In the arena, the same temperature feels lethal.
Ruth sometimes wonders if her work will be what kills her. If she’ll be trampled during an emergency evacuation. Caught in the underbelly of a California stadium when the big one hits. Players fear the fans, with their purchased proximity to the court. They fear the man who stabbed Monica Seles midmatch, the thieves who ransack the homes of football players on Sundays. In Ruth’s mind the predator is always the arena itself, whose vastness, meant to approximate the outdoors, keeps its occupants at an unnatural distance from the natural world. How hard would it be to escape, everyone scrambling for the exits at once?
Ruth adds heatstroke to the list of insulated dangers. A wave of vertigo causes her to brace herself against the wall. Is the building moving? The building is not moving; her phone is buzzing in her skirt pocket. Her daughter has texted her:
Download a temp app!!!
Ruth peers down the length of the hall, confused by Ariana’s omniscience. She sends back a trio of question marks and, lightning-fast, Ariana explains:
Dad says they’re waiting for you to report on the temperature. Download an app. Your phone has a thermometer.
It takes Ruth a second to process: what comes from the mouth of color analyst Lester Devon is, to Ariana, what “Dad says.” This is a family operation. Frantically, Ruth tries to write genius daughter but her phone autocorrects to genius squirrel and there is no time to clarify. The app is downloading. Ruth is rushing back to the court, sweating off her makeup and hating her shoes. When she undresses tonight, the insoles will be stained with blood.
At the mouth of the tunnel she sidesteps a cluster of rumpled, dehydrating journalists, getting as far onto the playing surface as she can with the game still in progress. She crouches at the corner of the court, holding her phone over the waxed wood. The numbers on her screen rise as the numbers on the game clock dwindle.
It is over ninety degrees. Ruth knew it was over ninety degrees. She could tell by the sweat pooling between her breasts and the prickling at the backs of her knees. But pooling and prickling cannot be quantified; pooling and prickling amount to speculation, and Ruth does not speculate.
She returns to her home base. Hitting the talk-back button as she slides into her seat, she says, “I’ve got a read on the temp.” Without asking for her source, Phillip communicates to the booth that Ruth is about to interrupt.
Lester, in Ruth’s ear: “And here’s Ruth Devon with an update from the sideline.”
Ruth, trusting her mic has been opened: “The Wildcats are not the only ones feeling the heat here in Seattle tonight. Due to some kind of electrical failure, the AC is out and it is ninety-one degrees on the court.”
Lester thanks her and launches into an analysis of how the heat could affect the final score. The Sonics, as a team, have more experience performing in high temperatures. Their point guard played a year in France, where stadiums are rarely air conditioned. Their Argentinian power forward doesn’t appear to have noticed the climate change, while their guard from the Virgin Islands looks, in Lester’s words, “invigorated.”
Hailing disproportionately from the northern half of America, the Wildcats are, by contrast, hot. Their eyes are glazed, their faces dewy and flushed, expressions wilting in disbelief. And then there’s Darius Lake, who is more than hot: he has a well-known tendency to cramp up. With the arena transformed into a steam room, he can barely walk.
By halftime Cincinnati is down fifteen. Wildcats retreat to the bench. They hunch their shoulders as trainers drape ice packs over their necks. The public address system blasts the hook from Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” a song Ariana heard and memorized at an inappropriately young age. Ruth laughs, and to her own ear her laughter sounds hollow—a cover for her mounting anxiety. The dread that sometimes wakes her in the middle of the night, recasting the basic facts of her life as insurmountable challenges. Her palms are slicker than they ought to be, her lower back enduring a succession of sharp, shooting pains. In her quest for the exact temperature she covered miles of the stadium’s underground labyrinth. She could use an ice pack, or a Gatorade.
Ruth remembers loading a two-year-old Ariana into her car seat during the swampy DC summer. How Ariana would wrinkle her small face and ask Ruth, “Ish hot? Ish hot?”
Ish hot, baby.
Ruth fishes her phone from her pocket and thanks her daughter for the tip. Ariana, wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, sends Ruth a row of squirrel emoji, plus the words, I got you.
CHAPTER NINE
Ruth is ready to follow the home team into the tunnel, but as she stands she becomes suddenly and irreversibly conscious of the smell. Of rubber and liquefied butter and sweat.
Of the flesh-toned water that pools between hotdogs in their plastic sleeves.
Of sockless feet in grass-damp shoes.
She looks to the crowd, expecting to see faces twisted in repulsion, noses pinched shut, but no one is reacting. It’s an emergency, this smell. Ruth scans the cluttered media table for an empty cup or paper bag. Finding nothing, she buries her nose in the skin of her forearm. Inhales her own sweat and soap. She’s fine. The heat may be coaxing certain odors to the surface, but the truth is that the arena always smells this way. And she likes the smell, how it suffuses every game no matter the city or series. No matter the season. The smell is nostalgic and urgent and has never bothered her. She’s fine—so why is she, with one hand splayed across her midsection, making her way to the booth? Stepping over photographers, circumventing stuntmen and dancers with their pompoms drooping in the heat, creeping along the perimeter, seeking out Lester.
As she approaches the booth Lester rises from his chair. “Yo,” he says. “Are you okay?”
Jay stays seated, his headset slung around his neck. They are both looking at her like she has two heads. Joke’s on them: theirs are the faces that won’t quite focus, blurring at the edges. She might have put on someone else’s glasses by mistake. Ruth pulls the frames from her face to check. The frames are red, the lenses thick, hers. To forestall panic, she polishes the lenses with the edge of her blouse.
That smell. A pipe has burst, or a long-dead body is festering somewhere in the stands. The heat has revealed the essential rot of the arena. This is not the smell of basketball. The realization comforts her.
“You smell that, right?” she asks Lester.
“Smell what? Ruth, drink some water. You look terrible.”
“Thanks.”
“You look like the recipient of bad news. You look like you got traded to TNT.”
Ruth clamps a hand over her mouth as her stomach revolts. Was the nausea this violent last time? She banishes the thought. People get sick. Food poisoning happens.
“I’m sick,” she announces, and she turns on her heel, tunnel-bound. The cinder block hallways are stuffed with reporters and interns and thin-lipped coaches. Physical therapists slinging buckets of ice. Ruth shoulders sideways through the tangle of them, wishing she was alone, at home, to contend with what she almost knows or is about to know or would rather not know. Not at work. Not at halftime. At home, at least, the bathroom floor grit rubbing against her knees would be less offensive—attributable to her own hair, own fingernails. Dirt spread by the soles of her own feet. There would be no stall door, which she has no time to lock, falling open to collide with her arched spine. The smell belching forth from the toilet bowl as she lifts the seat would be lemony Lysol, courtesy of her cleaning lady, not this atrocious decaying pipe-ammonia stench. Rust and dried urine if not for which this maybe wouldn’t happen. Ruth would maybe cough and heave before resting her head in her arms.
The stench is the cue her stomach needs to eject its contents. Throat burning and eyes watering themselves blind. A powerful urge to sob. Yes, it was like this last time. She remembers, though she’s convinced it was a different body that coursed with foreign hormones. That becam
e sick and thin then round and flushed. That contracted and tore open and produced a perfect baby girl.
And it was a different body that fucked Lester Devon—the last time and the first time and all the times in between. A different body that flew upward for a layup and landed in a ruptured heap. The body Ruth has now wobbles where it once flexed, is predictable and reliable if a bit stiff. Her body belongs to no team and is home to no one but herself. Ruth was certain she had been restored to the physical autonomy of mid-childhood, which was why she’d had her IUD removed at her last appointment—or she was somewhat shy of certain, which was also why.
For the remainder of the finals, the two arenas will smell like meaty, floral death—and there will be nothing she can do except chew gum and avoid breathing.
“Have you been pregnant before?” a doctor will ask.
“Once,” Ruth will say. “A long time ago.”
The bathroom she chose is remote, serviced by maintenance staff infrequently. Warped mirrors shudder beneath pale, buzzing lights. In Ruth’s backpack is a collection of individually wrapped breath mints, collected from restaurants and hotel lobbies—but her backpack is in a locker on the other side of the arena. What she needs more than a Lifesaver is a bottle of water. The water would slide cool and clarifying down her throat, pooling beneath the arch of her ribcage. She imagines it. The fantasy helps.
Ruth’s hands stop shaking; the sirens in her head cease. She doesn’t know for sure. The heat may have corrupted her senses, induced misleadingly familiar symptoms. Sure, there have been other signs: persistent cramps, an aching lower back. But she’s forty-two. She could have a cyst in her uterus or chronic vertigo or the flu. Her butt could be expanding on account of age and airport dinners. That one fried chicken place in Memphis, from which her crew always orders breakdown dinner after Grizzlies games. Ruth still has the appetite of a teenage boy.
She loves a succinct explanation—no doubt, pregnancy can explain most any symptom. But she knows better than to jump to conclusions.
She’s glad no one has followed her into the bathroom. Simone would have widened her eyes and deadpanned “Well, shit.” Roxanne would have pressed her hands to her cheeks and bubbled over with congratulations. Ruth refuses to consider what Lester would have done. The memory of stumbling up to the pair of male broadcasters mortifies her, but vaguely, like something she did a long time ago. Not a mistake she’ll repeat. She will tell Jay and Lester that she ate something bad; she’s fine now.
Her face needs a touch-up. She will tell Angie nothing.
Ruth checks and, yes, she has time to duck into the greenroom for a bottle of water before the start of the third quarter. The ghost of nausea is already yielding to fresh nausea. Her last bout of morning sickness lasted four months. She spent those days belly-down on the couch, head angled toward the bunny-eared television that showed only daytime talk shows and low-budget soap operas because it was the nineties. No Netflix. And no Netflix now, no couch, because she is Ruth Devon and this is Game Two of the NBA finals. She’s fucked, she’s completely fucked. And yet.
The fanfare of halftime reaches her through the tunnel. A thumping bassline and the stadium announcer’s oohs and ahs, muffled as if through a cup pressed against the wall. Unicyclists are dunking on each other, or an acrobat is balancing plates atop her head, or a dog is donning sunglasses and hopping on a skateboard, carving up the floor like a Venice Beach legend. Twenty-four minutes of regulation remain. It’s miserable in the arena tonight, but the misery—its strange source, its surreal temperature—is unprecedented. People will be talking about this game for decades. Try as she might, Ruth can’t think of a single place she’d rather be.
Darius Lake sits out the entirety of the third quarter.
By the time Ruth is in place for her interview with Coach Morris she has sweat off her makeup. She has raked her meticulously styled hair into a ponytail and pushed her silky sleeves to her elbows. “You look great,” says Julian, pit stains overtaking his T-shirt. “Like you’re on vacation.”
Ruth laughs. “Hey, people pay good money to sweat like this.”
Coach Andre Morris radiates camera-ready joy. A former point guard for the Atlanta Hawks, Andre is one of seven Black coaches across a league of thirty-two teams. In the late eighties, a picture of him mean-mugging, torn from the pages of Sports Illustrated, had a place of honor on Ruth’s bedroom wall between Kareem and Jordan. Halfway through Ruth’s first season with the network, when she was thirty-one and freshly divorced, Andre’s third wife brought their six-month-old daughter to a game. Ruth gathered the baby in her arms and instead of thinking I’m holding Andre Morris’s baby, she thought I’m holding a baby.
Since the end of halftime, Ruth’s spirits have been bolstered by the possibility—slight, though intoxicating—that being pregnant is no problem. Is fine or even good. The idea came to her as welcome as daybreak after a bad dream and now she can’t let it go. She has a boyfriend. A young and able-bodied, family-friendly boyfriend who wants to marry her. Joel is so desperate to marry her he predicted this development, didn’t he? Over expensive, oddly-colored pasta he said they could have a baby. Or talk about having a baby. Or talk about talking about having a baby. Joel said the word baby, Ruth is certain.
Coach is grinning at her. It’s the way players sometimes grin during their walkout interviews after scoring the game-winner. Ruth smiles back, a little bit starstruck. Around Andre she often is.
“How’s your team coping with the heat?” Ruth asks.
“Oh, they’re holding up great. Some extra sweat isn’t going to take down a group like this. Is it a strange night? Absolutely. But I can’t complain.”
“Careful, sir, you’ll launch a thousand conspiracy theories with a comment like that.”
“Conspiracy theories? Nah. I’m from Louisiana. This is nothing. This is comfortable.”
The rumors unfurl in Ruth’s mind: Coach Morris used his connections to tamper with the AC. Or the orders to disable the circuit breaker came from NBA higher-ups, who wanted to even the series. Or maybe the whole thing was orchestrated by a brand of sports drink—the one with which Emory Turner has a contract and Darius Lake does not.
They’re trying to smoke us out of here.
How many times has the network replayed the clip?
Conspiracy theories do nothing for Ruth. All too well she knows the outcome of a basketball game cannot be reduced to talent and execution alone. It matters when the ref blows the whistle. It matters when the roar of the crowd recedes and leaves a fan’s well-timed insult ringing in a player’s ears. And it matters when, deep beneath the court, in the arena’s mechanical underworld, smoke begins to rise.
Darius Lake returns in the fourth quarter, agony carved into his face. He hobbles and Ruth’s legs ache in sympathy. After a shaky layup Darius lands and stands frozen on one foot while his teammates chase the ball up-court. Ruth is relieved when Bell pulls him out. With seven minutes on the clock, it’s a smart decision: better to give up a single game than risk injury and lose the rest.
Seattle’s fans are howling, fists in the air and hair glued to their foreheads, the volume of their own sweat convincing them they worked for this. And Ruth gets it, the rising mercury of a fan’s emotions. This is among the last games to be played in the old arena; demolition is scheduled for July. This is a team that has dominated the Western Conference for years without winning a championship. When, back in January, Darius played as a Wildcat on Seattle’s court for the first time, the jumbotron showed a montage of highlights from his tenure with the Supersonics. A standing ovation was followed by a salute from Darius that almost read as emotional. Emotion-adjacent, for sure. Ruth tells herself no one’s cheering for Lake’s pain tonight—but damn if it doesn’t sound like it! How about a moment of silence? Or some respectful applause as Lake’s teammates help him to the bench?
The din pulses in Ruth’s ears
. The silk of her blouse is plastered to her chest. She doesn’t know if she can get through the rest of the night without vomiting; she doesn’t know if she will begin her next call to Joel with “I have news!” or “We need to talk;” doesn’t know if she needs a doctor’s appointment or a tub of prenatal vitamins or an abortion. She knows what she would name a baby boy—she has known for years—but the name is a flicker of a fantasy. Otherwise, her uncertainty is so unconquerable, her panic yields to a sensation of peace. As long as she’s here, as long as the clock is running, she’s okay.
For the remainder of the game Darius sits expressionless on the bench. He looks down at his fingernails as if longing to gnaw them raw. When he looks up at the scoreboard, scratching at the scruff on his chin, an ice pack slips from his neck and rolls down his back.
The Sonics win in a blowout.
“Your team showed incredible stamina tonight, both mental and physical, as the temperature in the arena rose above ninety degrees. Is there a reason why the Sonics are invulnerable to the weather?”
Spotlights swing around the bowl, illuminating patches of the still-packed stands. Cheers merge with the echoes of cheers; Ruth stands on the toes of her pumps to yell directly into Turner’s ear. After processing the question, Emory shakes his head in performed disbelief. “Well, we’re a young team. Not me, I’m old, but the rest of the guys are young guns. They’re healthy. We come from all over the world—”
Kasey Powell sneaks up behind Emory, a paper cup of water sloshing in his outstretched hand. Ruth, standing at an angle, realizes what’s happening a split-second before Powell dumps the water over Turner’s head. In a move she can only hope looks clutch on camera, Ruth jumps back to protect her microphone and grabs a towel from the shoulder of a passing rookie. She dabs at Turner’s face as she forms her next question.
The Second Season Page 8