by Rick Wilber
I knew Dunston would steal, knew when he did that the Mets had it in their pockets. I was blissed out, listening to the rest of the game, and by the time I closed in on the Holland Tunnel and tuned in to the Yankees’ third game, they’d widened their lead to 9—2. It was really beginning to look like a subway series now. I’d score a ticket for opening night—hey, I was a distinguished visiting professor, and for the first time in my life I could afford to look a scalper in the eye. The city would be on fire. I’d be back in Pinckney for the first day of classes after fall break. I’d get past this Diego thing.
***
It was close to midnight when I finally found a parking spot. Circling the block, I’d seen a light on in my loft. I had twelve hundred square feet right on Chambers, over a discount store, the third floor of a co-op I organized myself back in the days when nobody knew what a co-op was and nobody lived on Chambers Street.
The light on up there either meant that Diego had been there or that Diego was there right now. Either way, I was royally pissed. Not even two wins on the New Jersey Turnpike would be enough to calm me down if I walked in on him. But he wouldn’t dare. Probably he just came by to get more of his stuff and left a lamp burning the way he left socks on the bathroom floor. I hoisted my suitcase out of the back of the car and wheeled it down the sidewalk, all the tension of fifteen innings, fifteen hours on the road, fifteen cups of coffee tight as a bungee cord in my shoulders and my neck. I made myself breathe to a count. I’d get upstairs, I’d call Norm Fein. He could take a joke in the middle of the night, when the Mets had kept it alive.
On the second-floor landing I heard, dimly, a television. I’d taken my keys back, so if Diego was in my loft it meant he’d copied them before he handed them over.
The television was playing when I opened the door. I sensed him over in the far comer, slumped down in my fattest, softest chair. I had to cross the entire space of the loft to look him in the eye. He’d come up with some charming excuse: he’d left his long filbert brush, he couldn’t go on without it.
He sat in front of some postgame show, the tears rolling down his face. This was real familiar. Diego was depressed but he’d slit his wrists before he’d darken a shrink’s door. He had no use for Prozac, either. Wine was his medicine: just now an empty liter of Concha y Toro sat on the floor beside him. He hadn’t bothered with a glass. He was unshaven, and his hair looked like the Spanish moss I’d just left in South Carolina, curling at the back of his neck in damp gray tendrils.
I walked at a deliberate pace, like a manager heading out to the mound. He wouldn’t look up. He was well practiced at the long holdout, but I’d just survived fifteen innings of baseball. I could wait. Finally he raised his hooded black eyes, mournful eyes, eyes I have to admit were better even than Bernie Williams’s eyes. The whites were tinged with brown, and he had the lashes of a six-year-old boy, though at the moment they were crusted with yellow crud.
“What are you doing here,” I said in a monotone, and knew he’d already got me behind in the count. “What are you doing watching baseball.”
“I call the university, they say you’re on fall break. I know you come here.” He spoke English with the softest slur, his grammar flawless except for his reliance on the present tense. He was a present-tense kind of guy. “I know you want to see the game.”
“Did you copy my key?”
He shook his head in sad denial. “Lily. She lets me in.”
He was lying. Lily, my downstairs neighbor and oldest friend in New York, despised him. I scanned the room: big slick magazines, socks, wine bottles. He could have accomplished that much in a night or two: he was a slob but he was a clean slob, a compulsive duster and floor mopper. Every surface was shiny, though I’d been gone for two months.
“Get out.” But he held me with the mournful eyes, stared me down. He was loose and relaxed in my comfy chair. His jaw floated.
“Maisie, we have ten years.”
“Out.”
“I go alittle crazy, I see that. To throw away what we have? The tango lessons?” “The tango lessons! You were carrying on like that for ten years.” Hard to believe I’d let him get away with it for as long as I had. Middle age had made me a lot more forgiving. He was one of those guys who slept around, he just did: not a lot, but every once in a while, just to remind himself he was alive, I guess. He was short and stubby, but he was charming, and he had those hooded eyes: women came on to him right in front of me. I had no patience for a cheating man when I was younger, but Diego was transparent and guilty and I was a sucker for him. I knew he’d been fooling around when he came home and stroked my feet, cooked cazuela, stretched my canvases. He’d never confessed, he wasn’t that kind of mean. We’d never had it out. This last time, though, was outrageous: he’d brought the woman, the girl, home. To my co-op.
And he must have wanted me to walk in on them, too. He was livid about the Modem. The two of them, Diego and this child, on the plank floor I’d stripped and varnished myself, inch by inch. The girl was skinny and muscular, with cropped brown hair streaked blue, and when she jumped up, I got the willies. She looked like me thirty years ago, before Diego even knew me. She had full cheeks and a wide mouth drained of color. Her nipples were like putty, like mine. The only difference was that this girl looked completely sure of herself and I’d been a mess, around men anyway. I had Diego packing by sundown.
And I hadn’t seen him since, except for all the trips he made to pick up his stuff. He dawdled with moving out forever. He gave me a phone number, probably the girl’s. I made myself throw it away. Now he had the nerve to do the sensitive crying thing? I pictured Scott Brosius, his father dying, steady at third base. Did the man ever once get weepy on camera? “Have some dignity, for God’s sake.”
Diego hung his head and looked like he was ninety. He had holes in the back of his T-shirt. A sixty-year-old man, older than my own father lived to be, in a pocked shirt. “Maisie,” he said, “I have no dignity.”
“Go home.”
“I have no home but you.”
I have no home but you. See what you can do with the present tense? I had to work to stoke my fury. “You were living here, weren’t you?”
“Maisie.” By now he whimpered: that was the only word for it.
I reached down for the empty wine bottle at my feet. “I don’t care if you have to sleep in the park. You’re out of here, buddy.”
But he grabbed the bottle back and I realized it wasn’t empty. The last drink still sloshed in the bottom. If he got drunker he’d pass out and I’d have to deal with him in the morning I might weaken and let him stay. I hung on to the bottle and he tugged, a drunk’s tug. Like two children, we fought for the bottle till it went flying from our hands and torpedoed into the TV. The screen and the bottle splintered together. The television died slowly, a beam of light disappearing into a black hole.
“How’m I supposed to watch the pennant races?” I heard myself wail. “For God’s sake! We’re on the verge of a subway series. I need to be able to see those guys. I have to read them on the screen.”
“Maisie, you make no sense. I think you exhaust yourself in Carolina. You say it yourself, you never can go home again. Why do you go down there?”
“I go down there to see if I can pull my body and soul together, you cheating bastard. Get out!” I screamed like a banshee. “Out out out forever.” I heard Lily stir downstairs, heard her door slam and her soft neighbor feet come padding bare on the stairwell to rescue me. From the man I was supposed to be living with for the rest of my life.
* * *
The Yankees were one game away from the World Series, but now I couldn’t watch them, so I listened to them win the pennant on the radio, with Lily beside me. The two of us paced the space of my loft. Lily was a performance artist who didn’t own a television, even though she was the one who convinced me to pick up a video camera in the first place, to document one of her street shows. She didn’t like baseball either, but she was willin
g to endure it if I needed her.
After the way I coaxed Dunston on the New Jersey Turnpike, I thought maybe I really could predict what my guys would do by faith alone, but this time I was no good. I called a strikeout for Derek Jeter and he hit a two-run homer. “I can do it when I see them,” I told Lily, but she wasn’t listening. She was busy touching Diego’s paintings on the walls, as if she’d be able to feel what was wrong with him that way.
He’d left three canvases, which meant he’d still be coming back. I’d never be rid of him, and every time I saw him I’d want to forgive him, or at least let him stay. “Penis paintings,” Lily snorted. “The shining cock around which the universe revolves.” They were really vegetables on cruciforms, but Lily was right, what else could he mean by eggplants and summer squash? The colors were gorgeous, sublime: I’d always been jealous of his colors. The eggplant was an acid green on a lavender cross.
And if Diego wanted to paint penis vegetables after all these years of painting women, why not? I’d watched him paint a female body for nine of the ten years we were together. He never had enough money for a model, but he didn’t need a model anymore. He painted a woman just at the edge of aging, her breasts heaving down, her skin slack at the neck. He was painting me, but he was painting himself, too, his own slow decay.
He hadn’t left any of the women, and I missed them, all that color and motion. Across the top of every painting he put a banner in Spanglish: La Zapata needs a new heel or The family está cansada. Dealers kept telling him his work was stuck somewhere, only they couldn’t figure out where. H he said, I stick in a good place. When he’d painted well, he turned on the stereo and gave me tango lessons. We were the same height, and his loose round belly punched up against mine. Let go, he used to whisper, float, and when I did let go I knew his every move before he made it. Perfect balance, what every artist goes for: form and content, body and soul, hip and heart.
I knew his body like I knew my own. For ten years I’d watched him stand in front of a canvas for an hour, jiggling the wax in his ear before he got to work. And then one day, I felt my arm moving with his, the same crazy thrill I got with the tango lessons. I knew precisely what he was going to do next. His strokes were my strokes. I picked up the camcorder. When he finally stabbed at the canvas, I followed his hand with my lens as if we were attached. We were attached. Every one of those Spanglish lines broke my heart.
Watching him on the Avid, I saw I had an interesting little formal piece that no one would give two shits about. I went back to work, set him up in the comer of the loft with one of his old friends, another Argentine guy who was going to slap paint on cloth till he died. They were both a little drunk, their accents thickening, and they did funny imitations of the dealers who’d stopped representing them. They did even funnier imitations of the clerks in an emergency room when they heard you didn’t have insurance.
So I’d made another political piece, what I was getting known for, when what I’d started out with was sex. Once I wrote the grant proposal, once I spliced the two guys’ talk, once I’d transferred video to film, once I’d spent that money and put that distance between Diego and me I showed it to a few people who showed it to a few people and there it was in the “Art and Capital” show: Portrait of the Painter in a Frenzy. I pointed out how well Diego’s paintings would look surrounding a monitor, but painting was not, the curator told me, on the agenda.
Diego thought I should refuse the show. Anyway you make us look like clowns in that movie. No, I said, No, let’s don’t give up now. They’ll see your work, they’ll find you. But they didn’t find him, not the galleries he wanted. He stopped painting his aging women and started painting vegetables, firm and fresh.
“Really,” I said to Lily, when I caught her eye. “I can do it when I see their bodies. I can tell what they’re going to do.”
“Oh yeah?” Lily’s performing name was Lily Pons, but her real name was Mary Ellen Dougherty. We met freshman year at Marymount Manhattan, both sent by our fathers to what they reckoned was the only safe school in New York City. We were the only two in the whole college who didn’t own a headband or a pleated skirt. We’d outlasted each other’s lovers, but Lily didn’t have a clue what baseball was for. She tried to be a good sport, but she distrusted men, just about all of them, and Diego especially.
I, on the other hand, loved him still.
***
At least I still had a subway series to look forward to. By now the Yankees were the official American League champs and the Mets only had two more games to go. After the way they hung in for fifteen innings, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that they were going to the Series.
The Mets were down in Atlanta by then, trying to finish things off, and my TV was still busted. I talked Lily into coming with me to a dive on Chambers where a television sat high in the comer. I called every Met at-bat, but Lily was hardly listening. At the end of three innings, she plunked a five-dollar bill on the bar and asked if I’d mind .. .
I was alone with the three other customers, pale old men who looked like they lived in dark bars, and the bartender, who ran his fingers over his sparse black hair, Grecian formulaed and combed back like Joe Torre’s.
Well, this was just great. When I ran away down South the university was shiny and new and unrecognizable and the loneliness was unbearable. When I came back to New York the bar was worn and old and familiar and the loneliness was unbearable. For years people had assumed that Lily and I were lovers, even when Diego was around. Nobody understood the impossibility: my dearest friend, and indifferent to baseball. At least Diego hated it.
I ordered a Jameson up—my dad’s drink—and poured it down the hatch. I felt the wizened old man three stools away staring at me, and when I looked down from the game, another shot perched in front of me.
“Compliments of Frankie,” the bartender mumbled. I raised my glass to the old man, his cap atop his head, and he sat up considerably higher. “Slainte,” I said.
“Slainte.” He saluted me. “Mets.”
“Mets.” The two shots on top of the beer toasted my cheeks and the tip of my nose. I wasn’t a drinker—I’d nursed too many guys through their own troubles with the stuff—but I saw the attraction tonight. We all watched the game in silence as the Mets struggled on, Atlanta leading by five. I was strangely unconcerned. After what Dunston had done in the bottom of the fifteenth, I knew they could turn it around.
It was a relief to be in the company of men who never took their eyes from the screen. Finally, in the sixth, New York busted out with three runs and I bought a round for the house. We downed the shots in unison. Here was the closest I’d been to home in months, with strangers happy to watch the game. With four old men.
The Braves scored two more in the bottom of the inning, but I still knew what the Mets could do with sheer force of will. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding they’d fight their way back. I went to phone Norm Fein from the telephone on the wall and felt the old men watching me with the eyes in the backs of their heads.
I kept my own eyes on the TV, now playing ads, and thought I’d hear the same when Norm answered in South Carolina. But there was only chaos on his end of the wire: shrieks, giggles, little kids. A baby crying. A baby: that couldn’t be his. He’d divorced his wife this very year.
“Sounds like you’ve got a crowd over. I won’t keep you.”
“Nah, just my kids. Only sounds like the Russian army.”
“Normie—” A woman leaned close to the receiver. I could hear her smooch right over the wire. Normie. Normie, and a baby.
“Hang on, Maisie.” He muffled the receiver. Frankie motioned for me to come back and watch the game. The ads had disappeared and Matt Franco was in to pinch hit. This could be it. Franco took the plate like Genghis Khan.
“Extra bases,” I said to the bar.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Frankie said, “may this woman be right.” He waved me over to come sit again.
“I’m back,
” Norm said. “That was just my ex leaving.”
Just leaving, my ass. And wet-kissing him on the way out the door. Three kids, a baby: I saw the story whole. Norm had freaked, the usual midlife get me out of here. A lifetime job in a small town and a baby, too. Elis wife had let him divorce her but still called him Normie, still managed to distract him when the phone rang. I was rooting for her—Yougo, don i let him stickyou all alone with that baby—but that made me the other woman on the end of the long-distance call.
“Extra base hit for Franco,” I said, so at least Norm would remember what I could do.
“Yeah.” I heard in his confusion that he hadn’t even been watching the game. Hard to know what was more unforgivable, walking out on his wife after Baby Number Three or not watching the game. The Mets were on the verge of a subway series, playing their hearts out.
You’d think I could be sympathetic about the baby thing. I was the one who backed off when Diego, drunk, wept over the pleasures of parenthood. By then I was already past forty and my work habits were so strange: I painted by spotlights in the middle of the night, putzed around basement performing spaces. Would that be fair to some needy little baby? I had visions of myself crawling into P.T.A. meetings on arthritic legs. I told Diego I just couldn’t have a child at this stage of the game.
“Gotta go,” I said.
