Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  He vaguely understood, but did not say, that his own interest in baseball was carnal, too. During their sixth game together, the first in a double-header against the Red Sox, she came leaping into his arms in the giddy standing-ovation aftermath of a Mickey Mantle homer, and when their arms came down he discovered her hand clasping his. Their hands remained like that, twined atop the concrete bleachers and mostly unacknowledged save for the occasional shy glance and bitten lip, for almost all of the next game, which neither of them seemed to follow very closely. And though he hated himself for thinking it, he could not remember being so savagely happy in all his life.

  He cut it off after that—for a while, at least. He’d always been a terrible liar, and his ungainly attempt to explain away his mild sunburn to Alice—“maybe from mowing the lawn?” he’d asked, as if to draw out a better explanation from her—felt loathsome and excruciating. His wrestling with the boys vanished as swiftly as it’d come; instead he found himself barking orders at them, oppressed by their cap guns and bickering, incensed by all their toys underfoot which seemed like plastic symbols of all that was hindering him from . . . from what? He couldn’t say. He was not in love with Katherine Bluestein, if he defined love in the traditional way—that is, he did not long to marry her, father her children (the very idea brought a shudder), grow old in her company. But neither did he want to merely lay her down, like some sailor on shore leave. He didn’t think he wanted a new life, necessarily . . . just his same life, squared. But he knew this was impossible—absurdly so. There were laws of physics that applied to emotions. At night he’d lie awake listening to Alice snore and try cursing himself to sleep. To avoid Katherine, he even stopped working on his book for a couple of weeks, blackening his mood that much further.

  But 1960 was a pennant year for the Bombers, and everywhere he went, it seemed, they were all anyone talked about. Had it always been like this, and he’d never been aware of it? Or were his antennae so overtuned that every eavesdropped mention of Hector Lopez, Joe DeMaestri, Duke Maas, et al., or the Indians, Tigers, Bucs, or Orioles, no matter how distant or slight, whether in the butcher shop or the bookstore, on the sidewalk walking past the barber, or from the beat cops outside the bakery blowing the steam off the tops of their coffees, came flooding into his mind, swamping and drowning everything else? Without ever intending to, he realized, he’d carved a whole separate chunk out of his life, had created an alternate persona that both was and wasn’t him—and from everywhere, from the radio and the television and the newspaper and the kids bopping down Main Street in their navy-blue Yankees caps, it was calling him back. Against his own knotted desires and late-night curses he felt wrecked and powerless.

  He and Katherine were chaste through their eighth game, and for most of their ninth. They even bickered once, when she made fun of him for not taking off his hat in the greasy July heat. But during the seventh inning of that ninth and final game, Dr. Cross emerged from the bathroom to find Katherine waiting for him there, her purse in hand. He somehow knew what was coming—he could see it in the severe, almost deranged frown on her face; in the slight wet parting of her unbitten lips; in the serpentine way her shoulders rolled as she came toward him at the wall—but was startled nonetheless when her face met his and with its violent entry her tongue shocked his mouth. How long the kiss lasted wasn’t clear; he was only dimly aware of the sound of a bat cracking followed by the giant roar of the crowd, of her fingernails piercing his shoulders and his own arms hanging limp and heavy at his sides, of the rich, malty, tobacco-y taste of her mouth, of the muttered jostling men gave him as they came streaming in and out of the bathroom, of the wondrous and terrible gust of life battering its way through him. When finally he opened his eyes, as breathless as if to the crowd’s wild delight he’d run the bases himself, he saw her eyes fixed upon his, seeming to penetrate them in much the same way her tongue had just penetrated his mouth. He stood motionless, eyes wide and blinking. She cocked her head, seeming to sense his reluctance which wasn’t quite reluctance but something far more explosive than that: desire and fear, combusting. “There’s more,” she whispered, biting her bottom lip on which his own pilfered saliva gleamed.

  More: He knew of course what more meant. And yet he didn’t. Because even then, in the sweltering sauna heat of that stadium corridor, with her hands gently ironing out the creases her nails had left on his suit sleeves, and with what felt like a miracle of animal pleasure occurring in his elasticized limbs, he understood that with more came less. That there was an equilibrium to life, and that with everything you gained you lost something as well, in the same measure, so that whatever further bliss was available to him would have to be paid with equal degrees of pain. He had just one life, not two, meaning more was an illusion, a traitorous chimera. He slipped his hat off, rolling it in his hands in the thin space between them so that she was forced to let go of him and drop back a step, and he read and reread the label inside the crown as Katherine stood waiting, as if there inside that hat were the instructions he required, the biblical verse that could supply him fortitude. Then he nodded, and wiped his mouth, and feeling every cell in his body roiling in furious mutiny he shook his head no and turned glumly toward the exit, Katherine following along as a long train of sighs.

  They never spoke of baseball again, or of anything beyond the humdrum administering of his research needs. A rejected chill came into her eyes when she’d lift them from the sports pages to field his requests, and he’d lower his own when she’d stand up to retrieve his books or documents. When the Yankees lost the World Series that year, in the seventh game to the Pirates, Dr. Cross was on his way home from teaching, oblivious to all the crestfallen boys in their Yankees caps kicking pebbles down the sidewalk, to the cops and the barbers wagging their heads while loudly second-guessing the Old Perfessor’s decision to start Bob Turley on the mound rather than Whitey Ford, to the viral pallor of defeat on the faces of the men he passed. Alice made pork chops for dinner, and without exaggeration he told her they were the best pork chops he’d ever eaten, grateful for scraps his fussy children abandoned to their plates.

  But now Katherine was back. Katherine Bluestein and the Yankees. How had it happened? He shook the credit card statement in his hand, as if to throttle it for more information, his insides blistering with anger. Why couldn’t he ever remember? Why? How had she found him, after all these years—or, God forbid, had he somehow found her? Surely not the latter: Goddamn just look at me, he thought, with an acidly mournful snort. A decrepit and colorless sleeve of bones all but strapped to a hospital bed, with a heart so frail it couldn’t take an ounce more burden or the slightest boost in tempo—nothing more. Of course he’d occasionally thought about Katherine over the years, because after everything had cooled and his life had resumed being livable, when it’d matured into being a statement rather than a question, he’d come to believe that it was in just these unknown and private moments that our true characters were made or revealed. This belief had depressed him, at first, because it seemed to undermine his work as a historian, seemed to undermine the practice of history itself: How could he hope to comprehend and chronicle past lives—transmitted to him via the minuscule dripline of letters, autobiographies, recorded interviews, recollections of others, diaries which were rarely as candid as they seemed—when he knew his own mild history, written by another or even by himself, could never include what he deemed his most noble and ignoble moments—the primary but secret truths of his life?

  History records strong deeds; but the truth of history, he came to believe, was in the wavering. What if he had followed Katherine Bluestein into that More? Maybe nothing, or close to nothing. Several years later the sexual revolution would come charging in, as sudden and beguiling as Katherine’s tongue invading his mouth, and he would hear his colleagues and students dismissing such dalliances as “just sex,” which perhaps was what they were. Maybe that was all Katherine Bluestein could’ve been, and possibly wanted to be: a hobby of his,
practiced in dim little Updikean motel rooms near the stadium, her cigarettes burning on the nightstand like incense, his conscience parked outside by the door. Maybe he was both over-romantic and priggish to think otherwise. But he did. And because he hadn’t followed Katherine Bluestein into that More, he’d dedicated himself—applying all that super-heated radioactive energy she’d brought forth in him—to the idyll of who he was, or wanted most of all to be: an honest and decent man, that creature civilization had spent four thousand–plus years creating and honing, still and forever tilting against the windmills of brute nature. The wavering had forged him, just as his wavering at the edge of the burial pit at Gunskirchen Lager had forged him, when in that terrible hinge of a moment he’d learned how easy it would be—how natural—to surrender to his urges, to submit to his wants. Yet neither of these crucible instances would ever be known. They would be buried with him, as maybe all true moments are. What we leave behind, he’d come to believe, is mere simulacra, the invented residue of our public selves.

  But now. But now. Who was he, after all? His memory said one thing; his lack of memory, another. He tried ripping the credit card statement but its two pages were too durable for his weak hands to tear apart. This felt like further indignity, and again his eyes dampened with frustration and sorrow. But he was able to rip one of the pages, singly, first into halves and then into quarters, and the remaining page after that, and then all the quarters into smaller pieces and then, his curled arthritic hands twitching with pain, into even smaller pieces, until the bedspread was littered with unruly white shards, the shredded evidence of the man he was or wasn’t or could’ve been.

  That’s when the cat jumped onto the bed. Dr. Cross yelped and threw his hands up and back, as if accosted by a mugger, as the cat closed in on him with predatory grace. It lifted one paw, stepped lightly forward. “Shoo, cat,” Dr. Cross moaned. His arms remained fixed to the headboard as the cat arched its back and began kneading the bedspread, digging its claws into the cheap cotton layer atop Dr. Cross’s belly and purring, the tiny scraps of paper bobbing on the bedspread like floating debris in an eddypool. “Shoo,” Dr. Cross said again, but with such weakness that the cat dunked its head and seemed almost to smile, purring all the louder.

  They stayed that way for a long while, until Dr. Cross felt the warm music of the purring loosening his shoulders and with them his fears. As the terror subsided he found himself lowering his arms and even offering a hand which the cat nuzzled and with its wet snout smeared. He felt his body slackening, but not unpleasantly—the way morphine must feel, he thought. Maybe the nurses were right after all: perhaps some rest was in order, the restorative anesthesia of a brief nap. Yes, that was it. A nap. Through the window, outside on Henry Street, he could see the sunlight slanting, bowing to nightfall’s approach, and from the doorway he could hear the squeaks of the nurses steering their carts down the hallway, the eager babble from televisions in other rooms, the forlorn echoes of a distant unanswered phone going ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. The cat continued its kneading and purring, staring directly into Dr. Cross’s eyes, and Dr. Cross, wincing as the occasional claw pierced the bedspread and went digging into his sheer and withered skin, lulled by the soft staticky purring and yet strangely and powerfully lucid, returned the stare harder, wanting to know what the cat saw, wanting to know what it knew. He wanted to know what was coming for him.

  2

  “DUDE, SERIOUSLY,” Matty was saying. “I told you this was all on me. Will you stop scrounging the trash cans already?”

  “Force of habit, man,” Talmadge muttered, swerving away from the blue trash barrel. A tiny knot of annoyance gnarled the back of his neck: annoyance at Matty, for the way he was always belittling scavenging, but at himself, too, for the blinders he’d developed, for the way he’d come to view the world—Exhibit A, just then—as some kind of matrix for diving ops, a connect-the-dots trail of trash bags and dumpsters and recycling bins, as a treasure map without . . . he opted not to finish the thought, focusing instead on following Matty through the dense, round-shouldered, blue-jerseyed stadium crowd. It was just like he’d learned to navigate the human briars of places like Times Square: you got yourself behind some fast-walking native, your machete, or your ice cutter, and let that person carve you an open route right through those wadded-up tourists. You could draft whole blocks that way, as dreamy and unperturbed as when cruising an interstate. Anyway, it’s not like he could’ve grabbed anything from the trash barrels in the first place: His hands were full, with a jumbo light beer in one and nachos in the other. Closely monitoring the beer, which kept sloshing over the cup’s rim as he walked, he failed to notice Matty stopping, and in the collision splashed Miller Lite onto Matty’s lower back, basically down his shorts.

  “Thanks, dude,” said Matty. “That felt delicious. We gotta turn in here. (Coming through, bro.) Our seats are down this way. (Seriously, man, you gonna let me pass? Jesus.) I think we’ve missed, like, the whole first inning. Here we go, down here. Damn, you see that asswipe? Just standing there. I was like, dude, coming through, hello.”

  “I’m just following you,” said Talmadge, as they emerged from a gray concrete corridor into the massive sunlit bowl of Yankee Stadium—and the bottom of the bowl, at that, to a section along the first-base line that was almost level with the field. “Holy shit, what’d you pay for these seats, man?” Talmadge called out. Then a sudden grin quirked his face. “Or are we squatting?”

  “Screw squatting.” Matty quartered back as if to say something further but shook his head instead, swallowing whatever he’d been fixing to say, and then descended down the concrete steps. “They’re our seats, okay? This row here.”

  “Oh, man,” Talmadge said, more impressed than he wanted to be. Until this moment he’d thought his dad’s box seats at the Superdome were the shit. But Dick Bertrand had nothing on these. Third row from the field, just to the right of the Yankees dugout. He was almost shocked to see the field up close as actual grass with actual blades; the anomaly of seeing genuine earth in this unearthly city never failed to stagger him. He was near enough to see the thick, sunlight-glossed forearm hair of the Yankees’ first baseman, the rawhide curls on his glove, the weave of his socks. This was high-definition seating. He sat down in amazement.

  To Talmadge’s right sat a fortyish brunette whose enormous silicone breasts he couldn’t help noticing first, though with nonbiological interest, and certainly no amazement. They were positioned unnaturally high, aimed skyward like anti-aircraft guns, and set just barely inside a blue satin dress that must’ve been custom tailored to restrict them within the confines of indecent exposure laws. To her right sat a distracted, sweaty man at least a decade older, cursing at something on his cellphone screen, who Talmadge presumed to be her husband. He had one of those lumpy misshapen bodies on which shirts never fit properly, shirts bunching and puffing as his was bunched and puffed now, but this didn’t matter because at a certain tax bracket dishevelment was mistaken for charm. Dick Bertrand had a body like that, but without the bank balance to render it charming. With great agitation the man flashed the screen for the woman to see. She shrugged in the most noncommittal manner Talmadge had ever seen a person shrug, a scant lift of shoulder that could’ve signaled There’s nothing you can do right now about the price of crude as easily as it could’ve signaled I have no idea why you’re showing me that battery-operated contraption. Settling himself into his seat, with his beer between his legs and the nachos transferred to Matty’s knee, Talmadge greeted the woman with a Southern hello. She pretended not to hear, staring expressionlessly up toward the Jumbotron or the blue sky beyond it, conceivably scanning for enemy aircraft. Talmadge tried not to mind. Even the snottiest matrons of the Gulfport Yacht Club—he was thinking now of Mrs. Dubuisson, to whom his father had devoted years of courting for insidious society reasons—would’ve made some gesture in response. (In Mrs. Dubuisson’s case, a lavishly condescending return greeting that only later would you
register as devastating.) He thought of what Micah would do, in similar straits. Probably plant herself on the woman’s lap until either acknowledgment came or those boobs opened fire. But then Micah would never be found lounging in a field box at Yankee Stadium. The point was way beyond moot.