by Joe Schuster
“You got there,” she said, but he couldn’t tell if her tone carried congratulations or indifference.
“Yes. Three weeks …”
“That’s good for you,” she said, and then a silence hung between them, filled with the small clicks and static of the long-distance connection. “You hurt me,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but you did. First you tell me you love me and then you’re the Invisible Man.”
“I was a jerk,” he said.
“More than a jerk.”
He wondered if she had been a virgin before that Friday night at her apartment and felt more ashamed: he was a cad who deflowered women and left them in the lurch.
“Yes,” he said. “An asshole.”
“Even more than that,” she said.
He told her about the road trip he had taken before he stopped calling her—not all of it; he left out the details about the brassy woman he’d met in the Burger Chef in Kansas, but told her about the players with the medical bills and the Dear John letter.
“Don’t you think I got afraid, too?”
It hadn’t occurred to him, he said.
“I wasn’t some girl who came to college for an MRS degree, for Christ’s sake.”
Then silence hung between them again; in the background of their connection, he could hear the vague metallic chirp of other voices. He tried to picture her in her apartment, sitting as she did when she read, in a corner of her sofa, her legs curled up.
Someone knocked at his door and pushed it open almost immediately: a candy striper with his dinner. “Excuse me,” she said when she saw he was on the phone. He nodded in response.
“Is someone there?” Julie asked.
“Hang on a sec.” He laid the receiver in his lap while the candy striper set the covered plate onto his bedside table. “Thank you,” he said. When she left, he picked up the phone again. “Sorry,” he said, and let out a bitter laugh. “I’m actually …”
“What?”
“In the hospital here. That was the nurse leaving me my dinner.”
“In the hospital? Are you sick?”
He told her about the game … the non-game, as he was calling it. Leave it to him to get injured during a game that didn’t exist officially. Another miracle of nothing.
“This will make Audrey feel guilty,” she said. “She said I should light a candle, praying you’d get hurt or die. I said, ‘It’s not voodoo,’ and she said, ‘What good is it?’ ”
“At least I’ve succeeded in making someone happy,” he said, and realized it was a joke: a small one, but a joke nonetheless.
She came to Montreal on Thursday, the day after the hospital discharged him. They talked by phone each day, her calling him when she got home from work because she didn’t want him to worry about the long-distance charges the hospital would add to the bill he already had no idea how he would pay. As it turned out, he didn’t have to pay it; health insurance he hadn’t known he earned as a major league ballplayer paid most of it, and the team took care of the rest … and they hadn’t forgotten him, either, at least the organization hadn’t, even if none of his teammates ever visited him. The traveling secretary called him in the middle of the week, apologizing for not contacting him sooner. “The flight to Chicago was a nightmare, almost as bad as the one into Montreal,” he said. Because the Olympics had the entire city in a tangle, the baggage handlers mislaid half of the team’s equipment and it hadn’t even gotten to Chicago until halfway through Monday’s game. “We started out playing in souvenir jerseys until the fifth inning, when our stuff showed up.”
The traveling secretary asked Edward Everett what he wanted to do for the time being; if he wanted to stay in Montreal until he was more comfortable, the team would put him in a hotel, pay him his per diem and send his payroll check wherever he directed.
As it turned out, because he was injured, the team had to carry him on the disabled list for the balance of the season, which meant he would earn major league pay until the end of September, more money in the last two months of the season than he would earn for an entire year at triple-A.
He and Julie lived lavishly, at least by their own modest Midwestern standards. The hotel the traveling secretary found was at the edge of downtown, overlooking a wide boulevard and a lush park. From their window on the eleventh floor, they could watch the electric city as long as the Olympics were going on. Lines of pedestrians seemed endless, continuing to cross intersections even when the traffic lights were against them. Cars crept from block to block so slowly it seemed they seldom moved at all.
They ordered room service and ate far beyond his per diem: lobster and salmon and oysters served on a chilled plate floating in a crystal bowl of crushed ice. He was earning five hundred dollars a week for breathing in and out, he said, and in a fit of giddiness tried to calculate how much each breath was worth, but the sum, which he thought would be grand, was disappointing: eighteen breaths a minute times sixty times twenty-four times seven, around a penny for every four breaths.
“I guess I’m just not worth as much alive as I thought,” he said.
Sex was awkward because of his cast, so they made love only three times in the week, once on the day she arrived, the second time early in the morning a few days later, when they both woke before the sun rose, and the third time not long before Julie left. The second time was especially difficult because he moved suddenly with her above him and she twisted in a way that made him wrench his right leg, causing him to cry out.
He worried that he had damaged his leg even more and became glum. Finally, on the day after the Olympics ended, Julie suggested they were coming down with cabin fever. She ordered a wheelchair from the concierge and pushed him through the streets. The city, still littered from the crush of people who had attended the Olympics, was not as pretty as it had seemed from their hotel window. Crumpled food wrappers blew along the gutter and, here and there, Julie had to steer the wheelchair around broken bottles and, once, an overnight case that someone had abandoned, spilling its contents across the sidewalk: the slacks and blouses and underwear of some large woman. It had been, it appeared, one big party that no one wanted to clean up after.
They ended up at a church, Mary Queen of the World, which, with what Julie called “neo-Gothic architecture,” seemed out of place among the office buildings where workers in suits, carrying briefcases, went in and out of revolving doors. As they stopped at the entrance, Edward Everett realized that Julie was panting from the effort of pushing him and so they went inside so that she could rest before they set off back for the hotel.
The church was cool and dim, and their movements echoed beneath its great dome: the squeal of the wheelchair’s hard rubber tires on the stone floor, the squeak of Julie’s canvas deck shoes. Scattered through the pews, a few people knelt in prayer; others stood in the main aisle, gawking up at the ceiling mosaics that glittered back at them. A small boy let out a “Yap” that resounded and his mother reached down quickly to cover his mouth with her hand.
Julie genuflected beside the last pew and slid into it, sighing. “You are one heavy load,” she whispered, but loud enough that it came back to them as a hiss.
He shut his eyes. Things had turned out better than he thought they would on the darkest day, the Sunday after his injury when he had felt so abandoned in the hospital. In a day, Julie had to go back to Springfield for work. “I’m not important enough that I earn a paycheck for just being alive,” she said. The thought of her leaving brought him up short: he hadn’t thought about how there was life outside their bubble. He would miss her, he realized, had gotten used to being with her every minute; even the times she went to the lobby for a newspaper seemed like long stretches, when he waited in their room for the old and slow elevator to take its time delivering her downstairs and back.
“You’ve been very sweet,” he whispered.
“I’m a sweet girl,” she said in a faraway voice. He realized she was drowsing.
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��I made a mistake back in the spring,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gotten afraid.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “You were who you were.”
A heavy door along the side of the church opened, letting in a flood of sunlight momentarily before banging closed with a sharp report. “Shhhh,” someone hissed.
“Do you think we ought to get married?” he said.
“Is that a hypothetical,” she asked: “ ‘Is the state of matrimony a good thing?’ Or is it a proposal?”
“I don’t know …”
She turned to look at him and then took his right hand in hers. “Are you asking me to marry you, mister?”
She really was a pretty girl, he thought again. He saw them doing the vague things husbands and wives did together: pushing a cart through the aisles at a grocery, washing dishes side by side. Her in the stands with the other players’ wives, red-cheeked on a cool fall day late in the season, exhorting him when he batted.
“I guess I am,” he said.
“That’s sweet,” she said. “You’re a great guy and you’ll probably be hugely rich if you ever walk again and play ball, and I like being with you, but let’s just see. Two weeks ago, we weren’t even in each other’s lives at all.”
“I just don’t want to make the same mistake again,” he said.
“Ask me again in six months,” she said. “If we still like each other, then, probably, yes. But for now, let’s go back to the hotel, because if there’s one thing that makes a girl horny, it’s someone asking her to marry him.”
Two days later, she kissed him sweetly, got into a cab for the airport, leaving him balanced on his crutches on the curb, watching her red-and-black taxi until it turned a corner, and he went upstairs and sat in the quiet room for some time, thinking of her pushing through the throng at the airport, thinking of her sitting in a window seat watching the Canadian landscape fall away until the plane was too far up to see land, and then opening a book. Finally, he became aware that he was in what had become a dark room and he turned on the television. And within two weeks he had stopped returning her calls.
Chapter Five
He went home: what choice did he have? Four and a half weeks after Julie left, the team’s traveling secretary phoned him.
“This is embarrassing,” he said, “but we sort of lost track of you.”
“I haven’t gone anywhere,” Edward Everett said.
“Yes, and that’s the problem. We hadn’t meant for you to stay there this long but we hadn’t realized you were still there until the bill came across my desk this morning. We need to get you out of there, sport. Pronto. You’ve been burning up the room service.”
“I thought the per diem—”
“That’s only for when the team is out of town. They got back from that trip weeks ago.”
Could that be possible? Edward Everett wondered. Had he so lost track of time? For a week after Julie left, he was a virtual recluse in his room, leaving it only when the maid came to clean and he waited in the lobby until she finished, settled on an ornate couch, watching the guests come and go. It was a fine, old-fashioned place that seemed, although he’d never been off the North American continent, European. The clientele appeared wealthy and sophisticated, and the lobby echoed with voices in languages Edward Everett could not identify, much less understand. Men and women swept in trailed by bellhops pushing carts laden with luggage and all seemed to possess the same regal impatience if they had to wait in line to register or if a clerk fumbled for a room key.
Beyond those periods in the lobby—what were they, half an hour?—he stayed in his room, telling himself it was because he didn’t want to miss Julie if she phoned, which she did every evening after she got home from work. She told him about her job answering phones and typing for a podiatrist, describing the people who limped painfully into the office, telling him about the bags of trimmed corns and toenails she carried to the dumpster. For his part, he had little to say: I noticed the plaster walls aren’t square but actually rounded at the corners. I noticed that the paint is flaking outside the window. Gradually, their conversations began waning sooner and sooner each time.
When he wasn’t talking to her, he watched television. He avoided the American programs: they made him homesick. He wasn’t certain what he wanted to feel, but not that—not at a time when he wondered what his life would become, when he wondered if he would ever be able to play ball again or if that life was entirely behind him. What was he if not a ballplayer?
He preferred programs that had nothing to do with his life across the border—soap operas in French, newscasts about places he couldn’t even, if pressed, find on a map. Watching a story about a tornado in Manitoba that had killed a retired cobbler and his wife, he glanced out his window to the park eleven floors below where a plump man and woman lay in the grass, kissing. On the television, the reporter interviewed the dead couple’s daughter, who became so overcome with grief, she covered her face, but where he was, it was a beautiful day.
At night, he had trouble sleeping. It was difficult to get comfortable because of his cast and, outside his room, the hotel always seemed alive with noise:
Children dashed in the hall, shrieking, a mother scolding: “Now, now.”
On the other side of him, a couple made love and, afterward, the woman wept while a man’s voice buzzed with what Edward Everett assumed was consolation.
The elevator dinged.
He gave up, turned on the television. A preacher standing on a stage, framed by two vases of palm fronds, saying, “God has a plan for your life.” On another channel, a test pattern. He turned off the television, tried to sleep again.
Outside, footsteps scuffled by in the carpeted hall.
He eventually began appreciating the hotel’s amenities. In the morning, he had breakfast in the less formal of the two restaurants while he read the newspaper, something he had seldom done in the past, aside from the sports pages. So much turmoil in the world: riots in Rhodesia; three hundred Americans evacuated from Lebanon in the face of civil war; Argentina’s police killing two revolutionary leaders. He read the paper and glanced around the restaurant, feeling fortunate to be part of the privilege of the place: the deference of the waitress and busboy silently appearing to refill his water goblet and coffee cup. Around him, businessmen made notes on legal pads as they ate their eggs and bacon; tables of women with careful hair declined the pastry cart; obvious newlyweds on their honeymoon regarded each other sleepy-eyed across the table.
He began venturing beyond the hotel, going into nearby shops. One day, he spent two hours browsing belts in a leather shop; another day, he drank coffee in a café across the street from his hotel, counting the number of men and women who went inside. That day, he got back to his room after Julie had called and found a message slip under his door. He sat down in his chair by the window, picked up the phone but the thought struck him that he had nothing new to say, and turned on the television, to Casablanca, but dubbed in French, and spent the time until it was too late to call her trying to translate the dialogue back into English. Two days went by with her leaving him messages and his not calling her back, then three. Then a day came when there was no message from her, and a second day on which she didn’t call, and a third and a fourth and then he lost count.
The evening the traveling secretary called him, he was dozing in his room, dreaming: riding with his father in a Studebaker he had owned before Edward Everett was in kindergarten; although it was just his father and himself, Edward Everett sat in the backseat. His father was smoking, although Edward Everett had never seen him do so in life, but when he tried to open the window, the crank was missing. They were on a dirt road, racing past a line of barbed-wire fencing that seemed to serve no purpose, as the land bordering the road was overgrown with tall weeds that whipped the car’s windows as they sped past. Edward Everett was trying to say Slow down, slow down but, for some reason, couldn’t speak, and they hurtled onward.
After he got
off the phone with the traveling secretary, he went into the bathroom. At first, he thought he would splash water on his face to wake himself a bit more but, standing at the sink, he realized he needed to shower, that he hadn’t shaved for days and his hair was unkempt, much longer than he usually kept it. A beatnik, his mother would say. He wondered if the team would be angry he had charged so many hamburgers and grapefruit to the room. With chagrin, he remembered that one day he had signed for a ten-dollar tip on a three-dollar check for a waitress who told him he was her last table before she moved back to Manitoba to care for her ill mother. He wondered if they would punish him for it. The owner was wealthy; would he even miss the money? But he didn’t get wealthy letting his injured, marginal players live extravagantly.
The plane ticket the traveling secretary couriered to the hotel was for a flight to St. Louis at ten the next morning; from there, he would have to make his own arrangements. It occurred to him he had no place to go. He had given up his room in Springfield, had no home in St. Louis; he had no idea what his future was going to be. He would have to go back to the town where he’d been raised, where he hadn’t been in years save for brief visits in the off-seasons. He phoned the front desk, asked for long-distance and gave the operator his mother’s number. He wasn’t sure what she’d make of his calling her, telling her that he would need someone to pick him up at the Columbus airport—a hundred miles away—but the phone just rang and rang at her house until he hung up.
He thought again of calling Julie, but what would he say? What a shit he was for not calling her, he thought. Not long ago telling her—in a Catholic church, of all places—that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but now, sitting on the edge of the bed they’d shared, he had a hard time conjuring her face. He remembered her eyes were blue, but what he recalled was the fact of it, a detail she might list on her driver’s license, not an image of her eyes themselves. Her hair was, what? She was how tall?