something else. Scotch. Or NyQuil.
“You think he got jealous of your friendship with Turner?”
“I wouldn’t say I have a friendship with Turner.”
“You two have a rapport. It’s no secret. On media day you were looking extremely friendly.”
A text message dings loudly in her ear. She suspects Lester but waits to check. “We’re friend-ly, sure. We’re not friends. Look, I have no idea what’s gotten into Darius, but I can tell you I’m here for it. Bell, on the other hand . . .”
“Oh, don’t worry about Bell. He’s a cranky old man. Everyone knows that.”
“Casual fans don’t know that. They’re watching and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy hates her guts.’ ”
“Everyone in the truck gets it. Everyone at the network gets it.”
Ruth takes a breath and braces herself. “I don’t know if they’ve made any decisions about next season, but I feel like I didn’t do myself any favors tonight.”
Phillip sounds suddenly, conveniently distracted, opting for a variation on what he’s already said. “His team was down twelve. When the deficit goes over ten, Bell gets his panties in a twist. Hardly your fault.”
Ruth’s stomach churns. She hasn’t eaten since before the game.
“I wasn’t prepared. I should have been faster to fill the silence. Or cut the interview short. Anything.”
The Second Season Page 6