Page 21 of Diamond Ring
Who writes checks every month for his aunt, sitting at his dining room table and addressing them in neat handwriting. Who opened the door when Jake knocked, and let Jake pour himself out until he felt empty and then let him sleep in his bed.
Who Jake repaid by wanting more than even Alex, generous as he was, gave him, then crept away rather than apologizing.
Jake peels off his borrowed shirt and stuffs it into his drawer, unwashed. He shaves, with attention to his sideburns and upper lip, and despairs that he’s overdue for a haircut. When they shove a microphone at him to answer for their loss, he could at least look right.
He showers, scrubbing himself with a washcloth then a loofah, grateful for the sting of it. He dries off, assessing his body. He’s dropped weight from the long haul of the season, down almost fifteen pounds from what he’s listed as. He’ll have to put it back on, another thing he’s not really looking forward to, eating for the chore of it. He’s unbruised but achy, and he almost wishes baseball was a contact sport, so he’d have a record of how beat-up he feels.
He plugs his phone into the charger. When he turns it on, a stream of texts and calls appears, many from unknown numbers. He combs through and deletes messages, some with predictable slurs. Because the media and fans forget that he’s Jewish until they don’t. He blocks a few people, then blocks a few more, then tosses his phone aside.
His parents called, a voice mail telling him that they’re worried, that he should call when he’s okay to talk. Fear he hasn’t heard in his mom’s voice since high school. He texts back, apologizing for ducking out on them. Maybe he can make it up to them with expensive San Francisco dinners. Probably not.
Gordon left a message with instructions to buck up. Another from Braxton. Over voice mail, Braxton is soft-spoken, particularly for someone Jake’s height plus about fifty pounds. “This is Charlie” followed by pat encouragements that Jake will have other opportunities, and Jake can’t even listen to the entire message, because his lungs feel like they’re crawling up his throat.
He’s had a panic attack before, once, right after Matt died, an hour of his life Jake genuinely has no memory of, only that his mom slept in one of the two twin beds in his room that night, like he was a kid having a nightmare. Only later did she tell him that she thought he might try to hurt himself.
This one is like a wave, like standing on the beach and watching the entire ocean come toward him, immobilized. Panic crashes over him. His legs weaken to rubber. He breathes. If he focuses on that, he won’t focus on anything else. Not the acid burning the back of this throat. Not how helpless he feels, sitting on his tiled bathroom floor. Not at how he failed at something at which he was supposed to,meantto, succeed. About how that kind of failure might make him one too.
He throws up, the kind of retching he expected anyway, stomach full of whiskey and nothing. It’s better after. He brushes his teeth. Fixes his hair. Slides on deodorant. All his clothes are team-branded ones. He dresses, pulling on a green shirt that makes him look jaundiced.
A text from the team reminds him he has to go to the ballpark—that he will, at some point, need to own up to all this.
Another from Alex.You get home okay?
Because Alex asked stuff like that. Something that Jake teased him about until he realized that Alex did it out of habit. That he asked his aunt too, whenever she drove places.
Jake should apologize for sneaking out. For having gone over there at all. For throwing that changeup. For losing. Things that are both not his fault and his fault entirely. Because, with Braxton out, they made him the face of the franchise this year. If he gets the good stuff, he has to wear the bad.
None of which he can summarize in a text, since Jake’s brain—the part not devoted to a residual panic attack or the dread of having to go to the ballpark—is telling him he shouldn’t have left.
He should’ve stayed in Alex’s bed. They could’ve talked. He could’ve told Alex...what, exactly? That they felt fated, anointed by whatever petty fucking gods govern baseball. That they were supposed to win it all, the world theirs on a platter. Until it wasn’t.
Worse, he could say that he sometimes tells Alex stories to see him laugh. That he thinks about Alex calling him up, late at night, telling Jake to walk the few blocks between their apartments. Imagines Alex kissing him by the door and inviting him into his bed. The rest of the world might need him to beJake Fischer, but Alex just wants him to be Jake—the game denied them a title but perhaps they could have this.
It sounds sad when he puts it that way. A consolation prize, even if Jake needs consoling.
So he just textsYeah.
Clubhouse clean-out day is as bad as Jake anticipates. He goes in a few hours later, having tried, and failed, to nap. He ate, not tasting anything. At least he kept it in his stomach. Small victories.
When he gets to the clubhouse, everyone looks similarly dire or worse, a few guys in clothes they clearly slept in. At least Jake showered.
His stall is how he left it the day before, though a clubhouse attendant must have laundered his cast-off uniform, because there it is, neatly pressed. Along with Alex, who’s similarly stiff, standing by his stall while other guys are tossing cleats and batting gloves into duffels. Two flattened boxes sit next to him. He makes no move to set them up.
Jake came in to get his stuff. He can’t just turn and leave. It’s just Alex. Alex, who’s possibly his favorite person in the world outside immediate family and who’s looking at Jake now as if he’s a stranger.
For a second, neither of them says anything. Jake starts to thank him for dealing with his drunk ass the night before, to teasingly remind him that Alex owed him from the incident at the bar—then gets a clear memory of falling into Alex’s bed. Telling Alex they couldjustsleep, like there was another option.
Words come easy to Jake: in school, with the media, always with Alex. Right now, his mind is a jumble of things he shouldn’t say and ones he can’t. He closes his mouth.
Alex must notice because he ducks down to start assembling boxes. Another mark in Jake’s tally of fuckups.
Jake busies himself sorting the stuff in his stall that accumulated over the course of the season, including his necklace, thank fuck, because he couldn’t remember when he took it off. Headphones he thought he’d lost, whose cord he winds into a neat circle. A pair of Alex’s batting gloves that migrated to his stall the way Jake’s shirts used to end up in his ex-girlfriend’s dresser.
He should give them back. They still haven’t said anything to one another. It’s beginning to get awkward. Scratch that, itisawkward, more than when Jake woke up to the rub of Alex’s dick. An awkwardness that intensifies when reporters come in.
There isn’t a formal scrum—that would be cruel even for baseball. But beat writers need quotes to put a pin in the season, and players are supposed to oblige them. The reporter for theEast Bay Tribunecomes over, in that jacket he always wears, even if it’s in the mid-seventies today. Jake has had the last eighteen hours to think of something other thanShit happens. But every stock phrase and baseball cliché abandons him, particularly when Alex plants himself in the padded leather rolling chair beside his stall as if waiting to hear what Jake will say.
TheTribuneguy has an old-school black tape recorder, a miniature spiral notebook, fingers stained from a lifetime of gripping blue ballpoint. An expression like he’s going to ask about how Jakefeltlosing yesterday. Like baseball is about feelings.
