Fade Away, Page 20

  Slam dunk.

  Wallace landed with both arms spread for applause. His taunting chased Myron up court. "Welcome to the NBA, has-been. Or never-was. Or whatever the fuck you are. Oh, man, was that pretty or what? How did I look going up? Be honest. Bottom of my sneakers look sweet, don't they? I'm so pretty. So very pretty. How did it feel when I slammed it in your face? Come on, old-timer, you can tell me."

  Myron tried to tune him out. The Dragons came down and missed a quick shot. The Pacers grabbed the rebound and headed back up court. Wallace faked going back inside and popped way out past the three-point circle. He caught the pass and shot in one motion. The ball went in with a swish. Three pointer.

  "Whoa, old man, did you hear that sound?" Reggie Wallace went on. "That swish? There is no sweeter sound on earth. You hear me? No sweeter sound at all. Not even a woman crying out in orgasm."

  Myron looked at him. "Women have orgasms?"

  Wallace laughed. "Touche, old-timer. Touche."

  Myron checked the clock. He'd been in for thirty-four seconds and his man had scored five points. Myron did some quick math. At that rate, Myron could hold Reggie Wallace to under six hundred points per game.

  The boos started soon after. Unlike his youth, the crowd sounds did not fade into the background. They were not one indistinguishable blur of sound, a home-court cheer to perhaps ride upon the way a surfer picks up a wave. Or a boo in a rival's arena--something you expect and even thrive on in a perverse way. But to hear your own fans boo your specific performance, to hear your home crowd turn against you--Myron had never experienced that before. He heard the crowd now as never before, as a collective entity of derision and as distinct voices making ugly catcalls. "You suck, Bolitar!" "Get that stiff outta there!" "Blow out your other knee and sit down!" He tried to ignore them but each catcall punctured him like a dagger.

  Pride took over. He would not let Wallace score. The mind was willing. The heart was willing. But as Myron soon saw, the knee was not. He was simply too slow. Reggie Wallace scored six more points off Myron that period for a total of eleven. Myron scored two off an open jumper. He took to playing what he used to call "appendix" basketball; that is, certain players on the floor are like your appendix--they're either superfluous or they hurt you. He tried to stay out of the way and hit TC down low. He kept passing and moving away from the ball. When he saw a big opening and drove the lane near the end of the quarter, the Pacers' big center swatted the shot into the crowd. The boos were thunderous. Myron looked up. His mom and dad were still as two statues. One box over, a group of well-dressed men were cupping their hands around their mouths and starting a "Bolitar Sucks" chant. Myron saw Win move quickly toward them. Win offered his hand to the cheer's leader. The leader took it. The leader went down.

  But the odd thing was, even as Myron stunk up the joint, even as he continued to get beaten on defense and play ineffectively on offense, the old confidence remained. He wanted to stay in the game. He would still look for an opening, relatively unshaken, a man in denial, a man ignoring the mounting evidence that a crowd of 18,812 (according to the loudspeaker) could plainly see. He knew his luck would change. He was a little out of shape, that was all. Soon it would all turn around.

  He realized how much that sounded like B Man's description of a compulsive gambler's rationale.

  The half ended not long after that. As Myron headed off the court, he looked up again at his parents. They stood and smiled down at him. He smiled and nodded back. He looked toward the group of well-dressed booers. They were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Win.

  Nobody spoke to him at halftime, and Myron didn't get in the rest of the game. He suspected that Clip had been behind his playing. Why? What had Clip been trying to prove? The game ended in a two-point victory for the Dragons. By the time they got into the locker room and began changing, Myron's performance was forgotten. The media surrounded TC, who had played a brilliant game, scoring thirty-three points and grabbing eighteen rebounds. TC slapped Myron's back when he walked past him but said nothing.

  Myron unlaced his sneakers. He wondered if his parents were going to wait for him. Probably not. They would figure he would want to be alone. His parents, for all their butting in, were actually pretty good at knowing when to make themselves scarce. They'd wait for him at home, staying up all night if they had to. To this day, his father stayed awake watching TV on the couch until Myron got home. Once Myron put the key in the lock, his father feigned sleep, his reading glasses still perched at the end of his nose, the newspaper lying across his chest. Thirty-two years old and his father still waited up for him. Christ, he was too old for that anymore, wasn't he?

  Audrey peered tentatively around the corner and waited. Only when he signaled with a beckoning wave did she approach. She stuck her pad and pencil in her purse and shrugged. "Look at the bright side," she said.

  "And that is?"

  "You still have a great ass."

  "It's these pro shorts," Myron said. "They really mold and hold."

  "Mold and hold?"

  He shrugged. "Hey, Happy Birthday."

  "Thanks," Audrey said.

  "'Beware the Ides of March,'" Myron pronounced in dramatic fashion.

  "The Ides are the fifteenth," Audrey said. "Today is the seventeenth."

  "Yeah, I know. But I never skip an opportunity to quote Shakespeare. Makes me look smart."

  "Brains and a good ass," Audrey said. "Who cares if you have no lateral movement?"

  "Funny," Myron said, "Jess never complains about that."

  "At least not to your face." Audrey smiled. "Nice to see you so chipper."

  He returned the smile, shrugged.

  Audrey looked around to make sure no one was in earshot. "I got some info for you," she said.

  "On?"

  "On the private eye in the divorce case."

  "Greg hired one?"

  "Either him or Felder," she replied. "I have a source who does electronics work for ProTec Investigations. They do all of Felder's work. Now my source doesn't know all the details, but he helped set up a videotaping at the Glenpointe Hotel two months ago. You know the Glenpointe?"

  Myron nodded. "The hotel on Route 80? Maybe five miles from here?"

  "Right. My source doesn't know what it was for or what ended up on it. He just knows the work was for the Downing divorce. He also confirmed the obvious: this thing is usually done to catch a spouse in flagrante delicto."

  Myron frowned. "This was two months ago?"

  "Yep."

  "But Greg and Emily were already separated by then," Myron said. "The divorce was practically finalized. What would be the point?"

  "The divorce, yes," she agreed. "But the child custody battle was just starting."

  "Yeah, but so what? She was a near-single woman having a sexual encounter. That kind of thing hardly proves parental unfitness in this day and age."

  Audrey shook her head. "You are so naive."

  "What do you mean?"

  "A tape of a mother getting it on with some buck at a motel, doing lord-knows-what? We still live in a sexist society. It would be bound to influence a judge."

  Myron mulled it over, but it just wouldn't mesh. "First of all, you're assuming the judge is both male and a Neanderthal. Second"--he sort of held up his hands and shrugged--"it's the nineties for crying out loud. A woman separated from her husband having sex with another man? Hardly earth-shattering stuff."

  "I don't know what else to tell you, Myron."

  "You got anything else?"

  "That's it," she said. "But I'm working on it."

  "Do you know Fiona White?"

  "Leon's wife? Enough to say hello. Why?"

  "She ever model?"

  "Model?" She sort of chuckled. "Yeah, I guess you'd call it that."

  "She was a centerfold?"

  "Yep."

  "You know what month?"

  "No. Why?"

  He told her about the e-mail. He was fairly sure now that Ms. F was Fiona Whi
te, that Sepbabe was short for September babe, the month, he bet, that she was a centerfold. Audrey listened raptly. "I can check it out," she said when he finished. "See if she was a September playmate."

  "That would help."

  "It would explain a lot," Audrey continued. "About the tension between Downing and Leon."

  Myron nodded.

  "Look, I gotta run. Jess is getting the car around back. Keep me posted."

  "Right, have fun."

  He finished up, toweled off, started dressing. He thought about Greg's secret girlfriend, the one who had been staying at his house. Could it possibly be Fiona White? If so, that would also explain the need for secrecy. Could Leon White have found out about it? That seemed logical based on his antagonism toward Greg. So where did that leave us? And how did this all tie in with Greg's gambling and Liz Gorman's blackmail scheme?

  Whoa, hold the phone.

  Forget gambling for a moment. Suppose Liz Gorman had something else on Greg Downing, a revelation equally if not potentially more explosive than laying down a few bets. Suppose she had somehow found out that Greg was having an affair with his best friend's wife. Suppose she had decided to blackmail Greg and Clip with this information. How much would Greg pay to keep his fans and teammates from learning about his betrayal? How much would Clip pay to keep that particular warhead from detonating in the midst of a championship run?

  It was worth looking into.

  Chapter 27

  Myron stopped at the traffic light that divided South Livingston Avenue and the JFK Parkway. This particular intersection had barely changed in the past thirty years. The familiar brick facade of Nero's Restaurant was on his right. It had originally been Jimmy Johnson's Steak House, but that had to be at least twenty-five years ago. The same Gulf station occupied another corner, a small firehouse another, undeveloped land on the last.

  He turned onto Hobart Gap Road. The Bolitar family had first moved to Livingston when Myron was six weeks old. Little had changed in comparison to the rest of the world. The familiarity of seeing the same sights over so many years was less comforting now than numbing. You didn't notice anything. You looked but you never saw.

  As he turned up the same street where his dad had first taught him to ride that two-wheeler with a Batman reflector on the back, he tried to pay true heed to the homes that had surrounded him all of his life. There had been changes, of course, but in his mind it was still 1970. He and his parents still referred to the neighboring homes by their original owners, as though they were Southern plantations. The Rackins, for example, hadn't lived in the Rackin House for over a decade. Myron didn't know anymore who lived in the Kirschner Place or the Roth House or the Parkers'. Like the Bolitars, the Rackins and the Kirschners and the rest had moved in when the construction was new, when you could still see some remnants of the Schnectman farm, when Livingston was considered the boonies, as far away from New York City at twenty-five miles as western Pennsylvania. The Rackins and the Kirschners and the Roths had lived a big chunk of their lives here. They'd moved in with infant children, raised them, taught them how to ride bicycles on the same streets Myron had learned on, sent them to Burnet Hill elementary school, then Heritage Junior High, finally Livingston High School. The kids had gone off to college, visiting only on college breaks. Not long after, wedding invitations went out. A few started displaying photos of grandchildren, shaking their heads in disbelief at how time flew. Eventually the Rackins and the Kirschners and the Roths felt out of place. This town designed to raise kids held nothing for them anymore. Their familiar homes suddenly felt too big and too empty, so they put them on the market and sold them to new young families with infant children who would too soon go off to Burnet Hill elementary school, then Heritage Junior High, and finally Livingston High School.

  Life, Myron decided, was not that different from one of those depressing life insurance commercials.

  Some neighborhood old-timers had managed to hang on. You could usually tell which houses belonged to them because--in spite of the fact that the children were grown--they had built additions and nice porches and kept their lawns well groomed. The Brauns and the Goldsteins were two who had done just that. And of course, Al and Ellen Bolitar.

  Myron pulled his Ford Taurus into the driveway, his headlights sweeping across the front yard like searchlights during a prison break. He parked up on the blacktop not far from the basketball hoop. He turned off the ignition. For a moment he just stared at the basket. An image of his father lifting him so he could reach the basket appeared before him. If the image had come from memory or imagination, he could not say. Nor did it matter.

  As he moved toward the house, outside lights came on via a motion detector. Though the detectors had been installed three years ago, they were still a source of unbridled awe for his parents, who considered this technological advance on a par with the discovery of fire. When the motion detectors were first put up, Mom and Dad spent blissful hours in disbelief testing the mechanism, seeing if they could duck under its eye or walk superslowly so that the detector would not sense them. Sometimes in life, it's the simple pleasures.

  His parents were sitting in the kitchen. When he entered, they both quickly pretended they were doing something.

  "Hi," he said.

  They looked at him with tilted heads and too-concerned eyes. "Hi, sweetheart," Mom said.

  "Hi, Myron," Dad said.

  "You're back from Europe early," Myron said.

  Both heads nodded like they were guilty of a crime. Mom said, "We wanted to see you play." She said it gently, like she was walking on thin ice with a blowtorch.

  "So how was your trip?" Myron asked.

  "Wonderful," Dad said.

  "Marvelous," Mom added. "The food they served was just terrific."

  "Small portions though," Dad said.

  "What do you mean, small portions?" Mom snapped.

  "I'm just commenting, Ellen. The food was good, but the portions were small."

  "What, did you measure it or something? What do you mean small?"

  "I know a small portion when I see one. These were small."

  "Small. Like he needs larger portions. The man eats like a horse. It wouldn't kill you to lose ten pounds, Al."

  "Me? I'm not getting heavy."

  "Oh no? Your pants are getting so tight you'd think you were starring in a dance movie."

  Dad winked at her. "You didn't seem to have any problem taking them off on the trip."

  "Al!" she shrieked, but there was a smile there too. "In front of your own child! What's wrong with you?"

  Dad looked at Myron, arms spread. "We were in Venice," he said by way of explanation. "Rome."

  "Say no more," Myron said. "Please."

  They laughed. When it died out his mother spoke in a hushed tone.

  "You okay, sweetheart?"

  "I'm fine," he said.

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "I thought you did some good things out there," Dad said. "You hit TC for a couple of nice passes on the post. Real nice passes. You showed smarts."

  Count on Dad to find the silver lining. "I bit the big one," Myron said.

  Dad gave a staunch head shake and said, "You think I'm saying this just to make you feel good?"

  "I know you're saying this just to make me feel good."

  "It doesn't matter," Dad said. "It never mattered. You know that."

  Myron nodded. He did know. He had witnessed pushy fathers all his life, men who tried to live hollow dreams through their offspring, forcing their sons to carry a burden they themselves could never carry. But not his father. Never his father. Al Bolitar had never needed to fill his son with grandiose stories of his athletic prowess. He never pushed him, possessing the wondrous ability to appear almost indifferent while making it clear he cared intensely. Yes, this was a direct contradiction--sort of a detached attachment--but somehow Dad pulled it off. Sadly, it was unusual for Myron's generation to admit to such wonderment. His generation
had remained undefined--shoehorned between the Beat Generation of Woodstock and the Generation X of MTV, too young when thirtysomething had ruled the airwaves, too old now for Beverly Hills, 90210, or Melrose Place. Mostly, it seemed to Myron, he was part of the Blame Generation, where life was a series of reactions and counterreactions. In the same way those pushy fathers put everything on their sons, the sons came right back and blamed their future failures on the fathers. His generation had been taught to look back and pinpoint exact moments when their parents had ruined their lives. Myron never did. If he looked back--if he studied his parents' past feats--it was only to try to unravel their secret before he had children of his own.

  "I know what it looked like tonight," he said, "but I really don't feel that bad."

  Mom sniffled. "We know." Her eyes were red. She sniffled again.

  "You're not crying over--"

  She shook her head. "You've grown up. I know that. But when you ran out on the court again like that, for the first time in so long..."

  Her voice died out. Dad looked away. The three of them were all the same. They were drawn to nostalgia like starlets to paparazzi.

  Myron waited until he was sure his voice would be clear. "Jessica wants me to move in with her," he said.

  He expected protests, at least from his mother. Mom had not forgiven Jessica for leaving the first time; Myron doubted that she ever would. Dad, as was his way, acted like a good news reporter--neutral, but you wondered what opinion he was making under those balanced questions.

  Mom looked at Dad. Dad looked back and put a hand on her shoulder. Then Mom said, "You can always come back," she said.

  Myron almost asked for a clarification, but he stopped himself and simply nodded. The three of them gathered around the kitchen table and began to talk. Myron made himself a grilled cheese. Mom didn't do it for him. Dogs were domesticated, she believed, not people. She never cooked anymore, which Myron took as a positive thing. Her doting was all verbal, and that was all right with him.

  They told him about their trip. He briefly and very vaguely sketched out why he was playing pro basketball again. An hour later he headed into his room in the basement. He had lived here since he was sixteen, the year his sister had gone off to college. The basement was subdivided into two rooms--a sitting area he almost never used except for company and hence kept clean, and a bedroom that looked very much like a teenager's. He crawled into bed and looked at the posters on the wall. Most had been up since his adolescence, the colors faded, the corners frayed near the thumbtacks.