When he was fifteen he used to catch the train to London every fortnight to go and see a game. This would have been in the mid-seventies. He wore flared jeans and a denim jacket and a silky team scarf thin enough to keep folded in his pocket until he got near the ground. Once he showed me the Stanley knife he’d taken from our father’s old toolbox. He slid the blade in and out and told me if he ever had to use it he’d go for the chin or the cheek. Autographing, he called it. The hooliganism was just getting bad then, but he told our mother he knew how to look after himself. He only pulled his scarf out when he found a crowd of home fans, and he peeled it off again whenever he was on his own. My mother said I could go if he took me, but he always refused, and when I was old enough to go myself I went to the movies instead.
I stand at the window and look out at the street for a moment and then draw the curtains and get into his bed.
I followed him once. As far as King’s Cross station. It was odd seeing him there, the only person I knew in such a large crowd. It was hard not to call out, to run up and surprise him. He walked under the departure board and went into the gents’, and I waited in a newsagent’s looking at comics. I started to smile, thinking he’d been caught short. But he’d not come out after fifteen minutes. I thought he’d given me the slip, or he was waiting in there for me. Men came and went, and every time I heard steps I prayed it was him. It was as if he’d vanished. I waited another twenty minutes, panicky with impatience, too scared to go in after him. In the end, I just left.
…
He is awake and in pain when I come to pick my mother up the next evening. She tells me he’s been refusing his medication, and I can see that she’s upset. He didn’t think I’d wake him if he was asleep. “Of course not for a stupid football match,” my mother says.
When I told her about taping the game earlier, she didn’t know what to make of it. I could tell she disapproved, but she couldn’t say why. All she made me do was check that it was okay with the hospital, but when I told her that the nurse had said it was a wonderful idea, she pursed her lips with disappointment.
“It’s what he wants,” I told her when I had her home and settled on the sofa. “I didn’t think I could say no.”
“Tell me,” she said, “did you know? When the two of you were young?”
“No.” I was bent over the dark TV, one arm behind it feeling for the cables. I watched her reflection in the screen. We’ve had this conversation before, but this time something about her disapproval made me add, “I might have suspected.”
“And you never thought to tell me?”
“I didn’t know for certain.”
“You should have told me anyway. I’m not saying I’d have done anything different. But I’d have wanted to know.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“I would have known him better.”
“Well,” I said, “he hasn’t always been that easy to know, has he?”
“You could talk to him,” she said. “And not watch that rubbish.”
I unplugged the TV and the VCR and carried them out one at a time to the car. When I came in to say I was going, she was still sitting on the sofa staring at the space where the TV had been. The whole room looked empty, all the chairs facing in at nothing. “Go on,” she said.
At the hospital my brother watches me as I struggle in with the TV and the VCR. I balance them on separate plastic chairs and fiddle with the cables.
“You don’t know the score, right?”
I shake my head.
“I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“I don’t know the score,” I tell him, and he says, “All right, then.”
After a minute he says, “How is she?”
“She’ll be fine. How are you doing?”
“Just put the game on,” he says.
Sometimes I want to shake the IV stand next to his head.
I press play and the screen fills with snow. I have one sickening moment of doubt, thinking that I’ve taped the wrong thing or brought the wrong tape, but then the screen fills with the bright green of the floodlit pitch.
My brother makes me turn up the volume until the commentary makes conversation impossible and the crowd noise fills the room. He has trouble hearing over the sound of his breathing. A male nurse comes to the door, attracted by the sound. He smiles and leans on the door frame and calls, “Didn’t they play earlier?” My brother ignores him. I nod and pray he won’t give the score away. He smiles and pulls the door shut after him.
We are silent for a few minutes, and then, responding to the game, my brother says, “Shot,” and I find myself nodding.
…
I’ve only asked him about his sex life once. It was a Christmas Eve about ten years ago, and we’d escaped a house full of relatives for the pub. It was heaving. We were only going to have a pint, but it took us so long to fight our way to the bar we ended up ordering doubles of whiskey too. We found a place to stand by the cigarette machine, a glass in each hand. I bent my head close to his and told him I was interested—“Not in who does what to whom or anything like that. Just how you live your life.” I had the earnest intensity of someone on the verge of drunkenness, and he must have been in a similar state, or just carried away by the heightened holiday mood. He told me about “cottages,” the public toilets where he met and had sex with men, sometimes two or three a night.
“Two or three a night?” I was dubious. “These are total strangers?”
He nodded.
“What do you say to them?” I was talking too loudly, and I sensed heads turning toward us.
“I don’t say anything,” he whispered. “I look them in the eye. I smile. There’s a shared assumption. You don’t need to talk about it.”
It made me feel oddly unmanned. I leaned in, my arms encircling him, holding my drinks clear. I told him I couldn’t sleep with women like that, even if they were available.
“Me neither,” he said. I smiled, but he didn’t mean it as a joke. “You can’t compare them. It’s not that I fancy men and you fancy women. It’s about wanting the same or different. The sameness is what makes it all right.”
No, I told him, I couldn’t understand it, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He took a step back and shrugged and said it wasn’t his idea to talk about it. I asked him why he couldn’t just have one lover “like everyone else” and he said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He took a long sip of his beer and looked away over the rim of his glass.
I’ve done a lot of reading since my brother’s diagnosis. I know how the pneumonia is filling his lungs. Spreading until he has no room to breathe. Crowding him out. But at another level, I realize, I have no idea why my brother is dying, what he’s dying for.
…
At halftime I turn the volume down and offer to fast-forward through the commercials and the analysis.
“Are you in a hurry?” he says. He asks me if I watch a lot of football and I say, “Now and then.”
“Are you having a good time?”
“Sure.”
He is silent for a moment.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says at last. “I can’t stand watching a game alone, especially a taped one. It feels sort of pointless, like you’re wasting your time. It’s easier to pretend it’s live if there’s two of you.”
“I usually watch on my own,” I admit.
“It’s not the same,” he says. “You need a crowd, even if it’s only two.” I look over at him, but he’s staring at the screen, not me, and I look back at it. “When I used to go to games, you’d be jammed in so tight you couldn’t raise your arms. You all had to breathe together.”
“It sounds dangerous,” I say, but he shakes his head slowly, turning it on the pillow so that I can hear his hair rubbing against it.
“Warmest I’ve ever been in my life,” he says. “They used to say it could rain cats and dogs on the terraces and your feet’d never get wet. When someone scored,
I used to lift my legs and be carried twenty, thirty yards on this wave of men.”
“I’ve never been. Not to a live game.”
“You should. Once. Before they rip ’em all out.”
He means the terraces. Since the disaster at Hillsborough, when all those fans died, the government has decided that the terraces should be replaced by seats.
It pleases me that my brother likes football. I used to think that he’d only pretended to be a fan, only gone along with it to fool us. After I knew he was gay, knew for sure, it was tempting to doubt everything I had known about him before.
“Tell me something,” I say. “Why did you keep doing it?” He knows what I mean.
“Where do you want me to start?” There’s an impatience in his voice. “What do you want to know?”
I must hunch my shoulders, flinch somehow, because all he says is “I don’t know. It was freezing down there. Bloody fucking freezing.”
…
The second half begins. After a few minutes he says, “Thanks for doing this.”
“No problem.”
“Really,” he says softly, and then, “I’m going to sleep now.” The way he says it makes it sound as though he has no choice.
“Should I switch this off?”
“No. You’ve got to tell me how it turns out.”
I watch the rest of the game. I turn the volume right down until the players float soundlessly over the turf and the fans shout silent clouds into the cold night air. My brother’s breathing settles, gets shallow and ragged, then settles again when I’m just about to call a nurse. The game ends in a draw and I unhook the cables, turn everything off, and sit with him for a while after carrying the TV and VCR out to the car. I’ve a new paper, and I open it slowly.
I’ve often thought about what he told me that Christmas. I still don’t understand it. I imagine him down in one of those old Victorian WCs, tiled and echoing. I think of the casualness of it, the anonymity, the giving and the holding back. The silent understanding. It seems oddly familiar. There’s a surprising maleness to it.
When I was thirteen I had a dark line of down along my upper lip, what we used to call bum fluff. My mother wouldn’t let me shave. I was the clumsy one, and she was afraid I’d take my nose off or something. Instead she got my brother to do it. He grinned. This was about two years after I’d broken his leg. We’d never talked about it again. He carried one of the high kitchen stools into the bathroom, put a new blade in his razor, and tied a towel tightly round my neck, “to soak up the blood.” He rubbed a handful of shaving cream over my face as if it were a custard pie, filling my ears, covering my mouth. He ran his fingertip lightly across my lips to uncover them. The blade scraped against my skin and pulled at the fine hairs, but I didn’t say anything. He was very close, leaning over me, silent except for his breathing. He was concentrating hard, but he must have met my eyes once, because he said, “Don’t look so worried. I won’t cut you.” When he was done, while I washed my face, he told me shaving would make my beard come in faster. The water felt like oil on my skin. “It’s so smooth.” I looked in the mirror, touching my face, and he stood behind me, grinning. I smiled back, but when I looked at my face again a tiny globe of blood was just beginning to swell at the corner of my mouth.
…
My mother is getting breakfast ready when I get home, and she asks me how he is and I say fine.
“What did you talk about?” she says, and I tell her, “Football.” It’s so ludicrous, I whisper it.
She looks at me, and for a moment I think she’s going to say, “Men!” but all she says is “You don’t even like football,” and I shrug.
…
The local team are at home in February. The ground is at the end of an old residential street, the brick walls rising over the houses, the floodlights above them. I stoop in the darkness of the narrow turnstile and pass my money across to the ticket taker behind his grille and say, “One.” He is so close I can smell the damp wool of his coat.
I lean on the turnstile and it gives slowly, depositing me in a dank brick tunnel, gently sloping, leading up to a broader concrete passageway. I can see the curve of the stadium for the first time in the distance. Banks of steps lead up to the left, and I take them quickly into the daylight. After the darkness, the smell of the brick, the closeness of the walls, the pitch is a revelation. The dull day seems bright; the muddy pitch glows green. It makes me wonder if this isn’t the point, if the Victorian architects who built this place hadn’t meant for all the darkness and dampness to lead up to this moment.
It’s only a moment, though. It’s a biting day, and I stand on the open terraces cowering in the wind. My brother died two months ago. I’m home for the weekend, as I have been for every weekend since. I want to see what he saw in something, but there are only two or three dozen men around me, gathered in little knots and huddles, stamping their feet on the bare, cracked concrete. We keep a wary, respectful distance. The stands with their plastic seats and bright red corrugated roofs look more modern, but this part of the stadium must be prewar. Shallow slabs slope down to the field, broken up here and there by chest-high iron stanchions. I cross my arms and lean my elbows on one of them, waiting for the game to begin.
Opposite, at the far end of the stadium, they’ve already begun the demolition. The home terraces will be rebuilt over the summer, but the away end is already half gone. Last night I read in the local paper that the contractors are working flat out, even during games. The club has erected a tall hoarding to hide the work from the pitch, and lads on a youth training scheme have painted it to look like a crowd scene. I can’t make out any faces from so far away, but there was a photograph of it in the paper. Men with their mouths open, men with their hands in the air. The only sound coming from them is the ring of scaffolding going up and the thump of pneumatic drills. A local lady councillor has complained that there are four hundred and sixty-three figures in the crowd and not a single woman.
The home team are terrible, heavy-legged in the mud like cart horses. “Wankers,” someone on the terrace shouts. At halftime boys with their hands stuffed in the pockets of dirty jeans come out and wander around the pitch stamping down divots.
The players run out again and the floodlights come on, although it’s only four o’clock. The home team attack the goal in front of the terrace. They win a corner and have a shot fly just over the bar. It rises over the fence and lands among us. The men around me chase after it, running stiffly with their hands in their pockets. The ball skids across the concrete, bounces up off the edge of a step. One of them gets close enough to swing at it, but he misses and it bobbles down toward me. I think about letting it roll past but as it comes level stoop and catch it. The men running toward me stop. I hold the ball for a long moment, feeling the slight tackiness of the damp leather. Then I throw it out in front of me and swing, catching it on the full so that it sails over the fence. It’s caught by one of the gusts of wind trapped in the stadium, and for a moment it hangs in the night, shining in the floodlights.
Somewhere in the crowd a thin cheer goes up, and behind me someone calls, “Shot!” I feel their eyes on me and I stand very still, not looking round while the sensation of striking the ball, the sweetness of the contact, slowly passes.
Cakes of Baby
AT THANKSGIVING, Laura makes three pies for her mother—apple cinnamon, lemon meringue, and pumpkin. Her husband, Sam, watches her slide them gently one by one onto the back seat of their ’88 Accord. She hems them in with coats and props a bag in front so they won’t slide forward.
“You want to buy car seats for them?” Sam asks.
“You have to have pies at Thanksgiving,” Laura tells him, imitating her mother, Joan. “It’s either this or having her go buy them at Malarkey’s.” Malarkey’s is the fancy French bakery where Laura worked the summers between her sophomore and senior years at college. She used to bring leftovers from the display case home after work for her mother—slices of gâte
aux, tartes tatins, éclairs. Joan, who’d never had much of a sweet tooth, learned to love fancy pastry late in life, and Malarkey pies have been a Thanksgiving tradition for the past ten years.
“It was hard enough persuading her to let me make them. They’d better be perfect.”
“And this is the most we can do?” Sam shakes his head. “Saving her buying pies.”
Laura’s mother went bankrupt three months ago. The dry cleaner she bought with a small inheritance had been struggling for years, losing ground to Korean competition. She sold the old family home in the eighties, when the market was up, and moved to a rented condo. She told Laura she’d buy a place again when the market moved, but instead she put the money from the house into the business, and now there’s nothing left. She’s still in the condo, but her savings are running out, and she can’t touch her 401(k) for another five years without penalties.
“I know it’s dumb,” Laura says, climbing in beside her husband. “But Malarkey’s was one of those little luxuries for her.”
“Just remember,” Sam says, patting her thigh, “love is not a pie.”
“Love is not a lot of things,” she says, staring forward. “It’s not going into debt when you can’t afford it to pay for our wedding and honeymoon, right? It’s not pouring your money into some stupid failing business for years. It’s not sitting around for a decade in a rented condo in Paramus when you could have bought a house and had some fucking equity. It’s not lying about your finances and pretending everything’s fine and refusing help until there’s no money left.” She pauses to take a jagged breath. “If I had a fucking dime for everything love isn’t, we wouldn’t be in this jam.”
“We can help her,” Sam says quietly, keeping his eyes on the road. Sam’s in his first semester as an assistant professor of English, after five years of grad school working on Jane Austen and two as an adjunct, and despite his student loans and uncertain tenure he’s feeling like a man again after having Laura support him for the last few years. She was a pastry chef in Berkeley, but since they moved back east for his job, she’s only been able to get mornings at a local bakery. Her hands are shiny and scabbed with the countless careless little burns she picks up around the ovens.
Equal Love Page 14