The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story by Peter Lefcourt

Author:Peter Lefcourt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Gay Men, Social Science, Gay, General, Literary, Gay Studies, Baseball Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9780060975593
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: 1992-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

As a stroke of public relations brinksmanship, Ken Teffner's performance was virtuoso. The press conference was a masterfully deft piece of footwork in the face of a very treacherous situation. The public bought it. The story played the evening news that day and then died a quick death, relegated to the status of an anecdote.

There were a few smoldering embers, cracks made by other ballplayers, bench-jockeying, an ad-hoc reference here and there in a writer's column, the usual bevy of bad jokes. How do you get to second base on the Vikings? Kiss the shortstop. And so forth.

But by and large Teffner had pulled it off. He had sold Chernobyl as a minor nuclear incident, barely worth discussing. The Whites should have given him a promotion and a raise. Fritz Esterhazy should have given him a knighthood. He should have been voted into the Hall of Fame. Ken Teffner had managed to preserve the integrity of the game of baseball.

There were a few people, however, who didn't buy it, who had trouble dismissing the incident as tension-relieving hijinks in the midst of a pennant race. Susie Dreyfus, for one, found herself troubled by the revelations made at the press conference. She sat in her breakfast nook, watching excerpts from it on television, staring at the strange man in the sport jacket and tie who was her husband. They must have given him the tie. He never took one with him on the road.

After her fit of temporary catatonia the previous night in the Bob's Big Boy parking lot, she had driven directly home, given the twins dinner, then retired for the night, telling Mikva to let the machine answer the phone, which had not stopped ringing since she'd walked in the door.

She had taken a Halcion and went to sleep adrift in anger and confusion. When she had awoken this morning, she felt drugged and awful. Having managed to get the girls off to school, she had been sitting haggardly over reheated coffee, trying to figure out whether to call him, when Mikva came in to tell her that her husband was on television.

Susie flipped on the kitchen TV and saw clips from the news conference. She listened as Ken Teffner explained that it had all been a mistake, that nothing had really happened in the changing room in Neiman-Marcus. She should have been relieved. Randy wasn't kissing his teammate, after all.

And yet she didn't feel relieved at all. If anything, she felt worse. What about the handkerchief? The goddamn handkerchief wouldn't go away. Knowing who it belonged to did not necessarily answer the question of what it was doing in her husband's laundry.

There were probably a number of good reasons why her husband wound up with his second baseman's handkerchief. Maybe he borrowed it during a sudden sneezing attack. Maybe they were doing magic tricks and Randy forgot to return it. Maybe it got hot suddenly and he needed to shield his head from the sun.... But she wasn't crazy about any of these explanations.

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