The Uninvited Guest. John Degen
share with anyone.
A black hat was shoved onto his head and knocked down over his eyes for the trip past the photographers’ bench. He was aware of several bright flashes and men calling out his name. He recognized the voices as those of reporters he’d said hello to in the hallways every other evening, but this evening he knew he was to pretend he didn’t hear them. With the hat over his eyes, Stan saw only his own feet on the floor, tripping up several flights of stairs and crossing thresholds here and there until they were finally directed to a chair beside a large oak table in the GM’s private meeting room. The door to the room banged shut against several more shouts and flashes and Stan was left in the relative quiet and darkness, two stern men in dark suits as his companions. Looking at the faces of the two men, Stan was aware he had lost his job, the greatest job he’d ever hoped to have. He made note of it in his head. The job was gone. When he closed his eyes, he saw his wife’s face.
Nearing 1:00 a.m. the League president came into the office and dismissed Stan’s two silent guards. He sat down across the table from Stan, took off his hat and laid it on the table in front of him. Stan could smell the sweat and Brylcreem coming from the older man’s perfectly combed hair. The president had been talking to reporters and getting his picture taken since the end of the game. Stan heard exhaustion in his breathing.
“Stan,” the president began with a sigh, and then veered off in another direction unwilling to get right to the point “. . . Stan, check that top drawer there in that desk. He’s got to have a bottle of something in there.”
Stan shuffled to the GM’s desk, pulled a half-full bottle of bourbon from the drawer and sat back down.
“Well don’t just look at it man, let’s have a drink.”
The bottle slid back and forth across the table several times.
“Stan,” the president made another start, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next week or next month or next year. I don’t know. But for tomorrow and the next day and certainly the next, someone else is the head timekeeper here in Toronto. We can’t have you in the booth, Stan.”
“My wife is sleeping with a man… another man, I mean.” Stan hadn’t exactly decided he wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen during those lost two seconds, but he’d certainly never planned to be talking about it at that moment, just as he was being eased out of his job by a half-drunk sixty-year-old businessman in a sweaty suit. He said the words and then took a longer-than-average pull on the whiskey bottle.
“Well, Stan, I don’t know what to say. That’s a punch in the gut, isn’t it?”
The president drummed his fingers on the tabletop and looked around the room uncomfortably. He had been expecting denials and apologies. These were things he was used to from his employees, and he knew how to muscle his way past them. But a confession like this; what was he supposed to do with this?
“Are you saying you did this on purpose, Stan?”
The bottle was empty when Stan spoke again. “It’s the kind of idea you like to toy with in your head, isn’t it? You like to think about what you’d do if you came home early one night and found… you know, like what happens in books. You like to think you’ll have something to say about it.”
“You’re shook up, Stan. Did you understand what I said earlier, about tomorrow?”
“I understood.”
“Where do you live, Stan? Let me give you a ride. I have a driver waiting downstairs.” The older man looked at his watch and started to mutter something about his wife waiting at home, but thought better of it. “You need to sleep this whole thing off.”
Stan directed the League driver to an address in Toronto’s far east end, where the streets finished themselves in wide sand beaches. He had an idea what he’d find at home and was in no hurry to get there. The car pulled up to the last house on the street.
“You live here?” the president asked with undisguised suspicion, peering past Stan to the large front lawn and flower borders of a lakefront mansion.
“We rent,” Stan said as he climbed out of the car.
“You rent what? The garage?” But Stan had slapped the black sedan’s roof twice and the driver began inching away from the curb.
“We’re not done talking, Stan,” the president shouted as the car picked up speed. “I want you in my office in a week.”
The beach was empty of people. Though the air was warm for early spring, it was well past midnight and even the boardwalk stragglers had wandered off home to bed. Stan found the waterline and sat down in the wet sand. He wanted to get calm and give the ringing in his ears a chance to subside. He wanted to run through things in his head and see if they still made sense, if the same conclusions could be drawn. To his right was the glow of the downtown, dominated by the steady red sign on top of the Royal York Hotel. On his left sat the squat, brooding darkness of a water filtration plant, unlit but clicking away in its gloom, preparing to help the city shower and get ready for another day.
The lake breathed a chilling mist in his face, and somewhere way out on the water a laker moaned in its engine, invisible, bypassing the city for some more industrial port further west. For a long time he thought of nothing. He stared out into the misty water and just breathed. For a while he slept like that, sitting up, wrapped in his coat.
When he found himself awake and thinking again, he was running over a familiar memory. He remembered how his mother used to force him to finish his meals as a child. He recalled the nightly standoff before a plate empty of everything but broccoli or green beans or some other vegetable he’d decided to hate for a while. He laughed quietly when he remembered these struggles, since they were so futile and unnecessary. He didn’t actually hate eating anything. He had an indifferent palate. Everything was just fine as long as it filled him, but there he was each evening, arms crossed, with his mother standing above him in a similar pose. A contest of patience. He wondered if she had enjoyed the game as well as he had.
He found himself standing, and then walking, his feet pulling him slowly toward home. There was no avoiding it. At some point, he would have to walk through the door and see that she had cleared out. At some point he’d have to admit to being alone. He might as well get on with it. He turned back toward land and crossed through a park to Queen Street. He turned west and walked the long quiet street leading downtown. At Woodbine, he stopped to wait out a light, though there were no cars on the road. He was beginning to feel tired. He was beginning to want his bed, no matter how empty, and suddenly he regretted the distance in front of him. The light turned green, but before he could move, he felt the strong grip of a man’s hand on his arm, stopping him, pulling him backwards.
“Take it,” the man said, his words full of spit and the stink of alcohol, “take it all, I don’t want it any more.”
The man had been slouched in a darkened doorway beside the intersection. Drunk and a little lost, he’d stopped in the doorway to relieve himself and had instead fallen asleep standing with his head against the bricks. Stan’s impatient shuffle at the light had woken him. There was a brick pattern of lines in his forehead.
“I thought it was the perfect deal, you know,” he said, crying a little as he used Stan for support, “but a man has to be a man. He just has to.”
The drunk clung to Stan’s coat, and Stan resisted the urge to push him off, certain they would both fall and not wanting to hear the sound of the man’s head hitting the sidewalk. The drunk was clinging with his left hand, a strong left hand, and pawing at Stan with his right. At first, Stan thought he might be being robbed, the man seemed so intent on Stan’s pocket, but then he realized the drunk was actually trying to give him money. The man’s right hand was tensed to grip a large wad of bills and he struggled with Stan’s coat, trying to get at the pocket so he could shove the cash inside.
“Say, what are you doing there, friend?” Stan said, wrestling the stronger man and knowing he’d surely lose. “I think you want to keep that for yourself. There looks to be an awful lot there.”