Chapter 7 Tobík
Itext Damián at ten in the morning.
Free today? I can show you around.
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear.
Recovery day. Free after noon.
Meet me at the Monroe entrance. I'll find you.
I send him the address and then put the phone down on the counter.
There’s the question of the shirt I should wear today.
I ignore the question of the shirt and also pull the blue linen out of the closet, the one that fits across the shoulders the way the woman at the boutique in April said it would.
I’m choosing it because it’s hot outside.
That’s the reason I’m telling myself and I’m letting the reason stand because the alternative reason is unhelpful to examine before noon.
He’s waiting at the Monroe entrance when I get there at noon. His hair is down today, curls loose against his neck. My brain notes the hair and tries to move on from how it might feel to run my fingers through it.
“Tobík.” He lifts his chin and his smile hits me. “Where are we going?”
“There’s a taco place three blocks past the trail.
Green awning, run by a woman named Maria who’s about five feet tall and gives me a hard time about my standing order.
She started calling me Tuesday after the second week because Tuesday was easier to remember and I always came in on Tuesdays.
The lamb barbacoa is the thing. I’ve tried everything else on the menu, partly out of guilt that I wasn’t being adventurous enough. But the lamb is the best.”
“You have a name at a taco restaurant?”
“I have a name at a few places. Tuesday at the taco place the most accurate.”
He laughs. The surprised one, not the controlled one.
The Czech is already flowing between us, the sentences arriving without translation. I start walking and he falls in beside me, his stride longer and mine quicker, and somewhere around the first curve we find the rhythm without deciding to.
Claire waves from behind the dog park fence. Bagel is pulling against the leash and losing. I wave back and Damián watches.
“What’s the dog’s name?”
“Bagel. He sits on my left foot every time I see him. His full weight, completely committed. The owner’s Claire, that’s her behind the fence.
We met because Bagel kept escaping his leash to sit on me and Claire kept apologizing, and at some point the apologizing turned into a conversation.
Now I know about her job at the dog rescue and her boyfriend who plays bass and the fact that Bagel is a senior who only acts like a puppy for me, which Claire takes personally. ”
“Why the left foot?”
“I haven’t asked. Bagel doesn’t explain.”
The taco place appears on the left. Maria is behind the counter, and the moment she sees me her face opens up into a smile.
“Tuesday! Hello! But today isn’t Tuesday?”
“I am making an exception. I have brought a friend.”
She looks at Damián. Actually, she looks up at Damián, because Maria is five foot two and Damián is six foot four and that difference is significant.
“He’s tall,” she says, as though Damián is not present.
“He is. He plays football.”
“Soccer?”
“Yes.”
“The World Cup thing? My daughter has been losing her mind about the World Cup thing.”
“He is part of the World Cup thing.”
Damián extends his hand. His English arrives careful, slightly formal, third in line behind Czech and German. “Damián. Nice to meet you.”
She shakes his hand and gives me a look I choose not to translate.
We order the lamb barbacoa. Maria makes mine with extra cilantro because seven months ago she heard me say prosím and asked what language and I said Czech and she said “you’re Czech?
” and I said “yes, I am Czech” and she said “I had no idea” and I said “the information did not seem relevant to tacos” and the conversation evolved from there.
We have a rhythm now. The cilantro is part of that rhythm.
Damián and I eat on the stools at the counter, shoulder almost to shoulder. The lime is sharp and the cilantro ratio is correct.
“This is very good,” Damián says in Czech. Our private conversation out in public.
“I know.”
“You walked until you found this place?”
“Yes, I walked. The Beltline is twenty-two miles end to end and I’ve done most of it in pieces, mornings before practice, afternoons after.
Walking’s the method. You notice which places have a line at the wrong time of day.
You notice which places the air outside smells like the thing inside.
That’s how you find the food. Yelp doesn’t tell you any of that. ”
“Most people use Yelp.”
“Yelp doesn’t know how Maria looks at people. That’s a real metric. It’s the most reliable one I have.”
He smiles. The smile stays on his face longer than smiles usually stay on his face when he’s in public.
We leave and Maria says, “See you Tuesday, Tuesday,” and I say, “See you Tuesday, Maria,” and out on the path Damián’s arm goes around my shoulders.
The gesture is casual. I’ve seen him make it a hundred times with teammates, the arm draped, the weight even, the physical vocabulary of a sport where men touch each other constantly and the touching means brotherhood.
I know what this gesture means. It means his body speaks the way footballers’ bodies speak, with contact, with proximity.
His hand lands on the outside of my arm and stays. His thumb moves against my arm in small circles. One centimeter against the fabric, a motion so small it could be nothing, and my body knows it’s not nothing because my body has been waiting six years for exactly this nothing.
I don’t pull away. I don’t lean in. We walk.
A man passes us going the other direction. His eyes land on Damián’s arm and slide off and slide back. Two seconds of his attention, then he is past us, and the moment is already nothing again except I am keeping a record.
“This is different from Munich,” Damián says, after a moment.
“We have a system there. The same café for breakfast, the same physio at the same hour, the same route to the training ground. I’ve walked it for four years and I don’t think the man at the café knows my name.
He knows my order. That’s a different thing though.
Here you’ve walked yourself into the city.
People know what your smile looks like.”
“It took nine months.”
“It would take me nine years.”
“Less. You’re easier to know than you think.”
He doesn’t answer that. We walk another twenty steps and his arm has not moved and then his voice picks up, warm and light. “Your sport makes no sense to me. You play on frozen water. You hit a piece of rubber with a stick. You fight each other.”
“Your sport makes less sense. You run for ninety minutes and the score’s often zero to zero.”
“Zero-zero is a result. It means the defenses were good. You don’t understand.
Ninety minutes of two teams trying to break each other and failing is the most beautiful thing in sport.
The patience. Hockey is fireworks. Football is the slow build that doesn’t always pay off, and the not paying off is part of the beauty.
You’re allowed to disagree. You’re wrong, but you’re allowed. ”
“Hockey is also a slow build. People think it’s chaos because the puck moves fast, but the puck moves fast because of decisions made three plays earlier.
Anarchy with skates is what people who don’t watch hockey say about hockey.
People who watch hockey know it’s chess on ice.
You just bleed sometimes while you play. ”
“That’s an aggressive description of chess.”
“Marchetti calls the yellow cards in football stationery.”
“Marchetti seems wrong about most things.”
“He’s wrong about most things. He’s right about the stationery.”
His arm has not moved.
“Why hockey, though?” Lighter than the banter was. “Tomá? played football. Everyone in Brno played football. Why the one sport nobody cared about?”
“Tomá? played football.”
“Yes. That’s been established.”
“Tomá? was good at football. Really good.”
“He was.”
“Dad watched him. Mom watched him. The coaches watched him. The scouts watched him.”
“And?”
“There wasn’t any room on the pitch that wasn’t already his.”
I say it the way I would say something about the weather. Plain. The way I would say it to a teammate on the bench. Damián’s arm goes still on my shoulder.
“So you went somewhere else.”
“My grandfather had a rink behind his house. Outdoor. The ice was bad. Nobody cared about it.”
“So you went.” He pauses for a beat. “But it was yours.”
“It was mine.”
He walks beside me and his arm does not lift. He does not say I’m sorry in any of the three available languages. He just walks. After a moment he says, “He didn’t mean it.”
“I know. Tomá? didn’t mean to take up all the space. He was good and the space went where he went.”
The heat is doing what Atlanta heat does after noon. The linen on my back is sticking. I reach behind me with the gesture I have made a hundred times this summer, pulling the fabric away from the skin.
The hem rides up.
I feel the air find the band of skin between my hip and my rib, and I feel Damián’s attention shift. Not his eyes. His attention. His entire body going still beside me.
His arm comes off my shoulders. Not in retreat. In the way you put your hand down when you need to look at something properly.
“You have a tattoo.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You’ve known me since I was twelve. There are some things about me from after I was twelve.”
“Tobík.”
I turn slightly so the light catches it. The continuous line climbing from hip to ribs. The house at the bottom, the chimney in a single stroke. Then Brno. Then Kladno. Then Atlanta at the top, the skyline I added in March, the ink still darker because it is still new.
“Each city where I’ve lived. The house at the bottom, that’s where I grew up, the chimney is just one stroke, you can see it. Then Brno above that. Then Kladno when I went to the Extraliga. Then Atlanta. I added the skyline in March, that’s why the ink is darker there. It’s still new.”
“Atlanta is at the top.”
“Atlanta is where I am now. The line goes up. Each new city goes up. I didn’t plan it that way at eighteen, I just got the first one. But each time I move I keep going. It’s a continuous line. That part was on purpose.”
His eyes trace the line from hip to rib, following the cities.
His hand raises and he traces a finger along the part with the Atlanta skyline, causing goosebumps to rise even in the heavy heat of the afternoon.
I have read twenty-seven romance novels and I know what it means when someone reads a story on your skin with their eyes.
I have written notes in the margins of three of them about this exact look.
The fictional people did not mention that the real version makes your hands forget what they are for.
“It’s beautiful,” Damián says. His voice has dropped into a register I have not heard from him before.
I pull the shirt down slowly and the fabric covers the skin again.
The air between us does not go back to normal because he looked at a part of me I put there on purpose, and the looking felt like being read.
“We should head back,” I say, trying to get my mouth to form sentences. “The heat gets worse from here.”
“The heat’s been worse since ten.”
“The heat in Atlanta after three develops opinions about you. It’s not weather anymore. It becomes a relationship.”
He laughs. The surprised one.
We walk back toward Monroe and the sun is lower when we arrive. The light has the late-afternoon weight Atlanta does in June, gold and thick, the kind that makes everything look like a photograph.
“Thank you,” Damián says. “For the tacos. For showing me the city.”
“My pleasure. Tomá? asked me to show you around.”
The sentence comes out. I hear it land half a second after I have said it. I just put Tomá?‘s name between us as a shield. The corner of Damián’s mouth tightens.
“Right,” he says, nodding and looking over my shoulder. “Tomá? asked.”
He looks me in the eyes, thanks me, then turns and walks toward the hotel, his shoulders carrying whatever they are carrying as he moves toward the life expecting him to come back.
I walk home. The Beltline curves familiar around me. A woman with a stroller, the mural near Highland I have photographed six times, the flower stand woman who waves and I wave back and nothing requires translation.
I have read twenty-seven romance novels.
I know what it means when an arm stays on your shoulder and a thumb moves in circles.
I know what it means when someone reads the story on your skin with their eyes.
The notes have not been useful in my actual life until now and the usefulness is the problem.
Impossible has been my entire arrangement. Possible would break me open.
I keep walking. The spot on my arm is still warm. The line on my ribs is still warm. I am behaving as though something has happened. I am declining to investigate what.