Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [82]
“Hell of a player, Griffin. Two Heismans.”
The man paused, like he might sit down, and Macy moved over to make room.
“Great tailback,” the man said.
“Well, they measure these things differently now,” Ray said. “For my money, Bronko Nagurski was the greatest running back.”
“Ah,” the man said. “Played both sides of the ball. You don’t see that anymore.”
“No you don’t,” Ray said.
The man slipped the bill under Ray’s plate. “Come back soon.”
“Ray,” Macy said. “If you want to be with Randeane, if you need, I don’t know, support, I’ll be there for you. Neil, too.”
Ray picked at the fries, which were the best fries he could remember eating. If he did nothing else to improve his life, he could come to Buck’s every few weeks, have a beer and a plate of sweet-potato fries, and talk football with the cook.
Macy tapped the back of his hand with her fork. “Ray. You be the quarterback and I’ll be, I’ll be the guy who protects the quarterback. I’ll be that guy.”
“Honey,” Ray said. “There’s really no one like that in football.”
Right after Jennifer was born, they found cyst after cyst inside of Ellie, and when Jennifer was two, Ellie had a hysterectomy. Ray brought her an armful of red stargazer lilies from the florist, not from the grocery store or the hospital gift shop, because Ellie was particular about things like that, and when he walked in, she smiled, closed her compact, and set her lipstick on the bedside table. She’d brought her blue silk bathrobe from home and had brushed her hair back in a ponytail and tied it with a blue ribbon. She made room for Ray on the bed and they held hands.
“The kids are fine,” Ray said. “Nellie’s got Neil making the beds and Jennifer’s running into the wall about ten times a day. Then she falls down and laughs like a lunatic.”
“Oh, good,” Ellie said, and she looked out the window and sighed.
“Hey, no sighing,” Ray said. “Everything’s all right.”
Ellie said, “No, it’s not. I wanted one more baby. I wanted to be like everyone else. I didn’t want to go into menopause at thirty-three, thank you very much, and I am not looking forward to having Dr. Perlmutter’s hand up my you-know-what every six months for the rest of my life.”
Ray squeezed her hand. “For better or for worse. Isn’t that what we said? So, this is a little bit of worse.”
Ellie tossed his hand aside and squinted at him, like the sexy, fearless WACs he admired when he was a boy, girls who outran and outgunned the guys, even in skirts and heels.
“You think this is worse?” Ellie said. “Oh, shame on me. Sweetie, if this is what worse looks like—we’ll be just fine.”
She’d said the same thing when his blood pressure medication chased away his erections and Viagra brought them back, but not the same. They were unmistakably old-man erections; they were like old men themselves: frail and distracted and unsure. He’d lain in bed with his back to her, ashamed and sorry for himself. Ellie turned on the light to look at him. She had her pink silk nightgown on and her face was shiny with moisturizer. She pulled up on one elbow and leaned around him. He saw the creases at her neck and between her breasts, the tiny pleats at her underarms, the little pillow of flesh under her sharp chin, and he thought, She must be seeing the same thing. She snapped off the light and put her hand on his shoulder.
“So what, Ray? You think this is the worst? You think, finally, we’ve gotten to ‘for worse’?”
Maybe not for you, Ray thought.
“It’s not. It’s not better, but it’s not the worse,” she said.
Eleanor slid her hand under the covers and wrapped her fingers around his cock. She gave a little squeeze, like a salute. She pushed the covers back and pressed him onto his back. She talked while she stroked him. She told him about the guy who had come to do the patio and brought his four giant dogs with him; she told him about seeing one of Neil’s friends from high school who’d said, when