Assignment III - Tom Moran

My first reaction was a jolt of abject shock, trailed quickly by profound confusion and, ultimately, acceptance - at least of the immediate reality that I now had little choice but to unite with my boyfriend at center court, for no evident reason, in front of thousands of people now rousing themselves for a halftime pee break. If there are stages of grief that occur following the unveiling of likely public humiliation, then I cycled through them in a hurry. This was a startling new realm of mischief for Eric. I had never seen him to be a sucker for spectacle, and oftentimes it felt like he had actively avoided any sort of public exposure. On our first date, he had slinked down in his seat at the Florentine as though enemy agents were after him, or his parents were dropping him off at the prom in their flaming orange Chevelle. When I called him on it, he looked chagrined and sat bolt upright, tensing his back for the rest of the performance. He was lucky to get a second date after that debacle, but the fact he “took an opera for me,” as he would later half-jokingly put it, was sufficient to give him another shot at appreciating my tastes instead of tolerating them. It worked, I think: the longer we stayed together, the less self-conscious he became, even when we shared a box at the ballet or he came in to reluctantly drag me out of the lingerie section. It was such gestures of understanding which made me willing and, indeed, obligated to go to this game in the first place. My enjoyment of sports is generally limited to the Super Bowl, which I mostly watch for the camaraderie and the commercials anyway. I had seen the Bucks play once or twice when I inadvertently and inexplicably found myself over at Eric’s apartment along with one or two of his jock friends from high school, the ones who work drudge jobs in sporting goods stores or cubicle mazes, and spend the rest of their precious beautiful hours working off the stress with the help of a football or golf clubs. Ugh. To his eternal credit Eric didn’t play golf: most of his athletic activities at least involve athleticism. Sports, like the arts, was an area which we could discuss together in at best general terms, and it was always a delight when one of us discovered the other had a strongly-held opinion in one area or the other – like when Eric confessed a growing appreciation for Puccini, or when I, quickly flipping past a sea of muted people on a green lawn on Sunday morning TV, wryly commented that anything you can do while wearing slacks doesn’t truly constitute a sport. I took my eyes off of Eric to negotiate the concrete steps leading down to court level. Lucidity shone through my mental haze for a moment when I found my passage to the wood floor blocked by a phalanx of uber-men in Bucks jerseys. “Excuse me,” I said, and jostled past one of their lower backs. A hulking black hand came to rest on my shoulder, and I heard a voice from above say “Good luck out there. Make the man proud.” “Of what?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t, knowing any second of delay would lengthen the present ordeal. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable in the spotlight; three years in perky high school musicals dealt a crippling blow to my stage fright, and the two years as a teaching assistant killed it off completely. But this was different: improv in front of 18,000 strangers. No script to draw from, no sketched-out character to inhabit, no meticulously crafted lesson plan to turn to in front of a roomful of surly, expectant undergrads. Just me, this arena, and Eric, who no doubt had his lines prepared, whatever they were to be. But it wasn’t just us. The players, both teams lingered on the court. They stood stonelike and sweaty by the far sideline, towels around their necks, watching … me. My eyes refocusing through the arena dim to the far crowds, and I realized the multitudes in the bleachers and loges also stopped moving, their eyes shifting toward midcourt, to the scoreboard above or the ordinary woman and man caught up in the developing drama below it. Suddenly the floor went dark and a blinding white light burst from the rafters, coming to rest directly on me. I covered my eyes and turned my head down to the floor, noticing something queer about the edge of the light beam on the floor. It wasn’t circular. It was shaped like a heart. Shit. Eric and I had joked about this. About skywriting, or taking out an ad in the paper, or commissioning an ice sculpture that said “Will you marry me?” But we had joked about a lot of things: running off to the Caribbean together, shaving our heads, marking ourselves down as vegan Rastafarians when the census guy comes around. But they were jokes. Below the humorous froth of our daily lives, I had always sensed an unshakable bedrock in Eric, who never seemed to get too cocksure in his triumphs or despondent in his failures. It was this stoicism, so calm, steady and reassuring, that drew me to him in the first place. But here he was, in his sport coat, black slacks and a Jerry Garcia tie, trembling visibly, faring even worse than me. I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask him who put him up to this idiocy. Was it his “college bud” Jake, the eternal adolescent with the Bucks logo tattooed on the upper reaches of his hairy ass? His brother Bill, who still showed up at open tryouts for failing basketball teams in semi-pro mill towns even though he was 29 and hadn’t played since college? Or was Eric a perverse victim of fate, winning some sort of contest of which he had no interest in the prize? I needed to ask Eric all of these things, to greet him cordially, to kiss him wildly, to slap him across the face and storm off. But when I spoke, all that emerged was a barely audible squeak. Eric was silent. He just gulped, dropped down to one knee – his left, I remember – and pulled a small velvet box out of his pocket.