he's always right
You know what I learned today? The North Star isn't a constant. Did you know that? Because I didn't know that.
Like, the Earth has a tilt to its axis? Which I think we are all aware of. I certainly feel less than straight up-and-down, most times. So, right now, Polaris is the star in the northern sky and does all its good Polaris-dealies, but in a couple hundred years, the tilted axis will point at some new north, and it'll be another star.
Okay, this freaked me out. I'm not gonna lie. All that stuff about celestial navigation. I had a thing with Greek mythology for awhile (not a 'thing,' obviously, because, um, weird, but, like, it was my larval-dork obsession of the year when I was just a lil Candle), and so I can find a bunch of stuff in the sky, mainly just cos I know the stories and all, and that's good stuff to know.
And when we were at art school, every night we stood out on the end of the parking lot, watching the highway traffic (that's southern Californian beauty for you, man), and one of us would always be sure to point out the Big Dipper, I mean, every night we did this. And I taught some kids who were apparently raised by wolves how to find the North Star. We talked about when someday we'd be lost in the desert but we'd find our way out. It was art school. You don't just, like, turn off being philosophical and nostalgic for things that haven't happened yet. I was only sixteen years old, give a kid a break.
The point of which is to say that it's kinda important to me, and I didn't even know it. The idea of the North Star. Something steady, something constant. Something, yes, honestly, it only gets said so much because it's motherfucking true--something to show you how to get home. It's Polaris, you know? It's got meaning. In a couple hundred years it'll be just another bright spot in the sky.
I told you that things that happened in the sky fucked me up. This is what I get for taking astronomy. sigh.
And also, what is up with the hard sciences being all inspirational to me? I'm a political science major, living in Washington, DC, and I used to write the West Wing. The only time I ever got an idea for a story in class was in Earth and Environmental Sciences, when we were learning about the moons of freakin' Jupiter. Makes no sense!
*
Finished rereading 'The World According to Garp' today, while locked out of my room because I am living in a converted hotel and keycards SUCK. You know I was ten years old the first time I read that book? My dad gave it to me. You know how freakishly inappropriate that book is for a ten year old? I think I was spared a lot just because I didn't get half of what was going on.
I still have the same copy, the dumb fucking paperback with the last line quoted on the back, like, what the fuck? I read the last page of a book with my hand covering the last line so that I will not see it before I get there in the course of reading. Right on the fucking back of the book, naked as a jaybird. Pisses me off.
Anyway. Ten years later, and pieces of the cover are missing. Not the whole cover, no no, just bits and pieces. The whole thing's about to liquefy.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Twelfth: Perfect Life
(michigan seems like a dream to me now)
In the winter after 2002, Munson is living in Detroit, because he’ll be a starter next season and he might as well get used to it.
It’s the coldest place on earth. Eric Munson is absolutely sure. Poor southern California boy, thin skin and hair that’s never been frosted with ice while waiting for the bus. His jeans are stained with salt and snow, the cuffs wet-frayed, and his favorite sneakers have been curled with white too, thumping around in the dryer during the news.
He shivers from the memory of it even in his apartment, and pulls Shanda onto his lap when she walks in front of the couch, straight-jacketing his arms around her and mumbling into her shoulder, “I’m cold, I’m freezing, how come you’re so warm?” and she laughs, rubbing circles on his back and not making too much fun of him when he wears his blue-striped beanie inside all day long.
He’s not going to the desert this New Year’s. Shanda’s folks live in Cincinnati, and they’ll be there for the holidays. He calls Chavez to let him know and Chavez doesn’t believe him for awhile.
“Fuck off, you are too coming with me,” Chavez says.
Munson sighs. “Dude, Cincinnati. Family stuff.”
“But you can’t mess with tradition, man, it’s terrible fucking luck.”
Munson looks at their little tree, sparkly and silver and red, bent reflections in the round ornaments, presents stacked under the shedding pine needles, neatly wrapped in the Sunday comics and shiny paper with pictures of Snoopy in a Santa’s hat marching across it. “Got other stuff going on, now, though.”
“I went out there with you right after getting married,” Chavez reminds him, crossing the line from persuasively endearing into just plain whining.
Munson snorts. “Yeah, and how’d that work out for you?”
“Whatever. It’s the best tradition in the world, but if you wanna go to stupid Cincinnati and leave me hanging, go right the fuck ahead,” Chavez answers, only a little bit mean but on his way to more.
It’s a pretty good strategy, because Chavez getting Munson angry is usually the first step to Chavez getting what he wants. But Munson’s not falling for it.
“Oh, knock it off,” Munson tells him wearily. “Or I won’t tell you about how I bought you a plane ticket to come out here the first week of January.”
Eric Chavez pauses. Then he yelps, all former discontent vanished. “Dude! Really?”
Munson nods, and smiles at Shanda as she comes up and presses a mug of coffee into his hand, sits down next to him on the couch. “Yeah, really. You get your ass on a plane and all the wonders of eastern Michigan await you.”
He sets the mug on the coffee table to slip an arm around Shanda’s shoulders and she curves into him.
“All right!” Chavez statics excitedly. “I’m totally there. Reunion in Detroit. No doubt. It’s gonna be awesome, you and me, just wait and-”
“Say hi to Shanda, bro,” Munson says quickly. He holds the phone to her ear and she rolls her eyes at him.
Munson can just barely hear Chavez saying to his wife, “Oh, um. Hi. Hi, Shanda.”
“Hi, Eric,” she says back, and Chavez stutters out some unintelligible stuff, Shanda hmm’ing in vague acknowledgement before she hands the phone back to Munson, whispering, “Thought you said he was good with girls.”
Munson shrugs, tells his friend, “Okay, I’ll get you the specifics pretty soon, see you then.”
“Rock and fucking roll, dude,” Chavez answers, voice bright and eager.
Eric Munson hits the button to end the call, and Shanda winds a leg over his knees, kisses him on the cheek. “That’s a nice thing you’re doing. It’ll be good to see him again.”
“He thinks if we’re not together on New Year’s, we’ll both end up in the Mexican Leagues or something for tempting fate,” Munson says absently, not really listening to her.
“What’s fate got to do with it?” Shanda asks.
Munson twists a bit of her hair around his finger. Their little tree is backed up against the window and there’s a streetlight out there that makes a gilded halo around the head of the snowman that grins around a corncob-pipe at the top. The snowman’s been on top of every Christmas tree of Eric Munson’s life; he nearly had to mortgage his soul to Shelly to convince his sister to let him claim it. Munson’s mouth crooks up a bit, looking at the old snowman with his familiar crepe-paper face.
“Fate’s got everything to do with everything,” Munson tells her.
She laughs lightly, leans her head back against his arm. “Ballplayers,” she says, her face happily exasperated.
They go to Cincinnati and Shanda’s parents are in bed by nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve, leaving Eric and her to watch the countdown on the muted living room television, kissing like you’re supposed to and Eric Munson thinking, ‘every year better than the last,’ champagne-high and certain that he’s just figured out the trick behind a perfect life.
And Eric Chavez comes to Detroit, and after dinner with Shanda near the hotel where Chavez is staying (because he travels in style now, apparently, and anyway the Munsons’ couch is all of four and a half feet long), she sends the two men off, winking and stage-whispering to Chavez, “Try and keep him out of jail, please.”
Chavez doesn’t make any promises, and he’s got an arm around Munson’s neck before Shanda is half a block away and they’re still in her rearview mirror, weaving down the sidewalk. Chavez waits until they get around the corner before licking Munson’s ear, but he does it casually and lets Munson smack his head away without a fight.
“So what do you say, dude,” Chavez says. “You have a good New Year’s without me?”
Munson shifts under Chavez’s arm, his ear tingling and bitten by the wind from the wet stripe laid across by Chavez’s tongue. “Sure.” Chavez’s hold tightens to a half-headlock, and Munson amends, “I mean, of course it sucked. You know. Definitely missed freezing my ass off with you in the middle of Death Valley.”
Chavez smiles nostalgically. “Yeah, it’s a good time. Next year, no excuses, okay?” His arm is still around Munson’s shoulders, his hand fiddling with Munson’s shirt.
“Deal,” Munson says, and thinks about a year from now.
“So, yeah,” Chavez says, finally letting his arm fall off, just bumping into his friend occasionally as they walk. “Things seem to be going pretty all right, for you.” He jerks his head back the way they came, making it clear he’s talking about Munson’s marriage.
“Yeah.”
Chavez glances at him, Munson’s profile against the shop windows, his unfocused after-image reflection following him step for step and looking like a particularly well-defined shadow. Chavez taps their elbows together. “C’mon, dude, you stuck it out for better than a year now, huh?”
Munson wants to tell him that no one’s keeping score, but he just lifts his shoulders.
Chavez figures Munson doesn’t want to talk about it, but that’s never really stopped him before. He pushes his fingers back and forth across his chin, still kind of entranced by his own ability to grow facial hair, and says, “Probably it’s easy for you, because you’re not such a fuck-up.”
Munson looks at him sharply, but Chavez isn’t paying attention, his eyes taking in Detroit and the dirty-tissue snow slushed into the curbs, the white hanging off the sick-looking branches of the city trees.
“I mean, I guess if you don’t fuck around on a girl, she’s not so much gonna leave you in the middle of the night.”
Munson stops. It takes Chavez a moment to realize and turn back to face him. Munson’s got his hands jammed into his coat pockets, and his head is down. He’s looking for quartz pieces in the sidewalk, and he asks, “What are you trying to do, Chavvy?”
Chavez tips his head to the side. “What do you mean?”
Munson raises his eyes and he looks pissed off, his harmless, well-liked-by-kids-and-old-people face made tough like he always wanted to be when they were little.
“You don’t think we’re gonna end up back at your hotel room at some point tonight?”
Chavez shrugs, looking away blamelessly. There’s something tightening in his chest, below his heart, caged into his lungs. “Maybe.”
He did plan on it, he’s been thinking about it all night, getting Munce back and the door deadbolted and chained behind them. Munson looks good, fresh and strong and warm in his soft layers, though Chavez has seen him shivering and blowing on his hands all night. Eric Chavez keeps picturing what it’ll be like when he gets Munson stripped down to just his plain white undershirt, all that wool and cotton littering the floor, and he thinks that he’ll leave Munson in that last slender T-shirt for awhile, until Munson’s clawing for skin on skin and Chavez’s mouth is dry from the fabric.
Munson scoffs a laugh. “I’d put my money on it,” he says caustically, clenching his fists in his coat pockets.
Chavez moves to him. There’s no streetlight and this isn’t California and no one knows Eric Munson yet, so they’re safe. He touches Munson’s chest, trips his hand up and snakes under his collar, his fingers cold for a moment on Munson’s shoulder and then gone again.
“Okay, so what?” Chavez asks low. “We did the last time we saw each other. And it’s. It’s been awhile, man.”
The last time, the last time was . . . when? Before the playoffs. Before the streak. Christ, not since July. When the A’s were in Cleveland and Munson came up from Toledo. The last time they saw each other, and some farm road outside town, dead-ended and the summer picking up strength in the weight of the trees. Chavez and Munson in the backseat of Munson’s not-nearly-big-enough car, a cliché again, a classic, slamming knees on the door and the windows fogged like a movie. Too hot outside to take a breath and both of them drenched with sweat, sliding effortlessly against each other and Eric Munson saying, “This car’s gonna smell like you forever,” and Eric Chavez laughing, squeaking his elbows on the vinyl, his hands looking for purchase on Munson’s hips and his shoulders and his neck, slicking off every time.
Chavez is trying to think if anything’s changed. July in Ohio and January in Detroit, and it might as well be two different planets. They lost in the first round again; maybe Munson thinks he’s cursed now like everybody is saying. But Munson’s not even gone through his rookie year yet, the fuck can he say about losing in October?
Munson rubs his hand fast over his eyes. “Look, I know. Obviously I didn’t get you to leave California for Michigan in fucking January and not expect that we’d, um, you know, the stuff we do sometimes.” Munson gives himself a mental flick on the forehead. It’s been eight fucking years and he can still barely say it out loud.
He continues, looking to get angry again, “But would you mind not praising me for my devotion to my wife while we’re doing it?”
Chavez’s eyes get a little bit bigger, and he steps back. “Dude, that wasn’t . . . I wasn’t meaning to . . . I was just talking, man, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Munson sighs, staring off over Chavez’s shoulder. “I know you didn’t. I know you think it doesn’t count.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Chavez says, confused. He thought they’d settled this.
Munson’s getting pretty fucking tired of Eric Chavez playing dumb with him. But they haven’t started drinking yet and he’s not brave enough to soberly ask if Chavez really thinks they’re not in love with each other anymore. If Chavez really thinks this is the kind of thing that ends.
Munson wishes for about a tanker truck of liquor, without it he’s such a coward he can barely look his best friend in the face. “Fine. It doesn’t count.”
Chavez eyes him distrustfully. Munson’s twisting his hands in his pockets, Chavez can see the turns of his wrists, the face of his watch against his pulse. “You said you’d tell me if you weren’t okay.”
Munson shakes his head. “I will. I mean, I am. Okay. I’m fine. I just don’t want to think about Shanda when I’m thinking about you.”
“Sure. No problem.” Chavez whips his hand around in the air. “Not thinking about her anymore.” Munson’s still not looking at him. Eric Chavez roughs his hands up and down his arms. “It’s cold in Detroit.”
Munson, recognizing an overt change of subject when he hears one, does him one better: “What’d you end up doing for New Year’s, anyway?”
Chavez smiles. “I went out to John Muir. Or, you know, past it. Stinson Beach, remember?”
Munson nods. Stinson Beach is over the Golden Gate Bridge and just beyond the frame of Redwoods National Park at John Muir Woods, where the only scent in the air is the trees that will outlive everyone, beats out even the ocean.
The first time they went out there, the two of them, not too long into Chavez’s first season with the A’s, they had to ask directions at a twenty-four hour Safeway, one in the morning and the slapping echo of their sneakers on the linoleum, the two cashiers mostly asleep and Chavez buying a mess of candy, his backpack loose on his shoulders and Munson could hear the one cashier saying to the other as they walked out, “These fucking high school kids.”
“Yeah, the fireworks, there were boats out past the bridge,” Chavez says. “You could kind of see the ones from on the bay, but it was over the hill, you know? But the fireworks over the ocean, they were even better, I swear. It was, like, an aircraft carrier or something. Huge. Not too far offshore. I could hear the people laughing sometimes when it got quiet.”
Munson can see it perfectly. “Who’d you go with?” he asks.
They’re walking again, and it’s cold enough to snow. Munson isn’t used to it yet, he keeps thinking that each snowfall will be the last. Chavez shrugs. “Nobody.”
Munson glances at him with impatience, suspicion. Eric Chavez never does anything alone. “It’s not like you have to lie to me, man.”
Chavez looks at him blankly. “I’m not.”
When Chavez is lying, he can’t keep his hands still, it’s his dead giveaway and Munson never told him, because even before their whatever, they still played poker together sometimes and Munson liked winning.
But right now Chavez’s hands are in his pockets, because it’s a Midwest winter and Chavez didn’t think to bring gloves. Which doesn’t mean he’s not lying. Munson sees Mark Mulder with sand in his hair, Barry Zito barefoot with his pants rolled up to the knee, kicking through the surf. It’s a pretty-boy team and Eric Chavez certainly has something to do with that.
“Look, do what you want, dude, I was just fucking wondering,” Munson says, and he thinks that maybe it’s not cold enough to snow, maybe there will just be more of that ice rain, the kind where if it hits skin you start to bleed, thin and red on your face, your hands.
Chavez stops walking again. It’s taking them fucking forever to get to wherever it is they’re going, all this stopping and starting. “What the fuck, man? I’m not allowed to watch fireworks alone?”
Christ, but he’s tired of this. He wants to kick a parking meter or something, but he’d feel stupid, so he just answers, “You’re allowed to, I just seriously doubt that you did.”
Chavez’s eyebrows pull together. “You got something you want to say, Munson?” and Chavez’s voice is dangerously flat.
Munson shakes his head, but his mouth doesn’t agree and he hears himself asking, “Did you ever fuck Mark Mulder?”
Chavez’s face clears and he looks comically surprised for a moment. He wonders if Munson knows, but how could he ever know? Nothing even really happened. He’s briefly caught between guilt and anger and his stupid little-boy tendency to confess everything and beg forgiveness, and none of those are a very good choice, so Chavez just picks anger and runs with it.
“Can’t believe you’d ask me that,” he answers with his eyes sharp and sparking, because there’s some kind of gray area where they’re not supposed to talk about other guys. Especially since Chavez is pretty sure he’s the only one of the two of them who ever actually does anything with other guys. But it’s weird, they don’t talk about that, they never have.
Munson’s hands are balled up in the pockets of his coat, and Chavez didn’t answer his question and Munson’s not gonna let him get away with that. “Why not?” he says tightly. “’Cause you did?”
Chavvy wants to push him, see him ricochet off the wall and maybe hit his head and that hard-boiled cracking sound. It’s really fucking cold out here, he doesn’t want to take his hands out of his pockets.
“’Cause you’re a fucking asshole! And ‘cause it’s none of your fucking business!”
Munson sneers, thinking about Eric Chavez sitting on his bed and touching his hand to Munson’s back when they were sixteen years old and nothing important had happened. “You used to keep me updated on who you fucked whether I wanted to know or not, motherfucker.”
Chavez turns away from him, not wanting to see his face anymore. He tracks his eyes over the street, trying to breathe and maybe not punch his best friend, and Munson can see the wiry muscles in his forearms tensing and relaxing as his fists tighten, then release, bulging against the denim of his jeans. How the fuck can he make a fist inside his jeans pocket, it seems impossible.
“No, all right?” Chavez answers, back to confession now like he’s so good at, and his voice is brittle. “I never fucked him. Not for lack of trying, but he . . .he didn’t want shit to do with me.”
Munce is a little thrown, an unthinkable thing in his mind, somebody turning down his perfect best friend. “Really?” he asks without thinking.
Chavez glares at him. “Fuck you, Munce. If I was gonna lie, I’d tell you he blows me every hour on the fucking hour.”
Because Munson’s never been the kind of guy who thinks before he speaks, running his fucking mouth and wrecking everything, he isn’t too surprised to find himself asking recklessly, “What about Zito?” thinking about his cast at the small of Zito’s back and holding them together, thinking about Zito’s Bazooka Joe and Gatorade taste in Eric Chavez’s mouth.
Chavez’s eyes flash. This is so far beyond cool. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near this conversation. They don’t talk about guys, they never have, goddamn it. “I’m gonna hit you in a second, Munson, I swear to God I am.”
Munson thinks that sounds just fine, and he steps forward. “Just fucking try it,” he says, and he’s ready, adrenaline burring and he thinks crazily that it’s been nine years since they last fought, wonders if Chavez still leads with the right, or maybe not, maybe he’s taken to feinting, dancing, maybe they won’t be so evenly matched this time. Munson tastes metal in the back of his throat, the smell of iron and cigarette smoke in the air and the fog of his breath pouring out.
But Chavez doesn’t take a swing at him, not yet. “What about Brandon Inge?” Chavvy mimics brutally. “What about Halter? What about Dmitri Young, bitch?”
“Fuck off,” Munson says, his temples feeling vised, the bones of his skull about to give under the pressure, and it’s not the same, not the same at all. He’s only been with the Tigers a season and barely even played, and Chavez has already spent a lifetime with his team.
Chavez widens his eyes dramatically, and he’s so mad, this is so unfair. “Well, what the fuck, Munce? We’re allowed to talk about my teammates but not yours?”
“My teammates don’t look like yours do!” Munson cries furiously, forgetting that he’s got better arguments than that one. “My teammates didn’t just step out of a fucking jeans commercial!”
Chavvy stares at him in disbelief, then chafes a hard cold laugh. “This insecure act of yours is totally fucking played, man, so just get over yourself, for Christ’s sake.”
Munson’s face is warped and he definitely wants to get into a fight now, beat this out of them both. “Hey man, I’d just like to know, all right? If you’re gonna be fucking around with me, I think I got a right to know whose seconds I’m picking up.”
He watches, frozen in place and hysterical, as something murderous slams across Chavez’s face, before Chavvy’s eyes pull closed and he hauls himself under control with all the strength in his body, and the visible effort of it, the sheer force of will that keeps Chavez from hitting him in that moment, stuns Munson, throws him down.
Chavez thinks about the months between now and the backseat of Eric Munson’s car outside Cleveland. He thinks very quickly about blood and mouth-shaped bruises and how much it would hurt to punch someone with the weather this cold.
He tells Munson with all his anger raked into each word, “Not Zito. Not Zito, not Hudson, not Scott Hatteberg, not Tejada, not Mark Ellis, and not Art fucking Howe!”
And for a second they’re motionless, on the edge of beating the shit out of each other, then Munson’s lips quirk involuntarily, his expression twisting halfway between revulsion and amusement, and his hands drop to his sides, the tension shrinking out of him.
“Dude, Howe? Ew,” he says dryly.
Eric stares at him for a moment, and Munson sees the smile coming from way far off, sees Chavez fighting against it and trying to hang on to his rage, but it’s no good, and his face breaks open, grinning and then laughing, and Munson’s laughing too, so hard he can’t breathe.
Chavez stumbles over to him and slings an arm around his back, banging his forehead on Munson’s shoulder and howling with it. Munson crumples under his weight, sitting hard on the curb, and Chavez follows him down, arms around each other’s necks and shoes in the gutter, laughing until they’re crying, holding each other up.
After a long time, they settle, the laughs tapering off, leaving Chavez with a bad case of the hiccups and Munson with a woozy unbalanced feeling carbonating in his head. Chavez is leaning against him, tucked under Munson’s arm, his body jerking with every hiccup.
Eventually Chavvy sighs, resting his head briefly on Munson’s chest, the push of Munson’s collarbone in the depression of Chavez’s temple, and then he pulls away. Chavez blows out a breath, his face red-splotched, and scrubs his hands through his hair.
“Okay, so, pretty much, stop being a dick,” Chavez says, pinning Munson down with a knowing glance, Munson coloring ashamedly. “I’m not sleeping with my teammates.” He shrugs. “They’re not really mentally stable enough to sleep with.” He elbows Munson in the side, edging a grin. “Not that you’re any better, understand, but I guess I know your version of crazy pretty well by now.”
Munson nods, beating out a rhythm on Chavez’s arm. “I’d hope so.” He pauses. “And, sorry. About that.”
Chavez likes the fold of Munson against him, and his shoes are getting soaked from the melting snow pushed against the curb. He sighs. “And I’m sorry about the other thing.”
Munson slants a look at him. “What other thing?”
Chavez gestures abstractly with his hand, his knuckles chapped. “You know. Didn’t mean to make you feel bad. About this. ‘Cause of Shanda.”
Munson exhales. “It’s cool.” He takes his hand off Chavez’s arm, but stays tilted against him.
Chavez looks carefully, but he can’t see anything in Munson’s face, just sleepy and his eyes bloodshot from laughing so hard.
“If you told me to stop, I would,” he says, and then wants to chase that away as easily as he could the cloud of his breath.
Munson bends into himself, rolls his forehead on the nape of Chavez’s neck. He doesn’t answer.
Chavez raps his fingers without rhythm on Munson’s knee. Munson’s nose is against the side of his neck and it’s icecube cold, but he doesn’t move.
“You still want to come back to my hotel room with me?”
Munson’s breath pauses for a moment, and then there’s a slight movement, just a tuck on the back of his neck, but Chavez can recognize it as a nod. Chavez reaches back and puts his hand on Munson’s head, red frost-bit ears, shaggy hair. He curls his fingers and Munson hums, sits up straight.
He looks at Chavez, looking resigned and all the miles between Detroit and Oakland in his eyes. “You’re like a bad habit,” Munson tells him, smiling just enough that Chavez takes it for what it means.
Chavez smiles back. “Everybody’s gotta have one, man.”
Sighing, Munson pulls his eyes away and answers, “Guess so.”
Chavez stands, offers Munson his hand. By the time they’re down to T-shirts and struggling with belt buckles, it’s snowing again.
*
(you say you’re looking for something to believe in)
Eric Chavez, back home in California, is not as dumb as he makes himself out to be.
He’s got an eye for the strike zone that gets better every year, and sliders don’t fool him, and no one steals third anymore, but he still plays behind the bag when there’s a runner on, just in case, you know. It’s the only kind of knowledge he’s ever needed.
He’s stupid-cocky-proud about not having gone to college, because in ten years he’ll be set for life and fuck if he never learned how to solve a differential equation, since when does that ever come in handy.
But he knows some stuff.
Eric Munson is married and happy, and has never really been gay, just in love. Eric Chavez tricked him at some point, pulled off the greatest prank in the history of the world, somehow convincing Munson that they felt the same way about each other, but these days Chavez is kinda thinking that maybe it was just him, because what seventeen year old turns down a blowjob even if it’s from his best friend, and what best friend could let the person he cared for the most be in love alone? It was just cruel charm and Eric Chavez, talking and wheedling and arguing his way into Munson’s heart.
Just chipping away until Munson got tired of fighting and gave in to him, gave him what he wanted. What he doesn’t want anymore.
It’s all Chavez’s fault, he knows that too. They pretend it was Munson who fucked up the first time, pushing him away when Steve Scogin walked in on them, but that’s pretty transparently bullshit. Another convenient lie they share. Eric Chavez wouldn’t take him back and wouldn’t forgive him, and that’s worse than what Munson did, worse by far.
He knows that now.
He also knows that Munson would leave his wife for him if he asked. But Eric Chavez won’t ask. Not directly, anyway. Not with words.
He knows it’s a fucking cop-out, waiting for Munson to tell him to stop, because Munson will never tell him to stop. Munson can’t say no to him, he never could. Eric Chavez likes power and he likes being in control, but they’re best friends and he shouldn’t be thinking about it in those terms. If he really loved Eric Munson, he’d just leave him alone.
But Eric Chavez, not that dumb and not that nice, is also not that strong.
Chavez gets away with being this fucked up, because he’s not supposed to be smart enough to fix it.
Anyway. In Oakland, February is the same as March is the same as April. Before the summer heat sinks claws in, the spring is monochromatic and unchanging. Every day is bayside pretty and flashing with disinterest, and everything looks shaped out of wax.
Eric Chavez is killing time until the baseball season starts again, and he can’t really believe they didn’t get out of the first round last year. They were blessed. They were supposed to go the distance. Maybe he should have seen it coming. The Twins, after all, ended the streak. So, it was only right.
Mark Mulder doesn’t have much to say to him much anymore. He’s moved down to Scottsdale for the off-season, and Chavez teases him because that’s where Mulder’s mom lives now, but Mulder just tells him to shut the fuck up and starts talking about college football.
It’s not, like, weird between them or anything. They’re both just pretty tired. They’ve each lost interest in messing with the other’s head, which maybe means they’re maturing or something. But Chavez knows they’ll still live together next year, find another place in the hills, and they’ll still argue petulantly about whether to play Halo or Grand Theft Auto, and spit Gatorade at each other in the kitchen, and do rock-paper-scissors to decide who’ll pay for the cable each month, so maybe they’re not so adult after all.
Long winter-spring days and quiet breakfasts at noon, and Mulder doesn’t return his calls all the time, or Chavez doesn’t pick up when he sees Mulder’s name on the display, but it’s not a problem. Chavez has pretty much given up on Mulder. Mulder was never really worth all that Chavez made him out to be, anyway. They’re friends, and once the season starts they’ll have stuff to talk about again, so he’s not too worried.
Chavez does lonely really well. He drives around without destination, and he listens to music out on the balcony of his little one-bedroom apartment with the blue walls, and he rotates between five different bars, because he doesn’t want to be that guy who’s got nothing better to do than go to the same place every night. He wanders around a lot, he gets lost for the satisfaction of finding his way back.
Chavez gets into conversations with the insane homeless people down in Jack London Square, the ones who sleep in doorways and on park benches, and spend their days talking about the Messiah with their backs to the water.
Every day, he waits for Eric Munson to call him and say, “look, this is fucking stupid, let’s just be done, okay?” It’s coming, any day now, Chavez is sure of it. They fought on a sidewalk in Detroit and then fucked in a hotel room and Eric Chavez remembers gold in his mouth, Eric Munson’s hand on his face and his wedding ring clinking against Chavez’s teeth.
It all seems inevitable, at this point. Chavez knows he should be ready for this, but he’s not, he’s still so fucking scared. He doesn’t understand how he could be running away for so long and still be in the same place.
He starts going to early-morning services when he finds himself awake at five in the morning for no particular reason. He stays away from his regular Sunday church during the week, for the same reason that he doesn’t go to the same bar two nights in a row. He goes to Anglican churches, Presbyterian churches, Baptist churches, Mormon churches (only once, though, because Mormons are fucking crazy), anywhere with a cross above the door and pews inside.
He’s safe in there, you know. Watched over, protected, all that stuff. He thinks about crossroads a lot and the weight of twenty pieces of silver. The off-season’s always been strange and unwanted, out of place, one thing over and the next not begun yet. He feels like something’s gonna happen, pretty soon.
Having come to religion comparatively late in his life, Eric Chavez doesn’t understand how all these sects can be considered so different from each other. The words are the same, the stories, the lessons. The faces of the ministers and the shuffle of the yawning congregation getting to their feet for a prayer. There’s always a grandma-looking old woman at the back of the church who smiles kindly at him when he comes in. There’s always a little kid sleeping scrunched against one of his parent’s sides, mouth open and cheeks scrubbed pink. The certainty of God is constant wherever he finds himself.
One morning, he goes to a Catholic church, and it’s still dark when he goes in, the dawn kaleidescoping in through the stained glass as the sermon lulls over the sparse devout. He kneels and takes Communion, the wafer dissolving like air on his tongue, and he watches everybody else, moves his hand over his chest the way they do.
And when he goes into the little confessional booth, webbed wooden screen and the smell of velvet dust all around him, he honestly doesn’t know where to begin.
He knows well enough from the movies to say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” but that’s as far as his patchwork faith can take him.
“I, uh, I’m not a Catholic. So I . . . don’t know how to do this.”
The man, the shadow-profile behind the screen, nods and says, “Well, why don’t you start with why you’re here?”
Chavez moves his tongue over his teeth, counting. “I couldn’t sleep.”
Something rustles as the priest shifts. “So why aren’t you watching infomercials?”
He smiles a little bit. “Look, can I. I can say stuff to you, right? Even though I’m not a Catholic, that’s cool?”
“Of course.”
Chavez pushes his fingers into his T-shirt, pulls out the skinny chain. He bounces the cross in his palm, and the old light through the web of the screen makes linked gray diamonds across his hand and arm.
“I think I might be in love with my best friend again.”
And it’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud to someone who’s not Eric Munson.
Even tone, unsurprised, the priest’s heard worse. “Again?”
Chavez nods, watching the cross trip across the shell-cut scar. “When we were kids, we were, you know, like, together. Not really, but as much as we could be. Then we . . . weren’t anymore. And then we fell back in love, but it wasn’t any good, that time, we just kept fucking each other up.” He pauses. “Um. Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t swear.”
The priest chuckles low. “You say it however you want to say it, son.”
Chavez rubs his thumb on the cross, imprinting the shape of it in his skin. “Anyway. It was really bad, the second time. Because I . . . I got married, but we . . . didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. And then I got divorced, and said that we should just sleep together but not be in love with each other. And I thought that was working pretty well, except my best friend got married too, and now, I, I. I don’t know. I got no right, and I should just let it go, but I can’t.”
“And you think this means you’ve fallen back in love?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Chavez says, gold winking and dust in the light. “It was an accident.”
“How do you feel, having a relationship with someone who’s married? Especially after being married yourself, knowing it from both sides?”
“I feel like I’m going to hell,” Chavez whispers.
The priest pauses. “You’re sure you’re not a Catholic?”
Chavez surprises himself by laughing, jarring in the tiny room. He can almost hear the priest smiling, and Chavez wants to see his face, because he sounds like a good man, and maybe there’s a shortage of good men in Eric Chavez’s life right now.
“You feel that way about it, but that’s not a good enough reason for you to end it?” the priest asks gently.
Chavez puts his hands over his eyes, but only for a second. “I’m not . . . I’m not a very good person, Father. I know how wrong this is, maybe even worse than when I was the one who was married, and I’m the one who’ll have to say it’s over, but. I think about never getting to touch him again and it just fucking terrifies me.”
The priest is silent for a shade longer than he should have been, and then he says, sounding like Chavez might have managed to surprise him after all, “Your best friend’s a man?”
Chavez winces, because he knows what Christians think about people like him. “Oh, um. Yeah. I . . . should have told you that earlier. He’s. Yeah, a, uh, a guy. Yeah. Sorry.”
The priest sighs. “I guess that complicates things.”
Chavez waits for him to go on and say all the stuff he’s supposed to say, the affirmations that Eric Chavez is damned, the catholic nature of this weakness and the cities turned to salt and ash, but the priest just falls quiet, and Chavez thinks maybe he’s been selling the men of faith short.
“Yeah. I mean, if he was a girl, I woulda married him about fifteen times by now. Or, well, just the one time, I guess. ‘Cause it would have lasted.”
“So the only reason you haven’t been able to make this work is because it’s a homosexual relationship?”
Chavez winces again. He hates that word. It still sounds like a disease to him. “There’s other stuff too.”
“Like what?”
Chavez scratches at his knee. His back is starting to hurt from being strictly propped against the box’s tight walls. “Well, we, we’re not . . . what we do, for a living, it’s not really . . . we’ve never been able to tell anybody. Or be, you know, out like that. Like regular gay people are allowed to be. And we never will be, either. What we do . . . it’s more important than what we mean to each other.”
“And he feels the same?”
“Sure.” But Chavez stops, in his head, and considers that for a moment. Munson would give up his marriage, he’s fairly sure of that, his potential to be happy like everybody else is happy, and how much different is that from giving up baseball?
But even if Munson could give up baseball, Chavez is pretty sure he, himself, couldn’t.
“Well.” The priest sounds resigned. “You know what you’re doing is wrong. You know that ending it is the proper thing, if only for the sake of your friend’s marriage, and for your own peace of mind. I think you came here looking for an alleviation of your guilt, and if you want me to forgive you, I will, but that won’t fix anything. It’s not me you need to absolve you.”
Chavez closes his eyes. His throat feels too tight. “Yes,” he whispers.
“Yes, what?” the priest asks, confused.
“Forgive me. Please.”
The priest hesitates, the shadow of his head shaking, moving over Chavez’s face. Chavez clenches his hands into fists and he doesn’t know why he came in here, he doesn’t have this kind of elaborate belief.
The priest exhales, and says, half-reluctantly with his hand moving in the shape of a cross through the wooden screen, “In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti. You are forgiven, my son.”
Eric Chavez waits for a long time, but no, that doesn’t make him feel better.
*
(unmatched shoe on the sidewalk)
See, the difference between them, the really important difference that’s not the separation between ten and sixty-two and not the distance between Oakland and Detroit, not Eric Chavez being perfect or Eric Munson being happy, not the difference between being ten-percent gay and being gay for just one other person, the most important difference between them is that Eric Chavez has been in love with Eric Munson three times, and Eric Munson has been in love with Eric Chavez only once.
It’s important. It might not seem it, but it is. Eric Munson is all about longevity, and the force of credibility that comes from years of experience. There was a point, sometime, maybe before Arlington, when it occurred to him that he’s in love with Chavez because he’s always been in love with Chavez. He wondered, at the time, if that shouldn’t be a red flag, warning sign, danger alarm, but then he forgot about it because Eric Chavez agreed to sleep with him again, which kind of took priority in his mind.
And anyway, it doesn’t really matter why you’re in love with a person. The means don’t have anything to do with the ends.
Eric Munson is nervous and excited all the time now, because he’s going to be a rookie in another month, he’s going to be a major league baseball player, for real, not on the bench and not holding the lease on his apartment in Toledo. It did take him longer than he thought it would, and it was harder than he’d ever dreamed, but he’s almost there now, and he’s sure that once he sees his name on the Opening Day roster, he’ll recover the power and the talent that abandoned him in West Michigan, and Jacksonville, and Toledo.
He just needs to get to the major leagues, get there for good, and he’ll live up to it. He’s sure.
The approaching season distracts him. It’s easy not to think about Eric Chavez all that often, because he’s got other stuff to worry about. And he loves his wife. She’s wonderful. But that really doesn’t have anything to do with anything.
The phone rings at three in the morning and Eric Munson doesn’t wake up. He’s used to this, phone calls and visits in the thick of the night, the dull of the morning. No point in being annoyed by it, after he’s had all this practice.
Shanda reaches over him, soft weight on his chest, and mumbles with her chin on his arm, “’lo?” Eric Munson stirs, pulls her closer instinctively. She says into the phone, “Just a minute, Eric,” and Eric Munson wakes up. She tucks the phone against his ear and kisses his shoulder, rolling over and falling back asleep so quick she won’t remember a moment of it in the morning.
Munson, his eyes still glued shut and his voice sleep-muffled, says, “Dude?”
Eric Chavez is on the roof of some apartment building in San Francisco, which is a bad idea because he’s also really really drunk.
“Munce,” he answers and his eyes are shut too, his feet swinging off the edge of the building. He went to a party, a friend of a friend and their apartment is many stories below him, and he’s not exactly sure what he’s doing on the roof. He can see both bridges, but only the very tips of the Golden Gate, peeking out over the hills, the Presidio, the gray-brown stones and the musket-holes in the walls of the fort.
“What’s up, man?” Munson asks, rubbing a hand over his face and he’s still more asleep than awake.
“I’m very drunk,” Chavez says carefully, because he hates it when he slurs, he sounds dumb.
Munson groans, talking real low to keep from waking Shanda back up. “Drunk-dialing, Chavvy? I thought we had a rule about that.”
Chavez thinks about that for a long time. They’ve got a lot of rules. They don’t follow most of them, but whatever. It’s cold up here, the wind’s pretty bad. The clouds are moving across the city so fast, pulled aside like a curtain. “Um. There’s, a um. This roof? That I’m on? It’s San Francisco. I can see . . . a lot of stuff.”
He swings his legs some more, his heels kicking against the side of the building. He watches his feet swinging and one of his shoelaces is untied. He gets really worried about that, that his shoe will fall off and he’ll never be able to find it and he’ll have to go home with only one shoe and everybody will think he’s crazy and what kind of a person can’t even keep track of their shoes, shoes are easy, always right there at the ends of your legs.
“Stay away from the edge,” Munson tells him, yawning.
Chavez snickers, his mouth feeling too-slick and coated and a burn of liquor in the back of his throat. “Too late, dude.”
Munson shifts closer to the end of the bed, away from Shanda. “If you fall, I’m gonna make so much fun of you at your funeral, I swear.”
Chavez grins, little rubber thumps of his heels on the concrete. “So sweet, Munson, what a sweet guy.”
“How come you called, man? Is this just random, because if it is, please let’s do it in the morning.”
Chavez is following each street with his eyes, lined with sentinel streetlights and converging into the blocky mess of downtown. He thinks about gold, houses falling down the hills.
“I wanted to tell you something. It was . . . important.” He squints. He’s trying to remember.
Munson sighs. “Dude-”
Chavez scrapes up a handful of gravel and siphons it out over the edge. “No, it was really important.”
“If it’s so important, you’ll still remember it in the morning.”
The gravel gone, clicky tumbling onto the sidewalk fifteen floors south, Chavez brushes his hand off on his pants and looks down at it. There are a bunch of small red indentations in his palm, corners and punctures, peppered with pieces of grit.
“But if I’m not drunk. I’ll never tell you.”
That wakes Munson up a little bit more. He glances at Shanda, sleeping gently with her hair over her face, and reluctantly slips out of bed, going into the living room. He sits down on the couch and it’s drafty enough that he wishes he’d brought a blanket out with him.
“You don’t have to get drunk to tell me stuff, Eric,” he says, but that’s not true.
Chavez’s face does a weird half-collapsing thing, and the TransAmerica Building makes him think of Egypt, or maybe Las Vegas.
“So, listen.”
Munson waits, but when Chavez doesn’t say anything else, he prods with a tinge of impatience, “Three in the morning in Michigan, Chavez.”
“I’m on this roof.”
Munson blows out a breath. “We’ve covered that already.”
“It’s important,” Chavez insists, because it is, this roof, with the wind the way it is, and the city, this city. It’s so beautiful he thinks he’s crying a little bit, which is kind of strange.
“I, um. If I . . . Let’s say, like, that I had . . . a thing. Where I wanted you around. All the time.”
Munson’s eyes get a bit bigger. “What are you talking about?”
“I keep going to churches,” Chavez tells him pointlessly.
“Eric, what are you talking about?” Munson asks, demanding and starting to get panicked like he’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be.
Chavez blinks fast and yeah, he’s crying, he can feel the tear and taste it when it hits his mouth. It’s the wind, it’s this city. There are things he can say to Eric Munson that will keep Munson from leaving him alone, he knows that for sure. It doesn’t necessarily have to be true, it’s just got to sound good.
“If I said. If I said, ruin your life. For me. If I said, no one gets to have you but me. Because, um. Third time. It’s important, because it’s the third time.”
He pushes a hand through his hair and almost loses his balance, gripping the edge of the roof and the fly of his mind, the dizziness in his stomach and his chest. “I just, I don’t. I don’t want you to be in Detroit anymore.”
Eric Munson closes his eyes and he doesn’t know why he’s always closing his eyes when Eric Chavez is trying to fuck him over, it never helps. “I’m gonna . . . it’s my rookie year, man. Where else could I be?”
“Here. Right here. With me. It’s a . . . it’s a good roof. Munson. It’s a really good roof, I can see everything.”
“You’re drunk. You’re drunk and this isn’t fair,” Munson tells him, fingers against his eye. Get angry, get numb. “You know how fucking unfair this is.”
Chavez shakes his head and the city’s built of lights and he’s got tears in his eyes. “No, see. That’s right. You’re right. You’re not supposed to say yes. I’m supposed to ask, and. You’re not supposed to say yes. And then I. I get mad at you and say it’s over. So we don’t have to worry about it, anymore.”
“What,” Munson says, but he doesn’t know what he wants to ask. Stupid fucking Eric Chavez thinks he can just sit on a roof in San Francisco and do this. Detroit’s too far and Munson’s trying to be a good man.
“So it’s over?” he finally manages, and that isn’t what he should have said, because that makes it too easy for Chavez, when all he’s got to do is say yes.
Chavez breaks, shivers, and his shoe falls off. “Oh,” he says in an odd echo-tone, watching his shoe flip down and bounce on the sidewalk. His foot is immediately cold, and he curls his toes, tucks it against the back of his leg. His balance is worse, now.
“None of this happened like I thought it would,” Chavez tells him, spreading out cold and the yawn of gravity looming around him. “I wasn’t in love with you anymore. I wasn’t, I’m not. Except. Ah. Maybe a little.”
Eric Munson hits himself on the head a couple of times, fist to skull, thunk thunk, and this is the kind of thing that always happens at three in the morning, isn’t it, with half a continent between them and no one keeping watch to make sure Eric Chavez doesn’t go too close to the edge.
“It’s the third time,” Eric Chavez says, sounding amazed. “I never should have even once, but I did it three times.”
“It’s just once, Ricky,” Munson whispers, but Chavez isn’t listening.
“So, you see. See, see, Munce, see. I’m supposed to say it’s over. But. No. Because I . . . want you here. And I lost my shoe, just now.” He wiggles his toes against the back of his knee. “The priest said I shouldn’t. It’s not right, yeah. But, um. If you don’t mind. Or even if you do. Because I’m no good, and. I’m gonna just go ahead and keep being bad for you, if that’s okay.”
Munson sags back into the couch and his hand is still over his face. “It’s okay.” Not the kind of thing that ends. Best friends, best friends don’t know how to say goodbye.
Chavez smiles, his cheeks wet and his nose stuffed up. “Munce, you’re gonna have to say no to me, someday.”
“Yeah.” He takes his hand down and his arms are scrawled with goosebumps, the bend of his elbow and it’s probably not colder in here than it is on the unfamiliar roof in San Francisco where he can see Eric Chavez as a cardboard cut-out against the skyline with the buildings lifting him up like hands. “But not tonight.”
Chavez looks out and the bridges and the bay, the triangles and more important the diamonds, and the gnarled cords of the streets, a steep place, a clearing, somewhere flat and somewhere cold and the wind hard enough to blow the tears off his face.
“I think I love it here, Munson,” Chavez says. “This place. I’m gonna fall off this roof in a second, but. It’s still so beautiful.”
And the difference between them is that Chavez has been in love three times and Munson only once. The difference between them is that Eric Chavez thinks something beautiful is worth the fall, but Eric Munson is the one who knows it for sure.
(end part twelve)
*
part thirteen
Like, the Earth has a tilt to its axis? Which I think we are all aware of. I certainly feel less than straight up-and-down, most times. So, right now, Polaris is the star in the northern sky and does all its good Polaris-dealies, but in a couple hundred years, the tilted axis will point at some new north, and it'll be another star.
Okay, this freaked me out. I'm not gonna lie. All that stuff about celestial navigation. I had a thing with Greek mythology for awhile (not a 'thing,' obviously, because, um, weird, but, like, it was my larval-dork obsession of the year when I was just a lil Candle), and so I can find a bunch of stuff in the sky, mainly just cos I know the stories and all, and that's good stuff to know.
And when we were at art school, every night we stood out on the end of the parking lot, watching the highway traffic (that's southern Californian beauty for you, man), and one of us would always be sure to point out the Big Dipper, I mean, every night we did this. And I taught some kids who were apparently raised by wolves how to find the North Star. We talked about when someday we'd be lost in the desert but we'd find our way out. It was art school. You don't just, like, turn off being philosophical and nostalgic for things that haven't happened yet. I was only sixteen years old, give a kid a break.
The point of which is to say that it's kinda important to me, and I didn't even know it. The idea of the North Star. Something steady, something constant. Something, yes, honestly, it only gets said so much because it's motherfucking true--something to show you how to get home. It's Polaris, you know? It's got meaning. In a couple hundred years it'll be just another bright spot in the sky.
I told you that things that happened in the sky fucked me up. This is what I get for taking astronomy. sigh.
And also, what is up with the hard sciences being all inspirational to me? I'm a political science major, living in Washington, DC, and I used to write the West Wing. The only time I ever got an idea for a story in class was in Earth and Environmental Sciences, when we were learning about the moons of freakin' Jupiter. Makes no sense!
*
Finished rereading 'The World According to Garp' today, while locked out of my room because I am living in a converted hotel and keycards SUCK. You know I was ten years old the first time I read that book? My dad gave it to me. You know how freakishly inappropriate that book is for a ten year old? I think I was spared a lot just because I didn't get half of what was going on.
I still have the same copy, the dumb fucking paperback with the last line quoted on the back, like, what the fuck? I read the last page of a book with my hand covering the last line so that I will not see it before I get there in the course of reading. Right on the fucking back of the book, naked as a jaybird. Pisses me off.
Anyway. Ten years later, and pieces of the cover are missing. Not the whole cover, no no, just bits and pieces. The whole thing's about to liquefy.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Twelfth: Perfect Life
(michigan seems like a dream to me now)
In the winter after 2002, Munson is living in Detroit, because he’ll be a starter next season and he might as well get used to it.
It’s the coldest place on earth. Eric Munson is absolutely sure. Poor southern California boy, thin skin and hair that’s never been frosted with ice while waiting for the bus. His jeans are stained with salt and snow, the cuffs wet-frayed, and his favorite sneakers have been curled with white too, thumping around in the dryer during the news.
He shivers from the memory of it even in his apartment, and pulls Shanda onto his lap when she walks in front of the couch, straight-jacketing his arms around her and mumbling into her shoulder, “I’m cold, I’m freezing, how come you’re so warm?” and she laughs, rubbing circles on his back and not making too much fun of him when he wears his blue-striped beanie inside all day long.
He’s not going to the desert this New Year’s. Shanda’s folks live in Cincinnati, and they’ll be there for the holidays. He calls Chavez to let him know and Chavez doesn’t believe him for awhile.
“Fuck off, you are too coming with me,” Chavez says.
Munson sighs. “Dude, Cincinnati. Family stuff.”
“But you can’t mess with tradition, man, it’s terrible fucking luck.”
Munson looks at their little tree, sparkly and silver and red, bent reflections in the round ornaments, presents stacked under the shedding pine needles, neatly wrapped in the Sunday comics and shiny paper with pictures of Snoopy in a Santa’s hat marching across it. “Got other stuff going on, now, though.”
“I went out there with you right after getting married,” Chavez reminds him, crossing the line from persuasively endearing into just plain whining.
Munson snorts. “Yeah, and how’d that work out for you?”
“Whatever. It’s the best tradition in the world, but if you wanna go to stupid Cincinnati and leave me hanging, go right the fuck ahead,” Chavez answers, only a little bit mean but on his way to more.
It’s a pretty good strategy, because Chavez getting Munson angry is usually the first step to Chavez getting what he wants. But Munson’s not falling for it.
“Oh, knock it off,” Munson tells him wearily. “Or I won’t tell you about how I bought you a plane ticket to come out here the first week of January.”
Eric Chavez pauses. Then he yelps, all former discontent vanished. “Dude! Really?”
Munson nods, and smiles at Shanda as she comes up and presses a mug of coffee into his hand, sits down next to him on the couch. “Yeah, really. You get your ass on a plane and all the wonders of eastern Michigan await you.”
He sets the mug on the coffee table to slip an arm around Shanda’s shoulders and she curves into him.
“All right!” Chavez statics excitedly. “I’m totally there. Reunion in Detroit. No doubt. It’s gonna be awesome, you and me, just wait and-”
“Say hi to Shanda, bro,” Munson says quickly. He holds the phone to her ear and she rolls her eyes at him.
Munson can just barely hear Chavez saying to his wife, “Oh, um. Hi. Hi, Shanda.”
“Hi, Eric,” she says back, and Chavez stutters out some unintelligible stuff, Shanda hmm’ing in vague acknowledgement before she hands the phone back to Munson, whispering, “Thought you said he was good with girls.”
Munson shrugs, tells his friend, “Okay, I’ll get you the specifics pretty soon, see you then.”
“Rock and fucking roll, dude,” Chavez answers, voice bright and eager.
Eric Munson hits the button to end the call, and Shanda winds a leg over his knees, kisses him on the cheek. “That’s a nice thing you’re doing. It’ll be good to see him again.”
“He thinks if we’re not together on New Year’s, we’ll both end up in the Mexican Leagues or something for tempting fate,” Munson says absently, not really listening to her.
“What’s fate got to do with it?” Shanda asks.
Munson twists a bit of her hair around his finger. Their little tree is backed up against the window and there’s a streetlight out there that makes a gilded halo around the head of the snowman that grins around a corncob-pipe at the top. The snowman’s been on top of every Christmas tree of Eric Munson’s life; he nearly had to mortgage his soul to Shelly to convince his sister to let him claim it. Munson’s mouth crooks up a bit, looking at the old snowman with his familiar crepe-paper face.
“Fate’s got everything to do with everything,” Munson tells her.
She laughs lightly, leans her head back against his arm. “Ballplayers,” she says, her face happily exasperated.
They go to Cincinnati and Shanda’s parents are in bed by nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve, leaving Eric and her to watch the countdown on the muted living room television, kissing like you’re supposed to and Eric Munson thinking, ‘every year better than the last,’ champagne-high and certain that he’s just figured out the trick behind a perfect life.
And Eric Chavez comes to Detroit, and after dinner with Shanda near the hotel where Chavez is staying (because he travels in style now, apparently, and anyway the Munsons’ couch is all of four and a half feet long), she sends the two men off, winking and stage-whispering to Chavez, “Try and keep him out of jail, please.”
Chavez doesn’t make any promises, and he’s got an arm around Munson’s neck before Shanda is half a block away and they’re still in her rearview mirror, weaving down the sidewalk. Chavez waits until they get around the corner before licking Munson’s ear, but he does it casually and lets Munson smack his head away without a fight.
“So what do you say, dude,” Chavez says. “You have a good New Year’s without me?”
Munson shifts under Chavez’s arm, his ear tingling and bitten by the wind from the wet stripe laid across by Chavez’s tongue. “Sure.” Chavez’s hold tightens to a half-headlock, and Munson amends, “I mean, of course it sucked. You know. Definitely missed freezing my ass off with you in the middle of Death Valley.”
Chavez smiles nostalgically. “Yeah, it’s a good time. Next year, no excuses, okay?” His arm is still around Munson’s shoulders, his hand fiddling with Munson’s shirt.
“Deal,” Munson says, and thinks about a year from now.
“So, yeah,” Chavez says, finally letting his arm fall off, just bumping into his friend occasionally as they walk. “Things seem to be going pretty all right, for you.” He jerks his head back the way they came, making it clear he’s talking about Munson’s marriage.
“Yeah.”
Chavez glances at him, Munson’s profile against the shop windows, his unfocused after-image reflection following him step for step and looking like a particularly well-defined shadow. Chavez taps their elbows together. “C’mon, dude, you stuck it out for better than a year now, huh?”
Munson wants to tell him that no one’s keeping score, but he just lifts his shoulders.
Chavez figures Munson doesn’t want to talk about it, but that’s never really stopped him before. He pushes his fingers back and forth across his chin, still kind of entranced by his own ability to grow facial hair, and says, “Probably it’s easy for you, because you’re not such a fuck-up.”
Munson looks at him sharply, but Chavez isn’t paying attention, his eyes taking in Detroit and the dirty-tissue snow slushed into the curbs, the white hanging off the sick-looking branches of the city trees.
“I mean, I guess if you don’t fuck around on a girl, she’s not so much gonna leave you in the middle of the night.”
Munson stops. It takes Chavez a moment to realize and turn back to face him. Munson’s got his hands jammed into his coat pockets, and his head is down. He’s looking for quartz pieces in the sidewalk, and he asks, “What are you trying to do, Chavvy?”
Chavez tips his head to the side. “What do you mean?”
Munson raises his eyes and he looks pissed off, his harmless, well-liked-by-kids-and-old-people face made tough like he always wanted to be when they were little.
“You don’t think we’re gonna end up back at your hotel room at some point tonight?”
Chavez shrugs, looking away blamelessly. There’s something tightening in his chest, below his heart, caged into his lungs. “Maybe.”
He did plan on it, he’s been thinking about it all night, getting Munce back and the door deadbolted and chained behind them. Munson looks good, fresh and strong and warm in his soft layers, though Chavez has seen him shivering and blowing on his hands all night. Eric Chavez keeps picturing what it’ll be like when he gets Munson stripped down to just his plain white undershirt, all that wool and cotton littering the floor, and he thinks that he’ll leave Munson in that last slender T-shirt for awhile, until Munson’s clawing for skin on skin and Chavez’s mouth is dry from the fabric.
Munson scoffs a laugh. “I’d put my money on it,” he says caustically, clenching his fists in his coat pockets.
Chavez moves to him. There’s no streetlight and this isn’t California and no one knows Eric Munson yet, so they’re safe. He touches Munson’s chest, trips his hand up and snakes under his collar, his fingers cold for a moment on Munson’s shoulder and then gone again.
“Okay, so what?” Chavez asks low. “We did the last time we saw each other. And it’s. It’s been awhile, man.”
The last time, the last time was . . . when? Before the playoffs. Before the streak. Christ, not since July. When the A’s were in Cleveland and Munson came up from Toledo. The last time they saw each other, and some farm road outside town, dead-ended and the summer picking up strength in the weight of the trees. Chavez and Munson in the backseat of Munson’s not-nearly-big-enough car, a cliché again, a classic, slamming knees on the door and the windows fogged like a movie. Too hot outside to take a breath and both of them drenched with sweat, sliding effortlessly against each other and Eric Munson saying, “This car’s gonna smell like you forever,” and Eric Chavez laughing, squeaking his elbows on the vinyl, his hands looking for purchase on Munson’s hips and his shoulders and his neck, slicking off every time.
Chavez is trying to think if anything’s changed. July in Ohio and January in Detroit, and it might as well be two different planets. They lost in the first round again; maybe Munson thinks he’s cursed now like everybody is saying. But Munson’s not even gone through his rookie year yet, the fuck can he say about losing in October?
Munson rubs his hand fast over his eyes. “Look, I know. Obviously I didn’t get you to leave California for Michigan in fucking January and not expect that we’d, um, you know, the stuff we do sometimes.” Munson gives himself a mental flick on the forehead. It’s been eight fucking years and he can still barely say it out loud.
He continues, looking to get angry again, “But would you mind not praising me for my devotion to my wife while we’re doing it?”
Chavez’s eyes get a little bit bigger, and he steps back. “Dude, that wasn’t . . . I wasn’t meaning to . . . I was just talking, man, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Munson sighs, staring off over Chavez’s shoulder. “I know you didn’t. I know you think it doesn’t count.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Chavez says, confused. He thought they’d settled this.
Munson’s getting pretty fucking tired of Eric Chavez playing dumb with him. But they haven’t started drinking yet and he’s not brave enough to soberly ask if Chavez really thinks they’re not in love with each other anymore. If Chavez really thinks this is the kind of thing that ends.
Munson wishes for about a tanker truck of liquor, without it he’s such a coward he can barely look his best friend in the face. “Fine. It doesn’t count.”
Chavez eyes him distrustfully. Munson’s twisting his hands in his pockets, Chavez can see the turns of his wrists, the face of his watch against his pulse. “You said you’d tell me if you weren’t okay.”
Munson shakes his head. “I will. I mean, I am. Okay. I’m fine. I just don’t want to think about Shanda when I’m thinking about you.”
“Sure. No problem.” Chavez whips his hand around in the air. “Not thinking about her anymore.” Munson’s still not looking at him. Eric Chavez roughs his hands up and down his arms. “It’s cold in Detroit.”
Munson, recognizing an overt change of subject when he hears one, does him one better: “What’d you end up doing for New Year’s, anyway?”
Chavez smiles. “I went out to John Muir. Or, you know, past it. Stinson Beach, remember?”
Munson nods. Stinson Beach is over the Golden Gate Bridge and just beyond the frame of Redwoods National Park at John Muir Woods, where the only scent in the air is the trees that will outlive everyone, beats out even the ocean.
The first time they went out there, the two of them, not too long into Chavez’s first season with the A’s, they had to ask directions at a twenty-four hour Safeway, one in the morning and the slapping echo of their sneakers on the linoleum, the two cashiers mostly asleep and Chavez buying a mess of candy, his backpack loose on his shoulders and Munson could hear the one cashier saying to the other as they walked out, “These fucking high school kids.”
“Yeah, the fireworks, there were boats out past the bridge,” Chavez says. “You could kind of see the ones from on the bay, but it was over the hill, you know? But the fireworks over the ocean, they were even better, I swear. It was, like, an aircraft carrier or something. Huge. Not too far offshore. I could hear the people laughing sometimes when it got quiet.”
Munson can see it perfectly. “Who’d you go with?” he asks.
They’re walking again, and it’s cold enough to snow. Munson isn’t used to it yet, he keeps thinking that each snowfall will be the last. Chavez shrugs. “Nobody.”
Munson glances at him with impatience, suspicion. Eric Chavez never does anything alone. “It’s not like you have to lie to me, man.”
Chavez looks at him blankly. “I’m not.”
When Chavez is lying, he can’t keep his hands still, it’s his dead giveaway and Munson never told him, because even before their whatever, they still played poker together sometimes and Munson liked winning.
But right now Chavez’s hands are in his pockets, because it’s a Midwest winter and Chavez didn’t think to bring gloves. Which doesn’t mean he’s not lying. Munson sees Mark Mulder with sand in his hair, Barry Zito barefoot with his pants rolled up to the knee, kicking through the surf. It’s a pretty-boy team and Eric Chavez certainly has something to do with that.
“Look, do what you want, dude, I was just fucking wondering,” Munson says, and he thinks that maybe it’s not cold enough to snow, maybe there will just be more of that ice rain, the kind where if it hits skin you start to bleed, thin and red on your face, your hands.
Chavez stops walking again. It’s taking them fucking forever to get to wherever it is they’re going, all this stopping and starting. “What the fuck, man? I’m not allowed to watch fireworks alone?”
Christ, but he’s tired of this. He wants to kick a parking meter or something, but he’d feel stupid, so he just answers, “You’re allowed to, I just seriously doubt that you did.”
Chavez’s eyebrows pull together. “You got something you want to say, Munson?” and Chavez’s voice is dangerously flat.
Munson shakes his head, but his mouth doesn’t agree and he hears himself asking, “Did you ever fuck Mark Mulder?”
Chavez’s face clears and he looks comically surprised for a moment. He wonders if Munson knows, but how could he ever know? Nothing even really happened. He’s briefly caught between guilt and anger and his stupid little-boy tendency to confess everything and beg forgiveness, and none of those are a very good choice, so Chavez just picks anger and runs with it.
“Can’t believe you’d ask me that,” he answers with his eyes sharp and sparking, because there’s some kind of gray area where they’re not supposed to talk about other guys. Especially since Chavez is pretty sure he’s the only one of the two of them who ever actually does anything with other guys. But it’s weird, they don’t talk about that, they never have.
Munson’s hands are balled up in the pockets of his coat, and Chavez didn’t answer his question and Munson’s not gonna let him get away with that. “Why not?” he says tightly. “’Cause you did?”
Chavvy wants to push him, see him ricochet off the wall and maybe hit his head and that hard-boiled cracking sound. It’s really fucking cold out here, he doesn’t want to take his hands out of his pockets.
“’Cause you’re a fucking asshole! And ‘cause it’s none of your fucking business!”
Munson sneers, thinking about Eric Chavez sitting on his bed and touching his hand to Munson’s back when they were sixteen years old and nothing important had happened. “You used to keep me updated on who you fucked whether I wanted to know or not, motherfucker.”
Chavez turns away from him, not wanting to see his face anymore. He tracks his eyes over the street, trying to breathe and maybe not punch his best friend, and Munson can see the wiry muscles in his forearms tensing and relaxing as his fists tighten, then release, bulging against the denim of his jeans. How the fuck can he make a fist inside his jeans pocket, it seems impossible.
“No, all right?” Chavez answers, back to confession now like he’s so good at, and his voice is brittle. “I never fucked him. Not for lack of trying, but he . . .he didn’t want shit to do with me.”
Munce is a little thrown, an unthinkable thing in his mind, somebody turning down his perfect best friend. “Really?” he asks without thinking.
Chavez glares at him. “Fuck you, Munce. If I was gonna lie, I’d tell you he blows me every hour on the fucking hour.”
Because Munson’s never been the kind of guy who thinks before he speaks, running his fucking mouth and wrecking everything, he isn’t too surprised to find himself asking recklessly, “What about Zito?” thinking about his cast at the small of Zito’s back and holding them together, thinking about Zito’s Bazooka Joe and Gatorade taste in Eric Chavez’s mouth.
Chavez’s eyes flash. This is so far beyond cool. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near this conversation. They don’t talk about guys, they never have, goddamn it. “I’m gonna hit you in a second, Munson, I swear to God I am.”
Munson thinks that sounds just fine, and he steps forward. “Just fucking try it,” he says, and he’s ready, adrenaline burring and he thinks crazily that it’s been nine years since they last fought, wonders if Chavez still leads with the right, or maybe not, maybe he’s taken to feinting, dancing, maybe they won’t be so evenly matched this time. Munson tastes metal in the back of his throat, the smell of iron and cigarette smoke in the air and the fog of his breath pouring out.
But Chavez doesn’t take a swing at him, not yet. “What about Brandon Inge?” Chavvy mimics brutally. “What about Halter? What about Dmitri Young, bitch?”
“Fuck off,” Munson says, his temples feeling vised, the bones of his skull about to give under the pressure, and it’s not the same, not the same at all. He’s only been with the Tigers a season and barely even played, and Chavez has already spent a lifetime with his team.
Chavez widens his eyes dramatically, and he’s so mad, this is so unfair. “Well, what the fuck, Munce? We’re allowed to talk about my teammates but not yours?”
“My teammates don’t look like yours do!” Munson cries furiously, forgetting that he’s got better arguments than that one. “My teammates didn’t just step out of a fucking jeans commercial!”
Chavvy stares at him in disbelief, then chafes a hard cold laugh. “This insecure act of yours is totally fucking played, man, so just get over yourself, for Christ’s sake.”
Munson’s face is warped and he definitely wants to get into a fight now, beat this out of them both. “Hey man, I’d just like to know, all right? If you’re gonna be fucking around with me, I think I got a right to know whose seconds I’m picking up.”
He watches, frozen in place and hysterical, as something murderous slams across Chavez’s face, before Chavvy’s eyes pull closed and he hauls himself under control with all the strength in his body, and the visible effort of it, the sheer force of will that keeps Chavez from hitting him in that moment, stuns Munson, throws him down.
Chavez thinks about the months between now and the backseat of Eric Munson’s car outside Cleveland. He thinks very quickly about blood and mouth-shaped bruises and how much it would hurt to punch someone with the weather this cold.
He tells Munson with all his anger raked into each word, “Not Zito. Not Zito, not Hudson, not Scott Hatteberg, not Tejada, not Mark Ellis, and not Art fucking Howe!”
And for a second they’re motionless, on the edge of beating the shit out of each other, then Munson’s lips quirk involuntarily, his expression twisting halfway between revulsion and amusement, and his hands drop to his sides, the tension shrinking out of him.
“Dude, Howe? Ew,” he says dryly.
Eric stares at him for a moment, and Munson sees the smile coming from way far off, sees Chavez fighting against it and trying to hang on to his rage, but it’s no good, and his face breaks open, grinning and then laughing, and Munson’s laughing too, so hard he can’t breathe.
Chavez stumbles over to him and slings an arm around his back, banging his forehead on Munson’s shoulder and howling with it. Munson crumples under his weight, sitting hard on the curb, and Chavez follows him down, arms around each other’s necks and shoes in the gutter, laughing until they’re crying, holding each other up.
After a long time, they settle, the laughs tapering off, leaving Chavez with a bad case of the hiccups and Munson with a woozy unbalanced feeling carbonating in his head. Chavez is leaning against him, tucked under Munson’s arm, his body jerking with every hiccup.
Eventually Chavvy sighs, resting his head briefly on Munson’s chest, the push of Munson’s collarbone in the depression of Chavez’s temple, and then he pulls away. Chavez blows out a breath, his face red-splotched, and scrubs his hands through his hair.
“Okay, so, pretty much, stop being a dick,” Chavez says, pinning Munson down with a knowing glance, Munson coloring ashamedly. “I’m not sleeping with my teammates.” He shrugs. “They’re not really mentally stable enough to sleep with.” He elbows Munson in the side, edging a grin. “Not that you’re any better, understand, but I guess I know your version of crazy pretty well by now.”
Munson nods, beating out a rhythm on Chavez’s arm. “I’d hope so.” He pauses. “And, sorry. About that.”
Chavez likes the fold of Munson against him, and his shoes are getting soaked from the melting snow pushed against the curb. He sighs. “And I’m sorry about the other thing.”
Munson slants a look at him. “What other thing?”
Chavez gestures abstractly with his hand, his knuckles chapped. “You know. Didn’t mean to make you feel bad. About this. ‘Cause of Shanda.”
Munson exhales. “It’s cool.” He takes his hand off Chavez’s arm, but stays tilted against him.
Chavez looks carefully, but he can’t see anything in Munson’s face, just sleepy and his eyes bloodshot from laughing so hard.
“If you told me to stop, I would,” he says, and then wants to chase that away as easily as he could the cloud of his breath.
Munson bends into himself, rolls his forehead on the nape of Chavez’s neck. He doesn’t answer.
Chavez raps his fingers without rhythm on Munson’s knee. Munson’s nose is against the side of his neck and it’s icecube cold, but he doesn’t move.
“You still want to come back to my hotel room with me?”
Munson’s breath pauses for a moment, and then there’s a slight movement, just a tuck on the back of his neck, but Chavez can recognize it as a nod. Chavez reaches back and puts his hand on Munson’s head, red frost-bit ears, shaggy hair. He curls his fingers and Munson hums, sits up straight.
He looks at Chavez, looking resigned and all the miles between Detroit and Oakland in his eyes. “You’re like a bad habit,” Munson tells him, smiling just enough that Chavez takes it for what it means.
Chavez smiles back. “Everybody’s gotta have one, man.”
Sighing, Munson pulls his eyes away and answers, “Guess so.”
Chavez stands, offers Munson his hand. By the time they’re down to T-shirts and struggling with belt buckles, it’s snowing again.
*
(you say you’re looking for something to believe in)
Eric Chavez, back home in California, is not as dumb as he makes himself out to be.
He’s got an eye for the strike zone that gets better every year, and sliders don’t fool him, and no one steals third anymore, but he still plays behind the bag when there’s a runner on, just in case, you know. It’s the only kind of knowledge he’s ever needed.
He’s stupid-cocky-proud about not having gone to college, because in ten years he’ll be set for life and fuck if he never learned how to solve a differential equation, since when does that ever come in handy.
But he knows some stuff.
Eric Munson is married and happy, and has never really been gay, just in love. Eric Chavez tricked him at some point, pulled off the greatest prank in the history of the world, somehow convincing Munson that they felt the same way about each other, but these days Chavez is kinda thinking that maybe it was just him, because what seventeen year old turns down a blowjob even if it’s from his best friend, and what best friend could let the person he cared for the most be in love alone? It was just cruel charm and Eric Chavez, talking and wheedling and arguing his way into Munson’s heart.
Just chipping away until Munson got tired of fighting and gave in to him, gave him what he wanted. What he doesn’t want anymore.
It’s all Chavez’s fault, he knows that too. They pretend it was Munson who fucked up the first time, pushing him away when Steve Scogin walked in on them, but that’s pretty transparently bullshit. Another convenient lie they share. Eric Chavez wouldn’t take him back and wouldn’t forgive him, and that’s worse than what Munson did, worse by far.
He knows that now.
He also knows that Munson would leave his wife for him if he asked. But Eric Chavez won’t ask. Not directly, anyway. Not with words.
He knows it’s a fucking cop-out, waiting for Munson to tell him to stop, because Munson will never tell him to stop. Munson can’t say no to him, he never could. Eric Chavez likes power and he likes being in control, but they’re best friends and he shouldn’t be thinking about it in those terms. If he really loved Eric Munson, he’d just leave him alone.
But Eric Chavez, not that dumb and not that nice, is also not that strong.
Chavez gets away with being this fucked up, because he’s not supposed to be smart enough to fix it.
Anyway. In Oakland, February is the same as March is the same as April. Before the summer heat sinks claws in, the spring is monochromatic and unchanging. Every day is bayside pretty and flashing with disinterest, and everything looks shaped out of wax.
Eric Chavez is killing time until the baseball season starts again, and he can’t really believe they didn’t get out of the first round last year. They were blessed. They were supposed to go the distance. Maybe he should have seen it coming. The Twins, after all, ended the streak. So, it was only right.
Mark Mulder doesn’t have much to say to him much anymore. He’s moved down to Scottsdale for the off-season, and Chavez teases him because that’s where Mulder’s mom lives now, but Mulder just tells him to shut the fuck up and starts talking about college football.
It’s not, like, weird between them or anything. They’re both just pretty tired. They’ve each lost interest in messing with the other’s head, which maybe means they’re maturing or something. But Chavez knows they’ll still live together next year, find another place in the hills, and they’ll still argue petulantly about whether to play Halo or Grand Theft Auto, and spit Gatorade at each other in the kitchen, and do rock-paper-scissors to decide who’ll pay for the cable each month, so maybe they’re not so adult after all.
Long winter-spring days and quiet breakfasts at noon, and Mulder doesn’t return his calls all the time, or Chavez doesn’t pick up when he sees Mulder’s name on the display, but it’s not a problem. Chavez has pretty much given up on Mulder. Mulder was never really worth all that Chavez made him out to be, anyway. They’re friends, and once the season starts they’ll have stuff to talk about again, so he’s not too worried.
Chavez does lonely really well. He drives around without destination, and he listens to music out on the balcony of his little one-bedroom apartment with the blue walls, and he rotates between five different bars, because he doesn’t want to be that guy who’s got nothing better to do than go to the same place every night. He wanders around a lot, he gets lost for the satisfaction of finding his way back.
Chavez gets into conversations with the insane homeless people down in Jack London Square, the ones who sleep in doorways and on park benches, and spend their days talking about the Messiah with their backs to the water.
Every day, he waits for Eric Munson to call him and say, “look, this is fucking stupid, let’s just be done, okay?” It’s coming, any day now, Chavez is sure of it. They fought on a sidewalk in Detroit and then fucked in a hotel room and Eric Chavez remembers gold in his mouth, Eric Munson’s hand on his face and his wedding ring clinking against Chavez’s teeth.
It all seems inevitable, at this point. Chavez knows he should be ready for this, but he’s not, he’s still so fucking scared. He doesn’t understand how he could be running away for so long and still be in the same place.
He starts going to early-morning services when he finds himself awake at five in the morning for no particular reason. He stays away from his regular Sunday church during the week, for the same reason that he doesn’t go to the same bar two nights in a row. He goes to Anglican churches, Presbyterian churches, Baptist churches, Mormon churches (only once, though, because Mormons are fucking crazy), anywhere with a cross above the door and pews inside.
He’s safe in there, you know. Watched over, protected, all that stuff. He thinks about crossroads a lot and the weight of twenty pieces of silver. The off-season’s always been strange and unwanted, out of place, one thing over and the next not begun yet. He feels like something’s gonna happen, pretty soon.
Having come to religion comparatively late in his life, Eric Chavez doesn’t understand how all these sects can be considered so different from each other. The words are the same, the stories, the lessons. The faces of the ministers and the shuffle of the yawning congregation getting to their feet for a prayer. There’s always a grandma-looking old woman at the back of the church who smiles kindly at him when he comes in. There’s always a little kid sleeping scrunched against one of his parent’s sides, mouth open and cheeks scrubbed pink. The certainty of God is constant wherever he finds himself.
One morning, he goes to a Catholic church, and it’s still dark when he goes in, the dawn kaleidescoping in through the stained glass as the sermon lulls over the sparse devout. He kneels and takes Communion, the wafer dissolving like air on his tongue, and he watches everybody else, moves his hand over his chest the way they do.
And when he goes into the little confessional booth, webbed wooden screen and the smell of velvet dust all around him, he honestly doesn’t know where to begin.
He knows well enough from the movies to say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” but that’s as far as his patchwork faith can take him.
“I, uh, I’m not a Catholic. So I . . . don’t know how to do this.”
The man, the shadow-profile behind the screen, nods and says, “Well, why don’t you start with why you’re here?”
Chavez moves his tongue over his teeth, counting. “I couldn’t sleep.”
Something rustles as the priest shifts. “So why aren’t you watching infomercials?”
He smiles a little bit. “Look, can I. I can say stuff to you, right? Even though I’m not a Catholic, that’s cool?”
“Of course.”
Chavez pushes his fingers into his T-shirt, pulls out the skinny chain. He bounces the cross in his palm, and the old light through the web of the screen makes linked gray diamonds across his hand and arm.
“I think I might be in love with my best friend again.”
And it’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud to someone who’s not Eric Munson.
Even tone, unsurprised, the priest’s heard worse. “Again?”
Chavez nods, watching the cross trip across the shell-cut scar. “When we were kids, we were, you know, like, together. Not really, but as much as we could be. Then we . . . weren’t anymore. And then we fell back in love, but it wasn’t any good, that time, we just kept fucking each other up.” He pauses. “Um. Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t swear.”
The priest chuckles low. “You say it however you want to say it, son.”
Chavez rubs his thumb on the cross, imprinting the shape of it in his skin. “Anyway. It was really bad, the second time. Because I . . . I got married, but we . . . didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. And then I got divorced, and said that we should just sleep together but not be in love with each other. And I thought that was working pretty well, except my best friend got married too, and now, I, I. I don’t know. I got no right, and I should just let it go, but I can’t.”
“And you think this means you’ve fallen back in love?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Chavez says, gold winking and dust in the light. “It was an accident.”
“How do you feel, having a relationship with someone who’s married? Especially after being married yourself, knowing it from both sides?”
“I feel like I’m going to hell,” Chavez whispers.
The priest pauses. “You’re sure you’re not a Catholic?”
Chavez surprises himself by laughing, jarring in the tiny room. He can almost hear the priest smiling, and Chavez wants to see his face, because he sounds like a good man, and maybe there’s a shortage of good men in Eric Chavez’s life right now.
“You feel that way about it, but that’s not a good enough reason for you to end it?” the priest asks gently.
Chavez puts his hands over his eyes, but only for a second. “I’m not . . . I’m not a very good person, Father. I know how wrong this is, maybe even worse than when I was the one who was married, and I’m the one who’ll have to say it’s over, but. I think about never getting to touch him again and it just fucking terrifies me.”
The priest is silent for a shade longer than he should have been, and then he says, sounding like Chavez might have managed to surprise him after all, “Your best friend’s a man?”
Chavez winces, because he knows what Christians think about people like him. “Oh, um. Yeah. I . . . should have told you that earlier. He’s. Yeah, a, uh, a guy. Yeah. Sorry.”
The priest sighs. “I guess that complicates things.”
Chavez waits for him to go on and say all the stuff he’s supposed to say, the affirmations that Eric Chavez is damned, the catholic nature of this weakness and the cities turned to salt and ash, but the priest just falls quiet, and Chavez thinks maybe he’s been selling the men of faith short.
“Yeah. I mean, if he was a girl, I woulda married him about fifteen times by now. Or, well, just the one time, I guess. ‘Cause it would have lasted.”
“So the only reason you haven’t been able to make this work is because it’s a homosexual relationship?”
Chavez winces again. He hates that word. It still sounds like a disease to him. “There’s other stuff too.”
“Like what?”
Chavez scratches at his knee. His back is starting to hurt from being strictly propped against the box’s tight walls. “Well, we, we’re not . . . what we do, for a living, it’s not really . . . we’ve never been able to tell anybody. Or be, you know, out like that. Like regular gay people are allowed to be. And we never will be, either. What we do . . . it’s more important than what we mean to each other.”
“And he feels the same?”
“Sure.” But Chavez stops, in his head, and considers that for a moment. Munson would give up his marriage, he’s fairly sure of that, his potential to be happy like everybody else is happy, and how much different is that from giving up baseball?
But even if Munson could give up baseball, Chavez is pretty sure he, himself, couldn’t.
“Well.” The priest sounds resigned. “You know what you’re doing is wrong. You know that ending it is the proper thing, if only for the sake of your friend’s marriage, and for your own peace of mind. I think you came here looking for an alleviation of your guilt, and if you want me to forgive you, I will, but that won’t fix anything. It’s not me you need to absolve you.”
Chavez closes his eyes. His throat feels too tight. “Yes,” he whispers.
“Yes, what?” the priest asks, confused.
“Forgive me. Please.”
The priest hesitates, the shadow of his head shaking, moving over Chavez’s face. Chavez clenches his hands into fists and he doesn’t know why he came in here, he doesn’t have this kind of elaborate belief.
The priest exhales, and says, half-reluctantly with his hand moving in the shape of a cross through the wooden screen, “In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti. You are forgiven, my son.”
Eric Chavez waits for a long time, but no, that doesn’t make him feel better.
*
(unmatched shoe on the sidewalk)
See, the difference between them, the really important difference that’s not the separation between ten and sixty-two and not the distance between Oakland and Detroit, not Eric Chavez being perfect or Eric Munson being happy, not the difference between being ten-percent gay and being gay for just one other person, the most important difference between them is that Eric Chavez has been in love with Eric Munson three times, and Eric Munson has been in love with Eric Chavez only once.
It’s important. It might not seem it, but it is. Eric Munson is all about longevity, and the force of credibility that comes from years of experience. There was a point, sometime, maybe before Arlington, when it occurred to him that he’s in love with Chavez because he’s always been in love with Chavez. He wondered, at the time, if that shouldn’t be a red flag, warning sign, danger alarm, but then he forgot about it because Eric Chavez agreed to sleep with him again, which kind of took priority in his mind.
And anyway, it doesn’t really matter why you’re in love with a person. The means don’t have anything to do with the ends.
Eric Munson is nervous and excited all the time now, because he’s going to be a rookie in another month, he’s going to be a major league baseball player, for real, not on the bench and not holding the lease on his apartment in Toledo. It did take him longer than he thought it would, and it was harder than he’d ever dreamed, but he’s almost there now, and he’s sure that once he sees his name on the Opening Day roster, he’ll recover the power and the talent that abandoned him in West Michigan, and Jacksonville, and Toledo.
He just needs to get to the major leagues, get there for good, and he’ll live up to it. He’s sure.
The approaching season distracts him. It’s easy not to think about Eric Chavez all that often, because he’s got other stuff to worry about. And he loves his wife. She’s wonderful. But that really doesn’t have anything to do with anything.
The phone rings at three in the morning and Eric Munson doesn’t wake up. He’s used to this, phone calls and visits in the thick of the night, the dull of the morning. No point in being annoyed by it, after he’s had all this practice.
Shanda reaches over him, soft weight on his chest, and mumbles with her chin on his arm, “’lo?” Eric Munson stirs, pulls her closer instinctively. She says into the phone, “Just a minute, Eric,” and Eric Munson wakes up. She tucks the phone against his ear and kisses his shoulder, rolling over and falling back asleep so quick she won’t remember a moment of it in the morning.
Munson, his eyes still glued shut and his voice sleep-muffled, says, “Dude?”
Eric Chavez is on the roof of some apartment building in San Francisco, which is a bad idea because he’s also really really drunk.
“Munce,” he answers and his eyes are shut too, his feet swinging off the edge of the building. He went to a party, a friend of a friend and their apartment is many stories below him, and he’s not exactly sure what he’s doing on the roof. He can see both bridges, but only the very tips of the Golden Gate, peeking out over the hills, the Presidio, the gray-brown stones and the musket-holes in the walls of the fort.
“What’s up, man?” Munson asks, rubbing a hand over his face and he’s still more asleep than awake.
“I’m very drunk,” Chavez says carefully, because he hates it when he slurs, he sounds dumb.
Munson groans, talking real low to keep from waking Shanda back up. “Drunk-dialing, Chavvy? I thought we had a rule about that.”
Chavez thinks about that for a long time. They’ve got a lot of rules. They don’t follow most of them, but whatever. It’s cold up here, the wind’s pretty bad. The clouds are moving across the city so fast, pulled aside like a curtain. “Um. There’s, a um. This roof? That I’m on? It’s San Francisco. I can see . . . a lot of stuff.”
He swings his legs some more, his heels kicking against the side of the building. He watches his feet swinging and one of his shoelaces is untied. He gets really worried about that, that his shoe will fall off and he’ll never be able to find it and he’ll have to go home with only one shoe and everybody will think he’s crazy and what kind of a person can’t even keep track of their shoes, shoes are easy, always right there at the ends of your legs.
“Stay away from the edge,” Munson tells him, yawning.
Chavez snickers, his mouth feeling too-slick and coated and a burn of liquor in the back of his throat. “Too late, dude.”
Munson shifts closer to the end of the bed, away from Shanda. “If you fall, I’m gonna make so much fun of you at your funeral, I swear.”
Chavez grins, little rubber thumps of his heels on the concrete. “So sweet, Munson, what a sweet guy.”
“How come you called, man? Is this just random, because if it is, please let’s do it in the morning.”
Chavez is following each street with his eyes, lined with sentinel streetlights and converging into the blocky mess of downtown. He thinks about gold, houses falling down the hills.
“I wanted to tell you something. It was . . . important.” He squints. He’s trying to remember.
Munson sighs. “Dude-”
Chavez scrapes up a handful of gravel and siphons it out over the edge. “No, it was really important.”
“If it’s so important, you’ll still remember it in the morning.”
The gravel gone, clicky tumbling onto the sidewalk fifteen floors south, Chavez brushes his hand off on his pants and looks down at it. There are a bunch of small red indentations in his palm, corners and punctures, peppered with pieces of grit.
“But if I’m not drunk. I’ll never tell you.”
That wakes Munson up a little bit more. He glances at Shanda, sleeping gently with her hair over her face, and reluctantly slips out of bed, going into the living room. He sits down on the couch and it’s drafty enough that he wishes he’d brought a blanket out with him.
“You don’t have to get drunk to tell me stuff, Eric,” he says, but that’s not true.
Chavez’s face does a weird half-collapsing thing, and the TransAmerica Building makes him think of Egypt, or maybe Las Vegas.
“So, listen.”
Munson waits, but when Chavez doesn’t say anything else, he prods with a tinge of impatience, “Three in the morning in Michigan, Chavez.”
“I’m on this roof.”
Munson blows out a breath. “We’ve covered that already.”
“It’s important,” Chavez insists, because it is, this roof, with the wind the way it is, and the city, this city. It’s so beautiful he thinks he’s crying a little bit, which is kind of strange.
“I, um. If I . . . Let’s say, like, that I had . . . a thing. Where I wanted you around. All the time.”
Munson’s eyes get a bit bigger. “What are you talking about?”
“I keep going to churches,” Chavez tells him pointlessly.
“Eric, what are you talking about?” Munson asks, demanding and starting to get panicked like he’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be.
Chavez blinks fast and yeah, he’s crying, he can feel the tear and taste it when it hits his mouth. It’s the wind, it’s this city. There are things he can say to Eric Munson that will keep Munson from leaving him alone, he knows that for sure. It doesn’t necessarily have to be true, it’s just got to sound good.
“If I said. If I said, ruin your life. For me. If I said, no one gets to have you but me. Because, um. Third time. It’s important, because it’s the third time.”
He pushes a hand through his hair and almost loses his balance, gripping the edge of the roof and the fly of his mind, the dizziness in his stomach and his chest. “I just, I don’t. I don’t want you to be in Detroit anymore.”
Eric Munson closes his eyes and he doesn’t know why he’s always closing his eyes when Eric Chavez is trying to fuck him over, it never helps. “I’m gonna . . . it’s my rookie year, man. Where else could I be?”
“Here. Right here. With me. It’s a . . . it’s a good roof. Munson. It’s a really good roof, I can see everything.”
“You’re drunk. You’re drunk and this isn’t fair,” Munson tells him, fingers against his eye. Get angry, get numb. “You know how fucking unfair this is.”
Chavez shakes his head and the city’s built of lights and he’s got tears in his eyes. “No, see. That’s right. You’re right. You’re not supposed to say yes. I’m supposed to ask, and. You’re not supposed to say yes. And then I. I get mad at you and say it’s over. So we don’t have to worry about it, anymore.”
“What,” Munson says, but he doesn’t know what he wants to ask. Stupid fucking Eric Chavez thinks he can just sit on a roof in San Francisco and do this. Detroit’s too far and Munson’s trying to be a good man.
“So it’s over?” he finally manages, and that isn’t what he should have said, because that makes it too easy for Chavez, when all he’s got to do is say yes.
Chavez breaks, shivers, and his shoe falls off. “Oh,” he says in an odd echo-tone, watching his shoe flip down and bounce on the sidewalk. His foot is immediately cold, and he curls his toes, tucks it against the back of his leg. His balance is worse, now.
“None of this happened like I thought it would,” Chavez tells him, spreading out cold and the yawn of gravity looming around him. “I wasn’t in love with you anymore. I wasn’t, I’m not. Except. Ah. Maybe a little.”
Eric Munson hits himself on the head a couple of times, fist to skull, thunk thunk, and this is the kind of thing that always happens at three in the morning, isn’t it, with half a continent between them and no one keeping watch to make sure Eric Chavez doesn’t go too close to the edge.
“It’s the third time,” Eric Chavez says, sounding amazed. “I never should have even once, but I did it three times.”
“It’s just once, Ricky,” Munson whispers, but Chavez isn’t listening.
“So, you see. See, see, Munce, see. I’m supposed to say it’s over. But. No. Because I . . . want you here. And I lost my shoe, just now.” He wiggles his toes against the back of his knee. “The priest said I shouldn’t. It’s not right, yeah. But, um. If you don’t mind. Or even if you do. Because I’m no good, and. I’m gonna just go ahead and keep being bad for you, if that’s okay.”
Munson sags back into the couch and his hand is still over his face. “It’s okay.” Not the kind of thing that ends. Best friends, best friends don’t know how to say goodbye.
Chavez smiles, his cheeks wet and his nose stuffed up. “Munce, you’re gonna have to say no to me, someday.”
“Yeah.” He takes his hand down and his arms are scrawled with goosebumps, the bend of his elbow and it’s probably not colder in here than it is on the unfamiliar roof in San Francisco where he can see Eric Chavez as a cardboard cut-out against the skyline with the buildings lifting him up like hands. “But not tonight.”
Chavez looks out and the bridges and the bay, the triangles and more important the diamonds, and the gnarled cords of the streets, a steep place, a clearing, somewhere flat and somewhere cold and the wind hard enough to blow the tears off his face.
“I think I love it here, Munson,” Chavez says. “This place. I’m gonna fall off this roof in a second, but. It’s still so beautiful.”
And the difference between them is that Chavez has been in love three times and Munson only once. The difference between them is that Eric Chavez thinks something beautiful is worth the fall, but Eric Munson is the one who knows it for sure.
(end part twelve)
*
part thirteen