It was eight to nothing in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Mexicans silent while she, Alice and Fanchon served as cheerleaders for the Rojos and the beer bottles made a pyramid of their own, when Tim called time-out and went to the mound to have a word with Tommy, who to this point had allowed only two hits. What he said to him, she didn’t know, or not exactly, but it was apparent that in the interest of goodwill, not to mention international relations, he’d told Tommy to go easy, let them hit the ball, tie it up, win even . . .

Corey was outraged. When the Águilas scored their seventh run, he stamped across the grass and flung himself angrily down beside her on the blanket. “I can’t believe this!” he said. “They’re throwing the game!”

“They just want to be nice, that’s all.”

“Nice? Baseball isn’t about being nice. Baseball’s . . . baseball. It’s about winning.”

She looked out across the field, the colors so intense they were like living things, the green of the grass rippling with a cool fire, the faces of her players—of her husband, Ken, Tim, all of them—gone beyond the uniform white of Harvard and the Nordic races into another spectrum altogether and every dress on every woman in the crowd was as bright as the sun itself. It was a moment of release. She could feel it all go out of her like a long withheld breath. She was leaving in the morning, but she was part of this, part of the team, and she’d be back.

“No,” she said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s about playing the game.”

Chapter 2

2.

She’d never slept with another man until that first summer in Mexico when it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t even think twice about it. She was tripping and so was Ken. Fitz wasn’t there. Fanchon wasn’t there. She and Ken were in the lifeguard tower together and the whole world was disarranged. Clothes—her two-piece, his bathing trunks—were encumbrances, worse than useless, the invention of a society they were no longer a part of, a screen designed to keep you from your authentic self. What mattered was touch. The touch of the sun on her face, her breasts, her belly, the touch of his fingers that sent sparks of fire through her so that she could see them as if she were riding through her own veins and jumping the synapses of her nerves till it felt so good she never wanted it to stop.