Vicky came over and put her mitt on her head and said, “Let’s get on with it already.”
I needed to find someone at this conference, someone who wouldn’t harm a married man, or hated being married, or couldn’t bear to be alone for three or four days. I didn’t have any big strategy here. I liked to flirt. I needed to stay alert every second for a potential alliance in this war against morbidity and death. Were there rules or prohibitions? Some of my colleagues preyed upon the young, their own students, the low-hanging fruit, which struck me as a real character flaw. I wanted a grown-up, maybe with children of her own, someone who was needed somewhere else and wouldn’t get hooked. I’d driven the many miles here with purpose and concentration. I had to make the most of my time away from home. Over the last ten years, the stuff I’d done could be counted on one hand: a couple of late-night goodbyes that never got past the talking stage; a wriggling blond woman at a convention in Brooklyn who edited textbooks for a living; Ruth Gogelberg, Gunkelman, whatever, at this very conference three or four years ago. It started when I was sixteen. It started when I was five, the need for a girl to save me, the need to escape, in a panic to get away from my mother and father, out of this empty shell. I always had a girlfriend, always fell in love, and even at my most saintly and sexless, I always liked someone out there, was working at something, moving toward it with intention and forethought, nibbling around the edges until I hated the whole thing, until everything I did became about not cheating, not doing something, until it was pretty much a foregone conclusion, and all I had to do was pull the trigger and get it over with, so I could slink back to my safe and stable perch and pretend it had never happened and hate myself and think of someone new.
Amy finished stretching and pulled her hair back into a rubber band. Our thing went beyond lusty one-liners and therapeutic confessions. I’d been in love with her for a year. Not love. Whatever it was. And it just so happened that her personal misery, hidden behind a windfall of prosperity, was ironically charged, luridly beguiling, and possibly useful in a practical sense, as fact-based material for the once and future semiautobiographical storyteller. She walked into the dugout. I stood and walked out, pretending not to know her. She found a bat and went behind the backstop and took practice cuts, swinging so hard her helmet fell off.
The game started. A big sandy-haired kid stepped into the batter’s box and golfed the first pitch high and gone; it landed in the parking lot, where it bounced as people cheered, as he ran around the bases with his arms hanging down, like a pigeon-toed ape. Mohammad Khan could barely lift the bat, and tapped a base hit. Tabitha got up and somehow outran a dribbler down the first-base line. Then Amy went to the plate, grimacing into the sun, and took a wild cut.
She hit it pretty well. The second baseman knocked it down but couldn’t hold on. He picked it up and tagged Tabitha softly on the shoulder, then threw the ball over the first baseman’s head, over the dugout, where it beaned the golf cart that had driven Marilyn Michnick here. Mohammad limped home. When the ball is thrown out of play, the runner is awarded the next base. Amy waited at first. I couldn’t stop myself and yelled, “Take second!”
She looked at me as though the last thing in the world she needed was a man yelling at her in public; she got enough of that at home. It was a confusing moment. I still had some investment or pride in her, I wanted her to thrive, succeed, whatever, so I stood in front of the dugout waving her on. She ran down the base path, unsure, reached second, and stared right at me as she stomped testily on the base with both feet. Stomped as though to defy me. But no one had bothered to anchor the base, so it skipped out from under her and she fell.
And didn’t get up.
The pitcher, Stan, walked to second base. The shortstop knelt. Nobody seemed to be moving. As I got closer, I saw that her whole mood had shifted; she’d come to a sitting position, her arm in her lap. She seemed drunk, the way a drunk is soft, sleepy, in shadows, fighting to stay awake; she was staring down into her lap as if a haze floated in front of her. Looking at her arm, I had to force myself to breathe. It was my fault, I’d done it. I pushed that thought away.
“What’s up?” Carl asked, standing so close he was brushing my shoulder. He hadn’t seen her fall. Then he looked. I watched his face change. She was sitting with one leg folded under herself, foot turned, knees bent, so that the whiteness of her inner thighs showed.
The girl kneeling beside her talked in a loud voice, holding Amy’s forearm. “Tip your head forward, that’s good, now deep breath, just relax, you’re gonna be fine, don’t look, it’s okay, I’ve got your arm,” and Amy saying, in a kind of husky, sleepy voice, “I don’t want to look,” and then a guy in a Red Sox cap came over and draped her arm with a T-shirt.
The security guard called for an ambulance. Vicky walked across the infield dirt, squinted at Amy, then turned to me. Our former and potential closeness made me think she could read my mind. My thoughts were slow and bleating and obstructed, but I noted, finally, that Amy had been a kind of home, a vessel for my discombobulated mind, that my own family treated me like a footstool but this stranger had cared for my soul. At some point, we could hear sirens on the highway. They decided to get Amy out of the sun, and with heavy assistance, she stood and took a few unsteady steps and began lowering herself down to the grass, her legs bending, collapsing, as her handlers bumped into each other, holding her arm, wavering, guiding her down, her legs folded beneath her, all wrong. They raised her up again as though it had been their fault.
“Ready?”
“Sure.”
And again she went down, and this time she tucked her chin and went completely out.
“Amy?” the girl said, kneeling. We all waited. “Can you hear me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you faint easily?”
She nodded.
“I wish you’d told me that before. I wouldn’t have moved you.”
Amy’s gaze drifted down to the T-shirt covering her arm, as if it were some new friend. “I didn’t know until I fainted.”
An EMT and three paramedics arrived, asking a series of questions—name, day of the week, name of the U.S. president—and each time Amy answered politely.
“Can you move your fingers?”
“I can but I don’t want to, but thank you.”
The slapstick fainting, the bone snapped at nearly mid-forearm, crooked and flopping in the sleeve of her skin, not life-threatening but stomach-churning, her broken summer day, her arm lying in her lap, all of us standing over her as Carl used the security guard’s walkie-talkie. They strapped her to a red steel chair on wheels. I knelt down and attempted to communicate without making known any extramural bond between us.