“Happily Married” by Ryan Bender-Murphy

Every time I had watched a baseball game in person, the home team lost, but I couldn’t help but go today – the tickets were cheap, and the home team was on a wicked winning streak.

It was a sunny Wednesday afternoon in late August. My wife was at work. And since we had recently moved to the city on her behalf, I was the homemaker, which meant that I didn’t have to be anywhere other than where I wanted to be. In this case, I was sitting in the upper deck of the ballpark, facing the city’s iconic skyline and catching glimpses of the bay nearby, all while sipping a gigantic cup of beer.

The crowd was spread out on the upper deck. It consisted of bored teens, diehard elderly fans, work groups, summer camps, and adults chaperoning kids. Also, in a few instances, I could see someone like me: sitting alone, with nearly the entire row to themselves. Really, though, I didn’t pay much attention to the crowd before the game started, as I was busy taking pictures that I never bothered to send anyone. I had one recipient in mind – a best friend, you could say – but I decided against it. We were in a texting stalemate.

It was only when the first inning was well under way and everyone had taken their seats that I noticed a woman with a group of five boys, likely between ages ten and eleven, sitting a few rows ahead of me and slightly to the left. They were the only group in my general vicinity, and if it hadn’t been for the erratic movement of the boys, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything. But between the balls and the strikes, my attention had been caught, and now I was looking more closely at the woman, perhaps a few years older than me, and the boys, who were all wearing chunky baseball caps and sharing popcorn and soda, nachos and phones. The woman herself was on the phone – texting, that is; I could see big blocks on both sides of the thread – so she didn’t look at the boys or say anything to them unless they touched her arm, and usually then she would only reply with a nod.

Why did I keep looking at the woman and the boys? I asked myself during the second and third innings. No doubt, the woman was attractive. But I was happily married. And besides, there were plenty of better ways to scratch a ten-year itch than by ogling people at a baseball game. Also, attraction didn’t account for the boys, who were just as much a part of my looking as the woman. Certainly, the boys looked like me, or like people I had known when I was growing up, so there was an obvious connection on the surface. But it was something else, something about their lives that I couldn’t see, I realized, that made me all the more interested.

The image started early in the game. It was a mere flash at first: a natural, summery green. Then I could see that the imagined green was part of a backyard, and that all of the boys in the row ahead of me (and other kids too) were running around, contained only, it seemed, by a towering wooden fence. Then I could see that the children were rising on swings, hanging from monkey bars, temporarily disappearing into slides, kicking soccer balls, and jumping in bounce houses – all while a gaggle of adults hovered at the fringes of the backyard, mostly on a deck filled with tables and balloons. I was witnessing a child’s birthday party, I realized. And the woman at the game was there, too, talking to a man off to the side, right where the deck ran into the fence; it was the same man who was texting her now, even though, admittedly, I couldn’t tell with whom she was actually texting. But I knew that such big blocks of messages suggested a budding romance, a banter-filled dialogue that required utmost focus. Furthermore, the woman wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. So the woman had fallen in love at the imagined birthday party, which had taken place, I decided, in a Victorian-style house in an old neighborhood that I’d walk through when I met my wife at her work. And now the woman was at the baseball game with her kids and the man’s kids since they were both divorced, I decided. I also decided that the man and the woman were workaholics at the same company. But they worked in different departments and only fraternized with people roughly their age at kids’ birthday parties. Accordingly, their children were similar – they only played with the children of the company’s employees, as if part of an exclusive club.

It was at the end of this train of thought that I felt a deep, lonely pang, for I saw a world in which I could have no part, as if I were staring at the surface of the moon, knowing full well that I’d never step foot on it. Of course, I knew nothing about the woman and the boys sitting a few rows in front of me, and I could have been completely off base in imagining their lives, and I likely was, but the facts no longer mattered; the image had been made, and the feelings that arose from it were no less real. So maybe it would be better to say that I felt as if I were staring at the moon in a painting, or simply at a whole painting, and I was pining to enter it, knowing the impossibility of doing so, knowing that the boundary between object and image cannot be crossed in the way that I would have wanted, which is to say that I would have entered the image and looked around its four corners and realized that I had been consumed by it, that I was no longer a looker but a looked-at, and thus, I would have no longer felt my own presence. I would have lacked self-awareness, and time would have no longer mattered, and a bunch of other intriguing things would have happened – the best of which would have been that I’d no longer feel alone. But I was alone – outside of my marriage, that is. My best friend and I hadn’t talked since the move.

Was he my best friend, though? We’d watch baseball games together at bars, and at midnight he’d tell me his secrets. I only knew him as having a bluish glow, tinged in neon light. I had never seen him during the day, except once for brunch to watch the notorious “morning game” several years ago, an event which felt akin to meeting each other’s parents (something that has yet to happen). I knew, too, that he hated work and loved women. And once he had met a woman at a birthday party and went from first to second to third to home base in a matter of hours because they had both studied Shakespeare in college. They knew all about the plays that critics deemed “way out in left field.” They also knew all about the obscure Shakespearean works that weren’t even attributed to Shakespeare but it was obvious that he had written them. (There was always a rhyme of “nut” and “butt.”) In fact, my best friend and the woman made up Shakespearean plays once they had exhausted their knowledge and conversation of The Texts and committed sex acts based on their wholly fabricated acts. My best friend told me all of this after midnight one night, when our team won in a rout against the best team in the league.

Everyone was standing now, but the game wasn’t over. It was the middle of the seventh inning – the so-called “stretch” – and the home team was winning. If they won, I would text my best friend, I told myself, and it was very likely that the home team would win since the away team was down by five runs.

As I was standing, I recalled something I had once thought and then later attributed to a fortune cookie I had eaten at a Chinese restaurant in my imagination: “Love is water, and friendship is food. You can only last a few days without love, whereas you can go for a long time without friendship, but both are needed to survive.” Because I agreed with the sentiment, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it, I attributed it to a fortune cookie. My reasoning was that it is easier to discount a message hidden in what is consumed. Why not be more direct? was my reply to hidden messages. Otherwise, it must not be that important.

But Shakespeare is important, I later admitted. And paintings both in the mind and out there in the world are important. And so was the field below me, which was like a holographic painting because of its moving figures. And if I were to text my best friend what the home team players did to win, he’d text me what the away team players did to lose, and in doing so, the hidden message would appear in the white space between our texts: “We are still best friends.”

I paid more attention to the game once I sat down.

During the bottom of the seventh, the home team’s next three batters got struck out by nine pitches. I then noticed that half of my humungous beer was left, so I drank the rest of it and walked quickly to the restroom before the top of the eighth inning, likely the last whole inning. By the time I returned to my seat, the away team had scored a home run. I knew that it had nothing to do with me, but I looked away from the players all the same and saw something different on the woman’s phone. She was purchasing tickets of some kind – I could recognize the black and white dots of a theater’s reserved seating. I imagined that later in the evening she would go on a date with the man from the birthday party, after dropping their kids off at a babysitting commune – a large Victorian-style house overlooking the lake near downtown. The Madame there had olive skin and an enormous ruby hanging from her neck. So my brain told me, at least. Of course, nothing was really real – or collectively real, I should say – except the woman and her reserved seating and the boys around her. And, of course, so was the game, which the home team was now losing, through no fault of my own. I was staring at the babysitting Madame’s wrinkled neckline in my imagination when the score changed from 5-1 to 5-6. And as the home team continued to lose, I placed my head (in my head) on Madame’s bony shoulder, feeling her soft, white hair tickle my cheek. I wrapped my arms around her, and she wrapped her arms around me. “There, there, my child,” she said. “It’s okay to cry here.” She rubbed my back with her bony fingers adorned in turquoise rings, and I wept into her tough, leathery skin, right into the side of her neck, as if I were some wimpy vampire, or perhaps an anti-vampire, such that I drained into someone else. “You always have a place here,” she said. “Even if you’ve grown old, even if you could run your own babysitting monastery – you have a place here. Okay?” I nodded.

And then the scene vanished. The home team had lost, and the woman and the boys were picking up their trash and heading for the exits.

For a while I sat in my seat, watching as others moseyed out of the rows and back into the streets. Why did I come to the game? I asked myself. Was it for the love of the sport? To see the spectacle? To kill some time? To talk to my best friend? Perhaps all of these things and more. What I knew for certain was that I couldn’t compose a message about the game and send it to my best friend. I kept writing, deleting, and rewriting: “Lost another home game lol,” “Dude! This ballpark is dope,” “9th inning . . . FML,” etc.

But then I thought of something. My best friend had sent me to this strange city (with my wife in cahoots) to tail a woman he loved. My best friend wanted me to write him a report on the woman’s whereabouts and her doings. The woman was the same woman who had sat a few rows ahead of me. Yes, even though none of this was true, my best friend loved the unmarried woman who had just bought tickets to a very famous play. My best friend wanted to adopt her kids, but only if she didn’t get with another man. 

I left the ballpark and went straight home. I had plenty to write about, none of which I showed to anyone else. It was kind of like how you don’t tell people what you have dreamed. There was a secret, twisted world in my head, but this world spun around the one in which I was happily married.

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