The Fan

25

Bobby Rayburn sat very still on a stool in the visitor’s clubhouse. He checked the urge to move because he knew that any movement he made would lead to breaking things, and he didn’t want to do that with the press around. He glared at the back of Burrows’s head, bobbing over a microphone. Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten a hit-maybe he would never hit again-but he would never have dropped that fly ball. From long ago came a memory of kids’ teams he’d played on-how the subs would roll in the dirt and slide on the grass, just to get their uniforms dirty too. The memory maddened him: they were subs, and he was who he was. In his spotless road uniform, he glared again, uselessly, at the back of Burrows’s head. Maybe he would never hit again.

A few stools away sat Primo, shirt off and sweaty, surrounded by Spanish-speaking reporters, some from Mexico or God knows where; it was always like that when they played on the coast. Stook stood behind him, massaging his shoulders.

“Just a little sore,” Bobby heard Stook say, “from when you made that catch.”

“Be on the highlights, for sure,” said someone else.

“Take a sauna when you get back,” Stook said.

“Don’t like saunas,” Primo said.

“A steam, then,” Stook replied. “It doesn’t matter.”

Enough of that, Bobby thought; enough of watching Primo get treated like a superstar instead of the slap hitter he was. He began unbuttoning his shirt, a little roughly perhaps. The last button snapped off and flew across the room. A woman coming through the door picked it up and handed it to him.

“Jewel,” he said.

She nodded. “Got it in one,” she said. “I thought you were supposed to be bad with names.”

Bobby didn’t like that. “What do you want?”

“I mentioned I might have a few follow-up questions, and you said-”

Just call. “I know what I said. But I didn’t expect to see you out here.”

“I’m a reporter, Bobby. Whither thou goest I shall go.”

Bobby felt a smile coming, despite how angry and pent-up he was. He took a close look at her face, and in it caught a glimpse, no more than that, of the world beyond baseball. Many people said there was such a world-Wald said so all the time-but it had never penetrated. A world beyond baseball, and this woman had a foot in it. “Let’s have ’em,” he said.

“Let’s have what?”

“Your questions.”

She glanced around. Primo said something in Spanish and the reporters laughed. “Why don’t we go somewhere?” Jewel said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

Because I don’t socialize with reporters. That was the answer that popped up first in his mind, and the right one. But aloud Bobby said: “Why not?”

“No reason I know,” Jewel replied. “Got your ID?”

Bobby laughed. A minute or two before, he’d been ready to demolish the clubhouse, and now he was laughing. He stopped when he noticed Primo looking at him.

Jewel had a convertible. She wheeled up to the entrance at the players’ lot.

“Nice,” said Bobby, walking through the gate.

“Hertz.”

He got in.

“You disappoint me,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“I expected you to leap over the door, not open it.”

“I’ve already been to high school,” Bobby said.

She shot him a quick glance. “Not me,” Jewel said. “I’m still making up for it.” She stepped on the gas, hard enough to make the tires squeal, just a little.

“You didn’t go to high school?”

“Not what you mean by high school.”

“And what do you think that is?”

Jewel didn’t answer right away. She swung onto a ramp and accelerated onto a freeway. The night was warm and Jewel drove fast, her eyes on the road, her hands in proper ten-minutes-to-two position on the steering wheel, but relaxed. He noticed her hands: small, but strong-looking, the nails unpainted. Workmanlike, he thought; yet for some reason he had to force himself to take his eyes off them.

That’s when she said: “Val.”

“Val?”

“Valerie. Sorry. That’s what you mean by high school, isn’t it, Bobby?”

“I didn’t go to high school with Val.”

“Girls like her, then,” Jewel said. “And the whole scene that goes with it.”

“Isn’t it the same all over?”

“At my high school, boychick, if you didn’t win a prize at the science fair, you were a nobody.”

“Did you win a prize?” Bobby asked, making a mental note to ask Wald exactly what boychick meant.

“I did,” Jewel said. “But not in science.”

“In what?”

“Poetry. There was a prize every year for the best poem.”

“What was it?”

Jewel was silent for a moment. “The Oxford Book of English Verse. ”

“I meant the poem.”

Jewel, topping eighty miles an hour, turned and gave him a look. “Some other time,” she said. She flashed her brights at a Ferrari, forcing it over and breezing by.

“Where are we going?” Bobby asked.

“A place I know.”

“Where?”

“Right,” she said. “You lived here. I forgot.”

“I should never have left,” Bobby said. The words were out before he could stop them. She didn’t look at him or anything, but she heard: he could tell by her hands.

She took him to an old lodge on a saddle peak in the mountains. It had a view of the Valley on one side and the ocean, dark and endless, on the other.

“Makes you think of Raymond Chandler, doesn’t it?” said Jewel, as the valet took the car and they started up a piney path.

Bobby, who’d suddenly been wondering what it would be like to play in Japan, said: “What do you mean?”

“You know. Farewell, My Lovely. ”

“I thought that was Robert Mitchum.”

Jewel burst out laughing and took his hand. “I’m thirsty.” After a few steps, she let go. Her touch lingered on his palm.

They sat in high-backed wicker chairs on a terrace overlooking the treetops, and beyond them and far down, the sea. Nearby a pig turned on a spit over a wood fire, reflecting the flames on its glazed skin. A miniature flame bloomed from a candle on the table between them. The air, cooler in the mountains, smelled of eucalyptus.

A waiter in ruffled white shirt and string tie appeared.

“Champagne all right with you, Bobby?” Jewel said.

He nodded, although beer was what he wanted. She ordered, pronouncing the French brand name in a way that sounded French. “Aren’t you taking a chance,” he said to her, when the waiter had gone, “ordering champagne?”

“Why?”

“What if I start spraying it all over the place?”

Jewel laughed. “I’m sure there’s more to you than baseball, Bobby.” Bobby didn’t know about that. Perhaps she read his mind, because she added: “The very fact that we’re having this conversation proves it.”

The waiter returned, popped the cork, poured. Jewel raised her glass. “Here’s to singles up the middle.”

“I don’t want to talk about baseball,” Bobby said.

Jewel laughed again: “I wasn’t.” Bobby didn’t get that at all. She stopped laughing and asked, “What do you want to talk about?”

You, thought Bobby, but he didn’t say it. This wasn’t some hotel-lobby bimbo he was going to end up in bed with. This was a… what? He really didn’t know.

Jewel took a sip of her drink, more than a sip. “How did you get together with Wald?” she asked.

“Is that one of the questions?”

“Yes.”

Bobby shrugged. “He was a brother.”

“Brother?”

“Fraternity brother. I didn’t know him well back then-he was a year or two ahead. And a bit of a…”

“Nerd?”

“I was going to say dweeb. That’s not for publication.”

“Of course not. Funny how the dweebs of yesteryear become the movers and shakers of today.”

Bobby frowned. “Chaz isn’t a mover and shaker. He’s my agent.”

“Do you know how many other clients he has?”

Bobby shrugged. “Boyle, for one.”

“Primo?”

“No.” Bobby put down his glass.

So did Jewel. “I’ve done some research. Charles Wald has twenty-three clients in baseball alone, sixteen in the majors as of Opening Day. Doesn’t that make him a mover and shaker?”

“He’s just an agent,” Bobby said, but then he remembered the four pillars, and wasn’t sure.

“He probably makes more money than you do, Bobby.”

Bobby was appalled. He picked up his glass and drained it; then saw that she was looking at him in that measuring way again, her head slightly tilted.

“Why do you want to be traded, Bobby?”

Jewel watched Bobby’s face as he dealt with that one. First came surprise, then anger, then wariness.

“Who says I want to be traded?” he asked.

Jewel refilled their glasses. This was too easy. Not that Bobby was stupid; it was just that she was a woman and he, in many ways, still a boy, as Wald had said. That was the appeal, of course; maybe the appeal of the whole game. The realization that this was a mismatch made her feel bad, in passing. “Word gets around,” she told him, and pressed on. “Does your wanting to be traded have anything to do with Primo?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And on: “Is it because he’s having a career year and you’re in this horrible slump?”

Bobby negated that suggestion with a sweeping gesture of his arm; his glass crashed on the flagstones. He raised his voice. “I’m not in a slump. They’re just not falling in.”

The sudden violence didn’t frighten her; it confirmed that she was on the right track. She nodded and said, “Sometimes it must feel like you’re never going to hit again.”

Jewel expected another demonstration of annoyance, frustration, rage: more raising of the voice, more shattering glass, something. But there was nothing. And then in the candlelight, she saw his eyes fill with tears: the doubly reflected flame trembled, wobbled; but there was no overflow.

She wasn’t ready for that. “Excuse me.” She went inside to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face; a hard face, she saw in the mirror, with Janie way underneath. She also saw a new gray hair, which she plucked. When she returned, Bobby was drinking a beer and his eyes were dry. He tried to make them opaque as she came near. Jewel didn’t want that, didn’t feel like pressing him anymore. She could fill in the gaps without him.

“Ready?” she said.

He nodded. She paid. They went to the car. On a whim, she took the bottle of champagne, still half full, with her. On a whim: that was what she told herself.

Jewel drove along the narrow mountain road that led to the head of the nearest canyon. She no longer drove fast; there was no traffic, the night was quiet, Bobby silent. A baseball-sized rock fell out of the darkness into the cone of her headlights, bouncing on the pavement, and back into the night. She slowed down even more; that was the only reason she spotted the lookout around the next bend. Without thinking, she pulled off the road, continued between two tall rocks like gateposts, and parked on the edge of a black abyss. Without thinking: that was what she told herself.

In the distance lay the coast highway, traffic crawling along it like glow-worms. Then came a white fringe of surf, and beyond that the sea. Jewel felt Bobby’s eyes on her.

“Black as night,” she said,

“My heart,

Black as coal

Black as the ace of spades

Black as the blackest cliche,

Heart of my heartest heart,

Come give me a love.”

There was a silence. Then Bobby said: “What’s that?”

“The beginning of my poem,” Jewel replied. “The prize-winning poem.”

“You’re scaring me,” Bobby said.

Jewel laughed. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” she said, although she was trembling when she said it. Then she put her arm around him and kissed him on the mouth. He kissed her back, but tentative, almost shy. That surprised her.

And it surprised her when he said: “Are you making up for high school?”

“You’re very smart, for a ballplayer,” Jewel said. She kissed him again. She felt the strength of his body, the night all around, soft and warm, the abyss so close; everything conspiring with the mood she was in. “Take off your clothes,” she said.

He did.

His body was beautiful, as beautiful as the most beautiful cliche. She must have known that already, of course, having seen him many times in locker rooms, but she hadn’t let it register: that was the rule.

She put her lips to his chest, then started slowly down; going down on him, as so many women, or girls, did every season. She didn’t want to be one of them-did they have sex as infrequently as she, once in the last year, not at all in the two years before that? — but she wanted to go down on him anyway. She was close to coming already, and that wasn’t like her either.

Bobby stopped her. He drew her head up, level with his. The look in his eyes was complex; she would parse it later. Her own eyes, she supposed, were wide black holes of lust.

“You too,” he said.

“Me too, what?”

“Your clothes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

He helped her. She didn’t resist.

“Not bad, for an old lady,” he said.

“There’s an endorsement.”

“Here’s another.”

Then they were in the back seat; starry sky, soft night, abyss. And Jewel was having sex unlike any she had known; or so she thought. She fell under the illusion-did it have to be an illusion? — that something had clicked into place, and her whole life suddenly made sense. She came and came.

After, when they were dressed and sitting in their proper places in the front of the Hertz convertible, Bobby surprised her once more: “Will I see you again?”

A surprise, and a nice one, but she didn’t want to think about all the problems-how could they see each other, as long as they did what they did? Also, she didn’t want moony talk: she wanted to stay in this mood. She swigged from the bottle, then shook it and sprayed champagne into the night. “Here’s to singles up the middle and doubles in the gap, to round-trippers and grand slams.”

“Double entendre, right?” said Bobby.

“As double as it gets,” said Jewel, thinking it might not be a mismatch after all. She hurled the bottle over the edge.