Page 57 of Unwritten Rules
“I’m just saying. Look, Zach, I’m not a professional baseball player, so what do I know? But you’re down there, playing for gornisht, in that apartment all alone.”
“I could be in Baltimore playing for less than that.”And I’d still be alone, he doesn’t say. “I didn’t call you so you could lecture me or to have a fight.” He looks over to the picture frame, sitting on his bookshelf, and maybe he should take the batteries out of it and pack it back up. “I just wanted to show you what the place looks like.”
“I just want nice things for you, Zacheyleh.” And it hangs there, what constitutes “nice” things: a house, a few kids she can bless each Friday, hand uncomplicatedly against their foreheads, telling them that they should live long enough to see their children’s children as well. Things he grew up knowing he couldn’t have, openly, and still play the game.
“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“The apartment looks good. I’m happy that you’re happy there.” And she changes the subject to Eitan’s son, who’s now walking fully and terrorizing his unsuspecting parents, before Zach can contradict her.
Chapter Seventeen
June, Three Years Ago
The Elephants play a three-game set in Houston in the horror of Houston’s roofed park. It’s loud in a way few stadiums are, a combination of enclosure and a rabid fan base. Houston always seems to have their number: at the Elephants Coliseum, but more so here, hitting like someone’s telling them what signs Zach is putting down. It’s exhausting, especially when they lose by three runs.
Zach mostly wants to go, recover, shower, collapse. But Eugenio finds him after the game, after reporters elicited the usual quotes about getting ’em again tomorrow, even if Eugenio is starting the next game and the one after that. “There’s a Spanish place nearby, if you wanted to go get dinner. And, uh, game-plan.”
The caterers laid a team spread in the kitchen. But it was an afternoon game and Zach could use a drink not prepared at a hotel bar. “Let me go get changed.”
When he gets back to his stall to pull on his street clothes—there’s Eugenio. And Gordon. And Giordano. And Braxton. And Hayek.
“I updated the reservation,” Eugenio says.
They grab a couple of rideshares, and in the ten minutes it takes to drive from the ballpark to the restaurant, Zach runs through every possible outcome from bad to catastrophic that could happen during this. The waitstaff hitting on Eugenio, which happens, but is easier to brush off when it’s just him and Zach. Zach running into someone he met the last time he was in Houston and the two of them spending a solid minute trying to place each other before coming to the realization it was through Grindr. Zach somehow forgetting their teammates are there and that the rest of the restaurant is there and that the rest of the planet is there and reaching across the table to run his fingertips over the calluses on Eugenio’s palm.
But nothing prepares him for the slow torture of being crammed next to Eugenio in a booth in the noise of the restaurant, Eugenio explaining various menu items as his shoulder brushes Zach’s.
It’s a nice restaurant. Not a baseball-player-nice restaurant, which tend toward steak-and-bourbon kinds of places, but a nice one, located in an old house that their waiter informs them is from the 1920s, light walls and dark wood trim, all straight, masculine edges.
They’re in a back room, quarantined off from the rest of the dining area, which is probably for the best when Giordano asks, “Why is the food small?” and then their waiter explains the concept of tapas while Eugenio looks like he wants to slither onto the floor.
“What are you going to get?” Zach says.
Eugenio has his phone out, his notes app open, and is editing a list on it, one he probably started when he made the reservation. “I was thinking about the eel.”
“Huh, I don’t think I’ve ever had eel.” Which leads to a discussion of if eel is kosher, which Google tells Zach it is not, and then a story about his mother’s horror when one of their cousins made catfish fritters for Pesach.
“You guys decided?” someone says, and it occurs to Zach that they’ve mostly been talking to each other, not that Zach can really hear much beyond Eugenio’s warm breath in his ear. His thigh has gotten increasingly closer to Zach’s, even if his hands are resting innocently above the table.
“I haven’t looked yet,” Zach admits. “Uh, Morales, get me whatever.”
Their waiter collects their orders—Eugenio requesting a duck entrée and a variety of tapas—along with Gordon’s credit card and assurances that they’ll keep ordering and won’t break anything.
Eugenio hasn’t moved any farther away, even though they’re no longer studying the menu together. He looks down at where Zach’s hand is resting on his own leg. “How come you painted your nails for this game?”
The nails on Zach’s throwing hand are painted white, the kind of lumpy uneven painting he did with his nondominant hand so that Hayek could see what signs he put down. “The first couple times we played here, the stickers kept peeling off in the humidity. I had to reapply ’em between innings.”
“I should probably do that.”
“I brought the nail polish along, if you want to borrow it later.”
“Sure, I can swing by your room.” And Eugenio smiles like he’s getting away with something.
Their food comes. Eugenio ordered what looks like six things for himself, the unkosher eel, a fava bean salad, potatoes with spicy oil, a couple more things that Zach can’t identify. And Zach sticks his fork into one of them, unthinking, not having asked. Eugenio scoots the plate toward him, Zach eating from it and, when he glances up, Gordon is looking at them.
Zach swallows his bite of fingerling potatoes, which he didn’t really chew all that well, a lump down his throat that he washes down with a too-big sip of wine. He’s pinned into a corner of the booth, Eugenio on one side, Hayek—who is telling an incredibly loud, incredibly filthy, and almost certainly fabricated story—on his other. And he taps Eugenio’s thigh with his hand, then nudges him with his elbow. “Bathroom,” he adds, unnecessarily, when Eugenio slides out.
He exits their dining area, escaping into the safety of the underlit restaurant hallway. The bathrooms are both single occupancies, both occupied, so he waits. The restaurant, like everything else in Houston, is over-air-conditioned, ceiling fans stirring the already too-cold air.
