In the Park with George

We missed lunch but committed to working out on Sundays in the city. I was between Romanian deadlift reps when I noticed a stringy teenaged boy heaving through incline chest presses. His arms vibrated under the weight of his flip-flopped peers, who urged him to “push, bro, push.” I wondered who this boy’s heroes were. Growing up in an Italian Mets home, I wanted to look like Mike Piazza. Understated bulk. Old-school Flushing in a slugger’s body. That was before I knew about the meds.

Thirty minutes in and the mixture of BO and body spray was making me queasy. I flagged down Celeste on her elliptical and offered that we jog to the subway.

“Adult, unfiltered air will feel good,” she admitted.

“Plus, we need a few miles to match last week,” I added, holding my smartwatch up to her face.

As we walked out of the weight room, her foot clipped an oversized water tumbler and sent it wailing into the lobby. “Fucking Zoomers,” she muttered, chasing after it.

Early in our relationship, Celeste admitted that she didn’t want children. I was surprised; her Thanksgivings always had two kids’ tables, and her Midwestern family had a wholesome habit of playing board games after cleanup. I asked what part she didn’t want—the carrying part or the shit-stained part or the expensive part.

“The part when they’re more body than soul,” she reasoned.

For years I lied that I wanted kids but didn’t need them. But after my diagnosis it didn’t matter anyway, so we pivoted to decisions that were ours to make. Where to live, when to travel, how to regulate my side effects. I was recovering from my first round of treatment when she texted me a Zillow link to a one-bedroom loft near the ferry. “The city could be our baby,” she added.

We ran past a Duane Reade where, the morning after our second date, we walked out with Pop-Tarts and Plan B. As we approached the corner, the smell of garlic and oregano from the Dollar Pizza slowed our pace to a trot.

“The app would guilt us to death,” I panted, nudging her on.

A municipal playground was ahead. Parents were herding their snow-suited children through the park’s gates to run them before Sunday dinner.

A man was standing motionless outside the playground. His hand gripped the fence’s wrought-iron beam as if he were about to shake it. A thick, salt-and-pepper sideburn descended from a blue and orange baseball cap.

We sprinted across the avenue to beat the light. I hadn’t noticed the upturned trash can. I swerved inward, plowing her into him.

“George!” Celeste gasped, stumbling forward, steadying herself at the last second.

She turned to the man. “I’m so sorry—are you okay?”

He hadn’t moved. It was as if she had run through him.

“Hi,” said the man with a warmth that startled me.

“Anyway, I’ve been here long enough,” he said into the empty space between us. “Have a good one.”

The train left early, which was worse than late. We waited on the platform for another ten minutes, after which we would jog the rest of the way home. As we sped through the tunnel between boroughs, she tried to guilt me into a weekend in suburban Cleveland at her sister’s, where “Brad the Dad” would gloat about his four basketball-playing boys and why to him, “they’ll always be the Indians.” Before I could counter, a man, maybe sixty, stumbled in from the adjacent car, the tunnel wind blowing his stench in our direction. Once the door had slid shut, he began to belt “Nessun dorma” as if he were some famous tenor in disguise. She asked if I had a dollar to give him but the man was already gone, sliding the door into the next car.

My father loved opera. Puccini and Sondheim.

We jogged from the station in silence, listening to our breaths go in and out of sync against the relative quiet of the shipyard-turned-neighborhood. Once we punched through our building’s gate, we pulled off our balaclavas and I checked her pulse against mine, inputting the numbers into my phone.

“Anyway, that was creepy, huh?” she said, shaking her sneakers off in the foyer. “I’m not superstitious or anything, but still. Also, what was with that guy—no, the other guy. Was he, like, watching kids playing in the park?”

It was after she had gone to take a shower and I had taken the cobb salad and rosé out of the fridge that I realized I knew the playground man. He’d been to the gym a few times about a year ago. I’d just wiped down the bench after my reps when he stacked on two more 25s. He’d asked if I could spot him. I’d joked that he shouldn’t entrust his life to my sickly hands.

Our banter had followed the rhythms of two silver-haired men in their forties: one recites, the other nods. Details now rematerialized: associate professor of so-and-so; Mets fan on his father’s side; a son, to whom he kept referring in the past tense.

I sipped my wine and scrolled through my phone’s contacts and there he was, George Gym. I never texted him back. Now, it felt too late, too impossible, the window for a socially acceptable long-time-no-see firmly shut:

Hey George! It’s George! From the gym a year ago!

Hey George! Nice “running into you” by the playground!

Hey George! You kinda creeped out my wife staring at those kids, u good?

Hey George! Forgot to mention that I can’t have kids but at least you got to and idk which is worse? lol wanna grab a beer sometime?

We finished the cobb salad and the rosé, punched macros into our keto apps, and watched 90 Day Fiancé in bed. I showered and we had sex, my come landing like an unanswered question on her stomach. Celeste brought me water for my pills and fell asleep first, like she usually did when she drank after exercise.

I lay next to her and swiped through video feeds on mute. Night shift at a Costco. Dad cleaning a turtle tank. Anti-inflammatory salmon bowl.

I stopped on a video of three candles shaped 1 0 0 atop a white cake, their flames illuminating a wrinkled, toothless grin. The centenarian blew three times, half laughing, before the flames relented and turned to smoke. A younger, wrist-watched hand then entered the frame, petting the grinning man on his cheek.

I let the TAG Heuer promotion loop a few more times and wondered what it would be like to be a great-grandfather. You’d get to sit in the big chair at family gatherings, and maybe someone wipes the drip from your nose, or offers you cake, and you wouldn’t need to offer anyone any money because it wasn’t yours anymore, not in any practical sense, and you wouldn’t need to bother with your progeny’s affairs or their progeny’s affairs because the fact that you know their names is music to their ears, and for the first time maybe since toddlerhood, you simply being there would be enough.

My phone pulsed twice. A text message notification slid down from the top of the screen.

George Gym.

I tapped to open the message. The white text field made me squint in the dark.

A photograph.

A bespectacled boy sported a catcher’s mitt that dwarfed his little hand. In the glove was a baseball, nestled like a seed. A goateed bear of a man stood next him and smiled at the camera, his tree-branch arm around the boy’s shoulder. In the background, green gingham outfield; night sky stained with a few unsanctioned firecrackers shot from Corona Park; blue and orange pennants; speckles of flash photography. The boy wore a jersey with the goateed man’s name on the back. The jersey reached down to the boy’s knees and was polyester and not at all warm, and by the seventh inning he was shivering, but he wouldn’t dare cover it with a sweatshirt, not on a night like that. Not when his guy, Mr. Old-School Flushing, who held him close like a son, smacked a game-winning two-run homer at the bottom of the ninth to hold off the Padres 4-3 at home.

A few hours later, I woke up to pee. Since my procedure, I’m lucky if I only go once a night. I tapped my phone for light. Dead. Details of the photograph slid in and out like a dream looking for purchase in lived memory. Sliding back into bed, Celeste sensed my presence and turned to me with closed eyes.

“You okay, baby?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Let’s go to Ohio.”

Jacek Blaszkiewicz’s work appears in Gargoyle, Exacting Clam, Twin Flame Literary, Argyle, Midcult*, and various academic venues. He is the author of a book about music in nineteenth-century Paris and teaches music history at Wayne State University.