Knockout (Open Play #2)

Chapter 1 Enzo

Davide Rossetti owns one knife.

I’ve opened every drawer in this kitchen twice. Takeout menus. A corkscrew. A charger for a phone that no longer exists. One knife. The blade bends when I press it into a tomato.

“Davide.” I hold it up so he can see it from the couch. “Explain this.”

“It’s a knife.”

“It bends.”

“It cuts.”

“It apologizes.” I set it down. “Tomorrow I’m buying you a real one. That’s not a request.”

“You’ve been here nine days and you’re renovating my kitchen.”

“Nine days, nine dinners.” I start unpacking the bag. “You’re welcome.”

He comes off the couch to inspect the haul.

Tomatoes. Garlic. Onions. A bundle of basil that survived the walk better than I expected.

Bread from the stall run by the old man who spent ten minutes telling me about his sister in Bari, and who by the end of it had decided I was going to meet her.

Davide picks up a tomato and turns it over as if it might have a price tag hidden somewhere.

“These look good,” he says.

“They look good. That’s the problem.” I take it back and press my thumb in near the stem. “They’re grown to look good. A tomato should give a little. Like it’s tired. These are athletes. I don’t want an athlete. I want a tomato at the end of its career, thinking about a beach.”

“So why did you buy six?”

“Because we work with what the city gives us.” I line them up on the windowsill. “My father does the same thing with tourists.”

He laughs. That laugh is half of why I’m here and not in the team tower a block away, where the federation has the whole squad stacked behind a buffet and a swipe card, with a man in the lobby whose entire job is confirming we’re asleep.

I wanted a kitchen. Davide had a spare room and a real stove.

He had no idea what was about to happen to his life.

The onions go in first. Low heat. Oil. Patience.

I push my hair out of my eyes with the back of my wrist because my hands are busy. I’ve let it grow this year. Long enough to need pushing. Long enough that the federation photographer sighed at me. It stays. After the year I had, a man changes the one thing he’s allowed to control.

The knife fights me through every slice, and I tell it so, in Italian, because some conversations shouldn’t be translated.

“Stir,” I say, and hand him the spoon. “Slow. When they go quiet, tell me.”

“They’re onions. They’re already quiet.”

“They’re loud right now. Listen.”

He bends over the pan. He listens. This is a man who marks the fastest wingers in the league every weekend, and he is holding his breath over a pan of onions because I told him to, which is everything anyone needs to know about Davide. My mother would feed him until he begged for mercy.

“You know what my father cooked forty years on?” I say. “Two burners. You know what he never had?”

“A bending knife.”

“A bending knife.” I point at him. “Correct. You’re learning.”

When the onions go quiet and sweet, I take the spoon back and build the sauce properly.

Garlic sliced thin enough to read through, into the oil and out again before it can turn bitter.

The tomatoes crushed by hand, because the day a machine does that step is the day the dish stops being my father’s, and my father’s sauce is the reason half our street forgives him his opinions.

Salt. Time. The basil waits on the counter. Basil goes in at the end.

Davide sets the table, which in this apartment means moving a laptop and finding two forks that match, and opens a bottle of red wine to go with the pasta.

We eat at the small table by the window because I refuse to eat over a couch. For a while nobody talks, which is the correct review.

“You think the mister starts you against Austria?” he says, when his plate is half gone.

“I think he’s running out of ways to explain not starting me.”

“Twenty-five minutes on Tuesday and you turned their fullback inside out.”

“And the cross for the second goal came off my foot.” I tear more bread. “I’m not angry. He had his plan and the plan won the group. But the football starts counting differently. I want it. I’ve wanted it since I was six years old. I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to sound professional.”

“You? Pretend?” He points his fork at me. “You told the kit man his beard was a crime.”

“His beard is a crime. I said it with love.”

“Gallo says some English club is asking about you again,” he says. “He heard it from your agent. Your agent has a big mouth.”

“My agent has a beautiful mouth. It’s how he gets paid.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“They ask every summer. Every summer the answer is the same.” I mop sauce with the bread.

“In Naples my mother can walk to the stadium. My father closes the restaurant when we play and opens it after, so the entire street can come argue about my first touch over dinner. You want me to trade that for wet-sock weather and a bigger number in an account I never look at?”

“Most people would.”

“Most people are from somewhere they can leave.”

He shakes his head slowly, as if he’s heard this before and enjoys it anyway. “One day somebody is going to offer you the moon, Enzo.”

“The moon is a rock. I have Naples.”

He refills our glasses, and there’s a wind-up in how he does it. A brief ceremony that I know is going somewhere, so I wait. I’ve known him since we were seventeen and terrible. He gets to the point the way he defends. Eventually, and all at once.

“My friend Theo asked about you,” he says.

“Which one is Theo?”

“Tall. Brown hair. You met him outside the tunnel after the second match, for about eleven seconds. He asked if you drink coffee.”

“Everyone drinks coffee.”

“He asked if you drink coffee with strangers. He also said your eyes were unfair, which I did not repeat at the time because your ego is already a public safety concern.”

“My eyes are normal.”

“Your eyes are Naples storefront-blue and you know it. Drink your wine.”

I take my time with the wine. Davide has known I’m gay since we were nineteen, and in the years between then and this table it has never once been bigger between us than this.

“Tell him thank you,” I say. “And tell him no.”

“He’s a good guy, Enzo.”

“I believe you. It’s not about him.”

“Then what?”

“If a man wants to have coffee with me, we have it outside. At a table, at noon, in the sun, where his mother could walk past and wave. Where my mother could walk past. That’s the coffee I drink now.

Tournament coffee is a different drink. Tournament coffee is a number saved under a fake name, a room with the curtains shut, and a delete button in August. I know that recipe. I’m not making it again.”

He’s quiet for a second, eyes narrowed on me. “That’s very specific.”

“I’m a specific man.”

“And if Theo is fine with the sun?”

“Then after the tournament he can find me in it and ask. I’m here to play, Davide. Everything else waits.”

“It’s been a year,” he says. He doesn’t pick his fork back up. “A year since you’ve been drinking it alone, and I’ve never once gotten the story about the guy or why it ended. I’ve only known there was a guy.”

“There’s no story.”

“Enzo.”

“There’s a dinner going cold. That’s the only tragedy at this table.” I point at his plate. “The basil was perfect and nobody is honoring it.”

He looks at me a moment longer. Then he lets it go. That patience is why he gets nine dinners and Theo gets a no.

Both phones go off at once. Mine buzzes against the fruit bowl. Then the squad chat starts stacking notifications, which means it’s real. Nothing wakes the squad chat like the federation posting a graphic.

Davide reaches his phone first. “Bracket’s out.”

“Read it.”

“Round of sixteen against Austria.” He scrolls. “Win that, quarterfinal next week. Also here.”

“Against?”

“Winner of the Czech-Mexico match.” He keeps scrolling. “Czechia should take it. They topped their group. Organized. Mean at the back. And they’ve got that right-back from Roma, the one who—“

“There’s more sauce in the pan,” I say. “Take it before it tightens.”

My hands have stopped.

Something in my chest has already done the math. I give the hands a job instead. Plates, stacked. Glasses, gathered. In my family, a pair of stopped hands is a headline, and I’m not printing one tonight.

Davide gets up and serves himself without a word.

The squad chat is doing what squad chats do.

Gallo has posted a gif of a man praying.

Somebody is complaining about a referee for a match that doesn’t exist yet.

Ricci wants to know if anyone has seen his headphones, which has nothing to do with anything, which is why I love Ricci.

When Davide sits back down, he’s watching me the way he watches film. No hurry. All attention.

“You can tell me things,” he says. “The real things. Even the boring ones.”

“I know,” I say.

He nods. Then he gives me a full report on Tyson, his neighbor’s dog, who got a haircut yesterday and is so furious about it he spent the entire afternoon sitting with his back to the window.

I ask three follow-up questions. The situation deserves rigor.

Davide knows exactly what he’s doing, and I let him do it.

“The quarterfinal. We might never make it happen,” I say later, over the sink. “We have to win.”

“You say that like it’s unlikely.”

“I say it like a man doing dishes.”

“Sure,” he says. He takes the pan I hand him and lets that go too.

My sister’s voice note lands while I’m drying my hands. Four minutes, eleven seconds. I put her message on speaker and let it fill the kitchen.

Gianna’s exam went fine, and I should stop asking about it.

Carlo, our brother, fell one meter off a scaffold onto a stack of mattresses and is telling the whole street he survived a construction disaster, complete with a limp that changes legs depending on his audience.

Mamma is at war with the neighbor’s cat over the basil planter, and she’s losing on purpose because she likes the cat.

Papà changed the Thursday menu, three regulars staged a sit-in, and he cooked them the old dish anyway while giving a speech about democracy.

He’s thrilled. He’ll change the menu again next month just for the theater of it.

Then, with no pause at all: “And I saw the bracket. If you win and they win, I know what that quarterfinal is. You know the match I mean. Message me back, I have class. Answer the real question. Ciao ciao.”

She never asks the real question out loud. She leaves the space where it goes. She interrogates like a customs officer. She gets it from Mamma.

I record mine with the towel still over my shoulder.

“Tell Carlo a meter is a curb, not a disaster. Tell Mamma to stop negotiating with that cat. She represents this family. Tell Papà the regulars were right, he knows it, and I’m counting the days until he admits it.

The exam I never doubted. And Gianna…” I stop by the window.

The tomatoes sit on the sill in a row, going nowhere slowly.

“Austria first. We win Austria. Then I’ll count that far. ”

I play it back before I send it. I sound fine. I send it.

The apartment goes quiet the way this city goes quiet, which is not quiet at all.

A hum under everything. Machines breathing so people can sleep.

In Naples the night would still be talking, a scooter two streets over, somebody’s television arguing with somebody’s grandmother, a couple making up or breaking up on the corner where the fried-pizza place pulls its shutter down at two, the whole building living out loud through walls that were never asked to keep anything private.

Here the quiet has a temperature and a subscription fee. Davide’s door is shut.

I do the last things. Basil in a glass of water, tomatoes stem-down beside it, and the pan set upside down to dry.

The kitchen smells like my father’s kitchen. Nine days is all it took.

A car turns at the corner below, and its headlights climb the wall and cross the length of the ceiling and are gone.

Another ceiling did that once. A door shut softly, its quietness proving incredibly loud. Then the sound of the stairs. Then an engine catching somewhere below, and the lights crossing that other ceiling the same slow way, left to right, and gone before I had decided whether to be awake.

I put the last tomato in its place and hang the towel where the towel goes.

The moka pot gets filled for the morning and set on the stove. Two cups’ worth. Davide takes his black, complains, and drinks it anyway.

In my room, I set the alarm for seven. Training at nine, film at eleven, and R16 will be here before I am ready. The basil will hold. The tomatoes need two more days. By then we’ll know how much counting there is left to do.