The beer was very cold. One of her husbands had insisted on drinking it at room temperature, claiming that you could experience the beer’s full complexity. Lilly found it more tolerable cold.
“You’re being modest,” she said.
“No,” Jesse said. “I’m being accurate. I’m supposed to go five for five. I was a professional ballplayer.”
“And the other players never were.”
“No.”
“And professionals beat amateurs.”
“Every time,” Jesse said. “You want another beer?”
“God no,” Lilly said.
“You don’t like beer.”
“No.”
“We don’t have to stay here,” Jesse said. “We could go someplace and get something you like.”
“I like it here.”
“Okay.”
Jesse got out of the car and got another beer and brought it back.
Someone yelled, “You doing something bad in that car, Jesse?”
Jesse got back in the front seat and closed the door. He drank some beer. It didn’t have the jolt that scotch did, and it took longer. But it had enough.
“Do you feel the same way about being a policeman?” Lilly said.
“As?”
“As being a ballplayer,” Lilly said. “You know—professionals and amateurs?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re a professional policeman.”
“I am.”
“And it matters to you.”
“Yes.”
Someone had turned the field lights off. They could see the moon at the low arc of the horizon. They were quiet. There was something surprisingly romantic about sitting in a silent car with the windows down on a summer night. Maybe the memory of going parking, Lilly thought, memory of the uncertain groping in parked cars when everyone first had their license. It had all been starting then. She had not contemplated, then, being twice divorced at forty, living alone in an uninteresting condominium.
“Is the police work more important than Jenn?”
“No.”
“Maybe it should be.”
Jesse drank the rest of his beer.
“Because?”
“Because you can control the police work,” Lilly said. “At least some of it.”
“And I can’t control Jenn.”
“Nobody can control anybody,” Lilly said.
“I don’t want to control her, I just want to love her.”
Lilly smiled in the darkness. She thought of all the psychotherapy that had escorted her through two bad marriages. Shrinks must get bored, she thought. Always the same illusions. Always the same mistakes.
“You can do that now,” she said to Jesse. “What you want is for her to love you. You have to trust her to do that.”
Jesse stared out through the windshield at the opaque surface of the darkening lake.
“I’m not sure I can,” he said after a time.
“That’s the bitch of it,” Lilly said.
The parking lot was getting empty. Most of the beer was gone, and the Boys of Evening were drifting back to home and wives and children. Back to adulthood. None of them would have given that up to play ball forever in the twilight. But all of them were grateful for the evenings when they could.
Beside him in the front seat Lilly said, “I feel as if we ought to neck.”
“If we can do it without breaking a rib on the storage compartment between us,” Jesse said.
“When you were seventeen that wouldn’t have bothered you,” Lilly said.
“When I was seventeen I didn’t have an apartment to neck in.”
