You Should Be So Lucky

by Cat Sebastian

Eddie is leading the National League in not noticing men in locker rooms.

Eddie has to be careful, otherwise he’s going to open his mouth and give this man five paragraphs of lunacy, starting with “You’re pretty” and ending with “Are you always this bad at your job?” with maybe some “Can I touch your suit?” thrown in there to maximize the horror.

It can’t be because Mark’s handsome, because Eddie’s been attracted to plenty of men, and never once has it made him want to read a book.

There’s something so comforting in the ability to be wordlessly petty with someone, in knowing that as soon as you have a closed door between the two of you and the rest of the world, you can share all your least attractive thoughts.

The actual problem is incredibly boring, and Mark hates admitting it even to himself. Unless a couple has the good fortune to get hit by the same freight train, their story ends in exactly one way. He can’t go through that twice, and he couldn’t inflict it on anybody else. (He imagines telling William this, and can perfectly conjure up the image of William’s horrified expression. “How remiss of you not to have noticed mortality until now, darling,” followed by a decisive, derisive “you utter sap.”)

Mark starts laughing again. He’s making gay jokes with a professional baseball player in his living room. He could not feel more surreal about this if he tried.

This is the first time he’s been able to use the truth of his queerness to pierce the comfortable cocoon of homogeneity that bigots like to think they inhabit. He feels like he’s throwing a brick through the window of a building he’s despised for a long, long time.

“He’s hard not to like. He’s a mess, but you get to be as old as me and you realize damn near everyone goes through a time when they’re a mess. Problem is that most people who haven’t had it happen to them yet think it’s virtue and clean living keeping them out of the gutter.”

“Only two things in the world people count by months. How old a baby is, and how long since something awful happened.”

“Who gets to decide what losing even is? I mean, I know that who wins and who loses is pretty cut-and-dried in baseball. But this is a game where hitting the ball a third of the time is a job well done, and hitting it half the time is practically unheard of. With everything else, it’s even more confusing. I mean, I’m never going to get married and have kids. Some people will look at that and feel bad for me, right? But if I did get married, it would mean something went wrong. So the fact that I’m not married with a family of my own is a good thing, you know? It’s a win. It means that I’m still able to be myself.” Mark passes a hand over his mouth. “Yeah. I—wow. Okay.” “Sorry, I know I’m rambling. I know some things are just bad. I’m not saying things happen for a reason—I hate that. I’m saying that things happen. And it doesn’t have to mean anything except what it means to you. Nobody else gets to decide.”

He feels unaccountably angry about it, knowing there’s this tiny slice of relative freedom that he never even thought about until this morning, but which he’s now furious he’ll never have for himself.

Mark thinks the danger he poses is that people will notice that Eddie’s queer, but the real danger is that Eddie finally noticed he’s queer—or at least noticed the implications. He’s outside, alone—just as outside and alone as he was when nobody was talking to him, when he was in a strange city and on a strange team. That strangeness is something he’ll have to carry with him and something he’ll have to carry alone.

“If you think anything about you is disappointing to me, then I’m doing a better job than you think of hiding my feelings.”

“It isn’t all bad. You get older, and things change. That’s the price of admission. You lose the people who knew you first, and then you start to lose everyone else. You lose your work. You lose the place where you grew up. You get things in return—new people, new hobbies, a chance to see everything new that the world has to throw at you. But you lose the things you’ve had the longest, the things that went into making you.”

He might not be able to have exactly what he wants, but he refuses to live in the emotional equivalent of a safety deposit box.

It’s familiar, this reflex to turn to a person, to the person, to his person, and he recognizes it as someone might a troubling new symptom, a sign that the disease has progressed further than anticipated.

He understands why Mark doesn’t want to hide. It’s not just the burden of continually lying, it’s keeping your existence a secret. When the world has decided that people are supposed to be a certain way, but you’re living proof to the contrary, then hiding your differences is just helping everybody else erase who you are.

Rooting for a team doesn’t always mean that you need them to win; sometimes you just want to see them fight, do their best, or even just keep showing up. Sometimes you want to look at a guy and say: Well, he’s fucked, but he’s trying. These are old men; they’ve all had their share of losing, and maybe they know what they’re talking about.

Maybe they really are on the precipice of something new and wonderful; maybe this election means that a lot of people want things to be better in the same way that he and his friends do. Maybe whatever changes the next decade brings will be good ones.