“Early yet,” his partner said. “Pace yourself.”
Then he cut the cards for the new deal and his face said: I brought you to the zone, but now you’re on your own.
Tildy, too, was on her own and this was a day weighted with gloom from the moment she’d opened her eyes. In the note he’d left her, Christo suggested she take in a movie or visit the Botanical Gardens, as he’d be tied up all day. Thank you very much. Tildy could accommodate solitude — that was a skill she’d picked up early in life — but not this way, not now. For the very first time, she felt a real need of him, of the reassurance his mere hereness would bring.
She missed the cramped sameness of home and adoring Karl, childish but unquestioning. She wanted to loll in the warm smells of her own bed and hear the mice chittering under the floorboards. And she wondered if she wasn’t just playing out a long string of blunders reaching all the way back to …
Half awake, she sat in a murky barroom drinking amaretto and coffee and watching the Bowery Boys on television. The woman behind the bar talked to herself. She counted beer coasters and swizzle sticks and wiped the same glasses over and over. Her black hair was teased and lacquered, her long red fingernails meticulously shaped; they clinked on every bottle and glass she touched. Every few minutes she would glance up at the gray screen, then at the clock on the opposite wall. Her gestures hurried and anxious as if she were waiting for someone who was late, she would take a cigarette out of her purse and light it, and then grind it out underfoot after two or three hissing puffs.
“I’d like another when you get a chance.”
“When I get a chance? That’s a good one. When the hell did I ever have a chance? I’m just living the life I got handed.” In the time it took to bark these four short sentences, she had filled the shot glass to the rim, realigned the amaretto bottle and grabbed the coffeepot from the warmer. “You taking cream with that?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Yeah? You married, honey?”
“Yes. I just don’t wear the ring.”
“I know, I know. Why discourage them? Right after the tits it’s your hands they look over. And a girl your age — well, my advice would be to get out of it as soon as you can. It’s slow death, honey, the slowest there is. Marriage’ll eat away at your insides till there’s nothing left but the water and the fat and you’re no damn use to anybody.”
“You must have had a pretty bad experience.”
“Me? Uh-uh. Fuck ’em and forget ’em is my motto. But I’ve got eyes to see what goes on with people, and sooner or later, young and old, they just about all end up here.”
Behind her, through a blizzard of static, Leo Gorcey tugged at his bow tie and said, “Don’t bother me with that noise. What’s for dinner?”
Tildy left her change on the bar and wobbled into the light.
At 59th Street she bought a bag of popcorn and entered Central Park. Exhausted, she sat down on a bench that looked out over a small pond, and within half a minute, a squad of pigeons had gathered expectantly at her feet. Christo had told her that they were carriers of several varieties of parasitic disease and that every few months some desperate soul would be admitted to the hospital after making a meal of one. “When they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, they mean it.” Tildy munched a few handfuls of popcorn, then emptied the rest of the bag on the cement. The pigeons went at it so furiously they didn’t even notice a few sparrows who sneaked into the feeding circle. When Tildy left, they were tearing up the bag.
She continued up a gentle rise to a meadow where stretched out before her were a dozen baseball diamonds. The grass was withered, chewed up, and all but two of the diamonds were vacant, their emptiness almost spooky with the late sun flaring on wire backstops. But at the one nearest her, a father served up fat balloon pitches to his small son who, swing after swing, grimacing, hit nothing but air.
Down in one corner there was somewhat more advanced activity going on and Tildy went toward it, shielding her eyes: street types in a pickup softball game, shirtless outfielders, a pitcher with a transistor radio blaring in his back pocket. As she drew closer, circling around behind first base, the centerfielder sprinted and dove for a humpbacked liner, but the ball skipped by him and three runs scored. His teammates cursed him, loosed insults at him that were in no way playful, and when he finally picked himself up, chest speckled with dirt and dead grass, Tildy saw that he was fighting back tears. Evidently a more serious game than it looked; maybe there was money riding.
The inning ended without further damage, the other team took the field, and their first baseman tossed a few warm-up grounders. He was olive-skinned, tall, with pectorals swelling under a T-shirt that had his name felt-markered across the back: Silvio. A high throw kicked off the heel of his glove and, instinctively, Tildy trotted after it.
“Bring it here, Mommy.” He had stunning black eyes.
Tildy looked at the slightly misshapen ball, squeezed it, weighed it, rolled it around her palm. They were all watching her, smirking. She let it drop, bouncing it twice off her toes like a soccer ball, scooped it between her legs, caught it with her other hand and flipped it over her back. She took it on the one bounce and in the same motion launched a throw that trailed smoke as it rose from her shoe tops and whistled toward Silvio’s head. Ducking down and away at the last second, he threw up his glove and the impact of the arriving ball spun him halfway around. He whirled on her, features tense and sharp, but realized in another moment that to lose his temper in front of the others, and at the provocation of this scrawny little bruja, would also be to lose face.
“What position you play, Butch?”
“Shortstop.”
“Okay, Butch. You show us what you can do. Chombo! You go in the outfield.”
Silvio borrowed a mitt that was slightly too big for her hand and she felt suddenly haggard, ungainly as she took her position, rubbed dirt on her hands. She had not won his respect, only his curiosity…. Check the freak, boys. This ought to be good.
Her first chance was a slow roller that trickled past the mound. She charged, barehanded it and leaped high on the throw, scissoring her legs. The man was out by eight feet. He stood for a moment, hands on hips, and then spat.
“Get down with it, Butch.”
“In his face.”
The chatter felt good to her, a warming incantation. She caught a soft pop-up, backpedaling, to end the inning and scooted off the field with her head down to conceal the grin that forced itself on her. She flopped down under a tree and Silvio came and sat next to her, rubbing his back against the knobby trunk.
“You blow some minds out there, Butch.” He shook his head. “Where you learn to play ball, in the joint?”
“No, I just fell into it.”
“What else you do, Butch?”
The hand he had placed on her leg conversationally was still there. Did she imagine a slow, deliberate increase in its pressure? Then he shifted so that the outer curve of his hip melded with hers and there was no mistaking the heat that flowed between them. She felt an odd serenity with this stranger touching her, a soft abatement of her protective reflexes. They gazed into space, said nothing, while his fingers splayed and met, splayed and met, taking small pinching folds in the fabric of her pants.
“You’re up now,” he whispered. “Go hit a homerun for me.”
But with men on first and second, Tildy struck out on three pitches, her mind totally preoccupied with imaginings of what Silvio looked like without clothes. She came away from the plate blushing.