“I understand.” She didn’t want to be mocked.
In March, a week after I saw her at her house in Connecticut, her oldest kid walked off a soccer field and puked and passed out and almost died. Texts and lengthy emails flowed night and day with no punctuation, starting in mid-sentence, referencing jargon and arguments about emergency surgical techniques to relieve swelling in her daughter’s brain. Then notes from the hospital at all hours, waiting to speak to the doctors. Her husband was in Milan, working on a deal. Then I heard nothing from her for four months, not a word.
We’d put a lot into our emails. It was a gigantic pain in the ass. If either of us slacked off, the other one got offended. You had to be timely and consistently thoughtful. Although it was nice to know that on nights when I couldn’t sleep, at least someone out there was listening. When I started spiraling into my own black hole, or when Beanie went loco at two A.M., or when Kaya cried because her pillow was too hot, or when the magazine sent back my drawing thirty-seven times for revisions and then killed it, or when I received actual death threats for a cartoon I drew mocking military methods of interrogation, or when the dental surgeon sent me a bill for two thousand nine hundred fucking dollars, or the neighbors hated me because my car blew clouds of whitish-blackish smoke, or when Robin said I tasted like something she had for dinner that she didn’t feel like tasting again, when I thought that nobody would ever want me again, that I’d never crawl into bed with someone and fall into her arms, grateful, protected, in love—I could say it, through that doohickey in my pocket, and by the power of instantaneous electronic transmission it would find her, rising out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, and she’d zap back a little something to cheer me up, and that would be enough. Giving voice to every thought in my head, having a place for that, meant a lot to me.
Her kid recovered quickly, and in May Amy took to Facebook to celebrate. In June I wrote to her, wondering whether I’d see her here again, and waited patiently for that iffy response.
“I want to hear more about His holy vengeance, but I have to go play softball. It’s in the contract. Part of the fun.”
“Oh.” She looked miserable.
“You should play. It’s the Naked versus the Dead.”
“Some people from my class signed up.”
“Come on.”
“I’d probably hurt myself.”
“I hurt myself every year.”
“Look,” she said brightly. “I took your advice and went to a chiropractor.” She turned her head from side to side. She seemed to grow even taller.
“Praise the Lord.”
“Although that’s as far as it goes.”
“Any farther and it means you’re possessed by the devil.”
Almost sincerely she said, “You are not the devil.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “Although it’s interesting how you turned that against me, slightly demonic.”
“Sorry. It’s the possessed part.”
“Either way, you’re safe from me.”
She looked pained. Not too pained, not like she might keel over with blood pouring out her eye sockets, but maybe more like the electric toothbrush she’d been hoping for was permanently out of stock.
“You know what?” Her eyes narrowed again. “I was doing fine until now.”
She had been mine. There was that. So it was nice to be close to her, and it was nice to see it causing her pain.
I went into the dugout and looked through the mitts for one with no cracks in the leather. Tom McLaughlin sat on the bench, reading his phone. Frank Gaspari walked by with his socks pulled up. “Are we ready for this, or what?”
On second thought, I felt scummy and rejected and ashamed. Worse-looking every day, I had a cartoonist’s body: shoulders hiked up, head hung forward, face drooping, fuzzy gray hairs coming in on the sides, yellow toenails, my potbelly blousing my T-shirt, forcing me to suck in my gut, to fight the constant hunger of a tired middle-aged man. To be ugly in such a beautiful place was worse, among the shifting sands and rotting kelp and hopeless erosion.
The baseball field was at the far end of campus, inland, breezeless, and hot. You could smell fertilizer baking in the dirt. I watched an airplane fly along the bay towing a Geico banner.
Carl, the director, came across the field, lugging a duffel bag full of bats. He dropped it and jogged around the infield, ass bouncing, change jingling in his pockets, throwing bases on the ground. Then he sat, sweating heavily, on the other side of Tom and told us how much the bag of bats weighed, and where he’d lugged it from, and how an intern named Megan Donahue had locked the keys in the shuttle bus and the cops were on the way, and how the stage in the theater building had been shellacked two weeks ago but according to the theater people was still tacky, so the actors had to act in their socks so they didn’t stick to the floor. And the playwrights were all assholes. You had to call them “theater artists” or the “Drama Department” or they got angry. Then he pushed his long gray hair out of his face and went through the faculty, listing who was a piece of crap; anybody demanding a room change or failing to address students’ needs qualified, and this year, some of the new teachers seemed to be showing up with dietary restrictions or three names, like Alicia Hernandez Roulet. And the poets pronounced it “poe-eh-tray.” If it wasn’t for nice guys like Tom and me, he’d quit.
There was a certain headache you got after a day or so, the conference headache, which Carl already had. After three days you got a certain taste in your mouth, conference tongue. He told us how the administrators at the state U had lied and screwed him on funding, they were nickel-and-diming him to death, he had booze in his car that he’d stolen from Marine Bio and Sustainability—then we were quiet there on the dugout bench, and Carl asked Tom how much they paid him at other summer conferences. Tom laughed and said he never left the house for less than five grand but made an exception for this, since we had parties in the windmill.
More people straggled across the field; they seemed fine with the heat, pulling bats out of the duffel bag, dumping the bag to find helmets, testing swings, throwing and catching. Stan, a poet, claimed the mound to calibrate his underhand lob. An old lady with knee braces waited at the plate for batting practice. A security guard stood along the fence, and two women in beach clothes and visors sat in the stands. An able-bodied kid passed in front of the dugout, shirtless, barefoot, wearing jeans that had been shredded below the knee like a castaway’s—a fundamentally beautiful young person, covered in downy golden peach fuzz, handing out bottles of water.