Hardball (20 page)

“I can still taste you,” he said.

Down below, where sensitive tissue had direct contact with fresh underwear, I went on high alert. I wanted him to taste me again. Now.

Francine watched me over the rim of her coffee cup, half smiling.

“I’m with a friend,” I repeated because my not-aloneness was the second most relevant thing on my mind.

“When can I see you today?”

I didn’t answer right away. Dad and I were going to clean the gutters then have dinner. I was free at some point, potentially, but though my body wanted to drop everything and see him, my head didn’t want to be too available. “Today? I don’t—”

“I want to get inside you,” he said before I could finish.

I clammed up. My body started vibrating, and the shiver between my legs didn’t allow me to speak.

That dick. That cock. That huge thing inside me, stretching me to get in. I gripped the phone as if it was the last ledge before I fell over a cliff.

“I want to see you come while I’m fucking you.” His voice made pictures, and the pictures were absolutely filthy.

“Okay.” Who wouldn’t agree to that?

“This afternoon.”

“This afternoon?”

He expected a yes or no answer. I shook my brain as if it were a vending machine and words were a bag of chips that wouldn’t drop from the silver spiral.

“I have to do some things around the house with my dad this afternoon, and I should nap at some point, or I’m going to look like a ragmop and…” I now had seventeen bags of chips at the bottom of the machine when I only needed one. “The gutters, anyway, they look like hell, and the roof leaks if they get backed up and rain is coming next week, and I start work so we can’t wait.”

A sharp pain in my calf ended the sentence. Francine had kicked me.

I mouthed
ow
.

She held up three fingers.

“Three?” I asked her.

“I’ll be at your place at three,” Dash said and hung up.

Vivian

I’d been babbling to Dash, but I hadn’t been lying. The gutters were a mess. One of the five deciduous trees in Los Angeles grew in our side yard, and every year it exploded in red and orange then shed like a hound dog. The neighbors hated us, and in the months between the shedding of the leaves and the rains, I hated us too.

I stood on the roof and surveyed the work. I was about two-thirds done. Dad stood in the driveway with a rake, wearing a puffy winter coat he’d bought to ski in when Mom was alive. Mrs. Klein stood in her bedroom window, undoubtedly wondering why we didn’t do the normal thing and hire a guy to clean the gutters.

“I’m
schvitzing
in this jacket.”

Schvitzing
meant he was hot. “Take it off.”

“I’m bundled. How’s it going up there?”

“Okay?” I went girl-style and, as a lead-in to unpleasant news, asked the answer instead of stating it. “I don’t have too much time. He’s coming at three, and I haven’t showered.”

I wondered if my position on the roof meant the whole neighborhood knew that I smelled and a guy was coming.

“That was quite a nap you took.” He leaned on his rake. “Musta been up late.”

What happened with his eye? Did my father just wink at me, thinking I got laid? Who did that?

“Easy there, Dad. You’re not marrying me off so quick.”

“I know. If you left, who would do the gutters?”

I crouched by a gutter full of leaves, arms outstretched, and caught a mess of them between my palms, then I threw them on my father, who let out a Yiddish cry and waved his rake at me.

“I can’t believe you think I’d stop doing your damn gutters!” I got another armful and threw them on him.

“Elder abuse!” he cried, swatting the flying, wet leaves with his rake. “Help! Police!”

“I’m still coming here for dinner! You’ll never get rid of me.” I went to the other side of the house and got more leaves, walked across the roof, and threw them on him as he laughed and coughed between hysterical complaints of abuse.

I stopped looking. I rained wet brown leaves on him from all corners, listing all the ways he wasn’t getting rid of me and stomping on the shingles in my cowboy boots. When I grabbed the last handful, I looked down.

Two faces looked up at me. Dad’s, of course, and Dash’s.

“It’s three already?” I called down.

“I’m early. I couldn’t wait.”

“I like this guy,” Dad said, jerking his thumb to the guy with the filthy mouth and huge dick. “He said he’d help you finish up.”

“He’s wearing a jacket and dress shoes, Dad.”

“He said he won’t throw leaves at me. What more do I need?”

I took a few steps away and threw the leaves in the orange bucket on the roof.

“Oh,” Dad cried as Dash started up the ladder, “now she’s putting them where they go instead of pelting me with them.” He shook his fist at an unjust God—or me or the gutters or Mrs. Klein, who wouldn’t understand that he was joking.

The ladder rattled, and Dash’s head crested the roofline. I crossed my arms and leaned on one foot, letting the heel of my boot rock in an arc.

“You need to give a girl a chance to, you know, bathe. Put on a little mascara. All that.”

He put his leather gloves on my cheeks and kissed me. The neighborhood saw it. Probably Dad too. I didn’t care. I ran hot and cold when his lips tenderly touched mine, greeting me with gentle passion.

“You know it’s rude to be early, right?”

“Yup.” He kissed me again.

“It’s unseemly.”

Another kiss.

“Inappropriate,” I whispered to get another kiss, then I dropped my voice to barely audible. “As bad as being late.”

On the last kiss, his lips came off mine with a pop. “I’ll help you with this, then we can go.”

“Will I get to shower?”

“If you must.” He stepped back and put out his arms. “Let’s take a look at that downspout.”

Dash knew what he was doing when it came to gutters. Apparently the job had to be done three times a year in Ithaca. Since his father was a wounded veteran from Michigan—where you mowed your own damn lawn and took care of your own damn house—and since Dashiell was the oldest son, three times a year, he cleaned the gutters. An hour after he’d started my house, he’d not only told me all about his dad, his two-story, gutter-clogged childhood home in a frozen wasteland, and the sloped roofs that had nearly killed him four times, he’d also finished up the job perfectly.

“You ready to go?” He slapped his hands together to get the grime off.

“Sure. Where are we going?”

He lowered his voice and pointed to the driveway where my dad slowly raked the leaves. “We’re going to finish that guy’s birthday present.”

Vivian

Dash helped Dad with the leaves while I changed. I put on a wool maxi dress with a tiny black-and-white geometric pattern. It had a matching tote that fit a wallet, a notebook, a Kindle, a phone, and a secret birthday baseball.

Dash drove up the 101, hand in my lap, thumb stroking my hand absently.

“English lit,” he said. “I figured if baseball failed, I’d have that BA. I didn’t know it didn’t work like that.”

“Wait. Is that how you memorized so much Shakespeare? It’s freaking me out.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Okay? Were you in drama club ten years running or something?”

“English class. Seventh grade. I was just getting this weird fuzz on my face, and the thing with the voice? I sounded like two rocks smacking together. We were doing a semester of Shakespeare’s comedy and a semester of tragedy with Mrs. Newman.”

“You had a crush on your teacher?”

“A crush? Oh no. This was true love. Okay, let me start from the beginning. She was a black lady with a little Caribbean accent. A good Christian woman. Like, all turtlenecks and long pleated skirts. One day, she was marking up my paper, and it was so much red. I had no idea what to do with a comma. Still don’t. But I was sitting at her desk, and I saw her from the side, and I could see her eye on the other side of her glasses, and she had these lashes that curled up. They were short, but I’d never seen lashes with that much curl. I didn’t expect it. I felt like I was seeing inside her, and I got really turned on.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Yeah, and I realized she had breasts and hips. And lips. I mean, she was gorgeous, and it wasn’t flashy, but she was stunning. I fell deeply in love with her.”

“And she taught you how to seduce her with Shakespeare?”

“Mrs. Newman? Fuck no. Are you kidding? She’d never. I decided I was going to win her when I turned eighteen. So I memorized all Shakespeare’s romantic shit. All the sonnets. All the quotes about love and sex. I figured in six years, I’d be ready for her.”

He turned off the freeway. He didn’t continue the story. I punched his arm.

“Ow. What?”

“What happened?” I asked.

“What do you mean what happened?”

“When you turned eighteen?”

“I don’t know. I had a girlfriend by then. I mean, come on, sweetapple. I wasn’t really going to spend six years pining for my married English teacher. I just, you know, grew up.”

“But in the meantime, you had a ton of love sonnets to seduce women with. Nice job.”

He laughed and touched my face without looking away from the road. “Never occurred to use them before. I only pulled out the big guns for you.”

He pulled down a private road. The gate was open into a short stretch with a dozen big houses.

“I wasn’t that unattainable.”

“Maybe not. But it seemed like you’d appreciate it.” He turned off the car. “Got your ball?”

“Yup.”

We kissed, and I thought I’d never been so happy in my life.

Vivian

Greg Duchovney was a closer. He kept his hair and beard long because it was lucky, earning him the name “The Samson of Elysian.” He didn’t have more than fifty pitches in him per game, but of those fifty, eighty percent were brilliantly placed tricks of air and physics. The rest were signs he was getting tired. That was why they called him “The Forty.”

“Jesus, Wallace.” Duchovney turned the ball over in his hand, a blue Sharpie wedged between two fingers. “You John Hancock or something?”

“There’s room,” Dash said, stretching up to turn on the third air heater in the yard. The gas flame whooshed to life. “Stop whining.”

Duchovney had a brace on his left knee. It was quite a contraption of brushed metal wingnuts and rods, bridging the space between the outdoor couch and the coffee table. I had a hard time keeping my eyes off it. Though it didn’t look as though Greg was uncomfortable, the titanium cage told a story of pain.

I tried not to giggle when he handed me back the ball, signed. I was at his house for dinner as his friend’s girl, not in the stadium as a giddy fan. So I tried not to throw his stats back at him or tell him how he’d been robbed of a Cy Young Award two years earlier. Dash had already warned me against mentioning the accident. He didn’t say why. He just said I shouldn’t bring it up unless I was pressed.

And I wasn’t. We got all the way through dinner with two professional baseball players without bringing up knees, trips and falls, the good or ill health of anyone in the world, the pitching roster, or the Cactus League. Yet once we had established the life story of the dinner’s newcomer (me), we talked about nothing but baseball. The deftness with which painful subjects were skirted was world-class but exhausting. When Dora Duchovney started clearing the table, I jumped up to help.

Dora had an accent straight out of Minnesota, which made sense. Duchovney had been a rookie with the Twins and failed as a starter.

“Thank you so much for not asking,” she said, rinsing dishes as I stacked and scraped. “I mean, I’m sure you were raised to ask how someone’s doing when they have a leg that looks like that.”

“Dash told me he wouldn’t want to talk about it. I get it. My dad has arthritis, and he says he feels like it defines him. He has lots of other things to talk about.”

“Yes. Well, I’m sorry about your dad.” She ran the sponge over the edge of the carving knife too fast, nearly cutting her thumb.

“He’s all right. Will Steve get better though? What’s the prognosis?”

She shook her head. “He’s never playing again. And you know, unfortunately, baseball defines him, so he’s pretty down.” She rinsed her hands under scalding water. “It was such a stupid accident.” She shut off the faucet and snapped the towel, rubbing her hands as if she wanted to break her fingers.

Duchovney had picked up a chopper and was taking a step to throw the ball to first when he tripped on the ridge between the pitcher’s mound and the grass. But it wasn’t just a little trip and catch. He’d been moving forward too fast, and the catch had unbalanced him. The edge of his foot caught and twisted.

It should have been nothing. Except that he’d been unlucky. A series of tiny angles and trajectories had broken his tibia.

“It didn’t look like anything on TV,” I said. I’d expected him to get up and walk away.

Outside, Dash and Greg leaned on their chair arms, engaged in serious discussion.

“I know. Just bad luck. But he started taking apart everything he did before the game.”

“It was the second game of a doubleheader. It was late.”

“And he was tired. But I made him these meatloaf sandwiches for every game, and on that day, I made him one and not two.” She reached for the stack of serving dishes, slipped, almost fell over the open dishwasher, caught herself, and laughed. “Golly. I’m not even drinking.”

“He doesn’t blame you, does he?”

All the buttoned-up subjects of dinner must have gotten to me because the question was wildly inappropriate, yet it slipped out as if through the fingers of a clutched fist.

“I’m sorry,” I rushed to explain. “That’s ridic—”

“He tries not to,” she cut in, closing the dishwasher. “But how can he not? I’m not the best housekeeper already.” She indicated the half-done counters. “And we had a cook. I made the sandwiches, but the cook let us run out of meatloaf. I should have kept on him. I feel like I let it all slip. The sandwich. Everything. So he doesn’t have to say much.” She snapped the towel off the sink. “Anyway, my goodness, you didn’t come here to hear this nonsense. Are you traveling with our Mr. Wallace this summer?”