“We were just talking about the Easter basket,” my father said to me. He raised his chin at my husband. “Here’s something I bet she didn’t tell you.”
“Is this going to be touching?” I said.
“This one year, I don’t remember how old she was—”
“Seven,” my mother said.
“Somewhere in there,” he said. “Anyway, she got her grandmother, Helen’s mother this was, to take her to the drugstore and she spent her allowance on an Easter basket for us. Which she then proceeded to hide—where did she hide it?”
“The clothes hamper,” my mother said.
“So she had us go all around the house—‘warmer,’ ‘colder.’ She was the most loving little thing.”
“That’s a great story,” my husband said.
—
I suppose I should be able to explain why I married such a boy, shouldn’t I? Technically he was both handsome and good in bed, so kind that one time, early on, his guilt over the nice girl made him impotent with me, and so besotted that it didn’t happen again. And thirty seemed like an appropriate age, as if you’d been holding out all that time for the right man. I liked it that he didn’t have that East Coast thing: he’d grown up in New Mexico, near Albuquerque, and he thought Yale and Harvard were simply good schools, like Stanford and Berkeley. He graduated from the University of Wyoming. I don’t want to give you the idea that he was a knuckle-dragger, despite the Peace Corps and the rock-climbing. He read Borges and Márquez, and he translated some of Neruda’s love poems for me; no one, he claimed, had really gotten them right, though I doubt he did either. And he wasn’t interested in having kids—for the record, here’s exactly what he said. He said it was quote perfect just the two of us. I see now that this left him some wiggle room, if imperfection ever began to reveal itself. When I told him I’d rather stick my head in the oven, he probably thought it was just feminist talk from his feisty girlfriend.
We both knew I was a better writer, but while I bitched and moaned about having to cover an André Rieu concert, or the annual car show in Rhinebeck, he had what he thought was a book project: following around a young Dominican infielder who played for some minor-league team in Poughkeepsie. The manager gave him unlimited access—the dugout, the locker room, the bus, the budget motels. When he couldn’t get any magazines to pay his way, he used up all his miles on a reporting trip to the D.R. But ultimately, he said, this was a story about America. Well, you see the sweet futility.
—
So our newlyweds rented a half town house in Croton: numbered parking spaces by our unit, a shared balcony divided by an iron railing. We bought a yard-sale sectional—don’t think we didn’t have our little joke about sectional intercourse—and bookcases from Ikea and a kilim from Pottery Barn that was too thin to stay in place on the parquet floor. We had—but what’s the use of saying what we had?
On Saturdays he used to go over to the outdoor basketball court on our cul-de-sac. One of the neighbors had bought a pair of nets, and somebody would get on somebody’s shoulders and hang them from the orange hoops. Women could play, if they showed up in even numbers. Afterward, we’d have his friends over for beers; he grilled on the balcony until the people on the other side of the railing complained.
He taught me to drive stick and I taught him to keep his fork in his left hand; I showed him Paris and he showed me Machu Picchu. We learned Italian together, with tapes and a book, though we owed so much on our credit cards from those two trips—his miles would’ve been a help—that we never made it to Florence. I was the teacher in bed, and the one time I found a girl for us—I met her at the gym—it was sweet to see that he didn’t know the etiquette, though of course who does, and afterward he claimed not to want to again. Maybe he was afraid of hurting my feelings—he’d been scrupulous about looking only in my eyes—but I think I shocked him with some of our goings-on. A boy with boundaries!
Or maybe he just had better sense. I might have known this girl would make a pest of herself. I mean, a nineteen-year-old? Studying “communications” at a two-year college? But she was pretty, and eager, and I’d missed being with a girl, and she saved the I’m in love with yous until a couple of weeks later, when she begged me to meet her for coffee, just the two of us, and kissed me as I sat down. I finally had to block her number and her email and started going to a gym in Tarrytown.
—
His Dominican infielder: that’s what we should’ve done. It might have opened up his girl side, not to be too graphic. He took me to a game once and we sat just behind the dugout near first base. He usually sat in the dugout, but he told me the players were superstitious about having a woman there. That’s how gay baseball is. His infielder batted left-handed against the enemy’s right-handed pitcher—my husband explained that he was a switch-hitter, which was too hilarious—so I had a good view of how his buttocks strained the fabric of his baseball pants as he bent forward, wagging his bat. When he scored a run and loped back to the dugout, his smile exposed a broken tooth. Picking out this boy to follow around couldn’t have been a purely journalistic decision. This isn’t a regret, exactly, though now that I’m in my fifties, I couldn’t pay two boys to come to bed with me and play. Well one could, I’m sure, in some specialized corner of hell. Not all young women, it turns out, are such body Nazis; you have to wonder what’s wrong with them. But I’ve become such a spectacle these days, with my still-handsome legs and not much else, that I mostly forgo the pleasure.
It was sometime after the debacle with the nineteen-year-old when my husband got a phone call at his desk, then came over to my cubicle with his poor-me look: his infielder had gotten caught selling cocaine. “I’m a shitty reporter,” he said. “This was going on the whole fucking time, and I’m asking him like how do you place your feet to make the double play.”
“But this is great,” I said. “Now you’ve actually got a story.”
“You go ahead and write it. I don’t appreciate being lied to.”
“Okay, but you can’t waste time getting all humiliated. You need to go see him in jail. Like now. Before they deport him or something. Not to sound heartless about it.”
“This wasn’t the story.”
“This was always the story,” I said. “You just got it handed to you.”
“Yeah, well I guess I’m not a realist,” he said.
“Oh, baby,” I said. “It’s going to be a long life.”
—
I’d been remarried for a year when I spotted him at the organic supermarket outside Poughkeepsie, with my replacement. I’d heard they’d moved somewhere nearby, but I was passing through, needed to pick up olive oil and some decent coffee, and I figured what were the chances. He’d always hated shopping, but there he was pushing the cart, with green things up in the part you unfold to put a baby’s legs through, while she was doing the hunting and gathering. That prayer of mine, about him finding love again—whatever it was he’d found with me, it had never been that.