Chapter 23 Mars
MARS
Mik found me in the parking lot after practice, which was never a good sign because Mikhail Volkov did not seek people out.
Mikhail Volkov waited for people to come to him, and the fact that he had walked across an entire parking lot to stand next to my car meant that something had been observed and the observation required address.
"Santos," he said.
"Volkov."
"You are distracted."
"I am not distracted. My save percentage this week is .931."
"Your save percentage is excellent. Your behavior is distracted. These are not the same thing."
He leaned against the car next to mine, arms crossed, the posture of a man who had decided this conversation was happening and had allocated the time for it.
Mik was the only person on the team whose silence was louder than mine, and when he deployed it strategically, which was always, the silence had the effect of a pressure chamber. You either talked or you suffocated.
"I am not distracted," I said again.
"You smiled at practice today."
"I did not smile at practice."
"You smiled. During the breakout drill. Luca said something to you near the boards and your face moved in a direction that I have not previously observed it move, and the direction was upward, and the movement was what other humans call a smile."
"It was a facial adjustment."
"It was a smile. I have been watching you for three seasons, Santos. You do not smile at practice. You do not smile at games. You smile at your posts, which is a behavior I respect but which has never previously extended to people. Today it extended to a person."
I said nothing. The parking lot was empty except for our two cars and the afternoon sun and the specific, inescapable sensation of being read by a man whose own mask was so comprehensive that he recognized others' masks the way ornithologists recognized birdsong.
"The figure skater," Mik said. Not a question.
"How do you know about the figure skater?"
"Luca told Cole. Cole told me. The information traveled through the team communication network in approximately four hours, which is standard propagation speed for gossip involving a teammate's romantic life."
"There is no romantic life."
"There is a figure skater and a smile and a disruption in a three-season behavioral pattern.
In my experience, which is relevant because I spent eleven years hiding a romantic life and the hiding produced exactly the kind of micro-behavioral changes that you are currently producing, this combination of variables indicates a romantic life. "
I opened my car door. I did not get in. The opening was a gesture of escape that I was not yet committed to executing.
"I am not asking you to confirm," Mik said. "I am telling you that I see it. And I am telling you because the seeing means others will see it. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But eventually. And when they see it, you will need to have decided what the seeing means to you."
"What it means to me."
"Whether you will do what I did. Or something else."
What Mik did. The public kiss on the ice after Game 7.
The Sports Illustrated cover. The demolition of a closet that had been load-bearing for eleven years.
Mik had done the loudest possible version of what I was beginning to understand I would eventually need to do, and the loudness of his version was both inspiring and terrifying because my version would not be loud.
My version would be quiet, because I was quiet, and the quiet version required a different kind of courage.
"The team will be fine," Mik said. "I am telling you this from direct experience. The team adjusted to Cole and me in approximately seventy-two hours. By day four, Jonah was making jokes about our relationship. By day ten, Wes was baking us bread. The adjustment period is shorter than you think."
"It is not the team I am concerned about."
"The public."
"The public. The league. The specific intersection of being Brazilian, being a goalie, and being gay in a sport that has not fully decided how to hold all three of those things at once."
Mik was quiet for a moment. The quiet was not his strategic silence. It was the thoughtful quiet of a man considering a problem he had personally solved in one configuration and was now examining in a different one.
"When I kissed Cole on the ice," he said, "I was not thinking about the league or the public or the intersection of being Russian and being gay.
I was thinking about Cole. The rest was noise.
The noise was very loud and the noise lasted for weeks and the noise produced consequences that I am still managing.
But the noise was not the point. Cole was the point. "
"Theo is the point," I said. The sentence came out without clearance from the analytical brain, which was a pattern I was noticing with increasing frequency and decreasing alarm.
"Then the rest is noise." He pushed off the car and stood straight. "And Santos."
"Yes."
"The smile. At practice. It was good. You should do it more. The posts deserve a break from being your only source of joy."
He walked to his car. I watched him go. Mikhail Volkov, who had been the most sealed man I had ever met, who had spent eleven years behind a fortress that made my own look like a garden fence, was walking across a parking lot in Atlanta having just delivered the most personal conversation he had ever initiated with me, and the conversation had been about a smile.
One smile. Observed by one person. Interpreted correctly. Communicated with precision.
The mask was cracking. Not the goalie mask.
The other one. The one I had worn off-ice for my entire adult life, the one that said: I am a system, I am a position, I am a function.
The mask that did not smile at practice and did not think about figure skaters during film sessions and did not play bossa nova in an empty apartment and did not stand at plexiglass boards pressing his palm against the place where another man's forehead had been.
The mask was cracking and Mik had seen the crack and the crack was a smile and the smile was Theo.
I got in my car. I drove home. I played Joao Gilberto. I did not think about the regional in three weeks or the public implications of what I was becoming or the noise that Mik had promised would be loud and temporary.
I thought about Theo. The point. The only point.
And I smiled again, alone in my apartment, at no one, and the smile was practice for the version that would eventually be public, and the practice was its own kind of courage.
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