The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Five





He 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.

Beyond those periods in the lobby—what were they, half an hour?—he stayed in his room, telling himself it was because he didn’t want to miss Julie if she phoned, which she did every evening after she got home from work. She told him about her job answering phones and typing for a podiatrist, describing the people who limped painfully into the office, telling him about the bags of trimmed corns and toenails she carried to the dumpster. For his part, he had little to say: I noticed the plaster walls aren’t square but actually rounded at the corners. I noticed that the paint is flaking outside the window. Gradually, their conversations began waning sooner and sooner each time.

When he wasn’t talking to her, he watched television. He avoided the American programs: they made him homesick. He wasn’t certain what he wanted to feel, but not that—not at a time when he wondered what his life would become, when he wondered if he would ever be able to play ball again or if that life was entirely behind him. What was he if not a ballplayer?

He preferred programs that had nothing to do with his life across the border—soap operas in French, newscasts about places he couldn’t even, if pressed, find on a map. Watching a story about a tornado in Manitoba that had killed a retired cobbler and his wife, he glanced out his window to the park eleven floors below where a plump man and woman lay in the grass, kissing. On the television, the reporter interviewed the dead couple’s daughter, who became so overcome with grief, she covered her face, but where he was, it was a beautiful day.

At night, he had trouble sleeping. It was difficult to get comfortable because of his cast and, outside his room, the hotel always seemed alive with noise:

Children dashed in the hall, shrieking, a mother scolding: “Now, now.”

On the other side of him, a couple made love and, afterward, the woman wept while a man’s voice buzzed with what Edward Everett assumed was consolation.

The elevator dinged.

He gave up, turned on the television. A preacher standing on a stage, framed by two vases of palm fronds, saying, “God has a plan for your life.” On another channel, a test pattern. He turned off the television, tried to sleep again.

Outside, footsteps scuffled by in the carpeted hall.

He eventually began appreciating the hotel’s amenities. In the morning, he had breakfast in the less formal of the two restaurants while he read the newspaper, something he had seldom done in the past, aside from the sports pages. So much turmoil in the world: riots in Rhodesia; three hundred Americans evacuated from Lebanon in the face of civil war; Argentina’s police killing two revolutionary leaders. He read the paper and glanced around the restaurant, feeling fortunate to be part of the privilege of the place: the deference of the waitress and busboy silently appearing to refill his water goblet and coffee cup. Around him, businessmen made notes on legal pads as they ate their eggs and bacon; tables of women with careful hair declined the pastry cart; obvious newlyweds on their honeymoon regarded each other sleepy-eyed across the table.

He began venturing beyond the hotel, going into nearby shops. One day, he spent two hours browsing belts in a leather shop; another day, he drank coffee in a café across the street from his hotel, counting the number of men and women who went inside. That day, he got back to his room after Julie had called and found a message slip under his door. He sat down in his chair by the window, picked up the phone but the thought struck him that he had nothing new to say, and turned on the television, to Casablanca, but dubbed in French, and spent the time until it was too late to call her trying to translate the dialogue back into English. Two days went by with her leaving him messages and his not calling her back, then three. Then a day came when there was no message from her, and a second day on which she didn’t call, and a third and a fourth and then he lost count.

The evening the traveling secretary called him, he was dozing in his room, dreaming: riding with his father in a Studebaker he had owned before Edward Everett was in kindergarten; although it was just his father and himself, Edward Everett sat in the backseat. His father was smoking, although Edward Everett had never seen him do so in life, but when he tried to open the window, the crank was missing. They were on a dirt road, racing past a line of barbed-wire fencing that seemed to serve no purpose, as the land bordering the road was overgrown with tall weeds that whipped the car’s windows as they sped past. Edward Everett was trying to say Slow down, slow down but, for some reason, couldn’t speak, and they hurtled onward.

After he got off the phone with the traveling secretary, he went into the bathroom. At first, he thought he would splash water on his face to wake himself a bit more but, standing at the sink, he realized he needed to shower, that he hadn’t shaved for days and his hair was unkempt, much longer than he usually kept it. A beatnik, his mother would say. He wondered if the team would be angry he had charged so many hamburgers and grapefruit to the room. With chagrin, he remembered that one day he had signed for a ten-dollar tip on a three-dollar check for a waitress who told him he was her last table before she moved back to Manitoba to care for her ill mother. He wondered if they would punish him for it. The owner was wealthy; would he even miss the money? But he didn’t get wealthy letting his injured, marginal players live extravagantly.

The plane ticket the traveling secretary couriered to the hotel was for a flight to St. Louis at ten the next morning; from there, he would have to make his own arrangements. It occurred to him he had no place to go. He had given up his room in Springfield, had no home in St. Louis; he had no idea what his future was going to be. He would have to go back to the town where he’d been raised, where he hadn’t been in years save for brief visits in the off-seasons. He phoned the front desk, asked for long-distance and gave the operator his mother’s number. He wasn’t sure what she’d make of his calling her, telling her that he would need someone to pick him up at the Columbus airport—a hundred miles away—but the phone just rang and rang at her house until he hung up.

He thought again of calling Julie, but what would he say? What a shit he was for not calling her, he thought. Not long ago telling her—in a Catholic church, of all places—that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but now, sitting on the edge of the bed they’d shared, he had a hard time conjuring her face. He remembered her eyes were blue, but what he recalled was the fact of it, a detail she might list on her driver’s license, not an image of her eyes themselves. Her hair was, what? She was how tall?

Outside, the sky was darkening, perhaps rain moving in. Indeed, after a moment, sporadic drops were splashing against his windows and then a full-blown storm was lashing the glass. Lightning brightened the sky and seconds later thunder cracked. He stripped off his clothes, turned on the shower and, after he finished, dressed and went downstairs for his last dinner in another country.