I slept well that night, being truly fatigued in the best way. But I woke with a start around six. Kickoff was only hours away and I’d forgotten to invite Karen or so much as properly consider whether I ought to. One thing I knew: if I didn’t text her right now, it would seem to her, from whatever time she woke today until the time I did belatedly invite her (supposing I would), that it’d been a fraught decision for me, and that she’d only made the cut in the eleventh hour. She would also have spent her morning feeling that, once again, I’d chosen to leave her to one side of the project’s principals. Those kinds of hurt feelings, even when shown later to be unfounded, always leave a mark, simply from one’s having had to go down a thorny psychic path: the pentimenti of the heart.
Other things to do, a text came back almost instantly, dismissing my invitation. Why was Karen up so early on a Sunday? Maybe she meant her words in earnest, and not as retaliation for my having gone to see Daphne’s show alone. No, she’d risen early to attend to these other things. Whatever she meant exactly, this was, for my purposes, the best possible outcome: I’d extended the invitation, insincerely enough, and she’s declined, leaving me free to indulge my solitude.
It didn’t last. A few hours later, as I was getting ready to go, she wrote again to say that she might meet me at the game if she could. Here was the worst possible result, worse even than her definitely coming, as it introduced the kind of looming uncertainty that unnerved me most. All the same, by eleven-thirty I was on a train to East Rutherford, the New Jersey home of New York football. I’d left early for the stadium to savor gameday properly, something I’d not experienced in five years, and never on this coast. I pushed through the turnstiles of MetLife, the hulking stadium housing two teams, the Jets and the Giants, though secretly everyone knew it was Giants stadium; the snake-bitten Jets would need a lasting renaissance before that would change. In catching a first glimpse of the field, I had to shoulder my way through the crowd that was already developing within the stadium concourse. The grass I discovered was almost shaggy, nothing like what you got out in California at the Coliseum, home of the Trojans and at one time the Rams and Chargers—that paler green trimmed low and flecked with bits of brown from perennial sunlight. Today’s green was hard, overrich. I assumed it was rolled-in sod, bought from somewhere more hospitable and then scored with stark white lines. Lush and green, the grass somehow gave the impression of artificial turf, probably because it couldn’t really belong here, in East Rutherford, any more than that hemmed-in, electric green patch at Whent’s place belonged there.
I knew my seat to be exceptional even before I’d reached the stadium, but it was only in making my way through the congested aisles, past fans carrying pre-game pretzels the size of faces, cubic feet of popcorn in candycane troughs, and skinny daiquiris a yard long, that the margin by which this seat exceeded any I’d had before became fully apparent. The players, the red-and-blue Giants and the blue-and-orange Bears, were already on the field, running drills, taking handoffs, stretching in poses that smacked of yoga. I spotted Manning, the second Manning, as it were, throwing fades to Beckham Jr., who was still in sweats and wearing headphones that dwarfed his head. By this point, with game time approaching, most of the players were deep into their warm-ups. But Beckham was operating in his own time, playfully one-handing passes in the corner of the end zone, which would have been pointless showboating if not for the fact that he caught a quarter of his in-game passes this way, stretching out for balls you couldn’t get to with two hands.
I took my seat and scanned the field not for Duke Briar but Victor Skovsky, the new Bears quarterback and would-be savior of the club. The few others in my row were too deep in conversation to pay attention to me just now, so we got by with ghost nods and air-clinks, notable given that I had no drink in hand. Skovsky, I’d learned, had come straight out of the draft, a top-five pick. The front office was anxious to show off what he could do, and hence where the team’s future lay. For eight years the Bears had staked their fortunes on Cutler, the petulant, permanent boy with the prodigious arm, a type-one diabetic with first-rate toughness. He flashed greatness, tantalized coaches with it his whole career, but in the end could never sustain it for more than a drive or a quarter or a game or two at best. The quality of his on-field decision-making plateaued prematurely, refusing to keep pace with his physical development. He wasn’t a winner—it was pointless complicating that phrase. It said everything that needed saying.
I looked back into the luxury boxes and the darkened glass rebuffed my gaze. Were some of Garrett’s people here, too? Could the ones beside me be on his payroll? If only I could have wished away these thoughts recycled from the theater; but they were inevitable, given Jeff’s odd appearance in my life on Friday night. Unlike prior occasions, when my seat had been much closer to an end zone, and lofted in the sky, two or three decks up, the people right around me—I hesitate to call them fans—didn’t seem like diehards, or even people who had much room for spectatorship in their lives. They were busy, I thought, making the money that could cover seats like these, or they were aligned with others who did. The man nearest, for instance, wore purple cufflinks with a shirt that, despite the French cuffs, was making a play at casual, a pinstriped linen shirt that could equally well grace a boardroom, based solely on the fineness of the cloth. Immo’s purple, those cufflinks, those socks. Williams purple: Steinbrenner country, as far as New York sports went. No, these people didn’t seem much like fans at all—to my great relief. I would come off as an aficionado by comparison.
The seat next to mine was nearly covered up by the Williams man’s stuff: a leather briefcase, an umbrella, a three-quarter coat and hat. I staked my claim to the remainder with the aid of my windbreaker; he took no notice. Only then did I begin to wonder, rather unpleasantly, about Karen and when she might show. I tried to keep my focus on the field, even if the game wasn’t due to start for another twenty minutes, and I was helped along when my gaze landed on Skovsky. The quarterback had originally played hockey before his family, of Lithuanian extraction, moved to Bay Ridge and he morphed into a serious football man: American life could do that to anyone. Probably six-eight, taller even than Hank, the giant (this was the new way with quarterbacks), Skovsky was firing rocket after rocket in foreboding Cutleresque fashion, the ball traveling twenty yards without a hint of arc even though he was throwing flatfooted and, to his coaches’ dismay, sidearming the ball. I certainly hoped he could bring more joy to this team, Duke’s team, than his predecessor.
From my marathon sessions of sports television, which filled my apartment with a sham conviviality I depended on while working and living alone, I’d rapidly come to know more about the state of professional football at this particular moment than I’d ever known before. The Bears were off to a reasonable start this season: 2-1 and looking promising for the first time in a while. They’d not wanted to describe Skovsky as a franchise savior right after the draft, fearing they might jinx him and the city itself, only recently recovered from the Cubs’ curse. The storied Bears were now thirty-five years removed from a championship, then won under a dyspeptic coach and an uber-cool if diminutive quarterback, Jim McMahon. Skovksy, who’d played college ball for Arkansas, had better mechanics, crisper footwork, than McMahon, and his size ensured that he’d almost certainly be more durable.
But a quarterback, as they say, can only be as good as his receivers. The Bears had traded away their veteran pass catchers to shore up a shaky offensive line, and they’d used most of their picks to trade up and nab their quarterback near the top of the draft board, though they’d spent a second rounder acquiring a wideout from Ole Miss, Johnny Farrell. Which meant the man who was really making this season look, for the Bears, like something more than just the final year in a rebuilding effort, the man with top-three talent if not composure, was a mercurial undrafted rookie they’d just picked up for hardly anything: Duke. The win over the Chiefs last week, in Kansas City, had depended on him. Nine catches, one hundred and forty yards, including the grab that had brought them into range, in the waning seconds, for the winning kick. None of this was surprising as such. The question was, could he deliver with any consistency? Today, say.
Where was Duke right now, I wondered, given that he wasn’t the one on the other end of Skovsky’s tosses? My mistake had been to limit my search for him to the field. There on the near sideline, dressed in Bears’ colors, being earnestly counseled by three coaches—being talked into catching some warm-up throws, presumably—was number nineteen. He’d had to switch numbers for the pro game; no more thirty-two. He didn’t nod or otherwise react to the staff’s words, leaving me no way to know whether he shared their views or even understood them. It wasn’t indifference in his eyes, though, so much as a kind of focus tangential to sports. Whatever it was, he radiated tranquility, just as he had in that Cal game.
After receiving the lecture with due grace, Duke took up his helmet, which had been laying at his feet, threaded his fingers through the mask, and trotted onto the field. This was my first live glimpse of that trot, the one that had mesmerized me on tape. And to judge by the rustle of boos (his signing had been controversial), together with the attention of both teams’ fans, including my tony neighbors who so far had seemed oblivious to all goings-on, it might have been their first look, too. Everyone in the stands collectively regarded this uncertain prospect, just as tens of thousands of others must have been doing throughout the city, at home and in bars and right in the street, taking the game in through one screen or another. Duke went on jogging right past Skovksy. No look, no words. The vaunted college quarterback followed Duke with his eyes, assessing his new teammate with the languid gait that didn’t suggest speed so much as power—prodigious, latent—and with it control: all things Duke wasn’t going to summon yet, I knew, not until the clock had started. Ten yards, twenty yards, thirty yards ticked by before his glove went up, a faint little wave for Skovsky and his retinue with only the back of his hand—he didn’t bother turning around. The coaches were motioning Duke to come back some. I think they’d wanted him to run a proper route, but he had other ideas. Skovsky didn’t quibble, flicking the ball off his back foot with only a touch of bend, flaunting his own ease and conveying to Duke, or at the least to the team in general, that his own powers were every bit the match for the rogue receiver’s. Both were rookies, after all, and most had expected Duke, before his college troubles became news, to fare better in the draft, and Skovsky worse, than the two of them actually had. Duke might well have gone higher overall than Skovsky, had it not been for the baggage. Which meant there were things to prove.
The pass was long. I couldn’t tell if this was deliberate on the quarterback’s part, to suggest Duke’s sloth. In any case it didn’t matter: nineteen leaned back, crouched a touch, and lofted himself into the air, a near-vertical leap with a graceful backward slant to it and not much kick, right before two-handing a ball that looked borderline uncatchable. Not only that, he landed with the kind of poise that suggested, in-game, there’s be many yards after the catch, a Cal specialty of his. Instead of tossing the ball to practice personnel, Duke bent down and set it on the field decisively, like a heavy and fragile package, and went straight to stretching his hamstrings, as though warm-ups were over. Was one catch all it took when you were this good? They had Skovksy load up another one and send it sailing toward a receiver positioned deeper than Duke. This was more of a lob than a pass, though the sheer height of its arc evidenced the force this QB could muster, a power he would have to harness if he were going to throw effectively in the NFL. Remarkably, the ball got there so fast the receiver couldn’t close his hands around it, which sent it bouncing off his chest. From a profile I’d read in the Post on the train to the stadium, I knew Skovsky’s ball was considered hard to handle, but there was Duke, toward the end of the article, with a choice quote: “Put it on me, I’ll be fine.” If you could judge such things from a single pass—and Duke had caught the ball in a manner so impressive you probably could—well, he was right.
Nineteen was coaxed out of his stretches into taking a second pass, and this one, which came in just beside him, was a laser, the sort of pass only three or four quarterbacks in the league could manage. Without moving his body an inch, Duke picked it cleanly out of the air. Immediately he was back up on his tiptoes, reaching for the sky, stretching. An older man wanted to pass my seat. I stood up and he offered me a ruddy dewlapped acknowledgement as he brushed by and sat on the far side of the Williams man. His cable-knit sweater was too heavy for this time of year, but he appeared the sort who would’ve worn it in one-hundred-degree heat. A season-ticket holder type, he probably spent a lot of time on the golf course these days; but, once upon a time, at West Point or Dartmouth, he would have played good football, lining up perhaps at tight end. This, I thought, was the kind of man whose grandfather had probably lamented the mass dissemination of the game outward from the Ivy League. He was old enough, I could see, to have had some contact with that attitude himself, even if it was fast dying, or going underground, which is what actually happens. That sort of thing just doesn’t die.
By the time I’d sat down again, Duke was sprinting hard on a diagonal, coming back toward his QB. After a fractional hesitation, Skovksy, showing real touch, floated a ball out to Duke, who—only then did I notice—was heading straight through a running back platoon lost in pre-snap rituals, making first cuts, hurdling imaginary tacklers, turning the corner. It was going to end badly, clearly. Yet Duke accelerated, looped right around the players, cut across in front of the ball just as it cleared their heads and picked it up off his shoelaces. He left the ball where it was and almost skipped to the sideline. Where, after all, could you go from there? Even the running backs, once they’d figured out what had happened, were giddied by the improbability of it all. You started to understand how someone could begin to see himself as untouchable; you could also see how, the day the feat didn’t quite come off, things might suddenly grow cold.
Three passes were enough for Duke to know his game was in shape. The team still thought otherwise, particularly a rotund, nearly hairless man with a headset, who I knew to be the Bears’ head coach. Ed Cotter. I’d seen his martial baldness on SportsCenter only days ago, berating reporters. He’d been the last to counsel Duke before he’d caught a single ball today; this time around he was more animated. Advice turned to admonishment. Duke took it just the same as before, attending to his superior in a manner that gave little away. An encore from the receiver followed, a short post route—but now for a backup quarterback, as Skovsky was down on his knees, loosening up an apparently fickle back. The pass was more or less perfect, a better pass than anything the starter had thrown, finding Duke right between the numbers. Yet the receiver barely raised his arms, leaving the ball to recoil off his pads and skid in tiny circles on the grass. Duke looked over at Cotter and innocently held up his hands. The recalcitrance was impressive—career-killing, perhaps, but impressive, given the struggle he’d just had finding a team. Clearly the ordeal hadn’t cowed him. The shame was that it had surely further embittered him, which would only make him more of a nuisance to teams, for instance, through deliberate pass-drops like this one. Decisively contributing to last week’s win would have also given him leverage to exploit. You ought to enjoy whatever power you have while it lasts, I suppose. What would ultimately matter to Duke’s career was whether he caught the same pass in a game. Nothing that happened outside those sixty minutes of clock—even terrible, criminal things—counted for anything. That’s what his raised hands said to me.
I wasn’t the only one drawn in by Duke. The audible reactions around me to these inconsequential pre-game catches and drops confirmed as much. Whatever else he was, he was an All-American with freakish gifts, a player whose NFL life would have been off to a charmed start if not for the indiscretions that were so vaguely described by reporters, one was positively invited, by the shallowness of explanation, to assume the familiar script: girls, drugs, doping, bribes. But if that’s what it was, why didn’t they just give us the details? It’s as if the specifics might reveal circumstances around Duke to be troublingly distinct from the misdeeds we’d by now accustomed ourselves to from athletes. ESPN took the central question around Duke to be how high he could climb in the NFL, if he stayed true to the game, at least on Sundays. Comparisons to Beckham were rampant, but he’d been parrying them for reasons he didn’t seem eager to describe. Some pundits thought Duke had better hands, better legs, and that he could really block, too, relished it. Could he turn out to be that good? Going by the number of fans in Giants jerseys tracking him on the turf rather than their own star, Beckham, you’d have to say it wasn’t out of the question.
Many great college athletes, of course, failed to develop their nascent mythology in the pros. At the next level, they stopped seeming possessed. In my teens, it was Reggie Bush, the demiurgic USC halfback who even my father knew something about, following as he did, from some distance, all things Los Angeles, even after we’d moved away—including the Trojans. Simply put, Bush appeared, while in red and gold, to be of a different species when he was out on the field. Every game of his was touched by the supernatural, and everybody in California, not just Los Angeles, seemed to follow along, even if you weren’t really a sports fan. It’s why I knew of him even then. He was the second coming of Barry Sanders, the way Ty presented him to me. And, watching him, you couldn’t much disagree. When Bush went pro, in New Orleans, there were flashes of that sublime instinct for gaps. Those flashes ran through his entire career—with five teams. He never succeeded in turning them into lasting light. As early as his second season, it was obvious he wasn’t going to be the same man he’d been in Pasadena. As high as he could still leap, he wasn’t going to make this leap, to feature-back stud. Sanders’ legacy couldn’t have been safer. Eventually Bush would end up generating far more interest for a sex tape with a Kardashian (at least she was the really famous one of the sisters, Ty liked to joke) than for anything he achieved on the field.
So what would Duke’s path look like, given that Bush bore nearly every mark of superstardom yet showed himself to be utterly mortal, a creditable player but hardly a dominant one? For Duke’s part, he bore only one mark, and it lived in the loose-limbed jog he was showing off now before kickoff: what he was able to do in that split-second at the apex of his jump, in a crowd of arms and bodies, with the ball raining down. Today, what people wanted to know was whether last week, his demolition of the Chief’s secondary, was to be the exception rather than the rule; whether he would end up, like Bush, an athlete of glimmers alone, built for Hollywood, the C-list. The Giants’ defensive staff, its analytics department—every club had one now—would have been game-planning for him all week, studying film just as I had, but with data-crunching tools to isolate his weaknesses, how he might be exploited or taken out of the equation. That, of course, wouldn’t be a win only for the Giants. No, it would ratify the collective wisdom of the league and its scouts, in passing over Duke in the draft, a wisdom that extended to the Bears themselves during the offseason, before desperation set in and they’d been forced to make a late gamble on him.
I’d first noticed how Duke’s reputation hovered over him while watching the USC-Cal game Garrett had sent me. The innuendo of the commentary addressed both a sordid history and his custom of dabbling outside the lines of fair play and good taste: the way, for instance, he’d brutally blocked that USC safety right out of the game, as if his primary line of business were concussing opponents rather than catching balls. You could see he enjoyed riling his coaches and quarterbacks, whereas Bush, as far as I understood it, was never thought a bad teammate, one who couldn’t, for all his arrogance, keep the club’s interests out in front. How much differently, then, would Duke’s failure be understood, if indeed that’s what lay in wait for him, as it had for Bush? I got the sense there were plenty of people rooting for Duke to fail, for reasons of poetic justice alone. Was it this that excited Garrett? The prospect of betting on a villain, and on the fates not specially punishing evil, as the Greeks believed?
The two captains gathered at midfield, over the Giants logo. The home team won the toss but decided to kick. Soon nineteen was back near the Bears’ goal line, waiting for the ball. I’d not known whether Duke would return kicks at the pro level; he hadn’t the week before, against the Chiefs, but then his broad success in that game must have tempted Cotter to expand the receiver’s role and see what else he could bring to the team.
The kick came in low and flat, the ball wobbling in an ugly way, but still it had good depth. Not so much depth that Duke wasn’t going to try to run it back, though. From five yards deep in the near corner of the end zone—the kick wasn’t only ungainly but crooked—Duke cut back to the center and headed right up the middle, his lack of straight-line speed, or any appearance of even trying to run hard, fully on display. Who knows if he could have made better time if he cared to? What I’d witnessed before the game, his catch behind the running backs, certainly suggested he could, when it was strictly necessary, as in matters of pride.
This would have turned away some true aficionados of the game, never mind most coaches. It was almost a moral flaw in Duke’s style. Rather than appearing a half-step quicker than the rest, as Bush did, he appeared markedly slower; yet he was almost Jedi-like in working his way calmly through the chaos. The first defender arriving downfield supermanned Duke and missed, flying harmlessly by, a perplexed wrinkle running through the length of his body before he skidded to a stop behind the action, useless for the rest of the play. From there, one after another, Giants ended up on their faces in pursuit, frequently overshooting him, incorrectly anticipating his course. Duke seemed a master at finding an unorthodox line up the field, looping back, sometimes shuffling his feet on the spot before gently sidestepping another player. It had to be conceded, his nonchalance was effective. This was the way he searched out the right cut, explored the incoming line of defenders not just for a seam, but the richest one. There was the example of Le’Veon Bell, who’d once indulged in a similar running style, I knew, until his game deserted him on being traded to the Jets (not an uncommon happening, for that particular team). Yet Duke alone simultaneously gave the paradoxical impression of heedlessness and indifference. Doubtless he displayed elite elusiveness on this runback. But success couldn’t last forever: around midfield, a fourth or fifth man tried his luck, but this one approached rather gently, mirroring Duke, Jedi against Jedi, before shooting for Duke’s thighs and taking him down cleanly. The Giant had dug his crown right into the ball, expertly attempting to dislodge it, but somehow Duke hung on as he crashed to the ground at the forty-seven-yard line.
A screaming filled my ears, a hoarse, furious voice. Even amid the chaos of a football game it made me actually duck for cover. The Williams man looked alarmed, even reached toward me to give succor, I thought. But after taking a glance just behind me, from where the scream had come, he half-suppressed a derisive laugh, took a sip from his drink, and gave a mischievous, patrician yell of his own in opposition, being a man of New York. The scream recurred, and this time I made out a long, distorted cry of Bears in it. Turning sharply, I discovered a boyish man in a navy and orange jersey where I wasn’t expecting to find one. Not one who yelled like that, in seats like these. Though I hadn’t appreciated being deafened, I was glad that someone able to afford such a seat could also be so free with himself, with all of us. With crude joy on his face, the boy —he couldn’t have been more than twenty, and maybe not even eighteen—went so far as to squeeze my shoulder; and instead of shrinking away, I watched myself patting his hand in return. Our ensuing exchange, however, which took place during the television timeout—football was structured around these two-minute intermissions—disappointed in at least one respect. The laws of economics, it turned out, had not been challenged by his presence. This was really the seat of his moneyed grandfather, a season ticket-holder of long standing going back to the days of Phil Sims and Lawrence Taylor. Usually, when the old man wasn’t free to take in the game, he gave his seat away to business associates (just what sort of business I never learned).Today, at any rate, the ticket had fallen to the grandson, who’d only recently graduated from high school and was in from out of town with his father, the businessman’s son. The boy had come alone to the game, though. His father had things to tell his father, who wasn’t in the best of health.
But this young man—Oliff was his surname—was the third to take the name Henry, and he was here to cheer on his Bears, never mind his granddad’s eastern alliances. And it was clear enough to me, simply by the strength of his accent, which was much stronger than Garrett’s, that Henry was no child of privilege, nothing like the Williams man or his associate with the dewlaps. He was here, he told me, because he might take a clerical job at his grandfather’s firm. Which meant this might be a taste of his new hometown, though not his new team, of course. You couldn’t just switch allegiances as you pleased, and he, in his Bears regalia, was good enough to know that.
Henry was large but athletically built, something of a rarity as I looked around at all the indulgences in the stands, the nachos and tall boys and foot-long brats. There were plenty of hulking men and women here, but few whose size suggested strength, which stood in contrast to the players on the field, even the fattest of whom were in fact frighteningly powerful; those men would die of heart failure, yes, their brains would clot with tau proteins, but for now they were strong. Not so for the fans. Even the Williams man, though not fat, had withered and wilted, losing all the vim of humankind. But young Henry (the Third, technically), he was ruddy and alive. You imagined he could actually engage in a backyard game of football without collapsing in exhaustion after two or three plays. He had the forward, squared shoulders of a lineman who hadn’t, unfortunately, been able to bring himself to overeat enough to hold his place on the team. Henry was going to live a long time.
Though he seemed genial, I did notice him sizing me up. Truth be told, I don’t think he was much impressed. Why should he be, really? I looked a lot like the Williams man. Even if I was more casual than he was, my T-shirt today was too finely finished, effete by Henry’s standards. Most of the people in the vicinity looked like corporate types existing at several removes from the game, and I must have appeared like the moody child of one of them, no less than Henry appeared the dunderheaded progeny of another. Beneath the skepticism, I thought I detected a certain warmth in him that was the upshot of this kinship: brothers who’d taken different tacks yet came from the same stock. At first I pushed away from his familiarity. But when I had to explain how my ticket had come to me, the look of recognition he gave me, of like meeting like, compelled me to admit he was basically correct, even if my benefactor wasn’t my grandfather but my client, Garrett.
I told him I was here to see the Bears, his Bears, and that I’d heard interesting things about their new receiver, Duke Briar. That’s just when he waved me off, froze. As the ball was being snapped he pointed to the field: the first play from scrimmage. Apparently he had a sense of reverence and ceremony when it came to the game. One had to bear witness in the right way; talking over the inaugural snap would be wrong. What his team delivered then was perhaps the platonic NFL play: a simple draw up the middle, good for four yards. The crowd, appropriately enough, had no discernible response. Henry let his arms back down and went for his beer. I wondered how many he’d had before I’d arrived, and how many were to come before we were through.
It wasn’t long before he was regularly clapping me on the shoulder, and I had to admit to myself that we were incontrovertibly watching the game together. Ordinarily this would have put me off, but I felt an odd, almost silly sense of camaraderie with him, this devout fan who’d come all the way from Chicago. Probably it was a grave flight over, given what he’d had to discuss with his own dad about the grandfather’s failing health, the settling of affairs; but here the youngest Henry was at MetLife, oblivious to all of that, perhaps by the designs of the Oliff clan.
Henry got even friendlier as time went on, leaning right over my seat, plastic beer cup in hand, nudging me meaningfully at every turn in the game. He saw the pad I’d brought along, too, and even boldly reached down for it before I was able to push it out of sight with my foot. I told him what I’d be doing later on with it, though not to what purpose. He seemed pleased enough his team had an artist’s eye trained on it. He started explaining things to me, just to help me along in digesting the on-field action, while the Williams man checked in on us quizzically from time to time, taking the measure of this new friendship that had sprouted in a part of the stands, the rich part, where few bonds ever formed. The Bears were short on good receivers, Henry noted. They’d taken one early in the second round: Johnny Farrell out of Ole Miss. You know about anything of this? his look seemed to say. I did. Farrell’s ceiling was a lot lower than Duke’s, but his game was more polished, which meant he’d be immediately productive on the field, not a project the coaching staff would have to work on before seeing consistent dividends. With just three games in the books, this piece of conventional wisdom was already looking dubious. Dropping dead-on passes, being manhandled off the line, getting into his breaks late, Farrell’s follies had contributed to several picks. The occasional double-coverages thrown at Farrell—opposing coaches always did this to rookies, to test their nerve—had led to a clutch of offensive pass interference calls against him. He’d fumbled three times already, too, defenders jacking the ball right out of his hands.
Duke, though—Duke was actually making things happen, Henry declared coolly. This was really just his third game, since he’d only played a few downs in the season opener. He’d only been signed a week before that, so even now he was probably shaky with the playbook. Yet already he was seeming like the surer bet than Farrell, whatever the baggage he brought with him. Baggage hadn’t stopped Dez Bryant, right? And what about Beckham, making game-breaking plays through all the drama? I could see Henry enjoyed blitzing me like this as we watched. I think he’d assumed this level of detail would be too much for me, that it would prove his fanatic bona fides, not just to me but to all the bankers and lawyers in our midst, showing them that when it came down to it, he belonged here more than they did. I didn’t flinch. He was right about them, but not about me, not at this moment in my life, after sports television had entirely suffused my being. He had no idea just how much football I’d been watching the past months—exhibitions, pre-season games, even the Canadian Football League—far in excess of most sports fans, and maybe even more than him. Only a sick man could do it.
The next two plays of this ultimately futile three-and-out drive found Duke, not Farrell, drawing the double coverage. How quickly assessments in the league could change: Farrell had had a couple of bad games and already he’d become an afterthought for the opposition. It must have made him furious, and fearful. The Giants were effectively daring Skovksy to throw to Farrell. So he did. On second down, Farrell caught the ball on a little curl route near the far sideline, yielding three or four yards. The Bears went to him again immediately, on a play-action bootleg. He was open coming across the middle but dropped the ball, flinching at the safety who’d set up to level him. Cotter yanked down his headset and whipped around to him in full glower. Coach had to be genuinely crazy, Henry said, to be this upset a few plays into the game, particularly since the doubts about Farrell were already starting to get old. He might just lack the nerve for the pro game, the rap went, and this sort of cowardly drop only reaffirmed the suspicion. In fact, Cotter was famous for his aggression, recalling Ditka, the menacing leader of those eighties Bears squads. That’s how Cotter had won the job, actually, on a mandate of putting fire back into a franchise that had fizzled decades ago. It’s why they’d let him sign Duke, a wild card but a winner, too, and winning—whatever the cost—was all the Bears calculated for these days. Yet so far, on this opening drive, Duke was a non-factor. He never seriously got set along the line when the ball was snapped, and he didn’t push himself, accepting somewhat too readily that the double team took him out of play, that Farrell would have to carry the load. Not the ideal attitude in a decoy receiver; you couldn’t fool anyone so half-heartedly.
As the Giants took over after the punt, which was fair-caught, I turned to my sketchbook, a full-sized pad, and began to lay out Duke’s kick return on paper—mostly to have a reason to disengage, at least temporarily, from Henry, who was yelling a series of qualified shits and fucks in Manning’s direction as he got under center for the snap. I’d have to dump this sketch as soon as I was home. It had no authority at all, and authority flowed from the right beginnings. You couldn’t build up to it or add it in later; it could only be preserved. So I kept retracing the first faulty lines, reinforcing errors, suggesting wrong volumes and misapprehensions of the field’s geometry from my unfamiliar vantage. Still, it was an effective shield from Henry, which is all I needed it to be. For a moment he was looking over my shoulder, impressed by what was actually abysmal, before I threw him a stern glance and put my hand on top of the drawing. He leaned back and chuckled, and soon after went off in search of the bathroom and another beer. Really I was passing time until the Bears had the ball back, but the opportunity wouldn’t come for a while: the Giants, a perennial hit-or-miss team, were looking strong so far, steadily moving the chains with a recently revived running game. And the Bears, Henry admitted once he’d returned, quite collegiately, with two beers, had a leaky defense. He sat next to me, in fact, in Karen’s vacant seat. Luckily he was quite comfortable talking to me without my having to look at him, easing things substantially. It pained him to speak ill of the franchise, long famed for its defensive prowess, but it was the kind of thing you couldn’t shade without losing credibility among football fans. And so he was dismayed but not surprised that the Giants were effortlessly finding first downs. But the Bears would tighten up, he assured me, or himself.
Perhaps, but not now. The Giants marched seventy-five yards down the field, Beckham caught a couple of short passes along the way, and the drive was capped by an improbable fourth-down Manning touchdown scramble from seven yards out—apparently the old man could still find a way. Henry groaned theatrically, and the Williams man hooted mockingly. There were many gentle heys and yeahs and all rights from right around us. This was as loose as these professionals could get in public. You couldn’t say who said what exactly, and I’m sure they preferred it that way: close to the vest, even on their day off.
In the event, the scramble was reviewed and the score waved off: Manning had, as fate (and Henry) would have it, stepped out of bounds at the decisive moment. Yet the Bears didn’t do much with the ball after getting it back. In fact, what I remember most vividly of the game, and this is a sure sign of a moribund contest, is the punting. The Giants had one of the two or three best legs in the NFL, and their man Mahoney artfully pinned the Bears back deep time and again. His counterpart took a more primitive approach, evidently kicking the ball as far as he could each time, without much thought to strategy, which led to a series of touchbacks. Most disappointing, from my point of view, was Skovksy’s only throwing to Duke a couple of times. Tight coverage was part of the explanation; the Giants seemed intent on not letting Duke get going. Henry also mentioned the receiver’s lackadaisical route-running (when else did he use this peculiar word?). The Bears might have felt they had to throw to Farrell, Henry said over his third cup of beer, the one he’d brought back for me but reclaimed for himself, sensing my indifference toward it. They had a lot more cash committed to him than to Duke, after all. The problem was, Farrell appeared to specialize in dropping balls, the easy balls you couldn’t drop and stay on the field for long.
The stadium Jumbotron replayed these botched catches in slow motion—red meat for the home fans. If the Giants themselves couldn’t do anything special on the field, the video staff could at least humiliate the other team. For the Bears, Farrell was the biggest embarrassment of all so far, the sore point to be worried by anyone interested in heckling Chicago. Henry wasn’t going to sweat it, though. What was happening with Farrell happened all the time with rookie wide-outs. Either nerves threw off their timing, or communication with their quarterback hadn’t emerged yet. Getting a passer in sync with his catchers was the hardest thing an offense had to do. So what if it hadn’t happened yet? The season was young.
Chemistry—and Farrell must have been worried about this—chemistry didn’t seem to be an issue for Duke. Early in the second quarter, Skovsky finally sent the ball his way on a broken play. Only shreds of the pocket remained. The quarterback scurried toward the sideline with his torso twisted back, ball half-cocked, looking downfield. Duke waved vaguely in the middle of the field. Skovsky was going to have to throw across his body, with his feet and weight going the wrong way. But the arm he’d shown off in practice, that backfoot bullet I’d watched him fire, gave me and Henry a good feeling.
Skovsky threw. Three defensive backs were closing in on this ball that, under the circumstances, didn’t have much on it. All signs pointed to an interception or an incompletion; no-one would have blamed Duke for such outcomes. But somehow, in the grand collapse of those three Giants around the Bear, we watched him come away with the ball. I couldn’t quite see how; I don’t think Henry could either. Nineteen had a defender hanging off his mask, yet he stayed on his feet. Like an ox he dragged the man three or four more yards. Now, it seemed, Duke was anything but aimless. A twenty-yard gain. Dear Henry nearly spilled his beer. This, I knew, was just the sort of catch Duke had made a living at in college. Everything had to break down before he could get to work.
In the end, the Bears’ drive stalled. They got a long field goal for their trouble, and that was all the scoring there was by halftime: 3-0, Chicago. Henry, pleased we were leading—he adopted me as a Bears fan, and I felt like one in his company—escorted me to the concession stands, where we got platters of top-heavy nachos whose glinting orange cheese-sauce overflowed onto the ground in gobs, and would dribble off with any sharp movement we made walking them back through the concourses. Bits of jalapenos and ground beef would leave our plates this way, too. Henry bought himself another beer, of course, and smiled and pointed out the bar, all its liquor bottles, in case beer wouldn’t do for me. Something about Henry made me want to stay sober, though. He was right to sense condemnation in my abstention, though the problem wasn’t beer as such. I just couldn’t possibly eat these nachos and get drunk here with him. There had to be limits. But the nachos—now that they were in my hands, I was happy to have them. There was no comparable foodstuff outside the ecology of the ballpark. You had supermarket and pub versions of nachos, but the cheese was never tangy enough, or the chips tasted too much of actual corn or grain, whereas the proper flavor was more like salted crackers than anything else. I picked at the platter as we walked back to our seats, making my way up a steep staircase that threw me, suddenly, into the open, with all that blue sky and green grass in front. By the time I’d taken my seat, the paper boat of chips was sagging ominously. I’d asked for extra cheese sauce, yes, but the man had gone too far. The soggy edges of the boat were beginning to give way; some cheese had already made it over the edge. I looked down and found a drizzle of orange on my pants.
Henry was laughing, holding his own nachos clear of him. A practiced hand, clearly. He could have warned me—this would have happened to him many times before—but he just kept giggling and chewing those filthy things. Even the Williams man seemed to be getting in on the fun, giving me a wry wink. So, with real disgust for the both of them, and a savage pleasure in I don’t know what exactly, I took the leaky mess and tossed it like a pie, chip-first, into the aisle, splattering cheese in a wide sweep. The Williams man and the dewlapped gentleman beside him were aghast—and not only them. They wouldn’t look at me. Good. At least there wouldn’t be any more wryness. Henry’s laughter finally subsided. He even stopped chewing for a moment as his eyes bulged incredulously. He’d pushed me to it, though. I wasn’t about to feel bad. He closed his eyes momentarily, gathering himself, I presumed. Then he squinted at me, his face went funny, and finally, without warning, he slapped me on the back harder than he had all day, offering me his heartiest congratulations, being duly impressed, I suppose, by my utter disrespect for our luxury section, for the Williams man and his ilk. And just like that, I made the grade with Henry. It pleased me more than I would have guessed, which was the best kind of pleasure, the kind you never expected to find.
I was still licking encrusted cheese from my cuticles, even sipping once or twice from Henry’s beer, when Karen showed up.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said, inspecting the nacho sculpture I’d created in the aisle; it had taken about half an hour for the cheese to set like concrete, fastening the whole thing in place. I didn’t know that I looked surprised. I probably wouldn’t have, had I not made a friend I wasn’t quite sure she’d like. I pointed rather lamely to Henry, who was occupying her seat. He and Karen looked at each other and she introduced herself to him. She pushed her hand out to shake his, but he looked away. Despite his masculine bluster, maybe he wasn’t so good with women. She was certainly pretty enough to make you nervous, particularly when coupled with her gentle assertiveness. Eventually I told Karen his name, because he wouldn’t do it himself; he was busy chewing his soggy chips. He’d been fine to speak to me with his mouth full. I’d been listening to his mushy words, feeling the tortilla flecks ricochet off my face as he spoke. But, apparently, he couldn’t open his mouth with a pretty girl around. He was stuffing in more chips without chewing, to stall for time and readjust his approach now that the girl I’d mentioned had actually turned up. I felt sorry for what was being lost: I knew it was the end of the Henry I’d been getting to know. From here on out, I would get Henry-in-front-of-a-pretty-girl, who was liable to be far less interesting.
The Chicagoan stood and gathered his victuals and moved down one seat. Already he was showing some semblance of manners, which didn’t gibe with anything I liked about him. Why had I bothered hurling the nachos? Not for this! Now, if I were to do anything of the sort again, I knew he would feign surprise, even reproach, like the Williams man he was sitting directly beside, who looked alarmed once more but needn’t have been. Henry would be a good boy from now on, I could tell already. Karen smiled softly at my former friend, squeezed his forearm to avoid any nachos debris further down. She appreciated manners in whomever she found them, even a heavyset teenaged boy in a stained Cutler replica jersey. I thought her kindness might encourage him to strike up a conversation with her, if only small talk. But it seemed just to intimidate him further. He doubled down on the chips, and when he ran out of them he got up almost immediately, saying he needed the restroom. On his way past me, though, he smirked at me admiringly. I think he thought she was my girlfriend. I’d really made the grade with him now.
“So, how was Friday?” Karen asked me.
Friday? Indirection wasn’t her way, of course, but I’d not expected her to cut to the quick quite so sharply. The Bears kicked off just then to start the second half, so I paused in apparent deference to the game, as Henry had, and then, instead of answering her, I went straight for the pad at my feet. How could she interrupt me now, given how conscientious I was being about a Cosquer project?
“I thought you would have let me know something by now,” she pressed.
This time I was saved by helmets cracking like gunfire. The returner’s arms spiked forward and the ball fell to the ground. This was called the fencing response, the venerable diagnostic index of a loss of consciousness owing to blunt trauma. The Giants recovered the fumble, but players on both sides—is this half of what they did these days?—gestured quickly to the sidelines for the gurneys. I’d been looking at Karen at the moment of impact, watched her head recoil at the shot. Even if you’d seen your share of football on television, I couldn’t imagine a more bracing introduction to the live game. It would have confirmed for her every critical thought that had been swirling furiously around the game now for a decade: the CTE, the progressive loss of executive function, the violence it had induced in Aaron Hernandez, Junior Seau, Ray Rice, Richie Incognito, Kareem Hunt.
Karen murmured a few words while an unknown Giant got stretchered off the field. The downed man gave the ritual thumbs-up as he approached the tunnel, although the gesture was spare and meek. It looked like it cost him a lot, and indeed the Jumbotron showed his thumb twitching. But the crowd depended on this gesture: everything’s good. On cue, a roar went up. Karen, not yet acclimated to NFL expiation, groaned in disgust, and I understood her, though I felt with the crowd. What sort of project had she and I signed on to? This must have worried her privately, the use of an NFL athlete for Cosquer business. Was it wrong to profit from this grotesquerie?
The second half was short on scoring like the first. I was sorry there wasn’t some bit of magic for her, to offset the genuine fright the game continuously delivered even to its partisans. Not just that massive hit that greeted her at the start, but routine hits and blocks, often far off the ball. If that original demolition had left her speechless, prevented her, thankfully, from inquiring too closely about Daphne—what happened? what did you make of her? why didn’t you invite me along?—the smaller, routine traumas of the game were enough to keep her silent, inducing in her only miniscule flinches. I could see Karen’s neck tense each time, the skin going taut, and that tremor of her head as it retracted, cued precisely to whichever of the hundreds of on-field collisions happened to fall along her line of sight: reflexive responses to the unfolding game before us, from choice seats that made the experience as vivid, as gut-punching, as could be. Perhaps too vivid for all but the Henrys of the world—he who, when he returned to his seat behind me much later (I don’t know where all he’d gone), would offer muffled cheers, no more voluntary than Karen’s flinches, to the very same happenings on field.
Television screens cleaned up the game, distanced you from the worst of it. Tragedy in general depends on the gap; otherwise staged traumas become too painful to witness in tranquility. The pleasure is lost. I think this is what happened to Karen. She could find no peace. Had she verbalized her troubled response to the game, I might have rolled my eyes. Henry surely would have, at least privately. But these physiological responses of Karen’s were more convincing than any sermonizing. They displayed, in real time, how a football game, even a low-scoring one, amounted to a long procession of shocks. The live game was nothing like the televised version, where commentary drowned out most of the field noise, which was anyway pulled down low in the audio mix. In person, from the moment the ball was snapped, there was a crunching to be heard as opponents of all positions collided all over the field. This crunch accompanied every snap, with infinite variations, depending on the particular nature and sequence of the collisions involved in a given play. No matter what happened, no matter which team benefitted from it, no matter if anyone scored or not, you kept hearing it right up to the whistle, this syncopated banging of bodies. And the fans ultimately came for this, not the scoring as such. Yes, they desperately wanted to win the game, but so long as they had some point advantage, as the Bears currently did, they were only too pleased, like Henry, to lose themselves in this percussive symphony.
As the game wore on, the music did change subtly. The athletes picked themselves up off the field a bit more slowly, and their movements, even their impacts, began to lose their original crispness, their bodies bruising like ripe fruit. By the fourth quarter, everyone would have been playing through a fog from their heads having slammed into the turf, and each other, dozens of times throughout the afternoon. In the end, four or five of them would be helped off the field by trainers. Two would end up leaving by cart. Yet I can’t say I was genuinely worried for anyone’s safety. No-one was, it felt like.
Duke, anyway, seemed never to get caught by blind hits. He had a peculiar and profound awareness of space, and he used this gift to send player after player to the ground. In his dreams, Henry said to us, nineteen must have been a bulldozing defender, not a pass catcher. I was doodling by this point, mostly because tight coverage was keeping Duke on the margins of the game. We could see him trying to overcome this, wearing down the secondary with full-speed blocks and shoving his way through press coverage to create more space for himself. The result was two offensive pass interference penalties and a personal foul for unnecessary roughness, which brought back a touchdown run early in the fourth quarter that would have given Chicago some cushion.
By the fourth quarter, Karen’s cowering was subtler but there all the same. She didn’t ask me or Henry for any explanation of what we were seeing, as she knew I’d come to observe, not to teach, and any tediousness of that sort would only provide me a ready excuse for why I hadn’t brought her along to meet Daphne. So we found ourselves sitting in our familiar, sturdy silence, with Henry hollering as quietly as he could and the Williams man and his friend slowly losing patience with the game of attrition before us.
New York had been threatening to score all day, and finally they managed it, tying things up at three with a chip shot from the left hashmark. With two-and-a-half minutes remaining, Duke returned a punt from his thirty, weaving back toward midfield from the sideline, stepping around incoming defenders in his methodical way, creating rhythms none of them could dance to, four or five of them stumbling to the ground, some of the best athletes in the world made to look foolish. When the Giants finally brought him down, he'd made it all the way to their twenty. An incredible run, really, the second significant piece of work from Duke today, and once again a potentially game-changing one.
Skovsky went to him immediately, never mind the double coverage. The pass was slightly high but no-one was going to be talking about the throw—Duke should have had it. Instead the nose of the ball struck his fingertips at the top of his jump and the pigskin went spraying dangerously downfield. On second down, the Bears picked up four yards on an option pass; on third, Farrell cleverly batted down an errant pass that was likely to be picked off. The Bears took the field goal. Three more points, traceable to Duke.
The Giants did nothing with their final drive. A quick three and out, a punt, and the Bears bled the clock down to nothing. Duke didn’t even come onto the field for the possession. Henry was elated by the final line, 6-3 Bears, and in his exuberance spoke to Karen again, told her how she’d lucked into a real game today, even if it didn’t seem like it to her. I would have preferred a slightly less real game, so that she, my partner in this business, would have something more positive to leave with. She took it well, though. And I’d managed to get in four or five loose charcoals, including a quite developed one of Duke stretching on the sidelines, which I thought might be of real use to us.
Henry said his goodbyes speedily. His grandfather was anxious to see him; he had to hurry back. He came around into the aisle and leaned past me to shake hands with Karen; perhaps his team’s winning had given him confidence. He offered me a fist-bump and pointed to the fallen nachos, now petrified at the bottom of the stairs—a surprise for the staff, he said with a chuckle. I laughed, too, though Karen was occupied feeling around in her purse. Henry took the first step up the aisle and again gave me the look: admiration for the prize next to me. There was something small I saw in his eyes. All his sports knowledge, his passion, was for a sport that knew nothing of him, except in those few moments during the game, when there was a brief lull in the stadium, and he would scream his loudest from the stands. Someone on the Bears’ sideline, player or coach, had to have made out whatever bit of rude advice he’d offered the team. Wasn’t that a kind of acquaintance? Yet that look in his eyes, just as he was leaving, told me how glad he would have been to trade all those moments he’d collected over the years for what I had with Karen. What he thought I had.
“Do you want me to go?” Karen wasn’t looking at me as she said this.
“Why?”
“Well, you met Daphne on your own, so—”
“You can’t be upset over that. It was convenient, that’s all.”
“Oh, no.” She said it so plainly I almost believed her. “I just meant, if you and Duke will be more comfortable... It’s the same reason I didn’t show up at the beginning of the game. To give you time.”
“You’re Mr. Garrett’s guests?”—a question in form alone. MetLife staff, from the jacket badge. I immediately thought of my nachos just below us. The speaker was short and Puerto Rican, that’s the way she looked anyway, with tightly braided hair of black. She was chewing a giant wad of gum that looked like silly putty, and with each chew I could see the fillings in her teeth. She kept slapping the rubberized antennae of her radio while static intermittently came through its speaker, voices that were indecipherable without, I supposed, long experience with such devices. “Gotcha,” she replied to the noise. Without a word to us she started moving quickly up the aisle toward the exits.
“Oh, you have to come meet Duke,” I said to Karen, who seemed already energized by the briskness of our escort as we snaked through the concourses. We nearly lost sight of her more than once. The woman expertly shouted people out of her way, but strangely didn’t bother with smoothing our way. I was left to watch for any glimpse of her silvery hoop earrings as they jangled. She would pause periodically, just when she was about to slip off our horizon. She had an unerring sense for exactly when this was, even though she only turned back once to scan for us. On that occasion, she actually stopped and waited for us to catch up, snapping the gum and speaking into her radio, which seemed almost to be her companion, her friend. When we got within a few yards of her, she gave us the briefest of reproving looks and speeded onward.
Eventually we entered a parallel arrangement of walkways meant only for staff and VIPs. It seemed to cut the place right at the joints, linking areas of the stadium you thought couldn’t be so close together: the concession stands and the clubhouse, say. Everything was quiet in this alternate circulatory system: through the heavy concrete walls you could only barely hear the drunken yells of fans filing out. Without the crowds now, it was easy to keep pace with the woman, and in the new hush I could hear long spiels coming from her radio in BEV—maybe she wasn’t Puerto Rican—though I still had trouble making out the meanings. We twisted in all directions, occasionally rising up stairs, before finally descending to the locker-rooms.
She walked us into an adjacent room. “You mind waiting here?” She asked us this almost charmingly. “He’ll be out soon.”
I thanked her and she was off.
“What’d you think, anyway?” I asked Karen as we both sat down.
“I’ve never been to a game.”
“Not football necessarily.”
“Anything. Any game.”
“You looked... yeah.”
“The players are so much tinier than on television. But they feel way larger.”
“Too large.”
“Sometimes. Yes. Sometimes...”
“What?”
“I wonder if—”
“What, whether we should be doing this?” I squeezed her hand and she threw me off just as fast.
“Not exactly.”
“The game’s voluntary enough, isn’t it?”
“Wow.”
“I can’t cry for millionaires knocking a ball around. That’s your turf.”
“I’m not crying. I’m, I don’t know.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”
Through the open door we could see Bears trickling out of the locker room. Many had giant balloons of ice taped just under their knees or over their shoulders. One, a lineman who was bloated even without his pads on, came out limping in just a neoprene tank-top and jockey shorts, with two assistants spotting him. After a win, spirits ran high. Even the lame, as much as they squirmed in pain with every step, wore the halo of victory, and that’s all you saw in their eyes, even when their faces winced from the beating they’d taken.
Journalists crowded around, dashing in and out. There were suited men as well, one of whom swept the place with an aggressive gaze until it fell on me. He strutted forward at a good clip, smiling, his longish hair bouncing slightly and his brown lace wingtips clacking. The gray pinstriped suit he wore was cut a size too small, in a manner that was slowly but inexorably going out of style. The man flared into view under the strong light of the little annex we’d been kept in, some sort of media waystation that none of the reporters were actually using. Apparently they’d rather get their story in the locker room from half-naked men—and the players would rather give it there, too, saving them time.
“Here for Duke, correct? Arête?” he asked as stood in front of us. I didn’t answer to the company’s, or really the brand’s, name. It still sounded alien to me, like someone else’s possession, but Karen was quick to pop up and say yes to this man.
“Fred,” he said, pumping her hand while studying me.
Duke’s agent, Fred Hartley. His name had been cropping up lately on Fox Sports owing to his controversial roster of clients. He was talked about like some infamous attorney who loved nothing more than to defend evil itself, for its own sake. Not that it didn’t pay well. He’d once represented the most untouchable of them all, Michael Vick. Now even Vick had been forgiven. There was nothing you couldn’t come back from; I’m sure that’s how Hartley saw it.
Karen gave her name to him but I didn’t offer mine. I barely looked at him, aside from his predictably impeccable shoes. He retreated to the doorway, almost pulling Karen along with him.
“Duke’s keyed up about this,” he said. “Just let me get him.”
Hartley scraped sideways into the Bears’ locker room, his spotted blue tie ending up parallel to the floor as several reporters shot out trailing a tight end, a man of real magnitude who was dressed beautifully to boot. Suits rarely looked right on men of ordinary physique, but he was archetypal, so his garments’ lines merged with his own. Two reporters carrying phones as though they were mikes came out next, and then, after a small pause, there was Duke, clad in a black stretch top, icing himself just under the arm, his ribcage. He was no taller than I was, six feet at most. Yet unlike me, he was constructed unimpeachably. Some of the Bears I could see around him, however, looked like cartoons. Whenever I perused those sepia-toned photos of leatherheads from football’s early days, not one of them cut that figure. Syringes and creams must have been involved in turning men into such creatures, and in truth every year players were knocked out of the game on PED charges. But Duke was different: smoothly muscled, sinuous, with canonical dimensions; he was manifestly strong but also discreet.
“And here they are,” I heard Hartley say as Duke stepped gingerly into the room.
Duke pinned the ice under his right arm and offered his claw of a left hand. Karen took it in both of hers. I stood up, finally.
“So,” he said softly as he looked us both over with big, cool eyes, “you’ll be drawing me.” He was the game breaker today—his halo was bright.
“I will,” I said.
“And what are you going to do?” He touched Karen’s shoulder and dropped his eyes while taking his hand back.
“She’ll be writing about you,” I answered.
Duke looked at her again. “Is he right?”
“Sort of,” she said.
He laughed knowingly. He’d been a pro with the media since he was a red-shirted freshman; he conducted himself now with the composure such experience confers.
“Any headlines on the pictures,” Karen added, “that sort of thing. But what a game you had!”
“He did, he really did,” Hartley said.
I shook Duke’s hand, realizing that, like a pianist’s, his hands were his prized possession, the two things responsible for my being here today at all. He applied no pressure to my hand, simply extended his own to be fondled. Maybe he hated wasting them on anything but catching passes. This at least would explain why someone who’d been the center of attention for some time at Berkeley, a star, had the handshake of a forgotten man, the kind who’d have to go postal for anyone to notice him. Just as I was thinking of pulling my hand away from his, he squeezed it a little, to show a hint of respect, I thought, or else the opposite: to suggest the force he could generate if he needed to. Then, holding my eyes, he simply opened up his hand, this cavernous thing, so that our limbs were no longer in contact. The shake was over without my having moved an inch.
“That your sketchbook?” Duke asked.
“There’s nothing really worth seeing in it yet.”
“Well, let me know when there is,” Hartley said. “I’m clearing everything.” He thrust his card forward—it had nothing but his name on it in microscopic letters—clasped my arm, and patted Duke on his good shoulder with the authority of an age-old friend. From Duke’s patronizing nod I was sure that wasn’t true. He probably didn’t appreciate his white handler pressing his client’s rights just now, when he was here to do it himself, if the need arose.
“You really like football?” Duke said. “You follow it?” Karen and I hesitated. “I mean, you understand the game, right? The basics, anyway.” He was on the cusp of disappointment or anger, it seemed, though all you could see in him now was post-game beatitude. You knew it couldn’t last.
“He probably knows more than that,” Karen said.
“Oh yeah?”
“A little. But I’d actually hate to know too much before we started.”
Duke gave me a cocksure smile, as if offering me the look that should have accompanied my words but didn’t. I think he was impressed, early resistance being so alien to him.
“We’ll see, I guess,” he said. He lifted his arm and let the ice crash to the ground. “Don’t take me too seriously, though.” He stepped on the ice, packed it down. Larger pieces broke into smaller ones. “You know when this happened?” He was massaging his ribs and squinting from the pain while leaning onto the ice and crumbling it with his weight.
“On the interception?” I guessed. “That tackle?”
“Nah. That’s what they all thought, too. I didn’t feel anything on that play. No, this happened on a nothing play. You’d never pick it out on tape. Middle linebacker caught me with a little bit of his helmet, first quarter. I was feeling it the rest of the game, just barking louder and louder. I don’t even know if he knew he hit me.”
Hartley twisted around and segued into a new role—an agent played so many—that of bodyguard. He had the build, actually, of a former player, someone who was very good in high school but only average in college. At that point he would have washed out of the game, kept up his business and communications double major, and turned it into this, servicing (or fleecing) the players that actually did make it through to the pros. His resentment would have justified all this once upon a time; now agenting was just a lifestyle with endless rewards, like those shoes, that jacket. As if revisiting his playing days, he seemed to take an athletic pleasure now in sealing off the room from press stragglers. They’d had their chance with Duke already, in the locker room, and anyway they would have put to him the four or five questions they put to every athlete, every time, whether they were in the winners’ or losers’ locker room: How were you feeling out there today? What makes this team so tough to beat? What was the game plan going in? What can you take from this game into the next one? Any niggles you’re dealing with? Beneath all this was the real question they had for Duke, one that had been asked so many times now it was pointless stating it again, though in fairness it was the only one of real interest at this point: Do you really believe you’re going to last in the NFL?
Duke’s voice dropped down low as he spoke with us, while the stragglers hurled questions that Hartley neatly swatted away. The receiver’s tone wavered uncannily between the brusqueness of athletes and something more formal, reflective, almost academic. All this interest in him from the reporters seemed to drive him inward, so that I had to move closer to hear him, even cock my ear.
“You see me lay out those guys today?” he asked Karen conspiratorially. He turned to me, the arrogance returning to his countenance: “Did you draw that?”
I shook my head ruefully. “I can, though.”
“But do you think it would make a good picture?”
“Depends on how it’s done,” Karen said.
Duke rubbed his chin teasingly, as though his imagination had been set alight.
“You know, though,” I said, “I’m not sure how many straight football pictures we’re going to want.”
“I’m playing. I’m glad you’re not doing too many of those. My friend Fred here tells me we’re going more high-concept. Like the stuff you’re selling, right?” He pulled on his elastic vest at the neck and it stretched a great distance, probably two feet from his torso. He let it back down and only then did I notice, in black on black, the word Arête stitched right over his chest, with the diacritic transformed into a pictogram suggesting a severe and craggy peak. “This is beautiful stuff.”
Karen leaned in to examine the fabric.
“It’s got so much flex, it feels almost loose. You barely know it’s on when you’re running in it, but when it’s back in neutral, when you’re not pushing through it, there’s real shape, support. Never felt anything like it.” He tugged it one last time and it returned to form, holding his ribs in place like a soft cast. “And, I have to say, Theria isn’t so bad either.” A grin came over him. “Cotter doesn’t know a thing about it, so don’t worry. But that’s what’s in my Gatorade bottle.”
The reporters’ chatter faded as Hartley sent one beat writer after another packing with a glib comment or non-answer, and often a knowing compliment that couldn’t have been sincere yet nevertheless satisfied them that a modicum of respect had been paid.
“But right now, I’m just saying hi to you, like, Yes, I know you’re here. Obviously I’m not ready to go. Let me catch you in an hour? Two hours? The team’s letting me stay the night here. My hometown. So I can nurse these ribs.”
“Where should we meet?” I asked.
“I’ll text you.”
He bent at the knees, keeping his back straight and lowering himself to the floor to scrape up the newly compacted ice bag. I gave my number to Hartley, who was done clearing the room, and he showed Karen and me out to the concourse.
I stood there in the wind that had kicked up, now that the sun was falling. Karen’s long dark hair was slapping me in the face; she made no effort to prevent this. I took a step back to get out of range and she bunched her locks in her hands and winked at me.
“You want to handle this on your own tonight?”
“Why do you keep trying to—”
“All we know for sure is that there’ll be drawings—that’s why,” she said. “They didn’t necessarily want copy at all, remember? James especially.”
“There will be, Karen. Just—”
“Oh, I guess I know that. At some point, there’ll be something for me.” She grabbed my hand, squeezed it, then put herself very close to me. I think she was accepting the apology she knew I’d offer about not inviting her to the theater, had I been a more straightforward man. “But why don’t you get us started? He might speak to you more freely anyway, don’t you think?”
I frowned as if I didn’t quite understand. Really, I just wanted to hang on to her hand. Henry Oliff might have been right.
“I mean, to another man.” She laughed and looked at me and grabbed me by both hands; her hair went back to lashing me as she leaned into me, or I into her. I felt the blood in her cheek.