A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (42 page)

I didn’t lie: “Phyllis is a shrewd cookie.”

“She’s a good lawyer, but her husband is a shit too.” Lynn tossed back her drink. “You know, Jack, I honestly didn’t know anything about marriage when I married my husband. I mean anything.” Lynn sipped her brandy. “Clark came back from his mission and he seemed so ready, we just did it. What a deal. He told me later, this is much later, in counseling that he’d spent a lot of time on his mission planning, you know, our sex life. I mean, planning it out. It was awful.” She lifted her tiny cup again, tossing back the rest of the drink.

“But,” she began again, extending the word to two syllables, “divorce is worse. I don’t like being alone. At all. But it’s more than that.” She looked into my face. “It’s just . . . different. Hard.” I saw her put her teeth in her lip on the last word, and she closed her eyes. When they opened again, she printed up a smile and showed me the flask. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like any?”

“No,” I said, kicking back my chair and standing. “I’ll get another beer. Be right back.”

Under the grandstand, I stood in the beer line and tried to pretend she hadn’t shown me her cards. A friend of mine who has had more than his share of difficulty with women not his wife, especially young women not his wife, real young women, called each episode a “scrape.” That’s a good call. I’d had scrapes too. My second year in law school I took Lisa Krinkel (now Lisa Krink, media person) on a day trip to the mountains. We had a picnic on the Provo River, and I used my skills as a fire-tender and picnic host, along with the accessories of sunshine and red wine, to lull us both into a nifty last-couple-on-earth reverie as we boarded my old car in the brief twilight and headed for home. As always, I hadn’t really done anything, except some woody wooing, ten kisses and fingers run along her arm; after all—though I might pretend differently for a day—I was going with Lily by then. Lisa and I pretended differently all the way home. I remember thinking: What are you doing, Jack? But Lisa Krinkel against me in the front seat kept running her fingernails across my chest in a chilling wave down to my belt buckle, untucking my shirt in the dark and using those fingernails lightly on my stomach, her mouth on my neck, warm, wet, warm, wet, until my eyes began to rattle. Finally, I pulled into the wide gravel turnout by the Mountain Meadow Café and told her either to stop it or deliver.

I wish I could remember exactly how I’d said that. It was probably something like: “Listen, we’d better not keep that up because it could lead to something really terrible which we both would regret forever and ever.” But as a man, you can say that in such an anguished way, twisting in the seat obviously in the agonizing throes of acute arousal, a thing—you want her to know—so fully consuming and omnivorous that no woman (even the one who created this monstrous lust) could understand. You writhe, breathing melodramatic plumes of air. You roll your eyes and adjust your trousers like an animal that would be better off in every way put out of its misery. And, as I had hoped, Lisa Krinkel did put me out of my misery with a sudden startling thrust of her hand and then another minute of those electric fingernails and some heavy suction on my neck.

Then the strangest thing happened. When she was finished with my handkerchief, she asked me if we could pray. Well, that took me by surprise. I was just clasping my belt, but I clasped my hands humble as a schoolboy while she prayed aloud primarily to be delivered from evil, which was something I too hoped to be delivered from, but I sensed the prayer wasn’t wholly for me as she sprinkled it liberally with her boyfriend’s name: Tod. She went on there in the front seat for twenty minutes. I mean if prayers work, then this one was adequate. That little “Tod” every minute or so kept me alert right to the
amen.
We mounted the roadway and drove on in the dark. It had all changed. Now it seemed real late and it seemed a lot like driving my sister home from her date with Tod. Later I started seeing her on television, where she was a reporter for Channel 3, and it was real strange. Her hair was different, of course, blond, a professional requirement, and her name was different,
Krink
, for some reason, and I could barely remember if I had once had a scrape with this woman (including a couple of four-day nail scratches), if she was a part of my history at all. I mean, watching the news some nights it seemed impossible that I had ever prayed with Lisa Krink.

One of the primary cowardly acts of the late twentieth century is standing beneath the bleachers finishing a new beer before buying another and joining your date. I stood there in the archway, smacking my shoes in a little puddle of water on the cement floor, and tossed back the last of my beer. How lost can you be? The water was from an evaporative cooler mounted up in the locker-room window. It had been dripping steadily onto the floor for a decade. Amazing. I could fix that float seal in ten minutes. I’d done it at our house when Lily and I first moved in. And yet, I stood out of sight wondering how I was going to fix anything else. I bought another beer and went out to join Lynn. Just because you’re born into the open world doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to hide sometimes.

Lynn looked at me with frank relief. I could read it. She thought I had left. I probably should have, but you can’t leave a woman alone on this side of town, regardless of how bad the baseball gets.

The quality of Triple A baseball is always strained. I could try to explain all the reasons, but there are too many to mention. It is not just a factor of skill or experience, because some of the most dextrous nineteen-year-olds in the universe took the field at the top of every inning along with two or three seasoned vets, guys about to be thirty who had seen action a year or two in the majors. No, it wasn’t ability. The problem came most aptly under the title “attitude,” and that attitude is best defined as “not giving a shit.” It’s exacerbated by the fact that not one game in a dozen got a headline and three paragraphs in the
Register
and none of the games were televised. And who—given the times—is going to leave his feet to stop a hot grounder down the line if his efforts are not going to be on TV?

Night fell softly over the lighted ballpark, unlike the dozens of flies that pelted into the outfield. The game bore on and on, both squads using every pitcher in the inventory, and Midgely and the other coach getting as much exercise as anyone by lifting their right and then their left arms to indicate which hurler should file forward next. The pitchers themselves marched quietly from the bull pen to the mound and then twenty pitches later to the dugout and then (we supposed) to the showers. By the time the game ended, after eleven (final score 21 to 16), there were at least four relievers who had showered, shaved, and dressed and were already home in bed.

In an economy measure, the ballpark lights were switched off the minute the last out, a force at second, was completed, and as the afterimage of the field burned out on our eyeballs, we could hear the players swearing as they bumbled around trying to pick their ways into the dugout. Lynn and I fell together and she took my arm so I could lead us stumbling out of the darkened stadium. It was kind of nice right there, a woman on my arm for a purpose, the whole world dark, and through it all the organ music, Steiner Brightenbeeker’s mournful version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Outside, under the streetlights, the three dozen other souls who had stuck it out all nine innings dispersed, and Lynn and I crossed the street to her car. I looked back at the park. Above the parapet I could see Steiner’s cigarette glowing up there in space. I pointed him out to Lynn and started to tell her that I had learned a lot from him, but it didn’t come out right. He had always been adamant about his art. He was the one who told me to do something on purpose for art; to go without for it. To skip a date and write a story. That if I did, by two
A.M.
I’d have fifteen pages and be flying. I couldn’t exactly explain it to her, so I just mentioned that he had done the music for the one play I’d ever written a thousand years ago and let it go at that.

At the car we could still hear the song. Steiner would play another hour for his fierce little coterie. The Phantom of the Ballpark.

Lynn and I went to her apartment in Sugarhouse for a nightcap. Now that’s a word. Like
cocktail
, which I rarely use, it implies certain protocol. It sounds at first like you are supposed to drink it and get tired, take a few sips and yawn politely and then go to your room. A nightcap. I asked for a beer.

Her apartment was furnished somewhat like the interior of a refrigerator in white plastic and stainless steel, but the sofa was a relatively comfortable amorphous thing that seemed to say, “I’m not really furniture. I’m just waiting here for the future.”

The only thing I knew for sure about a nightcap was that there was a moment when the woman said, “Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable?” I was flipping quickly through the possible replies to such a question when Lynn came back with a pilsner glass full of Beck’s for me and a small snifter of brandy for herself. She did not ask if she could slip into something more comfortable; instead she just sat by me in the couch or sofa, that thing, and put her knee up on the seat and her right hand on my shoulder. For a moment then, it was nifty as a picture. I thought: Hey, no problem, a nightcap. This is easy.

“How’s your nightcap?” I asked Lynn. We hadn’t really talked much in the car or parking it in the basement or riding the elevator to her floor or waiting for her to find her keys and I didn’t know how we were doing anymore. Isn’t that funny? You see a friend playing the organ in the dark, and you fall asleep at the wheel. I sipped the beer and I had no idea of what to say or do next.

“I love baseball,” she breathed at me. She smelled nice, of brandy and a new little scent, something with a European city in the name of it, and her hand on my shoulder felt good, and I realized, as anyone realizes when he hears a woman tell him a lie when she knows it is a lie and that he is going to know it is a lie and that the rules have been changed or removed and that frankly, he should now do anything he wants to, it’s going to be all right. He’s not going to get slapped or told, “You fool, what are you doing!” It’s a realization that sets the adrenaline on you, your heart, your knees, and I sat there unable to move for a moment as the blood beat my corpuscles open.

When I did move, it was to reach for her, slowly, because that’s the best moment, the reach, and I pulled her over toward me to kiss her, but she came with the gesture a little too fully and rolled over on top of me, setting her brandy skillfully on the floor as her mouth closed on mine.

It had been a while for this cowboy, but even so, she didn’t quite feel right in my arms. Her body was not the body that I was used to, that I associated with such pleasures, and her movements too had an alien rhythm which I didn’t at first fully appreciate. I was still being dizzied by these special effects when she started in earnest. It wasn’t a moment until we were in a genuine thumping sofa rodeo, she on top of me, riding for the prize. My head had been crooked into the corner, stuffed into a spine-threatening pressure seal, and Lynn was bent (right word here) on tamping me further into the furniture. She did pause in her frenzy at one point, arch up, and pull her skirt free, bunching it at her waist. It was so frankly a practical matter, and her rosy face shone with such businesslike determination, that it gave me a new feeling: fear. Supine on that couch device, I suddenly felt like I was at the dentist. How do these things turn on us? How does something we seem to want, something we lean toward, instantly grow fangs and offer to bite our heads off?

I remember Midgely at the plate during a college game, going after what he thought was the fattest fastball he’d ever seen. It was a slow screwball, and when it broke midway through his swing and took him in the throat, he looked betrayed. He was out for a week. He couldn’t talk above a whisper until after graduation. And right now I was midswing with Lynn, and I could tell something ugly was going to happen.

Meanwhile, with one halfhearted hand on her ass and the other massaging the sidewall of her breast, I was also thinking: You don’t want to be rude. You don’t want to stand, if you could, and heave her off and run for the door. With her panties tangled to her knees like that she’d likely take a tumble and put the corner of something into her brain. There you are visiting her in the hospital, coma day 183, the room stuffed with bushels of the flowers you’ve brought over the last six months, and you’re saying to her sister Phyllis, the most ardent wrongful-death attorney in the history of the world, “Nightcap. We’d had a nightcap.”

No, you can’t leave. It’s a nightcap, and you’ve got to do your part. You may know you’re in trouble, but you’ve got to stay.

A moment later, Lynn peaked. Her writhing quadrupled suddenly and she went into an extended knee-squeeze seizure, a move I think I had first witnessed on
Big Time Wrestling
, and then she softened with a sigh, and said to me in her new voice, breathy and smiling, a whisper really, “What do you want?”

It’s a great question, right? Even when it is misintended as it was here. It was meant here as the perfect overture to sexual compliance, but my answers marched right on by that and lined up. What do I want?
I want my life back. I want to see a chiropractor. I want baseball to be what it used to be.

But I said, “How about another beer? I should be going soon, but I could use another beer.”

When she left the room, shaking her skirt down and then stepping insouciantly out of her underpants, I had a chance to gather my assertiveness. I would tell her I was sorry, but not to call me again. I would tell her I wasn’t ready for this mentally or physically. I would tell her simply, Don’t be mad, but we’re not right for each other
in any way.

When Lynn reappeared with my beer, I sucked it down quietly and kissing her, took my ambivalent leave. The most assertive thing I said was that I would walk home, that I needed the air. Oh, it was sad out there in the air, walking along the dark streets. Why is it so hard to do things on purpose? I felt I had some principles, why wouldn’t they apply? Why couldn’t I use one like the right instrument and fix something? Don’t answer.