THE BASEBALL THING became a topic for weeks. She spoke of it in terms of delight. She was so proud of herself. They should sign her up, she said. She could play the game better than those people on the field. Did you see, she said, how I caught the ball?
Yes, I said. Everybody saw.
Bare-handed catch, she said. They needed gloves!
Fair ball my eye, she said. That ball was foul. Those umpires were losers. Those Phillies were losers. Everybody was a loser. The whole rotten stinking world. Big deal. Why do people care about a lousy stinking game of baseball anyway? That wasn’t real life. Why do people care about anything? It’s all the same. Everything’s the same. We all die in the end. Huh! Even MacArthur died. He didn’t fade away.
The way they carried on, she said, you’d have thought she had done something really harmful.
“Whatever happened to perspective?” she asked.
At the same time she was going on about these things she was reading a book in secret that had something like this for a title...How to Win Back Love.
The book was full of sound advice, as was another book she’d been reading in the bathroom.
We used to joke about all the books that were published. Name anything, we agreed, and there was a book on the subject, even a biography of Julio Iglesias, tops on our list of un-required reading until I saw a title in a Sansom Street window--The History of Mouth Sounds.
But this book she was reading in the bathroom was something else again--How to End it When It’s Over.
I confronted her. “A book on suicide?”
“I’m allowed to read whatever I want. It’s a free country.
I ripped the book page by page.
“I thought we don’t believe in book burning,” she said.
“This is not a book.”
“I wasn’t going to do anything.”
“Then why read?”
“I like to read.”
“This is reading?”
She said, “If I wanted to do something I would just do it and be done.”
“Why even think about these things? I thought you were so pleased with yourself.”
“I am.” Then she said, “Did you see how those people booed me? Me!”
“It’s over.”
“I’m booing back.”
“Stop it, Joan. I thought we were winners.”
“I thought so, too.”
“Well?”
“We’re all losers, Josh. Don’t you know that? Nobody wins.”
It wasn’t much of a thing, this blemish that blossomed on her face alongside her left nostril.
I insisted it was next to invisible, this pimple.
“Don’t say pimple,” she said. “I hate that word.”
No wonder. She had never had a pimple, even in her teenage years. In her silken days she had never known this type of imperfection. These, to her mind, were omens.
She said, “I have no idea why I should be breaking out now.”
“One pimple is not breaking out.”
“Don’t say pimple!”
She became quite busy about this pimple.
“I know you’re staring at it,” she said.
She thought the entire world was staring at it, and it was true that it got worse from day to day. Soon, I said, it would be ready to pop. “Disgusting,” she said.
We tried another date. “Let’s go to Antonio’s,” she said.
“It’s very expensive.”
“So?”
When we entered the place I understood why she had chosen this over another. The lights were low.
“You’re staring at it again,” she said.
“In a place like this you need Braille.”
“Stop staring at it, please!”
“At what?”
“Please stop.”
“Your pimple?”
“Stop!”
We sat there, ordered and ate. I watched the couple in the other booth, a glum middle-aged man and wife, not a word between them, trained, from twenty years of marriage, in the subtle skills of apartness. I had seen such couples before and was thrilled to think that it would never be this way with us--and now it was. We were that couple.
Finally, she said, “You’re going to leave me over this. Over a pimple.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You don’t find me attractive anymore. I saw how you looked at me in the ballpark.”
“You saw nothing.”
“We mustn’t go to bright places anymore.”
“Come on, Joan.”
“Now this. A pimple. A fucking pimple.”
“I never heard you use that word.”
“Pimple or fuck?”
“This is not you, Joan.”
“You’re right. There is retribution. He gets even, this God of yours.”
“You got religion?”
“I wouldn’t quite call it that,” she said.
She saw a doctor. He lanced that stupid thing and it was gone. But not in her mind. In her mind it was still there, mountainous. She spread ointments on that spot--on that spot where nothing was--and hid that side of her face by keeping to profiles. Most mornings, now, she was reluctant to rise from bed. She was afraid to leave the house lest she be seen.
I tried to reason and in time I knew, it would not work. Something had happened.
She had persuaded herself that the world had come to an end.
I had once taught her the mysticism of balances. The world was divided equally between good and evil. Therefore, the single individual held absolute power. By going one way or the other, the individual could tip the earthly scales either way. We had tipped it the wrong way.
No, not by what we had done in Atlantic City, but by what we had done in Philadelphia. We had stopped loving. This she saw as universally destructive. We had destroyed not only ourselves, but the entire world.