he figures you're lying
"What I'm gonna do, my onetime ballplayin' friend," Durham said softly, "is die lovin' the game of baseball. An' what you're gonna do, if you betray that same love, is die confused." -David James Duncan
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Tenth: Seeing the Future
(life-raft)
It’s a fast season. It happens so quickly neither Eric will really remember it very well, years later. Bits and pieces, of course, shards, but the big picture escapes them pretty easily.
There’s the afternoon when Eric Chavez hits his first major league home run, when he’s sprinting around the bases and he sees the ball thump against the fence and bounce back onto the field, and he runs even faster, until Ron Washington holds up his arms and shouts, “You got a home run!” and he’s able to slow to a jog. It’s still a burned home run trot, and his teammates tease him, “hey, rook, who says you’ll ever hit another one out, shoulda made that last.”
And there’s the day Eric Munson, wearing his West Michigan Whitecaps uniform, dirt-filthy after a game, is handed his first paycheck, in the clubhouse, and he stares at it incredulously, because maybe somewhere, even after everything and being twenty-one years old and his signing bonus and his best friend being a Rookie of the Year candidate, despite all of this, it would appear that there was a very persuasive part of him that was convinced that this whole thing, this getting-paid-to-play-baseball thing, was just a fucking myth.
There’s a motel room on the outskirts of Detroit when the Oakland A’s are in town playing the Tigers and the Whitecaps have the day off, carpet burns on Eric Munson’s shoulder blades and Eric Chavez’s knees, and Chavez gets back to the team hotel after curfew with his shirt buttoned up wrong and metallic shower water sticking in his hair, being fined and told sharply, “pussy can wait, kid, the team comes first.”
There’s Amber Tarpy, traveling with Chavez sometimes when they’re just playing within the division, and there are still strangers on the East Coast, in the cities of the Central Division, and it’s okay because Chavez only cheats on her when he’s out of town (except for sometimes when they’re home if he’s particularly tired or drunk). She begins to look scared some of the time, wounded in the trace of her features, her eyes jittering across Chavez’s face, but he doesn’t think she can tell anything. There’s nothing really for her to see-none of this means anything.
There’s the next part of their life, coming up from behind, gaining on them.
Eric Munson is batting his weight in Class A, but not much more than that. He still has a slugging percentage of over .500, but the game is all at once hard for him, for the first time in his life.
There’s this split second hesitation in his swing, his ankles turning in and his left shoulder dropping. He sees all the same stuff, the pitcher’s arm and the blur of white and the undiagnosed synapse firing ‘go’ in his brain with clear perfect timing, just like always, but there’s a break between his mind and his hands, his feet, his hips, and he’s slow, he’s just behind. And because the ability to hit, truly hit with eyes and strength and all that’s in a man, can’t be taught, he doesn’t know how to fix it. It’s always just been there for him, he’s never had to look for it.
He’s pretty sure it’s just nerves, but he fucking hates it. He wants his talent to come back, he badly needs it. He wants to ask Chavez how it was so easy for him, sliding into Visalia from Mt. Carmel like it was the same league, but he’s embarrassed, he doesn’t want to admit this is happening.
Michigan is strange. It’s flat and hard and he can see the horizon at the edge of the land, which freaks him out. He misses mountains and hills, rises and falls. The sun sets over not-the-ocean, and he never really gets used to that.
He makes friends on his team. They’re good guys, kids from the Midwest and the Dominican Republic, and he’s never had to try to make people like him. They all seem to know him ahead of time, like they got a press kit about him before he showed up or something. He is, quite possibly, the most famous college-drafted minor leaguer in the country, but he never really thinks much about that.
He’s half-giddy with excitement and fear, and he thinks about California a lot, stupid trivial stuff like the red and yellow street signs in his neighborhood, wild ragged edges of the parks, huge stereos bungee-corded in the open backseats of convertibles and blaring loud across the town, 7-Elevens not Quik-Stops, Safeways not Lucky's. He tacks road maps up on the walls of his rented apartment, traces the routes the team bus takes around the Midwest, draws a line from San Diego to Oakland, from Oakland to Detroit.
The A’s play well, a young team and getting younger by the day as the midseason call-ups make their appearances, and they’re in the race in September, the skin of their teeth at the very edges of it, but still. They finish in second place with their absurd twenty-five million dollar payroll, and now even the greenest rookies are talking about Billy Beane like they’d lie down in traffic for him.
Eric Chavez doesn’t win the Rookie of the Year, doesn’t even really come close despite the campaigning done on his part by the A’s marketing people. There’s this kid named Beltran flying under the wire in Kansas City, and most of the veterans don’t have his kind of numbers by the end of the year. Chavez hits under .250, but he plays a good third base, his potential all at once huge and unfathomed, and at twenty-one years old, he’s still better than most people will ever be.
They don’t see each other much, and the time flies.
After the minor league season is over, Munson crashes at Chavez’s place in Oakland for a week, but nothing happens because Amber has moved in by that time. He sleeps on the couch with the television spastically muted, and in the mornings Chavez makes breakfast for all three of them before he’s got to go to the ballpark.
When Munson wakes up one night to find Chavez sitting on the floor, back against the couch and his head tipped back to almost touch Munson’s stomach, Munce mumbles and clumsily reaches for him, his fingers snagging in the tangles of Chavez’s hair. Chavez turns, on his knees to lean over him and whisper, “Thin walls, dude, too thin,” kissing Munson on the chin and the shoulder and the chest before passing his hand down over Munson’s eyes, chanting, “Go to sleep, go to sleep,” and Munson falls back down, never waking up far enough to wonder what Chavez was doing on the floor if he wasn’t going to take advantage of him.
Chavez goes to Anaheim and Munson stays another day in the apartment with Amber Tarpy. He thought it’d be weird, just the two of them without Chavez to fill the silences, but it’s actually not. His growing affection for Amber continues to spook him, but by the time he leaves to go back to San Diego, they’re honestly friends, the two of them, and he starts calling to tell her about some old movie on TV that he knows she would want to watch, to tell her that he saw a toddler on the street with a mohawk and a Ramones T-shirt, appealing to her totally out-of-character taste for old school punk rock.
Soon enough, the season’s over and it’s November again and Chavez is getting married.
It’s a small church down in Santa Barbara by the beach, and everyone looks uncomfortable in their shiny dress shoes, they should be barefoot but that would be too hippie. The church is picket-fence white, and they can smell the ocean, fresh and beating on the sand. There are lavender flowers, pink rose petals in the aisle. The light shafts in through the louvered windows, sculpted and tinted blue, clouded by dust, and the gold of the altar casts a mellow gleam.
It’s beautiful, really, it’s like a painting.
Munson feels out of place and guilty in the little church, watched and judged and condemned, but he knows that’s a stupid way to think. He stands next to Eric Chavez at the front, he’s the best man. Chavez looks good in his tuxedo, clean-shaven for the first time in more than a year, he looks unfairly handsome, astonishingly young.
Chavez smiles at the rows of people sitting in the ache-backed pews, his neck flushed under the tight collar of his bowtie. His hair is painstakingly combed and sheened like a new vinyl record, black plastic, and Munson wants to smooth a hand down the back of Chavez’s head, see if it’ll squeak under his palm.
The minister asks them all to rise for a short prayer, and Munce stares at the ground, fiddles with the ring in his jacket pocket. It’s a simple gold band, nothing fancy, and he wants to slit a little hole in the bottom of his pocket, let the ring slip out and clink to some convenient drain in the floor, sparkling and dancing into the sewers.
In the brief interval before Amber Tarpy emerges from the big doors at the back and walks down the aisle, the minister is talking about love, devotion, faithfulness, and Eric Munson barely suppresses his caustic smirk. Eric Chavez wouldn’t know faithfulness if it stole third base on him.
Chavez nudges his arm, leans back to whisper, sounding utterly baffled, “How the fuck did this happen, man?” and Munson stares at him in shock, but Chavez just cuts a grin like it doesn’t mean anything, and then the big doors swing open and the bonded light sweeps in, and Amber Tarpy steps evenly out of the white, begins the long walk towards Eric Chavez and his best friend.
They have the reception down the shore a bit, in the ballroom of a sprawling rough-jointed hotel from the silent movie era, blue and gray and tossed like a group of shoeboxes on their sides, the wide circle of a dance floor in the middle bordered by draped tables, bursts of flowers and long white tapers.
Munson watches Chavez moving around the room, Amber’s hand hooked through his elbow, and they look perfect together. Munson can see their tenth anniversary, their twentieth, fiftieth, bent and white-haired and still in love with each other. He’s got a clear vision of what Eric Chavez will look like as an old man, and he wonders if he’ll still be around to see it, confirm it.
Everyone dances and Chavez wipes the corners of Amber Tarpy’s eyes with the sleeve of his tuxedo pulled over his hand. She beams up at him and Munson is happy for her, he knows what she’s got.
Munson drinks gin and tonics, then seven-and-sevens, then Jack and Cokes, cut-crystal tumblers and the candlelight like wave-sparks on the glass. Munson’s eyes unfocus and he’s got to force them into clarity, the world blurring and reforming. He thinks that this was a great wedding, really, just a perfect wedding, little church and big shoebox ballroom. He starts giggling at that, and Steve Scogin comes over and tells him he’s plastered, Steve’s eyes as worried as Steve’s eyes ever get.
Munson decides that Steve Scogin will be his new best friend, and he’s about to inform the other man of this, but Scogin’s already pulling him out of his chair and Munson’s head is whirling, and he clings to Scogin’s shoulder like a life-raft, way far off aware that he’s not going to want to remember this in the morning.
At the entrance to the hotel lobby, Eric Chavez catches up to them and ducks under Munson’s arm, saying, “I got him, Steve, I’ll put him to bed.”
Scogin lifts his eyebrows. “You sure, man? It’s your party.”
Chavez nods, patting Munson on the chest. Munson rolls his head on Chavez’s shoulder, breathing in the powder-smell and champagne on Chavez’s neck. “They can spare me for a coupla minutes. Been a long time since I got the experience of drunk Munce.”
Munson whinnies a crazy laugh, clacking the words together in his brain like pinballs over and over again: ‘drunk munce drunk munce drunk munce.’ He nods sagely, his teeth on the tough cotton of Chavez’s jacket. He’s a very drunk Munce, there’s no doubt about it.
Scogin slaps Chavez on the back and says congratulations and good luck, and then he’s gone so quickly Munson is sure he just vanished into the air, peering in confusion for the Steve-shaped puff of smoke left in his wake.
Chavez keeps an arm low around Munson’s waist, walking him step-by-step to the elevators.
“Jesus, Munson, did you see anything that you didn’t drink tonight?” Chavez mutters as Munson staggers and would have fallen if Chavez hadn’t been there to set him upright again.
A bunch of clever comments come to mind, I didn’t drink the ocean, I didn’t drink your mom, but then they’re in the elevator, and it seems like a better idea to swipe his tongue across Chavez’s throat.
Chavez jerks, pulling away a little bit. His hand on Munson’s back clenches, his fist gouging hard like a stone. Munson lifts his head, grins at him.
“Not yet, Chavvy, right?” he says unsteadily.
Chavez doesn’t answer, his mouth thinning and his eyes mad. Munson wants to put his hand on Chavez’s face, tell him not to be mad, it was a beautiful wedding, he did everything right.
Chavez half-carries him down the hall, most of the floor taken up by the wedding party. Munson keeps scrabbling his hands on Chavez’s chest and back, nosing into his shoulder, and Chavez hisses at him, slaps his hands away, but Munson forgets and a second later he’s right back to it.
Chavez gets him in the room and dumps him down on the bed. Munson laughs again, pitched drunk laugh, and Chavez’s nails are picking at the hard tiny knots of his shoelaces.
Munson sits halfway up, reaches out and strokes his hand through Chavez’s hair like he wanted to do earlier, and it’s not plastic, after all, it’s coming unglued and falling in stiff shiny pieces into Chavez’s face. He palms Chavez’s cheek and Chavez has his bowtie undone and his first couple of buttons open. His face is gently tinged from the champagne and the candles, and he looks up as Munson touches his lips with his thumb.
“You looked good today, did I tell you?” Munce asks, Chavez coming into and out of focus, like an eye test, which is better, one or two, two or three? Chavez narrows his gaze, looking suspicious.
Munson pushes his thumb at the seam of Chavez’s lips, trying to get him to open. “You did, man, you always look so good. It drives me nuts.” He smiles. He’s so glad they can be nice to each other again, not like last winter when it was all mean and sadistic.
“Munson,” Chavez says raggedly, but Munson cuts him off, dropping his hand to Chavez’s shoulder and trying to pull him down.
“You know I didn’t want to be gay, not even just a little bit, but you were too good,” Munce tells him happily, wondering why Chavez isn’t smiling back at him, why Chavez isn’t leaning down.
“Shut up, dude, seriously,” Chavez tells him with a tight edge to it, and Munson’s hurt, but then he remembers, his messy grin resurfacing.
“Oh, you got married, I know. I was there. It was, like . . . twenty minutes ago, at least, I didn’t forget. But it’s okay.” He sits all the way up, his hands on Chavez’s chest and Chavez sighs, closes his eyes and lets Munson lay him out on the bed.
Munson nuzzles against Chavez’s throat, fingers working up under Chavez’s shirt, the crisp fabric and the dim-shined mother of pearl buttons. Chavez smells like his special occasion cologne, and there’s the sour chemical tang of it in Munson’s mouth.
He thinks that he was saying something, just a minute ago, he was making some point. He veers without direction through his mind, chewing on Chavez’s collar and finger-painting on his stomach.
“Um, it’s like . . . because it’s you and me, you know? An’ you can be married and I can be a Tiger and it won’t matter, because we’re still good. Right? Rightrightright?”
Munson attacks Chavez’s belt, and his head is that tea-cup ride at Disneyland, he can’t keep anything straight.
Chavez’s hands suddenly bolt around his, chaining, and Munce lifts his head to blink in drunken bewilderment. Chavez is looking up at him with his eyes intensely dark, almost a scowl but for the weak resigned shape of his mouth.
“I thought I could choose, but I couldn’t,” Chavez tells him, the pressure of his hands close to painful. “I need you both and I’m sick of feeling bad about that.” He looks like he’s going to say more, but then he shuts his mouth and just lies there passively, releasing his grip.
Munson doesn’t really understand, so he nods agreeably, spreading his hands out on Chavez’s hips. “Awesome. I’m gonna blow you now, okay?”
Chavez lets out a deeply-held breath, and stretches his arms up over his head, closing his eyes and craning back. “Go for it,” he whispers, his fingers tangled loosely together and his smooth face and the contrast of his sheer white tuxedo shirt and the tan of his skin.
Munson lifts a hand, drawing his knuckles down Chavez’s neck, bending to follow the path with his mouth, and this is the way it’s got to be, this is as good as it gets.
*
(end it quick)
Eric Chavez’s marriage lasts four months. To the fucking day.
They’re living in Oakland that off-season because Chavez has fallen in love with the place and convinced Amber to feel the same, though she still shivers and hugs herself when they’re waiting in line for the movies and it’s colder than it ever gets in southern California, still stares up at the spray-paint rain like she’s never seen it before.
Six days before Christmas, Chavez is out with some of the other year-round guys from his team and somehow ends up in the bathroom necking with a design student from the Art Institute across the bay.
It doesn’t go too far, because his teammates are nosy as fuck and will probably come looking for him in a second. There’s something else, some other reason why this is a bad idea, why there’s a scratchy hot feeling in the bottom of his stomach, but Chavez can’t quite get his mind around it. Something about purple flowers and Eric Munson standing in church light. Something complicated.
Either way, he pushes the design student away and smiles at him, clever-fingered kid with green eyes and a traced mouth. “Gotta go, man,” Chavez tells him, and the design student nods, not looking too disappointed, so Chavez pulls their hips together and kisses him hard one last time, so that he’ll know what he’s missing.
When he gets home, Amber is curled in a ball in the middle of their bed, and he showers, scouring himself raw until the soap burns, slides in beside her and tries to straighten her out, pulling at her arms and legs and peppering kisses on her shoulders and back. She wakes up and when she turns to face him, he can see that her eyes are swollen and laced with snaps of red.
“What’s wrong, love?” he asks, sincerely concerned and already making his plans for revenge against whoever it is that made his girl cry.
She presses her lips together, and touches his neck. There’s a mark there, he knows, but he’s got it all worked out, he’s got a good cover story, he tripped, you see, on the street, and banged his neck on a newspaper box on the way down. It’s not the greatest lie in the history of the world, a little too battered wife for his tastes, but after a night of drinking, it’s the best he can do and she loves him, she’ll believe him.
His mouth is open to explain, but she just pushes him onto his back and fits herself against him, hiding her face in his chest and holding him tight. Eric Chavez smiles because he won’t have to lie tonight, and wraps his arms around her, falling asleep like a rock thrown into the ocean.
Their first real big fight is a week later, when he tells her he’s going home to San Diego, going to the desert with Eric Munson for New Year’s like they always do. It doesn’t particularly surprise him that she doesn’t trust him all the way anymore, but it pisses him off, because he’s not going down to play free single guy with his best friend like she thinks.
He tells her over and over again, “we do this every year, we’ve always done it, ask anybody,” but she just keeps shaking her head and her mouth gets smaller and smaller until it almost disappears.
Chavez hasn’t seen Munson since the wedding. It’s a separate compartment in his mind, their whatever that has incredibly made it through more than a half a decade. It’s not in the same place as the design students or the pretty flighty girls who sort of recognize him and are so easy, so warm and soft under his hands. Their whatever doesn’t count, it never has, and Chavez genuinely believes he’s got a claim on righteous indignation when Amber’s flash-wooden eyes accuse him blankly of going to San Diego to cheat on her.
Eventually, Amber lets her head drop, her hair slashing across her face, and she says softly, “Just go, Eric. Fuck who you want,” and it’s the first time Chavez has ever heard her swear. He stands there idiotically for a moment, shocked and playing it over in his head, confirming, yes, she did just say that, it wasn’t a hallucination, it was real.
But it’s been a week of fighting and Eric wants to be in the desert so badly, so he jams some clothes into a bag and takes off without saying good-bye.
When Eric Munson gets a phone call two hours later from a sobbing Amber, the first thing he thinks is, ‘Eric you stupid fuck.’ She’s by turns hysterically accusing him of luring her husband into whorehouses and begging him to tell her that nothing will happen.
By the time he gets her calmed down and not hyperventilating, even making her laugh a little bit by saying, “see, didn’t I tell you that you should have married me, didn’t I say?” he’s pieced out the situation, as well as he can, and he’s so fucking mad at Chavez it takes his breath away.
He hates that he’s got to lie, that because Chavez doesn’t think it counts, he’s not supposed to either, but Chavez is already a hundred miles south of Oakland and not turning back, so Munson says to Chavez’s wife, “I promise you, he’s not coming down here to sleep with other women. You think I’d be a part of that? C’mon, kid, you know I adore you.”
Amber Tarpy, Amber Chavez, sniffs hard. “But you’re his best friend.”
Munson’s not certain what her argument is, but he recognizes it, because the two of them being best friends is pretty much his own excuse for everything.
He crosses his fingers, says, “That’s why I’m not gonna let him do anything to mess this up with you.”
Eric Munson convinces her, smooth-talker, and she sounds good by the end of it, even apologizing for accusing him, which makes Munson feels like he’s gonna throw up.
He doesn’t bring it up to Eric Chavez until they’re in the desert. Chavez rolls in aching from the drive and spit-mad at his wife, cursing under his breath and roughly hugging Munson before going into the kitchen to fill up the cooler.
Chavez blares the music in the car on the way out. He’s developing a taste for rap, which Munson supposes he should have seen coming. It’s a pretty clear message that he doesn’t want to talk, though, so Munce sips a Coke and keeps watch out the window for mushroom clouds and crashing spaceships and stuff.
They set up the tent, and before the sun goes down, Munson says, “You said you weren’t gonna fuck around anymore.”
Chavez is tearing pages out of the 1989 San Diego Metro Area phonebook that they always bring with them, skinnier every year, feeding strips to the small fire and folding paper airplanes. “I’m not,” he answers, his eyes on the fire.
“She called me, you asshole.”
Chavez pushes his fingers across the thin crumply paper, but the ink’s too old to leave stains. “Can I just say now that the two of you being friends really weirds me out?”
Munson jabs at the fire with a stick, short-tempered. “No, because that’s got nothing to do with anything. She says you come home and she can tell you slept with someone else. She says it’s happened more than once. You, you . . .” He’s having trouble articulating it because it’s so fucking obvious.
“You haven’t been married for two months yet, Eric, what the fuck.”
Chavez pulls at the Velcro cuffing his sleeve, ripping it open compulsively. “I don’t think you’re really in any position to give me marital advice, Munson, all right? If you think I’m such a bad guy, why the hell did you come out here with me?”
Munce shakes his head. “I don’t think you’re a bad guy. I think you’re incredibly stupid and fucked up, but that’s nothing new.”
Chavez coughs out a dry laugh, tugs his hood up, hiding his face with the stub of his nose sticking out. “You really want me to stop fucking around on her, Munce?” he asks, and there’s something beneath that, undertoned, what that would mean.
Munson keeps his eyes on the fire, poking it to watch the crackle, the finger-snaps. The smoke’s blue from the color of the paper, wispy because the desert twigs are so insubstantial, dusting at the touch. He doesn’t answer, and Chavez scoots a bit closer to him, sliding his hand up Munson’s leg.
Munson keeps thinking, ‘it’s going to have to end sometime.’ He can see the future, he can see the naked girders and scaffolding of the new stadium they’re building in Detroit, and the potential for the Oakland Athletics to win everything, not someday, not far-flung and simply wished for, something concrete, next year, maybe, the year after, close enough to taste it in the air.
He can see Amber breaking down little by little, day by day, and Eric Chavez never learning anything, innocent in his own mind because he loves her so much, it absolves him of everything. Munson can see a lot of stuff, but he can’t see the place where his life will start making sense again.
Eric Chavez comes back from San Diego, falls to his knees, and begs Amber’s forgiveness. He tells her that he’s a fuck up but he’s trying to be better, that he’s not a good person but she can fix him, that he did mess around, before Christmas, she was right because she knows him so well, he fucked up but he only ever wants to come home to her.
She cries, then he cries, and he never promises that it won’t happen again, because it’s not that kind of an apology.
And a month later, of course, it happens again.
It’s a girl, this time, at least, which makes it better in some awkward place in Chavez’s mind where he’s still only ten-percent gay. She comes up to him in Tower Records and says, “You’re that guy,” with a bleached-teeth smile and two hands full of sparkly rings.
Chavez, after one season as a starter, still isn’t used to getting recognized in public, and he answers, “I’m pretty sure I’m not,” but that just makes the girl laugh, her contacts tinted violet. They talk about East Coast/West Coast rap and Charles Bukowski, they get coffee and then ice cream, and they end up fucking in the backseat of Chavez’s car on the sixth floor of the parking garage, blocked off by concrete pylons and the voices of little kids echoing through the dark windows.
It’s not until he drops her off in front of the big old Colonial house that she directs him to, and he sees the two BMWs in the driveway, one with a bumper sticker reading, ‘My child is an honor student at West Jefferson High School,’ that Eric Chavez realizes he just fucked a teenager.
He skids down the street, and erases her phone number from his cell in a panic, and it shouldn’t bug him that much because he’s only twenty-two himself, but he’s been playing at adult for a long time now, and getting arrested for statutory rape would probably not do much for his career.
He worries about the cops and doesn’t worry about Amber, who finds the scratch marks on his back that night and doesn’t speak to him for five days.
He doesn’t ask her to take him back again, he just waits her out.
They continue on like that through the fake northern California winter and the early spring, and Eric Chavez can’t seem to stop. He fucks around drunk, he fucks around sober. He fucks strangers and he fucks his best friend when Munson comes to visit, when they go to San Diego for Amber’s mom’s birthday.
It’s not all the time, but it’s often enough to make him the worst husband ever. He doesn’t get caught every time it happens, just enough to make Amber start to hate him in a slow skin-stripping way, all turned back and dismayed eyes.
Chavez thinks that he just never really had a chance to do this, fuck around like a college kid, between being obsessed with Eric Munson in high school and so fucking alone in the minors that sex lost all its appeal. He thinks that everyone needs this, to show them how good it is to come home to the same person every night, to want only them. If Amber would just be patient, just wait until he gets it out of his system, then he’ll be able to love just her, he’ll be the man she deserves.
It always surprises him, how easy it is. He never consciously goes out looking for someone, but they always seem to catch his eye. In a spectacularly pathetic rationalization, he feels like it would be rude not to smile back at them, rude not to lean into them when they touch a hand to his arm, and, eventually, rude not to fuck them when they wrap their legs around his waist. It would just be bad manners.
Anyway. Amber doesn’t wait for him to get it out of his system, probably because she’s a lot smarter than he is.
She comes down to Phoenix with him for spring training and for the first week it’s wonderful, it’s like when they were first getting to know each other and talking about Mel Brooks movies all night long on the phone, before Chavez went to Arlington and got all fucked up again.
Then Eric Munson, on his road trip to Florida for the start of his second season in the minors, Double-A Jacksonville, stops off in Arizona to see the couple. The three of them go out to dinner, Munson and Amber teasing Chavez in perfect tandem, as has become their special talent whenever together.
Back at the hotel, Amber kisses Munson on the cheek and Chavez on the lips and goes to sleep early, worn out by ten o’clock, but when she wakes up at three in the morning and Eric’s still not there, she goes looking for him.
Munson got the room next to theirs, a connecting door and they forgot to lock it because they’re not too bright. Amber nudges it open expecting to find the boys stone-drunk and deliriously catching up, maybe watching a movie or talking about the prospects in Detroit’s system.
But her eyes adjust to the darkness and the two men are asleep under a single sheet, the blanket and comforters all wrecked at the foot of the bed, pillows crushed up and lying on the floor. The sheet’s pulled down low across both their hips, low enough that Amber can tell they’re not wearing anything, and she sees Chavez’s red cotton boxers draped on the headboard. Munson’s got an arm tossed over Chavez’s back, his hand dangling limply off the side of her husband’s body. Chavez’s head is turned to the side and he’s smiling, lank hair dripping across his eye.
Amber Tarpy steps back, closes the door very quietly. She packs her things, methodical and checking under the bed to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything, opening every cabinet in the bathroom. She leaves her wedding ring on the bedside table and doesn’t even write him a note.
She’s on the first flight she can book out of Sky Harbor, chasing night, and she doesn’t start crying until the cab pulls up at her parents’ house in San Diego. There are things you can forgive-there are things you can’t.
The alarm on Chavez’s cell phone is set to go off at four in the morning so he can get back before Amber wakes up. He pulls on his boxers and gathers the rest of his clothes into a bundle, sidesteps into his hotel room, walking on the balls of his feet with the bundle clutched to his stomach.
The bed is empty, though, neatly made up, and Chavez is confused for a long time before he sees Amber’s ring flashing on the bedside table.
He drops his clothes on the floor, picks up his wife’s ring, and goes back into Munson’s room. He sits cross-legged on the bed and pokes Munson until he shifts and sneezes and wakes up.
Chavez is playing with the ring, fiddling it to make the moonlight spark off the diamond, tinkering it against his own gold band. Munson pushes up on his hand.
“Dude?” he says, fuzz-mouthed. “Shouldn’t you be . . . what time is it?”
Chavez walks Amber’s ring across his knuckles, his cool poker chip trick. “I think she left me.”
Munson’s mind unfogs at that, a curtain thrown open. He sits all the way up. He’s still naked and he pulls the sheet up protectively without thinking about it. Chavez might have snorted at that, but it seems inappropriate. Chavez’s eyebrows are pulled down, focusing intently on the ring.
“What?” Munson says in disbelief. “What’re you-when?”
Chavez shrugs. “Just now. Or . . . since we fell asleep. How long ago was that?” He bites his lip, shakes his head. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Her stuff’s gone. She . . . left this.”
He flicks his thumb and the ring goes cartwheeling through the air like a quarter. Chavez catches it easily in the palm of his hand. He’s feeling okay. He wouldn’t have thought that he’d feel this okay.
“She must have seen,” Munson says, figuring this out. “She must have come looking . . . goddamn it, I told you we shouldn’t while she was right next door!”
Munson’s panicking, there’s no question. What the fuck were they thinking, they were just watching some dumb movie on cable and Chavez had rolled into him, grinning and his hand crawling on Munson’s stomach, his mouth open on Munson’s neck. What the fuck was he thinking when he heard ‘oh bad fucking idea’ in his head and ignored it, turning to meet Chavez’s mouth with his and unbuttoning Chavez’s jeans, tugging down his boxers. He only protested because he knew he should, and then Chavez’s hand slid down under his waistband and Munson decided it probably wasn’t that crucial, not with Chavez’s fingers tight and dry and knowing what to do better than anyone else ever has, with five years of practice behind him.
Stupid fucks, the both of them, reckless because it would be months before they would get another chance and Munson wanted it, he wanted it bad enough to not care, like he could keep Chavez pressing hot against him and craning back to offer his throat, for all the time he’d be flattened and tired in the southeast, like he could pack it up in his suitcase and throw it in the backseat.
And no way was it worth it, because Munson doesn’t want to be responsible for this, and he thinks ludicrously, ‘home-wrecker, home-wrecker.’
Chavez places the ring down on the bedside table, just like the one where he found it, and skates his fingers down Munson’s chest. “Calm down. It’s okay. I’m . . . it’s not so bad.”
Munson hits his hand away. “Your wife just fucking left you, Eric!”
Chavez gets angry in a wash. “Thanks for the newsflash,” he jeers. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming.”
Munson gapes at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Munson, I’m a terrible husband!” Chavez yells, not caring that it’s four in the morning and the walls are cardboard-and-air. He understands a lot, all at once, he’s seeing the truth of it. “I’ve been a terrible husband from day fucking one, did you not get that? She never should have married me, she should have left a year ago, she never should have looked at me in the first place. I went in there just now still tasting like you, I . . . I didn’t even th-think twice about it.”
And Chavez’s voice just splits down the middle, right at the end of it. He suddenly sees Amber in the lobby of that Oakland hotel with the journalist’s baby on her hip, smiling at him shyly and making her eyes go big so he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about her.
He hides his face with his hands, whispering, “oh god,” his shoulders trembling violently and he’ll be crying in a second or two, he knows it for sure.
He thought she’d wait for him to get over it. Maybe it would have happened soon, he thinks maybe he was close.
He makes his fingers into claws and digs at his eyes, forcing the tears, thinking that the sooner he starts crying, the sooner he’ll stop, be washed clean. Munson’s hands circle his forearms but Munson doesn’t pull Chavez’s arms down or haul Chavez to him, just holds on.
Chavez can’t make himself cry, his eyes only water from the pain of being clawed at, and the effort exhausts him. He lets Munson unfold him on the bed, Munson twisting close and smoothing his hands across Chavez’s head and shoulders and back, and Munson’s breath is damp and hot on Chavez’s neck, Munce saying his name over and over again, saying, “don’t worry, be all right, stay here and it’ll be fine,” until Eric Chavez falls asleep, his hands in loose fists against Eric Munson’s chest.
*
(fallback)
A four-month marriage shouldn’t happen to anybody but celebrities, and Chavez is oddly proud, not that he fucked up, but that he fucked up on a cosmic scale. At least he didn’t do it half-assed.
Munson is in Florida and Amber is in San Diego and their apartment in Oakland doesn’t feel bigger or emptier or anything like that. It’s the same as it ever was, it keeps its dimensions.
His parents are shocked, and Ruby calls him every night for a month to make sure he’s okay. Eric fell down, a little bit, especially that week and a half in Arizona after she left him but before the season started. He doesn't remember sleeping. Doesn't really remember anything, just occasionally seeing amnesiac flashes of his own face in the bathroom mirror, the lights off and shadows laked all over the glass. But he’s better now.
He packs up Amber’s stuff and ships it down to her. He writes her an eighteen-page letter (longhand to show he means it) that doesn’t say much of anything, and she writes him an email that consists of four lines and basically wishes him well in his life of sin.
Chavez wants to tell her that he’s sorry, and that she should have waited for him to get over it, and that he’s not gay and could she please not tell anybody that she thinks he is, and that he still loves her, but she doesn’t return his calls.
There’s this thing about being numb. Or disconnected. Or something. A place he’s been before, a quiet stricken series of days and nights that he knows pretty well. Eric Chavez keeps thinking about déjà vu, going around in circles, and he wonders how long it’s going to last this time. He’s having terrible dreams.
The team’s better this year, a lot better. They start slow but it doesn’t last, and Eric Chavez is becoming an elite player. Eric Munson is in Jacksonville, and the fight they have happens over the phone.
They’re talking about a bunch of stuff and Eric Munson is reticent, like he’s not paying attention or he wants to say something but won’t. Eric Chavez gets fed up with him, eventually, and tensely asks, “The fuck is with you tonight?”
“Nothing,” Munson answers blithely.
“You’re gonna start lying to me now?”
“Oh, what, you’re the only one that’s allowed to lie around here?” Munson, in the kitchen in his rented apartment, opens cabinets and glares at the contents, clapping them shut again.
“When the fuck have I ever lied to you?” Chavez asks, pacing around his own apartment.
Munson snorts a cynical laugh, but he doesn’t call him on it. “Whatever. It’s nothing.”
“Goddamn it, Munce . . .” Chavez kicks his mitt into the wall.
“Amber keeps calling me,” Munson says, then grimaces, picking at the counter tile with his nails.
“What . . . why?” Chavez answers after a moment.
Munson shrugs. “I guess trying to figure out how I could be friends with such a total fuckwad.”
“What the hell, man, you’re mad at me too?” Chavez collapses on the couch, rubbing his temple hard. “You’re taking her side?”
“As if you even have a side. You never did right by her, dude, you told me that yourself. You were always fucking around.”
Chavez’s eyes widen. “Oh, please be fucking kidding me.”
Munson shakes his head, punches the wall, quick sharp jabs. “I’m not. She’s my friend too, and you treated her like shit. You fucked anything that moved.”
“One of the people I fucked was you, asshole! Where the fuck do you get off?” Chavez’s hand flexes on his skull, testing the weak places. His eyes are shut so tight it’s painful.
“It wasn’t my responsibility to keep your marriage together,” Munson tells him.
“Yeah, well, it’s not your responsibility to get all judgmental, either. And I think you sucking me off at the fucking wedding reception pretty much rules you out for the morality title, so get the fuck down off the pedestal, why don’t you.”
Eric Munson slams down the phone onto the counter, gunshot plastic crunch, and Chavez cries out in pain, snatching the receiver away from his ear and then screaming, “You fucking asshole, what the fuck!”
Munson stares at the phone on the counter. He didn’t mean to do that. He picks it up again. “Eric?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Munson, you nearly busted my ear.” Chavez presses his palm to his ear, hearing the tidal rush of blood.
“You never should have married her,” Munson says, and he still wants to hit something, he wishes the two of them were on the same side of the country. “You knew you weren’t gonna stop sleeping with me and sleeping with half the population of the fucking state, so you never should have gotten married.”
Chavez exhales. “You think I don’t know that?” His ear still hurts, a dim echoing ring.
“Then why did you?”
Chavez slumps back. “Because I loved her. I thought . . . I thought that was how it worked. That you fall in love with somebody, and then you get married, and then everything’s cool.”
“You fell in love with me,” Munson says before he can think better about it. He pulls the phone away, knocks himself on the forehead with his fist. “I mean, uh. You know that. It obviously doesn’t . . . work like that all the time. Um. Maybe you should have . . . figured that out. From how it is between you and me.”
“You and me is, like, a totally different thing, though. It’s never gonna be normal the way Amber and me are normal. Were normal. Whatever.” Chavez scowls, pushing the coffee table with his feet, scraping the floor.
“The fuck does being normal have to do with anything? Since when do you care how other people do things?”
Chavez’s socked heels slide across the top of the coffee table. He can’t get any friction, cotton on the waxy lacquer. Munson sounds pretty angry at him. “Look, I thought I had a chance to be happy,” Chavez says, trying to explain and getting the knotted-stomach feeling that he’s not doing it very well.
“Oh,” Munson answers, sounding dull, because he’s got to say something, and that’s all he can come up with. Munson kicks the wall and hits a stud, his eyes watering and he’s pretty sure he just broke his toe. He hops around, loses his balance, and falls with a heavy thump. “Ow.”
“Munce?”
“Um . . . I fell down. But also you’re an idiot.” He pulls off his shoe, pokes at the injured toe. It moves; it’s not broken. Just hurts like a bitch.
“I’m an idiot?” Chavez repeats. Munson’s making little pained sounds, and cursing under his breath again, like they both do when they’re upset. Chavez tries to remember when they learned that, who taught it to them.
“You’re such a fucking idiot.” Munson pressure-wraps his toe with his hand, his legs bent and butterflied. “You think just loving someone’s enough, that’s all you have to put into it. And fuck staying faithful or acting like their feelings are more important than your dick.”
Chavez thinks, ‘fucking christ that hurts,’ and he closes his eyes. “I’m not like that. I just. I fucked up. But I tried, I did try.”
“Bullshit you tried. I would have stepped back, you know I would have, if you’d asked me to. The only reason we even started fucking again was because I got drunk in Texas, and I was willing to let that go and not mention it again, but no, no. You needed your motherfucking fallback.”
There’s a small cracked noise that comes from Eric Chavez, and he mumbles, “I, ah. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to go. I didn’t . . . look, just goodbye, okay, bye.”
Eric Munson turns off his phone and shoves it under the couch, then he lies on his back on the floor and watches the headlights from the interstate smear across the ceiling for a long time.
*
(first time i was in love with you)
They don’t talk for two months.
Eric Munson does worse in Jacksonville than he did in A-ball. He controls what he can, he gets better at picking at first, and it’s the same as catching in a lot of ways. But he remembers being taught that the best first basemen are left-handed, the ease of snagging throws off the line, he keeps thinking about it when he feels the pull in his shoulder reaching across his body. Thinks about it when a ball skips past, when he can’t get to it. Thinks about it even though it’s the worst possible thing to think about.
Sometimes they let him catch and he handles his pitchers like a veteran, feeling canny and wise and hoping in the back of his mind that if he’s good enough, they’ll take him off the field and put him back behind the plate where he belongs. But at the same time, he doesn’t want to be one of those catchers who’re around for their minds, not their bats. Hitting has always been the best part of his game, what he’s most proud of in the world, though he knows he shouldn’t be.
It’s a round bat and a round ball, it’s the hardest thing to do in sports, and he can’t get it back, no matter what he tries, days in the cages and trying a heavier stick, tape around his hands and pine tar until he can toss his batting gloves at the wall and they’ll stick. Nothing works. He misses aluminum, he hears ‘ping’ when it’s quiet and feels the buzz in his wrists and palms all the time, but that’s not really it.
He thinks about college and then high school and pretty soon he’s dreaming of being twelve years old, the sun going down and Eric Chavez pitching to him in the park, yelling, okay, hey, the curve, hit this, just try! Ten years later and he can’t hit anything. It’s like losing an arm.
He tapes a picture of the two of them up in his locker. It’s old, it’s them in the parking lot of Mt. Carmel, sitting on the hood of some green car that doesn’t belong to them. Chavez’s arm is around Munson’s shoulders and they’re grinning at the camera, legs dangling in front of the license plate. Munson’s got one hand behind Chavez’s head, giving him bunny-ears.
He doesn’t remember the particular day or even if it was junior or senior year, but he remembers how Chavez’s hair was flat and crinkly on the heel of his hand.
One of his teammates, another sometimes-catcher, Brandon Inge who was with him in West Michigan too, moving through the system on a parallel, comes over one day and squints at the photo.
“Who’s that?” he asks.
Munson is sitting on a stool tying his cleats. He answers with his head down, “That’s my best friend.”
Inge leans in, studying the picture. “That’s . . . dude, that’s Eric Chavez.”
Munson looks up, surprised. He wasn’t aware that people have started recognizing Chavez, knowing him by face and statistics. He shrugs it off. “Yeah, I know.”
Inge shows him a crooked grin. “You’re Eric Chavez’s best friend?”
Munson has a brief vision of the rest of his life, when the only thing he’ll ever be known for is being Eric Chavez’s best friend.
But he just nods, and Inge slaps him on the back, says, “Cool,” before wandering off to bug the pitchers.
That night, Eric Munson calls his best friend.
Chavez is in New York City. He’s in the corner store down the street from the hotel, buying a bunch of junk for the guys waiting upstairs, but when he sees Munson’s number on the display, he leaves everything on the check-out counter and walks out.
“So, listen,” Munson says. “It occurs to me that I was pretty much the worst friend in the history of the world, the last time we talked.”
Chavez laughs a little bit, walking slowly down the street. He can’t go off too far or he’ll get lost. “You weren’t so bad.”
“Dude, I think I called you six different kinds of asshole and also nearly made you deaf.”
Chavez smiles, stops on the street corner to watch the traffic signals blur in the mid-summer humidity. He thinks he probably looks very beat-poet romantic right now, in the yellow fall of the streetlight. All he needs is some rain. Maybe a cigarette. Maybe both, hey.
“I guess you probably had a right.” Chavez paces in a little circle, darkness and then into the light again. “I know I was pretty fucked up. With you and her both.”
Munson sits at the kitchen table, props his legs up on a stray chair. “And you’re not fucked up anymore?”
“Well, no. There’s just no one to catch me at it, now.” He means it as a joke, Munson can tell, but Munson still wants to see him, make sure.
“Look,” Munson says. “I’m saying I’m sorry, all right? You definitely didn’t need to hear that shit from me right after you . . . well, you know. I’m supposed to be your best friend.”
“You are,” Chavez tells him, and starts walking again, under the neon and the brick.
Munson traces the grain of the table with his thumb, eyes thinned in concentration. “Next time we see each other . . . I mean, I don’t know, man. Is this . . . still a good idea, do you think?”
“It was never a good idea, Munce. And I. It’s not like I can promise you that I won’t fuck off someday and be an idiot again.”
“Why is that, dude?” Munson asks, probably should have asked it years ago. “Why do you do this shit?”
Chavez watches a bunch of cars slip by, and there’s a pack of teenagers across the street in tank tops and baggy jeans, cawing with laughter and passing forties back and forth, arguing for possession. Chavez thinks about the life baseball kept from him, the normal world.
“I don’t . . . I used to be better. The first time I was in love with you, it was good enough, all I needed,” Chavez says, doing his very best.
Munson’s face gets pinched. “So, it’s my fault, you being this way? Because I fucked up the first time?”
“I didn’t say that,” Chavez protests, and he doesn’t want to fight tonight, it’s been two months and too long. “I just, it was like, I was so, like, wrecked after that. I couldn’t. It meant too much, and I hated that, I never wanted to, you know, risk that happening again. Never wanted to depend on just one person, as much as I depended on you. It’s dangerous, you know?”
Munson shakes his head, then remembers Chavez can’t see it. “I didn’t know. You never said.”
Chavez counts streetlights, all the way down to the World Trade Center rising like matchsticks at the end of the island. “Well, Jesus, Munce, I couldn’t say something like that to you, not back then. I was just a fucking kid. It was . . . it was safer to just end it.”
“It didn’t work, though,” Munson answers, grimacing. “Ending it. We’re still. You still think it’s too dangerous?”
“It’s different now. It’s . . . complicated.” Chavez blows out a breath. “Fuck. Why are we talking about this? I hate talking about this.”
Munson nods, smiling a little bit. At least they agree on something. “I know. I just . . . I wanted to know if. I kind of need to know if we’re gonna still be . . . doing that, next time we see each other.”
“Can’t just play it by ear, can ya, Munson.”
“Hey man, I’m just trying to plan my off-season.”
Chavez grins, but it fades off his face quickly. He takes a blind turn and he can’t see the Twin Towers anymore. “Seriously, Munce, I’m just. I don’t want stuff to be like it was before I got married.”
“Christ, neither do I,” Munson says with his eyes going wide, thinking about pushing Chavez’s face into the bed and trying to figure out which of them he was trying to hurt.
“But I don’t. I don’t know how to make it better,” Chavez says.
“Eric,” Munson starts, and then stops, swallowing a few times. He’s not sure how they could have grown up side by side like they did and still have all this between them. “You just. Stuff was like that because, because of Amber. And she’s. Well. Not around anymore.”
Chavez finds a crushed-up soda can on the sidewalk and kicks it along in front of him. “It wasn’t just her. I think maybe she was the, um. Excuse we used?”
Munson digs his thumbnail into the tip of his index finger. His head hurts, a dark slitted pain in his sinuses. “She wasn’t a fucking figment, dude. You got married. That, you know, actually happened, it wasn’t a dream or something. You were cheating on your wife, like, a lot, so let’s not blame her, ‘kay?”
Eric Chavez shakes his head, his face all twisted up. “I’m not blaming her. I’m not blaming you or her or anybody, just me, all right? I know it’s my fault, this time. We’re even, so don’t worry.”
“Oh god, would you . . .” Munson scrapes a hand over his face, breathing out hard. “Please stop keeping track of shit like that, please. We don’t have to be fucking even, Eric, jesus.”
“Shut up for a minute and listen to me, will you?” Chavez says, fingertips against his eye and his head starting to ache. “I. It wasn’t Amber. I mean, okay, she was a part of it, fine. But also. You weren’t what I wanted. Not really. If you were, I never would have gotten married.”
Munson closes his eyes. “Yeah, okay. Fine.” His voice is this tiny choked-off thing, cracking pretty badly.
“No, shut up, Munce, be quiet for once in your life.” Chavez drags his hand through his hair. “I’m not. I couldn’t deal with you. A year ago, I just couldn’t, man. I was so fucking in love with you but I didn’t want to be, didn’t want that at all, and I was just. I was crazy, that’s all.” He falls silent.
Munson doesn’t talk either, rubbing his temples and keeping his head down. Eventually Chavez sighs, and tells him hesitantly, “The only thing I know is that I can’t lose you. Okay?”
Munson breathes out. “You won’t. You couldn’t.”
Something loosens in Chavez’s chest, but he still shakes his head, because he needs to do this right, he needs to get something right, at least once. “You gotta stop being my best friend for a second and understand. If we keep this up, I’ll. I won’t be what you need, I really don’t think I will. I don’t wanna be all selfish and say that just because I want you, you should take me. Because I’ll tell you stuff I don’t really mean, and I’ll fuck up again, and you’ll stop wanting me around, after awhile. And that’ll be . . . pretty terrible for me.”
Chavez squints, not liking the sound of that. Not really liking the sound of any of this. He runs the back of his hand along the dirty wall, roughed-stone, scratching white marks on his knuckles.
Munson worries a long varnished splinter from the tabletop. This fucking place is falling apart. “So, that’s a no, then?” he asks carefully.
Chavez crosses against the light, a blast of a car horn. The city’s loud and everything’s got soot on it. There’s a difference between rebuilding and retooling. He’s thinking that you don’t throw something away entirely, not if it was perfect once, not if there was a good gloveman up the middle or a switch-hitting catcher or a pitcher in the ‘pen with a slider like a fucking punishment. You take the best parts first, you try to fix it.
“Let’s just.” Chavez cuts himself off, and wonders if he’s heading west, if he’ll hit the river soon. “Let’s try something different. Let’s. Not be in love with each other anymore. Let’s just be best friends who fuck around sometimes.”
Snapping the splinter into little pieces, trying to make them all the same length, Munson says, “Isn’t that, like, the definition of being in love?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s never really done us any good, has it? Being in love. It just seems to fuck everything up. So we should, you know. Stop.”
Munson closes one eye like a sniper, fucking up his depth perception. “I don’t think it’s that easy, man.”
Chavez grins. “Not for mere mortals, maybe. But we’re ballplayers. And therefore tough.”
Munson thinks, ‘say shit like that and you expect me not to love you?’
“Anyway,” Chavez continues. “Best friends is the important part.”
“Yeah.”
“And the fucking around is nice too.”
Munson smiles. “Yeah.”
“Best of both worlds, Munson.”
“If you say so, dude.”
Chavez pauses, scuffing his shoe on the sidewalk to hear the rasp. “You’ll tell me if you’re not okay?”
Munson puts his head down on the table, tacky on his face. “Don’t I always?”
Chavez nods, and looks around seriously for the first time in awhile. Who the fuck designed this city, it looks like a nightmare. “Eric . . . I think I’m lost.”
Munson smiles, and he gets up, goes over to his computer to find a New York City map online and make sure Eric Chavez gets back to where he’s supposed to be.
(end part ten)
*
part eleven
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Tenth: Seeing the Future
(life-raft)
It’s a fast season. It happens so quickly neither Eric will really remember it very well, years later. Bits and pieces, of course, shards, but the big picture escapes them pretty easily.
There’s the afternoon when Eric Chavez hits his first major league home run, when he’s sprinting around the bases and he sees the ball thump against the fence and bounce back onto the field, and he runs even faster, until Ron Washington holds up his arms and shouts, “You got a home run!” and he’s able to slow to a jog. It’s still a burned home run trot, and his teammates tease him, “hey, rook, who says you’ll ever hit another one out, shoulda made that last.”
And there’s the day Eric Munson, wearing his West Michigan Whitecaps uniform, dirt-filthy after a game, is handed his first paycheck, in the clubhouse, and he stares at it incredulously, because maybe somewhere, even after everything and being twenty-one years old and his signing bonus and his best friend being a Rookie of the Year candidate, despite all of this, it would appear that there was a very persuasive part of him that was convinced that this whole thing, this getting-paid-to-play-baseball thing, was just a fucking myth.
There’s a motel room on the outskirts of Detroit when the Oakland A’s are in town playing the Tigers and the Whitecaps have the day off, carpet burns on Eric Munson’s shoulder blades and Eric Chavez’s knees, and Chavez gets back to the team hotel after curfew with his shirt buttoned up wrong and metallic shower water sticking in his hair, being fined and told sharply, “pussy can wait, kid, the team comes first.”
There’s Amber Tarpy, traveling with Chavez sometimes when they’re just playing within the division, and there are still strangers on the East Coast, in the cities of the Central Division, and it’s okay because Chavez only cheats on her when he’s out of town (except for sometimes when they’re home if he’s particularly tired or drunk). She begins to look scared some of the time, wounded in the trace of her features, her eyes jittering across Chavez’s face, but he doesn’t think she can tell anything. There’s nothing really for her to see-none of this means anything.
There’s the next part of their life, coming up from behind, gaining on them.
Eric Munson is batting his weight in Class A, but not much more than that. He still has a slugging percentage of over .500, but the game is all at once hard for him, for the first time in his life.
There’s this split second hesitation in his swing, his ankles turning in and his left shoulder dropping. He sees all the same stuff, the pitcher’s arm and the blur of white and the undiagnosed synapse firing ‘go’ in his brain with clear perfect timing, just like always, but there’s a break between his mind and his hands, his feet, his hips, and he’s slow, he’s just behind. And because the ability to hit, truly hit with eyes and strength and all that’s in a man, can’t be taught, he doesn’t know how to fix it. It’s always just been there for him, he’s never had to look for it.
He’s pretty sure it’s just nerves, but he fucking hates it. He wants his talent to come back, he badly needs it. He wants to ask Chavez how it was so easy for him, sliding into Visalia from Mt. Carmel like it was the same league, but he’s embarrassed, he doesn’t want to admit this is happening.
Michigan is strange. It’s flat and hard and he can see the horizon at the edge of the land, which freaks him out. He misses mountains and hills, rises and falls. The sun sets over not-the-ocean, and he never really gets used to that.
He makes friends on his team. They’re good guys, kids from the Midwest and the Dominican Republic, and he’s never had to try to make people like him. They all seem to know him ahead of time, like they got a press kit about him before he showed up or something. He is, quite possibly, the most famous college-drafted minor leaguer in the country, but he never really thinks much about that.
He’s half-giddy with excitement and fear, and he thinks about California a lot, stupid trivial stuff like the red and yellow street signs in his neighborhood, wild ragged edges of the parks, huge stereos bungee-corded in the open backseats of convertibles and blaring loud across the town, 7-Elevens not Quik-Stops, Safeways not Lucky's. He tacks road maps up on the walls of his rented apartment, traces the routes the team bus takes around the Midwest, draws a line from San Diego to Oakland, from Oakland to Detroit.
The A’s play well, a young team and getting younger by the day as the midseason call-ups make their appearances, and they’re in the race in September, the skin of their teeth at the very edges of it, but still. They finish in second place with their absurd twenty-five million dollar payroll, and now even the greenest rookies are talking about Billy Beane like they’d lie down in traffic for him.
Eric Chavez doesn’t win the Rookie of the Year, doesn’t even really come close despite the campaigning done on his part by the A’s marketing people. There’s this kid named Beltran flying under the wire in Kansas City, and most of the veterans don’t have his kind of numbers by the end of the year. Chavez hits under .250, but he plays a good third base, his potential all at once huge and unfathomed, and at twenty-one years old, he’s still better than most people will ever be.
They don’t see each other much, and the time flies.
After the minor league season is over, Munson crashes at Chavez’s place in Oakland for a week, but nothing happens because Amber has moved in by that time. He sleeps on the couch with the television spastically muted, and in the mornings Chavez makes breakfast for all three of them before he’s got to go to the ballpark.
When Munson wakes up one night to find Chavez sitting on the floor, back against the couch and his head tipped back to almost touch Munson’s stomach, Munce mumbles and clumsily reaches for him, his fingers snagging in the tangles of Chavez’s hair. Chavez turns, on his knees to lean over him and whisper, “Thin walls, dude, too thin,” kissing Munson on the chin and the shoulder and the chest before passing his hand down over Munson’s eyes, chanting, “Go to sleep, go to sleep,” and Munson falls back down, never waking up far enough to wonder what Chavez was doing on the floor if he wasn’t going to take advantage of him.
Chavez goes to Anaheim and Munson stays another day in the apartment with Amber Tarpy. He thought it’d be weird, just the two of them without Chavez to fill the silences, but it’s actually not. His growing affection for Amber continues to spook him, but by the time he leaves to go back to San Diego, they’re honestly friends, the two of them, and he starts calling to tell her about some old movie on TV that he knows she would want to watch, to tell her that he saw a toddler on the street with a mohawk and a Ramones T-shirt, appealing to her totally out-of-character taste for old school punk rock.
Soon enough, the season’s over and it’s November again and Chavez is getting married.
It’s a small church down in Santa Barbara by the beach, and everyone looks uncomfortable in their shiny dress shoes, they should be barefoot but that would be too hippie. The church is picket-fence white, and they can smell the ocean, fresh and beating on the sand. There are lavender flowers, pink rose petals in the aisle. The light shafts in through the louvered windows, sculpted and tinted blue, clouded by dust, and the gold of the altar casts a mellow gleam.
It’s beautiful, really, it’s like a painting.
Munson feels out of place and guilty in the little church, watched and judged and condemned, but he knows that’s a stupid way to think. He stands next to Eric Chavez at the front, he’s the best man. Chavez looks good in his tuxedo, clean-shaven for the first time in more than a year, he looks unfairly handsome, astonishingly young.
Chavez smiles at the rows of people sitting in the ache-backed pews, his neck flushed under the tight collar of his bowtie. His hair is painstakingly combed and sheened like a new vinyl record, black plastic, and Munson wants to smooth a hand down the back of Chavez’s head, see if it’ll squeak under his palm.
The minister asks them all to rise for a short prayer, and Munce stares at the ground, fiddles with the ring in his jacket pocket. It’s a simple gold band, nothing fancy, and he wants to slit a little hole in the bottom of his pocket, let the ring slip out and clink to some convenient drain in the floor, sparkling and dancing into the sewers.
In the brief interval before Amber Tarpy emerges from the big doors at the back and walks down the aisle, the minister is talking about love, devotion, faithfulness, and Eric Munson barely suppresses his caustic smirk. Eric Chavez wouldn’t know faithfulness if it stole third base on him.
Chavez nudges his arm, leans back to whisper, sounding utterly baffled, “How the fuck did this happen, man?” and Munson stares at him in shock, but Chavez just cuts a grin like it doesn’t mean anything, and then the big doors swing open and the bonded light sweeps in, and Amber Tarpy steps evenly out of the white, begins the long walk towards Eric Chavez and his best friend.
They have the reception down the shore a bit, in the ballroom of a sprawling rough-jointed hotel from the silent movie era, blue and gray and tossed like a group of shoeboxes on their sides, the wide circle of a dance floor in the middle bordered by draped tables, bursts of flowers and long white tapers.
Munson watches Chavez moving around the room, Amber’s hand hooked through his elbow, and they look perfect together. Munson can see their tenth anniversary, their twentieth, fiftieth, bent and white-haired and still in love with each other. He’s got a clear vision of what Eric Chavez will look like as an old man, and he wonders if he’ll still be around to see it, confirm it.
Everyone dances and Chavez wipes the corners of Amber Tarpy’s eyes with the sleeve of his tuxedo pulled over his hand. She beams up at him and Munson is happy for her, he knows what she’s got.
Munson drinks gin and tonics, then seven-and-sevens, then Jack and Cokes, cut-crystal tumblers and the candlelight like wave-sparks on the glass. Munson’s eyes unfocus and he’s got to force them into clarity, the world blurring and reforming. He thinks that this was a great wedding, really, just a perfect wedding, little church and big shoebox ballroom. He starts giggling at that, and Steve Scogin comes over and tells him he’s plastered, Steve’s eyes as worried as Steve’s eyes ever get.
Munson decides that Steve Scogin will be his new best friend, and he’s about to inform the other man of this, but Scogin’s already pulling him out of his chair and Munson’s head is whirling, and he clings to Scogin’s shoulder like a life-raft, way far off aware that he’s not going to want to remember this in the morning.
At the entrance to the hotel lobby, Eric Chavez catches up to them and ducks under Munson’s arm, saying, “I got him, Steve, I’ll put him to bed.”
Scogin lifts his eyebrows. “You sure, man? It’s your party.”
Chavez nods, patting Munson on the chest. Munson rolls his head on Chavez’s shoulder, breathing in the powder-smell and champagne on Chavez’s neck. “They can spare me for a coupla minutes. Been a long time since I got the experience of drunk Munce.”
Munson whinnies a crazy laugh, clacking the words together in his brain like pinballs over and over again: ‘drunk munce drunk munce drunk munce.’ He nods sagely, his teeth on the tough cotton of Chavez’s jacket. He’s a very drunk Munce, there’s no doubt about it.
Scogin slaps Chavez on the back and says congratulations and good luck, and then he’s gone so quickly Munson is sure he just vanished into the air, peering in confusion for the Steve-shaped puff of smoke left in his wake.
Chavez keeps an arm low around Munson’s waist, walking him step-by-step to the elevators.
“Jesus, Munson, did you see anything that you didn’t drink tonight?” Chavez mutters as Munson staggers and would have fallen if Chavez hadn’t been there to set him upright again.
A bunch of clever comments come to mind, I didn’t drink the ocean, I didn’t drink your mom, but then they’re in the elevator, and it seems like a better idea to swipe his tongue across Chavez’s throat.
Chavez jerks, pulling away a little bit. His hand on Munson’s back clenches, his fist gouging hard like a stone. Munson lifts his head, grins at him.
“Not yet, Chavvy, right?” he says unsteadily.
Chavez doesn’t answer, his mouth thinning and his eyes mad. Munson wants to put his hand on Chavez’s face, tell him not to be mad, it was a beautiful wedding, he did everything right.
Chavez half-carries him down the hall, most of the floor taken up by the wedding party. Munson keeps scrabbling his hands on Chavez’s chest and back, nosing into his shoulder, and Chavez hisses at him, slaps his hands away, but Munson forgets and a second later he’s right back to it.
Chavez gets him in the room and dumps him down on the bed. Munson laughs again, pitched drunk laugh, and Chavez’s nails are picking at the hard tiny knots of his shoelaces.
Munson sits halfway up, reaches out and strokes his hand through Chavez’s hair like he wanted to do earlier, and it’s not plastic, after all, it’s coming unglued and falling in stiff shiny pieces into Chavez’s face. He palms Chavez’s cheek and Chavez has his bowtie undone and his first couple of buttons open. His face is gently tinged from the champagne and the candles, and he looks up as Munson touches his lips with his thumb.
“You looked good today, did I tell you?” Munce asks, Chavez coming into and out of focus, like an eye test, which is better, one or two, two or three? Chavez narrows his gaze, looking suspicious.
Munson pushes his thumb at the seam of Chavez’s lips, trying to get him to open. “You did, man, you always look so good. It drives me nuts.” He smiles. He’s so glad they can be nice to each other again, not like last winter when it was all mean and sadistic.
“Munson,” Chavez says raggedly, but Munson cuts him off, dropping his hand to Chavez’s shoulder and trying to pull him down.
“You know I didn’t want to be gay, not even just a little bit, but you were too good,” Munce tells him happily, wondering why Chavez isn’t smiling back at him, why Chavez isn’t leaning down.
“Shut up, dude, seriously,” Chavez tells him with a tight edge to it, and Munson’s hurt, but then he remembers, his messy grin resurfacing.
“Oh, you got married, I know. I was there. It was, like . . . twenty minutes ago, at least, I didn’t forget. But it’s okay.” He sits all the way up, his hands on Chavez’s chest and Chavez sighs, closes his eyes and lets Munson lay him out on the bed.
Munson nuzzles against Chavez’s throat, fingers working up under Chavez’s shirt, the crisp fabric and the dim-shined mother of pearl buttons. Chavez smells like his special occasion cologne, and there’s the sour chemical tang of it in Munson’s mouth.
He thinks that he was saying something, just a minute ago, he was making some point. He veers without direction through his mind, chewing on Chavez’s collar and finger-painting on his stomach.
“Um, it’s like . . . because it’s you and me, you know? An’ you can be married and I can be a Tiger and it won’t matter, because we’re still good. Right? Rightrightright?”
Munson attacks Chavez’s belt, and his head is that tea-cup ride at Disneyland, he can’t keep anything straight.
Chavez’s hands suddenly bolt around his, chaining, and Munce lifts his head to blink in drunken bewilderment. Chavez is looking up at him with his eyes intensely dark, almost a scowl but for the weak resigned shape of his mouth.
“I thought I could choose, but I couldn’t,” Chavez tells him, the pressure of his hands close to painful. “I need you both and I’m sick of feeling bad about that.” He looks like he’s going to say more, but then he shuts his mouth and just lies there passively, releasing his grip.
Munson doesn’t really understand, so he nods agreeably, spreading his hands out on Chavez’s hips. “Awesome. I’m gonna blow you now, okay?”
Chavez lets out a deeply-held breath, and stretches his arms up over his head, closing his eyes and craning back. “Go for it,” he whispers, his fingers tangled loosely together and his smooth face and the contrast of his sheer white tuxedo shirt and the tan of his skin.
Munson lifts a hand, drawing his knuckles down Chavez’s neck, bending to follow the path with his mouth, and this is the way it’s got to be, this is as good as it gets.
*
(end it quick)
Eric Chavez’s marriage lasts four months. To the fucking day.
They’re living in Oakland that off-season because Chavez has fallen in love with the place and convinced Amber to feel the same, though she still shivers and hugs herself when they’re waiting in line for the movies and it’s colder than it ever gets in southern California, still stares up at the spray-paint rain like she’s never seen it before.
Six days before Christmas, Chavez is out with some of the other year-round guys from his team and somehow ends up in the bathroom necking with a design student from the Art Institute across the bay.
It doesn’t go too far, because his teammates are nosy as fuck and will probably come looking for him in a second. There’s something else, some other reason why this is a bad idea, why there’s a scratchy hot feeling in the bottom of his stomach, but Chavez can’t quite get his mind around it. Something about purple flowers and Eric Munson standing in church light. Something complicated.
Either way, he pushes the design student away and smiles at him, clever-fingered kid with green eyes and a traced mouth. “Gotta go, man,” Chavez tells him, and the design student nods, not looking too disappointed, so Chavez pulls their hips together and kisses him hard one last time, so that he’ll know what he’s missing.
When he gets home, Amber is curled in a ball in the middle of their bed, and he showers, scouring himself raw until the soap burns, slides in beside her and tries to straighten her out, pulling at her arms and legs and peppering kisses on her shoulders and back. She wakes up and when she turns to face him, he can see that her eyes are swollen and laced with snaps of red.
“What’s wrong, love?” he asks, sincerely concerned and already making his plans for revenge against whoever it is that made his girl cry.
She presses her lips together, and touches his neck. There’s a mark there, he knows, but he’s got it all worked out, he’s got a good cover story, he tripped, you see, on the street, and banged his neck on a newspaper box on the way down. It’s not the greatest lie in the history of the world, a little too battered wife for his tastes, but after a night of drinking, it’s the best he can do and she loves him, she’ll believe him.
His mouth is open to explain, but she just pushes him onto his back and fits herself against him, hiding her face in his chest and holding him tight. Eric Chavez smiles because he won’t have to lie tonight, and wraps his arms around her, falling asleep like a rock thrown into the ocean.
Their first real big fight is a week later, when he tells her he’s going home to San Diego, going to the desert with Eric Munson for New Year’s like they always do. It doesn’t particularly surprise him that she doesn’t trust him all the way anymore, but it pisses him off, because he’s not going down to play free single guy with his best friend like she thinks.
He tells her over and over again, “we do this every year, we’ve always done it, ask anybody,” but she just keeps shaking her head and her mouth gets smaller and smaller until it almost disappears.
Chavez hasn’t seen Munson since the wedding. It’s a separate compartment in his mind, their whatever that has incredibly made it through more than a half a decade. It’s not in the same place as the design students or the pretty flighty girls who sort of recognize him and are so easy, so warm and soft under his hands. Their whatever doesn’t count, it never has, and Chavez genuinely believes he’s got a claim on righteous indignation when Amber’s flash-wooden eyes accuse him blankly of going to San Diego to cheat on her.
Eventually, Amber lets her head drop, her hair slashing across her face, and she says softly, “Just go, Eric. Fuck who you want,” and it’s the first time Chavez has ever heard her swear. He stands there idiotically for a moment, shocked and playing it over in his head, confirming, yes, she did just say that, it wasn’t a hallucination, it was real.
But it’s been a week of fighting and Eric wants to be in the desert so badly, so he jams some clothes into a bag and takes off without saying good-bye.
When Eric Munson gets a phone call two hours later from a sobbing Amber, the first thing he thinks is, ‘Eric you stupid fuck.’ She’s by turns hysterically accusing him of luring her husband into whorehouses and begging him to tell her that nothing will happen.
By the time he gets her calmed down and not hyperventilating, even making her laugh a little bit by saying, “see, didn’t I tell you that you should have married me, didn’t I say?” he’s pieced out the situation, as well as he can, and he’s so fucking mad at Chavez it takes his breath away.
He hates that he’s got to lie, that because Chavez doesn’t think it counts, he’s not supposed to either, but Chavez is already a hundred miles south of Oakland and not turning back, so Munson says to Chavez’s wife, “I promise you, he’s not coming down here to sleep with other women. You think I’d be a part of that? C’mon, kid, you know I adore you.”
Amber Tarpy, Amber Chavez, sniffs hard. “But you’re his best friend.”
Munson’s not certain what her argument is, but he recognizes it, because the two of them being best friends is pretty much his own excuse for everything.
He crosses his fingers, says, “That’s why I’m not gonna let him do anything to mess this up with you.”
Eric Munson convinces her, smooth-talker, and she sounds good by the end of it, even apologizing for accusing him, which makes Munson feels like he’s gonna throw up.
He doesn’t bring it up to Eric Chavez until they’re in the desert. Chavez rolls in aching from the drive and spit-mad at his wife, cursing under his breath and roughly hugging Munson before going into the kitchen to fill up the cooler.
Chavez blares the music in the car on the way out. He’s developing a taste for rap, which Munson supposes he should have seen coming. It’s a pretty clear message that he doesn’t want to talk, though, so Munce sips a Coke and keeps watch out the window for mushroom clouds and crashing spaceships and stuff.
They set up the tent, and before the sun goes down, Munson says, “You said you weren’t gonna fuck around anymore.”
Chavez is tearing pages out of the 1989 San Diego Metro Area phonebook that they always bring with them, skinnier every year, feeding strips to the small fire and folding paper airplanes. “I’m not,” he answers, his eyes on the fire.
“She called me, you asshole.”
Chavez pushes his fingers across the thin crumply paper, but the ink’s too old to leave stains. “Can I just say now that the two of you being friends really weirds me out?”
Munson jabs at the fire with a stick, short-tempered. “No, because that’s got nothing to do with anything. She says you come home and she can tell you slept with someone else. She says it’s happened more than once. You, you . . .” He’s having trouble articulating it because it’s so fucking obvious.
“You haven’t been married for two months yet, Eric, what the fuck.”
Chavez pulls at the Velcro cuffing his sleeve, ripping it open compulsively. “I don’t think you’re really in any position to give me marital advice, Munson, all right? If you think I’m such a bad guy, why the hell did you come out here with me?”
Munce shakes his head. “I don’t think you’re a bad guy. I think you’re incredibly stupid and fucked up, but that’s nothing new.”
Chavez coughs out a dry laugh, tugs his hood up, hiding his face with the stub of his nose sticking out. “You really want me to stop fucking around on her, Munce?” he asks, and there’s something beneath that, undertoned, what that would mean.
Munson keeps his eyes on the fire, poking it to watch the crackle, the finger-snaps. The smoke’s blue from the color of the paper, wispy because the desert twigs are so insubstantial, dusting at the touch. He doesn’t answer, and Chavez scoots a bit closer to him, sliding his hand up Munson’s leg.
Munson keeps thinking, ‘it’s going to have to end sometime.’ He can see the future, he can see the naked girders and scaffolding of the new stadium they’re building in Detroit, and the potential for the Oakland Athletics to win everything, not someday, not far-flung and simply wished for, something concrete, next year, maybe, the year after, close enough to taste it in the air.
He can see Amber breaking down little by little, day by day, and Eric Chavez never learning anything, innocent in his own mind because he loves her so much, it absolves him of everything. Munson can see a lot of stuff, but he can’t see the place where his life will start making sense again.
Eric Chavez comes back from San Diego, falls to his knees, and begs Amber’s forgiveness. He tells her that he’s a fuck up but he’s trying to be better, that he’s not a good person but she can fix him, that he did mess around, before Christmas, she was right because she knows him so well, he fucked up but he only ever wants to come home to her.
She cries, then he cries, and he never promises that it won’t happen again, because it’s not that kind of an apology.
And a month later, of course, it happens again.
It’s a girl, this time, at least, which makes it better in some awkward place in Chavez’s mind where he’s still only ten-percent gay. She comes up to him in Tower Records and says, “You’re that guy,” with a bleached-teeth smile and two hands full of sparkly rings.
Chavez, after one season as a starter, still isn’t used to getting recognized in public, and he answers, “I’m pretty sure I’m not,” but that just makes the girl laugh, her contacts tinted violet. They talk about East Coast/West Coast rap and Charles Bukowski, they get coffee and then ice cream, and they end up fucking in the backseat of Chavez’s car on the sixth floor of the parking garage, blocked off by concrete pylons and the voices of little kids echoing through the dark windows.
It’s not until he drops her off in front of the big old Colonial house that she directs him to, and he sees the two BMWs in the driveway, one with a bumper sticker reading, ‘My child is an honor student at West Jefferson High School,’ that Eric Chavez realizes he just fucked a teenager.
He skids down the street, and erases her phone number from his cell in a panic, and it shouldn’t bug him that much because he’s only twenty-two himself, but he’s been playing at adult for a long time now, and getting arrested for statutory rape would probably not do much for his career.
He worries about the cops and doesn’t worry about Amber, who finds the scratch marks on his back that night and doesn’t speak to him for five days.
He doesn’t ask her to take him back again, he just waits her out.
They continue on like that through the fake northern California winter and the early spring, and Eric Chavez can’t seem to stop. He fucks around drunk, he fucks around sober. He fucks strangers and he fucks his best friend when Munson comes to visit, when they go to San Diego for Amber’s mom’s birthday.
It’s not all the time, but it’s often enough to make him the worst husband ever. He doesn’t get caught every time it happens, just enough to make Amber start to hate him in a slow skin-stripping way, all turned back and dismayed eyes.
Chavez thinks that he just never really had a chance to do this, fuck around like a college kid, between being obsessed with Eric Munson in high school and so fucking alone in the minors that sex lost all its appeal. He thinks that everyone needs this, to show them how good it is to come home to the same person every night, to want only them. If Amber would just be patient, just wait until he gets it out of his system, then he’ll be able to love just her, he’ll be the man she deserves.
It always surprises him, how easy it is. He never consciously goes out looking for someone, but they always seem to catch his eye. In a spectacularly pathetic rationalization, he feels like it would be rude not to smile back at them, rude not to lean into them when they touch a hand to his arm, and, eventually, rude not to fuck them when they wrap their legs around his waist. It would just be bad manners.
Anyway. Amber doesn’t wait for him to get it out of his system, probably because she’s a lot smarter than he is.
She comes down to Phoenix with him for spring training and for the first week it’s wonderful, it’s like when they were first getting to know each other and talking about Mel Brooks movies all night long on the phone, before Chavez went to Arlington and got all fucked up again.
Then Eric Munson, on his road trip to Florida for the start of his second season in the minors, Double-A Jacksonville, stops off in Arizona to see the couple. The three of them go out to dinner, Munson and Amber teasing Chavez in perfect tandem, as has become their special talent whenever together.
Back at the hotel, Amber kisses Munson on the cheek and Chavez on the lips and goes to sleep early, worn out by ten o’clock, but when she wakes up at three in the morning and Eric’s still not there, she goes looking for him.
Munson got the room next to theirs, a connecting door and they forgot to lock it because they’re not too bright. Amber nudges it open expecting to find the boys stone-drunk and deliriously catching up, maybe watching a movie or talking about the prospects in Detroit’s system.
But her eyes adjust to the darkness and the two men are asleep under a single sheet, the blanket and comforters all wrecked at the foot of the bed, pillows crushed up and lying on the floor. The sheet’s pulled down low across both their hips, low enough that Amber can tell they’re not wearing anything, and she sees Chavez’s red cotton boxers draped on the headboard. Munson’s got an arm tossed over Chavez’s back, his hand dangling limply off the side of her husband’s body. Chavez’s head is turned to the side and he’s smiling, lank hair dripping across his eye.
Amber Tarpy steps back, closes the door very quietly. She packs her things, methodical and checking under the bed to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything, opening every cabinet in the bathroom. She leaves her wedding ring on the bedside table and doesn’t even write him a note.
She’s on the first flight she can book out of Sky Harbor, chasing night, and she doesn’t start crying until the cab pulls up at her parents’ house in San Diego. There are things you can forgive-there are things you can’t.
The alarm on Chavez’s cell phone is set to go off at four in the morning so he can get back before Amber wakes up. He pulls on his boxers and gathers the rest of his clothes into a bundle, sidesteps into his hotel room, walking on the balls of his feet with the bundle clutched to his stomach.
The bed is empty, though, neatly made up, and Chavez is confused for a long time before he sees Amber’s ring flashing on the bedside table.
He drops his clothes on the floor, picks up his wife’s ring, and goes back into Munson’s room. He sits cross-legged on the bed and pokes Munson until he shifts and sneezes and wakes up.
Chavez is playing with the ring, fiddling it to make the moonlight spark off the diamond, tinkering it against his own gold band. Munson pushes up on his hand.
“Dude?” he says, fuzz-mouthed. “Shouldn’t you be . . . what time is it?”
Chavez walks Amber’s ring across his knuckles, his cool poker chip trick. “I think she left me.”
Munson’s mind unfogs at that, a curtain thrown open. He sits all the way up. He’s still naked and he pulls the sheet up protectively without thinking about it. Chavez might have snorted at that, but it seems inappropriate. Chavez’s eyebrows are pulled down, focusing intently on the ring.
“What?” Munson says in disbelief. “What’re you-when?”
Chavez shrugs. “Just now. Or . . . since we fell asleep. How long ago was that?” He bites his lip, shakes his head. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Her stuff’s gone. She . . . left this.”
He flicks his thumb and the ring goes cartwheeling through the air like a quarter. Chavez catches it easily in the palm of his hand. He’s feeling okay. He wouldn’t have thought that he’d feel this okay.
“She must have seen,” Munson says, figuring this out. “She must have come looking . . . goddamn it, I told you we shouldn’t while she was right next door!”
Munson’s panicking, there’s no question. What the fuck were they thinking, they were just watching some dumb movie on cable and Chavez had rolled into him, grinning and his hand crawling on Munson’s stomach, his mouth open on Munson’s neck. What the fuck was he thinking when he heard ‘oh bad fucking idea’ in his head and ignored it, turning to meet Chavez’s mouth with his and unbuttoning Chavez’s jeans, tugging down his boxers. He only protested because he knew he should, and then Chavez’s hand slid down under his waistband and Munson decided it probably wasn’t that crucial, not with Chavez’s fingers tight and dry and knowing what to do better than anyone else ever has, with five years of practice behind him.
Stupid fucks, the both of them, reckless because it would be months before they would get another chance and Munson wanted it, he wanted it bad enough to not care, like he could keep Chavez pressing hot against him and craning back to offer his throat, for all the time he’d be flattened and tired in the southeast, like he could pack it up in his suitcase and throw it in the backseat.
And no way was it worth it, because Munson doesn’t want to be responsible for this, and he thinks ludicrously, ‘home-wrecker, home-wrecker.’
Chavez places the ring down on the bedside table, just like the one where he found it, and skates his fingers down Munson’s chest. “Calm down. It’s okay. I’m . . . it’s not so bad.”
Munson hits his hand away. “Your wife just fucking left you, Eric!”
Chavez gets angry in a wash. “Thanks for the newsflash,” he jeers. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming.”
Munson gapes at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Munson, I’m a terrible husband!” Chavez yells, not caring that it’s four in the morning and the walls are cardboard-and-air. He understands a lot, all at once, he’s seeing the truth of it. “I’ve been a terrible husband from day fucking one, did you not get that? She never should have married me, she should have left a year ago, she never should have looked at me in the first place. I went in there just now still tasting like you, I . . . I didn’t even th-think twice about it.”
And Chavez’s voice just splits down the middle, right at the end of it. He suddenly sees Amber in the lobby of that Oakland hotel with the journalist’s baby on her hip, smiling at him shyly and making her eyes go big so he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about her.
He hides his face with his hands, whispering, “oh god,” his shoulders trembling violently and he’ll be crying in a second or two, he knows it for sure.
He thought she’d wait for him to get over it. Maybe it would have happened soon, he thinks maybe he was close.
He makes his fingers into claws and digs at his eyes, forcing the tears, thinking that the sooner he starts crying, the sooner he’ll stop, be washed clean. Munson’s hands circle his forearms but Munson doesn’t pull Chavez’s arms down or haul Chavez to him, just holds on.
Chavez can’t make himself cry, his eyes only water from the pain of being clawed at, and the effort exhausts him. He lets Munson unfold him on the bed, Munson twisting close and smoothing his hands across Chavez’s head and shoulders and back, and Munson’s breath is damp and hot on Chavez’s neck, Munce saying his name over and over again, saying, “don’t worry, be all right, stay here and it’ll be fine,” until Eric Chavez falls asleep, his hands in loose fists against Eric Munson’s chest.
*
(fallback)
A four-month marriage shouldn’t happen to anybody but celebrities, and Chavez is oddly proud, not that he fucked up, but that he fucked up on a cosmic scale. At least he didn’t do it half-assed.
Munson is in Florida and Amber is in San Diego and their apartment in Oakland doesn’t feel bigger or emptier or anything like that. It’s the same as it ever was, it keeps its dimensions.
His parents are shocked, and Ruby calls him every night for a month to make sure he’s okay. Eric fell down, a little bit, especially that week and a half in Arizona after she left him but before the season started. He doesn't remember sleeping. Doesn't really remember anything, just occasionally seeing amnesiac flashes of his own face in the bathroom mirror, the lights off and shadows laked all over the glass. But he’s better now.
He packs up Amber’s stuff and ships it down to her. He writes her an eighteen-page letter (longhand to show he means it) that doesn’t say much of anything, and she writes him an email that consists of four lines and basically wishes him well in his life of sin.
Chavez wants to tell her that he’s sorry, and that she should have waited for him to get over it, and that he’s not gay and could she please not tell anybody that she thinks he is, and that he still loves her, but she doesn’t return his calls.
There’s this thing about being numb. Or disconnected. Or something. A place he’s been before, a quiet stricken series of days and nights that he knows pretty well. Eric Chavez keeps thinking about déjà vu, going around in circles, and he wonders how long it’s going to last this time. He’s having terrible dreams.
The team’s better this year, a lot better. They start slow but it doesn’t last, and Eric Chavez is becoming an elite player. Eric Munson is in Jacksonville, and the fight they have happens over the phone.
They’re talking about a bunch of stuff and Eric Munson is reticent, like he’s not paying attention or he wants to say something but won’t. Eric Chavez gets fed up with him, eventually, and tensely asks, “The fuck is with you tonight?”
“Nothing,” Munson answers blithely.
“You’re gonna start lying to me now?”
“Oh, what, you’re the only one that’s allowed to lie around here?” Munson, in the kitchen in his rented apartment, opens cabinets and glares at the contents, clapping them shut again.
“When the fuck have I ever lied to you?” Chavez asks, pacing around his own apartment.
Munson snorts a cynical laugh, but he doesn’t call him on it. “Whatever. It’s nothing.”
“Goddamn it, Munce . . .” Chavez kicks his mitt into the wall.
“Amber keeps calling me,” Munson says, then grimaces, picking at the counter tile with his nails.
“What . . . why?” Chavez answers after a moment.
Munson shrugs. “I guess trying to figure out how I could be friends with such a total fuckwad.”
“What the hell, man, you’re mad at me too?” Chavez collapses on the couch, rubbing his temple hard. “You’re taking her side?”
“As if you even have a side. You never did right by her, dude, you told me that yourself. You were always fucking around.”
Chavez’s eyes widen. “Oh, please be fucking kidding me.”
Munson shakes his head, punches the wall, quick sharp jabs. “I’m not. She’s my friend too, and you treated her like shit. You fucked anything that moved.”
“One of the people I fucked was you, asshole! Where the fuck do you get off?” Chavez’s hand flexes on his skull, testing the weak places. His eyes are shut so tight it’s painful.
“It wasn’t my responsibility to keep your marriage together,” Munson tells him.
“Yeah, well, it’s not your responsibility to get all judgmental, either. And I think you sucking me off at the fucking wedding reception pretty much rules you out for the morality title, so get the fuck down off the pedestal, why don’t you.”
Eric Munson slams down the phone onto the counter, gunshot plastic crunch, and Chavez cries out in pain, snatching the receiver away from his ear and then screaming, “You fucking asshole, what the fuck!”
Munson stares at the phone on the counter. He didn’t mean to do that. He picks it up again. “Eric?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Munson, you nearly busted my ear.” Chavez presses his palm to his ear, hearing the tidal rush of blood.
“You never should have married her,” Munson says, and he still wants to hit something, he wishes the two of them were on the same side of the country. “You knew you weren’t gonna stop sleeping with me and sleeping with half the population of the fucking state, so you never should have gotten married.”
Chavez exhales. “You think I don’t know that?” His ear still hurts, a dim echoing ring.
“Then why did you?”
Chavez slumps back. “Because I loved her. I thought . . . I thought that was how it worked. That you fall in love with somebody, and then you get married, and then everything’s cool.”
“You fell in love with me,” Munson says before he can think better about it. He pulls the phone away, knocks himself on the forehead with his fist. “I mean, uh. You know that. It obviously doesn’t . . . work like that all the time. Um. Maybe you should have . . . figured that out. From how it is between you and me.”
“You and me is, like, a totally different thing, though. It’s never gonna be normal the way Amber and me are normal. Were normal. Whatever.” Chavez scowls, pushing the coffee table with his feet, scraping the floor.
“The fuck does being normal have to do with anything? Since when do you care how other people do things?”
Chavez’s socked heels slide across the top of the coffee table. He can’t get any friction, cotton on the waxy lacquer. Munson sounds pretty angry at him. “Look, I thought I had a chance to be happy,” Chavez says, trying to explain and getting the knotted-stomach feeling that he’s not doing it very well.
“Oh,” Munson answers, sounding dull, because he’s got to say something, and that’s all he can come up with. Munson kicks the wall and hits a stud, his eyes watering and he’s pretty sure he just broke his toe. He hops around, loses his balance, and falls with a heavy thump. “Ow.”
“Munce?”
“Um . . . I fell down. But also you’re an idiot.” He pulls off his shoe, pokes at the injured toe. It moves; it’s not broken. Just hurts like a bitch.
“I’m an idiot?” Chavez repeats. Munson’s making little pained sounds, and cursing under his breath again, like they both do when they’re upset. Chavez tries to remember when they learned that, who taught it to them.
“You’re such a fucking idiot.” Munson pressure-wraps his toe with his hand, his legs bent and butterflied. “You think just loving someone’s enough, that’s all you have to put into it. And fuck staying faithful or acting like their feelings are more important than your dick.”
Chavez thinks, ‘fucking christ that hurts,’ and he closes his eyes. “I’m not like that. I just. I fucked up. But I tried, I did try.”
“Bullshit you tried. I would have stepped back, you know I would have, if you’d asked me to. The only reason we even started fucking again was because I got drunk in Texas, and I was willing to let that go and not mention it again, but no, no. You needed your motherfucking fallback.”
There’s a small cracked noise that comes from Eric Chavez, and he mumbles, “I, ah. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to go. I didn’t . . . look, just goodbye, okay, bye.”
Eric Munson turns off his phone and shoves it under the couch, then he lies on his back on the floor and watches the headlights from the interstate smear across the ceiling for a long time.
*
(first time i was in love with you)
They don’t talk for two months.
Eric Munson does worse in Jacksonville than he did in A-ball. He controls what he can, he gets better at picking at first, and it’s the same as catching in a lot of ways. But he remembers being taught that the best first basemen are left-handed, the ease of snagging throws off the line, he keeps thinking about it when he feels the pull in his shoulder reaching across his body. Thinks about it when a ball skips past, when he can’t get to it. Thinks about it even though it’s the worst possible thing to think about.
Sometimes they let him catch and he handles his pitchers like a veteran, feeling canny and wise and hoping in the back of his mind that if he’s good enough, they’ll take him off the field and put him back behind the plate where he belongs. But at the same time, he doesn’t want to be one of those catchers who’re around for their minds, not their bats. Hitting has always been the best part of his game, what he’s most proud of in the world, though he knows he shouldn’t be.
It’s a round bat and a round ball, it’s the hardest thing to do in sports, and he can’t get it back, no matter what he tries, days in the cages and trying a heavier stick, tape around his hands and pine tar until he can toss his batting gloves at the wall and they’ll stick. Nothing works. He misses aluminum, he hears ‘ping’ when it’s quiet and feels the buzz in his wrists and palms all the time, but that’s not really it.
He thinks about college and then high school and pretty soon he’s dreaming of being twelve years old, the sun going down and Eric Chavez pitching to him in the park, yelling, okay, hey, the curve, hit this, just try! Ten years later and he can’t hit anything. It’s like losing an arm.
He tapes a picture of the two of them up in his locker. It’s old, it’s them in the parking lot of Mt. Carmel, sitting on the hood of some green car that doesn’t belong to them. Chavez’s arm is around Munson’s shoulders and they’re grinning at the camera, legs dangling in front of the license plate. Munson’s got one hand behind Chavez’s head, giving him bunny-ears.
He doesn’t remember the particular day or even if it was junior or senior year, but he remembers how Chavez’s hair was flat and crinkly on the heel of his hand.
One of his teammates, another sometimes-catcher, Brandon Inge who was with him in West Michigan too, moving through the system on a parallel, comes over one day and squints at the photo.
“Who’s that?” he asks.
Munson is sitting on a stool tying his cleats. He answers with his head down, “That’s my best friend.”
Inge leans in, studying the picture. “That’s . . . dude, that’s Eric Chavez.”
Munson looks up, surprised. He wasn’t aware that people have started recognizing Chavez, knowing him by face and statistics. He shrugs it off. “Yeah, I know.”
Inge shows him a crooked grin. “You’re Eric Chavez’s best friend?”
Munson has a brief vision of the rest of his life, when the only thing he’ll ever be known for is being Eric Chavez’s best friend.
But he just nods, and Inge slaps him on the back, says, “Cool,” before wandering off to bug the pitchers.
That night, Eric Munson calls his best friend.
Chavez is in New York City. He’s in the corner store down the street from the hotel, buying a bunch of junk for the guys waiting upstairs, but when he sees Munson’s number on the display, he leaves everything on the check-out counter and walks out.
“So, listen,” Munson says. “It occurs to me that I was pretty much the worst friend in the history of the world, the last time we talked.”
Chavez laughs a little bit, walking slowly down the street. He can’t go off too far or he’ll get lost. “You weren’t so bad.”
“Dude, I think I called you six different kinds of asshole and also nearly made you deaf.”
Chavez smiles, stops on the street corner to watch the traffic signals blur in the mid-summer humidity. He thinks he probably looks very beat-poet romantic right now, in the yellow fall of the streetlight. All he needs is some rain. Maybe a cigarette. Maybe both, hey.
“I guess you probably had a right.” Chavez paces in a little circle, darkness and then into the light again. “I know I was pretty fucked up. With you and her both.”
Munson sits at the kitchen table, props his legs up on a stray chair. “And you’re not fucked up anymore?”
“Well, no. There’s just no one to catch me at it, now.” He means it as a joke, Munson can tell, but Munson still wants to see him, make sure.
“Look,” Munson says. “I’m saying I’m sorry, all right? You definitely didn’t need to hear that shit from me right after you . . . well, you know. I’m supposed to be your best friend.”
“You are,” Chavez tells him, and starts walking again, under the neon and the brick.
Munson traces the grain of the table with his thumb, eyes thinned in concentration. “Next time we see each other . . . I mean, I don’t know, man. Is this . . . still a good idea, do you think?”
“It was never a good idea, Munce. And I. It’s not like I can promise you that I won’t fuck off someday and be an idiot again.”
“Why is that, dude?” Munson asks, probably should have asked it years ago. “Why do you do this shit?”
Chavez watches a bunch of cars slip by, and there’s a pack of teenagers across the street in tank tops and baggy jeans, cawing with laughter and passing forties back and forth, arguing for possession. Chavez thinks about the life baseball kept from him, the normal world.
“I don’t . . . I used to be better. The first time I was in love with you, it was good enough, all I needed,” Chavez says, doing his very best.
Munson’s face gets pinched. “So, it’s my fault, you being this way? Because I fucked up the first time?”
“I didn’t say that,” Chavez protests, and he doesn’t want to fight tonight, it’s been two months and too long. “I just, it was like, I was so, like, wrecked after that. I couldn’t. It meant too much, and I hated that, I never wanted to, you know, risk that happening again. Never wanted to depend on just one person, as much as I depended on you. It’s dangerous, you know?”
Munson shakes his head, then remembers Chavez can’t see it. “I didn’t know. You never said.”
Chavez counts streetlights, all the way down to the World Trade Center rising like matchsticks at the end of the island. “Well, Jesus, Munce, I couldn’t say something like that to you, not back then. I was just a fucking kid. It was . . . it was safer to just end it.”
“It didn’t work, though,” Munson answers, grimacing. “Ending it. We’re still. You still think it’s too dangerous?”
“It’s different now. It’s . . . complicated.” Chavez blows out a breath. “Fuck. Why are we talking about this? I hate talking about this.”
Munson nods, smiling a little bit. At least they agree on something. “I know. I just . . . I wanted to know if. I kind of need to know if we’re gonna still be . . . doing that, next time we see each other.”
“Can’t just play it by ear, can ya, Munson.”
“Hey man, I’m just trying to plan my off-season.”
Chavez grins, but it fades off his face quickly. He takes a blind turn and he can’t see the Twin Towers anymore. “Seriously, Munce, I’m just. I don’t want stuff to be like it was before I got married.”
“Christ, neither do I,” Munson says with his eyes going wide, thinking about pushing Chavez’s face into the bed and trying to figure out which of them he was trying to hurt.
“But I don’t. I don’t know how to make it better,” Chavez says.
“Eric,” Munson starts, and then stops, swallowing a few times. He’s not sure how they could have grown up side by side like they did and still have all this between them. “You just. Stuff was like that because, because of Amber. And she’s. Well. Not around anymore.”
Chavez finds a crushed-up soda can on the sidewalk and kicks it along in front of him. “It wasn’t just her. I think maybe she was the, um. Excuse we used?”
Munson digs his thumbnail into the tip of his index finger. His head hurts, a dark slitted pain in his sinuses. “She wasn’t a fucking figment, dude. You got married. That, you know, actually happened, it wasn’t a dream or something. You were cheating on your wife, like, a lot, so let’s not blame her, ‘kay?”
Eric Chavez shakes his head, his face all twisted up. “I’m not blaming her. I’m not blaming you or her or anybody, just me, all right? I know it’s my fault, this time. We’re even, so don’t worry.”
“Oh god, would you . . .” Munson scrapes a hand over his face, breathing out hard. “Please stop keeping track of shit like that, please. We don’t have to be fucking even, Eric, jesus.”
“Shut up for a minute and listen to me, will you?” Chavez says, fingertips against his eye and his head starting to ache. “I. It wasn’t Amber. I mean, okay, she was a part of it, fine. But also. You weren’t what I wanted. Not really. If you were, I never would have gotten married.”
Munson closes his eyes. “Yeah, okay. Fine.” His voice is this tiny choked-off thing, cracking pretty badly.
“No, shut up, Munce, be quiet for once in your life.” Chavez drags his hand through his hair. “I’m not. I couldn’t deal with you. A year ago, I just couldn’t, man. I was so fucking in love with you but I didn’t want to be, didn’t want that at all, and I was just. I was crazy, that’s all.” He falls silent.
Munson doesn’t talk either, rubbing his temples and keeping his head down. Eventually Chavez sighs, and tells him hesitantly, “The only thing I know is that I can’t lose you. Okay?”
Munson breathes out. “You won’t. You couldn’t.”
Something loosens in Chavez’s chest, but he still shakes his head, because he needs to do this right, he needs to get something right, at least once. “You gotta stop being my best friend for a second and understand. If we keep this up, I’ll. I won’t be what you need, I really don’t think I will. I don’t wanna be all selfish and say that just because I want you, you should take me. Because I’ll tell you stuff I don’t really mean, and I’ll fuck up again, and you’ll stop wanting me around, after awhile. And that’ll be . . . pretty terrible for me.”
Chavez squints, not liking the sound of that. Not really liking the sound of any of this. He runs the back of his hand along the dirty wall, roughed-stone, scratching white marks on his knuckles.
Munson worries a long varnished splinter from the tabletop. This fucking place is falling apart. “So, that’s a no, then?” he asks carefully.
Chavez crosses against the light, a blast of a car horn. The city’s loud and everything’s got soot on it. There’s a difference between rebuilding and retooling. He’s thinking that you don’t throw something away entirely, not if it was perfect once, not if there was a good gloveman up the middle or a switch-hitting catcher or a pitcher in the ‘pen with a slider like a fucking punishment. You take the best parts first, you try to fix it.
“Let’s just.” Chavez cuts himself off, and wonders if he’s heading west, if he’ll hit the river soon. “Let’s try something different. Let’s. Not be in love with each other anymore. Let’s just be best friends who fuck around sometimes.”
Snapping the splinter into little pieces, trying to make them all the same length, Munson says, “Isn’t that, like, the definition of being in love?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s never really done us any good, has it? Being in love. It just seems to fuck everything up. So we should, you know. Stop.”
Munson closes one eye like a sniper, fucking up his depth perception. “I don’t think it’s that easy, man.”
Chavez grins. “Not for mere mortals, maybe. But we’re ballplayers. And therefore tough.”
Munson thinks, ‘say shit like that and you expect me not to love you?’
“Anyway,” Chavez continues. “Best friends is the important part.”
“Yeah.”
“And the fucking around is nice too.”
Munson smiles. “Yeah.”
“Best of both worlds, Munson.”
“If you say so, dude.”
Chavez pauses, scuffing his shoe on the sidewalk to hear the rasp. “You’ll tell me if you’re not okay?”
Munson puts his head down on the table, tacky on his face. “Don’t I always?”
Chavez nods, and looks around seriously for the first time in awhile. Who the fuck designed this city, it looks like a nightmare. “Eric . . . I think I’m lost.”
Munson smiles, and he gets up, goes over to his computer to find a New York City map online and make sure Eric Chavez gets back to where he’s supposed to be.
(end part ten)
*
part eleven