“Nothing’s for sure, sweetie. The Wildcats are leading the series two to one. If they win tonight, they only have to win one more, and it’ll all be over. But if Seattle gets this win, they’ll take the Wildcats to six games, maybe seven. In which case, yes, I will miss your graduation.” And so will your dad. She doesn’t say it, more willing to collude with Lester’s lie than pay the price of exposing it.
“Yeah, that’s what Chandler said.” Ariana giggles at some muffled contribution of Chandler’s.
“You didn’t believe him?” Ruth asks.
“I just thought you might know something he doesn’t.”
“No,” Ruth says. “They don’t tell me the scores of games that haven’t happened yet.”
Ariana goes quiet, and Ruth knows she’s been too harsh. Condescending, Ariana would say. There are nights when Ruth can’t stand talking to her daughter on the phone. The conversations veer too quickly toward argument or else empty affection, neither of which feels natural. As a toddler, Ariana was slow to talk, employing only a handful of garbled words by age two. Ruth had fretted that the speech delay was the result of Ariana tumbling from the weight bench and smacking her skull on the garage floor, but had never voiced this fear to anyone, terrified to hear it validated. Maybe to compensate for the lack of verbal communication, Ruth’s daughter was especially physical: quick to kiss her parents’ faces, to embrace a babysitter, to take even an unfamiliar child by the hand. Ariana’s mastery of body language—whomever she touched, she disarmed—persisted long after she learned to speak. And now Ruth craves the contact. She wants to sit beside her daughter, ankles propped and overlapping on the coffee table. She wants to bump against her in the kitchen, an excuse to spread a hand across the small of her back.
“Welll . . .” Ariana drawls, detaching from her mother. “I hope you make it.”
Ruth shuts her eyes. Shame bears down on her. Of course she wants to be at Ari’s high school graduation. The cap and gown, the beaming teenager, the indisputable proof that her child endured, did not disappear into the shadowy margins of an unsupervised youth.
“Me too,” Ruth says. “I wish I was there right now. I’m flying to Seattle tomorrow night. Can I call you from the gate?”
“I’m actually having dinner with Manny tomorrow.”
Ruth’s heart clunks, thrown into the wrong gear.
“Just the two of you?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” There is no reason for Manny to take her daughter out to dinner. No reason for Ariana to put on a form-fitting dress and those heinous shoes, to revise the bones of her face and sit across from her booker in a dark restaurant.
“To talk about LA.”
“Couldn’t you talk on the phone? Or over email?”
“Um, I guess. But he wants to have dinner.”
Earlier today, in the car on her way to the arena, Ruth checked Ariana’s Instagram. Sneak peek from last weekend’s National Mall shoot, Ariana had written. Champagne bottle emoji. Confetti emoji. Heart-eyes emoji. (Who was she heart-eyeing? The photographer? Her four hundred thousand followers? Herself?) In the picture Ariana is upright, sort of, body contorted into an unnatural S: shoulders thrown back, butt thrust in the same direction, thumbs stuck through the belt loops of her high-waisted stonewashed Levi’s. The jeans were cute, Ruth could admit. But the top. Was it lingerie? Like a sneaker it laced down the middle, revealing a runway of pale flesh, the dead center of her daughter’s chest.
Ruth wants to tell her it’s over. No more modeling. They will break the contract, pay whatever legal fees. Ariana can take a gap year before college. Go live in Montreal and learn French. Build houses for Habitat for Humanity. Live at home and get a pizza delivery job. Live at home and watch the entirety of Netflix. Anything, Ruth wants to say, but this.
Phillip is approaching, head tilted with a question.
“Okay,” Ruth says, squeezing her eyes shut. “Let’s talk soon.”
She can’t tell Ariana it’s over. She has forfeited the right to tell Ariana anything.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In past seasons, Emory and Darius would catch each other’s eye after a spectacular (or spectacularly bungled) play. They would smirk. Or they would avert their gazes and laugh. The effect, highlighted by each broadcast, was to give viewers the sense of having stumbled upon an extremely high-level pickup game. Tonight, with the pair halved and pitted against each other, it’s hard to say whether the effect has been eliminated or heightened. When Darius gets too close, Emory winces and squints in derision, as if the marigold hue of Lake’s jersey has burned his retinas. Alternatively, he leans in and blows hot air into Darius’s ear canal, eliciting the head-shake of an older brother: Are you for real? After a play in which Darius is switched onto Emory in the post, absorbing the contact but failing to affect the shot, Emory holds his hand at a child’s height from the floor. “Too little,” he screams. “Too damn little.”
Since he was a kid at Duke, Emory has tapped his left temple twice (or three times) after making a shot, a ritual both superstitious and ostentatious. In Game Three, to the alarm of Sonics fans, he stopped. The pressure of the finals, Ruth knows, can make your body forget its most basic routines.
Finally, the gesture is back. And here is the Emory Turner from the conference finals against Denver—bending the defense with his ball-handling, hard screens, and post-play, running a flawless two-man game with Kasey Powell. Game Four Emory gets wherever he wants on the court, all elbows and knees, all slash and spin; and when he dunks and hangs from the rim, it’s like he’s daring the league to redesign the logo.
Ruth sits with her elbow on the media table, two fingers pressed against her temple, increasing their pressure in tandem with Emory’s taps. She has no idea who will win this series. One of the many ways in which Ruth’s professional self departs from her private self: in basketball, not knowing is ideal.
Toward the end of the first quarter, when Ruth’s mind has turned toward her coach interview, her phone shivers across the table with a text from Joel. A link presented without comment.
Knowing she should know better, Ruth follows the link. A headline fills the screen.
wildcats coach rick bellantoni tapped to replace lester devon in the announcers’ booth next season.
It’s the first quarter and the Sonics are up by twelve. Ruth stares at this headline for five full seconds of regulation until the letters blur, overlap, and vanish into the darkened screen.
Could Bell be less suited to the job? He hates the media. He hates jokes cracked at his own expense.
He hates the three-point shot.
Ruth clears her throat, trying to eradicate a noxious, sticky layer of emotion. At parties, martini in hand, Bell is a delight. He leans against a bar or holds court with his chair pushed back from the table, requesting photos of people’s babies and offering restaurant recommendations and laughing like Santa Claus. That’s who the network wants, Ruth realizes: Rick Bellantoni with no skin in the game and a microphone wrapped around his face.
One minute and forty-two seconds left in the quarter, and the Wildcats call time-out.
Lester, in Ruth’s ear: “It’s not that Lake isn’t bringing his all to this game. We’re seeing the same Lake we saw in Games One through Three. The difference is Turner. When Turner isn’t suffering from a tragic bout of mental illness, it’s clear Seattle is the superior team. You think you’re watching Cats versus Sonics . . . but what you’re really watching is Turner versus himself.”
Jay has no time to respond, mandated to pay tribute to the Wendy’s fish sandwich again. Ruth looks across the court, through the bodies of dispersing players, over the head of a tattooed, ponytailed fan who will attempt a half-court shot to win a Subaru Forester. Lester is facing Jay, pontificating through the commercial break. In profile his chin is weakened, melting into his neck. Lester’s fading beauty bothers R
uth more than her own. She was never in love with her own.
Did he know? When he kneeled before her courtside seat and covered her knees with his hands, did he know Bell was getting the job?
Ruth’s job is to eavesdrop on Cincinnati’s huddle. To hover as close to Bell as possible without entering his line of sight. To note the way he berates or bolsters his players, his voice strangled and hydraulic, his cheeks flushing newborn pink. Instead, she wakes up her phone and skims the article.
According to a source at the network, executives took a meeting with the head coach of the Cincinnati Wildcats to gauge his interest in replacing color analyst Lester Devon in the booth this upcoming season.
This news will disappoint Ruth Devon fans, who have long anticipated the promotion of their favorite sideline reporter and occasional announcer to full-time analyst.
Would RD be the woker choice? She’s a woman, so yes. But for a job that draws on experience in the league and exhaustive knowledge of the game, the network would be hard-pressed to do better than Bell. Plus, the highly respected coach is likely to bring a wizened, grandfatherly perspective to the game, which fans desperately need after enduring the unfiltered bitching and moaning of Devon all these seasons.
Lester Devon, that is.
The half-court hopeful repeatedly bends his knees, struggling to square his shoulders, to keep from rippling with nervous laughter.
With a slip of her finger Ruth could hit the talk-back button and order Phillip to be straight with her. Are they giving the job to Bell? Were they always waiting, fingers and toes crossed, for a man more famous than Ruth to glance at Lester’s seat? And what about seven to seventeen years from now, when Bell finally wanders from the court to close out his lifespan on the cultivated green of a Miami golf course? Then can she have the job? Or will she be—picture Ruth approaching sixty, the skin around her eyes like ruined tissue paper—too old?
It frightens her, how close she is to saying these words. She feels drunk or adrift; there would be no consequences because soon there will be no Ruth Devon. If Bell gets the job, she’s done. There are other things she can do with her life.
She’s panicking, she realizes, moving two fingers from her temple to her tightening throat. The panic recedes as she acknowledges it; but the longing remains. She wants something she no longer believes she will get.
On the court, the fan bends his knees one last time. His form is good. After so many hesitant dribbles and misleadingly sheepish grins, he shoots. Ruth’s eyes follow the ball as it smacks against the backboard and sinks through the net. The man folds in half. Laughing, he unfurls to run a spasmodic victory lap, his brightly inked arms in the air. The stadium announcer could be a wolf howling at the moon.
Across the court from his ex-wife, Lester Devon rises, applauding, unabashed and unequivocally thrilled for this anonymous fan and his brand-new Subaru.
At halftime, Cincinnati’s general manager—indebted to Ruth since she agreed to let his nineteen-year-old daughter shadow her during a regular season game—ushers her into the locker room. It’s a space that evokes Ruth’s bedroom in high school, had it been surrounded in mirrors, duplicated ad infinitum. Sneakers avalanche from cabinets too full to close. Damp towels fester on the floor. Draped over tabletops are tangles of cell phone chargers, hoodies, and headphones. Feeling like an intruder amid sacred squalor, Ruth crowds into a corner with the equipment assistants and the high-energy towel boys. She watches Darius Lake cross the room in two steps and sink into his leather swivel chair. Behind him, his locker is conspicuously tidy: street clothes and spare uniforms hung side-by-side, shoes aligned.
One of the few players who still refrains from covertly checking his phone at halftime, Darius is serene as a trainer crouches at his side and wraps an ice pack around his left knee. His teammates sulk toward the toilets or stand before their lockers silently hydrating, excess water slipping down their necks.
Bell enters, flanked by assistant coaches. His is the body language of a mom spontaneously tossing treasured toys into a Hefty bag. He has no clipboard. There will be no calm dissection of pick-and-rolls or turnovers. Although she’s not the one in trouble, Ruth braces herself for the bullfrog bellow of his voice.
“How? Many? Minutes? Are in? An NBA game?”
Bell repeats himself, adjusting neither his volume nor his erratic accentuation.
In his vibrational drawl, somewhere between smart-ass and teacher’s pet, Darius supplies the answer. “Forty-eight minutes.”
Bell echoes his star. “Forty-eight minutes.” He grips the edge of a table strewn with empty Gatorade bottles. “So why, twenty-four minutes into a forty-eight minute game, are we lagging? Has every? Last? One of you? Contracted an autoimmune disorder?”
Ruth is often around men who are yelling. She has the ghost of an impulse to reprimand him: be nice, be humane! But who is she to silence Bell? If she had the privilege of assuming her own rage would draw a rapt, contrite audience, wouldn’t she exercise it? Easily she can imagine the satisfaction of her emotions ricocheting around the room. And it’s hard to argue with the results. Contained within the coach’s anger is the truth: the Cats need to get their shit together.
Players squirm, shoulders rising and falling, toes digging ditches into the carpet woven with the Wildcats logo. No mention of Emory Turner torching them. No mention of Seattle’s talent running deeper, of one team necessarily being second best. Darius scratches his chin, looks thoughtfully at his left knee encased in a bulbous wad of plastic.
Ruth senses moisture slipping from her body, seeping into the cotton of her underwear. She flinches. Blood.
“I’m not going to remind you how to play basketball,” Bell says. “I’m not a miracle worker. You have time to win this game, so do that. Fucking do that, okay? You have time.”
The coach shakes as he stomps into his office. Ruth’s fingers, wrapped around a ballpoint pen, also shake. She wants to say no. No to her insides contracting. No to pulling down her underwear in the bathroom and seeing the red inkblots of a miscarriage. The force of her aversion to this moment—which she can see so clearly, as if it’s already happened—takes her breath away.
She exits the locker room and stands in the hall, awaiting more moisture or the first flares of pain. Officials and interns and journalists move past her, staring straight ahead. Her discomfort makes her anonymous, somehow. The dampness could be discharge. Is vaginal discharge normal in early pregnancy? Is there such thing as normal when you’re pregnant at forty-two?
Wildcats flood the hall, moving toward the court with the long-limbed confidence of men who have not recently been cursed out by their coach. As Darius passes, knee de-mummified, Ruth watches his gait. Not a limp or a hobble; still, stiffer than he should be. Ruth feels a dread at the imperfection of the human body—even a near-perfect one.
She follows the team. Emerging from the tunnel into the chaos of the bowl, she feels like a fish caught and released. She returns to the media table, taking inventory of her mic, her notebooks, her pens. She returns to her view of the lights reflected in Lester’s bald head. She crosses her legs tightly, as if she can delay her body’s decision. Maybe she can.
The way these third-quarter Wildcats hit the floor, you would think halftime had been a crash course in defensive strategy. That Bell had sat them down, drawn X’s and O’s, talked them through the mechanics of swarming Turner on the block, forcing him to pass or else take jump shots beyond his comfort zone. There is exactly one way to beat the Sonics—Ruth can almost hear Bell say, though he did not say—and it’s by keeping Emory Turner away from the rim.
Lester: “There’s plenty of time for the momentum of this game to shift.” Ruth snorts. Wasn’t he the one who declared the Wildcats helpless against an unimpaired Turner?
Through her IFB she can hear a smile underlying Jay’s words: “Ladies and gentlemen, Lester Devon, a man who never says an
ything he can’t take back.”
What Ruth needs is someone to curse her out. To corner her in a locker room and demand that she wake the fuck up. She’s running out of time, letting her body distract her from the likelihood of the network hiring Bell or another ex-coach—someone who has stalked the sideline, suit jacket flapping, spit flying, for decades. Lester may have vouched for her, Phillip may be pulling for her, but the company is vast, full of suits and bald heads and stubborn assumptions.
Those assumptions: Sports belong to men. Women may enjoy sports, but they do so superficially, the way they enjoy Keeping Up with the Kardashians and romance novels and watching birds flock to a feeder. When a woman makes her living in proximity to a sport—or plays a sport or watches a game with her fists balled tight—her investment is not necessarily unwelcome. It’s just unnatural: a passion she contrived to get closer to manliness, or to redeem an oversized and otherwise monstrous body. Whereas men are born with athletic instincts—competition and domination and saving the day. When Lester Devon tells you a player added a euro step over the summer, Lester understands both the mechanical how and the spiritual why : the ember-hot motivation fueling the fancy footwork, a player’s absolute refusal to lose.
Don’t sweat it, ladies. Women know about other shit. They know how it feels to swell and rupture. They know how to love other people more than themselves—something men have only faked, to varying degrees of verisimilitude.
The Second Season Page 15