Sly and Trey were gone, Paolo told Rick as he moved to another table. Left with two blondes who spoke the language, albeit with a funny accent. Probably Irish, he thought.
After the third dance, maybe the fourth, Beverly finally convinced him to leave, through a side door to avoid her friends. They walked a few blocks, completely lost, then found a cab. They groped for ten minutes in the backseat until it stopped at the Regency. Her room was on the fifth floor. As Rick pulled the curtains, he saw the first hint of dawn.
He managed to open one eye in the early afternoon, and with it he saw red toenails and realized Bev was still asleep. He closed it and drifted away. His head felt worse the second time he awoke. She was not in the bed but in the shower, and for a few minutes he thought about his escape.
Though the disentanglement and clumsy goodbye would be over quickly, he still hated it. He always had. Was cheap sex really worth the lies on the run? “Hey, you were great, gotta go now.” “Sure, I’ll give you a call.”
How many times had he opened his eyes, tried to remember the girl’s name, tried to remember where he found her, tried to recall the details of the actual deed, the momentous occasion that got them into bed to begin with?
The shower was running. His clothes were in a pile by the door.
He suddenly felt older, not necessarily more mature, but certainly tired of the role of the bed-hopping bachelor with the golden arm. All the women had been throwaways, from the cute cheerleaders in college to this stranger in a foreign city.
The football-stud act was over. It had ended in Cleveland with his last real game.
He thought of Gabriella, then tried not to. How odd that he felt guilty lying under thin sheets listening to the water run over the body of a woman whose last name he never heard.
He quickly dressed and waited. The water stopped, and Bev walked out in a hotel bathrobe. “So you’re awake,” she said with a forced smile.
“Finally,” he said, standing and anxious to get it over with. He hoped she didn’t stall and want drinks and dinner and another night of it. “I need to go.”
“So long,” she said, then abruptly returned to the bathroom and shut the door. He heard the lock click.
How wonderful. In the hallway, he decided that she was indeed married, and she probably felt a lot guiltier than he did.
Over beer and pizza, the four amigos nursed their hangovers and compared stories. Rick, to his surprise, found such frat boy talk silly. “Ever hear of the forty-eight-hour rule?” he asked. And before anyone could answer, he said, “It’s pretty common in pro football. No booze forty-eight hours before kickoff.”
“Kickoff is in about twenty hours,” Trey said.
“So much for that rule,” Sly said, gulping his beer.
“I say we take it easy tonight,” Rick said.
The other three nodded but did not commit. They found a half-empty discopub and threw darts for an hour as the place filled and a band tuned up in one corner. Suddenly the pub was flooded with German college students, most of them female and all of them ready for a hard night. The darts were forgotten when the dancing began.
A lot of things were forgotten.
American football was less popular in Milan than in Parma. Someone said there were 100,000 Yanks living in Milan, and evidently most hated football. A couple hundred fans showed up for the kickoff.
The Rhinos’ home was an old soccer field with a few sections of bleachers. The team had labored for years in Series B before being promoted this season. They were no match for the mighty Panthers, which made it hard to explain their twenty-point lead at half-time.
The first half was Sam’s worst nightmare. As he anticipated, the team was flat and lackadaisical, and no amount of screaming could motivate them. After four carries, Sly was on the sideline gasping and heaving. Franco fumbled the ball away on his first and only carry. His ace quarterback seemed a bit slow, and his passes were uncatchable. Two were batted around long enough for the Rhinos’ safety to grab them. Rick fumbled one handoff, and refused to run the ball. His feet felt like bricks.
As they jogged off the field at halftime, Sam went after his quarterback. “You hungover?” he demanded, rather loudly, or at least loud enough for the rest of the team to hear. “How long you been in Milan? All weekend? You been drunk all weekend? You look like shit and you play like shit, you know that!”
“Thanks, Coach,” Rick said, still jogging. Sam stayed beside him step for step, and the Italians got out of the way.
“You’re supposed to be the leader, right?”
“Thanks, Coach.”
“And you show up all red-eyed and hungover and you can’t hit a barn with a pass. You make me sick, you know that?”
“Thanks, Coach.”
Inside the locker room, Alex Olivetto took over in Italian and it was not pretty. Many of the Panthers glared at Rick and Sly, who was gritting his teeth and fighting nausea. Trey had made no great errors in the first half, but he’d certainly done nothing spectacular. Paolo, so far, had been able to survive by hiding in the mass of humanity at the line of scrimmage.
A flashback. The hospital room in Cleveland, watching ESPN highlights and wanting to reach up to the IV bag and turn the valve so that the Vicodin could flow freely into his bloodstream and put him out of his misery.
Where were the chemicals when he needed them? And why, exactly, did he love this game?
When Alex grew tired, Franco asked the coaches to leave the room, which they gladly did. The judge then addressed his teammates. Without raising his voice, he pleaded for a greater effort. There was plenty of time. The Rhinos were an inferior bunch.
All of this was in Italian, but Rick got the message.
The comeback began in dramatic fashion, and was over before it really started. On the second play of the second half, Sly darted through the line and raced sixty-five yards for an easy touchdown. But by the time he reached the end zone, he was done for the day. He barely made it back to the sideline before crouching behind the bench and disgorging the entire weekend’s worth of hell-raising. Rick heard it but preferred not to look.
There was a flag, and after some discussion the play was called back. Nino had yanked a linebacker’s face mask, then placed a knee in his groin. Nino was ejected, and though this fired up the Panthers, it also infuriated the Rhinos. The cursing and taunting reached a nasty level, and Rick picked the wrong time to bootleg and run. He gained fifteen yards and, to prove his determination, lowered his helmet instead of stepping out of bounds. He was slaughtered by half the Rhinos’ defense. He staggered back to the huddle and called a pass play to Fabrizio. The new center, a forty-year-old named Sandro, bobbled the snap, the ball shot loose from the line, and Rick managed to fall on it. A large and angry tackle drilled him into the ground for good measure. On third and fourteen, he fired a pass at Fabrizio. The bullet was much too hard and hit the kid in the helmet, which he promptly removed and threw angrily at Rick as they left the field.
Fabrizio then left the field, too. He was last seen jogging toward the locker room.
With no running game and no passing game, Rick’s offense was left with few options. Franco punched the ball into the middle of the pileup over and over, quite heroically.
Late in the fourth quarter, trailing 34–0, Rick sat alone on the bench and watched the defense struggle valiantly to save face. Pietro and Silvio, the two psycho linebackers, hit like wild men and screamed at their defense to kill whoever had the ball.