Free Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin

outside. Tiny, pale apples hang among the leaves of the tree.
    “You know,” I say, “we’re not really looking at the house to buy it.”
    I walk back to the bed. The skin on the woman’s arms is mottled and hangs in folds. “We can’t afford to buy it,” I say. “I don’t make enough money to buy a house and—I don’t know why, but my wife wants to look at them anyway. She wants people to think we have enough money to buy a house.”
    The woman looks at me.
    “It’s crazy,” I say, “but what are you going to do in that kind of situation?”
    She clears her throat. “My son-in-law,” she begins, “wants to sell the house so he can throw the money away.” Her voice is slow, and I think she has no saliva in her mouth. “He has a friend who goes to South America and swallows everything, then comes back through customs with a plastic bag in his bowel.”
    She stops. I look at her. “He’s selling the house to invest the money in drugs?”
    “I’m glad you don’t want to buy,” she says.
     
    I might have had a small career in baseball, but I’ve learned in the past eleven years to talk about other things. I was twenty-three the last pitch I threw. The season was over and Jodi was in the stands in a wool coat. I was about to get a college degree in physical education. I knew how to splint a broken bone and how to cut the grass on a golf green, and then I decided that to turn your life around you had to start from the inside. I had a coach in college who said he wasn’t trying to teach us to be pro ballplayers; he was trying to teach us to be decent people.
    When we got married, I told Jodi that no matter what happened, no matter where things went, she could always trust me. We’d been seeing each other for a year, and in that time I’d been reading books. Not baseball books. Biographies: Martin Luther King, Gandhi. To play baseball right you have to forget that you’re a person; you’re muscles, bone, the need for sleep and food. So when you stop, you’re saved by someone else’s ideas. This isn’t true just for baseball players. It’s true for anyone who’s failed at what he loves.
    A friend got me the coaching job in California, and as soon as we were married we came west. Jodi still wanted to be an actress. We rented a room in a house with six other people, and she took classes in dance in the mornings and speech in the afternoons. Los Angeles is full of actors. Sometimes at parties we counted them. After a couple of years she started writing a play, and until we moved into where we are now we used to read pieces of it out loud to our six housemates.
    By then I was already a little friendly with the people at school, but when I was out of the house, even after two years in Los Angeles, I was alone. People were worried about their own lives. In college I’d spent almost all my time with another ballplayer, Mitchell Lighty, and I wasn’t used to new people. A couple of years after we graduated, Mitchell left to play pro ball in Panama City, and he came out to Los Angeles on his way there. The night before his plane left, he and I went downtown to a bar on the top floor of a big hotel. We sat by a window, and after a few drinks we went out onto the balcony. The air was cool. Plants grew along the edge, ivy was woven into the railing, and birds perched among the leaves. I was amazed to see the birds resting there thirty stories up on the side of the building. When I brushed the plants the birds took off into the air, and when I leaned over to watch them, I became dizzy with the distance to the sidewalk and with the small, rectangular shapes of the cars. The birds sailed in wide circles over the street and came back to the balcony. Then Mitchell put his drink on a chair, took both my hands, and stepped up onto the railing. He stood there on the metal crossbar, his wrists locked in my hands, leaning into the air.
    “For God’s sake,” I whispered. He leaned farther out, pulling me toward