Chapter Four
The first rays of dawn sliced through the delicate, hazy curtains. Nathan lay beside her, curled up in a fetal position, still, appearing to be asleep. Suella knew better: he was just lying down with his eyes closed, his mind swimming in deep depths of thought. Let him torture himself, she thought, as she swung her knees over the side of the bed and padded off toward the kitchen. As she made coffee and waited for the other two people in the house to wander in, she reveled in the bittersweet power she now possessed.
Toni emerged from the guest room first. She looked sheepish and stepped daintily around the house, as if floors were made of balsa wood. They looked at each other for a moment. Toni took extravagant care in putting cream and sugar into the coffee Suella had poured. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “We really are just friends.”
Suella nodded. “I’m not angry with you, I’m angry with him.”
Toni looked down. “I can totally understand. If it were me, I would be furious.”
Nearly eight years earlier, however, Suella had met with her lawyers for days drawing up a lengthy pre-nuptial that would cover every conceivable thing. She needed to protect herself in case he allowed himself to be seduced by one of the baseball groupies or if he found himself a younger model and decided to trade her in. Half. In the case of divorce, she would get half of the marital assets.
Suella decided that she wanted to get to know Nathan’s friend a little better. As she buttered her toast she asked “So, Nathan tells me you’re going through a little bit of a hard time?”
Toni’s eyes widened for a split second. She inhaled and exhaled deeply, to attempt to regain her composure. “Oh, well, you know. After you get past a certain age in Hollywood, women become invisible. I mean, there are only so many roles for chubby best friend or sister of the bride.”
“And Nathan’s been helping you?”
Toni’s lower lip quivered. “It was my last resort! I can’t find a good server job and I’ve already sold two eggs this year.”
“You what?”
Toni cleared her throat. “I sell my eggs to a biological company. For in-vitro and surrogacy programs and stuff.”
Suella nodded. “How long have you done that for?”
“Five years. It’s the only way I’ve been able to afford my apartment when work is tight. Then my car broke down and I get this big tax bill for a mistake I made four years ago. But I might not be able to sell the eggs any more. They’re getting old just like the rest of me.”
Suella chuckled. “You’re not old.”
“I am in Hollywood.”
Nathan woke up a short while later, and ventured into the kitchen in his shortie pajamas. He looked even more sheepish than Toni had. While the three of them ate breakfast, Nathan kept hanging his head low. Toni finally said “Well, I must go.
I’ve got errands to run.” She needed Nathan to take her to her car. As Nathan threw on some clothes and they left the house together, Suella reached for his arm as he passed her.
“When you get back, we have lots to discuss.”
Nathan winced deeply, his eyes turning into slits, as if he’d just been stabbed. He returned less than a half hour later, after delivering Toni to her condo near the beach. Suella had been washing dishes when he entered the kitchen. He stood in the center of the floor and spread his legs slightly, trying to adopt a strong stance. “Angel, I don’t want a divorce.” His eyebrows formed a straight line across his forehead, the way they always did when he was serious.
Suella smiled and turned toward him. “Honey, I’m not going to ask you for one.”
Nathan’s shoulders slumped and he exhaled with relief. The corners of his eyebrows also came down, giving him the jovial expression she loved.
Before he could say anything, though, Suella revealed her grand plan that she had just concocted. “We’re going to clone a baby. Toni is going to provide the egg, and she will also carry the child to term.”
“What?”
Suella was going to counter with a cruel “You heard me,” but she knew it would only get her upset and probably not affect Nathan. “We’re going to clone a baby. Toni is going to provide the egg, and she will also carry the child to term.”
His lower lip quivered several times while his eyes darted back and forth. Suella knew this meant that he was racking his brain trying to think of something to say, to come up with a coherent objection. Finally, he said “What if she doesn’t want to?”
“Oh, she’ll want to. We’re going to pay her. We’re going to pay her well.”
Nathan scratched his head. “I suppose you’ve got this all set up, have the doctor picked out and everything.”
“No, I want you to help me with that, too.”
“Help you? With cloning?” His voice rose, carrying the “o” sound of cloning for three syllables. “How in fuck’s sake am I going to be able to do that?”
“Aren’t you the one who’s always saying ‘I know people?’”
He nodded. “Yeah. People who can have someone killed for you. People who can rig gambling. People who break kneecaps. And worse!” With that, his hand went to his upper jaw, and the crown a dentist had placed on one of his bicuspids.
Before they married, Suella lived in Nathan’s New York co-op for awhile. Nathan used to snicker and swagger about being an outlaw. He admitted to her that he scratched the baseball with one fingernail that he kept longer than the rest. He also scuffed it with mound dirt or Vaseline. During the year that several players went to trial for steroids, he knew about that, too. Nathan had paced the apartment for days, saying “I’m going to hit those fuckers where they live. They call me a cheater, well they’re worse cheaters than me. At least I didn’t turn myself into some kind of roid montster.”
“Nathan, be careful,” she tried to tell him. It was the January of an unusually cold winter. He just laughed off her caring words.
A couple of nights later, right before the deposition, Nathan staggered home later than usual. He nearly fell over the couch in the front hall and Suella assumed that he’d been drinking. When he spoke, he slurred his words, his lip crooked and swollen.
His face was deadly, ashen white, his eyes wide. “Pain medicayshun. We got any pain medicayshun?”
Shocked, Suella said “Babe, what on earth happened?”
When he smiled weakly she could see blood on his upper lip, soaking through his teeth. “Some friends of the National League slugger’s club got hold of me. They told me what to say in tomorrow’s deposishun.” His eyes narrowed, and his eyebrows formed a straight line, his eyes sinking into his head. “Do you have fucking pain medicayshun?” She searched her medicine cabinets for the Demerol they’d given her the year before, when she’d had her eyes done. As she gave him one and a glass of water, she asked “What happened?”
He gave her the whole story, with lots of lisping and whimpering. An official from one of the other teams asked him to meet him for lunch in Chinatown. He wanted to know what Nathan would say during the deposition the next day, and Nathan made the mistake of telling them “I’m going to fry the bastards.” When lunch ended, and Nathan and the official left the restaurant, he felt a shove in the back as a black car pulled up on the street in front of them. A thug sitting in the shotgun seat said “Get in, Nate boy! We’re going to take a little ride.”
The car sliced through some side streets and back alleys and when they stopped, three beefy guys hustled Nathan out of the car and into the back entrance of a building so old they still used a mechanical elevator. The men smiled at him while the elevator rose.
Once they reached the right floor, the men shoved him out into the corridor and pushed him along the floor until they reached an office. They wrestled him down onto a static office chair and two of the thugs held his arms back and held him down. The third one, riding shotgun stood menacingly above him, smiling
crookedly. Nathan couldn’t believe that this guy looked just like the stereotypical bad guys in movies: mottled skin, hair slicked back, perpetual smirk. “Now what are you going to say for the league boys tomorrow?”
“That’s none of your fucking business asshole,” Nathan shot back.
The spokesman cracked him across the face with the back of his hand, causing his neck to snap. Pain exploded through his temples. “Well what our boys do is none of your fucking business. Now, tomorrow, you’re going to tell them you don’t know a goddammed thing.”
“Fuck you.” He braced, expecting the thug to punch him again,
Instead, he leaned back, grinning. He tsked tsked, shaking his head. “That’s quite a bad attitude you have there, pal. I think we need to call in a friend of mine, to adjust it.” A moment later he shouted “Ted” and a guy in a white coat carrying tools appeared. He was gray haired, wore glasses and even looked slightly frail. When he looked down at Nathan, his expression was grim. “I got a question for you, big guy. Have you ever seen the movie ‘The Marathon Man?’”
The thug forced Nathan’s mouth open with a long, prying instrument, while the small, frail looking older gentleman affixed two metal contacts to one of Nathan’s front teeth. He was so horrified he could literally see his heart jump against his ribs. He assumed that the old guy was going to shock him somehow. Instead he held pliers.
They had unusually long handles. Nathan thought he was going to simply yank his tooth out, but instead, he crushed it. He knew that in the old building, no one could hear him scream.
So Nathan knew people. He would have to find one who would clone a baby for them. Suella was kind. She said it would be okay if he waited until after the break to begin searching. Ironically, the game was played the same fateful night that she flew back to California from Cincinnati and made her life-changing discovery. She kept on searching, however. When Toni left the house and Nathan went on errands, that left lots of time for her to websearch and phone canvas.
Unfortunately, she kept coming up against wall after wall. Over and over she kept on hearing “I’m sorry ma’am, we don’t do that sort of thing here.” They didn’t even do it at UCLA, one of the premier medical institutions in the country. Still, at UCLA, a whiskered and shaggy haired graduate assistant gave her a glimmer of hope. He took her aside and said “Lifewind. Look them up.”
That’s all he said. It was so cryptic she wondered exactly what he meant, but when she got out to her car, she keyed the name into her phone. Several listings came up and she had to zoom in to have any prayer of reading them. First off, she could tell the company held several locations in southern California. That was good. Some were in the desert, some were along the coast, and others were up north. The full name of the company was “Lifewind Biologicals.” From the ads the links brought up, it looked like they manufactured medical equipment. What good was that? Of course, it could be a cover. None of the listings contained a phone number. What good was that?
Didn’t people cold call anymore? Emailing from the phone or even the home system was out. This could be traced too easily. By the end of the day she asked out loud: “How on earth does anyone get cloned?”
She would find the answer on the coming weekend. The Cincinnati Reds traveled out west, to play the Dodgers, and Suella could visit with the wives in the luxury box. The atmosphere was much more distracting and glamorous than the booth in Cincinnati. There were more paintings on the walls, richer carpet, and more crystal chandeliers. She could never believe that just a few feet past the glass, a baseball game was going on. While she didn’t know very many people in the Dodger’s organization, Carolyn Concannon saw her right away and shouted greetings. Her husband was one of the Dodger coaches, and this made her one of the oldest (but still glamorous) wives in the booth. “What’s been going on?” Carolyn asked, when Suella arrived beside her.
She looked around them, to check whether anyone was in easy earshot and felt like a character in a bad mystery movie. “I am trying to find out about cloning.”
Carolyn nodded, and for the next forty-five minutes, told her about a couple she knew who were unable to conceive. Cloning became for them a way to have the baby they always wanted. “It’s very clandestine, and they make you sign a pile of legal disclaimers a mile high but they’re really happy they did it.”
“Do you happen to remember which company it was?” Suella asked.
“Of course. Lifewind.”
It was the weekend, so Suella resolved to make first contact with them on Monday. On Sunday morning, Nathan seemed down while they drank their coffee.
“Is anything wrong?” Suella asked.
Nathan just shrugged, like a bored teenager. “Nothing.” She knew him well enough that his “nothing” was really a whole lot of something. She also knew all the ways to get it out of him without being too direct or prying. “I’ve forgiven you.”
“I know.”
“When this happens, it will be like a new beginning for us,” she went on. “We’ll be raising a child together. It’ll be so much fun.” She took his hand.
“I know. I’m just down, is all. “
“Are you getting lots of innings?”
“Sure I am,” he said. “You know that. You read the sporting pages as much as anyone I know.”
“Does anything hurt? Are you okay, physically?”
He chuckled. “You should know the answer to that, too. You know my ass better than anyone in this world.”
“Then what?”
He inhaled, exhaled slowly, then stared out into space for a moment. Just to think, he lifted the coffee cup to his lips and took a long sip. “This is just not the way I pictured it ending. Not the way at all.”
Suella was horrified. “But I said that I forgive you!”
He chuckled again, cracked a smile, and put an arm around her shoulders for emphasis. “Angel, you can be such a worrywart sometimes. Someone would think I walked in and found you with some young cock or something.”
Suella exhaled hard with relief, her shoulders dropping.
“It’s just that I expected it to end a lot better than this. Mop up pitcher for a fourth place club.”
During moments like this, Suella wanted to point out the millions and millions of boys and young men who dreamt of a career in the major leagues and wound up getting regular jobs instead. She was excited about the possibility of becoming a mother, though. “You started twice already this year, right?”
“Yeah. Only because some doofus got injured. I can still do it. I know I can. From now on, I’m pitching for me. If some contender is smart, they’ll pick me up for their stretch drive.”
That very afternoon, Nathan got to pitch. It was a bright, hot day and Suella felt grateful to bask in the air-conditioned comfort of the luxury box. He only faced two batters though, striking one out and getting the other to hit a weak ground ball. The next inning, another guy she didn’t recognize came out of the bullpen to start throwing. Sometimes she didn’t understand baseball. She turned to Carolyn and asked “Why would they take him out of the game? He got those guys out, didn’t he?”
Carolyn grinned. “Because he’s a lefty, honey. Didn’t you notice those two batters were left-handed? Frank brought in your hubby to throw to both of them because he had a better chance of getting them out.”
Suella shook her head, wondering what Nathan was thinking as he sat in the dugout.
Carolyn noticed her and touched her wrist. “Left-handed relief specialist is one of the best jobs in baseball, dear. He could pitch another five more years.”
Suella resolved to tell him this the next time he complained about not getting enough work.
Someone Else's Life Page 4
