The men began to swap divorce stories, and Grudeck turned to the growing line of people waiting to talk to him.
Mike Fitzgerald, another kid from grammar school; Jack Clancy, a wide receiver and a star pitcher; Stu Luby, the football center and a very good wrestler, who had to cut fifteen pounds to make 215 because he couldn’t beat Grudeck at heavyweight; Jimmy Smithers, the tailback and center fielder, one of the few black kids from Vauxhaul who had white friends; Chris and Mike Damiano, the twin brother linebackers and mid-weight wrestlers. Grudeck caught up with them all.
Grudeck looked at each of his old friends, and tried to figure which one the years had beaten up the most. Was it him?
Each conversation ended the same way, “Let’s get together sometime . . .” then just hung there.
After the boys came the girls, the girls, the girls. Some would never look better than they did at seventeen, all thin, tight, and firm, long hair shiny and soft, teeth white, lips flush pink. He remembered how they smelled. Like clean water. And he remembered their fake, blushing reluctance. Like Syracuse? No, not like Syracuse.
So now, almost thirty years later, the girls in the jock circle came out to see him. Grudeck remembered most of their names . . . Monica, Erin, Mary Anne, Patti . . . First names, anyway.
Some were with husbands and sons, who, depending on their ages, were either thrilled or oblivious.
The girls who married early had boys who grew up rooting for Grudeck. These kids, now young men, saw Grudeck at his long peak. Their mothers, looking small next to their mannish sons, introduced them by saying, “Oh, Ben [or Justin or Jake or Mike] here was such a big fan of yours. He had your baseball cards and your posters in his room. He thought I was cool because I knew you in high school.”
The girls who married later had sons who were only ten, eleven, twelve years old now and a half generation behind Grudeck’s best time; they said things like “Remember, honey, Mommy told you about the famous baseball player I grew up with. Well, this is him!”
The girls who came without husbands spent an extra minute on his arm, gave him a tighter hug and a hello kiss toward the lips. The girls with husbands turned it down a notch. Some of the husbands glanced around him nervously, knowing (or suspecting) this jock mountain of a man had once piped their wives in the back of a car or the dark bleachers or the basement rec room while her parents slept upstairs. High school stuff . . . except that Joe Grudeck didn’t become some hazy memory. He was a star. Famous. Huge, in legend and body. Grudeck didn’t let go. He was always there. In the newspapers, on TV; the talk and pride of the town. You didn’t forget Joe Grudeck. You didn’t forget his size. The weight of his body. The strength of his arms. Grudeck didn’t let go.
On and on, it went like this, and after an hour or so, Grudeck’s mood began to go south. After his circle of friends came guys whose names Grudeck couldn’t remember. Bench warmers, losing wrestlers, kids Grudeck carried on his broad shoulders, kids who would have never played for a championship team, if Joey wasn’t hitting home runs and scoring touchdowns. Kids who bragged about playing high school ball with Joe Grudeck to their co-workers, their new friends, their in-laws, their kids, and, someday, their grandkids. This is the gift Grudeck gave these guys. A hook into his legacy. He gave them moments, and then memories, and their own lasting athletic legacy, no matter how small. They played with Joe Grudeck, now a Hall of Famer. Otherwise, their careers were forgettable.
One after another, they came at him, remembering this game or that, verbal replays of highlights from Grudeck’s high school days. Grudeck’s face began to hurt from smiling. His right-hand ache was dulled by the Advil, but he could feel it just the same, and the oils from so many hands felt grimy on his own. He was hot, and the gym felt airless. Heavy beadlets of sweat amassed on his forehead and he felt rivulets trickling under his arms and down the middle of his chest. One after another, they came at him, an army of guys named Jack and Skip and Mike and Arnie, guys who made small talk and asked for a glimmer of recognition . . . “You remember me? I recovered the fumble in the Westfield game, senior year” . . . “Hi, Joe, you might not remember, but I wrestled one hundred six on jayvee the second year you won the states.”
Now Grudeck’s hip was full-blown killing him, a sciatic snake of pain radiating from his ass up his lower back and down his leg to the back of his knee. His feet hurt, too. Playing eighteen was easier than just standing there.
One after another, it was the same bullshit: a little small talk, Grudeck’s feigning interest in their lives, them pretending they knew something about Grudeck’s, a couple of smiles and back slaps, a pose for a picture, another flash exploding in Grudeck’s face like a mortar blast from an old war movie. Flash after flash. Now came the eyeball ache, exacerbated by each new blast of strobe.
Grudeck moved through circles of people, groups clustered by old teammates, organizations, or age. He was embraced by his parents’ friends who had patiently waited for him to arrive. He knew them all when they were his age; now the women had thinning hair swept up on their heads, their pear-shaped, overperfumed and powdered bodies stretching the fabric of their old-lady dresses. He felt lipstick residue on his face; medicinal Listerine breath was in his nostrils.
Mrs. Vezzosi . . . Gert Schumacher . . . Mrs. Przybylski . . .
The men, bent and bowlegged, had food stains on their sweaters or polyester sports coats and urine blotches on their pants. He shook their withered hands, sometimes calming their tremors with his grip.
Mr. Zabrinsky . . . Jack Ricciardi . . . Joe Mickles . . . Others, whose names he forgot.
They all came smiling, yellowed teeth or piano-key dentures wide open.
In him, they saw youth. In them, he saw death. It was coming.
I’m at my own wake, Grudeck suddenly thought. Except he was a walking, talking stiff—still alive to hear everyone’s stories about him. He was enshrined, and entombed. A gloom began to coat him, like the sweat leaking from his pores, only black.
When the buffet line opened, Grudeck used the distraction to take another break. He went back to the men’s room, where he exchanged pleasantries with an old guy he did not know who was just zipping up. Alone now, he looked hard into the kid-proof metal mirrors, now slightly warped and hazy, and searched for the boy in himself as he scrubbed his hands. It reminded him of Syracuse, when he looked into the steam-soaked mirror after he washed the girls off him, and saw someone different.
* * *
HE NEEDED AIR. Alone in the dark parking lot, Grudeck let the cool, misty April air chill the sweat on his body. He inhaled it deeply, then blew it out and watched the vapor dissipate like cigarette smoke.
He heard a car door shut, and the beep of automatic door locks. He’d started to move to an unlit corner, when he heard the sound of a woman’s heels on the pavement. A slender, dark-haired woman in a mid-length black raincoat pulled tightly at her waist approached. Grudeck immediately recognized how she carried herself. After all these years. He moved out to meet her, deeper into the darkest part of the lot.
“Stacy,” he said, surprised by the softness of his own voice.
He put his hands on both her shoulders and kissed her on the lips. It was quick and deliberate.
“I just promised myself I wouldn’t do that, and then I did,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Same old Joe,” she said.
“No! Well, yeah. But . . .”
“I know, I know . . . ‘I’m different.’ That’s what you always said.”
Stacy with the beautiful facey, that’s what Grudeck used to call her.
Now he said it again. And she laughed.
“You’re such a little boy. Still.”
He wanted to kiss her again, but instead held her at arm’s length to take her all in. She was better than ever, a more sophisticated version of her teenaged self. Her dark hair, always straight, was still long but shaped around her face. Those olive-green eyes, even in the dark, moved something inside him. A heart thump.
A lung expansion. Something. Something not lust. Her face, always thin and petite, had filled out, taking away some of the prominence of her nose. She hated her nose in high school, Grudeck remembered, and Grudeck always pretended it got in the way when he kissed her.
“Stop. Be nice,” she would say as Grudeck acted as if her nose had poked him in the eye.
Kissing was as far as it got. Grudeck never pushed, because he liked her too much, more than just another notch. More accurately, he didn’t want to give up the other notches and didn’t want to hurt Stacy Milo by cheating on her. Sometimes he thought it was the only admirable thing he’d done in his life. That was one part. The other part was that Stacy kept him at a distance because of his “groupies.”
“Pathetic, vapid girls,” she would say.
Grudeck knew what pathetic meant, but had to look up vapid. Still, he understood; the only way Grudeck would respect her was if she held him off.
Back in high school, she was an artsy but get-involved type. She wanted to be a photographer and was always lugging a camera. She was class treasurer, editor of the paper, and took pictures for the yearbook. That’s how Grudeck first noticed her. On the sidelines, with a long lens on a monopod. At mat-side, she would get down on her elbows at action level. Always in jeans and a baggy workshirt or flannel over a tee. Her hair tied back, which showed off that Roman profile; the strong chin, the nose, and those serious olive eyes. Grudeck remembered.
Through freshman, sophomore, and junior years, the only time Grudeck spoke to her was when he threw a kid out of bounds during a wrestling match. The kid crashed into Stacy.
“You all right?” Grudeck said as he helped her up, touching her elbow with his sweaty hand.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, eyes on her equipment.
That was it, until winter of senior year, when the school highlighted some of the artists in the class. Stacy had work hanging on three partitions outside the cafeteria. Stark images in lights and shadows, in black and white. Bare trees in winter. Lonely litter in an alley. Headstone obelisks against leaden skies. Dark clouds gathered around the City Hall Colonial clock tower. And two shots of Grudeck.
One was him standing alone under a gym light, up next to wrestle, his singlet pulled down off his shoulders, exposing the muscles in his back and arms. The shot was taken from the side, somewhat behind him, and the lighting gave his shoulders an enormous breadth while leaving his expressionless face in the shadows. Joey Grudeck, the sullen, teenaged Hercules.
The other was Grudeck the quarterback. He was standing upright in the pocket, his by-the-book throwing posture perfect, his clean white jersey and helmet gleaming against a gray sky, looking downfield, indifferent and high above the chaos of fallen linemen around him. Grudeck, in his whiteness, glowed at the center of the photo, with the dark-shirted opponents and mud-stained teammates strewn at his feet. That photo, too, had a mythic tone, the high school football version of Washington Crossing the Delaware.
When Grudeck saw the photo exhibit, he didn’t know what to make of it. Was she obsessed with him? She didn’t act that way, saying all of two words to Grudeck through three years of high school. His buddies broke his balls. She was a stalker, they said. The paparazzi. But the photos were not intimate. Grudeck had no personality in the photos. He was an inanimate object. Trees, headstones, Grudeck.
The images grew on him. He found himself sneaking looks on his way in and out of the gym. If no one was around, he’d take a few seconds to study the magnificence of himself.
One night after wrestling practice, then weightlifting, Grudeck was alone in front of the two photos in the dark hallway. The school was quiet, except for the swish of the janitor’s mop from a distant hall. Then there were light footsteps echoing, coming closer. Stacy Milo came around the corner, with a portfolio case in one hand, and tools to dismantle the exhibit in the other.
Grudeck was flustered at being caught, but at what? Being interested? Or self-indulgent? Either way, he feigned nonchalance. He flung his gym bag over his shoulder and headed in the opposite direction.
“Did I embarrass you?” Stacy said from behind him.
By what? Grudeck wanted to ask. The pictures? Or by catching him looking? But “Huh?” was all he said, as he turned to face her.
“The pictures. Do they embarrass you? If they do, I’m sorry.”
“No. No. Actually, they’re pretty cool,” said Grudeck, now embarrassed by how Dumb Jock he sounded. “They’re very . . . I don’t know, intense,” he said. Dumber still.
“Well, as long as they don’t embarrass you,” Stacy said. “That wasn’t the intent.”
“Don’t worry. It’s cool,” Grudeck said, and turned again.
“Don’t you want to know what the intent was?” Stacy asked. In her voice was a halftone of disappointment. Could Grudeck be that much of a lunkhead? Or did he really not care? Either way . . .
Grudeck stopped and turned toward her. Why didn’t he think of asking? Dope.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said.
“There was no intent,” Stacy said. “I just like the way they turned out.”
“Well, they’re nice,” Grudeck said.
“You’re easy to photograph. You’d make a good model,” she said, and those words froze Grudeck. Models were girls. Or fems.
“What?” he said.
“Not like a clothes model, like a photography subject. The way you move. Your body mechanics, they make for good composition. The way you fill up a frame. You know, photography stuff.”
But he didn’t know. It was the first of many things he didn’t know, but would learn, when he was with Stacy Milo.
“It just comes natural,” he finally said, as if he had to explain.
Then, out of nowhere, he asked, “You wanna get some coffee, or something, with me?”
She said no, but he said “c’mon” twice, and she relented.
That’s how it started. How it ended, Grudeck wasn’t sure. But for a few months, he spent a lot of time with her. Like friends. Coffee and cheesecake at the Peterpank (for Panko) Diner. Nighttime walks around the running track, all bundled up in layers of sweat clothes and jackets. Sunday afternoons hanging around the downtown. He even went to a couple of plays with her at Kean College. Grudeck found her intriguing. She talked openly about things foreign to him: art, creativity, expression, self-awareness. Exceptionalism, which she said he had and she wanted. But she also thought sports were barbaric, and brought out the worst in boys (“being bullies and showoffs”) and fans (“crowd behavior, like you see in those Hitler propaganda films”) alike. The only reason she liked to photograph sports was because of the action (“it challenges my skills”). She called him Joseph, or Joe, never Joey. “Sounds like you’re still in kindergarten,” she would say.
He talked openly to her, too. He told her things he had never told anybody before, or since. Things that left him—what?—vulnerable.
When you’re like me you’re never sure if people really like you, or just because you’re good at sports. I wonder if I’d have any friends if I sucked.
After games I hate when parents pay more attention to me than their own kids. I’m like, “Hey, your kid just played four quarters on the line. Go kiss his ass for a while.”
One night after the diner, they were parked in front of Stacy’s parents’ house on Emerson Street, sitting in the Malibu. He was talking about the flip side of glory—the fear of letting everybody down—when she grabbed his arm tightly and said, “Poor baby!” and he felt the warm softness of her breast against his triceps. It was her first move, and Grudeck freed his arm and draped it around her neck in a gentle headlock, then flexed his arm.
“Feel that?” he asked.
“Yeah . . . ?”
“That’s my second-biggest muscle.”
“Don’t be a pig,” she said, pushing him away, but laughing.
Two nights later, after a walk—it was early May and the chilly air was heavy with spring dew and the musky smell of
hyacinth—they ended up on the porch of the James Caldwell House, the town history museum. Grudeck told her the story of Reverend Angus, and she sided with the pastor.
“He was just trying to teach you something about the history of the town. You know, education?” she chided.
The porch had wicker furniture on it, and was shielded from the street by trellises and small hemlocks.
Stacy was shivering and Grudeck wrapped her up in his arms and kissed her. She kissed back.
“Joseph . . . I know what you do and I don’t want it to be like that . . .”
“Like what?” Grudeck said, nuzzling her neck.
“Like that!” she said, squirming. “Like those other girls.”
“C’mon, Stace, I really like you.”
“And I like you, even though you’re not my type.”
“Type? I’m everybody’s type.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
So there it was. Stacy wouldn’t go easy, and in the end, not at all. Grudeck didn’t force it; he wanted to prove he respected her. She was different. He wanted to protect her, even from himself.
A few nights later, they sat with their backs up against the concrete snack stand at the football field. Grudeck remembered how good it felt to be in the dark. Most times on that field, on so many brilliantly lit Jersey fall afternoons, he was the center of attention. This night, Stacy was the center of his.
With his maroon varsity jacket blending into the maroon-and-gold-trimmed snack-stand paint, and Stacy in a black turtleneck and open peacoat, they were invisible. And so small underneath the clear sky. Grudeck remembered the stars and the crescent moon, and himself not even a speck in that universe. He said this to her.
“It makes me feel, I don’t know, kind of relieved. Like free. That’s what I like best about you. You never talk about my games.”
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