I HAD TOLD HIM, at some point, about the high schoolers’ stones hitting my window. So when he took out the garbage late Thursday, coming out the back door of the garage instead of the front because the opener was sticking, he knew when he spotted the cup that I’d been inside his back yard. He realized, using his key to unlock the gate, what must have happened, and the picnic table pushed against the fence on the other side of the yard confirmed it. “I almost got teary,” he said, “thinking about you in my yard like that.” He dropped his chin and looked down at me, and there was something in his face of a father announcing a surprise at Christmas. “Hugh and Lionel can cover for me Saturday,” he said. “Till Sunday morning I’m totally free.”
He hadn’t eaten, so I fixed him a cheese and mushroom omelet as he gave himself a tour of my house. “Nice big bed,” he said approvingly, inquisitively, as he arrived back in the kitchen. I saw Ginger emerge from the family room, make her way along the wall.
“My father always said you could tell someone had made it if they had a big bed,” I said, sliding his omelet onto a plate. This was true, although I hadn’t thought of it for years.
“And you’re a small person,” Mick said.
“I toss.” I handed him the plate. He didn’t say thank you.
Eating supper, he was as calm and easy as if we ate together every night, as if my house were his own. He talked about Morgan’s flam boyance, Frederick’s amazing passes through traffic, Kennilworth’s possible getting-of-religion (a minister had appeared with him in the locker room before the last two games). There were certain rebounding drills, Mick said, that really were paying off. Or maybe it was less the drills than the players’ sense of boldness, the guys mentally expecting to get the ball and with their bodies demanding it. I tried to get a sense behind his words of what Mick was really saying, where he planned to spend his nights beyond tomorrow. I was too frightened, after what I’d seen between him and Karn, to ask him directly about his plans.
He’d realized he didn’t have to like his players. It wasn’t liking them that helped them, but seeing them. Every one of them was a person to Mick, every one different. It was Mick’s noticing and commenting on their small triumphs and little worries that kept them with the program. You spotted that hole in the defense when it was one thread wide. . . . Your squats are looking balanced. . . . I can tell you’re worried about your brother. . . . Not having to like him removed from Mick some of the burden of Eluard. Mick could shrug when Eluard yawned in his face. “I figure I’m lucky he’s still mad at me,” Mick said. “It’s the hot coal that keeps the furnace burning. Never underestimate the power of pride.”
Simple human recognition. I thought of what I’d seen, Mick and Karn together in their family room.
“And now that they’re winning . . .” Mick set down his fork and opened his hands in a what-do-you-expect gesture. “Winners win more.” He nodded at his plate. “That was delicious. Just what the doctor ordered.”
“Do you want to watch a movie?” I said, rising to pluck away his dishes as Mick leaned back in his chair. I wondered if Karn buttered his morning toast and made his coffee.
We sat on the sofa together. I rested my head on Mick’s shoulder, and he sat with one leg extended and the other ankle on his knee. I can’t recall what movie we were watching, but suddenly Ginger was on the sofa beside him. “You have a cat?” Mick said, surprised.
It turned out Mick liked cats, although Karn had almost a phobia.
“Were we home when you were prowling in our yard?” he asked me at some point, Ginger asleep at his side.
“Nobody was there,” I said. “I was disappointed.”
He shook his head and smiled, then glanced down at me. “Funny to see you with your clothes on.”
And soon we were upstairs and my clothes were not on, although there was only cuddling, and Mick fell asleep on his back with his hand on the bottom curve of my belly, almost as if he were claiming it. Ginger jumped up and settled herself between Mick’s legs and mine. I felt, for the first time, that my big bed was too small. I lifted Mick’s hand and rolled away and he gave a little moan, turned to his side, and gripped me from behind across my shoulders. Ginger resettled herself on Mick’s other side. It was at that point that I simply gave in, let my head sink into the pillow and my mind go a blank yellow-gray, knowing that for all the things Mick saw in his players, there were things he wasn’t seeing in me.
“What are your plans after tomorrow?” I said in the morning over coffee and bagels. (“Put some cream cheese on it for me, honey. Not too thick.”) “What are you thinking?” It was sunny and the snow on the ground sharpened the light. I should call Tessa and cancel, I thought, thinking of this evening.
“I’ve been thinking about that boldness, that going after the rebound. You know I don’t have much of a marriage. Haven’t for a long time. You know I’m not going to live forever. If Eggleston can hear the ball calling and go after it”—Buddy Eggleston was his shortest player, a reserve guard who didn’t get much playing time—“if Eggleston can butt himself in there, why can’t I?”
He hadn’t yet shaved, and the sunlit glints on his chin reminded me of baby grass. Ginger was suddenly in his lap. “Look at this!” he said, delighted. “Does she jump on you like this?”
I shook my head in irritation. I had told him last night that she ignored me. “You mean stay here,” I said. My coffee mug made a clunk as I set it down.
Mick lying on my sofa. Mick saying, “Are you always this late? What’s for dinner? Can you make me your famous omelet?”
Mick said, “You have a big bed.”
“It’s a three-hour commute.”
“I may not stay here every night. I can get a hotel room near home.”
I imagined the urologist down the hall poking his nose into my office. “I’ve got to know today, is he getting his shot here or in West Virginia? And what about the radiation, he doing it here like he said?”
“I don’t want to be an escape hatch for you.”
Mick looked momentarily baffled. “You’re not an escape hatch. You’re a rebound. You’re the ball.” He sipped his coffee, smiled. “You going to take me to meet Claudia?”
I saw a hospital bed set up in my family room. Visiting nurses. Karn ringing my doorbell, demanding to see him. Basketball players trooping in.
There are moments when your life can change, when with one word or look or gesture you can transform it. That was my moment.
“You want to meet Claudia today?” I said.
“Why not today? I’ve been hearing about her for years.”
“But today’s different, today’s . . . you and me.” It was absurd, it was selfish and silly and I didn’t know what else, but I didn’t want Mick to meet Claudia. There would be spillage between them. Colors would bleed and mix; it would be a mess and I wouldn’t be able to control it. Claudia would judge him, would judge me. Or: Claudia would like him as much as Ginger did. Claudia and Mick would sit together on my sofa, planning my life. “She’s getting married,” I said. “She doesn’t need anything confusing.”
“Genie, are you listening? I’m done with confusing. Karn knows my life is going to change. And she can accept that, Genie. I’m not that big in her life now. I’m just the guy who pays the bills.”
But Karn pays the bills, I thought. At least, she wrote the checks. “God, she’s purring so loud,” I said. And Ginger was: the noise was louder than a dishwasher, than a microwave, than an overhead plane.
“She likes me,” Mick said.
“I can see she likes you. She hates me. I fucking saved her and she hates me.”
Mick chuckled.
I said, “Why’d you get so whiny about being stuck in the West?”
Mick’s face twisted in puzzlement.
“Last year, before the NCAA tournament started, why did you go on TV and complain about your placement?”
“Oh. That was stupid. I got overcome, I don’t know. It’s embarrassing, really.” And he did look embarrassed, but only for an instant, and then his face changed. “What in the world made you think of that?”
I had no idea; I’d been as startled by my question as he was. “I just did,” I said. “I remember looking at you on TV and thinking, He’s losing it. He’s not going to win.”
“And I didn’t win. Great. You were right.” He set his coffee mug down. The cat was making her engine noise. “You don’t want me to meet Claudia.”
“Yes, I do, of course I do. But not . . . now.”
“What about Toby, are you ashamed of Toby?”
“No, no, you can meet Toby. If you meet Claudia, you meet Toby.”
“What about Tessa? Why don’t you call up Tessa, ask her to lunch with us?”
I made a helpless gesture. What was I doing? But I couldn’t stop myself.
“How about Jeremy? Jeremy and Sukie too? I saw him at the hospital when we were there for Jessica’s cath. He came out and talked to someone in the waiting room.”
“Jeremy and I aren’t friends, Mick. We’re partners, but we don’t talk about anything but business.”
“Well, who are your friends? Why won’t you introduce me to your people? You’ve met mine.” He pushed his mug away.
“I haven’t met Marcus.” I stood up, went into the kitchen, untopped a bowl of sugar. “I haven’t met any of your players.” He didn’t answer, and I poured milk into my coffee and added a spoonful of sugar, not the way I usually drank it, and then I stirred with a gesture that would have to be called ferocious. You made me meet your family, I thought, remembering the lineup in Jessica’s hospital room. I didn’t ask to meet them.
“Let me ask you one thing,” I said, walking back to the table. “Would you leave Karn if I weren’t around, if you didn’t know me?”
An uncomfortable comprehension filled Mick’s face. The purring had stopped. I glanced in Mick’s lap: Ginger was conked out. “Maybe not.”
“Then I’m an escape hatch.”
He didn’t look at me. “What’s wrong with doing what I want most for the time I have left?”
Ah, the ill card. How convenient to play it with me, when with Karn he pretended he didn’t hold it. “You have an obligation to your family,” I said firmly, looking not at his eyes or lips but at his forehead. My voice rose. “There were years that you weren’t there for them.”
“Of course I was there for them, I . . .” But Mick wavered, seemed to understand he was pursuing the wrong argument. He said, “I don’t have an obligation to you, then.” Our eyes met.
“Not in the same way.” Dropping my gaze.
“You mean you don’t want me. You mean I’d disrupt your”—he glanced behind him toward my living room—“perfect life.”
Since he’d arrived the silence in my house had become animated, vaguely threatening, like an animal stalking. When he was gone, I realized, the quiet might attack. I’d call Claudia and ask her lots of wedding questions, tell her to describe the flowers. By afternoon the snow would be melting and I could run. I’d have a steak and a couple of drinks during dinner out with Tessa and Herbie.
“You’d disrupt my life, yes, sure, but that’s not why I don’t want you here.” The words puzzled me slightly, like a teleprompter script I was reading but not thinking. “I don’t want you here because you’ve got a wife and kids and a grandson who . . .” I saw you in your family room. I saw your married life.
“I see what I am to you. I’m a sugar daddy who buys you things like cars.”
“Mick,” I said. “Mick, no.”
“And then I’m worthless anyway, because I can’t screw you.”
“That’s not . . . I don’t care about that.”
“Of course you care. I should just die, right? Maybe I’ll leave you something in my will.”
“You never went to a whole wrestling match!”
Startled, Mick pushed Ginger from his lap to the floor. “Who told you that? Did Karn tell you that? That’s not even true.”
“It is true! Jessica told me.”
“How can I go to a wrestling match in February? Do you know how long those matches are? Did it ever strike you as strange my sons picked wrestling? That’s all I heard about, wrestling. Don’t you think it hurt my feelings when they didn’t play basketball?” It had hurt him, I could see that; it had hurt him tremendously. What was I doing? I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t reach for him across the table. He turned away, setting his lips and swallowing. Ginger had moved to a spot in the sunlight and was cleaning a front paw. “All right,” Mick said quietly, getting up from the chair. “I understand.” And he headed for his suitcase upstairs.
Wait, I could have said. Wait—and then I could have set things right.
I GOT THROUGH the rest of the day just as I’d planned, I talked with Claudia and ran and exercised and went grocery shopping, and Tessa and Herbie actually agreed to something spontaneous, a movie following our dinner together (I didn’t mention Mick’s visit), but then I was home and lying in my gigantic bed and there was the smell of Mick. On my pillows, on my sheets, on the blue towel in my bathroom, and when I pulled down the sheets I found several reddish hairs. I had sent him home. Why? Because I didn’t want to be his waitress? To prove to myself I didn’t need him? To test, in some perverse way, how fully he was under my control? Because Ginger liked him? Because I felt sorry for Karn? Some kind of madness had come over me, I thought. What obligation did I have to Karn that I should send Mick home?
And Mick—why had he left? Wasn’t I worth battling for? Wouldn’t resisting me at that moment have been a true declaration of love?
Himself—I suddenly remembered, between the Tae Bo tape and a stint on my elliptical trainer—Himself after his wife died had a Filipino woman who gave him massages and sometimes, as he sickened, drove him to his office visits and sat in the exam room. When I changed his medicines Himself looked to the woman to be sure she’d understood. “Susie cares about me,” he said once, and even “I hate to be this bad for Susie.” His children, I remembered dimly, had been upset. I did not remember Susie at the funeral home.
Or Laura Ewing with the odd, slight man—Collier—who was always sitting by her bed, who was waiting in her hospital room at six A.M. when I stopped by before her cath. Mr. Ewing was large and dithery. “Can you talk to Collier, explain it to him?” Mr. Ewing asked. “Is Collier a relative?” I asked. “Well, he’s her oldest friend,” the husband said. “See, they grew up together. And he’s not one to marry. So he’s kind of always around Laura.”
Or Dr. Kelly with the young male aide who’d moved in with him, who called me after Dr. Kelly’s death asking for a loan. Or married Etta Fishbein with her hearty pal Mona, laughing at the intestinal gas that always plagued Etta on their camping trips.
What were these relationships? I wasn’t sure. I suspected they were bonds involving complicated, possibly sexual, tenderness. You could call such relations all sorts of things, but they were not nothing, just as Mick and I weren’t nothing. A decade-plus affair. A loyal mistress. A very special friendship. The phrases cheapened both of us, but the phrases were all we had.
Marriage was cement, marriage was the mortar of the social order. Every marriage, no matter how faulty, was sanctioned and sanctified, given its name, recorded by law. Why should society have that much power? Why should society tell us who and how to love? I wished Mick and I were the ages of our children, or as old as two nursing home patients, extremes when there was laxity allowed. I saw us as two birds captured and shut up in separate cages, beating our wings against the bars. But this was, perhaps, a glamorized view. After all, it was Mick’s choice to stay married. After all, I had started the argument that sent him home.
I had started the argument. That was the heart of the matter, as much as I wanted to blame the world. I was probably more censorious about Mick and me than even my bird-loving neighbor would be. At the end of the movie The Year of Living Dangerously, Mel Gibson runs up the steps of the plane that will transport him out of revolution-torn Indonesia, and his lover, Sigourney Weaver, emerges through the aircraft door to wrap, with breathtaking tenderness, her arms around his shoulders. I should have greeted Mick in the same way. How brutal that the weekend he had launched with such hope (rattling his cup on my stoop) had ended with my outburst at the breakfast table. I had met my Mel Gibson at the door and pushed him backward down the stairs.
He deserved to hate me. I deserved to hate myself, the gaping hole of I want that was me. I wanted to do my exercises, I wanted to not do dishes, I wanted my king-sized bed all to myself. Worse, I wanted people to think I was perfect. A hotel room for two hours a week was about right for me—I deserved no more love than that. I couldn’t give love, so why should I expect it back? No wonder I hadn’t lasted at marriage. No wonder Claudia was scared of me and Mr. Dylan left me and Tessa rolled her eyes.
The scent of Mick in my bedroom would dissipate, I’d have to wash my sheets and towels, the hotel where we’d met for years would be torn down. And I would have nothing, just nothing, to show for my years with Mick. Some newspaper clippings, a few second-rate photographs from our Hawaii trip years before, and . . . Yes, Genie, this is just what you deserve.
The next thing I knew I was on my knees on the bedroom floor with my nose pressed into the mattress. I was making a dreadful noise, like women in other countries who are allowed, even encouraged, to wail over their dead.
I GOT OUT OF THE OFFICE early that Friday and, after asking my blond neighbor to take care of Ginger, threw a couple of outfits in my suitcase, and the Jag and I were gone. It wasn’t a planned trip, more like a calling—frozen puddles cracked beside the road, the grass a yellow-brown, the clouds a hulking gray. Not an attractive time of year. About five I passed a white frame church in a town consisting of ten or twelve houses. The parking lot of the church was jammed, and more parked cars lined the road. PAINFUL MOMENTS TRUST GOD read a signboard in front of the church. A week ago I’d still been at work, unaware that Mick would be arriving at my house that evening.
It was dark when I reached my hometown. I passed the former hospital, now a county office building, where I’d been born, on a summer day so hot my father had forsaken the fathers’ waiting room and stood under a tree outside. I wondered which tree. I drove by my elementary school, the city park with my favorite swing sets, the doughnut shop (now a video store), the hairdresser’s (now also a tanning salon), the library. I drove along the street by my old house, around the block and down the alley past the back of it, and I imagined my father watching me from the front as if in a movie, with a typed identification running across the bottom of the screen: Eugenia (Genie) Toledo, age 48, Cardiologist. How pleased my father would be, and not simply with the fact of my returning to our old home. My car, my clothes, my slimness, my career—everything about me would please him. I would appear to have become just what he’d hoped for.
I thought of eating at a restaurant but I didn’t want to see anyone I might know. I had a headache, despite being off the pill, and it took some nerve to even enter a drugstore for ibuprofen, but the aisles, like the parking lot, were empty. The clerk had probably not been born when I left this town for college.
Left forever, I’d arranged that. I had known from the back seat of my father’s car that I wouldn’t be working here summers, or staying for weeks at Christmas, or returning under any circumstances to help out. There had been in my mother’s eyes—in her “You’ll love it!” and “What a lucky girl you are!”—an avid collusion. Until my father’s death, my mother herself would never get away.
I stayed in a hotel on the town square, a place that in my childhood had seemed glamorous, with inside hallways and its own restaurant and lounge. My room was hot and the heater made a racket. The linoleum under the room’s round table was sticky, and I ate my fast-food salad seated on the bed.
My mother would be appalled if she saw me here. One glimpse of me in this room, in this town, and she would know that something was wrong.
There was supposed to be cable, but all I could get clearly were adult movies. I hadn’t figured out the morning yet—when I’d wake up, where I’d eat, if I’d drive around town again or simply leave. I felt anxious and jittery, so I opened out my bedspread wrong side up on the floor and did what I could remember of my yoga tape. I thought of walking around downtown but decided that might not be safe. Finally, in desperation, I went downstairs to the lounge.
“Scotch on the rocks with a splash of soda,” I said to the young bartender, taking the drink and seating myself at a two-top. The only other person in the room was a tall man at the bar hunched over a beer. I took a sip of scotch and studied the grain of my tabletop, old enough to be actual wood. Tried to enjoy the smoky smell of my drink, the soft clink of the ice.
“Eugenia?” a man’s voice said. “Is that you?”
The guy at the bar. He stood, and it wasn’t his face but his rangy walk and sloping shoulders that I recognized. “Jim?” My God. I had slept with only two guys in my high school, and Jim was the embarrassing one, the farmer’s son I’d gotten drunk with—secretly, and more than once—not my official boyfriend, who was now a lawyer in Seattle.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “You’ve missed every reunion.” He gestured at the chair across from me. “Mind if I . . . ?”
He sat down, and I launched into a long, vague explanation of my trip, aware that he was peeking at my left hand.
“Middle-aged crisis, hunh?” he said.
In high school, Jim’s mind had baffled me. I couldn’t understand how a boy who constructed a chicken coop complete with balconies and a cupola was unable to write a simple verb-containing sentence. I checked his left hand—no ring. Of course my father hadn’t worn one.
“That’s probably why I’m here too,” Jim said. He was still attractive, although his face was weather-beaten and his hair thinned at the temples. “But I’m married. I have to get out sometimes. Cardiologist, hunh?” He seemed totally comfortable with me, his legs stretched out, his arms looped over the back of his chair. “That makes sense.”
“Another round?” the bartender called, and Jim held up two fingers.
“You still building things?”
He was. He’d built his house and a pool house and a gazebo. His occupation was fixing heavy equipment.
I asked him about the sign at the church and he shrugged. Maybe kids on one of those country roads, you know. Maybe a heart attack. He hadn’t heard of any murders, and you would one county over. Of course, a suicide was always possible, and that wouldn’t make the paper.
“Not something you’re thinking of, is it?” he said.
In high school, he wanted to walk me from English to Science and I wouldn’t let him. First off, I had a real boyfriend, and second, Jim embarrassed me. He wore jeans that were too short and got excited about B-pluses.
Although I wasn’t horrible to him always. Although he’d been a real country-boy lover, whooping and romping. Once we’d done it in the haymow of his father’s barn.
“I’m not that extreme,” I said, and then the whole story came spooling out, as if Jim had pulled a thread on a bobbin. “Would I know this guy?” he asked at one point, and I said “maybe,” and told him Mick’s name and team. “Figures,” Jim said, giving me a bemused smile.
I was on my third drink by the time I finished. By then we were both hunched over the table.
“Pretty knotty life there, Genie,” Jim said, watching me until I nodded. “You’re kind of a loner, aren’t you? And you’re used to it. I’ve been married almost twenty-nine years. It’s awful, in a way. There’s nothing I do surprises her one jot. In another way, it’s great. I’m comfortable with her, and you get to a certain age, most days that’s all you want.”
I said, “That has to be how Mickey feels with his wife.”
Jim straightened, leaned back in his chair again, flashed me his radiant smile. “I don’t suppose you want to take me upstairs with you,” he said.
“Not really.”
“I’m not bad.” He waggled his eyebrows. “I take my time a little more these days. Not so quick on the trigger.”
I laughed. “Thanks but no thanks,” I said, belatedly thinking he really wasn’t asking.
But he was gallant. “I’m not offended. I know you’re saving me from myself.” He tapped the face of his watch with his index finger. “And you used to like my wife.”
His wife, it turned out, was a girl with whom I’d snuck cigarettes during high school lunch periods. “You can’t cheat on Denise!” I said.
“I don’t try too often.” Jim reached for the saltshaker at the side of the table, lifted it from its wire basket, and centered it on the table. “I’m sure your coach is crazy about you. Why wouldn’t he be? And part of his whole thing with you—it’s a guy thing, I’m telling you—is possession.” He lifted up the pepper shaker, clicked it against the salt. “But you don’t want to be possessed.”
“No,” I said, surprised at the word “possession” applied to something other than a ball, surprised to hear a truth—and it was a truth, I recognized—enunciated so matter-of-factly.
“You’d probably like his wife,” Jim said, setting the salt and pepper back in their container, “if you’d met her in a normal way.”
I smiled. “I probably would.” Co-inky-dink. I thought basketball was his mistress. The sort of exuberant guilelessness the years usually knock out of a person.
“I should go,” Jim said. He retrieved his jacket from the bar stool, then took a seat at the edge of his chair across from me. “You okay?” he said.
I nodded. “Fine.” Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, Jim had said, his face squinched up, bits of straw sticking out of his hair. But I had to; I had choir practice later.
“You’ll survive,” Jim said, standing up.
I nodded, feeling clearheaded but unconsoled. That was never my issue, survival.
“See you later,” Jim said, “maybe”—giving, as he passed me (I didn’t imagine this, I could feel the sensation days later), a quick stroke to the back of my hair.
