“Why?” I said.
“Even an idiot knows the difference between exaggeration and lying.”
“I have to think about that. That’s pretty good.”
“I read it in a book by a guy named Wadi Assad,” he said. “Want to borrow it?”
Small world etc. I told him I’d just started my first Wadi Assad book but wouldn’t mind looking at another, and he said he’d bring it along next home game.
I was on my way out—I was taking Floss to late dinner by way of a goodwill gesture—when I ran into the Ranger announcers, Merle Halverson and Toby Scott.
Merle was about thirty years older than Toby and had a wrinkled brow and houndish jowls, and he did play-by-play in a big, sloppy voice that was always five seconds behind the action.
Toby was an ex-player who did so-called color. How do the people with the funniest voices end up in these jobs? Toby Scott would be polite to you if you were looting and burning his home, and his voice sounded like something he’d borrowed from the noisy kid down the street, full of shrill cries and rapid little barks. He was beady-eyed, too. The absolute antithesis.
Anyway, I described my locker-room visitor and they said it had to be Shaver Stevens, and I hit my head with the heel of my hand. Of course, of course.
“Sad story,” Merle said. “The club’s been picking up his bills, but there’s a limit to what they can be expected to do. He’s been out of hockey for six or eight months now.”
“What bills?” I said.
“Doctor.”
“What kind of doctor?”
“I’m not sure anyone knows. Does anyone know, Toby?”
“I don’t think anyone knows,” Toby said.
“Great game, Cleo.”
“Thanks, guys.”
After a tense, picky meal. Floss and I sat over cups of coffee in an after-theater restaurant where occasional figures from sports or the networks came over to say hello and get introduced to me.
She’d had her hair cut short and it would have looked pretty good except it made her seem popeyed, and she was wearing big, vicious rings on her fingers.
Finally I could sense she was working up to discussing the matter openly.
“Did you two have any sex last night?”
“No,” I said.
“None at all? Not any?”
“Honest, Floss, no.”
“What do you think of Archie?”
“Casual type. Nice. Probably wears Ban-Lon Windbreakers.”
“Do you think he’s sexy?”
“What’s sexy. Floss? I don’t know what sexy is anymore.”
“There’s something about Archie. I think it may be his shoulders. They make me just want to hug him and mother him and take him to bed.”
I sensed an opening.
“How long have you two been playing Monopoly?”
“Since I’ve been his agent. Since he was seventeen. For eight years. But we don’t talk about that.”
“Who doesn’t talk about it—you and I?”
“Archie and I. I just get out the board and we play. Nobody speaks. We just roll the dice and go to jail and buy up property and so forth. It was stupid to get out the board last night. But in the past we’ve played straight Monopoly with other people and nothing unseemly happened. He must like you. You must have piqued his interest. This means you can’t ever see him again.”
I ordered two more coffees.
“Why do you call him Master Archie?” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It’s a pet name. I had a dog with that name.”
“A dog?” I said.
“It’s all very complicated, farfetched, and depressing. We don’t talk about it, he and I. That’s the thing with Archie and me. We have always sensed complicity in each other. We are silent accomplices in a strange plot. That’s why I was so taken back by that business with the shirt last night. When he started taking off his shirt, it was as though eight years of silent, dirty, guilty secrets were being laid bare to the world.”
“I didn’t take it that way.”
“How did you take it? How could you take it when a man you’ve just met takes off his shirt in the startled presence of a dear old friend twenty years his senior. Did you have any sex with him at all after I went to my room? None at all?”
“None.”
“I took a pill, put on my sleep mask and went out like a light. I didn’t want to think about anything that might be going on at either side of the board.”
“It was an early night, really.”
“Archie has changed remarkably little in the eight years I’ve known him. It must be all that air travel. It must keep his bones young or something. Time moves at a slower rate once you get to a certain altitude.”
“We just talked a while.”
“Neurotic attractions are the deepest kind. They’re the deepest and best. They encompass the whole spectrum of emotions, from a thrilling sort of forbidden ecstasy that just shakes you to your very foundations, on the one hand, to the utter extremities of blackest shame, on the other.”
“It’s just Monopoly, Floss.”
She made a little pug’s face and shook her head rapidly.
“If you’ve never had an affair that was neurotically grounded, that was tainted in some basic way, you just haven’t lived, Cleo. You don’t know the first thing about life, love, sex, or shame. He was seventeen and so sweet. The clothes were his idea. I had Baltic and Mediterranean avenues with a whole stack of houses, and he said, with that little humorous look he gets, ‘I’m not coming across with a penny’s worth of rent until my mean old lady landlord plunks down a nylon stocking or some such thing right here on this table,’ with that funny little look of his.”
“Droll,” I said.
“That’s it exactly. Droll.”
“If you have a name for him, he must have a name for you.”
“How do you know? What did he say?”
“He didn’t say a thing, Floss. A pet name is usually a two-way thing, that’s all.”
“He calls me his old Aunt Glad. She was a real lady landlord who owned half of downtown Sarasota. She used to give him baths and tickle him.”
I signaled for a waiter to bring the check.
“Well, seeing we’re still friends, I’m glad we had this little get-together.”
“You can’t ever see him again, Cleo. Give me your word.”
“If it’ll make you feel better, I promise.”
“What Archie and I have is something extra special. It is something a person couldn’t find if she went looking for it in every corner of the world for an entire lifetime. It is better than incest.”
The check came.
“It is like incest but better. It is better because there is a small opening, a seam. You can see outside yourselves, if only darkly. There is something primeval about the whole thing. It is like an ancient biblical crime. A least that’s the feeling I sometimes have, and it plunges me into despair. Archie’s understated humor gets me over the worst parts, fortunately. I wish you could have something like this in your own life, but you never will because it is one of a kind.”
The check was so amazing I had to borrow twenty dollars from Floss to cover it.
“I’m scared when he’s with me and scared when he’s gone. Right now he’s about two hours out of Rio. By the time I’m home and in the tub, they’ll be making their descent.”
Tyrone Penny, the basketball star, came over to say hi. Tyrone was so tall he should have carried his own hole around with him, to make the rest of us feel we lived on the same planet. He was fitted out in velvet and fur and kidskin, with a swatch of alligator here and there. Looked pretty awful. But I wish I could have snapped a picture and sent it to my dad, Tom Spencer Birdwell, who always had a weakness for roundball.
Floss and I took a cab to her place. The driver was a New York wacko who had mechanical mice running around on the dashboard and all
over the seats. When we got out, he recognized me and insisted on kissing my hand.
It was only game one and I was already riding high.
The team played well on a short road trip. I had a hand in this, scoring my first goal against the Red Wings and getting a couple of assists two nights later in Philly. The new man Wayne Lassiter did some heavy shelling and our best defenseman Nils Nilsson was blocking shots all over the ice.
The way teams soar and plummet is sometimes mysterious, but I think in our case, to be open about it, my presence had a lot to do with the way we were playing. The media was living in our toilets, which meant we were super aware, always conscious of the spotlight.
Some of the guys complained about all the attention I was getting. Most were okay about it. There was a small group that chose to ignore me. And two or three gave me the long, crooked eye, as though they were members of a snake-handling cult and I’d just wandered into their tent.
I was still dressing and undressing by myself. After another victory, this one at home against the Sabres, Bruce McLeod sort of skittered, accidentally, into my area, nude, in the midst of some horseplay with a bunch of other guys, and I got caught up in the merrymaking and took a friendly little swipe at his cock.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Hey!”
“Just playing around.”
“Hey!”
“Don’t be so touchy.”
“That’s my penis.”
“I know what it is. It’s from the Latin.”
“Well, you can’t do that.”
“It’s locker-room stuff,” I said. “Fergie’s always grabbing your penis.”
“He doesn’t grab it; he grabs at it. There’s a world of difference.”
“He grabs at it, okay. And Dougie grabs at Fergie’s. It’s locker room.”
“Well, if you don’t know the difference between their grabbing at it and you’re grabbing it, I don’t know what to tell you.”
I handed him a towel and he covered up.
“We’re teammates, Bruce. It was just an impulse. I didn’t mean to violate you.”
“Well, okay, I guess, but try to watch it from now on.”
He handed back the towel and walked off. In came our coach, glancing back at Bruce’s ass as he entered. This, of course, was Jean-Paul Larousse, known as J.P. or Jeep. He was a small, attractive, soulful man who always needed a shave and who smoked French cigarettes constantly, even on the bench during a game, leaning over behind the backs of the players so that the TV camera wouldn’t pick him up when it scanned the bench. Jeep had a wife and four children back in Quebec somewhere, and he coughed a lot, and sometimes he lost his temper and his mind and climbed over the barrier behind the bench to attack drunken fans who were taunting him, and then the whole team would have to follow, skates and all, and pull him out of there before he was mauled to death.
In hockey it is important to display solidarity, and in our win at Philly every single one of us had to go side-flopping over the top of that stupid plastic panel in order to rescue Jeep from six or seven people beating on his head. Cops came, punches were thrown and sticks swung, and some elderly gent tried to wedge himself between me and a retaining wall. With the heavy jostling going on, I guess he thought all he had to do was stand there and enjoy the friction.
Anyway, J.P. rubbed his darkish jaw and said, “I have to say when they told me you are coming, I didn’t react too happy. I threw a few things, eh? I mean what do I need with this, a female, with her own body, in this crazy city which will eat us up alive? It is not sympathetic. But I have to say you do pretty good. That Seventeen, he is tough. You play on top of him, like I tell you. I can say this, which the other guys they never listen, but you play the body, you stay on top the man, there is no way you can lose in this game. This game is not hard, it’s easy. What is the name of this game?”
“I want to say hockey, Jeep, but I know that’s not the answer you’re looking for.”
“The name of this game is play the body, take the body, stay on top the man, shadow the man, chop the man’s ankles. They give you a stick, which nobody knows the first thing how to use it. A bunch of wind-up-and-shoots. Who plays this game today? You take the body, no way you gonna lose, I don’t care how many sixty-goal guys they got. It breaks my heart, eh, the way these kids come up here thinking they gotta do nothing but wind up and shoot. You know why it breaks my heart?”
“Because they’re right.”
“I am sick to my body. It tears my guts apart. They’re right.”
“What’s wrong with Shaver Stevens?” I said.
“Who, Shaver? He didn’t take the body. He didn’t play defensive, and he was a defenseman.”
“I don’t mean hockey, Jeep. What’s wrong with him that he has to see a doctor?”
“Who, Shaver? The guys talk, I don’t know. I took him into my office, we smoked some cigarettes. I don’t think he ever smoked before, Shaver. His father was some player. Chucker Stevens. That guy could play. He was a hockey player. No way his son could even carry his skates.”
We said goodnight and I headed home to Floss’s place. I kept thinking about Shaver and about what Floss had told me: When you meet someone who reads Wadi Assad, you’ve found a friend for life.
Shaver was too young to be so sad. But I didn’t know what I could do about it. I knew practically nothing about him and was too new to the team to get overly inquisitive. It’s always extra tragic to come across somebody who’s young, strong, and eager for life, and then to find out he’s got some rare condition or illness. Athletes aren’t supposed to die.
When I got to the apartment. Floss was sitting in the dark watching TV. She was in a robe but was still wearing those big rings. Her hair looked even shorter.
She was watching an old movie about a mummy’s curse and seemed engrossed. I felt compassion for Floss, but couldn’t help wondering whether I was wasting my deep feelings on a basically unhealthy relationship. That’s how she saw it, anyway. Primeval, biblical, neurotic, shameful, and dirty.
But if somebody needs compassion, does it matter what the root cause is? Does compassion have to be earned? What kind of problem merits compassion, and what kind falls short? Where do we draw the line?
In a case like strip Monopoly, which you are playing with a person twenty years younger than you are and which you think is better than incest, it is hard to say what a well-meaning friend should properly feel for you.
“Hey, how’s the movie?”
“Sh, sh, sh. He’s going into the crypt, the damn fool.”
“Did you get your hair cut some more?”
“It was uneven.”
“They took a lot more off.”
“How does it look?”
“Nightmarish,” I said.
“I know. My eyes look twice the size. But I always get my hair cut when I’m extremely tense. Here’s where the hand grabs him by the throat.”
The phone rang and she sprang out of the chair and ran into the next room to answer, slamming the door behind her. A hand did grab the man by the throat and then a commercial came on.
About twelve seconds later, Floss returned and sat back down.
“It’s for you. A man with a curious, far-off voice. I had a great deal of trouble understanding. I think he must be calling from a kiosk in Central Asia.”
I couldn’t guess who it might be. Practically no one knew where I was staying, to give me some peace from the media blitz. I felt a little sad for Floss. Obviously she’d thought it was Archie Brewster.
It was Archie Brewster.
“I disguised my voice,” he said. “She thinks I’m your Uncle Billy, the bachelor uncle who does a lot of traveling and calls from exotic places and comes to stay with your family once every two or three years and who may be just a wee bit gay. Don’t turn around. She has probably followed you out into the hall and is lurking, even as I speak, just beyond the doorway. Speak only in code, my darlin
g, the Free French are on the way.”
“Where are you, Uncle Billy?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “We were heading from Rio to Vancouver to Johannesburg. I know we got to Vancouver because there was hockey on the room TV. I saw you score a goal against the fellows in red. I was naked at the time, so it was extra exciting. But we never made Joburg. The plane’s air conditioning went haywire and the martinis iced up and we had to come down in this tropical ditch. Do you wish I was there?”
“Yes.”
“Do you wish you were here?”
“Yes.”
“No, you don’t. It’s hot, humid, and full of carnivorous insects. We’ve been in the airport about eleven hours. It looks like Lubbock, Texas, but that’s ridiculous. Are you naked?”
“Talk about ridiculous.”
“Is she naked?”
“Be serious, Uncle Billy.”
“Your Uncle Billy is never, ever serious. He brings you funny little hand-painted dolls from Santa Fe. He sends you jokey postcards from the St. Louis Exposition. And if Mom and Dad sometimes whisper about him, it’s only because he does a little tippling in his room. His visits never last very long, and although you’re always sorry to see him go, he passes from your mind in a matter of minutes. And it’s not until you’re a big, grown girl that you realize he always knew how little he meant to everyone.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“I’m only trying to even things up,” he said.
I was thrilled and delighted by the craziness of the gesture. Disguising his voice to his own neurotic lover. Employing a secret identity. It was a terrific routine and it went so well with his travel-weary look and droll mouth and bladelike shoulders.
“Even as I speak, the voice on the Muzak is announcing resumption of my flight. Darling, darling, darling, we’ve been apart too long. It is winter in Vienna and the streets are full of horse-drawn sleighs.”
Floss was lurking in the hallway, although she pretended she was on the way to her bedroom. As I crawled into my own bed, I realized a strange equation was beginning to develop. Floss had a Master Archie, Archie had an Aunt Glad, and now I had an Uncle Billy.
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League Page 3