“You’ve just been doused by your teammate Kasey Powell, a relatively recent addition to the Sonics lineup. What’s it like playing alongside this All-Star?”
Emory lifts his face from the towel. He shakes water from his hair and tells Ruth, “It’s no secret I had my issues with the trade. I may have said some things I’m not proud of. In this business, emotions can block common sense. But to come this far, to get another shot at bringing a championship to Seattle . . .”
The Sonics have played in the finals three consecutive years but haven’t won a championship since the nineties. How old was Emory in the nineties? Ruth can’t bear to do the math.
“I’m not saying Cincinnati’s done fighting. They’re a good team, but at the end of the day we’re better. And when we win, whether it’s in five or six or seven games, Kasey will deserve a lot of the credit.”
Emory shouts himself hoarse. Ruth bellows back, her voice straining, warbling.
“Speaking of emotions: You’ve gone on record saying Darius Lake is like a brother to you. A win for Seattle would mean a loss for Darius. Does that ever weigh on you?”
Emory busies himself untucking his jersey from his shorts. The look he finally gives Ruth is admonishing but playful. Meandering photographers stop and encircle them, shutters snapping like rain on a roof. “You have any brothers, RD?”
This is Emory’s style: throwing a question back in her face.
Ruth admits, “I do.”
Her brother, a real estate agent, lives in Indianapolis with his wife and four children. Ruth has opened college accounts for all of them. Her brother has not touched a basketball since high school, but he keeps a copy of Ruth’s schedule taped to his fridge and watches every game she works.
“You ever dominate him on the court?”
Ruth fails to repress a smile. It is wide and candid, a complete concession caught on camera. “Thank you, sir, and I’ll see you in Cincinnati.”
“Thanks, Ruth.”
That the entirety of their relationship unfolds on live television is, of course, an illusion: there’s no need to wait until Cincinnati. After Ruth has tossed back to Jay in the booth and pulled out her IFB—carefully freeing its translucent, coiled cord from her hair—Emory puts his arm around her shoulders and steers her away from her crew. They form a two-person huddle, instantly attracting a hundred sidelong glances, including Lester’s from across the court.
She’s expecting Emory to ask if she’s okay. Maybe he heard she was feeling sick, or maybe she still looks wan. She plans to blame the heat.
Emory says, “I’m sorry about the other night.” His voice is low and conspiratorial. “In the elevator at the hotel? That was not cool.”
Ruth feels suddenly light-headed, embarrassed. “No, no. We’re totally good.”
“But that was you. In the hall.”
“Yes,” she admits.
“It clicked afterward. Right afterward. I had a lot on my mind, and your hair was different? You didn’t have your glasses?”
She lets her head fall briefly, dramatically, against her palm. Her skin is damp, hot like a fever.
“I don’t think I have to tell you this is off the record; I know you’re not that kind of reporter. But me and Darius were just hanging out. We were playing Fortnite.”
Ruth remembers Emory on media day, calling Darius his enemy.
“You don’t have to explain,” she says. Between them passes an understanding: she won’t out him to Roxanne or anyone else. She was never going to. In part because Emory, though fast approaching his professional prime, is still a kid, and Ruth is hardwired to protect anyone younger than herself. She’s been that way all her life, from the time she was six years old and compelled to keep an eye on strangers’ toddlers, charting their wobbly paths to the top of the slide. And in part because snitching on Emory is not in her best interest, professionally.
“I’m sorry I blew you off,” he says. “I was in a mood. Darius and I can’t really occupy the same space right now. I thought we could.”
Ruth understands. She knows what it means to be officially split from someone while technically in the same room with him—technically doomed to sign autographs by his side in perpetuity. She rests a hand on Emory’s arm and backs away, sensing the zoom and focus of a nearby camera lens. She smiles as she disengages, knowing public moments with Emory Turner are always captured, syndicated.
“It’ll get easier,” she lies.
CHAPTER TEN
If she sees a drugstore she will ask the driver to stop.
They pass a CVS and Ruth says nothing.
If she could, she would consult the Magic 8-Ball she had as a kid, its answers malleable and noncommittal: Most likely or Better not tell you now or Ask again later. The results of the pregnancy test would be unambiguous. Ruth would be forced to make up her mind: do everything within her power to help the embryo thrive in an environment she imagines as parched, rough, crumbling—like a cracked-concrete tennis court, all sagging net and faded lines. Or deny her body’s scheming and dreaming: Sorry, pal, we had our chance.
She’s exhausted. One night of not knowing won’t hurt.
After a few nights in the Juniper, Ruth feels she has always lived among the hotel’s whimsically wallpapered walls, its sliding factory doors and low-hanging light fixtures; her own home is a distant memory, dimensions vague and smells unsummonable. As she rides the elevator up to her room she dials Joel. She will leave a message for him to hear first thing in the morning. The message will reveal nothing.
She slides her keycard into the door. The green light flashes. On the other side of the door a phone is ringing, not exactly in tandem with the ringing in her ear but on a slight delay. Ruth pushes into the room and sees him there, sprawled across the still-made bed.
Joel boards airplanes as casually as he calls a cab. His surplus of frequent flyer miles gains him access to as many of Ruth’s rare spare hours as he wants. Never knowing when she will open a door and discover him behind it has turned door-opening into an act of erotic suspense. Seeing him now, Ruth wishes she was still oblivious to the projects of her body. She would like to kiss him without guilt, without registering each second as a deliberate omission.
The air in the room is humid and shampoo-sweet. Joel’s T-shirt, plain white, is the kind he buys compulsively from drugstores when he travels.
“You,” Ruth says with reverence. She drops her backpack on the floor.
Joel looks up at her with a lazy, satisfied smile—cat, canary. “I was going to stay home tonight. And then I thought, why sleep alone when there’s a bed in Seattle with Ruth in it?”
Flirtation embarrasses her. She suspects the bone-dry irony of her first marriage zapped her appetite for it. When Joel gets coy, Ruth counters with physical affection. And because the nausea has temporarily faded, or because Ruth is left with the sense that tonight was historical and convinced that historical is approximate to wonderful, she sinks into him easily.
Joel’s skin is warm from his shower. Ruth’s is cold from the arctic hotel lobby. She presses the length of herself against him, her body somehow missing the heat of the arena.
“I should shower,” she says into his neck. “I’ve been sweating all night. AC was busted.”
“Don’t shower. Get naked, but don’t shower.”
“I’m so gross.”
“So be gross.”
They kiss and unzip. Pulling the waistband of her tights away from her ribcage, she frees her belly, her ass, her thighs from the vise-grip of the hosiery. The release is so climactic Ruth groans and laughs. Joel tugs her back into bed, his fingers tracing the inflamed indentations in her flesh.
At sex, Joel is unpredictable. Some nights he trembles and fumbles and comes too soon. Other times he catches her by surprise with his assertiveness, eliciting gasps that draw Ruth’s attention to herself—not
unpleasantly—as he pushes and pulls her into position. Ruth likes it both ways. She finds his off-nights endearing, and though the duration of Joel’s own pleasure varies, he always takes his time with her. What distracts her, afterward, is the mystery of what has emboldened or unnerved him. She suspects it’s her. She should look for patterns, nail down a formula. But she’s always so tired, and so ready to forget herself.
Tonight, she can’t forget herself. She feels plural. She’s multiplying. Maybe it won’t last; at her age, almost half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. And maybe she won’t let it last, because at her age she risks birth defects, gestational diabetes, complicated labor. (And twins, fucking twins.) And maybe, in some dark corner of her immutable superstition Ruth suspects the pregnancy is what she must give up to get what she really wants. A baby would be a temptation, a test. A sharp pull on the chain around her neck, forcing Ruth to prove herself.
Joel pushes into her. Condomless, because she waved him off, as she often does. Ruth thinks she remembers reading that the latex in condoms might harm a fetus. And if she’s not pregnant, then surely she can’t become pregnant; if the puking and aching and fatigue and weight gain have some other source, then surely the source (perimenopause? Lyme disease?) indicates infertility.
The night she first met Joel, Ruth was in a mood. She had spent the day in airports, each flight repeatedly delayed in increments of ten minutes. On the final leg of her trip her neighbor in first class had said, “I recognize your voice. Are you on TV?” When Ruth told him, “I’m a reporter for the NBA,” the man blinked, shook his balding head, and said, “No, that’s not it.” Then a concierge at the Juniper Portland had given Ruth’s room to a reality television star of already-fading relevance. Her own fame was still cultish; the concierge had no idea who she was.
It happened that Joel Fernandez was in town for a meeting. Slumped inconspicuously on the lobby’s couch between the Foosball table and the vintage photo-booth, he recognized her name. He gave Ruth the keycard to the penthouse and detained her in the lobby, chatting about Portland’s ceaseless rain and the particular brand of suitcase Ruth was rolling over the polished concrete floor. Ruth is sure she fixed Joel with the smile she gives to fans approaching her after a game, or to her daughter’s boyfriends. The smile is involuntary, often photographed, and always a shock to see on her own face (it belongs to her mother). Beatific and defensive: I’m thrilled, I swear.
Finally, Ruth pressed the button for the elevator and Joel passed her a palm-warmed business card. “Let’s have dinner sometime. I’m based in San Francisco, but I’m like you, I get around. Text me?”
Ruth could not have charmed him with her deadened airport eyes or her minimal tolerance of small talk, therefore his interest was in Ruth Devon, a woman he knew to be attentive and well-groomed on national television.
“I would,” Ruth said, “but I’ve recently sworn off dating.”
Joel cocked his head. He was thirty-three years old and baby-faced. Any law-fearing bartender would card him. Already Ruth could hear the contrived snort with which he would wrestle a scuffed California state driver’s license from his wallet.
“Why?” he demanded.
The elevator doors slid open, and Joel extended a skinny arm to hold them in place.
“Well, initially I swore off dating NBA fans. Then I realized I don’t know any men who aren’t NBA fans. So now it’s a moratorium on dating period.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t like to talk about basketball. In a perfect world, she would talk about little else. The problem was that no man of any age (she had experimented within a wide bracket) could discuss basketball with Ruth Devon without endeavoring to catch her in a moment of ignorance. Men quizzed her; they doubted her; they argued with her. Either about something so specific that a quick Google search proved Ruth correct, or on subjects so well-trodden—Michael versus LeBron; the defense of the nineties versus today’s pace-and-space offense—that Ruth had heard it all before.
“I hate basketball,” Joel said.
Ruth stared at him, certain he had already contradicted himself but too tired to pinpoint when.
“I don’t follow sports. For me, watching a game is like, Here’s a guy running. Here’s a guy throwing something. Here’s an angry coach chewing a large wad of gum. The whole spectacle, it doesn’t do anything for me.”
Ruth stepped into the elevator. “Right,” she said, laughing and meaning wrong.
Still, they maintained eye contact as the doors closed between them. Still, she messaged the man a month later, after flying into San Francisco the night before a regular-season game. She got to her hotel late and unsatisfied. There were nights when the career that sustained her, that breathed meaning into every red-eye and lost suitcase and traffic jam, became unwanted noise jackhammering in her ears. Her attempts to distract herself from industry news—internet browsing, channel surfing—inevitably returned her attention to basketball. Ruth found Joel’s business card in an ink-stained pocket of her backpack and remembered his body. Tall, lean, and commanding in the ritzy-twee lobby of his own hotel, the same frame would appear insubstantial on a basketball court. Ruth imagined him leaping toward the rim, falling and flailing like one of those inflatable hype men stationed outside car dealerships. There was something about Joel’s story that did not add up. He hated sports, yet he had recognized Ruth’s name? She sent him a text beginning Riddle me this, and Joel responded instantly.
I confess: my (much younger) brother plays division three ball for a school in the Midwest. He’s been obsessed with you for years. In fact, he’s the author of a viral tweet you may remember . . .
Joel linked her to the tweet, already a year old: I wish Ruth Devon was my mom. Underneath was a reply Ruth had no memory of sending: Honored, but would never try to replace your mother! She scrolled through Matthew’s timeline until she found a link to his Instagram, where she discovered a trove of Fernandez family photographs, including one of Joel holding a newborn niece in his hands, gazing at the infant with astonishment and hunger.
Ruth asked Joel to meet her for a drink in the hotel bar, which became a drink in her room when the bar turned out to be closed for renovations. Bourbon in her room became sex between crisp, expensive sheets whose whiff of bleach evoked temporality, nonmonogamy. It should have been a one-night stand. The thing was, Ruth couldn’t remember the last time she had slept with someone who did not actively salivate over the concept of her rather than the flesh-and-bone of her, who did not explore her body as a cultural artifact, public property, saying something like, “Now I’ve seen Ruth Devon naked” in the minutes after orgasm. Joel made her feel young and anonymous. He stroked the stretch marks on the side of her breast and said, “I have some of those,” pointing to three peach-pink squiggles on his left hip. That night was one she has often thought she would like to relive, moment by moment, exactly as it was.
In another hotel bed, with his fingers where she wants them, she almost does.
Afterward, Joel wants to know why Ruth winced when he covered her breast with his palm. Ruth remembers the current of pain that zipped through her nipple, electric and familiar. “It felt weird for a second,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of random aches and pains tonight. I guess I’m getting old.”
Joel considers but dismisses the possibility. “Nope. You’re getting tired. You don’t sleep.”
It’s 2:00 a.m.; Ruth can’t argue. “Can we sleep in tomorrow? My flight’s not until late.”
“Yes. I made a brunch reservation for noon.”
Ruth doesn’t want brunch so much as she wants black coffee and cinnamon donuts in bed. Brunch means mascara. Brunch means a stranger hovering over their table asking Ruth to record his outgoing voicemail greeting. It takes Ruth a second to say “Sounds great,” and her hesitation makes room for a longer, heavier silence. The kind that has been swelling between her and Joel every time they try to talk.
The baby can be acknowledged later, when Ruth is someone’s pregnant fiancée rather than someone’s pregnant girlfriend. Her disappointment over not getting Lester’s job—read: her devastation, her enamel-destroying rage—can be dealt with when it happens. For now, she should indulge in the thrill of accepting Joel’s proposal. She wants to marry him, as surely as she wants to feel a fetus kick from the inside. Until now, she has kept Joel at a slight distance: There are things she has not asked him, and even more things she has not told him. She has been savoring the pleasure of these things to be uncovered, dug up, confessed; but isn’t now the time?
Her nerves are worthy of the foul line: shoulders tensing, stomach knotting itself. By kissing Joel’s freckled shoulder, she breaks the tension if not the silence.
“Again,” Joel says, imitating his youngest niece, Mira, whom they babysat one weekend in April. “Again” was all the baby said, mostly in response to phenomena Ruth and Joel could not control: birds singing, sirens wailing, baristas steaming milk.
Ruth kisses him again. She takes the detour. “How is that kid?”
“She’s good. I spent yesterday morning with her, actually. We went to the park, the science museum, the cupcake shop.”
“The baby beat.”
“She’s talking a lot more. She kept saying ba-lew cupcake over and over, which was the one color the bakery didn’t have. Ended in tears. She’s a master manipulator.”
Ruth laughs into her pillow. “Does she make you want to be a daddy?” So light and loose, she almost believes her own performance.
Joel rolls to his side and props himself up on one elbow, the posture of a kid focused on a board game. Ruth’s question is one to which Joel always gives a different answer. Still, she’s expecting some variation on absolutely.
The Second Season Page 9