"And may I add a shout-out, Brent," he said, grabbing the microphone from one network sportscaster, "first to the Lord, then to my parents, Lleyton Starling Sr. and Vivian Morton Starling, and our family and friends, and last but not least to my girl, Dana Farinelli. Dana, I love you. Marry me," he added, holding up what Quinn thought was a spectacular oval ruby, surrounded by diamonds in rose gold that Lleyton said had been his grandmother's engagement ring.
"Well, there you have it," Brent Masters said, fighting for control of the interview. "A proposal on national TV. Dana, wherever you are, marry him, please."
Given Lleyton's exuberance, the media was relieved to turn to Quinn—who was watching the scene, now overrun with Jere juniors, chased by a screaming Smalley.
"Your thoughts on today's comeback," Brent said to Quinn, a smile plastered on his perspiring face as one of the smallest Jeres head-butted his left leg.
"Well, it was obviously a great win for our guys," Quinn said, not missing a beat as he scooped up the child before he could do further damage. "I think we played with a perfect balance of offense and defense and that's what you need."
"What was going through your mind as you scored that stunning diving touchdown?" Brent asked, almost giddy at being back in charge of the questions and answers.
"No one was open and I just didn't want to waste a scoring opportunity," Quinn said with a laugh, "so I thought, 'God, I'm going for it. Help us to score.'"
"Can you say enough about the way Coach Smalley has handled this team?"
It was all Quinn could do to keep from laughing in Brent's face. "I really can't say enough."
"And how inspirational has it been to have Blaine Mahr with you guys this week?"
It occurred to Quinn then that interviews were structured so that all the interviewee had to do was to repeat the key word in the question. Back in ancient times when the Temps won regularly, Blaine Mahr was the star quarterback. Having ascended to Mount Olympus—in this case, a largely ceremonial job at a Fortune 500 company—Blaine emerged whenever the Temps were in contention, which was virtually never, ostensibly to offer advice but really to remind everyone of the glory days with him that were long gone. The only good thing about it was the way it rattled Smalley.
"As if we don't have enough pressure, I guess I'm gonna have to blow smoke up this guy's ass all week," he griped.
The bad blood went back to their college days, although it wasn't helped by some unkind words Blaine had uttered about Smalley darling Lance. Quinn lapped it up.
"Do you think Blaine would mind posing for some selfies with me for the folks?" Lleyton asked Quinn.
"I'm sure he'd be just delighted."
For his part, Quinn kept his distance. Blaine wasn't afraid to be critical of what he saw as Quinn and the team's need for improvement. But once Blaine arrived to "work" with the players, Quinn acknowledged that he mustn't let his ego—or that of others—get in the way of learning. Blaine had been one of the greatest quarterbacks ever. So he must've done something right, right? After that, they got along fine, but Quinn was still wary of treading into Blaine's space, particularly as he was always accompanied by Tris Meeker, a short, stocky, pasty-faced publicist/gofer/factotum/hanger-on who looked like Truman Capote with a bad comb-over.
His main job was to create demand by running interference and denying access to the demigod. The only thing that made his presence bearable, Quinn thought, was that Blaine—at sixty, a poignantly pale shade of his former radiant self with gnarled hands, a curved spine and one leg that never completely straightened—was utterly clueless that Meeker was in love with him and would brook no one getting too close to his beloved, especially female reporters like Brenna.
"We have to break this up," he said harshly as she approached Blaine. Quinn, who was still talking with Brent, could see that tough as she was, Brenna was put out.
"Excuse me, Brent," Quinn said. "Blaine," he said, smiling brilliantly and putting an arm on his shoulder. "You know Brenna James of The New York Record. I'm sure you have a moment for one of the best writers around." With that, Quinn turned to Tris and gave him his best glittering vampire smile. "You guys don't have to leave yet, do you?"
Twenty-one
"Thank you for rescuing me from that garden gnome of a gatekeeper," Brenna said.
She and Quinn were back in New York, having one of their interviews/dinners that he tried to avoid but was just as equally drawn to. He told himself there was no point in getting too close to a journalist and a woman who had feelings for him at that. He imagined that she told herself the same thing. Yet there they were.
"Do you think Blaine knows that Tris is in love with him?" she wondered aloud. "Probably not. He's so self-absorbed, I'm sure he has no gaydar."
Quinn wondered how well Brenna's gaydar worked regarding himself. He broke into a cold sweat. But then she added, "Or maybe Tris is just one of those hangers-on, you know, the nerd who attaches himself to the jock, the chubby girl who trails the beauty queen, the best friend who's happy to be that friend when there's nothing else to be had."
Brenna looked at Quinn and laughed, then looked away. She was wearing a red dress consisting of a layer of lace over a Lycra sheath that hugged her curves in all the right ways. Her long, curly hair was swept back in a casual chignon. Her Memoirs of a Geisha facial palette—alabaster skin, smoky eyes, rouged lips and cheeks—was heightened by the coldest winter of the century and the heat of the room that was designed to stave it off, along with the crimson of her dress and the accents of ruby and diamond jewelry.
This was the other side of Brenna, Quinn told himself, the part that had been an arts writer and worked for Vienne at New York Rumours, that had loved that world and lost it—or had been forced to relinquish it, same thing. But there was more to it than that. This was also a performance for his benefit, as if to say, "See, this is what you could have, what we could have together."
He thought back to that dreadful night of Vienne's party and the flower reading and something small that he had witnessed and forgotten but that seemed meaningful now. They were preparing to leave—laughing, chatting, if only he could go back and freeze that pre-lapsarian moment—and Vienne put a hand on Mal's shoulder and gazed into his eyes with such longing that Quinn felt something he never had for her. He felt pity.
Brenna was his Vienne, and he didn't want to make her an object of ridicule, to evoke in others the same feelings he had about Vienne that night. Was there anything more ridiculous than a woman in love with a younger man who would never be hers? Oh, Bren, why can't I want you?
As if reading his mind, she said, "You and I, Quinn, are leading parallel lives. We both have glamorous jobs that are not quite what they seem. We both love what we do but hate the people we do it for. And, if I may be so bold as to venture a guess, we're both A+ students in the School of Unrequited Love."
Her eyes glistened as she stared out at a Manhattan skyline that glittered diamond-hard against the indigo night. As Quinn reached for her hand, she moved it away to pick up her notepad and pen. With the other, she turned on her tape recorder. Quinn understood. For the loveless, kindness was often the greatest cruelty.
"Now where were we?" she said.
Where we were was gridlocked, he thought, at the intersection of Fear and Desire. He was no more going to quit his job than she was going to quit hers, and his was a lot more dangerous, he knew. And he could no more forget Tam than she could forget him. He tried. Oh, how he tried. He checked in with Dave's widow and kids—though not too often. He didn't want Kelly to get the idea that he was putting the moves on her. He visited Nero and became a supporter of Gloria Halstead's poetry workshop. He called Aunt Josie, Uncle Artur, and Patience daily. He kept tabs on Aunt Sarah, which wasn't easy, since she didn't always return his texts. And he continued to raise funds for the orphanage he was building in Jakarta.
Quinn prepared for the playoffs until he thought he'd drop, driving himself in the polar cold and snow. But Tam stayed in h
is head, haunting his thoughts when he least expected it, as Jakarta often did. He had never really understood them, he thought now, and so he had lost them both, and that's what threatened to drive him mad, the realization that circumstances were only partly to blame. Had he made an effort with his mother and stepfather, he might never have been sent away from Jakarta—or rather, would never have wanted to go—and his aunt would never have died. Had he not cheated on Tam with Mal or Mal with Tam—but how could he have known their history?—he and Tam might still be together.
He did, though, and they weren't and that was the hell of it. No amount of avoiding the sports pages would make it otherwise. He would flip on his iPad and catch Tam's image or name and the pain of losing what was in his grasp—of fumbling love—would be as fresh and sharp as the knifing cold. And anyway, there was no end of the talk about Mal and Tam, the Quakers and the Miners, among the Templars. Quinn knew that the way to the Super Bowl—the way home, for it was going to be played at Templars Stadium—was through Mal and Tam. He understood that if he could beat them back-to-back and win the Super Bowl that this would be the first paragraph of his obituary and that would be as good as it would get for him. He would forever be the man who may not have been the best but who beat the best.
First, they had to get through the Orlando Copperheads, this year's Cinderella team, as the press endlessly dubbed them. Gee, couldn't the press do better than that? Quinn wondered. When had writing—thinking—become so lazy? Actually, the Temps had been the Cinderella team du jour for a while, but, no, the Copperheads had been even more forlorn so they got the designated cliché, while the Temps were called "surging" as in the popular meme of the sports networks, the blogosphere and the Twitterati: "Can the surging Temps beat…?" Fill in the blank, Quinn thought. No one, it seemed, save Brenna, some diehard Temps' fans and Quinn himself, thought they could do it. Certainly, no one thought they could get past Mal's Quakers or Tam's Miners, let alone both.
"There are just too many variables with this team and this guy," the International Sports Network's Ned Harris said of the Temps and Quinn. "He likes to run, which is risky. That's part of what makes it thrilling, too. But you never know what you're going to get. He hasn't proved himself to be an elite pocket passer. Certainly, he's not in the class of Mal Ryan and Tam Tarquin."
"Bullsh--," one poster wrote. "Wonder if Neddy boy would be saying as much if Quinn Novak were white."
There it was, what everyone was thinking but few would voice.
"That's right," one respondent answered, "play the race card."
Quinn told himself he really had to stop reading and watching sports; otherwise, some day he was just going to take the football and shove it down the throats of the haters. He prided himself on being gracious—win, lose or draw. But this was testing him, boring as it did into his Achilles' heel, which was the sense that he would never be good enough.
Mal, of course, was only too happy to hiss as much into his ear, like the serpent in, if not the Garden of Eden then the Garden State of New Jersey. "You better be prepared to go down—in more ways than one."
They were in one of those Jersey no-tell motels off I-95, midway between New York and Philly, that Mal now favored for their trysts. Since becoming a father—Tiffany had given birth to a boy they had named George, Mal's real first name, on Christmas Day—Daddy liked to up the ante, Quinn thought. He had wanted to do it with Quinn in the alley outside some gay bar. But the motel was as far as Quinn was prepared to go and only because it was clear that it was a "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" kind of place. At least it was clean, Quinn thought, clean and dismal with '70s paneling, bargain-basement green print curtains and mustard-colored walls. It represented the new normal, along with Quinn waiting anxiously—which he realized was not the same thing as eagerly—for the new father's arrival, clad in a bathrobe that Mal liked to rip from his shoulders. Quinn had bought a special one for just such occasions—cheap and thin, this not being a Ralph Lauren moment, he figured. Then there would be the endless bitching, a new twist in the torturous—or should that be tortuous? Quinn wondered—relationship.
"She has no time for me," Mal whined. "It's all about that goddamn baby."
"Well, somebody's got to make a new life the center of his or her universe, and it's usually the mother, Mal," Quinn said, enjoying the ability to offer sound advice while twisting in the knife. "Face it, when a woman has a baby, that's her world. Everything else must be secondary. You'll just have to adjust. Why don't you try sharing her life rather than expecting her to cater to yours?"
"Yeah, right," Mal said, slamming Quinn into the wall and entering him so roughly that he cried out in pain. With that, Mal dispelled any illusion Quinn might have had that fatherhood would bring a new vulnerability to him and thus shift the balance of power in their so-called relationship.
"What the hell would you know? Oh, that's right, you're the woman in this relationship, so, of course, you would take her part. But male, female or whatever you are, it's not like you could ever father a child, you loser, you thing of death."
Quinn thought of those words as they stood on the sidelines of Quaker Stadium, down 14-10 in the final moments of the league championship game. The win against the Copperheads had been a romp, the outcome never in doubt, as good as a bye week, the Cinderella team having apparently run out of glass slippers. Quinn knew the Temps would pay for the ease of that victory in balmy, muscle-warming Orlando when they headed back north. And oh, how they paid—the cold, the snow, the New York-Philly sniping, the snarky press, the battling fans—and that was before the game even started.
Why did they do it? Quinn wondered. Football was war as theater, with the punching and crunching made more pronounced by the stinging cold. There had to be better ways to make a living. But what would he and his teammates—to say nothing of their families and their cities—have if not this? Many of them came from little to nothing. They had given themselves to a game when they were too young to understand what that meant, and, having decided to dance with the Devil, they could not turn back.
And so they endured horrific verbal abuse that began the moment they disembarked from the train that brought them to Philly. Whose romantic idea was it to take a train to the 30th Street Station, where Philly fans would be lying in wait, when they could've taken the usual team bus? Smalley was no help either. "I should've known you guys would never come through," he shouted at the defense on the field as he paced the sidelines in the fourth quarter.
Quinn saw the look of fear, dread and hurt that began to veil the eyes of the players on the sidelines. He called them together.
"Listen to me, look at me," he said. "We are not losers, and this is far from over. Our D-line is going to hold them off, and our O-line is gonna get one more chance on the field. One more, and that will be enough. Believe me: We were born to win."
Don't make a liar out of me, Quinn prayed as he took the field with two minutes to play. Make my words a reality, God, Aunt Lena, he said to himself.
Thirty seconds now. Thirty brief seconds. Thirty long seconds. Time out. Space-time expanding. The ball as big as a flying saucer. Derrick catching it, barely holding it, but hold it he did.
The Miners looking to blitz. Quinn looking to stay upright. Which he did. One more pass now, this time to Greg, who fell backward into the end zone—touchdown. The extra point was the cherry. It was over at last.
"You're gonna fucking pay and pay for this," a stunned Mal said as he clasped Quinn afterward.
The next night. Another no-tell motel. Quinn in a corner bleeding as Mal loomed over him. Quinn wiped the blood from his mouth, triumphant.
"I still won," he said.
Twenty-two
Oh, Tam, I heart you—my lover, my brother, Quinn thought as the Temps and the Miners prepared to face off in the Super Bowl at Templars Stadium. For you are my brother in arms. On this field of battle, we meet as less than friends but more than foes—rivals, former intimates who have left eac
h other and, in leaving, stayed.
The teams emerged from opposite tunnels amid fanfare, all smoke but no mirrors to reflect the ridiculousness of the spectacle, Quinn mused. They stood at attention on opposite sides for "Our National Anthem," as the announcer intoned. It was sung by an opera singer who had been much criticized on the web, as if those "critics" would know anything about opera, or singing the Anthem for that matter, Quinn thought with a laugh. She transcended skepticism anyway. In a deep-blue sheath and yellow-green coat that underscored the team colors and her svelte attractiveness, she sang with lushness and ringing clarity.
"I thought these opera chicks were supposed to be fat," Derrick whispered to Greg. "This one's a real babe."
"Hush up," Jeremiah said. His eyes were closed, his head and body swaying to the music as he communed with something beyond the stadium, beyond himself. Other teammates like Austin were communing, too, their lips moving in prayer. Quinn took it all in as he sang, one of the few players to do so along with Lleyton. He was in his element, singing full throttle in his brilliant tenor, whooping and hollering afterward.
Lleyton had the fearless ignorance of youth, Quinn thought. He'd been playing as if he had nothing to lose. But Quinn had more than enough fear for him and the rest of his teammates, for he had lost much— Jakarta, his aunt and Tam, his everything. He did not wish to lose the little that remained or the possibility of winning. And that, he knew, was no way to play.
The world was a contrary place, and Quinn along with it. He longed for Jakarta. But maybe that was because he was thousands of miles away. If he were back there now, would he want to be here in this snow globe that was Templars Stadium instead? Would he care as long as he was in Tam’s arms?
The teams met at midfield for the coin toss. It was macho one-upmanship time. Jeremiah, breathing heavily, was like a bull pawing the ground before charging. Everyone else had his hands on his hips, except Quinn and, he supposed, Tam. Quinn couldn’t bear to look at him, that's how afraid he was of seeing hot hatred—or worse, cold indifference—in Tam’s eyes. In a world of cold, better fire than ice, Quinn thought, but what did it matter? They both burned.
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