It was raining hard. Manley’s hair was matted down over his eyes. I began to shiver. The water flowed down our bodies. I tried to see the humor in the situation. I took one of my hands off Man-ley’s neck and pushed the hair out of his eyes.
The rain was a torrent now, and I couldn’t control my shivering. I think that’s what did it. I shivered us into a beautifully timed climax. It was the kind of simultaneous thing that people spend years mastering. People read Hindu epics and do bizarre pelvic exercises to achieve what Manley and I achieved barely knowing each other and with no movement except for the little trembles of coldness that swept my body.
The rain came down. We were worried about the slick floor. If I tried to climb off, one of us might slip. We decided it would be best to remain absolutely still until the rain stopped and the stone floor dried a bit. These storms rarely last, Manley pointed out. He also said that stone dries fast. I thought about it. Stone does dry fast. Certainly faster than wood or carpeting.
We clung to each other. I pushed the hair out of his eyes. Somewhere an owl was hooting.
Attendance was slipping in Vancouver. As a result, the Canucks were playing part of their home schedule in Seattle, part in Ta-coma, part in Vancouver. Not an unusual arrangement in modern sports.
Our mistake was in going to Seattle. We were expected in Tacoma.
We all piled onto a bus and went to the right city. We got to the arena just before the scheduled start of the game, and by the time we got out on the ice the crowd was a little testy. The Canucks decided I was the one who had kept them waiting. It was a bloody contest with bodies spinning across the blue lines, sticks thwacking the boards, helmets bouncing across the goal mouth. With less than a minute left in a two-all tie, Nils Nilsson put the puck on my stick with a cross-ice pass, and I broke around the last defender, drew back my stick to bring out the goaltender, and swerved hard, low, slantingly left, my skate blades hissing, and put the puck into the cords on my backhand.
Slick as a berry, as Randall Leeds Packer would say.
My teammates came vaulting over the boards to smack me on the head with their giant gloves, and I felt a few claws on my backside as well. They were all shouting in my face, and giving me those gap-toothed, withered, senile grins, and rubbing my head with their gloves.
“All I want to do is play hockey,” I told them.
It was a noisy, happy locker room. When we were all dressed and ready to board the bus for the ride back to the airport, where our chartered plane would be waiting, we found out that our chartered plane had gone to Vancouver and was waiting there. The pilot thought we were in Vancouver. He knew Seattle was wrong, but he didn’t know Vancouver was also wrong.
It was decided we would spend the night in Tacoma. Four in the morning, a knock on the door. I went and opened up. It was two more Arab-looking fellows, making another bed check.
“Look, what is this?” I told them.
“Bed check, bed check.”
“How are we supposed to sleep, you people keep showing up, what is this?”
“It is just a formality,” one of them said.
“It is routine,” the other said.
“It is also four a.m., if you don’t mind, sirs.”
They shined flashlights all over the room and bed. One of them looked in the bathroom. The other opened the closet and beamed his light in there. The first one went over to the bed and felt it to make sure it was warm and slept in. I didn’t think I liked the idea of my bed being felt.
As soon as they were gone, I grabbed the phone and called Sanders Meade at his apartment in New York.
He answered in a phony Irish voice.
“This is just the handy man. I’m up here to unclog a drain. God love you for calling. Goodbye.”
“Sanders, it’s Cleo. Why are you disguising your voice? You don’t have to do that anymore. You’re back from ‘Boulder, Colorado.’ You’re safe from the media. You’re the president, damn it.”
“Cleo, what a relief. I thought it was Ahmed ben Farouky. He usually wakes me up about this time with results of the bed checks.”
“That’s why I’m calling. This whole thing is insane. It can’t go on. One of them wears a thing on his head. They have flashlights.”
“They’re pretty ethnic people.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have to be sensitive to other people’s customs and attitudes. Hughes Tool does business over there.”
“It’s four in the morning. What kind of custom is that, waking people up and beaming lights all over? You’re the president, Sanders. This Farouky guy is just the general manager. Tell him to knock it off.”
“You don’t know Benny.”
“Well, we’ve had it up to here. We’re grown-ups, damn it.”
“Cleo, think a minute.”
“Yes?”
“Reflect,” he said. “When did the bed checks start?”
“In Dallas-Fort Worth.”
“And what happened?”
“My bed was empty. What do you mean, what happened?”
“I mean in the game.”
“We won the game.”
“What happened in the game against the North Stars?”
“We won the game.”
“What happened against the Kings?”
“We won.”
“Against the Flames?”
“We won,” I said.
“Against the Canucks?”
“We won again.”
“Five straight victories. On the road. At the tail end of a trip that was looking more and more like an unmitigated disaster. Five wins, Cleo. All since the bed checks started. I think I can safely rest my case.”
On the flight to New York, we ran into horrific turbulence over the Great Lakes. I decided this would be a good time to review my personal life.
I had betrayed my friend Floss with Archie. I had betrayed Archie with Murray, in Archie’s own house. I had betrayed Glenway with Manley, his half brother. I had betrayed Sanders with Jeep. I had betrayed Shaver with Sanders, Glenway, Jeep, Murray, and Manley. I had betrayed Jeep with Murray, who I had also betrayed Archie with, in Archie’s own house. I had betrayed Murray with Manley, who I had also betrayed Glenway with. I had betrayed Archie not only with Murray, in Archie’s own house, but with Shaver, in Floss’s house, where I had betrayed Floss with Archie. I had betrayed Glenway not only with Manley, his half brother, but with Jeep, who I had also betrayed Sanders with, in Buffalo. I had also betrayed Sanders with Glenway, in Glenway’s apartment, and Glenway with Murray, in Archie’s house, but I had not betrayed Jeep or Glenway with Sanders, in Chicago, because Sanders lost his erection when I said Watergate.
Shaver was Most Betrayed. Manley was Least Likely to Notice, which is ironic because I hadn’t had time to betray him yet. Jeep was Worldly and Resigned. Glenway was Basically Unbetrayable. Murray was Willing to Discuss a Relationship, based on his Oral Needs. Sanders was Superficially Embittered, or a good bet to slink away and lick his wounds. Archie was Too Sleepy to Care.
I knew what I had to do. I had to order ten more Badger Beagles T-shirts from Yankee Doodle Novelties in Osaka, Japan.
We began our descent.
THREE
The Kramer is Now
15
This will be the meaningful part of the book, my last chance to find a theme in all the space junk that’s been floating through these pages.
I opened the door.
Anna Maria Mattarazzo looked up from my bed. Entwined in her long, dark hair was a young fellow wearing a yellow hard hat. They were otherwise undressed.
I closed the door and went back down on the elevator. I was determined to avoid any more mindless fun. I waited fifteen minutes, watching Mr. Willie water the apartment lobby plants. They were like apartment lobby plants anywhere. Pale, bent, and haggard.
I went back upstairs. Anna Maria was watching television by now. I looked in on Sh
aver. He seemed to be resting well enough, although he looked pale and thin.
“Anna Maria, who was that?”
“Call me Chickie, okay?”
She was wearing jeans etc.
“Who was that?”
“My boyfriend Jojo.”
“He wears a hat in bed?”
“We were hurrying.”
“Why were you hurrying?”
“I called the airport. They said your plane was in.”
“How often have you had sex in my bed while you were supposed to be caring for the patient, with or without hats?”
“Where can we do it?” she said. “You can only do so much in cars. Up to a point, a car is all right. You can do a lot worse than a car. Up to a point. Can we go to some cheap hotel where you don’t need luggage? My mother, what she’d do to me if she caught me going to some cheap hotel, forget it.”
“Where is JoJo now?”
“Taking a shower.”
I tried to think of some withering remark. Something with enough sarcasm in it to melt her right off the chair and onto the floor. I would pick her up with a spatula and put her in Jojo’s hard hat.
Nothing very original came to mind. Probably because it was so strange for me, so rare, to be in a position where I might criticize someone else’s mad, rash, wild behavior.
JoJo came out of the bathroom, dressed for the street. Decent of him. He was a tallish, shambling fellow with the same put-upon eyes that Washington Post had, despite the difference in age, race etc. People with put-upon eyes usually shamble. It gives them time to figure out how wary they should be of a given situation. This JoJo looked like the Third or Fourth Fastest Gun in the West walking into a saloon where the Fastest Gun was playing Super Pong with his cronies. He also had the worst-looking fingernails I’ve ever seen. I think he had syphilis of the cuticles.
“Hey, Chickie, so I’ll see you, hah?”
“I’m going with you.”
“Yeah, all right, but let’s go, hah?”
“Where did you park?”
“Hey, where did I park? Where am I gonna park?”
“What, there’s no space downstairs?”
“Downstairs? You know what downstairs is like?”
“You think I’m walking, forget it.”
“Hey, you coming or what?”
“You have to take me to Nineteenth Street.”
“I ain’t going to no Nineteenth Street. What kind of Nineteenth Street?”
“I have a detached retina that I have to check out down there, and feed her and her dog, and then we go home, okay?”
She pronounced it detached re-ti-na. When they were gone, I called Fat Sally at Nurses Anonymous and told her the patient was moving to a drier climate. The planet Venus.
I settled in. The season was winding down. Several very short road trips were all that remained.
I spent a lot of time hovering over the Kramer. I found that I enjoyed taking care of Shaver. I did everything myself. I wrote out a schedule, made frequent time checks to be sure my watch wasn’t running too fast or too slow, used the stove timer for crucial feedings etc.
Time passed. In some mysterious, intuitive, unexplainable way, I had the feeling Shaver was getting better. He was still pale and thin, sure. But there was something so utterly calm and peaceful about him. His face began to acquire a sweet glow. He looked a little transformed. He was like someone returning a little better, a little wiser, from a great journey through the world. (That sounds like Wadi Assad, although he’d have been pithier.)
I made sure the sheets were always clean, the patient’s pajamas always fresh. I even dusted and shined all the bottles in the Kramer until they sparkled.
Shaver did glow. There was a sweet, gentle, innocent, restful look about him. I could only hope it wasn’t the Glow of Death, or Madness, or Slow Starvation.
I called Dr. Glass. He said there was no such thing as the Glow of Death. If there was such a thing, he would have heard of it, he said.
I told him Shaver seemed so rested, so full of peace and well-being.
The loving atmosphere of the American home, he said.
The Arab bed-checkers continued to be active even though the road trip was over. They showed up at players’ houses in Westchester and on Long Island at two, three, four in the morning. They followed players’ wives to the supermarket, the dentist, their places of employment, the day-care centers where they took their children. They followed the children. They made phone calls around the clock. They carried flashlights and walkie-talkies.
They came to my apartment after a game with the Canadiens. It was 5:00 a.m. Two new ones, both wearing Ranger Windbreakers and headdress things. I refused to let them in the bedroom because God knows what they would have made of Shaver in his cube.
They were visibly miffed. One of them picked up the phone to call headquarters. I went to the intercom to buzz Mr. Willie. Neither of us got an answer.
The team won two at home, tied the Islanders in their building, won again at home, won in Philly, tied the Canadiens at home, won easily in Buffalo.
The more we won, the more we grumbled and bitched. It was embarrassing to be on a winning streak in the midst of this ridiculous front-office harassment. A delegation of players went to see Sanders Meade in his office at the Garden. The same office that big, fat, rasping James Kinross had occupied before his ouster.
Sanders had decorated the office with dozens of enormous blowups—photos that captured athletes in moments of terrific stress. All the walls were covered with these life-sized pictures of baseball, football, basketball, hockey players with expressions of nightmarish pain, agony, and defeat on every face. They looked like recruiting posters for a career in hell.
There were four of us. Team captain Mike McPherson plus Bruce McLeod, Eric Torkleson, and me. We sat in the office listening to Sanders gargle with mouthwash in his private toilet.
Bruce said to Eric, “Is it true Torkle got ticketed for jaywalking?”
“I never left the sidewalk,” Eric said.
They all laughed a little, bouncing on their chairs. We listened to Sanders flush.
When he came out, he went into a long, defensive, placating speech about our record in the last few weeks, and he said he would personally see to it that the bed checks were gradually phased out. It sounded very much as though the bed checks would end when the season ended. Maybe the Saudis thought this was a concession.
There were a lot of partly stifled laughs during Sanders’ presentation, with some eyeball-rolling thrown in, but at least he’d said that the thing would eventually come to an end.
Mike got some specific assurances out of him. Then he said, “When do we get to meet the general manager? You told us in Dallas-Fort Worth he was at a funeral.”
“In Boulder, Colorado, that’s right. He’s still there.”
“That’s some funeral,” Mike said.
“They’re very ethnic about death.”
We got up to leave. Sanders asked me if I’d mind very much remaining behind for a moment. Since he’d just spent twenty minutes in the same room with Torkle, I knew he didn’t have sex in mind. The others said they’d wait for me.
Sanders got behind his curvilinear desk. It looked like a warped surfboard. He offered me some Juicy Fruit, which I declined.
“He wants to see you, Cleo.”
“Who does?”
“Ahmed ben Farouky.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the president. Ask him.”
“Officially he’s still in ‘Boulder.’ I’m not supposed to attempt to contact him. He initiates all contact.”
“Next time he initiates, ask him why he wants to see me. I’m a member of the team. When he meets the team, he can meet me.”
“He’s given me a date and time.”
“Tie them in a pretty bow and stick them up your ass.”
&nb
sp; “I can accept that,” he said after a pause.
“He hasn’t given me a date and time.”
“I see what you’re saying, but he’s the general manager.”
“You’re the president.”
“He calls me Meade Sanders.”
It took me a moment to figure out what was wrong with that.
Spring was in the air, pretty much. From my window, I saw Central Park turning slowly green. There was a riot between joggers and bicyclists for right-of-way.
I gave Shaver a haircut, trimmed his fingernails and toenails, took care of Nutrient Injection, cleaned the plastic shield with Windex.
I think I was falling in love with him all over again.
The weight loss had given his face a shade more definition. Combined with his glow, this little bit of starkness made him look almost saintly. His radiance wasn’t a boyish radiance. He was definitely less boyish. He had, if anything, a more rugged look than before, but it was a ruggedness of the desert, not the hockey rink. A ruggedness of strange dreams and inner struggle.
The cloudy fluid didn’t bother me. I wasn’t afraid of the bottle with the cloudy fluid. I got rid of the contents, cleaned the bottle, returned it to the Kramer, watched it gradually fill up, got rid of the contents, and so on.
The Conquest of Fear, or How to Come to Terms With the Waste Products of Loved Ones in Your Spare Time Without Gagging.
I polished the chrome paneling and all the instruments and dials. I got some paint and touched up some rough spots on the undercarriage. I was scrupulous about Bedsore Rotation.
It was fun going to a medical supply store for a fresh supply of nutrients and for some spare rubber hosing and plastic tubing in the event of a World Shortage of these commodities. I’d never felt this sense of coziness and security before. We were two, Shaver and I. I Liked coming home to him. I started clipping news items for him to read when he woke up. I was constantly looking in on him, whispering to him, patting his plastic shield. I decided he ought to have a beard.
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League Page 36