She moved her chair forward, read over her opening, made it a fantasy (the mirror within a mirror of this pleased her: Cathy masturbating to a fantasy of her masturbating), and then set up the character’s situation. The exposition seemed awkward, an anticlimax after Cathy’s climax, and also halfhearted. The arbitrary choice of Cathy and Rounder — real people — had stunted her ability to make up anything about them, as though she were suddenly writing a nonfiction piece about them for New York Magazine.
What if she were?
What if the opening fantasy was a fantasy of a magazine writer while writing a portrait of these prominent New Yorkers? That character could be me, a free-lance journalist, searching for the ideal couple ostensibly through my work, but really to reassure myself that it exists, she said to herself, so tired now that after thinking the thought, Patty was unsure if it even made logical sense, much less worked aesthetically. She decided to stop and read what she had tomorrow.
Patty got up, hiding the pages under the manuscript of the romance novel. The thought of David discovering her experimental story filled her with dread. She looked at him, huddled under the blankets like a frightened animal, and resented his presence.
She was careful not to disturb the blankets while getting in the bed. After a few minutes of lying silently, listening to his breathing to make sure he was asleep, Patty touched herself furtively, secretly, loving herself to a choked and cowardly orgasm, and then bunched a pillow in her arms to fall asleep in its soft embrace. …
CHAPTER 9
“Fred!” Tom Lear called. He got up from a swivel chair placed in front of a television that was embedded in the paneling of a private box in Madison Square Garden. “Why doesn’t Hubie play Marvin and Cartwright together against Parish and McHale?” This was asked in place of a greeting.
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!