Page 57 of Rookie Mistake
"The discipline failed," I say.
"I know."
"The failing is the thing."
"I know."
"You are the thing, Eli. The discipline failed because of you and the failing is the best thing that has happened to me and the failing is the freedom."
He smiles. Not the grin. The real smile. The underneath smile that arrives when the performance is off and the room is safe and the person in the room is the person who makes the safety possible.
"Rookie mistake," he says.
"What?"
"Breaking your discipline. Making you cry during sex. Falling for a man who folds his T-shirts like religious ceremonies."
"These are not mistakes."
"Best mistakes I ever made."
His head returns to my chest. My hand returns to his hair. The lamp is on. The apartment is warm. The teaspoon is in the mug. The reading glasses are on the counter. The door is open.
The discipline failed.
The living begins.
ELI
The season continues.
This is the thing about hockey: the season continues regardless of what happens in the rooms where people live. The ice does not care about the crisis or the resolution or the teaspoon in the mug. The ice cares about edges and timing and whether you are fast enough and smart enough and brave enough to play.
I am fast enough. I am getting smarter. The brave is the new part, and the brave is the part that changes everything.
We make the playoffs. The Reapers finish third in the Eastern Conference with 102 points and the 102 points are the franchise's best season and the best season was built by thirty men who play hockey and who love each other (some literally, some fraternally, all in the committed, irreplaceable way that a team loves when the team has decided that the loving is ordinary).
Nikolai has the best defensive season of his career. The numbers are the numbers. Mars could recite them. I cannot. But the number that matters is the one that is not a number: Nikolai plays differently now. Lighter. The absence of the weight. The weight was the wall. The wall is gone. What remains is thehockey of a man who is not defending anything except the blue line.
I finish the season with twenty-six goals and fifty-one points. The points are the points. The thing the points do not measure is the thing Callahan identified: I stopped asking for permission. The asking-for-permission was the performance applied to the ice. The performing-on-the-ice stopped because the performing-off-the-ice stopped and the two stoppings are the same stopping.
The grin is still there. It will always be there because the grin is mine and the mine is real. But the grin is no longer the first tool. It is a tool. The first tool is the honesty - harder and slower and less charming and infinitely more useful.
The apartment is ours. We said the word. We said the word on a Tuesday in March when Nikolai was cooking (pasta, always pasta, though the sofrito has been incorporated into the rotation and the incorporation has produced a fusion that Carmen would describe as "acceptable" and that Nikolai describes as "an experiment in cultural negotiation"). I said: "This is our apartment." He said: "It has been our apartment since the teaspoon." I said: "The teaspoon was the lease signing?" He said: "The teaspoon was the commitment. The lease is paperwork."
The reading glasses are on the nightstand. The reading glasses go on for reading and come off for everything else. The glasses are glass and wire and a prescription for mild astigmatism. The glasses are no longer a wall. The glasses are just glasses.
My mother sent a second package. This one contained rice, beans, sofrito, a bottle of hot sauce, and a pamphlet. The pamphlet is titled "Understanding Bisexuality: A Guide for Parents" and it has been annotated in my mother's handwriting with notes like "this is what mijo said" and "Dave read this part" and "Luisa says this page is wrong." My father's contribution tothe pamphlet is a sticky note on the back that says: "That's great, buddy. Love, Dad."
The sticky note is on the refrigerator. The sticky note is the Dave monument. The Dave monument says two sentences and means them completely.
Ava visited in February. Ava met Nikolai. The meeting lasted forty-eight hours and involved Ava asking Nikolai approximately one hundred questions with the prosecutorial zeal of a second-year law student who considers the cross-examination of her brother's boyfriend a professional development opportunity. Nikolai answered every question with the flat, precise, unintimidated calm of a man who has been hip-checked by Mik Volkov and considers a Georgetown law student a modest threat by comparison.
"He passed," Ava said on the phone after she left.
"Was there a rubric?"
"Of course there was a rubric. He scored highly on emotional intelligence, culinary skills, and jaw structure. He lost points for the T-shirt folding, which I maintain is a symptom of a larger organizational pathology."
