When I came out of the elevator, Marty Rabb was at his door, looking down the corridor at me. There was something surrealistic about the way his head appeared to violate the fearful symmetry of the hall.
“Down this way, Spenser,” he said. “Glad to see you.”
The front door opened into the living room. To the right a bedroom, straight ahead a small kitchen. To the left the living room opened out toward the street and looked out at the dome of the Mother Church of Christ Scientist across the street. Traffic sound drifted up through the open windows. The living room was done in wall-to-wall beige carpet; the walls were eggshell white. There were framed mementos of Rabb’s career scattered on the walls. The furniture was in browns and beiges, and the tone was modern. On the glasstopped coffee table near the couch were a tray of raw vegetables and a bowl of sour cream dip.
“Honey, this is Mr. Spenser that’s writing the book,” Rabb said. “Spenser, this is my wife, Linda.”
We shook hands. She was small and black-haired. Her features were small and close together, and her eyes dominated her face. They were very round and dark, with long lashes. Her black hair was long down her back and pulled back at the nape of her neck with a dark wooden clip. She had on a salmon pink sleeveless shell and white jeans. Her makeup was so understated that at first I thought she wore none.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Spenser. Why don’t you have a seat here on the couch? It’s closest to the dip.” She smiled, and her teeth were small and rather sharp.
I said, “Thank you.”
“Would you like a hard drink, Mr. Spenser, or beer?'Rabb said. “I got some nice ale from Canada, Labatt Fifty, you ever try it?”
“Tried and approved,” I said. “I’ll take the ale.”
“Honey?”
“You know what I’d love, that we haven’t had in a while, a Margarita. Have we got the stuff to make a Margarita, Marty?”
“Yeah, sure. We got about everything.”
“Okay, and put a lot of salt on the rim,” she said.
She sat on one of the big armchairs opposite the couch, kicked her sandals off, and tucked her feet up under her. “Tell me about this book you’re writing, Mr. Spenser.”
“Well, Mrs. Rabb—”
“Linda.”
“Okay, Linda. I suppose you’d say it’s along the lines of several others, looking at baseball as the institutionalized expression of human personality.” She nodded and I wondered why. I didn’t know what the hell I’d just said.
“Isn’t that interesting,” she said.
“I like to see sports as a kind of metaphor for human life, contained by rules, patterned by tradition.” I was hot now, and rolling. Rabb came back with the Margarita in a lowball glass and the ale in Tiffany-designed goblets that said COCA-COLA. I thought Linda Rabb looked relieved. Maybe I wouldn’t switch to the talk show circuit yet. Rabb passed out the drinks.
“What’s patterned by tradition, Mr. Spenser?” he said.
“Sports. It’s a way of imposing order on disorder.”
Rabb nodded. “Yeah, right, that’s certainly true,” he said. He didn’t know what the hell I had just said either. He drank some of the ale and put some dry-roasted cashews in his mouth, holding a handful and popping them in serially.
“But I’m here to talk about you, Marty, and Linda too.
What is your feeling about the game?”
Rabb said, “I love it,” at the same time that Linda said, “Marty loves it.” They laughed.
“I’d play it for nothing,” Rabb said. “Since I could walk, I been playing, and I want to do it all my life.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Rabb said. “I never gave it any thought. When I was about five my father bought me a Frankie Gustine autograph glove. I can still remember it. It was too big for me and he had to buy me one of those little cheap ones made in Taiwan, you know, with a couple of little laces for webbing? And I used to oil that damn Frankie Gustine glove and bang my fist in the pocket and rub some more oil until I was about ten and I was big enough to play with it.
I still got it somewhere.”
“Play other sports?” I didn’t know where I was going, but I was used to that.
“Oh yeah, matter of fact, I went to college on a basketball scholarship. Got drafted by the Lakers in the fifth round, but I never thought about doing anything else but baseball when I got out.”
“Did you meet Linda in college?”
“No.”
“How about you, Linda, how do you feel about baseball?”
“I never cared about it till I met Marty. I don’t like the traveling part of it. Marty’s away about eighty games a season. But other than that I think it’s fine. Marty loves it. It makes him happy.”
“Where’d you two meet?” I asked.
“It’s there in the biog sheet, isn’t it?” Rabb said.
“Yeah, I suppose so. But we both know about PR material.”
Rabb said, “Yeah.”
