Baseball
by Wendy Flanagan
August 8, 2006
The man was lying naked on the rumpled, white hotel sheets with the lights dark. The blue glow from the television set, the sound muted but the light flickering, cast moving shadows over the hills and valleys created by bedding and muscle and bone. He lay half slumped against the headboard with one knee bent, the crumpled pillows behind him providing little support. In his dark hair, the first few wisps of silver were beginning to show at his temples. His skin glowed in the flickering light, perspiration drying on an end-of-summer tan. He gazed at the television impassively, occasionally lifting a heavy glass of ice and vodka to his lips.
There was a woman sleeping beside him, or pretending to sleep, he wasn't sure, her eyes closed, her breathing even and deep, one arm flung above her head. Her dark curls looked black against the too-white of the sheets and her face; with its Slavic looking cheekbones, it had too many shadows for him to discern her expression. She flinched slightly when his cellphone rang on the nightstand beside him. He picked it up, the glow of the LCD flashing green onto his face, mixing with the blue from the television, another depth in the water of a glacial lake. He looked down at the woman who had opened her eyes without moving any other part of her body and was now regarding him coolly.
"It's Mark," he said, cocking a single eyebrow in her direction. She shrugged and rolled away from him, flicking her dark hair away from her neck, the single sheet over her pulling away, exposing the long curved line of her back. He sighed and pushed a button.
"Hello," the man answered.
"Stevie. Didn't know if you were on the road or not."
"Hey Mark. No, I got back on Tuesday."
"Are you still at work?"
"Yeah, still catching up."
"Can you watch the game there?"
"Yeah, I have it on in the background," he said, taking a hit off his vodka before putting it on the bedside table where it immediately began to form a ring of condensation.
The woman rolled back over toward him and stretched her long arm out across his body, brushing his hard abdomen, making him shiver, as she motioned for him to hand her the glass of vodka.
"Did you see the collision?" Mark asked.
"Looked like that hurt. Who hit the ball?"
"He was like the ninth-place batter. Who is that, Kennedy?"
"Don't know. Don't these guys talk to each other?"
"You know what's really sick? I can't help but think that Bernie would never have gotten to that ball in time. You just know that's going to be the play that kills them," Mark said.
They paused for a minute, watching the batter work the count.
"How's work?" Steve asked, glancing down at the woman.
"It's okay. Quiet this time of year. I get to the gym a lot."
"That's good. How are the boys?"
"They're good. David's going through a stage where he thinks it's funny to speak Latin, or his version of the language, in casual conversation. All I know is that my older brothers would have kicked the shit out of me if I'd tried that."
Steve laughed and the woman looked up at him sharply, her eyes narrowed. Steve squirmed slightly in the bed and reached out to take the drink back. He took a large gulp, swallowing the cold, bitter alcohol with a grimace. When he set it
down again, he ran his fingers through his hair, agitated. Silence descended over the phone as he and Mark watched the next batter until Steve, like a child who can't resist picking at a scab before it's healed, asked, "How's Maria?"
The woman turned her face away from him as her eyes, already inscrutable, darkened with anger. There was a set to her jaw, a small muscle that worked at her temple, signs Steve had learned to read through unfortunate trial and error. He was perversely happy that she was pissed and resisted the urge to end the call.
"Mmmm. Not so great, actually. She's out tonight."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, it's some new thing of hers, she goes out and won't tell me who she's with. I come home to the babysitter and voicemail on my wife's cell. Says I'm not entitled to know her every movement. Says I go off to work and I'm gone the whole day and she never asks where I am. Jesus! Throw fucking strikes, will ya?"
Steve wished he had never asked, but knew it was too late to stop Mark once he had started in on Maria.
"I wish I had never let her quit her job," Mark said finally.
"Why's that?"
"She's too fucking smart. You know how educated she is. Most of the time she was working, she made more money than me. Hell, we moved to Tokyo for her job, remember? After Matthew was born, I mean, three boys in six years is a lot of kids, things were just too crazy at home. They needed her there." Mark paused. "Jesus Christ, that was a fucking strike. Just watch, Moose is going to fucking walk this guy."
"I don't get it," Steve said. "It's an elimination game and he's got Johnson and Wang ready to go. What's the hesitation?"
"Goddammed if I know. Things definitely started to go downhill when she stopped working. She got a little angrier every day, you know?"
"Sure, that can be a tough change. Have you talked to her about going back?"
"That's just it, she doesn't want to go back now. She left at the top of her game and if she went back now, it would be way down the ladder, and the kids are still pretty young and who's going to take them to the pediatrician when they get sick? The nanny? And every time we talk about it she gets this look in her eye like she fucking hates me, like she woke up one day and she was my wife and a mother to three kids and she isn't sure how it all happened."
"Sorry, man. That sucks."
"You know what else? She's gotten crazier and crazier in bed. After that last baby, it's like she doesn't want to be one of these women who doesn't care about doing it anymore, and so she's gone overboard in the other direction."
Steve glanced at the prone body next to him. She was lying with one arm propped on the bed, her head on her hand. One leg was bent
at the hip, her leg thrown over the other, so he was confronted with the length of her naked back and ass, and, if he sat up to take another drink and stretch his back, he would be able to see inside her.
"How far overboard?" Steve asked.
"You know, just always wanting to do something different, a little further out on the edge all the time. Not that I'm complaining. I mean, shit, how many guys you know are sorry their wife wants to have kinky sex? But it makes me wonder, you know? Maybe she's learning all this shit from some other guy?"
"She's smart," Steve said. "I'm sure she can think of new ways to get off all on her own." The woman started to get up off the bed, Steve reaching out a hand, grasping her arm and pulling her back. Her eyes were hard, nostrils flared slightly.
"Jesus Christ! Did you just see the human sieve on first base? Fucking Giambi."
"Take it easy, Mark."
"I know, I can't wait for it to be over. I can't take the anxiety anymore."
"The playoffs?" asked Steve.
"Of course the playoffs. What the hell did you think I meant?"
"Didn't know if you were still talking about Maria."
"Jesus, that too. Not the marriage. I just want her to be more like the Maria I married."
"Was she so different?" Steve thought about what she was like then. Was she warmer or gentler? All he can remember was thinking she was dangerous. The first time he had seen her, at a Christmas party Mark had brought her to, their fourth or fifth date only. She had walked in wearing a black dress. Her hair was long then. Her eyes were dark and unreadable, and she had been wearing red lipstick. He couldn't take his eyes off her lips, and she could tell. He had been embarrassed and had left the party early, ashamed to be coveting Mark's girlfriend.
"You know, when we were on our honeymoon, you remember we went to Africa?" asked Mark.
"Yeah." She had relented and reached for the glass of vodka. He held it away from her for a minute, teasing, knowing he was testing the limits of her anger. The corners of her mouth curving like a cat's, she bent to sink her teeth into the flesh at his hip. Hard. He winced and gave up the glass, then turned on his side toward her. He trailed the fingers that had been holding the glass, still cool and wet, down her stomach, then down between her legs, opening her with their insistent pressure. She made a half-hearted attempt to push his hand away.
"Well, we were in this camp where we were staying in a tent, and the bathroom was built out back, but it was open to the savannah. You'd be sitting there taking a crap and all of a sudden there would be this parade of elephants going from the watering hole back into the bush. It really was like a parade, too. The little ones actually wrap their trunks around their mother's tails. Anyway, so there was a shower too, and one day I snap a photo of Maria taking a shower. She's looking out at me over her shoulder, and that long black hair is just cascading down her back, and she was smiling at me in that way, you know?"
"Not really, no." He inserted several fingers inside her. She was still wet with the residue of their earlier lovemaking. She arched her pelvis toward him, not moaning, eyes open, the glass still in her hand. He used his thumb to stimulate her clitoris and still she kept looking at him with her glittering eyes, daring him.
"The way she used to smile at me, easy. In the picture, she's a little shy, embarrassed but proud, you know? She looked at me like we had a secret between us, like she loved me."
"And she doesn't smile at you that way anymore?"
"God, no."
She had laid her head back on the bed, accepting his ministrations, no longer focused on her anger, on the telephone, no longer concerned about him, just focused on her own sensation.
"Anyway, she thought that she had hid that picture away in the office at home, but I found it one day when I was looking for some old college photos, and I have it in a drawer at work. Every now and again I take out this ridiculous old picture of my wife taking a shower, and it's all I can do not to start bawling like a fucking baby."
"You're going to make yourself crazy, Mark. I'm sure she's out getting lit up with her girlfriends."
"That's another thing, you know? She likes to drink."
"Who doesn't?" asked Steve.
"No, I mean more than she used to."
"Why do you think that is?"
"I don't know. Sometimes I think she's set the dial to 'slow self-destruct,' but other times I just think she has this
whole life now that's separate from mine. We see each other at home, we interact, we take care of our kids, but you know, I feel like she's only half there. Jesus, what a fucking dink that was, fucking Johnson."
The woman was starting to contract around his fingers, her breathing still slow and deep. She could do this, he knew, have an orgasm without her face looking any different than when she was sitting there sipping a martini, a tiny bit flushed at the very edge of her forehead, but that was it. She controlled her breathing like she was doing yoga, slowly in and out through her nose, the contractions rolling through her body on the inside. He remembered the first time she had come when he was inside her — he could feel it, but he couldn't see or hear a thing.
"Look, Mark, I better get going."
"Sure, Steve. Sorry I've been talking your ear off. Hey, are you going to Mom and Dad's on Saturday for the birthday party?"
Steve swung his legs over the side of the bed, sitting up and arching his back, stretching the knots in his muscles. He grimaced slightly. "I don't think so. Think I'm tied up at work."
"Well, the boys would love to see Crazy Uncle Stevie."
He laughed."I'd like to see them too. I'll try to make it, but don't tell Mom, she'll take that as a yes. You going to watch the rest of the game?"
"Probably. I may as well wait up for my lovely wife."
"Don't get too crazy, it's not worth it."
"So speaks my bachelor brother."
Steve shook his head. "You never know. I could be on to something."
"Take it easy."
Steve threw the phone on the bedside table and turned toward the woman, but she had left the bed and was heading into the bathroom, her hips swaying slightly, the two dimples above her ass like eyes, watching him. A few moments later he heard the shower running. He refilled his glass from the ice bucket the bellboy had thoughtfully provided and the half-liter of Grey Goose he had brought in his briefcase. It was nearly gone, and he shrugged and emptied the last of it into the glass. The woman came out of the bathroom wrapped in a large white towel from which she unwound herself, letting it drop on the bed. She started to retrieve her clothes, starting with the white lace bra that had been the last thing he had removed.
"I take it you're leaving."
"Mmmm. Thought I better get home in case Mark has a nervous breakdown when the Yankees lose."
"How do you know they're going to lose?"
She laughed as she shimmied her skirt up over her hips, a brittle sound that he thought might crack and shatter into a million little laughs, sprinkled on the carpet. "I've willed it to be so."
"He knows something's up."
"Obviously."
"Aren't you concerned?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Why should I be?"
"Don't you worry he might eventually want a divorce?"
"Of course not. Mark would rather cut off his right arm than get a divorce."
"So you don't mind making him unhappy because you know he'll take it?"
"Something like that. It all fits."
"And me? Where do I fit?"
She sat down to fasten the straps of her heels. They were impossibly high, but she knew how to walk like a lady in them: not too much sway, not too much thrust. They looked expensive, and he figured they were. Everything about her was expensive. When she walked away, he could see the undersides of the shoes flashing red at him; they were always enough to make him hard again.
She shrugged on her jacket and picked up her purse, one hand sweeping her dark curls out from under the jacket's collar. She walked up to him and stopped very close, almost touching. They stood nearly nose to nose, she in her high high heels and he still naked. She snaked one hand behind his neck and brought her face close to his, at the last minute turning slightly to give the edge of his jaw a tiny nip with her teeth, then a small kiss on top of it to soothe him. "You're my sons' Crazy Uncle Stevie." Her smile was a mixture of sweet and smirk, as inscrutable as everything else she did. "See you soon." She trailed the hand from behind his neck and down his body as she turned and walked away, the red undersides of her shoes flashing at him as she went through the hotel room door.
He sat down on the edge of the bed, his elbows resting on his knees, hands together, holding his drink. His let his head hang down between his shoulders, exposing each vertebra to the empty room behind him. When he looked up, the silent television continued to flicker at him. Each time, he said he wouldn't see her again. Each time, she called and he answered. How did he imagine this was going to end? What was the best-case scenario? They all sucked and he knew it. He grabbed the remote from the tangle of sheets and clicked on the sound. The roar of the game filled the empty room, keeping him company. When A-Rod grounded into the double play he knew she had been right — the game was over. He snapped off the television, set his sweating glass on top and headed to the shower to wash off defeat.
n°
©2006 Wendy Flanagan & Nerve.com