The first basketball game she attended was a kick. January something, 1988. For a while Desie saved the ticket stub in her antique sewing box. The Hawks beat the Chicago Bulls 107-103. Dido played most of the third quarter and blocked four shots. Desie got to sit close to courtside, in a section with the other wives and girlfriends. Most of them, like her, were young and exceptionally attractive. At halftime the women laughed and gossiped. Desie didn’t follow professional basketball, and so was unaware how huge the sport was becoming. One of the Hawks wives pointed out a prematurely bald Chicago player, practicing jump shots, and said he was paid more than $5 million a year, not including endorsement fees. Desie was astounded. She wondered aloud how much Dido was making, and one of the Hawks wives (who memorized all the team stats) was pleased to inform her. It was a truly boggling sum of money for a twenty-two-year-old man, or for anybody. Desie did the arithmetic in her head: Dido’s salary worked out to $10,500 per game.
“See that ring on your finger?” the Hawks wife said, lifting Desie’s left hand. “One night’s work. And that’s if he got it retail.”
Desie didn’t return to college. Dido set her up in a bigger apartment in the Buckhead area, bought her a Firebird convertible (two night’s work, at least) and arranged for private tennis lessons at a nearby country club. Reebok supplied free shoes.
The engagement lasted a day shy of three months. It ended when Desie decided on a whim to fly to Detroit, of all places, to surprise Dido on the road for his birthday. When she knocked on his door at the Ritz-Carlton, she was met by a raven-haired woman wearing chrome hoop earrings and latex bicycle pants, and no top. Tattooed on the woman’s left breast was a grinning skull with a cowboy hat.
The topless visitor turned out to be a local exotic dancer who spoke fluent Serbo-Croatian, in addition to English. One of the Pistons players had introduced her to Dido at a bachelor party. Desie chatted politely with the woman until Dido returned from the basketball game. Unfortunately, he had sent his interpreter home early—reasoning there’d be no need, with a bilingual stripper—so Dido found himself mostly lost during Desie’s agitated discourse. Certainly her mood needed no translation; Dido had picked up on the anger even before she’d flushed her diamond engagement ring down the toilet.
He tried to make up after the team returned to Atlanta, but Desie refused to see him. She moved out of the Buckhead apartment and went to stay with her parents. One day, when Dido showed up at the house, Desie turned the garden hose on him. Being rejected sent him into a glum frame of mind that deleteriously affected his already marginal performance on the basketball court. One wretched night, filling in for a flu-bound Moses Malone, Dido scored only three points, snagged precisely one rebound, turned the ball over five times and fouled out by the middle of the third quarter. The following morning he was traded to the Golden State Warriors, and Desie never saw him again, not even on television.
Oh, you’ll find somebody new, her mother assured her. You just got off on the wrong foot.
But Desie couldn’t seem to find the right one. In her twenties she was engaged three other times but never married. Twice she returned the rings without rancor, but one she kept. It had been given to her by a fiance named Andrew Beck, with whom Desie was nearly in love. Andrew Beck produced and directed campaign commercials for political candidates, but his background was as an artist. For years he had seriously painted and sculpted and nearly starved. Then he got into television and became wealthy, as were all of Desie’s fiances. She told herself this was coincidence but knew better. In any case, she felt strongly about Andrew, who had a dreamily creative and distant side. Desie was captivated, as she’d never before been with a man who was even slightly enigmatic. Andrew couldn’t stand politics and generally detested the senators and congressmen who paid so exorbitantly for his image-shaping skills. Desie came to admire Andrew for hating his own work—only a highly principled man would stand up and admit to wasting his God-given talent on something so shallow, manipulative and deceptive as a thirty-second campaign commercial.