Chapter 23 Nate - July 2021, Toronto
The season they played in front of nobody covered for us completely.
We played each other eight times that year, and there is not one clip of us saying a word to each other, because there was nothing to hear at a faceoff in an empty building.
The thread went from every night to twice a week to once, and then to the kind of thing a man sends somebody he played juniors with.
Riley: you should have had the second one
Nate: I should have.
Riley: don't do that
Nate: Do what?
That one sat there for six days.
We were being friends. That was the whole program, ratified in a basement, unanimous, two nothing. I've honored a great many agreements in my life and that is the only one I've ever kept perfectly, and it took eight months to kill fifteen hundred messages.
The players' association put its gala on in July after moving it twice, and everybody in the sport came, because we had all spent eighteen months in a hotel.
A ballroom in Toronto with a thousand people in it and every one of them touching somebody. Guys hugging in the aisles. Two goalies who genuinely hated each other holding onto one another by the bar.
Riley Kowalski was thirty feet away from me for four hours.
When I moved it stayed thirty feet, and when he moved it stayed thirty feet, and neither of us ever once looked like we were doing it.
After an hour I understood that we were both running the same program from opposite ends, and that neither of us was going to be the one to break it.
He was in the suit. His father's, from 1989, charcoal, two button, except the lapels had been taken in and the shoulders opened up and the sleeves were the right length.
I stood at a high table with a drink and a man from the association talking at me about escrow, and I looked at the shirt cuff at the end of a sleeve that finally fit, and something went through my chest that I had to get off my face before it arrived there.
Because in April of 2017 that jacket was an inch and a half short. His wrists showed. He had brought a gear bag with stick tape on the handle to a media day in a building he did not need it in.
I grieved that inch and a half with a drink in my hand while a man explained the escrow mechanism to me. I filed it before it got as far as my face and said something about the salary cap that made him nod.
The pact got tested once that night, and it lasted four minutes.
We met at the raw bar, which was neutral ground and had a line, and there was no version of either of us getting out of it.
"Sinclair."
"Kowalski. You look well."
"So do you. How's the flex schedule treating you?"
And he took it. He took the flex schedule and ran with it, and for four minutes two men who once negotiated a treaty on Marriott notepaper at one in the morning discussed television windows.
"They're going to do it," he said. "They're going to flex a Saturday and everybody's going to lose their mind, and then they're going to do it again in March and nobody will say a word."
"They're going to flex two before Christmas."
"Two." He put a shrimp tail on a napkin. "It's a Canadian broadcast issue, that's what it is. Nobody in this room is going to say that out loud."
"Half this room works for the broadcast."
"That's the other half of it. How's the weather down there, still a swamp?"
"It's a swamp. How's Pittsburgh?"
"Wet. It rains in a way that seems personal." He ate another one. "You hear about Angelo?"
"I live with Angelo. Not literally."
"He's got a guy on our team convinced he has a cousin who's an air traffic controller."
"He does have a cousin who's an air traffic controller. She works in Newark," I said, "and he has offered her to me twice."
He laughed. It was a real one, the whole thing, and both of us heard it happen and neither of us did one single thing about it.
Then he said, "Well. Good to see you."
"You too."
And we walked away from each other at a raw bar in front of about half of professional hockey.
I got a few steps before a man from a sponsor put a hand on my shoulder. "That was good to see. You two have grown up."
Four minutes, executed flawlessly, on the flex schedule and the weather and a joke about a man from South Philadelphia with the names taken off it.
Two people who used to argue about a fourth line center at volume in the dark had a small conversation so warm and so smooth that strangers complimented us on our maturity.
It was the worst thing either of us has ever done to the other one, and there is not one word in it anybody could put in front of a jury.
The second thing that happened that night arrived while a man from a beverage company was explaining his brand's activation to me.
He was a long way in. I had a face for that and it held indefinitely.
"Nathaniel," said a woman's voice, behind my right shoulder. "You're needed."
I turned around. She put her hand out. "Penelope Ostrander. You're not needed. Come with me anyway."
The sponsor made a noise like a man who had been beaten by a professional and let me go.
"Thank you."
"You were one question from a second slide," she said. "There was a phone coming out. I've been watching."
We ended up on a low sofa by a window with one drink each. She had two majors and a decade of press conferences behind her, and she talked the way people talk when they have decided in advance which things they are going to say.
"So this room is a nightmare."
"It's a good room."
"It's an excellent room and it's a nightmare, and both of those are true at the same time, which is a sentence I've been trying to explain to my mother since I was fifteen." She turned her glass. "How long have you been famous?"
"I don't think that's…"
"How old were you when the first camera showed up? Not for the family. For you."
"Eleven."
"Nine," she said. "Well done, you got two extra years." She drank. "So you know the thing where you can tell exactly where every camera in a room is with your eyes shut, and the thing where you can feel a phone come out at forty feet."
"Yes."
"Good. Then I don't have to explain any of the next part."
She looked out at the ballroom for a while. "You've been watching a man all night."
I did not say anything. I sat there and did the one thing I knew how to do, which was not fill a silence.
"I'm not going to make you say anything and I'm not going to say his name," she said.
"I'm telling you that plainly, because I think you're about to decide whether to be frightened of me for the rest of your life, and I'd rather you didn't. I don't do gossip.
I've had gossip done to me since I was seventeen and it cost me somebody, and I'd sooner walk into traffic. "
"Then why say it?"
"Because you've spent four hours tracking one person around a ballroom the way a lighthouse tracks a ship," she said, "and I don't think you know that lighthouses don't track anything.
They stand still and they turn and the ships watch them.
You've been standing very still all night and turning, and half this room thinks you're being gracious.
" She said it like a doctor saying you're favoring that leg, with no weight on it at all.
"You've got a lot of theories about a man you met an hour ago."
"I've got one, and I've had it since the second drink, and I extracted you from a beverage executive first, which was charity." She stood up. "Enjoy the rest of your evening, Nathaniel. Nobody in this room noticed. I only noticed because I do the same thing, and I've had longer to practice."
She called me in September.
I was in the brownstone with the art still leaning against the wall in the front room, and I took it in the kitchen with the absurd hood over the range that I've never once turned on.
"I have a proposal," she said, "and I want you to hear all of it before you answer, and then I want you to take a week.
Two public people appear together on a schedule.
Eight to ten times a year. Openings, one gala, a tournament in the spring where I'll need somebody to sit in a box and look interested.
All lighting, no touch. Nobody lies to anybody in private and nobody ever asks the other one a question. "
"Penelope."
"I have my own reasons and they are mine and they are not for sale, including to you," she said, "and I'll never tell you what they are unless I decide to, and if that's a problem then the answer is no and we'll be friendly at parties for twenty years."
"That's not a problem."
"Then think about it."
"How long have you been building this?"
"Since the night of the gala. I don't move fast. I've just had a very long time to think about the shape of the thing I'd need."
I did not take a week. I took longer, which is worse, because anything past a week is a week plus the part where I already knew.
Then I called my uncle.
"Nate! It's been a while."
"I want to do the appearances program."
There was a pause on his end, and Marsh did not pause.
"With who?"
I told him.
"Well," he said.
And then he did something I've never once seen him do in my life, which is that he did not say anything else about it.
No notes, no adjustments, not one word about the rollout or the timing or which outlet, and this was a man who once revised a seating chart on a Friday to place me next to the daughter of a network chairman.
"Send me her people's details," he said. "I'll be good."
"You're not going to tell me how to roll it out."
"I'm just pleased," he said, and he was.
That is the part I did not enjoy. There was no triumph in it at all.
He had offered me a thing twice, four years earlier, and been told no both times, the second time with more force than the question deserved, and now I had called him, and the only thing in his voice was relief that a problem he had been holding for me was finally being handled.