Want Not (40 page)

And thus began his single season of baseball fandom. He’d pick Katherine up at the library and drive on to Yankee Stadium where they’d plant themselves in the grandstand for what felt like endless summertime picnics, feeling as though they were (or at least he was) stealing all those languorous innings from life itself, as if he’d found strange passage into a more vibrant and slower-rhythmed alternate universe, a sun-drenched otherworld that was sticky-footed with Coke residue and scattered with peanut hulls. With a cigarette braced between her fingers, Katherine would pore over her fifteen-cent scorecard, faithfully marking in the boxes but sometimes ignoring the game to bite her lip and stare at Dr. Cross (whom she’d dubbed “Young Perfessor,” riffing on manager Casey Stengel’s nickname of “Old Perfessor”) even in the midst of, say, a taut, two-out, bases-loaded situation. He’d blush and point to the field, as though he were the Perfessor of baseball and she the dewy student, rather than the opposite. But the score, he came to learn, was not her sole intrigue. Driving back from their third game together she confessed that what she loved most about baseball was not so much the game itself but, indeed, her boys: Roger Maris (“those magic blue eyes”) and Moose Skowron and Bobby Richardson (“even though he’s a fuddy-duddy who can’t hit worth a damn”) and Billy Shantz whose name sounded Jewish but wasn’t and Eli Grba whose name seemed like a typewriter accident but wasn’t. The way they moved in their uniforms, “like Greek statues that walked straight out of the museum,” or the way they spat, scratched, punched their gloves, loitered at base with their legs spread wide. “I suppose it’s rather carnal,” she concluded, which wasn’t a word he remembered hearing a woman speak aloud before, certainly not like that: so nonchalantly, unashamedly—so carnally.

He vaguely understood, but did not say, that his own interest in baseball was carnal, too. During their sixth game together, the first in a double-header against the Red Sox, she came leaping into his arms in the giddy standing-ovation aftermath of a Mickey Mantle homer, and when their arms came down he discovered her hand clasping his. Their hands remained like that, twined atop the concrete bleachers and mostly unacknowledged save for the occasional shy glance and bitten lip, for almost all of the next game, which neither of them seemed to follow very closely. And though he hated himself for thinking it, he could not remember being so savagely happy in all his life.

He cut it off after that—for a while, at least. He’d always been a terrible liar, and his ungainly attempt to explain away his mild sunburn to Alice—“maybe from mowing the lawn?” he’d asked, as if to draw out a better explanation from her—felt loathsome and excruciating. His wrestling with the boys vanished as swiftly as it’d come; instead he found himself barking orders at them, oppressed by their cap guns and bickering, incensed by all their toys underfoot which seemed like plastic symbols of all that was hindering him from . . . from what? He couldn’t say. He was not in love with Katherine Bluestein, if he defined love in the traditional way—that is, he did not long to marry her, father her children (the very idea brought a shudder), grow old in her company. But neither did he want to merely lay her down, like some sailor on shore leave. He didn’t think he wanted a new life, necessarily . . . just his same life, squared. But he knew this was impossible—absurdly so. There were laws of physics that applied to emotions. At night he’d lie awake listening to Alice snore and try cursing himself to sleep. To avoid Katherine, he even stopped working on his book for a couple of weeks, blackening his mood that much further.

But 1960 was a pennant year for the Bombers, and everywhere he went, it seemed, they were all anyone talked about. Had it always been like this, and he’d never been aware of it? Or were his antennae so overtuned that every eavesdropped mention of Hector Lopez, Joe DeMaestri, Duke Maas,
et al.,
or the Indians, Tigers, Bucs, or Orioles, no matter how distant or slight, whether in the butcher shop or the bookstore, on the sidewalk walking past the barber, or from the beat cops outside the bakery blowing the steam off the tops of their coffees, came flooding into his mind, swamping and drowning everything else? Without ever intending to, he realized, he’d carved a whole separate chunk out of his life, had created an alternate persona that both was and wasn’t him—and from everywhere, from the radio and the television and the newspaper and the kids bopping down Main Street in their navy-blue Yankees caps, it was calling him back. Against his own knotted desires and late-night curses he felt wrecked and powerless.

He and Katherine were chaste through their eighth game, and for most of their ninth. They even bickered once, when she made fun of him for not taking off his hat in the greasy July heat. But during the seventh inning of that ninth and final game, Dr. Cross emerged from the bathroom to find Katherine waiting for him there, her purse in hand. He somehow knew what was coming—he could see it in the severe, almost deranged frown on her face; in the slight wet parting of her unbitten lips; in the serpentine way her shoulders rolled as she came toward him at the wall—but was startled nonetheless when her face met his and with its violent entry her tongue shocked his mouth. How long the kiss lasted wasn’t clear; he was only dimly aware of the sound of a bat cracking followed by the giant roar of the crowd, of her fingernails piercing his shoulders and his own arms hanging limp and heavy at his sides, of the rich, malty, tobacco-y taste of her mouth, of the muttered jostling men gave him as they came streaming in and out of the bathroom, of the wondrous and terrible gust of life battering its way through him. When finally he opened his eyes, as breathless as if to the crowd’s wild delight he’d run the bases himself, he saw her eyes fixed upon his, seeming to penetrate them in much the same way her tongue had just penetrated his mouth. He stood motionless, eyes wide and blinking. She cocked her head, seeming to sense his reluctance which wasn’t quite reluctance but something far more explosive than that: desire and fear, combusting. “There’s more,” she whispered, biting her bottom lip on which his own pilfered saliva gleamed.

More: He knew of course what more meant. And yet he didn’t. Because even then, in the sweltering sauna heat of that stadium corridor, with her hands gently ironing out the creases her nails had left on his suit sleeves, and with what felt like a miracle of animal pleasure occurring in his elasticized limbs, he understood that with more came less. That there was an equilibrium to life, and that with everything you gained you lost something as well, in the same measure, so that whatever further bliss was available to him would have to be paid with equal degrees of pain. He had just one life, not two, meaning
more
was an illusion, a traitorous chimera. He slipped his hat off, rolling it in his hands in the thin space between them so that she was forced to let go of him and drop back a step, and he read and reread the label inside the crown as Katherine stood waiting, as if there inside that hat were the instructions he required, the biblical verse that could supply him fortitude. Then he nodded, and wiped his mouth, and feeling every cell in his body roiling in furious mutiny he shook his head no and turned glumly toward the exit, Katherine following along as a long train of sighs.

They never spoke of baseball again, or of anything beyond the humdrum administering of his research needs. A rejected chill came into her eyes when she’d lift them from the sports pages to field his requests, and he’d lower his own when she’d stand up to retrieve his books or documents. When the Yankees lost the World Series that year, in the seventh game to the Pirates, Dr. Cross was on his way home from teaching, oblivious to all the crestfallen boys in their Yankees caps kicking pebbles down the sidewalk, to the cops and the barbers wagging their heads while loudly second-guessing the Old Perfessor’s decision to start Bob Turley on the mound rather than Whitey Ford, to the viral pallor of defeat on the faces of the men he passed. Alice made pork chops for dinner, and without exaggeration he told her they were the best pork chops he’d ever eaten, grateful for scraps his fussy children abandoned to their plates.

But now Katherine was back. Katherine Bluestein and the Yankees. How had it happened? He shook the credit card statement in his hand, as if to throttle it for more information, his insides blistering with anger. Why couldn’t he ever
remember?
Why?
How had she found him, after all these years—or, God forbid, had
he
somehow found her? Surely not the latter: Goddamn just look at me, he thought, with an acidly mournful snort. A decrepit and colorless sleeve of bones all but strapped to a hospital bed, with a heart so frail it couldn’t take an ounce more burden or the slightest boost in tempo—nothing
more.
Of course he’d occasionally thought about Katherine over the years, because after everything had cooled and his life had resumed being livable, when it’d matured into being a statement rather than a question, he’d come to believe that it was in just these unknown and private moments that our true characters were made or revealed. This belief had depressed him, at first, because it seemed to undermine his work as a historian, seemed to undermine the practice of history itself: How could he hope to comprehend and chronicle past lives—transmitted to him via the minuscule dripline of letters, autobiographies, recorded interviews, recollections of others, diaries which were rarely as candid as they seemed—when he knew his own mild history, written by another or even by himself, could never include what he deemed his most noble and ignoble moments—the primary but secret truths of his life?

History records strong deeds; but the
truth
of history, he came to believe, was in the wavering. What if he
had
followed Katherine Bluestein into that
More?
Maybe nothing, or close to nothing. Several years later the sexual revolution would come charging in, as sudden and beguiling as Katherine’s tongue invading his mouth, and he would hear his colleagues and students dismissing such dalliances as “just sex,” which perhaps was what they were. Maybe that was all Katherine Bluestein could’ve been, and possibly wanted to be: a hobby of his, practiced in dim little Updikean motel rooms near the stadium, her cigarettes burning on the nightstand like incense, his conscience parked outside by the door. Maybe he was both over-romantic and priggish to think otherwise. But he did. And because he hadn’t followed Katherine Bluestein into that
More,
he’d dedicated himself—applying all that super-heated radioactive energy she’d brought forth in him—to the idyll of who he was, or wanted most of all to be: an honest and decent man, that creature civilization had spent four thousand–plus years creating and honing, still and forever tilting against the windmills of brute nature. The wavering had forged him, just as his wavering at the edge of the burial pit at Gunskirchen Lager had forged him, when in that terrible hinge of a moment he’d learned how easy it would be—how
natural
—to surrender to his urges, to submit to his wants. Yet neither of these crucible instances would ever be known. They would be buried with him, as maybe all true moments are. What we leave behind, he’d come to believe, is mere simulacra, the invented residue of our public selves.

But now. But now. Who
was
he, after all? His memory said one thing; his lack of memory, another. He tried ripping the credit card statement but its two pages were too durable for his weak hands to tear apart. This felt like further indignity, and again his eyes dampened with frustration and sorrow. But he was able to rip one of the pages, singly, first into halves and then into quarters, and the remaining page after that, and then all the quarters into smaller pieces and then, his curled arthritic hands twitching with pain, into even smaller pieces, until the bedspread was littered with unruly white shards, the shredded evidence of the man he was or wasn’t or could’ve been.

That’s when the cat jumped onto the bed. Dr. Cross yelped and threw his hands up and back, as if accosted by a mugger, as the cat closed in on him with predatory grace. It lifted one paw, stepped lightly forward. “Shoo, cat,” Dr. Cross moaned. His arms remained fixed to the headboard as the cat arched its back and began kneading the bedspread, digging its claws into the cheap cotton layer atop Dr. Cross’s belly and purring, the tiny scraps of paper bobbing on the bedspread like floating debris in an eddypool. “Shoo,” Dr. Cross said again, but with such weakness that the cat dunked its head and seemed almost to smile, purring all the louder.

They stayed that way for a long while, until Dr. Cross felt the warm music of the purring loosening his shoulders and with them his fears. As the terror subsided he found himself lowering his arms and even offering a hand which the cat nuzzled and with its wet snout smeared. He felt his body slackening, but not unpleasantly—the way morphine must feel, he thought. Maybe the nurses were right after all: perhaps some rest was in order, the restorative anesthesia of a brief nap. Yes, that was it. A nap. Through the window, outside on Henry Street, he could see the sunlight slanting, bowing to nightfall’s approach, and from the doorway he could hear the squeaks of the nurses steering their carts down the hallway, the eager babble from televisions in other rooms, the forlorn echoes of a distant unanswered phone going ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. The cat continued its kneading and purring, staring directly into Dr. Cross’s eyes, and Dr. Cross, wincing as the occasional claw pierced the bedspread and went digging into his sheer and withered skin, lulled by the soft staticky purring and yet strangely and powerfully lucid, returned the stare harder, wanting to know what the cat saw, wanting to know what it knew. He wanted to know what was coming for him.

“D
UDE, SERIOUSLY,”
Matty was saying. “I told you this was all on me. Will you stop scrounging the trash cans already?”

“Force of habit, man,” Talmadge muttered, swerving away from the blue trash barrel. A tiny knot of annoyance gnarled the back of his neck: annoyance at Matty, for the way he was always belittling scavenging, but at himself, too, for the blinders he’d developed, for the way he’d come to view the world—Exhibit A, just then—as some kind of matrix for diving ops, a connect-the-dots trail of trash bags and dumpsters and recycling bins, as a treasure map without . . . he opted not to finish the thought, focusing instead on following Matty through the dense, round-shouldered, blue-jerseyed stadium crowd. It was just like he’d learned to navigate the human briars of places like Times Square: you got yourself behind some fast-walking native, your machete, or your ice cutter, and let that person carve you an open route right through those wadded-up tourists. You could draft whole blocks that way, as dreamy and unperturbed as when cruising an interstate. Anyway, it’s not like he could’ve grabbed anything from the trash barrels in the first place: His hands were full, with a jumbo light beer in one and nachos in the other. Closely monitoring the beer, which kept sloshing over the cup’s rim as he walked, he failed to notice Matty stopping, and in the collision splashed Miller Lite onto Matty’s lower back, basically down his shorts.