Page 55 of Unwritten Rules
“Oh,” Zach says, a little dumbstruck. “I didn’t...” Everything else he was about to say sounds hollow, so he just says, “Eugenio’s really good at explaining all the analytics stuff. Math isn’t my favorite thing, but he’s patient even when I’m missing something obvious or it takes me a while to get there.” And he doesn’t look over at Eugenio, but he can see him in his peripheral vision, the reflection of the recessed lighting off his glasses, the shape of his smile.
“See,” Stephanie says, “you’ll do great. If you’re really stuck, I’ll try to throw you a life ring or something. Plus, it’s a new person and if she pisses you off, she knows you won’t answer her texts all season.”
Zach assumed it was going to be the normalEast Bay Tribuneguy, who’s been writing about baseball since Zach was in elementary school and hasn’t ever said anything to Zach about his hearing aid.
“Hey,” Zach says, when Eugenio gets up to go to the bathroom, “I’d prefer if she didn’t ask me any questions about my hearing.”
Stephanie blinks twice slowly and then drains the rest of her coffee. “Zach, I know, and I told her. If that ever changes, you can tell me, but I figured that was off-limits for the foreseeable.”
“Oh. Um, thanks.”
“It’s not really a ‘thanks’ thing. Players don’t want to talk about certain topics and so we don’t talk about those, if it’s personal and not, like, getting creamed by the Cleveland Spiders. If there are other topics that you don’t want to discuss publicly, just let me know.”
Eugenio comes back in, holding a mug of coffee for himself and one that he hands to Zach, whitened with soy milk from the carton he keeps in the fridge specifically for when Zach’s there. Their fingers brush.
“No,” Zach says, “I can’t really think of anything else.”
Chapter Sixteen
July, Present Day
Zach flies back to Miami from the All-Star Classic, an afternoon flight where he sleeps and doesn’t bother connecting his phone to the Wi-Fi. He’s hungover, the kind of awful hangovers he started getting in his thirties, where he wasn’t really drunk, but his body reminds him he can’t mix beer and liquor and champagne. His hip hurts, an ache he shouldn’t get on a few days’ rest, having caught one measly inning in front of an apathetic crowd. His clothing feels wrong. The collar of his shirt scratches against a few islands of stubble-burn at his neck, uncomfortable souvenirs that he tries and fails to soothe with a bottle of stinging hotel lotion. He rests his head uncomfortably against the cold plexiglass of the plane window, crammed in the too-small seat, and worries that he’s going to have to throw up in an airplane bathroom.
When he lands, there’s a message from his agent.
He doesn’t have his headphones, and the Bluetooth for his hearing aid is acting too spotty to use in public. The transcription of the message is mostly __________ on his visual voice mail. He has to wait through deplaning, the long haul to the baggage claim. He spends the walk to the parking lot praying someone didn’t get pictures of them coming out of the restaurant bathroom, or of Eugenio lingering outside his hotel room. Or him leaving, sockless, shirt half-untucked, face expressionless on camera.
He listens to the voice mail in his truck, driving back through the wet Miami streets. It’s midafternoon, humidity rising like steam from the pavement, and he wonders if Eugenio will like playing here in a few weeks, if it’ll be different from how he grumbled at the Bay Area cold.
“I hear you made a friend during the All-Star Classic,” his agent says. Though his tone is laughing in the message, different from how he might sound if they had to run PR triage. “Garza, the kid from the Rivers, wants to do an article about his fingers or whatever, and he was wondering if you’d do the same about your hearing aid.”
Zach feels relief like the blast of an air conditioner. He listens to the rest of the message, then tracks down Stephanie when he’s back at his apartment. It’s frigid, AC up too high, though his plants are enjoying the cold. Google reveals that she left the Elephants’ organization and founded her own firm, a slick minimalist website advertising Stephanie Guzman PR Associates, the splash page showing her in a blazer staring slightly off-camera; her hair is blue. There’s an email listed, a general contact account, the kind he suspects are never monitored, and a phone number he expects to go to voice mail. But she picks up when he calls.
“Um, It’s Zach Glasser. From the, uh—”
“Hi, Zach.” She sounds a little apprehensive that he’s calling her without warning. “How’ve you been?”
They switch to FaceTime and catch up a little. Zach tells her about the All-Star Classic and then asks about how she’s doing.
“It’s been nice choosing my own clients. Fewer press conferences where I have to write statements for players because they said racist shit on Twitter. Which, not that I’m not happy to hear from you, but most guys don’t call me with good news.”
“They want me to do aPlayers’ Updatepiece about my hearing aid. Garza—he’s a pitcher on the Rivers—is doing one about his prosthetic fingers, and I guess he mentioned it to his agent who mentioned it to mine.”
“Oh.” Her expression brightens at that. “Is that something you want to do?”
“Not really. But I’m thinking about it, I guess, more than I would if it was just me. Garza probably gets a lot more comments than I do, on account of his hand being so visible. Especially now that I’ve been around the league awhile anyway.” And most players in Miami haven’t asked about his hearing aid, other than a few chirping him about getting out of doing media, though it’s not like the media is really clamoring to hear about a team that’s eliminated from contention before the season even begins.
“A lot of those articles are ghostwritten,” she says. “I did a couple when I was with the Elephants. I don’t know if you saw them.”
“Yeah, I did. Which is why I called you.” Because he’d known that Giordano didn’t drink—and that Giordano didn’t drink because heusedto drink—but not that he nearly quit playing entirely. “How do we go about arranging this?”
She runs through the process: a contract his agent will need to review. An interview she’ll turn into an article that he’ll look over to make sure it represents what he wants to say. Coordination with the Swordfish PR folks. “It’s pretty painless. Though is there anything else I should know before we discuss specifics?”
“It’s not really about my ear itself. I have hearing loss in one ear that’s gotten worse over the last couple years. It’s probably genetic but no one else in my family has it.” He doesn’t say anything else for a second; Stephanie doesn’t prompt him either. And he looks away from the phone for the next part, saying it quickly.
“A lot of kids who have this kind of hearing loss have trouble in school. Not because of my actual hearing. But even when I was supposed to get seated in a particular place, teachers would ignore that, or kids would blow in my hearing aid to be assholes.” Things that feel hard to explain, especially when teachers who also taught Eitan and Aviva expected him to be the same way, or insinuated his mother was overbearing when she would come in for meetings about accommodations. Something that probably shouldn’t still bother him, years later. “It’s kind of a sore subject for me.”
“Zach—” she says it gently, drawing his attention back to his phone screen “—the thing about these kinds of articles is that they’re not really about you. They’re about what the people who are gonna read them identify with. So if you want to talk about your ear but leave out that other stuff, that’s okay. It’s just a matter of how we frame it.”
