Unwritten Rules Read online

  Stephanie blinks twice slowly and then drains the rest of her coffee. “Zach, I know, and I told her. If that ever changes, you can tell me, but I figured that was off-limits for the foreseeable.”

  “Oh. Um, thanks.”

  “It’s not really a ‘thanks’ thing. Players don’t want to talk about certain topics and so we don’t talk about those, if it’s personal and not, like, getting creamed by the Cleveland Spiders. If there are other topics that you don’t want to discuss publicly, just let me know.”

  Eugenio comes back in, holding a mug of coffee for himself and one that he hands to Zach, whitened with soy milk from the carton he keeps in the fridge specifically for when Zach’s there. Their fingers brush.

  “No,” Zach says, “I can’t really think of anything else.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  July, Present Day

  Zach flies back to Miami from the All-Star Classic, an afternoon flight where he sleeps and doesn’t bother connecting his phone to the Wi-Fi. He’s hungover, the kind of awful hangovers he started getting in his thirties, where he wasn’t really drunk, but his body reminds him he can’t mix beer and liquor and champagne. His hip hurts, an ache he shouldn’t get on a few days’ rest, having caught one measly inning in front of an apathetic crowd. His clothing feels wrong. The collar of his shirt scratches against a few islands of stubble-burn at his neck, uncomfortable souvenirs that he tries and fails to soothe with a bottle of stinging hotel lotion. He rests his head uncomfortably against the cold plexiglass of the plane window, crammed in the too-small seat, and worries that he’s going to have to throw up in an airplane bathroom.

  When he lands, there’s a message from his agent.

  He doesn’t have his headphones, and the Bluetooth for his hearing aid is acting too spotty to use in public. The transcription of the message is mostly __________ on his visual voice mail. He has to wait through deplaning, the long haul to the baggage claim. He spends the walk to the parking lot praying someone didn’t get pictures of them coming out of the restaurant bathroom, or of Eugenio lingering outside his hotel room. Or him leaving, sockless, shirt half-untucked, face expressionless on camera.

  He listens to the voice mail in his truck, driving back through the wet Miami streets. It’s midafternoon, humidity rising like steam from the pavement, and he wonders if Eugenio will like playing here in a few weeks, if it’ll be different from how he grumbled at the Bay Area cold.

  “I hear you made a friend during the All-Star Classic,” his agent says. Though his tone is laughing in the message, different from how he might sound if they had to run PR triage. “Garza, the kid from the Rivers, wants to do an article about his fingers or whatever, and he was wondering if you’d do the same about your hearing aid.”

  Zach feels relief like the blast of an air conditioner. He listens to the rest of the message, then tracks down Stephanie when he’s back at his apartment. It’s frigid, AC up too high, though his plants are enjoying the cold. Google reveals that she left the Elephants’ organization and founded her own firm, a slick minimalist website advertising Stephanie Guzman PR Associates, the splash page showing her in a blazer staring slightly off-camera; her hair is blue. There’s an email listed, a general contact account, the kind he suspects are never monitored, and a phone number he expects to go to voice mail. But she picks up when he calls.

  “Um, It’s Zach Glasser. From the, uh—”

  “Hi, Zach.” She sounds a little apprehensive that he’s calling her without warning. “How’ve you been?”

  They switch to FaceTime and catch up a little. Zach tells her about the All-Star Classic and then asks about how she’s doing.

  “It’s been nice choosing my own clients. Fewer press conferences where I have to write statements for players because they said racist shit on Twitter. Which, not that I’m not happy to hear from you, but most guys don’t call me with good news.”

  “They want me to do a Players’ Update piece about my hearing aid. Garza—he’s a pitcher on the Rivers—is doing one about his prosthetic fingers, and I guess he mentioned it to his agent who mentioned it to mine.”

  “Oh.” Her expression brightens at that. “Is that something you want to do?”

  “Not really. But I’m thinking about it, I guess, more than I would if it was just me. Garza probably gets a lot more comments than I do, on account of his hand being so visible. Especially now that I’ve been around the league awhile anyway.” And most players in Miami haven’t asked about his hearing aid, other than a few chirping him about getting out of doing media, though it’s not like the media is really clamoring to hear about a team that’s eliminated from contention before the season even begins.

  “A lot of those articles are ghostwritten,” she says. “I did a couple when I was with the Elephants. I don’t know if you saw them.”

  “Yeah, I did. Which is why I called you.” Because he’d known that Giordano didn’t drink—and that Giordano didn’t drink because he used to drink—but not that he nearly quit playing entirely. “How do we go about arranging this?”

  She runs through the process: a contract his agent will need to review. An interview she’ll turn into an article that he’ll look over to make sure it represents what he wants to say. Coordination with the Swordfish PR folks. “It’s pretty painless. Though is there anything else I should know before we discuss specifics?”

  “It’s not really about my ear itself. I have hearing loss in one ear that’s gotten worse over the last couple years. It’s probably genetic but no one else in my family has it.” He doesn’t say anything else for a second; Stephanie doesn’t prompt him either. And he looks away from the phone for the next part, saying it quickly.

  “A lot of kids who have this kind of hearing loss have trouble in school. Not because of my actual hearing. But even when I was supposed to get seated in a particular place, teachers would ignore that, or kids would blow in my hearing aid to be assholes.” Things that feel hard to explain, especially when teachers who also taught Eitan and Aviva expected him to be the same way, or insinuated his mother was overbearing when she would come in for meetings about accommodations. Something that probably shouldn’t still bother him, years later. “It’s kind of a sore subject for me.”

  “Zach—” she says it gently, drawing his attention back to his phone screen “—the thing about these kinds of articles is that they’re not really about you. They’re about what the people who are gonna read them identify with. So if you want to talk about your ear but leave out that other stuff, that’s okay. It’s just a matter of how we frame it.”

  “I guess I didn’t think about it that way.”

  “Garza—how’d he lose his fingers? Born that way? Accident?”

  “He said it was an accident.”

  “So, I guess I’d ask him what he wanted to focus on. If it was about the accident and recovery, we’d do that. If it’s about pitching now, we’d do that. If it’s about what he’d want kids going through the same thing to know, we’d do that. And probably a little bit of those things in whatever we end up with. But the point is that you get to control that narrative.”

  “If I give you my agent’s email, can you all work out the money?”

  “Sure,” she says, and then tells him she’s ready to write it down.

  * * *

  The three days between the All-Star Classic and the start of the second half of the season always feel like the shortest and longest days of Zach’s life—but this year especially so. He prints out their season schedule, circling when the Swordfish are playing against New York: a series in a few weeks, like Eugenio said, and another in New York in late September. He crosses off the days each morning, checking, and then rechecking his phone each time it buzzes to see if Eugenio texts him. And he’s disappointed when he doesn’t, though Zach doesn’t text him either, unsure of what to say.

  It’s hot in Miami in July,
the kind of hot they only get in Baltimore on the worst days of the year, the pressing, insistent kind of heat that makes Zach sleep all afternoon before going to the beach. He spends time at the ocean, watching the mild Florida surf, the lights that come on as the sun sets.

  He eats dinner at his favorite restaurant, the one where the owner has stories about the Dominican winter league and forgives Zach’s emerging Spanish. He thinks about bringing Eugenio there. About if Vladimir, the owner, has any stories about legendary Venezuelan players. About what Eugenio would think of the food.

  He ponders texting someone, an old hookup, one who’d probably come over if Zach asked, but he doesn’t. He ponders the under-decorated walls of his apartment, trying to see them through someone else’s eyes, and then spends the day filling them, hanging a few things he got while in Oakland. A framed scorebook page from his first big-league game. Prints from a comics convention: Hawkeye, with a hearing aid curving over one ear; Bobby Drake, commanding ice.

  A picture of Julia Child wielding a mallet he got Eugenio for his birthday, after Eugenio mentioned her show was one of the first to have closed captioning. The one that Eugenio left behind when he left.

  He finds a box at the back of one of his closets, tape still on it from the move. He works it open with a key. In it are a bunch of graphic novels he forgot about, and he puts them on his increasingly less bare bookshelf, next to a William Hoy biography and his mother’s New York Times Jewish Cookbook.

  The box also has a digital picture frame. Once charged, it takes a minute to blink on. A set of pictures his mother loaded appears: Zach, dressed up for Purim. Eitan in his too-big Bar Mitzvah suit, Aviva next to him in a floral dress and shiny beige tights. A Havdalah dinner at their house, the one where their cousin set his shirt moderately on fire holding a candle, and Zach grabbed a pitcher of water and dumped it over his head.

  “I found the picture frame you got me,” he says, when he calls his mom. “I guess I never finished unpacking.”

  She flew down to Miami when he first moved in, when all he had was a couple suitcases and his plants, whatever stuff he crammed in a U-Haul. And went with him to get a new bedframe and mattress, called to set up his internet and cable when he didn’t want to deal with talking to someone on the phone.

  “It’s good you’re not playing in that farkakteh Oakland stadium anymore,” she said the first time he took her to Swordfish Park. Though she stared at its roof as if in disagreement before saying, “I’m glad it has a roof. You could get sun poisoning in this heat.” As if Baltimore isn’t equally humid at high summer.

  They played catch in one of the lush parks that patchwork the city. Zach found his old fielder’s gloves and gave her the smaller of the two, even though it dwarfed her hand. He hadn’t oiled it recently, and it was dry in patches, the lacing a little frayed.

  “Next time, I’ll bring mine,” she said. Her old glove from when she played various pickup games, something as methodically tended as the rest of her house. “A good glove is like a good marriage. With the right investment and care, it should last forever.”

  “Show me around,” she says, now, and he gives her a tour—the kitchen, where he needs to wipe crumbs off the counters. His living room, the comic books stacked on his coffee table.

  “It’s not, like, great literature or anything,” he says, and she tells him about the novel her book club chose, which sounds both convoluted and sad.

  “I used to look up the SparkNotes to pretend that I did the reading. But now I just bring a second bottle of wine and listen to Charna Friedman talk about her useless ex-husband.”

  He shows her the view from his balcony, downtown Miami, the ocean a distant blue platter, talking about how the streets flood and drain during hurricane season, and reassures her his building has a generator.

  “The place looks nice,” she says when he’s done. “Like it belongs to a person.”

  “Not a baseball player?”

  “Not someone who’s moving out in October. I guess you’re considering not exercising your option. It would be nice if you were closer to home. The O’s could use a good catcher.”

  “What couldn’t the O’s use?” he says. There’s an email sitting in his inbox from his agent. A reminder, broken down in small, baseball-player-friendly terms, about the mutual option he has in his contract for after this season. That the team could decline to pick up his salary for the coming season, making him a free agent. That he could decline the team’s offer, elect free agency, and go somewhere else. “But, no, I haven’t thought about the option, really. Besides, I’ll be thirty-two. What’s that in dog years?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to think about it. If you want to go somewhere that’s not a contending team—well, it could be near us.”

  “I don’t mind Miami.” Because at least here his parents won’t set him up with their friends’ daughters. “The food down here is good. There’s beaches.”

  “Maryland has beaches.”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m just saying. Look, Zach, I’m not a professional baseball player, so what do I know? But you’re down there, playing for gornisht, in that apartment all alone.”

  “I could be in Baltimore playing for less than that.” And I’d still be alone, he doesn’t say. “I didn’t call you so you could lecture me or to have a fight.” He looks over to the picture frame, sitting on his bookshelf, and maybe he should take the batteries out of it and pack it back up. “I just wanted to show you what the place looks like.”

  “I just want nice things for you, Zacheyleh.” And it hangs there, what constitutes “nice” things: a house, a few kids she can bless each Friday, hand uncomplicatedly against their foreheads, telling them that they should live long enough to see their children’s children as well. Things he grew up knowing he couldn’t have, openly, and still play the game.

  “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “The apartment looks good. I’m happy that you’re happy there.” And she changes the subject to Eitan’s son, who’s now walking fully and terrorizing his unsuspecting parents, before Zach can contradict her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  June, Three Years Ago

  The Elephants play a three-game set in Houston in the horror of Houston’s roofed park. It’s loud in a way few stadiums are, a combination of enclosure and a rabid fan base. Houston always seems to have their number: at the Elephants Coliseum, but more so here, hitting like someone’s telling them what signs Zach is putting down. It’s exhausting, especially when they lose by three runs.

  Zach mostly wants to go, recover, shower, collapse. But Eugenio finds him after the game, after reporters elicited the usual quotes about getting ’em again tomorrow, even if Eugenio is starting the next game and the one after that. “There’s a Spanish place nearby, if you wanted to go get dinner. And, uh, game-plan.”

  The caterers laid a team spread in the kitchen. But it was an afternoon game and Zach could use a drink not prepared at a hotel bar. “Let me go get changed.”

  When he gets back to his stall to pull on his street clothes—there’s Eugenio. And Gordon. And Giordano. And Braxton. And Hayek.

  “I updated the reservation,” Eugenio says.

  They grab a couple of rideshares, and in the ten minutes it takes to drive from the ballpark to the restaurant, Zach runs through every possible outcome from bad to catastrophic that could happen during this. The waitstaff hitting on Eugenio, which happens, but is easier to brush off when it’s just him and Zach. Zach running into someone he met the last time he was in Houston and the two of them spending a solid minute trying to place each other before coming to the realization it was through Grindr. Zach somehow forgetting their teammates are there and that the rest of the restaurant is there and that the rest of the planet is there and reaching across the table to run his fingertips over the calluses on Eugenio’s palm.

 
But nothing prepares him for the slow torture of being crammed next to Eugenio in a booth in the noise of the restaurant, Eugenio explaining various menu items as his shoulder brushes Zach’s.

  It’s a nice restaurant. Not a baseball-player-nice restaurant, which tend toward steak-and-bourbon kinds of places, but a nice one, located in an old house that their waiter informs them is from the 1920s, light walls and dark wood trim, all straight, masculine edges.

  They’re in a back room, quarantined off from the rest of the dining area, which is probably for the best when Giordano asks, “Why is the food small?” and then their waiter explains the concept of tapas while Eugenio looks like he wants to slither onto the floor.

  “What are you going to get?” Zach says.

  Eugenio has his phone out, his notes app open, and is editing a list on it, one he probably started when he made the reservation. “I was thinking about the eel.”

  “Huh, I don’t think I’ve ever had eel.” Which leads to a discussion of if eel is kosher, which Google tells Zach it is not, and then a story about his mother’s horror when one of their cousins made catfish fritters for Pesach.

  “You guys decided?” someone says, and it occurs to Zach that they’ve mostly been talking to each other, not that Zach can really hear much beyond Eugenio’s warm breath in his ear. His thigh has gotten increasingly closer to Zach’s, even if his hands are resting innocently above the table.

  “I haven’t looked yet,” Zach admits. “Uh, Morales, get me whatever.”

  Their waiter collects their orders—Eugenio requesting a duck entrée and a variety of tapas—along with Gordon’s credit card and assurances that they’ll keep ordering and won’t break anything.

  Eugenio hasn’t moved any farther away, even though they’re no longer studying the menu together. He looks down at where Zach’s hand is resting on his own leg. “How come you painted your nails for this game?”