The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  “You have won her, yes?”

  Petrescu nods. The pilot kisses his forehead again.

  “For luck,” he says.

  In the air, Petrescu leans toward Tony and smiles.

  “If it had been for soccer,” he says, “we’d still be on the ground.”

  Around them, dark-suited businessmen snap their newspaper pages. Within two hours, they are circling Bucharest. From his window, Tony cannot get a sense of the city below. There are trees and lakes, but very few roads. He leans over the trophy case and stares at the ground below them. They circle the city several times, reluctant to land. Tony begins to wonder what the delay might be. He shifts in his seat and looks around for an attendant. Across the aisle, he hears Diana mumble in a half-sleep.

  “Tony, don’t worry. Probably, there is a dog on the runway.” She is looking at him tiredly from just above the lip of her blanket, and he can tell from her eyes that she is smiling. “In Romania, there are no paper napkins, very little fake sugar, and dogs run wild at the airport. Welcome to my childhood.”

  Nine

  Antonio Esposito Chiello, the keeper of the Cup, is sent to Romania in only his second full year on the job. It is a job passed on to him by death, a job he tries not to think about very much because he loves it too strongly to consider it real. Real, it might somehow go away. Other things, loved things, made real, had gone away. They always do.

  In his new job, Tony practises a new way of working. He breathes; he looks around; he tries to interest himself in where he is and what there is to see and remember outside of the fact that he is there with the Cup. He refuses to think of the trophy as his responsibility, something to be taken care of. Instead, it is simply part of everything he sees and everywhere he goes. It is attached to his experience of everything, attached to him. For him, the trophy is just another arm.

  Tony travels for three months every summer with three arms. He can lose sight of the Cup only as easily as he might lose sight of his own flesh. To leave it behind, he would first have to cut it away. It isn’t there to be watched and looked after; it is simply there, part of Tony wherever he goes. And he goes wherever the League tells him to go. He asks no questions and makes no suggestions or complaints. He has learned all this from his old friend Stan.

  There had been thoughts of winning the Cup. Early thoughts, like those of everyone else he knew. Born in Toronto in 1965, Tony had, in a way, already won the Cup twice, but as a child he had no memory of the celebrations. He knew the significance of his middle name, and understood why it was there like that. He wondered sometimes, “Why name me after a Chicago goalie?” but it was clear that for Tony’s family being Italian was more important than being from either Toronto or Chicago. He remembered his father’s friends at the house on Saturday evenings. Beer spilled into orange shag carpet. His mother laughing at him when he skated toward her across the backyard.

  He remembered feeling no pressure, as though the winning of the Cup was there for him in his future, unquestionably. It would be done, and the way it would be done was by simply living a life the way he was living it. Posters on the wall, a bed held off the ground by four hockey pucks, a slice of oozing honeycomb in his mouth for the drive to the arena.

  Coaches and referees praised him for his speed. His parents smiled at him from three rows above the glass. He grew and waited for time to bring him what he deserved. In the summer, he swam at Riverdale Pool during the hot days and played ball hockey on Grandview Avenue into the evenings. Things happened in his family. His father changed jobs every once in a while. The family sat at the kitchen table and his father would explain what the new job was all about. Where it was, how long the drive would be, when he would be home in the evenings, what kind of free stuff he could get. Always it seemed to be a better job. His mother smiled and laughed and made them all drink wine in fancy red-stained glasses.

  His sister married a Scottish boy from the neighbourhood. There were three days of flowers and large meals. His father took pictures of everybody in the backyard, by the fence, in front of the roses. Antonio danced with his sister and she lifted him off the ground, kissing him and calling him her little Tony Esposito, her little goalie. There was endless cake.

  Sometimes, his parents would bring another child home from the hospital. Twice it was sisters and the last was a brother. All of their cribs were held off the ground by four hockey pucks.

  “That way,” his father told Antonio, “the legs won’t dent the carpet.”

  Twice a year, his father would take him to the game with tickets he got from someone at work. Antonio sat watching the players while his father walked from section to section, looking for better seats. Only once, he managed to sneak Antonio into the Golds. His father lifted him from the tunnel into the only available seat, beside a young woman and her date. He told Antonio to watch out for him across the ice, and then disappeared back into the tunnel. A little later, the girl tapped Antonio on the leg, smiled, and pointed out his father to him, across the ice in the Greys, waving both arms. When Toronto scored, the girl gripped Antonio’s leg with her long fingernails and bounced on her seat. Her breath smelled like vanilla ice cream. The crowd yelled “Espo seeeeeeeeto!”, taunting the goalie, cheering for Tony.

  Late in the third period, a Chicago player was checked hard into the boards directly below Antonio’s seat. The girl beside him covered her face. The game stopped and all the players skated slowly in circles, looking over toward Antonio. A man in a jogging suit and black shoes came running across the ice from the benches. Two other skaters lifted the injured player to his feet. He leaned on the boards and breathed heavily. Blood ran in lines down his face, and he spat red onto the ice. He was crying. He looked huge, much bigger than players ever looked on television or from the Greys. All the players suddenly looked huge. The girl’s fingernails dug into his leg again.

  “Is it over yet?” she asked.

  The player turned and skated across the ice toward his bench. The crowd stood and applauded. On the glass just below Antonio, a wide streak of blood leaked downward in thin lines. Below it, on the ledge at the top of the boards, a tooth flashed white in a puddle of red. It looked to be dug into the wood. Antonio put his hand on top of the girl’s fingers. She looked at him and touched his face.

  “Are you okay, kiddo?” she said. Antonio nodded and threw up into her lap.

  Tony’s stewardship of the Cup began as he’d expected it to. Stan had always described with ironic amazement the disrespect and debauchery with which hockey players treated the thing they worked and sweated and lost teeth for. Sure, it was all kissing and smiling on the night of the big win, but after that, the Cup was just another possession in a long line of possessions. Stan taught Tony that very few players ever really understood the value of what they had won, and so Tony took over Stan’s job with the same sense of protective disdain for all who treated the Cup poorly.

  On the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with a crowd of press watching, a large seagull landed in the bowl of the Cup. It turned three quick circles, watching the people nearby and also looking out to sea, clicking its ringed yellow beak on the side of the bowl. There was laughter, and newspapers around the country picked up the wire photo, running it on the front page of their sports coverage. A determined, angry-looking bird nesting in the Cup. In the photo, there is an arm in dark suit material reaching for the bird, and the bird has pulled its head back behind its body, either trying to lean out of the way of the approaching arm or preparing to attack with its beak. The headline in USA Today ran, “New Jersey Resident Claims Cup as His Own.” Tony wondered how they had determined the bird was a male. After that trip, he bought himself Audubon bird guides for all the regions he thought he might have to visit in his job.

  When the bird landed, Tony was himself looking out to sea. Off the New Jersey coast, a cruise ship pushed north through moderate seas. Heading for New York, Tony thought and chuckled to himself. All that morning, Tony was reflecting on the newnes
s of everything on this side of the continent. New Jersey, New England, even old New York was once New Amsterdam. The thought was moving around in his head, trying to incorporate a name like Virginia, but then the seagull had landed and Tony had moved on it.

  Tony walked with a limp that entire day. The night before, a boy helping him bring the Cup through the lobby of the Trump Hotel had run into Tony’s heel with the wheel of the dolly, opening the skin. Overnight, the wound had dried out and his ankle fused in a painful tightness. When he jumped forward to remove the bird, he felt the wound reopen.

  Scott Marston, the Cup-winner from Atlantic City, threw up his breakfast ten minutes before the ceremony on the boardwalk. Behind a screen, Tony draped the Cup in its black velvet cover, noticing for the first time the number of birds that circled overhead. He wondered about bird feces. How one would remove them from black velvet. A scraper first, for sure, several passes with the light alcohol swab and then a good soft-brushing to straighten the grain. Marston had been with him for breakfast, and followed him onto the boardwalk, not wanting to see his family and friends until the ceremony. The morning sun and sea air had turned on him. Hungover from a night of rum and gambling with high school friends, Marston excused himself to one of the portable toilets beneath the boardwalk. As Tony made the final adjustments to the black velvet, he could hear Marston retching beneath him.

  Tony watched the gull for a long time after it flew away. It had picked itself out of the Cup with a simple springing jump, like it had bounced. With its wings spread, the bird caught the perpetual ocean breeze and quickly drifted far beyond Tony’s grasp. It dropped low over the sand and let loose a stream of white shit that just missed a young girl walking with her father. Over the water, it mingled with the other birds, but Tony kept it in sight despite the crowded skies. Two small grey and white feathers clung to the inside wall of the trophy’s bowl. Tony pulled them away and heard a delicate static discharge like the distant ringing of tiny bells.

  Ten

  At Aeroportul International Bucuresti Otopeni, Dragos Petrescu, his immediate family and Tony Chiello are photographed by two different young men, each with very expensive cameras. They are asked to pose formally, and no one will hear of Tony slipping out of the photograph. To the men with cameras, Tony is an important part of the story. They also take photos of the Cup but, strangely, do not ask Tony to remove it from the case. There are many young schoolgirls with armfuls of flowers. Tony is kissed and kissed again. He watches Petrescu receive his own flowers and speak with the red-faced girls, returning their kisses on both cheeks and slipping chocolate bars into their hands. The others too are receiving kisses and handing out little gifts. Tony wonders if it’s possible they are all somehow related to each other. He is embarrassed to have nothing to give away.

  Tony and the Cup are loaded into the rear seat of a bulky four-wheel drive. There is much shaking of hands and many new names. One of the photographers, a man in his twenties, climbs into the driver’s seat and smiles back at Tony. Diana climbs into the back of the car as well, the bulky trophy case standing upright in the seat between them. Finally, Petrescu manages to pull himself from the crowd and climb into the front passenger seat. They leave the parking area at full speed, and Tony watches through the rear window as three Mercedes sedans pull out of the parking lot behind them. The driver introduces himself as Vasile.

  “You also play hockey?” Vasile asks Tony.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Don’t worry about where we’re going. It is for me to wonder about where we are going. Are you on the same team?”

  “I’m too short,” Tony says, his eyes on the traffic speeding past them in the other direction. He is glad for the trophy case between him and Diana. He knows she’s learning something about him, and does not want to see what effect it has on her face.

  A cow grazes on the grassy avenue between lanes of a wide boulevard. An old man in a yellowing undershirt walks behind it with a long thin branch. He swats at the grass behind the cow’s back hooves. Tony watches him for the few seconds it takes to pass in the car. The man’s skin is burnt brown, and he whistles through toothless gums. Some kilometres past the cow, they stop at a light before a traffic circle. In the middle of the roadway, a fountain sends a wide spray into the air. Across the intersection, a man sits smoking on a stone bench. He wears a suit and tie and looks toward the car from behind dark sunglasses. He looks to be writing notes on a pad in his lap. The man raises his face toward the traffic circle, studies it for a moment and returns to his notepad. He has a high forehead, dented in the middle as though at a certain point in life he was struck by a hammer and somehow lived. Tony lowers his window. The air tastes of matches and thick exhaust. A mist from the fountain gathers around the car.

  “You see these shoes?” Vasile asks, lifting his leg from below the steering wheel.

  “Yes.”

  “These shoes belong to Ilie Năstase. He gave them to me.”

  Dragos laughs and says something in Romanian to Vasile, who also laughs. Diana does not laugh. Tony can see her hands resting calmly on her knees. He wonders if she has fallen asleep yet again.

  “The tennis player?” Tony asks, not wanting to be left behind the language barrier so soon.

  “Yes, you know another Ilie Năstase? I play at his club. He is a very generous man. We’ll be passing very near his house. I’ll show it to you.”

  “That’s okay,” Tony says. “I need to sleep.”

  “You will have much time to sleep in the grave.” The light changes and Vasile starts forward, laughing. “Have you ever been to Ilie Năstase’s house?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then, we go.”

  They pass a row of three horse-drawn carts. The carts ride on truck wheels and are driven by men in felt hats, women in brightly patterned dresses sitting beside them. Assorted children walk beside the carts or ride precariously between cargo.

  “Gypsies,” says Vasile. “They don’t play tennis.”

  “Do they play hockey?” Tony asks.

  This draws a sound from Diana, a soft snort of disgust, and Tony knows she is paying attention to the conversation. Vasile shakes his head and waves a finger in the air.

  “Yes, I know. I know. You are making a joke of me. I am capable of recognizing these jokes. My English is not so bad.”

  Tony changes the subject. “What is the name of the hotel?”

  “Don’t worry about the hotel. This is my country. You are my guest. You will be well taken care of.”

  Vasile turns from the boulevard onto a shaded, cobblestoned street. On the corner, two uniformed young men stand smoking. They lean in toward each other, stooped under the weight of the submachine rifles dangling from their shoulders. They look to be under twenty years old. They stare at Tony staring at them from the open window. Further down the street, a pack of dogs fight each other in the middle of the roadway. Vasile honks his horn and does not slow down. The dogs slip on either side of the car, still fighting, ignoring everything else.

  “Năstase lives here?” Tony asks.

  “Very near.”

  “This is the district of the embassies,” Dragos says. “Very wealthy. Diana and I grew up not far from here, but of course, in a very different world.”

  “And the dogs?”

  “What dogs?” Vasile growls.

  They speed along the cobblestones. Streets open out into wide squares, sometimes centred on statues or monuments and sometimes not, always with one or two dogs sniffing at the periphery. They speed through the squares. The air is better, cooler, filtered by the canopy of leaves. Vasile pulls onto the sidewalk and stops in front of a wide wrought-iron gate.

  “There he is. Năstase.” Vasile waves madly from the driver’s seat and honks his horn.

  Through a darkly shaded entranceway behind the gate, Tony sees two men in white sitting at a patio table. Behind them is a glow of white on rust-red clay, canvas netting and crisply painted lines. A woman
runs in and out of view at the centre of the glow, slamming hard at a tennis ball. The two men laugh and talk, taking turns throwing small dice onto the table. Vasile honks the horn again and steps from the car, his arms spread wide in front of him. The men leave their game and stroll to the gate, laughing and joking with Vasile. Tony can understand nothing. Neither man looks anything like the Ilie Năstase Tony remembers, but he can’t be sure because he hasn’t seen a photo of the famous tennis player in years.

  He tries to picture either of these men accepting the trophy at Rolland Garos, lifting it over his head with that exhausted smile of the champion tennis player. He watches both men greet young Petrescu, the slapping of the back, the powerful shaking of hands. Through the locked gate, they kiss Diana on both cheeks, and for the first time Tony notices a blush in her face. He listens to the language for any recognizable sound. Then there is English.

  “This is Antonio Chiello, from Canada—I told you.”

  One of the men steps forward and extends his arm toward the car window. Tony has not moved from his seat beside the trophy.

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Ilie.”

  Tony opens his door and slips from the back seat. He leans across the sidewalk and shakes hands. The man is in late middle age, but slim and very muscular in that wiry way of the exceptional athlete.

  “You play on the same team?” the man asks.

  “I carry the trophy,” Tony responds. It’s the phrase Stan favoured in this situation. The situation that will always come up until, like Stan before him, Tony becomes obviously too old for it to be asked.