The Spirit of St. Louis

I never saw Babe Ruth bat. Only in grainy old newsreel footage that I watched over and over and over again. When I was young, Babe Ruth became my hero. I suppose he still is. I have nothing of his, try as I may. I once bid on a check he signed at an auction, but it went for more than I had so it slipped away. A pair of his cleats, an undershirt, a cigar he was said to have smoked, with a picture corroborating the account. I had no chance. All throughout little league and high school baseball I wore his number 3 loyally. And of course, I was a Yankees fan to the core, though I lived near Cincinnati in Fairfield. 

When I was seven, I dressed up as him on Trick-or-Treat night. Ate four hot dogs and tried to figure out what a hooker was. Drank grape soda liked he drank beer. Made my own costume which I have in pictures somewhere. Lugged a bat around and wore spikes and spit a lot because someone said he spit a lot. I tried my best to look like him, but no one looks like Babe Ruth. His face looked like a catcher’s mitt. No one will ever be the Babe. He was baseball’s one true love. When I graduated from journalism school I moved to New York and interned for the Yankees in Yankee Stadium several years before the new stadium replaced it. Sometimes I’d walk around and wonder if I ever stood where Babe stood. I got drunk a lot and thought of getting a tattoo of the Babe, but I usually passed out before I went through with it, which was probably good kismet. 

I first saw her in Los Angeles. I had never been to Los Angeles and would not have gone if I hadn’t been sent. The desire simply never occurred and as a hard-drinking sports writer, though as much as I loved baseball and found Dodger Stadium to be historically appealing, I quietly despised Hollywood and all the exorbitance that it exudes. Somewhere in my brain I always correlated L.A. with a gross intemperateness, fairly or unfairly I never knew because I never visited before the judgement was rendered. Perhaps, it was as simple as that I read a book by someone that made me feel a certain way, or it was OJ and the Kardashians and police beating Rodney King and a mob beating Reginald Denny that stained my adolescent mind. I once had a young and impressionable mind that the media relentlessly and recklessly trampled.

But there was some ice skating competition at the Forum, some big-to-do, and so I booked a cheap flight I could hardly afford and from forty or fifty rows up in an uncomfortable seat where I sat next to sad prepubescent girls who stunk of cheap body spray and their domineering mothers who smelled like soiled dreams and Chinese dog leather knock-off designer purses, I tried to get comfortable in my seat and focus on young Ms. Eva Zolotov. My view was obstructed by a sign being waved by a most enthusiastic American preteen girl who patriotically rooted for all the Americans and hissed at anyone other, except for the Canadians, for some reason, of which she remained neutral. I could also hardly afford the seat, expensive as it was to my surprise, even in the nosebleeds as my father called them from our days in Cincinnati where I grew up watching baseball players the size of fingernails play a game with a ball the size of a speck of dust. It was there, I suppose, my love of sports germinated much like it germinates in these young girls who like me will probably fail in ever being watched by anyone on such a magnificent stage. It is one of those realities that caused me to drink, which might cause them to overeat or to have promiscuous sex, or to become the sad fate of their humpback mothers, pushing all their hopes and dreams onto their kids.

Thankfully, that patriotic girl’s arms must have tired out for when Ms. Zolotov took the ice, the sign disappeared and I sat up in my seat and watched the way a hunter must a majestic deer, spotting it with the laser scope of my anticipation. The deer metaphor was shit, so I crossed it out of my Moleskine journal emphatically in black ink and shoved my pen into the spine and laced it up so only to observe. I resolved that I would write the account later at the hotel without the distraction of my sad and partial settings. It suddenly seemed rude to write or to do anything other than to watch her skate. It was as though she were Babe Ruth and I was a time traveler, lucky enough to take in a ballgame and watch him bat. This analogy I simply pretended to interest myself, but it would soon become a close reality in my burgeoning fascination of the art.

Watch, observe, spectate, look on, it all fails. Maybe in Russian there are words for it, but in English there are not. I suddenly felt hopeless in that seat, both too far away and too close. I was hopeless that I would not be able to describe this performance suitably for my readers to appreciate what I was seeing, a fear I seldom knew. And rapidly my mind turned to mush and I thought in awful cliched metaphors as my eyes were glued to the brilliant flashes of the red effortless passes, jumps, and graceful lithe movements of the young and nimble Russian skater who I had seen only on TV or the cover of a magazine once or twice. I laughed at myself, my interest unpreparedly peaked, holding my breath every time she jumped and feeling as though I was a flea on her perfect back, my fate in hers, but simultaneously at a distance, entranced by the movement of her hips, the sultry string music she danced to, and the soft whispering of the ice that held her up as though it was God’s own palm which she frolicked across, seeming to know perfectly the boundaries of His majestic hand, choreographing herself effortlessly and precisely with Gypsy Waltz, the playful and elegant song she disported to. She seemed to inspire the song, the invisible orchestra and conductor that were somewhere hidden in the black of the rafters, rather than it inspiring her. She was dressed seductively in red, like a gypsy who was being chased or desperately torn from something or someone she loved dearly. I was lost in all time and space and I forgot that I was more than but an observer. It was as though I was a single eyeball floating there capable of nothing else but to behold her.

I checked the program to make sure she was 18 and was pleased to know that she was 22, for such thoughts I had were no fault of my own. And when the flawless performance ended and the crowd stood to applaud her, even the biased Americans which included the snot-nosed girl with the sign, I was glued to my seat with my mouth open having just watched the most beautiful thing I had ever seen a human-being do on this planet. I had no words and knew I would have no words to write that would be adequate at the time I sought to write them. I was a thirsty literary man in a vast wordless desert under a blazing hot and unforgiving sun. My editor would call and I would have nothing for him. Breathtaking, woefully inept; captivating, spellbinding, all crap, nothing was good enough to sum her up. Part of the reason I became a sports writer is that it was always so damn easy to write what I observed. To put into words the game and the athletes that play them. But I would have nothing for him and I would not be paid for there would be nothing to present unless I could somehow put to ink the drool on my chin, the butterflies in my stomach, the tickle in my soul, or the invisible palpitations of my heart which didn’t cease when she left the ice.

I found a bar. A fantastic sunless oasis. I don’t really know why I became a sports writer, but it was writing and it paid the bills. I often thought of it when I drank. Of all the things I could have done with my life, why did I choose to observe and write the accounts of spoiled millionaire babies playing kids games. It wasn’t like it was fifty years ago. Hell, even thirty. Athletes are now exalted to a status they do not deserve, something of Gods, but none were like Ruth, I inevitably say when I get drunk as in defense of the very sport I attack. I am both prosecutor and defense counsel with no biases. Always a contradiction, it seemed. Maybe they say the same of writers. None of us are like Hemingway anymore. They took our machismo. 

I suppose that is why I chose this assignment. For something different. Something obscure where I could get lost and write fresh thoughts, not the same stale lines of someone batting .220 and making 20 million. It was a challenge, perhaps, and if this didn’t work out I’d try my luck with alpine skiing, curling, or maybe horse racing. I don’t know how much money figure skaters made, but watching them it was obvious they weren’t motivated by money. Their sport was an emphatic art, a grace, like ballet only fiercely competitive and on butcher knives on ice rather than curled arthritic toes or non-slip wood. My editor was excited about my take on figure skating and felt the reader would be as well, but he was not willing to pay me for it unless the piece turned out to be worth it. So I sat at the bar and doodled notes on cocktail napkins about what I had seen that would go nowhere. Enraptured, inspiring... The useless list of adjectives went on and on like a terrible small town holiday parade full of insurance floats, greasy politicians, and clunky tractors never getting to the fat Santa everyone came to see. So I tore up the napkins and when I was drunk enough I threw them in the air and they fell back down to the bar like snow.  

Enraptured might be the word, even from such a distance. I drank more whisky and closed my eyes and thought back upon her performance, the ice in my glass jingling hypnotically, conjuring my subconscious to awaken like a 2,000 year-old mummy. She wore red and looked like fire gracefully dancing across the glowing ice and for the first time in my life I felt sympathy for fire. Then somewhere in the elegant pink flashes from her soul bleeding into her art, it appeared that she was being chased by someone that wanted to cage her. And I was lost in the story she told with her appealing physique, all without speaking. She was both an athlete and an actress simultaneously, a seductress, and I am not sure which she was more for she was very real and governed by such a grace that I had before never witnessed. She was a lost soul, forlorn in some woods and all the while she danced so effortlessly, seemingly always on the brink of some impending tragedy. I imagined what invisible beast or beasts must be pursuing her and why they must. Nazis or wolves. Ghosts or demons. All the usual suspects came to mind but none seemed fearful enough. My mind exploded with possibilities like fireworks and I felt such sorrow for her that I nearly left my seat to thwart such an offense against her innocence. She danced with such terror and exuberance, interchanging emotions in an instant. She was both delicate and indestructible and I couldn’t figure how in my hypnotic state that she could be so perfectly contradictory.

But when I learned of her harshness behind the scenes, her overbearing attitude towards her teammates which was well known by her nail-biting, verbal and non-verbal sideline reactions to their performances, she was, for lack of anything better, like asbestos snow. She demanded such perfection not only of herself but of everyone around her and if someone did not live up to her expectations, Ms. Zolotov made it known. She was Stalin’s daughter, the hammer and the sickle, the Kremlin kid. It was all to presumptive, so I left it at asbestos snow for fear of triggering another Cuban Missile Crisis, though I unapologetically titled a piece I wrote about her “The Cold, Cold War.”

I had no time or space to see any flaws in her performance, though there were none my technical eye and ear assured me. She cut the ice with surgical precision and beneath the orchestra there was the soft consistent undertone of the music of her skates, which she played like a virtuoso. The breaths in her jumps. That wonderful inhalation of a swish, silence, and the exhaling swash. There are no words for it. We are all woefully bankrupt of adequacy watching her, I wrote, even those who have watched the sport for decades. She is the Jordan of her sport, the Ruth, and she was yet to win a gold medal, with heavy emphasis on yet. She had once earned the moniker “the rabbit” in reference to her magical qualities and comparing her to a magician’s rabbit. But if she was a rabbit, God was that magician. She did not disrupt the continuity of my mind that felt as though it were intoxicated by some visual hallucinogen I ingested when I held my eyes open and resisted blinking for too long. The music so mystical, so enthralling, and it was as though she floated upon the notes, was carried to another place safe from the beasts that pursued her. I had never seen anything like it before and don’t expect to see anything like it unless I happen to see her again. Such happenchance is unlikely, you feel watching her, though surely you know she’ll skate again and you will watch her when she does, drawn to her like a moth to a flame. She is Halley’s Comet on ice. And I can’t help but to think how tragic it would be if I do not live again to see her. Give her the gold now and spare us all the wait.

What I scribbled down on napkins I hadn’t torn up I organized later and typed on my laptop in my hotel room. I sent them to my editor before bed and the next morning I woke up with the usual hangover and to a message that said, “Wow! Just wow, Jack!” When I called, he told me I may have found my permanent assignment and then he asked me what I thought of the other skaters, particularly the American, and I admitted that I hadn’t been so taken with her and hadn’t written anything at all about her. But she was your assignment, he reminded me. Oh, shit, I forgot, I lied. Well, I’m not some propaganda man, I complained. After a short silence he said, well, next time, write about her the way you wrote about Zolotov. Next time? I asked. Yes, he said. We are going to send you on the circuit after this. You’ll be going to Salt Lake City, Denver, and then St. Louis. Write like that about the American, good?

I laughed without laughing at all. So that is how I got my improbable start as a figure skater beat writer. Seven cities later I was mentioned in Pulitzer conversations until they accused me of being a Russian asset and gushing like a schoolboy over Zolotov, who I must call Ms. Zolotov for Zolotov alone sounds like some antacid or prescription medication for a seasonal allergies. “The Prized Miss,” I called her. I wrote in a rare retraction that she didn’t deserve the asbestos snow moniker from earlier because she was encouraging her teammates, and much is lost in translation of careless hard-drinking writers who have been conditioned to see drama where there is none. I was her defense counsel and never wanted to be her prosecutor so any drama or unsavory thing I heard was persecuted by my rationale which operated like a firing squad and never lived a life in ink.

I could never write so well of the American because I found her performances to be lackluster, maybe because I held them to Ms. Zolotov’s standard. Although she were neck-and-neck with Zolotov in the judges’ scoring competition to competition, I felt they were miles apart and couldn’t bring myself to understand the closeness in judging, excusing it only to my lack of understanding of the technical aspects of the sport that clearly disfavored emotion. But my editor wasn’t pleased, though Russian journalists who traveled the circuit bought me drinks, Stoli, and slapped me heartily on the back and said that I “knew well the sport” I didn’t know well at all. I was emotionally biased, I realized, and so after ten cities I informed my editor that I would resign my position and take an assignment elsewhere. He agreed and thought I’d be a good fit for the NHL, and so I was to depart the next morning from Chicago to New York where I would travel with the Bruins who would be in NYC facing the Rangers.

I was drunk in a Chicago blues bar, in a wooly tan cardigan, a Mickey Mouse t-shirt, and torn jeans, unassuming and out of place. I was drawing caricatures on cocktail napkins of Babe Ruth like some street or fair artist as though he sat beside me. I drew him well, I thought, though often he came out looking like a hairless King Kong. Then I began scribbling something down, some final thought of my brief stint as a figure skater writer that might help me tie it all together, some epitaph-like thing. Of my brush with the Pulitzer before I was blackballed by American patriotism. Modern day McCarthyism. I didn’t see her walk in as my back was turned to the galley but she found a seat next to me and ordered a Stoli on rocks in her beautiful accent. I felt her overtake me and looked over to first see her beautiful hands on the bar, as her fingers made circles like skaters in a warmup before they stopped to take the drink which was quickly poured and given to her. Beautiful women have such an unspoken advantage in such matters that I feel they have no right to complain about the meaningless things in life.

I thought at first that it must be the liquor. That I must have dreamed her up the way I dream up Babe on occasions. But she looked at me and smiled and I knew that my imagination wasn’t so great or wicked to conjure such beauty, so reality set in and with it, despite the alcohol, I was shell-shocked and quiet as a school boy and nervously cleared my throat. Some clever introduction it was.

“You write, beautifully,” she complimented. Her English perfectly blended with her native Russian to create a sort of enchanting language of its own. Pleasing to the ear in that it was enunciated so careful and exactly and her mouth moved dramatically with her words. She grinned and added, “Even if it wasn’t about me, I would say same.”

I motioned for the bartender to put her drink on my tab, but struggled to respond to her. “Well, thank. Thank you,” I stuttered nearly choking on my drink. “It is all about you. There is... no one like you.”

I have never in my life felt more inadequate, though I had been around famous people before. Famous athletes who make more in a year than I would in my entire life. Who would be enshrined in their respective Hall of Fames and be revered for all of time in sports circles. I had tossed footballs with Brady and Bradshaw and played wiffle ball with Boggs, Votto, Pujols, Trout and Pete Rose. But this was sublime, Elysian, brilliant, divine, and it was as though I had overdosed and passed go and gone straight to Heaven. But within no time at all it dissolved in a good way and The Prized Miss became a real person to me, Eva, as she introduced herself and I shook her hand, not some whimsical dream who floated upon classical waltzes at a distance on frozen dreamlike ice. It didn’t hurt that I was drunk already, and that I possess many levels of drunkenness, and the one I was in when she came into my life was that of idyllic optimism where anything at all in this world is possible to me and there is absolutely nothing that I couldn’t do with just a little bit of effort and opportunity. And so perhaps armed with this optimism I ordered us a few rounds and listened as she told me what my words meant to her. 

“....Particularly, coming from illustrious American writer as yourself,” she flattered me with a smile, “I am honored and very humbled by you. Even when you called me this...what is this...asbestos snow. So you mean by that I am beautiful but cancerous?”

“I retracted that. I’m quite sure you don’t cause cancer.”

“I know. I read,” she teased.

I grinned and nodded and the blues band that played fortunately didn’t play too loud so I was able to hear her speak and I didn’t have to ask her to say again what she said already. And no one seemed to recognize who she was so no one paid us much attention besides to look at her in appreciation of her beauty and perhaps to wonder about the incongruity of us. I was not at all on her level in terms of attractiveness and that is not me being self-deprecating in the least to say, nor was it exalting her in an unrealistic measure. It was simply how it was. She wore a black leather-like jacket a white t-shirt and blue jeans with black boots to her knees. And her fingers continued to dance on the bar as she looked over me to see the band on occasion before finally asking me if I would like to take a table with her closer to the stage where we could talk more intimately and hear the band better.

When we got to the table, the band took a break. They were two members, an elderly man who resembled BB King a little who wobbled away from the stage after passing his guitar to a stage man, and his daughter, who wore a beautiful blue dress, no shoes, and who sang like an angel, for lack of anything better, trailing behind him. They thanked people for coming and shook our hands and Eva seemed to enjoy the fact that no one knew who she was, which was so much different than any athlete I had known before who seemed to revel in the notoriety as much as they did in the money.

“I can be anyone,” she smiled wistfully. “I love being anonymous. Just Eva. No one else at all.”

“I don’t have that problem,” I joked. She smiled. I don’t remember a better date, if this was that. Laughing so much. Drinking so heavily yet feeling as though we were in control and out of control at the same time. Contradictory, the way she skated. Being so comfortable in a setting and with someone with whom I had absolutely nothing to lose, and who it seemed expected nothing of me. We talked between songs and the wait seemed to pay off in the anticipation of what we would say next. What subject we would speak of for the thirty or forty seconds between songs. She told me of her family, of her home, of her childhood, and her dreams. As much as she wanted to win Olympic gold, she wanted to be a mother and a wife. But gold had been engrained into her mind since she was little and she wondered if her life would feel like a failure if she never won it. It wasn’t as though it could ever be, well, you did your best. It would be as though, what more could I have done, she said. And she went on about the little doubts she had of herself in her ability to skate which she all but persecuted over the years. Then after several more drinks she doubted very seriously that she would ever find the kind of man she would love and who would love her, comparing her ambition to mountains like the Himalayas. It always seemed so imbalanced and impossible, she sighed.

“Are you going to write about this?” she asked as the band played their final song.

“No,” I replied honestly. This was for me. For just me and I wouldn’t share it with the rest of the world as I shared everything else I watched and observed.  Perhaps that made me selfish, but I didn’t care. “Not for all the money in the world.”

“Good,” she said with a facetious grin. “The Prized Miss greatly appreciates that.”

My face hurt from laughing and was seemingly stuck in a permanent smile.

“How did you come up with that?”

“I don’t know. It just came to me,” I admitted. “That’s the way writing is.”

“What did you think when you first saw me?”

I took a drink and looked at her. “You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking.”

She laughed madly.

I never asked how she found me. Or if she was specifically looking. My curiosity of it was lost somewhere between her telling me of the dwarf rabbits she raised as a child, her multiple knee injuries, how she won a tournament at 16 with a sprained MCL, and how some ligaments in her knees are like brittle thread waiting to snap. She was just 22 and the coming Olympics in Beijing would likely represent her last chance of winning Olympic Gold, which she had prepared for all of her life. At 19 she had won silver in the previous Olympics, narrowly defeated by a fellow countrywoman three years younger than her. I had watched those Olympics but was too drunk to give actual scrutiny to the dueling Russian women on the bar TV. I don’t even remember what bar I was in, but I do remember commenting that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, though saying it was likely the tequila talking and someone else saying she was probably only 16. How curious it was to me that this was happening.

“So are you single, Eva?”

She laughed. “You dog! You just now ask me after fifty shots of Stoli if I am single? So was the Stoli to prepare me or yourself for inevitable question?” She rubbed her face and smiled. Fifty shots was a gross exaggeration, but we were on the plus side of ten with a half dozen beers a piece to drink between. She had warned me that she drank with her brother who is in the Russian Navy in case I figured on trying to out drink her. And she also said that at some point the Russian security team might storm the bar and take her by force because she was in violation of team curfew. But she put her elbow on the table and her face in her hand and the beautiful contours of her face were accentuated by the flickering flame of the glassy glow of the green hurricane lamp. She looked very drunk but not so that her eyes dimmed or fluttered, only that she appeared to be gazing at everything in her sight and her beautiful mouth was always left open until she realized it and propped herself up and rubbed her face and eyes.

When the bar closed shortly thereafter we walked outside into the cold Chicago winter night which can sober a person quicker than most anything I know. She held on to my arm and asked me to escort her to her hotel and I of course obliged, preparing myself for the encounter with Russian security guards who I imagined to be brutish bricks of men in black suits. She giggled in the back seat of the taxi and said she needed this night and thanked me repeatedly, playfully mocking me by referring to herself in the third person and calling herself the prized miss, or the prized one, when she misspoke. Her fingers played gently upon my leg and I sat with perfect posture.

“So why did you ask me if I am single, Jack?”

“For obvious reasons, I suppose.”

“Were you going to ask me out on a date?”

“I couldn’t wish to be so lucky.”

“Hmm. You might be the sweetest man I have spoken to. In any language. I am deeply grateful for your kind articles of me. My family too, you should know. No one has ever said such about me, particularly in media. I am... well, I am personally honored to have met you. My prized mister. Words don’t favor me as much,” she giggled.

“Everything does,” I whispered looking at her. Then the cab as though on cue pulled up to the curb outside of her hotel and despite my nervousness of the barbarous security force that awaited me, I smiled at her, said nothing at all, then helped her out and into the hotel lobby which was adorned in obnoxious amount of brass. Someone was in fact waiting on her, sitting in a chair behind a newspaper, but it wasn’t the grayish ogre I expected. It was a thin woman who looked like a lunch lady in some Midwestern school. And she shouted something in Russian in a shrill tone and Eva looked back at me and smiled knavishly and waved before the woman snatched her up hostilely and they disappeared into an elevator. And that was it. She had come and gone from my life in the blink of an eye. Kismet had smiled upon me ever so briefly then abandoned me. It could end here and be a good story. Something to tell my drinking buddies back home on occasions but never put to ink. Something to remember. But it doesn’t end there.


The next morning I had the usual hangover which I chased away with orange juice and two bagels and a near overdose of Tylenol until there was nothing left but a slight headache that wasn’t much different than eyestrain. And sitting there in O’Hare at the boarding gate waiting for the plane, I thought about Eva and the night before and wondered what she remembered of it. In my enthrallment of being there I hadn’t made any effort to get her number or made any future plans to see her, which I supposed was best, I considered. I watched the trucks on the airport runway scurry around like matchbox cars in an invisible five year-old hand and the baggers and mechanics that looked like ants scurry to and from colossal planes. And the voice announced, “Flight 277 to New York now boarding Class A passengers.”

But I sat there and didn’t move. Then B and C class boarded and I looked out at the snow falling on the runway and the planes taxi to and from the terminals. And it all seemed very strange to me that in all the flights I had ever been on, I never really noticed what happens on the runway prior to and after planes take off and land. All of that which I had taken for granted, I now watched like a child. The flight attendant asked if I was on this flight when the gate was clear and I looked at my ticket which read “Flight 277 Class B” and replied, “No, I’m not. I’m on another flight.” And she smiled an unusually large smile and said okay and the last of the passengers were gobbled up into that worm-like tubular mouth and my fate was sealed. I looked up the figure skating circuit on my phone and thought there was another date in the US and there was, in Las Vegas in two days. So I tore up my ticket and headed back to the ticket counter and checked the board for flights to Vegas. It wasn’t long before my editor called and asked if I had made my flight and to give me the usual instructions as to who to meet and where to pick up my press pass. But I told him I was not on the plane to New York and that I was waiting for a 2:30 to Vegas.

I have lost a few jobs in my time, but I can honestly say that I never lost a job like this. To follow someone I was in love with and hope that I just might be having drinks somewhere and she just might walk in. Without my job I really had no way of continuing to publish articles that would celebrate The Prized Miss’s triumphs, but I didn’t think that far ahead. Nor did I consider how I was going to pay for my apartment or my loan or retirement to Ft. Lauderdale someday. All of that was out the window and what was left was me standing there in the middle of O’Hare with two bags on both sides of me, waiting for a 2:30 to Vegas. That was all there was. I was not the least bit concerned for anything, perhaps because part of me was still drunk, or perhaps because I was drunk on love and that idyllic optimistic me simply couldn’t be extinguished by the reality that governs so many other people around me. The reality that governed me until I witnessed her skate.

I have been to Vegas a handful of times and it was a jinxed city for me. Every time some unfortunate event had happened, none of which is worth detailing now, and none that involved gambling for I had never gambled a cent in my life. Usually it had entailed some level of heartbreak, but jinxed or not, there I stood. I checked in and drank for two nights in various bars and casinos. I walked the strip and looked for her to no avail. She was nowhere to be seen. I used an old press pass to get my way to the press area, a small corral just off the ice, and I watched her warm up, but I sat there in the pit of unenthusiastic reporters and tried my best to remain obscure for I did not want to distract her in the least, or for her to think I followed her as unnaturally as I had. She was in all gold and I never thought there would have been a better color for her than red, or black, or white, but suddenly gold became my favorite color.

I could not remain hidden long from her very observant and keen eye and she caught me looking, though I pretended to read a book and to be uninterested in something as dull as warmups. But I caught her smile at least twice, which was unusual for she never smiled during warmups. Her face was always dressed with intensity. And when warmups ended, she skated directly over to the press pit and shouted in her tantalizing Russian-flavored English, “Hey, you there, bookworm. Good book, it is?”

“Hardly,” I complained.

She smiled. The other reporters parted like the Red Sea and pretended to converse with each other though they watched us out of the corner of their sneaky eyes. She smiled full of life and enthusiasm. “Meet me tonight. In lobby of the Venetian at 9. By bar, of course.”

There was such a rise in me that I couldn’t continue the charade of nonchalance and I smiled and rose to my feet and to the wall of the rink as she skated away slowly as though to tease me.

“But doesn’t that fall perilously close to your curfew?” I called out recklessly for it felt like a time to be reckless.

And she turned and skated backwards, insouciantly swaying back and forth, puckering her defiant lips and finally replying as she looked me in the eye, “The Prized Miss is bound by no curfew.”

I laughed and she quickly reversed direction and made a slow final pass, saying as she did, “Blame yourself, fool. You and your fancy words have gone to my head. Tonight is for you.”

Fourteen skaters came before her. My editor sent me an angry text message asking me why after fourteen years had I thrown it all away, to which I replied “love is freelance” and to which he responded “???” Indeed, ???, to those that don’t know, who haven’t felt this recklessly for someone. Who care for nothing else but for one single soul in that way, washed clean of all the past failures, baptized in love, in hopes that it should last an eternity and in the sometimes naive expectation that it shall. It is a blindness, a condition that should render me lame if my body was as tortured as my heart was broken. But reckless, reckless! The very true and only word for it!

And I sat there and watched as she came out after that ham-fisted American who danced with no soul and the Japanese girl who was lacking boldness and stuck to multiple scared jumps rather than a few grand and daring ones as Eva did every single routine. She wore her hair in a short black bob-style and by the sequins on her outfit I knew she was dressed as a twenties’ flapper and so the music didn’t surprise me. I just happened to be an aficionado of twenties and thirties American music. It was Larry Clinton Orchestra’s You Go to My Head which morphed into Phil Spitalny Orchestra’s Puttin’ on the Ritz. I knew that I had told her I loved the twenties and thirties in the blues bar and she smiled at me as she danced and if I wasn’t in love before, I was drowned in it then. She went to my head like the bubbles of champagne. The crowd erupted and The Prized Miss, I knew, would be the Gold medalist in the next Olympic games, sure as snow would fall in Moscow.

So it was appropriate that the Venetian was mostly in gold and she came in dressed as a flapper in a different gold-sequined dress from the one she wore during her performance and I felt fortunate that I had dressed up somewhat in a fitted black suit and tie that I had bought after the competition. I took her in my arms and danced with her to an instrumental of Cheek to Cheek as she came in and I suppose I surprised her for I had some grace in my feet for a reporter.

“You’re on land now,” I teased her. “I am at the advantage.”

“What do you think I am, mermaid? An what do you think ice is?”

“Ice is water.”

She scoffed, “Hard water. Ice is land when it is frozen, stupid.”

“That is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” I argued.

She smiled and was happy I had a drink ready for her and as we danced she grabbed it and drank not missing a step or spilling a sip. I don’t believe I had ever seen anyone smile more intensely than she did standing there in that gold dress. It was a nervous kind of smile, only that she wasn’t nervous at all. The Venetian is beautiful in its opulence with all of its pillars, murals and statues. Its fountains, marble and gold and high-rollers. Such a rich excess of gold. I supposed that if I detested L.A. for its exorbitance, I should detest Vegas too. But I don’t. There is something playful to it. Something wonderful in the imaginative way it presents itself. Not pompously to those who inhabit it, but open to all who seek its comforts and lavishness, for a price. And it feels as though when you drink in the Venetian you’re in the mind of an alchemist and that you will turn and Marie Antoinette will appear walking behind you, with her head still attached, and all her jewels adorning her. Or some troupe from her court in silk floral suits and powdered wigs. The King himself, maybe. She must have known I was thinking so imaginatively because she asked what was going on up there and I confessed to her exactly what which amused her.

We had several drinks and she asked the bartender if he could put on Puttin’ On the Ritz and he plead that he was powerless over the casino’s stereo or sound system, whatever he called it, to which she pouted and looked at me playfully with a protruding bottom lip. I laughed and she could no longer hold it in and laughed with me. So we finished our drinks and Eva danced us out of the casino, doing a bit of her routine without the ice, of course, but with that wild hand thing and hip and head shake she did, just as the flappers danced, she assured me, to which I said I wasn’t that old to know, to which she replied, are you for certain? She was a renowned Russian humorist, she boasted, to which I replied, are you for certain? And we reveled in such back-and-forth quips. She was as brilliant a dancer out of skates as she was in them and I briskly walked to keep pace with her as she wildly frolicked her flapper dance between people and out the casino spilling onto the hot night street which was bleeding fantastic refractive lights.

“That place was much too bright to drink. And all that gold,” she complained looking down at her dress. “I felt invisible. Blended right in. Tragic, really. What did you think of my dance routine? Pretty good for mermaid, hmm, Buster Brown?”

“Who’s Buster Brown?”

She laughed. “I don’t know. American saying, no?”

“No,” I affirmed. Not that I knew.

I am not sure where we didn’t go that night. We had the most fun in old Vegas on the strip dancing to a four-piece jazz band that played for dollars and attracted less attention than the man with the monkeys a few hundred feet away. But Eva and I danced like we belonged in the twenties and it didn’t matter who saw us or who watched for we were both on that euphoric level of intoxication where embarrassment doesn’t exist and Ted Lewis goes around asking, Is everybody happy? And of course everyone is. We danced so well, or so goofily, that we attracted others who laughed at us and pitched in to the band’s old brown spittoon. And the fellow on the slide trombone kept lifting his bowler and raising his bushy eyebrows to say thank you to us and the tippers who traipsed by sprinkling dollars. It was as though the band tried to keep up with Eva who danced like mad, never showing the slightest indication of tiring, and whose long pearl necklace flailed wildly in grand orbiting loops as she went from the Charleston to the Jitterbug and back again and then on to things she must have invented herself in the moment. Free style, they might call it. And the old fellow in the blue zoot suit on the stand up bass had eyes like flying saucers and the fellow on the bass drum kept beating the drum which said The Spirit of St. Louis, the band’s name I presumed.

“What do they call themselves?” she asked out of breath.

“The drummer’s drum says The Spirit of St. Louis.”

“Well, that is silly name for band.”

“It was Lindbergh’s plane.”

“Lindbergh who?” she went on.

“The fella that flew across the Atlantic last year.”

“Oh, that fella?” she winked. I double winked back.

There are moments when you know you have become part of someone’s soul. When they open the door for you and it is up to you to walk in, to take off your shoes, hang your hat and coat, and acquaint yourself with the elements, pet the dog, or to turn and walk away. And you, in turn, open the door of yours and invite them in as well, expecting much the same courtesy. This was that moment. It wasn’t announced at all. It was in a glance there on the streets of Old Vegas. Something she said with her eyes and I said back with mine. And when I was too tired to dance anymore, my feet feeling like two busted watermelons, I stood there and watched her dance with old men and young kids and smiled at her. I don’t think any of them knew who she was. In fact, I’d bet on it and I am not a gambler.

We made love that night in my room at Caesar’s Palace with the blinds pulled open. It wasn’t that wild because we were ten floors up, and with all of Vegas to see we would hardly be an element of any sort of fascination as beautiful as she is. The fountains of the Bellagio lit up and sprayed every twenty minutes or so and before making love and after, she was like a child trying to hurry to the window to catch them. And when she did she frantically called me over and wrapped her arms around me and it seemed like Heaven. I am not a good enough writer to say anymore of that night, only that she never seemed to tire, despite herself, and neither of us could get enough of each other in any possible way until we finally passed out in exhaustion while those fountains and Vegas went on and on.


I made enough money to follow Eva for a good three months, and though I could no longer write as an objective figure skater writer, “The Prized Miss” moniker carried on even without me spilling ink for her. We had our objectors, of course, but Eva was such a force of personality and spirit that no one could control her. I’ve never known a more powerful person in my life. This is how my life as a freelance writer began. I would sell short stories here and there to various magazines, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to follow her forever. There were a few months she had off and we lived in New York and she trained nearby. Every day she trained. Even Sundays. There was no happier time in my life. I got steady work with the Post and have never written so well, I don’t feel. And I got to go to Russia to meet her family and see where she learned to ice skate. The walls of her family home were covered with pictures of her through the years, seemingly always in ice skates, always smiling. It was such a thorough history it felt as though walking from the kitchen to the upstairs bathroom I watched her grow up. Sometimes with teeth, sometimes without. Her family was kind and courteous to me, but seemed to have a curiosity of me that families have for new pets.

“Russian skepticism,” she toyed.” Get used to it, comrade.”

Happiness never ceased. The excitement to get her texts, her calls, to see her face wherever it was that I got to see her for however brief or long, never ebbed. I never dreaded anything with her, always looked forward to everything, and when she was gone, enough of her stayed with me to last until I saw her again, which wasn’t ever too long a time. I went to Oslo, Norway. To Helsinki, Finland. To Germany twice. To France. And my passport that was once as empty as my heart, was full of places I never thought I would go. Never more than a week or so passed without me seeing her, despite her rigorous schedule and training. And even as the Olympics approached, we made the time. I knew how much it meant to her to win gold and I tried not to interfere, but she insisted that I helped her relax which was as important than anything. But I think she said that to make me feel better. To absolve me of any guilt. The Olympics were only six months away and her training was twice daily and would be until then. We lived with her parents and I got work doing editing work for my friend’s business. It didn’t pay for much more than groceries, but we didn’t have to buy even that with her parents, and it allowed me to stay with her.

I had ordered fireworks in preparation for the Fourth of July and we were the only people in the Russian neighborhood who set off Roman candles, bottle rockets, cherry bombs and every other kind of firework the internet had to offer. No other ex-patriots lived in the area so people were confused by the explosions and probably thought the worst. I didn’t do so to celebrate American independence at all, honestly, though I was a proud American and loved history, Revolutionary War history particularly. I did so just to see Eva’s beautiful face as they burst overhead. To watch all the colors light up in her eyes and upon her face. I guess I knew her well enough to know she would be delighted by them the way she was thrilled by the fountain of the Bellagio. And I was right. I’ve never seen someone so amused and she stood on the roof of her parent’s house in her gym shoes and shorts and sweater with her hair in a messy bun and her arms stretched upwards as her parents stood on the lawn with half-amused and slightly annoyed smiles on their pale grim faces as I lit them from the side yard. A short time later police came but I had managed to light them all by then. And when they thought to arrest me on numerous violations and send me to the gulag, as I imagined it, Eva stepped in and wouldn’t let them take me anywhere. She barked at them furiously in Russian and I stood there not understanding a word except for an occasional nit, or no. She was, after all, The Prized Miss, and in Russia the country’s greatest figure skater is like America’s best quarterback, times eight hundred and three.


It was the morning after that, July 5th that I awoke to her vomiting in the toilet. She had her “body” bag ready for training beside her and she was on her knees on the cream-colored tile floor as though she had missed a jumped or blown a knee. The bathroom was bursting with bright yellow light and the rest of the house was so dark that it seemed not to exist at all. It frightened me because I had never seen her so vulnerable. So fragile and drained of life, when in truth she had never been more full of it. I walked in and stood in the doorway and she turned to look at me and smiled, saying softly masking the panic, “I’m pregnant.”

I was overcome with happiness, so much so that it froze me in my place. Like I was when I first saw her. I didn’t say anything just then, but I needn’t. She looked back at me and knew that a baby would merely exacerbate my love for her tenfold, if possible. I was selfish in my happiness, however, not considering the obvious predicament a pregnancy created for her. The Olympics was in six months and thus, one of two dreams had to end so the other could survive.

“I suppose this is the rigors in training to be mom,” she joked in her beautiful accent, excluding occasional articles of speech, usually the “a,” that was lost in translation. I helped her to her feet and she washed her face in the sink and rinsed her mouth with antiseptic. She didn’t cry nor did she appear happy. She seemed lost for a moment before she found herself and got herself in line. She said she felt tired and wanted to go back to bed but her parents would be suspicious and she would have to answer to her coach as well. But walking past our room she found the bed to be too inviting to pass up and she collapsed into it and was back asleep within a few seconds. I lied behind her and held her in the dark room with my face pressed gently to the nape of her neck and my lip playing softly upon that fine down that ran the length of her back in the groove of her perfect spine. I didn’t sleep at all and I stared into her skin knowing that a child, which we took every precaution against, was forming miraculously inside of her womb against all odds and it seemed to me like fate, but I was in no place to argue it. Moreover, in support of my thought, Eva had been told years earlier that she wouldn’t be able to conceive a child, and she was on birth control to regulate her periods. I wondered what she had done with the test. If she had thrown it away or if she hid it somewhere. Those two blue lines or the plus sign in the small circle. A tiny window to life. Or maybe she had seen a doctor. No. She wouldn’t have risked seeing a doctor and the news getting back to her coach, who she feared intensely as though he were Stalin himself.

I held her and pretended to sleep until early afternoon when she woke and we got out of bed and made our late breakfast, Eva telling her mother she caught a virus that several other girls on the team had and brushing it off. I felt small when she described it as a virus, though I knew she was simply doing damage control. Her father was at work and Eva and I ate and went back to bed where we made love with some brutal sense of finality that was no less pleasurable than all the times before, including the one that made the life inside of her. And when it was over, she said she took the test the morning before but didn’t know how to tell me, or that she would. And sitting there on the side of the bed, she tried to smile but couldn’t, and she cried when she said that she had an appointment to take care of things the following week and that she didn’t expect me to come. Or stay. 

I knew what it meant. She lied back down and I lied there with her and held her and when I tried to get up she wouldn’t let me, she simply asked me to understand and I said that I did. She said that her country depended upon her and she trained all her life for this moment and that if she waited four more years, the window might be closed or the ligaments in her knee might give out. It wasn’t something you can chance. But I didn’t care about a window, or the Olympics, or the desire of Mother Russia to win some meaningless medal count against political adversaries. Sports were harshly and resoundingly put into their proper perspective all of a sudden. They didn’t mean shit to me. They were games, stupid games, trivial competitions for amusement and a warped, vicarious, communal pleasure that was nothing more than a glorified and profitable mental illness. I stayed that night and the next morning when she went back to training I packed my bags and took the train to the airport. I don’t think she would have been surprised. I think that is how she preferred me to go. When she wasn’t there. When she wasn’t looking. I didn’t leave a note or a call anyone. I threw my cellphone in the trash and disappeared.

It felt like a terrible mistake as soon as I left. When the plane taxied down the runway and took off. When I watched those people on the tarmac as I had watched them in Chicago. But I knew I was in the way, and the baby was in the way, and I could never look at her the same way again, nor could she look at me like she did in Vegas. And though I loved her and she loved me, undoubtedly, I would never be figure skating, or a gold medal, or the Olympic Games. Maybe had we met after the Olympics, I thought. It was timing, that’s all. Just terrible timing. But God, I felt terrible for leaving even though I knew I had to go to make it easier on her, and selfishly, myself. My stomach felt it was full of ashes from a heart that was burned to the embers, smoldering in the bonfire that became of my soul. I ordered the maximum amount of drinks I could on the flight to London, and in London I had a few more on the layover. Then when we at last landed in JFK, I texted my former boss at the Post and said I was home. And I got drunk at an airport bar, though the drinks cost a small fortune, then took a cab to meet him and his wife somewhere in Manhattan.

He offered me my job back, covering baseball, and I quickly accepted. He said he wanted something good for the Series this year and I promised I would deliver. Some real human interest story. Sports drama, he meant. He was one of those “turning sports into soap operas for ratings types” and he didn’t even realize it. Stories featuring someone’s dirt or some social justice angle. His wife was pretty but she seemed bored listening to us, to him specifically, but when he told her I was dating Eva Zolotov, and lived in Russia with her for several months, she brightened up and said how much she loved her and how big of a fan she was, though she said that she was looking forward to the American girl beating her in the Olympics. That horse-faced, ham-fisted girl I was supposed to write more about, who hadn’t any soul at all. I don’t know how I managed not to cry there in that tourist bar when I heard some girls nearby speaking Russian. I leaned back in my chair and took a deep breath and had another drink and the room began to spin like a carousel.

“I can get you fifty grand in advance if you agree to write about Zolotov,” he said plainly. “Hell, you lived over there for months. You two were pretty serious, right? Got to be an interesting story there. A unique perceptive us Westerners don’t know. You know, behind the Iron Curtain with The Prized Miss. That sort of thing.”

“Yes!” his wife jumped in. “That would be fascinating!”

“No,” I said jiggling a glass of bourbon before it slipped out of my hand and spilled all over the floor. “No book. No more figure skating for me. It doesn’t exist.”

“Not a kiss-and-tell just a damn...”

“No. I will not write it.”

“A hundred?”

I closed my eyes and shook my head. I think I passed out then. Maybe I went on for a while longer. Maybe I cried. Maybe I did a lot of things, but when I woke up I was in my apartment. I stayed in for two days and on the third I went to Yankee Stadium and began to talk to some players and feel out some good stories. I still felt drunk and my heart was still smoldering. But that is the beauty of sports. Of baseball. No matter how bad it is, whatever is going wrong in your life, the game goes on. And you can take the subway to the stadium and get a ticket and immerse yourself into the game, the emerald green field glowing so perfectly it seems that every blade of grass is in the right place, the white chalk of the batter’s box and the fair-foul lines perfectly straight, and the glow of the seemingly endless lights during a night game, mesmerizing. Whatever heartache or trouble you suffered before you came, seemed to get lost somewhere between a strikeout or a grand slam, lost in the murmur of 40,000 anxious people like you, in the crack of the bat or the snap of the mitt. For nine innings while you are there, the outside world simply does not exist. At least, that is how it is for me and that is why I fell in love with the game in Cincinnati. And even when I don’t have a ticket, I can feel that way watching it on TV. Some rookie making his MLB debut. The sum of 20 years of dreams in one single pitch. 

Most of the stories written about baseball are centered around trades or rookies being called up from Triple A. Or there will be a hot streak, or a unlikely pennant chaser that catches everyone’s attention. And your job as a writer is to make known the unknown, the human interest stuff, less the drama unless your employer is desperate for ratings. Click-bait shit that sells ads for Rogaine, Viagara and beer. I suppose I am a purist, in that I try to avoid turning the game into a soap opera, or much worse, a business. Occasionally, I would do a story on a player from the early days that was worth recognition who no one knows much about. One who was seemingly lost in the weeds of time. Buried in the rubble of an old stadium, but who is still here in the stat books and in the very soul of the game. I wrote fervently, madly possessed without Eva.

When baseball season ended, I intended to hibernate until spring. I wrote well enough to make enough money that I needn’t work on anything until spring training. When everyone’s baseball fever returned with pitchers and catchers reporting around the time the groundhog comes out of the hole and cupid fires his fateful arrows. I had purposefully not watched or read any other sports wires to avoid the obvious reminders, and I drank heavily enough that I remained in that idyllic state of naive optimism and took up residency there. But there was the occasional twenties band that would play in a bar I went to or there was something on TV. Those cruel things that thwart recovery. I didn’t date or see anyone. There was no purpose. I knew in my condition I was in peril of becoming a priest by virtue of abstinence from the corporeal and my life dried up and became a case study in sequestered boredom.

I went to a Christmas party for the Post. I was gifted a Babe Ruth signed ball by my editor, a real nice gift that brought a measure of joy to me, but not nearly the joy it would have brought had my heart been unbroken. Maybe it was a bribe because he asked me after I opened it if I would reconsider writing about Eva. He told me I didn’t have to be disrespectful or respectful, whichever way I felt about it, he just wanted the story. Maybe a few pictures too. I thanked him for the ball and said nothing of it. I stood there staring at it realizing that I was worse off than I had thought because it was little more than just a ball to me. 

“Well, you heard right?”

“Heard what?” I replied.

“She’s out, Jack. Blew an ACL or something in training. Damn shame.”

I didn’t say anything in reply. I thanked him again for the ball and left the party without saying goodbye to anyone. I had earned the reputation of being morose, so I suppose I intended to keep it thriving. The ball was in a glass cube and as I sat in back of the cab and stared at it, the faded signature kept appearing and vanishing depending on our proximity to the street lights. The discolored leather and threads showed its age. It was certified, but I guess my skepticism led me to think that someone signed it for him. Or maybe it was a clever forgery. Anything to not think about her. Anything. Me and this fifty thousand dollar ball. What a gift. I hoped that I had expressed my gratitude well enough. I over-tipped the cabby, for what it was worth as though it would all balance itself out in the end. But it never does.

I tried to call her from my new phone, but it went to voicemail. I sent her several texts telling her how sorry I was to hear about the injury and in hopes to console her somehow. I wondered how she felt and I was worried that the vacancy in her womb, of me leaving, and the injury just a few months before the Olympics would be all too much for her to handle, as strong as she was. I had no doubt she loved me as I love her, so it wasn’t egotistical at all of me to think so. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t upset and that I didn’t blame her for how it ended. For what she did. But she never returned my calls or texts and it was as though she had simply disappeared or never existed at all. Maybe she was lost in depression and hibernating herself in some lonely hole. Maybe she was a figment of my drunk imagination, I thought, until I scrolled through pictures of us on my phone when we were happy. 


A month later, I got word that she was living in Alaska and rehabilitating her knee. Some family friend of hers lived in Anchorage and there was a university there where, rumor had it, she had enrolled as a student. I didn’t know any of it to be true for certain, only that is what had been told to me by someone who had proven in the past to be more than reliable. I had learned over the years to trust only certain sources. I also found out that the ball my editor gave me was worth more than fifty thousand dollars, and that he had paid only thirty five thousand several years earlier when someone was desperate to sell it. The estimated value of that ball was in the ballpark of $137,000, conservatively, I was told, because the ball dated back to when Ruth was in his heyday with the Yankees in the early twenties. I say this only because I once more sought to distract myself from The Prized Miss. And now that she was actively ignoring my calls and texts, the likelihood I would ever see her again was not good. 

And so I buried myself back in my apartment like the groundhog waiting for spring. I wouldn’t watch the Olympics. If there was a way that I could completely stay in bed and do nothing at all, to eat and drink through some tube and use the bathroom via some bedpan drone or a remote apparatus it is exactly what I would have done. But being that I couldn’t completely confine myself, and my boss wouldn’t let me, I checked my phone here and there and sometime in late January I got a message from an unknown number that said simply:

Hello Stupid...

It was several days old when I saw it and I waited several more days to reply. It wasn’t that I thought it was from someone else or that I didn’t want to reply. I did and I knew it was her because it was her number and at some point “stupid” had become her play name for me when we lived in Russia. Stoopid, as she pronounced it. She always smiled when she said it so I imagined her typing that message at 4:47am (Alaska time) on a Monday morning getting up to rehab her knee, determined and more than likely ahead of all reasonable timetables given to her by doctors for recovery.

Finally on Thursday I messaged back:

Miss me?

    No.

Really?

    No.

Are you okay?

    No.

I waited a few hours before I messaged her anymore. Her “no” replies came almost automatically. And several times as I lied there in bed on a cold Thursday night, a heavy wet snow falling outside on the streets and lamp-lights below, having looked up the time in Alaska prior to messaging and assuring myself that she was probably eating dinner and likely more able to respond, several times “...” appeared to indicate she was typing. Then again “...” before it disappeared. And she left me on read for a while longer then “...” came back before it vanished again and “...” then nothing. I was about to ask her what was wrong and if I could call her when the message came across. I have heard old people describe seeing Halley’s Comet, or Elvis dance, or Willy Mays play centerfield in Candlestick Park, or Babe Ruth bat, but other than seeing Eva skate, or in bed when her blouse slips off her shoulders and all that follows, or her eyes light up when she laughs, I could not have seen anything more amazing and beautiful in my life. Finally she asked:

Will you come see me?

...

Please. I need you.

She didn’t have to say please. I replied only one word that goes without saying. She sent her address and said she would look out for me. I checked my bank account, which I had depleted on rent and food and bills since I hadn’t worked since the last out of the World Series in October. I had a few hundred bucks which wouldn’t get me a flight to Anchorage. I could sell plasma, I thought. I had a few things around the apartment that were of some value. I could ask my boss for an advance or a loan I’d never pay back. But then I saw the ball on my desk and the nauseas feeling of parting with something like a limb or an eye came over me. I thought of whether I could sell a kidney instead, or a lung, but reasoned I could sell the ball much quicker.

That Saturday I took it to a shop on 5th to a high-end dealer I knew well. I asked for the 137k I heard it was worth. He countered at eighty two five. We settled somewhere between and I bought a flight to Anchorage that night which left Sunday morning. I hadn’t the heart to tell my boss I sold the ball because it was a priceless gift that under no other circumstance would I have ever sold. I figured if I had him over sometime I could always buy a cheap counterfeit. I had never been to Alaska before and would never have imagined going if not for her. I always imagined people to go to Alaska to hunt bears or moose or to fish and I wasn’t a hunter or a fisher so the state seemed to be an unlikely destination for me.  

I got off the plane and texted her that I was here. She gave me a different address and told me that she would see me there in thirty minutes or so. I took an Uber and the snow fell heavier than in New York and there were endless drifts and a relentless fall of snow that didn’t appear interested in stopping. It didn’t seem to bother the Uber driver at all and he made small talk about Alaska and what I was doing here. I said I was coming to see an old friend and he smiled in the rearview and said where I should eat and what I should do in Anchorage. He pulled up to the address which was the university parking lot and said this is the place. And I looked out the window at the austere-looking building complex and asked if he was sure and he said yes. I expected a house or an apartment, not university buildings.

I over tipped him in my enthusiasm to see her and stepped out towards the house with butterflies in my stomach about how I would feel when I saw her. I didn’t know where it was that I was to go, but assumed it was in the “arena” identified by a simple sign as such which led to a fairly small and ordinary building, but considering the university’s probable enrollment, was congruous and adequate. It wasn’t that it was awful by any means. It was nice, a dolphin-gray color building and the snow made it seem enchanted. I must have looked like a penguin walking the icy walk to the arena doors. I paused there for a moment thinking they’d be locked but they weren’t and they opened with the inhalation of a swoosh as though the building took a breath when I entered. Then I wondered what she was doing inside the arena being that she wasn’t able to skate, or shouldn’t be as of yet, with the kind of injury I heard she had sustained. Maybe there would be fireworks, I laughed considering it. I had spent the better part of a year trying to figure out what she would do or say next, usually to no avail. She found a way to surprise me more often than not.

Babe Ruth was probably rolling over in his grave. The boy who loved him more than anyone or anything in the world, who for all of his life wanted nothing but something of his, who had an autographed baseball in his hands, hawked it for this. To walk into a cold, remote arena in Anchorage, Alaska to see an ex-girlfriend. And as I walked in, it was as though Babe was walking with me and I could hear his spikes on the concrete. “There’re a million gals out there, son. Don’t get yourself in a twist about just one.” And walking in the darkness of that arena I said back to him, “Babe, you taught me a truly valuable thing. To swing for the fences, and that’s what I am doing.”

And The Babe vanished in a puff of smoke and there was a light in the middle of the ice that slowly expanded as though there was some door that opened from above. I took a seat about forty rows up where I felt most comfortable and the music began to play, You Go To My Head. She glided out in that gold sequined gown with the long string of pearls she wore in Vegas. But she wore a flapper’s hat and a sable-lined crimson-colored coat, faux fur, of course. Then the song faded and Puttin on the Ritz came on and she danced a marvelous routine that made me hold my breath. It didn’t appear that she was injured much at all other than she was more delicate in her jumps. And the song ended and the magnificent horns introduced Kitty Kallen who sang It’s Been a Long, Long Time.    

I took out a piece of paper from my bag and found a marker and wrote “10” on it and held it up as I walked down to the ice. She smiled when she saw it and tripped, spilling gently on her hip and sliding towards the wall. It took me by surprise because it was something I had never seen her do. Not once. No matter the difficulty of the jump, she had never fallen. I dropped the paper and hopped over the wall to get to her and I slipped and fell with far less grace than she. She laughed, still lying on her side and I laughed at myself flat on my back spinning like a top until whatever entity it is that makes fools of us, felt pity upon me and stopped my spinning. She had tears in her eyes and so did I and there was snow that fell from the rafters which she said was supposed to fall during her performance.

“Asbestos snow?” I joked.

“Some things never change,” she added, playing along. She stared at me and I back at her. It had felt like a long, long time. Her hair was raven-black in a bob and her hat had fallen off her head. Her sable-lined crimson coat with the furry collar and cuffs was slightly parted and underneath was an unnatural expanse of gold sequins. I laid on my side and looked at her in awe.

“How’s your knee?”

“Just fine.”

The snow fell thick and she let it fall upon her face and body as she lied still. It was as though she belonged to the ice, wasn’t real, and nor was I. And whether it was asbestos snow or not, didn’t make a difference. I’d stand or sit or lie in it for her no matter. I’d take the cancer or the broken heart or whatever may come of us. She just lied there and soon she would be buried but she didn’t seem to mind as she stared absently heavenward. Then she rolled over on her back so that I could not help but to see the glorious golden egg of her stomach.

“Well, are you going to kiss me or not, Buster Brown?”

I didn’t bother to try to get to my feet. I scooted to her like a desperate seal from a man with a club. And I kissed her and ran my hand over her protruding stomach.

“Why didn’t you tell me you kept the baby?” I asked.

She didn’t reply to that. She just smiled and looked at the fake snow that kept falling. “You know I purposefully tripped, right?”

I laughed and shook my head no.

“I wanted to see if you’d come running. And you did. They kicked me off team for getting pregnant. They said I violated curfew all those times and some code of conduct. I could have stayed on team if I had abortion. But I didn’t want to lose our baby. Not for ten gold medals. So they say, go quietly away and we will say it was knee injury.”

I was stunned.  There was nothing else for me to say or apparently do besides to lie there and hold her hand while we looked up at the rafters which seemed a million miles up.

“So I am without country. I moved to Alaska and am training here now. I am student. What do you say we marry, I become citizen, and after we have the little golden nugget, you help me condition for American trials so I can compete in next Olympics...as American.” She rolled her head to look over at me for my reply. I was still looking at the rafters in awe. I knew I would trade ten Babe Ruth balls to be right where I was. I would trade Babe Ruth himself to be here, and in fact, I had in a way. I never dreamed I would be in Alaska lying on ice with a beautiful figure skater, the love of my soul, and my dearest inspiration. But so it was, it is, and it will always be. What chance did I stand against such kismet? What chance did I have without?

“What was that band’s name in Old Vegas?” she asked reaching for my hand.

“The Spirit of St. Louis,” I smiled. I helped her to her feet and we made our way off the ice.

She laughed. “That was the night when I fell in love with you and all this and this child was fated. In the Venetian. All that gold.”

We named her Ruth.