The action resumes, and though Lester retains baseline levels of sass, calling flops and missed defensive rotations as he sees them, Ruth believes he’s in possession of himself. It’s a competitive game, with Kasey Powell and Tobin Whitestone compensating for Emory’s lapse. Scribbling notes without taking her eyes from the court, Ruth doesn’t feel sick; she feels her lungs expanding, the blood in the tips of her ears, the pads of her toes. For the moment, she is blissfully irrelevant on the sideline. At the end of the third quarter she will stop being a spectator in order to interview Bell, asking two questions about Cincy’s defense. In his answers the coach will use multiple syllables; he will touch Ruth’s shoulder, say her name. Ruth will walk away from the camera believing she has won, that the man will give her no more trouble.
A few minutes into the fourth, Darius steals the ball near half-court, and it’s just Emory between him and the rim. Darius leaps, long legs thrashing in the air and connecting with Emory’s chin. For the second time tonight Darius dunks emphatically and at Emory’s expense, hanging from the rim a beat longer than he needs to. By the time Lake lands, Turner is clutching his jaw in his left hand, circling his right above his head, gesturing for the replay.
“Oh come on,” Lester exhales in Ruth’s ear. “He wants, what? A flagrant for that?”
“Officials will go to the scorers table and take a look to see whether Lake may have jumped toward Turner with some amount of hostility,” Jay says.
“Some amount of hostility? He’s six-eight. He jumped to dunk it, caught a body. He can’t control who gets in his way.”
“A quick look at the film should—”
“I’m so angry I could spit,” Lester says. “Turner wants to bring a Finals game to a grinding halt in the fourth quarter so we can watch this moment over and over, dissect it from every angle, argue about it like it’s the friggin’ Constitution. Why? Because he’s upset that his ex-bestie dunked on him? Grow a pair, man.”
“Umm,” Jay falters, a rare event. “Let’s go to the national television big board here and see—”
“Excuse me? You want to go to the big board right now? Let me save you some time: There are games coming up. Between two and four, depending on what happens here tonight. What we have on the floor in front of us is a blatant display of disrespect.”
“Who are we disrespecting?” Jay asks. On her monitor Ruth watches the big board dissolve, a move Phillip must have condoned to feign some semblance of unity among the crew.
“The game of basketball,” Lester says. “That’s who.”
There’s a pause. Ruth releases a breath, thinking it might be over.
“Let’s talk about how we don’t do this,” Lester says, vigor renewed. Ruth flashes back to their daughter’s toddlerhood, to Lester Devon preaching: We don’t stand on the coffee table. We don’t shove raisins up our nose. We don’t wear our socks as mittens and our mittens as socks. “We all have things happen in our personal lives. Me, mere moments before this telecast, you would not believe what happened.”
Ruth would like to slice her hand across her throat, miming the fatality of a guillotine, but Lester won’t look her way, not now, and Ruth knows she will appear in the background of any midcourt shot. All she can do is adjust her posture and fixate on her screen.
“Honest to God, if I told you what happened it would bring you to your knees. But you don’t see me derailing an NBA game. You don’t see me—”
Jay says, “No, but we certainly hear you.”
Bell is berating the turned backs of the referees, hopping like a terrier too short to see over the fence. Players loiter near their respective benches, swigging from water bottles and throwing back their heads to watch the dunk replay in perpetuity. Again Darius leaps into the air. Again his legs thrash. Again his New Balances buck ever-closer to Emory’s chin. What’s clear, from certain angles, is that Emory was poised to protest, preemptively working himself into a rage.
Lester continues: “You think a person is driven. You think they know what they want and that they’re going to work hard until they get it. But no. This person—”
Jay: “Just to be clear, we’re still talking about six-time All-Star Emory Turner?”
“We’re talking about an individual in this building, I’ll tell you that much.”
“We’re going to take a short break for a few words from our sponsors. What’s as crispy on the outside as it is moist on the inside? It’s the new fish-fillet sandwich from Wendy’s.” Jay sounds delirious with relief, forever indebted to this fish sandwich.
Ruth hits the talk-back and says to Phillip, “I need a word with Les. Can you open our mics?”
“You want to do the honors, be my guest.”
She waits a moment before bringing the mic to her lips. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”
Lester meets her eyes across the court. From fifty feet Ruth can discern every flare of his nostrils and vibration of his lips, thanks not to the precision of her optometrist but to her intimate knowledge of the man’s furrowed face.
“Eh, so I got a bit colorful. I’m a color analyst.”
Armed with the knowledge that everything breathed into a mic is a soundbite, that anything recorded can be leaked, Ruth chooses her words with care. “What you’re doing? It’s not cool.”
“Oh, come on. I was speaking in code.”
“Code? It doesn’t take a mastermind to figure out where your ‘personal life’ intersects with ‘individual in this building.’ ”
Lester pauses. “I’m feeling a bit shaken up.”
“And that’s my problem?”
“Yes. You shook me up.”
What Ruth can’t shake is the feeling that this was inevitable. That even after their divorce, even on the cusp of retirement, Lester would find a way to hold what she wants just beyond her reach. Only two people per family can carry the gilded card, boast premium status. And what are she and Lester if not a family, beholden still to their stale, moth-gnawed impressions of each other?
“Lester,” she says. Meaning please.
Ruth knows Jay can hear them. She doesn’t care.
“We need to talk,” Lester says.
“We’ll talk after the game.”
“Fine.”
Ruth infers the petulance with which he would like to slam the phone into its receiver—were there a phone and were receivers still mounted on walls, perched atop desks. On the floor, the officials make up their minds and call a defensive foul. Emory lets his mouth guard fall from his mouth in disbelief—a gesture so impotent, it’s hard to watch. The mouth guard lands near the feet of the closest ref; Emory’s lucky he doesn’t get ejected. Bell is screaming, “Thank! You! Very! Much!” A dubious use of the last shreds of his vocal cords.
“Lake’s dunk will stand and he’ll have a chance at a three-point play,” Jay says, back on the air.
By the final minutes of the fourth quarter the score is tied, and Ruth feels she has always been a citizen of this basketball game. She was born at tip-off, came of age in the second quarter, wrestled with her demons in the third, and she plans to enjoy these last few minutes of regulation on the edge of her seat. Having lived her whole life in the clamor and clang of the bowl, Ruth has no regrets; other countries seem as fictional as Narnia, as the texts accumulating on her phone. Already Ruth is preparing her question for Emory Turner: “At the end of a game during which you passed to the wrong team, airballed a free throw, hid your face in a towel, amassed five personal fouls and one technical, how did it feel to sink the winning shot?”
But it isn’t his shot to take.
Eleven seconds on the clock, and it’s Cincinnati’s ball.
Cats are down one; the assumption is that Lake will take the inbound, get a screen, and drive toward the rim. Instead, he takes it easy. Casually he dribbles near the logo, waving off the screen and looking his defend
er Emory Turner dead in the eye. A lump forms in Ruth’s throat. She does not root; it doesn’t matter to her who wins this game.
Darius steps back fast. Emory hesitates: This can’t be the shot Darius wants, a thirty-foot three? Ruth’s hand covers her mouth. Emory jumps too late, and Darius gets a good look at a long one, the ball cutting a path so clean that Seattle’s defense is already soft and slack-jawed, watching the rotation of the ball, the swish of the net, the scoreboard lighting up siren red.
Ruth will return to this moment in her mind for years: Emory Turner yelling, to no one in particular, “That’s lucky! That’s lucky!” It’s ominous, the way he’s both playful and bitter. Something is real and something is staged; but Ruth can no longer say which is which. Then the joy from the bench. Then the cameras raised high in the air, as far as the journalists can stretch, pointed down at the celebratory dog pile.
Ruth heads into the fray to interview Darius Lake before he can wipe the sweat from his forehead or the smirk from his lips.
In Ruth’s ear, Lester and Jay spin their own conclusions. “Well,” Jay says. “Now that it’s all over, would you like to revise your previously stated opinion that tonight was, and I quote, ‘not playoffs basketball’?”
A moment of swollen silence before Lester admits, “It was playoffs basketball.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ruth survives her visit to the Wildcats locker room, where players peel off their jerseys, flinging them over Ruth’s head to the mountain of laundry on the floor. She survives both press conferences seated beside Roxanne, whose whispered comments on the players’ post-game finery—sweatshirts printed with canceled cartoon characters, flat-billed caps, long necklaces, leather vests, suit jackets paired with shorts—keep Ruth awake. Now she is horizontal on a bench in her dressing room, shoes kicked off, lanyard askew and press pass resting on her shoulder. Behind the skin stretched tight across her temples, her pulse berates her. What she needs is to be airlifted from the arena and dropped upon a hotel bed, like a whale returned to its natural habitat after a decade of Hollywood exploitation. What she gets is Lester Devon not knocking, slamming a basketball against the concrete floor. Ruth’s lanyard threatens to strangle her as she rolls to her side to see the Spalding, orange and black and so new it looks sticky, dipped in honey. A perfect object. She wants to touch it.
“I come in peace,” Lester says. He has shed his jacket and loosened his tie. Against her will Ruth pictures him in boxer briefs. When they were married he was the age she is now. At the realization she lets out a noise of displeasure.
“Honest to God, Ruth. I realize I went off script tonight. I realize some of my comments were unprofesh.”
Ruth squeezes her eyes shut, so fatigued she feels drunk. “Did you just apologize?”
Lester transfers the basketball from one palm to the other. “I think so. Would you like to play H-O-R-S-E?”
The air between them appears to waver, distorted as if by fumes. “You’re fifty-seven. Aren’t you tired?”
“No.”
“They’ll turn the lights off.”
“I put in a call. The lights will stay on.”
Ruth concentrates on filling and emptying her lungs. She should go buy a pregnancy test. She should call her boyfriend or her daughter, look into acquiring a therapist or a friend who doesn’t gossip for a living. But given the option of shooting hoops in an empty arena past midnight, she says yes. Even exhausted, even queasy, even pregnant by mistake, even with her ex-husband, her character permits no other answer. Barefoot, Ruth goes to her locker, lucky number nine. Wanting neither to undress in front of Lester nor endure the awkwardness of asking him to face the wall, she slides into a pair of sneakers—white and coral Air Swoopes, designed for Sheryl in 1997 and recently rereleased—and calls it good.
In the tunnel Lester says, “A new rule I just thought of!” his voice nearly cracking on the lie. Ruth stops. She touches the yellow stripe bisecting the cinder block wall and waits. “I get to ask you a personal question every time you miss a shot.”
“What happens when you miss a shot?”
“I get a letter.”
“If you’re the only one amassing letters, don’t I win automatically?”
“Yes. Does that ruin it?”
Ruth drops her hand from the wall. “No. I like winning.”
The bowl looks smaller when empty, revealing itself as a space with boundaries and edges. Turns out, the fans do not rise indefinitely heavenward; the roar of them is not a weather pattern. Ruth is aware of her own nerve endings: it’s the way she used to feel in church when the congregation fell silent. She throws back her head as she crosses the court, looking toward the rafters where birds fly and nest among the suspended banners and jerseys and American flags, knowing or not knowing that beyond this vaulted sky with its corrosive slants of light exists the real thing.
Lester takes his first shot from the dead center of the free-throw line, hands on the ball, feet on the floor. Eyes wide open: a truce. He swishes it, and Ruth smirks and duplicates it—no one gets an H; no one inquires about the other’s reproductive health; no one pleads the fifth or for a dare instead.
Lester’s second shot is a corner three. Ruth’s spirits deflate; she’s too sick for this shit. She tries, and the ball collides with the rim before bouncing out of bounds.
Glancing at the cleaning staff sweeping their way up the stands, Lester lowers his voice and says, “Should I speak in code?”
“Because you’re so good at codes,” Ruth says, jogging to retrieve the ball. Over the last twenty-four hours, her breasts have become so sore she must repress an instinct to cradle them in one arm. She returns to Lester’s side and awaits his question, knowing he will avoid asking it outright, avoid looking her in the eye, avoid admitting that the idea of Ruth pregnant with another man’s child makes him want to sink through the court, polished to the sheen of melted butter, and never rise again.
“So you’re getting a cat,” he says, eyes roaming the sideline.
She presses her palms into the grain of the ball. “Maybe I have the flu.”
“I’ve seen you when you have the flu and I’ve seen you when you’re getting a cat.”
“I haven’t taken a test yet.”
“But you’re late?”
Ruth throws the ball at Lester’s chest. He catches it. “That’s a separate question.”
They are standing in the post, almost directly beneath the basket. Lester closes his eyes and, as efficiently as if he were reaching for a book from the top shelf, gets a bucket. But Ruth too has memorized the mechanics of an uncontested shot this close to the rim. With her breasts aching and her stomach sour, she mimics him.
Sticking out his jaw, blowing into his nostrils, Lester snatches the rebound and dribbles, daring Ruth to defend him.
As a kid, the basketball court was the place where Ruth loved herself. Hooping was meditative, and on the best nights she would slip into a reverie, pretending to play all five positions on the floor. (And she was also the coach, tough-loving from the sideline; the fan pumping a fist in the air; the ref putting crucial seconds back on the clock.) With Lester, basketball is something else. When she plays in front of him, it’s always the day they met: Ruth the purest version of herself, Lester in awe of his luck. Both of them off-limits to each other.
She plays along as he tries to cross her up, showing off for an imagined audience or his ex-wife alone—who knows? Ruth refuses to fall on her ass but also fails to stay with him as he goes in for a layup.
“Late. Sore. Can’t stop puking. Can we go back to playing H-O-R-S-E? I’m tired.”
Tired, and mortified to be discussing her aging body with her ex-husband, ex-coach. How she, one or two years shy of the year when it surely would not have mattered, allowed her boyfriend to come inside her. How she ignored the twinges, the surges, the absence of blood until her hea
d was in the toilet. How she will never get what she wants professionally because she has a body that gets knocked up and produces hormones that make her want to stay that way. It’s with conception, not labor, that women themselves are reborn. You pee on a stick, watch the second line materialize, and now you can start from the beginning. Now you can do one thing right.
Lester tucks the ball beneath his arm and leads her to the padded courtside seats. These are the remortgage-your-house seats, the sit-beside-Beyoncé seats. They are more comfortable than you think. Ruth sits, and Lester looms over her, pacing in anxious circles, a configuration that feels natural to them both.
“Do you want a cat?” Lester asks, eyebrows asymmetrical. Lips gathered to one side.
For a moment, Ruth forgets the code. A dog, if anything, she almost says before she tells him the truth. “When you put it like that, like you’re offering me a bowl of ice cream, then yes. I do.”
Lester’s expression does not change, but he looks from side to side as if awaiting a punchline. “You already have one.”
“Ha,” Ruth says. Because it’s been a lifetime since she had a baby fused to her hip—and though she can still feel the muscular ache pulling her body downward and to the right, she has never claimed her daughter’s youth went by fast. Most memories feel as distant and dreamlike as anything from Ruth’s own childhood.
“I always wanted more,” Ruth says.
“Eighteen years after the first?”
“No. I thought I would reach a point, ideally in my thirties, when I didn’t have to work so hard. When I could actually afford to take a year off. I thought I would meet some previously unattainable goal and be happy and think: now, motherhood. But goals beget goals, I guess. It feels like there’s always one more thing I need to be satisfied.”
Lester is rocking on his heels, impatient for his turn to speak. Ruth talks faster. “I know there are ways. I know I could work through the pregnancy, take a leave of absence in the new year, come back in time to report on the finals. But I—”
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