where he had said he was. I looked in through the translucent glass of the shower stall and saw my grandfather in there, and I could also see that he had all his clothes on. Naturally, I was alarmed. I reached over and pulled aside the glass divider.
There—inside the shower—was my grandfather wearing his three-piece suit. He was standing under the spray of water, his wet hair hanging like seaweed down the sides of his head. Even his shoes were on. “Grandpa,” I said, “what are you doing in there?”
He looked at me. “The stars,” he said. “The stars are so beautiful.”
“The stars at night?” I asked.
“What other stars are there?”
I took his hand and led him out of the shower and took his clothes off and toweled him dry and into his pajamas. Then I went downstairs and told the attendants that they would have to take better care of my grandfather, that they would have to watch him more closely.
BUT BACK TO BRADLEY. In those days he had an idea that he was a painter. Of course he was a painter. That’s not what I mean. He labored as a house painter but his real love consisted of a variety of sly and very odd expressionism on canvas. He became proficient at it. He understood the ironies of his existence, painting houses during the day and making eerie images at night. When you’re as young as we were you have a strong sense of the pranks of fate. He had to prove that he could be a real painter and not a pretender, just the way that a lot of men feel they have to prove they’re real men. I’ve never known what that was about. I don’t think that most women have to prove that they’re real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.
Bradley comes on as a know-nothing but he really admired artists like Diebenkorn and Jennifer Bartlett and Hockney and all the other painters who knew how to use a light luminescent blue. He loved representational art that was full of problems you couldn’t solve just by looking. He loved stylization and stasis and pale pastel color, color that appeared to be temporary or about to fade, colors that might be in danger of becoming obsolete any minute now, blues that were endangered and inadequate. Did he mention that? Probably not. Because he had sold so few of his own works, he grew killingly modest. The more representational his art was, the more abstract he became. You couldn’t find him anywhere. He turned himself into the greatest abstraction.
As for his paintings, they filled up all the space we had. It was really tricky for me to adjust my attitude toward his accomplishments because I really wasn’t sure whether his work’s self-consciousness was intelligent or just gawky and shy. He had given up hyperrealism and had gone in for social commentary in faded hues. I remember that he splashed Tip of the Andes coffee on one of his canvases as a judgment against the proliferation of big coffeehouses like Starbucks, but how would you ever know that unless he told you, since the painting was of a window? All his canvases required an explanation or a commentary. They accumulated in the house. They even occupied the bathroom. And his art took up most of his free time. So when he was painting I found other diversions.
I had squeezed in some soffball as my one evening sport. I’m a bit of a jock. As a girl I swam constantly and played basketball when I could. I used to love to watch gymnastics. I would rather watch the women gymnasts than the men. I would rather watch women playing basketball than guys. When sports are played by women it speaks directly to my condition. I like to watch their fierceness and the animal pride of female physical movement.
Our softball team was doing pretty well that particular summer. We were blowing everybody else into the ash can. That week—the one I’m telling you about—we had this night game with the Brackner Buick Devils. They were another women’s team and supposedly our rivals. What I liked was simply getting out on the field under the lights during those summer evenings, playing the game, watching the evening come down to earth, the moths flittering in front of the floodlights. I was psyched for it. I had let Bradley know how much the game meant to me.
So on this occasion it was the bottom of the eighth inning. We were ahead, five to four. Bradley sat in the stands watching. He cast his husbandly gaze on me and maybe paid more attention to me as a Softball player than as his wife and lover. He had a curious budget of attention, Bradley did, maybe it was the painter in him, maybe he thought of Softball diamonds as geometrical abstractions. I was up to bat. Their pitcher was throwing some skillful stuff and they were concentrating hard in the infield and I could hear Bradley from the stands clapping and encouraging me. That was sweet. Give him credit. I had my patient husband the Toad in my corner. So I thought I’d show them, and on her next pitch I connected with what I thought was a line drive.
Their shortstop was a sort of lanky woman. She had that specific appearance of physical confidence as if she never thought twice about making a move before making it. All her moves were ones she did purposefully. First thought, best thought. She did them quickly. Body and mind together. It was certainly beautiful to watch. As an athlete she had no hesitation of the kind that sometimes hobbled me. After my hit, I was two steps off for first base when she ran backward and leaped to her left for the ball. She extended herself and went airborne and caught the ball smack in her glove. Thmp. My line drive.
I was out. I was absolutely out and out. What she had done was there and then the most amazing physical move I had seen for I don’t know how long, in its concentration and certainty and grace. Most people would have been crushed that they were put out in a game that close. Not me. Not that time. I am telling you it was heart-stopping. To watch that goddess in her ponytail doing that one leap caused me to halt in my tracks. I was almost irrelevant to what she did. I did the hit. She did the move on it. She had conviction. God, I loved that. So I stood there like a waxwork. I stayed right on that spot halfway between home and first base. They could have put me into Madame Tussaud’s, I was so unmoving. She got up from the ground and dusted herself off. She rubbed her forehead with her forearm. She held the glove up and then threw the ball to the pitcher. She smiled at her teammates and girl-whooped the way you do when you’re the champ of one particular action that you can do in front of other people. Then she smiled at me.
If a guy did that smile to another guy it might be a challenge to him and an insult. But not hers. Not her spun-steel-and-stardust smile. She was displaying what she could do for me. A very pleasing and smiling woman. And I thought: this certainly ain’t your regular sort of day. Or your regular sort of game either. Because that night with the moths clustering in front of the lights, when she smiled at me I felt that smile go down through me and out the other side. Some sort of competitive drive in me gave way to something else. As if I was transparent. A burning. Permeable to her smile.
We ended up losing that game. Six to five. Even while it was happening the game was already a quickly fading memory. Losing. Winning. Who cared? Because by that time I was watching her stealthily. I was trying to recover that moment by sheer willpower.
AFTERWARD THEIR TEAM and our team went out for beers at the King’s Armor Bar. As it turned out her name was Jenny. I’d seen her before. She worked as a meter maid. Almost like a song: Lovely Jenny, meter maid. Pitchers of beer circulated all around the table. I was the pretty woman in a baseball uniform sitting with her husband and surrounded by other girl-jocks. We were smoking and laughing and consuming the beer. I was being cool. My husband—Bradley—was scrunched up against my left side where I could lean into him and he was talking to the other husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends who happened to be stringing along. Jenny the meter maid had taken a seat on my right. I had not the slightest clue what I was going to do next. Except for my involuntary stomach flips it might have been any night at all. I was ignoring the stomach flips.
Peanut shells all over the floor. Smoke everywhere. Hubcaps decorating the walls. The cap-gun clang and bonk of pinball machines. People saying “Fuck” every five seconds and then laughing haw haw haw after they pour beer down themselves.
After
