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"So that's where we find our hero," she says.
"Yeah, sorry."
She sits and glances up at the screen.
"I was just checking. It's the playoffs," I say.
"I wouldn't have tagged you as a Yankees man," she says.
"I'm rooting for Oakland, actually."
I don't feel like detailing my
She's started to hate me a little already; I can hear it in her voice. This will make the sex hotter, if we can get there. |
whole life-long pathetic allegiance to the A's, something I've done a dozen times already in like circumstances, feeling, each time, the deep absurdity of my existence, my willingness to hand my emotional life over to a cadre of brute millionaires chasing a ball around some brightly lit corporate-sponsored lawn. The whole thing is just too homoerotic and sad.
"My ex," Molly says, "whatever we're calling him, he loves the Yankees. I'm sure he's watching the game right now." She's started to hate me a little already; I can hear it in her voice. This will make the sex hotter, if we can get there.
The bartender comes over and puts a napkin down in front of Molly. He's got a ponytail and a trimmed goatee that makes his mouth look like a vagina.
"You want another Merlot?" I say.
Molly shakes her head. "No mas. I'm heading up to my room."
"You're staying here?"
"I hate driving at night. Can't see for shit."
So now we both know what this is. I look at Molly in profile - her delicate ears, her plucked lips - and think about her hotel room, the big TV, the free shampoo, the battered queen-size some immigrant maid will strip the next morning, so as to wash away the evidence of our bodies. I think about the ecstatic, tawdry wrongness of the undertaking. Molly waits for me to turn away from the game. I'm waiting, too. There is no reason on earth that I should continue to watch, given the stated desires of the warm creature seated next to me. Except that now Matt Stairs has doubled, which brings the tying run to the plate in the person of our lanky leftfielder, Terrence Long.
Thankfully, there's a pitching change and I turn to Molly and say, "Have another drink. One more.
I'm transfixed by the larger idea that this is truly what matters, this game, all the silly games, that I can live a life free from the complex terrors of women, their soft wishes, their needs, their relentless burrowing into my heart. |
The game's almost over. Another half hour."
She shakes her head and sighs, like I've hit the wrong song on the jukebox, and instead of a slow dance we're delivered a vision of the future, the bleak days to come in which the sex has exhausted itself, and we're left to resent one another over the childish compulsions we can't quite shed.
I need to turn away from the TV, right now. But the screen is so bright and I'm so deeply in love with the Oakland A's at this moment, convinced that they can come back from six runs down and beat the awful Yankees, and that by so doing they will have affirmed my own capacities for unlikely triumph. It's actually worse than that, though: I'm transfixed by the larger idea that this is truly what matters, this game, all the silly games, that I can live a life free from the complex terrors of women, their soft wishes, their needs, their relentless burrowing into my heart.
I want to tell Molly that there's nothing special in my heart, just yellowed box scores and peanut shells, but that I am very much looking forward to fucking her, I'll go down on her for an hour straight. Scout's honor! If she can just let me catch the next few batters. And I turn to her, ready to make my pitch. But the look in her eyes is that of a manager who's already made his call to the bullpen.
"Have fun with your game," she says. She dips in close, gives me a peck on the cheek, so I have to smell her hair, which smells expensive. Then she wheels around and totters off to fetch her purse.
"Fuck the Yankees," I say loudly.
"Fuck something," the bartender murmurs.
I turn back to the screen. Terrence Long is up to bat. He strikes out.
n°
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Steve Almond's new essay collection is (Not that You Asked). It is, like much of his work, filthy.
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©2007 Steve Almond and Nerve.com |
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