Heft (32 page)

—How?

Overdose, he says.

He looks straight ahead of him and never at me. I do the same.

All the girls he tells me about were four years younger and full of ideas when I knew them. Denise Torres wore a bright green jacket every day in the winter and her laugh started with a
K
.

I have been trying to imagine what my mother was like when she was young. She would have been small. She would have been quiet unless she was nervous. If she was nervous she would have talked too much. I know she had one or two friends because Rhonda was one of them but I don’t imagine she had many more. I know she did not get along with her parents. They were not much in our lives and then they died. They did not like her husband, the man who used to be my father. She would have shuffled head-down through the hallways of her school. She would have found heroes to worship because she always did. She would have had crushes on teachers and senior boys who did not know her. All the girls I know from Yonkers, all the girls who will never leave, she was like them.

I wanted her to wait until I could take better care of her. I wanted her to wait until I was old enough to fix her, make her well again, put her someplace warm and tight.

I can see the practice facility over some trees while we are still on the parkway. A white bubble like the top of a circus tent. I feel a tug in my gut. I’ve been working out all week with Coach Ramirez, who told me how stupid I was not to call him sooner. But still. I’ve been eating eggs and steak and vegetables. I’ve been lifting but not enough to make me sore. I’ve been drinking protein shakes. One of my teammates told me he could get me juice from a guy he knows but the good scared and superstitious boy inside me told him no.

The facility looks huge when we pull up outside it. It’s as big as a warehouse. Both of us look at it.

What’s it like inside? I ask Dee.

There’s a field inside, says Dee. With bleachers and a wall and everything. Nice turf.

Did you play here? I ask him.

Nah, he says, and he looks embarrassed. My mom brought me here to see some preacher last year. They used it for a church. People falling down in the aisle like—

And he mimes a seizure, his eyes rolling back in his head, hands going up. He laughs.

You need me to stick around? asks Dee.

I say no. Lindsay has offered to pick me up. I pat the roof of the car when he drives off and then I am alone.

I wasn’t sure what to bring with me so last night I emptied out a small athletic bag of mine and cleaned it because it smelled bad. Then I carefully put everything I could think of into it. My cleats are inside the bag. My glove. Four bottles of water. A bag of trail mix. I don’t know how long I’ll be here. A cell-phone charger. I don’t know why. A copy of this highlights video that Coach and I put together at the end of last season. My wallet. Inside of it is my mother’s note to me. I carry it around everyplace I go.

I’m wearing my summer-league uniform, the Cardinals’ uniform, which I now think might have been stupid. Over this I am wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants. I take a long slow breath in and out. The air is freezing. The glass doors to the inside are covered in frost from the cold. I open the one on the right.

• • •

W
hen Yolanda went to bed last night I sat up for longer
than I usually do. I did not move from my chair. I leaned my head back and looked up at the ceiling, & then I looked all around me at my world. The dark wooden shelves loaded with books. The television, O my joy & comfort. The musty old couch.

I lifted up my shirt and looked down at my belly. I used to do this when I was young.

I thought of Charlene and how I had betrayed her. For really I felt this way: that I had betrayed her & myself. That somehow I had a hand in her death.

Before she called me this fall, before Yolanda came to me, in the ten years I spent with myself and no one else, I had ways of consoling myself. Yes there was food, but there was beyond food this idea I had of an oversoul of loneliness. A connectedness among the world’s lonely that I could turn to when I was very low. There was a delicious romance in being utterly alone, & I told myself I was nobler for it, & that there was a purpose to my solitude, O there must be.

I would pray. I no longer pray as much, now that Yolanda is here. I would pray first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I would remind myself of how many people there were like me, & how many people fall into the despair of loneliness, every day it happens, I would say, every day someone loses his connection to the world & then becomes the noble hermit, becomes connected to himself, the snake eating its tail, & then he must look steadily toward the lonely oversoul for help, he must or he will die. And then he becomes like I am, and the oversoul grows and expands lovingly, generously, and welcomes him as a member of its secret club. All of the people in the world who are lonely or sick or very sad.

Before everything, before Marty died—Marty, my dearest friend in the world. While I was still teaching, & even before. When I was a child. When I was unborn. I felt destined for solitude, very certain that one day it would find me, so when it did I was not surprised & even welcomed it.

Throughout my life I have met only one person with whom I felt a certain kinship in this regard, and it was Charlene Turner. From the moment I met her I thought—you too? And I could see by the look in her eyes that she also felt it. She was more lonely at the time than I, I could sense it, and it made me love her.

Last night, in my sorrow, I went into the drawer of my bedside table for the ten-thousandth time & from it I took out her stack of letters. Then I found what I was looking for: the letter in which she first suggested that we meet. & I allowed my mind to drift back through years & years, to the sense of possibility I felt when I first received that letter, the glimpse into a future very different than the one that, as it turned out, lay before me. I recalled our dinners together, our lunches, the glory of sitting across a table from a woman. Each time I saw her, I felt more & more convinced that she understood something about me, & I her.

This feeling in me was solidified the first time we went out for dinner & she ordered several things & ate them unselfconsciously. It was roast beef she was having, & she cut it into little precise squares first, & dipped them into their sauce, & then chewed them with her mouth open sometimes, looking all around the room. She drank too much. She had three rum and Cokes. It seemed like a childish drink to me. I was having water. I’ve never drunk very much. I was having water and shepherd’s pie that at first I tried to eat delicately, but she was so oblivious to me, still, that I relaxed.

She became quiet halfway through the meal. I asked her was she upset about something but she would not tell me at first. Then after a while she took her glasses off—I can see this motion still, hazily, as if in a dream—and put her fingers on the bridge of her nose. Then she turned her face toward me & put both her hands up to it. One on her forehead. One on her cheek. Her hair was down around her shoulders that night and lazily it slid off of one of them & down her back.

“I’m invisible,” she said to me. “I’m really invisible.” A very fat tear rolled down her cheek, the saddest tear I’ve ever seen, & I had and resisted the urge to touch it.

What do you mean, I asked her. But she shook her head & she would say no more. Instead she talked about school & work & how she planned on balancing the two, & how she had never been happier than she was now in her life, coming to school in the city, starting her life in the world. It was what she called it. Making her life in the world. I knew what she meant.

She stood up shakily at the end of the meal and raised one finger in the air as if testing the wind & she pointed it at me smiling.

I have always loved aggrieved & unbeautiful women. I have always loved beautiful women too, but it is the unbeautiful ones that haunt me & find me & abide, whose images I see before me when I go to sleep. My mother was unbeautiful. Charlene was unbeautiful. Marty.

None were invisible to me. Furthermore I don’t believe I was invisible to them, & this has remained, for me, an anchor in the world. Charlene, in her letters to me, told me things about myself I had never been told before. She made me feel noble & worthy. She told me once that I was a hero of hers. For years, our correspondence allowed me to feel connected, still, to Charlene Turner. Even after she stopped responding. Even then. I thought of her, & remembered her fondly, feeding the ducks, sipping her drink, walking swiftly wherever she had to go. I thought of her & I felt she was surely also a member of my club. & so I did not blame her for losing touch. I really didn’t blame her at all.

When, years later, she called me, it was a surprise but I realized that I had been expecting it all along. My innermost self had been expecting it.

She said to me, He’ll call you. And so I began to hope. I did not hesitate to. I did the foolish thing of imagining a life with Charlene & her son. This led me to Yolanda. & Yolanda broke my spell of solitude. I feel somehow, I can’t explain it, that my diminishing loneliness caused Charlene’s to increase. I have felt, always, that we are connected by that thread.

She named her son Arthur. It breaks my heart. It touches me deeply & yet I feel that some chance has been wasted.

The first time we met for coffee, the fabric of her purple down coat got stuck in the teeth of its own zipper. I helped her. I moved her hands away from it with my own & I pulled the fabric loose without a tear. Thank you she said.

• • •

T
hey’re there when I arrive, Gerard Kane, his assistant
Sarah—not as pretty as she sounded, a little plain—and another kid, a black kid, about my age, maybe a little older than me. I don’t know who he is. A few other men stand around chatting with them. They could work for the facility, I’m not sure.

They’re all sitting in the lobby, a large plain room with rough carpet. Like the lobby of a church, high-ceilinged, skylights letting sun in. Mr. Kane is drinking coffee. He’s leaning forward in his chair, his arms resting on his knees. Even in the winter his sunglasses hang around his neck on a string. His face is sunburned except for around his eyes. His mustache is as neat as I remember, his forearms as huge. He’s wearing a pullover windbreaker with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows.

Kel! he goes, when he sees me. How are you, kid?

He stands up to shake my hand and I set my things down.

This is Marcus Hobart, he says, indicating the kid sitting down next to him. He’ll be pitching to you today.

When Marcus stands up I see he is even taller than I am. Definitely stronger.

How’s it going? he asks me, and suddenly I realize he’s there for the same reason I am.

Locker room’s there, says Mr. Kane. Come on out when you’re ready.

Marcus and I go in together. He pulls off his jacket and his tear-away pants and I see that he’s wearing a summer-league uniform too. This makes me feel better.

You play for the Jays? I ask him.

Played, he says.

Cardinals, I say, pointing pointlessly to my uniform.

Cool, he says. You in school still?

Yeah, I say.

Where at?

Pells Landing, I say. But I live in Yonkers.

I got you, says Marcus. Like he doesn’t care at all.

How bout you? I ask.

Played in college for the Gators for a season, says Marcus. But I hated it. Now I’m trying to make this happen, he says, patting the air on either side of him, indicating Gerard Kane and everything that goes along with him.

Before I leave I take out my mother’s note and look at it. I want for it to comfort and inspire me, but it doesn’t.

The main area of the facility is perfect. It’s strange to be enclosed by something so large. Sound bounces off things here. I can speak quietly and still be heard.

They have us toss the ball back and forth for a while. Farther and farther away from one another, to see what kind of carry we’ve got. It’s something I’ve always been proud of: I can throw the damn ball as far as I want to. And precisely. Always I’ve been able to do this.

I chuck it to Marcus and it’s high and right. He chucks it to me and it’s perfect, it stings. Within a few throws I can feel my right shoulder warming up and then aching dully. It is not something I have felt before.

A mattress in the backyard. A mattress with a red bull’s-eye on it.

Marcus can throw the ball too—better than I can, maybe. It stings to catch a ball that this kid throws in from the outfield. I can feel it for seconds afterward. They have video cameras on us. They’re recording what we do.

Warm up, Kel, says Gerard Kane, and hands me a weighted bat. He takes over what I was doing and throws the ball with Marcus for a while. I imagine what he’s feeling: the sting of Marcus’s arm, the winging ball hitting his glove and stinging.

The ache in my right shoulder gets stronger while I’m swinging the bat.

Several boys from a local team, there early before a game, pile into the bleachers to watch us. They are twelve or thirteen. The age I loved playing the most. They tumble over each other, getting into the bleachers; they shove at each other’s backs and heads.
Go!
says one to another. They are very happy, they are thrilled with life.

At end-of-year banquets she sat by herself and I sat with her, not my friends. I was good then and guilty.

She didn’t let me paint the door. They took pictures of me with the door all peeling. Junk in the yard.

A kid from the facility is the catcher. He’s excited, you can tell. He squats behind home plate, mask on, mitt on, kind of bouncing on his haunches. I feel I am not ready yet. I keep swinging and swinging the weighted bat. Marcus Hobart walks to the pitcher’s mound and stands there, even taller than he was when we met. Very casual.

Ready, Kel? asks Gerard Kane.

The man who used to be my father gave me a baseball glove for Christmas. The last Christmas he was with us he gave me a glove but he didn’t tell me to oil it and he didn’t put a ball in it and wrap it around with string. I had to learn that on my own. I had to learn everything on my own.