He examined the dust jacket, smacked the book against mine, and said, “I’ll read it.” Then he handed the books to his secretary, who, I later learned, was his wife.
“How are things?” I asked.
“How are things? Things are, one day you’re a genius, the next day you’re the village idiot.” Three years had passed since the Mets championship season, and now, regardless of Mr. C’s having lifted the team from last place to the World Series, second-guessing his judgment had become every New York sportswriter’s pastime. He said, “Are you free for lunch tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Twelve o’clock, VIP dining room. Jean, give him a pass. I have to run.” Then he slapped my back and returned to his office.
Next I went to find Dr. Lans, the team’s psychiatrist. He’d spoken to me during spring training and offered to do so again when I rejoined the team in New York. His clubhouse-level office was dim, windowless, and adjacent to the media room, where the team’s public relations staff taught players how to sit, face the camera, enunciate words, and show no emotion whenever they answered press conference questions. Some players were naturally at ease, others jittery and self-conscious. “Those are the ones we worry about,” he said.
He sat behind his desk and I sat across from him. Quickly and defensively, he said, “I can’t talk about Darryl.”
“I don’t want to talk about Darryl.”
“Great,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“The losing streak.”
He barely paused before he answered. “The team has no center. That’s why it’s losing. A team is supposed to cohere, to shape an identity. This team hasn’t.”
“So how do you help players?”
“
I
may not be able to help them. But, I do know
what would
help them. Winning. One win can restore a team’s faith in itself. Now, I can talk to players individually about marital problems, money problems, self-esteem problems, and substance-abuse problems —don’t make a note of that—but I can’t do one thing. Make the team win. No.
They
have to win.” He raised an index finger, as if he wanted me to concentrate on an issue I might find baffling. “By the end of nine innings, they have to score more runs than the other guys. If they do that, then what’s complicated becomes simple. But we don’t want things too simple. If things are always simple, I don’t have a job. Don’t write that down, either.” “I won’t.”
On the field, I watched batting practice for a while. An hour before game time, I found the cafeteria where the reporters ate. I placed a sandwich and a Coke on a plastic tray and looked for a place to sit. The scene reminded me of high school. Certain groups crowded around tables and talked loudly; others whispered and seemed meek. Individual writers focused on their work. Seated alone was a man with a slight build, a ring of gray hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and a pale mustache. I can’t remember if I recognized him, or if we introduced ourselves to each other once he said it was okay for me to join him. But I knew his name and his work: Roger Angell. He covered baseball for the
New Yorker
. I would read his articles when they first appeared and then reread them when they were collected and published in book form several years later. I regarded his work with a minor sense of awe. He had a detached, nearly Olympian view of the game, and a graceful prose style untainted by the grubby, workmanlike banality of daily journalism. But then, his stepfather had been E. B. White, author of the children’s book
Charlotte’s Web
, and coeditor of the classic grammatical usage manual Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style
, a book that explains, for instance, how to enclose parenthetical expressions between commas: “If the interruption to the flow of the sentence is but slight,” the authors write, “the writer may safely omit the commas. But whether the interruption be slight or considerable, he must never omit one comma and leave the other. Such punctuation is indefensible.” I never thought I might have to take up arms to protect the integrity of a sentence, but, as Mr. White obviously did, I imagined Mr. Angell at age eight, having nightmares about comma splices. He asked what paper I wrote for.
“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m researching a novel.”
He stopped eating. “You’re a novelist?”
I nodded.
“What’s your name?”
I told him.
“Don’t know it,” he said, dismissively. Then he lifted his fork.
“I published my first novel last month.”
He lowered his fork and snapped at me the way a dog snatches a slice of meat from midair. “Who published it?”
“Four Walls Eight Windows.”
“Never heard of them.”
At that moment, his publishing pedigree made me feel more than ever like a literary mutt. So I said, “The
Times
reviewed it, and then listed it in its Bear in Mind section.” Without saying a word, he lifted his tray and left the table. At game time, when he saw me enter the press box, he turned away, as if I didn’t belong in the chair he, on some other night, may have occupied.
Forty thousand fans filled the seats, darkness embraced the stadium, and, above it, a halo of light dimmed to a milky blackness that obscured the stars. On the manicured field, players in white uniforms moved, whenever the ball was struck, with startling precision. For eight innings, the Mets played well enough to outscore the other team. But when they surrendered a lead in the top of the ninth, Mr. Cashen left his skybox and strode toward me, crouched like a pit bull ready to tear off a piece of flesh. “Disappointing, Thomas,” he said, hurrying by me, “very disappointing.” Kevin McReynolds, the Mets’ left fielder, had stepped to the plate. Without hesitation I said, “Don’t worry. McReynolds is going to hit one out of the park.” Mentally, I
saw
the ball sail over the outfield fence, and the act seemed uncannily real. Still, I mentioned it simply to cheer up Mr. Cashen, who was on the elevator when, moments later, McReynolds knocked the ball into the left-field stands. Immediately after the win, tension in the clubhouse vanished. Players spoke freely to the press, smiled, and joked with one another. Reporters surrounded McReynolds, demanding quotes for their columns and articles. I walked past naked players heading for the showers, and a seldom-called-upon relief pitcher who used his bullpen time to study for a degree in accounting. I stopped in front of Ron Darling’s locker when I noticed several Zen philosophy books on the shelf above his uniform. I nodded at them and said, “Does reading them help you pitch?” He glanced at the books, then looked at me and said, “Not unless they can tell me how to throw a better slider.”
The Mets won eleven straight, and twenty-three out of twenty-four. Secretly, I wanted to take semidivine credit for their winning streak, but the next day at lunch Mr. Cashen told the man seated beside me, Fay Vincent, the commissioner of baseball, that each time he rode an elevator near the end of a game, the Mets won. “So they want me on an elevator, any elevator, whenever we’re behind in the ninth inning!” Others at the table laughed. I felt slightly disoriented when a waiter said, “May I take your plate? ” Then I understood why. A year ago, I would have been the waiter.
I took notes for several days, then said good-bye to my sister and mother. At the airport, I bought a Sunday
Times
, found a seat, took out the book review section, and opened it.
A Stone of the Heart
had been included in the Editors’ Choice Summer Reading List. I called Jody to tell her. Then my flight was announced and I flew to Key West, not to wait tables but to see my first play produced. If someone had asked me who I was, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had an answer.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
’d written the play mostly on guest checks and time cards. Standing around before the hostess—who happened to be Jody—seated customers at my tables, I imagined lines of dialogue, often without intending to. I simply heard voices. This double-edged gift helped me as a writer but later amplified my paranoia. On good nights, particularly during autumn when hypo-mania kept my brain bubbling with words the way water boils in a mad scientist’s test tube, I wrote one or two pages of dialogue while waiting tables. When I got home, I pulled bits of paper from my pockets, dropped them on my desk, and the next morning I typed and revised them.
I had begun writing the play when Jody and I lived in New York. Around this time, I met the lawyer who handled my divorce and then Jody’s. His
Village Voice
ad had said, “No-hassle divorces, $105.” So I made an appointment to see him. After entering a grungy midtown building, I climbed a dim, narrow stairway. On the landing, I checked the office number listed in the ad. It was correct. The brass plaque nailed to the wooden door said “James Ingrassia, Attorney-at-Law.” Inside, a teenage girl seated at a cluttered desk held a baby in her arms. With her telephone’s handset lodged between her left shoulder and ear, she raised her chin to indicate the tattered armchair in which I should sit and wait. I glanced around the room. Old movie posters had been Scotch-taped to its dingy walls. Stacked below them were dull, nickel-colored film canisters. The infant burped, and the girl stroked the back of its head. Then she asked the person at the other end of the line to hold and shouted, “Your five o’clock’s here!” A door to my left opened. Beside it stood a man, perhaps five foot six inches tall, built like a wine barrel with arms and legs. He wore a tan corduroy suit, a striped shirt, and a mismatched paisley tie. He looked to be about forty and spoke in a soft, almost conspiratorial voice. “How you doing? Come on in,” he said, angling his head. His curly, chocolate-colored hair remained in place. I followed him. On his desk, screenplays bound with gold clasps lay beside court documents. And rather than legal casebooks, filmmaking how-to manuals filled his shelves. He sat, grabbed a notepad and pen, and said, “Okay, so. Why do you want a divorce?”
“I love someone who’s not my wife.”
He looked at me. “Do you know how often I hear this?”
“No.”
“Daily. I traffic in tragedy. I’m in the tragedy business.” Then he scanned the room, smiled, and said, “But I’m moving into the film business.” He coughed, expelling dusty air from his lungs. “Okay,” he said. “So. What’s your
legal reason
for a divorce? In New York, you can’t file for divorce just because you love someone other than your spouse.”
“Well, what are my choices?”
“Adultery, physical abuse, mental anguish.” He ticked off several other options.
I didn’t want my marital situation to be construed as excessively hostile. My first wife and I had married young. We didn’t hate each other, although when I moved out and asked for a towel she gave me one with a hole in it. “I guess I’ll go with adultery,” I said.
“Has your wife had affairs?”
“Two.”
“So do you want to be the plaintiff or the defendant?”
“Defendant,” I said.
“Noble.”
I shrugged.
As he made notes, he said, “What do you do?”
Instinctively I said, “I’m a writer,” even though I’d been paid less than two hundred dollars for my work.
He paused to stare at me. “Really? What do you write, fiction, nonfiction, plays, screenplays?”
“Fiction,” I said.
“You’re published?”
“Some short stories in journals.”
“Can you write a screenplay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I have ideas.”
He actually said this. But by the time I’d embellished his words the line in my play became “I have notes. Outlines. Ideas. (Beat—which means a subtle pause.) I want to lay them out for you. I want you to dwell on them. (Beat.) Can I lay the first one out for you?”
While writing the play, I changed our names. I became Mike; he became Al. And Mike said:
Go ahead.
AL
VIRUS.
Pause.
MIKE
Virus?
AL
VIRUS. That’s the title. The idea. Can’t you
see it? Ten million movie marquees, in black
plastic lettering—VIRUS. (Beat.) You like it?
Short pause.
MIKE
It’s simple.