The Sweetheart (29 page)

You lunge, but it's too late: in no time, Mimi puts you in a headlock and drops you both onto the mat. It is well within her capacity to roll you onto your back and pin your shoulders, but you know how to handle her. You snake a leg over her neck, and, careful to hold her under the chin and not on the throat, lock her into a head scissors. Mimi twists forcefully, heaving you onto your backside, but you manage to keep her head clamped. She thrashes about, more panicked than usual, perhaps because it leaves her midsection exposed and she senses that you have honed in on this vulnerability. It is difficult to hit her from this position, but you manage to get in one chop, and another harder one. Then, while she is still reeling from this last hit, you roll onto your stomach, cross your ankles, and press down on her shoulders with your shins. It's working—the ref slaps the mat once—but she twists, gets a shoulder off. You are so close, you sense, and, seeing the rope just in front of you, you reach out for it, hoping to steal that extra bit of leverage it would give you. But, just as your fingers brush it, you drop your hand. Mimi already thinks you have come by your station in a less than honorable way. Better to lose than for her to always second-guess your right to the title. Instead, you concentrate your energy and bear all the pressure those roadworked legs of yours can muster onto her shoulders.

The ref hits the mat again, and then again and again. First fall: Gwen Davies.

The response from the crowd is instantaneous: a roar of approval accompanied by the shaking of seat backs, the stomping of feet on chairs, the piggybacking leaps of Gorgeous Girls onto their escorts. You scramble off the mat and climb up the turnbuckle to take it in. Yes, it is loud and boisterous and spectacular, but the way you experience it is more than sight and sound. It is the force of their collective desire: they all want Mimi defeated. If you can't do this, you are going to let all of them down. The notion of disappointing them fills you with fear. If there was ever any doubt—if your want of a victory tonight ever wavered, if Sam's concerns or your own occasional ambivalence ever really made you question its merits—it is gone now, blown away by the winds of their desires. You want to give them what they want, what you have implicitly promised every time you have winked an eye or blown a kiss.

There is only one way this can end. You don't just
want
to win; you
have
to.

•    •    •

One down, one to go.

As soon as the bell rings, you charge again, anxious to work fast, to act before Mimi has time to think or catch her breath. This time, you manage to get her in a chicken wing and apply much more pressure than theatrics would dictate. She may have been unsure of your strategy earlier, but this, she reads loud and clear: you are doing your damnedest to take this fall, too.

“Is this your idea of gratitude?” Mimi hisses back at you.

You suck in your breath and then exhale, low and slow. “I don't owe you tonight.”

“You sure about that?” Her nostrils flare. “After what I did for you?”

“What exactly do you think you have done for me?” you ask, giving her wrist another yank.

“What exactly—” When she turns her face toward you, you can see that it is clammier than it should be this early in the match. Perhaps your plan has paid off; perhaps she is more injured than she is letting on. “I could have
destroyed
you,” she spits.

“
Destroyed
me? I think you overestimate yourself.” You give her wrist another little yank. “You want to win? Then win.”

“You're on,” she says, and then sets you straight with an elbow to the stomach.

This blow knocks the wind out of you, but, sensing you don't have much time, you come back with a kick—not your usual imitation roundhouse, but one that makes full contact—and, landing one, attempt another. It's too predictable. The second time, Mimi grabs your leg, drops you flat on your back, and dives on top of you. Desperate, you lock your arms and legs around Mimi and roll the both of you under the ropes and over the apron until you both thwack down onto the announcer's table.

“What do we have here, folks?” he says, scrambling to get out of the way. “Ladies and gentlemen, you won't get this kind of excitement anywhere else. This is no-holds-barred, going-for-broke grappling at its best. And this is just the
women
!”

Both you and Mimi scramble to your feet, rush to adjacent sides of the ring, and climb in. Luckily, you get to your feet just a hair ahead of her, enough time to attack first. You maneuver her into a full nelson and, once your grip is locked, toss her side to side to get her dizzy. You're running out of gas, but you have to act, so you jump up and put her in a body scissors, using your weight to drag her down to the mat. Mimi comes alive, presses back, nearly pinning your shoulders, but you manage to roll back, lifting her up with your legs, and slam her forcefully onto her seat. She doesn't make a noise, but you are well aware that the maneuver is hard on the torso, and so, your hold still secure, you roll back and drop her again, and she moans. Still, she has enough in her to roll onto her side, and then her abdomen, push up on her forearms, and twist until she is on top of you. You struggle with everything you have left, but she still manages to work her way up to her feet, your legs in her arms. Your eyes go wide—she is clearly wounded, her face braced, but by the sheer force of her will, she begins to spin.

It is not the first time you have been on the receiving end of the Hollander Helicopter, but it is the most punishing. This time, instead of hurling you safely within the confines of the mat, where you might land on your back with little damage, Mimi launches you into the turnbuckle, lacerating your shoulder blade. Before the ref can see the blood and call time, Mimi drags you, wincing with pain, into the middle of the mat, where she applies just enough force to secure the pin.

The audience groans with disapproval, and as you slouch over to the corner so the ring doctor can stop your bleeding, you feel your confidence waning, doubt creeping in. It is one–all—anyone's game—but you can't help but wonder if you have missed your chance. You lean against the ropes while the doc presses a towel against the cut for what feels like forever: long enough, you are sure, for Mimi to refresh and regroup. You try to push these thoughts out of your mind, but with every moment that passes, you feel your victory slipping away.

Sure enough, when the doc signals that you are ready and the bell rings, Mimi springs, whipping you into a hammerlock and then running you around the mat before flopping you down. As soon as you get to your feet, she fires a judo chop into your chest that knocks you back into the ropes.

Everything hurts. It will be over soon if you can't do something now, Gwen. If there is still some small well of resources for you to tap into, this would be the time.

As it turns out, there is: mercifully, you come to your senses quickly enough to harness the momentum and bounce back with a flying leg scissors. One foot lands on Mimi's chest, the other hooks behind her knee, sweeping the veteran wrestler onto her back. This move signals a turning of the tides, which the audience endorses with hearty, full-throated glee. You hear someone scream,
Take her out!
; still another yells,
Make her bleed!
Bolstered by their faith, much sturdier than your own, you manage to grab one of Mimi's legs with one arm and her torso with the other, lift her off her feet and drop her back over your knee. Mimi rolls onto the mat, limp with pain, and the crowd goes wild. They make their collective wish known, loud and clear:
Drop/the/Bomb/shell! Drop/the/Bomb/shell! Drop/the/Bomb/shell!

You would love to oblige them—for your victory to be as poetic as all the choreographed ones before it have suggested it might be—but sadly, you cannot. The Bombshell is a stunt. If you are going to win, you will have to rely on tactics that are less artful but more effective.

This maneuver, the most infamous of your career, will pass in a flash and occur before you can give it a first thought, let alone a second. For those not in attendance, the only evidence will be articles from the
Daily News
and
Wrestling As You Like It,
neither of which will mention the prematch interviews but instead will focus on this moment, describing it in one as
malicious
and the other as
positively criminal
.
In this tiny capsule of time, brief but eternal, you forgo not only your signature finishing move but all semblance of entertainment, not to mention sportsmanship, by rearing back and planting a Green Goddess squarely in Mimi's abdomen.

Wrestling As You Like It
will describe Mimi's subsequent scream as
earth-splitting.
The
Daily News
will use this more ominous word:
deathly.

As soon as you hear that sound, you know something is terribly wrong and drop to the mat, where your opponent lies folded in half. “Mimi,” you say, searching her face; “Mimi,” you say again, listening to her quick, shallow breaths. Before you can say anything else, the ref is on top of you, pulling you away. You have no choice but to steady yourself and take in the scene from a distance. The ref, the ring doctor, and Mimi, quiet now but for those breaths, her pallor graying, take up the foreground; behind them is the audience.
Take her out!
they cried.
Make her bleed!
Now that you've done what they asked you to do, they have all clammed up. All around you, people stand and stare, their hands over their mouths.

You cannot move. More and more people rush past you toward the injured wrestler: Joe, Johnny, and who knows who else. Again, someone yanks you backward; this time, it is Sam.

“Let's go,” he says. He holds open the ropes, but you don't budge. “Through the ropes!” he barks. “Now!”

This does this trick: you move slowly, but at least you move. “Jump down,” he says, and you do. This seems to be working: concrete directions. “Walk faster,” he commands, and the two of you barrel up the aisle, past the audience, still stunned, and march right into the grasp of two policemen, on-site to provide security, who take over the orders.

“This way,” says the elder of the pair, covering the right flank as the four of you hurry out of the auditorium: down the pink marble hallway, under the terra-cotta cornice, and into the squad car.

TWENTY-SEVEN

E
arly the next morning, these same two cops are in your room, on the phone again. This is how it has been all night, the two of them holed up in a motel room with you and Sam, the phone ringing every couple of hours.
Don't bring her in until we know something. Just stay there, make sure she doesn't blow out.
At long last, they can deliver the final update.

“Good news,” says the older cop.

After the sergeant's last call, many hours prior, you'd learned of hemorrhaging and understood that Mimi had been rushed to the operating room for an emergency hysterectomy. The word sounded serious enough, but you hadn't been entirely sure what it meant and had to ask for an explanation, which the officer had given with a stutter and more than a little pink in his cheeks. Still, in that moment, the finality of what this meant hadn't been of much importance to you. You could only focus on her condition and the images it conjured—a gurney being rushed down a corridor, feverish doctors and blood-drenched gowns—and the most immediate concern: would it be enough? Since then, you have remained in a fog of the past, replaying the events of the evening—no, the last year—on a continuous loop, focused on the moments where the story might have gone differently. You should have gone home when your father asked you to. You shouldn't have gone to Florida in the first place. You shouldn't have given Sal Costantini your name or any reason to remember it. You shouldn't have joined Cynthia on
Bandstand.
Yes, that is where this whole thing went wrong. That's when you developed this miserable itch. The officer tells you that the worst has been avoided. Surgery has gone as expected and without complication; Mimi's condition is serious but stable. The relief that washes over you is so complete that you almost don't hear the rest: according to the surgeon, a confluence of factors—a congenital abnormality, previous medical procedures, and a decade of trauma to the area—had contributed to her weakened uterus. You aren't entirely to blame. The cops have been instructed to let you go. There will be no charges.

Before they leave, the younger of the two officers shakes your hand. He has trouble hiding his disappointment. It's clear by his expression he looked forward to the possibility of booking a minor celebrity. The elder seems more sympathetic. He pats you on the shoulder. “Quite a relief, I'm sure,” he says.

“Yes,” you say, thinking of Mimi. Only later will it occur to you that he was referring to your own narrowly avoided catastrophe.

Once they leave, you are on your own. You will have to repeat all of this for Sam. He's gone out to fetch coffee and (at your insistence) the morning paper. Since leaving the auditorium, he's left your side only one other time, after the squad car pulled up to the Peabody, where he had to walk through the lobby still in the barest of his regalia, pack up, and check out of both rooms, and then bring everything to the agreed-upon meeting place, a nearby motel where you would be safe from scrutiny. He paid for these actions with an ignominious defeat—the commission declared a forfeit and awarded the belt to his opponent—but this news didn't seem to faze him. If his feelings for you are at all shaken by what has happened, he is keeping it convincingly to himself. His only concern has been for you; he has provided every comfort he could. You are sorry he wasn't here to hear the news. You don't want him to suffer any longer than necessary.

When the phone rings, you know right away who is on the other end. Only one other person knows where you are. You don't feel ready to talk to Joe, but Sam's not here to do the talking for you and you don't want to put him off.

“Have you heard?” he asks.

“The cops were here. They said she had an operation, but she's going to be okay.”

“And they told you that it wasn't your fault?”

“Yes, they told me.”

“Okay. Now you tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Say, ‘It wasn't my fault.' ”

Those words douse you like a wave—you had not expected reassurance from Joe—and leave you awash in gratitude. You have to press your eyes and your lips closed to stave off the emotions. When you regain composure, you say, “It wasn't my fault.”

“Good. Now we have to decide where to go from here. I don't think there will be any problem sanctioning a fight against Mildred, but if we are going forward, I will need to make my case to the commission soon.”

This shouldn't surprise you. For your entire relationship, Joe has been coaxing you up off the mat only to urge you on. Yet this time it sets you upright. You thought you were coming in to safe harbor, but this has sent you adrift again. After all this time, you are still unsure whether to read Joe's strategy as exploitation or as tough love.

“You still want me to win the belt?” you ask. “Even after what happened?”

“Well. I want
someone
to win the belt, and it's not going to be Mimi now, is it?”

“No, I know, it's just . . . people are going to feel differently about me now, aren't they?”

Joe does not say anything else for a long time. Perhaps he is carefully choosing his words, or maybe he is hoping you will realize what is inevitable before he has to say it. “Yes. The next time you step into a ring, it will be as a heel.”

It is not until you hear that final word—
heel
—that you understand. If you intend to stay in the business, the only way forward is to capitalize on the assault, to build a new, reviled persona around it. The thought of this makes you ill. Being a heel was unbearable before—the ominous glares, the insults and epithets, and, most terrifying of all, the terrible silence before and after every match. Wouldn't this treatment be infinitely more painful now for being deserved—a routine persecution for your crime?

But worse than what might lie ahead is what you must leave behind. What he is really saying is that the persona you have forged, the one on which you have gambled all of your relationships, is gone forever. No matter what you do next, The Sweetheart is dead. You are quite certain there is no way you can go into the ring without her. You need the love she inspires; you need the pulse and thrum of it. That sound that rushes in and fills the hollows inside you. Sure, it smells of kayfabe, but damn if it doesn't feel like bona fide affection. Maybe if you were still at the beginning of your career, just stepping out of Joe's DeSoto and onto the shell-strewn ground for the first time, your stars not yet drawn on a map but still twinkling above you, you could be different. Now you know what you want, and you know you can't get it as a heel.

“I can't do that, Joe. I wish I could. But I just can't.” And then you put the phone back into the cradle.

The room is too quiet now, too full of your thoughts, so you turn on the radio for noise. This is not quite enough to distract you, so you open your suitcase in search of your book; but when you lift the lid, you find, piled on top of your clothes, the stack of mail Mimi gave you last night. Sam must have swept it off the desk into your bag. Surprising, you think, dumping the letters onto the bed and sorting through them, that he would notice it in his hurry and preoccupation. You certainly hadn't. In fact, you forgot about the mail almost as soon as you threw it down; you hadn't so much as skimmed its contents. You were focused, after all: your eye was on the prize.

Most of the pile appears to be fan mail, which you simply can't stomach right now. You give each envelope a cursory glance before tossing it aside, stopping only when you spot your father's handwriting. Thankful, you tear into the envelope, but right away, your heart sinks. The letter is largely a report on Harold and all of his adorable and hilarious antics. If this were not bad enough, he fails even to say that you are missed. He hardly mentions you at all, except to say this:
I have decided to stop worrying about you so much. You have proven that you are happy and that you can take care of yourself.
It is unclear if he means this with pride or sadness or even if he really means it—perhaps he is trying to convince himself—but you read it as a severance. You have drifted too far from the shore to swim back. You don't know what you are going to do now, but one thing is clear: there is no going home.

After that, there is more fan mail, but at the bottom of the pile, there is a manila envelope. There is no address and no postage, only a name:
Betsy Mahoney.
The color of the envelope, its size, its heft: it's all too familiar. Only the name is different. If there is any color left in you, the sight of that name would be enough to drain it off. You grab your room key to tear into the package.
Betsy Mahoney.
Another set, filed under another name. It had never even crossed your mind. There they are: the pictures, the ones you didn't think existed anymore. Why are they here? How did they get here? Lucky break that Sam isn't around. Lucky, too, that Mimi didn't get curious. There's no telling what she might have done if she knew what she had.

Or did she?
I have done a lot for you,
she said when she handed over the stack of mail two days ago. And last night, in the ring:
I could have destroyed you.
You turn the envelope over and inspect its closure. Sure enough, its security has been breached: the original seal has been broken and the envelope resealed with additional tape.

So she had seen them. And then she gave them to you; she just handed them over without ultimatum. She could have easily assured herself a victory last night if she had used the pictures as blackmail. You wouldn't have hesitated to job the match in exchange for them. Everyone, yourself included, might be better off if only she had used her discovery as leverage: not the emotional leverage of gratitude, which she hadn't been above using—and which, had you realized what was in that envelope, would have been enough—but
real
leverage that would have left you without options. Years from now, she will tell you this was her original intention, but after her encounter with you in the lobby, she couldn't pull the trigger. She might have acted like a heel, but when it came down to it, she played it straight. And you put her in the hospital. This knowledge burrows inside of you and lodges itself so surely that it will never be extracted. For the rest of your life, you will wish that you had understood this sooner, that you had acted differently not just on that infamous evening but so many other times.

You gather up the photos and the rest of the letters, sweep them into the bottom of your luggage, and then curl up on the bed. You pray that Sam will take his time, get stuck in traffic, get lost for a while. You don't have the stomach for the comfort he will surely want to offer.

•    •    •

The key in the door startles you out of what might have been slumber. How long have you been asleep? Not long, surely; Sam is just returning. He nudges open the door with his toe, precariously balancing a paper bag and a cardboard box holding four cups of coffee, and you jump up to help him.

“Where's the black-and-white?” he asks.

“Gone,” you say, taking the box from him and setting it on the nightstand. “More coffee for us, I guess.”

You give him the same news the cops gave you, in the same flat tone.

“She's okay, then?”

“As okay as can be expected.”

“So, that's it? You're free to go?”

“I guess so. Let me see that paper.”

Sam seems to be carefully considering what he should do or say next. You fish the newspaper out of the bag yourself. It is already turned to the page you want. The article is barely a column and is not accompanied by a picture.
Positively criminal,
you read. You sink onto the bed and hang your head between your knees.

“What now?” Sam asks.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” you say to the carpeting.

“Should I call Joe?”

This is not the time to feel the old resentments. Still, you can't help but stiffen when he says
I
instead of
you.

“I've already talked to him. He still wanted me to fight on Saturday.”

“And?”

“And I said no.”

You do not look up to see Sam's face when you say this, but you can imagine that it is as neutral as he can make it. After a long silence, he ventures, “Then what are you going to do?”

“I don't know. I haven't gotten that far yet.”

“I guess you know what I would like you to do.”

“You still want me to come with you?” you ask, finally daring to lift your head.

“Of course,” he says. “You're still my sweetheart. That's all I care about.”

You do not deserve Sam's second thoughts, and yet here he is. It is both humbling and burdensome to be the object of such certainty when you are so unsure of yourself. But it is also an enormous relief. Everything else is up in the air, and yet he is still here.

It is too much. You have to wipe your eyes with the heels of your hands.

Sam stays where he is, gives you the space and time to have this moment, pays just enough attention to assure you that comfort is available should you want it. When it seems you've pulled yourself together without this, he says quietly, “Just think about it, okay?” After you nod your assurance, he politely steers the conversation toward lighter fare.

“Coffee's getting cold.” He examines the four cups, selects two, and hands you one. “This one's yours. I hope it's got enough cream for you. I told her to go heavy.”

Sam hops up to take a seat on top of the dresser and blows across his coffee. “Let's just stay here for a little while, okay?” he says. “I don't have to be home for a few days. We don't even have to leave this room if you don't want.”

“You don't have to stay.”

“I
want
to stay.” Sam jumps off the bed, grabs the paper bag, and reaches inside, pulling out a pair of MoonPies. “Hungry?”