The doorman in the lobby called me around nine in the morning and told me Charlene wanted to come up. That gave me about two minutes to run into the bathroom, stand in the shower, wipe myself off with a clean towel, and present my hungover presence at the front door.
Charlene had two coffees in paper cups in a bag and a large muffin of the kind that roughage is made out of and is totally inedible. She also had her green dress on, which is more than a heart can bear at nine in the morning. If I had to work with Charlene every day, I’d have my ass hauled in on sexual harassment charges inside of a week.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Just took a shower,” I said.
“I didn’t say you smelled terrible, I said you looked terrible,” she said.
I scratched my chest just to have something to do when Charlene pushed by me after I tried to kiss her. “Whiskey breath,” she said.
I went back into the bathroom and closed the door and put a half-pound of Crest on my teeth and then rinsed the whole lot of them in Listerine. I even brushed my hair. There wasn’t much I could do with my eyes, though.
I put on my robe and went back into the rest of the apartment, which is just one big room off a Pullman kitchen.
“Ryan, you ever get tired of living in one room?”
“Sure I do. But I don’t see the need for a bedroom when all I’m gonna do is sleep in it.”
She had sat down at the kitchen counter and opened her coffee. I did the same with mine.
“Brought you a muffin. Banana-apple.”
“I’ll drink some coffee first to get lubricated,” I said.
“You look like you were good and lubricated last night. I didn’t know you had a drinking problem.”
“Charlene, I just went out with one of my players and we were over-served, is all.” I took a sip and scalded the tip of my tongue.
“Charlene, why’d you come up here? To tell me about Jack Wade?”
She opened her purse then and threw it on the counter. I picked it up. It was an envelope addressed to Ms. Charlene Cleaver of Houston, Texas. I opened the unsealed envelope and took out the sheet of paper.
It said:
Ms. Cleaver:
That awful man has been pestering me again and it is more than I can stand, knowing that he is two-timing you at the same time he is sweet talking me…
It went on in this vein but I skipped through it to the signature.
Roxanne Devon.
I stared at the signature for a good ten seconds. It was a loopy handwriting, the kind that sophomore girls practice. She didn’t draw smiley faces instead of dotting her i’s, but it was in the same category as that.
I put the letter on the counter and took another slug of coffee.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me what you want to tell me,” she said.
“I do not know nor have I ever known anyone anywhere named Roxanne Devon.”
“Tell me another one.”
“Charlene, we don’t play until eight tonight so why don’t you and I go over to Brunswick, New Jersey, and go through the phone book and try to see if we can run down this Roxanne Devon.”
“You probably know she probably doesn’t even live in Brunswick, New Jersey. She just mails her letters from there,” Charlene said.
“Why would she do that, Charlene? If she don’t live someplace, why would she go there to mail poison letters to some woman she don’t even know in Houston, Texas? Tell me that.”
“Jack got arrested day before yesterday and yesterday I get this letter in the mail and I ain’t heard from you for a week.”
“We been on the road. In Cleveland and Chicago and then Kansas City. I don’t think of nothing on the road except the baseball games I still got to play”
“So you don’t think of me, is that it?”
“I think of you all the time, Charlene.”
“I don’t want you to think you got to lie to me,” she said.
“Why would I think that?”
“It’s not like we’re married,” she said.
“I know that.”
“‘Course you do. Got this bachelor apartment in this fancy building with a doorman. I bet I ain’t the first girl that doorman announced to you. He didn’t seem surprised by me or nothing.”
“Lewis ain’t been surprised since he got a draft notice to report to Vietnam in 1965,” I said.
“You think you can talk your way out of anything.”
Now she was making me pissed and I had a headache to boot. I got up and went to the icebox and took out a carton of Tropicana and poured some into a glass and drank it down. Orange juice makes me feel better every time I drink it. I poured another glass and then looked at Charlene. “You want some orange juice?”
“Stop stalling around,” she said.
“Charlene, you are making me crazy. I don’t know who’s sending you these letters, but I think we ought to go to the police about them.”
“And air our dirty linen in public?”
“We don’t have no dirty linen, Charlene, because these letters are fake and the work of that madman I work for, George Bremenhaven.”
“So you said once.”
“And so I say again. You just sit there while I put on my duds. We’re gonna go see George right now and have this out. You want me to quit, I’ll quit. Today. On the spot. I told George to stop messing around with my personal life and this is going too far. I’m gonna pop him one.”
Charlene just sat there, her mouth hanging open.
I went to the closet and grabbed a handful of clothes. Normally, I’d dress right there but I was doing a modest turn, so I went into the bathroom and closed the door. Shaved first and then brushed my teeth again with another half-pound of Crest and then slipped on my clothes. When I came out, Charlene hadn’t moved, even to closing her mouth, hanging open.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing my keys.
“Where we going?”
“George’s office.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the city. That big place across the river.”
“You mean, New York?”
“Only city I know of around here.”
We grabbed a Fort Lee cab with Lewis’s help and the next thing, we were tooling across the GW Bridge. It was a nice morning and there was a warm breeze blowing up the Jersey coastline right into the middle of Manhattan. I was hot, hot at Charlene and hot at George for causing me problems when there were enough problems trying to learn managing in Spanish.
Traffic was heavy and it took us a half-hour to get to the big sandy-colored building on Park Avenue. I thought Charlene was a little intimidated by everything about the city and that pleased me. When she’s in her own domain, which is Houston, she pretty well takes charge, but this was a different kettle of fish altogether.
We took the elevator up and the doors popped open and we were standing in front of the glass doors that said: BREMENHAVEN PROPERTIES, That described George’s day job. We marched right through, with me holding the door for Charlene. We were in the presence of sweet Miss Viola Foster, whom I have described before.
“Oh, Mr. Shawn, how nice to see you,” Miss Foster said. She looked at Charlene so I made the introduction and asked if George was in.
“I’ll see,” she said. This meant he was in, but since secretaries are told never to give anyone a straight answer I didn’t blame her any for lying to me.
She went to George’s door and opened it after a timid knock and went inside.
“Come on, Charlene,” I said to her and grabbed her by the arm. We went to the same door and I opened it.
George was at his desk and a man I didn’t know was sitting in an armchair to the side of the desk. Everyone looked at us, startled.
“I gotta talk to you, George.”
“I’m busy, Ryan —”
“I don’t give a shit because I’m quitting as of now.”
“You can’t do that,” George said in his imitation of a reasonable voice. It makes him sound like Adolph Menjou. “Mr. Sills, I apologize —”
“Hey, no problem, Mr. Bremenhaven. I never did get a chance to meet a real ball player before. You must be Ryan Shawn, I’ve seen you pitch many times.” Sills got up to shake my hand and gaze admiringly at Charlene.
“Sorry to bust in on you but George has a habit of slipping out side doors when he don’t wanna see someone and I know he doesn’t wanna see me,” I said, milking Mr. Sills’s pinkies. “George, I’ll make this short and sweet. You have gone one trick over your limit and that’s the last straw. I’m quitting as of now and you can get some other chump to babysit those kids.”
“Where would I get someone who speaks Spanish?” George said in that reasonable tone of his. He was just sitting there at the center of the room but everyone else was standing.
“There’s plenty of people in baseball speak Spanish." I said.
“But you’re an Anglo,” he said. “I trust you “
“You are a racist arrogant asshole,” I said. “I told you not to play your tricks on my girl but you just don’t know when to say no, do you, George. You just keep nudging, don’t you.”
“Miss Foster, you can leave the room. And take Mr. Sills with you. I’ll call you this afternoon, Sills.”
Sills didn’t seem to notice his reduction in rank from Mr. Sills to Sills the Hired Help. I figured he was a government man then. Like Baxter earlier. But he was looking at me funny, just standing there. “That’s it, Sills,” George said.
“Mr. Shawn,” — Sills had changed from the fan to a government agent in that moment — “I hope you reconsider … everything. And I hope you don’t quit.” Then he beamed at me, beamed at Charlene, and beamed his way out of the office. Miss Foster closed the door behind her.
“Now, what’s on your tiny mind, Ryan? And who’s the broad?”
“You keep a civil tongue, you son of a bitch. This is Miss Charlene Cleaver is who and you sent her another one of your nasty little letters allegedly from a Miss Roxanne Devon.”
George rose from behind his desk and came around and took Charlene’s hand in his and gave a little bow to go with it. “I am charmed, Miss Cleaver, really charmed to meet the woman Ryan here has gone on and on about for more than a year.”
Charlene lowered her gray eyes at that and let George hold her pinkies a moment too long. She said “Thank you, Mr. Bremenhaven” the way Scarlett O’Hara would have.
“I don’t think any description of you would have been adequate. That’s a lovely outfit you’re wearing, Miss Cleaver.”
What was he going to do next, sniff her? I got between them and said, “George, you snake, I got a good mind to punch your lights out —”
“Why, Ryan? Why? What have I done to deserve this?”
“You sent Charlene another poison letter from your alleged Roxanne Devon of Brunswick, New Jersey, who does not exist anyway.”
“I had an Aunt Roxanne once. She was my favorite aunt, favorite person in the family. She’s gone now,” George said. He wasn’t even talking to me, he was aiming all the charm at Charlene. Imagine a charming frog and you can vaguely imagine George. It was sickening.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Charlene said.
“Charlene, he’s the son of a bitch who was behind sending you those letters so that you’d get jealous and give me up so I could go on playing baseball for this son of a bitch for peanuts.”
“We don’t know that for certain, Ryan,” Charlene said.
“Ah, the benefit of a doubt. I am honored,” George said, oiling across the floor toward her.
“Well, I’m quitting, George. You get someone else for the game tonight. I’ll be halfway to Texas before the ninth inning,” I said.
“And leave everything I’ve been trying to build?” George said. “Where’s the gratitude, Ryan? Where’s your sense of patriotism? Do you think Norman Schwarzkopf would have quit?”
“We ain’t in war, George. It’s baseball. You ripped off a bunch of green kids from a foreign country and you make it a noble cause. You’re pathetic, you’re so low.”
“I’m paying you over a million dollars. If I can’t appeal to your sense of duty, let me appeal to your wallet.”
George usually had me there, but not this morning. I had a hangover, and Charlene showing up on my doorstep with that phony letter did not improve things. Imagine me saying a million dollars wasn’t that important. I was on the verge of doing just that when Charlene spoke up.
“How do you know that Mr. Bremenhaven had that letter sent to me?”
“Because it’s exactly the kind of rotten scheming trick George does all the time. You can’t trust him, Charlene. Don’t look him directly in the eye, either, or he’ll try to steal your soul on you.”
“You took all the players on a tour of New York and you said I authorized it,” George said in his reasonable voice. “You think I’m going to pay for all that?”
“Yesterday I was working for you, but that was yesterday,” I said.
“Ryan, you took them to the Statue of Liberty, for Christ’s sake. You trying to get them to defect to make me look bad?”
“I was trying to get them to be a little less homesick”
“What’s the Statue of Liberty got to do with anything?”
“You might have been owed an explanation if I still worked for you.”
“I’ve got a contract.”
“It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. I don’t have to pet up with this shit, George. Charlene is starting to believe there really is a Roxanne Devon, which I know and you know there is not.”
“Probably just a fan. Lots of girls go to baseball games and want to sleep with the players. Groupies. I hate to say that so boldly, Miss Cleaver, but it’s a sordid fact of the life in sports. What with this age of disease, with AIDS and all that, we try to tell the players to be careful, but you know, they’re really like children.”
“I ain’t no child, George, and I don’t fool around with groupies.”
“I wouldn’t either if I could have the company of a woman as beautiful and charming as Miss Charlene Cleaver. Why haven’t I met her before this, Ryan?”
“Because I try to keep the sordid side of my life separate from her. Like knowing you, for instance.”
“You see what I put up with?” he said to Charlene.
I waved a hand between them to get their attention. “Yo, George. Me. Ryan. I quit”
“Don’t let him quit on me, not at this crucial juncture, Miss Cleaver. This is more than about baseball. This is about trade and freeing the Cuban people from their yoke of tyranny. This is about America reaching out its hand in friendship to a poor, backward nation that yearns to breathe free —”
“You stole that from the Statue of Liberty,” I said.
“I didn’t steal, it’s in the public domain,” he snarled. Then he turned back to Charlene and gave her what he thought was a dazzling smile. The problem was that Charlene was getting herself dazzled despite my best intentions. I would have thought just being in the same room with that Gila would have sent her straight into a faint, but it was having the opposite effect.
I said, “Show him the letter, Charlene.”
She said, “Oh, I don’t want to show him.”
“Show him the fucking letter that got you upset enough to come two thousand miles to bug me about it at nine in the morning,” I shouted.
“Don’t shout,” Charlene said. “I won’t be shouted at by any man.”
“Charlene, you want me to quit and I’m quitting —”
“Miss Cleaver, Miss Cleaver, is that what you want? You want Ryan to walk away from his duties as a player and as a manager of the most revolutionary concept in baseball since the new playoff system?”
“We had talked about it, Mr. Bremenhaven,” Charlene said.
George looked at her sadly. I know his sad look, although it is a very subtle shift away from his cold-blooded let’s-screw-someone look. But I have studied the man for years up close.
“Then I surrender,” he said, lifting his hands. “No man ever stood in a woman’s way. If you think it’s the best thing for Ryan to turn his back on the game at the peak of his career when golden opportunities are waiting for him, then I can’t argue with you. I would never argue with anyone who obviously has Ryan’s best interest at heart.”
“Mr. Bremenhaven —”
“George. Please make it George.”
“George. I just don’t know what to think. Ryan came to Houston this past winter and he said you were poisoning things against him, first with Jack Wade who was gonna give him a job selling cars and then by sending me these notes from Miss Roxanne Devon of Brunswick, New Jersey. But now poor Jack has been arrested for income tax evasion and I was afraid that Ryan was involved in it, too, because he said you sent the IRS man in the first place to see Jack Wade and spook him about hiring Ryan.”
George, to his credit, took this all in as if it made perfect sense. He just nodded his head like one of those toy dogs that the Mexicans carry around in the rear windows of their cars.
“Miss Cleaver. I’m sorry that your distress made you travel two thousand miles on the spur of the moment but I am also pleased that it gave me the opportunity to meet you. If I were a younger man, I would be willing to fight Ryan Shawn right now for the sake of having a chance to try to win your hand. But” — he shrugged and sighed — “I’m an old man and I’ve had my day. I just hoped that, at the end of my day, I would be able to make some gesture, some little step forward for the game that has been so good to me and for the country that I love.”
“He means he fired his fifty-million-dollar payroll and picked up twenty-four homesick Cuban kids for next to nothing and then went out to sell the country that he was doing it for the good of baseball,” I said.
“My country has asked me to make a gesture of friendship to the Cuban people, to show that we can all live in the world in peace and harmony —”
“If George owned ‘Sesame Street’ he’d put it on pay-per-view TV,” I explained to Charlene.
“I met the President and I spent the night in the White House. In Lincoln’s bedroom. I saw Lincoln,” George said.
“Really?” Charlene said.
“He nodded to me as though he was saying I was doing the right thing,” George said.
“He just wanted you to free the slaves who work for you,” I said.
Charlene gave me that “shush” look and said, “You really saw Abraham Lincoln?”
“His ghost,” George said modestly. “That’s when I knew I was doing the right thing, reaching out the hand of friendship, not to Fidel Castro, but to the wonderful people of Cuba.”
“How come you never told me any of this, Ryan?” Charlene said, turning on me.
“Charlene, the only person George ever helped was George, and if he ever reaches out his hand of friendship, make sure you’ve got your wallet locked up.”
“Is this the way you talk to someone who’s made you a major league baseball manager?” Charlene said. “I’m surprised that Mr. Bremenhaven puts up with this.”
“George,” George said.
“George,” Charlene said,
“I get abuse all the time. I get it from the fans and from the press and from the players. I’m everyone’s favorite punching bag, but I try to do my best as God lets me see to do my best.”
“I think you owe Mr. Bremenhaven an apology, Ryan. You’ve been very rude.”
“Charlene, you want me to quit the team or don’t you? You don’t make this easy.”
“I just don’t want you to take me for granted, Ryan — think I’m just the girl in the Houston port of call. I don’t give a fiddle for whoever this Miss Roxanne Devon is, doesn’t even have the courage to tell me where she lives or give her phone number or nothing.”
“Whoever she is,” George said, “Ryan would be crazy to even think about giving up a woman like yourself.”
“Thank you, Mr. —”
“Just George. Everyone calls me George.”
“George,” she said.
“So why don’t you apologize, Ryan, and shake hands with the man? He is paying you an awful lot of money and I don’t think you have any complaint.”
This was ridiculous and I was damned if I was going to shake hands with a snake in the grass like Old George, but I saw that I was doing it anyway and George was slapping me on the shoulder in that hearty rah-rah way of his, saying, “Ryan, maybe it was a good thing to take those spies around New York yesterday. I just wish you’d have let the press know, they could have followed you, it would have been great publicity. Tell you what, let’s do it again tomorrow, the Statue of Liberty thing. Were they impressed?”
“They were cold. It was cold yesterday”
“We don’t want anyone to catch cold.”
“Then why don’t you turn up the heat in that welfare slum you own on the East Side?”
“Ryan Patrick, you watch yourself!”
“Honey, he does own a slum hotel on the East Side. That’s where he keeps his ball players. They got nothing to do all day, they’re trapped in a city they don’t understand, and they don’t speak very good English to boot. All they know is that Castro wants them to play baseball for the Yankees.”
“We might get a segment on ‘Good Morning, America.’ I met Joan Lunden a couple of weeks ago at Le Cirque,” George rattled on.
“George, we ain’t going to see the Statue of Liberty again. You want to put these kids on the news so that Castro gets a hard-on for them? Then what are you gonna do about next year when you want them back?”
“Castro has a contract.”
“George, I just told you to shove your contract up your ass and I ain’t even half as mean as Fidel Castro,” I explained.
“He can’t do that to me,” George said.
“George, he was gonna bomb the whole fucking country once until Kennedy stood up to the Russians. Castro is not afraid of George Bremenhaven looking cross-eyed at him.”
“Well, we have a contract. There’s levels and levels to this thing you wouldn’t understand, Ryan “
“I’m sure there are, George,” Charlene said. “And I’m sure we’ve taken enough of your time over nothing. Ryan, say good-bye to Mr. Bremenhaven — George — and let’s get out of this busy man’s way. I was pleased to meet you, George.”
The slimy shit took her hand again and milked the pinkies a bit longer than was seemly, but Charlene didn’t seem to mind. He did his little Adolph Menjou bow again and said, “Would you be my guest in my private box for the game tonight, Miss Cleaver?”
“Well, I was thinking about getting back to Houston.”
“What do you do in Houston, Miss Cleaver?”
“I’m a nutritionist at Rice University Hospital Center,” Charlene said, still letting him hold her hand.
“Fascinating,” George said, “I really would like it very much if you would be my guest tonight. We can have a little dinner catered in and watch Ryan and his boys jump on the White Sox.”
“You gotta get back to work,” I said to Charlene.
“Oh, Ryan. I have time off coming and I’ve never been in New York City before. It might be fun, George. I would like to be your guest very much.”
I happen to know that Charlene Cleaver, like most Texas men and women, despises baseball. The sports calendar for them begins in September when footballs fill the air and their clogged little thinking compartments. I have heard Charlene do a rundown on the Oilers or on Rice or any team you want to mention and give you the strong points and weak points without dropping a stitch along the way, but when it comes to baseball, she does this big yawn and prepares to wait the game out. She’s seen a few games over by Arlington just because I was playing for the Yanks, but that’s as far as it goes with her. And now she was volunteering to be in the company of a living turd like George through an entire evening of baseball played in 40 degree weather. Figure it out and send the answer to me by Federal Express.
“Tell me, Miss Cleaver —”
“Charlene”
“Charlene, would you mind terribly if the meal is vegetarian? I’ve given up meat, for the most part —”
“Oh, I love vegetarian cuisine,” she said. “Ryan tries to eat better than when I first met him, but sometimes he just goes pig crazy like this one time this winter at a barbecue —”
“I know, I know, When they’re young, they think they’ll live forever.”
“George, last time I saw you in Los Angeles you were tucking into a sixteen-ouncer from Kansas City,” I said with devastating accuracy.
“No, Ryan. You might have seen me eating meat a couple of years ago, but I’ve learned sensible eating now. If you don’t mind, Miss Cleaver, you can have meat if you wish —-”
This man was hitting on my woman by pretending to be a vegetarian. I knew what he was doing, he was just practicing. I knew that Charlene wouldn’t fall for him, but he just wanted to stick the knife in me to see if I was well done. I would have admired it if it wasn’t personal.
We got out of there with our wallets unpicked. I took Charlene in a cab down to the Village and bought her lunch. I was so mad at things in general that I ordered a beer and a plate of ribs.
And no salad.
If Charlene noticed, she didn’t say anything because she saw the way I was. She ate her fish and salad and her veggies and I just watched her.
“What an exciting place this is,” she said once.
“Where?”
“The city. It just seems to throb with life,” she said.
“You ought to hear the garbage trucks at one in the morning.”
“Oh, don’t see a negative in everything,” she said.
“Charlene, you came to New York all because of a phony letter written by one of George’s stooges and so I go over to punch out George and quit the team and give up my baseball career, all for you I might add, Charlene, and you end up making a date with the son of a bitch.”
“It’s not a date, Ryan. He’s just very, very charming and you paint such a negative picture of him,” she said.
“George Bremenhaven is a menace to society. He is also the worst thing to happen to baseball since the Black Sox threw the 1919 World Series. You can’t believe a word he says, and that’s on his truthful days. Vegetarian. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets his kicks watching them slaughter pigs in a rendering plant.”
“That’s disgusting,” she said.
“George is disgusting, Charlene, I can’t believe you agreed to go to his box in the Stadium tonight, I really can’t.”
“I’m just doing it for you, Ryan,” she said.
“For me? For me? Don’t do it for me, for pity’s sake.”
“For your career,” she said.
“My career? Nine o’clock this morning you were accusing me of keeping a babe on the side in New Jersey and I was willing to quit the whole thing to satisfy you. Now you’re going to be courted by a swine like George Bremenhaven to advance my career. What career, exactly?”
“In baseball, maybe even in politics someday. You are part of a great experiment, trying to bridge the gap between our two countries.”
“I’m the manager because I speak Spanish and it’s cheaper for George,” I said. “The kids are playing decent ball, but it’s a long season and it’ll get worse before it gets better. These kids play like kids, they get all het up by the game and it’s fun to to watch them win, but when they have to lose — and everyone loses sooner or later — they won’t have anything to carry them through the bad period. It can get very bad, Charlene. That’s the thing about baseball — it’s a very, very long season.”
I could see that Charlene didn’t believe a word I was telling her. Her evening with George had temporarily turned her against me and she was seeing the old, shiftless ball player that I used to be before maturity set in.
But, dammit, she was making me mad, with her thinking I was someone I wasn’t anymore.
So I shut up and ate my meat to spite her.