Murray moaned over the grass.
“Now this Nativity scene had Mary dressed in blue, Joseph in a maroon sort of robe, and the Baby Jesus in the manger in traditional white swaddling clothes, with a halo around his head, and surrounded in the barn and outside the barn by two gold-winged kneeling angels; two standing angels, which I always posted at each side of the barn; two shepherds in brown robes; five small sheep; three camels; the three Wise Men, one dressed in purple and gold, the others I can’t remember; two brown and white cows; and two gray donkeys. That was the Nativity at our house in Badger, and those were the people and animals taking part.”
He grabbed my hand and put it around his penis. It was quite, quite hard.
“All the Nativity pieces were wrapped in tissue from Christmas to Christmas, so I had to be very, very careful when I unpacked the box. It was my job to unpack the box. This was a solemn responsibility when you consider not only how easily the pieces could get broken but also the sacred nature of the pieces and of the whole scene. After I unpacked the box, I always put Baby Jesus in the manger first, to get the most important thing out of the way so I could relax a little. I built up from there, outwards, until finally the camels, the last pieces, were situated at the very edges of the table. Then my father would give advice, make corrections etcetera. When the scene was totally and perfectly set, everyone gathered and my mother gave me the okay to plug in the light cord which turned on a tiny, concealed bulb somewhere up there in the hand-carved beams in the stable, and a soft, celestial glow fell upon the manger, and everyone said it was the best Nativity scene ever, better than the year before, and the year before that, even though all the pieces were the same, and the table was the same, and my father and I had arranged everything the same way, exactly.”
He pushed my legs apart.
“We cared about Christmas, and standards, and neatness, and precision, and doing things right, and customs, and traditions, and never settling for second best,” I said.
Murray took my hand off his penis. I put it back on. He took it off, prying my fingers loose one by one. I guess he was ready, and correctly felt he wouldn’t be able to effect entry with my hand around his sex organ.
“Christmas Eve,” I said.
He entered me, moaning and sighing and breathing fast.
“Christmas Eve in Badger, Murray, was better than anything you could ever imagine. It was more Christmasy, more small-townish, more haunting, beautiful, innocent, sad, and safe than any other day in any other place in the world, and I’d bet anything on it. It was always cold and utterly clear. A crisp, sparkling cold. A clear, crisp, brilliant night with moonlight sparkling on the snow. The air was sharp and utterly fresh and crisp. It was like mountain air and it smelled of snow, although we knew it wouldn’t be snowing until we got out of bed early the next morning because then it would be Christmas Day and it always snowed in Badger on Christmas Day. We always had a white Christmas.”
He was building up momentum and breathing very, very fast.
“Our house was in perfect order. Cleaned, scrubbed, and dusted within an inch of its life. The tree was symmetrical, thickly branched, and fully and beautifully trimmed. The mantel was trimmed with holly and ornaments and branches of balsam. Mistletoe was hung in the doorway to the dining room, and on the chandelier out in the hall, and in the entrance to the living room, among other places. A fire was blazing, as fires should but seldom do. Our fires always blazed, with periodic crackling, because my father and brother went to great pains to arrange logs and kindling in complicated, interlocking designs that prevented smoking and smoldering, and guaranteed a steady, hearty, crackling blaze. The gifts were arranged beneath the tree, flawlessly wrapped and ribboned. The Longines Symphonette played Christmas carol after Christmas carol, the robust and stirring ones, the sad ones, the haunting ones. Friends, neighbors, and relatives kept arriving, and people exchanged gifts and admired our tree and our Nativity scene, and drank rum and brandy eggnog, and there was hot chocolate and hot cider for the teetotalers and kids. Despite the noise and commotion and general good cheer, our dog Bowzer would settle down to sleep in front of the blazing fire, and we’d hear his soft snoring, and soon his legs would twitch as he dreamed of chasing squirrels and rabbits in the woods behind the house. Around nine-thirty, people started going home in order to get ready for the candlelight service at the Presbyterian church.”
At the sound of the words “candlelight service,” Murray had his orgasm. I thought, well, I peaked him too soon. But he immediately started mumbling something that sounded like “don’t stop.” Except he was saying it very fast, in a breathy voice. “Dontstop dontstop dontstop.”
“All right, at ten o’clock my mother handed out candles and the whole family left for the candlelight Christmas Eve service at the Presbyterian church. We walked through the clear, sparkling night, snow crunching beneath our boots. From this or that house, others came out into the night and small groups formed, joined by other groups coming from different parts of town, until everyone converged in front of the church. We went inside. The altar was banked with poinsettias. The only light anywhere in the church came from long, long tapers, one at the end of each pew, all the tapers adorned with dark red velvet bows. The pews were draped with evergreen.”
Amazing. When I said “banked with poinsettias,” Murray’s penis began to restiffen inside me. When I said “draped with evergreen,” it sort of leaped into a red alert.
“The organist would be playing ‘O Holy Night’ as we entered the church. The church smelled of candle wax and pine.”
This made him moan with aching pleasure. Candle wax and pine. I think his teeth were chattering.
“There was no sermon on Christmas Eve. We just sang the old hymns. The old, old hymns. The Reverend Dr. Broadmore read from St. Luke—that was my favorite version of the Nativity. Then, one by one, we took our candles to the altar and lit them from a single large candle. After this, we walked down the aisle and out into the clear, cold, sparkling night. All through town you’d see pinpoints and flickerings and whole ribbons of lights as people headed home with their candles, walking over the hard snow. Among kids it was thought to be bad luck to have your candle blow out, so we were careful to keep it out of the wind, using our hands and body and the bodies of bigger people nearby. My candle never blew out, although the candles of others did, and I used to wonder what would become of them. All the way home, all you could see were the stars sparkling in the clear, Christmas sky, and the candlelight down below, looping and arching over hills, or flickering in the wind, or pinpointed singly as some old widower paused at the door to find his keys. When we got home, we used either my brother’s candle or mine, alternating year to year amid occasional squabbles over whose turn it was, to light the Christmas candle in our window. This candle burned for twelve days. The twelve days of Christmas.”
Murray climaxed again, moaning and trembling. He immediately followed this with “dontstop dontstop dontstop.” He wanted to hear about the opening of the presents on Christmas morning, and the crisp, browned surface and juicy meat of the turkey, and what the snow was like on Christmas Day, falling softly over the town. But he seemed too, too excited by it all and I thought it would be best if we called it a night then and there.
Too much innocence can burst the heart.
13
Wing turned out to be Malayan. We had a nice talk in the kitchen as dawn broke over Metroplex. He told me about some of the famous people whose service he’d been in, as he put it. He went back a ways. The thing he mourned was leaving Hollywood, but he’d seen the changes coming many years ago. The future belonged to TV and heavy metal. I think heavy metal might be a rock ‘n’ roll term.
Later he spoke of going electric, so I guess he was talking about rock ‘n’ roll. He’d left the service of Mickey Rooney to go electric.
Over my protests, he went and woke up Archie’s driver, the cowboy-hatted fellow, and this is how I reached my hot
el in Dallas minutes before a room check conducted by Jeep himself.
I’d just fallen into bed when he knocked on the door. I threw on a robe and went and opened up, and he told me he was checking all the players’ rooms to make sure we were where we were supposed to be and not out carousing.
“The Rangers don’t have room checks.”
“You are right up to a point,” he said.
“What is the point?”
“Midnight last night. The new general manager, he has insisted to check the rooms and the beds in the rooms.”
I had the door opened barely four inches. I was in no shape for a full-fledged visit from J. P. Larousse or anyone else. One Badger Christmas was all I could handle in an eight-hour span.
“So I must check, Cleo, which makes me very morose to do this thing, but they give it to me to do.”
“All right, you have checked. It’s a room check. You have come to my room and you have checked.”
“He has insisted to check the rooms and the beds in the rooms.”
“It is a room check.”
“It is a bed check.”
“The Saudi said this? Check not only the rooms? Check the beds?”
“It is terrible, this rule. What can I do?”
“We don’t have room checks on the Rangers. You know that, Jeep. We’re a mature outfit.”
“You must call me Jean-Paul.”
“Sure, the team’s going bad, but a room check won’t change things.”
“What will change things?” he said.
“We will play the body. We will chop the man’s ankles.”
“Cleo, it is not for me that I do this, eh, but for management in the big offices high above the city. I don’t do this thing, they would not hesitate to give me the knife. They always spill blood on the road. The team does not go good, the media is shooting tracer bullets, the coach refuses to check the beds, just like that they finish me off. What does it mean to them, one more coach, he gets on a plane, eating soft white bread?”
He forgot to mention his three or four kids and the snow crashing through the roof of his house. I flung open the door and he came in. I watched him scrutinize the bed. I was wishing I’d brought Murray, Floss, and Archie with me.
J.P. shrugged sadly, and gave me a grim smile, and sort of smoothed down the sheets, and fluffed up a pillow for me. He was looking so sad and grim and shamefaced I wanted to sing “O Canada” half in French and half in English to cheer him up a little.
We shook hands at the door and he went to the next room to check another bed.
I slept for four hours or so. After breakfast, I checked the schedule Anna Maria Mattarazzo had given me. Calculating the time difference, I realized she was probably in my apartment at that moment.
I called from my room. A man answered. I kept insisting to him that I had the wrong number, but he kept reading my number off the little thing on the phone. A slow, eerie panic began sweeping over me. Just then another voice came on. Anna Maria.
“That was your boyfriend, wasn’t it? It just hit me. I wish I’d realized sooner.”
“That was my uncle,” she said.
“What’s your uncle doing there?”
“He’s a repairman. There’s a small problem with the Kramer. I had to get somebody, so I figured who can you trust if you can’t trust family? Pino is family, so I go call him and he comes right over. I have to tell you it’s gonna cost. These things cost.”
“As long as he fixes the machine.”
“He’ll fix. No problem. He’s family. Why shouldn’t he fix?”
“How is Shaver?”
“The patient is fine. What happened was that some wires shorted and he was getting small jolts in his abdomen during feeding. But Pino’s on it right now. Nothing to worry about.”
She pronounced it ab-do-men. Wasn’t it supposed to be ab-do-men? First she referred to those highly complex, interconnected bottles in the Kramer simply as bottles, which was human and refreshing and nice, but pretty unprofessional, I thought. Now it’s these mispronunciations of body parts. Fib-yu-la. Ab-do-men. She liked middle syllables.
“This isn’t the kind of repair work Pino usually does. He’s doing it as a favor for me, because I’m family.”
“What does he usually repair?”
“Snowmobiles,” she said.
It would be amusing, when Shaver was up and about in five months or so, to sit in some small, elegant restaurant done up in ecru and puce, during our celebration of his complete recovery, and to tell him, over the jugged hare with chestnuts, that his well-being was literally in the hands of the Mafia.
I took the elevator down to the lobby, and when the doors slid open there was Murray Jay with his arms full of pepper grinders, olive oil etc.
“Ride up with me, Cleo.”
“Okay.”
“Where’d you go? I looked for you.”
“Had trouble sleeping. Got back in the Packard. What about you?”
“Got back in the Hudson.”
“Where’s Floss?”
“Went to New York.”
“What about Archie?”
“Tokyo,” he said.
The doors opened and we stood in the corridor.
“I’m exhausted,” he said. “I can’t wait to get home and get settled in. I’m moving into a brand new high-rise. The kind of building I’ve always hated. Doormen around the clock. A package room. A swimming pool. Laundry rooms. A barber shop. Endless carpeted hallways. A twenty-four-hour gynecologist.”
“Why are you moving into the kind of place you’ve always hated?”
“I need something ironic at this stage in my life.”
“I see you in a brownstone.”
“Everybody sees me in a brownstone. That’s just it. I want to play against the image.”
We ambled toward his room.
“Let me ask you this, Murray. Is absolutely everyone in this industry you talked about last night involved with the mob? Every single person?”
“It’s a total lock. No air gets in or out.”
“These guys don’t hurt people for fun, do they? They hurt people who won’t play ball with them, right? They want something, they make a threat, and then they hurt. They don’t hurt just to hurt.”
“They’ve been known to hurt for effect,” he said.
“But that’s to make a point. To impress people with their ability and their willingness to hurt.”
“They covered a guy with Handi-Wrap and threw him off a bridge.”
“But not just to hurt.”
“He was the prosecution’s key witness.”
“So they had a valid reason.”
Murray was slightly aghast.
“It wasn’t just a morbid act,” I said. “They didn’t hurt him just to hurt him. There was a legitimate, underlying reason. It wasn’t amoral, like we’re always reading about.”
We’d reached the door. I shook Murray’s hand and took the elevator back down. When the doors slid open, voice-of-the-Rangers Merle Halverson was standing there.
“Ride up with me, Cleo.”
“Okay.”
“Did you hear the rumor?”
“No, what?”
“Paid vacations for players. The Players Association will make it their top demand.”
“We’re off all summer,” I said.
“This is during the season they want. Paid vacations during the season. Two weeks.”
“Can we take it in long weekends?”
“It was just a matter of time. In a way I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
We reached his floor and got out.
“I thought it would happen first in the NBA,” he said. “All those black guys are usually in the avant-garde when it comes to clothes, cars and leisure time.”
We shook hands and I rode back down. Made it out the door this time. A nasty mix of rain, snow, and hail came crashing down. High winds
sent people spinning along the sidewalk.
I went back upstairs. I tried to read. I tried to sleep. I tried to watch TV.
I played well that night, getting a goal and an assist in an easy win for us. Afterward we came trudging and swaying into the locker room. Mild surprise. We see Sanders Meade standing on a chair getting ready to address the team. This is the first time he has appeared before us since his elevation to the presidency.
Finally we are all in the room, sitting or standing around, getting quiet, muttering and sniffling. I assume he is here to talk about paid vacations.
He is looking well, Sanders is. He has gotten over the fatigue of his long journey from New York to Chicago via Butte, Montana, and other way stations sprinkled and flung across the continent. I would go so far as to say he is looking fit and trim, as we often read of presidents. If the president is described as looking fit and trim, or trim and fit, it means he has had a good night’s sleep, he has had some fresh-squeezed orange juice upon awakening, and we have not lost further leverage in the Horn, the Rim, the Gulf, or the Corridor overnight. After presidential vacations, trim and fit becomes tanned and fit. This is automatic. Either way, it is a term I associate with people who have enough money to be happily obese, out of shape, and generally wasted, jowly, and dissipated, out drinking and screwing every night, but who have resolved to be fit and trim out of a deep sense of duty. In other words, fitness and trimness are moral qualities, and when the president is described as being fit and trim, we should all feel better. Power has its darker side, of course, and this same president will be described two days later as looking tired and drawn. This isn’t so bad. When he is called pale and haggard, however, or gray and shaken, he is having problems right down the line, personal and otherwise. Weary and bent means the job is just too much for him. And if you read that he is looking haunted and ashen, it probably means he is getting ready to board Air Force One for the ultimate scenario.
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League Page 31