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By Root 1053 0

sat down on his futon, to the Yankees’ opening game, to a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and three hot dogs bedecked with mustard and relish, when the phone rang. It was April already, and the breeze floating through the open door to the fire escape carried the promise of reasonable temperatures, and the smell of fried food from the restaurants downstairs, and the voices of the fifty thousand fans 150 blocks north, his own not among them. He had scored two MVP tickets from a guy he knew who sold faux Rolexes in Chinatown, but Jude had turned him down to attend a show at the Ritz. Di was at a dance conference in Chicago, but he wouldn’t have asked her to go with him anyway, had stopped asking her years ago, and Eliza, who was usually reliable for that sort of thing, he hadn’t seen in weeks. He had sold the tickets to one of his distributors, lost twenty bucks.

With reluctance he stood and moved away from the TV, where Mattingly was walloping a double. Picking up the phone on its fifth or sixth ring, Les muttered, “Good boy.”

“What?” It was Eliza.

“I’m watching the game. Yanks and the Twins.” He stretched the cord as far as it would go, craning to see. Only when he was on the phone did his apartment seem large. Standing at the kitchen counter, he might as well have been watching the TV across the street. “How lovely to hear from you. I thought you were MIA. Were you sick or something?”

“I was. I’m better. Now I’m better.”

“I wish you’d called earlier. I could have used a date for this game.”

“Is . . . air?”

Di’s cordless phone, for which she had paid six hundred dollars, produced an irksome static; it sometimes captured the voices of her neighbors, or the line of her live-in housekeeper, who wandered in and out of the conversation, oblivious. Les called them the voices in his head.

“Stand still and say it again, honey.”

“IS JUDE THERE?”

Strikeout for Ward. A cordless phone would come in handy now. “He’s not. He bailed on me. It’s too much to ask that my one and only son show an interest in baseball. Or meat eating, or any other, you know, institution of male bonding. He’s not even smoking reefer with me anymore.”

“Really?”

“You think he’s maybe a queer?”

“I don’t know.” Eliza sighed. “I don’t even know him. I met him once! Where is he?”

“He’s at a show. With his pal Johnny.”

“Johnny?”

“They’re thick as thieves. He’s brainwashing my boy. He quit smoking, quit drinking, quit eating meat. You want to come over and eat some wieners? Smoke some happy stuff?”

“Jude quit all those things?”

“He saw the light. He had a conversion experience. An eight-hundred-dollar conversion experience. Stuck his hand in a plate of candles at the Krishna temple and got second-degree burns up his arm. Landed in the ER.”

“Oh, shit. A plate of candles? Is he okay?”

“Aside from having his arm all wrapped up. Johnny tackled him before the burn got too deep. It’s his left one, so he can still wipe his ass.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

Who was at bat? He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. “What do you want with Jude, anyway?”

“I need to talk to both of them. I really want to talk to them.”

“You whine about meeting my kids, and then when one of them finally materializes, you disappear.”

“I’ve just been busy. You told me to apply myself. I’ve had a lot going on!”

“Wait, what are you doing home on a weekday?”

“Who . . . home?”

“What? Say it again.”

“ALL RIGHT, FINE. I’m on my mom’s phone. I wasn’t feeling well, so I took the train home.”

“Aren’t you not supposed to do that?”

“You wrote a note, saying you were taking me on a trip.”

“That was nice of me.”

“Les,” said Eliza through a burst of static, “ . . . tell you anything, right?”

“Sure, honey.”

Then a kid’s voice, not Eliza’s, said, “ . . . not fair, it’s totally not fair.”

“Quit your whining, man,” said Les, eyeing the hot dogs across the room, surely gone cold, as the Twins performed a double play that was truly not fair, and Eliza’s voice danced inextricably with the ghost of a stranger’s, their words sometimes nearly making a sort of sense.

“JUST TELL HIM TO CALL ME,