At least the seats are good. Of course, they always are: This is the minors. We’re five rows from the Beavers’ dugout. Waldo is buying his ritual pre-game hot dog from the spike-haired vendor; he half-rises from his seat, moving with either arthritic or contemplative slowness, in the attempt to dislodge change from his pocket. Beside him, I’m holding onto a sizable cup of beer for something like dear life, trying to blame this difficult afternoon, with its cargo of constraints, on something, if not someone.
Try: Portland. True enough. I’m with Waldo, steering away from the truth, because we all (Katie, her father Waldo, Sabra and me) live in the same town — Portland, largest city in Oregon, but a town just the same. Still, the problem is more exactly the fact that all of us are what was once called “decent” people. “Are you decent?” my mother used to bellow, outside my bedroom door, after I began erupting with the physical details of puberty. Well, we four are decent, by which I mean that any of us would be glad to offer the others a quantum of mercy, if mercy were a thing that could be trickled over sugar cubes and dispensed by visiting nurse, or angel, or even Sabra.
Actually, I don’t know Sabra. I’ve seen her play. I saw her hit for twenty-eight points in the Paul Masson Classic, on a night when the whole Oregon State team scored only fifty-one. She made second-team All-America: a beautiful little turnaround jumper and a nice way of subtly muscling for position, inside. Sabra’s black; a big woman, but graceful in movement, emotional, exciting to watch. Katie, for one, was fairly excited.
I try to find signs, bring back images, piece together fragments of the past to show where events were leading, how we got to here, but I’m a Victorian cartographer trying to dream up the source of the Nile from London and chart his imaginings. I haven’t been up that particular river, and now it’s been dammed, no access for citizens of this country, the nation of straight males. I do remember Katie jumping up to applaud one of Sabra’s baskets, a jumphook from the low post; the shot clanged the rim, smacked the glass, banged iron again, and then fell, by chance, through. It had the touch of the blacksmith on it, that shot, but there was Katie, flying from her seat, clapping, beaming with her customary radiance, and maybe I should have known, even then, what would happen between them.
That was ungenerous — implying that it’s the blacksmith in Sabra that attracts Katie, and not the artist. I’ve noticed that unfortunate tendency in myself. A few weeks ago I fielded a late afternoon call from Sabra; I was just home from the office (public relations for Pacific Northwest Bell, world’s most impossible job, please let’s not talk about it) and, as usual, I was in no mood. Sabra didn’t identify herself, just asked for Kate. At the hospital, I said.
“When’s she gittin home?” Sabra asked. I think it was the casualness of the question — the inference that Sabra had a right to know such things, was already closely stitched into the fabric of Katie’s life — which set me off. Her question brought out all the gall in me, including buried hatreds that belong, I still think, to other people and not to me.
I almost said, “She’s not gittin home, Sabra. She’s getting home, with an e, and a gee on the end. And you’re not finding out when.” I didn’t say any of this, but the blunt racism of the sentences I had composed, inside my very own head, gave me a little shock: so this was how far jealousy could drive you from the person you thought you were. Just what other unpleasantries could it accomplish? I didn’t try to find that out. “About six,” is what I said to Sabra. “I’ll have her call you. This is Sabra, right?” Sabra said Unh-hunh, and I went out to pick blackberries from the backyard, since it was already high summer, and in Oregon even the weeds bear fruit.
When Katie stepped down into the yard that day I was already showing stains; sure enough, one was over the heart. But blackberries leak thin purple juice that can approximate bleeding only symbolically. I don’t think Katie even caught the metaphor, at least till I handed her a tin pot brimmed with shining berries and told her to call Sabra.
Katie looked at me crookedly. “You talk to her at all?” she asked, giving me her wide open gaze, full of honesty and blue eyes. Katie is thirty-four, the age when our peers are getting pregnant, bombing Soho and Berkeley and Santa Monica with babies, and Katie, meanwhile, lifts weights and plays basketball and kayaks in rough ocean and is just beginning to learn technical climbing. Her body is tightening, even as Katie in some indefinable way is loosening. I think she’s loosening, that is; maybe she’s just going crazy. Even Katie isn’t devoutly convinced that what she’s doing is sane. I appreciate this particular ambivalence more than I can say.
“Sure, I talked to her,” I said, trying to make it sound easy. “Her number’s on a Post-It on the refrigerator.”
“I have her number,” Katie said. I gave a couple of hitches with my shoulders to indicate disconnection, the way you begin to repeat the word Okay when the phone conversation is winding up. I was on my way into the house when Katie said, “You’re a highly sweet man, Owens. You know that?”
I had gone up two steps; I turned. Beyond Katie the sky shimmered with steely blue; it was empty of clouds, vacant, as it always is in Portland in July. The tree giving Katie an oval green halo was full of plums, and they were ready. Soon they would drop, then rot; the cycle had speeded up lately, and there was nothing I could do to contain it, or even join it: the seasons were just headed for rotting.
Katie was still in her scrubs; she held the berry pot I’d given her at arm’s length. “So you keep telling me,” I said. “Why don’t you come in and help me jam?”
“I can’t. Not today.”
Part Two
Freudianism doesn’t pay. But it has its timeless attractions, like an old lockpick set discovered in a basement bin. You can’t help tinkering.
So I think all this has to do with Katie’s mother. Her mother took a gruesomely long while to die: twelve years from when the first cancer was diagnosed. On my way to the ballgame today I kept remembering Louisa. I remembered, for example, a summer evening when Louisa and Waldo came over for dinner. Silver salmon was $3.99 a pound at Fred Meyer’s that day; that’s the kind of thing I remembered, in the depths of my shallowness. But that’s not all. I remembered how they looked, Waldo eternally sheepish in his Beavers’ baseball cap and cigar, Louisa energetic in pink cotton blouse and Prussian-blue cardigan with red reindeer on it, though it was August. She was often cold; already she carried a fragility around with her, which was the last thing Louisa wanted. Her hair was falling out, which made her wear a scarf over her head and smile with a great constancy. She laughed at every joke I made, the last couple of years, as if the world were truly made to amuse us, and she had only just figured that out.
They came into our backyard and Waldo lit the cigar, because he was allowed to, outdoors. There were a good number of mosquitoes out there, a quorum, but Katie and I had draped a white tablecloth over the redwood picnic table, and Katie had just mowed the lawn and lit the pink candles, and the dinner I’d made, the coho with fresh dill, corn on the cob, and cold cucumber soup, sat under the plum tree evoking summer quite exactly, and Louisa did something few cancer patients tend to do. She did a cartweheel. Her scarf came off and drifted down onto the cut grass. She picked it up carefully, not flustered at all, shook the grass flakes out, and tied it under her chin. She was ready for dinner now, a dinner which she would not eat, but one whose imagery, despite the silver cloud of mosquitoes, suited her growing hunger for a romantic picture of life.
Waldo kept taking off his baseball cap and sweeping his hand lightly over his beautiful head of white hair, a gesture of effacement, his characteristic gesture. But there was something unusual that day: he kept himself apart from conversation, kept his consciousness turned toward Louisa, as if he were just now taking her in, seeing her as he had when they first met. After all this time, he was no longer taking Louisa for granted.
Louisa was a poet, an unlikely avocation for an optimist. She believed that pain like everything else serves a purpose, and I hope all the years of it didn’t grind that belief out of her. Katie inherited her worldview from her mother; she’d been taught, however subconsciously, that things turn out well in the end. Katie is shiningly beautiful and blazingly bright; she’s never been left by a lover, and no one close to her had ever died; it’s not surprising that she thought of death as an unlikely accident that sometimes happened to other people, usually after a long and happy life — or else on the 24-hour news channel, in places like Sri Lanka or Kuala Lumpur, where life is different all around.
So here is my theory. Despite the time given Katie to prepare for her mother’s death, she was not, in the end, really ready. Louisa suffered for so long it began to seem to Katie that this was a new mode of life — her mother would just go on dying forever. There’s a funny word you hear in connection with grief (and grief itself is usually called “the grieving process” and broken down into concrete stages, which is heartless and no doubt depressingly accurate). The funny word I mean is “accepting” a death. So far as I know, you don’t have much choice. Do you accept a left hook to the jaw? No, but you can recover from the impact. Katie didn’t exactly recover. She sought — and now you can see the little jabbing point of my lockpick, trying to nudge aside the tumblers one by one, solve the coded secrets of the mind — Katie sought her mother. She looked in the world for a woman to love and found Sabra. How does that sound?
“Vaguely plausible,” Katie said. “Escept that Sabra is a real person. I didn’t fall in love with the idea, Owens. I didn’t want to be in love with her. I love, you know, you.”
We were in Katie’s room, where the bed is always made, the log-cabin quilt stitched by her grandmother always stretched tight over the blankets. No one sleeps in the bed, so far as I know. After work, Katie goes into her room to read, or else just sits in the pink flowered armchair, staring, the tips of her fingers pressed together. Her room is how she likes it: just so. She brings home cut flowers, usually irises, and arranges them in a white-glass vase; her oak desk is really just a platform for pretty objects, miniature sanddollars and strawflowers, white angel’s-wing shells and feathers from Steller’s jays. Katie tenderly vacuums her Navaho rug, which was woven by a woman named Bessie Salt, by getting down on her hands and knees, hose roaring in hand, going over and over the pattern. Sometimes, these days, Katie speaks on the telephone in her room. A white phone. The sound of her laughter slips under the door and finds me in the kitchen, where I’m cooking, and crying, since I’m still no good with onions.
“So,” I said to Katie, “you tell me.” I did not mention the fact that I, in return, love her. On my way out I tapped a small black-and-white photograph in a simple frame, new on her desk. The dark face there smiled serenely; dangly silver earrings, hair pulled black. “She’s lovely,” I said. “Very attractive woman, Sabra.”
“That’s Alice Walker,” Katie said. “In 1986.”
Part Three
We always had what people call “a good sex life.” (When I hear this phrase I always picture sex as a little creature in a cage full of cedar chips, tended carefully by both partners, a much-beloved well-behaved guinea pig with an everpresent need for lettuce.) Perhaps that’s why I didn’t pay Katie much heed when she told me she had a “crush” on someone. That’s nice, I said. It’s a woman, Katie said. “So you’re finally coming around to my way of thinking,” I said.
Fairly standard reaction, I think. Lesbianism makes sense to men: if women are attractive to me, why shouldn’t they be attractive to each other? I like women, though often for the same reasons why they sometimes don’t like themselves. They are kindly, considerate; they think of others before themselves. When they come over for dinner, they clean up the dishes afterwards. They don’t compete and they don’t argue; they nurture.
Then again, some of them powerlift and technical climb and sit in their rooms with Alice Walker while you make dinner. It’s also possible to love that kind.
Katie and I went for a hike last weekend in the Columbia River Gorge, up above Horsetail Falls to Triple Falls. There were several sorts of abundance going: ferns, thimbleberries, banana slugs, heat. The day blazed away, and when we reached Upper Horsetail Falls Katie clambered down into the water, under the spray. Then she walked ahead of me on the path, lean and tan and, despite herself, the winner of the wet T-shirt contest. We sat overlooking Triple Falls and ate tunafish sandwiches and grapes; Katie had brought a granola bar. I gestured toward the bush beside her. “That’s poison oak, you know,” I said.
This seemed to bother her. “I know,” she said.
“Well, you get poison oak.”
“I know that too,” she said, more quietly, but then she threw a handful of grapes right into the river. The grapes floated, then went over one of the falls, and nobody knows what happened to them after that.
“I have something to tell you,” she said, very tightly, and at the sound of that tightness I constricted too. “I may be moving out, at least for a while.”
“Yes?” I said. There were grapes in my hand too; I too could throw them in the river. But then there would be no more grapes. For a minute I tried to concentrate on grapes, what they tasted like, what they looked like bobbing along on fast water, what became of grapes that went down a river. I tried to picture my grapes in the Columbia, streaming past Astoria into the sea. I almost succeeded in this. I didn’t say anything.
“I want to try to tell you why I’m doing this,” Katie said. “I know it sounds like a stupid thing to say, but I want you not to take it personally.” She took a hard bite of granola bar and chewed it furiously, concentrating. “It’s just me, really,” she said. “Like — do you remember the other night in the Thai restaurant on Belmont, when the waiter asked us how we wanted the food, and we both answered at the same time, you saying hot and me saying medium?”
I nodded: the Bangkok Kitchen. The lemongrass and coconut-milk soup; the waiter with the Stevie Bauer World Tour T-shirt. “Well,” Katie said, “I’d been to that restaurant before. I knew that medium was really very hot. But I didn’t say anything. You said, ‘Let’s have it hot, okay?’ So I just sat there, knowing better, not saying anything. I knew exactly what was going on. I was actually kind of humoring you, because I didn’t want to argue about it.”
“So we get to argue about it now,” I said.
“I felt completely stuck,” Katie said. “Glued right into all my old patterns with men. I felt like I couldn’t move my feet or even open my mouth, and I really and truly thought, There is someone at this table I dislike intensely, and it’s not Owens.”
“So you’re saying?”
“That doesn’t happen to me with Sabra.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It does sound stupid. How the hell could I not take it personally?”
“Because you know you’re wonderful,” Katie said.
I know I’m not wonderful. My limitations are legion; they’re everywhere, crowding around me. I don’t know how to row a boat; I have trouble opening doors, even when I happen to have the correct key in hand; I can’t even tie off a balloon once my hot air has blown it up. I have an angular soul: I’m crabby in the morning, and sometimes at night. I hate my job, and do nothing about finding a new one; my frustration takes wings, and flies around the room like a bat who doesn’t want to be there. When I thought about Katie moving out I twinged with a certain self-admission: that she might be right not to love me. But perhaps this happens to everyone. Perhaps part of the sting always involves the fugitive suspicion that the lover leaving you is really only giving you just what you deserve.
“I get it. We’re breaking up over a conversation we didn’t even have about Thai food,” I said. “Here’s the solution. We go back and have it medium, and be done with all this.”
“You’re not listening. It’s me. Not you. Me.”
“I’m listening,” I said, and I was, and I still am. Katie: I’m listening.
Part Four
Early this morning Waldo called up and asked if I wanted to go see the Beavers. Minor league baseball: the Beavers are Philadelphia’s Triple-A affiliate. It’s something Waldo and I do. He gets two-for-one coupons with his Dine-Out card. He needs a second person to go with, and it is usually me.
I like my father-in-law. Waldo keeps his pleasures simple and his bitterness out of the public eye. For all I know he isn’t bitter at all. Now that Louisa is gone, Waldo often eats at those cafeteria-restaurants that offer all-you-can-eat, with reduced prices for Golden Agers, and the abundance of different meats and desserts (he eats nothing else) makes a deep impression on him there. He likes to describe what he’s eaten in such places with wonder and satisfaction, and the list is usually both impressive and a little disgusting. Waldo speaks often, too, about the weather and the past. He talks about his days as a celebrated athlete, a hurdler and a basketball player, which are equally hard to believe when you look at him, pear-shaped, now. He grew up in Drain, Oregon, a town that, to hear him tell it, did not truly exist at the time. The rains came harder and the mountains were taller; there was more weather and more wildness and you were tied to the few other people in the valley by a common thread of deprivation. Waldo keeps a close eye on the weather around the world; there are still spots that tend to extremes, the way the whole planet was in his youth.
“Hundred-twenty in Needles yesterday,” Waldo said to me today — almost the first thing he said. He’d been standing in the sun by Will Call a while, because he is always early, while I am always on time. The brightness of the sun made his skin seem pale and papery, unhealthy. “Typhoon in Manila, too,” Waldo said admiringly.
“It’s always hot in Needles,” I said helpfully, though I only know this fact because Waldo often mentions Needles. In truth, I do not know where in hell Needles is, but I know it must be close to the bottom circle.
“Cause it’s down so dang low,” Waldo said, taking off his baseball cap to mop his glistening forehead with a bandana, as if he’d just emerged from Needles. Waldo appropriates the news. In his mind he is landlord to the world, including its natural inhabitants. “Saw my red-tail hawk again this morning,” he said a minute ago, as we found our seats and squinted over the bright field, where pigeons were wheeling in the air.
I don’t want to be here with Waldo: in a few days his daughter is moving out of our house, moving in with a woman. I have no idea what Waldo knows about this; Katie wasn’t home this morning, and I didn’t call to ask her, though the number was handy on a Post-It on the refrigerator. So here I sit, behind the Beavers’ dugout, holding an oversized paper cup of half-flat beer, not drinking it, not comfortable, trying to keep what is on my mind from spilling into my talk — protecting Waldo from the truth about his daughter and allowing Katie a slim measure of privacy — and straining, meanwhile, to find replies to Waldo’s remarks about a world that is either far-away or gone forever.
Waldo’s given me this beer. He always buys me an Enormo-Cup at the refreshment stand on the way in.He doesn’t himself drink; I think he’s trying to encourage me to act just as I would if he weren’t here. Of course, if Waldo weren’t here, I wouldn’t be either. I’ve watched enough minor-league games now. There’s never much of a crowd, and the players have their minds and energies fixed elsewhere, on the majors, where life truly exists, where they all hope they’re going or going back to. You watch a few minor-league games and it begins to undermine the abiding illusion that all sports fans harbor — the premise that both the players and you really care about this game.
“How many times you been out here this year?” I ask Waldo.
“Today makes an even dozen,” he says, pride in his short smile. My expression of amazement is so sincere that he must feel obligated to explain himself. “Well, I like it out here,” he says, pointing with the stub of a hot dog to the vast expanse of empty seats.
“What is it you like?” I ask, with a slash of embarrassment — I’m out here too, I often am, I should know why he’s out here. “Best, I mean. What do you like best?”
“Why, being with all the people,” Waldo says. He takes off his cap to stroke back his hair; for a second, as he begins the motion, I think he is tipping his cap, in response to some imagined applause from the largely-imagined crowd.
As the game gets underway, I feel the strain easing its way out of me. Waldo isn’t talking about Katie — why should he talk about Katie, after all? — and I find myself able to concentrate on something other than Katie for the first time in days: the game itself. The Beavers, unfortunately, are getting pounded; the Albuquerque Dodgers have this nineteen-year-old Dominican catcher who has developed the habit of raining baseballs onto Portland streets, where they’ve become a constant menace to the local populace. By the third inning the Beavers have to make a pitching change. We are all waiting for our whale-like washed-up right-hander to amble in from the bullpen, holding his warm-up jacket casually and jauntily on his shoulder, like a matador his cape. The crazed mascot, meanwhile, is trying to amuse us by playing theatrical games with the umpire. The ump bends to dust off home plate, and the Beaver, whose head and teeth are unpleasantly oversized (he looks like he’s been stricken by a grotesque glandular disease), give the ump a pro-wrestling-style boot to the bottom, and the ump gives chase up the third-base line.
“Katie told me she’s moving,” Waldo says.
I’m stunned, almost as much as I was the first time I heard that news. I nod, wait grimly for Waldo to tell me what else he knows.
“Must be pretty hot inside that suit,” Waldo says.
“What suit?”
He gestures. “That Beaver suit,” Waldo says. “But he does pretty well, considering.” The Beaver is now running around with a bucket of water in his paws. “But you know? There’s one thing that’s really wrong,” Waldo says.
Waldo’s about to disparage his daughter; I don’t want to hear that right now. All the same, I have to ask, “What’s that?”
“He’s not very funny,” Waldo says. “The Beaver.”
After this I begin to lose track of the game. I keep waiting for Waldo to come back to the subject that is so palpably on both our minds, waiting for it and dreading it. I keep seeing Katie in moments extracted from our six years together, expecting that any minute now the knot of sadness will loosen into petty dislike for her. But that doesn’t happen. Nothing happens.
It’s almost over before I finally look at Waldo, who is rummaging in his many pockets for a match to light his cigar, and it hits me: he’s not going to mention Katie again. That’s what we’re here for, in fact — to not talk about Katie. The one flat mention of my nightmare was to let me know he knows; the rest of it, the talk that is atomically small, is to tell me that nothing has changed between us. Pretty hot inside that suit equals Life does go on, you know, and here we are.
Here we are: Waldo puffing slowly on his cigar, me crunching peanut shells with inept hands, and that’s all. We’re both saddled with the traditional male vice of being unable to speak from the heart, but gifted with the traditional male virtue of not needing to. The game wobbles toward its unkempt conclusion, and we sit in insufferable Needles-like heat and silence, as insulated and contained by our natures as the Beaver within his suit. We’re not hiding something in here; this is just how we are. To someone else it may seem that our heads are tragically enlarged, that we should not have a small squashed Beavers’ cap crowning our fur pates, that we should not be upright, that we should not even be here at all: we should be gnawing down saplings, or floating in the pond we’ve created, or whacking the surface of the still water, because there is danger. But this is how we are.
The Beaver shortstop leads off the bottom of the ninth by tapping weakly back to the mound. Waldo turns to me, heaving a sigh. “Nope,” he says. “Don’t think we’re gonna win this one.”
Nope, Waldo. Don’t think so. But next week you and I might be out here again, saying very little, just keeping each other company — two men for whom absence is a presence, joined in common loss.
But what am I talking about? I’ve lost nothing. Katie still lives with me. I can affirm this very easily. I can drive home, find her in her room. The bed there will be made tight; Alice Walker and blue tailfeathers and angel’s wings will be shining on her desk. The Navaho rug will be the same pearly gray, with a white pattern flashing across the center, which looks like four lightning bolts yoked in a rough parallelogram; at the end of one bolt a straight slender line emerges and runs clear to the rug’s edge. his is the spirit line, whose purpose is to provide escape for the soul. All the same, Katie will be home. I’m sure of that. Nothing is lost: there she is. For now. I’m sure of all this.
