Ted loaded Marty into the Corolla for the ride to Manhattan, Central Park. First they were to pick up Mariana in Spanish Harlem.
“Smell that?” Marty said, inhaling into his ruined lungs as they sped along Eighth Avenue. “Beans, coffee, plátanos, music, pussy…”
Ted was slightly appalled at the list. “You smell music?”
“Sometimes, yeah, sometimes I smell music and hear pussy.”
“Yeah? What does pussy sound like?”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Pussy sounds like music.”
“You disgust me.”
“I don’t care. We should move up here, Teddy.”
“Sure. I’ll get on that.”
“It’s closer to your work.”
“Well, that is true.”
Ted saw Mariana on the corner, flagging them down.
Marty smiled. “I don’t know about you, buddy boy, but I hear a certain kind of music.”
“You’re disgusting.”
He pulled up alongside her. “Your chariot.” Mariana got in. At the next red light, Ted hit the cassette deck. He had missed the Dead, and it was a good idea to block out any random news that might penetrate their hermetically sealed news bubble. He turned to Mariana in the backseat and said, “This is the Grateful Dead … the band … your tattoo. It’s a song called ‘Box of Rain,’ one of my all-time favorites.” He wanted to play music for her all day like high school kids do when they’re getting to know one another trying to display their inner plumage through what they like. Marty broke in, “You got any big bands there? Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw?”
“I like this,” Mariana said. “I like this Grateful Dead. A ‘box of rain’ is a nice idea. I like that.” Ted looked over at his dad to savor this tiny victory.
“Sounds like music for potheads. Like hippie narcocorridos,” Marty said.
“Exactly,” Ted said, and started to sing along, and he could tell, or he hoped he wasn’t imagining, that Mariana was listening, because he was singing to her. He was thrilled to meet her eyes in the rearview mirror as he sang:
“‘It’s just a box of rain, I don’t know who put it there. Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare. But it’s just a box of rain or a ribbon for your hair, such a long long time to be gone and a short time to be there.’”
They parked and entered the park at Eighty-sixth Street off Central Park West, angling for the ball fields. As they walked, Ted tossed the softball, a Clincher, up in the air as nonchalantly as he could. “I want you to teach me how to pitch a softball. You never did.”
“No.”
“C’mon, I throw peanuts professionally. I make a living with my arm. I think I can handle a little softball.”
“No. You’ll embarrass yourself. You throw like a spastic, and my arm might fall right out of the fucking socket.”
“We’ll just have a catch, then.” For Mariana’s benefit he added, “C’mon, you’re a god till October.”
There was a game on every one of the eight fields, so the three of them just sat on the grass in the Venn-diagram intersection that was the common outfield between the fields on the east and the fields on the west. Technically, they were on the playing fields, and the center fielders from three different games formed the points of a triangle around them, but this was New York, nobody owned the park, not even with a permit. Some high school kids played Frisbee and hacky sack nearby.
“You know what I used to call Central Park?” Marty asked. “The prison yard. It’s like this whole congested city is a lockup and a few hours a day the prisoners get to come out and get some fresh air before they go back to their cells.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Mariana countered, “I love the park. Without the park I think we’d all kill each other.”
Marty talked about the pitching and hitting like a pro scout, pointing at one of the pitchers. “Watch this guy, you see when he throws the curveball, he regrips the ball in his mitt, gives it away every time, like a tell in poker. Watch.” They watched. The pitcher looked to his catcher for a sign and put his hand into his mitt, rotating the ball out of view. “He’s moving it,” Mariana said.
“Curveball,” Marty said, and sure enough, the next pitch was a curve. “It’s a dying art, softball. When I was a kid, it was just as popular as hardball, now it’s mostly for fat guys, and this co-ed stuff is bullshit. Though I think the lesbians are supposed to be the best softballers out there right now.”
Ted squinted at him, trying to figure out if he was joking, and if he should join in, and what was Mariana thinking. Mariana knew it was more than half joke. “Yeah, big sport for the dykes,” she said.
Ted jumped up. “C’mon, Dad, we’re gonna play catch.” He helped a stiff Marty to his feet.
“Okay,” Marty groaned, “we’re gonna have a catch. You don’t say ‘play catch,’ you say ‘have a catch.’”
“Okay, then let’s play have a catch.” Marty grimaced, and tossed the ball to Ted. “Ow,” he said. Ted fielded the ball and threw it back. Sure enough, he was a bit spastic and ungainly, something jerky like a windup toy, but he was accurate enough to get it back to Marty.
“Throw it like a ball, like this, not like a peanut.” Marty threw it back in a fluid motion. Ted trapped the ball in his glove with his nonglove hand, the way five-year-olds do when they are first learning to catch. Not at all like a smooth lesbian.
“Isn’t this great?” he said. “I’m gonna start to air it out now.” Ted wound up to put some mustard on it. Since he was so tense and gripping the ball so hard, his release point was way late, and he fired the ball straight down off his own toes. “Motherfucker! Sun in my eyes.” Not a physical possibility.
Marty would have liked this over as fast as possible. “Don’t strangle the ball. You wanna learn softball pitching? Here. Try it like this.” He modeled the submarining motion of a softball pitcher and fired a strike back at Ted, who took it off the shin.
“Fuck me! Strike!” Ted shouted. “You still got it, old man, you still got it.”
“I got nothing,” Marty said. Ted tried the underhand motion, but the ball barely left the ground, rolling and bouncing back to Marty.
“We look like a coupla Jerry’s Kids out here. Do what I’m doing.” He showed Ted the proper motion, the little dance. “Use your hips.”
Ted tried to mimic his father’s motion, but looked terrible: what should be going right was going left and what should be going left was going right. But Ted thought it was all great. He looked over to Mariana and smiled. Marty mumbled, “Jesus.” Then louder, “Yeah, like that, almost exactly like that.” Marty tossed the ball back to Ted, who missed with his glove and took it on the chest.
Mariana helped out. “The fucking sun.”
“Yup,” said Ted. Ted practiced his new motion a few times, started nodding like, yeah, I got this, then fired wildly, diagonally, straight at Mariana’s face. With the reflexes of the legendary Rangers goalie Eddie Giacomin, Mariana reached up with one hand and snagged it cleanly. Marty was impressed.
“Nice grab, Mariana.”
Ted seconded that. “Yeah, helluva snatch.”
What? No, please no, he hadn’t said that, had he? Not again? He had. He heard it echo on the air, cutting through the birdsong. His head got crowded with thoughts, all vying for his tongue, but for some reason a snippet of Robert Frost came forward farthest and fastest, describing the effect on Adam, still dewy from Creation himself, of newly created Eve’s voice, an “oversound, her tone of meaning without the words,” on the voice of the earth—“Never again would birds’ song be the same. / And to do that to birds was why she came.” Never again would birds’ song be the same. Fuckin’ A right, Bobby F. What was the matter at hand again? Oh yeah …
“No. Not snatch. No. Never snatch.”
“You didn’t like my snatch?” Mariana asked.
“Paging Doctor Freud,” Marty said.
“No, yes, no, I don’t know, it’s a homophone … come on … I’m sure it’s … that was technically a snatch, what you did, I mean…”
“Stop saying ‘snatch.’ Stop talking altogether,” Marty offered, oh so helpfully.
“Okay, I simply mean. Again, Freud schmoid. Just toss it back. The wing’s not quite warmed up. Can you reach me? Let me move up…”
And as Ted jogged toward her, she cocked the ball with minimum turn like a catcher throwing out a runner at second, and rifled a frozen rope from behind her ear to Ted’s ear. Ted could not even flinch, didn’t even move his hands, until the ball had already ricocheted off his dome with a hollow coconut sound. Ted looked at Marty, who was now laughing.
In a delayed reaction, Ted’s eyes fluttered and he then just fell face forward into the grass. Out cold. And to do that to birds was why she came.