Now Batting for Boston: More Stories by J. G. Hayes

by J. G Hayes

  “Well, I’m sober now. But I think of it… I like to think of it as becoming the person I always was, trying to become the best part of myself.”

  Now for it. You took a deep breath and tried to speak slowly. “But really, I haven’t changed at all. I’ve … I think I was always this person, this person you see now—” you vaguely waved not at yourself but at the objects around you—“and I just needed the … right circumstances to bring that out in me. You helped me a lot in a way.”

  He laughed then, a little, but his face jerked back as if he’d been slapped. There was a sadness in his eyes now. You thought the years of corporate consumerist one-upmanship were taking their toll on him.

  “Really? Hmmmph. I … well. And ahh … how have I helped you?”

  “Well, as I recall, you … you started being a little … embarrassed about me, I think. Ashamed of your roots, of our roots. Of where we lived? And you made me see that … there was another way to live. Another someone I could be.”

  Again you vaguely waved at the things in the room.

  “Well,” he said. He clasped his hands together. His jaw tightened. He looked away first.

  “I think … embarrassed might be … too strong a word,” he said lowly.

  “Oh, come on, Tim; let’s call a spade a spade,” you said. “You were embarrassed. The last two years you didn’t even … you wouldn’t even tell people you were from Southie, or that—”

  “I just wanted something better, that’s all,” he sulked. “Is that so wrong? Looks like you did too, huh?”

  He looked around the room.

  “Well, I guess you were the first one to put that idea into my head.” You paused for a minute; something he said had pissed you off. “But… something better? Tim, what was better than … than what we had? All those years?”

  “Sean, I had an opportunity. You know that,” he said quietly. He started picking the label off his beer with his thumb. He wouldn’t look at you.

  “Of course you did. More than, evidently, more than anything you had here.” At this point you had to tell yourself to calm down, to keep speaking slowly, casually. You could hear the blood thumping in your ears, it sounded like booted soldiers tramping, tramping.

  “Sean, don’t… . Sean, please don’t pretend that things weren’t crazy, that you … that your drinking and … and the other stuff wasn’t getting out of control.”

  “Well, you’re right. You’re right, Tim. I was … an alcoholic. Still am. But a recovering one now.”

  You pursed your lips and looked up at him.

  “But … I just … I dunno Tim, I always got the feeling … I just had the feeling there was more to your leaving than that. I think you were looking for someone with a fancier address than D Street.”

  He looked down. His beer-bottle peeling was furious now.

  “I mean,” you went on, “when you started hanging out with all those new South End friends and all and … I mean, don’t tell me that stuff didn’t always turn your head, Tim. The right cars. The right addresses. The right people.”

  He said nothing, stared down at his shoes.

  “So what if they did?” he finally mumbled. “Looks like you’ve subscribed to the same theory.”

  He jerked his head again toward this room, the things in this room, this place.

  You held his eyes and tried not to smile.

  “And I assume you’ve found what you were looking for?” you asked him. “You’ve … done okay yourself?”

  “I’ve done okay,” he said.

  “Lost your “dese-and-doze” accent anyway, I see,” you said. “Well, whatever, Tim. The bottom line is you left me, took off to Chicago, and … well, I guess that was that. Eight years ago? Hard to believe.” You paused, took another sip of tonic. “And then when I didn’t hear from you … and of course I had no way of getting in touch with you …”

  “You think that was easy?” he asked, and he almost snorted. “You think I didn’t pick up the phone a thousand times all these years?”

  “Oh? There were—” and you gulped again, couldn’t help it “— there were no others? You didn’t … replace me?” You snorted. “I can’t believe that.”

  Your eyes slammed into his. He folded his arms, put down his beer.

  “Well?” you pressed, like a child.

  “There were one or two,” he said. He took a deep breath and when he lifted those blue eyes up to you they were like lasers. “But there comes a time,” he continued, “when you … well.” He stopped, looked around. Made a point of looking at Mark’s picture on the mantel. He picked up his beer again. Gulped it with lowered, restless eyes. “I guess it’s a moot point now anyway.”

  He did this thing with his face, this squirm—he’d always done it when he was mad and he did it again now and you thought you might weep.

  “So anyway,” he said. He looked around, fixed his eyes again on the picture of Mark on the mantel.

  “Is that your …”

  “That’s Mark,” you said.

  His lower lip stuck out and he folded his hands in front of him, nodded.

  “Yeah, we’ve both done pretty well for ourselves. Mark’s a doctor and I own my own business. In fact, I just finished work.”

  “So this isn’t all his?” he said. “You’re not his little …”

  He never finished sentences like that, which always made his inferences darker, more insulting. You felt your face coloring. He set his lips grimly to see that he had scored a direct hit.

  But you smiled, fluttered your eyelids, managed to smile and look down and reply casually, “That’s just my point. Tim. You just proved what I’m saying. Your assumptions about … about this—” (you spread your arms out and nodded toward the room, the things in the room) “—aren’t exactly a vote of confidence in my favor, are they? That’s what I’m getting at. That’s my whole point. I never felt that… . Well, I mean I did in the early years … but once you met those other friends of yours, once you started going to college, I never felt that just me was enough for you. I had the feeling you were ashamed of me, ashamed of our roots. That you wanted me to become … something I wasn’t. A person with a pedigree, and things, all kinds of things.”

  He sulked, when all you wanted was for him to apologize. He glowered. You became bewildered over just which one of his moods made you want him more.

  “The thing is,” you repeated, “I own my own business now. Mark’s a doctor and does quite well, but I’ve got my own business now and I couldn’t take on another client if I wanted to.”

  He looked up at you from his shoes, nodded. “Well … that’s good.” He folded his hands. He actually cracked his knuckles, and he hadn’t done that since one moment before your first touch, when you were both seventeen. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s your business?” and now he wasn’t even bothering to shield the anger in his eyes, the regret, everything. His right knee started bouncing and the part of you that had planned this evening rejoiced at his acute discomfiture. This wasn’t the healthiest part of you, you thought.

  You smiled again. “Uhff, please. I just finished work—that’s the last thing I want to talk about,” you said. “But you sound … angry almost. Regretful. You got your wish though, Tim—here I am, no longer the working-class slob. So you got your wish.”

  “Sean, I—”

  “What … what made your feelings change for me? From love to shame? What was it, Tim?”

  He looked away, crossed his legs, brought the beer halfway to his mouth then brought it down to his lap again.

  “Sean, you were… . Don’t pretend you weren’t getting out of control.”

  “No, I mean, before that. Way before that. Fuckin’ … the night I went to pick you up at your school and I was early and came up to you and some of your school friends.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I do. I was cutting across the street and for the first time, when your eyes met mine, they didn’t … it was like, you weren
’t happy to see me. In front of your school friends. It just stopped me dead.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “So you see, Tim, maybe it was a good thing that you left me. Left me when I … when I … begged you to stay.”

  “You were out of control!” he cried, and you made yourself look disappointed at his emotional display, as if such outbursts were inappropriate to your life now, to the hushed and hushing objects surrounding you at this moment. “When I started my business and that night we went out to dinner with my backers—”

  “I embarrassed you?”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, what do you think? Showing up dressed like that and half in the bag and … and then when Dennis had his party …”

  “It was so important that you make a nice impression on those new best faggy friends of yours from the South End, wasn’t it?” you asked. “Where are they now, by the way?” Your breathing was heavy; you lost it for a moment and pointed at him. “You forgot where you came from, Tim. You forgot loyalty. Maybe … maybe you feeling ashamed of me had a lot to do with my drin—well, never mind.” The blame game, you were playing the blame game and you hadn’t done that in years.

  There was a sound out of him and you looked up to see what it was. It sounded like a sob, a catching in his throat, but he had dispatched it by the time you looked.

  “Loyalty?” he said. “Jesus Christ! I just didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in your D Street apartment! I was sick of the craziness! I wanted to do something with my life! And I wanted to do something with your life!”

  “Well, I guess you got your wish then, Tim. Looks like we’ve both done something with our lives. But … excuse me, I thought … I thought it was our D Street apartment. I thought we were doing something with our lives. We were … we were being together.”

  This was the crux of it. You fumed, rearranged things on the coffee table. You tried to center yourself, breathed deeply.

  You exhaled loudly.

  “I forgive you,” you said. “I really have. I’ve forgiven you a long time ago. I just … I’m sorry.”

  You got confused for a minute as to whether you were still playing the game or not. You began to think this wasn’t such a good idea, punishing him like this. It wasn’t. But your mouth shot off again.

  “I mean, what does that mean exactly? Do something with my life? Does that mean buy a certain car or have a certain job or … I mean, what does that mean? Why are you ashamed of where you come from?”

  He wouldn’t look at you after you said that.

  You wouldn’t look at him. He was holding his beer so tightly you thought the bottle might explode.

  But it didn’t. His mannerisms, the way he said things, everything, was screaming how sorry he was. The fact that he was here, had sought you out, made the first move—but you wanted him to say it. You wanted to hear it, even though you knew it was impossible for him to say he was wrong; he never could. Even when things had been at their best between the two of you, he could never say those words. There would be flowers from him, there would be tears and hugs, but never could he admit that he was wrong, and that was what you were waiting for. His mouth actually opened, but then he saw how your face was set, and he closed it again.

  After that there really was nothing left to say. You looked at the Rolex on your wrist; you had to. He grunted—or was it a groan?— smiled quickly, got up. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, rattled his change, looked around. He looked brittle then and you almost lost it again. But you didn’t, you gathered up the ice bucket, the empty beer and tonic bottles. He went in front of you, held the kitchen door open for you. You couldn’t look at the back of him, for fear you’d miss your step.

  The two of you walked back out into the hall, to where the foyer and parlor met. Now his face was set.

  He turned and walked to the front door. He kept his back to you; he stopped. You thought that if the two of you embraced now, the embrace would never end. But he kept his hands in his pockets as he turned. At last he pulled a hand out, extended it.

  “Glad to see you’ve done so well,” he said. “And … I really mean this, Sean. I wish … you and Mark all the happiness there is in the world.”

  You laughed then. The clock chimed and you knew you wouldn’t have to wait long; Mark and Brad were beyond anal when it came to time and they’d be home any minute.

  “Could you just wait here for a minute, Tim?” you said. “Please? I need to do a few things, but hang on. I’ll walk out with you; just hang on a minute.”

  His face shifted a bit.

  “Can you do that? Just wait a minute?”

  “Okay,” he mumbled. He grimaced and looked down at his shoes.

  You went into the parlor and pulled open the drawer of the mahogany table. You pulled out the oval-framed picture you had placed there earlier and returned it to the mantel, beside the other picture, its mate. You went upstairs, back to the dressing room, and took off the Armani suit. You wiped it clean as you hung it back up, right where it belonged—you’d seen it there often. You grabbed your dirty clothes from the bottom of the closet. You slipped off the three-hundred dollar shoes in a kind of daze, shoved them back onto the shoe rack. You closed the walk-in closet’s door, then opened the third drawer down in the bureau, where you placed the Rolex watch. This is where it was kept. You looked again at its inscription, TO MARK FROM BRAD— HAPPY FIRST ANNIVERSARY.

  You opened your old shopping bag and put on your T-shirt, your sweatpants, your white socks—still damp—and your sneakers. An odor of ammonia and floor wax still clung to your shirt.

  You went back down to the kitchen and rinsed out the tonic bottle, then the beer bottle. Before you rinsed out the beer bottle you brought it to your lips, inhaled. You closed your eyes and licked the rim of the bottle—not for the alcohol but for the scent of his mouth. You gently slid the bottle into your mouth.

  You rinsed out the ice bucket, dried it with a yellow and blue plaid dishcloth, put it back. You opened up the top kitchen drawer beside the refrigerator, and found the check made out to your business in its usual place, the usual amount. You went into the front hall and took out a vacuum cleaner, a pail filled with cleaning liquids, and a mop.

  Tim’s face was squirming when he saw you.

  “Sean, what the hell is going on?” he growled.

  Mark and Brad came in just as he asked that question.

  “Oh. Hello,” Mark said.

  “Hey, guys. This is my … friend Tim.”

  “Oh. Hey. Hello, Tim.” There were handshakes all around. Tim could barely sputter a polite response.

  “The place looks great, Sean, as usual,” Mark said. “Thanks. You get your check okay?”

  “I did,” you said. “Thanks.”

  Tim turned to you as you picked up the vacuum cleaner, your cleaning supplies, and you knew that he got it now; he knew that you had tricked him. Why did you?

  “We’re going out again in a minute—can we drop you somewhere?” Brad asked, going through the mail you had piled on the hall desk when you first got here.

  You shook your head.

  “I’ll just cab it,” you said. You always took a cab, the last job of the day. “I borrowed a beer and a tonic,” you told them.

  “Help yourself, you know that,” Brad said, not looking up from the mail. He was doing that nose-twitching tic again. You thought of a grain-reaping machine, the way he was sifting through the mail, a mountain of mail. When you went home you never thought of work.

  “See you next Thursday, guys,” you called as you held open the door. Tim went first.

  He didn’t have to ask what that was all about as you walked down to the corner in silence, side by side. There was a noise coming out of him again but you couldn’t be sure of what it was. You didn’t look.

  He stopped suddenly. In front of you. You felt sorrowful, now that you’d done it.

  “I’m sorry,” you said. “I just … I wanted you to …”

  He h
eld his palm up. That was a memory-bash too; he used to do that when he needed a minute.

  “No,” you said, “no, I need to say this. I just … I see that it was a shitty thing for me to do now, but I wanted to show you what it might’ve been like if I became that person you wanted me to be. Defined by my things. The harmless little consumer.”

  “I felt so … I felt so belittled by you, Tim.”

  The two of you resumed walking.

  You stopped at the corner, at the taxi stand.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It was a shitty thing to do.”

  The two of you stared at each other.

  “I’m not ashamed of who I am anymore,” you announced.

  You noticed his eyes were red-rimmed. They never looked bluer than when they were red-rimmed, like Japanese Iris they were.

  The cabbie recognized you. He got out and opened the trunk of his vehicle, helped you stow your cleaning things.

  “D Street, man?” the cabbie asked you.

  Tim’s head shot up.

  “Yeah,” you said, climbing into the backseat.

  Your eyes held Tim’s. You kept the door ajar. You had one foot on the sidewalk still. Tim was standing there alone, on the corner, his eyes rusting wounds, his hands jammed into the pockets of his microfiber pants. Behind him the sky was vermilion, electric.

  “Do you want to talk?” you asked him. “I promise I’ll be me this time.”

  AN HOUR LATER in your place, in your apartment, lying on your bed, you looked at your naked body awash in the sodium streetlight, at how the D Street light fell onto the old tattoo on your right delt: IRISH PRIDE, the scroll read, above a Celtic knot, the symbol for eternity. That last part had been Tim’s idea, when you both got matching tattoos when you were seventeen. That night you two had made love for the first time. Jesus, you thought, nineteen years ago. You took out the pieces of that night, you played with them: the flopping and shifting of seventeen-year-old limbs and hands and torsos, the shaking, reaching fingers, had been awkward at first; but the deepest place inside you knew what it was doing—it sang, flowed, gleamed. You swore, still swore, you could see a light coming out of the both of you. He had sobbed in your arms when you finished because the whole world had shattered into a flowering. Right in this apartment, in this very bed. You recalled how this small room had filled up that night with the smell of his hot sneakers, his sweat. Like wet leaves, like a ripe garden, the room had smelled. While he sobbed, in release, in bewilderment, in love, you had traced the outline of his tattoo. Shyly at first, whispering to him over and over that his tears were waterfalls of eternity. It was the one poetic utterance you had ever given vent to. At the time you had thought the phrase was dumb, senseless; but then later you remembered how you had dreamed his blue eyes were waterfalls, and you began to have hope then in the world, in things, began to believe that I had made the world connected. That I wanted people to love one another, love life.