Casey's Home (3 page)

1998

On
a warm spring morning, the air in Tampa smelled exactly like sweat socks. Not
particularly pleasant, but true, Ben thought as he entered the athletic
department. Making his way through the early-morning crowd of students, mostly
swimmers or runners or others who practiced during the off-hours, Ben smiled at
the occasional familiar face.

“Morning,”
a kid said, nodding as Ben passed.

“Yo,
McDunnough. See you this afternoon, man,” came from one of his boys.

Ben
shoved open the door to the office he shared with Billy Wells and set his bag,
filled with the usual paraphernalia of coaching, down by his desk. Billy,
already red-faced in the rising heat, shifted the phone from one ear to the
other, yelling.

“Jesus,
Jake, what the hell have you two been doing with all that cash?”

Ben
pretended not to notice, sliding into the squeaky wooden chair he had been given
when he started at DeSoto, seventeen years before. It barely rolled on its
ancient metal castors across the bare wood floor beneath his desk. Billy was
shouting at his son-in-law, gathering an increasing head of steam with each
sentence until at last he slammed the phone violently down onto the receiver.
Ben had a daydream, when he was in the mood to allow it, where Billy was given
his own office somewhere upstairs with the fat, ex-military football coach and
that six-foot woman who coached volleyball, Mrs. Oaks. Then the little office,
with its large east-facing window and cluttered shelves of trophies and
scorecards, would be his. And then, for once in the many years he had worked
there, it might just be quiet.

“That
boy,” Billy said, and Ben knew he was talking about Jake, who was at least
thirty-five, “is a jackass. I have no idea why Lee married him. Except that
he’s probably well hung. Hell, I know he is. I coached him long enough to have
witnessed the thing a time or two.”

“Jesus,
Bill,” Ben said, shuffling through the ever-increasing pile of papers on his
desk. He did not want to know the size of Billy Wells’ son-in-law’s penis.

“You’re
as sensitive as a goddamned girl, Ben.” Billy settled back into his seat,
tipping back and staring at the ceiling. “You watch the game last night?”

“I
did,” Ben admitted. “Very exciting.”

“The
problem,” Billy began, leaning forward earnestly, “is that in the end, it isn’t
ball, you know? Where’s the defense against a man who can hit a ball five
hundred fucking feet, fifty times a year?”

“Pitching?”
Ben said mildly.

“Fuck
pitching,” Billy said. “The fielders are slacking off, the infield’s a shambles
and no one remembers how to hit a good solid grounder so that when one of these
behemoths actually hits the ball out of the park, there’s a man on base.”

“This
is why no one’s ever asked you to go on Sports Center,” Ben said. “What’s on
the agenda for today?”

“Agenda?”
Billy asked, raising an eyebrow. “Agenda? I thought we might, you know, play a
little ball. See how the boys do now that we’ve drilled the shit out of them.”

“Sounds
good,” Ben said. “And maybe we could finish the expense reports from last
week.”

“Oh
yeah.” Billy was tapping his pencil wildly against his teeth, giving his words
a lisp. “That’d be just a great time.”

Already
tired, though it was only nine, Ben simply pushed Billy’s report to the bottom
of the stack sitting on his desk and stood, stretching.

“Coffee?”
he asked. Absently, Billy nodded, the pencil still clicking against his
canines.

The
faculty lounge was one of Ben’s least favorite places. He had never enjoyed
sweating it out in the windowless room with the other coaches for meetings or
even worse, potluck dinners. He didn’t want to stay behind at the university
and talk about sports theory. He looked forward to the concrete reality of
eating dinner off one of his mother’s Norman Rockwell TV trays, preferably
during Baseball Tonight.

Ben
smiled at the department secretary, who looked up from behind her desk and
snorted at him, as if she were thinking: typical, here he comes again for
something, the bastard. Ben was never sure what appeased these women. He
suspected it would involve not being secretaries.

“Just
getting some coffee,” he explained. She didn’t answer, so he slid relatively
unmolested into the back room. Janine Oaks stood at the copy machine, leaning
on it and watching the TV sitting on top of a bank of file cabinets.

“Ben,”
she said, glancing away from the TV.

“Janine,”
he answered. “How’re the girls doing this year?”

“Fourteen
and six,” she said.

Selecting
two mugs, Ben poured the thick black coffee into one of them. “Good for them.”

He
tasted the coffee and winced. Clearly, Ed Black, the track coach, had been
making it again, although he’d been specifically asked not to. Ben added about
half a cup of milk from the mini-fridge and two heaping tablespoons of sugar.
It still tasted more like sludge than coffee.

“So,
I was thinking...” Janine said slowly, her voice in perfect cadence with the
long clack of the copier behind her.

“Hmm?”
Ben asked, pouring the second cup.

“I’ve
been meaning to ask you something,” she said and he turned.

“Sure.”

Janine
Oaks was an attractive woman, if you liked volleyball players. Ben wasn’t
really sure if he did or not, though she was pretty in a big-featured,
smooth-haired way. Frankly, she looked like she could hold her own in a fight
and though the thought intrigued him, it also frightened the hell out of him.

“Would
you, um, be up for dinner tonight?”

Tonight?
Ben swallowed and for a moment considered making up some wild excuse to get out
of it. Such short notice, he would waffle, commitments to the team, game
tomorrow… anything to get away from Janine Oaks and her sizable set of breasts,
the top edge of which, just visible under her low-necked t-shirt, were colored
a soft pink with embarrassment.

She
was embarrassed. It seemed like such a monumental thing, suddenly – the
knowledge that a woman would find him attractive enough to blush from head to
toe.

“Sure,”
he said, smiling. “I’d love to.”

“Great.”
She relaxed, sliding almost bonelessly along the copier until he worried that
she might be about to kneel. “I know this great restaurant. Stan and I used to
go there all the time...” She trailed off and then shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t
have plans and it’s a Friday and I drove past the restaurant yesterday on the
way to my sister’s and I thought, damn, I haven’t been there in ages. Who can I
ask out to dinner? And you were the first person I thought of.”

He
wasn’t sure, after all that explanation, whether or not to be flattered.

“That’s
fine,” he said. “I haven’t been out to dinner in…” Years. Eons. To be truthful
here? No. “Some time,” he finished.

“Fantastic,”
she said. “I’ll come get you, if you like.”

Volleyball
women.

“That’s
all right,” he said, stepping into his role. “I don’t mind coming to get you,
if you’d like me to.”

She
blushed again and nodded. “You remember where I live from last year’s faculty
dinner?”

He
did: a big white house with a lovely, overgrown garden. The place where he had
wandered out to find Stan, then still Mr. Janine Oaks, with his hand way up the
short, black skirt belonging to Liz Cornwall from the Phys. Ed. department.

“What
time should I pick you up?” he asked.

“How
about six?” she said.

“Great.
Where are we going? Or is it a mystery?”

She
shook her head and he noted that her glossy brown hair was the color of the
polished wood of his desk. “It’s on the canal in New Port Richey. ‘Max’s.’”

He
knew it. He had always been under the impression that mostly old folks ate
there. Blue hairs. But then, volleyball players had always seemed like a
conservative bunch.

“I’ll
pick you up at six,” he told her.

Back
at his desk, coffee in hand, he felt a bit giddy. It was ridiculous to feel
that way about anything so trivial as a dinner. He was, after all, sort of
technically middle-aged. It was not as if he were anticipating sex. Certainly,
that would be nice, but Janine Oaks didn’t seem like the kind of woman who just
hopped into bed, not that he would know how to recognize that sort of woman anyway.
What he wanted, he realized, was to sit and talk with someone else, another
adult. Tonight.

“What
are you over there grinning about?” Billy said, unusually perceptive.

“I
have a date.” Ben tipped the old wooden chair back and listened to it complain.
The coffee was disgusting but energizing.

“Ooo
hoo,” Billy said, raising an eyebrow and grinning. “With who, may I ask? The
lovely Mrs. Oaks?”

Disappointed,
Ben just nodded.

“She’s
been ogling you for months,” Billy said and Ben came to the sudden uncomfortable
realization that they were gossiping.

“She
hasn’t,” Ben said.

“For
a washed-up former pitcher, boy, you don’t look that bad. You shouldn’t be that
surprised.”

“Billy,
do you ever think we’ve known each other far too long?” he asked.

The
older man laughed and set down his mug with a thump, sending splashes of black
liquid onto his desk blotter. Ben half expected it to eat right through the
paper.

“Probably,”
Billy said. “Probably.”

All
afternoon, he tried not to think about it, but it was impossible. He felt a new
buoyancy, unlike anything he’d known since his marriage had ended, years
before. There were moments in the evening when he could still remember what it
was like to have another person there to talk to, someone to share his day
with. It hadn’t occurred to him how similar each day had become until he was
relaying them only to himself.

He
and Billy put the boys through their paces, and he was especially tough on
them. With their soft faces and easy grace they were asking for it, he thought.
Damn teenagers. But the whole time, in the back of his mind, he was seeing
Janine at the copier – she was just Janine now – with that soft rosy tint along
the edge of her v-neck, dipping into her cleavage and intensifying there. And
he realized he was thinking about sex, though not in the obvious, sweaty
tangling of body parts way. He was picturing what it would be like to kiss her,
to slide his tongue along her straight, white teeth.

At
home, he took a long shower. After spending the afternoon surrounded by boys
half his age, he looked down at his own stomach and saw it stretched there. It
wouldn’t suck-in any longer. Not that he was fat. He didn’t drink and he
certainly exercised, but he was forty-four years-old. It didn’t matter how
often he crunched in front of Seinfeld reruns in the evening, his smooth skin
had become bulky. What would a woman think of this body he no longer
recognized, he wondered nervously?

He
shaved carefully to avoid any nicks, his face appearing jaundiced in the
yellowed glass of the old bathroom mirror. At least, thank God for small
mercies, he still had all his hair – thick, dark and unresponsive, prone to
collapsing in his eyes or standing up around the crown when he least expected
it. Was he still good-looking? He was fairly certain he had been, once, when he
was playing ball. Since his career had ended in injury, it had been impossible
for him to really look at his own face. His features seemed to blur together
until he barely registered himself, like a person seen briefly from a moving
car. Tonight, however, he was determined to see himself as she would see him:
tall, barrel-chested, with a pleasant face that really only worked because his
lips were full and his eyes were large. Long hands, even teeth… there was
nothing exceptional there.

But
there must be something, he thought, that he was missing, seeing that he wasn’t
that bad looking. Why else would he be standing here preparing for his first
date in four years? And then there it was, crinkling around the edges of his
eyes: the sadness, the disappointment. Ah ha, he thought, and patted his face
dry.

He
was so sure he remembered where she lived. And in truth, he did remember the
house, which she had painted the pale yellow of an anemic winter lemon, but not
how to get there. Several wrong turns after starting out, he spotted two of her
fat, orange cats curled around each other in the front window and knew he had
the place at last. Janine answered her door wearing ocean blue silk that stood
away from her body despite the obvious tightness of the dress. He forgot to
bring her something and felt sheepish about it except that she was practically
hopping out the door into the car so perhaps she hadn’t expected anything
anyway. Though, he mused as they drove through the early evening’s hazy light,
it would have been nice to surprise someone, for once.

In
the car, they talked about their teams, about the season, about the year the
way two people who work in the same office do. He watched her uncross her
impossibly long legs and smiled when she caught him doing it. She asked what
Billy was like to work with, and he commented on the way Ed Black made his kids
run too many stairs. The restaurant rose up suddenly and he felt a delicious
sense of relief at having arrived.