Venestra, who had her blouse buttoned to the neck when he came in, kissed him on the forehead. It was all she had to do. He undressed her like a baby. In bed, under the gun, she said, “Lover, what do you call yourself these days? Is it Slaughter or Rocco?”
He had to check his uniform number, which was on the floor next to the bed, to make an accurate determination.
“What name has he been using?” he asked. She shrugged. “I mostly call him Teddy Bear.”
“Teddy Bear?”
“Sometimes Pooh-Pooh with an h. He’s really very sweet in his pea-brained way. Why is it, honey, that all your friends are so stupid? Do you have any idea?”
He thought about it until he got distracted, then thought about something else. “Search me,” he said.
“Do you know the kind of thing he does? Rocco reads to me from the paper about you hitting a grandslammer or something as if it were about himself.”
“I’m Rocco,” he said.
“I mean Slaughter,” she said, “though he calls himself Rocco for the sake of the neighbors. I kept telling him that it’s pea-brained to identify with the achievements of someone else. And he says, ‘they use my name so it must be about me.’ He actually believes, though he can barely walk on his banged-up leg, that he’s the one that’s been doing all the exploits he reads about in the paper. Anyway, we’re both proud that you’re doing so well.”
“The crazy thing is, I haven’t even been trying.”
She nodded sympathetically the way she used to before they were married. “I can understand that,” she said.
They were still in bed when the original Hatchmeyer let himself in with his key. He had brought some steaks home which he thought to chicken fry, he said, ignoring his replacement, who was lying there with his eyes closed and his hands behind his head.
“Anything you want to do, Rocco, is all right with me,” she said.
While they were making dinner plans, the other Rocco, the original of that name, got himself out of bed and dressed. “I have to get to the stadium for batting practice,” he announced. “If you’re late, the manager fines you.”
“Have a good game, honey,” Venestra said.
He got a hero’s welcome at the ball park, American Legion bands, fan clubs, Shriners, confetti, baton twirlers, a twenty-one gun salute, singing prisoners of war, a religious leader to throw out the first ball. He was awarded a slightly used Plymouth Duster and had to listen to four or five speeches lauding Slaughter Hatchmeyer as a fine athlete and a credit to the game.
His first time at bat he received a standing ovation and heard the fans chant…Hatchmeyer…Hatchmeyer…Hatchmeyer…Hatchmeyer…Hatchmeyer…
The chant made him slightly sick, an experience comparable to watching a movie made with a hand-held camera. “I’m not Hatchmeyer,” he called back, though nothing was made of it. His protests were taken as modesty. Suddenly, he dropped the bat he had been swinging and pulled off his false mustache and wig in full view of the thirty-eight thousand home fans and countless numbers of television viewers, although on television the camera immediately cut to a commercial.
A groan from the great crowd and then what he thought of, hard to define otherwise, as a stunned silence.
In the next moment they were applauding madly again, tears on everyone’s face who had eyes to cry.
It was like a movie he had once seen or had had described to him by a parent in exceptional detail. Perhaps he was watching that movie on television at this very moment.
Taking a few practice swings, he stepped into the box to face the opposing pitcher. It looked like the same pitcher he had faced yesterday, a curve ball artist who had the look of a lonely man perpetually in mourning. He remembered the first pitch as it came breaking toward him, watching it as he had the day before, not trying to hit it, watching himself watch it. The crowd as always was full of itself.
As the bat came around, repeating the past, he could see his wife Venestra in the stands behind a book called What Comes Next.
The fans scream his name as Hatchmeyer punishes the curve ball with his long-handled bat for all the bad times it had given him.
A Moving Story
We leave the old house, my wife and I, without looking back. Our possessions remain behind as hostage to former commitments, all our things: furniture, books, clothes, child, dog, cats, important papers. The movers, according to arrangement, will bring them later. First we have to show our good faith by entering the new house and declaring our intention to take possession. As prospective owners, we are constrained (for our own good, says our lawyer) “to establish a relationship with the property” before the deal can be consummated.
We have talked about it at length, lying in bed back to back unable to sleep, and both of us feel that rituals, even when their application has long since become vestigial, can be satisfying in themselves. Buying a house is not unlike a marriage as selling a house is not unlike a divorce. We have talked about all this on many a sleepless night and are prepared to fulfill the forms of our decision.
The new house is dark when we arrive, the street itself dark, boards over some of the front windows. The boards are unexpected. The external darkness we put down to a quirk in the weather. “Perhaps we’re at the wrong place,” says my wife, only partly serious. We are both tremulous with excitement. I ring the bell, producing a nervous laugh from one of us. “You can use the key,” she says. “It’s our house now.”
“I don’t have the key.”
She presses a ring of keys into my hand. “One of them,” she says, apparently amused at my confusion, “is the right one.”
The door opens at first try. “It must be the right house,” I say, “though someone seems to have taken the bulbs out of the fixtures.” I try a few switches with no results.
“It has nothing to do with the bulbs, honey. The electricity’s been turned off.”
I wonder how she knows that, though decide it is not the time to ask.
The first room we enter is the first floor parlor. Some clutter has been left behind, odds and ends of broken furniture, cat shit, trash piles, wire hangers, dress store dummies. “It’s not what I had in mind,” says my wife.
“Aren’t they responsible for cleaning everything out?”
“I don’t remember,” she says. “What did the lawyer say?”
The lawyer said not to worry, he would take care of everything.
He had been adamant from the start on that single point.
The cat shit seems antique, is solid and easy to dislodge with the toe. I move the trash, most of it — some candy wrappers float in the air as if resistant to displacement — to the far corner of the room. “We’ll get a cleaning lady,” I say, “and charge it to the former owner.”
My wife doesn’t seem to be listening, stands with her back to me staring disconsolately at the floor.
“At least the floors are good,” I say.
“Would that they were,” she says. “Look closely, Jack. That’s not the original parquet, but a cheap imitation. It wasn’t like that when we bought the house.”
We have the idea that the former owners have taken the original floors with them, though it seems a lot of effort to no useful purpose.
“The house,” my wife says sotto voce, “is nothing without them.”
What could have possessed them to go off with the parlor floor?
It seems, putting the best possible light on it, some kind of moral deficiency.