Chapter 11

It's tough having a social life during the baseball season. Not only are you out of town for almost exactly half the time between early April and early October, you're out-of-town all the time from late February through the month of March. If your club is fortunate enough to play in the post-season, there goes the rest of October, too. That leaves three and a half months during the winter for establishing some kind of normal day-to-day existence.

Unfortunately, I'd met Alice as the season was getting underway. Baltimore plays almost all its home games at night, so even when I'm at home, I'm tied up from an hour before any normal woman gets off work, until it's time for any normal woman to retire for the night so that she can go to work the next day.

In short, when it comes to dating, being a ballplayer really blows.

The fact that Alice Winslow was holding down a responsible, high-level position in a major hospital didn't make it any easier. She wasn't the kind of woman who took "mental health days" away from work, or who could call in and tell everyone she'd be a few hours late coming in.

But we were both interested in getting something started, here, and we were willing to work at it. Little League baseball was, by this time, over for the season, so even Alice's afternoons away from work for that activity were temporarily shut down.

There was, however, Saturday night. The Orioles played Saturday home games at night, almost exclusively. Their only regular concession to playing in the sunshine in hot, humid Baltimore was on Sunday.

So I worked on Sunday, but Alice did not. And my "working day" started late enough that I could make a late night of it, on Saturday nights after the game.

Alice could sleep late on Sunday morning, and she was more than willing to devote her late Saturday nights to me. I asked her to help make the evenings begin a little sooner by showing up at the games on that night. Again, she was willing. She would drive her car to the ballpark, and I'd cab it to the park on Saturdays, so that I could leave after the game with Alice.

That quickly became our routine. I saw her, briefly, on other days and nights during the week. Sometimes we'd meet for lunch near the hospital. But, for the most part, Saturday night was it, for us.

We didn't do anything special. A very late, after-the-game dinner at a decent restaurant. There weren't that many Baltimore eateries that served dinner at those ungodly hours, but there were a few. Conversation. We talked about everything. We were getting to know one another more intimately.

I resolved, right from the beginning, to be completely open and real with Alice. Like a lot of people, I had intellectual pretensions and took pride in having some interests in life that were perhaps atypical of a professional athlete. But I was no Renaissance Man, and I knew it. I read the sports pages first, and the front page only later, if at all. My tastes in literature ran to police procedurals and escapist adventure tales.

I subscribed to the New Yorker Magazine, but usually ended up just scanning it for the cartoons. Now and again, I'd actually read -- and grasp -- a piece of the magazine's nonfiction. But not often. I was well-enough educated that I could have faked it a bit, and let Alice think -- at least for awhile -- that I was more of an intellectual than I really was. But I didn't try it. Right from the start, something was telling me to treat this woman differently. This wasn't a seduction.

At least, it wasn't only a seduction.

Learning of Alice's virginity had been a shocker. I mean, I'd known for a long time that her past adult life had been strongly influenced by her religious upbringing and by her adherence to her vows. But I hadn't been aware of how absolute those influences had been -- before her membership in the Order as well as during -- and even now -- long after!

So the "seduction," if there was to be one, was going to have to be accomplished with unusual care. If I had ever made love to a virgin, I didn't know about it. As a matter of fact, my own virginity had been unceremoniously lost to a much older woman (God bless her!) who was a close friend of my mother's, but who hadn't been above taking my cherry at the tender age of 14.

Well, to be fair to her, I was big for my age.

But of the long line of blonde bimbos since then, and even the relatively few girls I'd met and bedded who rose above the "bimbo" designation, I doubted that any had been new to the world of sex when I came into their lives. No. Those transactions had been between consenting adults (and, before that, consenting teen-agers), and both participants had known exactly what they were doing.

Sometimes, we had been making love. Most of the times, we had just been fucking.

My conscience was reasonably clear. I hadn't been all that much of a cocksman. Oh, the numbers were up there -- in fact, I'd lost count some time ago -- but for the most part, I felt as if I'd acted honorably. The women who had given it away casually had gotten what they'd come for. I'd tried to make it memorable for them, and I'd never mistreated anybody. The scattered few real romances I had experienced were good-faith ventures that didn't always end well, but none of them had ended with lies and recriminations, either. I hadn't been perfect, perhaps, but I'd been decent.

And there were no little Zeke, Juniors out there, wondering where their Daddy was. I had been extremely careful in that regard.

But now. Now there was a woman I was beginning to have feelings for, and those feelings seemed different from all the others. I had said nothing about those feelings to Alice. I felt that it was far too soon, and I worried that my own feelings might still turn out to be subject to change.

But I was enjoying her company more than any woman I'd known -- at any stage of my life. I wasn't focused on bedding her. Oh, I thought about it. I thought of it as a highly desirable eventual outcome of our relationship. But I knew it had to be something that I waited for.

And I didn't even mind the wait.