BY THE MIDDLEOF MARCH, I was hardly sleeping. I had turned my bedside clock to face the wall so I couldn’t see when I was awake. On call nights, I drove to the ER even when the patient did not sound acutely ill. Some nights I played winning Turkman tapes between one and three A.M., while I did yoga or Pilates on my bedroom floor. My patients were no longer telling me I looked great. One evening I boiled and ate an entire pound of spaghetti topped with Parmesan cheese and butter. Other evenings I didn’t eat at all.
I had done it. I had destroyed, for no good reason, the central relationship of my life, and I would never see the man I loved again.
I knew I had to look decent for Claudia’s wedding. I should look happy, or at least composed, for that one day. And I was happy—finally, truly—about Claudia’s marriage. It was the rest of my life that scared me.
I arranged to watch Mick’s games of the first NCAA weekend at Tessa and Herbie’s. If Mick’s team won both their games that weekend—Thursday and Saturday—they would play the weekend of the wedding, and I would find a way to deal with it, period. If they won both their games on Claudia’s wedding weekend they’d stay alive to the following weekend and the Final Four.
If the Warriors could make it to Monday Night it would be a dream for Mick, a fitting cap to his career. Bilal the neurologist had predicted it. I wished I had that much faith. It seemed like something dangerous to even think of. When the notion crossed my mind, I used an old meditation mantra to drive it away. When Raj asked me if I wanted to join the betting pool I said, “Not this year.”
“Wow,” he said, shaking his head. “Weddings are hell, right?”
Herbie, Tessa’s husband the dentist, was one of those people who always talked about their work as if it were a series of disasters. “I couldn’t get your wife numb,” he was telling someone on the phone as I arrived at his and Tessa’s house. Herbie was bald, no taller than Tessa, and had a tendency to sweat. His hand made the phone receiver look enormous, but small hands were a plus for a dentist, Tessa said.
Tessa pointed me toward the den, where she reached into an ice chest to hand me a bottle of beer. An enormous TV screen was showing the game preceding Mick’s game. Tessa and Herbie had a real den, with smoke in the air and dark walls and plaid reclin ers. Not only did Tessa smoke, but Herbie, in a gleeful spiting of the brochures in his office, was a connoisseur of cigars. Tessa nodded toward a chair, and I handed her a blank tape for recording. “I didn’t tell Herbie you and Mick split up,” Tessa said, and I nodded. “He doesn’t know about Mick’s PSA being up, either.” She reached behind her neck and grabbed her hair in her left hand, draping the immense hank over her shoulder like a woman in an ad for shampoo. “I didn’t want to upset him.” Herbie had been having problems in his office—he suspected his longtime office manager was embezzling, and his best hygienist had had a miscarriage and was missing work—and I was touched that Tessa, protective wife that she was, worried that bad news about Mick would distress Herbie more. “Are you on call?” she asked.
“Howard’s covering.”
“Well, it’s Thursday.”
“How’s Mick Crabbe these days, eh?” Herbie burst into the room, both tiny thumbs up. “Big Mick Crabbe?”
“I think he’s reasonably big,” Tessa said. “Isn’t he, Genie?” I covered my eyes with my hands and shook my head.
Thank God I was at Tessa and Herbie’s house. A game like this I couldn’t take alone.
Turkman won. They won handily, making me anxious only a few times, and I made plans to come back Saturday an hour before their next game.
Mick looked happy, yes, but also distant, and even the postgame interviewer’s malapropism (“Your team was just incredulous!”) didn’t seem to pierce the cloud of his thoughts. Maybe he’s thinking about me, I thought. Please, please, be thinking about me. “Incredible,” Mick said to the interviewer. “Yeah, our guys were good.” He spat out a few more obligatory answers and turned away. Enjoy it, Mick, I thought, my hands going clammy. Enjoy it now.
“Beer?” Tessa said two nights later, handing me a bottle, and I thought of that movie where Bill Murray gets stuck in time and wakes up each morning to the same Sonny and Cher song. I handed Tessa another blank tape, and moved my beeper and phone from my handbag to my pants pockets so I wouldn’t have to stir from my chair.
It was a wonderful game. “I don’t know how you can defend against this Turkman team,” one of the commentators said. “They’ll kill you in the paint and they’ll kill you at the perimeter. It’s almost like the ball’s on their side.”
“Dickens and Flitt,” the commentator said. “Sounds like a moving company.”
“Oh, they’re moving things all right,” his partner parried. “They’re moving the ball.”
“Maybe they’ll get a better game next time,” Herbie said after Turkman’s win. “Mick doesn’t want it too easy.”
M. L. HOPKINS: WOKE UP IN A CHEVY
“They can win by fifty points,” I said, slipping the phone from my pocket. “Fifty points would be perfect.” Tonight they’d won by 32. Five nights to make it through until Mick’s next game. I’ll get Jeremy to write me a script for some sleepers, I thought, glad to have the excuse of Claudia’s wedding.
I saw M.L. in the office on Wednesday, after she’d managed to detox herself using pills saved from old prescriptions. “I realized there’s not much visual joy in drunkenness. I mean, you’ve got the occasional fabulous sunset”—M.L. bracketed these last two words with her fingers—“but there’s nothing you can count on to be nourishing. You wake up and you’re staring at stucco or some horrible upholstered chair.”
I wondered what M.L. would think of the furniture in Tessa and Herbie’s den. I sat down on my stool. “So you’re quitting.”
“I quit already. Four days.”
Whatever drives a person to wellness, you have to take it as it comes. “Good for you,” I said. “I can put you on Coumadin now? I don’t have to worry about you forgetting to get your blood tests or falling down the stairs and bleeding in your head?”
“I’ll be a good girl, I promise. I’m going to AA.”
I smiled at her; I almost wanted to hug her. Her hair that day was done in merry spikes, its red tips freshly colored.
THURSDAY,two days before Claudia’s wedding, Mick’s game was tied at the half, and it was two points in Turkman’s favor was tied at the half, and it was two points in Turkman’s favor with 9:16 left when Frederick Flitt, going for a pass from Tom Kennilworth, got hit by an opposing player, fell over the ball, and collided with the floor.
“Oh God!” I clapped my hands to my face.
The commentators were right on it. “O-o-h, that had to hurt!”
“That’s a worrisome-looking injury, you hate to see an injury like that.”
“That knee is going where a knee should not go.”
“Here, we’ve got it on the replay: he goes up for the pass, there’s Jacoby coming in on him, and Flitt is . . . Ouch.”
“Maybe we can run that again, zoom in on it.”
“There’s Frederick Flitt’s mother in the stands, she looks concerned. There’s Coach Mick Crabbe, he looks concerned. He’s staying out of the way of the medical people who are out there checking Flitt. There’s Tom Kennilworth, he’s concerned. Just a tremendous amount of concern here.”
“I can’t stand it,” I said. “Turn it off.”
“Hold on, hold on.” Herbie set down his cigar and reached for the remote. “Let me mute it. Don’t you want to see him get up?”
“What happened?” said Tessa, arriving in the den with a fresh bowl of chips.
“He’s not going to get up,” I said. “This’ll kill Mick, kill him.”
“It’s only one knee,” Herbie said. “These guys are macho. He’ll get up.”
But Frederick did not get up, and his spell on the floor became a commercial break, and when coverage resumed he was being loaded onto a stretcher and carried from the gym. In Tessa’s family room, the three of us were as mute as the TV. There was a shot of Mickey standing with his mouth open, jowls slack. He looked like an old man in a nursing home, oblivious to his family at the door.
“Jesus,” Tessa said, “and Mick’s got to finish this game.”
“Does Flitt have knee problems?” Herbie said. “I hadn’t read that. Ask your buddy about that. Sometimes teams keep that stuff quiet.”
“Genie and Mick aren’t going to spend their time talking about some player’s knees,” Tessa snapped. “That’s not what their time together is for.”
Herbie snickered and I went red, and in an instant I was close to tears, thinking of Mick’s smell, the slightly rough tips of his fingers. The screen showed his shoulders and the back of his head as he conferred with his assistant coaches.
“He’ll put in Eggleston,” I said quickly. “The guys’ll really want to win it now.” I swallowed, glanced toward Tessa (she was looking suggestively at Herbie), and perched myself on the edge of the sofa, half afraid and half eager to see more. Mick turned to face the court and his face was simply ferocious. His face said, Frederick will be avenged. His face said, We are teaching that ball a lesson. “Go ahead and put the sound on,” I told Herbie.
WHEN I GOT HOME from Tessa and Herbie’s, the red light on my answering machine was blinking. “Call me on my cell tomorrow between six and seven in the morning,” Mick said. “If you can. I’ll make sure I’m free. I . . . I’m thinking of you. I hope you’re okay. Love you, cupcake.”
Love you, cupcake. After all I’d done, he still loved me. I closed my eyes and warmth suffused through me, as if someone had switched on a heater in my soul.
“Where are you?” I said when I called. I’d been afraid to take a sleeping pill and risk missing the hour between six and seven. Instead, I’d barely slept, although Ginger, for the first time in weeks, had ensconced herself on my bed. In her own way, on her own schedule, she paid the rent.
“I’m in the hotel fitness center,” Mick said. “No one’s here.”
“It was great,” I said. “Unbelievable. I was screaming when Morgan made both free throws. I knew Chiswick would make that three-pointer, I could see it the second he shot, but I was holding my breath when they fouled Morgan.”
“Me too. Did you see Frederick go down?”
“Oh, God, yeah. That was awful. Your other games seemed easy, but this one, this one . . .”
“At least Frederick got hurt while he was playing. He didn’t crash a motorcycle or something. They kept him overnight at the hospital; I’ll go see him right after I get off with you. Doc Kitchener says it’s bad. He says Flitt’s been playing with instability all season, can you believe that? Both knees.”
“He never told you?”
“Nobody told me. And you couldn’t tell. It makes me sick, sick. I mean, what do I do to point guards, Genie? I kill ’em, Genie. It’s not right.” His voice had gone high and curly.
“Oh, Frederick’ll be fine,” I said. “They’ve got great orthopedic procedures these days.”
He made a slight noise.
“He’ll be fine. It’ll work out.” I waited for him to agree but he said nothing. “How are you feeling?” I asked, suddenly anxious.
“I’m fine. I’ve got a doctor visit scheduled next week, but I can always postpone it if we . . .” He trailed off. If we win the regional. If we go next weekend to the Final Four. He would never say these things.
“You will, Mickey. I know you will. I can feel it.” The moment the words were out I regretted them. A hex.
“Well, Frederick’s our pillar. Without Frederick we might . . .”
I couldn’t stand to hear him try to cover for me and my stupid wish, and my words rushed over his. “Claudia’s getting married tomorrow, can you believe it? In Indiana. I drive over there in a couple hours. I’m talking to you from home; I actually took today off. Didn’t realize I’d be celebrating two things today.” Too much talk, I told myself. I sounded like a frantic TV hostess filling time.
“When tomorrow, can you . . . ?”
“Four in the afternoon. There’s a dinner afterward in the church social hall. I should be out of there by eight at the latest. What’s your game time? I can watch it from the hotel.”
“It should be after eight.”
“I can’t wait, Mickey. I can’t wait to see you and your team.”
What I was saying was wrong. I didn’t know what I should say, but I could tell by Mick’s slight hesitations that he was disappointed. I heard myself go on. “We’ve got a rehearsal at five at the church today and then the rehearsal dinner. It’s kind of a reversed wedding—I’m hosting the rehearsal dinner even though I’m the mother of the bride and Toby’s family is doing the reception. Because it’s in their town and in their church, which isn’t what I would have wanted, but everyone in Toby’s family has been married in the same place and . . .”
Mick interrupted. “Did you watch the game alone last night?”
“I went to Tessa’s. I watched it with her and her husband.”
“Good. I don’t want to think of you watching it alone. Are you getting out some?”
“I get out plenty, Mick. I work. I’m not a recluse.”
“I worry about you. I’ve got my team and my . . .” He faltered. “Don’t watch alone tomorrow night, okay? Especially after Claudia’s got herself married.”
I made some kind of squeak.
“What?” Mick said, and when I couldn’t answer right away he launched into a sermon about my goodness, what I had to offer, how I should start dating.
“Don’t say that,” I said. “It makes you seem too far away from me.” Worse, it made him sound like he was dying.
“I am far,” he said. “I’m in San Antonio.”
Our city. Our imaginary city of our imaginary life, and there Mick really was. I should have let him stay the weekend that he showed up at my house. My whole world would be different if I had let him stay. My blood turned cold as ice but semiliquid, like one of those freezer bags you put on sprains. “I don’t know, Mickey,” I said. “I may just want to collapse in my hotel room and watch you guys.”
“I told you,” Mick barked, “don’t watch it by yourself !” Like a grouchy old man, one grandchildren begged not to visit.
“Mick, I’m a grown-up. I’ll be fine whatever happens.”
“Why won’t you listen to me? I worry about you!” Just eight hours before, he’d called me cupcake. I wanted to be a cupcake again. Then I realized that that was what he thought I was.
“I’ll go watch it with Tessa and Herbie,” I said, eager to reassure him. “They’ve got a room at the same hotel.”
We said a few more things, but nothing else I’d remember.
AT THE REHEARSAL DINNER , I sat myself next to Alice, the black sheep of Toby’s family. My brothers and their families weren’t in yet. Alice’s husband, the disliked dentist, couldn’t make it, and I wondered if any of tonight’s absences—Alice’s husband, my brothers and their families, Claudia’s stepbrother and stepsister by my ex and his wife—were statements about me. If so, I hated them for slighting Claudia. If so, I was really alone.
Alice did seem to inhabit a social stratum higher than her sisters’, despite her unprepossessing yellow house. She wore a red satin jacket and black pants instead of a floral print dress, and she made a point of talking about colleges. “Claudia has lovely hair,” she told me. Her husband’s mother was in a nursing home, and hearing I was a doctor, Alice brought up end-of-life issues. She herself wanted a vial of morphine. Her husband had a gun. “He says most medical people have a plan,” she said, looking pointedly at me.
Across from Alice and me at the long rectangular table sat my ex, Hank, and his wife, Sheryl. Sheryl wasn’t attractive—she had crooked teeth and an enormous bottom—but she had a direct, frank way that was appealing. Much of her conversation involved the challenges of looking after Hank. She seemed to view him as an enormous restoration project that provided her regular, sometimes startling, satisfactions. She had gotten him out of jeans and T-shirts. She had found him vehicles for his retirement money and hobbies for his empty evenings. He was now certified in a special piano-teaching method, and students drove to him from over an hour away.
“What do you think of Hank’s suit?” Sheryl asked me when Hank went to the restroom.
“Very natty.”
Sheryl raised her eyebrows. “He didn’t think he could wear green.”
When Hank returned to the table I complimented him on his outfit, and he blushed and stammered in response. I was married to that man? I thought. Yet he’d always had a smiling passivity that people took as kindness.
“You’re looking nice tonight too, Genie,” Sheryl said, although I was sure I didn’t. I’d put on a string of colored beads to draw attention from my worn face. “You must be thrilled about Claudia and Toby.”
“I’m very happy,” I said. “And did you hear Claudia’s going to finish up her college this summer?”
“A woman has to look after herself,” Hank said.
Sheryl nodded vigorously. “The woman is the looker-outer.”
“Toby’s a decent young man,” Alice told me during dessert. “He used to stop by our house on occasion.” She raised her eyebrows, as if his visits had been a secret. Alice left a few minutes later, before coffee. One of her children, the son in Baltimore, was calling home at nine.
“Now, who is she?” Sheryl asked once Alice left. “I swear, I need a flowchart for this family.”
“Nice of you to talk to Alice,” Toby’s grandmother said reedily as our whole group walked to our cars.
“It’s a little sad,” one of the aunts said, “all her children far away.”
I said, “She was very pleasant. We had a good visit.”
Toby’s mother said, “She didn’t touch her dessert.”
“Now, Kathy,” Toby’s father said to his wife, “that’s not really your . . .”
“You know her and her diet!” A cousin.
“Boy,” I said, “and I spent an extra dollar fifty on that nutball.” There was a silence, and Toby’s mother eyed me briefly before she laughed. The other women laughed an instant later. Toby’s father and I exchanged a rueful smile.
I could be my family’s Alice, I realized. I could be the one everyone was scared of, the one whose choices weren’t quite trusted or understood. “Of course, you only ever had one child,” Myra, Rick’s wife, mother of three, had said to me the previous Thanksgiving. Even my brother Dean’s nastiness, I realized, might mask wariness of my motives. Dealing with Genie, Dean might tell his harried wife, it’s best to attack first.
“You can follow us to the B-and-B if you want,” Sheryl said, tucking her hand under my ex-husband’s upper arm.
But I was not staying at Harvest Haven like the rest of the out-of-town family. I was at the Holiday Inn. “Back problem,” I explained to Sheryl. “The bed is more reliable.” The television was more reliable, that was the point. Rick and Myra were arriving with their family later this evening at the B&B, while Dean was driving in from Chicago with his family tomorrow and only for the ceremony, because Dean’s wife said there were only two places in the world worth leaving home to sleep in, a certain small hotel in Maui and the Four Seasons San Francisco. “My friends Tessa and Herbie come in tomorrow,” I said to Sheryl, “and they’re at the Holiday Inn too.”
“Bad backs also, hunh?” Sheryl said knowingly, and I thought again how much I liked her.
“Maybe Alice can sit on the bride’s side tomorrow,” Toby’s mother told me. “With you.”
LATER THAT EVENING, my psychiatrist brother Rick and I were wedged together on a settee in the parlor of Harvest Haven, as his wife settled their children into bed upstairs. He had called me when they’d arrived, and I’d driven over from the Holiday Inn to greet them.
In the Harvest Haven parlor, once Sheryl had left to pick up her and Hank’s son and daughter from the airport, I’d filled Rick in on the latest about me and Mick. “Why did I let myself get involved with him?” I asked in a whisper, not really meaning Rick to answer.
“Fear of intimacy?” Rick said, too loudly. “That’s usually at least part of taking up with a married man.”
I said, “I was very intimate with him.”
Rick smiled in what might be pity. “That’s what the lover always says.” His face changed, and his voice became high and mocking. “My husband can’t meet my needs. My husband can’t understand me. For what it’s worth,” Rick went on, pulling his chin back and speaking in his doctor-on-the-radio voice, “here’s a question I always ask my patients: What are you most afraid of ?”
Mick’s spark and dark, I thought. What drives a player and what he fears. And Rick thought he was original. “I’m afraid that Mick will die, of course,” I said, appalled that Rick would make me voice this.
“What difference would his death make? You don’t see him in person anyway.”
“He called today. I talked to him this morning.”
“But how long had it been?”
“Not forever.”
“Oh, Genie.”
I stood up and moved to Sheryl’s former seat. “I don’t like you as a psychiatrist,” I said. “You’re mean as a psychiatrist. So long as Mick doesn’t die,” I said, “I know he’s there.”
“There, where is there? In your mind?”
He really was mean. I wondered if there was trouble between him and Myra. What about Myra, he’d asked me earlier, does she seem okay to you? She seemed her usual. Stolid, unsmiling, kid-obsessed. “Upstairs now!” she said to her children at exactly ten, tapping the face of her watch. “And I want you each brushing your teeth for two full minutes!” The youngest had only eight teeth.
“It’s ephemeral,” Rick was saying now, “this relationship of yours. It’s not the real work of making a life in the world with a partner and a family. It’s a fantasy, it’s a fairy tale, it’s a fucking lie.”
I glanced toward the door to the dining room, wondering if Patti the proprietress could hear us from the kitchen, or if Sheryl and the kids were about to burst through the front door. Rick turned his face from side to side as if he were stretching his neck. I should have asked him how he was, but I didn’t think I had the strength to hear it. “Well,” I said, standing up, “I should go. You must need some rest, after your long drive.”
Rick’s eyes rolled toward me, his mouth open. “You go, sure,” he said. “You go.”
TO MY RELIEF, the bride’s side in Toby’s family’s church did not at all look empty. My brothers and their families filled two pews. Rick’s girls wore socks decorated with ribbons and jackets with shiny buttons; his son had on a bowtie. Dean and his wife looked like a couple in an ad for cognac, although their girls were dressed for a playground. In the front pew, I sat next to Sheryl and her two children by Hank, both of whom waved at me from the far side of their mother. I had on a silk suit in a shade of blue that clashed a bit with Sheryl’s lavender dress. Tessa and Herbie and assorted friends of Claudia’s from school and work filled the rows behind us. Howard was covering for me this weekend, so he couldn’t make the trip to Indiana, and I was disappointed in Jeremy and Sukie, who sent their regrets with an elaborate excuse. Alice was seated on Toby’s side with a handsome man I took to be the dentist husband.
I was afraid I would cry. Not out of joy or relief or fear, but simply because my daughter’s wedding would give me the opportunity to let go. But it would be wrong to cry about Mick here. The tears would be contaminating, red wine on a white tablecloth. No matter how much you scrubbed or what stain removers you tried, the tablecloth would never be the same.
I had seen Claudia in the brides’ dressing room, I’d adjusted her veil and fiddled with her bra strap, I’d helped Detra, the maid of honor, whose barbed-wire tattoo on her upper arm was sure to start some conversations, get Claudia’s train stretched out just so, and yet when I turned to watch my daughter come down the aisle, I was overwhelmed. Claudia looked different from anything I’d ever wanted to resemble (my own wedding gown had been severe, and I’d banned baby’s breath as too fluffy). She looked exactly as she had dreamed of looking. She was, indeed, wearing her gown; her gown was not—in another of my mother’s punishing phrases—wearing her. In the front of the church, the groom had appeared with his best man, and Claudia, on her father’s arm, strained toward Toby, as if she were ready to make a break down the aisle. It felt like watching a lightning storm come in to see Claudia and Toby set their eyes upon each other, to feel, like a charge in the air, their headstrong faith that the two of them—despite Hank and me, despite Toby’s clearly mismatched parents (his mother had had an allergy attack and was holding a hankie over her lower face)—would do it right, no matter the contradictory evidence around them. When Claudia passed my pew, she didn’t even glance my way.
They may do it, I thought. They may make a real marriage. Something ordinary outside but voluptuous within—a shoebox lined with satin and scented with spices, a hobbyhorse with a wildly beating heart. That’s what brought tears to my eyes, and it had nothing to do with Mickey. If I had to label them tears of anything, I’d say that they were tears of pride.
TESSA OPENED THE DOOR to her hotel room. Behind her, Herbie was stationed in a chair directly in front of the TV, an unlit cigar jerking at the corner of his mouth. “You ready for the game?” Tessa said.
There had been nothing wrong with the reception, but nothing exciting about it, either—the sort of event whose attendees, asked about it later, would answer, “It was nice,” in a vaguely challenging tone. Dean and his family were probably already back in Chicago. Rick and Myra, looking weary and walking apart, left the reception by six, trailed by their gloomy oldest, his bowtie askew. Claudia’s bridesmaid, Detra, had offered to buy drinks for all Claudia’s friends, and that group headed out stuffed into two cars. When I left, Hank and Sheryl were helping Toby’s mother load her van. Toby’s father nowhere in sight. “What a jewel!” Toby’s mother said about my ex. “How’d you let him get away?”
“I called up LeeAnn from my office and asked if she could tape Mick’s game,” I said to Tessa.
“Oh, okay. Well, come on in. You can see Herbie has his pacifier.” My face, involuntarily, made a complicated twitch. I tried to calm myself. Breathe in two beats, breathe out four. “I can’t watch it, Tessa. I’m going to that multiplex next door. I’ll see two movies if I have to. I just want to walk out into the lobby and have it over.”
On the television, the tournament theme music was playing. “You’re not dragging me off to some movie,” Herbie said, glancing at Tessa. “I’m staying here for the Battle of the Big Men.” That was how Turkman’s game had been billed; the opposing team also had a dominant center, Jared Winslow.
“I’ll watch it on tape later,” I said. “After I know how it ends.”
“He’ll do fine!” Herbie said. “Mick’ll be fine!”
“I’ll come with you,” Tessa said, searching the floor for her shoes. “Just let me brush my teeth.” I closed the door and waited outside the room. The empty hall narrowed in the distance, just as I imagined my future. “Men,” Tessa mumbled as she closed the door behind me.
I knew she didn’t mean this seriously. She loved Herbie, Herbie loved her, and both of them were excited to be in a hotel room. A hotel room, she said, made them feel like they were sneaking around. And as for Lady Godiva, she told me as we walked across the parking lot, well, Herbie adored it, he adored it!
Our first movie was a romantic comedy, and the second one was a thriller. In between, Tessa and I got drinks and used the bathroom. I don’t remember those movies’ names. I felt as if I’d swallowed a whole loaf of bread and it was swelling in my abdomen, until my heart and lungs were pressed up into my throat and I could hardly breathe. He isn’t losing, I scolded myself. Stop being superstitious.
“Are you okay?” Tessa whispered.
“Nervous,” I whispered back, and Tessa squeezed my elbow, and eventually the thriller ended in an embrace after gunfire, and Tessa and I emerged blinking into the lobby. We passed the kid collecting tickets. “You watch the Midwest final?” the kid called, speaking to a large bearded man across the lobby.
The big man was eating popcorn and walking, his eyes half closed and seemingly unfocused, and he moved with slow relentlessness in our direction. Finally he stopped a few feet from us, his middle eddying and wobbling, and it seemed to me he was the embodiment of grief. “Not much of a game,” he said, inserting a kernel of popcorn into his pink slot of a mouth, and in that gruesome moment, I knew.
LEEANN’STAPE:
I fast-forwarded through the first half, even the shots of Mickey, and I could see that things weren’t right. There were flashes of Eluard being Eluard, but whole minutes when he wasn’t, and Morgan was missing not only his free throws but his three-pointers as well, the shots he was supposed to rule. The usually cocky Kennilworth seemed timid, and Eggleston, filling in for Flitt, had the ball stripped from him two times in a row.
They weren’t listening to the ball, I thought. They’d gone deaf.
“It’s even more lopsided than the score,” Mick said to the interviewer at halftime. “You better let me get to the locker room. We’ll come back.”
They didn’t. In the final seconds, Eluard did manage to grab the ball away from Jared Winslow and run it down court alone, but somehow Eluard missed the basket, and he sank to his knees in what looked like despair as the horn blew to end the game. At this point Jared Winslow came to Eluard, bent over, put his hands on either side of Eluard’s face, and spoke to him intently. Eluard stood and the two men embraced. That was it, the one mysterious and possibly redeeming moment, although even this was really Winslow’s moment and not Eluard’s.
There were people jumping up and down, Kennilworth with his head hanging, the coaches shaking hands. The camera flashed to Mick’s family—Karn, who resembled a half-deflated blow-up figure, Jessica staring into space, Bobby and Eric slumped against each other not speaking. What’s wrong with you? I felt like screaming to the cameraman, and a producer must have thought the same thing, because abruptly the scene changed and an interviewer was standing beside Mickey, his mike thrust in Mick’s face. “We just didn’t have it tonight,” Mick said, “and they came out gunning.”
This was supposed to be the Battle of the Big Men, but your center Eluard Dickens didn’t . . . How much do you think the loss of your point guard Frederick . . . ? Any word on how Flitt . . . ?
Mick’s eyes swung briefly as if he were looking for help. I’m erasing this tape, I thought. I never want to see this tape again. “The doctors are still evaluating him,” Mickey said, glancing at someone offscreen, and he was already moving away as the scene flashed to another interviewer, this one standing with the winning coach.
Don’t watch alone tomorrow night, okay? As if he’d known.
I had a tape of Claudia and Toby’s wedding. That tape was a keeper.
