The Second Season Read online

  Her work is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a thrill Ruth never imagined when she was a shaggy-haired, acne-prone point guard. Even now that the creases between her eyebrows have deepened—her voice crackling at a doleful octave that causes her to clear her throat every time she hears it played back—the assignments have not stopped or slowed.

  Today is the last day of May. Ruth’s contract is up in October. She has never gotten anything in this business without asking for it.

  Phillip answers on the second ring. Over the years his voice has changed, too, the nodes cystic from so much shouting. Now he sounds like he is eternally recovering from bronchitis.

  “What’s up, RD?”

  “This is a serious call,” she warns him.

  “I consider myself a serious man.”

  In public, her producer calls her RD. If he’s had more than a few energy drinks, he calls her girl. As in, “Hey, girl” or “Girl, I got you.” They are both in their forties, him late, her early. She doesn’t mind the shtick—at times, the shtick fuels her—but she appreciates the respect that seeps into his voice as he addresses her by name.

  “Ruth. What can I do for you?”

  She closes her eyes and swallows against the pressure in her throat, trying to harness the high she felt this afternoon when Emory Turner agreed to slip behind one of the black curtains honeycombing the Media Day ballroom and to speak to her, her alone, about playing against his best friend and former teammate in the NBA finals. In her mind she replays Turner’s comment: “Darius is my brother, but for the next four games he’s my enemy.”

  His tone was serious, sincere, and yet it was hard to believe him. She still pictured Emory Turner and Darius Lake in matching forest-green warm-ups, hands over their hearts for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or sweat-slicked post-game and sabotaging each other’s interviews with unsolicited details. Two perpetual groomsmen.

  “Four?” Ruth asked. “You’re predicting a sweep?”

  Known for his mix of vulnerability and cockiness, Emory was in fine form today. Sitting with his knees splayed: “Two here, two in Cincinnati, and I’ll see you next season.”

  Sequestered with the Supersonics star forward, a once-in-a-generation talent, she felt herself professionally invincible. Now she feels as though she’s exposing to her boss some unsavory side of Ruth Devon—a drug habit, a kink—but she presses on, delivering the lines she rehearsed in the shower.

  “Lester’s leaving. I want his job. Of course, you’re going to hear from a lot of guys who want his job, but I believe”—she takes a stabilizing breath— “that I’ve earned it. You know I love the sideline, but I’m ready to call those games.”

  Her gravitas does not faze Phillip, a man known for karaoke, for restless leg syndrome, for his full head of salt-and-pepper hair. The average NBA fan may not know his name, but he is the ghostwriter of the league, telling a story you thought told itself.

  “You’re right. All the guys want Les’s spot. You’re not the first person to call me up. But I hear you, Ruth. You know I hear you. An offer’s going out next month—and that’s all I can say right now. Can you hang tight until then?”

  All the tension leaves her shoulders. Asking is the hardest part.

  On paper, Ruth is not qualified for a full-time analyst role. She has never coached or played for an NBA team. Truth be told, she was never qualified for any of this—a realistic goal would have been a few years of regional sideline reporting, fluff pieces and humanizing tidbits, until the season her makeup artist admitted defeat.

  “I can hang,” she says.

  Were it possible for a woman to meet the job’s requirements, Ruth would. Either the network is willing to break the mold for her or they’re not. Ruth takes nothing for granted and resents no one. Maintaining her pride is a priority.

  Phillip laughs.

  “What’s funny?” she asks.

  “Ruth Devon vying for her ex-husband’s job. You think he sees what’s coming?”

  “I’m not a betting woman,” Ruth says, “but I’ll tell you this: Lester never does.”

  Joel claims to love Ruth best on vacation mornings. Limp hair knotted, no makeup, underwear lines discernible through the threadbare butt of her sweatpants as she rises from the couch for more coffee. And yet when she catches him looking at her like she’s a prize he has won, they are always in a hip restaurant in a newly gentrified neighborhood—her lipstick fresh, complexion smooth in the candlelight. Tonight, after their server uncorks a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Sancerre, Joel raises his glass and says to Ruth, “You know, sometimes I find it hard to believe you have an eighteen-year-old kid.”

  Joel Fernandez is six years younger than Ruth and has never been married. The year Ariana was born, he was still hemming his Dickies with safety pins, abusing his eardrums in unlicensed clubs, and letting friends pierce his body parts backstage. Frequently his band’s set was cut short by the Redondo Beach police department. As the officers elbowed their way through the mosh-pit, The Unholy Messes upped their tempo, racing through the final chorus.

  Ruth makes Joel divulge more details of his youth than he would otherwise volunteer. Their childhoods were so different—his lawless, hers ruled by the seasons of organized sports. Did teenage Joel ever dream that the low-budget record label he and his bandmates founded after high school would ultimately sign some of the biggest artists of the new millennium? That on his thirtieth birthday, he would sell his stake in the company and open a chain of luxury hotels dotting the West Coast?

  No more than Ruth could have dreamed up her own life.

  She knows he means well, but the compliment—that she does not look like a mom—is one she hears often, and never guiltlessly.

  “Believe it,” Ruth says. “I have the migraines and the Google search history to prove it.”

  “What have you been searching?”

  “Average salary of a woman without a college degree. What models do when they’re no longer young. What models do if they get pregnant. Sexual assault in modeling industry. Drug use in modeling industry. Signs my teenager is on drugs. Signs my teenager—”

  “Is fine.”

  “Signs I’ve failed as a mother.”

  “Signs you need a vacation?”

  “Signs I will never sleep again.”

  As their server delivers a shareable heap of squid ink cavatelli to the table, Joel says, “Ariana is going to do great. That picture she sent you? That was so sweet. I would never have sent my mom a picture like that.”

  He means the group shot of Ariana and her friends getting ready for prom. With a Sephora’s worth of powder redefining their features, the girls looked like proud, prize-winning cats. Ruth often fantasizes about scrubbing her daughter’s face clean—but who is she to talk? Without the transformative hour in the makeup chair, she would reflexively duck from the camera’s view.

  Two years ago Ruth was nervous about introducing this man in his thirties to her daughter, whose facial symmetry had already attracted thousands of followers on Instagram. Though Ruth has no way of knowing if Joel complied, she was adamant that he meet Ariana in person before looking her up. Her hope was that he would register Ari as a lanky child, with her father’s goofy sense of humor and her mother’s pimples, before consuming the airbrushed, angled idea of her. Joel, to his credit and Ruth’s comfort, does seem to view Ariana as the kid she is. When he visits them in DC he pretends to confuse Snapchat and TikTok, Kanye and Jay-Z, playing the fool for Ariana and her friends. “Turn down that techno!” he cried when Ari blasted the Chainsmokers through the car speakers, and “What’s that—overalls?” when she came downstairs in a Marc Jacobs romper.

  “Is she upset about you maybe missing her graduation?” Joel asks.

  “I think she’s immune to my absence, to be honest. We’re always apart for two or three weeks during the playoffs. But I’m ups
et. Somehow, until I saw the schedule, it didn’t occur to me that I might not be there for the ceremony.”

  “Couldn’t you back out of Game Seven, if it happens?” Joel asks. “Give some other reporter a chance to shine?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” He bows his head plate-ward. Joel’s tone is overly casual. Was he, in fact, suspicious of the phone call? She knows he wasn’t lingering outside the hotel room door—she listened for the ding and descent of the elevator. But maybe he never believed her promise in the first place. Maybe, deep down, he expects her to go after Les’s job. It’s almost appealing, that he might know her better than her promises.

  “Career suicide,” she says.

  That she’s not pursuing a spot in the booth is a lie that will, most likely, be absorbed by the outcome. Ruth has no reason to think she will get those games. As her voice approaches Hubie Brown levels of husk—the problem being that she is not Hubie Brown—her new contract is liable to include less airtime, not more.

  “On the subject of”—Joel rotates his fork in the air—“momentous occasions . . .”

  When men use the kiss cam to propose to their girlfriends, the girlfriends give one of two effective answers: “Yes for real” or “Yes until halftime.” Ruth is haunted by the visible trauma of the second group. What motivates men to turn a simple question into a high-stakes spectacle? Ruth supposes it’s the roar of the arena, the uncontained enthusiasm they figure might as well be for them.

  “This isn’t a proposal, I promise. Although, God, my heart is pounding.” He takes a yogi’s breath in through his nose, out through his mouth. “I think we should consider getting married. I mean, I want you to consider getting married. To me. I love you exponentially. I’m sold.”

  Her right hand locates his left. With a gentle application of pressure, she urges him to calm down. Joel’s nonproposal is a nonsurprise; the question has been in the purse of his lips, the tilt of his head, for months.

  “I love you too. But marriage—or at least, being married to me—might not be what you think it is.”

  Blushing, and with a mouthful of wine, Joel squeezes and releases her hand. “No spoilers, please. I’ve never done it before.”

  “There’s a lot of paperwork.”

  “That’s life, baby.”

  “I’ll look old in a wedding dress.”

  “Yet young in your bridal sweats.”

  “Aren’t we skipping a few steps? You could move to DC. We could start by living together.”

  “You’re not in DC more often than anywhere else.”

  “I’m there all July.”

  “Not if you work the summer league.”

  “Children,” she says, planting her glass on the table with exaggerated force. She is laughing but she means it. “You’re young. You could still have some with someone else.”

  “Maybe I could have some with you! You don’t know.”

  At forty-two, Ruth has a slim chance of conceiving naturally. Beyond that, the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, or fetal abnormality would be too high for comfort. Her period is an erratic guest; she can’t remember the last time she reached down and felt the slickness of ovulation. It would seem her body made the decision on her behalf. It’s over. She is, as certain moms on the playground used to say with a self-deprecating/self-righteous laugh, “one and done.”

  Still, she asks Joel, “Do you want to have some with me?”

  Historically, Joel’s attitude toward fatherhood has been noncommittal. Last year, pinned to the couch with his former bandmate’s newborn on his chest, Joel’s bliss was feminine and palpable—he looked at Ruth with an unhinged grin, already googling IVF therapy in his mind. She has witnessed him with his sister’s kids—the automatic sinking to his knees upon greeting them, his precise awareness of each toddler’s motor skills and whether the adult nearest the staircase ought to intervene. But when Ruth points out that by dating her Joel is delaying, if not missing, his opportunity to reproduce, he smiles and pulls her close. “Isn’t that for the best? The world is on fire.” Or: “Every day, my sister steps on a Lego. What kind of life is that?”

  Now he says, “I always thought your mind was made up on that front. But we could talk about kids. If that’s a conversation you want to have, we can have it.”

  When Ruth married Lester she had every intention of bearing at least three children. Her body, built for jump shots and speed, embraced the challenges of pregnancy. Birth was brutal but she had healed fast. Even when she began traveling for assignments, relying on her mother to babysit and on Lester to swallow his proliferation of objections, she still meant to sneak another baby into her twenties. A second pregnancy was, in Ruth’s mind, non-negotiable—until the moment Lester requested a divorce. And even then, she remained open to the possibility of another. By the time she turned thirty-five she had a secret habit of perusing a sperm bank’s digital catalog—which allowed customers to organize the donors by height, race, eye color, favorite hobby, and level of education—before logging out, thumbs atremble. By forty, when well-intentioned female colleagues said Ruth was smart to have only one child—and so young!—Ruth experimented with agreement. After all, Ariana had survived her mother’s ambition. Why roll the maternity dice again?

  Joel says, “How about this? We elope. You sell your house and move to California. Ariana will probably want to be out west eventually, anyway.” Ruth dislikes the flippancy with which Joel speaks of Ariana’s budding modeling career. “We can do this”—Joel points from his plate to hers—“whenever we please, but at home. Our home. Say you don’t want it.”

  A baby would thwart their dinner plans, Ruth thinks. But Joel has moved on from the subject of babies.

  “I want it,” Ruth tells him. She has never struggled to want. She has never looked at him and not admired his high cheekbones, full lips, and asymmetrical brow. She has never entered a room and been disappointed to find him in it. When he laughs at one of Ariana’s ironically wholesome jokes—dad jokes, her friends call them—Ruth’s pleasure is unequivocal.

  His eyebrows disappear behind his curls. “You do?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure about getting married again. I told myself I wouldn’t. But for you, I’m willing to reconsider.”

  Joel spears two pieces of inky cavatelli. Before delivering the bite to his mouth, he says, “I think the next few years could be great. Maybe even . . . the best?”

  Ruth meets his gaze and tells him the truth, which is that she agrees.

  GAME ONE

  Seattle, Washington

  Wildcats - Supersonics

  0-0

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the morning Ruth repents for last night’s wine. The first glass she sipped but the second coincided with Joel suggesting marriage; she gulped it. Now, the sandpaper tongue. The stuffed left nostril and localized headache suggesting she slept with one temple pressed against stone. Lately, Ruth’s body begrudges her every whim—beverages, but also desserts and overzealous workouts and popcorn microwaved at midnight. Ruth would like to tell her body, we are not that old. Look at the man we are with; look at the hours we keep! Remember the gynecologist noting, “Ruth appears younger than her stated age.”

  The number alone denotes nothing. Forty-two is an Instagram influencer with toned abs and cleavage up to her neck. Forty-two is someone’s grandma. For men, forty-two is the rom-com’s male lead, the bank commercial’s hot dad—whereas a woman can be a young forty-two or an old forty-two or, at forty-two, invisible. Often Ruth finds herself comparing her body to her mother’s at the same age. Cheryl Landon’s abdomen was pale dough cinched by caesarian scar tissue. Long hairs sprouted from her neck and grew like weeds until her fingers found them, gripped, and ripped. Dark, unruly tufts escaped the hollows of her armpits, the elastic of her underwear. As a child Ruth was neither awed nor repulsed by her mother’s body. Her mothe
r’s body was something she involuntarily memorized, like a map on the wall.

  Ruth’s own body is something to be conquered.

  Joel has a lunch meeting in San Diego, the next city tapped for a Hotel Juniper. As Joel showers and shaves, Ruth stays in bed, curled around her laptop and searching Second Spectrum for film of Darius Lake’s playoff assists. When Joel kisses her goodbye, he tastes as he smells—like spearmint and eucalyptus and pipe tobacco. The products Joel buys from his hipster barber, the man responsible for Joel’s curls hovering perpetually at his eyebrows, never sheepdogging into his eyes, always make Ruth nostalgic for a decade they did not live through. Which, she supposes, is the point.

  “I wish I had time for breakfast,” Joel says.

  “Don’t worry about it. I have to be at the arena in an hour.”

  “Meetings?”

  “Meetings. Interviews. Shootaround.”

  “Good luck tonight. Maybe I’ll turn on the TV when I get home.”

  He is not kidding. On the question of whether he will tune into Game One of the NBA finals, from the sideline of which his celebrity girlfriend will be reporting, Joel Fernandez, straight man in America, is a maybe.

  He leaves and the door locks itself. At the top of Ruth’s Twitter feed is a tweet Emory Turner sent shortly after midnight:

  Let’s get it! Game 1. 1 win. Gotta see @HeyRD for that walkout.

  Gritted teeth emoji. Prayer hands emoji. Retweets already in the thousands.

  Ruth is often asked what it’s like to be a lady with a ponytail sidling up to seven-foot All-Stars, daring to pry into their emotions, their insecurities, their hopes. Her work offends a certain kind of man who considers the world of professional sports his last refuge from womankind. If Ruth is feeling generous, she can almost sympathize. Everyone wants to be an expert on something. Used to be that every man felt safe assuming his sports knowledge surpassed every woman’s. For most of Ruth’s career, the industry merely tolerated her. Aging analysts in their flamboyant suits would slap their hands against the studio desk: “Can we talk about Ruth Devon? I’m no sexist, I just don’t want to listen to her call a game she can’t play. Keep that girl on the sideline, is all I’m saying.” Ruth spent summers sucking in her breath, panic-planning an alternate life, convinced her access to her own life would be abruptly denied. But the network could not let her go—she was too prepared, too reliable. Quick on her feet and good in a crisis. An NBA encyclopedia in heels, Ruth became a fan favorite gradually. A household name suddenly.