“Look, you can’t write a book like this without letting your sister know. That’s number one. Number two is don’t quit the newspaper—take a leave of absence.”
“But I hate my fucking job.”
“You love your job, Juan. You’re just down tonight.”
“No, man, I don’t wanna come back to the Union-Register after I finish this novel. I wanna move to Gibraltar and write poetry.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“In iambic pentameter.”
Often I’ve advised Juan to stay away from the Cuervo. “Emma?” I sing out. Moments later she glides into the living room with three mugs of green tea.
“Juan wants to resign,” I inform her.
“No kidding?”
“To do a novel,” he pipes up defensively, “and after that, poems.”
“The newspaper needs you,” Emma counsels. “Unlike some of us,” I add.
“I’ve probably had too much to drink. Way too much,” Juan admits, between slurps of tea.
“What would your novel be about?” Emma asks.
Juan looks mortified until I say, “Baseball.”
He flashes me a grateful smile. “That’s right. Baseball and sex.”
“Well, what more do you need,” says Emma.
“How about a spy?” Perhaps I’m feeling inspired by the prose of Derek Grenoble. “Try this: The major leagues are infiltrated by a Cuban espionage agent!”
“A left-hander, obviously,” Emma says lightly, “but what position would he play?”
“Middle reliever,” I suggest. “Or maybe a closer, so he could fix a big game. Say! What if Fidel was gambling on the Internet, betting his whole cane crop on the World Series?”
Juan rubs his eyelids. “Man, am I wiped.”
Emma and I guide him to my bed, tug off his shoes, tuck him in and shut the door. Wordlessly she leads me back to the living room and we make love again, intercoupled on one of my consignment-shop armchairs. This time she murmurs and moans, which I choose to read as expressions of pleasure and possibly fulfillment. An hour later she wakes me to ask if I’m really leaving the newspaper, as I’d hinted on our drive to Janet’s house. “Hush,” I say.
“You are, aren’t you?” she persists. “Jack, don’t do it. Please.” Then she reaches between my legs and grabs me, something no other editor has ever done. As a style of management it proves surprisingly effective, at least in the short term.
Emma and Juan are still asleep when my mother calls at eight in the morning. She says she was planning to drive up from Naples and visit me on my birthday.
“That’d be nice,” I tell her.
“Unfortunately, we’ve got a minor crisis here.”
“Nothing life-threatening, I trust.”
“At the country club,” my mother explains, “a black family has applied for membership and Dave’s gone ballistic.”
“Dave ought to be ashamed of himself.”
“The fellow’s name is Palmer. Isn’t that ironic for a golfer?” My mother is adorable at times. “The best part, Jack—he’s got a five handicap and a teenaged son who can knock a driver three hundred yards. Naturally, Dave’s out of his mind. He wrote the nastiest letter to Tiger Woods, of all people, but I ripped it up while he was having his sigmoidoscopy. Dave, that is.”
“And you find this an attractive quality in a husband—seething racism?”
“Oh, come on, Jack. He’s fairly harmless. It’s all hot air.”
I ask her what the country-club furor has got to do with my birthday on Saturday, and she says the membership committee is meeting that very afternoon to review the applicants. “If I’m not sitting beside him, Dave’s likely to say something he might regret.”
“Worse,” I say, “there’s a chance he’d rally enough support to blackball the black Palmers. Am I right?”
“We’ve got a few narrow-minded types. Every club does.”
“So you need to be there to keep Dave muzzled.”
“Let’s just say he usually defers to me on public occasions. I’m sorry, son, but this one’s rather important.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get together some other weekend,” I say. “You stay put and hose down your harmless old bigot.”
“Did you want anything special for your forty-seventh?”
“Same as last year, Mom—serenity, a cure for receding gums and a new TV set.”
“Don’t tell me the Motorola went off the balcony, too.”