Death in Paradise

Chapter Thirty-six

Lilly came down to the lakeside one evening to watch Jesse play. Though it was still bright, the lights were on. The players gathered in shorts and sweats and tee shirts and tank tops and baseball caps on backward. All of them had expensive gloves, and the talk among them was the same talk, she thought, that Cap Anson had heard, or Cobb, or Ruth, or Mickey Mantle: insulting, self-deprecating, valued for its originality less than for its tradition, like the ancient ballad singers she'd heard of, rearranging the same phrases to create something new. The music was the same. Beloved teammates. Beloved adversaries. Celebrating the same ritual, together on a summer evening. She felt entirely separate from this. She understood it, but she knew she'd never feel it. If there were real differences between the genders, she thought, she was observing one of them.

Looking at the game, her eyes were drawn to Jesse. It wasn't just because of their intimacy, she was pretty sure. It was the way he moved. Among twenty or more men who all valued the same thing, Jesse seemed most to embody it.

It was darkening after the game. Jesse and Lilly walked across the outfield toward the parking lot. The coolers were open. The beer was out. The cans were popped. The bright malty smell of the beer rode gently on the evening air. The men smelled of clean sweat. Jesse took two beers from a cooler and opened them and handed one to Lilly. She took it though she didn't like beer much.

"I don't belong here," Lilly said.

Jesse smiled.

"Can she play short?" someone said. "We need someone, bad, to play short."

Jesse held up his hands, all five fingers spread.

"Five for five," Jesse said.

He walked with Lilly across the parking lot toward his car. He had his glove under his left arm, and the open beer in his right hand.

"Don't you want to stay and drink beer with your friends?" Lilly said. "I could meet you later."

"No," Jesse said. "I'd rather drink beer with you."

She liked that. They sat in his car in the quiet, drinking their beer.

"You got a hit every time," Lilly said.

Jesse nodded.

"People hit eight hundred in this league," Jesse said. "Nobody's throwing a major-league slider up there."

The beer was very cold. One of her husbands had insisted on drinking it at room temperature, claiming that you could experience the beer's full complexity. Lilly found it more tolerable cold.

"You're being modest," she said.

"No," Jesse said. "I'm being accurate. I'm supposed to go five for five. I was a professional ballplayer."

"And the other players never were."

"No."

"And professionals beat amateurs."

"Every time," Jesse said. "You want another beer?"

"God no," Lilly said.

"You don't like beer."

"No."

"We don't have to stay here," Jesse said. "We could go someplace and get something you like."

"I like it here."

"Okay."

Jesse got out of the car and got another beer and brought it back.

Someone yelled, "You doing something bad in that car, Jesse?"

Jesse got back in the front seat and closed the door. He drank some beer. It didn't have the jolt that scotch did, and it took longer. But it had enough.

"Do you feel the same way about being a policeman?" Lilly said.

"As?"

"As being a ballplayer," Lilly said. "You know-professionals and amateurs?"

"Yes."

"And you're a professional policeman."

"I am."

"And it matters to you."

"Yes."

Someone had turned the field lights off. They could see the moon at the low arc of the horizon. They were quiet. There was something surprisingly romantic about sitting in a silent car with the windows down on a summer night. Maybe the memory of going parking, Lilly thought, memory of the uncertain groping in parked cars when everyone first had their license. It had all been starting then. She had not contemplated, then, being twice divorced at forty, living alone in an uninteresting condominium.

"Is the police work more important than Jenn?"

"No."

"Maybe it should be."

Jesse drank the rest of his beer.

"Because?"

"Because you can control the police work," Lilly said. "At least some of it."

"And I can't control Jenn."

"Nobody can control anybody," Lilly said.

"I don't want to control her, I just want to love her."

Lilly smiled in the darkness. She thought of all the psychotherapy that had escorted her through two bad marriages. Shrinks must get bored, she thought. Always the same illusions. Always the same mistakes.

"You can do that now," she said to Jesse. "What you want is for her to love you. You have to trust her to do that."

Jesse stared out through the windshield at the opaque surface of the darkening lake.

"I'm not sure I can," he said after a time.

"That's the bitch of it," Lilly said.

The parking lot was getting empty. Most of the beer was gone, and the Boys of Evening were drifting back to home and wives and children. Back to adulthood. None of them would have given that up to play ball forever in the twilight. But all of them were grateful for the evenings when they could.

Beside him in the front seat Lilly said, "I feel as if we ought to neck."

"If we can do it without breaking a rib on the storage compartment between us," Jesse said.

"When you were seventeen that wouldn't have bothered you," Lilly said.

"When I was seventeen I didn't have an apartment to neck in."

"And now you do."

"And now I do."

"Well then," Lilly said. "Lets go there."

"And neck?"

"For starters," she said.