yet for some reason he had to force himself to take his eyes off them.
That’s when she said: “Val.”
“Val?”
“Valerie. Sorry. That’s what you mean by high school, isn’t it, Bobby?”
“I didn’t go to high school with Val.”
“Girls like her, then,” Jewel said. “And the whole scene that goes with it.”
“Isn’t it the same all over?”
“At my high school, boychick, if you didn’t win a prize at the science fair, you were a nobody.”
“Did you win a prize?” Bobby asked, making a mental note to ask Wald exactly what boychick meant.
“I did,” Jewel said. “But not in science.”
“In what?”
“Poetry. There was a prize every year for the best poem.”
“What was it?”
Jewel was silent for a moment. “The Oxford Book of English Verse. ”
“I meant the poem.”
Jewel, topping eighty miles an hour, turned and gave him a look. “Some other time,” she said. She flashed her brights at a Ferrari, forcing it over and breezing by.
“Where are we going?” Bobby asked.
“A place I know.”
“Where?”
“Right,” she said. “You lived here. I forgot.”
“I should never have left,” Bobby said. The words were out before he could stop them. She didn’t look at him or anything, but she heard: he could tell by her hands.
She took him to an old lodge on a saddle peak in the mountains. It had a view of the Valley on one side and the ocean, dark and endless, on the other.
“Makes you think of Raymond Chandler, doesn’t it?” said Jewel, as the valet took the car and they started up a piney path.
Bobby, who’d suddenly been wondering what it would be like to play in Japan, said: “What do you mean?”
“You know. Farewell, My Lovely. ”
“I thought that was Robert Mitchum.”
Jewel burst out laughing and took his hand. “I’m thirsty.” After a few steps, she let go. Her touch lingered on his palm.
They sat in high-backed wicker chairs on a terrace overlooking the treetops, and beyond them and far down, the sea. Nearby a pig turned on a spit over a wood fire, reflecting the flames on its glazed skin. A miniature flame bloomed from a candle on the table between them. The air, cooler in the mountains, smelled of eucalyptus.
A waiter in ruffled white shirt and string tie appeared.
“Champagne all right with you, Bobby?” Jewel said.
He nodded, although beer was what he wanted. She ordered, pronouncing the French brand name in a way that sounded French. “Aren’t you taking a chance,” he said to her, when the waiter had gone, “ordering champagne?”
“Why?”
“What if I start spraying it all over the place?”
Jewel laughed. “I’m sure there’s more to you than baseball, Bobby.” Bobby didn’t know about that. Perhaps she read his mind, because she added: “The very fact that we’re having this conversation proves it.”
The waiter returned, popped the cork, poured. Jewel raised her glass. “Here’s to singles up the middle.”
“I don’t want to talk about baseball,” Bobby said.
Jewel laughed again: “I wasn’t.” Bobby didn’t get that at all. She stopped laughing and asked, “What do you want to talk about?”
You, thought Bobby, but he didn’t say it. This wasn’t some hotel-lobby bimbo he was going to end up in bed with. This was a… what? He really didn’t know.
Jewel took a sip of her drink, more than a sip. “How did you get together with Wald?” she asked.
“Is that one of the questions?”
“Yes.”
Bobby shrugged. “He was a brother.”
“Brother?”
“Fraternity brother. I didn’t know him well back then-he was a year or two ahead. And a bit of a…”
“Nerd?”
“I was going to say dweeb. That’s not for publication.”
“Of course not. Funny how the dweebs of yesteryear become the movers and shakers of today.”
Bobby frowned. “Chaz isn’t a mover and shaker. He’s my agent.”
“Do you know how many other clients he has?”
Bobby shrugged. “Boyle, for one.”
“Primo?”
“No.” Bobby put down his glass.
So did Jewel. “I’ve done some research. Charles Wald has twenty-three clients in baseball alone, sixteen in the majors as of Opening Day. Doesn’t that make him a mover and shaker?”
“He’s just an agent,” Bobby said, but then he remembered the four pillars, and wasn’t sure.
“He probably makes more money than you do, Bobby.”
Bobby was appalled. He picked up his glass and drained it; then saw that she was looking at him in that measuring way again, her head slightly tilted.
“Why do you want to be traded, Bobby?”
Jewel watched Bobby’s face as he dealt with that one. First came surprise, then anger, then wariness.
“Who says I want to be traded?” he asked.
Jewel refilled their glasses. This was too easy. Not that Bobby was stupid; it was just that she was a woman and he, in many ways, still a boy, as Wald had said. That was the appeal, of course; maybe the appeal of the whole game. The realization that this was a mismatch made her feel bad, in passing. “Word gets around,” she told him, and pressed on. “Does your wanting to be traded have anything to do with Primo?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And on: “Is it because he’s having a career year and you’re in this horrible slump?”
Bobby negated that suggestion with a sweeping gesture of his arm; his glass crashed on the flagstones. He raised his voice. “I’m not in a slump. They’re just not falling in.”
The sudden violence didn’t frighten her; it confirmed that she was on the right track. She nodded and said, “Sometimes it must feel like you’re never going to hit again.”
Jewel expected another demonstration of annoyance, frustration, rage: more raising of the voice, more shattering glass, something. But there was nothing. And then in the candlelight, she saw his eyes fill with tears: the doubly reflected flame trembled, wobbled; but there was no overflow.
She wasn’t ready for that. “Excuse me.” She went inside to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face; a hard face, she saw in the mirror, with Janie way underneath. She also saw a new gray hair, which she plucked. When she returned, Bobby was drinking a beer and his eyes were dry. He tried to make them opaque as she came near. Jewel didn’t want that, didn’t feel like pressing him anymore. She could fill in the gaps without him.
“Ready?” she said.
He nodded. She paid. They went to the car. On a whim, she took the bottle of champagne, still half full, with her. On a whim: that was what she told herself.
Jewel drove along the narrow mountain road that led to the head of the nearest canyon. She no longer drove fast; there was no traffic, the night was quiet, Bobby silent. A baseball-sized rock fell out of the darkness into the cone of her headlights, bouncing on the pavement, and back into the night. She slowed down even more; that was the only reason she spotted the lookout around the next bend. Without thinking, she pulled off the road, continued between two tall rocks like gateposts, and parked on the edge of a black abyss. Without thinking: that was what
