Emperor of the Air (8 page)

I get up and go over to the painting again. I glance behind me. I put my head next to the wall, lift the frame a little bit, and when I look I see that behind it the plaster is stained brown from an interior leak. I take a deep breath and then put the frame back. From outside in the yard I hear the women speaking about basement storage space, and rather than listen I cross the room and enter a hallway. It smells of grease. On the wall, at waist level, are children’s hand marks that go all the way to the far end. I walk down there and enter the kitchen. In it are a Formica table and four plastic chairs, everything made large by the low ceiling. I see a door in the corner, and when I cross the room and open it I’m surprised to find a stairway with brooms and mops hung above the banister. The incline is steep, and when I go up I find myself in the rear of an upstairs closet. Below me Jodi and the agent are still talking. I push through the clothes hanging in front of me and open the door.

I’m in the master bedroom now. A king-size bed stands in front of me, but something’s funny about it, and when I look closer I think that it might be two single beds pushed together. It’s covered by a spread. I stop for a moment to think. I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong. We came here to see the house, and when people show their homes they take out everything of value so that they won’t have to worry. I go to the window. Framing it is a new-looking lace curtain, pinched up in a tieback. I look out at a crab apple tree and some telephone wires and try to calculate where the ocean might be. The shadows point west, but the coastline is irregular in this area and juts in different directions. The view of the crab apple is pretty, spotted with shade and light—but then I see that in the corner behind the curtain the glass is splintered and has been taped. I lift the curtain and look at the pane. The crack spreads like a spider web. Then I walk back to the bed. I flatten my hands and slip them into the crevice between the two mattresses, and when I extend my arms the two halves come apart. I push the beds back together and sit down. Then I look into the corner, and my heart skips because I see that against the far wall, half-hidden by the open door, is an old woman in a chair.

“Excuse me,” I say.

“That’s all right,” she says. She folds her hands. “The window cracked ten years ago.”

“My wife and I are looking at the house.”

“I know.”

I walk to the window. “A nice view,” I say, pretending to look at something in the yard. The woman doesn’t say anything. I can hear water running in the pipes, some children outside. Tiny, pale apples hang among the leaves of the tree.

“You know,” I say, “we’re not really looking at the house to buy it.”

I walk back to the bed. The skin on the woman’s arms is mottled and hangs in folds. “We can’t afford to buy it,” I say. “I don’t make enough money to buy a house and—I don’t know why, but my wife wants to look at them anyway. She wants people to think we have enough money to buy a house.”

The woman looks at me.

“It’s crazy,” I say, “but what are you going to do in that kind of situation?”

She clears her throat. “My son-in-law,” she begins, “wants to sell the house so he can throw the money away.” Her voice is slow, and I think she has no saliva in her mouth. “He has a friend who goes to South America and swallows everything, then comes back through customs with a plastic bag in his bowel.”

She stops. I look at her. “He’s selling the house to invest the money in drugs?”

“I’m glad you don’t want to buy,” she says.

I might have had a small career in baseball, but I’ve learned in the past eleven years to talk about other things. I was twenty-three the last pitch I threw. The season was over and Jodi was in the stands in a wool coat. I was about to get a college degree in physical education. I knew how to splint a broken bone and how to cut the grass on a golf green, and then I decided that to turn your life around you had to start from the inside. I had a coach in college who said he wasn’t trying to teach us to be pro ballplayers; he was trying to teach us to be decent people.

When we got married, I told Jodi that no matter what happened, no matter where things went, she could always trust me. We’d been seeing each other for a year, and in that time I’d been reading books. Not baseball books. Biographies: Martin Luther King, Gandhi. To play baseball right you have to forget that you’re a person; you’re muscles, bone, the need for sleep and food. So when you stop, you’re saved by someone else’s ideas. This isn’t true just for baseball players. It’s true for anyone who’s failed at what he loves.

A friend got me the coaching job in California, and as soon as we were married we came west. Jodi still wanted to be an actress. We rented a room in a house with six other people, and she took classes in dance in the mornings and speech in the afternoons. Los Angeles is full of actors. Sometimes at parties we counted them. After a couple of years she started writing a play, and until we moved into where we are now we used to read pieces of it out loud to our six housemates.

By then I was already a little friendly with the people at school, but when I was out of the house, even after two years in Los Angeles, I was alone. People were worried about their own lives. In college I’d spent almost all my time with another ballplayer, Mitchell Lighty, and I wasn’t used to new people. A couple of years after we graduated, Mitchell left to play pro ball in Panama City, and he came out to Los Angeles on his way there. The night before his plane left, he and I went downtown to a bar on the top floor of a big hotel. We sat by a window, and after a few drinks we went out onto the balcony. The air was cool. Plants grew along the edge, ivy was woven into the railing, and birds perched among the leaves. I was amazed to see the birds resting there thirty stories up on the side of the building. When I brushed the plants the birds took off into the air, and when I leaned over to watch them, I became dizzy with the distance to the sidewalk and with the small, rectangular shapes of the cars. The birds sailed in wide circles over the street and came back to the balcony. Then Mitchell put his drink on a chair, took both my hands, and stepped up onto the railing. He stood there on the metal crossbar, his wrists locked in my hands, leaning into the air.

“For God’s sake,” I whispered. He leaned farther out, pulling me toward the railing. A waiter appeared at the sliding door next to us. “Take it easy,” I said. “Come on down.” Mitchell let go of one of my hands, kicked up one leg, and swung out over the street. His black wingtip shoe swiveled on the railing. The birds had scattered, and now they were circling, chattering angrily as he rocked. I was holding on with my pitching arm. My legs were pressed against the iron bars, and just when I began to feel the lead, just when the muscles began to shake, Mitchell jumped back onto the balcony. The waiter came through the sliding door and grabbed him, but in the years after that—the years after Mitchell got married and decided to stay in Panama City—I thought of that incident as the important moment of my life.

I don’t know why. I’ve struck out nine men in a row and pitched to half a dozen hitters who are in the majors now, but when I think back over my life, about what I’ve done, not much more than that stands out.

As we lie in bed that night, Jodi reads aloud from the real estate listings. She uses abbreviations: BR, AC, D/D. As she goes down the page—San Marino, Santa Ana, Santa Monica—I nod occasionally or make a comment.

When I wake up later, early in the morning, the newspaper is still next to her on the bed. I can see its pale edge in the moonlight. Sometimes I wake up like this, maybe from some sound in the night, and when I do, I like to lie with my eyes closed and feel the difference between the bed and the night air. I like to take stock of things. These are the moments when I’m most in love with my wife. She’s next to me, and her face when she sleeps is untroubled. Women say now that they don’t want to be protected, but when I watch her slow breathing, her parted lips, I think what a delicate thing a life is. I lean over and touch her mouth.

When I was in school I saw different girls, but since I’ve been married to Jodi I’ve been faithful. Except for once, a few years ago, I’ve almost never thought about someone else. I have a friend at school, Ed Ryan, a history teacher, who told me about the time he had an affair, and about how his marriage broke up right afterward. It wasn’t a happy thing to see. She was a cocktail waitress at a bar a few blocks from school, he said. Ed told me the whole long story, about how he and the waitress had fallen in love so suddenly that he had no choice about leaving his wife. After the marriage was over, though, Ed gained fifteen or twenty pounds. One night, coming home from school, he hit a tree and wrecked his car. A few days later he came in early to work and found that all the windows in his classroom had been broken. At first I believed him when he said he thought his wife had done it, but that afternoon we were talking and I realized what had really happened.

We were in a lunch place. “You know,” Ed said, “sometimes you think you know a person.” He was looking into his glass. “You can sleep next to a woman, you can know the way she smiles when she’s turned on, you can see in her hands when she wants to talk about something. Then you wake up one day and some signal’s been exchanged—and you don’t know what it is, but you think for the first time,
Maybe I don’t know her
. Just something. You never know what the signal is.” I looked at him then and realized that there was no cocktail waitress and that Ed had broken the windows.

I turn in bed now and look at Jodi. Then I slide the newspaper off the blanket. We know each other, I think. The time I came close to adultery was a few years ago, with a secretary at school, a temporary who worked afternoons. She was a dark girl, didn’t say much, and she wore turquoise bracelets on both wrists. She kept finding reasons to come into my office, which I share with the two other coaches. It’s three desks, a window, a chalkboard. One night I was there late, after everyone else had gone, and she came by to do something. It was already dark. We talked for a while, and then she took off one of her bracelets to show me. She said she wanted me to see how beautiful it was, how the turquoise changed color in dim light. She put it into my hand, and then I knew for sure what was going on. I looked at it for a long time, listening to the little sounds in the building, before I looked up.

“Charlie?” Jodi says now in the dark.

“Yes?”

“Would you do whatever I asked you to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, would you do anything in the world that I asked you to do?”

“That depends,” I say.

“On what?”

“On what you asked. If you asked me to rob someone, then maybe I wouldn’t.”

I hear her roll over, and I know she’s looking at me. “But don’t you think I would have a good reason to ask you if I did?”

“Probably.”

“And wouldn’t you do it just because I asked?”

She turns away again and I try to think of an answer. We’ve already argued once today, while she was making dinner, but I don’t want to lie to her. That’s what we argued about earlier. She asked me what I thought of the house we looked at, and I told her the truth, that a house just wasn’t important to me.

“Then what is important to you?”

I was putting the forks and knives on the table. “Leveling with other people is important to me,” I answered. “And you’re important to me.” Then I said, “And whales.”

“What?”

“Whales are important to me.”

That was when it started. We didn’t say much after that, so it wasn’t an argument exactly. I don’t know why I mentioned the whales. They’re great animals, the biggest things on earth, but they’re not important to me.

“What if it was something not so bad,” she says now, “but still something you didn’t want to do?”

“What?”

The moonlight is shining in her hair. “What if I asked you to do something that ordinarily you wouldn’t do yourself—would you do it if I asked?”

“And it wasn’t something so bad?”

“Right.”

“Yes,” I say. “Then I would do it.”

“What I want you to do,” she says on Wednesday, “is look at another house.” We’re eating dinner. “But I want them to take us seriously,” she says. “I want to act as if we’re really thinking of buying it, right on the verge. You know—maybe we will, maybe we won’t.”

I take a sip of water, look out the window. “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Nobody walks in off the street and decides in an afternoon whether to buy a house.”

“Maybe we’ve been looking at it from a distance for a long time,” she says, “assessing things.” She isn’t eating her dinner. I cooked it, chicken, and it’s steaming on her plate. “Maybe we’ve been waiting for the market to change.”

“Why is it so important to you?”

“It just is. And you said you’d do it if it was important to me. Didn’t you say that?”

“I had a conversation with the old woman in the yellow house.”

“What?”

“When we looked at the other house,” I say, “I went off by myself for a while. I talked with the old woman who was sitting upstairs.”

“What did you say?”

“Do you remember her?”

“Yes.”

“She told me that the owner was selling the house so he could use the money to smuggle drugs.”

“So?”

“So,” I say, “you have to be careful.”

This Sunday Jodi drives. The day is bright and blue, with a breeze from the ocean, and along Santa Monica Boulevard the palm fronds are rustling. I’m in my suit. If Jodi talks to the agent about offers, I’ve decided I’ll stay to the back, nod or shrug at questions. She parks the car on a side street and we walk around the corner and go into the lobby of one of the hotels. We sit down in cloth chairs near the entrance. A bellman carries over an ashtray on a stand and sets it between us; Jodi hands him a bill from her purse. I look at her. The bellman is the age of my father. He moves away fast, and I lean forward to get my shoulder loose in my suit. I’m not sure if the lobby chairs are only for guests, and I’m ready to get up if someone asks. Then a woman comes in and Jodi stands and introduces herself. “Charlie Gordon,” I say when the woman puts out her hand. She’s in a gray pinstripe skirt and a jacket with a white flower in the lapel. After she says something to Jodi, she leads us outside to the parking circle, where a car is brought around by the valet, a French car, and Jodi and I get in back. The seats are leather.