“Nick?”
He folds his hands, then opens them. His eyes move back and forth. He moves his lips, he appears to read, there is no sound. He sways.
“Hey, Nick?”
A pigeon lights on his shoulder. In the distance there are sirens.
“Miss?” a librarian calls out. “Yes, you there standing in the middle of the street. I think that boy wants you to read him your letter.”
Nick nods. Anne groans and shakes her head. The crowd of students, trotting cross-country men, motorists, bicycles, and wheelchairs begins to chant. “Read that boy the letter.”
Anne pinches her eyes, then rips open the envelope. There are cheers.
“ ‘Darling David,’ ” Anne reads, then stops.
“Loudly now,” the librarians call out.
“ ‘Darling David, I want you to know that while you’re down in Georgia fighting for the freedom of this country I miss you and I love you. And I’ve been thinking about the night when you proposed. I’m still too young, I think, to consider marriage. But your words are always on my mind. You should be happy to know that I’m casually dating, just like we agreed both of us should during this difficult time of separation. I met this guy in my speech class—his name is Nick. He’s a baseball player, the walk-on who got the big scholarship. He could be really good. I haven’t told him about you yet. That’s all for now. Love, Anne.’ ”
Nick stands, rinsing another beer mug. The manager yells over to him to hurry up. As usual The Second Fiddle is crowded—packed like the grandstands on Ladies Day, Nick thinks. He nods, waves his dripping arms, then mumbles to himself and anyone within earshot the morning’s message, “Hey, we need some help out here.”
“Sure, but you’ll have to pour me a drink first.”
A customer. Blonde, attractive, probably twenty-two or twenty-three. Nick asks anyway to see some I.D. Her name is Vicky Williams.
“Good evening,” Nick says.
“Good evening to you too, and if you’re through dreaming I’ll have a Canadian Club on the rocks.”
Nick reaches for the whiskey. “Peanuts?” he asks. Vicky takes a dollar from her wallet and says yes.
“Shell ’em yourself, miss.” He sets the basket of nuts on the bar.
“You’re a strange one,” Vicky says.
“I’m just a ballplayer without a following, miss. She jilted me for a first lieutenant.”
“I was jilted for the girl who lived next door.”
“To you or to him?”
“Actually both. I lived two doors down.”
Nick turns and rinses more beer mugs. He refills peanut baskets. He empties ashtrays, he tells a joker not to sit on the jukebox, he tosses away dead beer bottles and opens cold fresh ones, he wipes up ashes, suds, shells, occasional nickels and dimes from the bar.
“Hey, ballplayer,” Vicky says, later, tugging Nick’s arm. “Remember me? What time do you knock off?”
“I work until the final inning, or at least each night I try to.”
“Can I catch you later in the parking lot?”
Nick nods.
Anne holds her head and cries. They are in Nick’s basement apartment on Main Street, two months after they have met, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio, sitting naked on Nick’s rumpled bed.
“It was that bad, huh Anne?” Nick asks.
She sobs. He stands and turns off the radio. Then he walks into his kitchen, finds and puts on his cap, winces and stares at the refrigerator. Nick shakes off the first two signs. Then he winds up, delivers, hears the grunt of the batter, the crack of the bat. The manager runs out and hands Nick the towel. Nick stares at his glove and heads for the showers, thinking he’ll need a computer to figure his mushrooming ERA.
“I’ve been laughed at,” he calls to Anne, “I’ve been slapped in the face, I’ve been booed. Once a girl even fell asleep in the middle of it—” He walks back to the bedroom. “But never this, Anne. Never tears.”
“You don’t understand, Nicky.”
“Nick. The name is Nick. The diminutive of Nicholas. From the Greek, meaning ‘victory of the people.’”
“This afternoon you earned your victory, Nicholas.” Her eyes widen.
Nick pauses, confused. “The full nine innings, Anne? Victory? No need for a reliever?”
“No need for a reliever, Nick. You just pitched a shutout, a perfect game, a no-hitter.”
“Then why the tears?” He scratches his cap. “You rounded third and headed for the plate but didn’t score, eh Anne?”
“I scored. Believe me, I scored. Remember when my legs tightened?”
“I thought you were just trying to stay awake.”
“I still tingle, Nick.”
“Stop. You’ll make me blush.”
“Go ahead and blush. This was my very first time.”
Nick shakes his head. “But what about the doughboy? Come on, Anne, don’t pull that one on me. I read World War II novels. It happens every time with them, sometimes even twice.”
“You mean with David? Never.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
Vicky leans against her car and chatters her teeth. The December night is cold. “Well, well,” she says, “I wasn’t sure you were going to show.”
Nick shrugs. “I figured it would be nice to swap stories. Remember the one about the girl who lived next door?”
“I made that up,” Vicky says. “And if you want a ride you’re going to have to tell me your name.” They get inside her car.
“And I believed you,” Nick says. “The name is Sandy Koufax.”
“I’m Jayne Mansfield, and I’m cold and exhausted.”
“Do you want to get some coffee?”
“No, let’s just go to bed.”
“I only pour the stuff, lady, I never touch it.”
Vicky frowns, pulls out into the street, then lets her hand fall to his thigh. “But Nick,” she says. Her tongue licks her bottom lip.
“But Vicky,” Nick says.
Her fingers tiptoe toward his belt. “But Nick—”
“Vicky—”
She drives. “Why not? Don’t you find me attractive, or did a line drive hit you where it counts?”
Nick smiles and leans back. “Because I think it would be wrong, that’s why. Didn’t they ever teach you that in school?”
The telephone crackles. “You’re not serious, Nick,” Anne says. “We’re old enough for our own decisions. After all, we’re seniors in college.”
“I’m confused, Anne. I don’t know what advice to give you.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do, Nick.”
He takes a deep breath, looks at the receiver in his hand, then hangs up. Then Nick paces the room, hitting the walls of his basement apartment with his left fist. Then he goes into the kitchen and knocks over the table. He walks out of the pantry with a Coke bottle and fires a sidearmed curve at the picture tube of his TV. The blank glass shatters.
The phone rings and rings.
“Did you hang up on me?”
“I just busted up my apartment, Anne.”
“Nick, I just busted up my life.”
“But you’re sure, Anne, you’re sure it’s not my child?”
Earlier, a full ten months earlier, during the spring of Nick’s junior year, on the tiny patch of grass near the Psychology Building, Anne is telling Nick the identical thing, only this time it is Nick’s child. Nick holds his stomach and breathes quickly through his teeth. Anne looks out at the street. Nesting birds chirp. The sun dumbly shines.
“I feel like my life’s just been stopped,” Nick says.
“Well how do you think I feel?”
“I guess we’ll have to get married.”
“I don’t want that. Not if it’s like this.”
“O.K. Give me an alternative. Do you want to raise the baby yourself? Or do you want to put it up for adoption?”
Anne stares him full in the face. “I’ll give you an alte
rnative, Nick. Air fare. Kansas City. An abortion, damn it.”
Nick says nothing.
“Well, Nick, I don’t want to rush into getting married.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“I haven’t seen one yet.”
“Well, let’s get you to a doctor.”
“Sure, Nick. A doctor.”
“And let’s think about this, O.K.? This is very serious.”
Anne sighs. “Don’t I know.”
Nick holds his brow. “This changes everything,” he says. “I need time to think. Give me time to think.” He takes a step away, then turns. “Anne, please don’t do anything until we decide what’s best for both of us.”
“Sure, Nick.”
He crosses the street and goes into Stan’s Gridiron. A year of doing it, he thinks, and now this. Progenation. The law of averages. Another life. He shoves his way through the crowded bar, enters the John, waits for an open spot at the urinal trough, unzips. “You,” Nick says aloud. “You’ve screwed up my life.”
The guy standing next to him looks over. “Huh?”
“I said you screwed up my life.”
“Eat it, meatball.”
“Keep your eyes to yourself, fella.”
A voice from inside one of the stalls. “Hey, if you two are fairies, go around the block to The Wigwam.” Then the voice whistles.
Nick shakes and looks up, sees the guy hulking next to him. “You hear him in there? I’m having a conversation with my joint and he calls the two of us fairies.”
“You was talking to your joint?”
“A girl I know just told me she’s expecting.” Nick spits and pounds his palm with his fist.
“Uh huh,” the big guy says. The stall door opens. The whistler steps out. Nick steps back when the fight starts. For a while he watches.
Then Nick calls out. “Hey, give me a hand busting this off the wall.” He points to the condom machine. The big guy grins.
“It’s the machine’s fault,” Nick says. “You got the idea?”
The big guy nods and slams both fists against the machine’s side. It creaks and wobbles. He slams both fists again. The whistler runs out, both lips bloodied, and Nick watches the machine as it falls, hears it smash against the porcelain of the urinal. He lifts it up and over his head and throws it inside the open stall. The big guy is on his knees, stuffing his pockets with quarters. Nick’s breath is quick. He smiles and steps outside.
And walks out to the university’s pastoral South Farms, his hands in his pockets, his heart in his mouth, thinking. His kid. If there is a kid. If there isn’t a kid then there isn’t a kid. Nothing to worry about then. But if there is a kid it’s his kid. If there is a kid—
Nick pictures wastebaskets, green plastic garbage liners, red blood, and tiny hands and fingers. If there is a kid. Nick pictures Anne’s legs, open and splattered with blood. He closes his eyes.
“It would be wrong, Anne. I don’t think you should do it.”
She breathes into the phone. “We’re talking about my life, Nick.”
“But you’re sure, dead sure, this baby isn’t mine?”
Vicky yawns and stretches out on the couch in Nick’s apartment. Nick pounds the arms of his chair. “I could get another meteor easily,” he says, “or would you prefer something more in the line of a sudden incurable disease? Imagine the remainder of your life spent wasting away in a hospital, Vicky. Yawn once more and you’ll regret it.”
“What are you talking about?” Vicky says.
“Just my life,” Nick answers.
“But I want to go to bed. Can’t we—”
“You can think of bed at a time like this?”
Her eyes widen as she nods.
“The world is quietly becoming insane and all you can think of is bed? Vicky, where’s your character?”
Her hands begin unbuttoning her blouse. Nick shields his eyes.
“That comes close to violating good taste, Vicky.”
“Yes, Nick. I’m certain the baby isn’t yours.” The television set is shattered.
“Have you considered entering a convent?”
“Nick, did you hit your head?”
“Anne, this is ripping my guts up.”
“I’ve got feelings too.”
“It’s his baby, you’re sure about that, and then you call me.”
“But I can talk to you better than I can talk to him.”
“But you can’t marry me better.”
“Nick, let’s not go through that again.”
“I know, I know. He’s a first lieutenant with a future—a growing business, the Army—and I’m the wild man of the Big Ten, without a fastball or a scholarship, and this spring I’ll probably be riding the bench.”
“It’s not just that, Nick.”
“Anne, it is exactly that.”
Nick stops by the barns and looks at grazing sheep. He sits on a fence and hangs his head, imagining himself rising and striding from the bullpen to the pitcher’s mound. It is a fine bright spring afternoon. He looks around as he jogs out. He sees the box seats change to church pews. The bases are loaded with Anne’s relatives. Nick tries to throw his first warm-up pitch, but the ball inside his glove is a wadded diaper. It floats to the infield grass, and he sees Anne slowly march down the right-field foul line with her father. Her belly looks like a balloon. He sees them kiss at first base. Anne kneels at home plate before the umpire. Nick is suddenly next to her singing the Kyrie. The stands are empty. Nick cries out. The sheep look up at him and bleat.
He walks from the South Farms back toward campus. He goes into Treno’s and asks the bartender there for change. He takes a handful of napkins from the counter to disguise his voice, then enters the phone booth and unscrews the light bulb. Nick makes the sign of the Cross and begins dialing.
First his trainer, who might know about these things, Nick thinks, but whose wife says is out, and then Nick tries a guy he met during his first year in the dorms. Nick sits in the darkness of the tiny booth and taps his feet and sweats. He gets the number, dials the area code of Kansas City.
“I’ve, uh, I’ve got a friend who’s got a problem.”
“How long has she had this problem?” The voice is clean, professional. Very slick, Nick thinks.
“A little over two, uh, I think two months.”
“Well, allow me to explain what your friend might do.”
Nick pictures the voice sitting at a desk in a darkened room. Stubby fingers fondle the phone. The voice’s teeth are yellow. In the hands is a fat cigar. The stubby fingers are yellowed. The breath is bad. Roaches run about on the floor. Nick thinks the voice is smiling, is laughing, was counting greasy money before he called. He hangs up.
And dials Anne’s number.
“Beverly?”
“Yes? Hello? You’ll have to speak up, I can hardly hear you.”
Nick looks at the napkins over the mouthpiece, then throws them to the floor. “Bev, this is Nick. I need to talk to somebody.”
They arrange to meet outside of Treno’s. Nick walks out into the now cool evening air. He paces. He smokes a cigarette even though it breaks his training. He laughs. He looks at passing couples, counts cars, parking meters, the number of dark spots on the full face of the rising moon, then slaps his hands.
And begins running, full out, past Krannert, past the greenhouse, across the Quad and beyond the Student Union, across Green Street, dodging coeds and bicycles and buses and wheelchairs, to the field behind Men’s Old Gym. Nick is crying, or it is the wind against his face, the feeling in his stomach, the run, and he slows, rubs his eyes, leans against the backstop and stares at home plate in front of him. He holds his sides and squats, then folds his hands, bows his head. He kneels, prays.
“You can look up now.”
Nick squints between his fingers. It isn’t a trick—her blouse is fully buttoned. Her legs are crossed. She isn’t yawning.
“The incurable disease threat worked, huh Vicky?
”
She smiles, then runs her hands through her blonde hair, stretching out again on the sofa.
“I’ve got problems, Vicky.”
“Nick. Let’s put them to bed.”
Anne cries into the phone. Nick looks up, exhales, stands. The telephone cord is tied into knots.
“Stop crying,” he says. “Pull yourself together.”
“You’ve got to help me, Nick.”
“Is it money?”
“David can pay for it.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“I don’t know, I just want to talk. I’m so confused.”
“Anne, we talked about all of this last winter when you decided you wanted to marry him. So why don’t you call him up and cry on his goddamn shoulder? O.K., Anne? Leave me goddamn alone.”
“Nick, I want you to understand something.”
He is yelling. “Oh, I understand something. It’s his baby, you’re sure about that, or at least you think you’re sure, or anyway you’re going to marry him this spring as soon as you graduate and he gets his commission, and you call me first to tell me you need a goddamn abortion. Sure, Anne, I understand.”
“Nick—”
“You made me break my TV set.”
The field is dark, empty.
There are hits, Nick thinks, and there are outs. The altar versus the airplane. As a pitcher Nick knows he should prefer the latter—you need twenty-seven every game to earn the complete win. Got to get them when you can, in whatever way you can. He puts his hand inside his jacket pocket, takes out the long-distance telephone number.
Nick squats behind the plate, flashing the series of signs. But if there is a kid, he thinks, the kid would be retired before he even came up to the plate. Killed before he was born. If you’re a full-blown person then. If you’re not, then it’s no matter. You’re hamburger. But if you are fully alive—
The visitors’ dugout changes to Mary’s side altar. Nick shivers and shakes. Anne would walk there at the end of the ceremony, then kneel and leave a bouquet of flowers. They could try to make the best of it. They could try.
“Hell,” Nick says, “it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve pitched with a man already on base.” He stands, jogs to first. Relieved, he taps the bag with his toe and wind-sprints to second. Nick imagines the ball bounding past the outfielder and quickly tries for third. The coach’s arms are windmilling, and Nick makes his cut and barrels toward home, his arms and legs pumping, his pulse pounding in his ears. He lowers his shoulders, he raises his arms and slides, his foot hooks home plate. Safe! The crowd is on its feet.
The Evening News Page 14
