So I turn around and show him. I let him see the whole thing. The want and the fear on the same face, no rationing, no leash.The most exposed I’ve been to another person since a man vanished from my place months ago.
“That,” he says looking at it. “Okay. Now I know what I’m holding.”
“Don’t drop it.”
“I’ve dropped it once. I know exactly what it weighs now, and I know what the floor does to it.”
“People say that...”
“I’m not people. I’m the specific man who did the specific damage. Nobody knows the fragility of this better than the person who broke it. That’s the one qualification I actually have.”
We eat at the small table. Two plates. Two glasses. Bread in the middle. It’s a preview of a life. We both know it’s a preview. That’s the hairline under the whole beautiful afternoon, because a preview is what they show you before they decide whether you get to keep the thing.
Later, he falls asleep on the couch, the way he used to. Except he doesn’t wake at some black hour and find his shoes. He sleeps. In the light. On purpose. I sit at the other end with his feet in my lap and watch a man sleep in my borrowed living room. Asleep, the curls resign. They come loose over his forehead, light brown gone boyish, and the face under them is one no press room has ever met. I let myself have it. The whole picture. Wanting it completely.
Somewhere under the wanting, quiet, hairline-thin, is the part of me that has been left before and knows exactly what a preview is.
I don’t listen to it. Tonight I’ve decided to believe the man on the couch. That’s the bet. I made it with my eyes open. I already know it’s the one that can ruin me.
Chapter 14: Marek
The federation does the team photo on Monday. I stand in the back row where I belong, and for the first time in my career, I understand exactly what I’m standing in.
Forty-something people. Players and staff. The two kit men. The chef nobody thanks. A whole apparatus built to put eleven of us on a pitch on Wednesday for the biggest match of my professional life. My face is in it. My name is in the program.
And I have spent the entire morning thinking about a man’s feet in another man’s lap.
“Chin up, Kovár,” the photographer calls. “You look like a man at a funeral.”
“He’s always like that,” Novotný says. “It’s his good face.”
“It’s my only face.”
“He has another one now,” Šíma says quietly, not to the photographer. Just to the air near me.
“Another what?” Novotný asks.
“Face,” Šíma says. “He’s had a second face for about two weeks. Nobody else has noticed.”
“I don’t have two faces.”
“You have two now. It’s fine. Most people start with the other one. You’re just late.” He faces front for the camera. “Smile with the new one.”
I let it go past. It’s easier than the alternative, which is that he’s right.
The federation’s press officer collars me before the bus. Half the country’s outlets want the Kovár-versus-Valenti angle, she says. Can I give them two minutes on marking him. I give them ninety seconds of scouting clichés, and she beams like I handed her a bouquet. Nobody anywhere knows how long I have really been marking him.
On the bus he sits without asking, which is its own kind of asking.
“You’re doing math,” Šíma says.
“I’m always doing math.”
“Different math. You’ve got the face you get before a penalty. The one where you already know the corner and you don’t like it.”
“It’s a big week.”
“It’s the biggest week.” He looks out the window. “Want to tell me the corner?”
