by Matthew Klam
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.
A couple of conference-goers in bikinis sat on towels on the third-base line in front of the other dugout, and the able-bodied kid went over and gave them water, then spilled water on them and they screamed. He ran but they chased him and pulled him to the ground and pinned him and poured water on him. Everybody was having fun.
They were perfect and beautiful, whereas I was already a little revolting, although better straight on, but worse from the side. I was forty-two years old, obstructed by the limits of love, grasping at lust, scared to work on a crumbling marriage I’d be sure to hang on to for whatever remaining time we had here on earth.
A young woman dug through the mitts beside me and kept flapping them open and closed until I told her that a righty wears the thing on her left hand. I got a ball and went out onto the grass and showed her how to throw and catch. Her name was Eva Rotmensch. Some people pronounced it “Ava,” she said, but they were wrong. She walked with turned-out feet and had a flat pale face with a sharp jawbone and bluntly cut hair. She wore a cropped white blouse and pink shorts so fitted and tiny it would be difficult to imagine any underpants surviving inside them. When she raised her arms, her shirt went with them and I saw her thin torso. She needed me to know that she belonged to the theater company, as opposed to the theater workshop. Never played softball before, no sports, spent the first twenty years of her life in a dance studio. She pranced around on long, strong legs, like she was still onstage, mimicking my exaggerated throwing motion, elbow back, above her ear, and threw it over my head, then threw it into the bushes, then under the stands, waiting each time for me to go get it, like my daughter, who didn’t know how to do anything and needed me to show her, as though she were doing me a favor, turning whatever should’ve been fun into a pain in the ass.
I asked polite questions about her acting career, and mentioned a few out-of-the-way spots where people go to sunbathe, smiling at her, wondering whether she liked the beach, whether she liked swimming in big waves, feeling invisible and ignored, wondering what it would be like if for some reason she put down the mitt and lay on the grass and pulled down her shorts and begged me to fuck her.
Art historian Marilyn Michnick sat behind the fence, smiling and serene, and nearly blind, needing a cane, beside Alicia Hernandez Roulet, whose ugly little walleyed dog yapped around the field. Mohammad Khan, a theater critic, cleaned his eyeglasses with long, delicate-looking fingers, complaining about having to play. “I don’t like to get sweaty. I don’t like to be wet.” Vicky Capodanno came toward us from right field, in the baggy black T-shirt and shorts and combat boots she wore every year for softball, and a few steps behind her, Tabitha wore a baseball cap and a long thing you toss over a bathing suit that looked like a tablecloth. I recognized a couple stragglers, among them a taller lady moving stiffly, hunched and broad-shouldered in her gray sleeveless T-shirt and blue-and-green plaid shorts, who I’d spoken to a few minutes earlier: Amy O’Donnell, who I’d once held as we caressed in the dark, trembling and naked, and later while sleeping in the quiet dawn. I wanted another moment with her, something I could look back on later, to get me through another year, a scene, a place to park my soul through winter months of diapers and screaming.
I looked across the road, beyond the tr
ees, to houses and a cornfield in the distance. Whatever hadn’t been watered was dead. A guy in a jungle hat took batting practice, drilling balls into left field, where eight or nine people stood chatting in two clumps, some of them not even facing the batter, and I wondered if one of them would be hit by a ball and killed.
Amy went behind the dugout and started stretching, some kind of hurried knee-bend squat. She was so tall. Her people could be traced back to the northern coast of Ireland, where shipwrecked Vikings raped the villagers, which made them tall and fair. She bent, she hunched, she made horrible faces. Now she squatted side to side.
The guy with the water came through the trees from the parking lot, and one of the girls in a bikini tried to make a run for it, shrieking, and he tackled her and spilled water on her and she screamed. They were young, although not so young, but like a different species.
“What’s his problem?” I asked Eva. “Why isn’t he playing?”
She watched him, lips parted, not smiling. She said his name was Ryan.
“Is he in the theater company?”
“He’s in something in New York, so he’s going back and forth, taking the train, so he can’t be in anything here.”
He rolled around on the grass—he had fine golden skin and a Chinese tattoo on his neck—as she watched him, her poor little blouse straining at every button, her ass floating in the air like a helium balloon. I threw the ball, but she wasn’t looking and it flew past her and pegged Stan in the back. He wheeled around, scowling, and kicked it away.
One of these nights, maybe after a rehearsal, under glittering starlight, Ryan might meet Eva walking from the theater to the dorms. And may it not turn into a long-term monogamous relationship, and may it end in a mutual hatefuck. Amen. Behind us, a group of interns stood blocking the dugout, looking sweaty, stealing our water, complaining to Mohammad Khan about having to clean up the tent after lunch.
“The kitchen is a total slime pit!”
“We’re totally covered in slime!”
They went on complaining as they tipped up bottles of water: a young woman in a torn miniskirt with torn black stockings and heavy mascara, and her sleepy-looking friend, filling out a T-shirt with the school’s name across her chest, and a third one with bouncy, eggy, shiny hair. It was as if the water they poured down their throats went right into their sumptuous breasts to keep them full.
Four more days of this. Then I could go home and choke my wife.
There were enough of us now to split into two teams. People wandered out to take positions so we could start.
I pictured myself heaving over some sullen nineteen-year-old, my baggy old face hanging down, and went along the dugout thinking filthy thoughts, grabbing helmets and lining them up beneath the bench, and asked nicely if anyone had the order, and saw that I was batting seventh. On this broiling Saturday afternoon, where were the cuties of my youth? Women in their forties had replaced them, hunching toward the grave. For so long I’d been young, but that was over, and the thing to do now was teach a little comics and go home, where I could drop my eyeglasses in the toilet, and fall down the stairs in my pajamas, somebody wailing in the background while I stood in my kitchen, in a state of shock, loading the dishwasher.
Vicky came over and put her mitt on her head and said, “Let’s get on with it already.”
I needed to find someone at this conference, someone who wouldn’t harm a married man, or hated being married, or couldn’t bear to be alone for three or four days. I didn’t have any big strategy here. I liked to flirt. I needed to stay alert every second for a potential alliance in this war against morbidity and death. Were there rules or prohibitions? Some of my colleagues preyed upon the young, their own students, the low-hanging fruit, which struck me as a real character flaw. I wanted a grown-up, maybe with children of her own, someone who was needed somewhere else and wouldn’t get hooked. I’d driven the many miles here with purpose and concentration. I had to make the most of my time away from home. Over the last ten years, the stuff I’d done could be counted on one hand: a couple of late-night goodbyes that never got past the talking stage; a wriggling blond woman at a convention in Brooklyn who edited textbooks for a living; Ruth Gogelberg, Gunkelman, whatever, at this very conference three or four years ago. It started when I was sixteen. It started when I was five, the need for a girl to save me, the need to escape, in a panic to get away from my mother and father, out of this empty shell. I always had a girlfriend, always fell in love, and even at my most saintly and sexless, I always liked someone out there, was working at something, moving toward it with intention and forethought, nibbling around the edges until I hated the whole thing, until everything I did became about not cheating, not doing something, until it was pretty much a foregone conclusion, and all I had to do was pull the trigger and get it over with, so I could slink back to my safe and stable perch and pretend it had never happened and hate myself and think of someone new.
Amy finished stretching and pulled her hair back into a rubber band. Our thing went beyond lusty one-liners and therapeutic confessions. I’d been in love with her for a year. Not love. Whatever it was. And it just so happened that her personal misery, hidden behind a windfall of prosperity, was ironically charged, luridly beguiling, and possibly useful in a practical sense, as fact-based material for the once and future semiautobiographical storyteller. She walked into the dugout. I stood and walked out, pretending not to know her. She found a bat and went behind the backstop and took practice cuts, swinging so hard her helmet fell off.
The game started. A big sandy-haired kid stepped into the batter’s box and golfed the first pitch high and gone; it landed in the parking lot, where it bounced as people cheered, as he ran around the bases with his arms hanging down, like a pigeon-toed ape. Mohammad Khan could barely lift the bat, and tapped a base hit. Tabitha got up and somehow outran a dribbler down the first-base line. Then Amy went to the plate, grimacing into the sun, and took a wild cut.
She hit it pretty well. The second baseman knocked it down but couldn’t hold on. He picked it up and tagged Tabitha softly on the shoulder, then threw the ball over the first baseman’s head, over the dugout, where it beaned the golf cart that had driven Marilyn Michnick here. Mohammad limped home. When the ball is thrown out of play, the runner is awarded the next base. Amy waited at first. I couldn’t stop myself and yelled, “Take second!”
She looked at me as though the last thing in the world she needed was a man yelling at her in public; she got enough of that at home. It was a confusing moment. I still had some investment or pride in her, I wanted her to thrive, succeed, whatever, so I stood in front of the dugout waving her on. She ran down the base path, unsure, reached second, and stared right at me as she stomped testily on the base with both feet. Stomped as though to defy me. But no one had bothered to anchor the base, so it skipped out from under her and she fell.
And didn’t get up.
The pitcher, Stan, walked to second base. The shortstop knelt. Nobody seemed to be moving. As I got closer, I saw that her whole mood had shifted; she’d come to a sitting position, her arm in her lap. She seemed drunk, the way a drunk is soft, sleepy, in shadows, fighting to stay awake; she was staring down into her lap as if a haze floated in front of her. Looking at her arm, I had to force myself to breathe. It was my fault, I’d done it. I pushed that thought away.
“What’s up?” Carl asked, standing so close he was brushing my shoulder. He hadn’t seen her fall. Then he looked. I watched his face change. She was sitting with one leg folded under herself, foot turned, knees bent, so that the whiteness of her inner thighs showed.
The girl kneeling beside her talked in a loud voice, holding Amy’s forearm. “Tip your head forward, that’s good, now deep breath, just relax, you’re gonna be fine, don’t look, it’s okay, I’ve got your arm,” and Amy saying, in a kind of husky, sleepy voice, “I don’t want to look,” and then a guy in a Red Sox cap came over and draped her arm with a T-shirt.
The
security guard called for an ambulance. Vicky walked across the infield dirt, squinted at Amy, then turned to me. Our former and potential closeness made me think she could read my mind. My thoughts were slow and bleating and obstructed, but I noted, finally, that Amy had been a kind of home, a vessel for my discombobulated mind, that my own family treated me like a footstool but this stranger had cared for my soul. At some point, we could hear sirens on the highway. They decided to get Amy out of the sun, and with heavy assistance, she stood and took a few unsteady steps and began lowering herself down to the grass, her legs bending, collapsing, as her handlers bumped into each other, holding her arm, wavering, guiding her down, her legs folded beneath her, all wrong. They raised her up again as though it had been their fault.
“Ready?”
“Sure.”
And again she went down, and this time she tucked her chin and went completely out.
“Amy?” the girl said, kneeling. We all waited. “Can you hear me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you faint easily?”
She nodded.
“I wish you’d told me that before. I wouldn’t have moved you.”
Amy’s gaze drifted down to the T-shirt covering her arm, as if it were some new friend. “I didn’t know until I fainted.”
An EMT and three paramedics arrived, asking a series of questions—name, day of the week, name of the U.S. president—and each time Amy answered politely.
