And then he slid her free and had her in his arms and he was pressing her down into the bed with the weight of his body, just holding her. He wasn’t aroused, or not at first, but she was—oh, yes, she certainly was.

Chapter 7

7.

Things began to cool down after that. It was as if they’d reached some sort of meridian, halftime in the game they were playing, the game to neutralize all games, as Tim would say, the only game that wasn’t a game at all. Work had begun to pile up. There were end-of-term exams, both for Fitz and his students. Joanie was busy too. One of her coworkers came down sick with something that might or might not have been pleurisy and Joanie covered for her, picking up still more hours, which was a good thing because they were undecided about what to do for the summer—stay and pay rent or go to the Jersey shore with her parents—and the extra money would come in handy either way. They kept away from Tim’s the next two Saturdays and that was all right too because the rest of the group was feeling the same end-of-term pressures he was and because Tim had decamped with Dick and Peggy for an exploratory trip to Mexico, with the intention of finding a place where he could set up a summer research project, with or without Harvard’s blessing.

The Yankees came to town the second week of May and he took Corey to see them play. Despite a powerful lineup featuring Mantle, Maris, Berra, Skowron and Howard, the Yankees were crushed, 14-4, and Carl Yastrzemski was the hero for Boston, with a home run and three RBIs, which seemed to suit Corey just fine. They had hot dogs, Cokes, peanuts and ice cream, and Corey, who’d brought his mitt along, almost caught a foul ball that wound up coming down in the row just behind them, where a loudmouthed clown with a beer belly reached over Corey to catch it barehanded. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that he’d gotten a chance to spend time with his son, special time without Joanie, who’d begged off on the grounds that she didn’t really care all that much about baseball and it would only be wasted on her. Which was just fine with both of them—it was a men’s thing anyway, wasn’t it? And after that night at Tim’s, he found himself trying to reach out more to his son, not that he felt guilty, or not exactly—it was just that the research was all about interiority, and interiority by its very definition was exclusive, selfish even. You could take your son to the ballpark, but you couldn’t take him inside your head.