it afforded to catch a glimpse of Sara Gaskell in high-heeled shoes and a dress.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, blushing all the way down to the backs of her freckled arms. “It’s these goddamned shoes. I don’t know how anyone can walk on these things.”
“Practice,” said Miss Sloviak.
“I need to talk to you,” I told Sara, under my breath. “Now.”
“That’s funny,” said Sara, in her everyday, bantering tone. She didn’t look at me, but instead aimed a sardonic smile at Crabtree, whom she knew to be in on our secret. “I need to talk to you, too.”
“I think he needs to talk to you more,” said Crabtree, handing her his coat and Miss Sloviak’s.
“I doubt it,” said Sara. The dress—a fairly amorphous black rayon number with a boxy bodice and cap sleeves—rode up a little behind and clung to the fabric of her panty hose, and as she clattered around the foyer, arms and throat bare, ankles wobbling, hair piled atop her head with the relative haphazardness she reserved for festive occasions, there was an awkward grandeur to her movements, an unconscious headlong career, that I found very appealing. Sara hadn’t the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deino-therian body might have on a man. Balanced atop those modest two-inch spikes of hers she projected a certain air of calculated daring, like one of those inverted skyscrapers you see from time to time, sixty-three stories of glass and light set down on a point of steel.
“Tripp, what did you do to this dog?” said Crabtree. “He can’t seem to take his eyes off your larynx.”
“He’s blind,” I said. “He can’t even see my larynx.”
“I bet he knows how to find it, though.”
“Oh, now, hush you, Doctor Dee,” said Sara. “Honestly.”
Miss Sloviak looked uneasily at the dog, who had assumed his favorite stance, directly between me and Sara, teeth bared, paws planted, barking operatically.
“Why doesn’t he like you?” Miss Sloviak said.
I shrugged, and I felt myself blushing. There’s nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
“I owe him some money,” I said.
“Grady, dear,” said Sara, passing the overcoats along to me. There was a patent note of stratagem in her voice. “Will you go and toss these on the bed in the guest room?”
“I don’t think I know how to find the guest room,” I said, although I had on several occasions tossed Sara herself down onto that very bed.
“Well, then,” said Sara, her voice alight now with panic. “I’d better show you.”
“I guess you’d better,” I said.
“We’ll just make ourselves at home,” said Crabtree. “How about that? Okay, now, old Doctor. Okay, old puppy dog.” He knelt to pet Doctor Dee, pressing his forehead against the dog’s tormented brow, murmuring secret editorial endearments. Doctor Dee stopped barking at once, and began to sniff at Crabtree’s long hair.
“Could you find my husband, Terry, and ask him to lock Doctor Dee up in the laundry room for the rest of the party? Thanks, you can’t miss him. He has eyes just like Doctor Dee’s, and he’s the handsomest man in the room.” This was true. Walter Gaskell was a tall, silver-haired Manhattanite with a narrow waist and broad shoulders, and his blue eyes had the luminous, emptied-out look of a reformed alcoholic’s. “That’s a lovely dress, Miss Sloviak,” she said as we started up the stairs.
“She’s a man,” I told Sara as I followed up after her, carrying an armful of topcoats.
IN the summer of 1958 it was reported in the Pittsburgh newspapers that Joseph Tedesco, a native of Naples and an assistant groundskeeper at Forbes Field, had been suspended from his job for keeping an illegal vegetable garden on a scrap of vacant land that lay just beyond the wall in center right. It was his third summer at the ballpark; in the years before this he had failed at several modest enterprises, among them a domestic gardening business, an apple orchard, and a nursery. He was careful in his work but terrible with money, and he lost two of his businesses through disorderly bookkeeping. The rest of them he lost through drink. His well-tended but rather overexuberant patch of tomatoes, zucchini, and romano beans on tall poles, some four hundred and twenty feet from home plate, had caught the unfavorable notice of a real estate broker who was attempting to close the deal for the sale of the ballpark site to the University of Pittsburgh, and soon afterward Mr. Tedesco found himself sitting, in his vast undershorts, in his living room in Greenfield, while his former crewmates went on chalking foul lines and hosing down the infield dirt. Then his tale of injustice made the papers; there was a public outcry and a protest from the union; and a week after the scandal broke Mr. Tedesco was back on the job, having fulfilled his promise to dig up the offending plants and transplant them to his own postage-stamp backyard on Neeb Avenue. A few weeks later, just after the all-star break, at his youngest child’s and only daughter’s eighth birthday party, Mr. Tedesco had too much to drink, choked on a piece of meat while laughing at a joke, and died, surrounded by his wife and children, his two grandchildren, and his rows of Early Girls and lima beans. With an almost mysterious affection his daughter would afterward remember him as a big, fat, shiftless, and overexuberant minor craftsman, with bad habits, who committed a kind of suicide-by-appetite.
I’m not sure how much of that I’ve got right, but it shows the lengths to which I’ve had to go in order to account for why a woman as sensible and afraid of disorder as Sara Gaskell would ever waste an hour on a man like me. Her mother, whom I’d met on two occasions, was a sad, strong, undemonstrative Polish lady with a black wardrobe and a white mustache who worked in a laundry. In raising her half-orphaned daughter, she had brought to bear all of her considerable armaments in a largely successful effort to expunge Joseph Tedesco’s evanescent legacy of failure and excess, and raise a woman who would always go for the sure thing, however modest. Thus Sara had submerged an early love of literature to the study of accounting, following this with a Ph.D. in administration. She’d refused the proposals of the first two great loves of her life in order to pursue her career, and then, having found herself Chancellor of our college at the age of thirty-five, allowed herself to marry.
She chose the head of the English Department: his affairs were in order, his career well-established, his habits husbandly, and he kept his seven thousand books not simply alphabetized but grouped by period and country of origin. As the eighth child of a poor Greenfield family she was attracted to Walter’s genteel manners, to his Dartmouth education, his knowledge of sailboats, his parents’ penthouse apartment on Central Park West. Her mother approved of him; Sara told herself that he was quite literally the best she could hope for. Nevertheless, in spite of all her mother’s efforts, there remained a wild and sentimental Neapolitan streak in Sara, and this, along with some faint Electral residue she saw crackling in the air around me, may also help to explain her willingness to endanger her stable existence for the doubtful pleasure of my company.
The other explanation I used to make to myself was that my lover was an addict and I was a manufacturer of her particular drug of choice. Sara would read anything you handed her—Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet—at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting
