Chapter Eleven
JUNIE
The Chupacabras’ travel coordinator was a man named Dale who had booked hotels for a minor-league baseball club for nineteen years and had never once, he told me later, in his own defense, encountered a social media manager who traveled with the team, and so his spreadsheet had a column for players, a column for coaches, a column for equipment, and no column for me, and I lived, hotel to hotel, in whatever cell Dale improvised.
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said, “Dale.”
“Dale,” he agreed, the way you’d say the name of a hurricane.
Here is what two professionals do in this situation.
They call the front desk. We called the front desk.
The front desk explained, with genuine regret, that a medical supply convention had eaten the city, that the hotel was sold out to the studs, that every hotel within a Lyft radius was sold out to the studs, and that they could offer us a cot, and then a pause, and then the correction that they could not offer us a cot, the cots had also gone to the medical supply people, a sentence I will be turning over for the rest of my life.
I hung up and relayed the cot situation. Saint turned his book face down on the nightstand, which I had learned was Saint for clearing the decks.
“You take the bed,” he said. “I’ll sleep in the tub.”
“You’re six foot four.”
“I’ll sleep diagonally in the tub.”
“You have a GAME tomorrow. You are the entire load-bearing wall of this franchise. I’m not filing the injury report that says our starting goalie tweaked his everything sleeping in a Denver bathtub like a Victorian ghost. I’ll take the tub.”
“You’re not sleeping in a tub.”
“I’m scrappy. I’m five six. Tubs were designed for me.”
“Junie.”
“We could ask Pickle to trade. Pickle’s rooming with Mason.”
We both considered a world in which we explained to Mason Duffy, group-chat menace, founder and self-appointed chairman of Saint’s Wedding Planning Committee, why one of us needed to trade rooms at 10:30 p.m., and we watched that world burn to the ground together in respectful silence.
“It’s a king,” Saint said, finally, to the bed, like a man reading a depth chart. “It’s basically two beds that happen to be adjacent.”
“Zoning,” I said. “You’re proposing zoning.”
“There’s precedent. The bus.”
“The bus was an accident. My head is a sleep hazard, it goes rogue, that’s documented.”
“I’ll build a wall,” he said, and then he actually did it, that’s the thing about him, he stood up and collected every pillow in the room, plus the decorative bolster, plus, after a moment’s assessment, a rolled bath towel for the gap at the footboard, and he constructed down the center line of that king bed the most structurally serious pillow barrier ever erected by man, plumb and true, a welder’s grandson to the last, and then he stepped back and looked at it and said, “Rule 6a.”
“The door,” I said.
“The wall is the door.”
“The wall is the door,” I agreed, and that is how the arrangement’s two signatories, a documentation professional and a man with a rulebook of his own he kept in his hands, ended up lying in the dark on opposite sides of a pillow Maginot line, both of us flat on our backs like two people lying in state, both of us breathing in the manner of people demonstrating how relaxed they are, at eleven o’clock, in Denver, awake.
I want the record to show we were heroically weird about it.
I brushed my teeth with the bathroom door closed and the fan on.
He waited in the hallway, in the actual hallway, while I changed, until I opened the door and informed him that if a teammate walked by and found the franchise goalie loitering outside his own room at eleven p.m. the group chat would achieve fusion.
He came in and changed in the bathroom and emerged in a T-shirt and flannel pants, and I had seen this man in full gear, half gear, and a hoodie economy, and none of it had prepared me for flannel, and I said, “Nice pants,” in a voice that came out sideways, and he said, “Thank you, they’re pants,” and turned off the light.
The dark in a hotel room is a specific dark. Blackout curtains, air unit cycling, a stripe of parking-lot orange along the ceiling seam. Under it, next to it, one wall of pillows away, the loudest quiet in Colorado.
I lasted, by the clock on the nightstand, until 1:47 a.m.
“Are you asleep?”
“Deeply,” he said, instantly, from eight inches and one bolster away.
“Me too.”
The air unit cycled. Someone’s ice machine sighed down the hall.
“Ask it,” he said.
“Ask what?”
“Whatever you’ve been loading since the light went off. I can hear you. You breathe in fours when you’re drafting.”
I lay there, caught, in the dark, breathing in what was apparently fours.
And I don’t know if it was the dark, or the wall between us making the room feel like a confessional, or the fact that his voice with the lights off had a texture it didn’t have anywhere cameras were, low and unhurried, off the record, but the thing that came out of me was not the volley I had loaded.
It was the other thing. The thing that lived under the volleys, in the sub-basement, with the clip.
“You heard it in warmups,” I said. “The clip. In February. You’ve heard it. Everyone’s heard it, it has its own remixes. But you’ve never heard the whole episode.”
“No.”
“It’s fifty-one minutes. He spends fifty-one minutes explaining to two other men and a Casper mattress ad why the agency, quote, ran better lean.
I was the lean. I was the running better.
And the thing is, the clip everyone plays, the a lot clip, that’s not even the part.
” My voice was doing fine. I was proud of it, distantly, the way you’re proud of an intern.
“The part is the laugh after. His cohosts laugh, and then he does this thing, this little magnanimous thing, he goes, no, no, she’s great, she’s great, it’s just, and then he says it.
A lot. Like, a LOT. And the way he says it, everybody instantly knows what he means.
That’s what I couldn’t get past. It wasn’t slander, slander I could fight.
It was shorthand. Fourteen thousand strangers heard two words and went, oh, HER, we know her, we’ve met her, exhausting, and I was dating him, Saint.
I was dating him and working for him and I found out I was a lot on a podcast, at 1x speed, doing dishes. ”
The air unit cycled. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything in the specific way he has, the way that’s a hand on the boards, the way that means keep going, the net’s covered.
“So I fixed it,” I said. “That’s the part Hazel yells about.
I didn’t get mad, I got optimized. Eight months, new job, new city, and I built a Junie who is exactly enough.
Never a lot. Delightful in fifteen-second increments, upbeat in all meetings, first to leave every party while it’s still fun, and it WORKS, that’s the sick part, everyone loves her, she has four million followers on a team account and a laugh people put in compilations, and every single night she does the numbers.
Was today a lot. Was that email a lot. Were you a lot at the diner, with the spreadsheet, with the SMOOCHONOMICS, was the star sticker a lot.
It’s a great system. Airtight. The only cost is I haven’t said one unbudgeted sentence to anyone but my sister in two years. ”
The orange stripe lay along the ceiling.
My eyes had adjusted enough to see it, and to see, in my peripheral vision, over the crest of the pillow wall, that he was on his back with his hands folded on his chest like a man giving testimony to the ceiling, which, I had learned by then, is where Saint Lindell keeps his depositions.
“You’re saying unbudgeted sentences right now,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I noticed. I’m ignoring it. If I look straight at it, it stops.”
He was quiet for a while. The real kind, the working kind. I could hear him choosing, the way he chose at the diner, the mug-quarter-turn quiet, except his hands stayed folded and the choosing happened in the dark.
“I’ve been thinking about what to do about him for a while,” he said, conversationally, to the ceiling. “The podcast man. I want to be fair. I’ve only heard eleven seconds.”
“Fifty-one minutes wouldn’t improve him.”
“No. But I’ve had eleven seconds and two months of primary sources, and I’m ready to file.” A pause, the length of a pipe tap. “He undersold you.”
The air unit cycled. I lay very still on my side of the wall.
“That’s,” I said, and stopped, because my voice had gone somewhere unbudgeted.
“He had the data,” Saint went on, flat, judicial, a man reading a scouting report to a ceiling in Denver.
“Two years of it. Front-row seat. And the best he could do, with all of it, the whole Junie Bloom file, was a lot. That’s not cruelty, cruelty at least pays attention.
That’s a man rating Bandido’s a four because the line was long.
The tortilla was never the problem. He just had no palate. ”
“You’re comparing me to a taco.”
“Nine point five,” he said. “Would have said ten, but the scale only goes to ten because nothing’s earned it, and I’ve been saving the top of the scale for a reason.”
And there, at two in the morning, in the dark, on the wrong side of a pillow wall, I laughed.
The real one, up and out, ugly, unperformed, the one that isn’t in any compilation, and I heard him make a sound on his side that in a less disciplined man would have been a laugh too, and then my eyes were leaking into a Denver pillow at the same time, both at once, laugh and leak, a lot by any measure, a LOT, and there was no camera and no audience and nobody did the math on me.
“Get some sleep, sweetheart,” he said, per rule 5, approved usage, except it didn’t sound like the rulebook. It sounded like the wrist tape.
“Sleep. Sure. Yes.”
Neither of us slept. I know because I lay awake for hours listening to him not sleep, the two of us breathing on our backs like a synchronized event, the wall holding, the wall utterly failing at the only thing walls are for, and at some point before the mountains went gray at the curtain edge, a hand came over the crest of the pillow Maginot line, palm up, open, on my side, not reaching, just available.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I put my hand in it, and his fingers closed, and we stayed exactly like that, on opposite sides of the door, holding hands over the wall until his alarm went off at 6:15, and nothing happened, I want to be clear, nothing happened.
Everything happened.