B009XDDVN8 EBOK (11 page)

“He plays shortstop. I never play shortstop.”

“You might if you played with a little more get-up-and-go. I could talk to the coach.”

“Oh God. Mom?”

“Daddy won’t talk to the coach,” said Caitlin.

“I’m not good enough to play shortstop,” said Eric. “I’ll never be good enough.”

“Not if you don’t work at it,” I said. “But nothing’s impossible, if you’re a Willing.” That was my little catchphrase, and it used to get a laugh when my kids were young and cute and adored their father, but it got no laugh today.

“I’m not good enough to sit on the bench. I stink.”

“You don’t stink, you just have to pay more attention to the game.”

“I don’t want to pay attention. It’s baseball, it’s stupid. Watching worms is more interesting than watching baseball. But at least I don’t have to do it anymore. You promised and then you broke your promise.”

“I did it this one time and I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“It wasn’t the first time,” said Caitlin, helpfully.

“You broke your promise,” said Eric, with the utter calm that he could summon in the most fraught situations, “and under the terms of our agreement, now I get to quit.”

“You don’t want to do that,” I said.

“Sure I do. I hate baseball, I always have. It’s dangerous. People get hurt.”

“No they don’t.”

“Then why do we have to wear helmets? Skydivers wear helmets, motorcycle racers.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Marines.”

“It’s just a game.”

“Then you play it. I only played because you made me. But since you broke your promise, I’m allowed to quit. That was the deal, wasn’t it, Mom?”

“Yes it was,” said Caitlin.

“So I quit,” said Eric.

“There’s no quitting in baseball.”

“There is now,” said Eric.

“You don’t want to be a quitter, son.”

“Why not? I love quitting. It’s, like, my favorite thing. Remember when Mom got me to try out for that stupid play and after two rehearsals I quit? That was great. And that time you signed me up for that series of golf clinics with that goofy lady?” He raised the timbre of his voice to absurd warbling heights. “‘Today we’ll learn all about chipmunks.’”

“Chipping is an important part of the game.”

“That was the only time I ever had fun at golf, when I walked away. How long did I last at lacrosse?”

“A week or so?”

“Three days, which was two days too long. I thought quitting lacrosse was pretty cool, but now I get to quit baseball, which has been, like, a dream of mine for years. You always say we need to make our dreams a reality, don’t you, Dad?”

“Quitting gets you nowhere.”

“But I’m not going to be a mediocre quitter. I’m going to be the greatest quitter of all time. I’m going to make the
Guinness Book of World Records
. In fact, I’m going to find more stuff I can sign up for just so I can quit. Dance class. Accordion lessons. In fact, let’s go to Dick’s and get a squash racquet right now so I can quit that tomorrow. Quitting squash will be one of the highlights of my life, next to what happened today, of course, because today I quit baseball.”

“You having fun?”

“I wasn’t before but I am now.”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“But we had a deal. Mom?”

“You had a deal,” said Caitlin.

“You’re encouraging him,” I said.

“If you want to quit baseball, Eric,” said Caitlin, staring hard at me, “I’ll call the coach.”

“He’ll be relieved,” said Eric. “He’ll be thrilled. The only one happier than me will be him.”

“You’re not quitting,” I said.

“Watch me,” said Eric, before throwing his spoon at the bowl. “And I still want a dog.”

“So you can quit on that, too.”

“I’d never quit on a dog, Dad,” said Eric, staring right at me, his gaze as sharp as a dart, “but today I’m quitting on you.”

Caitlin let a twist of victory raise the corner of her mouth as Eric disappeared from the kitchen. “Isn’t it nice to see that our son has goals?” she said.

“I know we have our problems, but you can still support me in front of the kids.”

“I won’t support you when you’re wrong. You were wrong to force him to play Little League this year, and you were wrong to make him look bad in front of his friends. He knows what he likes and baseball isn’t it.”

“Everyone loves baseball.”

“Not Eric. And frankly, I’ve always disapproved of it myself. Young boys just standing around in the outfield, picking their noses while pitchers struggle to throw strikes. At least in soccer they get to run around.”

“Soccer is the leading edge of a plot to turn us French. I won’t have my son eating snails for breakfast. And I don’t want him to be a quitter.”

“He devours books, he finishes all the video games he starts, he’s a genius at that computer, and he gets all As in school. The kid is not a quitter, he’s just not a ballplayer.”

“Maybe we should sign him up for football.”

“Are you listening to yourself, Jon? I mean, really.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “Boys need sports.”

“Not your boy,” she said.

Caitlin and I met in an Intro Philosophy class our sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin. Back then her good looks were hidden beneath limp brown hair, round glasses, the whole shy-intellectual kit. I fancied that I was the only one deep enough to see through the unremarkable and find the beauty beneath. I wasn’t a jock or an activist with vivid political stripes, I didn’t write for the school paper or act in the school plays, I didn’t do anything to attract attention to myself, which, let me tell you, didn’t really draw the chicks. But Caitlin with her baggy sweaters seemed to be right within my wheelhouse.

The first iteration of our relationship started with sex on a beery night and continued in a hang-out-together-with-other-friends-until-we-hooked-up-at-night sort of way. We didn’t have deep discussions about what we were doing together, we just did it, and in the doing it was as if we were creating a new type of relationship, free of the bland expectations that society imposes upon the real thing that exists between two people. Whatever it appeared we were to others, and whatever we did while we were apart, we had an understanding that we were together and that we cared for each other even if we were too cool to show it. I thought our relationship was Zen-like in its perfection—as per my Religion 463 course: Buddhist Thought—freedom and sex, attachment and nonattachment. And did I mention the freedom and the sex?

Dude.

Our understanding lasted until the beginning of the next school term, when, with many tears and much anger, she told me to get the hell out of her life. Something about my inability to open up, my inability to share my deepest feelings. She said she was tired of knocking her head against a brick wall, that we were so cool together she was getting frostbite.

“But at least the sex is good,” I had said.

“Not that good,” she said.

We went our separate ways on relatively good terms and I just assumed, in the way the young often assume, that I’d eventually find someone better. But as I churned relentlessly toward the calamity of graduation, I slipped into a series of short-term relationships that always floundered on the shoals of my personality, variously described in the breakup confrontations as remote, guarded, selfish, detached. One well-meaning waif even sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock” as she broke up with me. It was a bloodbath. Then, at some open house or other during my senior year, I again ran into Caitlin.

When I spied her across the room for the first time in well over a year, I froze, startled at the deep and despairing regret I felt. She was laughing at something someone said, her teeth caught a bit of light, and I remembered the way we were together, the comfort, the tacit understanding, the coolness of her touch. I knew full well what had happened to us, why I always seemed distant. It was the secret, the thing I kept from everyone. For the first time I felt like I was cursed by what I had done, and what it had done to me. And then she turned and saw me staring, and smiled with real delight at seeing me, and it felt as if she was smiling at me from a more innocent and promising time in my life. My mother by then had died in that Florida hospital room, and I had lost contact with everyone from my childhood except for Augie and Ben, whom I only kept up with in our weekly calls and the occasional bawdy outing. In truth, I had more history at that moment with this woman across the room than I did with almost anyone else in the world.

I don’t know if I had loved Caitlin in our first go-round, but I loved her at that instant with an eviscerating force. There have been two moments in my life when I saw a brilliant possibility and seized it with all the power of my being. The second was when I saw Caitlin that night and swore to myself that I would never do anything to lose her again.

But somewhere over the years, without exactly knowing how, I had.

Now, as she leaned against the pristine stainless steel of the refrigerator and stared at me, it was like she was staring out with the eyes of a stranger. And maybe she was, since she had replaced her glasses with contact lenses tinted blue. In fact, her whole look had been given a slick suburban burnish. Her limp brown hair was now glossy and gold, with the perfect streaks of a teenager, the specialty of Chez Rochelle on Highway 31. She no longer wore baggy jeans and sweaters, but white capris and a navy sleeveless top she bought at the Ann Tyler Factory Store off Route 64, an outfit that showed off her tight body and lean, muscled arms carved at the Nautilus Fitness on Route 321. She was prettier than she’d ever been, more beautiful than I had ever imagined she could be back in college. And the gap that separated us had never been greater.

Between us lay all the moments when, instead of confiding wholly one in the other and placing our hearts on the line, we had settled for less. Between us lay routine and habit and the taking of one another for granted. Between us lay the years of our marriage. That those years had become a barrier instead of a lovely shared connection was a tragedy, and the fault was mine. For all the times I had held back a truth here or a fear there, for all the years I had played a part until the acting became the reality, the fault was mine. And there was nothing now I could do to make it right and no time now in which to do it. I looked at her and felt something slip inside and I went slightly unhinged for a moment and my eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, “tell your son.”

“No, that’s not it,” I said, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand.

“Jon?”

“I’m just sorry.”

“For what? For staying in Vegas for an extra day of debauchery?”

“No, that couldn’t be helped.”

“For not calling?”

“My phone went dead.”

“And there was no phone in the hotel?”

“At those prices?”

“Then what?”

“For whatever happened to us.”

She looked at me coolly, as if it were all a trick, which maybe it was. “What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know, I’m a little out of sorts. It was a tough trip.”

“Why? How’s Augie?”

“Not so good,” I said.

I had never told Caitlin the truth of what Augie, Ben, and I had done in Pitchford all those years ago, but I had told her of the dissolute life Augie was living in Vegas. She admired that I flew out to check on his health and welfare now and then, though she also admitted that it puzzled her. She didn’t see me as much of a caretaker, and yet there I was, winging off to Vegas every time Augie had so much as a cold. He’s more like a brother, I had told her, and she seemed satisfied with that.

“Is he sick?” she said. “Is he depressed?”

“He’s dead.”

“Jon?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Jon. You poor thing. How?”

“How you would expect.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“So am I, but it was inevitable, wasn’t it? It just gets you thinking about things. I never got a chance to tell him that I loved him. That I was sorry the way things turned out. That I wish I had been a better friend.”

“But you
were
a good friend to Augie. Surprisingly, shockingly good.”

“Not as good as I could have been. I let things get between us. I saw him more as a burden than as a crucial part of my life. Something to be handled. As things got messier I pulled away when I should have been stepping up. I let the detritus of life get between us, and I’m sorry for that.”

She pushed herself off the refrigerator, stepped toward me with her arms out. “Jon, sweetie, come here.”

I stepped toward her and I let her hug me and it felt good, letting myself be hugged, just standing there with my tears while my wife hugged me. I felt small just then, a little boy being hugged by his mother—not my mother, I don’t remember her ever hugging me, but some idealized figure of a mother. I felt safe, loved, cocooned.

“We don’t have to go out tonight,” she whispered. “We can stay in. I’ll call Denise and cancel. We’ll stay home and talk it out. About Augie, I mean.”

But she meant more, didn’t she? Something had cracked in the barrier of habit between us and there it was, a final gift from Augie, an opening toward my wife. For what? Who knew, but it was there, for an instant. What scared me more, the thugs from Vegas or that opening? But what could I do? For everyone’s benefit I had to disappear, I had to meet Harry, I had things to plan, there wasn’t enough time.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “We should go out. Thad’s been looking forward to it.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Yeah. We’ll go out, we’ll laugh, we’ll forget about things. We promised.”

“All right, sweetie, if you insist. But we can leave early, come home, spend some time together, talk.”

“That would be nice, really nice,” I said, enjoying the last hug with my wife before I pushed myself away. “But I can’t. Maybe Thad and Denise can drive you home from the restaurant.”

She stepped back, stepped away, stared at me.

“I have to leave a little early,” I said, missing the hug, but plowing on like a plow horse. “I have to meet someone at ten.”