Hot Properties (30 page)

Fred had just been let into the box by a tall handsome man in his sixties, who, instead of challenging Fred’s right to enter, asked, “Can you rebound?”

Fred had worried while on his way up that maybe Tom Lear would have forgotten his invitation and decided to wander off during halftime, or that Tom, given that the Knicks had lost the two games prior to this one, might not have come. He was startled by the distinguished man’s question and then enormously relieved at seeing Tom. “He can’t,” Fred answered Tom.

“Why not?” asked the door-opener, not aggressively, but with a quiet undertone of authority that implied he was used to being answered.

“Because,” Fred said with the nervous pride of a star pupil, “he has no backup if they get into foul trouble, and Webster can’t keep up with McHale on the fast break.”

“So?” Tom said, obviously enjoying this esoteric conversation, which now had the attention of everyone in the box. When Fred entered he got an impression of many people broken up into groups of twos and threes: a few on the couch at the rear; a pair by the bar; one lone person still looking out the balcony down to the court below; and others gathered around the television, studying the halftime statistics. “They won’t get any fast breaks with those two in,” Tom continued, “because McHale will have to keep ’em off the offensive boards.”

“Nah,” Fred said, shaking his head like a wise old man. “Webster isn’t a good offensive rebounder. He’s pretty good on the defensive boards, and he’s a great shot-blocker, but he won’t give ’em fits on the offensive boards. They’re too slow to play together for long, and besides, it leaves you thin for the second team.”

“Okay,” Tom said, sighing.

“Thank God!” someone at the bar said to the room. Then to Fred, “You have no idea how he’s been torturing us about this garbage. But nobody here knows enough about basketball to keep him quiet.” They all laughed and Tom hung his head, but the group’s attitude was friendly, indulgent, and warm toward Tom, like a family toward the favorite baby, pretending they were capable of criticizing him when, in fact, anything he might do delighted their hearts. Fred envied this with the keenness of a starving man watching another eat a feast.

“Who is this savior?” a woman by the television asked about Fred.

Fred noticed, as everybody’s eyes moved to study him, that the lone figure at the balcony was Tony Winters. Tony looked at him blankly, as though he didn’t know him.

“Fred Tatter,” Tom Lear said to the group, and then rattled off their names. It turned out that the distinguished man who had opened the door was Richard Winters, Tony’s father. Fred recognized one of the other names. Sam Billings, whom he knew to be the producer of Tom’s movie, but the rest were obscure. That made Fred anxious, since he couldn’t know who was important and who was not, a circumstance rather like walking through a mine field, in which any innocent twig might have the capacity to blow his career to kingdom come.

“Was Ray Williams really close to his sister or is that just bullshit?” the thin leather-skinned woman who was introduced as Melinda Billings asked. She had the emaciated body and cynical eyes of a woman who spent her life attempting to retain the allure of her youth, knowing all the while it was both hopeless and required. She referred to the Knick guard who had been playing poorly (and therefore earned the active abuse of fans) until that night. Williams had missed the previous playoff game when it was announced he had to attend the funeral of his sister, a forty-year-old victim of cancer. Tonight he returned and had played a brilliant and uncharacteristically mature half. The same fans who had vilified Ray now felt piously supportive and, presented with a good performance, were rapidly alibiing for Ray’s earlier play (he had been distracted by the wait for his sister’s death), and spinning out a fantasy in which the tragedy would spark a fundamental change in Ray, and he would now forever burn with the intensity of a superstar.

Fred, although he knew as a sportswriter it was an appealing angle, was also convinced that Ray was a hopelessly stupid and undisciplined basketball player who, in time, would return to his selfish and disorganized play. People don’t change, most of all athletes. Fred knew. The yearning of the Knick fans to believe in a mystical transformation through personal tragedy was precisely the reason Fred wanted to escape from sportswriting. Covering the Knicks, Fred would be obliged to go along with the pretense: fans didn’t want the truth, namely that whatever makes a player weak transcends whether his wife loves him or his father dies on the night of the big game, or all the other movie clichés. The young power hitter who can’t hit a change-up won’t do so simply because he’s fallen in love, the brilliantly talented quarterback who chokes under pressure and throws fourth-quarter interceptions will go on throwing them even if his two-year-old son recovers from leukemia, and Ray Williams would continue to turn the ball over, despite his sister’s tragic death, because he was too dumb to keep his concentration up. But all that has to be concealed from the sports fans. They don’t want the illusion destroyed that the games they watch possess a significant soap-opera subplot. Why couldn’t they appreciate the games as games? Fred wondered. Why isn’t the simple majesty of men able to follow a ninety-mile-an-hour ball and hit it with a stick of wood enough to astonish and delight? Even inconsistent Ray, twisting his muscled arms in midair and lightly flipping a basketball through windmills of flailing arms up against the backboard and into the basket, was a miracle of nature, an awesome proof of humanity’s ingenuity, a modern preservation of our savage past, the physical equivalent of our evolution from painting on cave walls to splashing paint on a canvas. Now we celebrate the warriors who toss pigskin spears. Who cares if their wives love them, if they need cocaine to face the modern equivalent of death (failure), or if Ray Williams needs a sister to die in order to know he shouldn’t take jump shots from the top of the key when Bill Cartwright is loose under the basket? Watch him do it! Whatever the reason!

“Yeah,” Fred answered. “I guess he’s dedicating the game to her.”

There was a murmur from them at this.

“I think she kind of raised him.” Fred said, making it up, but already busy convincing himself it must be true. “His bad play this year dates almost exactly from when she was diagnosed.” That bit of sentiment originated with the Knick publicist whom Fred had called to get his ticket. The Garden organization was taking a truly clever tack: immediately after saying that, the publicist went on, “But Ray doesn’t want that known. He doesn’t want people to think he’s using his sister’s corpse as an excuse.” Who knows, Fred said to himself while the others in the box gave him their full attention, eyes wide open with the wonderment of children, maybe it’s true, maybe her being sick really did bother him. But then what was bugging Ray for the previous six years?

“How come nobody said anything about it while he was fucking up?” Tom asked peevishly.

“Ray kept it from everyone but Hubie and asked him to keep it a secret. He didn’t want to use her death as an alibi.” Boy, is this bullshit, Fred thought, amazed that he was holding their attention so easily. I’ll bet Tom isn’t sorry he invited me, he thought proudly. “They’re a very close family. You know,” he said to the leather-skinned woman. Melinda wife of the powerful producer, “Ray’s brother, Gus, plays for the SuperSonics. They grew up guarding each other. It’s great when they play in an NBA game opposite each other. Suddenly you can picture them playing as little kids on a dirty playground on a summer day in New York.”

“Yeah, it’s fantastic,” Tom Lear said. “Straight out of a movie.”

“Does sound like a movie,” Sam Billings said, and for a moment the room seemed to hold its breath. By Fred’s count there were certainly three writers in the room and he suspected one of the men at the bar was also. Fred almost blurted out, “I’ll write it.”

“Yeah,” Tony Winters said. “Think of the dream casting. Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.”

Someone murmured appreciatively. Fred cursed himself for not having thought of it.

Tony, meanwhile, frowning with concentration, went on: “Richard Pryor and Robert Redford. Eddie Murphy and Clint Eastwood—”

People began to laugh as they understood he was fooling.

“As brothers?” Tom Lear said, spelling out the joke.

“Yeah,” Tony went on. “You do a movie in which Redford and Pryor are two poor brothers who grew up in the slums and who end up facing each other in the championship game. Call it
De Naturals.
Don’t bother to explain how they’re brothers. Just assert it.” Tony looked thoughtful while people, with slight embarrassment, laughed sporadically. “Meryl Streep could play their mother. I think it would be a good stretch for her. She could play a Polish mother—”

Now the room was laughing shamelessly, except for Fred, who stared sullenly at Tony. That’s disgusting, he said to himself with rage. Making fun of talent that way—it’s a cheap shot.

“—she could do a Polish black accent,” Tony elaborated. “Now
that
would be interesting!”

Fred wanted to say something cutting, shut off Tony from the group’s admiration as thoroughly as he had been. Tony would deserve it—his smug attitude of equality with the people he made fun of infuriated Fred. Tony had no right to such a pose. What play of his had run on Broadway? Everything was so easy for men like Tony. He took his presence in the private box for granted. Probably his father had been bringing him to elite seats his whole life. Someone like Tony Winters had never sat in the mezzanine of anything. And Fred, poor Fred, he had been stuck way up in the back, in life’s cheap seats, scraping ancient gum off his shoes and straining for a view of the action.

“Are you a sportswriter?” Richard Winters asked Fred in his low, calm tone while the others were elaborating on Tony’s joke.

“Uh, used to be. I’m writing a novel now.”

Richard nodded wisely, as though he had expected that answer. “Did you cover basketball?”

Tony called across the room, answering for him: “You probably have read Fred’s stuff, Dad. He did a lot of writing for
American Sport
magazine. The interviews?”

Fred was bothered by Tony having overheard (why is he on my case?) and made nervous by his tone. He had called it “Fred’s stuff,” not even giving it the dignity of an “article.”

But Richard Winters snapped his fingers and looked delighted at Fred. “Of course! You did that great interview with Billy Martin. First time I understood both why he was a great manager and also why he’s crazy. Everything else I read about him would do one or the other, never both.”

“You two know each other?” Tom Lear asked Fred, meaning him and Tony. There was ill-concealed surprise in the question.

“Oh, sure,” Tony said. “We’re old friends.”

Fred now relaxed, decided he had been paranoid. Obviously Tony was trying to be helpful and friendly. He did not notice, nor did the others, that Tony smiled to himself after his assertion of amity with Fred, like a man contemplating an irony.

Below, the buzzer sounded to signal an end to the halftime warm-ups and the teams went to their benches for final instructions before the start of the second half. Fred moved toward the door. “I’d better get back—”

“No, stay!” Tom said, and a few others did also.

“We have plenty of room,” Richard Winters added with a note of warmth sufficient to imbue his words with urgency, but not intense enough to suggest even a hint of desire.

The Knicks, although they gave their fans a good scare near the end. won the game, Ray Williams perfectly playing his role of the athlete redeeming personal tragedy through triumphant performance. He won the game with his controlled, determined leadership and showed no vulgar pleasure in his achievement or the fans’ delight. He left the court with his head bowed, accepting the congratulating embraces of his teammates with an unprecedented modesty.

For Fred, also, the evening was a triumph. While they shuffled into the elevator to take them out, Tom turned to him suddenly. “Where’s your friend?”

“My friend?”

“Who did you bring to the game?”

Despite the fact that Fred had had hours to prepare a response, he still fumbled over his response: “I gave it away to one of the teenagers outside.”

“You didn’t sell it?” Tony Winters asked, and again Fred thought that perhaps in his tone there was an insult, a suggestion that Fred was incapable of any act that might be considered generous or good.

Before the game, when Fred arrived in a taxi outside Madison Square Garden, there was a collection of kids desperately asking, “Selling any? Anybody selling?” as there usually is preceding a hot game. Normally there are plenty of ticket scalpers available, but their goods must have gone quickly, because by the time Fred arrived—only five minutes before game time—with his spare ticket, having thought of no one he wanted to accompany him to the box at halftime. the forlorn cries, “Ticket? Anybody got a ticket?” had not been comforted. He spotted a pair of black teenagers and walked up to them, whispering, “I’ve got one. I can give you one.”

“How much, man?” asked one.

“Where is it?” the other said before Fred could answer.

“Courtside.” Fred said.

They looked startled. And then wary. “How much you want for it?”

“Nothing. Cost me nothing.” He held the ticket out, leaving to them how to resolve which one would get it. One of them grabbed it, saying, “It’s my turn. You said it was my turn.”

“Fuck,” was all the other one could say, listlessly, suggesting that his whole life had been dominated by ill fortune.

During the first half, the kid had sat next to him, in a state of ecstasy, totally into the game, shouting himself hoarse, arguing with the refs, advising the players, cursing extravagantly at the opposition. All around them, people smiled at his intensity and laughed at his expressions of agony.

Fred had felt stupid, stuck with the extra ticket, embarrassed by his deception of Marion and his inability to think of someone to invite along that he would be comfortable with, but the accident of having provided a seat for that kid salved his conscience. You see it was for the best, he told himself. I’m a good guy, after all.