The Yips Pt. 01

There was Hope in Chatham, who looked barely old enough to drink legally but who was actually 38. Her white skin was as radiant as a glass of milk in a dairy industry commercial. Bryan had no idea how she managed to avoid the Cape sun. Hope loved to be tied to her bed with scarves and kissed softly all over. It was the first time Bryan had seen a woman come just from having her nipples nibbled.

There were others. Some once, some repeated.

In July he answered his cell, a number he did not have in his address book. He didn't recognize the area code.

"Bryan Monnic? This is Paul Gannittis. I'm the general manager of the San Diego Padres. Congratulations! We just drafted you."

He talked to Paul for a long time. The Padres had taken Bryan in the tenth round and were prepared to pay him a six-figure bonus to forego his senior year and report to their A league team in September.

He thought about it seriously for the next few days. It was the culmination of his dream to become a professional baseball player. He called and talked it over with his father, with his mother, with his college coach. He discussed it poolside with the Lowells. They had strong opinions about his future. He smiled to himself. They examined all aspects of his possible decisions in careful deliberation as though he was their son and not just a summer visitor.

Melody was down for the weekend and had nothing to say about it. He caught her looking at him with some expression he could not decipher and was certainly not going to ask her for follow up.

In the end, he decided to go back to Austin, finish his senior year, hope to hell he didn't suffer some severe injury, and try to improve his position in the next draft. It was a risk, as Paul reminded him when Bryan called to decline the Padres' offer.

**********

The season ended. Cotuit was eliminated from the playoffs in the quarterfinals, but Bryan was not unhappy. The summer had been about impressing the scouts and having fun. He batted.325 and tied for the fewest errors by an infielder. After almost every game a half a dozen scouts wanted him to hang around and talk.

Also, after almost every game there was a pretty face who wanted an autograph or a hug or a ride home.

The Lowells threw a farewell party for the Kettleers. A caterer came in with several grills and smokers. A broad white tent with bright interior lights went up in the meadow behind the pool. Bryan was standing in a circle with several of his teammates talking about the upcoming year when Brie walked up. Bryan noticed the guys eyeing her in her sheer yellow summer dress and he began to get angry. He wanted to yell at them. Back off! She's a kid! She's still in high school!

Bryan sighed. He realized he had begun to think of her as a real sister.

She listened to their banter, which had cleaned up considerably in her presence. He left the group to get another plate of ribs and found Brie had joined him. They watched Clara and Sara, in the pool up on the shoulders of two guys, trying to push each other into the water while a crowd cheered and splashed.

"I'm going to miss having sisters," Bryan said.

"You'll always have sisters now. You're our brother forever."

He laughed. "Three instant sisters."

She gave him that look again and leaned closer. "We need to talk. Come." And she walked off in the direction of the meadow. He followed her past the tent and into a stand of blueberry bushes, where she turned and faced him.

He was preparing himself to let her kiss him once before stopping her and giving her the talk about age difference, etc., when she blurted, "I'm going to tell you something that nobody else in the world knows."

He stood still, waiting.

That look again, but nervous. "Melody.... Look, Bryan, there are... things that you have to know."

"Basically," she continued, "I think I might be a witch."

"You... think?"

"Yes, but that isn't what I want to tell you." She looked around as if to make sure that no one had snuck up on them. "As long as I can remember, my sister has been stupid focused. I think she's always been trying to become our dad. She played lacrosse because he had been on the team at Harvard. She was of course All-American. She actually studied in high school -- never partied at the dunes like everyone else - because he had been the valedictorian of his class. She was the best at whatever she did, because she has natural physical genes and she's smart as shit. Harvard Law Review. Summa cum laude. Ten Wordles in thirty fucking seconds. Add to that whatever it is that is inside her, riding her like a fucking jockey with a whip... and you get Mel. The world beater."

Bryan was trying to figure out what this all had to do with him and with Brie's alleged witchiness.

She noticed. "Mel has been a bitch to you all this summer. Every time she's here, she does her best to make you feel ignored and unwelcome."

"Didn't work," Bryan said.

She smiled. "I'm glad. Everyone else tried double hard to let you know mi casa su casa, you know.... Oh shit."

After a long moment he said, "And?"

"You ever heard of a guy named Jaime Rodriguez?"

Bryan nodded. "He's in the Brewer's organization. I read somewhere he's tearing it up in double A. Threw a no-hitter a couple of weeks ago. Why?"

"He was our summer guest two years ago."

Byan looked back at the house, at the party going on without them. He was getting an odd feeling about this odd family he had been adopted into.

"One day the family went down to New York to see a play and stay the night. All except Mel, who was running an online LSAT tutoring class. And Jaime, who had practice. And me. I was staying with a friend that week. We were supposed to be out fishing, but the boat had engine problems. So I rode my bike home to get my iPad."

She was looking at the pool cabana, a tiny house all on its own.

"You can guess where this is going. I heard noises from the kitchen window and followed them out to the pool. I snuck into the cabana. They didn't see me. They were occupied. On the couch."

Bryan was stunned. He tried to picture Melody on her back, actually enjoying....

Brie sighed. "You always read about these things. The man on top, pounding into...." She stopped.

Bryan blushed for her. She read things like that?

"But they were just still. Naked and still. I could tell he was inside her." She noticed Bryan's surprise. "Quit it. I know how it works."

He shrugged.

"It got quiet. I heard him say that he loved her. And when she told him back, I nearly shat. Melody, the ice sculpture, the perfect student and athlete and daughter. Especially the perfect daughter. Telling this guy she'd known for a couple months she loved him with all her heart and wanted to be with him forever."

Bryan blew out, puffing his cheeks. He could imagine that being a surprise. "Did they catch you?"

She shook her head. "Nope, and I have never.... until now."

"Why me?"

"I don't know. Witch instinct."

He smiled. "And they--?"

"I don't know how much more went on between them, but after the season he went back home to Florida. Two days later, Mel drove down to be with him."

She paused. A long silence. She looked sad and uncomfortable. "Look him up."

Bryan took out his cell and searched the name. Images. Brie came close and looked over his shoulder, pointing at one shot. He tapped it and it filled the screen. Jamie Rodriguez. Holding a little girl. Standing next to a young boy. Smiling at a blonde woman.

"Son is five. Happily married."

"Oh," said Bryan.

"Yeah. I didn't want you to leave us thinking.... Brother, Mel was never mad at you."

**********

On the plane back to Austin, Bryan recalled the last time he had spoken to Melody, the day before the farewell party. Standing in the kitchen sipping a glass of iced tea, he had been looking out at Sara, Clara, and Brie as they swatted a badminton birdie around without much regard for actual rules. Or uniforms, as they were all in bikinis.

Melody came in quietly and startled him when she said, rather harshly. "Don't get any ideas."

He had turned to face her. "The only ideas I have are entirely fraternal.... And what crawled up your ass?"

She looked flustered for an instant. Bryan had not once addressed any of them in such a tone.

"They're good kids," he continued. "What are you worried about?"

Melody reclaimed her indignant face. "I-"

Bryan cut her off. Man, that had been petty and it felt good. "I know. You don't want your high-class bloodline to be diluted with.... mine."

"Obviously. What have you got to offer, anyway?"

"Well," Bryan said. "We know I won't be going to Harvard Law." He spoke the words Harvard Law with an exaggerated respect that made it satire. He had to resist the urge to use air quotes.

"But your degree in Communications will be so valuable."

She used his exact mocking tone when she said Communications. Bryan almost smiled. He had known she was smart. He was beginning to think she was also intelligent.

"My major is actually in Classical Languages. With a concentration in Ancient Greek."

"Bullshit."

Bryan, who was well used to this reception, then had nonchalantly busted off about twenty lines of Homer, interspersing with the English.

"The translation is mine," he said. "Copyright: me."

Her face was inscrutable. He rattled off some Cicero in Latin and threw in a few Aramaic proverbs for seasoning.

Melody looked nauseous. She stared at him for a few seconds then ran off. He thought she was going to puke.

What the hell had that been about?

**********

He should have said yes to Paul Gannittis. He should have been happy with that draft position, taken the modest bonus, and gotten his butt out of Austin.

He should have done a lot of things - but he didn't. And that's how he met Lauren Esposito.

He was living off-campus in a nice high rise with three other teammates. The amenities were spectacular. The first day of classes there was a huge party in the common area. Bryan was mingling in the crowd when he saw a vision that caused his heart to accelerate. Hanging onto two of the football players, laughing, flirting, was a perfectly wonderful young woman. Black hair curled tightly about her head framing big green intelligent eyes and a sexy off-center smile. Her pert nose turned up like some Disney princess incarnate.

She was attractive, but not one of the overgroomed southern belles that infested the campus. It was just.... there was something about her that Bryan fell for. He could not define it. Later, he would think about her openness, her giggle, her happy attitude, her smarts. It was love at first sight.

Love at first sight should not exist. It's booby-trapped heartbreak. He realized this years later. Years too late. He thought it would be a wise investment to have a private investigator on retainer to fully vet any love interests his future children might have.

But then again, a thorough examination does not always detect deeply imbedded flaws.

Baseball players have been corking bats for a hundred years. It's simple. And totally against the rules. Drill a hole down the center of the bat from the fat end. Fill the hole with cork, compress the plug into the hole, glue a piece of wood on to hide the hole. Common sense told hitters that the ball would rebound harder off the barrel of the corked bat, enhancing velocity and the distance the ball traveled. It was fucking cork, wasn't it? The only problem was that it was not true. Batted ball distance is a function of bat speed and bat mass and ball elasticity. Drilling mass out of the bat may allow for increased bat speed, but this is not enough to compensate for the loss of mass.

Anyway you look at the physics, the reality is that a corked bat presents and behaves as normally as could be, but the drilling weakens the barrel. One day the bat will fail catastrophically on contact with the ball, the barrel flying into separate pieces, the cork exposed to the unforgiving eye of the umpire.

His hypothetical private investigator would never have found her flaw in time.

Lauren's appearance and outward behavior fit some need that he had. She was a piece fitting a gap in the jigsaw of his psyche. He did not know why. It was inexplicable and unexpected and it didn't matter. It was false, all veneer. It was unsupported by fact. He had no idea if she was a good person or a horrible person. All he knew was her externals, and he incautiously allowed himself to fall in love with those.

It took Bryan two months to pry her away from her tight end boyfriend and another month to get her to commit to him exclusively.

He used his future professional career as bait, self-serving bragging, something which was new to him and he would think slimy behavior in anyone else. He told her about the offer from the Padres, about how another year of college ball would make him that much more desirable. And the payoff would be an actual payoff. He anticipated a signing bonus several times that which the Padres had tried to tempt him with.

But give him a break. He was 21 and his heart had been captivated by the idea of Lauren Esposito.

**********

The studio was like a dozen other studios. The gushing blonde another incarnation in the inexhaustible series of white, black, Latina, brunette, redhead, blonde local color fluff piece interviewers. Sometimes they wanted the professional athlete alone, sometimes they wanted the athlete with his lovely wife.

Today they wanted Lauren and Bryan Monnic, and the setting was -- he had to squint against the banks of hot dazzling lights -- Channel 5. News. Sports. Weather.

They sat in fragile-looking director's chairs, red and white with the Red Sox logo prominent. Behind them was a green wall, which Bryan knew by now was a color space the director would fill with electronic images. Logos, videos, photos.

Bryan was tired of these repetitive dialogs filled with probing questions like what was their favorite dinner place. How did you meet. What do you do on off days. But his agent told him to show up and interact, and Parker Brannan had a whole bunch of clients who were making multimillions in five different sports. Bryan wanted to be one of that bunch, so he did what his agent told him.

It had been fun at first, this kind of demand on his time. It was part of the breathtaking excitement of being, at long last, a major league player. The summer after his senior year at Austin he had been drafted by the Boston Red Sox and given a mid-six figure bonus on signing, which paid for the wedding and the honeymoon. Bryan's new agent and financial planner put most of the remainder into safe investments, which pleased his family but led to Lauren pouting because she wanted them to buy a Lexus SUV to replace their ten-year old Camry.

Bryan had mature fielding skills but was a minor league season or two away from being able to hit professional pitching consistently. The Sox organization at that time was short of second basemen. They had a few retooled shortstops and some utility players, but no pure sure-gloved number 4s. Bryan had the time of his life. He paid careful attention to the coaching staff and the older retired players who roamed through the system teaching the minor leaguers. And he practiced. All the time. He was first in the clubhouse and the last to leave. He went in on off days to lift weights and take batting practice. He watched video. He ran. He tracked down a thousand pop flies. He scooped up two thousand ground balls.

All this for a little over two grand a month. That's right. While the players on the major league roster were making millions, those in A, AA, and even AAA drew salaries that left them barely able to live. Bryan disliked the poor pay but accepted it as the way the system worked. Lauren hated it and showed it sometimes in ways that Bryan thought irrational.

Until he found out it was rational to her.

In college, she had struck him as much more together and mature than a typical coed. She was always carefully groomed and perfectly made up. Never heavily; always tastefully. Her clothes were not expensive, but were never wrinkled, never a stain or tear. When he first was allowed to come to her dorm room, he was fascinated. It was immaculate. No bras or panties lying about. No socks under the bed. As a matter of fact, there was not even dust under the bed. He had never met anyone her age like her. Her room looked like an advertisement in a college magazine. Prominent on the wall over her bed were two large posters, both of weightlifters, glistening skin oiled, muscles roped and bulging.

He fucked her that first time with those two masses of man gazing down. She ran her hands over his chest, her face... He could not read her. Something about her was distant, and it made him irate, and he began to power thrust into her. She looked up into his eyes and began to vocalize her pleasure, but when she glanced to the side, up at where Bryan suspected the posters to be, he snatched up her pillow and put it over her face. Her cries were muffled, but she kept making noises of appreciation.

She came. Hard. She fell asleep in his arms, making in her dreams small whimpers like a satisfied animal.

They had lived for a few months in Greenville, North Carolina, in a rented duplex. Then Bryan was promoted to Salem A ball, where they leased an apartment on the third floor of an old triple-decker. In the winters they returned to Texas and moved in with Bryan's parents. After Salem, he was assigned to the AA affiliate in Portland, Maine. There they split a house in South Portland with two of his teammates and their wives.

At every stop, his wife kept their modest living space spotless and organized. She never stopped sharing with Bryan her dreams of how their life would be once he had made it to the big leagues. Their wobbly secondhand desk had a drawer full of papers on which she had sketched house plans and garden arrangements.

He understood her desire for that comfortable life where money was not a worry, where the lack of it would never even cross your mind, because he had seen her childhood home.

She never talked much about her family, he noticed after they had been together a few months. She had grown up in Pyote, Texas, Population Rounding Error. When they had graduated and he asked her to marry him, he insisted on meeting her parents. She was more than hesitant. She discouraged him, tried to talk him out of it, found excuses why she could not travel on any of the days he suggested. Finally he told her he was going to go alone. This possibility for some reason horrified her, and she agreed to the trip.

It was six hours from Bryan's home to Pyote in the brutal Texas heat, and Lauren said maybe five words the whole way. She did not seem to be mad at him, however, so he let it go.

His GPS directed him through the tiny town, down a long ribbon of broken asphalt and off onto a washboarded gravel road. The Espositos lived in an old single wide trailer plopped in a weedy yard and surrounded by a chicken coop, a lean-to shed, and five cars and pickup trucks in various states of mobility.

The working poor, Bryan had noted, were very often overweight. A minority managed to somehow be rail-thin. The Espositos were the latter. Bob Esposito worked on an oil rig and looked to be about 100 pounds, giving him a 10 pound edge on Lauren's mother Ellen. Both of her parents had dark leathery wrinkled skin and looked hard used by life and dessicated by the sun and the arid land.

For all that, they seemed happy enough. They hugged and kissed their daughter. Bob shook Bryan's hand and Ellen gave him a huge hug. When Bryan told them he had come to request their permission to wed Lauren, her parents were ecstatic. Bob whooped and thumped his future son-in-law's back, then Ellen hugged him again and made his shirt wet with her tears.