“I have the same card,” Ruth reminded him.
“My point exactly. That’s my exact point, Ruthie. Only one person per household should have this card. I can’t coach an NBA team—I can’t be the person I am supposed to be—without knowing that someone is at home prioritizing our family.”
Ruth crossed her arms as smoke permeated the air. “Why you? Why do you get to keep the card?”
“Because when we got married, you said you wanted to be a mom. You didn’t get surgery on your knee and you didn’t play overseas. Because you wanted to be a mom, okay? Maybe you were too young to know precisely what you wanted, and maybe my dumb ass should have seen that. But it doesn’t matter anymore. The point is moot. You’re her mom, okay? Is that okay with you?”
Ariana was crying. Ruth cried too. Lester put a pot of water on the stove, as if Ruth would soon dry her tears and sit down to dinner with her family.
Ruth dried her tears and sat down to dinner with her family. Ariana, graciously behaving as if they had not, moments earlier, made her out to be the fulcrum of their marital strife, told a story about a second grader named Sadie who had covertly consumed a family-size bag of Skittles at recess, then vomited beneath her desk during a timed spelling test. After dinner, Ruth and Lester sat on the scummy bathroom floor to lean over the edge of the tub and wash their daughter’s sun-licked curls. Lester held his hand protectively above Ari’s eyes as Ruth poured water over the girl’s head. Suds slipped down the delicate arch of her knobbed spine.
When Ariana was asleep, Ruth made herself a large bowl of popcorn, standing directly in front of the microwave, openly defying Lester’s anxiety about household appliances causing cancer. She was about to retreat to the room they still called theirs when Lester appeared in the kitchen doorframe, a basketball tucked beneath one arm.
“One-on-one?”
She recognized his version of a truce and left the popcorn in the microwave. She followed Lester out to the driveway. The lights they had installed above the garage doors were bright like a film set. The hoop was NBA regulation—stanchion, tempered glass. For half an hour, their game stayed friendly.
“Cash,” Ruth said.
And Lester, instead of grinning in admiration of Ruth’s shot or leaning in for a sweaty kiss, grimaced. A minute later, when Ruth was driving toward the basket, Lester called a foul.
Ruth stopped. She dribbled twice. “An offensive foul? Are you serious?”
“You elbowed me in the ribs.”
“Nope.”
“Come on, it was classic Ruth.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ruth Landon? Bitch from the District?”
“I barely touched you.”
Lester went stiff and silent. The body language was meant to indicate that he (sane) was disengaging from Ruth (crazy). “Fine, fine,” he said. “Your ball.”
“I think I’m done.”
“You’re quitting because I called one foul?”
“Who made you the ref?”
“I think my résumé speaks for itself.”
She hated him. The hatred had been looming for months, maybe years, a dark cloud encroaching on one corner of the windshield. She had always warded it off, reminding herself that she was flawed, thus culpable. She had, for instance, told Lester that becoming a mother mattered more to her than basketball. She had not meant to imply the two things were mutually exclusive, but maybe, to Lester, they were.
Lester was disappointed in who Ruth had turned out to be. Ruth could relate, and she had always tried to wring that sympathy for traces of love, but she couldn’t anymore. A triangle of sweat darkened his gray T-shirt. His bald head gleamed in the lights and his face was rigid with disbelief. She hated this old man who had dared to marry Ruth Landon. She hated his litany of instantly formed opinions—on every blast of a ref’s whistle; on whether Ruth’s hair looked better up or down; on the best barbecue in Atlanta (and how it compared to the best barbecue in San Antonio); on whether the highest scorer in the WNBA could play garbage-time minutes in the NBA; on which Hollywood blockbuster ought to have won best picture in 1997. She hated the way he rode the highs and lows of their marriage—accepting apologies but not making them, pretending their anger had rolled from their shoulders—without changing any facet of his behavior. Without considering whether he had ever, in his life, been wrong.
He said, “You look like the Kool-Aid man. Maybe you need to rest.”
She slammed the ball against the concrete and let it roll into the yard. She flattened her palms against the damp front of his shirt and shoved. He was not surprised, did not fall. Ruth went to try again and he grabbed her wrists and affected a look of paternal exasperation.
“Relax, kid. It’s a game.”
The man was dead to her.
Maybe it was a game—eight years, a shared mortgage, a little girl with creamy skin and perfect curls—but it was a game Ruth and Lester had lost.
GAME THREE
Cincinnati, Ohio
Wildcats – Sonics
1-1
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The US Bank Arena, nestled between the interstate and the Ohio River, is not a building of which Ruth retains a mental map; but, as in certain airports, she arrives and finds she knows her way around. She has worked sideline here before, called a game or two. She locates Angie in a dressing room where, after an hour in the chair and an unanswered phone call to her daughter, Ruth hides a backpack containing everything she could need to survive Game Three: Ritz crackers, cinnamon Altoids, a toothbrush, Gatorade, extra makeup—plus various drugs that may or may not alleviate nausea, and which may or may not affect her pregnancy, which she may or may not keep.
And which she still has not confirmed—though, as the days pass, the unpurchased pregnancy test loses its allure, its authority. To pee on a stick seems to Ruth like a gratuitous ritual. A bit of a scam. Doesn’t she know her own body?
In the three days since Ruth first became aware of the hormones flooding her system, the nausea has come in waves. Each wave must crest before it breaks, pummeling Ruth on the shore of some bathroom floor. On the flight it was bad. The doggish smell of stale coffee teamed up with a flight attendant’s perfume to send Ruth rummaging through her seat pocket for the paper bag stashed behind the menus and optimistic water-landing illustrations. The bathroom in first class was occupied. Ruth shifted in her seat to assess whether anyone was paying attention. Across the aisle, Roxanne was hunched over her laptop, lost in a draft of her Emory-Darius piece. But was the businessman beside her a fan? Were Lester and Jay watching from two rows back? The sickness was a softball spinning in Ruth’s stomach, gaining speed, when the door to the toilet folded open and a man emerged wiping his hands on his jacket. Ruth threw herself into the bathroom and slid the lock. Puking in private was a win.
Since landing in Ohio her symptoms have mostly cooperated with Ruth’s schedule. Alone in a hotel room, dwelling on the unnerving yet familiar sensation of her uterus being pinched and stretched like pizza dough, any scent, any memory of a scent, might set her off. But throughout yesterday’s press conferences, production meetings, and an hour-long appearance on an Ohio network’s sports news program, Ruth held the queasiness at bay. The news anchor was an old friend from Georgetown, one of the boys on the basketball team with whom Ruth had gone to the Tombs to drink beer and yell at the television. Laughing with Brian, saying and meaning, “I’m thrilled to be here,” Ruth did wonder whether the pregnancy was in her head. A manifestation of her urge to self-sabotage. At this time next year she should be in the booth—not in a milk-sour bed with a newborn at her breast.
Two hours before tip-off, made-up and styled and sucking on a steady succession of mints, Ruth rushes to a theater in the west end of the tunnel. A taped interview with Bell, to be aired before the game and circulated online, was supposed to be Lester’s assignmen
t; the two men are assumed to have an unbreakable NBA coaches’ bond. But Ruth’s director has received a last-minute update from the Wildcats PR staff: Rick Bellantoni wants Ruth instead.
Her stage manager sits them on a behemoth of a couch. The couch is meant for players to slump on, enormous knees splayed as they review past plays. The couch is an odd choice, Ruth thinks. She resents the challenge of sitting with her butt center-cushion, legs crossed, body angled toward Bell but not cold-shouldering the camera. And she resents the optics, which she knows is the point: these people are friends! One of them regrets humiliating the other on live television!
Bell leans into Ruth’s space and whispers, “Think they’ll make us hug it out?” Ruth’s smile is tight. She intends to get over it. For now she stays mad at him. His face—the snowy eyebrows and blotchy, bulbous nose—annoys her. Simone is dressing Ruth with a mic, muttering sarcastically to herself, and Ruth is twisting toward Phillip, Lester, and Jay huddled in one corner. She doesn’t want to be a diva but she does want a chair. She would prefer to be filmed from the waist up. On the couch beside her, engrossed in his phone, Rick Bellantoni scratches at one corner of his mouth to dislodge some shard of sauce—barbecue or taco. It’s not a smell this time but a sound that does it, the unholy amplification of fingernail against stubble. This isn’t happening, Ruth assures herself. I would never sprint from the room thirty seconds before taping an interview with the most revered coach in the NBA. But it is, and she does. The first apology is to him: “Bell-I’m-so-sorry-please-excuse-me.” The second is to her boss, shouted over her shoulder.
Can she make it to her dressing room? A quick calculation—the upheaval in her belly versus her speed in leather pumps—and yes, she can. Halfway there she senses Lester on her heels, but it’s a suspicion she refuses to turn and confirm. Now she’s in a stall on her knees. Now she’s tying back her hair, the elastic creasing her blond waves. Her muscles contract violently. Her jaw shakes and aches. She wants to sob like a child every time. Wants someone to tuck her into her goddamn bed.
When Ruth exits the stall she finds Lester leaning against a sink, his arms folded and his honey-hued dress shoes pointed gracefully inward. His face is drained of color, of expression. His face is a project in which Ruth is almost compelled to invest, but she ignores the guilt. Let Lester jump to his conclusions. Let Lester be his own problem. For once.
Ruth spins the dial on her combination lock and Lester watches. Ruth brushes her teeth and Lester watches. Ruth touches up her makeup, reteases her hair, dissolves an Altoid on her tongue and Lester watches. Together they walk back to the theater—six minutes have passed, the upper limit of what Phillip might excuse without explanation. Ruth can feel confusion radiating from her ex-husband. He wants to laugh at her, to yell at her, to reach for her hand. She knows him well enough to navigate these trails through the wilderness of his male feelings—but his silence is new. For the first time in Ruth’s memory, the man is speechless.
When Ruth reclaims her spot on the couch beside Bell, she’s smiling.
As Ruth watches Darius Lake sprint and leap, come off screens and throw crisp chest-passes, calm in the controlled climate of his home arena, her journalistic dispassion yields to joy. Thrumming in her chest, buzzing like neon in her limbs. It’s not that she’s rooting for the Wildcats. No one at the network gets to root—they willingly signed away those rights. As a kid she was a Celtics fan, recruited by her Boston-born father. It was the era of Larry Bird, and all Ruth wanted was for Bird to win. Even a blowout win, objectively boring, made Ruth’s heart swell with pride. Celtics up by thirty? Still a good game. And God, she despaired when they lost! Watching them fold to Philadelphia in Game Seven of the Eastern Conference Finals, preteen Ruth went light-headed with grief. She covered her face with the neck of her sweatshirt, deep-breathed into the bones of her knees. The crowd in the garden broke into a chant: Beat LA! Because if the Celtics couldn’t win, at least the Sixers could head west and make the Lakers suffer.
Crowds in the eighties sounded the same as they do now. There is no difference in the roar of them, or in the double-stressed syllables of de-fense.
Afterward Ruth lay awake seething, reliving each possession, cursing every foul call. In the morning she was exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot and her jaw ached and her mother wasn’t buying it.
“Who is this boy?” Cheryl demanded. “Tell me his name.”
“There is no boy,” Ruth moaned into her pillow.
Cheryl stood in the glow of the ceramic lamp on Ruth’s bedside table, hands to hips as she scrutinized her daughter’s heartbreak. “Basketball didn’t do this to you.”
But it had. It used to. The elation of a win, the ruination of a loss—Ruth doesn’t feel it anymore. But she still takes joy in a player at the peak of his powers. In odds defied, score tied, clock running down. Watching highlights she will often locate herself behind the basket, waiting to film her walkout. As the final play unfolds, Ruth Devon’s jaw is guaranteed to drop.
Tonight, in the third quarter, her jaw drops in unison with Lester’s. They lock eyes across the court, both of them processing the error a half second before the crowd does. Before the offending player himself realizes what has happened.
In the middle of a chaotic play, Emory Turner has collected a loose ball and passed it to his best friend. The pass was not a choice but a reflex, an irrepressible sneeze. Watching him react to the turnover—his hands flying to his head as Darius dunks on a breakaway—is excruciating for Ruth. Basketball is a game of mistakes and corrections, yes, but the fans in Cincy are reveling in the error, chanting “e-mor-y” in a taunting melody. It’s the moment when Turner, who has seemed rattled all night, proves the wheels have come off.
Ruth is experiencing full-blown synesthesia. The clash of colors on the court—Seattle’s lush green versus Cincinnati’s high-noon yellow—somehow trigger and affirm and illustrate her nausea. The pandemonium of the bowl merges with the audio in her ear. She shuts her eyes and cups a hand over her right ear to focus on the feedback in her left. Diplomatically, Jay Thomas is saying, “Whether it was an intercepted pass to Powell at the perimeter or Turner actually forgot that Lake’s playing for the other team . . . I guess we’ll never know.”
“Give me a break,” Lester says. “Look at Turner’s face. The guy is suicidal.” Even through Ruth’s earpiece she can detect the moment Lester’s attitude shifts into fifth gear. Her stomach lurches. “I mean—did the man have a stroke? Passing to a guy who hasn’t been on your team since what, November? That’s not playoffs basketball. That’s sloppy and absurd. Forget about your friend and play ball. Turner should be fined for that nonsense!” Lester’s voice climbs a ladder, higher and higher.
Jay, with a nervous chuckle: “That would be a very subjective call, don’t you think?”
“Passing to the wrong team? That’s not subjective. It’s a calamity.”
Jay says nothing. Lester, likewise, falls silent, and Ruth knows Phillip has cut in to tell him to take a breather—a reminder Les needs a few times per season but which Ruth, when she takes his place, will never need. She vows it.
It’s true that Turner, who is now shooting free throws, appears miserable. He dribbles, tonguing his mouth guard forward and back. His chest rises and falls. He’s an emotional player, and Ruth sympathizes. She too played with her finger on the trigger of her own indignation, alert to in-game injustices, any slight or disrespect. It was long after college that Ruth, surveilled by her own success, learned to suppress and conceal the feelings that could be used against her—which, it turned out, included everything but gratitude, humility, and joy.
Behind the basket, high-income Cincy fans try to derail Emory’s concentration. They whip towels through the air and wave heart-shaped posters of Emory and Darius in last season’s Sonics jerseys, a jagged white line dividing them. They scream Brick! and bash their Thundersticks in tandem. And maybe it’s wo
rking: his limbs look heavy, as if connected to a depleted battery. His shooting motion is stiff. He holds his follow-through as the ball briefly rises then falls a foot short of the rim, plummeting into the paint.
The ref bounces the ball back to Emory.
With a look of disgust, Emory swishes the second.
At the next opportunity Coach Morris calls timeout. As T-shirts are launched into the stands and the Wildcats’ wildcat performs dunks off a trampoline, Ruth looks at Lester across the court and shakes her head. A warning. He rolls his eyes in response—she thinks she sees him do it, but maybe she only infers the eye-roll, the same way she can infer the temperature of his breath or the texture of the buzzed nape of his neck. They were married eight years—a run at which Roxanne would wave her hand and say, “You dated. Just say you dated him”—but their marriage never really ended. It’s out there, like a hometown or a high school in whose confines Ruth might find herself reimprisoned if she’s not careful. The possibility makes her throat tighten, even as she misses him, the same way she misses summer evenings of her youth spent sinking shot after shot, hoping to make a hundred from the free-throw line before the park lights shut off at ten.
Ruth eavesdrops on the home team’s huddle, careful to stay out of Morris’s line of sight. Several rows above the court a camera shifts in Ruth’s direction—she’s aware of its gaze bearing down on her but avoids looking into the lens. The army of cameras stationed throughout the bowl, resting on tripods or shoulders or mounted above the backboard, appear in Ruth’s dreams as stoic horses, their cylindrical faces looming on the sideline. Stock-still until spooked, then rearing back and swinging their heads from left to right. Ruth steps aside to give this one the view it wants: the unbelievable length of Emory’s spine curled over the bench. Massive hands cupping his knees as he grinds his teeth. Seattle is down fourteen. His teammates don’t touch him. They hardly look at him.
The Second Season Page 11