"Even I know that's low."
He nodded. Lifted the mask. "I can go for a few hours with it low but no more."
"That night we drove back into the city?"
"I was close to passing out."
"You got some kind of oxygen tank in the back of your truck?"
"Yeah." He looked at the monitor. It had reached ninety-one. He poked through some pills on a dish, picked up several, and swallowed them dry. I realized that he lived on a cycle of medications, up and down, through the day, and from what I'd seen, he was a different man in each of the phases of the cycle: high and charismatic and exuberant when the steroids kicked in, despondent and nearly catatonic at the low.
"You just took a steroid?"
"Yes. Man, I'm sorry I got you into all this, Bill. I never expected it, okay? It wasn't the plan, I was just trying to get back… I've been, I've been way out, man. I'm feeling the oxygen."
He lay slack on the bed, eyes closed, a smile on his lips, and I felt like I was losing him.
"Who was your father?" I asked, for this is often a way into who a man is.
"My father? He was a bastard, a real hard-ass. He's the reason… he was just a bad farmer. Never should have been a farmer, but my mother loved the land, see. Potato farming was in his family, but potato farming on Long Island started to die in the sixties. He was frustrated. I accept that. A frustrated, bitter man. I don't think my mother was easy, either. They fought like hell. She once threw a pot of coffee at him. I loved her, though, I always did."
"You worked on the farm?"
"Sure, sure, I could drive a potato truck by the time I was eleven. Tractor, too."
"Your dad kept farming?"
"Even though there was no money in it, yeah. He broke even some years. We put some ornamental trees in, sold them to landscapers, that kind of thing."
"Who was the girl from England?"
Jay wasn't expecting my question, and his face fell into the same haunted melancholy I'd seen the first night I knew him, when he'd hugged Allison after the deal to buy the property on Reade Street.
"Her name was Eliza Carmody," he said. "Beautiful girl. Sassy as hell. It was June after my sophomore year in college. I was going toI'd been-" He sighed, unable to say it.
I pointed at the yellow clipping on the wall. "The Yankees?"
He nodded and pressed his lips together and closed his eyes.
"Would you've made it?"
"Who knows? Maybe. They had a great farm system. I'd played well for two seasons in college."
"You had a shot."
"Yeah."
"You were a big kid from a farming town way out on Long Island, your family had no real money, your parents argued a lot, and you had a shot. You would've given it your everything," I thought aloud. "Is that fair to say?"
"Fair to say, yes," he agreed. "At this late date."
"So," I pressed him. "Eliza Carmody?"
"Yeah, it was the summer, I was working for my father. I'd had a bunch of girlfriends in college that year, you know, the usual sort of thing, no one special, nothing really serious, basically doing more fucking than studying, playing ball and drinking beer, then I got signed, and they told me, Play out your season at college, finish the college playoffs, then we'll work you into the double A team in July. I had two or three weeks to kill, so I went home, worked out, threw the ball every day. I was just waiting for things to get started."
In that time he did a little work for his father, Jay said, delivering a truckload of privet hedges to a big shingled place on the water a few miles away, he and a couple of other sweaty, sunburned boys working for seven dollars an hour, more than the Mexicans got, simply because of the color of their skin, and they pulled the green farm truck up in the driveway and started unloading the bushes, each with a heavy ball of earth wrapped in burlap. That was when he saw a tall young woman of about twenty hitting a tennis ball against a backboard. She wore a pleated tennis dress that just reached her fanny and the boys on the crew watched her with hunger, watched not only her tanned thighs and shoulders but the way she drilled the ball with aggression, again and again, grunting each time she hit it.
"I just had to talk to her," Rainey said, adjusting his oxygen. "She was spectacular. I didn't care that I was some poor kid from a potato farm. Worse that could happen was she'd tell me to go to hell."
He threw down his shovel, he said, and stepped onto the court, suddenly awkward and out of place within the crisp white lines.
"Hello," she'd called, "those are not exactly tennis togs."
He'd looked at his work boots. "No."
She came over to him. "Can I help you with something?"
Was she amused by his presence? Her accent was British, he realized. He liked it. "No. Not really."
"You're not planning to serve it to me?"
"Excuse me?"
"Not planning to bang it at me?"
"No."
"Do you play tennis?"
"Not really."
"What good are you then?" She was standing quite close to him, considering they didn't know each other's names. "You have another sport?" she asked, squinting up into the sun.
"Baseball." He watched her eyes move from his face to his throat to his chest and then back again.
"I see," she said.
"You're British?" he ventured.
"Yes."
"I was watching you hit the ball."
"Yes, that was apparent."
She was a year or two older, he could tell, and decades more knowledgeable about the world. "You're visiting?"
"I'm just on holiday for a week with my mum and then it's back to London."
"You live there?"
"I do. You live here?"
"Jamesport."
"Where is that?"
"Here on the North Fork. Just a small town."
"So you may be accurately described as a small-town boy?"
He wasn't sure if she was teasing him or belittling him. But he also knew they'd be having sex soon, perhaps within the day.
"I guess."
"But a big small-town boy."
"I guess, yeah."
"You must play sports?"
"Baseball."
"Oh yes, you said that. Are you quite good?"
"Yes."
"You are?" She smiled to herself. "How good?"
It was his one piece of currency, he knew then and remembered now, his only one, and he had never used it before, at least not in this way, with someone from well outside his world, and he didn't know if she would find it valuable or even know what it meant.
"Well," he began, "I got signed by the Yankees."
"The New York City Yankees?"
"Yes, the New York Yankees is the name. Their farm system, I mean."
"The baseball team."
"Yeah," he said, a little frustrated, "the Yankees."
"They signed you up, then?"
"I play on their farm team first, then you eventually get your shot at the majors."
She had edged even closer, dragging her tennis racquet in the green clay. "Will you make it?"
He waited. "I don't know."
"What do you think?"
"I think I will. Yes."
And this twenty-year-old British girl, who later Jay was to discover had already enjoyed a number of lovers, ranging from an Oxford don to a banker colleague of her father's, saw in Jay, I suspect, what was really there. Strength and decency and confidence and pure talent. It was not just his size and animal health, it was the openness of his face, and enough of this had survived to attract Allison Sparks years later, I realized. She was embittered and amused and skeptical, but she still saw it in him. As I had, too. He had been, standing in the sun on that tennis court, a beautiful boy-man. Eliza Carmody had known such men before, but he was pure and this intrigued her. It was new.
"I think," Eliza Carmody said a little more softly, "that you should pick me up here tonight at seven o'clock."