Playing Days Read Free Page B

‘High hopes’ – and those are what I left him with, as I grabbed my duffel from the backseat and stepped out.
    Mine was one of the apartments overlooking the road. Most of my teammates had lived in that block, at one time or another, but there were also civilians, as you might say. Evidence of families, too: small bicycles cluttering the walkways, watering cans, rubber boots. The bright variety of life displayed on washing lines, strung between bathroom window and balcony railing. Herr Henkel had given me the keys, and I struggled with one of them to enter the windowless stairwell. Jetlag had begun to set in. A day before I was in another world. Alone at last, I thought, almost grateful for the darkness as I walked up a short flight to the front door numbered on the keychain.
    The room it opened onto had a big bed in the middle, which looked luridly comfortable in the dusky light coming through the curtains drawn over the window opposite. These were thick and ugly, and the first thing I did was tear them down with a violence that suggested to me, for the only time that day, the carelessness of a young man’s joy. The waxy patterned cloth filled my fists; I pushed and kicked the curtains onto the floor. It was five o’clock on a summer’s afternoon, and the day had more or less cleared up – the sunlight had brightened as it leveled. The window overlooked a dirty walled-up balcony, which drained poorly; standing water had discolored the tiles. Beyond that was the road, and beyond the road were the farm and the valley and the woods. The transparent western light thickened to bronze before it faded altogether. That was the light I fell asleep in.
    It was dark when I woke up, partly from cold. I was hungry too, but not hungry enough to go looking for something to eat at that hour (it had just gone ten), so I decided to get cleaned up and changed and to head back to bed. We had an early start in the morning. Practice began at nine, and we opened the doors to the press from eleven o’clock. My duffel was lying where I had dropped it, on the pillow beside me, and I took out the basketball and began to unpack my clothes.
    When I was in college, I never had much interest in fashion, but I did develop a strange sort of ambition, regarding my wardrobe, to pare it down to a useful minimum. When I bought pants, I looked for a pair I could take interrailing through Europe, or wear to a funeral, or to a job interview – that would suit me in hot weather or cold; in rain; on long journeys; at grassy and dirty picnics. Even the sneakers I wore, all-black Air Jordans, once did service, under dark trousers, at a college ball. I liked to consider myself, not handsome or fashionable, but unattached, light-footed, always ready to leave. Folding my few things away, into the heavy antique wardrobe that loomed over the bed, I had the sense that one of my vanities had been put to use at last, had justified itself. That I was living as I had dreamed of living.
    The apartment had three rooms: a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. Only the bathroom overlooked the inner courtyard. There was a high window, designed no doubt to let a little air in, but I was tall enough to see out of it. Lights from the apartment complex glimmered inirregular squares. In the morning, I could give a shape to the pattern they made. The buildings were identical, but brightly and diversely colored; they’d also been set at odd angles to each other. But all I could see that night were a few lit windows, and I stared out at these for a minute, enjoying the sense of having arrived at a place where other people were already (inscrutably) at home.
    After a while, the glow in the nearest window resolved itself into a few dim shapes, and those shapes resolved themselves into a head, an arm, a loose dress. I realized that I was looking at a young woman with long hair. She was brushing it out in a way that suggested to me – I have three sisters