The Hotel Eden: Stories (15 page)

I felt right at home. There was Midgely, the only guy who stayed with baseball from our college squad, standing on the dugout steps just like a coach is supposed to look; there were all the teenage baseball wives sitting in the box behind the dugout, their blond hair buoyant in the fresh air, their babies struggling in the lap blankets; there was the empty box that our firm bought for the season and which no one
ever
used; there beyond first in the general admission were Benito Antenna’s fans, a grouping of eight or nine of the largest women in the state come to cheer their true love; and there riding the summer air like the aroma of peanuts and popcorn and cut grass were the strains of Steiner Brightenbeeker’s organ cutting a quirky and satanic version of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” I could see the Phantom of the Ballpark himself pounding out the melody in his little green cell, way up at the top of the bleachers next to the press box.

“What?” Lynn said, returning from a solo venture underneath the bleachers. She handed me a beer and a bag of peanuts. She had insisted on buying the tickets, too. Evidently I was being hosted at the home park tonight.

“Nothing. That guy’s an old friend of mine.” I pointed up at Steiner. Lynn was being real nice, I guess, but I felt a little screwy. Seeing Steiner and being in a ballpark made me think for a minute the world might want me back. He had played at our parties.

And it is my custom with people I don’t know to pay my own way, at least, but as she had handed me the plastic cup, I had accepted it without protest. My financial picture precluded many old customs, even those grounded on common sense. I would keep track and pay her back sometime. Besides, early in the game, so to speak, I didn’t have the sense not to become indebted to this woman.

“Don’t you want a beer?” I asked her. She demurred, and retrieved a flask of what turned out to be brandy from her purse along with a silver thimble. I don’t have the official word on this, but I don’t think you drink brandy at the ballpark. Certain beverages are married to their sports, and I still doubt whether baseball, even the raw, imprecise nature of Triple A, had anything to do with brandy. Brandy, I thought, taking another look at my date as we stood for Steiner’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which he sprinkled with “Yellow Submarine,” brandy is the drink for quoits.

I don’t know; I was being a jerk. It wasn’t a first. Blame it this time on the eternal unrest that witnessing baseball creates in my breast. There you are ten yards from the field where these guys are
playing
. So close to the fun. I loved baseball. The thing I regretted most was that I hadn’t pressed on and played a little minor-league ball. Midgely himself and Snyder, the coach, talked to me that last May, but I was already lost. Nixon was in the White House and baseball just didn’t seem relevant activity.

That isn’t my greatest regret. I regretted ten other things with equal vigor—well, twelve say. Twelve tops. One in particular. Things that I wanted not to have happened. I wanted Lily back. I wanted to locate the little gumption in my heart that would allow me to step up and go on with my life. I wanted to be fine and strong and quit the law and reach deep and write a big book that some woman on a train would crush to her breast halfway through and sigh. But I could see myself on the table at the autopsy, the doctor turning to the class and looking up from my chest cavity a little puzzled and saying, “I’m glad you’re all here for this medical first. He didn’t have any. There’s no gumption here at all.”

I took a big sip of the beer and tried to relax. Brandy’s okay in a ballpark, a peccadillo; it was me that was wrong. Lynn rooting around in her big leather purse for her silver flask and smiling so sweetly under the big lights, her face that mysterious thing, varnished with red and amber and the little blue above the eyes, Lynn was just being nice. I thought that: she’s just being nice. Then I had the real thought: it’s a tough thing to take, this niceness, good luck.

The most prominent feature of any game at Derks is the approximate quality of the pitching. By the third inning we had seen just over a thousand pitches. These kids could throw hard, but it was the catcher who was doing all the work. The wind-up, the pitch, the catcher’s violent leap and stab to prevent the ball from imbedding itself in the wire backstop. Just watching him spearing all those wild pitches hurt my knees: up down up down.

I started in, as I always do, explaining the game to Lynn, the fine points. What the different stances indicated about the batters; why the outfielders shifted; how the third baseman is supposed to move to cover the return throw after a move to first. Being a frustrated player, like every other man in America, I wanted to show my skill.

After a few more beers, I settled down. The air cooled, the mountains dimmed, the bright infield rose in the light. I leaned back and just tried to unravel. I listened to Steiner’s music, now the theme song from
Exodus
, and I could faintly hear his fans singing, “This land is mine, God gave this land to me…” Steiner made me smile. He played what he wanted, when he wanted. In nine innings you could hear lots of Chopin and Liszt, Beethoven, Bartok, and Lennon. He’d play show tunes and commercial jingles. He played lots of rock and roll, and I once heard his version of
An American in Paris
that lasted an inning and a half. He refused to look out and witness the sport that transpired below him. He had met complaints that he didn’t get into the spirit of the thing by playing the heady five-note preamble to “Charge!” one night seventy times in a row, until not only was no one calling “Charge!” at the punch line, but the riff had acquired a tangible repulsion in the ears of the management (next door in the press box), and they were quick to have it banished forever. As long as the air was full of organ music, they were happy.

When Steiner did condescend and play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” he did it in a medley with “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly and “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. The result, obviously, was an incantation for demon worship which his fans loved. And his fans, a group of ten or twelve young kids, done punk, sat below the organ loft with their backs to the game, bobbing their orange heads to Steiner’s urgent melodies. This also mollified the management’s attitude toward Steiner: the dozen general admission tickets he sold to his groupies alone.

As the game progressed through a series of walks, steals, overthrows, and passed balls, Lynn sipped her brandy and chattered about being out, how fresh it was, how her husband had only taken her to stockholders’ meetings, how she didn’t really know what to say (that got me a little; shades of actual dating), how being divorced was so different from what she supposed, not really any fun, and how grateful she was that I had agreed to come.

I held it all off. “Come on, this is great. This is baseball.”

“Phyllis said you liked baseball.”

I didn’t lie: “Phyllis is a shrewd cookie.”

“She’s a good lawyer, but her husband is a shit too.” Lynn tossed back her drink. “You know, Jack, I honestly didn’t know anything about marriage when I married my husband. I mean anything.” Lynn sipped her brandy. “Clark came back from his mission and he seemed so ready, we just did it. What a deal. He told me later, this is much later, in counseling that he’d spent a lot of time on his mission planning, you know, our sex life. I mean, planning it out. It was awful.” She lifted her tiny cup again, tossing back the rest of the drink.

“But,” she began again, extending the word to two syllables, “divorce is worse. I don’t like being alone. At all. But it’s more than that.” She looked into my face. “It’s just … different. Hard.” I saw her put her teeth in her lip on the last word, and she closed her eyes. When they opened again, she printed up a smile and showed me the flask. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like any?”

“No,” I said, kicking back my chair and standing. “I’ll get another beer. Be right back.”

Under the grandstand, I stood in the beer line and tried to pretend she hadn’t shown me her cards. A friend of mine who has had more than his share of difficulty with women not his wife, especially young women not his wife, real young women, called each episode a “scrape.” That’s a good call. I’d had scrapes too. My second year in law school I took Lisa Krinkel (now Lisa Krink, media person) on a day trip to the mountains. We had a picnic on the Provo River, and I used my skills as a fire-tender and picnic host, along with the accessories of sunshine and red wine, to lull us both into a nifty last-couple-on-earth reverie as we boarded my old car in the brief twilight and headed for home. As always, I hadn’t really done anything, except some woody wooing, ten kisses and fingers run along her arm; after all—though I might pretend differently for a day—I was going with Lily by then. Lisa and I pretended differently all the way home. I remember thinking: What are you doing, Jack? But Lisa Krinkel against me in the front seat kept running her fingernails across my chest in a chilling wave down to my belt buckle, untucking my shirt in the dark and using those finger-nails lightly on my stomach, her mouth on my neck, warm, wet, warm, wet, until my eyes began to rattle. Finally, I pulled into the wide gravel turnout by the Mountain Meadow Café and told her either to stop it or deliver.

I wish I could remember exactly how I’d said that. It was probably something like: “Listen, we’d better not keep that up because it could lead to something really terrible which we both would regret forever and ever.” But as a man, you can say that in such an anguished way, twisting in the seat obviously in the agonizing throes of acute arousal, a thing—you want her to know—so fully consuming and omnivorous that no woman (even the one who created this monstrous lust) could understand. You writhe, breathing melodramatic plumes of air. You roll your eyes and adjust your trousers like an animal that would be better off in every way put out of its misery. And, as I had hoped, Lisa Krinkel did put me out of my misery with a sudden startling thrust of her hand and then another minute of those electric fingernails and some heavy suction on my neck.

Then the strangest thing happened. When she was finished with my handkerchief, she asked me if we could pray. Well, that took me by surprise. I was just clasping my belt, but I clasped my hands humble as a schoolboy while she prayed aloud primarily to be delivered from evil, which was something I too hoped to be delivered from, but I sensed the prayer wasn’t wholly for me as she sprinkled it liberally with her boyfriend’s name: Tod. She went on there in the front seat for twenty minutes. I mean if prayers work, then this one was adequate. That little “Tod” every minute or so kept me alert right to the
amen
. We mounted the roadway and drove on in the dark. It had all changed. Now it seemed real late and it seemed a lot like driving my sister home from her date with Tod. Later I started seeing her on television, where she was a reporter for Channel 3, and it was real strange. Her hair was different, of course, blond, a professional requirement, and her name was different,
Krink
, for some reason, and I could barely remember if I had once had a scrape with this woman (including a couple of four-day nail scratches), if she was a part of my history at all. I mean, watching the news some nights it seemed impossible that I had ever prayed with Lisa Krink.

One of the primary cowardly acts of the late twentieth century is standing beneath the bleachers finishing a new beer before buying another and joining your date. I stood there in the archway, smacking my shoes in a little puddle of water on the cement floor, and tossed back the last of my beer. How lost can you be? The water was from an evaporative cooler mounted up in the locker-room window. It had been dripping steadily onto the floor for a decade. Amazing. I could fix that float seal in ten minutes. I’d done it at our house when Lily and I first moved in. And yet, I stood out of sight wondering how I was going to fix anything else. I bought another beer and went out to join Lynn. Just because you’re born into the open world doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to hide sometimes.

Lynn looked at me with frank relief. I could read it. She thought I had left. I probably should have, but you can’t leave a woman alone on this side of town, regardless of how bad the baseball gets.

The quality of Double A baseball is always strained. I could try to explain all the reasons, but there are too many to mention. It is not just a factor of skill or experience, because some of the most dextrous nineteen-year-olds in the universe took the field at the top of every inning along with two or three seasoned vets, guys about to be thirty who had seen action a year or two in the majors. No, it wasn’t ability. The problem came most aptly under the title “attitude,” and that attitude is best defined as “not giving a shit.” It’s exacerbated by the fact that not one game in a dozen got a headline and three paragraphs in the
Register
and none of the games were televised. And who—given the times—is going to leave his feet to stop a hot grounder down the line if his efforts are not going to be on TV?

Night fell softly over the lighted ballpark, unlike the dozens of flies that pelted into the outfield. The game bore on and on, both squads using every pitcher in the inventory, and Midgely and the other coach getting as much exercise as anyone by lifting their right and then their left arms to indicate which hurler should file forward next. The pitchers themselves marched quietly from the bull pen to the mound and then twenty pitches later to the dugout and then (we supposed) to the showers. By the time the game ended, after eleven (final score 21 to 16), there were at least four relievers who had showered, shaved, and dressed and were already home in bed.

In an economy measure, the ballpark lights were switched off the minute the last out, a force at second, was completed, and as the afterimage of the field burned out on our eyeballs, we could hear the players swearing as they bumbled around trying to pick their ways into the dugout. Lynn and I fell together and she took my arm so I could lead us stumbling out of the darkened stadium. It was kind of nice right there, a woman on my arm for a purpose, the whole world dark, and through it all the organ music, Steiner Brightenbeeker’s mournful version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Outside, under the streetlights, the three dozen other souls who had stuck it out all nine innings dispersed, and Lynn and I crossed the street to her car. I looked back at the park. Above the parapet I could see Steiner’s cigarette glowing up there in space. I pointed him out to Lynn and started to tell her that I had learned a lot from him, but it didn’t come out right. He had always been adamant about his art. He was the one who told me to do something on purpose for art; to go without for it. To skip a date and write a story. That if I did, by two a.m. I’d have fifteen pages and be flying. I couldn’t exactly explain it to her, so I just mentioned that he had done the music for the one play I’d ever written a thousand years ago and let it go at that.