by Emily Nemens
“What’ll it be?” he asks.
“Gin and diets, two. And … Dee?”
But she’s turned around and is talking with the young right fielder, who looks nervous at the attention. Tami shrugs and smiles to Jason. He smiles back, and this time, she doesn’t doubt it.
* * *
When she tells him she was married to a pitcher in Texas, she can see his shoulders relax, his jaw loosen. She’s one of them. Like flipping a switch, his vocabulary nosedives into baseball jargon. He talks about his batting practice routine, about watching tape obsessively through the winter. He’s not bragging, but there’s a swagger in his assuredness, and it makes the skin on her chest flush. He prattles off his OBP and RBIs, last year’s numbers and goals for the next. The bar clears out—Deidre and the other outfielders are long gone—and Tami, so hungry her stomach feels like a woozy walnut in a sea of gin, suggests they eat. Remarkably, he agrees.
She’s been to the dining room only a few times, always when someone else was buying. Waiters in tuxedos weave between the tables with steaming plates and gleaming knives. Their server seems snippy that Jason won’t remove his hat, but he’s also too polite to tell him to do so. They order steak for two, and when he says two Tami can feel her pulse throb in her neck. What does this man look like at rest? What does he look like happy? What does he look like turned on?
The Caesars come and Tami asks about college—at the bar he mentioned he’d had some. She didn’t realize he’d been at the University of Iowa during the school’s one championship season; they talk about Omaha and the College World Series. She’d been once with Danny—not on the team bus, but following it up Interstate 35 in their VW Rabbit, baby Jeremy hollering in the back for most of the ten-hour drive. They’d been eliminated in the first round of the tournament.
The waiter reaches for their empty plates. “Are you going to finish?” she asks. He looks down, brow knit in confusion. “College, I mean.”
As soon as it comes out she realizes the mistake, how she sounds like some nagging relative. She can feel a wince, and when she tells herself to smile through it, the result is some sort of grimace. She reaches for her wine.
But then he says, “Maybe,” without any hesitation, and she’s released, all that fussiness and worry gone in a puff of smoke. Thank the wine and his quiet charisma for that. “I think I might start over.”
“Oh?” He keeps doing this thing with his eyes—maybe it’s more eyelashes, or eyebrows, she can’t figure it out yet—but it’s one of the most suggestive, sexy looks she’s ever experienced. “My agent, Herb Allison—you’ve heard of him?”
She nods, of course she has.
“He’s a big architecture buff, got me into it. I think I might do architectural preservation.” The steak arrives, bloody and glistening and almost the size of a second baseman’s glove.
“Really.” Her heart is racing, her head spinning. She never thought she’d be so lucky, to find an athlete who cared about her other passion. “Architecture?”
He butchers their meat, pushing the smaller piece onto her plate before stabbing the rest onto his. “Herb, he’s got one of those Test Case—sorry, Case Study—houses, and convinced me to buy another, just down the street. It’s amazing to inhabit that kind of space. I mean, we all care about our homes, right? But when you’re preserving something of architectural significance—”
“It’s like it’s not really yours,” she says, thinking first of Taliesin but then of her own house, how it looked so spooky without its lights. She notices a tremor as she reaches for her wine and hopes he doesn’t see it. “You’re more of a steward.”
“Exactly. It’s a money pit, but it’s worth it.” It was. He’s chewing like a midwestern boy, elbows on the table, and it makes her smile. “Anyway, I was thinking I could set up a preservation trust, for stadiums or something. Do you think I need a degree for that?”
“Maybe not.” Tami never went to school for Frank Lloyd Wright—she got her GED and took some community college classes, but nothing close to an architectural history course—and she knows as much about organic modernism as anyone working at the house. But then Jason is talking about LACMA’s new pavilion and visiting Frank Gehry’s studio and the Philharmonic’s concert hall, about parabolic arcs and things that have nothing to do with Tami, with this moment. She needs him to come back to her, to Arizona. “You’ve been to Taliesin West, then? I mean, sure Gehry’s great, but the other Frank. He’s the original.”
He shakes his head. “I keep meaning to, but every season I just get too busy, games and practice and strength training and then Lian—” He stops himself before he finishes her name. Tami didn’t know it, but that must be her. Lianne? Liana? What happens to his face just then is like the outfield grass when a thick cloud passes overhead, blocking the sun. A brief darkness, his eye jumping from sapphire to navy. Then it’s gone. He takes another bite, swallows. “By the time I’m done at the stadium, it’s always closed for the day.”
“And how long have you been with the team?” She gives him a playful glare, praying that his gloom won’t return.
“I know. Too long to keep using that excuse.”
“You sound very occupied. I mean, focused. On your training.” Her foot slips out of her shoe and a toe finds his calf, that ball of muscle. He’s filling their wineglasses and a splash jumps out of his cup, making a purplish stain on the white linen. “I like that.”
* * *
Over the rest of the meal he asks about her. She worries he’s trying to separate himself back to some safe distance with generic getting-to-know-you questions, but as he persists, she senses it’s not a buzzkill but something else, some midwestern earnestness that’s been bred into his kind. If you like a woman, you ask her about her hometown, her mother’s people. If her mother’s people are wicked—and Charlene’s family was—back up and try again; ask about her father. It’s so different from Ronnie—the only time he asked about her family was to hold it against her. Typically she’d gloss over Danny, Terrance, and the boys, but if Jason’s in the middle of a breakup, he should hear it. Life goes on. He nods thoughtfully when she talks about divorce; that sexy man she saw earlier pushed aside by a kindhearted one.
She reaches recent history, her time in Arizona. “I work up at Taliesin, actually.” It’s not deliberate, her decision to use the present tense, but it does sound better. “Gift shop, mostly, but I’ll guide tours if they need me. Know all that stuff, just in case.”
While they’re waiting for the check, he says some nice stuff about how good a listener she is—which seems silly because she’s the one who talked through most of their bottle of wine—and that he likes her dress. She finds his knee under the tablecloth and says thank you, that he’s a good listener, too. That she’s excited for him, for the possibility of starting fresh.
“What do you mean by that?” he bristles. Only once tonight has his wife, or ex-wife, come up—and then it was his doing, a darting near miss.
“I—I—I,” Tami stutters, sure she has ruined everything. The cloud is back, his eyes a dark sea. “I just think the spring is great for new beginnings. A new season, a fresh leaf.” She keeps stammering about the opportunities of the coming year, trying to hurry backward from whatever dangerous line she just about crossed.
Something works, and when she looks up at him again, she can see he’s moved away from that angry knot. The waiter delivers the check. Tami makes a cursory reach for it, but Jason pulls the leather folder from the table. “Please, let me.” She can’t help noticing he pays with hundred-dollar bills, and as he does, a poker chip falls out onto the table. He doesn’t ask for change, but the chip—$1,000—he jams back into his pocket.
* * *
She’s probably too drunk to get behind the wheel, but she offers and he agrees—he’d ridden to the restaurant with teammates. She’s embarrassed to have such an important, such a famous, such a handsome man in her crappy old car, but then she remembers his dusty Jeep.
<
br /> As he slides into the passenger seat, he grins at the duct tape on the Chevrolet’s interior panels. “Your car has seen better days.”
She smirks at him. “So have I. We can’t all drive Cadillacs.”
He harrumphs at that. “Those boats? Me and my lucky Jeep, two hundred thou and going strong.” With the alcohol, he’s loosened, reminding her of nothing so much as a giant puppy, big paws and a waggling tail. She loves it. He lets his body sink back against the seat. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see. Put on your seat belt.”
“Yes, Mom.”
This sets them both snickering, and Tami reaches over the gearshift to check his lap. Her fingers grip the seat belt holster, but also brush down his thigh, the solid slab of muscle. “Very good.” They titter some more.
The road’s practically empty this late. They rush past ritzy lodges with triple-height columns and giant, red-tiled haciendas with sprawling crabgrass lawns. He finds some classic rock station and starts singing along. He’s awful, but it makes her feel the buzz and prick of want, which spreads from a thick spot in her throat, up, down, everywhere.
The song ends, and she turns the announcer down to a low hum. “I know there are a lot of women in this town trying to take advantage of athletes.” He’s watching the palm trees flick by in a fronded colonnade. The resorts on both sides are getting bigger and bigger, but each steps farther back from the edge of the road, so it looks like everything is the same, like they’re not moving at all. “I’m not.”
“What are you doing then?” He turns to look at her. His face isn’t happy or determined; it’s something else entirely, a look she doesn’t recognize. Bewilderment? Dismissal? Is that sadness? She wants him to smile again, so she does, so wide she feels her teeth clench.
“I’m here to help.” He snorts. That half smile again. Tami presses into the accelerator. “Laugh all you want. You’ll see.”
* * *
Another ten minutes north, and the roadside development drops down to a smattering of homes. He surveys the new emptiness, the scrubby land that starts just past the shoulder. The cacti are tall here, taller than a man. “Are we still in Scottsdale?”
“Technically, North Scottsdale,” she says. “It’s not much farther.”
They curve up to the compound entrance, the sandstone sign lit from below. Above, Frank Lloyd Wright’s low-slung buildings are dark shapes against a craggy backdrop of mountains. Tami knows a service road, five hundred feet past the main entrance, with a gate they rarely lock.
They take the long way around the compound, rutted roads carved into the mountainside. The moon casts everything in strange greens and browns, purples in places you wouldn’t expect. Once, this whole landscape was filled with tents and lean-tos, Frank’s disciples camping in the desert, hoping to gain, by proximity, some expertise from the great master. Hundreds came during the Depression, paying for the opportunity to quarry stones and put them in place, the already-old man directing them with the tip of his cane. The steady flow continued for decades, long after Wright’s passing, first his widow and then his apprentices directing studies. But as the rest of architecture came to believe in technology, to prefer homes not with canvas louvers but with windows that shut, the stream of students slowed to a trickle. Now, only a handful come each year. Tami’s heard a few stalwarts still camp far up the hill, in those last places from which you can’t see the power lines and the perpetual glow of the city. Those holdouts won’t bother them tonight.
She parks the car next to a stand of acacias. Jason comes around and opens her door with a wobbly bow, and she thanks him. The electricity has returned, zapping between them, and she runs a finger across his abs. “Follow me.”
The pavilion, the cluster of cabins, the theater and studio and Frank’s residence are dark shapes blocking the sparkle of Scottsdale and Phoenix beyond. “On our left is Wright’s studio,” she starts, waving at the building with her best Vanna White. “Construction began in 1937. He designed the Guggenheim in there.” Jason walks up to the casement windows and peers into the room lit by a lone desk lamp. He must still be drunk, but in his admiration he’s turned a reverent that seems nearly sober. “Notice how that whole wall up there, the ceiling, is just treated canvas. Makes for great diffuse natural light when the morning sun hits it. Less great in the weather. Water … resistant.” They start toward the next building, another angular shadow coming up like the crag of a mountain. Idiosyncratic modern, that’s what the tour ladies call it.
Her finger points to a low rock along the path, a red square inscribed into its face. “Notice the red tile. That’s his signature.” Jason squats to see it better: a big F, two L’s, a W that melts into something diagonal. This tile is a replica, the difference between it and the original discernable only to connoisseurs, but she doesn’t mention it.
“And over here we have the cabaret theater. Built later, in 1949, it has seating for fifty.” She tries the door but it’s locked. She never had the key to this one. “You’d have had to stoop through the entryway. That was a big principle for him, compression and release. Also, he was short.” She winks, he smiles. Her heart is thumping in her chest.
The wavering of the reflecting pond sends out blue light from around the corner. Jason surges ahead, eager to see it. “And the main house,” she says, anticipating the moment it will fill his field of vision. The Prow—that’s what Wright called the grand entrance, its angular pool and regal stairs. She can see Jason’s whole body lift at the sight. “The elevated first floor, just past that pool, was the Garden Room, where Wright received guests. His private library and bedroom were upstairs.”
That’s the last building; past it is a long, low wall separating the house from the terraced slope of hill. She steps toward the ledge, imagining the labor it took to quarry and cut these stones, to transport and arrange them just so. Jason follows, and they settle down atop the wall, their legs swinging over the edge. “When Frank Lloyd Wright built this compound, he planned the sightlines so that he couldn’t see anything but the open valley. No lights, no power lines, no development save for the road coming up to the house. Originally, he didn’t even want electricity up here.”
“So much for that,” Jason says and he hiccups, the tinge of alcohol coming back into his voice. He surveys the city blinking below them. Tami does, too. Somewhere, not too far from the base of the hill, is Ronnie’s latest development, Paradise East. She tries to spot it, knowing the particular orange of construction lights is different from the white of streetlights, the yellow of cars, the blue of screens. Jason’s hand, its callused fingers, finds the small of her back and she forgets all about Ronnie.
“Growth,” she says. “Even the best architect couldn’t stop that.”
Jason is watching her; she can feel his eyes on her face. Is he going to kiss her? But instead he says, “Do you like it here?”
“Taliesin is my favorite place in the state,” she says quickly. “On the planet, maybe.”
“No, Scottsdale. Arizona, I mean. Restarting here.”
Suddenly, she feels about an inch from bursting into tears, from telling him how hard it is to be poor in a place like this, the fancy houses and flashy cars, the rich bitches and mean men like Ronnie. But she tamps down the feeling, cursing herself for nearly letting it surface. That’s not why they’re here. This is about him, about her helping him. “I like the springs here. The weather, the blooming cactus. Spring training. This season gives me hope.”
He’s looking out at the twinkling horizon. “You got enough to share? I’m feeling pretty low.”
“You?” She shakes her head. “No hope about it.” She remembers the banner across the spring program—“the golden boys”—and can hardly believe that same man is now sitting next to her in the dark, so close she can feel his body shifting. “Whatever’s going on, you’re going to be fine.”
“If you say so.” The two are quiet for a minute, more.
“Do you want to talk abo
ut it?” Tami asks.
He shakes his head. “I just can’t turn it off, you know? I always want to win.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being competitive. That’s why you’re where you are.”
He shrugs. “Exactly. You ever hear of ‘thrill-seeking behavior’?”
She hasn’t, and she tries to imagine what that means. The thrill of stepping up to the plate? Of course he has that, and the batting average to prove it. Or does he mean something more explicit, some thrill more dangerous? It’s not fast cars—he still drives that old Jeep. Is it pushing his body to its limits? He’d get caught if he was doping. Is it women? Is she just the latest lady in some string of calculable risks? “Is that why you’re getting divorced?”
He nods. “Liana—my ex—she finally called me on it. I guess I figured no one would, because, well…”
“You’re you.”
“Yeah.” His hand drifts from her back. Tami waits to feel his fingers again. She closes her eyes, anticipating the touch. Nothing. She opens them: he’s cupping his shoulder in his palm, frowning like it’s bothering him.
“You sore?” she asks.
He keeps rubbing. “Just a little stiff.”
“Maybe you need to loosen it up.” Danny always had to throw on his days off; she caught. She slides off the wall and picks up a stone the size of an apricot. “Try this.”
He throws the rock impossibly far. They finally hear the soft thud of it smacking some cactus.
“Impressive.” She feeds him another. This one he frowns at, winds up, and—crack. The streetlight on the switchback below them goes out with a spark.
“Whoops.”
“Oh, it’s okay. It’ll give the biddies something to worry about tomorrow.” She settles back onto the ledge. But the busted light sends her mind running. “Can you hit that one?” she asks, pointing a finger at the next lamp down the road.
