Chapter 9 Mars
MARS
My apartment was a system.
This is not a metaphor. My apartment was a literal system, designed and maintained with the same principles I applied to the crease: economy of space, clarity of sight lines, nothing extraneous, nothing unaccounted for.
The living room contained a couch, a coffee table, a turntable, and a shelf of vinyl records organized by genre, then alphabetically by artist, then chronologically by release date.
The kitchen contained the equipment necessary to cook the meals in my nutritionist's plan, arranged by frequency of use, with the most-used items in the most accessible positions.
The bedroom contained a bed, a nightstand, a lamp. The bathroom contained the minimum.
There were no decorative objects. No art on the walls.
No photographs. My mother had noted this during her single visit, a weekend in October during which she had cataloged the emptiness of my apartment with the focused alarm of a woman who believed that a home without photographs was evidence of a spiritual emergency.
"Marcus," she had said, standing in the living room, looking at the blank walls. "Where are the people?"
"I live alone."
"Where are the pictures of the people?"
"On my phone."
"On your phone is not in your home. A phone is a pocket. A home is a statement. Your home says nothing."
"My home says 'efficient.'"
"Your home says 'nobody lives here.' A hotel room says more about its occupant than this apartment."
My mother, Claudia Santos, was not wrong.
She was rarely wrong. She was a woman from Belo Horizonte who had married an American musician, raised a son in Miami, taught Portuguese at a community college, and maintained opinions about domestic aesthetics that she delivered with the authority of a person who had been right about everything for fifty-three years and saw no reason to adjust.
She called on Thursdays. This was the schedule.
Thursday evenings, after practice, before dinner.
The calls lasted between twenty and forty-five minutes depending on the density of the maternal interrogation and whether my father, David Santos, was in the background playing guitar, which he often was, because David Santos existed in a state of permanent musical expression that Claudia had stopped trying to manage approximately thirty years ago.
"Marcus. Voce esta bem?"
"Estou bem, Mae."
"You sound different."
"I sound the same."
"You sound like you're smiling. You don't smile on Thursdays. Thursdays you sound like a man who has played hockey and is tired. Today you sound like something else."
My mother could hear a smile through a phone from 660 miles away. This was not a goalie trait. This was a mother trait. Specifically a Brazilian mother trait, which operated on a sensory bandwidth that exceeded any analytical framework I had developed.
"I've been skating at a rink in Decatur," I said. "In the mornings."
"You always skate in the mornings. This is not new information."
"There is someone else at the rink."
The pause that followed was approximately three seconds, which in Claudia Santos's conversational rhythm was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
My mother did not pause. My mother spoke in continuous streams of Portuguese and English that alternated based on the emotional register of the topic, with Portuguese reserved for love, anger, and cooking, and English for practical matters.
A three-second pause meant she was recalculating.
"Someone," she said.
"A figure skater."
"A figure skater." Another pause. "Marcus. When you say 'someone' in that voice, with that particular quality of careful neutrality that you use when you are trying very hard not to reveal something, I need you to understand that the neutrality itself is the revelation."
"I am being neutral because the situation is neutral."
"Meu filho. I have known you for twenty-six years.
You have never mentioned another person at a rink.
You have never mentioned another person at all, except teammates, and you mention them the way you mention equipment.
Functional. Necessary. Unremarkable. This person is not unremarkable. I can hear it."
The turntable was playing Joao Gilberto.
"Chega de Saudade." The bossa nova filled the apartment with the warm, precise architecture of a guitar and a voice that understood longing the way I understood angles.
The song was about the end of longing. The end of saudade.
The arrival of the person who makes the missing stop.
"He skates at 5 AM," I said. "I watch from the stands."
"And?"
"And nothing. I watch. He skates. We have spoken twice."
"Twice. And you are calling me to tell me about this after two conversations. Marcus, you did not call me after your first NHL start. You texted. You are calling me about a figure skater after two conversations."
She was right. She was devastatingly, precisely, Brazilian-motherly right.
I had called because the system in my apartment, the system that organized my life into compartments and categories and predictable routines, had developed a fault.
The fault was Theo Kimura. The fault was that I had come home from the rink this morning and put on Joao Gilberto instead of my usual post-skate silence, and the choosing of music over silence was a behavioral deviation that my own monitoring systems had flagged as significant.
I listened to music when I felt something. I lived in silence when I was managing. The music meant the feeling had exceeded the management, and the exceeding was new, and new things in my system required investigation.
"Mae," I said. "I do not know what I am doing."
"Good," she said. "Knowing what you are doing is your whole life. Not knowing is where the living starts."
"That is not helpful."
"It is the most helpful thing I have ever said to you. Your father agrees. David, tell him."
From the background, my father's voice, American and unhurried, accompanied by the sound of a guitar being tuned: "She's right, kid. The best stuff happens when you stop trying to predict it."
"Your father is a musician. Musicians are unreliable narrators."
"Musicians," my father said, "are the only people who understand that the space between the notes is where the music lives."
"The space between the notes," my mother repeated. "Marcus. Go to the space between the notes."
I did not know what this meant. I suspected it was the kind of advice that made sense only in retrospect, after the thing it was advising you toward had already happened and you could look back and say "ah, the space between the notes, yes, I see it now."
After the call, I ate dinner. Grilled chicken, rice, roasted vegetables.
The nutritionist's plan. I washed the dishes.
I wiped the counters. I performed the evening routine that I had performed every evening for three seasons in Atlanta, the sequence of actions that constituted the maintenance protocol for the system that was my life.
Then I did something I had never done.
I took a photograph of the turntable. The record spinning. The amber light of the lamp catching the edge of the vinyl. The sleeve of "Chega de Saudade" leaning against the shelf.
I looked at the photograph. It was not a photograph of a person. It was a photograph of a room that contained a sound that a person had caused, and the distance between those two things was the space between the notes, and my mother was right, and the space was where the living started.
I did not send the photograph to anyone. I saved it. The saving was enough.
For now.
-e