home from work because she didn’t want him to worry about the long-distance charges the hospital would add to the bill he already had no idea how he would pay. As it turned out, he didn’t have to pay it; health insurance he hadn’t known he earned as a major league ballplayer paid most of it, and the team took care of the rest … and they hadn’t forgotten him, either, at least the organization hadn’t, even if none of his teammates ever visited him. The traveling secretary called him in the middle of the week, apologizing for not contacting him sooner. “The flight to Chicago was a nightmare, almost as bad as the one into Montreal,” he said. Because the Olympics had the entire city in a tangle, the baggage handlers mislaid half of the team’s equipment and it hadn’t even gotten to Chicago until halfway through Monday’s game. “We started out playing in souvenir jerseys until the fifth inning, when our stuff showed up.”
The traveling secretary asked Edward Everett what he wanted to do for the time being; if he wanted to stay in Montreal until he was more comfortable, the team would put him in a hotel, pay him his per diem and send his payroll check wherever he directed.
As it turned out, because he was injured, the team had to carry him on the disabled list for the balance of the season, which meant he would earn major league pay until the end of September, more money in the last two months of the season than he would earn for an entire year at triple-A.
He and Julie lived lavishly, at least by their own modest Midwestern standards. The hotel the traveling secretary found was at the edge of downtown, overlooking a wide boulevard and a lush park. From their window on the eleventh floor, they could watch the electric city as long as the Olympics were going on. Lines of pedestrians seemed endless, continuing to cross intersections even when the traffic lights were against them. Cars crept from block to block so slowly it seemed they seldom moved at all.
They ordered room service and ate far beyond his per diem: lobster and salmon and oysters served on a chilled plate floating in a crystal bowl of crushed ice. He was earning five hundred dollars a week for breathing in and out, he said, and in a fit of giddiness tried to calculate how much each breath was worth, but the sum, which he thought would be grand, was disappointing: eighteen breaths a minute times sixty times twenty-four times seven, around a penny for every four breaths.
“I guess I’m just not worth as much alive as I thought,” he said.
Sex was awkward because of his cast, so they made love only three times in the week, once on the day she arrived, the second time early in the morning a few days later, when they both woke before the sun rose, and the third time not long before Julie left. The second time was especially difficult because he moved suddenly with her above him and she twisted in a way that made him wrench his right leg, causing him to cry out.
He worried that he had damaged his leg even more and became glum. Finally, on the day after the Olympics ended, Julie suggested they were coming down with cabin fever. She ordered a wheelchair from the concierge and pushed him through the streets. The city, still littered from the crush of people who had attended the Olympics, was not as pretty as it had seemed from their hotel window. Crumpled food wrappers blew along the gutter and, here and there, Julie had to steer the wheelchair around broken bottles and, once, an overnight case that someone had abandoned, spilling its contents across the sidewalk: the slacks and blouses and underwear of some large woman. It had been, it appeared, one big party that no one wanted to clean up after.
They ended up at a church, Mary Queen of the World, which, with what Julie called “neo-Gothic architecture,” seemed out of place among the office buildings where workers in suits, carrying briefcases, went in and out of revolving doors. As they stopped at the entrance, Edward Everett realized that Julie was panting from the effort of pushing him and so they went inside so that she could rest before they set off back for the hotel.
The church was cool and dim, and their movements echoed beneath its