Page 43 of Diamond Ring
“If you’re gonna apologize,” Alex snaps, “that ain’t the shit you apologize for.” Though Jake doesn’t think he hurt anything but his pride. He’s pissed off, clearly, fluffed up with irritation in a way that takes years off his face. Alex, how he remembers him.
Conversation around them stops, though music’s still playing, a song Jake actually likes but now will associate with Alex growling at him like some kind of terrible classical conditioning.
Jake has a lot of experience breathing through things. Smiling when his arm felt like it was on fire. When teams told him, “Hey, no hard feelings, but we’re gonna go in a different direction.” When his agent told him no news meant just that.
This one’s harder to breathe through. A faintly metallic taste coats his tongue. He breathes, pulling in the temperate Oakland air, and puts on another smile. That turns out to be a mistake when Alex’s glare intensifies.
A cooler sits over by the sidelines. Jake grabs two waxed paper cups from a stack, then dispenses water into them. He extends ones to Alex. A peace offering. A placation. For a second, Alex looks like he’s contemplating dumping the cup over Jake’s head. Joke’s on him. Jake’s been told he looks great wet.
Around them, guys have resumed their conversations, the first stilted discussions of eavesdroppers, then actual chitchat. Jake, like a complete dumbass, doesn’t move. “It’s water. You drink it if you’re thirsty.”
Alex narrows his eyes, the same deep brown Jake remembers shadowed underneath the tipped-up screen of his mask. He takes the cup, drains it, crumples it, and tosses it into a bucket that’s been repurposed as a trash can. “I got other pitchers who need to throw.” Like Jake’s imposing on his time. Like they’re going to spend the rest of the season embroiled in an argument.
Or would if Jake wasn’t here on a one-year desperation contract. He can’t afford to get into it with Alex; teams have released him for less. They can work together. It’ll be fine. Even if what they need is—Jake doesn’t even know. Therapy. To duke it out in foam armor. To work each other out of their systems and move on.
Alex is right about one thing—he has to pitch. Jake reascends the mound, pausing to take in the stadium. Even though he’s been working out here for a week, it still gets him every time: that upper deck staring down at him, its seats like unsatisfied spectators.
He comes set, readying himself, then throws another changeup. And,fuck, hits Alex again.
Alex yanks his mask off, tossing it into the expensively maintained dirt. His leg guards clop against his spiked cleats as he storms toward Jake. He’s close, in Jake’s face, poking at his chest in a tender spot at the top of Jake’s left pectoral. “You trying to start something, Fischer?”
“Angelides”—Martinez jogs over wearing the kind of world-weary expression only a baseball lifer can manage—“go take a walk.”
Alex’s lip curls. For a second, Jake thinks he’s not going to move, instead standing with an intractability that Jake at one point admired.
Slowly, like someone took a pin to him, Alex deflates. Then makes his way to the dugout, grumbling as he goes, leaving Jake wishing he could start the day over. Or possibly his whole baseball career.
That night, Jake lies awake in bed. His ceiling hasn’t become any more interesting in the last sixty minutes, the same familiar thoughts spinning in a repetitive loop.
He gets up, fumbling for his socks and shower slides, and drifts around his apartment. He does a slow circuit: the kitchen, attended by a new refrigerator and cheap variegated tile backsplash. Living room, furnished with stuff liberated from various storage lockers. Small luxuries—matching lamps, a couch long enough to nap on. If he can stick around, he wants to upgrade to a nicer place. But if he and Alex are gonna fight, eventually the club will decide Jake’s not worth the trouble. Hasn’t been since a decade ago.
His parents keep asking him, subtly then more forcefully, what he’s going to doafterbaseball. As if his career is already over. He’s made a list of options, none particularly appealing: Coaching. Mentoring. Running Little League showcases, the kind that upsell gullible kids and their parents on how to make it in the game, like it’s not a combination of money, skill, and sheer dumb luck.
He could go to college. Except he has no idea what to study, no desire to be the oldest person in a classroom or to hear about how he’s finally doing something with his life from his high school friends who all have master’s degrees.
He files it forlater, an increasingly overstuffed mental folder. When’s he going to find someone nice and settle down?Later. When’s he going to consider his post-baseball life?Later. When’s he going to win a Fall Classic?Later.
When is he going to get over this fight with Alex?Later, later, later. Not when everyone—not just Alex but especially Alex—expects him to just smile and let things go.
Eventually Jake goes back to his bedroom. He knew he’d end up here, even if he’s worked more and more to distract himself. His anxieties are often like being stuffed in a too-small chair with a seatmate determined to hog all the legroom.Intrusions.As if he could just ask them to leave.
Today was bad. Tomorrow will be the same way. I’m going to fail. I’m going to get hurt.
With those, the possibility of false relief, an itch vibrating under his skin.If I don’t...
Sighingly, he begins the process of stripping and remaking the bed.
It’s an objectively harmless behavior, but it eats at his time, his ability to think about anything else. He doesn’t mind dust or germs, really—it’d be hard to survive in a clubhouse if he did—but the pervasivewrongnessof things being out of order agitates him.
“You get five,” he promises himself. Five cycles of this and no more. Down from ten a year ago, twenty a year before that. Slow, sure progress, even if it feels like he’s labored up a hill and is in constant danger of backsliding.
When he’s done, he flops on the bed no sleepier than when he got up. His phone is charging at his bedside. He opens a hookup app and browses through the endless icons of guys with abs better than most professional athletes. Some include their faces, but many don’t, and he scrolls, letting the icons blur.
He pauses over one profile pic that’s like many of the others around it: chest and abs, no face, a limning of hair, a thick trail leading from navel to waistband. A few gray hairs among black ones. Whoever took it wasn’t fussed about the lighting, or the cut of his stomach, which has the kind of barreled thickness that suggests a layer of muscle underneath.
Mostly what catches Jake’s eye is the loop of a titanium Phiten necklace that ballplayers wear for superstitious reasons. In the picture, the guy has his hand splayed on his chest, sifting through his chest hair—big palms, thick fingers—and yeah, okay, Jake is sliding into his DMs.
Jake’s own profile is set to “Ben;” the guy’s is set to “Mike.” Jake could do the classicHey, or the even more charmingCan I see your dick?Though the latter is always fraught, since Jake’s body might not let him return the favor—another side effect of his meds that the doctors said might wear off and hasn’t.
