Chapter Two Jimmy

Chapter Two

Jimmy

T HEY GET THEIR ASSES HANDED TO THEM AT Y ANKEE S TADIUM IN a truly spectacular fashion, and by the time they get back to the hotel after the game all Jimmy wants is a burger from room service and never to talk to anyone again for the rest of his natural life, but Tuck catches him in the lobby and reminds him that Rose is in town with some friends tonight. "Come on, man," Tuck says when Jimmy tries to beg off. "It makes her think I'm cool and popular when I get the whole team to come out."

"You are unequivocally neither one of those things," Jimmy promises, tapping his key card as they step into the elevator. Then he looks at Tuck's hopeful face and sighs. "Text me when you pick a place."

In the end it's almost half the team piling into a motorcade of Ubers headed downtown: Tuck and Jonesy and a bunch of the guys from the outfield, plus a couple of the new call-ups whose names Jimmy keeps forgetting, kids so young they still have acne dotted all along their greasy hairlines. He swears they look more like babies every single year. "That's because you're a bag of fuckin' bones, you grizzled bastard," Tuck says whenever he mentions it. Jimmy guesses he's got a point.

The bar—club, whatever—is on the top floor of a fancy hotel, high ceilings and an enormous roof deck that looks out over the water, a view of the Hudson River that might make a certain kind of person feel sentimental about New York. Jimmy's drinking a beer and listening idly as Jonesy and Tito insult each other's mothers when suddenly Tuck elbows him in the ribs.

"Shit," Tuck says, motioning toward the corner. "Isn't that—"

Jimmy follows his gaze to a cordoned-off VIP area—the team is also in a VIP area, allegedly, but all at once Jimmy understands that theirs isn't the real one, that there's another area within the VIP area that's for actual celebrities. There's a curtain, lush green and thick-looking, but it isn't quite closed all the way.

"Oh, fuck me," Ray says, popping up in his seat like a prairie dog. "Is that Lacey Logan?"

It is in fact Lacey Logan, Jimmy sees now, seated on a low couch with her long legs crossed demurely at the ankles. She's with the other girl she's with all the time, the actress from the survivalist thing on HBO, the one with the face that's kind of mean. "Stars," Jimmy concedes, taking a swig of his beer. "They're just like us."

"They are nothing like us," Tuck corrects, gazing longingly in the post-apocalyptic pirate queen's direction.

"Isn't your literal fiancée supposed to be meeting us here any minute?" Jimmy asks him. Tuck scratches his eyebrow with his middle finger instead of answering.

Jimmy smirks, glancing over at the curtain one more time before turning his attention back to the guys, pulling Tito into a different conversation before things with Jonesy get too heated and they all wind up getting their asses kicked out onto Tenth Avenue. Rose arrives with a gaggle of her girlfriends, tufted and patterned and boring as a suite of expensive furniture, and they order another round of drinks. They went to dinner in the Meatpacking District before they got here, but pretty soon Jimmy is hungry again; he wonders if there's a food menu at this place, though he already knows that if there is it's going to be full of raw fish and various gourmet foams. He's about to order buffalo chicken sliders to his hotel room and call a car to take him back uptown when Ray gets unsteadily to his feet. "I'm going to go say hello," he announces.

Jimmy looks up at him, confused. "To who?" Then, as it dawns on him: "To Lacey Logan ? Oh, buddy." Jimmy shakes his head. "Please don't."

"Why not?" Ray asks, looking wounded. Ray is twenty-one, maybe twenty-two at the outside, dressed in jeans and an oversized polo shirt; he was wearing an Orioles cap when they got here, but the bouncer downstairs made him take it off before they got in the elevator, and his hair is a little bit matted. "We're both Very Important Persons, right?"

"The opacity of that curtain suggests otherwise," Tuck points out.

Ray ignores him. "She's from the Midwest," he goes on, with the authority of a seasoned Wikipedian. "I'm also from the Midwest." Then, like he's trying to convince them: "She's on the re bound, my dudes."

Jimmy thinks he heard something about that, actually: Lacey Logan breaking up with some skinny nice-guy comedian from SNL his ex-wife Rachel used to like. The guy was on coke, or the guy was cheating? Maybe both. Jimmy is about to ask Ray for the details, if only to try and distract him into sitting back down and drinking a glass of water until his blood alcohol level dips beneath the legal limit, but the kid is already trotting off across the club like Tom Cruise gunning it down the runway in an F-14, all aviators and flight jacket. Jimmy can practically hear the theme music playing in his head.

"Well?" Tuck says expectantly.

Jimmy looks back. "Well what?"

"You're his captain, Jimmy. As far as that young man is concerned, you are his father . You need to go and save him from himself before he winds up in jail."

"You get him," Jimmy counters stubbornly. He didn't want to come out tonight in the first place, and this is why. Well, not this, specifically, he didn't portend this exact clusterfuck, but he's over the late nights and the paparazzi, the whole who's-fucking-who scene of it. He's too old.

"They're going to send him to Rikers Island, Jimmy. You ever read about Rikers Island?"

"They're not gonna—" he starts, but Tuck just keeps on looking at him, and finally Jimmy rolls his eyes and gets up off the couch, his knees cracking loudly in protest. He jams his hands into his pockets and ambles over to the curtain, where by some miracle Ray has not yet been forcibly removed by a bouncer twice his size and tossed out the window onto a passing trash barge. "Ray, buddy," he says, swinging an arm around the kid's skinny shoulders, "your team needs you. For, uh. Top secret sports stuff." He nods at the women on the sofa, holding up one conciliatory hand. "Ladies."

The blonde nods back, but the brunette—and the brunette, make no mistake, is Lacey Logan—narrows her eyes in his direction, pointing with one short vermilion fingernail. "Jimmy Hodges, right?"

"Uh." That startles him. "Yeah."

She nods, unfolding herself from the sofa and offering a hand. "Lacey Logan."

Jimmy clears his throat. "Nice to meet you."

"You too." She's got a firm handshake, businesslike. She's taller than he would have thought she was—not as tall as him, but close to it—and slightly gawky-looking, like a very lovely ostrich. Her hair is twisted into a long, complicated-looking ponytail over one shoulder. "This is my friend Matilda."

Jimmy nods, patting the kid on the back. "This is Ray."

"Oh, now," Matilda says Britishly, sounding like Dame Maggie Smith in that show about the rich people in the castle. It occurs to Jimmy to wonder if her accent is even real. "Ray, we have met."

"Yeah," Jimmy says, feeling bad for the kid, a little defensive on his behalf. He only got called up from the minors last week. "Well. We were just—"

"You guys got killed tonight, huh?" Lacey says.

That surprises him, both the fact that she's got that knowledge as well as what a less confident guy might call the rudeness of her deploying it quite so baldly. "You could say that," he admits, rubbing a hand over his beard. She's wearing a fringy dress and a pair of red platform stilettos. Her legs are, like, ten miles long. "You watch a lot of baseball?"

"No," she says with a smile. "But I like to put the local news on in my hotel room."

Jimmy nods. "I usually watch the Food Network, myself."

"Also pleasantly numbing," she agrees. "You cook?"

"Quesadillas, mostly," he confesses. "The odd bag of frozen vegetables. I can grill a steak."

"Yeah, that tracks."

"That's the vibe I give off, huh?" Jimmy asks wryly. "Red meat and freezer-burned green beans?"

"All-American," she says. "Like a Kraft Single."

Jimmy lets out a low whistle. "Like a Kraft Single ," he repeats slowly. "I gotta tell you, pal, that's gonna fester. That one smarts."

Lacey's red mouth drops open. "It's a compliment!"

"Is it?" Jimmy is very dubious.

"It is!" she insists seriously. "Kraft Singles are the superior melting cheese."

"Uh-huh." He shakes his head. "I'll take your word for it."

Neither one of them says anything for a second too long, both of them still looking at each other. It's only when Matilda abruptly announces her intention to use the loo that Jimmy realizes Ray has also drifted mournfully off, so it's just the two of them now, him and Lacey Logan, and he means to say his goodbyes but instead he just keeps standing there, waiting for her to send him on his way. "You're on tour right now, yeah?" he asks, shaking out his aching hands for a second before tucking them back into his pockets. "Where you headed after New York?"

"Canada tomorrow," she reports. "This was the end of the US leg. And Europe after that, but not 'til after the holidays." She nods back in the direction of the team, none of whom are even pretending not to be watching. "What about you guys?"

Jimmy thinks for a minute, trying to imagine the calendar in his mind. "Minneapolis," he tells her. "So, like, basically the same."

Lacey laughs at that—a real laugh, loud and open-mouthed. Jimmy grins at her; he can't help it. If he didn't know better—and he does know better, obviously, he's a thirty-seven-year-old has- been catcher with knees like hamburger and twenty extra pounds in the gut—he would almost think she was—

What he means to say is—

It sort of feels like Lacey Logan is flirting with him.

As soon as Jimmy thinks it he feels deeply and profoundly ridiculous, heat creeping up the back of his neck in a way that makes him grateful the club is so fucking dark. He's delusional. It's like thinking a stripper really likes you. She's arguably the most famous person in America, in the middle of a stadium tour that's on track to gross billions of dollars. Also, she's young. Jimmy tries to remember how young, exactly: Twenty-five? Twenty-six? It's not that he's never dated that young, but it's not a great look at this point. He tries to avoid it.

Not that he's planning on dating Lacey Logan.

Not that it's even on the table.

"One more game here tomorrow, though," he hears himself tell her, "so who knows. Maybe we'll redeem ourselves before we leave town."

"I hope so," Lacey says. "For your sake."

"Thank you for that vote of confidence."

She grins. "You're welcome."

She's drunk, maybe? Jimmy guesses it's conceivable she's flirting with him if she's drunk.

"Can I ask you something?" he blurts. "Are you drunk?"

Lacey looks at him a little strangely. "Uh," she says, "nope."

That's right, Jimmy remembers. She doesn't drink. It's a part of her good-girl, Mickey Mouse Club image, how there's never been a picture of her spilling messily out of a restaurant or a video of her losing her temper and yelling at a photographer. Lacey Logan never fucks up.

"Are you drunk?" she asks curiously.

Jimmy shakes his head. "No, actually," he says. "Although I understand why you might think that."

"Yeah," she agrees, but she's smiling at him again, nodding at the space on the couch lately vacated by her mean friend Matilda. "You wanna sit?"

So. Jimmy sits.

She's strangely easy to talk to, Lacey Logan, about the folly of trying to get anywhere by car in New York City and the Joan Didion essays she's been reading in between tour stops and how Ray spent all day trying to convince the rest of them to go on the Circle Line. She's funnier than he was expecting. She seems smart. She's—not normal , certainly, but normal enough that Jimmy is still sitting there almost an hour later, trying to act like a person who would not be more comfortable in a chair with better lumbar support, when he glances across the club and realizes that at some point Tuck did him the favor of quietly collecting the rest of the team and taking off.

Not that Jimmy needs the privacy, obviously. Not that there's anything for anyone to see.

"Are you hungry?" he asks her, looking around for a waitress. He'll eat the sushi at this point. He doesn't give a fuck. "I would, like, kill a man for a mozzarella stick right now."

"If you order mozzarella sticks I will one hundred percent go in on them with you," she promises, and she sounds sincere enough that Jimmy laughs.

"I don't think they have mozzarella sticks here."

"They'd get them for me," Lacey says, then has the good manners to look abashed. "Sorry. I'm sure that sounded very—" She wrinkles her tidy nose.

"No, no," Jimmy says, holding a hand up. "Honestly, it just makes you sound like a good person to know. In, like, the deep-fried appetizer space."

Lacey smiles. "I like to think so." She pulls her phone out then, scrolling through what looks like an endless stream of notifications. Jimmy is about to take it as his cue to say good night when all at once she lifts her sharp face from the screen. "We could go somewhere else," she announces.

Jimmy snorts. "Okay."

"What?" Lacey looks at him blankly. "For mozzarella sticks, or whatever. Why is that funny?"

He opens his mouth, then closes it again. "Be serious."

"I am," Lacey insists. "And also, you're the one who came over here to talk to me to begin with, so I don't know why you're now acting like it's so ridiculous that I might actually want to—"

"I came over here to—"

"To what, exactly?" Lacey raises one perfect eyebrow.

Jimmy gapes at her for a moment, the silence stretching out like taffy between them. "What do you want me to say?" he asks finally, feeling caught out and a little embarrassed. "Like, am I attracted to you? Of course I'm attracted to you. Do you even—I mean, everybody is attracted to you."

He's trying to couch it in the broadest, most general terms possible, but Lacey's smile, when it comes, feels decidedly specific. "Okay," she agrees, like she's pleased they concur on the terms of the arrangement. "I'm attracted to you, too."

Jimmy feels a trapdoor open deep inside him, the unmistakable sensation of something tumbling right the hell through. "Okay," he echoes slowly.

"So, like I was saying," she continues, folding her hands neatly in her lap, "let's go somewhere."