Chapter 3

Susan waited until eleven o'clock the following day, the Orioles' first day on the road, to call Zeke Taylor on his cell.

She was trying for minimum feasible inconvenience to him. Knowing the club had a night game scheduled, she was trying to catch the ballplayer before he was likely to head out of his hotel room for lunch.

"Mr. Taylor?"

"Yes?"

"This is Susan Munger. I'm the person Arlie Stone talked to you about. The writer looking for an agent to handle my novel."

"Yes. What can I do for you?"

"Is this a convenient time for you, sir?"

Zeke laughed. "Please. Formality isn't necessary. I'm just a grown man who plays a kid's game. Call me Zeke. Or 'Streak.' And, yes, it's a convenient time for you to call."

"Okay, Zeke. I'll try. Arlie gave me a copy of your autobiography. It's absorbing and beautifully written. May I ask? Did you have a ghost writer?"

"I had an excellent editor," Zeke said, "but, no, no ghost writer. It's essentially my own writing, as improved, as I said, by an excellent editor."

"Well, I'm not even a dedicated fan, and I really enjoyed it. It's probably the first sports-related book I've ever read from beginning to end. Biography, in general, isn't my usual reading passion. But this was engrossing."

"Ms. Munger, I'm going to help you all I can, even if you didn't like my book."

She laughed. "It's not flattery, Zeke. You did a wonderful job on that book."

"It's selling well," he said. "Not as well as it would have if I'd played for the Yankees, but well enough, considering."

"You have a first-rate publisher."

"Yes."

"Do you happen to know whether your editor handles novels as well as biographies and other non-fiction?"

"I happen to know that she does," he said. "Her name is Gwen Riordan. I know she handles several novelists because she frequently complained to me about their foibles and eccentricities in the course of praising me for being her favorite kind of writer."

"So she prefers biographers?"

"No, she was telling me that she prefers writers who actually listen to her advice and who usually follow it."

"She sounds pretty senior. Do you think it's likely at all that her publishing house would be interested in a first-time novelist? Or that she would get the editing assignment?"

"Well, there's no way for me to know that much about how the place works," Zeke said, "but my impression is that Gwen handles some young, relatively unknown writers. The people she complained about to me weren't household names as novelists -- at least not in my household."

"She sounds like someone I'd like to meet with and talk to," Susan said.

"You want me to call her? Pave the way for you a little?"

"You wouldn't mind? I mean, you're hardly in a position to recommend me. You've never seen my work."

"Arlie says you're a published poet and short-story writer. He says you're excellent."

"Yes. But I'm the greenest kind of rookie, and this is my first novel I'm peddling, here. And Arlie has read exactly one hand-picked short story of mine and a handful of my published poems."

"Gwen's job is to find and cultivate talented writers," Zeke said. "Let's give her a chance to do her job. If you turn out to write like Snoopy, she'll forgive me, eventually."

"I'd be extremely grateful if you'd put my name in front of her," Susan said. "I can play it any way she asks -- send her some chapters, send her my published work, do a proposal letter, anything."

"She'll be wanting you to come in, in all likelihood. She's in Manhattan."

"That'll be difficult," Susan said, "but not impossible. It'll absolutely have to be while the club is back in Baltimore so that Arlie can help me arrange to be away overnight. But I can take the shuttle up from Washington and make it a twenty-four-hour trip at the longest."

"I'll ask her to call you, and the two of you can work it out. Meanwhile, talk to Arlie and be prepared with some dates and times that you could go up there."

"I will," Susan said. "Thank you, Zeke."

She broke the connection and sighed. She had a new respect for the intellect of professional baseball players. If they were all as hip and smart as Zeke Taylor, maybe she ought to give Arlie the go-ahead about arranging a date for her with this Cassidy guy.

She well knew, of course, that they probably weren't all like Taylor. Even she was aware that Zeke Taylor had a superb reputation, not only as a top-flight star in the game but also as a solid citizen. He was Baltimore's most popular player since Cal Ripken.

All she knew about Cassidy was that he was young, ambitious, and interested enough in her to approach Arlie Stone during spring training in Florida.

Arlie was supposed to be looking into Mr. Cassidy's bona fides and essential character even now as the team took its first road trip of the season.

Susan missed Lars Jensen. But Miami was a thousand miles away, and she and Lars had no real prospect of seeing one another anytime soon. There had been a brief, vague discussion about his visiting Baltimore after the end of the school term. But no promises had been made. No commitments. When they had renewed their friendship at his apartment in Coral Gables, they had quickly taken it to a higher level, and it had been a very satisfactory day and a half spent together, mostly in Lars' bedroom.

A thousand miles, or thereabouts. She laughed aloud in Arlie's empty house, thinking of how horny she'd been by the time she'd looked up Lars Jensen in Florida, spoken to him by phone, and then found her way south to the young man's apartment in Arlie's rented convertible.

But all that was close to a month ago. Now she was back where she had been: a recently rejected woman, her plans for marriage cancelled, her life undergoing reconstruction on all fronts.

Finding Arlie Stone and his children had been a godsend, and the job had proved even more perfect for her than she had hoped. The book was going well, and her confidence in her ability to secure a publisher was soaring.

What was that zany rock song? "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades?" That was pretty much how Susan felt right now.

Except there were some not-so-minor gaps in her life. The biggest, by far, was a nagging feeling of loneliness and of the emptiness that comes to anyone who once had been highly active sexually. Before her marriage plans had gone awry, Susan had been just such a person.

She'd gotten a late start, really, in cultivating her sexuality. Her family responsibilities back in California had drained off a lot of the energy and had occupied a lot of the time that a young girl might otherwise have spent exploring the possibilities.

Indeed, Susan had been a virgin until midway through her senior year in high school. In her central California community, that made her a very late bloomer.

But bloom she did. College back east was a whole new world. Susan had been raised by her mother to know right from wrong, and she knew as well the critical importance of avoiding promiscuity and sexual license. She would never have allowed herself to be thought of as "easy," not even by the standards of today's supposed female sexual equality.

Still, her good grasp of behavioral norms over the next four-plus years that it took to secure her undergraduate degree did not prevent her from finding out that she enjoyed, craved, and thrived upon sex.

By the time she and Burton Coyle had announced their engagement to the world early in their senior year, she'd had a sufficiency of lovers adequate to fill her memory book for what she assumed would be a lifetime.

She'd sampled the field adequately enough to satisfy herself that Burton was The One. She had been ready, then, to become a one-man woman and, presumably, to live happily ever after.

Unfortunately for Susan, Burton Coyle didn't feel precisely the same way. He, too, had enjoyed his past four years at Penn, and he, too, had found in Susan a near-perfect sexual partner. But he wasn't ready for just one sexual partner. Not even after the announcement of their upcoming marriage.

Not ever, probably.

By the time word got back to Susan that Burton Coyle was still regularly engaged in sampling side dishes, the two of them were out of school, living together in Baltimore, and planning their wedding.

To Susan, that engagement ring had been the end of all extracurricular activity. Actually, she hadn't been with another man for well over a year, even before the engagement was official. Burton had become her only man.

Twenty-four hours after she'd found out he was still playing, Burton Coyle was history.

He made a few forays, seeking forgiveness and restoration of the status quo ante. He made the usual promises to mend his ways. But he learned very quickly that Susan wasn't the forgiving type. She was unquestionably gone for good.

Susan's next several weeks had been spent scrambling to press the re-set button on all her plans. She had to find a permanent place to live, find a paying job, reorganize every aspect of her post-graduation life.

She had few friends in Baltimore, and those she did have had been met through Burton. That made them something less than pillars of strength at a time of trouble with Burton Coyle.

Probably, if Arlie Stone had gotten a glimpse of exactly how close to the bone Susan Munger had been living on the morning she interviewed for a job in his household, he'd have hesitated twice-over before hiring her. She had been, quite literally, days away from calling home and asking for gas money to get her back home to California.

All that was history now, and Susan had not immediately paid any attention to the sexual, spiritual, personal side of her life in recent weeks. She had been too occupied with her new job, her relationships with Arlie and his children, her newfound security, and the revival of her interest in finishing The Novel.

The brief time with Lars Jensen had changed all that. Having re-awakened her libido, Susan was having difficulty making it go back into hibernation.

She spent an inordinate amount of her free time daydreaming about Lars or about this Cassidy person -- a young man she hadn't yet met, or even seen from a distance of less than one hundred yards.

Well. It was only natural, Susan thought. Lars had reminded her about the joys of sex, and this Herm Cassidy fellow had expressed an interest in her to Arlie after having merely seen her from afar, as she had seen him.

And, after all, there weren't that many opportunities to meet young men when one was a full-time nanny and housekeeper.

Writing her increasingly torrid romantic novel wasn't helping, either. It might have been helping the actual writing (assuming she wasn't going overboard with the story's sexuality), but writing the novel was anything but a release from Susan's own feeling of sexual need and deprivation.