The Might Have Been (6 page)

Watching Julie blush from his attention at dinner, he thought it must be the true thing: he was an adult now, settling into what would be his career, baseball, and maybe it was time and she was the one. So many of his teammates were married already; one had four children with a wife he’d married when he was seventeen. He saw himself living forever across the dinner table from her, talking about his games, her talking about whatever she did as a career, and so the words fell out as if he’d been holding them in his mouth so long they needed to spill out if he was going to be able to take in a breath.

They, too, broke up weeks later when he came back from a trip through Kansas and Iowa, during which he had met a woman in Wichita with whom he hadn’t slept but had wanted to because she was funny in a brassy way, and his teammate with the four children got a call from his wife saying she had to borrow money from her uncle because doctors had found a hole in their second child’s heart and another teammate got a Dear John letter from his fiancée, who had fallen in love with her dentist.

In the hospital in Montreal, as his teammates were scoring another three runs in the eighth inning, during which Cook (already!) didn’t
hit a home run but did double in two runs in his first major league plate appearance—in the hospital, then, he knew it had been a mistake to stop seeing Julie because of a momentary flirtation and a bout of fear.

Before he could tell himself not to, he dialed her number, thinking he should hang up, wondering if she had found a new boyfriend since he had stopped calling her, wondering if perhaps they were in bed right now, Julie and the imaginary boyfriend, someone smarter than he, more well read, wittier.

She answered on the fifth ring.

“Hello,” he said.

“Ed?”

Then he wasn’t sure what to say to her; how foolish it was to call her. What did he expect, that she would give him sympathy after the way he had treated her?

“Ed? Are you all right?”

“I’m great,” he said. “No, that’s not true. I actually got hurt.”

“I thought—I thought I’d never hear from you again,” she said, as if he hadn’t told her about being hurt. “I wrote to you and …”

He had forgotten about the letter she’d sent, but now he remembered seeing the pale blue envelope on the mail table in his rooming house, and her neat handwriting that made clear she had paid attention to her Palmer penmanship classes as a girl. “I don’t know why you stopped calling me. I can live with not seeing you, but I need to know why.” He had thought about responding, but the team left town the next day, and by the time he got back a week later, he had put the letter out of his mind.

“I’m in Montreal,” he said.

“It’s been almost two months.”

“I know. I just—”

“Montreal? What are you doing in Montreal?”

“Baseball, playing baseball.”

“You got there,” she said, but he couldn’t tell if her tone carried congratulations or indifference.

“Yes. Three weeks …”

“That’s good for you,” she said, and then a silence hung between them, filled with the small clicks and static of the long-distance connection. “You hurt me,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but you did. First you tell me you love me and then you’re the Invisible Man.”

“I was a jerk,” he said.

“More than a jerk.”

He wondered if she had been a virgin before that Friday night at her apartment and felt more ashamed: he was a cad who deflowered women and left them in the lurch.

“Yes,” he said. “An asshole.”

“Even more than that,” she said.

He told her about the road trip he had taken before he stopped calling her—not all of it; he left out the details about the brassy woman he’d met in the Burger Chef in Kansas, but told her about the players with the medical bills and the Dear John letter.

“Don’t you think I got afraid, too?”

It hadn’t occurred to him, he said.

“I wasn’t some girl who came to college for an MRS degree, for Christ’s sake.”

Then silence hung between them again; in the background of their connection, he could hear the vague metallic chirp of other voices. He tried to picture her in her apartment, sitting as she did when she read, in a corner of her sofa, her legs curled up.

Someone knocked at his door and pushed it open almost immediately: a candy striper with his dinner. “Excuse me,” she said when she saw he was on the phone. He nodded in response.

“Is someone there?” Julie asked.

“Hang on a sec.” He laid the receiver in his lap while the candy striper set the covered plate onto his bedside table. “Thank you,” he said. When she left, he picked up the phone again. “Sorry,” he said, and let out a bitter laugh. “I’m actually …”

“What?”

“In the hospital here. That was the nurse leaving me my dinner.”

“In the hospital? Are you sick?”

He told her about the game … the
non
-game, as he was calling it. Leave it to him to get injured during a game that didn’t exist officially. Another miracle of nothing.

“This will make Audrey feel guilty,” she said. “She said I should light a candle, praying you’d get hurt or die. I said, ‘It’s not voodoo,’ and she said, ‘What good is it?’ ”

“At least I’ve succeeded in making someone happy,” he said, and realized it was a joke: a small one, but a joke nonetheless.

She came to Montreal on Thursday, the day after the hospital discharged him. They talked by phone each day, her calling him when she got home from work because she didn’t want him to worry about the long-distance charges the hospital would add to the bill he already had no idea how he would pay. As it turned out, he didn’t have to pay it; health insurance he hadn’t known he earned as a major league ballplayer paid most of it, and the team took care of the rest … and they hadn’t forgotten him, either, at least the organization hadn’t, even if none of his teammates ever visited him. The traveling secretary called him in the middle of the week, apologizing for not contacting him sooner. “The flight to Chicago was a nightmare, almost as bad as the one into Montreal,” he said. Because the Olympics had the entire city in a tangle, the baggage handlers mislaid half of the team’s equipment and it hadn’t even gotten to Chicago until halfway through Monday’s game. “We started out playing in souvenir jerseys until the fifth inning, when our stuff showed up.”

The traveling secretary asked Edward Everett what he wanted to do for the time being; if he wanted to stay in Montreal until he was more comfortable, the team would put him in a hotel, pay him his per diem and send his payroll check wherever he directed.

As it turned out, because he was injured, the team had to carry him on the disabled list for the balance of the season, which meant he would earn major league pay until the end of September, more money in the last two months of the season than he would earn for an entire year at triple-A.

He and Julie lived lavishly, at least by their own modest Midwestern standards. The hotel the traveling secretary found was at the
edge of downtown, overlooking a wide boulevard and a lush park. From their window on the eleventh floor, they could watch the electric city as long as the Olympics were going on. Lines of pedestrians seemed endless, continuing to cross intersections even when the traffic lights were against them. Cars crept from block to block so slowly it seemed they seldom moved at all.

They ordered room service and ate far beyond his per diem: lobster and salmon and oysters served on a chilled plate floating in a crystal bowl of crushed ice. He was earning five hundred dollars a week for breathing in and out, he said, and in a fit of giddiness tried to calculate how much each breath was worth, but the sum, which he thought would be grand, was disappointing: eighteen breaths a minute times sixty times twenty-four times seven, around a penny for every four breaths.

“I guess I’m just not worth as much alive as I thought,” he said.

Sex was awkward because of his cast, so they made love only three times in the week, once on the day she arrived, the second time early in the morning a few days later, when they both woke before the sun rose, and the third time not long before Julie left. The second time was especially difficult because he moved suddenly with her above him and she twisted in a way that made him wrench his right leg, causing him to cry out.

He worried that he had damaged his leg even more and became glum. Finally, on the day after the Olympics ended, Julie suggested they were coming down with cabin fever. She ordered a wheelchair from the concierge and pushed him through the streets. The city, still littered from the crush of people who had attended the Olympics, was not as pretty as it had seemed from their hotel window. Crumpled food wrappers blew along the gutter and, here and there, Julie had to steer the wheelchair around broken bottles and, once, an overnight case that someone had abandoned, spilling its contents across the sidewalk: the slacks and blouses and underwear of some large woman. It had been, it appeared, one big party that no one wanted to clean up after.

They ended up at a church, Mary Queen of the World, which, with what Julie called “neo-Gothic architecture,” seemed out of
place among the office buildings where workers in suits, carrying briefcases, went in and out of revolving doors. As they stopped at the entrance, Edward Everett realized that Julie was panting from the effort of pushing him and so they went inside so that she could rest before they set off back for the hotel.

The church was cool and dim, and their movements echoed beneath its great dome: the squeal of the wheelchair’s hard rubber tires on the stone floor, the squeak of Julie’s canvas deck shoes. Scattered through the pews, a few people knelt in prayer; others stood in the main aisle, gawking up at the ceiling mosaics that glittered back at them. A small boy let out a “Yap” that resounded and his mother reached down quickly to cover his mouth with her hand.

Julie genuflected beside the last pew and slid into it, sighing. “You are one heavy load,” she whispered, but loud enough that it came back to them as a hiss.

He shut his eyes. Things had turned out better than he thought they would on the darkest day, the Sunday after his injury when he had felt so abandoned in the hospital. In a day, Julie had to go back to Springfield for work. “I’m not important enough that I earn a paycheck for just being alive,” she said. The thought of her leaving brought him up short: he hadn’t thought about how there was life outside their bubble. He would miss her, he realized, had gotten used to being with her every minute; even the times she went to the lobby for a newspaper seemed like long stretches, when he waited in their room for the old and slow elevator to take its time delivering her downstairs and back.

“You’ve been very sweet,” he whispered.

“I’m a sweet girl,” she said in a faraway voice. He realized she was drowsing.

“I made a mistake back in the spring,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gotten afraid.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “You were who you were.”

A heavy door along the side of the church opened, letting in a flood of sunlight momentarily before banging closed with a sharp report. “Shhhh,” someone hissed.

“Do you think we ought to get married?” he said.

“Is that a hypothetical,” she asked: “ ‘Is the state of matrimony a good thing?’ Or is it a proposal?”

“I don’t know …”

She turned to look at him and then took his right hand in hers. “Are you asking me to marry you, mister?”

She really was a pretty girl, he thought again. He saw them doing the vague things husbands and wives did together: pushing a cart through the aisles at a grocery, washing dishes side by side. Her in the stands with the other players’ wives, red-cheeked on a cool fall day late in the season, exhorting him when he batted.

“I guess I am,” he said.

“That’s sweet,” she said. “You’re a great guy and you’ll probably be hugely rich if you ever walk again and play ball, and I like being with you, but let’s just see. Two weeks ago, we weren’t even in each other’s lives at all.”

“I just don’t want to make the same mistake again,” he said.

“Ask me again in six months,” she said. “If we still like each other, then, probably, yes. But for now, let’s go back to the hotel, because if there’s one thing that makes a girl horny, it’s someone asking her to marry him.”

Two days later, she kissed him sweetly, got into a cab for the airport, leaving him balanced on his crutches on the curb, watching her red-and-black taxi until it turned a corner, and he went upstairs and sat in the quiet room for some time, thinking of her pushing through the throng at the airport, thinking of her sitting in a window seat watching the Canadian landscape fall away until the plane was too far up to see land, and then opening a book. Finally, he became aware that he was in what had become a dark room and he turned on the television. And within two weeks he had stopped returning her calls.

H
e went home: what choice did he have? Four and a half weeks after Julie left, the team’s traveling secretary phoned him.

“This is embarrassing,” he said, “but we sort of lost track of you.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” Edward Everett said.

“Yes, and that’s the problem. We hadn’t meant for you to stay there this long but we hadn’t realized you were still there until the bill came across my desk this morning. We need to get you out of there, sport. Pronto. You’ve been burning up the room service.”

“I thought the per diem—”

“That’s only for when the team is out of town. They got back from that trip weeks ago.”

Could that be possible? Edward Everett wondered. Had he so lost track of time? For a week after Julie left, he was a virtual recluse in his room, leaving it only when the maid came to clean and he waited in the lobby until she finished, settled on an ornate couch, watching the guests come and go. It was a fine, old-fashioned place that seemed, although he’d never been off the North American continent, European. The clientele appeared wealthy and sophisticated, and the lobby echoed with voices in languages Edward Everett could not identify, much less understand. Men and women swept in trailed by
bellhops pushing carts laden with luggage and all seemed to possess the same regal impatience if they had to wait in line to register or if a clerk fumbled for a room key.