The Laws of Average (6 page)

The married couple took on a lover, someone neither of them knew, but someone who knew her from afar. The lover was shorter, better manicured, better goateed, better spoken, bluer-eyed and obsessive in his preparation. The husband bought everything they'd need but the lover brought his own everything.

The underlying rule to override all other rules was simple: she was the center of it all. Anything which transpired first and foremost was about her and her comfort level and her desire. This was never spoken or written down or directly communicated in anything other than body language and the body was hers. She didn't share well and this was also an underlying principle: under no circumstances whatsoever should the two of them do anything to force her to choose. Headgames and guilt were specifically forbidden.

The trial run went like this: the husband was to set everything out in the hotel room they'd secured for the weekend and then promptly leave. And to leave not just the room and not just the floor. The husband was afforded an allowance to go downstairs and play table games and instructed to keep his cell phone on him at all times. She wore a bluetooth earpiece specially programmed to dial his number and his number only; a quick touch of the finger below her temple instead of breaking stride to reach for the purse where she kept her fancy things like the device to which the earpiece was paired. They worked out a code system in advance so they wouldn't have to actually speak to each other, a certain number of rings negotiated for a certain whatever. He could not, in any circumstance, accept the call and go live with her on the other end. This was something they both insisted upon because they weren't sure how they'd react to each other's breath in those first picoseconds of the exchange, and he disabled his voicemail to make absolutely certain his receiver stopped ringing precisely on the number of rings she wanted it to.

As she preened herself in the big mirror directly opposite the room's king size bed, the husband and the lover stood in the bathroom, struggling to keep their voices down. The lover smiled a little too wide for the husband's liking. The husband had been in the room far too long for the lover to initiate anything; still fully clothed, the lover scratched at his chin and repeatedly motioned towards the door. There was too much of the phrase “my way” for the husband to feel comfortable leaving their conversation just yet, and there was too much of the phrase “but that isn't what we agreed” for the lover, who kept correcting the husband's pronoun usage. Anytime he used the word “we” he made sure to correct it to “she,” which made him even more uncomfortable, and which made him even more resolute to keep doing it. Then there was the conversation about how he wasn't an employee. And then there was the exchange about how she's allergic. And then there was the taptap-taptap on the wall that neither of them made. And then there was the unmet glance when the husband finally pried himself through the doorjamb and she pretended to adjust the earpiece he clearly saw already wedged securely into her ear, the big towel she'd used after her shower still riding her chest.

The lover scrunched past the husband and unlatched the security chain on the big door with one hand, the DO NOT DISTURB card in the other. The husband stood and waited. The only sound in the room was trickling out of the television set, craned out on a metal arm from its veneered cabinet so she could see it at the incredibly precise angle she preferred. The lover flicked the laminated card with his long finger after he turned around in the little hallway, his eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline, eyes bouncing around the room.

She was the center of it all.

The door clicked behind him and the hallway opened up to reveal more click-closed doors, each marked with a doorplate embossed with thick numbers in Arial font and inset braille. He had to wait for the elevator to take him down the 60+ floors of glass and steel. He drummed his fingers against the contour of the phone in his pocket for a good three minutes before the torpedo-shaped car opened behind the brushed metal doors. He dragged his feet past the threshold and silently acknowledged the young Brazilians already in the car, blinged out and shaded up and speaking fast in a language he didn't understand. Their thick cologne stained the air he was breathing into his lungs. None of them returned his quick nod. He was invisible to them, sealed away in his own little curve of the torpedo, silently watching the numbers on a red diode fall away, the torpedo pausing only to let more bodies fill the thinning foot-space. In the lobby he slinked through the arms and legs of the crowd, and made his way to one of the $5 craps tables, where a miniature swarm of the same crowd he'd just made his way through/behind/over was buzzing around the elliptical pond of felt and clay chips. He fished one of the hundred dollar bills out of his wallet and placed it on the table, waiting patiently for the attendant to stack him with green, red and white chips. The husband took his time transposing them into the wooden grooves below his thumbs and fingers on the padded railing. He selected a single red chip and placed it on the Pass Line; he had enough money in his wallet to play like this for a week, if he had to. He took his phone out and placed it in the drink holder that was molded into the rail. An overhead camera spun and whirred silently in its large black bubble and the husband's face fuzzed onto a monitor in an unmarked office somewhere on the colossal property. Someone pulled a joystick and fine-focused the camera to pull in and zoom on the cell phone; Another Someone scrunched in to take a close look, over the top of Someone's shoulder; Yet Another Someone squinted before pulling a phone handset out of its socket and speaking something to Still Another Someone, all the way on the other side of the property. The emulated ringtone kept ringing. She was the center of it all.

The door clicked behind him and the hallway tunneled into the back of the room, where she sat upright in the bed towel draped up top, the big fiesta-patterned comforter pooled down below. He waited long enough to hear the footsteps disappear outside the door and into the elevator lobby before he cracked the door open again to loop the card's cut-out notch around the door handle. He pulled the door tight, refastened the brass security chain and drummed his fingers on the doorjamb before turning back towards the room. He watched her for an uncomfortably long time; she never so much as exhaled in his direction. When she did move she fiddled with the towel or canted her chin towards the window, which was hidden beneath two enormous black-out curtains; the room dripped with yellow light. The lover slid back into the bathroom and slicked cologne on his neck with a rough swipe of his hands, cris-crossing the bigs of his fingers over his throat. He didn't meet his own gaze in the mirror as he did this. When he reappeared in the little hallway she was looking in his general direction but hadn't turned her head enough to make full eye contact. She flinched her shoulders and then didn't move them beyond the shallow elevating action caused by her lungs, the motion so largely out of her control. Because if she could stop all of her internal organs at once, perhaps she could actually enjoy this the way the husband swore to god she would, and to this she wasn't at all philosophically opposed. The lover slinked to the far corner of the bed, breaking her perpendicular gaze with the television. She did not meet his eyes, even when he bobbed his head around and mugged and made slapping sounds with his hands on his sides. He made a big arc between them with an outstretched arm and a fist unfurled, fingers cocked at perfect angles to one another as he scraped the air for her attention. He lowered his arm and stood there without any pretense, his eyes scanning the small bowl at hair atop her head, her thin torso, matchstick legs and unpainted toenails. He felt she could tell. Just tell. The digitally-emulated telephone tone kept ringing. She was the center of it all.

In the bottom of the eighth in Orange Slices vs. Juice Boxes, Kenny's perfectly-timed relay met Grady at first base, a no-arc dart that hit him square on the tip of his nose. Grady's mom, who had been prepping the next two batters by straightening their hats and tucking in their shirts—the small boys wobbling around with their aluminum wands mostly parallel to their legs, the oblong chalk circle surrounding them like an enchantment or glyph or landing pad for a futuristic teleport apparatus or something—instantly dropped her clipboard and ran full stride, cottage-cheese asscheeks at full ripple in her workout pants, pushing past the pitcher's mound (Casey parked on it again, naturally) and arrived at 1
^st
base a good two seconds before the bad news of pain had even registered in her son's skull.

It wasn't so much that he felt it, either, because he was already injured via two external stimuli: 1) Kenny's mitt umbrellaing over the purple canvas of his Juice Boxes cap, perpendicular to his bare hand extended full-fingered over his gaping mouth; 2) The overpowering stench of his mother's chamomile body lotion wafting over him, a dense suspension-fog of dirt and perfume.

Grady had been through this before and knew to fall the ground. His mother always preferred him to begin wailing before this action, but his timing had been thrown off by the simple fact that he had actually
made contact
with the ball. His temporary disbelief at blooping the ball (just through Casey's feet again, naturally) to where Kenny was standing, scratching his black Reebok cleats in the dirt while knocking two knuckles against the hard plastic cup strapped against him underneath his tighty-whiteys, had given Kenny just enough time to drop his free hand from his groin and pick up the spongy synthetic leather ball between his outstretched middle and index fingers, cock his shoulder (“LIKE A GUN!!” —Coach Noah), step forward, and hurl the orb towards Grady, who had just arrived on the base to claim his stand-up single. Twenty years later, during his first flirtations with Eastern philosophy at a third-tier state university, he would write it all up as karma, but for this moment he knew to do just like his mother said.

Coach Noah was planted in the outfield wearing his matching Juice Boxes cap and Juice Boxes sweatshirt, amongst his Juice Boxes players. He stretched his arms above the mostly crabgrassed field and spread his fingers wide. Out here, where the Juice Boxes outfielders couldn't see the drama playing out beyond the pale dirt boundary between them and the base paths, Coach Noah's players took this motion as his signal for them to lock their ankles into their shoes right where they stood.

“READY, COACH!!!” The little voices dogpiled on top of another to form one big booming voice in this, his one measurable achievement after many many weeks of Saturday morning practices where, after usually showing up 20 minutes late (and, occasionally, more than a little hung over), Coach Noah drilled them to take their defensive positions and exclaim the prescribed exclamation. A brief, unfamiliar wash of shame overcame him.

“No, no. I just mean stay here.”

Coach Noah trotted towards 1
^st
base, where by this time Grady's mother had already forklifted her son out of the chalk-dirt sift and up into her arms, the lip of her workout pants straining to hide the fact that she was (still) wearing the fuschia thong her Secret Someone had given to her earlier in the week with the implicit instructions not to launder them until such time as they saw each other again later in the week. Grady's crying deepened in pitch when his mother slung him into her chest. She adjusted his weight by jerking his body between her biceps and forearms.

“Is he okay?” Coach Noah acted legitimately concerned. “Is he hurt?” (Coach Noah only ever saw Grady on game days and had no idea the kid couldn't register pain because he was always asleep by the time Coach Noach drifted through his parents' house like a thin breeze, Grady's father slouched into his overstuffed leather recliner in the basement, TiVO shifting gears between
Law and Order Criminal Intent, House M.D
. and
Law and Order Special Victims Unit
). Grady's mother shot Coach Noah a quick glance as he stood in front of her, trying to come across as Genuinely For Real Concerned.

He repeated himself. She repeated her glance and then looked past him towards the chalk circle where the on-deckers were still spinny-dizzy, oblivious at first to all the Grady Drama, but before too long the bouncing orange mass with way too many arms and legs hanging off it at grotesque angles came clearer and clearer into focus, trundling directly at the ondeckers with enough speed and inertia that they couldn't have gotten out of its path even had they been paying attention from the first fat plop of the ball against Grady's nose. The clashing sound the chain-links made against their own fence posts sounded far more like the great smashing of a giant sheet of glass as the orange mass piled through, arms, legs, hats, cleats, aluminum and underwear all gnarled into the most twisted twist of metal, flesh and polyester that rivaled some of the worst waking images among the thin contingency of war vets sprinkled among the onlooking audience.

It was the untanglement of all the above that resulted in the net 65% loss in Grady's vision (over the coming weeks) and 100% unraveling of Coach Noah's years-on-thin-ice marriage (even faster, remarkably) to someone named Becky, Beth, Jen, Karen, or some other name dominated by a soft-E vowel. No one in attendance would ever understand why Grady's mother blamed the Grady Drama on Coach Noah at all, let alone so immediate and loud. Not even Grady's mother understood this.

But Coach Noah understood. He'd felt the same fever in the palms of his hands and tips of his fingers that now burned on the peak of her nose and on the hills of her cheeks, the grip and contraction of her from the inside, the build and release and spill that was no more. Yeah, he understood it perfectly: her machine-gun texting, the nightstand still in tremble for hours after he'd holstered his phone on his hip and left for work; her swimming the parking lot in a constant, slow, awful circle; her gerunding her way into his daytime and his defiant resistance extending permanently now into her nighttime. It hadn't always been this way, of course, and Coach Noah was okay with it. Grady's mother, though? Not okay. Largely unfamiliar with okay. Pretty much never touched okay, and on the rare occasions she had, she totally pushed it away. The surge of drama a rollercoaster inside her, up and up and down and down. All the okay boys bored the hell out of her, never did even as much as smell her. And Coach Noah was so beyond the threshold of okay—his stature, his goatee, his construction-ravaged jeans—well, the spin of him left her wrung totally dry.