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and they held each other in the hot apartment, saying nothing, and then, as if it had been a ritual now completed, they turned and walked hand in hand to Harvey’s bedroom.
    “You’re the best one I ever had.” She smiled, pulling him down on top of her.
    Harvey smiled back. “I’d say you’re in my top ten. But moving up quickly.” He had still not grown accustomed to her jaunty references to past lovers, even though he suspected the motivation. She had come into physical beauty, as if it were an inheritance, only in her twenties, and she always needed to reassure herself that she was no longer the gangly teenager whose intelligence, to say nothing of her irritating knowledge of the male world of sports, had not made her one of her prep school’s most sought-after dates. She had told Harvey once about a prep school boyfriend, a pitcher for his school team, who lost interest in her soon after she advised him to mix up his pitches and start more batters off with the curve. Heartbroken, she ran to her father, an athletic New York lawyer, who responded by saying that her boyfriend’s curve was probably not good enough to start batters off with anyway; her father thereby proved himself a doubly cruel parent—insensitive to Mickey’s disappointment in love and skeptical of her baseball judgment. At twenty-six, she was now dating another baseball player.
    “Hey, you,” she said beneath him. “Pay attention.”
    “I can’t, Mick. I’m too depressed.”
    “Sure you can. Like this.”
    She was right; they made love, then peeled away from each other and lay on their backs.
    “What’re you thinking about?” she asked. He was drifting away, and she was reeling him back in.
    “You really want to know?”
    “I’m game.”
    “I was thinking about that night at the Sheraton in Boston. Last June.”
    “Hunh,” she said. “So was I.”
    Harvey had gone 3-for-4 against Dennis Winston in Fenway Park that night, one of those hits giving Providence a one-run lead in the eighth. Rudy came into the game and gave up a three-run homer to Tony Jallardio. It cost Bobby Wagner a win, the Jewels the game. Rudy and Harvey took a cab over to La Hacienda in Somerville, which, its name notwithstanding, served the best pizza around. They had a few beers back at the Sheraton Boston bar, where they drunkenly accommodated an autograph seeker by scrawling their names in felt-tip pen all over her bare arm. At one in the morning, they stumbled up to their room and fell into their beds.
    There was something in Harvey’s. It was Mickey, and she wasn’t wearing much. “What a pleasant surprise,” Harvey said.
    “The station sent me up to cover the game tomorrow,” she said, pulling the covers up just under her eyes. “You know, Boston and Providence, natural rivalry. My crew’s driving up tomorrow morning, but I thought I’d surprise you. You’re not angry, are you?”
    “Do you always hide in other people’s beds?”
    “Don’t you?” Mickey said. “You’re drunk.”
    “How’d you get in here?”
    “I told some nice fellow down at the desk that you were expecting me for an interview, and I showed him my press credentials.”
    “And he gave you a key?”
    “The power of the press,” she said and laughed. “Why don’t you get out of your clothes and come to bed so Rudy and I can get some sleep? Hi, Rudy,” she called out.
    Rudy was lying on his bed with his arms folded behind his head. The smoke from his cigarette curled up into a shaft of blue light thrown up from the street below. “Hi, Slavin,” he said.
    “Tough luck with Jallardio tonight,” she said.
    “I threw dumb.”
    “By the way, Rudy, what’s with Charlie Penzenik?” she asked. Charlie had started the season at second base, but lost the job to Rodney Salta in June because Charlie was rapidly winning the race for lowest batting average in the American League. At Rankle Park, they had stopped flashing his batting average on the scoreboard when he