Hardball (7 page)

Not until a pipe under the house broke and I found out it was the avocado tree roots pushing on the foundation did I know why the off-bloom had bugged me. The tree was going to be a major pain in my ass. So I had it cut down. Had the stump ground out. Roots dug out as far as they could be without sending my house down the hill.

Then my patio was too sunny. The front of the house wasn’t on the street. It faced south, right into the giant eyeball rising and setting over the east and west sides of the horizon. I was home half the summer, and I spent it trying to manage the shade in my front yard.

I was in a tucked-away enclave in the Oaks section of the Hollywood Hills. I’d bought it for the view and kept it for the quiet. I was easily distracted by anything sensory. Everything found a way into my eyes and ears. Even a strange taste could distract me. A shirt seam half undone and rubbing my skin could drive me nuts. So the ambient noise of the city was great until a truck was a little too loud or the neighbors two blocks away let their smoke detector battery go dead and I was assaulted by chirping every thirty seconds.

In my house, I controlled my distractions. I could have as much sensory input as I needed to work out or run my business. No one watched me up in the hills. One side of my house faced the cliff and Los Angeles. One faced the narrow street. The back faced the neighbor, a movie director and his wife who were home half the year, and the other side faced an acre of nothing.

But the avocado tree had been a sort of good luck charm, and that off-bloom, and the crushing roots on the foundation, had fucked everything else.

The girl I fucked in New York found a boyfriend. The one I fucked in St. Louis tried to get me to commit to I-don’t-know-what. Mary in Oakland was fine, but we only played the A’s once a year unless they got in the playoffs, which was unlikely. So I went without pussy for too much of the summer, and the bad luck built up.

I made an error in game three of the playoffs.

I didn’t think of things as going to hell. None of those individual craptastications spun together to make a shitstorm.

At Christmas, my mother had announced she was selling the house and moving into an apartment with her boyfriend. I was happy for her but felt unmoored.

Still, I could juggle all the little things. I’d work it out.

Not until I looked under the table and saw my glove was gone did I put it all together. Things were going wrong. General things. Every piece on the board had shifted, from my personal to my professional life and everything that linked them.

I needed to put it all back.

I backtracked. The tree. Well, there wasn’t much I could do there that wouldn’t take eighty years to fix. But I planted a fig tree and hoped for the best. I’d find new women where I needed them, and I bought the house I grew up in. My mother still left it to live in town, but the house? I had that.

Then Daria’s pin.

Losing the stupid insult of a pin reminded me that I hadn’t fixed a thing. All I’d done was plaster over the leak. I needed Daria’s pin. I couldn’t play without it. Not successfully. I didn’t know where the leak in my charmed life was, but I knew the luck was seeping through it.

Going to the Petersen and seducing a school librarian was exactly what I needed to keep my mind off everything. An easily achievable goal that would fill the well of shitty circumstances.

Vivian the librarian.

Vivian with a bowl of apples on her desk for the kids.

Vivian with a neck like a lotus stem.

She’d do nicely.

Vivian

Jim opened the door of his green Saturn to let me in. He was a gentleman’s gentleman, looking into my eyes when he spoke despite the low-cut liquid silk of the dress, complimenting me chastely, and keeping the conversation light.

“Security told me Dash Wallace from the Dodgers was in the building Monday,” he said. “I wonder what he wanted.”

I told him about the glove and the conversation after, leaving out the double entendre about endowments and the part where I blurted out how handsome he was. “So it’s this big deal because you can’t go around accusing kids of stealing, but we have to solve the issue if there is one. We’ve searched backpacks and lockers—”

“Third graders don’t have lockers.”

“But they have brothers and sisters and cousins, yada yada. It’s such a disaster. If one of our kids took it, it’s not in the building. So we’re contacting parents, and it’s going to be an ugly mess, I’m sure.”

“Did he say what was so special about it?”

“No. Just that it was important. I don’t have high hopes.”

The museum rose at the intersection of Fairfax and Wilshire. Gigantic wind-shaped comic-book swirls made of brushed metal covered the building, lit from behind in deep red. In one sense, the building was ridiculous and fake, out of proportion, overly ambitious, poorly yet grandly designed to look like a birthday cake or to represent the absurd cartoonishness of Los Angeles itself, a city so driven by cars that they had their own museum. In another sense, if the designers had wanted to go big or go home, their mission had been accomplished.

Jim pulled into the lot, the only entrance to the building (it was a car museum after all), where we were stopped by a valet. Flashes went off for everyone getting out of their limos and foreign sports cars, but he and I were able to walk up to the doors without a glance from anyone.

I caught a glimpse of Michael Greydon and Laine Cartwright with two of their children. Brad Sinclair was there. Monica Faulkner, the singer. I scanned for Dash. Every face. Every body. Would I see him first, or would he see me?

One guy. From the back. Brown hair and a perfect body next to a woman in a copper up-do. I gulped. Of course he wouldn’t be here alone. The man turned to kiss the woman.

Wasn’t him. But it was a reminder. Dash was a beautiful man. He was rich, talented, and sought after. He wasn’t coming alone.

“Wow, this is some raffle you won,” I said as I clung to Jim’s arm. I was glad I’d worn the gold dress. It was appropriate. Whoever Dash’s date was, I was about to give her a run for her money.

We got on the white-lit polymer steps to the second floor. Below us, the first floor was designed like a freeway clover, and inside each leaf was a car on a turntable. One from each of the major auto-producing nations: Japan, the US, Italy, India.

I scanned for him below. Nothing.

“Who are you looking for?” Jim asked.

“Dash Wallace said he was going to be here.”

“The roof is the VIPs,” he said as we crested the second floor. “He’s probably up there.”

I deflated and felt relief at the same time. I could stop looking for him because I wouldn’t see him unless he came looking for me, which was unlikely.

As soon as we stepped off the escalator, we were assaulted by a cacophony of bells, whistles, whirring, and tapping. The floor was crowded with people and games, machines, tables, and an announcer.

“Looks like all the fun stuff is here,” I said.

“Your specialty.”

“I’m
fun
? I’m not fun.”

He laughed. “Yes, you are.”

“What do you want to do first?” I straightened his satin blue tie and patted his lapel.

“Batman.” He pointed at the Batmobile. “Gotta do Batman.”

We headed to the exhibit that had inspired the party. The museum had acquired each incarnation of the Batmobile from the 1970s TV show to the most recent reboot. We grabbed drinks and got in line to sit where Michael Keaton had sat while the car shimmied in front of a screen depicting the chase scene with Superman.

Michelle appeared when we were at the front of the line. Her smooth ebony skin seemed to stretch for miles from her neck to her sternum. Her breasts were covered with two strips of shiny white fabric belted at the waist so precisely placed that not an inch of inappropriate nudity could be seen at any angle.

I saw her just as Jim and I were giggling about bat signal-worthy crises at school. Out of apples. Bat signal. Inappropriate language. Bat signal.

“Ex-girlfriend at two o’clock,” I said.

“Bat signal,” he murmured, looking behind me.

“Not your two o’clock, you dolt. My two o’clock.”

She tapped his shoulder so hard it must have hurt then triangulated between us. I guessed I didn’t have to worry about him stalking her. She had no problem being in the same room with him.

“Hi, Michelle.” His face lit up like the city at sunset. He loved her, the poor sod.

Her lips pressed together, and her eyes burned two dime-sized holes right in him.

I held out my hand. “I’m Vivian.”

She glanced at me as if deciding it was safe to shake my hand, then she did. I looked at her and tried to think non-threatening thoughts, averting my gaze after a point and looking over her shoulder. At which point I swallowed my own face.

“Bat signal,” I squeaked.

The guy running the Batmobile attraction undid the velvet rope. “You two next?”

“Yes,” Michelle said, slipping between Jim and me.

He looked at me, silently asking if it was all right, but I was still speechless that a man I hadn’t seen anywhere but on a TV screen was five feet from me for the third time in a week.

“Mr. Wallace,” I said.

He smirked. “Almost didn’t recognize you without the glasses, Apples.”

“Did you forget my name?”

“No, but I think he did.” Dash pointed toward Jim and Michelle having it out in the front seat of the Batmobile, so deep in discussion that they weren’t paying attention to the attraction.

I turned to face Dash. He’d shaved for the event, and though I liked the scruff he’d had before, the angles of his jaw looked extra sharp without hair to soften them. His tux brought out the width of his shoulders, and the open jacket let me see the flat perfection of his waist. I didn’t want to think about the rest. Not while I had to form words.

“I hope they stay together this time,” I said.

“You look…” His eyes scanned my body, and I felt prickly heat all over. “What are the words?”

“Nice? I look nice?”

“You could conduct electricity in that dress.”

I laughed. Part nerves. Part space filler. Part delight over an obscure fifth-grade science reference.

I flattened the gold fabric against me. “I was going for more insoluble.”

“You’ve just out-scienced me.”

“I help the kids with their homework after school.”

He pointed his chin at the Batmobile. Jim and Michelle were talking quietly among the blasts and screeches of the screen. “I think you lost your date.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t want to keep you from yours.”

She was a five-foot-eleven triathlete with a PhD, no doubt.

“I came with my sackmate.”

My brain skipped as if tripping on a crack in the pavement.

Sackmate.

A friend with benefits. That was my first thought. Up on deck, the consideration that a casual fuck buddy made him kind of available. In the hole, the actual definition of the word sackmate.

A shortstop’s second baseman. Double-play partner. Jack Youder.

Not a fuck buddy unless you’d just hit a grounder to short with a man on first. Then you were fucked.

It had taken me forever to unravel that, and he watched the process, probably wondering if I knew what he meant. I couldn’t stand in public with a baseball god and look like a deer in headlights.

“What are you going to do when he goes free agent?” I asked.

He stiffened, unamused and seemingly unimpressed. Fuck. Foul ball.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Dash said.

“You’d have a hard time finding a mate as good to sack.”

I was trying to lighten him up, and it worked. He smirked and looked at me the way he had when we’d met at the park. He looked at me as though he was trying not to. As if I was a magnet’s north and his gaze was stuck on me like magnetic south.

“You have a way with double entendre, don’t you?”

“Don’t let it fool you. I’m a librarian. You don’t get more boring than that.”

Jim and Michelle got out of the Batmobile. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. They wanted to touch Dash Wallace, but my brain wouldn’t let them, and the energy it took for mind to command matter drained me of any conversational material. I’d never felt so stupid in my life.