could make the redolent air
As if the event
2008-9 Rangers: Blair Betts, Colton Orr.
Note: In Game Six of the Eastern Conference Quarter Finals, April 26th 2009, Capitals at Rangers, Brashear hit Betts, which ended in a suspension and fractured orbital bone, respectively. Betts previously had several shoulder injuries, which I've opted to draw out here, hey he did fall on his shoulder. After Lisel Mueller's Romantics. Edited by faded-lilac in a very noble way.
Warning: a dumb joke, covalent bonding.
It is spring in New York, and the first round of the playoffs have ended. Ended yesterday, Tuesday, and now it is the real beginning of the off-season, spring into summer stretching out wide and endless, like a sheet still wet from the wash, heavy in its own way and with something still to do. Summer will be drying, hot and dull. He remembers that from growing up: he could stand in the backyard and see the laundry flapping on the line, look over the low fences or hear the gentle percussion of towels billowing then snapping on the wind throughout the neighbourhood. They had moved when he was ten, and after that he'd gone west, straight out the Yellowhead Highway to Prince George. Now he is in New York, where there are no trees to run lines, and the pillowcases would probably go gray with smoke.
This apartment in Midtown, in the middle of a long avenue, is bookended by sleek, glassed-in office buildings. He has not left since he walked out the door to take the 6 to the Garden on Sunday: four stations down, and then across the avenues. He came back after that, in a cab, and he'd stood at his door, dumb and unable to get his keys from his jacket pocket. After that, after the smeary mess of memories from the sleek ice, cut by skateblades and gear scattered like exploded shot, to the clean sheets of the recovery room bed.
The doorbell rings tinnily. Betts unfolds, standing up from the couch, to get it.
It is early afternoon, he guesses. He is not wearing a watch. Which is good, because he has to spring the lock with both hands, contorting his wrists, which is harder than it looks. Except he's not really looking: he won't, and he can't. Injury makes everything more difficult. A watch would've fallen to the floor, silver links unspooling over the wooden boards. Maybe hurt him, like how he is, pinched at his skin, hurt him again. He certainly couldn't pick it up. He has managed, but not by much: he's in a clean undershirt, for all that's worth.
Orr stands at the doorway. "Hey," he says, thickly. "I wasn't sure if you'd be in, or up - or like how you are." Orange-yellow light from the hallway spills in behind him, and intermixes with the narrow path of sunshine from under the windowshades. It slides away over their feet: Orr's shoes and Betts' socks are bright and shadowed in even partition. It seems very fair, unlike a whole lot of other things.
"I am. You wanna come in?" Orr does not move, for a long second, and steps in, looking seriously at Betts.
Betts touches the tape, aware of Orr's attention to the paths his fingertips trace. It isn't to shelter weakness: Orr would never hurt him, never seek to attack when he'd been favouring one side. This morning in front of the mirror, while brushing his teeth, he'd evaluated it critically. The tape itches, and leaves red marks. The purple-blue bruises are flattening, spreading until they are pale. The surgeons had explained it all, the mesh patch below his eye, the clean way it had been done, bone cleared out, and he'd looked at it sideways, because the sense that it was underneath his eye, deep in, was still difficult to - wrap his head around, and Betts had smiled at the joke then. The depth, three-dimensionality of his own body is harder to think about. It doesn't look good, but that doesn't matter. It had been dark, it is dark here: he hasn't turned the lights on, not since he has returned from the hospital. In the blur of shadows and oxycodone every four hours, he has tried to look at his shoulder, but all he can tell in the dark is that it is certainly sore enough to be ugly. It's another thing he knows, and he hates that, as much as he hates the mellow throb from collarbone to spine because his career is reducible to knowing when his shoulder is separated.
Orr's here for - what it is, probably nothing. Probably nothing at all, and if it is anything, then they will do what they do. Orr is here, though. It pulls at something funny in him. Then Orr shuts the door.
Orr hangs his coat up, and turns back to Betts. This time, at least, he does not stare. Betts, opportunistically, takes the chance to look at Orr. There is, at least, nothing new about his appearance. He is wearing a shirt, a dress shirt, and when he moves his arm, there's probably a darker stripe where the hemmed sleeve of his undershirt strains around one bicep. He must have come from a meeting, the post-season one, all done up, then stopped by. That's nice, Betts thinks, contemplating the kindness like a plucked blade of grass between two fingertips. Orr's so recently been outside, even on the paved sidewalks here, that his presence makes Betts think again of spring. New York is still windy, and Orr is likely pink-cheeked from the zip of the wind through the tall buildings. Betts can't see any of this, not in the dark like how they are, but none of Orr is unfamiliar. None of him is remarkable either, he is as unelaborate as the miracle of a human being can be: wide-set eyes and stony shoulders, pale sweep of his bones under the skin, unrepaired and mostly whole, in original condition. His hair will have fallen softly over his forehead. This sets Betts' heart to beating very fast.
Betts scratches at the curve of his hairline behind his ear. Displacement, he thinks, a nervous compensation for how he wants to worry at the tape under his eye. "Can I get you something? Come on into the kitchen." He does not look back to see if Orr is following.
"Water, yeah?" he asks, as Orr walks into the narrow little kitchen. Betts slides two glasses along the countertop. When he'd come back here, after the hospital, left at the sliding elevator doors, it had hardly mattered. The next day, between attempts at sleep and icing his shoulder, he had been pleased that the place was neat, that before - he had started the dishwasher, the plates clean and dry, glasses speckled with water drops. Yesterday, melted icewater trickling down his back, he watched the game. The sweatshirt he'd been wearing is draped over the couch, and probably still wet. He should move it, there's some notion of not ruining the couch with mold, not needing to throw it out later.
This has not really come up before. Everyone was playing, and usually, as soon as that last loss drains off, guys head out, going home, or anywhere they won't have to think about it, another season ending like that. He's staying here; the team's doctors and the medical centre's specialists are keeping a close eye on him, and the lease doesn't break until June. Which is all fine, and probably more than he needs. Maybe the team - the Rangers, he thinks fiercely, maybe they'll re-sign him, they're doing their best to look out for him, he'll be at a hundred-percent when the season comes back in the fall. He's supposed to go in again, at the end of the week. Maybe his shoulder will not ache so much.
What it comes to, though, is that he can't do this easy. A fracture to his face looks worse, but the pain of his shoulder is debilitating. He fills the glasses: turns the tap on, pushes a cup under the flow of water, and when it is full, bumps it out of the way with the second one. The sink-basin is square, cut slightly too deep for this; his shirt billows with the exaggerated movement, and his hand is wet. He slicks it down the mesh of his basketball shorts, and hands one glass to Orr. The other one, the one he meant to drink, is in the sink: it's not too much trouble to get, but it is too much to let Orr see him try this again.
"Thanks." Orr drinks, deeply, and places the glass back down, easily. "So, how's it been? You went to the hospital, got it all fixed up?"
"Yeah, on Sunday. Came back here, just lying low." Somehow he's compelled to add, "it looks worse than it is."
"Well, it should be. It, uh. Pretty bad stuff." And for a moment, Betts is confused. Here in the kitchen, Orr hasn't seen any of it, except maybe the embarrassing circus with their water-glasses. He cannot possibly know how Betts is hurting, he's just been looking for less than a minute. It's all a big deal in his own mind, but how can he know what Orr thinks? Orr is his own: Betts had last seen him before his own last game, but it was Orr's second-to-last game - and they don't even share that experience, so how could Betts possibly know more? The whole team had skated out, and Betts had raised his chin towards Orr in acknowledgment. That was reasonable enough: they sometimes played together. Until now, Betts hasn't thought of this encounter. There was nothing to it: everyone talks on ice, sometimes like Orr, they get to a little more. But by then, Betts hadn't been looking at him: he'd only heard about that secondhand. Before, though: Betts had raised his chin, and Orr had looked, held his gaze overlong. Betts, if he'd thought about it, would have thought that Orr broke away. He hasn't thought about it, not before this, but Orr hadn't done that.
Orr hadn't looked away at all. Clear-eyed, stern-hearted, and he had been looking. The Garden is lit by a vast bloom of lights, but on the ice, all the light comes to a light blue. It glints off visors and shims over helmets, though by this late in the season the gear is scratched and sanded down so the light doesn't hit - reflect to the eye - shine with easy brightness. He had brought his chin down, because if he knew that Orr was looking at him, then he was looking back. He'd had to be there, to tell, be there to be looked at, although that whole notion makes him feel sticky and untruthful; why would Orr do that, put that him in the state of being looked at? Betts stares out where the window is. It makes him anxious, thinking like this, thinking of Orr spending time that way.
It shouldn't, really. Looking, not even touching, is hardly the worst thing in the world, and he's in no position to complain, really. Not with how it had been, what came next. Touch isn't a good sensation, feeling beyond what was usual on the ice: the press of his skates to his ankles, the rub of his glove on his wristbone. Even staring at his gloves, curious how he'd ended up shattered over the ice, he'd known it had been bad. Betts hadn't ever worried for his vision, but now he wonders if he should have. He was: out, bloody, medicated, then left to his own ends. He blinks. The tape pulls around his eye, but he can see just fine. There's that. He can see. Orr can see.
It's nothing. Just eyes, and seeing and looking are the same anyway. Orr wants to look at him -- let him see. He wants to look at Orr -- at least he can.
"Bad stuff," Orr repeats. "Not such a good season, after all."
Betts doesn't have the heart, nor the desire, to quarrel with him. It was a fine season, until it ended. Which is a general truth: finality comes, brute and unpenetrating, majestic in its uncaring. The specifics don't matter under the cold sweep of the final game of the season: eighty-two games are all that is given, a few more in the playoffs for the luckiest, and then everything comes to an end. Their end happened to be like this, with Betts on the couch and Orr looking at the Capitals on ice.
Not a success, but what could be? Skills, luck: it came down to a good and lucky shot in the last period of the final game. They used what they had, and his absence did not cause this. He's not that good, for one. He's not a goal-scorer who can change the game around him, and even if he could be that player in his twelve minutes of ice-time, it was one game. One more game, and then the end. Not fate, just the count-down of a clock. While he hopes for Washington to see four games and no more, he can do nothing. Their season will end, after four losses or three rounds of wins. All seasons end, even for the winners. That's what seasons do, they end. Winning does not make success, and losing does not make failure: both of them come to red numbers ticking down to nothing. Nothing, the uncoloured expanse of seasonless time. For a season is only a way to measure out time, to count the days of a career, the time that his shoulder will allow him to play. He used to think it would be longer, but: a season is less than a year, and his playing days are countable not as seasons but as games. Time goes the way of all things, and will betray him.
Betts chews at the inside of his cheek, hoping that the pain, however dull it may be, will bring him back to himself. It doesn't precisely work, but at least Orr hasn't noticed.
Orr edges the lip of the glass with his left thumb. He looks intently at this operation. It is enough so that Betts begins to watch as well: Orr's thumbnail has been cut back until it is very short. It has to be, for hockey. A crust of nail, ivory and manicured, wouldn't fit in gloves. Without the build-up of calcium and keratin, the pink throb of blood to his fingertips is very near. Betts' own hands have a cooler tint, the blood under the surface tends to appear purple. The curve of Orr's fingertip, beyond the nail, is lined and dry: a stratigraphic record of what he has done with this hand. Gloves put on, shots, injuries that build up over time. Orr does not have very large hands, but his fingers are crooked, and his palm is broad.
The noise from the street filters up to them, crawls ten stories, slides around the silence in the room.
What else can they say to one another? "You want to --" Orr shrugs back. "Wherever the bedroom is here?" Orr has been here, of course, but it had been evening, after playing, and they were heavy and sure about it.
Orr has touched him with those fight-rough hands, not to pummel out some weakness, but like this, like this. This resonates, a steady thrum of certainty low in a body. They have, a couple times previously. They have done this before. It should not be different, they have a pattern to these things. "Yes." Orr would put one hand to the swell of muscle at Betts' ribs, the parabola of a core. Orr's hand shaped around air, skin, flesh, muscle, the bone of rib. Like that, Orr would mouth at Betts' neck, his hands, his hips. It got heavy, and Orr's got it from him a few times, if they can get so far and don't exhaust themselves in every touch before that.
It is a small apartment. Nice for what it is, even on his yearly pay. He'd chosen this place for its proximity to the Garden. At the time he'd signed, he hadn't thought that would ever be a bad thing, but now, he doesn't really like it. They're quickly in the darkened bedroom.
Orr makes to prod at his shoulder. That's what this is, touch as an anchor. It is really no different than a low five on the bench, a reassuring shrug under the cap of a shoulder-pad. It affirms what they have done, and what they will do. It would be different if he were a big goal-scorer: for them is the bench-wide salute, the taps on the helmet, the loop of film for the highlight reel: all of these, pressing in to touch, to share the heady moment, rich and bright, quality like foamy beer on tap. The team are friendly, the young guys will snap rattailed towels at each other in the shower, they'll go drinking together in celebration, shouldering up to the bar in sweaty suit jackets.
They are separated so often by padding: polyamides, foam cells under slick plastic, elasticized blends, gloves of glue, leather, and nylon. He touches his head only by way of leathered palm, the hard shell of helmet, sytrofoam and polyester. A touch on the ice is insulated by these layers, the narcotizing effect of gear. Even after a goal, it dulls effect, it keeps them enclosed. It closes affect to the simple matter of killing penalties, taking faceoffs, winning. Had it only worked Sunday, kept his body safe with all those layers, deadened the sensation of hitting the ice, the implosion of bone. The only thing that has been close has been pain. The surgeons and nurses offered cool caring, mediated by the safety of gloves. Orr's is the first touch he's felt in days.
Betts sits on the edge of the bed, and pulls his socks off. "Not supposed to put weight on it." He wants to forestall any stupid dramatics, avoid showing hurt any stronger than what's on his face. It would hurt to do like how they usually do. "My shoulder, I mean." He is not about to mention his eye, his face, even what's going on his head to Orr. Either it's clear, or it's a secret and should stay that way. He's resigned to that: it's enough not drinking like this, doesn't matter if he hurts and is due back at the hospital because he can keep it to himself. That defence hasn't crumbled, and getting with Orr is enough. There is nothing he has to say, since they both want this.
They're not going to talk about it. That's not what they do. They drink, and sometimes they engage in a little heavy petting, or have sex. The fact they're not thick through whiskey and beer throws Betts off enough already. The water glasses are in the kitchen, behind walls, away from them: if it'd been alcohol, they'd have brought it in, no use in letting good stuff go warm, clinking glass to glass before going hand to hand.
What's it like, what's it like without whiskey under his tongue, the burn of skating in his thighs, two cans of beer within reach on the nightstand or crushed on the ground. That had been his trick, a single twist and he could flatten an empty can. He doesn't know any of that, least of all if he has the strength for weak indulgences exacted on aluminum. Betts looks up from the ground. There's nothing there, not the shiny smashed multi-pointed stars that Orr found impressive and someone had to kick out of the way when he got up, afterward.
"Worse'n than usual?" Orr slurs a little, not from drinking, he must be tired or something. He has not begun to undress either. They both stay in place, slow and distant, like swimmers in the morning lake.
Betts has not asked him to go easy. It's not like that. Any conclusions he has drawn are his own, after watching Betts take a trainer's needle, stretching to get through the effects of a rough hit. "Yeah." It hasn't stopped them before; after all, cortisone shots are meant to make movement easier, however he uses his shoulder. It still feels fine, mostly, and so what if he doesn't mind getting pushed into the wall? So what if he can't feel his arm at all? The loose feeling in his shoulder, when it gets jarred forward, when he holds to the head of the bed, as they fuck, it gets doubled-up: he likes it. Muscle, even bad and broken, gets tight in the moment. Better, and hotter, and faster, all slurry sensation, that's what they're doing. It wouldn't matter. Today, there's not much difference in the darkness of the sheets or the ceiling. Betts does not mind. Someone's got to, when they're doing things this way, and Orr's not bad for it. It's good, they both have a good time with it. It's what they should be doing.
Orr nods. "Alright. You wanna get on your back?" Betts looks at him curiously. "On the bed, like. Not anything."
His heart unseats. This has been well done, carefully managed in rare late evenings. They don't need to say much of anything at all, not now. It hasn't been terribly common, after all: this thing is a unthinking thing. To say that it is private would be too much: he'd have to contemplate it when he was alone for that, and he never thinks of this if he can help it. And if it's not private, it's public, which is too strange to even contemplate, like picking up a roll of stick tape and finding that it has become a rose. It's just him and Orr, and they've been here before. They both know how it goes, palm to skin, every moment alike. Orr fists his hands in the slick mesh of Betts' shorts, the string-tied waist easing around his legs.
There's nothing to talk about, is there? Orr looks at him, kind and almost sweet. Sweet, like gummy rose-water candy over Easter, the same kind of solid pleasant plainness. He should have kept it to himself. They've never needed to talk about anything, and why? It's not like his shoulder hasn't hurt before. Not like Orr hasn't come back to the room, eyes blurred over and a dizzy stagger to his walk that even the foam under their skates can't disguise. They haven't not both kept to themselves in the dark, alone together in a slurred mess of sheets, hands, and missing words. Word salad, that's what it is, when Orr'll say something strange and never notice. Betts has always kept it a secret, even from Orr, even in these moments. Because it is now, when they are something very simple, a rough hand on the filmy white of an undershirt, that giving voice to it, even in so kind a way as to be concern, means a hand taken away, a dark hotel room on his own, with his more constant friend: numbing chronic pain.
His body is more than that. He and Orr, they're nothing that he's given voice to, and Orr certainly hasn't been thinking about it in his off-time, but they can be something together. It sounds silly, cheap, like the fact that they fuck isn't real enough, like saying something has any power over the thing itself. Everyone's the same animal in sex, making the same careless noises. Those don't mean anything more than the act itself, so why should some finer words? Sometimes they get together, because it's hard being alone when his body is slipping away from him, when he becomes less with each day. First his knee, then his shoulder, now his mind. His eye. If there's anything that makes it clearer he's somewhat less than he had been when he got here, what could it be? He's scared, because a couple of nice doctors snaked their tools under his eye and inserted a mesh square of rust-resistant, high-quality steel. His body is not all his own, what had been bone is matched to steel like a machine. That had been what the surgeons decided, and he doesn't mind it, not compared to what it could be, a bloody mess or his vision compromised, but he would have liked to know what was happening. Who would've told him? Whatever he thinks doesn't matter: he'd been good, and he was a second-round pick, a fourth-line player. He'd been doing it with Orr, and he's injured, broken-down, bones so recently smashed that he still has his hospital wristband. Feeling sorry for himself will do not a bit of good, Betts thinks, and firms his jaw. These are things which have happened. They're the truth now. He doesn't need to categorize to know why Orr is here. It happened, is all, and not even the softest word does so much as Orr's heavy look. This is like the inverse of telling a lie: he knows it to be true, it doesn't matter what he says to anyone.
What would it even be: he wouldn't know what to say. Orr wouldn't either, but that's so far from the principal thing. Their encounters pile up like ice on a sharp stop -- hotels in different cities, Orr's place downtown, Orr at his door today. It's not nothing, even if Betts won't make it anything more than that. He curves his neck, offering up the hunch of overdeveloped muscle, the line of his body like geometry. Certain and sure: an axiom. Orr's hands are tangled in his shirt, and Betts breathes. His heart unseats.
As Orr undresses, working down the buttons of his shirt with his tongue between his teeth, Betts considers him: partly as a distraction from the fact that he is naked and cold, partly because he can. Orr is not handsome. He's not unhandsome either. He just looks how he does. Square jaw, nose torqued from hits, but which will look distinguished when he is older, very blue eyes set in a broad face. Betts doesn't need to look, not even so close, to know that. Orr presses a haphazard breath to the distinguishing line of lip and chin. An open-mouthed kiss.
His eyes are kindly and not so wide-set as he jokes. This is what Betts remembers: no one much minds, but everyone: in hockey, from the Prairies, knows the same jokes. They're still not funny, and they both knew them before -- but Orr has told the joke a couple of times. He curls his index, middle, and ring fingers so the tips touch the inner surface of his palm, and leaves his thumb and little finger out, then holds his hand to his face, knuckles in like he's going to punch himself. The punchline to the joke is drawing his thumb out farther and saying, hey see any Mennos. Betts is not sure if Orr grew up Mennonite. It seems like the kind of thing he ought to know.
He looks like himself. Betts eases down, to lying on his back. He looks like himself.
There is a thumbprint-sized spatter of freckles at the joint of torso to hip, the crease of Orr's waist. Before they even once did this, Betts knew pretty well what Orr's body was like. Bodies: muscle, skin, freckle, bone, creases of curve, long lines, are all made to the same design. The showers, the dressing room, these are places that it doesn't matter, and Betts had noted, abstractly, how pale Orr was, the curl to his hair when it was damp with sweat or after a shower. These are things he knows about all of them, though. Just flesh, just meat, just bodies. A body is a functional thing. It's what they do, and if they're smart, they won't be failed by their flesh.
Out from under Ranger blue and the best products modern materials science can offer, though, and it's Orr. Orr's body rapidly becomes very particular, from the freckles visible where his undershirt has been rucked-up to the scrape of his fingers down Betts' forearms, the heated friction of joint, muscle, and blood at his groin where he rubs against Orr. His own larger hands are aligned with Orr's, and Betts looks to their interlaced fingers. All of those little bones, hundreds probably, in so simple a motion as holding their hands together. Orr lavishes hot breath on Betts' pulse. It comes to Betts then: Orr is keeping Betts' shoulder in a safe position: he has made an armature of his own arm. His elbow is bent and it can't be easy, like an eternal push-up, but he's done it all the same.
It's slow and infinite, the sweet certainty that Orr will do this for him. It's what Orr does, he offers congratulations on ice where the only touch is the solid thump of slick plastic, an all-purpose gesture; he breathes over Betts' knuckles even taking the joints soft in his mouth with the collusion of heat and spit. Tenderly, he presses his palms into the sweep of Betts' thighs, pressure on the cables of tendon behind his knees.
With the shades drawn over the windows, in this lightless bedroom, it is them. The very same, on ice or off it, with words or without them. It's all solid like architecture, firm like concrete. The supporting glass that trembles in the wind. New York is a hard city, the ice at the Garden cracks under the weight of a body. It is sometimes better to move than to maintain a rigidity: buildings give, their bodies allow. It comes to a flourish of motion. The bones in his face shattered inward, a comic-book impact under his eye, the fragments buried like exploded shrapnel in the ground of yielding soft tissue.
He will give. Betts is not weak, just hurt, and Orr is so good to him.
It is only air between him and Betts. Orr is this near. His hands press close, pushing the air away, as they touch: skin on skin, muscle over muscle, curve to arch, molecule to molecule, electrons spinning out in overlapping orbit, sharing atomic space.
And it ended: the Rangers signed Brashear over Orr, so before the new season, Betts was in Philadelphia and Orr was in Toronto. Presently, they're "damaged goods" and largely irrelevant, respectively.
2008-9 Rangers: Blair Betts, Colton Orr.
Note: In Game Six of the Eastern Conference Quarter Finals, April 26th 2009, Capitals at Rangers, Brashear hit Betts, which ended in a suspension and fractured orbital bone, respectively. Betts previously had several shoulder injuries, which I've opted to draw out here, hey he did fall on his shoulder. After Lisel Mueller's Romantics. Edited by faded-lilac in a very noble way.
Warning: a dumb joke, covalent bonding.
It is spring in New York, and the first round of the playoffs have ended. Ended yesterday, Tuesday, and now it is the real beginning of the off-season, spring into summer stretching out wide and endless, like a sheet still wet from the wash, heavy in its own way and with something still to do. Summer will be drying, hot and dull. He remembers that from growing up: he could stand in the backyard and see the laundry flapping on the line, look over the low fences or hear the gentle percussion of towels billowing then snapping on the wind throughout the neighbourhood. They had moved when he was ten, and after that he'd gone west, straight out the Yellowhead Highway to Prince George. Now he is in New York, where there are no trees to run lines, and the pillowcases would probably go gray with smoke.
This apartment in Midtown, in the middle of a long avenue, is bookended by sleek, glassed-in office buildings. He has not left since he walked out the door to take the 6 to the Garden on Sunday: four stations down, and then across the avenues. He came back after that, in a cab, and he'd stood at his door, dumb and unable to get his keys from his jacket pocket. After that, after the smeary mess of memories from the sleek ice, cut by skateblades and gear scattered like exploded shot, to the clean sheets of the recovery room bed.
The doorbell rings tinnily. Betts unfolds, standing up from the couch, to get it.
It is early afternoon, he guesses. He is not wearing a watch. Which is good, because he has to spring the lock with both hands, contorting his wrists, which is harder than it looks. Except he's not really looking: he won't, and he can't. Injury makes everything more difficult. A watch would've fallen to the floor, silver links unspooling over the wooden boards. Maybe hurt him, like how he is, pinched at his skin, hurt him again. He certainly couldn't pick it up. He has managed, but not by much: he's in a clean undershirt, for all that's worth.
Orr stands at the doorway. "Hey," he says, thickly. "I wasn't sure if you'd be in, or up - or like how you are." Orange-yellow light from the hallway spills in behind him, and intermixes with the narrow path of sunshine from under the windowshades. It slides away over their feet: Orr's shoes and Betts' socks are bright and shadowed in even partition. It seems very fair, unlike a whole lot of other things.
"I am. You wanna come in?" Orr does not move, for a long second, and steps in, looking seriously at Betts.
Betts touches the tape, aware of Orr's attention to the paths his fingertips trace. It isn't to shelter weakness: Orr would never hurt him, never seek to attack when he'd been favouring one side. This morning in front of the mirror, while brushing his teeth, he'd evaluated it critically. The tape itches, and leaves red marks. The purple-blue bruises are flattening, spreading until they are pale. The surgeons had explained it all, the mesh patch below his eye, the clean way it had been done, bone cleared out, and he'd looked at it sideways, because the sense that it was underneath his eye, deep in, was still difficult to - wrap his head around, and Betts had smiled at the joke then. The depth, three-dimensionality of his own body is harder to think about. It doesn't look good, but that doesn't matter. It had been dark, it is dark here: he hasn't turned the lights on, not since he has returned from the hospital. In the blur of shadows and oxycodone every four hours, he has tried to look at his shoulder, but all he can tell in the dark is that it is certainly sore enough to be ugly. It's another thing he knows, and he hates that, as much as he hates the mellow throb from collarbone to spine because his career is reducible to knowing when his shoulder is separated.
Orr's here for - what it is, probably nothing. Probably nothing at all, and if it is anything, then they will do what they do. Orr is here, though. It pulls at something funny in him. Then Orr shuts the door.
Orr hangs his coat up, and turns back to Betts. This time, at least, he does not stare. Betts, opportunistically, takes the chance to look at Orr. There is, at least, nothing new about his appearance. He is wearing a shirt, a dress shirt, and when he moves his arm, there's probably a darker stripe where the hemmed sleeve of his undershirt strains around one bicep. He must have come from a meeting, the post-season one, all done up, then stopped by. That's nice, Betts thinks, contemplating the kindness like a plucked blade of grass between two fingertips. Orr's so recently been outside, even on the paved sidewalks here, that his presence makes Betts think again of spring. New York is still windy, and Orr is likely pink-cheeked from the zip of the wind through the tall buildings. Betts can't see any of this, not in the dark like how they are, but none of Orr is unfamiliar. None of him is remarkable either, he is as unelaborate as the miracle of a human being can be: wide-set eyes and stony shoulders, pale sweep of his bones under the skin, unrepaired and mostly whole, in original condition. His hair will have fallen softly over his forehead. This sets Betts' heart to beating very fast.
Betts scratches at the curve of his hairline behind his ear. Displacement, he thinks, a nervous compensation for how he wants to worry at the tape under his eye. "Can I get you something? Come on into the kitchen." He does not look back to see if Orr is following.
"Water, yeah?" he asks, as Orr walks into the narrow little kitchen. Betts slides two glasses along the countertop. When he'd come back here, after the hospital, left at the sliding elevator doors, it had hardly mattered. The next day, between attempts at sleep and icing his shoulder, he had been pleased that the place was neat, that before - he had started the dishwasher, the plates clean and dry, glasses speckled with water drops. Yesterday, melted icewater trickling down his back, he watched the game. The sweatshirt he'd been wearing is draped over the couch, and probably still wet. He should move it, there's some notion of not ruining the couch with mold, not needing to throw it out later.
This has not really come up before. Everyone was playing, and usually, as soon as that last loss drains off, guys head out, going home, or anywhere they won't have to think about it, another season ending like that. He's staying here; the team's doctors and the medical centre's specialists are keeping a close eye on him, and the lease doesn't break until June. Which is all fine, and probably more than he needs. Maybe the team - the Rangers, he thinks fiercely, maybe they'll re-sign him, they're doing their best to look out for him, he'll be at a hundred-percent when the season comes back in the fall. He's supposed to go in again, at the end of the week. Maybe his shoulder will not ache so much.
What it comes to, though, is that he can't do this easy. A fracture to his face looks worse, but the pain of his shoulder is debilitating. He fills the glasses: turns the tap on, pushes a cup under the flow of water, and when it is full, bumps it out of the way with the second one. The sink-basin is square, cut slightly too deep for this; his shirt billows with the exaggerated movement, and his hand is wet. He slicks it down the mesh of his basketball shorts, and hands one glass to Orr. The other one, the one he meant to drink, is in the sink: it's not too much trouble to get, but it is too much to let Orr see him try this again.
"Thanks." Orr drinks, deeply, and places the glass back down, easily. "So, how's it been? You went to the hospital, got it all fixed up?"
"Yeah, on Sunday. Came back here, just lying low." Somehow he's compelled to add, "it looks worse than it is."
"Well, it should be. It, uh. Pretty bad stuff." And for a moment, Betts is confused. Here in the kitchen, Orr hasn't seen any of it, except maybe the embarrassing circus with their water-glasses. He cannot possibly know how Betts is hurting, he's just been looking for less than a minute. It's all a big deal in his own mind, but how can he know what Orr thinks? Orr is his own: Betts had last seen him before his own last game, but it was Orr's second-to-last game - and they don't even share that experience, so how could Betts possibly know more? The whole team had skated out, and Betts had raised his chin towards Orr in acknowledgment. That was reasonable enough: they sometimes played together. Until now, Betts hasn't thought of this encounter. There was nothing to it: everyone talks on ice, sometimes like Orr, they get to a little more. But by then, Betts hadn't been looking at him: he'd only heard about that secondhand. Before, though: Betts had raised his chin, and Orr had looked, held his gaze overlong. Betts, if he'd thought about it, would have thought that Orr broke away. He hasn't thought about it, not before this, but Orr hadn't done that.
Orr hadn't looked away at all. Clear-eyed, stern-hearted, and he had been looking. The Garden is lit by a vast bloom of lights, but on the ice, all the light comes to a light blue. It glints off visors and shims over helmets, though by this late in the season the gear is scratched and sanded down so the light doesn't hit - reflect to the eye - shine with easy brightness. He had brought his chin down, because if he knew that Orr was looking at him, then he was looking back. He'd had to be there, to tell, be there to be looked at, although that whole notion makes him feel sticky and untruthful; why would Orr do that, put that him in the state of being looked at? Betts stares out where the window is. It makes him anxious, thinking like this, thinking of Orr spending time that way.
It shouldn't, really. Looking, not even touching, is hardly the worst thing in the world, and he's in no position to complain, really. Not with how it had been, what came next. Touch isn't a good sensation, feeling beyond what was usual on the ice: the press of his skates to his ankles, the rub of his glove on his wristbone. Even staring at his gloves, curious how he'd ended up shattered over the ice, he'd known it had been bad. Betts hadn't ever worried for his vision, but now he wonders if he should have. He was: out, bloody, medicated, then left to his own ends. He blinks. The tape pulls around his eye, but he can see just fine. There's that. He can see. Orr can see.
It's nothing. Just eyes, and seeing and looking are the same anyway. Orr wants to look at him -- let him see. He wants to look at Orr -- at least he can.
"Bad stuff," Orr repeats. "Not such a good season, after all."
Betts doesn't have the heart, nor the desire, to quarrel with him. It was a fine season, until it ended. Which is a general truth: finality comes, brute and unpenetrating, majestic in its uncaring. The specifics don't matter under the cold sweep of the final game of the season: eighty-two games are all that is given, a few more in the playoffs for the luckiest, and then everything comes to an end. Their end happened to be like this, with Betts on the couch and Orr looking at the Capitals on ice.
Not a success, but what could be? Skills, luck: it came down to a good and lucky shot in the last period of the final game. They used what they had, and his absence did not cause this. He's not that good, for one. He's not a goal-scorer who can change the game around him, and even if he could be that player in his twelve minutes of ice-time, it was one game. One more game, and then the end. Not fate, just the count-down of a clock. While he hopes for Washington to see four games and no more, he can do nothing. Their season will end, after four losses or three rounds of wins. All seasons end, even for the winners. That's what seasons do, they end. Winning does not make success, and losing does not make failure: both of them come to red numbers ticking down to nothing. Nothing, the uncoloured expanse of seasonless time. For a season is only a way to measure out time, to count the days of a career, the time that his shoulder will allow him to play. He used to think it would be longer, but: a season is less than a year, and his playing days are countable not as seasons but as games. Time goes the way of all things, and will betray him.
Betts chews at the inside of his cheek, hoping that the pain, however dull it may be, will bring him back to himself. It doesn't precisely work, but at least Orr hasn't noticed.
Orr edges the lip of the glass with his left thumb. He looks intently at this operation. It is enough so that Betts begins to watch as well: Orr's thumbnail has been cut back until it is very short. It has to be, for hockey. A crust of nail, ivory and manicured, wouldn't fit in gloves. Without the build-up of calcium and keratin, the pink throb of blood to his fingertips is very near. Betts' own hands have a cooler tint, the blood under the surface tends to appear purple. The curve of Orr's fingertip, beyond the nail, is lined and dry: a stratigraphic record of what he has done with this hand. Gloves put on, shots, injuries that build up over time. Orr does not have very large hands, but his fingers are crooked, and his palm is broad.
The noise from the street filters up to them, crawls ten stories, slides around the silence in the room.
What else can they say to one another? "You want to --" Orr shrugs back. "Wherever the bedroom is here?" Orr has been here, of course, but it had been evening, after playing, and they were heavy and sure about it.
Orr has touched him with those fight-rough hands, not to pummel out some weakness, but like this, like this. This resonates, a steady thrum of certainty low in a body. They have, a couple times previously. They have done this before. It should not be different, they have a pattern to these things. "Yes." Orr would put one hand to the swell of muscle at Betts' ribs, the parabola of a core. Orr's hand shaped around air, skin, flesh, muscle, the bone of rib. Like that, Orr would mouth at Betts' neck, his hands, his hips. It got heavy, and Orr's got it from him a few times, if they can get so far and don't exhaust themselves in every touch before that.
It is a small apartment. Nice for what it is, even on his yearly pay. He'd chosen this place for its proximity to the Garden. At the time he'd signed, he hadn't thought that would ever be a bad thing, but now, he doesn't really like it. They're quickly in the darkened bedroom.
Orr makes to prod at his shoulder. That's what this is, touch as an anchor. It is really no different than a low five on the bench, a reassuring shrug under the cap of a shoulder-pad. It affirms what they have done, and what they will do. It would be different if he were a big goal-scorer: for them is the bench-wide salute, the taps on the helmet, the loop of film for the highlight reel: all of these, pressing in to touch, to share the heady moment, rich and bright, quality like foamy beer on tap. The team are friendly, the young guys will snap rattailed towels at each other in the shower, they'll go drinking together in celebration, shouldering up to the bar in sweaty suit jackets.
They are separated so often by padding: polyamides, foam cells under slick plastic, elasticized blends, gloves of glue, leather, and nylon. He touches his head only by way of leathered palm, the hard shell of helmet, sytrofoam and polyester. A touch on the ice is insulated by these layers, the narcotizing effect of gear. Even after a goal, it dulls effect, it keeps them enclosed. It closes affect to the simple matter of killing penalties, taking faceoffs, winning. Had it only worked Sunday, kept his body safe with all those layers, deadened the sensation of hitting the ice, the implosion of bone. The only thing that has been close has been pain. The surgeons and nurses offered cool caring, mediated by the safety of gloves. Orr's is the first touch he's felt in days.
Betts sits on the edge of the bed, and pulls his socks off. "Not supposed to put weight on it." He wants to forestall any stupid dramatics, avoid showing hurt any stronger than what's on his face. It would hurt to do like how they usually do. "My shoulder, I mean." He is not about to mention his eye, his face, even what's going on his head to Orr. Either it's clear, or it's a secret and should stay that way. He's resigned to that: it's enough not drinking like this, doesn't matter if he hurts and is due back at the hospital because he can keep it to himself. That defence hasn't crumbled, and getting with Orr is enough. There is nothing he has to say, since they both want this.
They're not going to talk about it. That's not what they do. They drink, and sometimes they engage in a little heavy petting, or have sex. The fact they're not thick through whiskey and beer throws Betts off enough already. The water glasses are in the kitchen, behind walls, away from them: if it'd been alcohol, they'd have brought it in, no use in letting good stuff go warm, clinking glass to glass before going hand to hand.
What's it like, what's it like without whiskey under his tongue, the burn of skating in his thighs, two cans of beer within reach on the nightstand or crushed on the ground. That had been his trick, a single twist and he could flatten an empty can. He doesn't know any of that, least of all if he has the strength for weak indulgences exacted on aluminum. Betts looks up from the ground. There's nothing there, not the shiny smashed multi-pointed stars that Orr found impressive and someone had to kick out of the way when he got up, afterward.
"Worse'n than usual?" Orr slurs a little, not from drinking, he must be tired or something. He has not begun to undress either. They both stay in place, slow and distant, like swimmers in the morning lake.
Betts has not asked him to go easy. It's not like that. Any conclusions he has drawn are his own, after watching Betts take a trainer's needle, stretching to get through the effects of a rough hit. "Yeah." It hasn't stopped them before; after all, cortisone shots are meant to make movement easier, however he uses his shoulder. It still feels fine, mostly, and so what if he doesn't mind getting pushed into the wall? So what if he can't feel his arm at all? The loose feeling in his shoulder, when it gets jarred forward, when he holds to the head of the bed, as they fuck, it gets doubled-up: he likes it. Muscle, even bad and broken, gets tight in the moment. Better, and hotter, and faster, all slurry sensation, that's what they're doing. It wouldn't matter. Today, there's not much difference in the darkness of the sheets or the ceiling. Betts does not mind. Someone's got to, when they're doing things this way, and Orr's not bad for it. It's good, they both have a good time with it. It's what they should be doing.
Orr nods. "Alright. You wanna get on your back?" Betts looks at him curiously. "On the bed, like. Not anything."
His heart unseats. This has been well done, carefully managed in rare late evenings. They don't need to say much of anything at all, not now. It hasn't been terribly common, after all: this thing is a unthinking thing. To say that it is private would be too much: he'd have to contemplate it when he was alone for that, and he never thinks of this if he can help it. And if it's not private, it's public, which is too strange to even contemplate, like picking up a roll of stick tape and finding that it has become a rose. It's just him and Orr, and they've been here before. They both know how it goes, palm to skin, every moment alike. Orr fists his hands in the slick mesh of Betts' shorts, the string-tied waist easing around his legs.
There's nothing to talk about, is there? Orr looks at him, kind and almost sweet. Sweet, like gummy rose-water candy over Easter, the same kind of solid pleasant plainness. He should have kept it to himself. They've never needed to talk about anything, and why? It's not like his shoulder hasn't hurt before. Not like Orr hasn't come back to the room, eyes blurred over and a dizzy stagger to his walk that even the foam under their skates can't disguise. They haven't not both kept to themselves in the dark, alone together in a slurred mess of sheets, hands, and missing words. Word salad, that's what it is, when Orr'll say something strange and never notice. Betts has always kept it a secret, even from Orr, even in these moments. Because it is now, when they are something very simple, a rough hand on the filmy white of an undershirt, that giving voice to it, even in so kind a way as to be concern, means a hand taken away, a dark hotel room on his own, with his more constant friend: numbing chronic pain.
His body is more than that. He and Orr, they're nothing that he's given voice to, and Orr certainly hasn't been thinking about it in his off-time, but they can be something together. It sounds silly, cheap, like the fact that they fuck isn't real enough, like saying something has any power over the thing itself. Everyone's the same animal in sex, making the same careless noises. Those don't mean anything more than the act itself, so why should some finer words? Sometimes they get together, because it's hard being alone when his body is slipping away from him, when he becomes less with each day. First his knee, then his shoulder, now his mind. His eye. If there's anything that makes it clearer he's somewhat less than he had been when he got here, what could it be? He's scared, because a couple of nice doctors snaked their tools under his eye and inserted a mesh square of rust-resistant, high-quality steel. His body is not all his own, what had been bone is matched to steel like a machine. That had been what the surgeons decided, and he doesn't mind it, not compared to what it could be, a bloody mess or his vision compromised, but he would have liked to know what was happening. Who would've told him? Whatever he thinks doesn't matter: he'd been good, and he was a second-round pick, a fourth-line player. He'd been doing it with Orr, and he's injured, broken-down, bones so recently smashed that he still has his hospital wristband. Feeling sorry for himself will do not a bit of good, Betts thinks, and firms his jaw. These are things which have happened. They're the truth now. He doesn't need to categorize to know why Orr is here. It happened, is all, and not even the softest word does so much as Orr's heavy look. This is like the inverse of telling a lie: he knows it to be true, it doesn't matter what he says to anyone.
What would it even be: he wouldn't know what to say. Orr wouldn't either, but that's so far from the principal thing. Their encounters pile up like ice on a sharp stop -- hotels in different cities, Orr's place downtown, Orr at his door today. It's not nothing, even if Betts won't make it anything more than that. He curves his neck, offering up the hunch of overdeveloped muscle, the line of his body like geometry. Certain and sure: an axiom. Orr's hands are tangled in his shirt, and Betts breathes. His heart unseats.
As Orr undresses, working down the buttons of his shirt with his tongue between his teeth, Betts considers him: partly as a distraction from the fact that he is naked and cold, partly because he can. Orr is not handsome. He's not unhandsome either. He just looks how he does. Square jaw, nose torqued from hits, but which will look distinguished when he is older, very blue eyes set in a broad face. Betts doesn't need to look, not even so close, to know that. Orr presses a haphazard breath to the distinguishing line of lip and chin. An open-mouthed kiss.
His eyes are kindly and not so wide-set as he jokes. This is what Betts remembers: no one much minds, but everyone: in hockey, from the Prairies, knows the same jokes. They're still not funny, and they both knew them before -- but Orr has told the joke a couple of times. He curls his index, middle, and ring fingers so the tips touch the inner surface of his palm, and leaves his thumb and little finger out, then holds his hand to his face, knuckles in like he's going to punch himself. The punchline to the joke is drawing his thumb out farther and saying, hey see any Mennos. Betts is not sure if Orr grew up Mennonite. It seems like the kind of thing he ought to know.
He looks like himself. Betts eases down, to lying on his back. He looks like himself.
There is a thumbprint-sized spatter of freckles at the joint of torso to hip, the crease of Orr's waist. Before they even once did this, Betts knew pretty well what Orr's body was like. Bodies: muscle, skin, freckle, bone, creases of curve, long lines, are all made to the same design. The showers, the dressing room, these are places that it doesn't matter, and Betts had noted, abstractly, how pale Orr was, the curl to his hair when it was damp with sweat or after a shower. These are things he knows about all of them, though. Just flesh, just meat, just bodies. A body is a functional thing. It's what they do, and if they're smart, they won't be failed by their flesh.
Out from under Ranger blue and the best products modern materials science can offer, though, and it's Orr. Orr's body rapidly becomes very particular, from the freckles visible where his undershirt has been rucked-up to the scrape of his fingers down Betts' forearms, the heated friction of joint, muscle, and blood at his groin where he rubs against Orr. His own larger hands are aligned with Orr's, and Betts looks to their interlaced fingers. All of those little bones, hundreds probably, in so simple a motion as holding their hands together. Orr lavishes hot breath on Betts' pulse. It comes to Betts then: Orr is keeping Betts' shoulder in a safe position: he has made an armature of his own arm. His elbow is bent and it can't be easy, like an eternal push-up, but he's done it all the same.
It's slow and infinite, the sweet certainty that Orr will do this for him. It's what Orr does, he offers congratulations on ice where the only touch is the solid thump of slick plastic, an all-purpose gesture; he breathes over Betts' knuckles even taking the joints soft in his mouth with the collusion of heat and spit. Tenderly, he presses his palms into the sweep of Betts' thighs, pressure on the cables of tendon behind his knees.
With the shades drawn over the windows, in this lightless bedroom, it is them. The very same, on ice or off it, with words or without them. It's all solid like architecture, firm like concrete. The supporting glass that trembles in the wind. New York is a hard city, the ice at the Garden cracks under the weight of a body. It is sometimes better to move than to maintain a rigidity: buildings give, their bodies allow. It comes to a flourish of motion. The bones in his face shattered inward, a comic-book impact under his eye, the fragments buried like exploded shrapnel in the ground of yielding soft tissue.
He will give. Betts is not weak, just hurt, and Orr is so good to him.
It is only air between him and Betts. Orr is this near. His hands press close, pushing the air away, as they touch: skin on skin, muscle over muscle, curve to arch, molecule to molecule, electrons spinning out in overlapping orbit, sharing atomic space.
And it ended: the Rangers signed Brashear over Orr, so before the new season, Betts was in Philadelphia and Orr was in Toronto. Presently, they're "damaged goods" and largely irrelevant, respectively.